Grimmer Than Hell

by David Drake

  The ninth floor was empty save for a browned, youngish man on a stool at the base of the winding stairs. "Hey, back already?" he cackled, his grin combining cameraderie and condescension. A woman and three men, one of them well-dressed and very drunk, clattered down the stairs together.

  Lacey moved aside. He held out three large bills to the doorman. "Which stall?" he asked.

  "One a these days you'll want the Honeymoon Suite and I'll fall right off this chair," the seated man chuckled.

  "Which stall?"

  The doorman blinked up at dark eyes and a neck bright with scarred lightning. His hand twitched toward the length of pipe behind him, but wisely he controlled the motion and took the proffered money instead. "Sixty-one's empty," he said, looking away. "I'll mark you down for it."

  Lacey turned without nodding and began to climb the last flight of steps. Under his breath the doorman muttered, "Bet I don't see you many more times, buddy. Ones like you they don't let walk around very long."

  The tenth floor was sweaty, stinking bedlam, far darker than the lower levels because the canvas cubicles spaced around the walls blocked most of the windows. Studding the ceiling at two-meter intervals were 150 separately-controlled scanner units. They stood like the sprinkler heads of an earlier day in which fire had been thought a greater danger to society than privacy. Beneath them, divided by narrow aisles, were arrayed the cribs that bumped and swayed to the activities of their occupants which the cameras impassively recorded. The accommodation house catered to those who did not want their neighbors in their own dwelling units to learn what they were doing, or who they were doing it with.

  In Lacey's case, what he was doing it with.

  "What stall?" boomed the floor boss, a huge albino with Negroid features who stood in front of a control panel.

  "Sixty-one."

  "Right, sixty-one," the albino echoed, checking the panel. "Two hours of scanner time. You want company?" His doughy fingers indicated the north wall, the Mourners' Bench, along which waited apathetically a score of haggard prostitutes of both sexes.

  "No."

  "S'okay, sixty-one," the bigger man repeated. "We rent you four walls and a private scanner. What you do with them's between you and the data bank."

  Lacey strode down the jostling aisle to the crib marked 61 in red numerals on the tile floor. He stepped inside and drew the curtain shut. The scanner above him beeped and an orange telltale came on, indicating the unit was in operation. The cubicle was dim enough that the supplementary infra-red system was probably on. Without haste, Lacey stripped off his coveralls and folded them, laying his pistol on top of the garment. He opened the package he had brought and removed the artificial vagina from its foam nest. He switched it on, sat down on the cot, and affixed it to himself.

  Lacey's eyes were as empty as the lens of the scanner they stared up toward as his body shuddered. Beneath the emptiness was a rage that bubbled like lava-filled calderas.

  * * *

  He walked back to the State Building, this time from a desire for walking rather than from shame. The shame had drained out of him along with some of the other emotions he was trying to void. Lacey's mind was working again, using the rhythm of his feet to shuffle patterns in the information he had collected. The dusky street was quiet enough and as clean as is only possible in a society in which all litter has value to someone. At alternate blocks stood uniformed police with gas guns and banana-clipped stunners, ready for their computer links to direct them to trouble. For the most part they appeared as bored and logy as the vagrants with whom they shared the evening. There was infrared for the omnipresent scanners, but no power was wasted for men to see by. The night is an irksome companion.

  The squad at the gate of the building passed Lacey without hesitation. Several of the red-hatted men recognized him, while the rest ignored him because their implants told them it was safe to do so. On several floors only the stairway was lighted by glow strips, since government offices tended to close at nightfall like everything else. Level 16, where uniformed monitors wore helmets to direct squads to trouble spots, was a bright exception; and Level 17 was about a quarter occupied also. An investigator could run his subject at any time—the data bank would wait—but many of the hunters were like Lacey. They stuck to the unusual criminal who had eluded the first rush of a Red Team; stuck with him until they had drunk his blood.

