Striper Assassin

by Nyx Smith

  The fact is that he used the ignorant savage as a pawn in his mercurial rise to ultimate power. Whether every detail of his plans back in Seattle succeeded is quite irrelevant. He still used her, the slitch. He made her a servant, a slave to his will, just like he uses everybody. If he wished, he could use her in any manner he wanted. Why, if he felt so inclined, he could even arrange to have her right here on this bed, strapped down spread-eagled, a moaning abject slave to his basest physical needs…

  The thought makes him smile, then laugh.

  Other people failed him. That’s why the slitch survived, why she lived to pursue him out of Seattle. She was supposed to have been killed. She was hired to kill the man whom he’d set up as a thief, the thief of a very valuable datafile. Naturally, Ohara himself had the file. The phony theft was staged merely to deflect suspicion. The death of the man was necessary to keep him from revealing the truth. Striper’s own death, had she died, would simply have helped account for the disappearance of the datafile.

  As it turned out, the file disappeared and Ohara got off scot-free. But for Striper’s interference, her failure to cooperate by dying, the plan went exactly as intended. That ass of a police lieutenant, Kirkland, didn’t know how close he was to the truth. Ohara did sell the data stolen from Seretech, as Kirkland said, but not to John Brandon Conway, the famous corporate intermediary. Rather, he used the data to buy into KFK. Like most multinationals, KFK is highly diversified and has at least one subsidiary for which the Seretech genetic engineering data might have been tailor-made.

  Just the thought of how he reamed those imbeciles at Seretech sets him off laughing again. How much more heartily he’ll laugh once he’s dismissed KFK’s entire board of directors, including that pompous ass of a vice-chairman, Torakido Buntaro, with all his holier-than-thou jappo presumptions.

  The days ahead are going to be sweet, indeed.

  He lifts his head to look as the bedroom door opens and a figure in dark clothing steps through the doorway.

  * * *

  Tikki pauses for several moments, just staring. She feels… confused. She’s here in a condo at the Platinum Manor Estates to eliminate a man called Bennari Ohashi. She has seen Ohashi’s picture, knows that he looks Japanese. She also knows that Adama holds Ohashi responsible for the death of his beautiful Leandra. Yet, now, as she stands in the doorway of the condo’s luxurious red-hued master bedroom, she finds herself unable to distinguish between the image in her memory, her memory of Ohashi’s face, and the face of the man lying on the bed. And the man on the bed is definitely not Japanese. His features are unmistakably Anglo, and Tikki knows him, knows him from personal experience. He doesn’t look exactly the same as when last she saw him, but she recognizes his smell at once, and his smell leads her to discover the familiar characteristics in his features.

  His name is Bernard Ohara and she’s been waiting since Seattle for the opportunity to kill him.

  She only wonders how it is that she finds Ohara here.

  Is this the man Adama wants dead? Could it be anyone else? She’s at the right address. The master bedroom reeks of Ohara’s odors, as if he’s been living here for months. This cannot be a coincidence. Can it?

  She shakes her head.

  Adama always said he chooses his weapons very carefully. Now she thinks she knows what he meant. What better weapon than one which willingly seeks the target? Which has personal reasons for wanting Ohara dead?

  Ohara marked her for death back in Seattle. That’s all the reason she needs.

  Ohara slowly sits up, wearing no more than a puzzled frown and a pair of satiny gold shorts. “Who are you?” he says. “And what are you doing in my bedroom?”

  “Do you still dance?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Tikki slips the shoulder-slung JAMA-5 behind her back and draws the Kang from the reverse-draw holster at her left hip.

  “I think you should leave,” Ohara says. “Now.”

  Wrong.

  Tikki points and fires. The Kang roars five times in rapid sequence. The pounding reverberations are deafening. The sheets and pillows on the bed flutter and jerk. Ohara’s eyes go wide. The acid stink of his fear suddenly floods the air. He twitches convulsively, scrambling from the bed, falling, getting up, staggering, jumping, spinning toward the door at the right of the room.

  “You get out of here!” he shouts. “GO AWAY!”

