Still, he wasn’t in a position to be choosy. He pulled out of the lot and hoped that Oxford wasn’t the type to go making a police report about his stolen vehicle. Besides, he could probably trade some of his hoard on the street for something as good, if not better. The way the car smelled, Nohar suspected that was how he got this one.
The car’s comm had been ripped out and sold a long time ago, so Nohar stopped at a public comm on the way back to Beverly’s building. It was just as well. With all the attention focused on Manuel, he didn’t want to risk anyone tracing the search he was about to make back to a comm anywhere near him.
He pulled over on a street that was mostly empty, flanked by boarded-up shops and a vacant lot. There was a kiosk with a public comm, wrapped in graffiti that looked like psychedelic urban camouflage. The only people around were a trio of rodents sitting in the doorway of the building across the street. They were passing something around between them. At this distance Nohar couldn’t tell if it was alcohol or drugs.
Nohar left the car and walked up to the comm. He left the flywheel running in the Python in case he needed to make a quick exit.
He wasn’t a hacker, and he was never much of anything with computers, but his job as a private eye had given him the opportunity to pick up a few tricks from Bobby. One of those tricks was picking up people from their aliases—the handle they used on the net.
He was looking for someone named “The Necron Avenger.”
Necron was the name Oxford had given him, the only way Manuel had ever referred to his hacker friend. In his mind, Nohar was already thinking of Necron as a young version of Bobby. He couldn’t help but wonder if Manuel had met Necron under similar circumstances. Were they drawn together because they were both outcasts? Nohar had been raised in a human neighborhood, and the only friend he had was the weak little kid in the wheelchair. A mule in a moreau community was in almost the same position.
Nohar told himself to stop speculating about the kid and started the comm cycling into the public news databases. Unlike the commercial news databases, where Nohar usually did his research, anyone and their second cousin could post an article on the public database. Even with the rough indexing the database provided, there was so much information—most of it trash—that any given article was lucky to receive a single reader from the millions accessing the net every day.
To find anything in that morass of home-produced programming, Nohar needed a series of very specific filters to weed out everything he didn’t want. He had one very basic filter—Necron’s handle.
In a few moments he indexed every article The Necron Avenger had made in the last month. He was in a hurry, so he put a few extra dollars into the comm to download the articles to a ramcard, which the machine spat out at him.
He wasn’t after what Necron was saying right now. He was after where Necron was.
Even though the net was a high-tech colossus connecting every comm and most of the full-fledged computers on the planet, the way it propagated information hadn’t changed much since the turn of the century. Everything, from phoned messages to news broadcasts, flowed along the optic cables from node to node, winding its way to whatever destination. Each node along the way left its signature on the transmission, and even at a public comm, it was possible to filter the headers on any particular message to find out where it originated.
In a few moments Nohar had isolated a set of arcane strings of characters. Each string pointed to a node somewhere that had received the article and passed it on, all the way back to the node that had first received Necron’s messages.
The first thing Nohar did was check the first node for each of the messages he had for Necron, about two dozen. All originated from the same node.
That was promising. Almost everyone with a computer or a comm that wasn’t in a high security situation left their access to the net on permanently. However, hackers were different. Many of them left their computers and comms isolated from the net, only connecting when they were doing something specific. A lot of them, especially those who skirted the law like Bobby used to, would manufacture their own temporary node on the net, complete with faux IDs. They would then use their temporary nodes to connect to whatever they were doing anonymously, then disconnect their computers from the net.
The fact that Necron’s originating address was constant meant that he was using the same server each time he posted an article to the database. That meant either he wasn’t a professional like Bobby, or he was sophisticated enough to manufacture a permanent bogus address to block tracers. Nohar doubted the latter; pros like that dealt in the shadows, and generally didn’t post to the public databases.
Necron was probably just an amateur with a talent with computers. It also meant he probably didn’t do anything much illegal. It was possible to do a business in data trafficking without necessarily skirting the law.
Nohar logged on to the server, and like most servers, it wasn’t too protective of its user list. He managed to feed in Necron’s handle and it spat back Necron’s given name—or at least an alias that he was more likely to use in the world off of the net.
Oswald Samson.
It was another name that was easy to trace. There was only one Oswald Samson in the whole Compton area as far as the city directory was concerned. Nohar left the comm with Necron’s address.
* * *
• • •
Oswald Samson lived in a little white one-family ranch house on the edge of where Compton began to bleed into the other southeastern LA suburbs. The yard was wrapped in chain-link, and the windows had the curtains drawn against the darkness outside. The sky was dark, and the streetlights lit the area like a stage set.
Nohar wasn’t certain that this was Necron’s residence. There was a good chance that Necron picked “Oswald Samson” out of the directory, just as Nohar had. There was also a chance that this wasn’t the right Oswald Samson. However the fact that he was a resident in Compton made Nohar think that there was a good chance that Oswald was Manuel’s hacker.
Nohar parked on the street and stepped out of the car. In the distance, music was blaring, and he heard the sounds of laughter and partying. Someone was having fun a few houses down. Nohar could smell the beer from here.
