He was intercepted at the breach by a Special Tactics officer who stood just inside the structure, a bulky assault rifle in his arms. They were like gargoyles, the ST troops, kitted up in their encounter suits and body armor. Rubberized, flexible material was stretched over their skins, mimicking human musculature and over that hung the molded carapace and skirt of heavy antiballistic plates. He was more of a soldier than a police officer, which of course was the point. Terrorists and subversives often fielded big heat these days and national policy was that major cities should have police forces who could match them.
An officer in the Special Tactics corps was without identity, a part of the monolith. Their helms were sealed and set with tiny cameras, their faces walled away. ST troops were wired directly into their helmets, seeing only what the cameras showed them and speaking through a computerized modulator. As long as they were linked in they were blind and mute save for what the system allowed. Walken didn't stick around them for long; men with guns who couldn't see or speak for themselves were hardly his idea of righteous company.
"ISB," Walken said firmly, shoving the badge up in the trooper's visored face. He didn't bother stopping, nor did the trooper halt his progress. Squinting through the smoke, he nearly tripped on something as he stepped through the hole. He recovered, knelt and found himself staring straight down at a dead man's face — or what remained of it.
Though his eyes stung Walken could clearly see the bloodied face of a downed Korean, just over twenty years old and dressed in a black polycarbon onesuit. He saw with a thrill of horror how his teeth were but shards sticking out under his upper lip, how his lower jaw was torn away so that his tongue lolled like meat. He stared a moment, frozen, before he slowly came to himself and rose to his feet.
"There's more where that came from." The trooper's voice crackled from over his shoulder.
Walken slowly nodded, his breath returning, still staring at the corpse at his feet. His brows were knit. "Worse than this?"
"Some of 'em, I think." His chuckling crackled with distortion as his helmet's speakers struggled with the sound. Walken's skin prickled faintly at the sound of it. The trooper's amusement rang at cold odds with his own grim horror. Both were men who saw plenty of dead bodies, but the trooper's attitude spoke of a detachment that made the scene all the worse.
"All right," he replied and without further word he continued on.
In Baltimore he had been a street cop for five years. Once, when he was walking foot patrol around Patterson Park, he'd run into a pack of Screaming Wespes. The Wespes were a youth gang, Euro immigrants displaced from the war and they weren't usually known to be violent. But this was just when the White Rocket hit that bad old town, before its psychotic effects were known and everyone wanted a taste.
He'd found them clustering around an alley mouth, wrapped up in surplus Euromil coats against the winter. They were specters with flat-tops and black bar warpaint across their eyes. Only this time, he saw as he approached, they were really ghoulish. Their skin was pale, their eyes hollow in a way that no paintstick could mask. They were standing around something, something he couldn't see and their faces had been smeared with livid stains — red, dark and fresh, dripping off their faces. By the time he drew close enough to see that they were standing around a body, they'd tried to pounce him. He'd had to mow down the whole group with his issued shotgun just to save his life.
Beyond the gory tangle of the Wespes and their victim, the alley had been filled with corpses. The Wespes had jumped a bunch of kids down from Hopkins on a jog and had killed them all with their bare hands — the Rocket gave addicts that strength, along with doping them up and destroying their sanity. The fuckers had spent the past whoever knew how long just standing around, mid-fugue, chewing on bloody chunks of meat torn from the bodies just beyond them. Before he joined the Bureau it had been the worst crime scene that he'd ever seen. As he stepped past the dismantled Korean and walked the trash-strewn expanse of the squat, he was reminded of that scene long past.
Across the office floor more bodies were strewn, no doubt the jawless fellow's gangster friends. They lay crumpled on the floor or lying across heaps of office garbage, halos of blood radiated from their surprised and broken corpses. Even at a distance Walken could see that they had been taken apart as well. Plastic office furniture had been heaped in enormous piles in the center of the gutted structure and a few phosphorescent lanterns dotted the floor, generating pools of pale white light beyond which the condensed piles loomed in the darkness overhead. More gray-armored troopers were visible milling around the scene and their gun lamps threw broad shafts of light among the detritus. The place was a real shithole, a good short-term spot for the kind of activity they had seemed to have planned for. Not the best place to die.
