by P. R. Adams
One of the other cars drifted back toward us.
The leading one moved up on Danny, slowly choking off the road ahead of him.
Danny took the Super-Ninja onto the narrow shoulder, then there was no space ahead for him to take, and he was gone, plunging out of sight.
“Shit!” I squeezed the steering wheel. We were outnumbered, and they had better gear.
The car that had dropped back earlier drew closer.
I yanked Ichi into the car. “Buckle up. Now.”
We rounded another bend, and ahead, the air limo hovered over a straight run. Time had run out.
I jerked hard on the wheel as we closed on the car ahead of us. It was like the one used by the assassins at the ranch. They were fast, agile. And light. Lighter than the sluggish thing I was driving. The front left of my fender dug into the rear passenger tire. The driver’s head—covered with a ski mask—came up, glanced up at the rearview mirror, but it was too late.
The car fishtailed slightly. I caught its rear passenger quarter panel with the front quarter panel on my side and pushed it into the oncoming lane, toward the cliff wall.
My windshield splintered into an intricate web, followed immediately by the rear windshield.
I lost contact with the other car. “Chan!”
“Sniper. I know. Nearly there. Defenses keep changing.”
The bullet must have come close, but Chan was absorbed in the hacking.
Thermographic imagery eliminated the worst of the obscurement of the cracked windshield, but as we sped beneath the air limo, the lead car quickly dropped back to our position. The pilot spun the air limo around, giving the sniper a shot at our rear.
I braked, and the damaged car banged into us just as the sniper fired. The round tore through our car’s roof and grazed my leg.
It’s still functional. Stay focused.
I accelerated, trying to pull away from the lead car. Impossible, even before my rental had taken so much damage.
They had their windows down, masked people with guns turning toward us.
“Get down!” I swerved into the other car, knocking the gunmen back from their windows for a moment.
But there were only so many times I could do that, and things were getting worse.
And now there was a third car speeding toward us.
Another round tore through the roof, this time catching me in the right tricep area. My arm felt like it came out of its socket and went limp.
I drove with my off hand. “Chan! Get that car out of the air!”
“Yeah,” Chan shouted. “Done!”
Something shifted in the tenor of the air limo fans’ hum, and a second later, the vehicle plunged to the road, crashing into the wounded, trailing car.
Two cars left, one of them damaged, the other accelerating toward us. Almost manageable.
Almost.
I swerved into the damaged car and tried to push it into the cliff, but all I could manage was to keep it in the oncoming lane.
Ichi must have realized the trouble I was in, because she unbuckled and leaned out the window, spraying the damaged car as the gunmen brought their weapons up again.
The driver started pushing me back, trying to get out of the other lane.
Why? The approaching car would come at me, not him. Wouldn’t it?
But it wasn’t. It was staying in the oncoming traffic lane, heading right at the other car.
The oncoming car’s door opened, and a human form shot out. A bubble inflated around the form, growing, bounding off the road, arcing out over the dropoff, bouncing up, over the rails, and out of sight.
Reckless. Insane. We were speeding straight at a head-on collision, on a narrow mountain road.
“Ichi, get in!” I reached for her with my right arm, surprised that I could even lift it.
She fell back in her seat and desperately reached for the seatbelt.
The gunmen in the other car aimed, and I hit the brakes. Hard.
The other vehicle shot forward and the driver swerved. Too late.
With a horrendous shriek of metal and tinkling of shattered glass, the vehicles crashed into each other, front ends plunging low and rear ends climbing.
We came to a stop a few feet beyond the twisted wreck.
The shattered windshield of our ambushers’ car was red with blood except where one of the gunmen had been launched through it. The top of the gunman’s head was pulped, like ground beef.
Ichi stared at me, pale, hands braced against the window frame, knuckles white, muscles bulging along her arm and shoulder.
“You okay?” I knew she wasn’t.
“I—” She blinked.
