The general thumbed the cable out of his neck. "I never thought much of those foreign cars." He watched as Wells popped loose his own cable. "Oh, for Christ's sake, I'm joking, you pissant. I know about Greek mythology. So, when are you going to launch your little monster? Going to break a bottle of champagne over the wallscreen?"
Wells looked a little put out. "I launched it already. Even as we speak, it's making its way through the system, learning, changing, going about its business. Never has to be fed, never needs a day off. The perfect employee."
Yacoubian nodded and stood. "I'm in favor. Speaking of perfect employees, when you're done with your man Tanabe, let me know. I'm either going to hire him or kill him."
"Doubt you'll get the chance for either, Daniel. TMX has even less turnover than the military. Our benefits package is very fine."
"Well, I can dream. Which way out of here?"
"I'll show you."
As they walked down a deeply carpeted hallway, the general turned and gently took the founder of Telemorphix by the arm. "Bob, we never really went into the lab at all, did we? Not the super-clean part where security matters. I mean, I didn't have to be searched just to go into that conference room, did I?"
Wells took a moment to answer. "You're right, Daniel. I did it just to piss you off."
Yacoubian nodded, but did not look at Wells. His voice was very, very steady. "Thought so. One to you, Bob."
He had never much liked flying. He did it with some frequency, and was aware that even with the modern age's traffic-choked skies, it was perhaps the safest way to travel. But this did not soothe the more primitive part of his spirit, the part that did not trust any experience he could not control with his own hands and mind.
That was the thing of it: he had no control. If lightning struck the Skywalker on takeoff or descent—storms of any kind were not a problem at the plane's cruising altitude of 105,000 feet—there was really nothing he could do about it. He could kill as many people as he wanted, disrupt the electronic equipment with the strange twist he had inherited from one of his long-dead parents, but that still would not bend an out-of-control suborbital Chinese-made passenger jet to his will.
Dread was gnawing at this sour thought and others like it because the descent into Cartagena was rough. The big plane had been bucking and slaloming for the last quarter of an hour. A tropical storm, the Qantas captain had informed them with studied Ocker nonchalance, was kicking up a bit of a fuss in the whole Caribbean basin, and the ride down would be a bit bumpy. Still, he reminded them, they should all be sure to look at the lights of Bogotá, which would be sliding past on the left side of the plane any moment now.
As the captain finished his sightseeing suggestions and winked off the seat screen, the plane heaved again, a thrash like a wounded animal. Nervous laughter rose above the hum of the engines. Dread lowered himself farther into his seat and clasped the armrests. He had turned off his inner music, since playing his soundtrack would only emphasize that he was helpless, that for the moment he wasn't writing the script for his own netflick at all. In fact, there was really nothing he could do to make himself feel any better. He would just have to hang on and hope for the best. It was like working for that old bastard, really.
Another roller-coaster swoop. Dread clenched his jaw, tasting bile at the back of his throat. To add insult to injury, the Old Man, the would-be-god, who was undoubtedly rich beyond Dread's comprehension, still made his employee fly commercial.
"Está usted enfermo, señor?" someone asked. He opened his eyes. A pretty young woman with a round face and golden hair was leaning over him, her face expressing professional but still genuine concern. Her name tag read Gloriana. Something about her was strangely familiar, but it wasn't her name. It wasn't the unpleasantly spartan jumpsuit she wore either, a fashion for cabin assistants that he hoped would pass quickly.
"I'm fine," he said. "Just not a very good flyer."
"Oh." She was a bit surprised. "You're an Aussie, too!"
"Born and bred." With his unusual genetic heritage, he was frequently taken for Latin American or Central Asian. He smiled at her, still trying to figure out why her appearance plucked at his memory. The plane shuddered again. "God, I hate this," he said, laughing. "I'm never happy until I've landed."
"We'll be down in just a few minutes." She smiled and patted his hand. "Never fear."
The way she said it, and the reemergence of the smile, suddenly popped the memory loose. She looked like the young kindergarten teacher at his first school, one of the only people who had ever been kind to him. The realization brought with it a kind of sweet pain, an unfamiliar and somewhat disconcerting sensation.
"Thank you." He put some energy into a return smile. He knew from experience that his smiles were impressive. One of the first things the Old Man had done was send him to the best cosmetic dentist in Sydney. "It's nice of you to be concerned."
The captain announced final descent.
"It's my job, isn't it?" She made a deliberately exaggerated cheerful face and they shared a chuckle.
Customs was easy, as always. Dread knew better than to carry anything unusual, leaving even his own perfectly legal hardware at home—you could never tell when you might bump into a border agent who was a closet hobbyist and might recognize and remember serious top-of-the-line ware. That was what carefully nurtured local contacts were for, after all—to supply you the things you didn't want to bring in. As usual, Dread carried nothing more controversial than a mid-level Krittapong pad and a few suits in an insulex garment bag.
