by K. W. Jeter
'Where was this recorded?'
'As I said. Something new.' Vogel had moved back from the panel and stood next to Iris, gazing at the image before them. 'In fact, current. At the present location of the owl in question. This is where it's at, the thing you're looking for.'
Iris glanced over at him. 'And you know where that is?'
'Again, as I said. I have useful information for you.' Vogel displayed his thin, mocking smile once more. 'You see? You're not sorry now, that you met up with me.'
'Maybe.' Iris regarded him with suspicion. 'Information doesn't do me any good, if it doesn't translate into action.'
'True. As wise men have spoken, the word is the deed.' Vogel ran his thumb over the buttons on the playback unit's remote control; a wire dangled from it and ran to the portable machine by the panel. 'Aber in Anfang war der Wort: the word still comes first. Which you have now received. Or at least in part: you know that the problematic owl is not lost, except perhaps to you. /know where it is; too bad you're the one looking for it.'
'So we make a deal,' said Iris. She had been expecting as much. 'Tell me what it is you want in exchange for the owl's location.'
'Not as easy as that.' Vogel shook his head. 'Even if I told you what you think you want to know — which I have every intention of doing it wouldn't do you much good.'
'Why's that?'
'You'll see; let me lay a little more information on you.' Vogel's thumb fidgeted over the remote control's buttons, punching in a quick sequence. 'You'll love this.'
Iris watched the panel screen. The image of the owl dwindled into the background as the camera angle pulled back to a wider shot. Now the image on the panel included a couple of bored-looking, hardfaced men, sitting on cheap folding chairs in front of the owl's perch. The floor around them was littered with battery-depleted pornoids, the glossy nude images gone gray and static, a set of discarded gin rummy hands and greasy Chinese take-out containers speared with disposable plastic chopsticks. None of that concerned Iris; what interested her was the matched pair of blackly gleaming automatic rifles, safeties off, lying across the men's knees.
'Who are these guys?' The men were wearing identical dark gray trouser-and-jacket outfits, with vaguely military overtones but no distinguishing insignia. 'Private security?'
'You might say that.' Standing beside her, Vogel regarded the screen. 'Not your average rent-a-cops, though.'
She nodded in agreement. 'Not with that kind of firepower on hand.' Iris recognized the make and model of the autos,. pre-devolution Czech hardware, from having worked one during a training session at the LAPD's firing range. 'Shit like that, you'd expect from the UN peace-enforcement squadrons.'
'This gear's better; the registration finktags have been disabled. See where the transmitter bumps have been filed away?' Vogel pointed. 'They can fire off these puppies all they want, and the central ammo-discharge agency wouldn't know squat about it.'
Iris glanced over at him. 'That's a capital-class felony. Just being in the same room with illegally modded gear like that.'
'Exactly.' Vogel smiled at her. 'So these guys must be really stupid, or really motivated. Which do you think it is?'
'Who's paying them that kind of money?'
'Maybe nobody.' Vogel shrugged. 'Maybe they're ideological types. With some non-financial reasons for what they're doing and risking.'
'Wait a minute.' Her gaze went from the panel screen to Vogel again. 'So you don't know who they are. And who they're working for.'
'Does it matter?' A tinge of impatience sounded in Vogel's voice. 'Get real. What difference is it going to make, knowing what's in their heads or who's signing their paychecks, when you're looking down the business end of one of those automatics?'
She mused it over in silence. This job, thought Iris, is getting hinkier by the minute. What had that sonuvabitch Meyer steered her onto? Heavy people, that whole Tyrell Corporation bunch, had had the owl in the first place, and heavier people, unknown and mysterious parties, apparently wanted it. And seemingly heaviest people, who could hire gun-toters like the ones shown in the image on the panel, had the owl right now, and were very likely not going to give it up with a mere please and thank you. It's that valuable? — she couldn't figure how it could be. Rare and expensive, sure, but not something anyone guarded with an illegal army.
