As was typical of such middle-grade establishments there was a human clerk at the front desk. It being the middle of the afternoon, no one else was around. Tourists were off sightseeing and business travelers bemoaning their miserable individual fates. Smoke coiled upward from the tip of a stimstick stuck between his lips as the clerk intently manipulated the details of a projected war game grounded in ancient local lore. In addition to the rapidly changing statistics displayed on the portable box screen, miniaturized African warriors and British soldiers of an earlier time fought in the air around him. Though muted, their shouts and battle cries were clearly audible. The preoccupied clerk was literally in the game.
Stepping forward, Molé ignored the spears, knobkerries, and bayonets that briefly inclined in his direction. A soft but demanding cough failed to draw the attention of the clerk, who continued to ignore the elderly figure now standing next to the counter. Coughing a second time as he waved away a cloud of Zulus and smoke, Molé spoke loudly enough to ensure he would be heard over the martial din of the game.
“Excuse me. I beg your pardon?”
The clerk did not so much as glance up from his gaming.
Pulling his comm unit from a pocket, Molé flicked it to life. Accompanied by their respective portraits a pair of full-length three-dimensional images took shape in the air between him and the clerk. As the figures rotated the portraits morphed to reflect, as best Molé’s intelligence sources had been able to discover, the most recent incarnations of the pair he sought. The hovering images did not interact with those projected by the game, but the large visuals did interfere.
“Please, it is important that I know: have you seen either of these two visiting Namericans?”
Making no effort to conceal his annoyance at the persistent interruption the clerk finally responded—with unconcealed reluctance and palpable disdain.
“Yebo, I seen them, old man.” As he spoke, each word was accompanied by a dip and rise of the stimstick clamped in his mouth.
A small spark stirred within the hunter. “You are certain?” The casually dismissive remark about his age he filed for reference.
The clerk looked to be in his midtwenties. Cocksure and apathetic, it was plain that he had finally responded to the presence of his elderly visitor only in hopes of getting rid of him as quickly as possible. Around the attendant the faultless images of nineteenth-century African warriors, tough-as-leather Boers, and her majesty’s dedicated soldiers drifted in cybernetic limbo as they awaited a resumption of their master’s commands. Responding to programming, several of the soldiers lit cigarettes in cynical imitation of the games master who controlled their highly transitory existence. In advanced gaming, idle time and downtime were not the same thing at all.
“Of course I’m certain.” The clerk’s affirmation was accompanied by a scowl. “D’you think I’m half senile like you?”
Molé added this as a footnote to the previous comment about his age. “No, I certainly do not think that. Please, when did you last see them?”
The younger man shrugged indifferently. Interruptions like this he did not need. Gaming time was ever precious. One never knew when a serious interruption like the arrival of a guest, or even worse the manager, might take place.
“Why should I tell you anything, old man?” Looking his visitor up and down, he was plainly not impressed. “You don’t look like police. You don’t even look like a private investigator. You look too—old.”
“Yes, I am old,” Molé genially agreed. “But not too old.”
The clerk’s brow crinkled. He liked puzzles, even when they arose from unexpected sources. “ ‘Not too old’ for what?”
Molé’s expression and voice did not change. “You’ll find out, if you don’t tell me when last you saw these two visitors.” A touch on the comm unit ghosted the aliases of Archibald Kowalski and Ingrid Seastrom.
“If I don’t …?” The clerk gaped at his caller. Not only was he old, the quietly brash interrogator was short. A threatening presence he was not. But the last thing the clerk wanted was a time-wasting argument. As the oldster had pointed out, the white couple he was interested in were not even Africans. So why should the clerk care if some petrified elder wished to get in touch with them?
“Oh, what the hell—yebo, I remember them pretty good. They struck me as a real mismatch, even for a mostly Natural traveling with a Meld.”
“You cannot imagine,” Molé murmured in agreement.
“They checked out yesterday morning.” Puffing furiously on his stimstick, the clerk was already turning back to his game.
Yesterday morning. It would soon be over, Molé told himself. He was close enough to the end now that he felt he could relax. “I don’t suppose they happened to mention where they were going?” he inquired casually. “A destination, perhaps, or even a direction?”
Having resumed the game where he had paused it, the clerk replied without looking up. “Nawso. They just left. Didn’t volunteer nothing about where they were headed and I didn’t consider it my place to ask.”
“No, you wouldn’t.” You mindless box-dwelling nit. Life is passing you by and like so many of your ilk all you can do is sit and stare with vacant eyes into the bottomless hollow depths of a wholly artificial existence. The excitement you purport to feel, to experience, is as synthetic as your soul. Napun Molé considered himself something of an expert on realities.
When the clerk’s stimstick suddenly flicked out, his aged visitant saw an opportunity to introduce a touch of one reality into the younger man’s life.
“Isihogo and damnation!” Yanking the half-finished narcotic twig from his mouth he began searching through the desk on which the portable box screen rested. Molé extended a hand.
“Allow me. In repayment for your kind and considerate assistance.”
