Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle)

by Michael Shean

  Stadil nodded as well. "Exactly. I am hearing from a different source that three of these... Princess Dolls... are coming in on a nonstop flight from Great Siam." Stadil was quiet a moment and his thick fingers spread out fanlike on the desktop, drumming on a laminated blotter that would never see a pen. "I can perhaps find for you the name of who they were meant for. But..."

  "It'll cost me." Walken completed his sentence, frowning still. He looked even less amused when Stadil burst into laughter.

  "You?" Stadil shook his head, his short hair stalwart against gravity. "No, no, Agent — not you. Your agency, perhaps, but I would never presume to ask a personal favor. It would not be, as you say, ethical. I will speak to your superior, Mr. Wolsey. Then, if he agrees, I will point you in the direction you need to go."

  "All right," Walken ground out. The thought of having to deal with this bastard — at Bureau request no less! — only served to frustrate him. "I'll wait downstairs, shall I?"

  "Unnecessary." Stadil reached for the phone. "I will be speaking to him here, if you do not mind. It will not be long."

  The bastard enjoyed this far too much. Making him wait, making him sit through that bizarre show and then bringing him up here to dangle information in front of him. The conversation he had with Wolsey was entirely in a language he didn't understand and entirely at Stadil's leisure. Upon closing up his end of the conversation he reached over and slid the phone across his desk.

  "Agent Wolsey wishes to speak with you," Stadil nearly purred. The tiger's smile had returned.

  "I'm sure." Walken reached for the handset, lifted it to his ear. "I'm here, sir," he said into the receiver.

  Wolsey was always fairly acerbic, even on a good day. It recalled the angry police chiefs in old teleprograms, the old stereotype still in operation since the earliest police shows. Talking to him now, however, revealed a patina of calm covering over his superior's usual growl.

  "You are to follow Stadil's lead where he points you," said Wolsey, his voice flat as the surface of a cemetery pond. "He's got information on who he believes ordered the Dolls. Go and get them."

  Walken didn't really know how to reply. He stared at Stadil for a moment, his face set, countering the man's smile with his own grim expression. Perhaps it was within the purview of the Bureau to maneuver in such a way, but it hadn't happened since Walken had joined up. It for damned sure didn't make him happy.

  "Are you sure, sir?" He knew the answer before it had come out of his mouth and he didn't blame Wolsey for barking the affirmative and hanging up. He took a deep breath, smiled a very forced but reasonably civil smile and put the handset back into its socket.

  "All right, Mr. Stadil," Walken said, his voice as flat as Wolsey's had been. "What have you heard?"

  What Stadil had heard was brief but very interesting. According to the Slav it was a pack of Jopok boys, soldiers of the Korean mob, long since imported from the motherland and generations ingrained. The Koreans had made their way up the West Coast to Seattle from Los Angeles over the past seventy years. After the crews down there had solidified as a part of the city's criminal infrastructure it wasn't long before new gangs broke off on their own, running girls, drugs, protection rackets. Sometimes they even did smuggling work for the Wonderland houses. It wouldn't be the first time he'd had to deal with them.

  The Koreans weren't nearly as powerful or wealthy in Seattle as they were further down the coast, and Stadil hadn't heard of any Korean boss that was into kids. Come to that, neither had Walken.

  Stadil couldn't say where the Koreans were now, but he did know that a group of them had been tasked with recovery, testing and delivery of product, led by a hacker named Park Jang Woo. A generic enough name, but Walken knew it; Park was a young, up-and-coming data intrusion expert among the local Jopok boys. Hot shit but wasted on gangsters. There was far more money to be made with corporate espionage. Safer money. As Walken stepped out into the cool September evening, he felt the voice in his head whisper that the lead was strong. It made sense.

  It wasn't until he'd gotten in the car and driven halfway across the field toward the highway that he reached for the car's panel and found himself calling Wolsey's number for a call he had apparently missed.

  "Where in the hell have you been?" Wolsey's voice was a roar that filled the car's cabin. "I've been calling you for twenty minutes!"