Though maybe there were only the two she had seen on the panel. 'How many others are there?' She gestured at the panel. 'Besides these?'
'That I know about? Maybe six or seven total, that I've seen coming and going, including these two beauties. But I haven't been monitoring this feed — which is live, by the way — for very long, and I don't have access to any other video sources at this location. So there may be others.'
'That's not good.' There were a lot of variables that would have to be dealt with, all of them with lethal potential. The unknown made her uncomfortable; it was one thing not to know what to expect when running down an escaped replicant, a whole other thing when looking at an organized, well-financed operation such as this. A replicant's options, violence-wise, were limited and tending toward the diffuse, even when they ran in packs, as sometimes happened. Someone hunting a replicant faced the possibility of getting killed, all right, but if it happened it would be through the blade runner's own ineptitude or miscalculation or sheer bad luck. Iris had no worries along those lines; she was still, after all, alive. Which counted for a lot in this game. The dead were that way because they had been losers before they began. She had a hunter's black and efficient karma in her bones; she could feel it there, the same way the owl undoubtedly knew how sharp its own claws were. But she was also alive and in the game, she knew, because she had shrewdly picked her targets; escaped replicants were her natural prey, as mice and other small vermin were to the owl. Go up against something larger and tougher, she told herself, and you're the one who gets retired.
'You're wondering,' said Vogel astutely, 'if you can pull this one off. Since it's not quite the same as what you've handled before.' Iris nodded. 'Maybe I'm out of my league here.'
'Over your head. And every other good coward-enabling cliché. That's the problem with you blade runner types. You have it too easy; hunting down replicants is a piece of cake. Just licensed slaughter; they've got no real survival skills. How could they? A four-year lifespan is long enough to get desperate, not smart.'
'You think it's so easy?' Iris glared at him. 'You do it, then. See how long you last at it.'
'Simmer down,' said Vogel. 'Replicants aren't the problem here, are they?' He indicated the panel screen with a jerk of his head. 'Deal with the problem in front of you. We're talking real human beings here, as tough and bad as you, if not more so. And with real weaponry, even bigger than that cannon you tote around next to your heart. They've got what you want. You can either decide to go for it, or not.' Head tilted to one side, he watched for her reaction. 'What's it going to be?'
She had to think. If her boss Meyer had known about this, that the owl wasn't just flapping around the city, scavenging rats out of the alleys in the dark, but was actually in the possession of some heavy-duty organization like this — and how could he have not known? then it opened up all sorts of ugly conjectures. Including the possibility that the whole job he'd given her was actually some kind of set-up. She could have gone on poking her nose into things, letting the word get around that she was looking for this particular real-live owl — there were probably dozens of gossiping dealers at the souk who were aware of it by now — and generally making a target out of herself, ready for the thugs on the panel screen to pay their terminal kind of attention to her. Iris glanced up at the image on the panel. I could've wandered right in there, she thought. 'Got an owl?' And bang, I would've been sorted out but good.
'I could've been in big trouble' — Iris glanced over at Vogel — 'if I hadn't run into you.'
'See?' Vogel smiled. 'I knew you'd get to like me. Or at least appreciate me.'
'Oh, I do. I even almost
regret beating the crap out of you.'
'It's not the best way to get a relationship started.'
Iris returned his thin, humorless smile. 'Depends on who you're seeing. Like they say, some people pay extra for that.'
'I could do without it.'
'I'll try to remember that,' said Iris. 'Because we still haven't worked out all the little kinks between us, have we?'
'Oh?' One of Vogel's eyebrows lifted. 'Like what?'
'Like what the hell it is you exactly want.' Iris's gaze narrowed to slits. 'You know what I want.' She gestured toward the panel screen a few yards away from them. 'I want the owl. But I haven't got the least notion of what you'd be getting out of this.'
'As I said before.' Vogel's smile turned even more amused. 'I want to help you.'
'Your ass; this is LA. Nobody helps anybody else, without a reason.'
