House of the Sun (16 page)

Yet apparently that's just what Scott did. Where was the profit motive in his actions? It's pretty hard to enjoy the fruits of your labors when a kilo of C12 in your abdominal cavity has splattered your body hither and yon. Was I missing something here? Was there more to Scott's actions than the obvious?

Or—now
here
was a nasty little thought—had bruddah Scott even
known
he was packing a belly-bomb or that it would be detonated when it was? Maybe he hadn't
known
he was on a suicide mission. Maybe he'd really expected that he'd be fighting his way out .. . possibly with me in tow.

Yes, now
that
made a nasty kind of sense. I could easily imagine some Yamatetsu covert op monitoring events—maybe through some kind of bug on Scott's person—waiting for the right moment to press the little red button on the transmitter beside him. Bang goes Scott, taking with him all evidence that could be used to trace the responsible party. (Part of that evidence, of course, was one Dirk Montgomery ...)
That
could be why Scotty let me go: because he expected that we'd both be getting out of there in one piece. The only reason I was alive to think this through now was that the covert op was asleep at the switch, a few seconds slow on the button.

Oh joy. Now that made things
really
tight, didn't it? If my line of reasoning was anywhere near correct, I was a walking, breathing piece of evidence that could connect the
oyabun'
s assassination directly with Jacques Barnard. So now, not only did I have yakuza payback teams to worry about, I also had my theoretical Yamatetsu covert ops looking to tie up the loose ends in their operation. Oh, and just for good measure, toss in the Hawai'i National Police Force as well. Presumably murder is against the law in the Kingdom, and they might have some interest in the matter. Suddenly, I was very popular, wasn't I?

So what the frag was I supposed to do now? I pulled the C-N Buddy over to the side of the road, and I stared out over the Pacific as despair rolled over me like a dark and cold wave. Where the frag was I supposed to go?

I was hooped—well and truly hooped.

Options—let's work through them one at a time. I could go back to the Diamond Head Hotel—
null!
Suicide, basically. Yamatetsu would be waiting for me there, as would the yaks if they had any brains at all. My only hope of surviving the experience would be if the yaks and the corps were too busy geeking each other to geek me. Not an attractive bet.

I could hightail it for Awalani Airport and grab a suborbital the frag
out
of here. Hell, I still had my open corp ticket, didn't I? Sure, I could jump aboard a plane and leave all my grief behind me—
null!
I knew from experience just how much security surrounded those birds. There was no fragging way in hell that Barnard, or the yaks either, for that matter, wouldn't know I was hopping a plane out. At Awalani, in the middle of the flight, or at whichever airport I chose as my destination, there'd be that gentle tap on the shoulder that's more shocking than a punch in the teeth. I'd be dragged away, and then there'd be the bullet in the back of the head. Or who knows, maybe I'd be turned to stone and get to join the statues I saw in the background during Barnard's telecom call.

The more I thought about it, the more hooped I was. I hadn't really paid attention when Scotty had told me why there were so few wannabes in the Hawai'i shadows—no running room if things go for drek. Now I was learning from personal experience that he was right, and I didn't like the feeling at all.

What options did I have? Was there any other way off the islands? Not that I knew about, on the spur of the moment. Was there anywhere I could hole up until this all blew over? Not that I knew about, on the spur of the moment. Was there anyone who had contacts and resources that could help me out? Not that I knew about, on the spur ...

Wait a tick. Maybe there
was
one. It was a long shot, but when things get desperate "risk amelioration" isn't much of an option.

"Kia
ora!"
I practiced as I pulled the Buddy back onto the road, trying to get just the right tone of bellicosity into my voice.
"Kia
ora!"

9

But before I paid my respects to bruddah Te Purewa—ne Mark Harrop—at Cheeseburger in Paradise, there were a couple of other things I needed to take care of. Like, hooking up with any and all resources that might prove useful even if they weren't in the islands.

