House of the Sun s-17

by Nigel D Findley

  House of the Sun

  ( Shadowrun - 17 )

  Nigel D Findley

  Nigel D Findley

  House of the Sun

  1

  Her name-the one she gave me, at least-was Sharon Young. Not beautiful by any means, but attractive. A strong face, with a good, full mouth. Sharp eyes, the kind that don't miss much, a rather striking shade of green. Long, straight black hair. And, despite what looked to me like a deep-water tan, she was a shadowrunner.

  She didn't tell me that, of course. It's hardly something you admit to someone, not unless you trust him with your life. But the good ones don't have to tell you-there's something about the way they move, the way they watch everything that's going on around them-and she was one of the good ones. She wore a loose-fitting jacket, possibly armored, that hung open, and I found myself playing the old game of "find the heat." I gave it up quickly, though: there were enough places under that jacket to stash anything from a hold-out to a chopped-down SMG. I watched her take a sip of the beer she'd just bought, saw the slight frown of distaste. That raised her one notch on the Montgomery Scale of Aesthetic Appreciation. The only thing that kept the draft at The Buffalo Jump from looking green was the unhealthy brew of preservatives, artificial colors, and flavors it contained.

  She set the glass down. Time for biz, I thought. "Mr. Montgomery," she began.

  "Derek," I corrected. "Or Dirk."

  She inclined her head, flashed me a quick half smile. "Dirk." Then she paused again, apparently getting her thoughts in order, deciding just how much she needed to tell me, and how best to go about it.

  I glanced away while she did so-a touch of courtesy that also gave me a moment to indulge my own paranoia. A quick look around the room reassured me that nobody in the bar was paying us any undue attention. It was about fifteen hundred hours-midafternoon, between the lunch crowd and the after work rush. When I'd arrived in Cheyenne a year ago, I'd been mildly surprised that the Sioux Nation worked on the same nine to seventeen schedule as Seattle. I don't know quite what I'd expected to be different… but I had expected some differences. Now, though, I understood that cities were cities-sararimen were sararimen, whether they were Nihonese, UCASan, or Amerind.

  The salad show was in full swing on the small stage, two pieces of blond jailbait, surgically modified to look like identical twins, contributing to the delinquency of a vegetable in an impressively desultory manner. Nobody seemed to care much, even the occupants of "gynecology row" down front. The soundtrack-second tier glam rock, ten years out of date-could just as well have been white noise for all anyone seemed to care, the DAT recording so overused and abused that digital dropout made the songs virtually unrecognizable. I felt one of those momentary flashes of deja vu. For an instant I wasn't in The Buffalo Jump, but an almost identical place a thousand klicks away-Superdad's, in the Redmond Barrens…

  I shook off the memories, forcing them back into the black mire of my subconscious where they belonged. I wasn't ready to think about Seattle, not yet. With an effort, I refocused my attention on Sharon Young.

  By now the attractive shadowrunner had figured out how she was going to make her pitch. With elaborate slowness- obviously to ease the suspicions of a twitchy contact-she reached into a pocket and drew out two small objects, which she placed on the table before me. One was an optical memory chip in a protective casing, the other a silver certified credstick. Again she paused, as if waiting for me to make a move for the chip and certstick-a test to see if I'd breach street etiquette. I kept my hands stationary on the scarred tabletop and waited.

  She smiled then, a momentary thing like the single flash of a strobe. I knew it was a test, she knew I knew, I knew she knew I knew, and all that. "I need a background check," she said quiedy. "A confidential background check."

  "An employment issue?"

  "If you like."

  'Then I assume current information is of most interest."

  Again mat flash of a smile, accompanied by a millimetric nod.

  We understood each other. She wanted a line on someone-present whereabouts, current activities, all that kind of drek. And she didn't want the subject to know I was doing any digging. A standard trace contract, the kind of low-risk, low-exposure backdoor stuff I'd been taking since I drifted into Cheyenne.

  "You have a name, I presume."

  Her green eyes were unreadable. "Then you'll take the contract?"

