Striper Assassin (40 page)

Tikki swallows, struggling to think amid the din of her own hammering pulse. Do one last job for this mage? She’d have to be mad to even consider it. “Suppose I
don’t
?”

“Oh, but you will. You will, tigress. I choose my weapons with great care. You want your friend back. And I want the man responsible for the death of my beautiful Leandra.”

“And who might that be?”

“Bennari Ohashi.”

49

Without warning, the lights go out and Raman finds himself immersed in a blackness more complete than any he has ever experienced. For a moment more, he hears a howling like that of a violent storm, and then the sound fades to nothing.

It’s as if he’s suddenly gone blind and deaf. He can see nothing, hear nothing. A worrisome strangeness, but one he doubts. A powerful mage could easily cast such illusions. The question is, what does he do now? He looks to his right, where Striper was standing, but sees only blackness, blackness everywhere, in every direction. He can feel the gun in his hands, but cannot see it, even when he lifts it in front of his face.

He descends to a crouch. There is a hard, stable surface beneath his feet. To his hand, his left hand, it feels rough and gritty, like concrete. Is that part of the illusion, or a flaw in it? The latter, he suspects. Fooling his eyes and ears is one thing; also deceiving his sense of touch and his sense of his own body would be much more difficult. The more senses that must be fooled, the greater the magic required. A mage intent on merely neutralizing him would have no need to go to such lengths.

Briefly, he speaks into the darkness, if only in hopes of advising Striper of his situation, but hears no reply.

He wonders what to do next.

Striper may need his help.

50

When the elevator doors open, she’s already in motion, tossing a Winter Systems flash-pak and a MECAR SA MP-76 riot grenade into the hallway.

The flash-pak ignites at once, firing a series of blinding micro-bursts designed to disorient any animal relying on visible light, and powerful enough to overcome the reactive flash compensators of most military-style helmets. The riot grenade bangs immediately, but takes a second or two to achieve full effect. Fragmentation damage is negligible. The MECAR MP-76’s plastic shell tends to split like the skin of a fruit rather than shatter into lethal shards. The minimal explosive charge serves primarily as a propellant for the grenade’s potent fumes.

Four seconds later, Tikki steps into the corridor, wearing a combat gas mask with five-stage filtration and flash-elimination faceplate. That makes the air she breathes distasteful and reduces the light in the hallway to darkness, but she’s used to smelly air and working in low light.

The hallway is short, extending only a few meters to the left and right. Seven males in full body armor lay sprawled about with a variety of military-style weapons. They’ll be unconscious for about an hour and too sick to move for an hour or two after that.

Tikki turns toward the door at the left end of the hallway. Even as she turns, the doors snaps open, revealing a man in mirrorshades and a dark suit. The machine pistol in his hand makes his function apparent. He doesn’t collapse because the gas from the riot grenade has already cleared from the air.

Tikki fires a three-round burst with her JAMA-5 narcoject submachine gun. The man staggers back and drops to the floor. He’ll be out for about five hours. The door stays open, which is lucky. Tikki follows through with another flash-pak and riot grenade.

About three seconds later, she steps into the anteroom and foyer of the condo belonging to Bennari Ohashi. The three plainclothes guards sprawled there look unconscious. Tikki pulls off the gas mask. Beneath it, she wears a balaclava pull-over face mask, a tactical assault vest, and commando-style pants and shoes, all black.

The double doors to the rest of the condo snap open, letting in a man in a white servant’s uniform and carrying a tray laden with sandwiches. He gapes and stops, gazing wide-eyed at Tikki. She steps toward him, pointing the JAMA-5 at his chest.

“Put the tray down.”

The man turns, hesitantly, smelling of fear, and puts the tray on a small table beside the double doors. Tikki pushes the man back against the wall and points the muzzle of the JAMA-5 at his face.

“Where is Bennari Ohashi?”

The man gapes and stares at her, then stammers in frantic Japanese, “I… I don’t know…
I don’t know!”

Irritating.

