A Song Called Youth (78 page)

“I can accept anything, even staying here, if Lester’s with me.”

He shook his head. “I haven’t got the authority.”

She leaned forward and said, “You think we don’t know about RM17?”

He couldn’t speak for a moment. He saw a flicker of triumph in her face. It made him angry. But he knew she was only doing what anyone would do, in her place.

He glanced at the door. “I don’t know what rumors you’ve heard, but it’s all . . . ”

“Murder is murder.”

“Now look, Mrs. Chesterton . . . ”

“Murder is murder. Murder is . . . ”

“
All right. That’s enough.”

He sagged back in his seat. “Look, the damn Colony is falling apart. Colony maintenance is at an all-time low. Especially since the explosion. Maintenance supplies are trickling through the New-Soviet blockade so slowly . . . we’ve got just enough to keep going. We’re getting sabotage like you wouldn’t believe. Vandalism. We’ve got random violence—people are getting stir-crazy. I just don’t have time to take your problems on.”

“Murder is murder. You people are going to have to murder me, too, if you want me to shut up about it. Unless you let him go.”

He opened his mouth to tell her not to threaten him, that there hadn’t been a murder. But he couldn’t say it. It was as if his voice box just wouldn’t work. Not for that particular lie.

He thought,
Jesus, Son of God, I’m listening. Tell me what to do.

He didn’t expect an answer. But the strange thing was . . . 

He suddenly knew what he had to do.

He said, “I don’t think I can help you.” But he was writing something on a pad, keeping his body between it and the office’s wall camera. “Here’s a special pass to see him whenever you want.”

When he handed it to her, he could tell by her suddenly guarded expression that she’d caught it; that he’d given her
two
documents. A pass and, under it, a note. She looked at him; he looked at her. She nodded and left the office. Probably wondering how she could trust the chief of security. And realizing she had no choice.

The note read,
My office is bugged. I’ll contact you and we’ll meet in the Open, at the Monument. Let you know when the meeting will be. I’ll try to help you. Destroy this, after you get home.

He watched her go, thinking: Now I’m in it deep.

But, hell, he’d made a choice. He’d chosen sides.

Faid was a wiry, nut-brown man with a droopy mustache and large, excited eyes. He wore a rather battered Japanese action suit today, tiger-striped, and he added a large smile when he saw Russ. “This is one funny place to meet,” Faid said in a rather thick accent. “It’s all broken here, rather.” He’d learned his English in London, and he mixed Britishisms with his bad Standard.

Russ said, “Hell, it ought to be useful for somethin’.” They were in one of the closed-off cafés on the Strip, the small section of the Colony that had been designed as the recreational center for its technicki population. The shops and cafés and spas were closed now; there were no supplies to keep them open. Russ, as Security Chief, had a key to all the silly little units on the arcade.

The place was dusty—more proof that the air filters were working badly in the Colony. Normally dust was precluded wherever possible, since it increased wear on the LSS equipment. Dust was a life-support risk. The windows were blocked-off paperboard; the only light was from the electric lantern Russ had set on the table.

“Shall we be sitting down, then?” Faid asked, gesturing toward a table. “I think the service will be slow, what?”

Russ smiled. He shook his head. “Can’t stay long.” He took two passes from his pocket, handed them to Faid. “You’re security, you know how to use ’em.”

“I
was
security, bloody not security anymore . . . ”

“I know. I’m sorry. That’s Praeger’s doing. But take these. It’s up to you if you want to actually use them—the situation is like this: I’m going to be taking some risks. I’m going up against Praeger. Chances are I’ll be arrested. If you help me, there’s big danger in it for you, and maybe not much else. But I thought you might want to, anyway.”

Faid nodded. “You bloody well are knowing me too good, Russ!”

Russ pointed to each of the passes. “This one gets you into any place in Security Section; this one can be used to transfer prisoners. When the time comes, I’ll want you to get this man out of detention and hide him.” He gave him a piece of paper with the name and prisoner number of Kitty’s husband. “I promised someone about him. And if he’s loose, he just might do Praeger a dirty, which’ll please the bejeezus out of me. Only, not yet. I don’t want to do it that way except as a last resort.”

Faid wagged a finger at Russ, saying, “You are knowing me too good!” And then he grinned and stowed the passes in his pocket.

