The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller (16 page)

Under the right conditions, prions are capable of forming spontaneously, and given the right sequence of ingestion, they can silently march up the food chain. Which is exactly what they did. Only this time, the chain was pork.

There was no practical way to determine which pigs carried the bad chemical seed. So in the case of the neo-pigs, the organ recipient risked contracting a disease that caused physical debilitation and madness, followed by death. This was not a chance that Zed was willing to take. The pigs were shipped off, slaughtered, and their meat sold in the more desperate pockets of the third world, where the populace was willing to face a gamble with disease as opposed to the sure thing of starvation.

Zed pulls his wheelchair back from the bathroom counter and pushes himself into the
master bedroom, the only bedroom. He has exhausted all the known biological options.

Very soon, it will be time to try something else.

***

The streetcar halts at the Pearly Gates. The doors hiss open and the security people trudge in and start scanning the lobe of every passenger, Lane and Rachel included. The gate marks the entrance to the Pearl District, a Class 9 security area, which stretches for another dozen blocks down Tenth Avenue. The residents here value civility, cherish safety, and aspire to keep the high life at cruising altitude come what may. Thus the gate lives up to its moniker, and functions as a portal into a heaven of sorts.

The doors slide shut and the streetcar moves on. Lane and Rachel have this particular car to themselves in mid-afternoon. Given their suspicions about Green, Johnny, and Mount Tabor, it seems best for them to confine their meetings to public places. “I’ve got about as far as I’m going to get from the outside,” Lane tells Rachel. “The next step is going to be a little on the spendy side.”

“What step?”

“You’ve heard of Pinecrest?”

“Of course I have. It’s probably the most exclusive gate between here and San Francisco. Mostly biotech and pharmaceutical people. We haven’t made it a political target because it’s too far out of town. They use an air hop to commute.”

“Well, then so will I.”

“How so?”

“Turns out that most of the upper echelon of the Institute for the Study of Genetic Disorders dwells out there, including the CEO. I’ll need to get inside and start to pal around. It’s the only way we’re going find out how the Institute is related to Mount Tabor. If I play it straight and go to the Institute as a cop and Johnny’s brother, I’d trigger all kinds of alarms. I need to take the long way around.”

“And just how might you do that?” Rachel asks.

“I need a new identity, which can be easily arranged. But that takes money. Then I buy a house in there and make some new friends.”

“Which also takes money,” Rachel observes.

“Yes, it will. And that’s precisely why it’ll work.”

“Let me see what I can do,” Rachel says. “The Street Party has certain contingency funds that are off the books.”

“I’m shocked,” Lane quips.

“As well you should be.”

Through her window on the streetcar, Rachel watches Lane exit up front and start down Eighteenth Avenue into the afternoon shadows. He walks at a brisk pace, and exhibits an acute awareness of his surroundings, something that he probably picked up through years on the street. She likes the way he moves. It has a power and purpose to it that you don’t often see. She’s sure that the women in Pinecrest will be drawn to him, and for a brief instant, she envies them. The force of it launches her into an unbidden fantasy: She’s there with him behind the gate. They bid goodbye to the ugly world outside and settle into a very comfortable life full of quiet, beautiful moments.

The streetcar starts up and yanks her back to reality. She’s left feeling a little guilty about her indulgence. Her whole ideological thrust is toward a society where the gates are gone, and quiet, beautiful moments are accessible to everyone. She looks back down Eighteenth as it slides from view, but he’s already dropped from sight. She breathes deeply. Politics isn’t the central issue here. It’s Lane.

She reels her heart in and gets out her laptop. There’s much to be done.

***

After a quick scan for Bad Boys, Lane hops off a trolley in the Middle East and walks a half block down a side street into the deepening shadows of twilight. In the scrawny trees, the birds sing their last sad song, and scruffy children dart in and out between the rusted vehicles. Fall pushes hard against the oncoming night and wood smoke drifts on the breeze.

In spite of the poverty, the desperation, the violence, the pain, the place carries a heavy charge that repolarizes him in some primitive, ineffable way. He knows what those behind the gates can never know, that predictability is a slow, comfortable poison that eventually smothers you to death.

