Who Hunts the Hunter (13 page)

19

“The pigeon has been aced.”

“Any police involvement?”

“Not as yet.”

That’s good to hear. O’Keefe returns the handset to the heavily armored payfone, then pauses to light a Platinum Select. The first drag is smooth and flavorful, hinting of cloves, and adds substance to his sense that everything is going as it should. An interesting perception, he reflects, considering where he now stands. A quick glance around assures him that Hartford may be the only place in the world more disreputable than Newark.

Everywhere, traffic rumbles, from the elevated lanes of the interstate, barely a block away, as well as from the street immediately before him. Trucks and buses rumble; motorcycles whine and blare. Everyone is on the move and none of them are stopping here. He can understand that. The street is lined with garbage, some of it burning. The buildings rising five and six stories into the dirty sienna glow of the morning look like burned-out derelicts, well beyond salvaging. At one end of the block, synthleather-clad orks are beating on someone whose shrill screams briefly rise above the rapid thudding of fists and clubs. At the street’s other end, a Lone Star special tactics team lines gangers up against a wall, and, when one steps out of place, opens fire with autoweapons.

O’Keefe turns and heads into an alley cluttered with garbage and junk. Devil rats peer at him from dark corners. A pair of troll-sized legs protrudes from under the rusted remains of a stripped-down refrigerator. O’Keefe slides one hand through the pocket of his black duster to the butt of the Luger SPv3 holstered at his hip. The weight of the parabellum is as reassuring as the Kelmar Tech utility vest covering his chest. When real trouble comes, and it is already on the way, he will be ready.

Three blocks further on is the Kuritomo Motel. It’s the kind of streeter hole where joyboys and girls jack their clients, then leave them to die. O’Keefe is not worried about the pair of biffs he left waiting here. They can handle most common sorts of trouble. That is why he uses them.

O’Keefe crosses the narrow strip of parking lot to his rented Leyland-Rover van, grabs his duffel, and goes to find room 12 and his “partners.”

The room is a moderately squalid rectangle of stained wallcoverings, scratched and mismatched plastic furnishings, and worn carpeting. There are two narrow beds and one chair. In the chair sits Shaver, cleaning her Ingram 20t SMG. On one of the beds sits Whistle, watching her wrist-watch. Beside her, in a large gray case made of a macroplast composite, lies about seventy kilograms of bait, now slumped, prone, unmoving.

“You fed it first?” O’Keefe asks.

Whistle nods, then whistles to confirm it. Keeping the bait well-fed is essential to delivering it intact. Testing the effectiveness of tranquilizers on it is essential to events soon to come.

“I don’t like sharing space with Weres,” Shaver grumbles.

“You’ll adjust,” O’Keefe replies.

Shaver is a former Sister Sinister. She knows many deceitful little tricks that turn a female’s natural deficiencies into edges as deadly as any gun, and she is deadly with guns. She conceives of herself as enticingly voluptuous and dresses in tight-fitting black synthleather, though now stripped down to underwear, revealing her many tattoos and scars. Whistle always dresses in white. She’s young for a mage and has only a limited repertoire of spells, but she comes from the streets and has a temperament as solid as granite. No sniveling suburban slitches, either one of them, though they do complain. They are a team unto themselves. For the moment, they make advantageous allies.

Whistle the White and Shaver the Black.

Curious ... a curious pair.

But, O’Keefe understands Shaver’s sentiment. Having a

Were, even a young one in the room only recalls the risks they face, and hunting creatures like Weres is about as risky as it gets. They’re unpredictable, some little more than animals with the power to assume a human form. They’re difficult to snare because they recover so quickly from almost any sort of injury. O’Keefe’s tried fifty different brands of tranquilizers, with dosages strong enough to bring down a behemoth, yet the best results tranqs ever yield is a fleeting stillness, perhaps as little as a minute or so of unconsciousness. Repeat exposures sometimes yield no effect whatsoever, as if the body, once exposed, immediately develops a natural tolerance.

