"You think he'll have checked into her that fast?"
"You kidding me?" Her laugh was a chime in his ear. "He's a cold one, sure, but I could tell he was just itching to get that girl open and see what made her tick. Special product, you know?"
Walken made a dark noise in the back of his throat. "Yeah," he said. "Guess so."
"Oh, c'mon," Bobbi said with a sigh. "I know you don't like it, baby, but it's business to him. Professional interest, you know?"
When the train came it did with a whisper — always so quiet, gliding on its alloy rail — and they filed inside.
"Bet you haven't been down this way in a while," she murmured as they'd finally exited the train into the station nearest Pierre's, the mastoid pickup of her earbead transmitting her words into his own. They took their time navigating the dense masses of people, Bobbi in jeans and a mesh top under an oversized leather jacket, Walken invisible in the camo suit and cowl. They were sailors in unfriendly seas, trying to reach the safe harbor before getting tangled up in the shoals.
"No," he replied. "Used to driving, not the crowds. Good thing you got these radios."
"I am a well-prepared kind of girl, baby," she said softly and Walken could hear that her usual self-assurance had rooted itself in her tone again. The horror of the night before seemed to have passed somewhat, or at least turned into something that their minds could more easily process. He wasn't sure if it had been the tangle of their bodies and the mingled emotional release, or the hunt itself that served as the catalyst for this rapid return to normal. Perhaps it was simply survival instinct. Walken had always been able to do it as a cop, but Bobbi's resilience only made him admire her more.
"Glad to hear it," he replied.
They made for the exit, shouldering past a group of salarymen. They were standing together like a herd of black-suited wildebeests, trying to shield themselves from the collective gaze of a group of wing-haired teenagers lounging against the terminal railing. Walken recognized them as Young Sons from their red fatigues and their long leather coats, black fading into bright crimson around their sleeves and ankles. Bad news. They liked to dance up close with blades, the red in their uniforms a warning. He felt a pang of sympathy for the group of corporates as they shuffled by and hoped the Sons didn't take too much of an interest in them.
They stepped out of the station into silver sheets of afternoon drizzle, the sky a canopy of seemingly persistent lightness rather than a real color. "Always fucking raining," muttered Bobbi, who standing under the awning took a collapsible plastic umbrella from her bag and unfurled it as she settled back in the corner of the station entrance, out of the sight of the throng. "Don't know if that suit can handle all the input."
Walken wrinkled his nose under the suit's hood. "Isn't this supposed to be camouflage? It's worked just fine so far."
"Yeah," she murmured, "But it's not exactly perfect. It's a demo model - the other night was the first time I used it, to be honest. I worry how it's going to handle the city and the rain." Bobbi leaned out a bit to squint at the rainy street. "Well, can't just stand here. I guess we'll have to give it a test."
A flare of irritation shot through him with her admission, but there was nothing for it — it had worked so far and so hopefully it would work on the open streets. Walken stepped past her into the rain and suddenly became a distortion. Like a man-shaped fisheye lens, he immediately stood out. It wasn't that the suit's processor didn't work, rather it did its job too well; every drop fell in painfully high resolution, standing out as they were rendered in perfect, unnatural clarity. He had instantly turned into a living tech demo.
"Jesus," Bobbi hissed. "Get back here!"
He stepped back, next to Bobbi and immediately became the shadowed pillar beside her. Beads of rain clung to the darkness, suspended as if in zero gravity. "Here," she muttered and dug a black plastic rain poncho out of her bag to hand to him.
He took it, swept off the cowl — immediately shutting down the suit's camo module — and became himself again, pulling on the poncho and pulling its hood over his head as he put the sniper cowl away. "Not perfect," he muttered, "But I guess it'll work."
"Stupid fucking rain," Bobbi grumbled. "I should've thought of this in the first place. I swear, you get bagged thanks to Pierre's shitty tech and I'll plug him myself."
"Yeah, yeah," Walken chuckled as he took her arm, "You're a stone killer. C'mon, girl. Let's get out of here."
