House of the Sun (20 page)

About four hours in a receiver in the team's commo suite chirruped. Beta hurried over and slipped a hushphone headset on. I could see her lips move as she subvocalized, but I couldn't hear squat of either incoming or outgoing communication. After a minute or two she set the headset down and came over to Kat. Beta glanced in my direction before she spoke, but I'd already made sure I was staring blankly into space, quite obviously paying no attention to the proceedings. I quieted my breathing, trying to hear everything I could and momentarily wished for cyberears and enhanced peripheral vision.

"It's him," I head Beta say.

"Neheka?"

Beta shook her head. "The big worm," she corrected. (Or that's what I
thought
she said, at least. It could just as well have been "the bookworm" or "the big word," or even "the bakeware," really ...) Whatever it was Beta had said, it was enough to break Kat away from her datawork and send her hurrying over to the hushphone. That piece of hardware did its usual fine job of work, and I couldn't make out a single syllable of the conversation, which lasted more than five minutes.

When Kat was done and had terminated the circuit, I watched her expression and body language out the corner of my eye as she walked back to the briefing table and the networked 'puters. Nothing meaningful; maybe Hawai'ians have their own
body
language as well.

It was something like two hours after the conversation with "the bakeware" that Poki let out a creditable rebel yell. I was on my feet in an instant and hurrying over to him. Kat got there before me, though—chipped? I wondered—and it was to her that the elf decker announced, "Got it."

"Yeah?"

Poki smiled nastily at my skepticism and told me, "Hey, slot, seventy-bit's old news. Where you been anyway?"

I shook my head, isn't there
anything
that doesn't change
so fragging fast you can't keep up? The elf had sliced a corporate code in less than a fragging
quarter
of the time I'd expected. Whatever is the world coming to, etcetera etcetera drekcetera. I held out my hand for the chip, but the decker just pointed to a high-res data display.

I shot a meaningful look at Kat, and she picked up on it right away. "Got a couple of ticks to check my 'puter's memory, Poki?" she asked. "Think I might have picked up a virus."

The decker looked absolutely scandalized for a moment, and he opened his mouth to bag about it. But then he saw the hard edge in Kat's eyes, swallowed his kvetching, and nodded. (I'd already scanned that Kat had the juice in this outfit, but it was nice to get a little confirmation.)

"Yah, okay," he said, though his voice told me and everyone else that it definitely was
not
okay. He stood up, unjacked, and followed Kat to the briefing table ... but not before giving me a solid dose of stink-eye. I shot him my best "Hey, I'm just a harmless idiot who
probably
won't reformat all your storage" smile, and sat down in the chair he'd just vacated.

It took me a few moments to make sense of the 'puter's user interface. (Sure, modern systems are supposed to follow the same paradigm, but just because you can drive a Volkswagen Elektro doesn't mean you're immediately competent behind the wheel of a 480-kilometer-an-hour Formula Unlimited racing machine, right?) When I thought I had everything under control, the first thing I did was scope out how many copies of the chip's contents Poki had in memory or in long-term storage. As far as I could tell, there was only the one: a single copy of the file in volatile memory displaying on the screen. Unfortunately, the key phrase was "as far as I could tell." If a nova-hot decker wanted to hide a backup copy from an amateur code-jockey like me, he'd sure as frag be able to do it. Once I'd done what I could in the way of security, I actually read through the message on the display.

Apparently, Barnard had never learned how to write concise letters. (But then, of course, by-the-bit charges for message traffic don't mean much to a corporate suit.) The message from Jacques Barnard to the late Ekei Tokudaiji filled three screens. I read it over twice, word for word, then scanned again for overall content.

For all the meaningful content I pulled out of the text, Barnard could as well have kept it down to two or three lines. If I'd been asked to give a high-school-style precis of the letter, it would have come out something like, "Keep on doing whatever it is you've been doing with regard to the subject under discussion, and be aware that some other, unidentified people might take steps to stop you from doing so. Have a nice day."