A shopping mall in Washington, D.C.

“We each get a copy, Stoner,” Brummel said. “That was the deal,” he added, as Lopez accepted the manila envelope from Stoner.

Stoner said, “They’re both there.” He was looking out the window of the cafetamine shop at the glassy maze of the lower levels of the capitol mall.

It was almost ten at night, and the shops lining the corridors of the vast subterranean mall were mostly closed. Some of the cases were dark, some were lit up but forlornly motionless; they displayed clothing and mindtoys and designer medinject units and ninja gear and sporting goods and vidinserts; the glass of the cases reflected one another, so the goods were layered in reflection, collaged with skewed squares of shine; one case mixed by reflection with another, a jumble of enticements; like a premonition, Stoner thought, of the coming time when the stuff ends in the city dumps, jumbled together again.

He felt empty and hopeless tonight; he felt bought and sold. Passing information to the enemy.

Think of the family.

Lopez slurped at his Styrofoam cup of speed-spiked ersatz coffee as Brummel looked at the little datastick in the envelope. Which was stupid; it wasn’t as if you could tell anything by looking at some loose stick. Stoner shifted in the hard booth, rested his elbows on the synthetic white tabletop, his chin on his meshed fingers. A waxy cruller, made of God knows what, sat untouched on a paper napkin in front of him
.

Stoner asked, “When do you get me out of the country?”

“After this stuff is looked at good,” Lopez said.

“Work on your grammar,” Stoner said. “How about we find a booth, I pay for the computer time, you read through it quick right there?”

Brummel looked at him. Perspiration glazed his dark skin. “You got a reason to worry?” He glanced at the corridor, then over his shoulder at the shop. It was empty, except for the Japanese kid behind the counter.

Stoner hesitated.

The three men sat bolt upright in their seats as the room shook with a sudden roar, the windows and tabletops vibrating; the Korean boy had switched on an iPod, blasting the heavy-metal squeal of a neopunk band. The lead singer was jeering:

Let’s bring the war home

We deserve to suffer like the rest of the world

Yeah, bring the war home

Bring the killin’ home

Build a brand new

Refugee dome

Yeah bring the war home

Stoner winced. “Yeah,” he told Brummel, “I always got reason to worry. I don’t think anyone’s on me tonight. I don’t see how they could have us under voice surveillance here when they didn’t know—and we didn’t know till ten minutes ago—where we’d have our meeting. But you’re stupid if you don’t worry.”

“Come on, please, let’s get out of here,” Lopez said.

They left the shop, walked down the echoing corridor together, past a crowd in front of a cinema octoplex, Stoner asking, “What about the booth?”

“If we can find one with a working drive,” Brummel said, nodding.

A bald man in a saffron robe was ranting at the octoplex lines. “Those of us who know these are the last days of man,” he shouted, “demand that the suffering of innocents cease! Today I make another sacrifice, my flesh for their flesh, one ounce of flesh a week until the war is over!” He held up an arm and used a hunting knife to pare off a chunk of the heel of his hand; blood ran down the blade, twined his wrist; he screamed but completed his cutting; some of the crowd groaned in revulsion; others laughed.

Someone yelled, “You’re not really serious unless you cut off your dick!”

The man in saffron opened his robe, took his penis in hand. An SA cop on a jitney rolled around the corner, pulled up next to him . . . 

Stoner, Brummel, and Lopez turned a corner, hurrying away from the scene. Behind them there was a piteous scream.

They found a number of “Grid-in” booths at an alcove in the next corridor. There were twelve—seven were vandalized, scored with graffiti, their cables hanging out.

One of the booths worked. Stoner tapped its keyboard for “isolated reading” and then entered the stick files. He stepped aside, let Brummel and Lopez go through it, knowing he was taking a chance. They could always take the stuff and ditch him, leaving him twisting in the wind. Or kill him.

“I have something else, of course,” he murmured, “something I’m keeping back till I’m safe and out of the country. Something very useful to the NR.”

“It looks all right,” Brummel said, stepping out of the booth, not concealing his excitement very well. “It—” He broke off, staring past Stoner at the bend in the corridor.

Stoner turned to look. A Second Alliance bull, this one without a helmet, was staring at them. He raised his arm, spoke into his wrist. Then turned away, was gone around the corner.

