“Stop the car.”
It’d been the fucking broken window. This bastard had just walked into her back seat. She hadn’t bothered to turn on the damn alarm. Stupid, stupid, stupid all around.
The toes on her right foot kept the accelerator pressed to the floor. Her eyes stayed locked on the moreau in the back seat as the BMW’s transponder beeped warnings at her. The car was heading for a red light.
The cat in the back seat showed some teeth. Angel was beginning to read some emotion in those shadowy yellow eyes. The smell of stress was feline, but a different flavor of feline than Angel was familiar with.
“Stop the car,” he repeated. “We don’t want this to get messy.”
What the fuck was she doing? The bastard had a gun, two of them, in fact, one of them hers, and she wasn’t even looking at the road—
Hell, the road was clear the last time she looked.
“You don’t know what messy can be.” God help her, she was grinning.
The BMW’s computer went nuts with the warning beeps when she zoomed through a red light at the intersection of First Street. Horns dopplered past her and the thought crossed her mind that they were going to shoot by VanDyne in no time now.
“Damn it, stop the car! I’ll shoot if—”
There was a crunch when Angel came up on a car too fast for the collision avoidance system to compensate. She scraped by and turned her attention forward. The Bay was rushing up like a fog-shrouded abyss.
“Shoot me, then! You think I give a shit any more, you cock-sucking dweezil? Pull the goddamned trigger. I just hope your candy-ass can swim.”
They were almost on top of the bay.
This was crazy.
Angel hit the control that popped open all the locks on the car. VanDyne’s headquarters was the last building on the right, then the Main Street-California intersection, a short concrete embankment, then water.
The gun pressed into the back of her head. It trembled slightly. Angel smelled cat and gun oil.
The second she saw the VanDyne building—a refurbed Federal Reserve Bank—shoot by, she slammed on the brakes and pulled the BMW as hard to the right as she could. Half the computer’s red lights lit on the dash as the air filled with the high-pitched scream and acrid smell of fishtailing rubber.
The cat was thrown back and to the side, slamming somewhere into the passenger footwell.
The rear of the car kissed the concrete embankment—blowing a chunk of it into the bay—and she was shooting down Spear at about eighty klicks an hour. She saw movement in her rearview mirror and slammed on the brakes again. The cat was thrown forward—
Angel popped the door and ran, leaving the BMW to roll to a stop in the wrong lane.
Her thoughts were lagging about five steps behind her actions. She was still wondering if running was a good idea when she’d cleared the four lanes of Spear in two-and-a-half running steps.
She hit the curb when she heard the squeal of more tires back on Market. It was the black Chevy four-door screaming into the turn against the light.
Her foot touched the curb and one of the metered power feeds on the curb erupted into a shower of sparks. The echo of the gunshot was still dying when she cleared the sidewalk and dived over the barrier into VanDyne’s parking garage.
Cars, but no sign of manned security. The one guardbox by the gate was empty. As she glanced at it, the windows exploded, showering her with tiny cubes of polymer as she passed it. She leaped on the hood of a new Plymouth Antaeus and jumped from there, over a railing, to an upper level of the garage. Behind her she heard the Caldera crash through the barrier.
She had nowhere left to run but up. She was running so fast now that every third step she had to hit the ground with her hands to change direction.
She was cornered. What the hell was she going to do when she hit the top of the garage?
It was, at most, fifteen seconds she spent like that—running flat out, the sound of the Caldera gaining on her, her field of vision taken up by about a square meter of concrete that rushed by a dozen centimeters from her nose.
She must have run up a half-dozen levels, barely ahead of the Chevy, when she heard a noise ahead and to the right. Angel looked up in time to see a Dodge Electroline van peeling out of its parking spot. It backed and slammed itself across the traffic lane, crunching its end into an opposite retaining wall in the process.
“Shit!”
She was running too damn fast to stop, so she jumped. She got a brief view of the side of the van—Infotech Comm Repair or some such—before she slammed into the ceiling above the van. She hit with the back of her right shoulder and bounced, sending a shivering splinter of pain down that side of her body. It didn’t do much to slow her forward momentum. She hit the roof of the van, which was still rolling forward a bit after bouncing off the retaining wall.
She had enough time to realize she was in deep shit as she rolled off the other side of the van. This time she managed to lead with her feet. She ended up on all fours on the opposite side of the van as she heard the Caldera round the last turn.
On the other side of the van, she heard the side door crash open.
She was still trying to figure out if the van was an innocent bystander or another one of the fuckers out to get her when guns started going off all over the place.
Angel only had a slice of view out from under the van, but she could see the Caldera. Three people, all moreaus. They’d angled the passenger door toward the van, and some sort of canine was firing one of those nasty looking machine pistols toward her and the van.
The van was returning fire.
Boy, was it returning fire.
In response to the first short bark from the anonymous canine’s machine pistol a deafening chatter came from inside the van. It sounded like a jackhammer on steroids. Angel could follow the trace of the shot from the billows of concrete dust that blew in its wake. A cloud of gray dust tore in the direction of the black Chevy and twisted through the right front fender with the sound of shearing fiberglass.