And snaring them is just part of the problem. Holding them can be even more difficult. Ordinary chains and manacles are not always effective. Nor are cages and cells. The beasts can be slippery. For one thing, they’re not limited by metahumanal preconceptions about how the world should work, and therefore how it “must” work. They’re quick to make use of an opportunity a metahuman might not notice. The classic story of the beast that gnaws through its own leg to escape a trap is just the beginning, as far as Weres are concerned.

“You better have this zoned out frozen,” Shaver says.

“Things seem to be evolving properly.”

“So says another one of your contacts?”

O’Keefe nods."Quite.”

The small red and black figure in the dark gray cage lifts its head, growling hoarsely, and begins slapping angrily at the bars of the cage. Whistle whistles soft and long, as if favorably impressed."Hey, Tang,” she says, looking to O’Keefe."Forty-five seconds this time.”

Unfortunate. O’Keefe had been hoping that this latest mixture of barbiturates and opiates might provide a longer-lasting effect. He’ll have to try something else. If worse comes to worse, he knows of a gas that can be used, though only under controlled conditions.

“Good going,” Whistle says."With tranqs like this, taking Striper’ll be a glide.”

O’Keefe shakes his head. From what he’s learned of Striper he knows better than to joke."You’ll remember my instructions,” he says pointedly, “and you’ll follow them to the last decimal.”

Whistle whistles.

“You said you’d have a tranq that would work,” Shaver growls.

“Focus on your own concerns, and leave my problems to me.”

“Sure, Tang. Whatever.”

“Good.” O’Keefe turns to check his bed. The coming days will be trying. If his plans unfold properly, the payoff will make his efforts worthwhile, but in the meantime he needs some rest.

Nights spent on the road are long and tiring, and sharing space with two biffs, even a pair like this, soon gets rather old.

20

Amy slips the lead into the jack behind her right ear, and spends a moment hanging in the nothingness of interface wash, then finds herself sitting in the virtual node of her palmtop.

The node looks more or less like a regular office, complete with pictures and plants, except that everything’s yellow or gold. Amy rolls her iconic hiback armchair in against the back of her virtual desk and the touch-sensitive keyboard of the desktop comes glowing to life. To her left and right are racks of microcassettes containing various programs. On the walls facing her are three large display screens. The screens themselves are a pastel shade of canary yellow. Data displayed on the screens comes up a bright, distinctive shade of gold.

Amy glances down at herself, then grunts with wry disbelief. She’s spent odd moments playing with different master persona control programs, changing her persona icon in an attempt to make herself more comfortable with the virtual world of the Matrix. Today, her iconic self, one of the less likely ones she’s tried, takes the form of the Voluptuous Swede. She’s got long blonde hair down to there, a swimsuit smaller than heck, and a golden-tan body with dimensions way out of proportion to anything approaching reality.

Her breasts are the size of ... of ...

Well, forget it.

The Sniffer program has unearthed something like 400 megapulses of data with enmeshed references to the 148 items Mr. Audit-Kurushima Jussai is questioning. Marvelous. Amy slots a scanner subroutine into her desktop and starts wading through the data, armed with a trio of language interpreters and a wordchecker boasting several thousand synonyms and buzzwords with any relationship to terms like used, consumed, expended, and so on. Unfortunately, most of the datafiles are proprietary research text files that can only be analyzed, and analyzed with some hope of accuracy, by the primitive art known as reading.

Thumbnail definitions pop up on the left-most display screen for words with more than six syllables or ten letters, or anything particularly obscure.

Hours pass like instants. Noon has come and gone by the time Amy’s found definite indications that a mere twelve items have been consumed. It’s almost five p.m. before she’s reconciled the consumption records for a total of sixty-two items. At midnight, she’s gone through every last record the Sniffer prog unearthed and she’s still got twenty-seven items worth almost eight million nuyen unaccounted for.

