This is what she’s being paid for here: to shape the official version, and to make the truth go away.
She approaches the door to the stairs, the way barred by a Ukrainian bouncer named Kron. He recognises her and has been briefed that she was coming.
“Emergency med team got here just ahead of you,” he informs her, holding the door open.
She proceeds downstairs to the sub-surface vault where the fights take place. There is the usual smell of alcohol, sweat and cologne, but there is another unmistakable note in the bouquet. Blood. She’s been warned it was a messy one, and the sight of two surgeons plus their call-out crews confirms this. They are carrying out on-the-spot patching up to prepare their patients for transfer to the infirmary.
There are still a lot of people down here: not just staff, but witnesses, friends of the people involved. Vera Polietsky is standing close to one of the huddled med teams, arms folded. She gives Nikki a curt nod. Between the surgeon and one of his assistants she catches a glimpse of Liza. She looks doped-up, out of it. They’ve given her something since she authorised the call to Nikki.
The guy who went crazy is lying on his side unconscious inside the chamber, which is locked. The medics have tubed and sedated him, leaving him in the recovery position. His feet are shackled together, one arm in a vacuum splint.
There are puddles of blood close to the fight chamber, considerably more than she’s ever seen shed inside it. On any other day, the sight of all this would give her pause, but it’s far from the worst thing she’s seen lately.
Then she does see something truly horrifying, and not because it’s a person walking upright soaked in blood. It’s because said person is Alice Blake, and she’s standing right in the heart of the mess Nikki is here to conceal from the likes of Alice Blake.
One of the staff clocks her reaction and misinterprets it.
“This is Wendy Goodfellow,” he says. “She was the one who suggested we bring you in.”
Nikki’s lens confirms the ID. How did she manage that, she wonders, but more to the point, has Nikki just walked into her trap?
“Nikki Fixx,” Alice states, offering a thin smile and a steely stare.
It’s like looking at a different person, or maybe the scales have fallen from Nikki’s eyes. She seems older than she looked a few hours ago, though it’s harder to look like a wide-eyed innocent when you’re standing inside an underground fight club covered in blood. She’s also ten times more street-smart than Nikki would have guessed. Give the girl this much, being the one who suggested bringing Nikki in was a baller move.
Nikki gestures her to come away from the group so they can talk privately.
“What the hell are you playing at?” she asks.
“Just go with it,” Alice replies. “Do what you came here to do. There’s no point in keeping up any pretence. Like the man said, I was the one who told them to call you, and Liza’s only reservation was that you’d push your price up because of the added risk.”
Nikki’s stomach is turning somersaults. She’s totally made. This girl could pull the trigger on her life here at any second. And yet it seems she isn’t about to. Not yet, anyway.
“Why you doing this?”
“I’m trying to blend in, so I can garner some information. If your previous antics achieved anything constructive, it was that they demonstrated nobody was going to give me squat while I was identifiable as FNG.”
Nikki is being called out on everything. She figures there’s no angle in pretending she still thinks Alice is Jessica Cho. Her only game here is to make out she’s someone who can get the skinny.
“Yeah, you’re gonna blend right in. Just need to hope everybody who saw a grab of you floating above Central Plaza was too busy looking up your skirt to pay much attention to your face. Yeah, I know who you are, Alice. You’re overseeing the goddamn Seguridad.”
Nikki expects her to look shocked or annoyed that she’s been made too. Instead Alice looks scornful.
“Took you this long, huh? And I was told you’re someone who always knows what’s going on around here.”
That one smarts, pounding as it does upon an already tender spot. She needs to get off the ropes.
“How did you get your ID changed, Wendy? Isn’t that illegal for an FNG official?”
“Where have you been?” Alice counters. “You dumped me and disappeared.”
Nikki knows her only play is to go on offence.
“Where have I been? Where have you been? I went to investigate something and when I came back you were gone. Where did you go?”
“I came after you to see if I could help.”
“Like I told you not to, you mean? Then what?”
“I was abducted.”
“You were what?”
“The floor opened up on me in a corridor and I got dropped into a container. I was drugged. When I woke up, I was strapped to a table and someone was hacking into my wrist unit, wiping my grabs.”
“Who was he? You get a name?”
“He wouldn’t tell me, but I heard someone call him Trick.”
“And this Trick abducted you?”
“No. He said someone else dropped me off and paid him to erase the grabs. Said I had seen something I wasn’t supposed to.”
Nikki glances at the medical teams, the anxious staff and the friends of the girl who got slashed, these last barely moving as the surgeons work to stabilise the casualties ahead of transport.
“What did you see?”
“I don’t even know. I opened a door to a room underneath Sin Garden and there was some kind of orgy going on.”
“Some senior Quadriga or FNG person in there maybe?”
“Not that I recognised. It couldn’t have been that, because one of them asked me to join in.”
Nikki knows she shouldn’t laugh, but with all the tension that’s been building up, some part of her decides she needs a release. It’s the idea of buttoned-down little Goody-Two-Shoes being confronted by that scene, the image of her face when it was suggested she jump right in.
