Fade to Black (10 page)

In front of Seven Hexes Pizza, he noticed a gray and black van. He walked right past it and around the corner into the deep shadows cast by the tall ferrocrete tenements lining Sutherland. The van followed.

As Bandit stepped into the dark recess of a tenement doorway, the van glided to a stop at the curb in front of him. The passenger door of the van swung open. A big ork in an armored black vest and black fatigue pants stepped onto the sidewalk and joined Bandit in the shadowed doorway. People called this ork Shank.

A dwarf called Thorvin followed along.

"Hoi, Bandit," Shank said.

Thorvin grunted.

Bandit watched these two closely. Their presence here roused his curiosity. They rarely came looking for him except when a special opportunity arose. A glance at their auras revealed only that they seemed calm, untroubled, in harmony with the plex.

"We got a job," Shank said. "Rico wants you in the game."

Interesting. Bandit knew this Rico, too. Rico was clever, in some ways as clever as Raccoon. He had a woman, an Asian woman, who was perhaps more than she appeared. Not entirely human, perhaps something other than human. She was clever, too. "The decker," Bandit said quietly. "Is she in?"

Shank frowned, then said, "You mean Piper?"

"Yes." That was the name.

"Sure she's in. She and Rico're planning the run right now. You want in?"

"Likely," Bandit said. "Good money?"

Shank told him about the money. It was good. Bandit didn't really care. Money was useful for buying food and renting hiding places, but that was all. He only asked about money because it was expected.

People who didn't want money were not trusted. "The run will take us where? Someplace interesting?"

Shank nodded, slowly. Seeming puzzled. "Yeah. Sure. I bet it'll be real interesting. Heavy security. Some corp facility."

"High-security facility?"

"Ain't that what I just said?"

Shank meant yes. This was very good, indeed. High-security facilities had high security in order to guard valuable things. Things that might be taken, things that might be hoarded. Or sold. Or traded. Or examined for what they might mean. It was difficult to know what might or might not have value with just a first look, so many things had to be taken to a safe place where they might be hidden and examined carefully. Often with magic. Long magic. What the uninitiated called "ritual magic," as if such magic could be done by rote, without thought or inspiration.

"You interested?" Shank asked.

Bandit nodded, just once. "When do we start?"

* * *

The night streamed with energy, throbbing, alive. Maurice slowly ascended, then descended, his astral form rising as high as the walls of the surrounding buildings, then settling down to several meters beneath the black concrete of the alley. All appeared in order. The energies of the astral plane flowed smoothly and harmoniously. No malign species of phantom or magically active being seemed to be in the vicinity.

There was of, course, one minor fluctuation, one small disturbance in the flux of astral space, originating from within the warehouse to his right, but this he had expected.

He had come prepared.

He returned to his physical body, his mundane form. This brought him a sense of dissatisfaction, no less than the necessity of leaving his studies tonight in order to "practice" his Art in the sordid world of the mundane. As he regained his sense-awareness of the physical plane, he sat once again in the rear of his Mercedes limousine. The limousine waited, lights out, in an alley off some street in Sector 2, near the airport, the ocean terminals and piers. "Biffs remain in the car," he said. The five women sharing the rear of the limo with him grumbled briefly in discord. Much as he might have expected. They were his wives. They attended to the innumerable inconsequential details of daily living, thereby freeing him to pursue his arcane inquiries. They had also produced a number of children, who, in time, would also serve him. They expected to accompany him everywhere, imagining that their service to him earned them various inalienable rights.

On a night like this, when certain undeniable facts of existence invaded the hallowed domain of his research, he would grant no latitude, tolerate no dissension. The biffs would do as he said or else face the consequences. Fortunately for all of them, Daniella, his first wife, had the capacity of understanding to order them all into silence.

Daniella would keep them in line.

With one meticulously manicured finger, Maurice pointed. The door to his right clicked and swung open. The faint shimmering in the air by the limo's ceiling drifted out through the open door. Maurice followed it outside.