  "Talking to Stadil," Walken replied. "I didn't get any call on my head-rig..." He paused to take the little earbud phone out of his pocket; a tiny light glowed serenely blue on its black snail-shell body, indicating full charge and no problems. "...no, it's fine. Maybe he has his office shielded."

  Wolsey spat a muttered curse. "Well get your ass back toward Sea-Tac," he rumbled. "There's a hell of a mess building up there."

  Walken frowned. Dread pooled cold and heavy in his gut. "The Dolls?"

  "Somebody hit the bus on the way back up toward the office." Wolsey's voice was a constant thrum of barely-constrained rage. "Someone hacked the onboard guidance and stopped it in the middle of the Verge."

  Ah, shit. "The crew?"

  "Buttoned up and unable to override," Wolsey told him. "They were stuck at an intersection when whoever made this happen came and shot the fuck out of 'em."

  Walken drew a breath. The dread thickened. "Stadil said there might be a Jopok crew signed on to get the shipment," he said.

  "Son of a bitch!" Walken flinched as Wolsey's voice tested the threshold of the car's speakers. "Get the hell down there and find out what's happened. Civil Protection's already on scene with orders to hold until an agent arrives, but you know how those fuckers are. Get down there and sort this out before some corporate asshole screws the whole thing up."

  Walken made for the scene with all best speed, shouldering the car through shoals of traffic. Things thinned out as he reached the Verge and the glittering spires of the city's downtown core gave way to the slow decay of its far less modern outliers.

  Seattle now consisted of three divisions: the New City, Old City and the Verge. The New City was the downtown core, corporate-dominated and commercial. The Old City, which served as the area's outermost border, was a dense wilderness of long-abandoned urban ruin. In between them was the Verge which, although largely dominated by the poor and working class, served as a border between the two zones. With economic prosperity on one side and chaos on the other, the people of the Verge were constantly sweating with the weight of their twin burdens. It was no surprise that it was from there where much of the organized crime in the city originated.

  The city had very much become a spreading amoeba of neon and consumerism. Consumer society had existed in its supercharged form even in the previous century and graft and civil corruption since the dawn of civilization. It had nearly killed the city once already; by the Thirties the whole state government had gone bankrupt in an explosion of scandal. Forget reform - the Fed rebuilt the whole damned system.

  The state and civil governments had been reduced in scope and power; there was a whole new movement at the time, driven by the swollen specter of corporate interest, to reduce states' rights thanks to big-time fuckups like that. It wasn't as if Washington had been the first state to do it. California had nearly taken a nosedive some twenty years before and the Midwest had its whole agro-economic collapse, but this had been the last straw. Corporations moved in to take care of much of the lower levels of administration in the form of contracted labor and with open corporate interest came prosperity and civil expansion. A great engine of development followed, fueled by investment capital and it took hold of the area around the previous downtown area. In ten years it had created what would soon become the New City.

  The New City was everything the Old City was not; new, clean, free of the character of the city it had been spawned to overwrite. It wasn't a haven of creativity and modern Bohemians. It wasn't even about corruption anymore. It was instead being turned into a great corporate camp, glittering and soulless, run more and more by the interests
that handled the processes of this new organism they had collectively grown.

  He hated it with a passion. Even as he crossed into the immediately tattered confines of the Verge he felt himself relax; the weight of the towers and the empty people that crowded them seemed to slide off his back and every degree by which the New City shrank in the rearview its influence fell away. Even the terrible thing which he sped toward seemed less of a challenge. The Verge was home, after all. He lived here, knew its streets. The police were waiting for him.

  But 'police' was an outdated term, gone out of style the same way Miranda rights were no longer sacred. It suggested a form of pure public order, an interest in justice that seemed entirely absent in the city of today. History had seen the country become very top-heavy; the government had retracted itself into the form of an administrative nexus, cutting away many of its civil operations and corporate interests had rushed in to prop the whole mess up.

  These days, the jackbooted constabulary of Seattle was a privatized affair referred to as Civil Protection — CivPro — and they were in many ways no better than some of the iron-handed outfits operating out of the Third World. CivPro officers were gargoyles haunting city corners with armored uniforms and machine pistols, sneering at anyone who didn't look like they had a decent credit rating.