He ducks off the street where a set of cement stairs descend to the basement floor of an old walk-up apartment building. At the bottom of the stairs, a metal-lined door painted a dull shade of rust awaits him, with a minicam mounted above the old spotlight. He stands before the camera and waves silently.

“I think I see the Man,” comes a voice from a hidden speaker. “But I could be fooled now, couldn’t I?”

“Yes, you could,” Lane answers the coded query. “But not by me.”

With a hydraulic hiss, the door swings open and Lane steps into an anteroom with a security scanner. Passing through, he enters the apartment proper. To his left is a neatly maintained kitchen, where a middle-aged woman of mixed race is wiping off the countertop. To the right is a large, open room with a mass of electronics and machinery mounted along both walls. The maze of indicator lights and small displays is broken only by a large Ultrares video screen where an ancient sci-fi movie called
The Magnetic Monster
plays on in silence.

“I hear you’re a cop without a contract.”

The voice comes from Warhead, who occupies a heavily motorized wheelchair now rotating to face Lane. The rotation reveals a quadruple amputee, a stump of humanity with long hair parted in the middle and a dark brown bristle of beard. His mouth is obscured by a framework that holds a hashish pipe, but his eyes are bright and hard.

“You heard right,” Lane admits. “No more contract. So what else do you hear?”

Warhead ignores the question. On the roof of this building a small dish points up to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, and a big fiber cable snakes down here into the basement. Some say Warhead owns the satellite outright. Word on the street is that he’s punched through to the Outernet, although Warhead emphatically denies this.

“You wanna puff?” Warhead offers.

“Don’t smoke much anymore.”

“Suit yourself.” Warhead mutters something in what sounds like an exotic foreign language and the wheelchair moves to a mechanical stall at the far end of the electronics racks. When the chair stops, mechanic grippers poke out, take the pipe, empty it, and refill it with ground hashish from a chrome hopper. A spring-mounted rubber ball comes down, tamps the load, and then the pipe is passed to Warhead’s waiting lips as flame is applied from a butane orifice and he puffs away.

“Good stuff,” he declares as he exhales twin blue clouds through his nose. “Wanna know how I got trimmed to my current dimensions?”

“Sure. Who wouldn’t?”

“Air crash. Dump of plane. An old 737 with its guts ripped out for dope. I was ridin’ shotgun and we lost it comin’ in at night. Plane like that has a high airspeed when you’re landing. Couple of hundred miles an hour. Last thing I knew we were sailing past the last runway light, and the airspeed still said one twenty-five. Landing lights picked up the trees and that was it. Woke up in a hospital in Bogotá with everything clipped clean off.”

Warhead gives Lane a mischievous grin. “But not my pecker. Still got my pecker.”

Lane smiles. He’s heard Warhead tell dozens of different stories about how he parted ways with his limbs. One time, he was the victim of a hideous radiation accident in a covert nuclear lab outside Kabul. Another time, he was tortured by the agents of some tin-pot African
dictator. In still another, he was the hapless recipient of a genetic misfire, and fell from the maternal bomb bay as a wingless missile plunging earthward at a ruinous velocity. In any case, the story always ended with the retention of his pecker, phallic redemption to offset his physical calamities.

“After that, they wanted me in porno,” Warhead informs Lane. “Really bad.”

“So why didn’t you go for it?”

“I thought about it, that’s for sure. I had the wood. But most important, I had the focus.”

“The focus?”

“Yeah, your normal male performer has five appendages, if you count his dick. Me, I got only one. Terrific focus. And all kinds of new camera angles.”

“You would’ve been good, but it’s a tough business,” Lane says. “You’re probably better off doing what you’re doing.”

“And speaking of that, what can I do for you?”

“I need an ID package.”

“Cash up front. And not Bird shit.”

“Absolutely. But it’s got to be the very best.”

“Costs more.”

“Not an issue. It has to survive a Class Ten stress test.”

Warhead breaks into a broad grin. “Hey, hey. Now we’re talkin’. So if it’s for around here, it’s gotta be for Pinecrest. Right?”

Lane shrugs. “Can’t say.”

Warhead shrugs back. “Then I never asked.”

