Case had rented a coffin here, on a weekly basis, since he’d arrived in Chiba, but he’d never slept in Cheap Hotel. He slept in cheaper places.
The elevator smelled of perfume and cigarettes; the sides of the cage were scratched and thumb-smudged. As it passed the fifth floor, he saw the lights of Ninsei. He drummed his fingers against the pistolgrip as the cage slowed with a gradual hiss. As always, it came to a full stop with a violent jolt, but he was ready for it. He stepped out into the courtyard that served the place as some combination of lobby and lawn.
Centered in the square carpet of green plastic turf, a Japanese teenager sat behind a C-shaped console, reading a textbook. The white fiberglass coffins were racked in a framework of industrial scaffolding. Six tiers of coffins, ten coffins on a side. Case nodded in the boy’s direction and limped across the plastic grass to the nearest ladder. The compound was roofed with cheap laminated matting that rattled in a strong wind and leaked when it rained, but the coffins were reasonably difficult to open without a key.
The expansion-grate catwalk vibrated with his weight as he edged his way along the third tier to Number 92. The coffins were three meters long, the oval hatches a meter wide and just under a meter and a half tall. He fed his key into the slot and waited for verification from the house computer. Magnetic bolts thudded reassuringly and the hatch rose vertically with a creak of springs. Fluorescents flickered on as he crawled in, pulling the hatch shut behind him and slapping the panel that activated the manual latch.
There was nothing in Number 92 but a standard Hitachi pocket computer and a small white styrofoam cooler chest. The cooler contained the remains of three ten-kilo slabs of dry ice, carefully wrapped in paper to delay evaporation, and a spun aluminum lab flask. Crouching on the brown temperfoam slab that was both floor and bed, Case took Shin’s .22 from his pocket and put it on top of the cooler. Then he took off his jacket. The coffin’s terminal was molded into one concave wall, opposite a panel listing house rules in seven languages. Case took the pink handset from its cradle and punched a Hongkong number from memory. He let it ring five times, then hung up. His buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi wasn’t taking calls.
He punched a Tokyo number in Shinjuku.
A woman answered, something in Japanese.
“Snake Man there?”
“Very good to hear from you,” said Snake Man, coming in on an extension. “I’ve been expecting your call.”
“I got the music you wanted.” Glancing at the cooler.
“I’m very glad to hear that. We have a cash flow problem. Can you front?”
“Oh, man, I really need the money bad. . . .”
Snake Man hung up.
“You shit,” Case said to the humming receiver. He stared at the cheap little pistol.
“Iffy,” he said, “it’s all looking very iffy tonight.”
CASE WALKED INTO the Chat an hour before dawn, both hands in the pockets of his jacket; one held the rented pistol, the other the aluminum flask.
Ratz was at a rear table, drinking Apollonaris water from a beer pitcher, his hundred and twenty kilos of doughy flesh tilted against the wall on a creaking chair. A Brazilian kid called Kurt was on the bar, tending a thin crowd of mostly silent drunks. Ratz’s plastic arm buzzed as he raised the pitcher and drank. His shaven head was filmed with sweat. “You look bad, friend artiste,” he said, flashing the wet ruin of his teeth.
“I’m doing just fine,” said Case, and grinned like a skull. “Super fine.” He sagged into the chair opposite Ratz, hands still in his pockets.
“And you wander back and forth in this portable bombshelter built of booze and ups, sure. Proof against the grosser emotions, yes?”
“Why don’t you get off my case, Ratz? You seen Wage?”
“Proof against fear and being alone,” the bartender continued. “Listen to the fear. Maybe it’s your friend.”
“You hear anything about a fight in the arcade tonight, Ratz? Somebody hurt?”
“Crazy cut a security man.” He shrugged. “A girl, they say.”
“I gotta talk to Wage, Ratz, I . . .”
“Ah.” Ratz’s mouth narrowed, compressed into a single line. He was looking past Case, toward the entrance. “I think you are about to.”