That morning, when I'd gotten ready to cruise out to the meet in Scott's limo, I'd debated whether or not to bother bringing my pocket 'puter. Hell, I'd reasoned if I needed communications or data retrieval or whatever, the rig in the back of the Rolls would put my personal 'puter to shame. Out of habit, though—and a sense of cussedness, perhaps—I'd brought the scratched little unit along in my pocket.

Thank the Spirits for habit and cussedness. At a little village called Kaaawa, I pulled over and used a public phone booth outside a ramshackle grocery/ice-cream/tourist-foo-foo store. First order of biz—after polarizing the transpex so no one could see in—was to disable the vid pickup, which I did in the most efficient way by smacking it a good one with the butt of the Browning I'd inherited. Second was to haul out my trusty 'puter, jack it into the phone's data port, and trigger the sophisticated—and hideously illegal—smoke and mirrors program that my old chummer Quincy (how long since I'd seen that slag?) had once blown into the little unit's EPROM chips. Phone and 'puter clicked and hummed for a few seconds while Quincy's code seduced the LTG system. Finally, with a beep that was the electronic equivalent of, "Take me, stud, but be gentle," the phone succumbed to the 'puter's entreaties and I had the run of a very small corner of the PA/HI RTG.

First things first. Convincing the innocent, trusting phone system that I was an authorized Hawai'i Telecommunications Corporation senior manager, I set myself up a private and secured mailbox in HTC's automated datamail system. (This was only a temporary setup, unfortunately; I didn't have the time or the resources to make it permanent. At some time, a month or two down the road, some watchdog program would start barking when it noticed that nobody was paying for the datamail box even though it was still active. HTC would immediately close it down, but by that point it shouldn't matter to me. In a month or two, I'd either be dead or off the islands.) This datamail box was the electronic equivalent of a "blind maildrop" in espionage fieldcraft. People could leave messages for me there, and I could retrieve them at my leisure, but there was no way, theoretically, that any interested party, like Jacques Barnard, could track down my actual location even if he compromised the mailbox.

Step two: Get in touch with the people that I wanted to leave me messages. The first of those was simple. One of the ever-wiz little utilities on my Quincy-modified 'puter let me send off a text-only message through a series of cold relays to a certain telecom in deepest, darkest Renton. The message contained no names, nothing that could compromise either sender or recipient. The header addressed the message to the president of Demolition Man Building Services Inc. The body text of the message was the digital address of my new datamail box cyclically encoded (again thanks be to Quincy, forever and ever amen). The way I figured it, only one man still alive would recognize the reference and know who was trying to reach him. When he got back into the sprawl, Argent would pick up the message and hopefully contact me through my blind drop.

The second person was harder, but again Quincy's codebashing helped me out.

Within minutes I'd whipped up a simplistic little gofer of a smartframe and fired it off through the Matrix to the Cheyenne LTG. Once there, the gofer would search for any references to one Sharon Young and deliver her a message.

The content of that message was more problematic than the one to Argent. Young and I didn't have much in the way of background; we certainly didn't have any codes in common as I did with Argent. My message had to meet two criteria. First, it had to identify me without using names. Second, it had to communicate my blind-drop address in code. And third, it had to contain the key to that code in such a way that only Sharon Young would recognize it as such and be able to decrypt the address.

It had taken a fair bit of skull-sweat, but I'd finally come up with something that
should
serve. "Exposure has become direct," the message began, echoing the conversation between Young and me at The Buffalo Jump. "Discussion necessary on extraordinary disbursements. Confirming terms of payment: deadline forty-eight hours, twenty percent on twelve, ten on eighteen." And beneath that was the encrypted bit-string that was my blind-drop address.

Subtle.
Too
subtle? The terms of payment I'd quoted in the note were totally out to fragging lunch with regard to what we'd actually agreed, and I hoped Young would notice that and recognize the significance. Take the numbers I'd quoted: 48, 20, 12, 10, 18. That was the key to decrypt the address, of course: 48201-21018. Smart,
neh?
We'd see soon enough. I checked that everything was kosher, then used the 'puter to tell the phone system to forget everything that had happened over the last ten minutes. I unjacked my 'puter, climbed back into the cramped cockpit of the bubble-topped Buddy, and turned the little three-wheeler back toward Honolulu.