Some of the furniture had been righted. A few scum-laced chairs had been ringed around a desk of stained beige plastic and beyond that a pair of what looked like portable meeting tables. The desk played host to a pile of electronic gear, a scattering of Lexan ROM plugs and the body of another dead Korean seated in front of it. This one wore a dark red onesuit, a Donnie Hwang which cost more than the whole of his fellows' street couture put together. His body was half-draped over the desk and Walken could see that he had been impaled upon something; the fabric was tented upward over an unseen, upthrust shape.
With a grunt he moved around the side of the desk. The Korean's arms dangled so that gloved hands trailed the concrete floor. The brutal black shape of a Steyr bullpup carbine had been shoved to the grips into his chest, the barrel exiting through the other side tenting the poor bastard's suit. Blood had pooled thick and dark across the surface of the scarred desk. Walken saw that it still oozed from around the edges of the wound. They had not been dead for very long.
Again Walken found himself standing there, blinking, perplexed by the violence of it. It wasn't that he was dead, it wasn't even that it was gory — Walken had obviously had his share of that — but there was something casually cruel about how the wound had been inflicted that seemed almost childlike, like wings being plucked off a fly. The corpse's eyes were still open, as was his mouth... but only just a bit, as if he had only just thought of something to say before he'd been run through with his own weapon. It was monstrous, that scene and Walken found himself staring at it as if it were a roadside massacre seen from an automobile window.
Eventually he broke from his reverie. He moved past the corpse and the awfulness it offered to examine the other objects on the desk. He drew a pair of black electrostatic gloves from his coat pocket. Pulling them on, he dusted his palms against one another. The faintest scent of ozone reached his nose as the charge threw off dust from their surfaces, sterilized and clean.
He began to probe about. "All right," he murmured, peering at the machines, using the focus needed for investigation to push the sight of the body into the back of his mind. "All right. Let's see what I've got here."
What he had was a small stack of diagnostic equipment and a portable computer, wired up to a skulljack cable. The operator, which he assumed was the corpse next to him given the port that gleamed behind his ear where his short black hair had been shaved away, was meant to plug himself into the gear and brainride it for purposes yet unknown. He reached into the back and spooled up another cable around his hand so that he could investigate the terminals. Two prongs, narrow and conical, stretched out six inches from the plug. A neurological interface probe, the kind that could penetrate flesh and bone if there were no sockets to host them.
He assumed that the other two tables were meant to host the Dolls, but where were they now? He could find no blood on the tables, nor any other kind of circulatory fluid that might indicate the Dolls had been interfaced there. He found a torn swatch of silk under one of the tables, jammed just under its metal rim. White silk, most likely from one of the tarted-up wedding dresses. Perhaps whoever killed the Koreans had carried the Dolls away in a hurry.
He went through the ROM plugs wi
th a single gloved finger, peered at the Hangul that had been scribbled across their caps in black marker. He recognized the characters as a Who's Who of high performance intrusion and cracking programs. He saw among them names like Metasurg, Hyoong Lance, Abercrombie Mark IV and Decept. This was extremely expensive, illegal countersecurity software — the Abercrombie alone was worth more than an entire year's salary — and he recognized them as some of the same software that was used at the office to breach complex computer systems.
Walken took out his issued databook, using its microcamera to take a battery of pictures of the scene and of the equipment. The swatch he left alone save to carefully draw a few threads from a ragged edge and tuck them into a plastic bag, then left it and the desk for the forensic squad and wandered further.