  Tikki puts five more rounds into the floor around Ohara’s feet, then another five into the wall around the door as Ohara stumbles through, exclamations rising into hysterical shouts. Tikki follows him down a short hall and into the next room, a study, popping the Kang’s empty magazine and ramming home a full one. Ohara moves toward the desk at the rear of the room. Tikki points and fires. Slick rounds chew up the walls, the floor, the desk, and the monitor sitting on it. Ohara’s shrill shouts become screams of terror. He staggers sideways across the room, through another door, and into another room.

  Tikki follows.

  Ohara leads her through a huge room like a living room. She rams a new clip into the Kang and opens fire again, smashing things all around her target, lights and lamps and expensive crystalline decorations. Why she doesn’t just put the shots into Ohara and end it she isn’t sure. She feels strangely at odds with herself. Part of her wants Ohara to know utter terror. Another part wants to blow him away, make her kill, have her revenge. Another part shouts for her to make the kill personal, make the change, assume her four-legged form and take this man as prey, shred him, then devour him. Yet another part keeps telling her, adamantly, that she’s got to kill this man to obtain Raman’s safe release.

  And yet, she resists. She hates the idea of giving Adama what he wants, of giving into his will, serving his wishes. She despises the concept of serving another as her master. She would almost rather let Ohara escape than cooperate with a mage who has apparently been manipulating her with magic. She detests being used. It makes her feel like helpless prey, like a weak, insignificant little creature forced to turn and run at the first sight of anything like a hunter.

  Feelings like that make her ill, sick with disgust, furious with outrage.

  Ohara bangs through a sliding transparex door and stumbles onto a balcony, then turns and bangs back against the impact-resistant panes guarding the balcony’s outer edge. Tikki follows as far as the doorway, Kang thundering. The transparent pane at Ohara’s back fractures and then bursts into a shower of fragments. Ohara snivels and shrieks and begins laughing hysterically, maniacally.

  “I KNOW WHO YOU ARE!” he screams, then pauses to laugh, laugh like a madman. “You’re the monster… yes!” He laughs wildly, frantically. “You’re the monster! The monster! You don’t scare me! You aren’t here! YOU’RE NOT REAL!”

  Tikki pauses, lifting the Kang to point directly at Ohara’s face. In a sense, she realizes, Ohara’s right. She isn’t here. Now that she’s faced with the inevitability of making another kill, she remembers something, a previous kill she made for Adama. The memory comes to her clearly. It’s been flitting around for days somewhere just beneath the surface of her conscious mind. She was on the back stairway of a residence tower, the Ardmore complex. A door opened and a young male came onto the stairs, and she killed him because he might sound an alarm and prevent her from reaching her target. It seems impossible now. She killed a kid, an innocent kid. The realization hurts.

  She could have just clubbed him over the head.

  All this effing magic has her fragged up. She’s been doing things that are insane, things that don’t make any sense! Here in the middle of a city, she’s been acting like a creature of the wild…

  It’s all too complicated.

  As she watches Ohara sniveling and shrieking and laughing, a distant part of her mind tells her that this puny nothing of a human being is not worthy of being taken as prey, that it is somehow less than prey, like a bug. The idea of even bothering to kill it is practically an insult.

  On impulse, she swings the JAM
A-5 out from behind her back, points and fires once. The weapon thumps. Ohara doesn’t seem to notice the small dart that suddenly appears, sticking out of his midsection. Momentarily, his sniveling subsides and he goes limp. Tikki isn’t sure what she will do if he sways forward; but, as it happens, she doesn’t have to worry about it.

  Perhaps Fate decides the matter.

  Ohara sways back, back through the hole in the balcony’s transparent outer wall, and topples into the night.

  It’s seven stories to the ground.

  Tikki hesitates a moment, considering the hole in the balcony’s outer wall, then turns to go. She almost doesn’t care if Ohara dies in the fall, or if through some miracle he should survive. Too many other things are bothering her, questions involving her entire existence. She isn’t sure who she’s killing for, or why, or if she even has the right.

  She has to get away.