The night was cool, the air rank with offensive odors. The ground vibrated faintly as with the distant rumble of machinery or passing subway trains. Maurice tucked his ivory-handled walking stick under his arm and tied the sash of his dark, caped coat A trivial exertion of will returned him to his astral perceptions.

He found his ally, radiant with etheric energy, facing him from just an arm's length away.

The ally, recently summoned, was proving to possess a peculiar blend of naivete" and eccentricities.

Though bound to Maurice's will, his service, the spirit showed signs of developing a uniquely willful personality. It preferred to be addressed as a female. With Maurice's permission, it had assumed an astral form like that of a curvaceous young white woman with long, gold-brown hair, and wearing a flowing halter-top dress that fell to mid-calf. It wished to be called "Vera Causa." Maurice found this troubling.

The spirit spoke to him mind-to-mind, asking,
Your desire, master?

Guard,
Maurice thought.

Yes, master,
the spirit replied.
I guard you always. Master is kind and spirits are grateful.

Indeed.

Returned to his mundane physical perceptions, Maurice extended his walking stick and moved up the alley. To his right the big black metal door of a warehouse stood partly open. He paused to examine both door and doorway, which appeared to be unguarded, astrally and otherwise.
Master, be cautious,
his ally warned.
Danger here. Much violence.

That was certainly true.

The open doorway led directly to a landing at the top of a flight of stairs. A faint luminescence from the radiance of the surrounding city carried in through the doorway to dimly illuminate the landing. The stairs, however, descended into pitch blackness. Maurice called forth his magelight with a flick of one finger. The light swelled radiant and full, growing from a mere pinpoint to the size of a globe mounted atop the head of Maurice's stick.

Lifting the stick out before him, Maurice descended the stairs. Again, his ally warned of danger, of the violence that lingered here. Maurice knew the source of this violence. It was the man he had come to see.

The stairs led into a corridor unlit but by Maurice's magelight. Some distance ahead another door waited partly open. Maurice paused to examine it, then stepped through.

That put him in the main chamber, a room two or three times the size of the average simsense theater.

At the distant end burned a single candle. Just beyond the candle's small flame stood a man stripped to the waist. He had a mass of wavy blonde hair and a well-muscled, athletically proportioned body. He stood with his feet together, arms at his sides, face turned toward the black of the ceiling hanging closely overhead.

Behind the man, Maurice perceived the huddled form of a woman, nude. Quite dead. "You come again."

The voice carried quietly throughout the space. It was that of the man. He went by many names, but, as Maurice knew, his real name was Claude Jaeger. His aura was a seething torrent of dark-hued energies.

Maurice had encountered homicidal maniacs with clearer auras, but Jaeger was far more dangerous than any lunatic killer. Death clung to him, not like a leech, but as the source of his power.

With a shout, Jaeger suddenly turned and lashed out, perhaps with a kick. The movement was so swift, Maurice could not be certain. A dark shape to Jaeger's right, about the sire and shape of a fire door, rang like a bell. Sonics slapped the walls of the surrounding chamber and reverberated. The door, or whatever it was, fell to the floor, clanging loudly, separating into two pieces.

"Does this form of exercise please you?"

Jaeger turned toward Maurice with a face as cold as the concrete underfoot. "It is not exercise," he said. "And, yes, it pleases me greatly." He paused for a moment, then said, "Would you care to try? I have another door."

Maurice considered briefly, then dismissed the thought Jaeger followed the path of a child, that of a physical adept His art, as he called it, was devoted to improving his physical power. His exercises included breaking inanimate objects and living bodies such as human beings. The practice of the art eluded explanation for the simple reason that the art itself was absurd. It was eminently practical, no doubt but had no value beyond the purely mundane. Jaeger himself was like a weapon, effective, but essentially devoid of the desire for truth or for anything more than mere physical stimulation.