  Another test-she was being careful. "Contingent on reasonable disclosure," I shot back.

  "You'll have minimum exposure," she said calmly. 'The subject's out of the country at the moment."

  I raised an eyebrow at that. If she knew the subject wasn't in Cheyenne, what kind of paydata was she looking for? I tried to cover my surprise by running my forefinger lightly around the rim of my beer glass.

  My left forefinger. It was a concentration exercise. I was gratified to see there was no tremble, no instability in my finger. Maybe the glitches in my cyberarm were really behind me.

  "It really is a background check," she continued after a few seconds. "Any buzz you can get on current activities will be valuable, don't get me wrong-motivation, connections, exposure… But I'm really looking for deep background-the whys and the hows, how he got to where he is."

  Okay, that made more sense. She knew the subject was out of the country, but she wanted me to learn what he was doing, and presumably what led up to the trip. I nodded. "You're the principal?" I asked, a little test of my own.

  She just flashed me a another grin-passed with flying colors. "The subject is Jonathan Bridge," she told me at last. "Ork. Sioux citizen. Born and raised in Cheyenne."

  "Personal background?"

  She tapped the datachip with a fingernail. "Standard rates," she said, with a glance at the certstick. "Half on acceptance, balance on delivery. Deadline ninety-six hours, ten percent on twenty-four, twenty on twelve."

  That meant a ten percent bonus for each full day by which I beat my deadline, and a twenty percent penalty for each twelve hours I was late. "Standard expenses."

  "Extraordinary disbursements?"

  "We'll talk."

  I nodded. As she'd said, The conditions were standard. I'd done enough of this kind of work in Cheyenne to know the going rates. Just one more thing… "Any direct exposure, and I bail," I said flatly.

  Her turn to nod. "I understand," she replied… and I couldn't shake the feeling that she really did. How much did she know about me, beyond the "brag-sheet" I'd circulated through the shadow networks?

  "Contact information's on the chip," she said, rising smoothly to her feet.

  I stood too-didn't offer my hand, just as she didn't offer hers. "I'll be in touch."

  "I know you will," she said quietly. She turned and was gone. I waited for her to leave me bar before scooping up the chip and the certstick-etiquette, again and always. I sat once more, turning my gaze on the pseudo-twins, while using my peripheral vision to look for any response to her departure. Nothing, no "trailer" making his or her way to the exit-not that I'd expected anything. Pro is pro, and you get a sense for it… if you want to stay in this biz, you do, at least.

  2

  I parked my Americar beside the Dumpster in an alley just off Randall Avenue, swiped my keycard through the maglock on the back door, and climbed the narrow staircase to the second floor. I approached the door to number 5 and looked for the telltales I'd put in place when I'd left. All were where they were supposed to be. Again I waved my keycard, then diumbed the secondary maglock I'd installed the day after I'd moved in {right thumb, of course). The circuitry hummed for an instant as it decided whether I was me. Then the bolt snapped back and the door swung open.

  As soon as the door was
shut behind me, I peeled off my duster and tossed it toward the nearest chair. Midsummer in Cheyenne is hotter than hell (but it's a dry heat, yeah right)-much too hot to warrant anything more than shirtsleeves, let alone an armored coat. But I'd rather be slick with sweat than drenched with blood; call it a character flaw. Since I'd left Seattle, I'd made it a point-bordering on an obsession-never to leave my doss without at least some armor between me and any high-velocity ordnance that might be directed my way.

  I crossed to my "office"-a small desk wedged into one corner of me tiny, two-room apartment-and slumped down in a swivel chair that was probably older than I was. I flipped my telecom out of standby mode, and waited while the drek-kicked flatpanel got the idea.

