The Moreau Quartet, Volume 2

by S. Andrew Swann

  The cops called names out of the cell block by some equation that must have involved species, the first letter of your last name, and a dart board somewhere. It seemed to Angel that they called a name every ten or fifteen minutes, and it caused no lessening of the crowding whatsoever.

  Hourly, rumors spread back from the cell nearest the door. First that they were all going to be set free. Next, that they were all going to be prosecuted with a two-year minimum sentence. Then, everyone they found with a record was going to be shipped to Oakland. There were rumors that there were two dead, ten dead, fifteen dead. They said that no one really died even though the newsvids said so.

  Rumors that Father Alvarez De Collor was coming, that Sylvia Harper was coming, that the media was coming, that no one was coming because the cops were keeping everything a secret. They let the humans go. The Fed was already involved . . .

  As time passed and Angel felt more and more isolated from the outside world, it became harder and harder to segregate out even the obvious bullshit. When she’d been there ten hours and the rumor passed by that the cops were going to shoot all the moreys and dump them in a mass grave in the Presidio with the help of the Army Corps of Engineers, Angel felt unreasonably nervous.

  The last rumor Angel heard was something about President Merideth’s aliens from Alpha Centauri. She never caught all of it because that was when her name was finally called.

  The population density had lessened to the point where she could make it to the door of the cell without actually climbing over people. In the previous hours she had actually seen people literally passed over the heads of fellow inmates.

  When she reached the door, there was the lean form of DeGarmo, looking like he had gotten about as much sleep as she had. He was accompanied by a cop in riot gear who held the remainder of the cell at bay as the gate opened.

  “Finally,” Angel said as she walked out of the place that had been her home for a good fourteen hours.

  DeGarmo shrugged. “For the record, bail was posted ten hours ago. But the city is suffering a bureaucratic meltdown. System wasn’t designed to handle this many people.”

  As they walked to the cell block entrance, the door before them opened, letting in another two cops. One was holding a wallet computer and reading off of it. “Jesus Montoya.”

  As Angel left, she distinctly heard two different moreau voices say, “Over here!”

  One cop shook his head and put a hand up to a helmeted forehead. “Shit. Now what?”

  When Angel made it outside, she was blinded by the unexpected intensity of daylight. She turned to her lawyer. “What day is it?”

  “Wednesday, close to noon.”

  “Thanks for getting me out of there. I thought it would never end.”

  “A feeling affecting many people in that building. Something you should be thankful for.” DeGarmo walked her a distance to the curb, where the BMW was waiting.

  “Don’t the cops want this for evidence or something?”

  DeGarmo smiled. “All they ever really had you for was leaving the scene of the accident. The injured parties never pressed, especially when I informed them of the possible assault charges they were facing.”

  “What about the city?”

  DeGarmo ran a hand through his black crew cut. “That’s what you should be thankful for. They’re so overwhelmed with cases that it was fairly easy to get them to drop what was essentially a nuisance. Especially when I pointed out I could shoot down the charges in front of any judge in the state.”

  Angel shook her head. “Damn, again, what do I owe you?”

  “You’ll receive a bill.”

  “Yeah, right.” Angel punched the combination and opened the BMW. “Did I thank you?”

  DeGarmo nodded.

  It was a measure of how strange Angel’s universe had become, the fact she was regarding a lawyer as a person and not as some hypothetical amoral construct to be lumped in with cops and politicians.

  “One last thing,” he added as she got behind the wheel. “I’ve gotten St. Luke’s to release Mr. Dorset’s ashes. They’ve gone as far as offering to pay for the funeral arrangements—”

  Angel yawned. “Look, can you hold that thought?”

  “All right, but arrangements should be finalized.”

  “Tomorrow, okay? When my biological clock has reset. And after I’ve gotten some sleep.”

  “Tomorrow.” DeGarmo extended his hand and Angel shook it.

  Yes, Angel thought, before this week is out, that bastard Byron should be put to final rest.

  She rode the accelerator all the way home.

  Chapter 15

  Eight hours later. Angel was driving circles around the remains of The Rabbit Hole and wondering what had happened to her life.

  She’d dug up a relic from Cleveland, a music ramcard, and had the cardplayer jacked up to full volume on the BMW’s comm. It was morey music—mostly the screams of clawed guitars—garage bands that no one outside of Cleveland had ever heard of. Unlike most of the synthvid crap that clogged the comm channels on the West Coast, this music had once existed outside of a computer’s memory.

  The screaming chords and pidgin Arabic lyrics were a reminder of when her life had been understandable. Angel wanted to withdraw into the back alleys that had bred her, back when she knew the rules, back when she was going to live forever and the world was a half-dozen city blocks.

  Back when she didn’t have enough sense to worry about tomorrow.

  Must really be fucked up if you’re nostalgic about living in a burned-out building and a neighborhood that chewed up and spat out a good friend of yours every month or so.

  Fucked up was right. This mess was infecting everything. Every facet of her life was becoming distorted.

  Even Lei.

  Angel slammed a fist into the side of a steering wheel.

  Even her best friend, damn it. Her only friend in this town. What was worse, she hadn’t seen the argument coming until she found herself in the middle of it.

