Striper Assassin (17 page)

Fast is what she gets.

The Flyer kicks in and suddenly she’s a U.C.A.S. military red alert screaming into and through the Philly Regional Telecommunications Grid with all the authority of a Federated-Boeing Black Eagle pitching full-bore into an attack run. System access nodes slam open ahead of her. Subprocessing units snap to and shunt other bit-stream traffic the hell out of her way. She hits an ITT-Rand code-orange satellite uplink under the guise of a crash-priority override, and in just milliseconds she’s through the link and blasting down into the regional grid for Austin, Texas.

Every kind of alarm goes off in her wake, but now she’s an ordinary telecom utility merely going through the motions per her imbedded autoexec commands. The Rand deckers who come screaming after her ass whip right on by without giving her a second look.

That’s about as subtle as the Flyer gets.

In the real world, meat fingers play over keys. In the virtual reality of the Matrix, her angel icon dives through a node into the Austin LTG.

She streams past the octagonal MCC cluster and the Sematech pyramid, then through a node with whirling revolving doors. That puts her into Doogie’s Palace, a virtual Voodoo Chili stand in snowy black and white, with a bell on the counter and a sign in pulsing red neon that reads Press for Service.

Her master persona control program is already on-line. The gold ramjammer Angel plays her keyboard guitar. A swirling stream of alphanumerics streaks from the keyboard speaker, arcing up and spiraling down to tap the bell on the counter.

The bell blats like an air horn.

Doogie flashes into existence, or rather his icon does. There’s a burst of spectroscopic color and then suddenly there he is, looking like an oversized lap dog, a mutt or a mongrel as big as a man, and fat, with long, floppy ears and neon shades. He sits on a tall stool behind the service counter.

“What’s up, Angel?” Doogie says.

“Where’s the Bazaar?”

“Three guesses.”

Neona doesn’t hesitate. To find the Bazaar, you have to know Doogie or someone else who keeps track, and to get what you need out of Doogie you have to play his guessing game, and play it like you mean it. Ordinary meat people might think it strange. Neona knows better. “Okay,” she says. “Zurich!”

“Nope.”

“Hong Kong!”

“Nope.”

“Managua!”

“Nope.”

“Well, I give up!”

Bells, whistles, sirens, flashing, flaring lights, and even a foghorn all go off. “Rabat!” Doogie shouts.
“Ha!”

“Thanks, Doogie.”

“Sure, babe. See ya ’round the trons.”

The golden angel blasts into the regional grid, through a series of uplinks and downlinks, then down into the Rabat LTG. Neona’s meat fingers never stop moving. There’s always new code to be written, ice and deckers coming after her, and nodes coming up ahead. The Chinese Flyer is her ramjammer engine, but she’s the captain and her fingers are the helm. Think fast or die, write that code or crash. If she isn’t fast, she’s going nowhere and maybe something big and nasty’s coming up from behind.

Down at the far end of the local grid, she skates through the pulsing neon tent flaps of a node, down the curving kaleidoscope of a sculptured dataline, through another set of tent flaps, then comes abruptly to a halt in front of Hassan’s Arch.

The Arch is huge, like the front face of a castle, but with a giant keyhole archway bored right through the middle. The huge keyhole opening blazes with blue electric. A pair of enormous, shiny chrome trolls with massive war axes stand guard in front of the keyhole. An army of paranormal animals flank the trolls: aardwolves and bogies, boobrie birds, deathrattlers and devil jack diamonds, firedrakes, gila demons, greater wolverines. Hell hounds and more. The ledges above the keyhole are lined with harpies and troglodytes, black annis apes like huge orangutans with vicious fangs. Up on the battlements squats a wyvern.

How much of this is just animation? How much is real IC? Neona doesn’t know and isn’t real interested in finding out.