“Yeah. We’ll all need to change our pants.” A glance in the rearview mirror revealed a new look for Chan, trembling lips and wide eyes—more frightened than when the cybernetic assassins had attacked us in the hotel room. “Chan?”
Chan nodded. “New pants.”
Something rumbled toward us from the direction we’d come. I pulled my pistol, shoved the door open with some effort, then braced on unsteady legs. Real flesh would’ve been a lot less steady in that situation.
A motorcycle came around the distant bend—black, sleek. It slowed.
The rider brought it to a stop in a pool of shadow, straightened, pulled off a glossy black helmet.
Danny.
I headed back toward him, still trying to sequence everything into something approximately linear. They’d been waiting for us, known the path we’d take. Three vehicles, an air limo.
And then a fourth vehicle had rammed into one of them.
The bubble!
I ran to where I thought the bubble had gone over the mountainside. About sixty feet down, a short woman with dark hair was extricating herself from a deflated rubbery shape. She wore a black bodysuit—slick, bulging at the shoulders with armored plates.
She glanced up at me, big brown eyes alert, small mouth pursed. Her movements were choppy, almost birdlike. Full cheeks puffed out. Korean, maybe; Chinese more likely. “It’s good to see you alive, Mr. Mendoza. I wasn’t sure I had made it in time.” Spoken with hardly any accent.
“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but who the hell are you?”
“Huiyin Lin. I’ve come to save your life.”
Chapter 10
We pushed the rental off the road and descended into the woods below while Danny and Ichi retrieved her car from a trail about ten miles out from the crash site. The car was charcoal gray, a generic Chinese model that was smaller and more sluggish than my rental. It smelled like it had just come off a used car lot, cleaners and air fresheners. But with four of us squeezed in, it was tight, and it didn’t take long for Chan’s smell to overpower everything else. Fortunately, the place Huiyin was taking us to was just over an hour away. She spent the first half of the drive alternating between sullen glares at Chan and grunting clipped directions. When I pulled onto a stretch of interstate about ten minutes out, Chan finally said we were clear.
Danny radioed that he would run decoy to be sure, then sped off.
Shadow became twilight as we pulled into a little subdivision of single-story houses with fresh-looking paint and pristine siding. The places were large for the area, the smallest probably over twenty-five hundred square feet, all of them in good repair, with well-manicured lawns. Even the streetlights—quaintly fashioned after old gaslight lamps—worked.
Money. In a region of the country that didn’t have much.
Huiyin activated the garage door using a palm-sized data device, and I pulled in. The headlights revealed gardening tools hanging from hooks, and the fresh mountain air was replaced by the stuffy smell of tools, oil, and fresh-cut grass.
I powered the car down and said, “You don’t strike me as the lawn care fanatic sort, and a cozy ranch house in the mountains of West Virginia seems even less authentic.”
Huiyin smirked. “The people I work for have many connections.”
“And who would those people b
e?”
“The same people Dong Jianjun was supposed to be working for.”
Chinese intelligence. “I’m assuming revenge isn’t on the menu.”
“Mr. Dong brought about his own demise.”
“And you are here to save me why?”
The dome light came on when she opened the car door. “We can speak inside, where the air is fresher.”
A quick glance at Chan caught the color where ink didn’t cover cheeks; the blow had landed.
Inside, the house was cool, the air laced with holiday aromas. We passed through a utility room into a hall with bedrooms off of it and a long dining room at the end. The aromas came from a table there, covered with stacks of plastic boxes stuffed with Christmas detritus: a disassembled tree, ornaments and a wreath, wrapping paper, lights. At the other end of the long dining room was the sort of kitchen people saved up for but could only afford in the years where they were too old and tired to appreciate it—stainless steel appliances, high-end cutlery, granite countertops, and tailor-made cabinets with a matching island. The living room off to the left of the kitchen was even more impressive—plush leather furniture, pale oak paneling, mountain stone hearth and tile.
