Fiddleback Trilogy 1 - A Gathering Evil

  In agonizingly precise slow motion I saw a hollow-nosed, 180-grain bullet that had been drilled and patched core through the sighting dot. Upon impact, the droplet of mercury inside the bullet shot forward, bursting free of the front of the bullet. Its microfine beads ripped through the tissue like shotgun pellets. The rest of the bullet fragmented, expanding to create an exit hole five times the size of the entry wound as it went out just above his neck.

  As the head snapped forward, it dropped from the camera frame, and the movie ended. I knew without question that what I had just seen was a memory conjured up from before I woke up in the body bag. Whatever it was that was in the incense had freed that vision when I saw Loring. I had shot and killed him, I knew it. I felt it right down to my soul. I had killed Nero Loring, yet here he sat before me.

  The man's eyes rolled down and skewered me with a feverish stare. In a voice I heard as being as mechanical as Coyote's phone voice, he spoke to me. "He told me you would come. Once the destroyer, once my salvation." He lifted his hands to me as if transferring an invisible burden. "You must find her and bring her to me. He cannot have her."

  I concentrated, frowning, to pierce the mystery of his words. "Who is he and who is she?"

  "He is Fiddleback." Loring's eyes blazed with madness. "She is Nerys. Into your hands I commend the spirit of my daughter. If you cannot save her, we all will die!"

  The real world came crashing back as Loring collapsed in the middle of his sand painting. I shivered all the way down my spine, then called out to George. He arrived a minute later and gingerly stepped over the lines Loring had drawn. Following his lead, I made my way to the center of the picture and lifted Loring's emaciated body. A man his size should have weighed at least 130 pounds, but he was easily below 100.

  George and I wormed the comatose man through the tunnel and with Will's help managed to get him into the car. I belted him into the shot-up passenger seat and put my rifle case in the seat behind him. Straightening up, I slammed the door shut. Turning to George I started to thank him, but he stalked away around the car with his arms held wide like a bird facing off against a snake.

  Will and I backed away, watching him carefully. He made a circuit from the radiator all the way back to the rear bumper, then dropped to the ground. As we came around that end of the car, we saw him wiggling his way back from under the vehicle. In his left hand he held a sticky cocoon covered with grayish silk. Without hesitation he set the cocoon down on a flat rock and smashed it with another stone.

  "When you came out here, you were followed."

  I glanced between the black liquid dripping down the stone and the nearly destroyed car. "Yes."

  George nodded proudly. "That was why. It was evil. I suggest you do not return the way you came because they will have forces arrayed to stop you."

  I decided not to point out that his thesis was, in fact, unprovable unless I did return by the route that had brought me to the mountain. As that had never been my intention in the first place, I had no trouble agreeing to his plan. "Thank you, for everything."

  Will frowned. "I deeply love and respect my grandfather, but you, a white man, you cannot believe all this mumbo-jumbo that he has been teaching me. The old ways and the old monsters have no power in the real world."

  In Will's words I sensed he had reached a decision point in his life. One half of him, the modern half, dreamed of living in City Center just like everyone else. That world had no room for superstitions and bogeymen. That was a world of superficiality where being seen in the right place far outweighed actually doing anything real. In many ways, though difficult to attain and maintain, it was an easy way of life because it required only a willful dedication to work mixed with an equal dedication to hedonism and social climbing.

  The other part of him, the part that had listened to stories of the old ways from the day of his birth, had seen just enough to question things. He'd doubtlessly been involved with his grandfather in ancient rituals. If Will had what El Espectro described as latent empathic abilities, his grandfather could be using ancient rituals to teach him to harness those abilities. Will knew enough to make him wonder if his grandfather might not be right and, if he was, Will knew his whole world view became one leaf on a tree instead of the whole tree itself.

  "I don't know how to answer that, Will. I've seen things that make me question what is real and what isn't." I nodded at George as I opened the driver's door. "If I had the opportunity to learn what he could teach, I would. If he is wrong, at the very least you are rescuing from extinction traditions that predate recorded history. If he is right, you will be infinitely more able to deal with the world than you would be if you remained willfully ignorant."

  I climbed into the car and started it. As I drove away I saw the two Indians walking back toward the Cave of Dreams. George offered Will half of one of my sandwiches, and the younger man draped his arm over his grandfather's shoulder.

  On another two-tire track I drove from the mountain into Fountain Hills and picked up Shea Boulevard. I took that back into Scottsdale, passing into the darkness of Frozen Shade at 120th Street. I picked up the 101L and headed south to Thomas. There I exited, having skirted the heart of Drac City, and dropped Loring with El Espectro's friends at a little house set back from the road between Hayden and Pima. At no time during the journey did he wake up, and when I left him his eyes were still fairly dilated from whatever drugs he had used.

