The young man who made her hot fudge sundae complained about the President's decision to cut funding for education programs, social-service programs, arts programs, by 40 percent. He was trying to support his addiction to the theater by selling ice cream from a cart.
President's a nutcase. Out to screw everyone. Not a dime for schools or the arts, but I hear he's hired two new bodyguards. Pentagon funding's stable, and he wants a new division for the CIA.
More talk followed, about the cuts in mental health and homeless housing. The trickle-down theory pissing down on everyone for a third time, even though it had failed miserably the first two times around. Then there was the release of prisoners, their crimes declared to be no longer criminal acts, but acts that required the help of a social-service force cut by almost half.
What're they gonna do, though? They got no more room in the prisons. And you know which prisoners they'll let out? The wrong ones. All the wrong ones. As if we didn't have enough crazies out on the streets as it is. Year of the Serials—Jeesus.
She hadn't understood then, but she remembered. White collar criminals emerged first. Then pedophiles and rapists, serving petty time. After that, those serving time for domestic violence.
Her grandfather had been in a somber mood on the walk home, not talking or singing with her the way he usually did. She'd tugged hard on his leg to get his attention, and he'd looked down at her as if he were looking toward something distant, and unpleasant. She shuddered at his eyes. The way they saw her.
His hand pressed against her forehead, in blessing, perhaps. As if transferring some vision from a world he wouldn't live in long enough to teach her about. His hand on her forehead, and a shock of vision splashed against the back of the eyes. The gleaming walls of a city filled with uncontained rage and despair. This vision, searing and complete. He was a man of the spirit world, a man of quiet in a noisy city. A peaceful man.
Here is your darkness.
Where the dead walk.
The vision shifted, pulled her forward in time, and as she stood alone on a city street, the dead and dying reached for her, scattered like coins on the streets, their hands extended in pleading, in violence. She could smell their death, putrid and chemical, as if they had gone on dying and dying endlessly, their bodies recomposing as fast as they rotted. Dead men, reaching for her.
Your darkness.
She reached to them, feeling their grief pass through her, and then a shock of pain and bright light in her eyes as she was lifted up, lifted by a large hand, and looked into a pair of sharply blue eyes.
Nick.
He picked her up off the ground, held her aloft near his face. She was thirteen, and by then had survived a year and a half on the streets, mostly alone. As he lifted her he laughed, and she scratched at him, at his eyes and face.
Got a tough one, Larry. Wanna help?
Another cop. Not laughing.
Put her down, Nick. Jesus, she's not an assassin.
Never know with these kids. Last one I picked up had a knife, aimed it right for my heart.
Yeah, well, we're supposed to rescue 'em, not torture 'em.
I rescued her. She was about to walk over a live wire.
He rescued her.
This wasn't what she wanted to see. This was all the past. All the past. Nothing to do with Clare or Adrian or the problems with Nick now.
Show me now. Show me today. My darkness today, here, now.
A sense of laughter, light and easy. Voices chiding her, then fading. Her grandfather's voice, teaching her.
You can't force what you see here, Jaguar. You know that.
Voices, fading, and space contracted in on itself to spit her out like old gum onto an empty street.
The vision dissolved, and she took in air, and saw that she was still standing outside the cage, bright sun all around her, the air warm and close against her skin. She sighed, moved her hands against the bars of the jaguar cage. Whatever she'd learned, she didn't know how to use it yet. But at least she'd ended up where she started.
Although the moment of vision could be very still, there was no predicting what the body would do in response to the events of the space. This time, she'd remained motionless; her face pressed into the bars now gone warm under her flesh. The male jaguar sat licking at his mate's ears. She pulled her hands down and saw that the knuckles of her fingers were white, bloodless.
Then she heard a quiet voice behind her.
"Jaguar?" it asked.
Jaguar recognized the tone, and the tenor of concern. She knew who it was. "Hello, Rachel," she replied, without turning around.
"I know it's the Serials memorial...." she said, her voice trailing off.
Jaguar turned around and smiled. "Only on the home planet. Here, it's business as usual. Besides, on the home-planet Toronto there's no memorials," she noted. "They've granted amnesty to all offenders, and rugs to all the dirt so they can sweep it away."
Rachel clucked her tongue, but smiled as well. "You're such a cynic," she said.
"I'm such a realist," Jaguar replied. "You have the new file for me?"
Rachel nodded and moved forward, handing Jaguar a pebble-sized piece of metal. This was the component she would add to her computer to access the rest of the files on Clare Rilasco. She pulled the earring from her left ear and fitted the component neatly in the slot just above the piece of obsidian at the sickle curve of metal.
"Thanks. What do I need to know before I go in?"
"Not too much," Rachel said. "Alex told you she's not here just to rehab, right?"
"I understand the home-planet officials want to know who paid for the hit on Patricks, correct?"
"That's an understatement. NICA, State Bureau of Investigation, all major networks want to know. Apparently even the Division of Intelligence Enforcement is on it."
"They're busybodies by vocation, anyway. Stupid acronym. DIE—do you suppose that's supposed to be threatening?"
"Probably didn't get it," Rachel said. "They take themselves very seriously, from what I've heard."