After a short cab ride, he caught the elevated train across the causeway to the Getsemani section of the old town, which looked back across the bay from behind the Murallas, the centuries-old military walls the Spanish had built to protect their port city. He checked into his hotel under the name "Deeds," unfolded his garment bag and hung it in the closet, set his pad on the polished desk, then went back downstairs to run some errands. He returned to the hotel in less than an hour, put away what he had acquired, then went out again.
It was a warm night. Dread walked down the cobbled streets, unnoticed by either tourists or locals. The smell of the Caribbean and heavy feel of the tropical air were not that different from home, although the humidity was more like Brisbane than Sydney. Still, he thought, it was strange to come so far and have only the aftereffects of an eight-hour flight to prove you were somewhere different.
He picked a public phone at random and gave it the number he'd memorized. When the call was answered—voice only, no picture—he reeled off another number and was immediately given an address, then the other party hung up.
The hovercab dropped him off in front of the club and grunted away, skirts fluttering over the uneven surface. A crowd of young people in scarlet moddy bands and imitation body armor, the Colombian version of Goggleboys and Gogglegirls, stood in front waiting to be admitted. He had only been in line for a few moments when a street urchin tugged at his sleeve. Many of the visible areas of the child's skin had been burned red-raw by the use of scavenged skin patches. The boy turned and walked off down the street, limping slightly. Dread waited a few moments before following him.
They were in the darkened stairwell of an old building near the waterfront when the urchin vanished, slipping away through some unseen exit so quickly and expertly that the man he had been guiding did not immediately notice his absence. Dread, who had been alert since entering the building for the slight but worrisome possibility of an ambush, was impressed by the child's skill: the sisters chose their minions well, even at the lowest level.
At the top of the stairs a half-dozen old wooden doors ran down each side of the hallway, standing guard over a solitary and rather unfortunate-looking rubber plant. Dread walked noiselessly along the hall scanning each door in turn until he found one with a handpad. He touched it and the door opened, revealing itself to be both thicker than its appearance suggested and hung on strong hinges in a fibramic box frame.
T
he room spanned the length of the entire floor—the other doors were false, at least on this side of the hallway. The exterior windows, however, had been left in place: from the doorway, Dread had six separate views of the seaport and the choppy Caribbean. Except for these Monet-like ocean vistas, the room's white walls, black marble table, and Yixing tea service were an almost perfect copy of his simulated office. Dread smiled at the sisters' little joke.
A light was blinking on the only object of modem furniture in the room, a huge sleek desk. He sat down, quickly found the retracting panel that contained the connection hardware, and plugged himself in.
The room stayed in place, but the Beinha sisters abruptly appeared on the far side of the table, side by side, their sims as featureless as two parcels wrapped in brown paper. For a brief moment Dread was startled, until he realized that he was in a simulation which duplicated the room even more exactly than the room mirrored his own online office.
"Very nice," he said. "Thank you for preparing this welcome."
"Some people find their environment crucial to their ability to work," said one of the Beinhas, her tone implying that neither she nor her sister were such people. "Our program is ambitious. You will need to be at your best."
"We await the second third of our payment," said the other lumpy shape.
"You received the coded list?"
Both sisters nodded in synchrony.
"Then I'll download one of the two keys now." He felt around on the unfamiliar desk for the touchscreen, then opened the account the Old Man had created and dispatched the sisters one of the pair of encryption keys necessary to access the list. "You'll get the other when the operation launches, as we agreed."
When the Beinhas—or their expert system—had examined the goods, they nodded again, this time indicating satisfaction. "We have much work to do," one of them said.
"I've got time now, although I have something I really must do before too late tonight. Tomorrow I'm all yours."
There was a moment of silence from the twin shapes, as though they were considering this as a literal possibility.
"To begin with," said one, "the target has changed security companies since we last briefed you. The new company has come in and altered several aspects of the compound's defenses, not all of which we have discovered. We know little about the new company, whereas we had several informants at the previous firm."
"Which may be why they've changed their security people." Dread called up the report. The information hung in the air before him. He began to bring up the rest of his array, charts, lists, topographical maps, blueprints. Color-coded and gleaming, they turned the virtual office into a neon fairyland. "How does this change of security affect your program?"
"It means more danger to you and the rest of the ground team, of course," said one of the sister-shapes. "And it means we will undoubtedly have to kill more people than we planned."
"Ah." He smiled. "What a shame."
Even a cursory discussion of the new twists in the operation took several hours. When he had terminated the contact and left his new office, he was feeling stretched thin by work and the flight in. He walked back along the waterfront, letting the soothing sound of the ocean wash over him. As he passed large and imposing office buildings, a small formation of camera-drones, activated by motion or his body heat, came swarming out. They overflew him once, then retreated to the shadows, scanning him all the while. Tired and irritated, he resisted the impulse to lash out at this surveillance, to damage or confuse them. It would be a waste of time, as well as foolish. They were only doing their job, monitoring someone who was close to their building after hours; the pictures would be viewed briefly in the morning by a bored guard, then the information would be erased. As long as he didn't do anything rash, that was.