Walken spent an hour lurking in the blank lobby of Pierre's building, staring at gray walls, until Bobbi emerged from its innards with a new set of keys. She'd gotten them a new car, a Mercedes Cirion. It was a bland block of German plastic and steel with four ball tires and an onboard computer. It didn't have sensors, but it had an encrypted black-market transmitter for mobile connectivity. It was also surprisingly maneuverable for a midrange.
"Perfect for our needs," she said as the car drove toward Lionel's clinic. "Better than that damned Honda. The lag made my brainride like wading through a cesspool."
"Yeah." Walken's eyes were on the road but his mind was drifting off in another direction, floating off toward the Doll again. "This guy, Lionel. He's not Rasta, is he?"
"Sort of," Bobbi replied. She was squinting in a mirror that folded down from the roof, applying rich, wine-colored paintstick around her eyes. "I mean he's not, not really, but he used to be."
"Lapsed Rasta?" Walken's mind boggled. "You know some weird fucking people, Bobbi."
"It takes all kinds, this underground of ours," she said with a sigh, blinking her eyes in the mirror. Framed by the burgundy paintstick they shone like polished emeralds. "Perfect."
They reached Lionel's clinic around noon and parked in the manicured lot. Bobbi had called Lionel as they had left Pierre's and again the same red-uniformed orderly bowed pleasantly as they walked around to the clinic's rear entrance as Lionel had directed. "Good day to you," the orderly said, as if the night before had never happened. "Please come with me."
The orderly led them through the sterile corridors once more. Walken found himself frowning deeper and deeper with every step they made through the winding maze toward their destination.
"Hey," Bobbi murmured, taking out her earbead. "You okay?"
"Fine," he replied, voice low. "Just wondering what she's going to be like when we get there. If he's cut her all up into pieces."
"Well, I'd be really disappointed if he did." She shrugged. "He'll owe us both."
Somehow he was not reassured, but Bobbi laid her hand on his arm and that made him feel a little better.
When they entered Lionel's cavernous medical theater, however, the little Doll was laid out naked and apparently whole upon Lionel's slab. Her dark hair had been shaven away, smooth pale skull seamed pink where a laser had been used to cut open a flap in the side of her head to get to the biocomp inside. Walken felt strangely relieved to see that this was the only blemish the little girl's pale skin. Lionel was in the back of the chamber, dressed as before, his face lined with lack of sleep. He must have been up all night.
"Afternoon, Lionel," Bobbi called as the doors swung closed behind them. Having slept and no longer numb from nearly being butchered, he was aware of their weight, the grace with which they drifted on their floating hinges. Walken was also now much more aware of the kind of technology that was contained within the medical theater.
It was like a Tokyo black clinic in miniature: set in the walls and on the worktables were very advanced devices, the newest in tissue analyzers and DNA synthesizers and the like. A miniature clonal vat for growing organs and tissue grafts filled one corner. Everything in here was new and cost an absolute fortune and it was only now that he was fully aware of what kind of connections Bobbi had.
No wonder Stadil chose her for this, he thought to himself. Whatever we need, every piece in the puzzle available to us in one way or another if we're smart enough to get them. It was most impressive.
"Good afternoon, little sister," Lionel said, l
ooking up from a holomonitor being thrown up from the machine he was consulting. Images of DNA, ghostly coded spirals, were conjured in blue light. "You brought your friend, I see. Agent mon, dat one. De Walker."
"Walken," he corrected automatically.
Lionel shrugged. "If you say so, mon." He switched off the machine and approached them. His coat was fresh, Walken saw, though the t-shirt and black jeans he wore beneath were rumpled. He did not seem to have slept. "Me been busy all night an' all day, working over de Babylon girl. She's very flash, dis one. Not de same as de rest."
"Oh yeah?" Bobbi sauntered up to the opposite side of the slab, looking down at the Doll's nude body. "You didn't have to cut her up to tell?"
"No need," said Lionel. He gestured to Walken, who had up to that moment remained where he stood by the doors. "C'mere, mon," he said. "Me got tings t'show you. Ya wan see dis, find yourself justified."