  Lacey sat at his desk and pulled down the scanner helmet to begin checking back the message capsule. In all likelihood the assassin had not believed that would be possible. In general his assumption would have been correct; but this case had been handed to Lacey. The capsule had popped onto Follard's desk from the Tower's security system, hidden from the scanners as it ran past a battery of useless fluoroscopes and radiation testers. For his own reasons, Follard had not allowed a subordinate to open the capsule; he had paid for secrecy with his life. Lacey picked up the capsule where it had entered the system, delivered ten minutes before then with a mass of others like it in the hold of an air car. Lacey switched to a roof camera showing two bored guards with batons and the green uniforms of a private message service standing around while the white-haired driver dumped armloads of capsules into the chute. Lacey magnified by ten, then by a hundred, as he focused the image on the tumbling rectangles.

  And then the computer took over. With time and even greater magnification, Lacey might himself have been able to catch the routing slip on the metal and identify the death capsule. The precise machinery of the police net scanned the object for tiny imperfections and for details of the routing slip so slight that even the corner of a letter in a camera field would be an identification. Lacking that, the capsule's albedo alone could identify it where the light intensity was known. Technology made practical a job that was otherwise only a theoretical possibility. It was like giving a bloodhound an escapee's sock to sniff.

  The capsule had been in the morning's delivery. Had it not been, Lacey would have traced through the Tower looking for the point at which an insider had slipped it into the normal flow. He gave quick directions to his implant and the delivery car jerked backward across the city in a series of ten-second jumps in the helmet. They stopped when it had run back to its loading point, the internal dock of a regional distribution center.

  All but three floors of the huge granite building were lifeless, filled with sorting machinery and endless belts studded with hundreds of thousands of capsules of identical shape and size. Odd-sized packages were handled by humans on the two lowest floors, and the charge for such service was enough to guarantee its use only in cases of necessity. The third level received packages by dumbwaiter and capsules by chute, integrating them into the bins from which the delivery cars were loaded.

  The computer needed further guidance at that point, for the chutes themselves were inaccessible to men and thus unscanned. The conveyors on each floor, however, with their complex system of shunts, feeds, and crossfeeds that sorted each capsule toward its proper drop chute, were as open to cameras as any other room. Lacey moved floor by floor, focusing each time on the aperture which dropped capsules into the Follard Tower bin. His voice had grown husky with giving directions and his fingers stiff from flexing on his chair arms, but if anyone could have seen his face behind the helmet they would have cringed back from a smile more fitted to a tiger than a man. Even a man like Lacey.

  Mail to the Follard Tower was delivered at twelve-hour intervals. Lacey ran each floor back to the time the previous load had gone out, then switched up one level. The speeded up, reversed flow of images would have driven mad anyone less used to it than he was; and perhaps—a possibility that Lacey had never denied to himself—he withstood it only because he was already mad.

  On the eighth floor he picked up the capsule again, part of a shipment brought from Richmond Subregion by high-altitude airliner. It was not too long afterward that Lacey's helmet focused on a Petersburg street and a man, slim and fiftyish with tight-rolled hair and a skin so black it looked purp
le, who dropped the capsule into a collection box and then thumbed in coins until the postage light glowed green.

  "Name and data," Lacey croaked to his implant.

  "William Anton Merritt, age 54, on dole for past thirty-seven months. Eight years Chief of Operations, Security, for Southern Region. Previously—"

  Lacey cut off the flow and returned to his man. It was without surprise that he back-tracked Merritt to a counter in the General Delivery room of the Petersburg mail depot where he had peeled off a routing slip addressed to him and replaced it with the one that would carry the toxin to Follard. There was no reason, after all, that the murder device should have been prepared in the subregion from which it had to be mailed in order to pass as coming from the conspirator Mitchelsen. Back a step further, then; Merritt punching his I. D. on a code board and waiting the few seconds for the capsule to drop into the delivery slot. From there back through a mirror image of the previous routings—no less arduous, but no less possible to follow—for they led straight back to Greensboro Subregion in which sat Lacey hunched under his helmet and the body of Loysius Follard lay on a teak slab with a thousand torchlit mourners howling around it like the damned.