Just a routine check, Stoner told himself. He said, “When do we go?”

“We’ll be in touch. I’ll contact my sister,” Brummel said.

Stoner held Brummel’s eyes. “Soon.”

“Soon as we can make it.”

“How soon is that, dammit?”

“A few days.”

“
Sooner,
” Stoner barked. He moved off toward the escalator leading to the parking structure.

In the parking lot he started his Guatemalan Rapido and drove out into the weirdly abstract, arrow-marked lanes between cars. Seeing a light in his mirror. Another car starting

Just someone going home from the mall. Everyone goes out the same way, after all.

But when Stoner was out on the street, he turned at the next corner, and the car behind him turned too: A Ford Hydro Shuttle hanging back but tailing him. He took another turn, arbitrarily, watching it.

The stranger turned too.

They weren’t bothering to hide that they were tailing him. Which meant they wanted to scare him—or they were about to come down on him.

He sensed somehow that they were going to take him. Now.

He pulled up at a crowded restaurant and bar, doubleparked, went inside as calmly as he could, going from deserted dark street into brassy lighting, noise, laughter.

“Yes, Sir, are you here for dinner?”

“I’m meeting someone in the bar,” Stoner said.

He tried not to run, managed to keep it down to a trot, as he hurried into the bar, past it to the credfone booths. He slid his card into the fone slot, and the screen lit up. Stoner punched his home number, waited breathlessly, glancing over his shoulder. No one was following him in yet—but they could have put a bird’s eye on him.

His wife’s worried face appeared on the screen. “You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. But . . . anything going on at home?”

She shook her head.

“Okay. Your sister there?”

She nodded.

“Okay. I want you to make that little trip to see your mom.”

Her eyes widened. “Okay.”

He cut the line. She knew what to do. She’d arranged it with her sister. Her sister would put on her clothes, get in the car, drive out of the garage as fast as she dared, drive off to Falls Church, where her mother lived. They’d think she was going to her mother’s. The sister wasn’t a twin, but she looked enough like her from a distance that it might work. The surveillance crew, with luck, would follow the sister.

His wife and daughter would go out the back, through the neighbor’s yard to a friend’s house, call a cab. They’d meet at a certain motel in Baltimore.

If
it worked
. If
the Company was fooled. There was a chance: God knows CIA Domestic could be fooled.

Stoner went to the men’s room. The window was nailed shut. He took off his coat, balled it around his fist, smashed the window glass, hoping the noise from the bar would cover it. He broke out tile jags from the window frame, climbed on a sink, wormed through the frame onto slimy asphalt, expecting someone outside to grab him as he came out. No one there. A wet, trash-gunked alley.

He got to his feet—saw headlights swinging into the alley to his right. He turned down a narrow walk between the restaurant and the next building, feeling his way along in pitch darkness; moving back toward the restaurant’s front. Smelling urine, garbage. He emerged onto the sidewalk. The Ford Hydro was gone; it was around back. And there was a cab just letting a young couple out in front of the restaurant. He ran to it, got in before they closed the door, slid a fifty-newbux note through the slot to the driver. “Go anywhere, fast!” he yelled. The driver saw the bill, and the car squealed away from the curb.

Stoner watched through the rear window. He didn’t see the Hydro. The dumbshits were still looking through the alley. The cab turned a corner and he felt a ripple of relief. Ditched them for now. Unless they had a surveillance bird on him too. He glanced up at the sky. No telltale silvery fluttering. But the birds were small; you never knew.

He’d have to contact Brummel directly, somehow. Tomorrow, if he got through the night alive.

The New York County Jail.

There were forty beds in the county jail’s hospital room. Charlie was lying in the bed nearest the door, trying not to hear the shouts and babbling and jeering of other patients—other prisoners.

He gave up trying to get comfortable on his back, moved to his right side. That hurt too. He shifted to his left side. After some more experimentation he found that if he remained on his left side and tucked his knees up near his chest, bunched the sheets up under his sore kidney, he could minimize the discomfort. Now and then he reached under his sour-smelling, grimy pillow and let his fingers play over the plastic cigarette lighter he’d found in a refuse barrel. Some guard had thought it empty. But chances were there was a light or two left in it.