As he expected, the four other bodies were Jopoks as well, spattered with blood and taken apart. Like the other two they also seemed to have been torn apart by hand and Walken marveled at just what kind of monstrous fucker had been responsible for this kind of work. Plucked apart and left dead, bloody on the floor like insects, he could find nothing on them that could tell him anything more of what they had planned or what had happened to them. It wasn't at all like the Wespes, he decided as he stood looking down over the last of the bodies after searching its bloodied pockets. The Wespes could be blamed on drug-induced psychosis. This was something else.
Violence dulls the heart. Scenes like these had a blunting effect on the psyche, like a shower of stones poured over one's spirit. Walken was far from immune from the numbness that came from such bruising. There was no avoiding it. The true measure of what lay beneath came from how you felt once the moment passed. Newbies puked, veterans endured and some simply grew corroded.
Walken always came away harrowed. As he finished his fruitless search about the scene he felt a familiar subtle chill settling down around his shoulders. His instincts and his desire not to linger overmuch among the bloody dead drove him out, numbness tingling somewhere around his middle. The breach in the wall yawned and he felt something similar open inside him. He needed air.
He walked back out, stepping past a pretty young forensic tech into the alleyway. It was empty now, the carrier having gone and he turned around to look at the tech as she now knelt over the unfortunate jawless bastard. She had curly red hair pulled back into a tail and her eyes were hard with focus as she stared down into the Korean's ruin of a face and ran a forensic scanner's wand over it. Her irises were gleaming silver.
He recognized them as cosmetic replacements made not from vat-grown tissue but synthetic materials. They were less expensive by far — cosmetically-enhanced clonal eyes were an art form unto themselves — but they imparted a distinctly glassy, emotionless look. Walken wondered for a moment if she had felt anything behind those polished lenses or if it all ran together for her, if she was hollowed out from night after night of these kinds of scenes as her eyes made her seem. He almost envied her.
Davis was waiting for him when he emerged from the alley. Spotting Walken he approached. His face was stony. His jacket was open now and Walken could see that his badge and gun rode next to each other on his belt on official display. "You were supposed to stay back and wait for the all clear," he said and his voice was full of cold anger. "What the hell is the matter with you?"
Davis' fire was undoubtedly meant to put him off balance, but the scene at the squat had rendered Walken temporarily immune to the effects of such petty corporate bullshit. "I could ask the same of you," Walken said instead. "You had instructions to wait until I arrived. You didn't. I go where the scene is, Detective. Now fuck off before I decide to put this down in my report and your bosses have you walking a beat in the Verge!"
At this threat Davis's skin went gray with rage. He opened his mouth to speak but held his tongue, glowering instead at Walken's back with unspent fury as he walked away. The crowd was all but gone now, which made it a simple thing to get back to his car and get the hell out of Dodge before the numbness wore off. He had way too many things to think about.
The rain had picked up again and the streets were filled with the glimmering shards of neon carried with it from on high. Walken steered the car this time. He drove it down the spangled, rushing streets, weaving it like a drunken whale through late night traffic. His active brain was on autopilot, eyes and fingers reacting to the thin string of automobiles as he drove back toward the Field.
His conversation with the Chief had been brief, consisting of Walken's report and Wolsey's stone-faced orders in reply. While he was on the scene, word had gotten out that Stadil had indeed been the one who the Jopok had been working with to facilitate the deal. Wolsey was sending Walken back to Stadil's place to rendezvous with Kelley and the Agency task force that was on the way. He had complied without comment, starting up the car and heading down the highway.
As the city passed around him the scene at the squat played over and over in his mind. It seemed obvious to him what was going on now. The Koreans appeared to have intended to crack and cleanse the Dolls' biocomputer matrices so that they could be reprogrammed — given to a higher-up, perhaps, or sold on the domestic black market. Except for their nerve interfaces, biocomputers were pretty primitive in terms of function compared to solid-state devices. They were also vastly more expensive as a rule.
Of course, that had all gone south the moment they had strafed the ambulance. Maybe they had decided to try to wipe the Dolls for sale in order to cover their escape, since there was nothing left for them in this city but a morgue ticket. Stadil — or perhaps the Jopoks' bosses — had seen to that. Did someone send angels of death on ahead of Walken, knowing they would do their bidding before the authorities arrived?
