by Brian Craig
He was surprised to hear Pasco laugh shortly. “The vehicle ain’t bugged,” he said. “You can cut the crap. If you want to carry on doing it the Doc’s way, that’s your business. I have to ask myself what’s best for me. I’m the guy whose ass is on the line here.”
“Zarathustra can do us both a lot of damage,” Carl pointed out uncomfortably. “I have to do things his way—and I have to do my level best to persuade you to do things his way, too. We both have our asses on the line—but ask yourself, are you really so keen to start overruling your orders this early in the operation?”
He glanced sideways when he’d made the point, expecting to see Pasco scowl again—but Pasco was only looking at him, with as much respect as resentment.
“For a shotgun guard,” observed Pasco sourly, “you’re a pretty smart guy, aren’t you?”
“We’re in the same boat, Ray,” said Carl quietly, “riding the same frail hope. If it fouls up, you can at least go back to the Doc and say I told you so. In the meantime, let’s give ourselves a chance to hit the jackpot, okay?”
Pasco still didn’t scowl. He didn’t say “okay” either, but he didn’t scowl. Carl was prepared to take that as a good sign.
“Anyway,” said Carl, trying to sound laconic, “I guess you could say that we won the first round. They tried to stop us, and they failed. Next stop, the Underground. I guess they know you there—though we couldn’t really pretend to be anything we aren’t, could we?”
He hoped that the reference to Pasco’s limited capacity for disguise was subtle enough not to cause offence. It seemed that it was.
“Yeah,” said Pasco off-handedly. “They know my face. But that has advantages as well as disadvantages.”
“What happened to your face, anyhow?” asked Carl, deciding that it was time to take the chance. He breathed a little more easily when Pasco didn’t react in a hostile manner.
“It was way back when I started as an Op,” said the big man drily. “I went to pick up some guy. It was a shit job anyhow—freaker was only worth two grand, and he surrendered like a lamb. I was playing it strictly by the book, taking him in alive, when up pops some crazy dame with some kind of miniature fire-extinguisher which turns out to be loaded with freakin’ nitric acid.”
“You never thought of getting it fixed?”
“No. Every time I look in a mirror, it reminds me to be careful. I’ve been careful, ever since. People who bury their mistakes make ’em over and over again. And it seems to make it easier to scare the shit out of the punks. It makes it just that little bit easier to get information out of people who’d normally be reluctant—makes it clear that I’m a guy who doesn’t like to be delayed. Psychological thing—maybe you’ll get to see it real soon.”
Carl nodded. “Did you ice the dame?” he asked, casually.
“Naw,” said Pasco. “Took her in alive. Bumped into her once, after she got out—it was on a Missouri ferry in the Kansas City PZ. Said hello, real polite, but she couldn’t wait to get off the boat—I thought she was going to jump over the side in mid-stream.”
Carl chuckled. “That’s shipboard romances for you,” he said. “They never last.”
Pasco even condescended to laugh at that one. Maybe, Carl thought, he wasn’t such a bad guy after all.
Maybe.
They hit the Underground before nightfall and sealed the sneaker. Its sensors were smart enough to take care of anyone who even tried to approach it without first-class ID, so Carl had no worries about leaving it. Pasco judged that it was best to have a drink and take a look around before they started making connections with the GenTech weasels, so they went into the main bar and suggested to a couple of slummers that the table they were occupying ought to have had a RESERVED sign on it.
Pasco seemed to be well-known in the Underground, and when he said hello to people they said hello back, in a nervous sort of fashion which Carl had never observed before. Carl began to see some of the advantages of looking the way Pasco did. He would have been recognized whatever he looked like, but this way the recognition always carried with it just that hint of intimidation.
As they sipped their liquor Pasco pointed out some of the people with whom Kid Zero had previously been associated.
“The Atlas Boys are hanging out by the pool tables,” he said. “And over by the entrance to the arcade there’s one of the Low Numbers with his old lady—Mike Quin and Two-tone Tess. No sign of Ace the Ace—but he’s a has-been anyhow, too old for the gang game. I’ll lay odds that the sams in the comer are Yakuza, but whether they’re M-M affiliates I don’t know.”