“Blow it out your arse, old man.” Rising, the clerk leaned toward Molé’s extended hand. “But thanks for the relight.” He regarded the middle digit his elderly visitor had extended toward him. “Finger lighter meld, yes? Something like that seems appropriate for you.” He smiled thinly. “Can’t lose your lighter if it’s part of your body.”
“That is very true.” Molé waited as the clerk put the stimstick back in his mouth and extended himself still farther in his visitor’s direction, nodding at the proffered finger as he did so.
“It’s a traditional meld, right? From the old days?”
“Not so old,” Molé countered. “Not so traditional.” As the tip of his finger popped back, it simultaneously came to life.
The hellish narrow jet of yellow-orange flame roared as it instantly carbonized the stimstick and flared past to slam into the clerk’s face. Screaming at the top of his lungs, his voice reaching the very apex of agony, the younger man fell backward clawing at himself. His eyes had melted away like two scoops of vanilla gelatin and the rest of his face was on fire. So was his shirt. Flailing wildly at himself only served to spread the flames to the rest of his body and to the furniture around him. Their eternal battle interrupted, unfeeling Zulu impis and proper British battalions stood down as they flicked out around the sagging box screen.
Molé had long since turned and headed for the exit. In his profession one never knew what small and seemingly insignificant accessory might one day prove useful. That included the need to make fire. As he reached the door he glanced back in the direction of Reception. The clerk was moaning now, no longer screaming, a flaming near corpse lying like a burning Yule log in the center of the increasingly engulfed front desk. The hotel alarm was sounding and the building’s integrated fire suppression system was spraying white foam everywhere. Molé was not put in mind of the holiday season.
“I never go anywhere without a little napalm,” he murmured softly as he pulled the entry door shut behind him.
By the time the first fire floaters and ground units arrived, the hotel was fully engulfed. In addition to the clerk, whose body could be identified only through dental records, two pa
nicked guests and one bystander died. More were taken to area hospitals while others were treated at the scene for burns and smoke inhalation.
Smoke inhalation. Ignored by fire and police personnel, the old man strode purposefully in the direction of the vehicle park where he had left his roadster. That was what the disrespectful clerk had perished from. Smoke inhalation. He recalled the semaphoring stimstick. It was, to Napun Molé’s way of thinking, almost … funny. He nearly smiled.
Alien to the marching orders they had been given, his facial muscles were not quite up to the task.
THAT THE N1 HAD BEEN the main route between Cape Town and Joburg for a very long time was evidenced not only by the amount of traffic the wide roadway carried but also by the fact that the express lanes were completely automated. Guide strips running down the center of each lane could control and convey anything from a suitably equipped one-man scoot to a road train all the way from the SAEC’s main port at the Cape to the massive industrial-commercial complex centered on Johannesburg and Pretoria. Once they hit the outskirts of Parow, Whispr programmed their turnout for distant Worcester and eased back in the driver’s seat. Accelerating to a relaxed two hundred kph, the rented roadster settled into one of the middle lanes.
Hissing by at even higher speeds, electrically powered speedsters rocketed past them in the fast lane. With their maximum velocity controlled by the guide strip embedded in the roadway they were no danger to themselves or their occupants. At the other extreme, individual trucks jockeyed for position with massive road trains consisting of a hauler attached to four or five engineless containers. Swiveling the driver’s seat sideways, Whispr let his long legs extend to the far side of the passenger compartment. He had room to do so because Ingrid had already ratcheted her own seat backward on its servo and was engrossed in a manuscript on her reader.
Dividing his time between enjoying the rapidly changing scenery that was blurring past, monitoring the car’s perfectly independent systems, and sneaking furtive sideways glances at her, he stood her indifference for half an hour before he could take the silence no longer.
“Are you going to read all the way to Sanbona?”
She glanced up at him. “Maybe. Why?”
“I just thought …” He hesitated, desperate to engage but not wanting to put her off. He waved a hand at the terrain speeding by outside the vehicle. “We’re in Africa. Doesn’t it interest you at all? Don’t you care? We may never have the opportunity to do this again.” His expression twisted. “What happened to your goddamn overriding sense of scientific curiosity?”
She indicated the reader. “I’m indulging in it right now. Reading the most recent update to The Journal of Atlantean Medicine. Just because my body is here doesn’t mean my mind can’t attend to business.” She smiled sardonically. “You, of course, suffer from no need to keep current with an ongoing profession.”
“Is that so? Might surprise you to know that people in my ‘ongoing profession’ have to—”
He broke off. What was he going to tell her? That information on the latest methods of breaking and entering or taking down a mark was shared among thieves? That discussions on the best way to remove subsist from the unwary took place every time he encountered another of his ilk? That devices for defeating or confusing police functions while the latter were carrying out their duties were updated as fast as law enforcement techs could invent new ones? She didn’t give him any time to catch his mental breath.
“What exactly is it that you do, Whispr? Besides eke out an existence on the fringes of conventional society. I don’t know that I’ve ever asked you.”
Should have left her to her reading, he reproached himself angrily.
“Odd jobs.” Leaving his long legs where they were he let his gaze drift back to the road ahead. “Pick up a little subsist where I can.”
There—that was truthful enough.
