A Gathering Evil

  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 other. 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 ju
st 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 acouple 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.

  Jytte pointed out that this strategy was a modification of 20th-century Yakuza tactics employed against megacorporations in Japan. There it only had to go so far as disrupting stockholder meetings. Because the Japanese could not stand open conflict, they would pay the Yakuza off to keep them out. In the United States, causing a disruption of business was necessary to shake anything loose, and the tactic had been applied by other companies in Chicago, New York and Miami with apparent effectiveness.

  It did not take her long to cross-correlate employment records of Build-more's staff with places where this tactic had been used to come up with a candidate for employing it here. Barney Kourvik had worked with all the companies who had employed the tactic and had, most recently, been employed as a consultant by Build-more to school them in how to defeat that sort of thing. Build-more officials apparently feared that Lorica would start using strong-arm tactics to increase their power in Phoenix.

  His star pupil and liaison with the company was Sinclair MacNeal, one of four sons of Build-more's tyrannical founder Darius MacNeal. Sinclair had managed to be disowned once already and had spent time in Japan working for a corporation whose interests clearly conflicted with those of his father's company. He rejoined the company three years ago as a security specialist and had finally risen to the number two spot in that department. It seemed very apparent that Sinclair was our man.

  "We'll have to have a talk with Mr. MacNeal, I think," I commented as the phone rang.

  Jytte answered, listened for a moment, said, "I will inform him," and hung up again. She turned to me and said, "Alejandro says Estefan Ramierez has delivered the painting. He has a few people coming over for a private viewing tonight, but thought you might like to see it this afternoon before anyone else gets a chance to look at it."

  "I would. Marit? Bat? Jytte?"

  Marit shook her head. "I'm going shopping with Dottie in a half hour, so I'll pass. I'll see what she can tell me about Sinclair MacNeal since her husband works at Build-more."

  Bat nodded.

  Jytte looked from Marit to Bat and then to me. "I cannot leave here." She headed back into her dark sanctuary, then stopped halfway through the door and turned back. "Thank you for asking."

  The three of us piled into the new Ariel Marit had rented and drove to City Center. The valet who accepted custody of the car looked a bit askance at Bat, but held his tongue and drove away without squealing the tires. Marit and I waved to Dottie up on the Level Nine, then I kissed Marit and left her at the elevator while Bat and I trekked across the mezzanine. On the other side we found the escalator that went up one level and deposited us near the Mercado.

  I noticed Bat looked around a great deal and seemed to study everything with intensity. "Have you not been here before?"

  He shook his head. "Not in public."

  "But you have been in City Center before?"

  "Once, the Bookbinder Building. Rich fan of pit fights offered me $10,000 dolmarks to fight a Thai fighter he'd flown in. Had a ring in his penthouse suite."

  "What happened?" I smiled. "I know you won."

  "Fight left the ring. I tossed the Thai through a window. Broke some other stuff, too."

  "What?"

  "Ming vase. Revere silver service. Rodin bronze." Bat furrowed his brow. "Oh, and an all-pro linebacker for the Cardinals."

  Bat cracked a bit of a smile, and I laughed openly. "So they never asked you back?"

  "You got the picture." He pointed to a cantina that was part of the Mercado. "Fought in that place down in Acapulco."

  As we followed the nearly deserted, winding street around the restaurant, Alejandro's Gallery came into view. "There it is." I gave Bat a wry grin. "You'd best try not to break anything."

  Suddenly fire blossomed in the windows and doorway of the gallery. Flames and black shot through the bars on the windows, spitting shards of glass and chunks of wooden window framing into the air. The ground shook with the thunderous detonation and one of the two doors danced madly across the cobblestone street. It smashed against the restaurant's wall as the force of the blast knocked the both of us down and shattered windows throughout the Mercado.

  Because Bat and I had been in the street and a bit back from the explosion, the only damage done to us came when we fell down. Behind us people ran from the bar in a blind panic. Clothing hung tattered on those who had been closest to the windows, with blood quickly soaking it.

  Bat got up first and pulled me to my feet. We both ran toward the gallery, but the fire raging inside burned so hot we could not approach closer than five feet from the door. Roaring flames licked up and
out of the windows and doors, blackening pastel colors and making the window bars glow red hot. I tried to look inside, but I could see nothing in the smoke and flames.

  Bat pulled me back as firefighters arrived and started spraying chemical foam in through the door. I sat down on a bench, and he stood beside me. "God in heaven, Bat, I never thought..."

  "They'll rule it accidental, electrical, and blame it on paint stored in the back." I saw muscles twitch at his jaw. "It was the Witch."

  "How do you know?"

  "It was you who said she had no taste in art. This gets the spider painting and gets Alejandro for bringing the other one to auction. It was her."

  I pursed my lips and nodded slowly. "Okay, you know it, and I know it. We can't prove it."

  "Don't need proof, I know it. Proof is for your friend and Nero Loring."

  "Okay, what now?"

  "I want you to meet a friend of mine." Bat grinned. "You'll like him. He sells guns."

  Bat took me to what looked like a small pawnshop nestled in the shadow of City Center. The thick coat of dust over the whole place made me feel I was walking into a museum more than any sort of viable commercial establishment. Old and tarnished musical instruments lined the left wall and a plethora of rifles the right, like soldiers preparing to battle over the battered televisions, radios and toaster ovens huddled in the middle. The glass cases ringing the walls had some pistols and a number of interesting jewelry items, but nothing like what we would require to bust Lorica open and take the Witch.

  Bat walked through the dimly lit shop like it did not exist. The teenager sitting in the cashier's cage glanced at him and buzzed him through the gateway into the back, then returned to reading an old science-fiction paperback. He paid me no attention at all.