Carl looked around. The Atlas Boys were impossible to miss, owing to the fact that the least of them had twice as much muscle as anyone else in the room, but the two Japanese guys looked deceptively harmless. “Is it always this crowded?” he asked.
“Sure,” said Pasco. “Nearest thing to a PZ there is this far out in No-Man’s-Land. The Spiders run a tidy joint and everybody likes it that way. But it’s what you might call a precarious balance of power. Once tipped, the whole place could go up in a shooting war. It’s usually safe to ice the minor actors, if you do it in a reasonable manner, but if the Kid does show, we’ll have to be careful.”
One of the Spiders had drifted over to their table. He had the falsely casual air of one paying a duty call.
“Mr Pasco,” he said politely. “Good to see you back again. You quit the org to go freelance again?”
“Naw,” said Pasco lazily. “I’m too old for all that—I like the quiet life now. Just brought in a pal to show him some of the sights. This is Carl Preston. Carl, meet Romeo Carmona.” Pasco pronounced the name Ro-Mi-o instead of Ro-MAY-o, but the Spider didn’t correct him.
As Carl shook hands with the Spider Pasco added: “With a name like that he should be in the mafia, but his ancestors came from the wrong part of Italy, ain’t that so, Romeo?”
“That’s so,” confirmed the Spider politely. “But we’re too far west, anyhow. The families are strictly east coast these days. Any friend of Mr Pasco’s is welcome here, Mr Preston. You staying long?”
“Not long,” said Carl amiably. “We just dropped in to take a look, on our way to somewheres else.”
“Just got time to look up a couple of old friends,” added Pasco, leaning across to offer his own hand to be shaken, passing on a big bill as he did so. “Purely private—nobody’s business but our own.”
The Spider nodded, and strolled away. Pasco finished his drink unhurriedly, and watched Carmona pass the message on; then he stood up, and said: “Let’s go.”
They walked through the arcade where the electronic gaming machines were. Carl saw that Pasco looked at the horrorshow booths as they went past, but he didn’t pause at all. In the darker corridors beyond the arcades the big man quickened his pace, and checked back a couple of times to see whether they were being followed. There was no sign of anything amiss.
“Pity,” muttered Pasco. “Would be nice if someone’d tip his hand, but I guess if there’s anyone here who knows what we’re about he’d keep his head down.”
Eventually, they came to a heavily-armoured door in a shadowed alcove. Pasco showed some ID to a camera-eye, but some time passed before they were admitted into the apartments beyond. There were four rooms in all but three of them—the bedroom, bathroom and kitchen—were hardly more than closets. The main room was lined with a profusion of consoles and screens which would not have seemed out of place at the heart of a GenTech research station.
The man inside was small and wizened, with unnaturally pale skin and colourless eyes. He looked as if he hadn’t seen the sunlight for twenty years.
“Carey Castle,” he said by way of introduction. “Pest control. The scavengers raid the net, I raid the scavengers. We have a very convoluted web here, though some of the websters don’t realize quite how convoluted it is. I put out a few new feelers when your call came through, but you said to be discreet. Nothing’s come through yet.”
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p; “Nothing’ll come over the net,” said Carl, looking round. “The Kid’s not stupid enough to feed the disc into a system terminal.”
“Never overestimate the capacity which the human mind has for stupidity,” said Castle scornfully. “I’m monitoring as much traffic as I can, looking for anything interesting. You can bet your life that a dozen other stations monitored the signal which was sent to me, and it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that one or two have decoded it by now. We need to know who else is interested and who’s passing information on regarding this affair. I don’t have anything yet, but I’ll get it, given time. Everybody has to use the net.”
“Never mind that,” said Pasco. “What about the local hackers? Any of them acting suspiciously?”
