Hardwired (11 page)

So. “Who will I be working for?” As if the answer mattered.

Michael the Hetman stares out the window, his face bleached by the sun. “For me,” he says. “There is a job...” He screws up his face and shrugs. “There is maybe something wrong with it. I can’t tell. Everything seems right, but the feeling is wrong. I want you to watch it for me.”

Sarah looks up at him, wondering if this is another oblique warning like the one from Cunningham. As if Michael is maybe finding her too hot to shelter anymore, taking too much pressure from the people he does business with. Wants to move her out where she will be a target.

“Who’s dealing?”

As if that answer mattered. She would have to take the job no matter how bad it smelled.

“I’ve taken delivery of a new shipment,” Michael says. He frowns and moves to the next chair. His calf-high soft, leather boots creak as he sits. “Crystal computer matrices,” he says thoughtfully. “Fifteen thousand of them. High quality, from a source that’s never delivered so well before. New boys just reaching the big markets, maybe. Or maybe thirdmanning for someone else. I can’t tell.”

“You want me to guard it?”

“Yes. Among other things.” The Hetman sighs and rubs his chin. “Normally it would take me some time to move that kind of quantity. Months. But now there’s someone up north, in Pennsylvania, who approached Andrei, wanting matrices in quantity. Will pay well for them.” His liquid eyes turn to Sarah. “I can think of no reason not to sell. Andrei wants the deal badly. But there are too many coincidences here, mi hermana.”

Andrei, Sarah knows, is one of the Hetman’s lieutenants. She watches as Michael fumbles in his pocket for a Russian cigarette.

“Someone may be trying to set me up, but I can’t think who, or why.” Crimping the end. Lighting it with a match that trembles. His hands are liver-spotted, old man’s hands. “These people I’m dealing with are small men, and if they hijacked the cargo they wouldn’t last long. Unless they have protection. But no one has that kind of strength, and right now I’m friends with everybody here on this coast. No sign that anyone’s getting their moves ready. So maybe you’ll be working for me for nothing.”

“You don’t feel that, Hetman,” Sarah says. “Or you wouldn’t be hiring me. Not at that price.”

He gives her a long, expressionless glance, his eyelids jittering a nervous reply to Sarah’s words, the cigarette smoke drifting ceilingward. Behind them the video begins to hype some new cocaine substitute, guaranteed nonaddictive, the audio filled with the tasteful hissing of compressed gases, the delighted exclamations of a young couple obviously in love. The cigarette flutters in the corner of Michael’s mouth as he speaks.

“I’m hiring a panzerboy,” he says. “If they’re trying for a hijack and expecting to be able to knock out a truck, they’ll be surprised. Andrei is handling the deal, the money. He’ll have friends to protect him, but I want you to ride along in the panzer. Watch the deal, watch the panzerboy. You’re hardwired for firearms?”

“Pistols and machine pistols.” She shrugs. “Guns have no style,” she says.

He smiles, a little wistful. As if he has heard this declaration many times, and knows that guns always seem to matter in the end. “I will get you a Heckler and Koch, seven millimeter. You will practice with it?”

“When are we running?”

“Saturday.”

“I’ll practice tomorrow. If you can get me the gun by then.”

“I will send a boy to meet you, take you to the range, then collect the gun when you are chipped in with it. Meet you when?”

“Tomorrow. The Plastic Girl, noon.”

The Hetman draws on his cigarette and nods. Sarah can see the reflection of the vid in his eyes, hears the jarring resumption of a South American comedy, the canned laughter raucous in reply to shrill Spanish. “I hope I am wrong about this, mi hermana,” says Michael. His voice is filled with Russian sadness that is no less genuine for its being theatrical. “I would be sorry to see another war. Just when things seem a little settled.”

A war would mean work for Sarah; but she doesn’t want it either. She knows that the only important war is already over, and that both she and Michael have already lost it, that any fighting here in the American Concessions is over the scraps the Orbitals had left behind, not thinking them worth the bother.

The Hetman rises to his feet. His hands make nervous movements. Sarah rises with him.

“I will go arrange for the gun,” he says. A long worm of ash falls from the end of the cigarette, leaving a fingerprint of gray dust on his vest.

