"Well, hell yes," chirped Kelley, who flashed him a grinning salute before he turned around to cross the parking lot toward where the agents in question now stood by a parked limousine.
Gerald Exley was an ungodly mountain of a man, with thick arms and powerful legs that were too substantial for his original frame. His bulk , the ever-present menace of his monolithic body of meat and grafted muscle, made him terrifying to behold. Exley was a rumbler before he joined the force, or so it was said, with lots of modifications. That bulk, augmented into a bone-crushing mountain, seemed to quash the merest thought of resistance in most suspects merely by his physical presence.
Howard Brighton was also large, but while Exley was a picture of physical imposition Brighton had the approximate shape of an upright mass of jelly. And yet, Brighton was spry on his feet despite his girth; Walken had seen him run down a kid one quarter of his weight and just as fit as Exley was. Both of them were as hard as nails.
Kelley brought the two agents over to him. "Evening, gentlemen," said Walken.
"Morning, Agent," grunted Exley and held up the chronograph on his wrist. "Two thirty in the morning to be precise. I got out of bed for this, you know?"
A smirk lined Walken's lips at that. "Well, you've got one up on all of us, then. Are we sure the club's been cleared?"
"All but the office." Kelley jerked a thumb toward the ziggurat's summit, raked by blue light. "We've already been on the line with him, but he refuses to come out."
"They always have to do it the hard way," Brighton muttered in a voice that was so much gravel.
That brought a grin to Kelley's lips and he nudged Brighton. "That's what makes it an adventure," he told him and with a wink that made Brighton smirk he turned back to Walken. "All right, Agent," he said, "You're in charge. What's the word?"
Walken considered the door, then grunted. "Come on," he told them and strode like MacArthur on the beach toward the doors of the club.
Brighton looked at Exley, who shrugged. "Gonna be interesting, this," he said and taking up his shotgun followed Walken with zeal.
The four of them crossed the open club floor. The house lights had been brought up with the exodus of patrons and as Walken looked upward he could see the truth of it. The walls were bare concrete, painted up to the level of the shadows where the neon frescoes ended. Above them the ceiling was lost in a maze of cables, ventwork and catwalks. Where earlier in that night it was a darkly magical hedonist temple, it now seemed an utterly pedestrian, industrial mess.
"I heard this place was something else," rumbled Brighton from over Walken's shoulder, sounding vaguely impressed.
"Looks better with the lights off," Exley nearly purred in reply. "This Stadil's a fucker, but he for damned sure can put on a show." They started to chuckle.
"Elevator's through here," barked Walken, stepping up to the side of the door beside the bar; he paused for a moment, looking to Kelley while the other two agents covered the door with their own shotguns.
The slim agent produced a sniffer, a much smaller, fist-sized cousin of the rig Walken used to sweep the plane. He pulled a spring-loaded cord from its casing and Walken winced despite himself as he watched its terminal disappear behind Kelley's ear. Implants did nothing for him. The whisper in his head turned him where he needed to go far better than any machine.
"Just a moment," Kelley said, thumbing a button set into his little sniffer's pistol grip. The air seemed to crackle as the sniffer charged. Kelley's eyes went a little unfocused, as if he were looking at something very far away.
Silence hung between the four as he swept the door, the frame around it, the room just behind. Despite the dreamy character of his eyes, Kelley's brows furrowed. "I got trouble," he advised them. "Four drones swarming the shaft. Looks like buzzers. Armed, but I can't tell with what." Buzzers were rotor-driven security drones, little more than motors and sensors being directed by wireless link. Stadil must have had them outfitted with guns.
"Probably fletchers," said Exley, who reached to detach his magazine. "Or automatics. Link me up, Al. I'll do the honors." Walken watched as he held onto the yellow box with two fingers of the hand that held his Bedley by its grip, then deftly produced from his coat a single black metal magazine. He socketed it and slammed it home before dropping the box and taking a step back. Walken moved out of the way, pulling Kelley with him by the shoulder and Exley went to work.
A split-second flicker of data between the two men's implanted computers gave him a clear map of the room beyond and with surgical precision he trained the Bedley's muzzle on the door. A squeeze of the trigger made the shotgun's angry mouth spew flames and thunder. This time Walken did not wince. Instead he watched with interest as a hole the size of an apple opened up where Exley's penetrator slug blasted through the wall, raining fragments and powdered concrete, then as another opened up just over where his head had been a moment before. The shotgun's roaring echoed in their ears and Walken moved to kick the door open. He did not need to wait for Kelley to tell him that the drones were down.