Case had a sudden flash of the shuriken in their window. The speed sang in his head. The pistol in his hand was slippery with sweat.
“Herr Wage,” Ratz said, slowly extending his pink manipulator as if he expected it to be shaken. “How great a pleasure. Too seldom do you honor us.”
Case turned his head and looked up into Wage’s face. It was a tanned and forgettable mask. The eyes were vatgrown sea-green Nikon transplants. Wage wore a suit of gunmetal silk and a simple bracelet of platinum on either wrist. He was flanked by his joeboys, nearly identical young men, their arms and shoulders bulging with grafted muscle.
“How you doing, Case?”
“Gentlemen,” said Ratz, picking up the table’s heaped ashtray in his pink plastic claw, “I want no trouble here.” The ashtray was made of thick, shatterproof plastic, and advertised Tsingtao beer. Ratz crushed it smoothly, butts and shards of green plastic cascading onto the tabletop. “You understand?”
“Hey, sweetheart,” said one of the joeboys, “you wanna try that thing on me?”
“Don’t bother aiming for the legs, Kurt,” Ratz said, his tone conversational. Case glanced across the room and saw the Brazilian standing on the bar, aiming a Smith & Wesson riot gun at the trio. The thing’s barrel, made of paper-thin alloy wrapped with a kilometer of glass filament, was wide enough to swallow a fist. The skeletal magazine revealed five fat orange cartridges, subsonic sandbag jellies.
“Technically nonlethal,” said Ratz.
“Hey, Ratz,” Case said, “I owe you one.”
The bartender shrugged. “Nothing, you owe me. These,” and he glowered at Wage and the joeboys, “should know better. You don’t take anybody off in the Chatsubo.”
Wage coughed. “So who’s talking about taking anybody off? We just wanna talk business. Case and me, we work together.”
Case pulled the .22 out of his pocket and levelled it at Wage’s crotch. “I hear you wanna do me.” Ratz’s pink claw closed around the pistol and Case let his hand go limp.
“Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with you, you wig or something? What’s this shit I’m trying to kill you?” Wage turned to the boy on his left. “You two go back to the Namban. Wait for me.”
Case watched as they crossed the bar, which was now entirely deserted except for Kurt and a drunken sailor in khakis, who was curled at the foot of a barstool. The barrel of the Smith & Wesson tracked the two to the door, then swung back to cover Wage. The magazine of Case’s pistol clattered on the table. Ratz held the gun in his claw and pumped the round out of the chamber.
“Who told you I was going to hit you, Case?” Wage asked.
Linda.
“Who told you, man? Somebody trying to set you up?”
The sailor moaned and vomited explosively.
“Get him out of here,” Ratz called to Kurt, who was sitting on the edge of the bar now, the Smith & Wesson across his lap, lighting a cigarette.
Case felt the weight of the night come down on him like a bag of wet sand settling behind his eyes. He took the flask out of his pocket and handed it to Wage. “All I got. Pituitaries. Get you five hundred if you move it fast. Had the rest of my roll in some RAM, but that’s gone by now.”
“You okay, Case?” The flask had already vanished behind a gunmetal lapel. “I mean, fine, this’ll square us, but you look bad. Like hammered shit. You better go somewhere and sleep.”
“Yeah.” He stood up and felt the Chat sway around him. “Well, I had this fifty, but I gave it to somebody.” He giggled. He picked up the .22’s magazine and the one loose cartridge and dropped them into one pocket, then put the pistol in the other. “I gotta see Shin, get my deposit back.”
�
�Go home,” said Ratz, shifting on the creaking chair with something like embarrassment. “Artiste. Go home.”
He felt them watching as he crossed the room and shouldered his way past the plastic doors.