'O ye of little faith.' Vogel ruefully shook his head. 'You're really going to have to learn to start trusting people.'
'Not trusting anything is what's kept me alive so far. I'm not going to change my operational style just for your sake.'
'You're going to have to,' said Vogel. 'Because you don't have any choice. You already know that you can't get the info you need out of me any other way. You either trust me, or you punt on this job.'
Iris resisted the urge to hit him again. 'Tell me who you're working for. Whose side are you on?'
'You don't need to know that.'
Her words rasped out from between clenched teeth, 'Tell . . . me.'
'Can't.' This time, the shake of Vogel's head was hard and final. 'Not without getting you into even deeper shit than you're already in. There are some things you're better off not knowing. Let's just say that there are certain parties for whom it's as vital as it is for you that you succeed at the assignment you've been given. Parties — people, forces, whatever — that would prefer having this owl some other place than where it is right now.'
'Like in their hands.'
Vogel shrugged. 'Conceivably.'
'And they're using the police to get it for them.'
'That's one possible analysis. If it helps you in some way to believe that, then go ahead.'
'One more question.' Her white-knuckled fists trembled at her sides. 'Why me? If this thing is so important, than it wasn't just Meyer's idea to give me the job. Somebody told him to give it to me. Why?'
His expression became, almost pitying. 'Maybe they've got more confidence in you — that you can do it — than you do yourself.'
Iris turned back toward the screen panel and looked at the image it presented. One of the two men with the high-powered automatic rifles had propped his weapon against the side of the folding chair so he could unwrap a processed food-substitute sandwich packet on his lap and start ingesting the contents. Behind him, the owl shifted on its wooden perch, the bright yellow eyes watching hungrily for its own living food sources.
'All right,' said Iris. 'But I'm going to need a little time. To get things ready.'
'Don't take too long.' Vogel pressed a button on the remote control, and the panel went blank and dead. 'They're not going to wait around for you. They've got plans of their own.'
Iris looked from the candlelit interior of the dead blimp, through the tears in its metallic sheathing, to the night's darkness outside. The rain had stopped, leaving the city streets black and glistening.
She shook her head. It's not their plans I'm worried about.'
6
'Bad night?'
The chat had greeted her as soon as Iris had walked in the door of her apartment. As the bolts of the automatic door locks snicked into place behind her, she nodded, eyes closed. 'Not the best I've had.'
She dropped her ring of swipe cards on the floor and lay out on the couch, striped by the first pearl-gray light of dawn sliding through the blinds on the barred window. The couch wasn't long enough to stretch out full-length; she had to curl her knees up into a semi-fetal position. Which suited her bleak mood.
'Tea?' The round face of the chat bobbed close to her own. 'Hot and minty-fresh?'
'No thanks.' Right now, she didn't feel like rubbing her hand across the chat's smooth head, either, and leaking a transdermal endorphin buzz into her central nervous system. 'I'm fine.'
The chat wobbled away and returned with a faux handstitched comforter, which it managed to tug into place over Iris. She helped it out, pulling the hem up under her chin, though her impulse was to pull it all the way over her head, sealing herself into a soft, dark womb.
'That's great.' She managed a wan smile at the worried-looking autonomic creature. 'Look, I'm okay. Really.'
'Sure?' The chat appeared dubious. It had never seen her like this before. She hadn't gotten the thing yet, when she had been going through the roughest parts of the departmental training and had been afraid she would wash out of the program and wind up back on the streets.
'Yeah,' lied Iris. 'Don't worry about me. Go get in your basket.' She pulled a hand out from beneath the comforter and pointed to the corner of the apartment's front room. 'Sleep and stand-by.' She watched as it reluctantly did as she had ordered. 'That's a good boy.'
She lay for a while longer, head turned so she could gaze unseeingly at the irregular islands and continents of the water- damaged acoustic ceiling tiles. Then she raised her head from the sofa's saggy end-cushion and told the phone on the side table to get Meyer for her.