A radiant red window appears and then disappears right in front of her. From it comes a neon eyeball the size of a basketball, but sporting a little red beanie and a pair of mirrorshades. It zips straight into her face, zips all around her, back and forth, up and down. This much is standard stuff—access ice—a Fuchi Watcher 7K, though apparently modified. Most systems use access intrusion countermeasures as the switch to turn on serious ice if an illegal entry is detected. Here at Hassan’s Arch every entry is illegal till proven otherwise. Neona’s fingers fly. The golden angel strums her keyboard guitar. Alphanumerics stream up and around and right in through the Watcher’s shades.

The eyeball sprouts a pair of skinny arms, snaps its fingers in time with her bitstream, does a little dance, then zips away, vanishing through another window.

“Welcome to Hassan’s Gate,” the wyvern says.

The golden angel laughs, laughs loudly, and exclaims, “Bismillah! Balek! Balek!”

That means something like, “Goddammit, get out of the way!” in some Arab language, or so Neona understands. Whatever it means, it’s a virtual code. The last part of the entry code sequence.

The blazing blue electric filling the keyhole archway vanishes. A dozen different massive doors, gates, grills, and iris-openings slam open in rapid sequence, thundering.

The trolls step aside.

The golden angel janders through.

Beyond the arch comes the Bazaar, a labyrinth of booths and stalls, wandering alleys populated by clowns and acrobats, fire-eaters and jugglers, fortunetellers and a never-ending variety of merchants. You can find almost anything you want here, from classic master persona control programs to killer utilities to secret data on the latest techno-wizardry being cooked up by Fuchi I.G. Call it a private LTG.

What Neona wants is a dusty chrome snake charmer in a flashing green and red striped turban, and she finds him standing in front of a pulsing green and red tent with his dusty chrome cobra. Swirling alphanumerics emerge from the charmer’s flute. The golden angel plays a few chords of her own. The charmer raises a hand in a wave. Neona skates in through the tent entrance.

Down the rugged stone steps of a sculptured dataline.

And into the face of a node like a pair of massive metal bank vault doors. Before the doors stands a skinny little man in a white robe. He holds a big white book. He’s called the Usher and he bows as Neona approaches.

“Usher,” she says, “I need to see Book.”

“The Book is very busy, Angel.”

“Usher, it’s important.”

“Your membership is expired, Angel.”

The angel lifts her iconic hands and shows the Usher the treasure she holds, a pile of shimmering gold coins winking with the logo “Two thousand nuyen.” Somewhere a million kilometers away to her backside her meat fingers are racing over the keys, snatching the nuyen from her account, bringing it up.

The Usher smiles and extends a broad, flat plate. Neona opens her hands. The coins sluice down into the depression of the plate and vanish. The Usher nods.

“You can go right in, Angel.”

The doors slam open.

She skates through, into the claustrophobic alleys of the Exchange. Orange and red datastores like books rise on row after row of shelves till they blur into infinity. Neona skates down the aisles till she spies the familiar icon of what is supposed to be a chubby old man with wispy hair, eyeglasses, and a rumpled suit. A chubby old man, except that he is pure, gleaming chrome and his glasses and suit are electric blue.

“Book!”

Book turns toward her, peering at her over the rims of his glasses. The golden angel skates right up.

“I need some data.”

“What do you have to exchange?”

That’s why they call it that, the Exchange. The membership fee gets you in, but you have to tell something to learn something. It can be a high price to pay. This time, the price of her future is the best and only real secret from her past.

She tells about the run back in Miami, the fixer who set up her and her chums, who got her friends killed and forced her to flee. One day, she’d like to get back at that fragger, but right now she’s got to concentrate on making herself a new life.

When she finishes. Book smiles faintly and nods. “Interesting data. What would you like to know?”

“I need to find somebody called Striper.”

Book stares at her for a moment, then says, “You’ll have to give me more of a handle than that. I’m not a miracle worker, you know.”

Neona smiles to herself. Book may not be a miracle worker, but he can sort through mega-reams of data like nobody she’s ever met. Nobody and no program.

“Striper’s a runner. Heavy-duty. You know. A real wetworker.”