Sigh. I should have expected it, I suppose. There are more ways to conceal meaning than by using 70-bit public-key encryption. Veiled language, cryptic references that mean something to no one but the two principals, "closed" allusions to things like "our communication of 12/18/55" and "the matter that so concerns our mutual friend" .. .

In addition to my simple precis, I
could
conclude one thing from the message with a fair bit of certainty. Namely: Tokudaiji and Barnard weren't strangers, and their interests had definitely aligned several times in the past. That's all I knew for sure after reading the message.

I could make a couple of guesses, of course. First, considering what Te Purewa—"Marky" to these folks—had told me, it seemed reasonably logical that "whatever it is you've been doing" was calming the populace down when
Na
Kama'aina
and ALOHA tried to stir them up. And second .. .

Second ... I couldn't be at all sure about this, but I couldn't shake the feeling, gut-deep and so very disturbing, that this
wasn't
a fake message whipped up just to set the mind of a soon-to-be-dead courier/Trojan horse at ease. If someone had asked me to bet on the instigator of Tokudaiji's death, not so long ago I'd have put a whack of cred on one Jacques Barnard. Now? No bet, chummer. Sure, I've been known to be wrong, but deep down where instinct sends you messages, I just didn't buy it anymore.

So, what the flying frag was going on?

I checked that the chip I'd given Poki was still in the 'puter's chipslot, then downloaded a copy of the plaintext message to it. Once I was sure it was safely ensconced on the optical chip, I deleted the copy from memory. Then I removed the chip using the same carrier and slipped it into my pocket.

Kat and Poki were watching me as I walked back to the briefing table. "Thanks," I said with a nod at the decker.

Then I focused my attention on Kat. "I need to go back to
my doss in Chinatown." I'd misstated the location of my flop, of course, and I watched her eyes closely for any reaction.

There was none—none beyond a frown of disapproval, that is. "Your safe-house is insecure," she pointed out. "The yaks might have compromised it." She gestured around at the ops room. "Just hang here,
hoa,
you're covered here. You scan? If you need to catch some sleep . . ."

I shook my head. "There's gear there I need," I lied sincerely. "If I don't get it, I'm dead. Not now, but pretty fragging soon."

She glanced over at Moko, still sprawled in his hammock. "I can send—"

"No good," I cut in. "It's secured. Unless I cut off my thumb and give it to Moko ..." I shrugged and let the thought hang.

Kat considered it. The fact that my implication I was using a thumbprint security system of some kind didn't even faze her told me something more about this group's resources. "Moko can come with you," she suggested after a moment.

I shook my head. "That's just asking for trouble, isn't it?" I pointed out. "It's not as if Moko isn't a memorable type, after all." She half smiled at that and I knew I'd won. "I'll be back in touch the minute I've got my gear," I told her, to soften the victory. "Give me a cold relay so I can contact you."

After a moment she nodded once, and recited a string of digits. I committed them to memory. "Get his bike ready," she told Zack. Then she turned back to me. "Hope you know what you're doing, bruddah."

"So do I," I told her fervently, and that was the only truthful thing I'd said in the past few minutes.

* * *

I had to ride around in circles through the depths of Ewa for almost ten minutes before I spotted a landmark I recognized. From there it only took me another five to make it back to my doss.

I was cautious going in, of course. I didn't think it particularly likely that the yak soldiers had a line on my flop, but you don't bet your life blindly on vaporous things like "likelihoods." There were no unusual-looking people in the stairwells or the hallways, and when I reached the door to my room all the telltales I'd left were still securely in place. Confident for the first time that I
was
doing the right thing, I went in and locked the door behind me.

Then the confidence vaporized. I knew what I had to do—what I
thought
I had to do, rather—but that didn't make it any easier. I'd lived this long trusting my gut, but one of these days that well-tuned organ was going to let me down, violently and terminally. I sat down in front of the telecom, slipped my Manhunter from my waistband, and set it on the table beside the keyboard. Then I just stared at the screen for a couple of minutes.