  51

  There’s an impact beyond comprehension, then suddenly he’s tearing away, ripping free of his own flesh, shedding every last particle of humanity, everything but his animal awareness, as he hurtles down a black passage into an ocean of searing white.

  The pain is beyond comprehension. He lives a billion eternities of agony in a mere instant. He lives ten billion more in the instant that follows. He senses a trillion trillion others thrashing and shrieking with a torment no less devastating than his own, and then something else, a presence, malignant and evil, a fiendish monstrosity reveling in the glorious suffering of souls uncounted. This abominable horror has caught him, along with so many others, only to feed on his agony and essence throughout all eternity.

  His earthly schemes are undone. He is in the grip of one whose power exceeds all comprehension.

  Then, the agony swells again, and there is nothing else.

  52

  It’s well past midnight when Kirkland lifts his eyes from his desktop monitor. What he sees coming through the door of his office is Deputy Chief of Detectives Nanette Lemaire, accompanied by Kirkland’s immediate boss. Captain Emilio Henriquez. The door swings shut behind them.

  “You’re to close the Exotech case,” says Lemaire.

  “I’m working on it,” Kirkland replies.

  Lemaire shakes her head. “You have till tomorrow evening to shut it down. By twenty hundred, you’ll have a suspect in custody. You scan me?”

  Kirkland spends a few moments watching Lemaire and Henriquez, then a few more lighting a cig. Henriquez doesn’t look like he’s about to make any protest about anything.

  Kirkland takes a deep drag off his cig. “I’m a little thick tonight. Chief. Why don’t you lay it out for me.”

  “Don’t make trouble, Brad,” Henriquez says. “Not on this one.”

  “I’m not making trouble. Just asking a simple question.”

  Lemaire compresses her lips. For a woman her size, big as an ork, she’s got thin lips. They briefly disappear inside her mouth.

  “This is how it reads,” she says, adamantly. “The media’s got it now. The mayor’s ready to drop a load in his pants. By order of the board of Hetler-Shutt, our parent corporation, you’ve got till twenty hundred tomorrow to make an arrest, and one that’ll stick.”

  “And the hell with justice,” Kirkland remarks.

  “Brad,” Henriquez says darkly.

  Lemaire glares.

  Kirkland takes another drag off his cig. “Do I get this order in writing, Chief?”

  “Spare me your drek, Lieutenant!” Lemaire shouts.

  “Don’t ask me to play patsy for the BOARD!” Kirkland roars.

  Several moments pass. Lemaire turns several shades of red. Henriquez breaks the silence. “Why do you think I'm standing here, Brad?" he says quietly. “Nobody’s looking for a patsy.”

  “You gonna sign off on the case, Captain?”

  “You close it. I’ll sign it.”

  That makes a difference. At least, it’ll suggest, in writing, that Kirkland took advice before closing the case. That means someone to share the blame if the case comes back to haunt them. Kirkland can deal with that. He can also deal with shutting down cases prematurely, even pinning the rap on the wrong piece of dirt. There’s plenty of dirt to go around and they’re all guilty of something. Pinning a rap on the wrong slag bothers him, but that’s the price of staying on the job, doing what little he can to actually fight crime. It’s called making deals with the devil. Deals like this make him want to vomit, but somehow he manages to go on swallowing his bile. It’s either that or just walk away, and just walking away isn’t his style.

  “You know I’ll back you up,” Henriquez says.

  That’s probably true.

  Kirkland meets Lemaire’s glare for several moments. “Whatever you say, Chief,” he says softly.

  Henriquez and Lemaire head out, passing Detective-Sergeant Paul Zanardi on his way in. Zanardi looks feverish, excited, but too bleary-eyed and tired to show it right.

  “Marchese just called in. He says Bernard Ohara just fell out through a transparex wall and took a dive off his balcony.”

  Kirkland hesitates, then says, “He should be so lucky.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Kirkland sips his lukewarm soykaf, drops the rest in the garbage can behind him. “Some new data’s just come to light. Ohara’s our perp.”

  Zanardi looks astounded. “You serious?”