  Finally the ancient system came grudgingly online. I slotted the certstick Sharon Young had given me and checked the balance-more from a sense of completeness man because I expected any jiggery-pokery; there's no percentage in stiffing someone on an advance. The numbers came up just the way I'd expected them to: 4,000 nuyen in certified funds. I hit a couple of keys, and my telecom happily transferred the cred from the stick's microchip to my account in the Cheyenne Interface Bank. That made my account… well, pretty close to 4,000 nuyen, if you wanted to be picky about it. Of that, I earmarked 800? for rent, to be siphoned out of my account whenever my landlord got around to it. (I'd already made the mistake of bouncing one transaction off him. Big mistake. My landlord was a big, bad, bald ork with a sunburned pate, creased as though someone had wrinkled it up and then tried to flatten it out again. Everyone called him "Mother" and left it at that-probably because anyone who tried to go any further was too busy spitting teeth to finish.)

  Banking duties finished, I pressed the keys to display my mail. One message in my default mailbox, the one I use for biz. I thought I knew what that one would be, particularly when I saw that the Matrix code was Cheyenne. Two messages in my private inbox. Since only three people have the passcode, it wasn't tough to guess about those either.

  Business before pleasure, unfortunately. Another couple of keystrokes, and the biz message flashed up on the screen. I recognized the digitized image at once. Jenny was her name, troll and proud of it, Amerind and even prouder of that. She wasn't quite a fixer, but she did occasionally broker "consulting" contracts for people she liked. For some reason I had yet to fully understand, she really liked me.

  I kicked the replay up to double speed, and let my mind drift while Jenny yammered through her message. I knew what it was about, a contract she'd tossed my way a week back as a favor, to help me make my rent. Everything had come out the way the contractor wanted, and Jenny was gushing with overspeed praise. I slipped the replay back to standard speed when it seemed that Jenny was winding down.

  "… And if you want to talk about it some more, why don't you come visit some time?" she was saying, with a bedroom smile that would frighten small children. "Our friends will be putting the credit transfer through tomorrow." Her smile grew broader until I thought she'd swallow her ears. "Catch ya later, Bernard." And the screen went blank.

  I couldn't help but chuckle. "Bernard." I don't know where it had come from, but the term had swept its way through the shadow underground of the Sioux Nation over the last couple of weeks, a kind of trendy substitute for "chummer" or the Japanese "omae." So far it wasn't in common parlance-not yet-but the local shadowrunners and wannabes had cottoned onto it as a kind of lodge recognition signal.

  Shadowrunner. It was to laugh. Jenny would drek her drawers if she ever met a real shadowrunner. (Christ, I almost did my first time.) The kind of biz she brokered might be considered "shadow contracts" if you really stretched the definition of the term, solely because they were mildly illegal, or perhaps extra-legal. All of them were a far cry from the media-fed vision of balls-to-the-wall shadowrunners, tweaking the noses of the megacops while dodging a fusillade of bullets. Been there; done that; too rough; pave it.

  Let me tell you about the "run" I'd just completed for Jenny. There was a midrent co-op apartment block on the edge of Cheyenne's downtown core-the Avalon-that had been having problems with chip dealers running their business out of one of the penthouses. Activity all round the clock, disreputable types coming and going, chipheads in the lobby, and all that drek. The renters' council had tried to evict the suspected chipmeisters… and had been told, in no uncertain terms, that if they filed the necessary papers, their knees, elbows, and other body parts would come into conflict with blunt objects in the hands of hired bone-breakers. The cops couldn't move against the dealers because there was simply no proof. The residents knew what was going on, but they couldn't bridge the gulf between knowing and proving.

  Enter Dirk Montgomery, stage left, riding a white charger. My contract-my "shadowrun," if you will-was to roust the chipmeisters and get them out of the building. No constraints on how I was to go about it, no questions asked, results being the only things that mattered.

  Jenny, I think, expected me to confront the chipmeisters directly, possibly over the iron sights of a big fragging gun. (God knows where she'd built up her exaggerated, romanticized image of me…) In the old days, maybe she'd have been right; maybe I would have taken the direct route. But things have changed. These days, I prefer "social engineering" to hanging my hoop out in the wind.