I put the lid on one of the boxes and clamped it shut, then strode to the refrigerator, noting the expiration date on the carton of eggnog that rested on the front of the main shelf. I pulled out a bottle of beer—expensive, trendy. “So you were saving me from someone?”
Huiyin caught the refrigerator door before it closed. “Many someones.” She pulled a beer out for herself, then surprised Ichi by tossing her one.
Chan set the hefty backpack down beside the table with a thud. “Where’s the bathroom?”
Huiyin twisted the top on the bottle off, sucked away foam, then pointed the opposite direction from where we’d come. “First door on the right.” She glared at Chan’s back while sipping beer.
When the bathroom door closed, I said, “Chan’s a gifted Gridhound.”
“He needs to clean himself up.”
“One thing you have to understand about Chan: Chan is Chan. No he. No she. And the obvious isn’t really that. Not with Chan. We deal with it because we’re a team. An effective team.”
Huiyin snorted. “This job carries too many risks for unnecessary complications.”
“And this job relies on trust. I trust Chan. And Ichi. And Danny.”
Huiyin sauntered into the living room, set her beer down on an end table, peeled off her jacket, and plopped onto one of the leather chairs. A sheer, sleeveless black mesh blouse clung to her slender body. Not overly athletic, but she carried herself confidently. “You have any idea who wants you dead?”
I leaned against the wall separating kitchen and living room. “I can give you a pretty big list. My former employer sits at the top.”
“The Agency?” She took a long drink. “They have problems of their own right now.”
“They outsource a lot of cleanup work. I just assumed these were guns for hire.” I had no reason to share all my thoughts.
“Guns for hire using cars not on the market?”
Ichi crossed between me and Huiyin, sauntering the same way she had. Mocking? Attempting to seduce? The smaller Chinese woman’s eyes tracked Ichi until she settled on a sofa against the wall to my right. There was something going on between them already. I didn’t need Ichi distracting a potential ally or enemy just to show me she could.
I slid to the floor with a groan—authentic but amplified. “If it’s not the Agency, then who?”
Huiyin’s eyes returned to me. “A company. An American company with substantial ties to Chinese interests.”
“I think you named about half the American corporations that still exist.”
“This one also has ties to your Agency.”
That substantially reduced the list of suspects. “Is this a game, or do you legitimately not know who’s trying to kill me?”
“I have no time for games, Mr. Mendoza.”
“Stefan’s fine. So we have a short list of companies behind an effort to kill me. Do we have a why?”
“You killed their man.”
“I’ve killed a lot of people.”
She bowed toward me slightly, which could have been respectful acknowledgement or mockery. “Dong Jianjun.”
Pieces fell into place. She didn’t care about keeping me alive. She wanted to sever ties between their double agent and this mysterious corporation. Or she wanted me to think that. “You must have ideas about how to identify this company?”
“Jianjun—” Her lips squeezed tight. “We have accessed Dong’s accounts. He was not as careful covering his bribes as he should have been. We know there was money coming from multiple sources. One was through a name you should be familiar with: Heidi Ostertag.”
Money coming through Heidi? “You sure about that? She’s even more ex-Agency than me.”
Huiyin finished her beer. “I didn’t say it was Agency money.”
Ichi sipped at her beer and made a face. It was just enough to give away that she wasn’t a drinker. She looked at me, mimicking Huiyin’s cool demeanor. “Do you think Heidi was playing us, Stefan?” She was even trying to sound like the Chinese agent, mimicking the almost-American accent.
“Anything’s possible.” I did have questions for Heidi, but I had a hard time believing she was involved with the people trying to kill me.
Chan stepped out of the bathroom, trailing mist, towel roughing up spiky magenta hair. There was a stop at the refrigerator to procure a beer, then a hasty shuffle to the table to grab the backpack, followed by the scraping of a chair pulled out from the dining room table. Perfume and soap floated in Chan’s steamy wake—sweet and nutty—then the Gridhound took a seat.
