Cybernation (2001)
Page 8
Be interesting to hear what Toni would say. He hadn’t consulted her about it.
9
On the Bon Chance
“Okay,” the tech said, “here it is.”
They were in Media, a ballroom-sized place divided into cubicles, thick with computers, printers, duplicators, and other electronic impedimenta.
Chance looked at the monitor, a 21-inch flatscreen connected to a top-of-the-line Macintosh computer. The Avid software and the computer’s hard drive would allow up to a hundred hours of film storage, and with such a nonlinear editing system, you could do all kinds of things. Wipes, fades, dissolves, blue-screen, holoprojics, whatever. It was a powerful tool, used in a lot of movie and television productions, and with it you could take an ordinary piece of film or CGI and do amazing things.
To the world, CyberNation must be about amazing things.
Onscreen was the computer-generated image of a soaring marble and stone cathedral. Dust motes swam in beams of sunlight lancing through low-hanging clouds. The point-of-view camera moved in on a simulated dolly toward the arched building.
Music began, a Bach fugue with thundering organ chords.
As the POV shot approached the massive doors to the building, they began to open and dissolve. Doves flew out and scattered. The music began to morph into a classic rock ’n’ roll number with the words seeming to grow right out of the organ notes, something with a heavy, driving beat, all about American dreams and suicide machines. As the music changed, so did the image, from a towering pseudo-Gothic edifice to a futuristic nightclub. The camera continued to dolly in and through the doors, and inside the club dozens of beautiful people danced together, frantically gyrating to the rock beat. Sweat made their thin shirts and blouses stick to perfect bodies. The men obviously all lifted weights, the women didn’t wear bras and didn’t need them.
Overhead, lasers flickered through clouds of colored smoke, and the slogan CYBERNATION—WE CAN TAKE YOU ANYWHERE YOU WANT TO GO!” appeared superimposed over the dancers, with the sign-up URL under it.
The scene froze. “That’s the intro. What do you think?” the tech asked.
“Not bad,” Chance said. “But dial down the volume on the music a hair, and when we get the slogan super, I want a wah-wah sting that echoes the bass line. And see if we can vibrate the words a little. Who is doing the voice-over?”
“Foghorn Franklin.”
“Good. He’s perfect. What happens from here?”
“We’re still working on the wire-frame dinosaur stuff, and the space aliens, but we’ve got the harem sequence and the shopping at Harrods almost done. The wire-frame’ll be ready for texture in a couple of days.”
Chance nodded and turned away from the Avid. She glanced at her watch. She hadn’t heard from Roberto yet. She wondered how he was doing.
He was probably doing just fine. She worried too much about the details, she knew that. It was hard to trust people to do what you told them to do, and with good reason. Once upon a time, she had been a corporate manager, on the fast track to the vice presidency of a Fortune Five Hundred company. She’d been making good money, had been well-respected, and had been kicking ass and taking names, but she’d had to quit. People kept screwing up, doing things differently than she’d told them, and it drove her up the wall. The idea of being a decent manager was: You hired good workers and turned them loose, and they didn’t call until the job was done, except if they had problems. The reality of it was: You inherited a lot of deadwood in whatever department you took over, and it was a while until you could figure out who worked and who shuffled papers and pretended to work. Yeah, once you got the lay of the land, you could fire the lazy ones, but then you had to spend time looking for somebody new, and that was always the devil-you-knew-versus-the-devil-you-didn’t. You’d read this great resume, the guy would show up and give a good interview, and as soon as he got the job, he’d turn into a brain-dead lame donkey you couldn’t move with a flaming two-by-four shoved up his butt. Half the time you couldn’t lop off the deadwood in the first place because they’d sue for one kind of discrimination or another—gender, age, race, whatever. You could catch somebody stealing the petty cash, flashing old ladies in the subway, or snorting cocaine in the lunchroom and it wasn’t enough to get rid of them if they had the right leverage.
And office politics? Stupid bosses who’d Peter Principled out? Backstabbing coworkers?
Don’t even hike those trails . . .
Chance smiled at the memory. Being in charge of most places was no picnic in the park. The reason she had taken this job was that they let her start from scratch, hire anybody she wanted, and she could get rid of anybody who worked for her with two words: You’re gone! There was no appeal. She didn’t have to answer to anybody except the Board, and as long as she met the goals of the business plan—which she herself produced—nobody cared how she got it done. She couldn’t imagine a better job.
Roberto was good, and she should trust him to do what was needed, but she was still too hands-on. She still worried every time her neck was essentially in somebody else’s hands. She’d have to work on that. She needed to relax—’Berto was the best she’d ever found at his kind of work.
But if he didn’t call in the next hour or two, she was going to be bent out of shape.