Castle shrugged. “I put new fibre-eyes through the walls to take a look at the real screwballs,” he said. “They soon spot them and black out the tips, but I can usually get an hour or two of good tape. Nobody doing anything they shouldn’t be.”
“Show me,” said Pasco.
Castle punched in a few command codes and pointed to a row of screens. Four were active but only two showed an image.
“Pawlak’s got the lights out—it’s his bedtime,” said Castle. “Zagorski probably found the eye and blacked it out already. He’s very sharp, and he often tries to take a bit out of us—the Kid’s traded with him in the past, so he might be our best bet.”
“Who’s that one?” asked Pasco, pointing to one of the live-action shots, which showed an Oriental busy in front of a screen.
“Yam On Wan. He’s M-M—has a dish and decoder for their sats. He’s watching data-flow way down in the Argentine. Routine, for him.”
“And the other?” Carl saw a little old lady, extensively cyborgized, similarly hunched over a screen—but her fingers were plugged in instead of playing with a keyboard.
“Harriet the Hooker. She’s out on Cloud Nine, just coasting. She’s strictly a small-time pickpocket—credit fraud, transaction raider. If you want my tip, go for Zagorski. He obviously has something to hide. You want me to run the tape I took before he blacked me out?”
“No,” said Pasco. “I don’t think so. How often does Harriet use her armchairs?”
“How the hell should I know? I’m not a voyeur, you know—I don’t run these fibres through the walls for the fun of it. I have business to do, and all the scanning programmes in the world are useless unless somebody’s paying attention.”
Carl saw what Pasco was getting at. The armchair in Harriet’s cosy little cave was empty. Its seat was the only bit of vacant space on view. No one was there now—but it was just possible that someone had been there not so long ago—and had already gone again. The hooker was behaving normally—maybe expecting that someone might try to have a peek at her—but for a hooker, carelessness of the physical environment was entirely normal. An empty space was just the kind of thing she might have forgotten to cover up.
“Call Carmona and have him send out a wrecking crew,” said Pasco grimly. “I want a word with Harriet, and I don’t think she’ll be opening her door to strangers just now.”
6
The moment Harriet heard the drills get to work on her lock she knew the game was up. There was no use taking time out to wonder how that scuzzbag Carey Castle had rumbled her—though she was convinced that she’d been acting absolutely normally since he ran his newest thread through her wall. By the time he’d opened up the spyhole she’d already stowed her copy of Kid Zero’s disc, and it had seemed easy enough to simulate business as usual, but something had obviously gone wrong.
She had no illusions about her ability to hold out under interrogation. She had too much flesh left on her, and all of it could be hurt. She pulled all her connections loose immediately, trying to ignore the headache it left her with.
There was only one thing she could try, so she tried it. She dialled the number of the phone by the pool table, hoping that one of the Atlas Boys would answer it. She had some credit with the Atlas Boys, and they were big fans of Kid Zero—maybe his biggest, in more ways than one.
When the connection was made she recognized Cyril’s voice, even though he only said: “Yeah?” That was good—Cyril was a nice boy.
“It’s Harriet the Hooker,” she told him. “Something big’s going down between GenTech and Kid Zero. The Kid left me something for safe-keeping and the Spiders are battering the door down to get hold of it. I don’t know how many there are or who they’re working for—can you help?”
She heard Cyril relaying the message, and prayed that Big Charlie wouldn’t be in the middle of a break. The door was already creaking on its reinforced hinges, and she knew that the locks and bolts couldn’t hold it against the kind of brute force which the cutting crew could muster.
“We’ll be there, Harriet,” said Cyril briefly. Harriet hung up before he could hear her sob of relief.
The door held out for another twenty seconds, and then her nest was wide open to all comers. The first man through had only half a face, and she somehow knew that his manners would be as ugly as his mug. He came over to her and turned her chair half-round so that it faced him. He towered over her. A second man came in behind him—younger, handsome in a way, but very solid. They both had “hard man” written all over them. She didn’t know them, but they obviously weren’t gangmen. She hoped they were only Ops, but she knew how desperate that hope was.