  The transition had been so seamless that Angel still couldn’t figure out exactly what had happened. Lei had come home, and, at first, Lei was happy to see her back.

  At first . . .

  Down Market to the coast, up Mission to the scene of the fire—she’d been driving randomly, trying to clear her mind, and she’d been caught in this loop for the past fifteen minutes like a damaged ramcard, repeating the same four bits over and over. Market, Beale, Mission, and Second.

  Angel could understand Lei’s point of view. No one should borrow trouble. She shouldn’t keep involving the cops and screwing with Lei’s life. Angel had tried to be reasonable, but somehow their voices kept getting raised.

  A visit by an Asian gentleman in Mr. K’s employ hadn’t helped matters. Angel then had to explain how she’d become tied to someone with major league involvement in the shady side of the computer underground. The vindictiveness that revelation had unleashed made Angel run away from the apartment, into the BMW.

  She’d been cruising south of Market for nearly two hours now.

  Angel had needed to clear her head, and while she could have gotten the same air by walking, she felt better with a few tons of armor around her. That and the Beretta—Lei had made it very clear that she didn’t want a gun in the house anymore. Angel had slipped the gun under the driver’s seat.

  Angel tried to think, even though she didn’t really want to.

  She turned off Second again, passing the corner of Chinatown, and thought of Mr. K’s message.

  Dear Miss Lopez, the letter went, find enclosed the tickets I agreed to replace. Two are not the originals, I’m afraid, since forging the primitive copy protection of the Nonhuman Football League is infinitely easier than reproducing the subtle encryption that masks the data covering two of the ramcards you gave me . . . The letter went on for
a whole page like that, the upshot of which was that it was going to take days of computer time to unravel the data, and even then only if Mr. K had the right algorithm in the first place.

  This whole situation had her in a dark foggy room with only a few solid objects she could get a grip on.

  No question that Byron was a data courier. Between Mr. K fingering his MO, the anomalous data on two of the tickets Byron gave her—the ones, ironically, for the Denver game—and all the veiled references to “delivery” from Byron himself, Angel was finally clear on what he did for a living. Byron carried data from person A to person B, data that was much too valuable to trust to a sat transmission, or worse, the comm net.

  Knowing that did little for her piece of mind, since she still had no idea what the data he carried was. She had to wait for some point between tomorrow and never for Mr. K to crack the encryption on those two ramcards before she could find out what Byron was carrying.

  At least it was pretty clear where the data came from. Everyone seemed to agree who employed Byron Dorset, Mr. K, DeGarmo, even the paranoid cop Anaka. Byron transported data for VanDyne, a massive conglomerate which was into everything from comm circuitry to defense contracting. A company that, after the quake, inserted itself indelibly into the heart of San Francisco by championing the rebuilding effort. They were responsible for everything from the rebuilt Pyramid and Coit Tower, to that domed monstrosity on Alcatraz that was supposed to be an alien habitat.

  The question that nagged at Angel was whether or not Byron was working for VanDyne when his throat got torn out. That question raised the fog level by an order of magnitude.

  However, she was left with the fact that Byron had been running things smoothly for ten years. He’d made a few million moving hot data for VanDyne with no problems—up to now.

  Suddenly, Byron gets creamed.

  Angel knew that all this was far removed from the drug deals and gun running that had been rampant in her home neighborhood. However, she was familiar with the pattern. If something that established suddenly went wrong that badly, it generally meant one thing.

  Someone fucked up.

  Almost always, that someone fucked up by wanting more money. Angel suspected Byron’d fucked up.

  She passed the ruins of The Rabbit Hole and thought herself deeper into the fog.

  The information on those tickets was worth a lot to somebody. Mr. K was investing millions worth of computer time against that payoff. So, how does this get Byron’s throat slashed by a feline morey on Eddy Street?

  Angel’s head was beginning to hurt. There was so much bullshit she needed to explain.

  “Go slow,” she said to herself. “One step at a time.”

  Go with the assumption that Byron fucked up. How do you fuck up a job that sweet? Simple answer, you want more money. It was a simple rule from her days on the street. You get greedy, you get dead. For some reason, Byron must have bucked the program he’d been following for ten years, and it got him killed.

  Angel knew that she was making too many assumptions, but assumptions were all she had to go on. Besides, the way Byron laid this whole mess on her, it was nice to think he’d brought this all upon himself.

  So, the next step was to figure out what Byron had been supposed to do before he screwed up. That was fairly simple. He was a courier. He was supposed to deliver the data to someone. Angel could even picture where the drop would have been. Byron had made a point in his letter about attending the Frisco-Denver game, and—to drive the point home—the data in question was on the tickets to that very game. Once there, a simple exchange of ramcards with some Denver fan would be ridiculously simple.

  Something got screwed before that rendezvous.

  That gave her two suspects for the killing if Byron was trying some sort of double-cross, VanDyne and the anonymous guys from Denver. Whoever offed Byron must’ve freaked when he didn’t have the data on him. VanDyne would want it back, and the guys from Denver would want the stuff they were paying big bucks for.