San Rafael, California
Killing the three was the easy part. After he had gotten everything from Dowling he wanted, and a whole lot he hadn’t cared about, he very carefully choked the man out, using the special hold he’d learned from a Vale Tudo jujitsu fighter in Brazil. Enough so the guy was unconscious, but not so he’d die. Then he had retrieved the bodyguards one at a time, choked them out, and put everybody into the limo. He’d driven to the spot, only half a mile away, choked them all again to make certain they were out. Then he accelerated toward the guardrail overlooking an eight-hundred-foot drop-off, and locked the car’s brakes in a hard skid that stopped right at the edge of the pavement.
He backed it up a few yards. Then he repositioned one of the unconscious guards in the driver’s seat and strapped him in with the seat belt. He jammed the guy’s shoe into the side of the accelerator, and the engine roared. He shut the door, reached in through the window, and shifted the automatic transmission lever into drive.
The car lurched forward and gathered speed. It hit the rail with plenty of momentum, punched through, and rolled out over the long drop-off.
It made a lot of noise going down, tumbled and flipped several times. Santos was able to follow the car’s fall most of the way, until the car’s lights went out, probably because the battery had been knocked loose.
Adios, amigos.
It was not totally foolproof, but nobody would have any reason to look past the obvious: The driver for a corporate vice president, on the way home in the dark on a mountain road, had seen a deer or coyote or some other animal, slammed on his brakes, and too bad, had skidded right off the cliff. Yes, a trained accident investigator might notice that the safety railing was perhaps not damaged as much as a high-speed impact would warrant. But a California Highway Patrol officer would see skid marks that matched the limo’s tires, indicating that he had tried to stop. The men would have died from injuries sustained in the wreck, and there would be no sign of drugs or other injuries that could not have come from the impact, Santos had made certain of that.
Accidents happened. A real CHP officer with any time on the job would likely have seen a dozen incidents just like this, and if that was what you were looking for, then that was what you would see. There would be no reason to think anything else.
Maybe the insurance company would send an expert out to check on things. Even so, such an investigation would take time, measurements had to be made, tests run, reports written, and even then, a conclusion would not be certain.
So, Mr. Acidente Experto, why is it you think this was not an accident?
Well, the guardrail did not show damage consistent with a high-speed impact.
> Perhaps the metal in this rail came from a particularly strong batch?
Not according to my tests.
Yes, but—how do you know how fast the car was going when it struck the guardrail, eh?
The length of the skid marks is indicative of substantial velocity.
Ah, but putting on the brakes slowed the automobile down, no? Perhaps enough so that the impact was considerably lessened? Is this not possible?
Yes, it is possible . . .
As he hiked back toward where he had a hidden car waiting—one with license plates he had swapped with a car in the long-term parking lot of the aeroporto in San Francisco—Santos smiled to himself. If, a week or a month from now, the authorities did somehow become convinced that the limo’s destruction had not been an accident, that would not matter. By then, the information he had been sent to collect would have been used. How? He didn’t really know or care, that was not his problem. He had been sent to get it, he had gotten it, end of story. There was no way to tie him to the incident in any case. He had bought the car under a false name. Nobody knew him here, and nobody who might have seen him would know who he was or where he had gone. He was just another black man, and they all looked alike to whites, no?
He would call Jasmine when he got back to San Francisco, using a disposable mobile phone. A short message telling her answering service the job was complete. That would make her feel better. Missy was wound too tight. The only time she loosened up was in bed, and even then, she never let everything go; there was always a part of her still in control. He intended to get past that eventually. Bring her to pure animal pleasure, no mind left, just howling and quivering in ecstasy. It might take a while, but he didn’t mind—getting there would be half the fun.
And once he had her there, she would be his slave. Then he would dump her and find another. The world was full of women.
10
Washington, D.C.
Toni was expecting the postman; the most recent order of faux ivory slabs for her scrimshaw should be here about now, so when the doorbell rang, that’s who she thought it was. Not that she had gotten much scrimshaw done since the baby was born, bits and pieces while he was napping, mostly. Nobody had told her what a full-time job one small human child was.
She opened the door, but instead of the postman, Guru stood there.
The old lady smiled at Toni’s startled expression. “Hello, best girl. Surprise.”
“Guru! What are you doing here!”
“Waiting to be invited into your house.”
Toni opened the screen door and held it wide. “Come in, come in!”
Guru—which in Bahasa Indonesian meant “teacher”—picked up her suitcase and moved past Toni into the house. She also carried a heavy, wooden cane.
The old woman, whose name was DeBeers, was coming up on her eighty-fifth birthday. She’d had a stroke back when Toni was five months pregnant, and was supposedly recovered completely. Toni had seen her when she’d taken the baby back to show off to her family six or eight months ago, and Guru hadn’t been using a cane then.
But before she could ask, Guru read her mind: “The stick is for defense, not for walking. Do you think I could come all the way from the Bronx on a train unarmed? Did I not teach you better than that?”
Toni laughed. Of course not. Pentjak silat was a weapons-based art. You only used your hands if you didn’t have anything else available. Guru used to say, “You are not a monkey, use a tool. You can fight with your hands. You can also butter your bread with your finger, but why would you if there is a knife handy?”
Toni waited until Guru had put her bag down and found a seat on the couch. “I’ll go make the coffee,” she said.