“Harriet,” said the man with the ruined face gently, “we haven’t time to be civil about this. We know Kid Zero was here—we want to know what you did for him, where he went and how long ago.”
“Ain’t seen the Kid in over a year,” she said valiantly. “I heard he was in New Mexico.”
The man with half a face sighed, and said: “You’re under arrest, Harriet. We’ll make up the charge sheet later, but you now as well as I do how much we have on you, and how much more we can get. If you don’t help us, we’re going to disconnect you, implant by implant—and we aren’t going to be very particular about how we rip the implants out. You have ten seconds, Harriet, and I want you took look into my eyes, so that you’ll know I mean exactly what I say.”
As he spoke, he picked up one of her hands, and pinched the plug on her ring-finger between his thumb and forefinger. He pressed just hard enough to let her feel the force of his grip—so that she could anticipate what it might feel like when he tore the plug away from the artificial synapse which linked it directly to her nervous system.
She looked into his eyes, as he had asked her to, comparing the one which was natural with the one which didn’t.
He began counting: “Ten, nine, eight…” It was obvious that the man had a real flair for melodrama.
Harriet thought about the afterlife, and about the pain that might have to be suffered before she got there—and she prayed that Cyril and the boys would soon arrive.
When the count had reached three there were the first sounds of a scuffle outside, and a Spider lurched into the room, collapsing into the armchair she’d cleared for Kid Zero. He was followed by another, who came in without his feet touching the floor—he was being held that way by Cyril Atlas. Big Charlie Atlas—Charlemagne, as Homer Hegarty called him and as he naturally preferred to be known—was just behind him, filling the entire doorway with his bulk. The remainder of the cutting crew was still outside, hopefully accompanied by the rest of the Atlas Boys.
Neither of the Atlas Boys had guns in their hands—they didn’t want any trouble with the Spiders which would lose them a home base, and theirs was a delicate mission, diplomatically speaking.
“Two,” said the man with half a face, hauling out a pistol as he said it. That was as far as he went, for the time being. He eyed Cyril and Charlie with open disdain.
“Can I help you boys?” said his companion smoothly, moving to stand in front of Cyril Atlas. Cyril looked around for somewhere to put the Spider down, but the room was now too crowded. He turned around and passed his captive to Charlie, who stepped bac
k in order to let him out. Then Cyril turned back to loom over the man who’d had the temerity to confront him.
“That’s my mother your friend’s messin’ with,” lied Cyril, without much conviction. “Why is your friend messin’ with my mother?”
“We’re from the Welfare Department,” said the hard man. “We just want to make sure that she collects all the benefits she’s entitled to.”
“Call him off, Charlie,” said the Spider in the armchair. “You don’t want any part of this. It’s corp business. You remember Ray Pasco, don’t you? Butt out, or your next home-from-home will be Sandrat City.”
“We don’t want any trouble,” said Charlie Atlas, in his slow basso profundo. “Peace Through Strength is our motto. We don’t believe in violence—just Dynamic Tension. Seems to me, though, that this here is a tense situation.”
“I’m warning you, Charlie,” said the Spider, “you’re losing a lot of moral credit here. We’re the guys who run this joint, and we decide who can do what. Mr Pasco won’t hurt Harriet, if she tells him what he wants to know.”
“Do you know what he wants to know, Ma?” asked Cyril, loudly—and when Cyril was loud he was very loud indeed.
“No, son,” said Harriet, “I don’t know anything. He’s asking about someone called Kid Zero, but I didn’t ever have a Kid named Zero, did I?”
“I don’t have time for this sort of pantomime,” said Pasco wearily, and shot Cyril Atlas clean through the right eye.
While the exit wound was spewing out a mess of red cloud and grey matter Cyril’s face took on a surprised expression. Then he fell backwards into Charlie Atlas’s arms. Charlie had no alternative but to catch him, because there was no space for him to fall over, and the fact that he had both his arms around Cyril meant that he had no chance at all to get out of the firing-line.