Did I have the jam to do it? Did I have the jam
not
to do it? Frag, I
hate
these questions. Finally, I accepted that, a) I really didn't have that much choice; and b) if I played it right, it wasn't going to increase the danger I was in—already maximal—by any meaningful degree. I sighed, and then I keyed in the LTG number I'd taken off my voice-mail back in Cheyenne, what seemed so long ago.

I fidgeted and fretted as the telecom clicked its way through the intermediary nodes of the cold relay. Finally, the Ringing symbol blinked on the screen. Belatedly, I ran through the math to figure out the time in Kyoto, Japan. Nigh on midnight unless I'd slipped a time-zone somewhere. Would Mr. Jacques Barnard still be in the office? I doubted it. If not, would he have the call redirected, or would I get that most hateful of voices, the one that says, "Please leave your message after the beep?"

The Ringing symbol cleared, but the screen stayed blank. Then I heard the electronic click of yet another relay. After a few more seconds the screen cleared, and I was staring into the face of Jacques Barnard.

He was at home, I figured. Behind him, slightly out of focus, was a nighttime cityscape, viewed from a decent height—like from the penthouse of a downtown skyraker. for example. He was awake and alert, but he looked mentally cooked. When I'd first called him from Cheyenne, he looked to have aged a good decade in four years. Now he'd added another five years to that figure. He leaned back, brushing an invisible speck of dust from the sleeve of his maroon velvet smoking jacket—a fragging
smoking
jacket
—and he gave me a smile that reminded me of sharks and barracudas.

"Mr. Montgomery," he said. "I'm so glad you saw fit to contact me. Can you please do me a large favor and tell me just what the
frag
is
going
on
?"

I mentally flinched at the ferocity of his words. I'd never seen Barnard lose his temper, and I'd never expected to see it. I wished I'd been able to forgo the pleasure. "Tokudaiji's dead," I told him.

"I do understand that," he said coldly. "I would like to assume that you were not responsible—"

"You got
that
right," I said fervently. Then I went on to give him a capsule description of what had gone down. He didn't interrupt or ask any questions, but I could see his brain spinning at 1,000 rpm behind his eyes. "I thought Scott was one of yours," I finished at last.

"A reasonable assumption," he acknowledged slowly, "since it was the same one I had made." He paused. "What is the . . . the tenor of the islands, concerning this matter?"

"I don't know directly," I told him, "but I can guess how things are going to shake out. You were using Tokudaiji to counter ALOHA's 'corps out' rhetoric, weren't you? When word gets around that a corp hitter whacked him"—I raised my hand to forestall the inevitable objection—"I know you're saying Scott didn't do the dirty deed on Yamatetsu's behalf, but who's going to believe that?"

"Even
you
have some difficulty believing it," he put in incisively.

I didn't have to acknowledge it; he could see it in my eyes, no doubt. "Anyway," I went on doggedly, "ALOHA's going to be able to play this one for all it's worth. 'Corps cack defender of the common people,' and all that bulldrek. They'll have the people behind them, and they'll be able to give you some serious grief."

"They would be
exceptionally
foolish to try," Barnard said flatly. "There are individuals in the corporate sphere with less . ..
restraint
... than I. And many of them have close connections with Zurich-Orbital and the Corporate Court." He paused. "Still, I have to agree with your analysis."

"Well, that makes me feel just so warm and fuzzy inside," I said sarcastically. "Get me the frag out of here, Barnard,
Now
. Hawai'i's getting a little too hot for me, if you'll pardon the wordplay."

Barnard smiled, but there was no real amusement in the expression. "Impossible at the moment, I'm afraid," he said flatly. "Perhaps in a week or two ..."

"I'll be dead in a
day
or two."

"Not if you use those skills that so impressed me during our first acquaintance," he pointed out. Normally I like an ego-stroke as much as the next slag, but this one grated on me. I kept my reactions under control, though. "There is a further small matter on which I would value your assistance," he went on.