She drops the muzzle of the JAMA-5 to the man’s shoulder and fires a single shot. The man slumps. She’s not going to stand here and argue. She’ll spend less time searching the condo.

She knows the layout of the place, knows all the particulars. Adama laid it out previously, when she still believed his lies, before he took Raman captive. She isn’t exactly sure how she feels about Raman, what exactly he means to her life, but she’s sure he means something, and she’s willing to kill—kill anyone necessary—if that’s what it takes to get him back.

That Adama is compelling her to do this job is infuriating, but she can live with the anger. What she can’t live with is the idea of losing what may be the chance of a lifetime.

She steps from the foyer, JAMA-5 at the ready.

* * *

Ohara wakes with a start, gripped by the realization that the ruthless demon-creature haunting his sleep is coming for him. Every night that passes without news of Striper’s death is one night closer, one night closer to him that the vicious primitive gets. If she isn’t killed
soon…

If the assassins Enoshi has hired waste any more time…

The inevitable conclusion is beyond his capacity to bear. He stumbles from the bed and into his private bathroom. He grabs a handful of pills from the bottles along the expansive marble counter, hurriedly swallowing them down. He’s always had a delicate constitution—just another indication of superior intellect. The pills help to stabilize his physical chemistry, and thus counter the deleterious effects of his horrifying dreams. A half-dozen bursts of DeeVine from his chromed pneumatic injector temper his emotive upset with a vague, wispy sense of euphoria. He sorts through the P-fix BTL chips scattered across the counter and slots
The Almighty!
into the datajack behind his right ear. The chip helps restore the unity of his thoughts, his clarity of vision, his objective perspective on the truth. Such aid is necessary in a world on the brink of social and economic collapse.

He returns to the bedroom and lies down on the bed.

Fortunately, almost everything is going according to plan. He already has one multinational securely in his unyielding grip: KFK International. More will follow. Before long, he will control the world’s economy-corporations, banks, the orbitals, everything. Everything will be his. He will face obstacles, certainly, but with his unrivaled intellectual power he will anticipate and annihilate any and all difficulties that may arise. The world will jump at his command.

Right now his only problem—more of an irritant really—is that primitive slitch Striper. He should never have allowed her to live. He should have finished her in Seattle. He would have done it, too, except that the slitch took him by surprise. With his lofty intellect and refined sensibilities, he did not expect to be challenged, much less confronted, by a savage, something risen from the bowels of the nightmares of humanity. If he has made any mistake at all, that was it, being surprised. Now, though, he knows better. That is why he had Enoshi hire killers. Fight primitives with primitives. That’s the ticket.

The fact is that he used the ignorant savage as a pawn in his mercurial rise to ultimate power. Whether every detail of his plans back in Seattle succeeded is quite irrelevant. He still used her, the slitch. He made her a servant, a slave to his will, just like he uses everybody. If he wished, he could use her in any manner he wanted. Why, if he felt so inclined, he could even arrange to have her right here on this bed, strapped down spread-eagled, a moaning abject slave to his basest physical needs…

The thought makes him smile, then laugh.

Other people failed him. That’s why the slitch survived, why she lived to pursue him out of Seattle. She was supposed to have been killed. She was hired to kill the man whom he’d set up as a thief, the thief of a very valuable datafile. Naturally, Ohara himself had the file. The phony theft was staged merely to deflect suspicion. The death of the man was necessary to keep him from revealing the truth. Striper’s own death, had she died, would simply have helped account for the disappearance of the datafile.

As it turned out, the file disappeared and Ohara got off scot-free. But for Striper’s interference, her failure to cooperate by dying, the plan went exactly as intended. That ass of a police lieutenant, Kirkland, didn’t know how close he was to the truth. Ohara did sell the data stolen from Seretech, as Kirkland said, but not to John Brandon Conway, the famous corporate intermediary. Rather, he used the data to buy into KFK. Like most multinationals, KFK is highly diversified and has at least one subsidiary for which the Seretech genetic engineering data might have been tailor-made.