“BITCH,” HE SAID to the rose tint over Shiga. Down on Ninsei the holograms were vanishing like ghosts, and most of the neon was already cold and dead. He sipped thick black coffee from a street vendor’s foam thimble and watched the sun come up. “You fly away, honey. Towns like this are for people who like the way down.” But that wasn’t it, really, and he was finding it increasingly hard to maintain the sense of betrayal. She just wanted a ticket home, and the RAM in his Hitachi would buy it for her, if she could find the right fence. And that business with the fifty; she’d almost turned it down, knowing she was about to rip him for the rest of what he had.
When he climbed out of the elevator, the same boy was on the desk. Different textbook. “Good buddy,” Case called across the plastic turf, “you don’t need to tell me. I know already. Pretty lady came to visit, said she had my key. Nice little tip for you, say fifty New ones?” The boy put down his book. “Woman,” Case said, and drew a line across his forehead with his thumb. “Silk.” He smiled broadly. The boy smiled back, nodded. “Thanks, asshole,” Case said.
On the catwalk, he had trouble with the lock. She’d messed it up somehow when she’d fiddled it, he thought. Beginner. He knew where to rent a blackbox that would open anything in Cheap Hotel. Fluorescents came on as he crawled in.
“Close the hatch real slow, friend. You still got that Saturday night special you rented from the waiter?”
She sat with her back to the wall, at the far end of the coffin. She had her knees up, resting her wrists on them; the pepperbox muzzle of a flechette pistol emerged from her hands.
“That you in the arcade?” He pulled the hatch down. “Where’s Linda?”
“Hit that latch switch.”
He did.
“That your girl? Linda?”
He nodded.
“She’s gone. Took your Hitachi. Real nervous kid. What about the gun, man?” She wore mirrored glasses. Her clothes were black, the heels of black boots deep in the temperfoam.
“I took it back to Shin, got my deposit. Sold his bullets back to him for half what I paid. You want the money?”
“No.”
“Want some dry ice? All I got, right now.”
“What got into you tonight? Why’d you pull that scene at the arcade? I had to mess up this rentacop came after me with nunchucks.”
“Linda said you were gonna kill me.”
“Linda said? I never saw her before I came up here.”
“You aren’t with Wage?”
She shook her head. He realized that the glasses were surgically inset, sealing her sockets. The silver lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones, framed by dark hair cut in a rough shag. The fingers curled around the fletcher were slender, white, tipped with polished burgundy. The nails looked artificial. “I think you screwed up, Case. I showed up and you just fit me right into your reality picture.”
“So what do you want, lady?” He sagged back against the hatch.
“You. One live body, brains still somewhat intact. Molly, Case. My name’s Molly. I’m collecting you for the man I work for. Just wants to talk, is all. Nobody wants to hurt you.”
“That’s good.”
“ ’Cept I do hurt people sometimes, Case. I guess it’s just the way I’m wired.” She wore tight black gloveleather jeans and a bulky black jacket cut from some matte fabric that seemed to absorb light. “If I put this dartgun away, will you be easy, Case? You look like you like to take stupid chances.”
“Hey, I’m very easy. I’m a pushover, no problem.”
“That’s fine, man.” The fletcher vanished into the black jacket. “Because you try to fuck around with me, you’ll be taking one of the stupidest chances of your whole life.”
She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails.
She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.
TWO
AFTER A YEAR of coffins, the room on the twenty-fifth floor of the Chiba Hilton seemed enormous. It was ten meters by eight, half of a suite. A white Braun coffeemaker steamed on a low table by the sliding glass panels that opened onto a narrow balcony.
“Get some coffee in you. Look like you need it.” She took off her black jacket; the fletcher hung beneath her arm in a black nylon shoulder rig. She wore a sleeveless gray pullover with plain steel zips across each shoulder. Bulletproof, Case decided, slopping coffee into a bright red mug. His arms and legs felt like they were made out of wood.
“Case.” He looked up, seeing the man for the first time. “My name is Armitage.” The dark robe was open to the waist, the broad chest hairless and muscular, the stomach flat and hard. Blue eyes so pale they made Case think of bleach. “Sun’s up, Case. This is your lucky day, boy.”