If he is responding to pressure, Sarah thinks, if he is ready to betray her, then it will be tomorrow. When the boy comes with the gun, he will use it. She will try to be ready for it, poised to make her move, if that’s what’s really in the cards. She raises her hand to her throat, like a gypsy woman touching iron.

His eyes are unfocused, looking not at Sarah but at what will come, the future that, from the direction of his dreaming gaze, seems to be waiting above her right shoulder. She feels as if she should turn her head and see what is there.

“Thank you, Michael,” Sarah says.

He turns his wise eyes to her, says nothing. She fights an impulse to put her arms around him, to seek a piece of comfort here in the sterile brightness, ignoring the fact that this is business and that this man may already have arranged for her death... But it’s a death she could almost welcome, feeling as if her own soul fled when she watched Danica’s eyes turn to marble, that it is lost somewhere, with all the things that had seemed to give her meaning. Where does the shaped charge go when it has done its task? It flies apart, needles of steel each pursuing its own end. Scrap, seeking oblivion.

Once, she thinks dully, there was a purpose to this. Her life had intent, a wider focus. A direction, upward, out of the gravity well and into the black enveloping purity of airless space. Now the focus has narrowed. There is only the single imperative, Survive this Moment. The past scarcely matters; the future will be dealt with, instant by instant, as it arrives. Each tick of the clock, a new burden, a new application of the imperative. The Hetman will help her get through this moment, provide another brief imperative. Survive until tomorrow, attend the meet at the Plastic Girl. Then survive the meet, if possible.

The boy across the room weeps, shreds another tissue. “Clever of them,” the Hetman says, “to go through Andrei, and not come direct. Knowing that Andrei would add his pressure to theirs.” The voice is reflective, reaching into the ether for the enemy that may exist there, trying to know his mind.

“I’ll meet your boy,” Sarah says. And leaves, before the pain in her throat breaks free. Daud is only a dozen doors away, sharing his room with an old man who is having his hips rebuilt. The flowers that Sarah and the old man’s children have brought do not entirely mask the smell of chemical disinfectant. In an upper corner the video is showing the same graceless comedy that was playing in the waiting room. The old man is watching intently and does not acknowledge Sarah’s presence.

“Hello, Daud,” she says.

LEDs pulse green in Daud’s corner, machines make ticking noises as they perform their obscure tasks. A vid screen shows a succession of jagged parabolas. He is breathing on his own these days, and his heart beats for itself. Over Daud’s head gleams a mobile of stainless steel, the bars and weights that he is supposed to use to exercise his new arm. The chemicals he was taking to alter his hair color have been discontinued, and his hair, where it has grown in after being shaved, is brown; there is a bald spot on one side of his head, pink with new skin. A gauze patch is taped over the eye socket that will soon be filled with a Kikuyu implant. From beneath the patch a wire trails to the computer on the headboard, keeping the optic nerve alive. The sheet is tented over the stumps of his legs, and from beneath it come the tubes that are keeping the tissue and bone alive in its coating of gel.

Sarah bends over the bed to kiss him. She pulls a pack of cigarettes out from her pocket, lights one for him, and puts it in his mouth. His remaining eye is alert as it follows her movements: he has developed a remarkable tolerance to the doses of endorphin they have been giving him.

Daud swallows. There is a plastic button on his throat where the tracheostomy went in, where the machine had fed him air for weeks. His voice is ragged, forced up the damaged trachea, made harsher by the cigarette smoke. “Where’s Jackstraw?” he asks. “He told me he’d come.”

“I haven’t seen him.” She doesn’t want to tell Daud that Jackstraw will probably not come again, will have long ago found another boy to take Daud’s place. For weeks Jackstraw has been just a voice on the phone that answers Daud’s calls without enthusiasm, that cuts him off with talk of business, sudden guests, clients’ demands. Anyone less isolated than Daud, anyone less desperate, would have long since got the message. When Jackstraw judges Daud can earn money for him, he will visit.

“We can start building you legs now, in the next few days,” Sarah says. “One after the other, as soon as you’re strong enough. I just got a job.” She tries to smile. “Would you like the right first, or the left?”

He shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter.”

“I’ll be gone a few days. From Saturday.”

“On the job.” He reaches up with his pink new arm and flicks ash from his cigarette.