She was staring at him. “Some of those jobs must be pretty odd, I imagine.”
He turned back at her. “Look, you knew what kind of person I was when we decided to make this trip. I’m not a saint and I don’t live on alms. You want the nasty particulars, you’d better wait until this is over. Otherwise you’re liable to start having second thoughts, and this is no time for second thoughts.” He looked away. “If you’re gonna go all ethics on me we’d be better off calling it quits right now.”
“Take it easy.” Though she looked back at her reader, her attention was still focused on him. “I’m not judging you. I was just curious, that’s all.”
His tone turned sarcastic. “That’s why we’re here. Because Ingrid Seastrom is just curious.”
She smiled kindly. “If it wasn’t for you, Whispr, I’d probably be dead by now. If not at the hands of that assassin Molé then by others who want the thread. You speak of ethics. It would be unethical of me to presume to render judgment on someone who’s saved my life.”
“Nothing wrong with that logic.” Shifting in the seat, he turned on his side. Between his attenuated body and slender lower limbs he stretched from one door of the roadster to the other, a fleshy pillar that in any serious accident would crumple like cream cheese.
She eyed him a moment longer, then gave a mental shrug and returned to her reading. While interesting, the landscape racing by outside their vehicle was nothing remarkable. Besides, diverting herself with the long list of recent medical articles allowed her for at least a little while to forget that she was embarked on the last stages of a journey as bizarre as it was dangerous. With a common street thief and maybe murderer as her sole companion, protector, and business partner. Without a doubt she had taken complete leave of her senses.
Then why, she wondered not for the first time, did she feel so exhilarated?
When automated road services transferred them to the Off lane and the roadster began to decelerate, she finally looked up from the reader. Whispr had left her alone since their last conversation and she had managed to lose herself in the medical journal. She had not really noticed how quickly they had left civilization behind. They were entering the Karoo, a region of deeply folded mountains and canyons far removed from the urban delights of Cape Town.
They were still several kilometers from the exit when their vehicle suddenly slowed to a stop. It was not alone. Though traffic had thinned quite a bit they could see that every roadster, family transport, truck, scoot, and other vehicle had similarly been stopped. While traffic heading south toward Cape Town continued to flow unhindered, all four northbound lanes had come to a standstill. Whispr could have disengaged their vehicle from the automated roadbed and gone off-road, but assuming that the situation in which they currently found themselves was akin to what they would experience in a similar set of circumstances back home, he did nothing. No one else was breaking from the stalled lines. Had any of the stopped vehicles attempted to do so their occupants would have been subject to an on-the-spot fine.
The reason for the disruption soon manifested itself in the form of a pair of police vehicles that came screaming up behind the travelers. Ignoring the in-road guide strips and utilizing their onboard anticollision hardware they were able to weave a relatively consistent path through the stopped traffic. Floaters, of course, could have traveled off-road and aboveground—but not at the speeds achieved by the law enforcement vehicles.
As soon as the police pursuit had blasted past, the roads re-engaged and traffic was allowed to move again.
Ingrid had turned off her reader and was slipping it back into her backpack. “Wonder what that was all about?”
“No idea.” Whispr forced his muscles to unclench. Police sirens of any stripe unsettled his nerves. Had the two chasers slowed down and settled in behind them he had been prepared to break contact with the road and take off on his own. Though he had not voiced his concern to his blissfully unperturbed companion he was not prepared to be questioned by the local police. The last time police had tried to question him he had been forced to flee through night and swamp unaware that
they had killed his partner. He did not want to go through anything like that again. He most especially did not want anything like that to happen to Dr. Ingrid Seastrom.
In all likelihood she would probably have disagreed with his line of reasoning, he knew. She’d probably welcome the police. Never give a thought to the possibility that some of them might be working with a delister like the assassin Molé. She was right about one thing, though. Just like she’d said, if not for him and his lifetime of accumulated street wisdom she probably already would be dead. The image this realization brought up displeased him and he hurried to put it out of his mind.
With a population of just under a hundred thousand, Worcester was the principal town in the Breede River Valley. Wild, difficult to negotiate mountains rose on either side of the valley, dominated by the two-thousand-meter plus Keeromsberg to the northeast. Here they would leave the steady traffic of the N1 to head southeast and then due east into the Little Karoo. Ingrid knew there would be no more accommodating automated roadways. She and Whispr would have to manual drive. That was partly the point. If anyone had managed to follow them this far, they would by now be wondering where the hell their quarry was going and why.
The road seemed to divide the landscape: greenery to one side, raw rock and scrub-covered mountain to the other. Whispr drove easily, more relaxed on the old winding pavement than he had been on the smooth-surfaced national highway. No howling police vehicles out here, he told himself. Pursuit of any kind, governmental or private, would have shown itself by now. He was starting to believe that they really had thrown any trackers off their trail. Probably as soon as they had boarded the flight from Miami. The roadster’s scanner detected nothing behind them for at least half a kilometer.
Maybe, he told himself, he could even ease back and start to enjoy some of this journey. Leastwise the part before they tried to slip themselves into the most secretive of SICK’s research facilities, where they would likely find themselves arrested or killed.