“This isn’t amusing,” G2S states, in a tone that reminds Nikki how being fired and sent back to Earth would not be amusing either.
“How did you get away from this Trick guy?”
“He was attacked. Some people came in, broke the door down. They beat on him, took some of his gear away. Took him away.”
Nikki fails to conceal the shock in her expression.
“You know him?” Alice asks.
With that horse already bolted, lying would only raise more questions.
“I know everybody,” she replies. “Who attacked him?”
“There were three of them. A woman and two men. My lens was disabled so I didn’t get any IDs.”
“And these people knew Trick, you say?”
“They had a need for his skill and his equipment. They wanted him immediately and exclusively.”
Nikki can’t think what this need might be. Trick could provide a lot of services, and God knows he isn’t cheap, but why would they be abducting the guy?
She has a bigger question, however.
“How come the person who witnessed this was allowed to simply walk away?”
“Trick unlocked the clamps. He told them I was nobody. He had given me this new ID by that time.”
“And why would he do that?”
Alice straightens her posture.
“Because he had discovered who I really was and he desperately needed to get on the right side of me,” she replies, her greater message unmistakable.
“So you got up and ran, made it past them and gave them the slip?”
“No. The woman could see through the fake ID. She knew who I really am and what I’m doing here. She said she was ‘running off primary.’ Do you know what that means?”
“Yes. It means she ID’d you from locally stored information. The face-recognition in her lens found you in its cache of images seen first-hand, rather than referring to the central database.”
“You’re saying she had seen me before? Because I didn’t recognise her.”
“Or maybe she had just seen your picture. It’s been shared in certain circles.”
“She mentioned something named Project Sentinel, like I was connected with that. You heard of it?”
“No.”
“Me neither. But once she had identified me, she got her people out of there quickly.”
“You didn’t get any pictures, any grabacións?”
“I already told you, Trick was working on my unit at the time. My lens was disabled. Still is. I can’t get it connected up again.”
Nikki feels a rush of hope as the implications hit home.
“So you didn’t record what you saw in here? You’re not recording right now?”
Alice shakes her head impatiently, like she doesn’t see the relevance.
“Which would mean we’re in ‘my word against yours’ territory here.”
Alice sighs irritably.
“You really don’t get it, Freeman. If I wanted to railroad you out of here, the absence of a few recordings wouldn’t make any difference. There’s a litany of crimes with which I could charge you. But I’m interested in a bigger picture here, which means I’m prepared to hold my nose and ignore the overpowering stench of your corruption if it helps me find out what’s really going on. So how about you help us both by telling me what you learned talking to the people you didn’t want to be talking to while I was there?”
FIRST DO NO HARM
Alice experiences a certain relief in no longer having to pretend she doesn’t know just how corrupt Nikki Freeman is, but it doesn’t make the ugliness of it all any easier to swallow. She feels the bile rising in her throat listening to Nikki so blithely describe the function and dynamics of this venal, fetid morass of self-gratification and indulgence.
Her shirt is clinging to her, the material weighed down by the damp and sticky weight of the slashed woman’s blood. Every so often she catches the smell of it and threatens to gag. She wishes she could tear it off, wring it out over Freeman’s head, rub it on her face. This is the world you’ve created, she wants to tell her, the world your on-going greed and amorality sustains.
But she has a job to do, so instead she simply listens, the anger turning toxic inside her like the blood on her clothes is surely putrefying.
“I spoke to Sol Freitas. He was one of Korlakian’s work colleagues from NutriGen.”
“I remember. Him and Alex Dade. Presumably your inquiries were not restricted to food processing.”
“They all work for Julio Martinez, who runs one of Seedee’s rival bootlegging organisations. Omega was involved in the theft of a shipment intended for Yoram Ben Haim. They paid a manifest administrator to divert Yoram’s people to another dock so that they could make off with the shipment when it came off the shuttle. Freitas thinks Yoram killed Omega as payback for that.”
“It seems highly disproportionate payback.”
Nikki pauses, clearly evaluating how much to disclose, which serves only to tell Alice that there’s plenty she’s keeping back.
“Yoram’s people were diverted to Dock Nine, which was in lockdown. They snuck in and there was an altercation with these high-level mercenary types. I don’t know who they were.”
Nikki breaks her gaze for a moment. It’s enough to tell Alice what she’s hiding: she was there.
“And what is Yoram saying about it?”
Nikki pauses too long once again.
“I know you work for him, so let’s skip the games. How is his demeanour? Could it have been him?”
Nikki frowns, busted.
“He’s on edge, feeling besieged, looking for conspiracies. He even thinks you might be part of it: that the incident at the Ver Eterna was a set-up and you took a dart so that there could be a crackdown.”
Alice glances at her forearm, Nikki tracking her gaze. There is still a bump beneath her sleeve where the bandage sits.
“And is that what you think? That I’m at the heart of some grand conspiracy?”
“I think Yoram is pretty paranoid, but he’s probably not wrong that Julio is planning something. Freitas was boasting about some move Julio hasn’t made yet. That’s why he thinks Omega’s death and what happened to his body was a pre-emptive strike in the war that’s coming.”