  I drove a bit away from there, checking for unwanted tails, then stopped at a convenience store with a pay phone. I shoved a copper Columbus into the slot and called Marit. Juanita answered and got her for me quickly.

  "Hi, Tycho. What's up?"

  "Did anyone else know I was going out to the reservation?"

  "No, didn't tell anyone, just as you asked." Her voice lost its cheery tone. "What happened?"

  "Aryans picked me up soon after I left City Center. I managed to elude them, but your car got chewed up." I frowned. "Maybe they just had a lookout for your car. No one else knew?"

  "No . . . wait. When we went to Sedona yesterday, Rock took the Ariel off to have it serviced. He does that for all of us. Before I called down to get the car ready for you, I called him to find out if it was in the garage or still being fixed. I didn't tell him where you were going, but I did say you were using the car." As she spoke she realized what she was saying. "Rock may be tight with the Aryans, but he'd never set them on you."

  No, my dear, but he'd sell me out to Lorica as per Nerys' orders. "You're right. Heinrich probably has connections all over the place and was angry for what I did to that kid of his yesterday. I'll have to let everyone else know to be careful."

  "True." She hesitated for a second, then a little more life returned to her voice. "Listen, Jytte called and said she'd done the computer work you asked for. She's at the meeting place, if you want to go down there and start sorting through it."

  "Will do. I'll see you later?"

  "I'll be here, keeping the sheets warm for you." I heard the sound of a pillow being plumped in the background. "So, how badly is my car damaged?"

  "Oh, gotta go, someone here wants to use the phone. Later."

  I hung up and returned to the Ariel. I kept looking for Aryans or others as I drove down to the headquarters and ended up doing a full circuit around the area before I felt confident that I'd not been followed. I parked in the back and checked my weapons, as per usual.

  In the conference room I found Bat sitting in front of a daunting pile of reports.

  "Anything good, Bat?"

  He grunted and flipped one report toward me. I snapped it out of the air and decided, based on the title, that it was surprisingly thin. "Nerys Loring. Fascinating reading?"

  "Gossip, some transcripts, medical records. Like other corporators—all skin, no bone." Bat glanced back over his shoulder toward the parking lot. "Nice body work on the Ariel."

  I smiled. "Hope to start a fad. It'll give the gangs something to do other than shoot each oth
er. I had a lead to follow up on Nero Loring and someone thought that was a bad idea. Loring's safe and, if we're lucky, some people will be able to get something useful out of him."

  Bat nodded and went back to the report he had been reading. I sat down and started in on the report about Nerys. It took me about 10 of the 70 pages in the report to decide Bat had been correct.

  Nerys' life, as chronicled in this report, was almost straight normal for a woman in her early 40s. Born in 1968, she was the daughter of a successful engineer and inventor. She did all the normal things kids did in those days, including Brownies and Girl Scouts. Her school transcripts showed her to be a bright student with her language skills slightly outstripping her mathematical skills in testing and grades. At the age of 12 she even won an Arizona state poetry contest.

  Things changed at 14. She had been given a puppy for her birthday and named it "Buttons." As nearly as anyone could make out, she opened the gate around the pool and the puppy shot through less than a week after her birthday. Buttons jumped onto the floating pool liner which began to wrap around it as the dog sank. Nerys dove in to save the dog, became entangled in the pool liner herself and was under for at least six minutes. Her father found her and pulled her out, but she was clinically dead.

  The Rural-Metro Rescue Team managed to get her heartbeat back and start her breathing again. She was air-evacced to Phoenix Children's Hospital and ended up in a coma for three months. She had no brainwaves to speak of and she required a respirator to keep her lungs working. Her parents reluctantly agreed to turn the respirator off.

  They did, but she kept breathing. The EEG monitor showed renewing brain activity. She awakened within a day and left the hospital after a week. She continued intensive physical therapy for another six months to get her body back into shape—the doctors agreed that the brain damage she had suffered made learning how to use her body again normal. After that, she was given a clean bill of health and even worked hard to make up the half year she'd missed at Gerard High School.

  After graduation from high school, she went to Arizona State University, taking a double major of business and engineering. She joined Lorica at the bottom and started working her way up until, at the time the maglev project started, she was assisting her father in design work. After the initial design phase was completed, she shifted her attention to the business side of Lorica and started its expansion into a host of projects that diversified the company and actually helped it survive the recession in '05.

  Her time spent strengthening the business also consolidated her power within the company so, two months ago, she was able to oust her father easily. Once he was out she purged his loyalists and the data flow used to compile the report all but dried up. End of story.

  I double-checked something in the school transcripts section. Before the accident Nerys had been very literate and had above average language skills. After the accident these skills did not diminish much, but her mathematical skills shot past them by all the measures listed in the charts. SAT scores showed a hundred point gap between the two, with her math score being as close to perfect as most folks ever get.