"Because they have to earn their keep," Jaguar commented.
DIE's people were the mercenaries of intelligence, hiring out consultancies on means of improving intelligence operations to a variety of federal agencies. Jaguar assumed, as many others did, that they were actually a branch of NICA, but that the interests of both groups were best served by keeping that connection invisible.
After the Serials, the CIA had changed its name to the National Intelligence Central Agency, reorganizing under a new set of procedural codes established by a nervous Congress and a President determined to clean up a corrupt system. But subsequent administrations weren't as concerned with corruption, and NICA had found ways around the procedural codes pressed upon them in a time of conscience. They'd split into a number of small branches that specialized in different areas of intelligence, and they began hiring outside agencies to assist in their work. Federal regulations for private corporations were very different, and DIE had been born out of that shift.
She'd seen the CEO on newscasts, a large and affable man who spoke smoothly about nothing to reporters. The DIE people she'd met were just a series of nondescript middle-management types who handled specific projects, then disappeared.
As far as she knew, they didn't even have a main office, preferring to let their people work out of their own homes or offices. It was a neatly conceived idea, distracting to the eye, making it difficult to track who was actually doing what. But Jaguar had heard that their interests included research into the empathic arts for military use. Like the Pentagon, they experimented in ways she didn't approve of. Unlike the Pentagon, they were efficient, and therefore, she felt, more dangerous. She wasn't sure if they ordered hits, or if they liked to keep their hands clean for the research they did.
"I wonder," Jaguar mused. "Maybe NICA called the hit and screwed up. DIE might be here to remedy the failure."
"That'd be ugly, because they're about the only group
I know that might actually get away with it. At any rate, Clare's not talking. She's not afraid or anything, either. She was offered immunity and protective relocation—the works—if she'd talk. She said confidentiality was a professional courtesy she offered to her clients, and she couldn't possibly betray it."
"Jesus—and was she using the proper fork when she said it?"
"Probably. She's a cool one."
"I guess. Did you give me—"
"The works," Rachel interrupted. "Any and all info on Clare's connection with corporate entities, with government agencies, their people and processes. And personal history, medical history, psychological—the usual. Religious background, food preferences, what she likes to drive, favorite music, favorite clothes. There's some great gaping holes in her life from right after the Serials. I'm not sure what you can do about that."
"Wait and see," Jaguar said. "I'll be back to you after I've met her, see what I need next. By the way, did Adrian hook up with the medical-team members I set him up with?"
"All is well. He met, he spent, he will soon be conquered. I'm in the middle of the list, and when he calls me I'm going to offer to sell him lingerie when he tries to sell me drugs I don't need."
"That," Jaguar said, "sounds like fun. Wish I could listen in."
"Don't," Rachel said. "You always have to comment in the middle, and it makes me laugh."
"Okay. I'll be good. What about the Ascension Project people?"
"Terence Manning is putting in some overtime in the leader role," Rachel said. "They're all set up, too."
When Jaguar saluted her as if she was readying to leave, Rachel stopped her. "There's one more thing," she said, and from the tone of her voice the one more thing was something she knew Jaguar wouldn't like.
"Go ahead," Jaguar said, "I won't bite. Not you, anyway."
"Alex asked if you'd be willing to do this one on tap."
"You mean, with a recording implant?"
"That's right."
"No. I wouldn't."
"Okay."
"That's all? Just okay?"
"He said not to push it if you didn't want to."
"Well—why did he bother asking when he knew I'd say no?"
Rachel shrugged. "You're asking the wrong person."
"I am. But since he asked you to deliver messages, tell him I said no, and tell him I won't play Board games with him. I'd rather go back to the home planet and take a job teaching college students the difference between Zen and failure to get homework in on time."
"Ouch."
"Ditto."
"Give him a break, Jaguar. He's not like you think he is."
"He's a Supervisor," Jaguar said, and this, to her, summed up the matter.
"He's a good man," Rachel said, then clucked her tongue against her cheeks. "Forget it. It's not my job to tell you who he is. You need anything else from me?"
"Just—Rachel, did you meet Clare?"
"Briefly," Rachel said. "Why?"
"I want to know what you think. I was surprised Alex gave the assignment to me, and I'm trying to figure out what he's up to."
Rachel pressed a finger thoughtfully against her lips, and considered for a moment before she spoke. "She's an assassin," Rachel said at last. "Alex probably thought you could figure that out better than anyone else."
Jaguar laughed. "Maybe," she said. "Maybe you're right about that."
The long mirror behind the bar was coated with the ancient smoke of millions of cigarettes, and splashed with amber liquid that had dried to the consistency of a polyurethane coating. Adrian could see his own face, distorted by patches of gray, patches of brown, but still his young, handsome face with its boyish grin and alive eyes that had a tendency to see others peripherally, where vision revealed the edges a person would rather hide.
It was a good face, and people trusted it, thought it was open and lively. People, he thought, were real idiots. He stole a glance around the room, saw that nobody had their eyes on him, and examined himself, lifting his chin and smiling. Good face. He liked it. It would get him places someday. He'd make some money here and get the hell out of this damn city, back to New York, where something was always happening. New Manhattan was even better than the old pre-Serial borough had been. There were opportunities there that no longer existed in L.A. or Chicago since the Killing Times, though there was money to be had in any city, he'd found.