  This time, Lacey did not need the data bank to identify the girl who jumped from an air car to mail the capsule to Merritt in Petersburg.

  For the moment he did not trace the capsule to the point at which it was filled with explosive and sealed, or back even earlier when the PDT had been removed from some government stockpile. That information was safe in the data bank until he chose to retrieve it, and the people concerned—the scores or perhaps hundreds it had taken to bring off so many simultaneous assassinations—would be just as easy to find a few hours or days later. Only death had ever saved a target from Lacey. Instead of searching for other names now, he twitched the finger no wedding ring would ever grace and said, "Give me a current location on William Anton Merritt."

  Information that far-reaching required a delay for computer time to check literally hundreds of thousands of scanner images in a pattern of concentric probabilities; but for Lacey it was only seconds before the data squeaked back into his mastoid. He grunted as he considered it. "Estimated time of arrival?" he asked.

  "Forty-three minutes."

  How does an ex-bureaucrat, supposedly on State Subsistance Allowance, come to be piloting a private stratosphere craft from Toronto to Greensboro? Friends, doubtless, like everything else Merritt had arranged. Lacey gave a few specific instructions, then asked, "My driver from yesterday—Tamara Damien. Is she on duty?"

  "She will report at 0700. Do you wish another driver assigned or should she be given an emergency summons?"

  "Hmm. What time is it?" The windows were, Lacey noticed as he swung up the scanner helmet, beginning to pale.

  "0637."

  "Fine, I'll be in the target range. Tell me when she gets in."

  The range was a quadrant of Level 15, separated by opaque partitions despite the added scanner cost. Experience had proven that peripheral images of men raising guns destroyed the efficiency of the clerical unit sharing the floor, even though a myrmillon divider would have been more than adequate to stop the tiny needles.

  There were already a dozen shooters using the 20-meter range, standing with their backs to the outside windows and firing inward toward the point of the wedge where the target screen stood. Jacket open, Lacey took a vacant station. His stance comfortable and his fingers curved loosely on his thighs, he announced, "Ready."

  A target image visible only from his station flashed, a tawny woman raising what might have been either a length of pipe or a shotgun. Lacey's weapon was in his right hand, then locked with his left as he crouched and fired three shots so sudden they appeared to have been fully automatic.

  The target disappeared and a silhouette of it formed on the spotting screen just above Lacey's head, red dots at right wrist, right elbow, and right shoulder identifying his shots. His implant said, "Time, point three six seconds. That is exceptionally good. However, your accuracy continues marginal with no hits in the central body mass"—the silhouette's torso pulsed red for emphasis. "In a true firefight, you may not be lucky enough to get limb hits if you are so far outside your aiming point. Speed is less critical than accuracy."

  Computers have no sense of humor, so Lacey avoided even the edge of a smile when he heard it refer to what it imagined had been his aiming point. He had raped, openly and with deliberation, and had forever lost his capacity for a similar act. He would not make the same boastful error if he ever found it necessary to kill: that must look to be an accident.

  He was a violent man in a world of arrogance—of Sig Hanse and his Sepos, of the sneering Red Team which had taken him into custody years before, of the myriad counterclerks and bureaucrats taking their frustrations out on the nearest target. Lacey avoided an actual explosion only because he knew his hand had the power of life and death over every one of them individually. If the Psycomp had noticed that murderous streak, it had weighed it against Lacey's depth of control and usefulness—then passed him as acceptable to the State.

  Targets continued to flash. He sprayed the edges of five more—on one he hit a swinging medallion three times and got zero credit since, of course, a real medallion would have deflected the needles which grounded themselves only after penetration. Finally his implant announced, "Chauffeur 5 Damien has reported to her car."