"We have work," Maurice said.

"What work?" Jaeger snapped harshly.

Maurice ignored the intemperate tone. He had difficulty enough trying to decide how he might best elaborate, what words would achieve the desired effect. As a general rule, the spoken word displeased him.

Speech could be unbearably precarious, intolerably inexact. He much preferred the mathematical precision of the arcane arts, the One True Art. It alone could be trusted.

Quietly, and precisely, he said, "Our client is staging a sensitive operation. We are to back up the back-up, you might say. In case something should go wrong."

Softly, resonantly, Jaeger chuckled. "I would say it in terms very different from those, mage."

Maurice supposed that was so.

10

Unlike the old, three-story brick building on Mott Street, the big CMC stepvan really did belong to the New Jersey Consolidated Light and Power Corporation. It was painted in the corporate colors of blue and yellow, marked with various ID numbers, and loaded with equipment.

New Jersey C.L. & P. had lost track of the stepvan for the moment, Piper had arranged for that.

According to her, the corp had one of the worst matrix security systems of all the corps in the Jersey-New York megaplex, but whether that was true or the corp just wasn't up to her standards, Rico didn't know. In the end, it probably didn't matter.

Rico took the passenger-side seat, braced one foot against the dash, and gave Shank a nod. Shank hit the remote that set the big bay door in front of them to trundling up, then drove them toward Doremus Avenue, at the north end of the port, where they picked up the Jersey Turnpike.

It was just after 23:30 hours. The truck lanes were laden with heavy, swift-moving traffic-massive two-and three-trailer tandem rigs, container rigs, Roadmaster articulated and straight trucks, cargo vans and stepvans. Rico turned his head to glance back at the trio on the bench seat to his rear: Bandit, Filly, and Dok. Like him and Shank, they were outfitted with day-glo orange hardhats and vests, all marked for C. L. & P. The five of them were just another repair crew in a sludge-bloated ocean of technicians and crumbling infrastructure. No one would look at them twice.

The highway carried them across the Passaic River and onto the Kearny Peninsula, one of the most heavily industrialized areas in the plex. Rail yards, factories, storage tanks, and warehouses, all constructed on a mammoth scale, slid past on either side of the highway. The warning lights of factory stacks and the flame-stroked steeples of chemical plants rose high into the orange-phosphorous glow of the night.

Another bridge and the Hackensack River, then into Secaucus, another industrial zone, this one sprawling up the backbone of Jersey and Union Cities, and on up the Hudson to well beyond the G.W. Bridge.

The backside of Union City was far enough.

Shank turned the stepvan down the ramp to Paterson Plank Road, then up West Side Avenue.

North of the sewage plant, the road became a broad boulevard. It was a kind of Executive Row, like a little slice of Manhattan tucked in between chemical and food processing plants and the compacted, decaying streets of Union City's Zone 2, West New York. Broad plazas glowed with light. Fountains glittered and sparkled. Shining towers rose like polished chrome from the halos about their foundations to dominate the skyline.

Just past Sixty-ninth Street, Shank slowed the stepvan, flipped on the amber warning blinkers, and swung the vehicle across the boulevard. He drove the truck, one wheel at a time, up over the curb and onto the gold-lit plaza set in front of the imposing headquarters of Shiawase Compudyne, a division of the Shiawase Corporation of Kyoto, Japan. There was one very important feature of Compudyne's North American operations. Rico stepped from the stepvan to find it right there beside the truck. Set amid the golden tiles of the plaza was the round black insert of a manhole cover.

Shank tugged the cover up and dragged it aside. Dok and Filly began setting up the requisite safety-orange guardrail to surround the open hole and then pulled out the orange-and-red-striped compressor that would pump fresh air into the hole. Rico opened a Sony palmtop computer marked for New Jersey C. L. & P., paused to glance around the plaza, then began tapping the palmtop's keys.