She couldn’t hear the Chevy’s tire go, she could just see the gust of wind as it exploded. After that, sparks began grinding from the rim as the driver of the Chevy began reversing. That move probably saved the Chevy’s engine, if not its front-end alignment.
In three seconds it was over, and the only sound in the garage was the scraping echo from the rim of the Chevy as it escaped downward. The suspension on the van rocked as the occupant jumped out of the door on the other side.
Angel got up from her position on the ground, and prepared to bolt—
And Kobe Anaka rounded the front end of the van, still wearing the same damn suit and still looking like he needed a world of sleep. He was holding a smoking assault rifle.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” she said, too shocked to run.
From his look, it was a mutual question.
Chapter 16
When Anaka pulled her into the van and Angel finally saw the interior, she came to the conclusion that the Asian cop was a hardcore nut. Her reaction upon seeing the back of Anaka’s van was, “Is all this shit legal?”
Kobe Anaka’s response was, “Most of it.”
There’s a class of people who doped themselves up to the max on hardware and sat in desert bunkers waiting for the end of the world—other people just liked the toys. And Anaka had the toys.
Behind a wire-mesh fence and a digital thumbpad lock that closed in a lengthwise half of the rear of the van were guns. The weaponry Anaka was carrying must have cost a fortune. Angel only recognized about half the artillery. There was a Desert Eagle and an Uzi for the old Israeli crowd. For the Europeans there was a modified H&K Valkyrie with a barrel extension that must be a flash and noise suppressor. From the subcontinent was a fifty-cal Vindhya sniper rifle with an electronic sight the size of Angel’s head. From th
e States was a very new looking M26-11 which Angel only knew from a comm broadcast she’d seen once, something that fired so fast that it had to alternate between four different barrels to keep the damn thing from melting. The clip was bigger than Angel’s foot.
That didn’t even count the Steyr caseless fifty-cal assault rifle he had strafed the Chevy Caldera with.
Anaka pulled out of the garage, spreading a coat of burnt rubber from his parking space to the entrance. Angel had to hold on to the fence in the back to keep from being tossed into the rear of the van. She didn’t want to tumble back there because it looked like she’d trash a few grand worth of electronics that filled the right rear quarter of the van.
When they hit the street, Angel saw the remains of the Caldera—but no sign of the BMW.
What the fuck just happened?
Once they were on the street, Angel felt safe enough to move. She pulled herself into the passenger seat up front, next to Anaka. She wondered if White, or any of Anaka’s coworkers at the Police Department knew about this van. People seemed to have tagged Anaka as a little paranoid—but folks with this kind of hardware generally weren’t just receiving garbled transmissions, they were off on another frequency altogether.
Angel wondered what his psych profile looked like, and if you were still nuts when people were really after you.
They turned on to Market, shot past City Hall and Police Headquarters, took a turn, and soon the van started weaving up and down the chrome-new hills of Japantown in a sort of half-assed western course toward Golden Gate Park.
Through all this, Anaka was silent. Finally Angel said, “Are we far enough away from the action, or do we have to start swimming first?”
Anaka looked at her as if he suddenly realized he had a passenger. He didn’t look good. He was even more disheveled, and it looked like he had gone without a shower for days. “Don’t push me, Angel—my whole operation just got blown, and I have no idea if I got made or not.”
“What the fuck? What operation? Who’re you working for?”
“Me.” The way Anaka glared at her made her nervous. If this guy was out on his own, running his own rulebook, he was dangerous. Another rule that had served her well on the street: Never antagonize crazy people.
Lone psycho guns down rabbit in Golden Gate Park—she did not like the sound of that.
She tried to sound calmer, soothing, “What operation?” Good, now let’s just hope he doesn’t think I sound condescending.
“Surveillance on VanDyne. What else?”
Foolish me, it was so effing obvious. “Just you?”
Anaka smiled, and for a brief instant he looked normal—or as normal as Angel supposed he ever looked. “You’d be surprised what one man can do with the right equipment.”
The buildings melted away and suddenly the van was in the park. Anaka began paying very close attention to the traffic. He also mumbled to himself in subvocalizations he probably didn’t realize Angel could hear. “Street clear, no sign of an aerial transponder, no EM from the van—”
He sighed and sounded relieved. “Okay, we’re clean, and it doesn’t look like we’re being followed.”
Luck-ee. Angel had thought that lately she’d been overly paranoid, but Anaka raised that paranoia by an order of magnitude. What was worse, he might have been justified. Angel doubted he’d ever be jumped from his own back seat.
“You expect those moreys to still be after me?” She certainly didn’t. She figured she had the feline hit squad pegged. Violent, prone to brute force, somewhat stupid, and rather unlikely to jump anything that could outdo their firepower. They acted almost exactly like the street gangs she knew back in Cleveland.
Besides, they’d split in her BMW. If they got within range, she could really screw them over with the remote.