Confident, cocky, lazy, dead, he reminded himself, walking on without a backward glance. The Old Man would be proud of him.
He walked into his room and undressed, then hung his suit in the closet. He examined his naked form in the mirror for a few moments, then sat on the bed and turned on the wallscreen. He brought up his own inner music, a burst of deep-sonic mono loco dance dirge, in honor of his visit to Colombia. He found something on the wallscreen with abstract but fast-changing visuals, and turned up the sound in his head until he could feel the bass pulsing in his jawbone. He watched the images flicker by for a few moments, then checked himself in the mirror again. There was something predatory in his long, muscled limbs, in the flatness of his own expression, that excited him. He'd seen that face before. He'd seen that movie. He knew what was going to happen now.
As he walked to the bathroom, he threw a few dissonant horn-blasts into the music, sharp edges of sound that suggested mounting tension. He brought the volume down as he opened the door.
Camera zooms in. . . .
Her wrists were still bound to the shower-head with tape, but she was no longer standing upright. Instead, she hung with knees bent and her weight on her extended arms in a way that he knew must be painful. When she saw him, she screamed and began to struggle again, but the tape on her mouth reduced the cry to a muted bleat.
"I followed you," he said as he sat down on the edge of the bathtub. In his head, with the music underneath it, his voice had a deep, leading-man resonance. "I followed your cab until it dropped you at your hotel. After that, it wasn't very difficult to find your room . . . Gloriana." He reached out to touch her name tag and she jerked away. He smiled, wondering if she noticed that it was the same smile he'd used on the plane. "Normally, I'd want a more extended hunt, a little more sport. I mean, that is what you're here for, isn't it—soothing the cares of the weary business traveler? But taking you out of there and bringing you up here, all in your own suitcase . . . well, I'd say that was pretty good for spur-of-the-moment, wouldn't you?"
Her eyes widened and she tried to say something, but the tape choked it off. Writhing on the shower-head, she swayed from side to side. Her blonde hair, so immaculately styled six hours ago, hung in lank, sweaty curls.
He reached out and plucked her name tag free. It was the electrostatic kind with no interesting sharp bits, so he tossed it aside. "You know," he said, "I know your name, sweetness, but you never asked mine." He stood and walked out of the bathroom, slowing the music inside him until it was something like an underwater funeral march, deep and heavy and resonant. He came back in with the hardware store bag,
"It's Dread." He opened the bag and produced a pair of pliers and a file. "Now, let's get you out of that ugly uniform."
Christabel was worried. It was taking her a long time to ride to the place Mister Sellars had said. What if Missus Gullison went to her friend's house looking for her? What if her friend's parents were home? She would be in real trouble, and it would be even worse when Daddy found out.
Thinking about how angry her father would be made her close her eyes. She accidentally rode down off the curb and almost fell when her bike thumped down onto the road and her front wheel went all wobbly. She pedaled hard until the bike was going straight again. She had promised Mister Sellars that she'd help him, so she had to do it.
The place he'd told her to go was along the outside edge of the Base, another part she'd never seen before. It was way behind the athletic field—she could see men in white shorts and shirts doing some exercises on the grass. Music and a voice she couldn't understand because it was too far away were coming from speakers on poles by the field. The place Mister Sellars had sent her had lots of trees and bushes on this side of the fence, and trees and bushes on the other side of the far fence, but none in between. The empty space between the two fences looked like when she took her eraser and rubbed it across a drawing she'd done.
Mister Sellars had told her to pick a spot where there were some trees behind her so no one would see what she was doing. After a little hunting, she found one. When she looked back, she couldn't see the field or any of the houses or other buildings, although she could still hear the music coming from the
field. She took her school bag out of her bike basket, took out the bolt cutters and put them on the ground, then took out the little scissor-things and the roll of screen. She took the scissors and went to the fence, which was made of something almost like cloth, with little boxes along the top that made a quiet cricking noise. Beyond the outer fence, far away, smoke from campfires floated up into the air. Some people lived underneath the trees outside—she saw them when she and her parents drove off the Base—and even more of them lived down in the valley near the freeway. They made their own homes, funny places built from old boxes and pieces of cloth, and her Daddy said some of them even tried to sneak into the Base by hiding in garbage trucks. She could see some of the box-people through the fence, far away and tinier than the men on the exercise field behind her, but the fence was funny to look through. Everything on the other side was a little cloudy, like when you could write your name on the inside of the car window.
She touched the scissors to the fence-cloth, then remembered that Mister Sellars had said not to cut it yet. She went back to the bike basket and got out her Storybook Sunglasses.
"CHRISTABEL," the message in them said, "IF YOU ARE AT THE FENCE, TURN YOUR SUNGLASSES OFF AND ON TWO TIMES FAST."
She thought about this for a moment to make sure she was going to do it right, then pushed the button on the side of her glasses four times, off, on, off, on. When the pictures had come back inside them again, there was a new message.