The scent of fresh leather. The relaxed feel of soft cotton. The welcome quiet. The careful presentation of subtle colors.

Even after several days of affluence, Lane still continually wallows in the experience as he leaves the highway and heads west toward the main gate into Pinecrest. The legion of microprocessors inside his car constantly strives toward perfect motion, while the big engine yearns to explode into runaway acceleration. He has his window down, and the wind flutters the fabric of his open shirt and silk sports coat. As he guides the wheel, his big Rolex watch catches the afternoon sun with an arrogant sparkle. He idly fingers the lobe on his ear, mounted in a platinum setting adorned with microcarving. Somehow, the lobe feels fat, swollen with prosperity, just like Rachel Heinz said it would back in Portland.

Allen Durbin, that’s who he is. The lobe chronicles his pseudo-life in great detail. The schooling in Europe, the construction projects in Asia, the electronics consortium in India, the three ex-wives. And now, at last, he has achieved the rarified status of investor: one who simply tends his fiscal fields and watches the seedlings of cash poke through the soil and head toward the sky.

All of which makes him a perfect candidate for Pinecrest. When he met with the compound’s representative on the phone, she politely requested a Class 10 lobe scan to extract the basics and he courteously agreed, holding the phone’s scanner up to his ear. An hour later, she was back in touch, and quite enthusiastic about the possibilities of having Mr. Durbin take up residence. There were several homes available that might suit his needs.

The gate into Pinecrest is a massive structure of reinforced concrete with a cosmetic stucco glaze and a tunnel in the middle where the street passes through. On its roof are crenellations, slots for small weapons that give it a medieval cast.

When Lane arrives at the gate and stops, the security people smile politely and ask how they can help. His car tells them most of what they need to know. After naming the representative he is meeting, he is scanned and his appointment checked. Once inside, the road curves several times through a parklike setting. He enters a village with small buildings set tastefully into the luxuriant vegetation. Above the village, rolling green hills of oak, pine, and fir rise to a soft curtain of fog that hangs limply over their crests, all topped by a clear, blue sky. By
design, no houses or roads are visible.

After parking the car, Lane climbs out into the clean air swept in off the Coast Range. He walks a short distance to the realty office, where he meets the representative, a perky young woman named Nicole Harris, who apparently has never had a bad day in her life.

“Mr. Durbin,” she says to Lane as she puts her fingers over the back of his hand, “I’m so pleased to meet you. Is this your first visit to the Portland area?”

“No. But before, it’s always been on business.”

“Well, this time, I hope we can get you to stay a little longer,” she says with just the right hint of humor and the thinnest glaze of sexual innuendo. “Now, before we go out and look at houses, let me spend a few minutes on the community itself.”

“Of course,” Lane responds as they cross the office to a conference room with a wall-mounted plasma display that she activates with a laser pointer. On the screen, a three-dimensional model of Pinecrest rotates against a black background. As she emphasizes certain facts, the view zooms in, all with no loss of detail. Sixteen square miles of secured living, with an average of .75 acres per house. All medical, professional, and food services available on-site. An eighteen-hole golf course, a scenic pond, bike paths, and jogging trails. The security perimeter includes a buffer zone replete with enhanced dogs, electronic sensors, and twenty-four-hour surveillance. The normal complement of security personnel includes eighty people, fifty on duty and thirty in reserve at an on-site barracks. Plus there’s a secondary reserve of more than two hundred at a central barracks in West Linn. With the exception of the gate, all security measures are cosmetically concealed from the casual viewer, and are carefully designed to harmonize with the community’s environmental integrity.

When they leave the office, Lane follows Nicole’s car up a winding two-lane road into the foothills. Occasionally, they pass a small address number on a cement post, and a gated driveway that disappears into the trees.

A mile later, they pull into one such driveway and, after several twists, arrive at a large, two-story house with a turnaround in front. Although new, the house reflects a popular style from the 1930s, an eclectic marriage of art deco and art moderne. Many of its smooth cement corners and edges have been softened into graceful curves. The railing on the upper deck uses fat metal tubing, and one surface near the entrance gleams with a matrix of blocked glass. On each side of the front door, two fluted columns are inset in the cement and topped by sunrise patterns.