  Their lights marked the way, a swollen mass of fluxing red and blue among the empty streets of this forgotten corner of the Verge. The rain had thankfully let up and the cordon of officers ringing the scene stood steaming in transparent plastic slickers. The blue and white of their uniforms was bright under ribbed black ballistic armor. Walken knew the weight of the riot armor himself. He'd been a street cop in Baltimore before he joined Narco, after all, long before he'd come over to work for the Bureau.

  Beyond them sat the bus. It looked as if it had been hit by a military gunship. The loaf-shaped ambulance was perforated an obscene number of times with holes as thick as a man's thumb, strewn in the orderly runs of assault rifles. Machine pistols wouldn't have the power or capacity for the strafing done here. The façade of the building it had stopped in front of was like a prehistoric ruin, pocked and shattered with the hollows left by stray rounds. The single streetlight at the corner drowned the ruined vehicle in its harsh sodium glare, as if to proclaim its tragedy.

  He got out of the car and made his way past the cordon, his badge parting Seattle's corporate finest like Moses on speed. He scouted for someone in a suit coat. Someone that mattered. It didn't take long to find him; by the ruins of the bus was a knot of heavily-armed officers toting automatics. The suit was there with them.

  "Agent Walken, Industrial Security," announced Walken as he closed the distance with the man. He was thin, rather pale, but wore about him an air of arrogance and self-importance that was almost as solid as his charcoal suit. "Good evening."

  The pale man looked at him, his eyes working in a slow blink. "Detective Davis," he replied in a thin tenor. "Man in charge. You're late." He seemed almost bored.

  Walken did his best to smile. CivPro 'Detectives' were as much corporate reps as they were investigators and Davis seemed more the former than the latter. Giving a shit wasn't in his job description. "Hit traffic on the way over," he said. "Sirens don't go as far as they used to, you know?"

  "Traffic's a bitch," said Davis. His bored look turned into a thin smile, malicious around the corners. He thrust his chin toward the perforated ruin. "So I suppose that this your mess, Agent. Federal contraband stolen right off a city street? Medical crew shot up? Even for the Verge, that's classy."

  Walken gave him a flat look. "Yeah," he said after a moment. "Just my luck. You got a report for me, Detective?"

  "Looks like someone was planning an intercept." Davis shrugged, looking at the watch of heavy lunar silver hanging from his wrist. "Hacked into the autodrive over a secure signal, probably a carrier piggybacked over the standard comms wave — I figure it's up to you to figure out how that was done — and sealed the crew in by triggering the bus's onboard quarantine suite. Steered it off the expressway out here and parked it, where they were waiting." He waved at the wreck. "You can see what happened next, I'm sure."

  "Yeah." Walken glanced around. "Where's the medical team?"

  "On their way." Davis slipped his hands into his pockets with another shrug. "No signs of life in there, Agent. Nary a thump nor a whisper. Whoever did this cut the whole crew."

  Walken grimaced. "And the cargo?"

  "Pods read open," Davis said. "We haven't looked inside. That's your job, after all."

  The sneer in Davis' tone made heat rise up the back of Walken's neck. He nodded, drew his Nambu and proceeded warily toward the ambulance. Better there than here, where he might be tempted to pistol-whip that smarmy fucker.

  The ambulance looked even worse as he drew close. The smell of blood filled his nostrils as he surveyed the shredded vehicle. The holes sprayed into its dark blue hull were all above the midline, he noted, about waist level to the crew inside. One of the bus's rear doors hung slightly open. A hint of shattered glass glinted on the deck just beyond. Blood raced in his ears as he stared into the vague sliver of sputtering light beyond and every nerve sang in warning as Walken stepped up on the bumper and nudged the back hatch full open.

  The door swung open, revealing the crumpled body of a woman in medical blues. She had gone the same way as her vehicle, shredded through with automatic fire. Her body lay tangled among the cords of a portable defibrillator, wreathed in a pool of darkening blood. The majority of her head had been sprayed across the lower half of the bus and what remained was a shattered piñata of meat and bone.

