Fade to Black (7 page)

Her target indicator winked rapidly, then blinked out. She didn't dare follow. The exit tunnel was too confining, and she'd be spotted. The targets were pros, and the van was believed to be equipped with advanced electronics that might very well include short-range antiair radar. Bobbie Jo did what she had to do. She stayed with the tandem-trailered truck for another eight hundred meters. The instant the transitway surfaced again, she punched up full power. The steady whine of her engines rose to a cyclone scream. She arced up and back, soaring over the, city, then quickly flipped to bring her belly pod to bear on the ground below.

A dozen target indicators winked in front of her eyes.

She was still scoping them out, sweeping back and forth across the city, hunting the target, when Skip called her back to base.

The Colonel was not happy.

* * *

Rico grimaced, clenching his teeth. Barely an hour had passed since he'd accepted the job from L. Kahn and already he didn't like it. The whole thing could be a set-up.

"You sure you saw a drone?"

"Of course I saw it," Thorvin snapped, steering the van around one final corner onto Mott Street. "Any moron with freaking infrared goggles coulda spotted it. I oughta know a freaking Cyber Designs Stealth Sniper Series 53 when I see one. I broke one of the freaking things down about a year ago just to see how it worked. It ain't top of the line, but it ain't half bad either. It's serviceable. All right for standard recon. It just hasn't got anything like the kind of electronics to beat what I got in this van."

"Yes, but whose drone was it?" Piper said. "And who was it eyeing?"

Shank grunted. "Maybe it's just a coincidence."

Rico turned his head to look out the passenger-side window, into the side-view mirror, then at the dark, decaying buildings slowly passing by. Piper's questions struck right at the core of the problem. Rico wished he had answers to match them. He had plenty of guesses, but he didn't like those guesses any more than Shank's suggestion about coincidence.

L. Kahn could have arranged to put up a drone just to send a message that he'd be watching, alert for treachery. It would be a stupid thing to do because Rico would take it as a sign of betrayal, but then L. Kahn didn't necessarily know that Thorvin had the gear to spot the drone.

Any fragging thing was possible. Every one of the four of them in the van had at least one warrant out for them somewhere in the U.C.A.S. Cops and feds and practically every corp in the world all had riggers who could put up drones. Some of the local security companies used drones for ordinary surveillance, like night watchmen. And, like Shank said, it was definitely possible that the drone was completely unrelated to anything that mattered. There were dozens of jobs being worked at any one time within the bounds of the Newark plex. Sometimes you couldn't turn a corner without stepping into the middle of somebody's dustup.

It just seemed too coincidental to
be
coincidental that a drone had shown up overhead just as they were leaving Chimpira.

On the other hand, Thorvin had lost contact with the drone once they reached the transitway, and nothing else had happened to suggest that they were being followed. "You didn't see no cars following?"

"Not a freaking one."

Still what bothered Rico was the one possibility no one had mentioned: they might already be blown.

The corporate "entity" they were supposed to penetrate to make their retrieval might already know they'd been hired for the job. That "entity" might have been watching L. Kahn and might be hunting for the four of them at this very moment.

Preemptive op is what corp security slags called it. They'd be careful, Rico decided. Now more than ever. They'd get off the street and stay off as much as possible until the job was done. They'd check out everything two or three or four times before they started the run. They'd build in backups on top of backups in case anything went wrong. If they found even a hint of evidence that L. Kahn was playing games, they'd handle that, too.

Four a.m., the rain started coming down. Right on schedule. First it drizzled, then it poured. In less than a minute it turned into a torrent. The corps controlling Manhattan seeded the clouds most every night in an attempt to clear the garbage out of the air. Like they said on TV/3V, the rain brought the garbage down indiscriminately, on the just and the unjust alike.

Momentarily, the safehouse came along on the right, a three-story brick building that had been condemned a decade ago, then uncondemned. City records showed it as turned over to New Jersey Consolidated Power and Light. Piper had made it that way.

The place was crammed in between a two-story factory and a nine-story moving and storage tower. It had two brown metal bay doors large enough to accommodate a semi and no windows at ground-level. The door on the right began rising as they approached. Thorvin had the transmit code. He drove the van across the sidewalk and right inside. The door trundled down behind them.

The ground floor looked like a junkyard, one big room filled with mechanical parts and equipment, a pair of Scorpion motorcycles, a spare van. Thorvin called it his emergency repair shop. What he called it or how he used it mattered far less to Rico than that the rigger should have what he needed to jury-rig repairs when they were on a run.

Rico led the group upstairs. The second floor had bedrooms, a kitchen, and the main room, which doubled as both a living room and conference room. Rico set Shank and Thorvin to clearing up the garbage lying around since God knew when, then handed Piper the datachip from L. Kahn. Piper had her axe.

They'd stopped to pick that up. She'd scan the chip, print out a hardcopy, and they could get started with the job.

Piper took the chip, but then slid her arms around Rico's neck and said softly, anxiously, "This one worries me,
jefe."

Rico exhaled heavily. "We just gotta be careful, chica. I think we're playing with big boys this time. Some damn megacorp."

She nodded. "I'll get to work."

"Good idea."

Rico checked on supplies: food, ammunition, other gear. The devil rats in the basement had been working on the power lines, so he got Thorvin down there to patch things up. When he returned to the second floor, he found Piper sitting on the sofa, axe in her lap. Her eyes rose to meet his.

"Got something?" he asked.

"Surikov," Piper said. "Ansell Surikov. That's who they want us to get."

7

Everybody wanted something.

That's why the crowds stood waiting outside the old stadium beneath the giant TV/3V screen advertising Chromium Retrosocket, coming soon. That's why so many thousands of people jammed the Main Line along Bloomfield Avenue through the western half of Sector 3. And that's why Monk stood in the middle of the traffic lanes, amid a teeming mass of people, with six-story tall coffin hotels on the left and decrepit ferrocrete tenements on the right, all ablaze with flickering, flashing neon signs.