Oswald’s house was quiet and dark.
Just looking at it made Nohar’s hackles rise. He felt his adrenaline kicking in even before he realized why. He smelled humans. The scent was faint, but at one point there were enough standing around here to saturate the air with the odor of their sweat.
Nohar let himself through the gate and drew the Vind as soon as he was out of direct line of sight of the street. Now he was paying attention to everything. The lawn had been crushed. He could still see signs of footprints treading the weeds into the soil.
When he got to the front door, it was obvious that the doorjamb had been splintered by someone forcing the door. It was just closed now for appearances.
He began to feel ugly flashbacks of his visit to Royd’s house. He was too late again; he could feel it. He was certain that he would find Oswald Samson’s body somewhere inside the house.
He wanted to leave right now. A sudden certainty that the LAPD would descend on this place overwhelmed him. But he didn’t really have an option. He had to follow any lead that might help him reach his son.
Nohar pushed the door open, keeping the place covered with his gun.
Streetlights filtered through the door and illuminated what was left of Oswald Samson’s house. Someone had been looking for something, and the way things looked, they hadn’t found it.
Not only had they shredded the carpet, eviscerated the furniture, they had even gone so far as to tear the drywall out, exposing the wood frame of the building and the wiring. The lights were out because they’d been dismantled and were lying on the floor. The comm had been taken apart, and the electronics were scattered throughout the room.
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Nohar wandered through the house. Floorboards had been taken up, pipes had been pulled from the wall and opened. The lining of the refrigerator had been torn out. The sheet-metal ducts for the air-conditioning had been slit open and peeled back. No object in the house had been left intact.
But there was no body. Oswald Samson hadn’t shared Royd’s fate.
By now, Nohar didn’t need to ask what everyone was looking for. It wasn’t Manuel, it was in that package he swiped, the one delivered to the Compton Clinic by mistake. From the look of the disassembled comm, Nohar suspected that it was a ramcard that was in that package.
He spent about half an hour sifting through the wreckage. There wasn’t much here that told him what he wanted to know. He did manage to find fragments of Oswald’s personal life. The guy was human, and had a teenage kid. He found holos of both of them, tossed in with piles of other junk. He didn’t find signs of Oswald’s wife, or signs that he’d ever had one. He did, however, find the kid’s room. It was as trashed as the rest of the house, the comm just as disassembled.
It also didn’t take long for Nohar to find something that didn’t sync with the Necron he was looking for. He found a plaque honoring Oswald Samson for twenty-five years of service with the INS. That didn’t make sense. First off, Oswald had a job working for the Fed. Nohar couldn’t see Manuel palling around with a government agent, even if he was just an immigration officer. Second, that plaque put Oswald in his mid-forties at least, as old as Nohar. As Bobby had said, hacking was a young man’s game. Lastly, Oswald was a pink. . . .
All of this made Nohar start wondering about Oswald’s kid. The kid must’ve been around Manuel’s age. . . .
Nohar walked around to the living room and picked up the broken holo of Oswald and son. He studied it, hunting for some clue to what had happened to his own son.
• • •
When he stepped out the door of Oswald’s ranch, he was hit by a chlorine smell that made his nose itch. It was powerful enough that it overwhelmed anything subtler. Nohar froze in the doorway, looking around, searching for movement.
He could almost see the fumes hovering over the lawn.
Someone had tried to cover their scent, and had done a good job of it. He knew the smell; it was chlorine bleach. Nohar’s hand hovered near the holster as he slowly made his way down the walk toward his commandeered car. At each step, he looked away into the darkness, down both sides of the street, checking for an ambush.
The only signs of life were from the party that was still going on down the street.
He reached his car without any incident. By now the bleach had numbed his nose to the point where the car could have been doused in it and he wouldn’t be able to tell.
Chapter 16
“Nohar, what have you done to yourself?” Maria stared at him as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing.
“Is that you?” Henderson asked. Both of them were wearing blousy shirts and pants that were a decade away from any style. Nohar presumed the clothes belonged to Beverly. Maria was wearing green and Henderson was wearing navy. Nohar thought they should swap colors.
He stood in the doorway and said, “Can I come in?”
Beverly’s voice came from back in the apartment. “He can’t fit through with you both clogging the doorway.”
The other two stared at him, as if they didn’t quite trust his new appearance. But they moved aside so Nohar could duck inside the apartment.
Nohar ducked plants as he moved to the cramped corner where Beverly’s comm sat. As the door shut, Maria swiveled her chair around to face him. “What have you been doing all afternoon?”
Nohar sat and took out the ramcard he’d minted at the public comm. “Checking out Manuel’s acquaintances.” He slipped the ramcard into Beverly’s comm. “They’re watching the Clinic.”
Henderson sat down next to him. A ghost of chlorine still haunted his nose, but he could just make out the odor of her musk next to him. She touched his arm and asked, “You went to the Clinic? Wasn’t that dangerous?”
