"Angel, why did you run?" Gamma asks.
She nearly blacks out. It"s hard to think. Hard to remember. The pressure eases a little, but it hurts. Oh, frag, it hurts". She"d do anything to stop that hurting. Anything at all.
"We have an agreement."
She"s grunting, trying to answer, to nod.
"Haven"t I treated you well?"
"Sorry . . ." She snivels. "I"m sorry . . ."
"After everything I"ve done for you."
The pressure eases. She"s panting, gasping, breathing. She remembers, too. Everything he"s done. When she was bone busted and broke, Gamma took her off the hard-core streets of the Bronx, gave her Matrix work. He gave her s.p.a.ce in his doss. He"s lining her pockets with fifty nuyen an hour. Why did she run from him? Is she crazy? Brain-fried? She"s had it worse, a lot worse. Shick, Gamma"s treated her jewel. "You"re an ungrateful little wretch."
It"s true, but so hard to admit. "Always been . . ."
The glare of the moon subsides. She catches sight of Gamma"s head, the buzzcut hair, the impa.s.sive Asian features. He smiles softly, faintly, but she can see the subtle sadness in his eyes, the hurt from her betrayal. "I understand," he says in a voice grown tender. "You"ve had a great deal of hardship. Hard luck. You"re so used to running, slot and run, isn"t that right? You"re afraid to stop running even when you"re safe. You"re always afraid Mr. Johnson might be just a step behind you."
The mere mention gives her a shiver of nerves. She steals a quick glance around with her eyes. It"s been a couple of years already, but she"s still running from that job in Miami. How could she have forgotten that? Her Mr. Johnson turned out to be dirty. The Miami job was a setup. She got some wiz tech out of the deal, but her chummers all got dusted. She barely escaped with her life. She made it through Philly, Baltimore, New York City. Now here she is on Long Island, the Zone. Hiding with Gamma. Hiding in the Zone. Her and Gamma and his cutters.
What was she thinking? She"s got jack for brains. Run from Gamma? Is she blasted? totally scrambled? Gamma"s the only chance she"s got. Gamma said so and it"s true. "Sorry," she blurts. "I"m sorry."
"Let"s go back to the doss, all right?"
She chokes back a sob. "Jewel."
The cutters help her up. She"s a little unsteady. She feels like she"s got bruises all over her body and a trickle of blood slips out of her nose. One of the cutters hands her the Fairlight Invader, a little dusty but no worse for wear. Gamma cradles the back of her head and gently presses a kerchief to her nostrils till the trickling blood comes to an end.
"I really care for you a great deal," he says softly.
Neona closes her eyes, and whispers, "I know."
The Leyland-Rover van waits in the street, just on the other side of a pile of rubble. Neona moves through the sliding side door to one of the bench seats behind the bucket up front. Gamma sits beside her, slips an arm around her shoulders. It"s a comforting feeling. Rea.s.suring. She"s going home, and she"s exhausted. All she wants is sleep. One of the cutters takes the wheel. The others take the bench in the rear and the van starts humming, moving out.
It"s a long slow ride. Around piles of debris cast down by crumbling buildings. Through streets full of burned-out hulks and stripped-down junk. Past forests of withered lifeless trees and oceans of gnarled twisting vines. Ponds and puddles with a stench so strong it burns the eyes. Whirling dust demons. The cutter at the wheel sends them banging through ruts and potholes and bouncing over sprawling debris, but he does not turn on the headlights. The fog curls and flows everywhere. Never shine headlights into the fog, not this fog. It attracts bad things.
A low brick wall appears on the left. It supports a sign. An old black sign with faded white lettering. Neona"s seen it in daylight and knows how it reads: "King P Psy Ctr." She doesn"t know what that means. She knows that the buildings lying just beyond, on both sides of the rutted road, look ancient, medieval, big brick castles with bars on the windows and metal gratings over the doors. Maybe a hundred years ago, this was some kind of psychic research center, or maybe a gov lab. It looks like the kind of place where a person could scream and scream and never be heard. A place where razorguys in black synthleather burn holes into people"s brains with burning metal brands.
It gives her shivers.
But it"s safe. It"s home.