It’s impossible.

She jacks out.

Not impossible ... nothing’s impossible. She tells herself that, popping a cap for her headache, sitting for five minutes with her eyes closed and the throbbing behind her eyes slowly subsiding. She’ll just have to extend her search. The Metascience Group’s databases are organized into clusters. Everything, both research and administrative records, revolves around specific group sections and research tracks. Obviously, the Sniffer prog missed some dark, dusty corners in the datastores where the missing twenty-seven items are mentioned.

Again, Amy jacks into her virtual office. She compares the list of datastore directories the Sniffer prog checked against a swiftly compiled list of all the directories on the network, and—ah-hah!—several small ones were indeed bypassed.

One of them isn’t regular.

Datastore directories are named to identify the specific group section and research track of the data they contain. One directory isn’t named like that. It’s called, “Special.”

What the frag is that?

Special?

Some administrative aide’s idea of a joke, most likely. Someone’s been using the network for playing electronic games again, or for viewing
Live!
Action!
Porno!
or God knows what else. Still, she should check it out, leave no byte unturned. Amy taps her desktop to bring up the Special directory and suddenly her virtual office disappears. She finds herself standing, not sitting, all but surrounded by utter blackness, and facing a massively constructed oval-shaped door. The door is orange. Standing before it, facing her, is a blazing red man, tall as an elf, but equipped with enormous wings. Above him, in bold red caps, sizzles the word, SPECIAL.

Great. A glitch in her palmtop? No. You idiot. She realizes she hit the wrong key. She’s autoexeced herself right into the electron fantasy of the network, apparently right to the address of the directory she wanted to examine. Usually, she leaves this kind of thing to the people who really know what they’re doing, the gurus in Systems Engineering. Tonight, though ...

Oh, what the hell.

“You. Open up,” she tells the Winged Man, wondering if that will work. That is what you do on the inside, right? Talk like it’s real? She’s done this before, enough to be practiced at it, but it always seems so foolish.

“Identify,” the Winged Man replies.

“Amy H. Berman, Resource VP, Priority Five.”

“Your SecCode.”

“Four-eight-two-nine-nine-one.”

“Executing.”

The Winged Man turns and flies away, right through the big orange door, which immediately clanks like a bank vault clanks, and swings open, revealing the broad panorama just beyond ...

Amy steps onto a sun-drenched beach, like something from a Carib League travel promo: golden sun overhead, powder-blue sky, near-transparent water stretching away to an infinite horizon, virgin white sand extending off to her left and right as far as the eye can see. She feels something wobbling and shaking and looks down and realizes it’s her big bouncy-breasts—not hers, the Voluptuous Swede’s.

To her rear, a sun-bronzed, muscle-bound giant with an enormous bulge in a too-brief g-string is pointing a camera at her and snapping pictures. Naturally, she must turn, lift her hair up atop her head and smile, posing.

This is what she gets for fiddling with persona programs.

Enough.

Two steps away lies another sun-bronzed-muscled monster with another giant bulge, sunning himself on the sand.

Amy steps over and pulls off his mirrorshades. There’s a viewscreen where his eyes ought to be. A text file starts scrolling by even as she first looks. Nothing interesting there. She moves on to the next one, the next in the series of tanned, muscled superstuds lying there in the stand, and the next one and the one after that. The datafiles she’s looking at seem no more significant than secretarial notes. She’s onto her fortieth hunk when something stops her cold. When suddenly, she’s looking at nuyen.

Or maybe ...

No, the file has the format of an accounting spreadsheet. Rows and columns, titles and dates and amounts. She’s seen enough spreadsheets to recognize one, even if all the entries in the file are scrambled, encoded in some way so that she can’t read it. Which is ridiculous. One of the reasons the Metascience Group’s computer network was originally isolated from the greater world of the global matrix was to negate any need for special codes and other security measures, all of which consume network resources and impair network performance.