“That would be nice,” the old woman said. “You have any of my nephew’s Javanese beans I sent you left?”
“Sealed in a vacuum bag to keep them fresh,” Toni said.
“You are a good girl. How is our baby boy?”
“He’s terrific. Taking his nap right now, he’ll probably be awake soon.”
“This is also good.”
Toni hurried off to grind the coffee beans and put them into the gold mesh filtered drip pot. She used bottled water—Guru was particular about her coffee—and once everything was going, she hurried back into the living room.
“I am happy you are here,” Toni said. “You should have called. I would have come to the train station and collected you.”
“And miss the look on your face when you saw me? No.”
Toni smiled again. Guru had been family since Toni had begun learning the martial art of silat from her more than sixteen years ago. Toni had been thirteen when she’d seen the old lady, past retirement age even then, clean up her front stoop with four thugs brave enough to threaten an old pipe-smoking granny. Guru had come from Java with her husband as a young woman, raised a family, and been widowed before Toni had been born. Her husband had taught her the family martial art usually reserved for men, and she in turn had passed it along to Toni.
It would not be polite to ask the old woman why she had come nor how long she planned to stay, but as usual, Guru was ahead of her. She said, “I will take care of the baby while you work.”
“Thank you, but, uh, I wasn’t planning on going back to work,” Toni said. “Not for a while, at least.”
“Plans change, best girl. I think maybe you will go back very soon.”
“I don’t see how—”
The phone jangled. Toni was tempted to ignore it, let the computer take a message, but Guru waved at her. “You should answer that,” she said. “I will go and check on the coffee.” She smiled.
Toni shrugged. As she reached for the com, she saw the ID.
“Hey, Alex. What’s up?”
“Trouble here in River City,” he said. “Got a major blowout on the web. It’s like somebody poked a stick in a nest of fire ants, they’re running around, mad as hell, biting everybody close. You know, I wish your mother hadn’t gone home, I could sure use your help on this.”
Toni stared into the kitchen at Guru, who was pouring the coffee from the pot into a carafe, humming to herself.
It had to be a coincidence. Had to be.
But deep in her soul, Toni didn’t believe it. What she believed was, Guru had known!
She couldn’t have known that Alex would say that. And yet, there she was, making coffee, as if Toni had called and asked her to come up and watch the baby. She had come here, knowing Toni could use her help.
How was that possible?
“Toni?”
“Um. Yeah. Guru is here.”
“Really? That’s great. How is she?”
“Fine. She came to watch Little Alex so I could go back to work.”
Alex didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “Coincidence,” he finally said.
“She said I’d be going back to work sooner than I expected. She got here ten minutes ago.”
There was a long pause. “Coincidence,” he said again. “I have to believe that. It’s too spooky otherwise.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Coffee is ready,” Guru said from the kitchen. “Hello to Mr. Alex.”
“Guru says hello.”
“I heard.” Another pause. “Well, you might as well come on down here. I really do need all the help I can get.”
Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia
Michaels cradled the receiver and shook his head. Someday, he was going to have to sit down with that old lady and ask her how this tenaga dalam, the “inside magic” she claimed to know, worked. There was probably some scientific explanation, but damned if he could figure out what it was.
Meanwhile, he had bigger problems. He voxaxed Jay Gridley.
“Talk to me, Jay.”
“We got it tracked to Blue Whale,” Jay said.
“Which is?”
“Major West Coast backbone server. Couple-three big nodes there.”
“What happened?”
“Don’t know yet, boss.”
“Go find out.”
“I’m gone.”
Michaels stood and headed for the door. His phone was going to ring in a minute or two, and the director of the FBI would be on the other end of the connection, wanting to know what the hell was going on. Since he didn’t have anything he could tell her, he wasn’t looking forward to the conversation.
His secretary looked up at him as he passed her desk. “I’m going to the bathroom,” he said. “When the director calls, tell her I’m indisposed.”
Becky said, “Take your virgil with you. I don’t want her yelling at me.”
Virgil was short for Virtual Global Interface Link, a device slightly larger than a cigarette-pack that was a phone, modem, computer, weavewire fax, GPS, credit card, scanner, clock, radio, TV, and emergency beacon all in one. They weren’t common devices, not in the version Michaels had, and it hadn’t taken him long to figure out that the FBI had his virgil monitored and sat-tracked 24/ 7. They said this was for the safety of high-level personnel. If you had a powered FBI-issue virgil attached to your belt, you could run, but you couldn’t hide, and unlike the civilian models with fudge-factors built in to keep terrorists from using them to guide ballistic missiles to targets, the military GPS was accurate to within a couple of feet. Michaels was fairly sure it would work even if it was turned off.
If you actually went to the rest room and took the virgil with you, they could tell which stall you were in.
“Battery is dead,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” Becky said. “Right. And there aren’t a half-dozen new batteries in your top desk drawer where they always are?”
“I’ll replace it when I get back.”
“Chicken.”
“That’s me. Bye.”
San Francisco, California