They pull around to the rear of a building and park. One of the cutters tugs open a heavy metal door and Neona precedes them all inside, down a flight of stairs to a broad open s.p.a.ce: the "commons," they call it. Mostly it"s just doss s.p.a.ce for the cutters Gamma keeps around: cots, a table for eating, and other accommodations. Neona"s telecom and couch are right in the middle of things.
As she enters, Neona spots the only other girl she"s seen with the group. Her name is Poppy and she"s kind of a cutter, with cybereyes and hand razors. She"s also Gamma"s girlfriend. Now, though, she"s lying on a cot on her back like she"s unconscious and her face is a purplish ma.s.s of bruises.
"What happened to Poppy?"
"She took a fall," Gamma says. "But don"t worry. She"ll be more careful in the future."
That"s rea.s.suring.
11.
The AC Plutocrat spends a brief eternity settling onto the aeropad. Gordon Ito is up and standing by the side hatchway door before the rotorcraft actually touches the pad. A small crowd of people rush to arrange themselves around him. An anxious-looking female steward stands between him and the door.
"Do it," Gordon says, finally.
The chopper"s rotors are still pounding the air outside, thumping rapidly, but the steward turns and shoves at the door. One of Gordon"s exec protection specialists adds a quick thrust and the door jerks open, admitting a cyclone blast of wind.
Gordon thrusts his hands deep into the pockets of his platinum-hued trench and moves briskly down the steps to the aeropad. People run to move out ahead of him: the chief of his personal security detail, two physical adept protect specs, his confidential a.s.sistant. The latter all but shouting into a wristfone to be heard above the gale of wind.
The aeropad sits atop Tower Five of Fuchi Industrial Electronics" monolithic shrine to economic tyranny, soaring two hundred and fifty stories above the Manhattan streets. The wind always rages up here. Gordon knows that better than most. It howls and rushes chill and ruthless over his cheeks. He feels its bite as a matter of routine.
Double transparex doors slide open before him and he strides into the aeropad transit lounge. White-gloved Fuchi hostesses bow and intone the usual insipid greetings. The rhythmic thumping of the Plutocrat"s rotors resounds against the lounge"s floor-to-ceiling windows, pursuing him as far as the elevator.
By the elevator waits Bucky Freese with an urgent expression and a mouthful of potentially disastrous remarks. Gordon cuts him off with a two-word snarl.
"Not now."
Idiot.
Freese is a freak with a head full of wire, a talent for decking and d.a.m.n little else. The checked sports jacket he wears over his Stuffer Shack tee and striped cargo jeans provides the only hint that he belongs to one of the most powerful megacorps on the face of the planet. A uniformed security guard starts dressing him down for not displaying his Fuchi badge prominently.
Gordon snaps his fingers, gestures. The guard desists. Freese joins the small crowd on the elevator.
"Uh ... Mr. Ito?"
Gordon"s confidential a.s.sistant does the honors, turning to Freese, glaring at him, then saying, simply, "Shut up."
Freese blinks widened eyes, but shuts up.
The elevator doors slip closed. The elevator hums, descending, descending briefly, and slows to a halt. The doors slip open. The uniformed guards posted to the hallway outside straighten their posture as Gordon and his small crowd move out. At the end of the hallway, Gordon turns right and he and the crowd enter his personal preserve.
As he steps through the door to his office suite, his platinum blonde senior exec sec and the protect spec who watches over her are both on their feet.
"Get Donelson," Gordon says.
No one wastes words. The exec sec turns to her telecom. The techs with the security detail start sweeping for invasive electronics. The security mage goes into astral overwatch mode. Gordon snaps his fingers and his confidential a.s.sistant provides a Platinum Select cigarette and a flame.
"Mr. Xiao called," his exec sec informs. "I"m to tell you he called for you in Boston-"
Gordon cuts that off with a sharp gesture. He already knows about the call. Just another move in a game that has yet to fully unfold. Gordon had been in Boston early this morning, well over eighteen hours ago, handling a special matter for Xiao, a matter that only makes him wonder why the head of the Fuchi Special Administration had wanted his chief of operations away from the office. Whatever it is, it"s sure to be different. Something so far unmentioned, of course. Something Xiao does not want Gordon to know about. At worst, it bears a direct relationship to the reason for Gordon"s hasty return to the towers, and that would be very very bad.