  Walken stared at the dead woman for a long moment, as if searching for her long-fled mortality, before tearing his gaze upward. The isolation pods where the Dolls had been stored lined the right side of the ambulance, two moored in brackets along the floor and one along the top along with a large equipment module. The lower pods were empty.

  The upper pod, however, had been drilled through like the bus around it. Walken's blood began to pound loudly his ears as he looked at the clear canopy clouded with the spidery lacework of cracks ringing bullet holes, the white spray of synthetic blood. Beyond the gory veil he could see one of the Dolls — the middle one, he thought, despite her obscured face — and he knew that she was dead. One hand, drained of color, was pressed against the ruined glass — even with her brain savaged as it was, the animal reflexes had still fired.

  When he stepped out and gave the all clear, Davis and his men looked even more bored and disappointed. They had no doubt hoped for something the bomb boys could bill the Fed for. "What's the ETA on that new bus?" Walken called down to them.

  "Got about twenty minutes," Davis called back. "Pretty messy in there, huh?"

  Walken gave him a dim look. "Yeah," he said, then his words dissolved into muttering as he stepped back inside the bus. "Bastards." Twenty minutes to scan the area before the forensic techs and the coroner arrived. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes to try and clear his mind, to put himself into the necessary state of observation. Seconds ticked by. His eyes adjusted to the darkness.

  When he opened them again the entire scene leapt into his mental stage. Holes everywhere, shots from only one direction based on the ragged curls of metal pointing inward from the right. Dead medic on the floor. Blood everywhere, red and white mingling into pink among the diamonds of the decking. It was plain, too, that whoever had hit the bus had some idea of its configuration, the gunfire specific in its application to clear out the crew and leave the pods untouched.

  But not entirely, the voice in his head reminded him. He looked again at the Doll's pod. The holes still occasionally dripped half-congealed whiteness. Whoever it was that hit the bus, they didn't seem have all the information. They destroyed part of their intended cargo and from what he could see it was unintentional. It could simply be a very unfortunate coincidence, but he didn't think that he was dealing with professionals here. They were messy. Messy
usually meant a trail.

  He crouched down by one of the empty pods and examined the lockplate. No obvious sign of mechanical interference, no sign of acid or carbon scoring from a laser cutter. That interested him. He stared at the plate for a long moment, searching for signs of activity — and then he saw a glint of light around the interface port on the side of the lock. New scratches shone around the port, indicating recent use. Someone must have plugged into the lock and hacked it directly.

  Walken sat back, frowning. The Koreans. They must have one hell of a systems man, just like Stadil had told him.

  "I figure it took them about five minutes to do it." Davis was standing on the street by the open doorway. "Damned fast work, too — we don't take our time with federal requests. They got in here before even the first patrol units arrived."

  Walken stood. "Yeah," he murmured to himself, his face grave. Not many people could have slotted in and overridden a lock like that at such a rapid pace — this kid, he really was a hell of a talent. Too bad that he was wasted on his current company and due for prison at least now that he was involved with murder.

  He turned to look at the ruined body of the dead medic, staring again. Half her head was missing. Tongue lolled over splintered teeth, partly split by a passing bullet. Terrible. By her ruined head, however, a footprint had been made in the congealing blood. Cross-slashed voids, the soles of men's orbital boots. Expensive and impractical for surface wear. It spoke of someone who had either grown up in space or merely longed for it. He wondered if Park had been raised on one of the colonies in orbit, maybe Treehaus or Ellery-Simms. It was a clever crew, but raw. Good planning and terrible execution. Hitting the bus and killing off the medics probably meant little to them, but they had managed to kill one of their three charges. There was no kind of universe in which they could escape the wrath of their bosses now.

  So what then? Would they try and sell the Dolls off and disappear from the city? Or perhaps they'd leave them behind and just take off? The latter seemed doubtful; the money needed to disappear with the thoroughness a botch like this required would demand the kind of cash that the Dolls were worth. In any case, the situation was a bad one. A Romeo, the worst sort of case that an agent of the Bureau found himself having to take. His first.