  Kirkland tokes on his cig and sits back in his chair, considering the pros and cons, then says, smiling, “Think I’d joke about a thing like that, Zanardi?”

  53

  Adam Malik carefully descends the stairs to the squalid foyer of the tenement, walking stick in one hand, briefcase in the other. The stick conceals a short blade like that of a sword, but one magically imbued to provide a slight edge in a fight, in the unlikely event he should ever have to participate in physical violence. The real treasure is inside the briefcase, securely cradled in plush velvet. It takes the form of a huge gemstone weighing perhaps seven or eight hundred carats. Malik does not yet understand even a fraction of the gem’s potential, but he knows its value is beyond measure. It is called the Vault of Souls, and the power it contains exceeds anything he has ever encountered.

  Now. as he steps into the foyer, a darkness emerges from out of the empty air in the center of the room, and swells to fill the room completely. Malik smiles, for this is the manifest form of the Master, the spirit calling itself Abbirleth. Malik holds himself still as the darkness slowly dwindles, gathering around him, filling him, becoming one with his flesh, his mind, his spirit.

  “You are ready,” the Master says.

  Malik smiles. “Yes.” Then a thought occurs. “What about the Weretiger stumbling around in the basement? My spell of confusion will fade shortly.”

  “Leave him,” the Master says. “He is of no concern… We have a new servant now…”

  “Yes,” Malik says again, still smiling.

  The new servant waits out front by the car. He is an ork, a blank slate as far as magic is concerned, and not particularly bright. Those two factors make him easy to control. He is physically large and powerful and has no qualms about killing. That should make him useful, a good weapon, very good. He will never be as resistant to injury as, say, a Weretiger, but in this world of violence and death, to replace him is a simple matter.

  “And what of Striper?”

  “We are through with her as well…”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Now, we go…”

  As the Master wishes, so it shall be. Malik is more than pleased to be getting out of Philadelphia. More than pleased to do whatever the Master wishes. The Master has granted him many favors, given him a taste of power beyond human conception. A power enabling him to summon the spirit of his beautiful Leandra, and to bask once more in the glory of her love. The Master’s power also made controlling the Weretigress Striper as easy as expressing wishes, and gave him the weapon with which to take vengeance on those responsible for the death of his beautiful
one: Neiman, Jorge, Harris, and, of course, Ohara.

  Bernard Ohara was the worst. It was he who ruled the Special Projects Section with an iron fist, he who insisted on the ritual summoning that led to Leandra’s death. Ohara richly deserved the death he got. Malik’s only disappointment was that it was not more cruel. The Master’s pleasure would have been greater had Ohara’s death, like that of the others, been one of exceptional violence.

  The Master’s pleasure is of great importance, because without the Master’s power Malik would be nothing, the greater secrets of the metaplanes forever closed to him.

  Now, all the knowledge of the universe awaits him.

  From the foyer he steps out onto the sidewalk. He will not miss this decaying, god-forsaken neighborhood. Neither will he miss Philadelphia. Who would?

  Carson, the new servant, opens the rear door of Malik’s old limo. The car is a virtual antique that looks like it’s falling apart, but Malik likes it, and for the moment, it suffices. Malik slides into the front-facing rear seat.

  “We goin’ now, boss?” Carson inquires.

  “Yes,” Malik replies. “On to Newark.”

  The Master has an affinity for places like Newark, a city like so many others that the guidebooks describe as urban hells.

  Very appropriate.

  Carson climbs behind the wheel of the limo and starts the engine. As the Lincoln pulls away from the curb, the world suddenly explodes into a million shards, a million fiery fragments, roaring with the monstrous searing flames of an inferno.

  54

  The thousand candles climbing the wall in tiers burn brightly. On the altar half a hundred incense sticks also smolder and burn. Eliana dips her thumb into a small clay pot on the altar, then dabs a spot of the gray paint of Cat on her forehead, nose, and cheeks. She uses a bowl of pure water and a fresh, clean towel to meticulously bathe her thumb and fingers and hands. That done, Eliana retreats three steps from the altar and settles slowly to her knees.