Donelson, Gordon"s deputy, comes through the door from the east side of the office suite. "I want status on Chrome Horse. Fifteen minutes."
"No problem."
Chrome Horse is a special op against Xiao. A fact-finding op. It pays to keep informed.
Donelson goes out. The chief tech with the security detail steps up. He shows his open palm. Lying on his palm is something about the size of a fleck of dandruff.
"Looks like another IntSec model, sir. They seeded the carpet. We"ll be clean in a few moments."
Fuchi Internal Security. They never quit. Gordon"s got the tech to neutralize the really sophisticated techniques applied against his office suite, so IntSec keeps trying this primitive s.h.i.t. Seeding his carpet. They managed to get a bug into his exec sec"s clothes a few weeks ago. Gordon"s got an op running in response to that, too. Payback is a b.l.o.o.d.y slitch and he"ll see that they pay in quad. IntSec"s problem is that they"re jealous of his budget, his overt budget, those portions they"ve managed to find out about. What worries him now is the budget that no one knows about, the shadow budget, for the ops that no one approves, because, regardless of how things go, no one really wants to know.
He takes a drag on his Platinum Select and starts snapping his fingers. The techs rush it. The senior tech sweeps Bucky Freese and Gordon as well, and says, "All clear, sir."
"No calls."
"Understood, sir," replied his senior exec sec.
Another sec has a cup of his brand of Brazilian coffee steaming inside his private office. He motions the sec and the techs and bodyguards out, then motions Bucky Freese inside.
Behind his gleaming onyx desk, the doors sealed, security tech on, Gordon turns in his high-backed synthleather chair to face the broad unpaned window overlooking the Hudson. He sips his coffee and draws on his cigarette. He considers Freese, shifting nervously in front of the desk, never really at ease without a datajack in his head. The key to the man is tech. Computer tech. Hardware or soft, it"s all one big toy. The more powerful the toy, the greater his interest. Give him a specialist group with access to some of the most powerful toys in existence and he"ll only want more of the same. Give him the freedom to play with his toys and he"ll swear his undying loyalty.
"What went wrong?"
Freese coughs, clears his throat. He sounds nervous, saying, "We got sleazed."
"How bad?"
"It was like . . . somebody knew we"d be there. They popped in and blew us away, sucked out all the guano before we got more than a dime."
"How is that possible?"
The silence from the front of the desk gives Gordon warning. He turns in his chair to face Freese and finds the man fidgeting, rubbing at his brow, his nose, his chin. He doesn"t seem to have any answers and that"s bad because Freese is supposed to have all the answers. In his relatively short tenure with Cybers.p.a.ce Development Corp, a Fuchi subsidiary, he engineered some major advances for the code in persona chips. He is a brain and now he is Gordon"s brain. One of his jobs is to play a little game. He skates into Fuchi financial datastores and moves numbers around. Sometimes he fiddles with interbank accounts. He likes to think of himself as a kind of watchdog. Every time he succeeds in transferring funds from one part of Fuchi, say, the Pan-Europa division, to Gordon"s finger accounts, he comes and tells Gordon just how he did it, so that Gordon can order improvements in security.
What Freese is saying now is that someone beat him to it. Gordon doesn"t like that. "I asked you a question."
Freese rubs at his jaw. "I never seen anything like it."
"You"re the expert. Explain it."
Freese stands almost motionless for going on thirty seconds, staring at the front right corner of Gordon"s desk, then rummages through his pockets and pulls out a chip-camera. "I could show you," he says. "I got it all . . ."
Before he can say anything further, Gordon points at the desktop. Freese puts the carrier down. Gordon reaches over and picks it up. A record of the run that went wrong? Evidence that might conceivably be used to crucify the entire Special Administration? Evidence that will shortly be eradicated beyond any chance of recovery. "This is a record of the run?"
"Yeah. Just the main bits."
"You have records stored elsewhere?"
"Uh, no." Freese shakes his head. "I figured I better be careful. Guano like this could cause trouble."
Faintly, Gordon nods. "Good thinking."
Freese smiles nervously.