  That didn’t explain a hotel on Eddy Street, damn it.

  “Calm down, one step at a time, right?”

  Think.

  Fact, Byron got offed by a feline morey. Assume the cat killed Byron for the data. That would explain why Byron’s condo had been trashed. The smell there could have been feline, canine, or—

  Angel slammed on the brakes and pulled to the curb. The realization had hit her like a defensive tackle rushing out of the fog. There had to be more than one set of players after those cards at the same time.

  It was obvious.

  The killers, the cat among them, wanted the data. They must have been sure Byron had the data on him. They didn’t know Byron’s MO of distancing himself from the hot stuff. Anyone familiar with Byron’s courier duties, like Mr. K, would have known that Byron would stash the data off on someone else until the final transfer. Someone who had known Byron over the course of his ten years as a courier would have known that it was likely that Byron would only have his hands on the vital ramcards at the Denver game during the scheduled trade off.

  That meant that the killers, cat included, weren’t VanDyne or the guys from Denver. Otherwise they would’ve known better than to kill Byron before he gave up the location of the ramcards.

  Once they offed Byron and saw their mistake, they trashed his condo looking for the stuff. These guys were hasty, sloppy, and violent.

  That meant they were not the folks who’d very cleanly broken into Angel’s apartment—twice. They were not the ones who methodically read over every ramcard in her house, and were careful enough to cover their scent with some spray disinfectant. The killers who trashed Byron’s condo probably didn’t know enough to search her place.

  The folks searching Angel’s apartment, looking for the ramcard Byron had slipped her, just weren’t prescient enough to know that she had dropped the shit in the morgue at Frisco General. These guys might fit the bill for the guys from Denver, the people Byron was supposed to hand the cards off to.

  So far she had three players.

  There was VanDyne, the origin of the hot potato. There were the guys from Denver, who seemed to have been shafted by Byron. Then she had the feline hit squad that only barely seemed to know what it was doing.

  None of this explained why Byron was offed on Eddy Street, or why he was supposed to be meeting with the Knights of Humanity.

  Could the Knights be the guys from Denver? That was bullshit. A Knight attending a NonHuman football game was asking to be the lead on tomorrow’s newscast. Also bullshit, they weren’t VanDyne—or they shouldn’t be if VanDyne was in the practice of hiring moreys.

  And the Knights certainly weren’t hiring feline hit squads.

  Angel looked up from the wheel and sighed.

  Everything seemed to fit together so smoothly, and then she hit a wall.

  She was only a few blocks short of the coast. Up that way was VanDyne HQ itself, across the street from the Hyatt Memorial. That started her thinking in a new direction.

  She hit the controls on the BMW’s comm, cutting the music and activating it for outgoing calls. She frowned in frustration when she realized that her car’s antenna was still sitting in a gutter somewhere around the Pyramid. She killed the engine, turned the wheels toward the curb, and looked for a public comm.

  The search took her halfway around the cycle she’d been traveling. She ended up having to loop around the postquake Sheraton to get to a comm on Market. She pulled up to it, the BMW facing down the hill and toward the Bay.

  There was really no rule that prevented her from calling VanDyne herself and asking about Byron. It was the kind of thing she felt stupid about not realizing sooner.

  The comm squatted in a spanking new booth sitting within its own blue aura. She got out of the car and listened to the foghorns in the distance, the surf, gulls—almost felt normal.


  Then she realized that the salt air off the bay carried the smell of old smoke, and as she closed on the comm booth she saw new graffiti, “Off the Pink.”

  “Off the Pink,” half a block down from the Sheraton.

  Angel shrugged and ran her card through the comm’s reader and called up the directory. The World Headquarters for VanDyne Industrial was just a few blocks up Market. Right on the coast, and pretty damn close to all the BS that had happened to her.

  There was a brief thought that those punks in The Rabbit Hole could have been there for Byron, and not just fucking around. No, that didn’t quite make sense, did it?

  She glanced up Market as she started to call. “Wha?”

  Was it paranoia, or was that four-door Chevy Caldera parked up the street the same one that had been behind her at the last light? If so, it had followed her around the Sheraton. On the comm, someone was saying, “Van Dyne Industrial, can I help you?”

  Angel ignored it, and walked back to her car. Okay, she thought in Lei’s direction, I’ve gone totally paranoid. Angel tried to stay calm, but she was running by the time she got to the BMW.

  She slammed the door behind her and jerked the car into the street, flooring it. The BMW shot down Market, toward the Bay. Angel took a few deep breaths and groped under the seat for the gun.

  It wasn’t there.

  And there was an unfamiliar smell in the back seat.

  The BMW had made it half a block by the time she turned around. Had she been that stupid?

  Her unwanted passenger was already returning to an upright position. In one hand was Angel’s Beretta, in the other was an FN P101—a small machine pistol with a trapezoidal barrel whose hole was the diameter of Angel’s index finger. He was a feline the size of a jaguar but with fur a uniform tawny color.

  Angel’s foot was still pressing down on the accelerator as he leveled the machine pistol at her. For some reason she noticed the hands. Large, powerful hands with gloss-black claws that reflected the streetlights shooting by.