Walken joined Bobbi at the side of the slab, looking down at the unfortunate girl. He thought that, divested of the horrible dress and the layers of makeup, she would seem human again. Instead she seemed even more synthetic. It was her fragility, enhanced even more now that her voluminous skirts had been removed, the stark and blemishless paleness of her skin against the brushed steel of the medical table. He realized that she had a pair of black metal ports set into her ribs, just below her armpits.
"What the fuck are those," he asked, blinking. "The ports I mean."
Lionel was staring into the monitor attached to the table, consulting the ghostly lines of data crawling across its screen. "Nerve plugs," he said, not looking up. "For a harness, me say. Shared sensorium."
"Shared sensorium?" Bobbi's voice piped up from beside him, quizzical.
A shrug rose in Lionel's voice. He still consulted the table's monitor. "So the client can feel what the Doll feels, sister. When she be in use."
Beside him, Walken felt Bobbi recoil a bit from the table's edge. "...oh."
Lionel's indifference sparked a small flame in the back of Walken's head, a flame that he had to work very hard to keep from bursting into an instant conflagration. He forced his eyes on the seam in her head to try and quash that sudden rage — the pink line reminded him of the route marker on a computer map, leading from her temple to mysteries he'd never wanted to view in the first place.
"Okay," Walken said after a long moment's meditation, forcing his eyes to rise and look at Lionel. "What do you have?"
"Dat little girl, she no Babylon Doll, mon," said Lionel, eyes glittering. "Not dat I ever saw. Dat ting's for sure."
"Not a Doll?" Bobbi looked between the two of them; she sounded a combination of bewildered and fascinated, traces of dread lurking in the back of her tone. "What is it... she... then?"
"This girl was part of a pair," Walken said. "The other one killed a lot of people."
Lionel nodded, adopting an impressed expression. "I don't doubt it, mon. Dis children, she stronger than people know. She got sacs in her bloodstream pumpin' chemical stimulants into her body on demand, a total lack of physical self-restraint - ya mon, dis little sister, she could do more den any normal person think."
"So she's doped?" Bobbi looked down at the doll's head. "Is that what makes her strange, aside from trying to kill people? She got some new type of biocomp that lets her do it?"
Another nod from Lionel. "I been trying to put me head around it all night, sister," he said. "First of all, de skin is like bonded armor; me had to turn de laser up high to get through. And de biocomputer matrices, dey like nothing I seen before — not in de brain at least."
That explained to Walken the lack of skin evidence in the Koreans' wounds; explosive rounds would've blown through a substance like Lionel was describing, but darts would never have made purchase. He remembered the fury of her fallen sister, the seething rage. Broken flesh, the tangled limbs. White blood on stained concrete, running like milk. "All right," he said, "What is it?"
"ROM storage." Lionel canted his head, gesturing to the Doll's shaven skull. "Capacity like dey got in supercomputers — whole platters of hologram memory's worth in biological modules. No brain in dere at all."
Walken's eyes narrowed. "What, all of it? Just one big storage module? No processors, behavioral modules? No hardwired training?"
"De whole ting, mon, all spliced directly into de nerve stem. Dis little child, she got more storage in her head den even some of da more righteous supercomputers do."
Walken frowned down at the girl's pale body. "A massive storage unit connected directly to the nervous system," he said. "Like recorded reflexes, something like that? Mercenaries and bodyguard types augment their fighting styles with counter-combat reflexes — could it be similar to that?"
Lionel nodded. "Verra good, mon," he said, approval in his voice. "Could be something like dis. Seem like it could be vast amounts of data, but it was linked directly into de nerves — an nothing like dis exist, mon. Not in all of Babylon nor Wonderland either. Dis be one macca duppy, a demon child." He shook his head, though for all his seriousness there was a bright, mad light deep in the back of his eyes. "But she not giving up her secrets now."
"Lionel, can it be interfaced?" Bobbi looked back down at the girl, the curiosity burning in her eyes giving way to confusion. She blinked. "Wait, what do you mean? What's the matter?"