  So how did I handle the chipmeisters? Simple. I staked out the apartment building and identified the dealers' major clients-secondary distributors, mainly, rather than the guttertrash users. Once I had lines on most of them, I sent each one a personal message by registered e-mail, politely informing them that I had reason to suspect that the person they were visiting so regularly at The Avalon was involved in the illegal chip trade-all "for their own good," of course. The kicker was that I CC'd each letter to the Cheyenne vice department.

  The upshot? The secondary distributors stopped visiting, and within a couple of days the chipmeisters had moved on. "Shadowrun" complete, zero exposure-just the way I liked it these days.

  What? No gunplay? No hashing it out with corp sec-guards? No exchanging friendly volleys of small-arms fire with Lone Star troopers?

  Well… no. By choice. You could say I'm getting old, slowing down. I'd say I'm getting smart, wising up. There's a lot to be said for subtlety.

  I'd never had any desire to prove I was the baddest, steel-hooped motherfragger ever to walk the streets. Not only did an acquaintance of mine-maybe a friend, depending on your definition-have a lock on the title, in my biased opinion, but experience told me too many people got themselves rather dead trying to go that route. Better a live rat than a dead juggernaut, I'd always figured.

  And anyway, you needed edge to get out there on the street. Juice, jam, fire, whatever you wanted to call it. You had to have the moves and the instincts… and when the drek came down, you had to trust those instincts. Did I still have the instincts? Over the last year, I hadn't trusted them enough to find out. And, out there in the shadows, that would have made me a walking target.

  All right, granted: there was the sheer adrenaline rush of putting your ass on the line, the transcendent joy you couldn't get any other way without feeding BTL signals into your forebrain. But everything came with a cost, and I always had a reminder of that to hand-my left hand.

  So let Jenny think what she wanted; let her play her shadowrunner games. Let her pretend that she was operating on the periphery of the shadow "major league." Everyone to her own illusions and delusions. I'd played in that major league once-just once, just one night-and I knew I didn't have what it took to survive a second exposure.

  I felt the rush of memories, but I headed them off at the mental pass. That was then, this was now-to (mis)quote Gautama… or was it Michael Nesmith? I deleted Jenny's congratulations, and brought up the messages from my personal mailbox.

  I didn't recognize the originator address of the first message, but when the image came up on the screen, I knew it had to be a guest account on a remote system somewhere. A shock of dirty-blond hair, cut short and sub
tly spiked. Slender, slightly elongated face-attractive rather than classically beautiful. Brown eyes in a pale, slightly freckled complexion.

  "Hoi, bro," my sister Theresa said.

  I flicked a key to freeze the playback while I scrutinized her image. There were dark circles under her eyes. Those eyes had once seemed to flash with the sheer joy of being alive. Now they reminded me of documentary footage I'd seen of solthers shipped back from the insanity of the EuroWars. Her cheeks were slightly hollow, and I guessed that she was still almost ten kilos undermass.

  But there were also noticeable improvements. Her eyes were still shell-shocked, but at least they didn't look quite so wounded. Her lips were quirked in a tentative half smile-a long way from the old days, when her smile would have brightened up the whole of my dark, dingy doss, but still a vast improvement from just a few months ago. The pain was still there-the pain that had prompted the choices that, in turn, had directed the course of her life. And the pain that those choices had caused her. That pain would probably always be there, I realized sadly. But there was a major change for the better. Now she felt pain; before, she had been pain… and there's one frag of a big difference. These days, I could look into her eyes without wincing.

  She was bouncing back-finally I could perceive it, and trust that perception. It had taken almost four years- eighteen solid months of detox, analysis, psycho rehab, chemo and electro therapy, followed by twenty-eight months learning how to relate to the real world again. But it was finally starting to pay off. I shook my head. It was absolutely staggering what the human body-and, more important, the human mind-could endure without collapsing.

  I backed up the replay a couple of seconds and keyed Play.

  "Hoi, bro," my sister Theresa said. "Greetings from the Front Range Free Zone. Sorry I missed you, but I'll try again in a couple of days.