  Jytte came into the room as I finished reading the Nerys report. "Satisfactory?"

  I nodded. "Excellent work, especially on such short notice. You saw the score shifts after the accident?"

  The woman nodded woodenly. "I did some checking of contemporary medical literature regarding personality and intelligence shifts after brain trauma caused by oxygen deprivation. What happened in her case is atypical and manages to push well beyond the mean improvements in those few cases where the accident appears to have proved beneficial as opposed to neutral or detrimental, which it is in the vast majority of cases. I would also note that her case is the only case in which such a beneficial result was noted in a case where brain trauma was not secondary to cold water-induced hypothermia."

  "Wow, I'm impressed."

  Jytte handed me another piece of paper. "This is a ballistics report from Scorpion about the gun that killed Buc in the graveyard. They think it was a Steyr SSG-PIV Marksman .308. Bolt action, five- or 10-round cartridge clips, it comes fitted with mounts for NATO-type scopes. It is a very good gun, but inferior to the PVI model."

  "I know. Thanks." She started to turn away but I stopped her. "Back to Nerys for a second. Have we got any writing samples from before the accident to compare with what she's written since then?"

  She shook her head. "I made the attempt to obtain samples, but I have found nothing. I am in the process of trying to get current addresses for all her schoolmates, but Gerard closed in 1988, so obtaining that data is difficult. Once I have it, I will communicate with them to find out if they have anything."

  "Good luck."

  Jytte regarded me curiously for a second, then turned away. Coldly efficient, it would have been easy to think of her as no more than a mobile extension of the computers with which she worked. I knew that was not true. She was a person who had been grossly traumatized physically, emotionally and mentally by a monster. Her amnesia about the whole incident was a blessing for her, but cutting herself off from her past meant she defined herself through her computer work and her altered body.

  Reflecting on her situation, I wondered if I truly wanted to find out who I had been. Apparently I had gladly murdered people for money. Having met Hal, and having seen his concern for a stranger like me, let me know that people were much more than just walking targets. I fervently believed some of them, like Heinrich and Leich, deserved killing, but not for money and not because they managed to offend some bureaucrat's sense of decorum.

  I realized I could not be content with not knowing who I had been. Certainly the skills I had learned in my previous life had served me well here. They made it possible for me to recover my identity. To find out who and what I truly was I just had to continue the tricky job of navigating between megacorporations in this world and whatever other things might be arrayed against me outside it.

  The best way to do that, I figured, was to start in on the reports Bat had been reading. I took half the pile from him and started going through them. Most were short pieces that detailed areas of competition between the corporations in the southside of Phoenix and Build-more. It appeared, from what I read, Build-more was trying to expand and diversify, much as Lorica had done under Nerys in the last four years. The expansion had Build-more in competition with all the companies in the southside, so we ended up cataloging points of conflict to see who won the race.

  Alejandro arrived late in the afternoon and avoided death by not laughing when he saw us up to our ears in paper. "Tycho, I wanted to show you the color sketch of the painting Estefan delivered to me today."

  He handed me a small piece of bristolboard roughly 6x8 inches. Estefan had produced in miniature a three-quarters view of Phoenix, as if the viewer were in a helicopter heading in toward City Center. In the picture a giant brown recluse sat perched amid a huge web that covered the maglev line and connected all the towers. The spider itself had a dark tunnel near the Lorica Citadel and Estefan had even included the web-bound body of an insect dangling from one of the towers.

  "I love it."

  Alejandro nodded proudly. "He says it will be three feet by four feet, and he expects to have it finished in a couple of days. I'll call when it comes in, and you can come down and see it." He chuckled lightly and tapped the color sketch. "I've shown this to a couple of people already and one made a photocopy of it to fax around. It should be all over by this point."

  "Great! When you call, I'll get the money and come right down there."

  "Good." Alejandro took back the sketch and headed for the door. "Oh, by the way, if Marit wants to get rid of her car, I'll buy it. I've got a client into retro-Guevarista-realist pieces."

  Alejandro's offer mollified Marit a bit when I told her about the car. She seemed less upset about its destruction than she was about my almost having gotten killed. This I appreciated very much, and was very appreciative in return
. We spent the next two nights out seeing shows and dining at Avanti City Center and Vincent's in the Macayo Tower.

  The days I spent in the conference room going through lots of reports. Marit helped out when she could and between the three of us, we actually caught up with the flood of material Jytte managed to coax from the computer network tying the city together. At the end of it all, we came to two conclusions.

  The first thing we agreed upon was that the Build-more sponsorship of the Aryans was not directed at any one of the other corporations—it was aimed at all of them. The Build-more strategy appeared to be designed to cause trouble to see what the other corporations would sacrifice to beef up security. If any of their subsidiaries became neglected, Build-more would stage an executive raid, or would offer to buy that corporation and fit it into their empire.