The touch may have been innocent, but Nohar didn’t feel it that way. He moved his arm from under it by turning on the comm and starting to run through the record of Necron’s public messages. “The new coloring bought me some cover. Didn’t stay long.”
“Did you find out anything about Manuel?” Maria asked. There was a catch in her voice and Nohar couldn’t bring himself to say that their son had been supplementing his income with petty theft. He sidestepped the issue.
“I found a coworker with a lead. Manuel may have a ramcard with information these guys are looking for.”
“Like, what you have there?” Henderson asked.
“Another victim of the Bad Guys,” Nohar said.
Beverly turned toward all of them from the kitchen side of the room. “Why don’t you all take a break for dinner?”
• • •
Nohar ate dinner as he perused The Necron Avenger’s collected works. Most were the typical hacker montages of sound video and text that were spliced together with little regard for form or sense. One article consisted of Mozart’s 25th Symphony conducted by electric guitars and overlaid with images of the Race—the one nonhuman species that wasn’t created on Earth. It culminated with news footage of the bombing of Alcatraz.
That article was called “Requiem.”
There was one called “Drips,” more recent. This was a collage of human generals and government officials spliced in with combat footage of the Pan-Asian War, mostly moreau corpses. Spliced in with that were scenes of human-supremacy groups preaching that the moreaus were so much genetic waste from the war, and should be disposed of like any hazardous material.
Another untitled piece was strictly sexual images run through slide-show fashion, intercut with subliminal images of needles and surgical procedure.
Nohar didn’t know what to make of Necron’s work, but there was a theme running through it—a near obsession with the moreau world that was at odds with what Nohar had seen of Oswald Samson. It might explain a pink owning a house in Compton.
The more of his work Nohar saw, the more he realized how paranoid and apocalyptic Necron’s point of view was. There was a sense of intractable evil in the world Necron portrayed, a cycle of pain that led inevitably to disease and death.
The subtext—maybe it was even the point of all the messages—was that the disease and death were engineered by those who ran the country.
Necron made him uneasy. . . .
He was on his seventh message from the Necron Avenger when the comm went dead. Nohar looked up at the other three. Maria and Henderson were quietly talking to Beverly, finishing the last of their dinner. None of them had noticed anything going wrong.
Nohar had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. He got up from the comm and started moving to the front door, ducking under the pipes and around the three females.
“Nohar?” Beverly was the first one to notice him move, though she wasn’t even facing him.
“Shh.” Nohar kept moving to take position next to the door. He didn’t have time to reach for his gun. Almost at the same time, the lights in the apartment went out and the door flew open.
“Nobody move!”
Nohar saw the arm belonging to the owner of that voice. It was pointing something into the room. Nohar didn’t wait to see what it was. He grabbed the wrist, moving his leg so he could pull the speaker into his knee.
When his knee struck flesh, Nohar brought his other hand down on the back of the intruder’s skull. The person flipped over his knee, and landed flat on his back. Whatever he’d been armed with went sailing into the room.
Nohar placed his foot on the intruder’s throat, immobilizing him.
There was a pair of light-enhancing goggles on the guy’s face, and Nohar tore them off, revealing the intruder’s face. Nohar recognized hi
m from his picture—
Looking up at him was Oswald Samson’s son.
Now that he was face-to-face with the kid, he could see the oversized skull and the elongated fingers. The kid was a frank—a genetically engineered human.
Necron finally made sense to Nohar.
The kid coughed and spat, and managed to wheeze, “Where’s my father?”
• • •
After it was clear that the kid was alone, Nohar sent Henderson out to fix what the kid had done to the power. Nohar restrained the kid with a belt and threw him on the couch. He retrieved the kid’s weapon, a government-issue.45 automatic that probably belonged to his father.
Nohar shook his head and turned to the kid. The aggressiveness was gone. The kid seemed to deflate on the couch. Nohar saw him clearly in the dark, but frank or not, without the light-amplification gear his eyes probably hadn’t adjusted to the dark.
“You were trying to do what?” Nohar asked the kid. He looked at the gun and thought of a wild shot hitting Maria, or Henderson, or Beverly, and felt a lethal anger building. The adrenaline was still surging and hadn’t found a true outlet yet. It was the kind of internal high that he could do anything on.
He leveled the Vind at the kid’s forehead. “Explain. Now.”
“I’m looking for my dad.” His head tuned back and forth, as if he was trying to find Nohar.
“How did you get here?”
“Followed you.”
There it was. This kid had come home to trashed house and missing father. When Nohar’d shown up, the kid had seen him and assumed he was one of the Bad Guys. He had even used the bleach to cover his scent. He’d probably been inside the house when Nohar had walked up to the door, and had slipped outside while Nohar was searching the place.
The lights came on again, and after a few moments the comm came back to life, still in the midst of playing one of Necron’s messages. Nohar looked at the frank kid, no more than fourteen—for a human still a child—his eyes locked on the gun, and he could feel real fear begin to wash off of the kid in waves.
The Moreau Quartet: Volume One: 1 Page 39
