Silhouette

by Dave Swavely

  “This is a flatmovie-viewing room,” said the peacer I was following. I knew it was he because “A-1” appeared in the corner of my glasses while he spoke. He moved over to the wall to his right and drew his gun. The falcon I was looking through swung out and around until it faced a door that said PRESS CLUB THEATER and the park employee standing next to it in his conspicuous uniform. He was dressed like the old popcorn and hot dog vendors who had worked the crowd during sporting events, and he was frozen stiff, staring openmouthed at the menacing black machine.

  While the point man gestured with his gun, softly but firmly telling the nervous man to step away from the door, I switched back to the dual screen and took in the thermal. The second peacer was arriving at the other entrance to the theater, farther down the same tunnel, and the third was positioning himself on the other side of the theater. I wondered where this was, so I asked the editor to give me F-3. In a moment, I was looking through another bird at the third peacer, who was outside. He was crouched near a door on the high, thin walkway that had been extended from the elevated press boxes on the intact, north side of the stadium, so that the visitors who were bold enough to traverse it could see the whole inside of the stadium, including the wrecked south side, in all its glory.

  “Go full for a second,” Twitch said to me, and I did, the falcon’s view filling mine. He tilted it down, giving me a vertigo-inducing look over the thin railing, then swept the stadium briefly, reminding me of my one visit here as a tourist, which was quite enough, thank you very much. The stadium’s owners had chosen to leave the ruins basically as they lay (fallen light rigs, bloodstains and all) after the quake had rudely interrupted a concert, killing more than two thousand people and wounding more than ten thousand. By a gruesome twist of fate, that particular daytime event was being broadcast live, so numerous cameras with independent power sources captured hundreds of images of people being crushed, impaled, and dissected by falling debris, or thrown to their deaths from the upper levels. The recovered footage was now shown daily to spellbound sightseers in several theaters like the one Korcz was in now.

  I reverted to the split screen and told Twitch, in my business voice, to send in F-1. On my right screen, I was back in the first falcon, which floated past the point man and into the door he had opened. At first, the interior was all black, but then Twitch turned on the infrared and I could see, from the side, quite a few people situated in ascending rows, staring at the screen. He turned the falcon to show both agents readied near the two entrances, then flew it to a spot in the air between the screen and the people.

  Through the bird’s speaker, and in an electronically modified voice that boomed louder than the movie, Twitch told everyone to remain in their seats and be calm. Then he maneuvered to the left middle of the audience, and I saw the small blue blip nearing the red and green ones on my left screen.

  “Mr. Valeri Korcz,” the hovering falcon said as I switched to full screen so I could have a better view of the man, whose two accomplices turned out to be an elderly couple. “Please put your hands in the air and move slowly to the end of the row. No harm will come to—”

  And then all hell broke loose. Korcz dived behind his aging friends, and Twitch proved true to his name, firing immediately. The soft shell streaked right between their heads and hit Korcz on the hip, exploding in a cascade of green gas. The old couple, and whoever else was sitting close enough, slumped over, unconscious. But Korcz must have exhaled with impeccable timing (not an easy trick), because through the cloud I saw him disappearing off the screen. Twitch must not have seen it, because he didn’t move the bird right away, so I switched back to dual screen and watched the red blip dive for the back right corner of the room. The two peacers, and the second falcon, gave chase as Korcz stepped over seats and gasping people until he finally barreled through the exit, finding himself on the high walkway about fifty feet from the crouching third agent.

  The editor put me in the third falcon just in time to see Korcz simultaneously reach for his guns and dive backward—another impressive move. The peacer in front of me fired two stopper rounds, but because of the slight curve in the walkway, his moving target was partially obscured, and both of the softsteel Xs grazed the railing just enough to be detoured.

  What wasn’t obscured at all by the railing, however, was Korcz’s angle on the hovering falcon, and he earned kudos again by sending a barrage of bullets its way. All I could see through the camera was the flash of his muzzles in the distance, and then darkness, as it became obvious that at least one of the projectiles had smashed the lens. Others must have impacted elsewhere on the bird, because it fell to the walkway, distracting the crouching peacer long enough for Korcz to climb over one of the old press boxes and into the upper-level seating. I gathered this from the thermal view, because the right side of the glasses was dark until the other falcons emerged from the theater and fanned out toward the area where Korcz had disappeared.

  “A-2, go back into the tunnel and stay parallel with his location,” I said. “There’s nowhere to go up there, so we just have to keep him from leaving.”

  The peacer and his falcon obeyed, heading back through the theater, while the other two men pressed up against the press boxes and moved cautiously forward, waiting for the remaining bird to locate Korcz. It did, not long after, and the man was running wildly through the seats toward the west, away from the agents’ position. I watched him from a distance, because Twitch had pulled the falcon way back, not wanting to lose another one of his toys. I soon grew thankful for the wide angle, however, because at its left edge I could now see Korcz’s objective.

  The mad run was not mere desperation, after all.