But New Manhattan was where he wanted to be.
He reached down and rubbed at his leg, which twitched just at the thought of going. Going. Getting the hell away from that crazy cop he had to deal with. Not that she couldn't be fun, but she was ... something. He wasn't sure. Some kind of mind-fuck going on. Flashes of memories from his childhood kept coming up when he thought about her, unbidden memories that were visceral.
The smell of his father's whiskey. The sickly taste left on his lips after he kissed his mother's cheek. Something about her makeup, and her sweat. Sickly sweet. He felt nauseated a lot, and then angry in knifelike jabs that left him even more queasy than before.
He took a long sip from his beer and shook off the feeling. He wondered if she was some kind of—they were called something he couldn't remember. Witches, he called them. People who messed around with telepathy and that sort of thing. Something scientific about it these days, he knew, and once in a while the news would carry a story about another one arrested for fraud or for murder.
Maybe he should have paid more attention to that sort of thing, but he'd always been too busy to deal in any bullshit he didn't think would make him some cash, and he couldn't figure out how to cash in on that sort of thing. Witchcraft and shamanism. Stupid shit.
He swiveled back and forth on his bar stool, scanning the scattered groupings of people at tables having lunch, casting his glance up and down the bar.
He was supposed to meet with the Ascension Project leader, a man who said Adrian would know him by the daisy he wore in his lapel.
"Daisy," Adrian muttered to himself. "Fucking jester shit."
He swallowed the last of his beer and slid the empty toward the bartender, watching his own face in the mirror.
"Another?" the young woman asked.
"Another," he agreed, smiling at her. She was a little younger than he. Certainly younger than Jaguar. When she brought back his full glass, he touched her fingers briefly in taking it from her, then smiled at her in embarrassment.
"Sorry," he said.
"Not a problem," she replied, grinning.
"Yeah—well, I know how hard it is tending bar. You deal with assholes a lot. I don't want to make your work any worse."
"I appreciate that. It's unusual, but I appreciate it."
He wished he could ask her where she lived, to find out if it was in range of the damn implant in his leg. He could do with a little interaction that didn't include Jaguar. Something pleasant and not demanding. Something like this young woman. He smiled at her again, and was about to continue the conversation when the mirror showed him the aspect of a man standing behind him.
The man smiled and nodded, either at Adrian or the bartender. "One of those would be nice," he said, and sat next to Adrian.
Daisy, Adrian noticed. This is the guy.
He patted Adrian on the back and said, from behind his teeth, "Pretend like you've known me for a while. Like, how's it going, Adrian?"
"Sure. Fine, except that I don't know your name."
"Call me Terry."
"Is that your name?"
"Could be. It's something to call me, anyway. When I grab my beer, we could go over there and throw some darts."
"Fine by me." He stood and stretched in a leisurely way, picking up his beer and waiting for Terry to follow suit. They walked to the holodart board, and Terry fed it tokens, pressing the release for the darts.
Adrian grabbed his dozen, the lightness of them confusing him for a moment. He fumbled them, dropped half, and bent over to pick them up.
"Lemme help with that, buddy," Terry sai
d, and patted him on the back.
"Sure—hey, shit—" He slapped at the back of his neck. "Watch it, will you?"
Terry backed away quickly, looked down at the darts he had in his hands, and smiled sheepishly. "Sorry," he said. "I thought they were off."
"Yeah, well, that's okay. Only be careful. Those things sting like a bitch. Is it bleeding?"
"A little. Lemme get a napkin." He got one at the bar before Adrian could think to say he'd ask the bartendress to help him.
When he returned, he pressed it hard against the spot, making it hurt worse. When Adrian yelped, he apologized again, and backed off.
"It's fine," Adrian said, gathering the rest of the darts from the floor, careful not to press any switches. He preferred the old-fashioned kind of dart, where you could see the point before it hit the board, but they were hard to find anymore. The laser darts, though painful, couldn't kill anyone in a bar fight, and insurance carriers liked that.
"Don't worry," Terry said as he made his first throws. "I'll make it up to you. I understand you want to do a little business. You want access to the Ascension Project membership."
"That's right," Adrian said. "A little interaction with some people who might buy my wares."
"You got up-front money?"
"Some," Adrian said. He wouldn't use all that Jaguar gave him if he didn't have to. "I like to work percent of profit better, though."
"Don't we all. But," Terry said, his hand swinging back and forward as he released a dart, "what we like and what we can get are two different things."
"That's for sure," Adrian mumbled. A hard sell. But he had the money, which was all that mattered. He'd talk the guy into splitting the difference. After all, why should he take 100 percent of the risk in this. If he couldn't go fifty-fifty, they'd have no deal, and he'd walk away.
Adrian gazed wistfully over at the bar, where the young woman moved easily between beer tap and customer. Maybe before he walked away, he'd get her address and phone number, just to remind himself that there was some fun left in the world.
4
THE FEAR PRINCIPLE Page 6