The Jamaican shook his head. "Me can't be sure. Advanced decomposition be part of its design, failsafe. Turned it all into withered meat. Good ting I ran de analyses last night, I got all de information I could. Else we be at crosses right now."
"Oh?" This from Bobbi, whose lips were pursed. "Yeah, well. You did, so we're cool, right?"
"Not entirely." Lionel looked to Walken. "I take de Doll, she belong to me now. Spirit done gone to Jah already, you don' need de rest. I give you what you asked for."
"Why do you need her?" Walken's voice was mechanical now, his eyes dull. Bobbi's face turned toward Walken's and she saw it slacken, grow wooden. She did not understand what she saw there. "What does a Rasta clinic doctor want with Babylon tech anyway? Or why even run a black clinic in the first place?"
"For study," he replied. "Never got to look hard at one of these before. De rest is between I and Jah alone. We got a deal, mon?"
Walken didn't react — not like Bobbi had expected, perhaps. Keeping his feelings carefully flat, he reached his hand across to Lionel, over the body of the Doll and offered it to him wrist-up. "Burn her when you're done," he said, "And we have a deal."
Lionel took his hand at the wrist, shook it once and showed perfect, polished white teeth. "Ites."
Walken didn't talk to Bobbi at all on the way back to her place. She'd tried to talk to him a few times, but after being ignored for the third time she sat quietly in her seat, staring at the window, looking from time to time to see if his face had changed from the empty mask he wore. It had not.
He was angry. He felt as though he had been betrayed, but he wasn't sure why. Was it because Bobbi had sold the Doll's body? She was like everybody else in the way she felt the Doll had not been a girl anymore, not human. To Bobbi the doll was meat and meat could be sold to advance one's goal, especially when one's goal was as lucrative as hers.
But Walken didn't blame her. She had not agreed with him the night before, when he had explained his feelings — she had only changed the subject. She had already made the deal with Lionel, after all. He was angry at himself, but that didn't make sense to him either. Shouldn't he be angry at the Wonderland scum? He had always been so, the vast black markets his constant enemy, jeering at him with every work of technological obscenity given up from its depths. But then, seeing the little girl's naked body on the cold steel slab, he thought that he was giving away something important. Her flesh, full of mysteries, her pointless death beneath the trash. Somehow he felt that an angel had passed, for a purpose great and terrible and he had missed it. That made him angrier than anything else.
And there were the other questions. In the space of just a few days S
tadil had destroyed Walken's life and placed him on a road toward something different, destructive. He'd nearly been killed already and the Bureau was on his tail. The Dolls were gone and in their places they had left even more strangeness. More mysteries. His life now was paved with them and besides what comfort Bobbi offered in her arms he had nothing else to do but solve them. He wondered, thinking again of the dead little girl, if his road would lead him to a similar slab. A feeling that it might loomed like a shadow over his mind.
"So listen," Bobbi finally said as they passed through the downtown core and made it toward the bridge, "I gotta say something. You don't have to talk back, just... listen."
He nodded. Ahead on the bridge, the traffic slowed.
Bobbi looked at him a moment and again her face was washed with light — light from the console, the dash, the passing flashes of the lamps hanging from the bridge wires. "I don't know what the hell is going on," she began, "But you gotta know, I didn't do that to fuck with you. I heard what you said last night. I respect it."
"Do you?" The car lurched forward a bit, the chain of autos moving along with their own gravity, not fast enough for him. He didn't want to have this conversation now.
"Yeah," she said, sounding a little hurt. "I do. And I know you got a special place for those kids. I don't try and understand it, you know that to me they're dead already, but I respect it. Hell, I admire it. But I can't do anything about what's been done. You need to get your way along and those are the only terms that Lionel would give me. You gotta follow your course."
"And you have to get your money." His lips curled. It wasn't nice, but it felt good to be vicious for once. Old muscles flexed in his mind.
She winced a little, looked at her hands. "Yeah," she said, "I guess so. But this is more than that. Last night, I thought that this was all about some crazy fucker having his way with this cop that fucked up a deal he knew he was gonna get killed over. Shit like that happens, you know and I wanted in on the ride. There was the money too, of course.
Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle) Page 18