'Will do.' The phone ran through its security out-protocols, speed-dialed, then extended its headpiece toward Iris. 'Here you go.'
'What's the problem?' Meyer's voice, both harried and sleepy, sounded in Iris's ear. 'It better be good, calling at this hour.'
'Like you don't know.' She let the curved strap dangle loosely from her hand rather than snugging it tight across her skull. 'What the hell have you gotten me into?'
The phone was silent for a few seconds, before Meyer responded. 'Look,' he said, 'just do the job. Or don't. But don't ask any more questions, either.'
'You sonuvabitch.' From the corner of her eye, Iris saw the chat cringe in its basket, alarmed by the anger in its owner's voice. 'This is some kind of weird, deep shit you got me walking through, and if I'm going to get to the other side — with this stupid owl you're so hot on then I'm going to need some help.'
'Like what?'
'Don't worry,' said Iris, her voice bitter in her own ears. 'I won't ask you for information. I've got another source for that. You know what I'm talking about, don't you?'
Meyer was silent again, for longer this time. 'Go with it,' he said finally. 'You can trust the guy.'
'Oh, that makes me feel a whole lot better. Coming from a lying sack of shit like you.'
'So this is what you needed?' Meyer's voice sounded more weary than angry over the phone. 'To dump on me? Fine, you got it. Anything else?'
'Yeah, there's something else. Jesus Christ. This job isn't going to be a piece of cake.'
'Didn't think it would be.'
'So I'm going to need a little hardware upgrade,' said Iris. 'Something bigger than I normally carry around with me. I'm going to need you to okay an armory draw.'
'No can do.' The emphatic shake of Meyer's head was almost audible through the phone line's real-time excrypt sequences. 'Look, Iris, we're trying to keep this whole operation on the quiet. If I let you pull out of the station armory the kind of equipment you're going to want — I know you, when it comes to stuff like this — then it's going to be all over the department in no time. That kind of paperwork gets redundantly routed to every division, every level. I can't do that for you.'
'You can't do it officially, then fine. I don't give a shit about the requisition forms in triplicate and the rest of the paperwork. Get the stuff out the back door to me. That's all I'm asking.'
'“That's all?”' Meyer exploded, his shout barking out of the phone. 'Are you insane? What you're talking about is misappropriation of departmental property — secured departmental property. That's an administrativ
e felony, class alpha; sanctions for which include, but are not limited to, rank demotion, forfeiture of accrued retirement benefits and monetary fines.'
'Don't cite the rule book to me, Meyer. I've read it.'
'Then maybe you read the part about what else the internal investigations division could do to me. Which is basically to drag my sorry ass up to the roof of the station, put a bullet through my head I and toss my body over the side. And they'd get a gold star in their own personnel files, for having taken care of the incident in such a neat and expeditious manner.' Meyer's voice simmered down a few degrees. 'You know the department runs a tight ship, Iris. They have to.'
Iris sat up on the couch, letting the comforter slide down onto the floor. 'And what do you have to do, huh? Tell me that.'
'What are you talking about?'
'I'll make it plain for you.' The phone sweated in her fist as she talked to her boss. 'Do you want this owl or not? If you do, then you're going to get me what I need, no matter what it takes. If you got a problem with that, then you can find somebody else to go bird-hunting for you.'
Another few seconds of silence, then Meyer spoke again. 'All right,' he said. 'I'll get the stuff out the back door to you. Give me a list.'
She had already been thinking about that. When she had finished telling Meyer her requirements, she held the phone away from her ear, expecting another explosion from -him.
Instead, she got a weary sigh coming from the other end of the line. 'This is nuts,' said Meyer's voice. 'We'll both wind up taking a dive off the top of the station.'
'Don't worry.' Iris kicked the wadded-up comforter away from her feet. 'I'll return everything in good condition.'
'No, you won't.' Meyer sounded resigned and defeated. 'You'll get yourself killed, in as messy a way as possible. And I'll wind up holding the bag for it.'