Gordon taps an optical key in the touch-sensitive top of his desk and an entire workstation console winks on. A display equipped with multiple displays and a full suite of data-ports rises out of the desktop. Gordon taps a few more optical keys and slides the chip from Freese into a port near the display"s base. Another tap and the record file from Freese"s chip begins executing.
The first scene to appear is direct from the Fuchi private telecommunications grid-the floor of a narrow cavern formed by the cool jet cliffs of a pair of colossal datastores, soaring up infinitely tall into the black electron night. Between the two ma.s.sive datastores burns the cobalt blue beam of a datastream, looking as hot as the interior of a nuclear furnace.
"ID the stream," Gordon says.
Freese replies, "Funds transactions between Fuchi Union Trust and Fuchi World Bank. An average of ten thousand transactions a second. And they"re both on the Fuchi private grid."
Simplifying the task of an intercept.
On Gordon"s display, five iconic figures now materialize beside the blazing data stream, Freese and his team of deckers. The sheer volume of the beam make the decker"s icons seem puny and frail. Their iconic forms resemble construction workers: hard hats crowned by flashing blue strobes, blue-striped vests. All synchronized to match the blue of the datastream. They set out two lines of glowing blue traffic cones, and, between the two lines of cones, begin construction of a temporary node, a dataline junction that will vanish without a trace once the job is complete.
It"s a tactic they"ve used before. Gordon takes a drag from his Platinum Select and watches the milliseconds tick by on the counter at the top of his display screen. So far nothing unusual.
Just down the datastream hovers a violet globe sizzling with red veins like the markings on a soccer ball. Probably Killer IC of sufficient strength to induce lethal feedback and fry the brain of any decker it attacks. Not a problem for Freese and his team unless they frag their Fuchi access codes or set off a system alert.
Freese and his team open neon blue toolboxes. From the boxes they take jet black panels. They fit the panels together to form a large black box surrounding a section of the datastream. The box has two circular ports, allowing the datastream to pa.s.s untouched through the center of the box.
Then they step through the walls of the box.
And into a sculptured node.
Freese and his deckers move into position on the verge of a vast virtual highway a thousand lanes wide and stretching off to infinity in both directions. Iconic sedans fill every lane, streaming along at a speed almost beyond comprehension. As each sedan approaches it flashes its value in nuyen. Freese and his deckers, now resembling police, pick out various sedans with jabbing fingers and wave them down a newly constructed exit ramp.
Briefly, the exit ramp winks, Dataline To Secret Caribbean League Accounts. A counter in the exit ramp"s pavement keeps a running tally: ten thousand nuyen, fifty thousand, a hundred and climbing. Freese"s team is selective. The sedans they finger never total more than five digits in nuyen, never less than four. Nothing large enough to instigate an immediate alert, and that"s all that matters.
Someone somewhere will have to explain what happened to the missing funds, probably within a matter of hours. Not Gordon"s problem. His problem is the Special Administration and Fuchi Americas" ruthless compet.i.tion. If a VP in some banking subsidiary has to be sacrificed to the cause, it"s a necessary expense. An investment to secure the future.
"This is where it happened," Freese says.
The greenish haze infiltrates the scene. A whirling five-pointed star like the Matrix icon for the entire Fuchi private grid appears in the electron night just above Freese"s iconic head. An oval portal rimmed in sizzling electric green rises out of the pavement of the exit ramp. Iconic sedans sent down the ramp pa.s.s through the sizzling oval and vanish into the black interior of the portal.
Before Freese or his team can react, twenty million nuyen are gone.
"What"s happening?" Freese shouts.
Three of his deckers continue waving sedans down the ramp. They move like zombies, badly configured semi-autonomous knowbots, stilted, jerky, puppets on strings. Another ten million vanishes into the portal. Then Freese looks up.
"Slag that fragger!" Freese shouts.
One of his deckers draws a shimmering neon sidearm and opens fire on the whirling star above Freese"s head. The bullets wink Sparky IC. The star spins into a blur. The bullets abruptly reverse direction and separate into a stream of whirling fragments. The decker screams. As the bullet fragments strike, his iconic body is immersed in a storm of sparking discharges like lightning flashes.
Then he winks out.