Just a few steps in front of him stood a man on a plastic crate. "What's wrong with society?" the man shouted, waving a sheaf of hardcopy. "Too much coercion! Corporate, government, economic coercion! No one can escape it, not the squatters, not the salarymen, not the execs, not even the SINless! Coercion dooms us all to sterile and empty lives, years with no hope, no goals and no end!

"Neo-anarchism is the only answer! the only way humanity can throw off the chains of oppression!

Transcend its degeneracy and rise up out of the mire of the new corporate feudalism!

"We must unite in common cause and seek Pareto optimality!"

Monk frowned.

Pareto what?

A bit further along was a woman shoving a pushcart up the street while she hawked weevo warts, which, when applied with a solution of three percent sodium bicarbonate, would make all men handsome and virile and all women beautiful and fertile.

Weevo warts ... Monk wondered what those were.

After that came pyramids and crystals, positive and negative ion generators, a grow-your-own-clone booth, a tarot reader, a palmist, a noodle stand, cheap body organs and cyberware, another noodle stand, soykaf, a Sidewalk Doc, and a group of masked men big enough to be orks, all wearing the black hoods, jumpsuits, gloves, and boots of the Sanitation Department.

"Where's the
stiff
?" one shouted.

Monk tried not to pass judgment. The writer's business was to watch and listen. To learn the patterns of the world and reveal them to others. To do that, he had be like a sponge. He had to soak up everything, remember it, and eventually find ways to explain the seeming randomness of existence to others, regardless of the medium he used.

One of these days, people would read his telebooks or watch his tridplays or experience simsense performances that he had orchestrated, and they would find truth.

And that would be a great day.

He could see it already: "One Day in the Life of the Main Line Mega-market of the Newark Metroplex!"

Or words to that effect.

"By
Monk!"

He grinned.

What happened then caught him completely by surprise. From somewhere amid the noise of the street, the babble of voices, the reverb of adverts, the rumble of subways and transitways, the roaring of boom boxes and the distant clatter of gunfire, he heard a kind of high-pitched whining sound, but didn't really pay much attention. He didn't think anything of it.

As he turned one way, something hit him from the other direction, first in the leg, then in the hip. The impact itself didn't come as much of a shock. He'd been getting jostled by the crowds for hours, in fact, practically every day of his life. It was what followed that took away his breath.

Whatever had hit him seemed to sweep him right up off his feet. For a second or two Monk felt himself being carried along at near breakneck speed, arched over backward, his arms and legs flying out wide into empty air. Just in passing, he noticed a few things: the blur of a neon sign advertising soykaf, the face of an Asian man, mouth gaping as in astonishment, eyes bulging and staring down at him, a hooded woman battling a pair of gangers over a handbag, the rear of a fat man's bald head, a rat dashing across the sidewalk, threading a path through a half a hundred pairs of feet.

There was that strange whining sound, too. And a kind of exclamation, like, "Hey!" Then Monk suddenly realized he was in freefall. He wasn't quite sure how that had happened. It was really strange.

Like he was just floating in midair. Immune to gravity. He caught a glimpse of someone smoking a red cigarette, then spotted a patch of ferrocrete wall, then everything around him was crashing. He was tumbling, rolling, flipping upside-down, smashing into things. His body hit the ground. That kind of hurt.

"Are you all right?" somebody called.

Monk wasn't sure about that. He felt kind of funny. Like he might suffocate and vomit and pass out all at once. He felt banged up, too. He spent a few moments just getting back into the habit of breathing. Once he got that down, he tried opening his eyes and looking around. The first thing he noticed was the pile of plastic trash cans around him. The second thing he noticed was someone kneeling next to him. Someone wearing a leopard-print jacket, pants, and boots. As another moment passed, Monk realized this someone was female and
looking right at him.
His eyes widened. He looked at her more closely. Her hair was frizzled and wild and kept changing colors, winking from red to orange to gold and back again. She had bright blue eyes, a pert nose, and lips like Cupid's bow. She smiled, looking right at him, and showed off teeth as white as... well, anything he had ever seen. She smelled like a fragrant garden. She was... she was...

She was
beautiful...

"Hey, you're kinda cute."

"Huh?"

She giggled.

Aches and pains faded to nowhere. Monk stared. Women never paid much attention to him. Beautiful women like this one never even seemed to notice he existed. They weren't interested in writers. Didn't consider them good nesting material. They had their eyes on salarymen, execs, and the tall towers and big money over on the other side of the Hudson River.

She lifted a hand to cover her mouth, then helped him sit up. She had slim little hands like a girl.

"You must've been in another world," she said, smiling. "Didn't you hear me beep?"

Monk frowned, wondering what she meant.

"Hey, are you an elf?" Abruptly, she brushed at his spiky hair and leaned over as if to look at the side of his head, maybe at one of his ears. His ears
were
kind of weird. Pointy like.

"Uh ..."

"My father was a dwarf. Can you believe it?" She looked him in the face again, then smiled and thrust her arms out to her sides as if to invite him to look her over. Monk couldn't help accepting the invitation.

She was slim and just plain gorgeous.

"Wuh ... wiz," he said, breathing hard.

She giggled again, then smiled warmly, right at him. "I'm Minx," she said. "Who're you?"

"Monk," Monk blurted.

"Wiz!" she said, softly. "You know, you remind me of the flower children. They were always in another world. They were these people back in the twenty-hundreds who said we should make love, and mostly just that." She smiled like she thought that was funny. "And they meditated, too. A lot of them wore tie-dyed clothes like you."