“Yes.” Sarah can sense a fever behind Daud’s eyes, some desperate intensity building. He reaches up with his good hand to one of the handgrips of the weight machine, clasping it, then batting it away in frustration. When he speaks, he keeps his teeth clenched on his cigarette, biting on each word.

“Jackstraw said he would try to get me some hormone maskers,” Daud says. “Can you bring me some? Maybe tomorrow, before you leave?”

She looks at him in surprise at how desperate he is, how far from reality. She moves forward to sit on the edge of his bed, reaching for his hand. He snatches it away. “Will you bring me some?” he cries.

She tries to speak calmly at the ache in her throat. “Daud,” she says, “you can’t suppress your hormones, not when you’re trying to rebuild muscle tissue.”

“You don’t understand!” Desperate now. He is beating on the mattress with his fists, bounding from the mattress with each strike. A red warning light begins to blink from one of the machines, synching with a little mechanical peep. The old man in the next bed stirs restlessly, his comedy interrupted.

“I’m getting a beard! They shave me every morning now! I’m getting older!” He turns his head away, gasping for breath, coughing through the phlegm that coats his scarred windpipe. “They only want me young, my people,” he says. “Jackstraw will only want me if I stay young.”

“Daud.” He is coughing too hard to speak. She takes his cigarette and stubs it out, then reaches for his hand with both of hers. He lets her take it now, holding it to her breast, stroking the hairs on its back with her knuckles. The warning peep dies, the light turns green again. “You’ll be strong,” she says. “You’ll be young. You’ll do fine. You have nothing to be afraid of.” An incantation of hope, that she must repeat every day. Trusting that it will come true, or at least that Daud will come to believe it will come true.

“The ones who want cripples. I don’t want to be with them.” A breathy whisper, a last protest through the torn throat. Sarah kisses his hand, strokes the arm, says nothing. Says nothing at all, her language all mute strokes, comforting touch, until it is time to leave.

She calls a cab from the waiting room, tells it where to meet her, and goes out through one of the back doors, this one off the cafeteria. Her nerves are tingling as she steps near the loading dock where the food comes in, her eyes flickering left and right, looking for faces she hasn’t seen before. She zips up her armored jacket and turns the collar up. It looks odd: the cafeteria workers have seen this behavior before, but still don’t understand it. She ignores their stares, looks left and right, puts her weight on the metal door.

The heat almost takes the breath from her lungs. Instantly, it seems, her body is sheathed in sweat. Sarah dodges past a parked car to an alley, sees no one, moves quickly along the baking concrete. The hospital is huge and has a lot of exits: Cunningham’s people can’t cover their all. The alley stinks of trash, urine, and frangipani. She stands for a moment, waiting, her eyes searching the blank windows above for sign of movement, for the foreshortening bullet... The cab arrives within a minute: she almost flings herself into it. She feels herself safer here, though she knows it’s an illusion. Last time they used a rocket; the fragile doors of a cab aren’t going to stop their hardware if they really want to get in. She shouldn’t even unzip her jacket, but she does.

Sarah looks over her shoulder as the cab speeds away and sees hurried motion through the rising waves of heat, an old piebald Mercury colored mainly primer gray, lunging from the curb before its passenger-side door can swing shut…

Now she knows.

She is being hunted. Now, at this moment, not in some indefinite future. And Sarah’s first feeling, to her surprise, is relief. The knot of tension at the back of her neck subsides; already her muscles seem to be easing, moving more fluidly. The waiting is over; she knows the situation and will be able to act.

But maybe she’s being premature. First she should confirm things.

“Turn left here. Then right.” The driver gives her a look in the mirror, but follows instructions. The Merc follows, keeping well back now that they have their quarry in sight. Sarah digs in her pocketbook for the control and turns on her police-band scanner, feeding the sounds directly into her audio nerves now that there’s nothing else she needs to hear. Plenty of traffic, but none that sounds like it’s from the Merc. She pops through a succession of channels. Nothing.

“Go straight.” She’s pretty sure the Merc is alone, that there aren’t any backup cars. She lifts a hand to her throat, where her friend lives.
Weasel, I will call on you soon
. “Left.” The driver glances at her in his mirror again. They’re heading straight for Venice.