  "Patch me through to her," Lacey said, slapping a fresh magazine into his gun before he holstered it. He turned to the nearest window. For cleaning purposes the whole two-meter vitril panel pivoted inward.

  "Ready."

  "Morning, Tamara. I'm in the target range, Level 15. Drop down and pick me up, will you?"

  The girl's voice was deepened by the car microphone and Lacey's implant. "No landing stage on fifteen, sir."

  "Sure, but the windows open."

  "On the way."

  Lacey swung the vitril off its catch. The gush of air as the car dropped past it, then rose and steadied, brought a startled protest from the shooter beside Lacey. He ignored the other man, set his left foot on the sill and stepped into the back of the car. The slightest queasiness in the vehicle would have catapulted Lacey thirty meters to the pavement. Tamara kept it rock solid until he was seated, then moved off a few meters to where she did not have to fight the eddies around the building.

  "You didn't do that to save yourself a walk," she chided. "Trying to prove something to me?"

  "That's right," he agreed. "That I can safely trust you with my life." He leaned forward, grinned up at the scanner, and said, "We're going to the airport, friend Tamara, to arrest a man named William Anton Merritt for multiple counts of murder. He wasn't in it alone, Lord knows, but it'll be simpler for a Psycomp to dig out his accomplices than it would be for me and a scanner."

  She moved the car off smoothly without apparent emotion, gaining speed and altitude as she headed west. There were no lane markers in the sky, but cars were few and almost all drivers professionals. On balance it was safer than street traffic had been fifty years before.

  "You are good, aren't you?" Tamara said at last in a jerky voice. Lacey made no reply. "Don't you even wonder why a, a citizen like Bill Merritt would start a p-plot like this?"

  "Wonder?" Lacey repeated. "Not really. He was, is, a very damned able man himself. The killings, the planning for them, proved that. Hanse could and did shunt him out of the service, of course, but Merritt's own contacts must have been nearly as good. As Chief of Operations he could have . . . not seen it, I think, because Hanse's a sharp boy too . . . but felt it when some members of his own organization got together with rich men, men with connections outside the country where arms could be stockpiled and soldiers trained. You could take over this State, I think, with a few men in the right place and not too many more scattered around to look menacing. You could do it because damned few of the rest of them care. Of us care."

  "Bill cares. He found—a lot of us who do."

/>   "Sure he did, friend Tamara. And he killed not just eighteen people but likely two or three others standing too close to each of the ones he aimed at, too. I won't arrest him for caring, just for the murders; because it's my job and I'm better at it than he hoped."

  She turned toward Lacey at last, her eyes full of tears and fire. "Do you know how many thousand they'd have killed if they took over? How many Hanse will kill if he gets away to Argentina this morning? Do you call that justice?"

  "Justice? What's that?" Lacey demanded. "But they pay me to enforce the law, and yes, that's damned well the law!" He took a deep breath. "Now, mind your flying. If we go down, there'll be a Red Team around Merritt before the echoes of the crash have died. Believe me, he'd rather I take him than those animals in uniform. . . . Believe me, I've been there."

  She obeyed but the tears gurgled in her voice. "Don't you think you owe anything to society?" she asked.

  "This society?" Lacey repeated with savage incredulity. "The society that made me what I am?"

  Tamara said nothing more for a minute, concentrating on the thickening traffic as they approached the huge concrete slab of the port.

  "We've got a priority clearance," Lacey said. "You can set us down on the terminal building."

  "We couldn't get close to Hanse," the girl said, as much to herself as to her companion. "When he flew it was in his own CT-19, and he always carried his own car with him. He didn't trust anyone, anything. We delayed, hoping he would slip up; but we waited too long. And so their plans were so close to ready that if Hanse gets to Parana now, he may be able to bring it all off even with Follard and the others dead."