Case whipped his arm sideways and the man easily ducked the scalding coffee. Brown stain running down the imitation ricepaper wall. He saw the angular gold ring through the left lobe. Special Forces. The man smiled.
“Get your coffee, Case,” Molly said. “You’re okay, but you’re not going anywhere ’til Armitage has his say.” She sat crosslegged on a silk futon and began to fieldstrip the fletcher without bothering to look at it. Twin mirrors tracking as he crossed to the table and refilled his cup.
“Too young to remember the war, aren’t you, Case?” Armitage ran a large hand back through his cropped brown hair. A heavy gold bracelet flashed on his wrist. “Leningrad, Kiev, Siberia. We invented you in Siberia, Case.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Screaming Fist, Case. You’ve heard the name.”
“Some kind of run, wasn’t it? Tried to burn this Russian nexus with virus programs. Yeah, I heard about it. And nobody got out.”
He sensed abrupt tension. Armitage walked to the window and looked out over Tokyo Bay. “That isn’t true. One unit made it back to Helsinki, Case.”
Case shrugged, sipped coffee.
“You’re a console cowboy. The prototypes of the programs you use to crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming Fist. For the assault on the Kirensk computer nexus. Basic module was a Nightwing microlight, a pilot, a matrix deck, a jockey. We were running a virus called Mole. The Mole series was the first generation of real intrusion programs.”
“Icebreakers,” Case said, over the rim of the red mug.
“Ice from ICE, intrusion countermeasures electronics.”
“Problem is, mister, I’m no jockey now, so I think I’ll just be going. . . .”
“I was there, Case; I was there when they invented your kind.”
“You got zip to do with me and my kind, buddy. You’re rich enough to hire expensive razorgirls to haul my ass up here, is all. I’m never gonna punch any deck again, not for you or anybody else.” He crossed to the window and looked down. “That’s where I live now.”
“Our profile says you’re trying to con the street into killing you when you’re not looking.”
“Profile?”
“We’ve built up a detailed model. Bought a go-to for each of your aliases and ran the skim through some military software. You’re suicidal, Case. The model gives you a month on the outside. And our medical projection says you’ll need a new pancreas inside a year.”
“ ‘We.’ ” He met the faded blue eyes. “ ‘We’ who?”
“What would you say if I told you we could correct your neural damage, Case?” Armitage suddenly looked to Case as if he were carved from a block of metal; inert, enormously heavy. A statue. He knew now that this was a dream, and that soon he’d wake. Armitage wouldn’t speak again. Case’s dreams always ended in these freezeframes, and now this one was over.
“What would you say, Case?”
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Case looked out over the Bay and shivered.
“I’d say you were full of shit.”
Armitage nodded.
“Then I’d ask what your terms were.”
“Not very different than what you’re used to, Case.”
“Let the man get some sleep, Armitage,” Molly said from her futon, the components of the fletcher spread on the silk like some expensive puzzle. “He’s coming apart at the seams.”
“Terms,” Case said, “and now. Right now.”
He was still shivering. He couldn’t stop shivering.
THE CLINIC WAS nameless, expensively appointed, a cluster of sleek pavilions separated by small formal gardens. He remembered the place from the round he’d made his first month in Chiba.
“Scared, Case. You’re real scared.” It was Sunday afternoon and he stood with Molly in a sort of courtyard. White boulders, a stand of green bamboo, black gravel raked into smooth waves. A gardener, a thing like a large metal crab, was tending the bamboo.
“It’ll work, Case. You got no idea, the kind of stuff Armitage has. Like he’s gonna pay these nerve boys for fixing you with the program he’s giving them to tell them how to do it. He’ll put them three years ahead of the competition. You got any idea what that’s worth?” She hooked thumbs in the beltloops of her leather jeans and rocked backward on the lacquered heels of cherry red cowboy boots. The narrow toes were sheathed in bright Mexican silver. The lenses were empty quicksilver, regarding him with an insect calm.
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