Just the thought of how he reamed those imbeciles at Seretech sets him off laughing again. How much more heartily he’ll laugh once he’s dismissed KFK’s entire board of directors, including that pompous ass of a vice-chairman, Torakido Buntaro, with all his holier-than-thou jappo presumptions.

The days ahead are going to be sweet, indeed.

He lifts his head to look as the bedroom door opens and a figure in dark clothing steps through the doorway.

* * *

Tikki pauses for several moments, just staring. She feels… confused. She’s here in a condo at the Platinum Manor Estates to eliminate a man called Bennari Ohashi. She has seen Ohashi’s picture, knows that he looks Japanese. She also knows that Adama holds Ohashi responsible for the death of his
beautiful Leandra.
Yet, now, as she stands in the doorway of the condo’s luxurious red-hued master bedroom, she finds herself unable to distinguish between the image in her memory, her memory of Ohashi’s face, and the face of the man lying on the bed. And the man on the bed is definitely not Japanese. His features are unmistakably Anglo, and Tikki knows him, knows him from personal experience. He doesn’t look exactly the same as when last she saw him, but she recognizes his smell at once, and his smell leads her to discover the familiar characteristics in his features.

His name is Bernard Ohara and she’s been waiting since Seattle for the opportunity to kill him.

She only wonders how it is that she finds Ohara here.

Is this the man Adama wants dead?
Could it be anyone else?
She’s at the right address. The master bedroom reeks of Ohara’s odors, as if he’s been living here for months. This cannot be a coincidence. Can it?

She shakes her head.

Adama always said he chooses his weapons very carefully. Now she thinks she knows what he meant. What better weapon than one which willingly seeks the target? Which has personal reasons for wanting Ohara dead?

Ohara marked her for death back in Seattle. That’s all the reason she needs.

Ohara slowly sits up, wearing no more than a puzzled frown and a pair of satiny gold shorts. “Who are you?” he says. “And what are you doing in my bedroom?”

“Do you still dance?”

“Excuse me?”

Tikki slips the shoulder-slung JAMA-5 behind her back and draws the Kang from the reverse-draw holster at her left hip.

“I think you should leave,” Ohara says. “Now.”

Wrong.

Tikki points and fires. The Kang roars five times in rapid sequence. The pounding reverberations are deafening. The sheets and pillows on the bed flutter and jerk. Ohara’s eyes go wide. The acid stink of his fear suddenly floods the air. He twitches convulsively, scrambling from the bed, falling, getting up, staggering, jumping, spinning toward the door at the right of the room.

“You get out of here!” he shouts. “GO AWAY!”

Tikki puts five more rounds into the floor around Ohara’s feet, then another five into the wall around the door as Ohara stumbles through, exclamations rising into hysterical shouts. Tikki follows him down a short hall and into the next room, a study, popping the Kang’s empty magazine and ramming home a full one. Ohara moves toward the desk at the rear of the room. Tikki points and fires. Slick rounds chew up the walls, the floor, the desk, and the monitor sitting on it. Ohara’s shrill shouts become screams of terror. He staggers sideways across the room, through another door, and into another room.

Tikki follows.

Ohara leads her through a huge room like a living room. She rams a new clip into the Kang and opens fire again, smashing things all around her target, lights and lamps and expensive crystalline decorations. Why she doesn’t just put the shots into Ohara and end it she isn’t sure. She feels strangely at odds with herself. Part of her wants Ohara to know utter terror. Another part wants to blow him away, make her kill, have her revenge. Another part shouts for her to make the kill personal, make the change, assume her four-legged form and take this man as prey, shred him, then devour him. Yet another part keeps telling her, adamantly, that she’s got to kill this man to obtain Raman’s safe release.

And yet, she resists. She hates the idea of giving Adama what he wants, of giving into his will, serving his wishes. She despises the concept of serving another as her master. She would almost rather let Ohara escape than cooperate with a mage who has apparently been manipulating her with magic. She detests being used. It makes her feel like helpless prey, like a weak, insignificant little creature forced to turn and run at the first sight of anything like a hunter.