* * *

It was getting on to evening by the time I made it back to the Ewa area of Honolulu. Blame it on my being too distracted to read highway signs accurately. When you've got a megacorp
and
the yakuza gunning for you, it's easy to mistake Kapaa for Kapua and get totally fragging lost. The sun was sinking down toward the ocean, one of those spectacular views tourists pay the big cred to see, and all I could think was "Hurry the frag
up
!" I'd feel much better with the cloak of night around me, I figured.

I ditched the three-wheeler a couple of blocks from the Cheeseburger in Paradise, using every shred of tradecraft I could muster to spot anyone who was affording me an abnormal degree of interest. I didn't seem to have any shadows, but it's a tenet of the street that you'll never spot anyone who's
successfully
shadowing you, right? As I approached the door of the tavern, I saw a reflection of myself in a store window. My flowered shirt was tom down one side, my pants were stained in places with something I hoped was mud (and not residue from Tokudaiji's blasted skull), and I still had hibiscus twigs in my fragging hair. I had looked better, I had to admit. I did what damage control I could under the circumstances—damn near squat, to be honest—and then I jandered into Cheeseburger in Paradise.

The crowd looked pretty much the same as when Scott had bought me a couple of beers—the same hard-bitten locals, the same street-rats not quite watching the strip show. The same ork with the same chipped tusks was behind the bar, and he gave me a solid dose of what Scott had called "stink-eye" as I walked in. Yet again, I was the only
haole
there, and you can bet your
okole
that I felt it. I was out of my element and out of my depth, and the patrons at Cheeseburger in Paradise weren't going to let me forget it.

What I most wanted to do at that moment was to turn round and slink back out into the predusk where nobody was trying to glare holes in me. I couldn't do that, of course, so I jandered on in like I fragging owned the place. I kept thinking about the heavy Browning crammed down my waistband—not that it was an easy piece of hardware to forget—for the benefit of those patrons who liked to play "spot the heat." The booth Scott and I had taken the day before was vacant, so I slid into it, settling my back firmly and reassuringly against the wall. Now that I felt about as safe as I could under the circumstances, I looked around for friend Te Purewa.

No, he wasn't there. (Frag, of course not. The old Montgomery luck was continuing to run true to form, I thought disgustedly.) I thought I recognized one or two of the slags he'd come in with yesterday, but I could well have been mistaken. One leather-clad Hawai'ian ork with a lousy attitude looks very much like another to the untrained eye.

A waitress came up to me—not the same one as yesterday, but they could well have been sisters—with a "Well,
what?
" expression on her face.

I sighed. "Give me a dog," I told her. And I settled down
to wait.

* * *

Thank the Spirits I didn't have to wait that long, not much more than an hour and a half. I swallowed about a liter and a half of Black Dog beer and sweated out what felt like twice that much of cold, rank fear-sweat. A couple of tables full of hard-hooped locals were giving me the speculative eye. I knew they'd picked up on my heat when I'd come in, but they were getting to the point where it was even odds they'd try the
haole
just to see if he knew how to use the hardware he was packing.

When Te Purewa swaggered in at about nineteen hundred hours, I was glad enough to see him that I'd have gladly stuck out my tongue at him—or any other portion of my anatomy, for that matter—if it would make him look on me more kindly. He saw me the moment he came in the door, and his scowl raised the stink-eye quotient by a significant factor. I glanced over to the hard-eyed waitress—I'd already explained to her what I wanted her to do and slipped her a big enough tip that she might actually remember—and gave her the nod.

I couldn't hear exactly how she phrased things—probably something like, "See that wild-assed
haole
in the corner? Says he wants to buy you a drink. If you happen to drop your credstick, kick it home before you bend over to pick it up, huh?"—but it didn't really matter. Te Purewa—Mark Harrop—shot me a fulminating glance from under his night black brows, but I saw there was a new element in his glare—curiosity.