I barely noticed the sensor being retrieved from the backpack’s underside. Slick.
Chan’s magenta eyes floated in the dark corner. “You sharing Dong’s data?”
Huiyin’s lips puckered in an extended pout, then she flicked a data card to me. “There is nothing more to be had from it. What you want is on that.”
It was Chan’s turn to snort. I set the card down at the table end, stacked a few boxes on the floor to clear room, then watched the careful assembly of computing components. For the first time, I noticed the Zen-like ritual behind Chan’s motions, the care taken with each connection and positioning. Long, skinny fingers with black metallic-painted nails worked the components into a semi-octagonal screen, erecting a shield against the outside world. I took the inevitable pair of VR goggles when offered and turned the chair at the opposite end of the table around, propping my chin against its back.
The world was black, a void. I called out, “Ichi, if we lock up—”
She was beside me, radiating heat, beer on her breath, fingers squeezing my shoulder. “You are safe.”
I smiled; I hadn’t heard her.
The virtual world blossomed like a meadow in spring—morning star indigo, the vibrant cerulean of a clear midday sky, deep ruby red, rich marigold. The colors dulled into the drab gray of an office building, then into the sleek black of some sort of idealized aircraft or ship, then into what might have been an office or cabin. Razor-thin strips of bright green LEDs outlined the contours of a desk, the room. An egg-shaped chair traced in brilliant cyan and cut from the same oil-slick black material spun, revealing a seated Avatar-Chan, surrounded by gold pillows.
I spun around, taking in the furniture. “New digs?”
Avatar-Chan waved, and a matching chair absent the pillows lit up. “Safer here. No Jacinto.”
It didn’t seem like there would ever be a place on the Grid where there could be no Jacinto, not after what had happened the last time we’d gone into a VR session. “Can you trace this data without him knowing you’re running around like this?”
“He’ll be preoccupied.”
“What about Miss Lin?”
Displays rained down from the ceiling, growing from a few inches across to a yard, then tw
o. Huiyin’s image filled the displays—on some, the petite Chinese woman who sat in the living room; on others, a bloated version or one modified in caricature: mustached, bearded, covered in pimples, buck-toothed.
I focused on the display showing the woman no doubt watching us. The other displays disappeared. “She sounds like she’s spent some time in the States.”
“Twelve years. An aunt in California. Dual citizenship.”
That sounded legitimate. Agencies pursued people who could move around easily, although the Chinese usually preferred students and the like. “Anything else?”
“Twenty-nine. No sign of advanced education. Seems like a marginal IQ.”
“Let it go, Chan. If she’s here to help us, let’s use it.”
Avatar-Chan curled around a pillow. “The data dive won’t be easy.”
“All right. Keep digging on Huiyin when you have the cycles to spare. I’ve got some others I need to know about. Six people killed about an hour outside Denver. I’ll send you some images and the particulars. Several more in Emmett, Idaho, same time frame.”
“Okay.”
Displays slowly rose from the desktop, and a complicated panel of interfaces flared to life in front of Avatar-Chan’s chair. Delicate hands settled in the air over the interfaces, then a mad dance of tapping, swipes, and swirls brought the displays to life. The displays took on a 3-D appearance, and within the display, a Grid took form.
Avatar-Chan mumbled, “Heidi was sloppy with her security. Easy passwords.”
“You mean you recorded her.”
“And they were easy to guess.” Sullen tone, matched by Avatar-Chan’s nostrils flaring.
The Grid resolved into recognizable icons: cylindrical manila data stores, angry red security access cubes, circular magenta Grid relays. Chan was building out a metaphor layer for a hack, something I’d watched Jacinto do a couple times. It was an uncomfortable thing to watch, even if you were familiar with how Gridhounds saw the world—virtual and real. They lived off patterns, rituals, memory, and instinct, and no two operated exactly the same.