Alice recalls the words of Helen Petitjean, who gave her such invaluable information, not least the heads-up regarding Nikki.
There is tension in this place. You can feel it. And it’s building up to something bad, something explosive.
Alice becomes aware of Nikki glancing to her left, from where she sees one of the surgeons approaching, wiping sweat and a smear of blood across her forehead. Behind her Liza is being moved gently on to a collapsible gurney, a medic holding up a clear bag full of fluid.
“Hey, Lupe,” Nikki hails her. “How’s Liza? She still gonna be able to count past six on her fingers?”
“My team are going to get her prepped over at ERU where I can work my magic. I’ve seen worse lately. Good thing is it was a cut with a laser scalpel, so the severing was clean. Nothing ripped and ragged.”
“And what about the girl José’s working on? She gonna be okay?”
“Think so. He was able to stop the bleeding quite quickly. Irony is, if she’d been cut up like that anyplace else, it might not have worked out so well for her.”
“How come?” Alice asks.
“Because José was here on the spot waiting to deal with his specialty: fight injuries,” the surgeon explains. “He had the equipment and the know-how.”
“I’m not sure I see his contribution as ‘ironic’ given that she was injured with one of his implements,” Alice replies. “By implication she wouldn’t have sustained such injuries anywhere else.”
The surgeon gives Nikki a quizzical look, seeking an explanation for Alice’s attitude and possibly her very presence.
“Oh, sorry, allow me to make some introductions. This is Dr. Guadalupe Hermosillos, trauma surgeon at Enfermería Rueda Uno. Lupe, this is—Ah … Wendy Goodfellow. She’s new here, so I’m tutoring her in the ways of Seedee.”
Alice and Lupe size each other up warily.
“Wendy, here’s the thing they don’t teach you at the induction courses,” Nikki says. “If you really want to know what’s been happening on CdC, you gotta talk to the surgeons.”
“Why is that?”
“The most common ailment we encounter at ERU is amnesia,” Lupe replies. “When people sustain an injury, they can seldom tell us how it happened. Nobody ever says they were stabbed or slashed or beaten up. They pitch up at the ER, and they can never remember a damn thing.”
“Aren’t there investigations following up on what you witness as a doctor?”
“We can only describe the wounds we’re treating. We’re not in a position to say for sure how they were inflicted, and we need patients to know that, so they aren’t reluctant to seek proper treatment.”
Alice tries and fails to mask her disapproval. This is all so rotten.
“It’s not some epidemic of violence,” Lupe adds. “Simply that people don’t want to get themselves fired on account of their extra-curricular activities.”
“And do you get their, ahem, gratitude, in exchange for this?” Alice asks.
Lupe stares back by way of reply.
“Hey, how’s tricks generally these days, Lupe?” Nikki chimes, driving over Alice’s question and the awkwardness it threatens to precipitate. “I mean, what is the worst thing you’ve seen lately?”
Nikki gives Alice a warning glance, and she gleans from both this and the ensuing question that Lupe is a potential source. More ugliness to be swallowed in pursuit of the bigger agenda.
“Oh, no contest. A few days ago, this guy came in, looked like he had put his right leg through a wood-chipper, foot-first.”
“What happened to him?” Alice asks.
Lupe and Nikki share a look. Alice gets there late.
“He couldn’t remember,” she says.
“Thing is, in this case I think he genuinely couldn’t remember. He was really spooked. He said the last thing he recalled was coming out of the shower. Next thing he’s lying on his bedroom floor and his foot looks like burger meat.”
“Who was he?” Nikki asks. “Was he a player?”
“Actually, he was a pilot. Not the usual type for a mystery injury. That’s what made it all the weirder.”
“What was his name?”
“You know the rules, Nikki.”
“Come on, Lupe. Confidentially we’re investigating a possible gang war here. Nobody will ever know it came from you.”
Lupe considers it for a moment. She looks like she might be about to cough when one of the Klaws staff interrupts.
“Nikki, the medics are getting ready to ship out soon, so if you need to speak to the wits …”
“On it,” she replies.
Two of the staff are lifting the unconscious guy on to a gurney. Alice sees that the slashed woman is also being moved, electrodes attached to multiple points on her face and body. The friends who came with her are getting ready to accompany her to the infirmary.
Nikki steps across and cuts them off. She shows them her ID.
“I’m Nikki Freeman of the Seguridad. Now, any one of you want to score some points by telling me what your buddy took tonight before he went full-on feral?”
Most of them simply look down, wanting to melt. One of them does answer, however.
“Nothing,” the guy says. “Just some drinks from the bar. I swear. Javier doesn’t touch stims or enhancers. He’s a lab-rat, same as the rest of us.”
Nikki takes this in. If she believes him, her face offers him no such reassurance.
“Okay, I’m gonna tell you all what I told everybody who already went upstairs. This didn’t happen. You saw nothing. You weren’t here. You know why? Because this place officially doesn’t exist.”
She paces in front of them. They look tired and frightened. They just want this to be over, and Nikki knows it. But Nikki means a different kind of over.
Places in the Darkness Page 19