“A professional killer.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Is she chipped?”

“I don’t know.” The data file from Hammer wasn’t clear about that. “She’s supposed to be strong, and really tough. There’s a report that she got shot up by the cops one time, then just up and ran off. Maybe she uses magic. I don’t know.”

“Where’s she from?”

For some reason, she had expected Book to just reach out, pull a datastore book from some shelf, and tell her everything she needed to know. Because that was the way it worked in the past. She decides to speed things up and sends her fingers flying across the keyboard of her virtual guitar. The bitstream of data spirals into Book’s book. That’s everything she knows, all the data from the chip Hammer made her examine: digitized photos, coded police and news reports, and so on, including a lot of what might be only rumor. It’s enough to sketch out an image, but that’s all. If Neona’s going to find Striper, she’ll need a lot more data, hard data.

“Seattle,” Book says after a couple of moments. “I think we’ll start with Seattle references.” Book leads her around the stacks of virtual datastores. Around and around and around. It’s a while before he pauses and says, “There’s a good chance, say seventy-six percent, that this woman you’re looking for once traveled from Macao to Seattle under the name of Mari Tan, and also from Hong Kong to Manila, Taiwan to Macao, Shanghai to Osaka… Hong Kong to Taiwan… and Osaka to San Francisco.”

“So that’s like… all over southeast Asia.”

“China, Japan, the South Pacific, and the west coast of North America.”

Wow.

“There’s also an even better chance, say eighty-three percent, that this same woman traveled from Seattle to Los Angeles and Seattle to Chicago under the name of Fallon Sontag.”

“How do you figure?”

“Data from the Seattle Bureau of Customs and Passport Control. The probabilities I quoted primarily reflect the degree of correspondence between the digitized images you gave me and those registered with the data base. I could tell you the algorithm I used in making the comparison, but let’s just say it’s better than any the government uses and leave it at that.”

“What else you got?”

“Well, let’s see.” Book looks into his book, adjusts his glasses. “Mari Tan is listed as Han Chinese, twenty-three years of age, black hair, brown eyes, one point seven meters tall, fifty-six point five kilograms in weight, a citizen of China and resident of Hong Kong, and a dealer in antiques. Fallon Sontag is listed as twenty-five, brown hair, hazel eyes, one point seven meters tall, weighing fifty-nine kilograms, a citizen of Seattle and a freelance media snoop.”

“Sounds like two different people.”

“I imagine that’s the idea.”

Neona doesn’t doubt it. The idea of a bogus ID is, after all, to let a person go around like someone other than who she really is. The trick, Neona guesses, would be to paint a picture close enough to fool the Customs inspectors, but different enough to really frag up a computer-based search for comparisons. A minor difference in vital statistics might do it. The kind of search some hokey government office might run probably wouldn’t use digitized images because it would eat up too much memory and too much processing time.

And, come to think of it, Neona wouldn’t be surprised if Striper the person corresponded to neither of her supposed physical descriptions, that of Mari Tan or Fallon Sontag. More likely, the real Striper was somewhere in between.

“Which identity’s more recent?”

“Didn’t I say that?”

“You said Sontag’s twenty-five—”

“And Tan is, or was, twenty-three. The Sontag ID is more recent.”

“Do you think both IDs are bogus?”

“From you, Angel, I’ll take that as a legitimate question, rather than a sassy remark. Yes, I think they’re both bogus. Did you ever hear of a killer having a real ID?”

“Not lately.”

“Well, there you are.” Book checks a few more datastores. “The Mari Tan identity originates in China, in Beijing, so you can forget about getting more on that ID. Not even the Chinese know how to penetrate the bureaucratic morass of their government data bases. As for the Fallon Sontag identity, there are some possibilities. Have a look at this code.”

Book hands her a book, a pulsing red virtual datastore. The pages swirl with alphanumeric characters, but they’re sweet sweet music to the golden angel. She recognizes the style of the code at once. “This is Kidd Karney’s One-Oh-One-Oh!”