  I moused the glasses until the falcon’s view was reduced to the far left and I could see through the rest. I grabbed both ends of the gun belt embedded in the seat behind me, snapped them together at my stomach, and pulled the holstered boas around to the front. I throttled forward, toward the top of the stadium, and slightly to the left as I gauged where Korcz would be by now.

  When the aero crested the top of the old ruin, I saw the tiny shape of the man, running with his back to me, well on his way to the floor of the stadium, where he could escape out the other side. As I presumed, he had been running for one of the stadium’s huge light poles, which had fallen across the upper level and been bent, but not broken, its upper length and the lights attached to it stretching all the way down to the field. Korcz was using it like a ramp, running down it with the concentration and steel nerves of a high-wire artist. The two peacers on the catwalk were firing at him, but the stopper rounds weren’t very accurate at that distance, and only a few even hit the metal around him. Twitch, taking this all in through his falcon, spoke up.

  “D’you want I should make a rush at him and gas him?” he said anxiously.

  “No, just hang,” I answered. “And tell the castle to send a few more cars, in case this doesn’t work.”

  I was still behind Korcz, but getting closer, and I had lowered the aero down near the rusty metal of the fallen pole. I slowed it slightly, hoping he wouldn’t hear the hum until I was upon him, and not wanting to kill him just yet. As he grew larger in the windshield, I brought the car down even farther and pointed the front bumper at his back.

  About a car length before I would have hit him, he suddenly looked back and then dropped, bouncing off the pole and down into the remains of the light array resting on the field. I couldn’t see whether or not he had lost the guns, so I switched the aero to hover and nudged it to the left a bit. As it was stopping and banking slightly, I slid to the passenger side, lowered the window, drew both of the boas, and stuck them out in front of me as I extended up and over the top of the car. Though my head, shoulders, and arms were exposed to the light array, the rest of me was safe behind the heavy fibersteel of the aero. I scanned the bulky, smashed mess with my eyes and with the guns, squinting at the reflections shining from it. My finger gripped the trigger of the right boa, with its fourteen c
aseless stopper rounds, but my other one only rested on the guard of the left gun, which held twenty killers.

  When nothing stirred in the debris, I retreated slightly into the car and tapped the glasses until the thermal view appeared at the left. Before I could enlarge it, I noticed the red spot moving away from a blue one, and pushed myself back up. Korcz had jumped out from under the array and was running away from me across the field, unarmed. I tucked the left boa under my right forearm, closed my left eye, and fired two stoppers at him. After my hand came down from the second kick, I saw his collapsed body curling up on the ground, in the middle of a cloud of dust.

  By the time I pulled the aero over to him and got out, he had managed to drag himself to the edge of a gaping fissure that ran through the center of the stadium’s field. He had also managed to pry loose a small knife that had been concealed under his arm. I took it from his almost-limp hand and threw it into the blackness of the crack, where it did not hit bottom, at least that I heard. As I went to turn him faceup, I saw the thick, bloody cross behind his right ear where one of the Xs had hit him. Based on the way he was struggling to move, I assumed the other one had hit him in the kidneys or lower spine. I turned him over, grabbed his lapels, and held his upper body over the edge of the crevasse.

  “There are a lot of dead people down there,” I said to him. “I’m sure they’d love some company.” Korcz blinked his eyes at the blood that had seeped over to his face during his crawl. In my mind, I pictured this man walking up to D’s car, my little girl staring at him from the back window. “Did. You. Kill. Darien. Anthony?”

  “What?” he said, or something that resembled it, and blinked a few more times.

  I pulled out the killer boa and held it to his face, my hand shaking from the rush of emotion, until I heard Twitch’s voice say, “Is everything all right, sir?” And on the left side of my vision, because the editor had switched back to the falcon view, I saw myself from behind and above, the dark maw of the crack on the other side of me so big that it looked like it could swallow me whole, if I wasn’t careful.

  6

  We took Korcz to the cathedral and locked him up, but within an hour it was obvious that this man was not the murderer. No fewer than five reliable and independent sources, both real and virtual, confirmed that he had flown into the Bay Area that morning, rather than three days ago, as Harris had said. He had come to visit his parents (the old couple), who still lived here. He was on vacation from a security job with an East Coast firm similar to ours, but smaller, and they had granted him his perfectly legitimate weapons clearance. He also had no explosives on him, or in the belongings we searched.

  Why had he run, then? Seems that he had been guilty of some financial indiscretions years ago when he was an agent of BASS. Darien had handled the problem personally in a discreet and gracious manner, allowing him to leave without controversy, and even serving as a reference for him later on when he applied for his new job—which explained the periodic contact between the two men.

  When Korcz heard that same morning that Darien had been killed, and then was confronted by a BASS posse, he thought that the clemency toward him had expired. The man also apparently had a deep-rooted paranoia about BASS leadership, which for some reason only Darien had been able to assuage. I made a mental note to ask him about this at some point before he was released, but now I was calling Harris from a net room in the castle, near the aero garage.

  The tech beside me was busy with my special instructions when the tattooed freak appeared on the screen. I didn’t want to endure his gloating, but there was a method to my madness.