“I don’t even know who they were.” There was an uncomfortable note in Anaka’s voice when he said that. Loose ends were nagging Angel; they must be torture for this guy.
“Then who’d follow us?”
Anaka let the van roll to a stop in a dark section of the park. He glanced about, as if looking for witnesses, and called up an interesting-looking program on the comm that nestled between the two front seats. He called up a display on the screen that looked exactly like the logo on the sides of the van: Infotech. With a few presses on the screen, “Infotech” became “Handy Landscaping” and the background changed from red to green.
Angel caught a glimpse of activity out of the corner of her eye and looked at the side-view mirror. The paintjob on the van had changed.
“The Fed.”
Angel turned her head and realized that Anaka was responding to her question. “The— Why would the government be after you, us, this—what’d you do to the paint?”
“Dynamic liquid crystal under a transparent finish. Programmable. Useful in undercover work.”
Was that kind of stuff legal for— No, Angel thought, probably not. How long have you wanted to be a spy, Anaka? How many intelligence agencies turned you down before you settled for being a cop? When the CIA turned you down, was it the psych profile, or were you just a security risk?
“You think the Fed’s after you?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you know?”
“The Fed’s running VanDyne.”
Anaka had lost it. She’d been sideswiped by a lot of BS, but massive government conspiracies were a little—well—nuts.
“What do you mean, ‘the Fed’s running VanDyne?’”
“Just what I said.” Anaka turned his seat around and pushed past Angel into the back of the van. He squatted in front of a stack of obscure electronics and pulled out a keyboard. From the arrangement, someone running the show there had to sit on a pillow duct-taped to the floor of the van. Anaka crossed his legs and put the keyboard on his lap. “About twelve hours of good coverage on VanDyne’s HQ. That, and a few hours on the comm last night—”
“Just tell me what you mean ‘The Fed runs VanDyne.’”
“First off . . .” The screens were bolted at an angle overhead to give some room for the electronics. Anaka tapped a few keys and one of the screens lit up with a schematic map of North America. “From a ten-hour sample of their data traffic, here’s a plot of the signal density.”
The map freckled with a few dots here and there, but one part of the eastern seaboard lit up like a nuke.
“DC?”
“Langley. The signal’s encrypted, so I can’t make heads or tails of it, but VanDyne’s in nearly constant contact with the CIA, the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Pentagon. Those are the places I knew—”
“So?” Angel was hoping that this all could be dismissed as a paranoid fantasy. “They’re defense contractors.”
“That isn’t all. It’s a matter of record that last February VanDyne was bought out by The Pacific Import Company—”
“So?” Angel climbed out of her seat to get a better look at what Anaka was doing in the back of the van. She found herself squatting between the side door and the wire mesh that caged the artillery. “Companies get bought out all the time.”
“By companies half their size whose primary business—allegedly—is running arms for the CIA?”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Look behind you.”
Angel glanced at the ranks of firearms Anaka indicated. “Okay, so you know about gunrunning . . .”
“That isn’t all.” Anaka’s voice was raising, and his gestures were becoming more animated. Angel suspected that he needed someone to believe him. “It was hard to unearth with a privately owned corporation, but look at this—” Anaka tapped a little at the keyboard and names began scrolling across one of the screens.
Angel couldn’t make heads or tails of it. “What’s all this?”
“A partial
employee list, backdated to the thirties.”
“Where’d you get that? You hack their computer?”
“I wish. As far as I can tell, they only have one dedicated line into their mainframe and they watch it like a hawk. No, I got this list from the county. I ran a list through the standard federal credit search and, God help me—” Anaka’s voice actually broke. Angel could smell stress floating off the guy and thought he was pretty damn close to cracking.
“Go on,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder to calm him.
“Not a single employee had a credit record prior to 20 February, 2059.”
“Huh?”
“Not a student loan, not a mortgage, not a single car payment before the Pacific Import purchase. I ran things through the DMV. Every plate I ran came up as a car purchase after February.”
“You saying these people didn’t exist?”
“Then, the capper—” Anaka called up yet another screen and a picture appeared of a rather generic black human. Text began rolling across the picture. “Peter Washington. The picture is from DMV records. The info is from various tax and credit databases. According to all the local data he’s been a resident in Oakland since the quake. Homeowner despite the fact he’s never carried a mortgage. Earns something like a hundred grand a year without a sign of financing a college education.”
“Okay.”
Anaka slammed a few keys so hard that Angel thought they might break. “Look. I managed to run the picture through another database.” Another picture of the same guy, more text scrolling by. A lot more text scrolling by. “I got on a sat link to Interpol.”
Angel squinted at the text rolling by the guy’s face. “Jesus.”
“See? Interpol has the most comprehensive terrorist database in the world. Peter Washington is better known in his native Western Somalia as Obura Dambela, alias Abdula Kazim, alias Pierre Olan, alias . . .” Anaka sat back and caught his breath. After a few seconds he seemed to calm down. “Worked for several nationalistic causes in North Africa and around the Med. The UAS, the EEC, and the Islamic Axis want him in custody—the one thing in ten they agree on.”