Whatever the situation truly was, the Bureau had decided that Stadil had jerked them off. He had played them all for fools, put them on this false trail — and whether Stadil meant for the Bureau to rid him of the Jopoks or to keep them busy while an assassin killed them off really didn't matter to them now. Wolsey should have known better. Walken fumed silently in the car as it plowed through the streets, lights and siren on again, livid at the whole fiasco. He looked forward to rounding the bastard up.
When the Bureau returned to the Ballroom it did so in force.
By the time Walken arrived in front of the club he found himself deluged in yet another sea of CivPro uniforms and police cruisers. Special Tactics was mercifully absent. This was the Bureau's show and this time Wolsey had wisely ensured that the cannon brigade would be elsewhere. Cordoned off to one side of the structure, on the opposite side of the parking lot, was a crowd of people in mingled fetish dress and finery; it looked like it had been a busy night before the heat arrived. He looked around for Bobbi's cockatiel crest but didn't see her. When he emerged from the car Walken was hailed by a familiar voice.
"Hey, Tom! Catch!" Out of the corner of his eye Walken saw a black mass hurtling his way. He turned in time to catch it, fingers wrapping around the beastly length of an automatic shotgun. The thrower, as he had expected, was Kelley. Arnold Kelley was a fellow agent in the Bureau, a tall, lean figure swallowed in a slightly oversized suit and a rumpled overcoat. He had a distinctly dodgy appearance, disheveled as he was, but the green eyes that were set in his narrow face glittered with good humor. Kelley was a technical agent, one of the brain corps. He approached his job with a kind of adventurous spirit that Walken had always envied. He never seemed to be bothered by the grim nature of the job, even though those as new as he was were quickly sobered by the bizarre things they saw.
"Thanks," Walken called back, handling the shotgun easily. It was a Bedley Seven, a riot gun, with selectable fire and a yellow box magazine fixed to its belly. Inside the magazine, according to the label stenciled across its surface, were nonlethal jelly slugs. Walken's brows arched; they aimed to take him alive, then, whatever he might be throwing at them. Good. His fingers wrapped around its bulk at mid-length and its dangerous weight was comfortably felt in his hand. "What's the situatio
n, here?"
Kelley crossed from the group of clubgoers to whom he had been talking, his own shotgun in hand. "Stadil's holed up in his office," he said, "with four or five of his boys. We've got him cornered. Tricky thing, the elevator is the only way up. Can't use too many people at once."
"True enough," replied Walken; he looked down at the Bedley in his hand. "And the Dolls?"
"No clue," said Kelley with a helpless shrug. "Not here as far as we can tell. Probably taken to another location after the Koreans were killed. He'll know, though, no doubt about that."
Walken's fingers tightened a bit more tightly on his shotgun. "So we're going to take them alive," he said. "Good. No point in blood if we don't need it."
Kelley nodded. "Yeah," he said, lifting his own Bedley in indication; Walken saw a magazine of jellies slung to its belly as well. "But you've been up there, right? How many do you figure we can fit in the elevator?"
Walken thought about it a moment. He reconstructed the elevator in his mind, remembering the space between Beefy on the trip up. "Maybe... four," he said. "Two crouching on either side, two standing behind them. Could fit another one in the middle but there'd be no cover. Not that there's much in the first place."
He considered that and then nodded. "All right," said Kelley. "We've got Exley and Brighton here. Wolsey wants you to do the honors, though."
A thin, tight smile lined Walken's face; he had expected that. "Agent in charge," he said. "My chance to save my ass." He brought the shotgun around, resting it upon his shoulder as he looked up at the sagging ziggurat once more. "All right, then. Get Exley and Brighton and inform Wolsey that we're going to move. I want that bastard and his boys in custody."
Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle) Page 5