  “Sir Michael Ares,” Harris barely managed to say in his talking-head voice, because he was laughing so hard. He clutched his stomach and rocked back and forth in his chair. “Leads an assault on an innocent man, almost killing his geriatric, heart-patient parents” (more laughing) “who immediately go to the press, when they wake up, describing the entire fiasco in vivid detail! This is Nirvana! The third heaven. Brainsmash, Headflip without the hangovers. A night with Marilyn—Monroe and Manson! I think it’s on the news right now.…” He started fumbling with some of the screens beside him.

  “I don’t want to see it,” I said. “You told me Korcz had been in town for three days, and that he had explosives on him.”

  “Beautiful, ain’t it?” he said, proud of himself. “After you asked me about those names, our Tricky Dickies ran a net scan, and found out he had flown in and bought three tickets for the Stick. I was hoping it would waste your time, at least, but I didn’t even dream (Dream Base Outer Space) of a John Woo firefight! And you phosgenated his mum” laughing again “best use of toxic chemicals since the Haiti massacre!”

  “You realize people could have been killed or wounded,” I said.

  “Torque ’em! That would have been Even Better Than the Real Thing.” He was singing again; it was definitely time for this discussion to end.

  “Harris,” I said, and the excuse for a man raised his eyebrow as high as it could go, cocked his head to the side, and showed me all his multicolored teeth.

  “Yes, my Cardinal Squeeze?”

  “You’ve worn out your welcome,” I said, and clicked him off. I asked the tech if he had successfully skirted the squatters’ jam and recorded the conversation. He said yes, and did I want to see it? I said no, but copied it to my glasses, and headed for the garage.

  * * *

  As I headed north to the Ranch to visit Paul, the olive green and black of the castle and the early-evening sun receding behind me, I put the glasses on and brought up the reports and inquiries that had reached my desk during the day. One was merely an informational item, about a BASS aero that had been fired upon by a punk in Japantown who had built his own bazooka. Another was an “external employment transfer”—read termination—that I immediately signed with my code, trusting the evaluator who had submitted it. Beyond that, there was nothing significant or pressing, so I spent the rest of the trip learning about the plan to expunge the squatters, which had been intricately outlined two years ago, then shelved. I liked the plan, so I notified the necessary people that they should be prepared by tomorrow to implement it at a moment’s notice.

  When I had finished that project and was approaching Paul’s Marin County residence, I finally began wondering why my boss and friend had seemed so troubled when he called me. He seemed to have no interest or excitement about the arrest of a possible suspect. Had he known that Korcz wasn’t the man? Or was this unrelated? I only knew it was something of weight, because the only other times I had been invited to the Ranch were for social occasions involving our whole family.

  As the memory of those family moments flooded into my mind, I pushed out the ones of the member I had lost and focused on the one who remained. I called Lynn, not really wanting to talk to her but thinking that I should. In fact, I used the audio on my glasses instead of the car phone, because I didn’t want to have to look her in the eye. The answering message came on, and I started talking to our net system, half hoping that she wouldn’t hear and answer.

  “Hi, Lynn,” I said. “I wanted to see how you’re doing. Dumb question, I guess. And, uh, just wanted to let you know that I plan to sleep at home tonight, or at least try to sleep—”

  “I don’t know,” she said, picking up the call. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what?” I said, bracing myself.

  “I don’t know if I want you to come home.”

  We were both silent for a while. On my end, I was weighing whether this was a good or a bad turn of events.

  “I’m just really confused,” she finally continued. “Part of me wants to hurt you, hate you, for this. But part of me needs you. I’m not sure which part to listen to.”

  “I knew you would blame me for this,” I said defensively, but feeling deep inside that I couldn’t win this argument.

  “Who else should I blame?” she answered, as if she had been rehearsing this in her mind. Then she said
my answer before I could get it out. “The killer? Michael, sometimes it takes more than one person to make a murder. I gave you the choice. I let you decide about your job—probably because of some antiquated notion of male leadership that I got from the old lady…” Her straining voice was suddenly choked off by a series of sobs. “This is what I was afraid of!” Then more sobs.

  I sat silently for a few moments, listening to the humming of the aero’s engine. I thought about striking back or hanging up, but something told me that would mean more than I was ready for it to mean. I was truly beginning to think this might be the end for us, and for some reason the biggest part of me didn’t want that.

  “Lynn,” I started, having no idea what I was going to say.

  “No, Michael, listen,” she interrupted in a softer voice. “I don’t know what to think right now, so you need to do the thinking for us.” She let out a combination of a sob and a chuckle. “Huh, that’s from, uh—”

  “Casablanca,” I said.

  “Yeah.” It sounded like she was wiping her eyes and nose. “You just tell me if you want to come back here or not, that way I don’t have to make the decision. Yeah. I guess I kinda want you to come home right now, I guess. But stay away if you want. You just tell me, so I know how it’s gonna be.”

  “Well, I can’t come right now—” I started.

  “Fine. Goodbye,” she blurted.