And he was right. The punctured corpses of the drones lay on the floor before the elevator door, little more than rotors enclosed in a flat, hexagonal frame. The ugly pepperbox muzzles of flechette guns stared up at them from beneath the wrecked machines. The buzzers' chassis were plated with the flat black honeycomb of polycarbon ablative — enough to fend off a few shots from sidearms, but nothing before the might of Exley's superdense slugs. "Jesus," said Brighton, blinking down at the ruins. "Guess you were right, Ex."
"Made sense to me," murmured Exley and left it at that.
Walken punched the elevator button. The ringing in their ears had died in time for the hum of an electric motor to take its place.
They stood there, ringing the doors and waited for the elevator to reach them. Only Kelly didn't have his gun out. He still had the sniffer in one hand, the barrel of his Bedley resting against his shoulder as he scanned the area before them. "Looks clear," he told them, eyes fixed. "No charges in the shaft. No drones either."
"All right," said Walken. His eyes narrowed as the elevator tolled its arrival. "No screw-ups on this one, guys. We need Stadil alive."
The doors slid open, revealing only emptiness inside. The lights dimmed momentarily and then flared to life again.
As one, the four of them moved into the elevator. Walken and Kelley knelt on either side of the door, whilst Exley and Brighton pressed themselves standing against the walls. Somewhere between the slaughter of the drones and entering the elevator Exley had replaced the slugs with the stunner box again. Kelley had stowed the sniffer and had returned to his own gun. "You said there were four or five of them up there with Stadil," Walken asked, looking across to Kelley. "Right?"
"Yeah." Kelley blinked experimentally, clearing focus from whatever fading data the sniffer had hung before his eyes. "His bouncers. You said they were meaty, right? Stapled up?"
"Looked like it to me." Walken looked up at the other two men. "When the doors open, spew 'em. They know we're coming and I don't feel like dying today." He reached for the single glowing button that marked the office.
"No problem," said Brighton, who leered upward at the ceiling. "Wouldn't want to get up only to get put in bed all over again."
It would have been funny to Walken were they somewhere else, but here, now, it was only a moment's distraction. The elevator started, slowly gliding upward toward the office where Stadil and his men waited and Walken wondered if Beefy would be up there as well. He would use him as his target point — the man who led him up seemed to Walken the most dangerous of all.
It seemed to stretch on forever, their journey, as if Walken had hit some kind of cosmic slow-motion button by mistake. Braced against the wall as he was, Walken's senses seemed to swallow up everything around him all at once. The sweat that was beading against his skin, the weave of his shirt, the weight of his coat on his shoulders. The cold bulk of the shotgun in his arms.
The entire elevato
r, time and place, seemed one unit in that instant. They formed a unified pattern, spiraling down from all around him, to settle into his center. His fellow agents, however, were not a part of that matrix — they were hollows, voids in the rhythm, the rocks around which he would gauge the current. He would wonder about that, when he had time to himself and the whole world wasn't perched on the edge of Death.
He closed his eyes, felt the elevator stop and prepared himself for a sea of lead.
The first thing that hit him upon the opening of the elevator doors was the smell of charred flesh. A collective blink rippled through the four of them as the scene opened wide before them: darkness, broken only by the flickering static snow that fell behind each of the enormous wall-screens. Smoke, hanging in an acrid haze over the desk and the hodgepodge of antiques. Blood all over the laminated blotter, spreading in a thick pool around a smoking head.
It was Stadil's.
Stadil lay dead, slumped over his desk. Around him lay the crumpled masses that were the five bouncers. Walken spotted Beefy right away, staring up at him with white, clouded eyes. Each one of them seemed to have simply collapsed where they stood, placed in a circle around Stadil. A cable ran from each of their skulls into something over which the now-dead fixer had been draped. Walken rose to his feet, staring a moment, then took a step into the room.
"Christ." Brighton's rumble was streaked with confusion. "What the fuck is all this?"
Walken took another step, needlessly sweeping the muzzle of the Bedley across each dead body in turn. "Kelley," he began, but Kelley was already plugging himself back into the sniffer.
"I got bingo on each one," he said and his voice betrayed a mingling of surprise and horror. "Nothing, not even residual neuroelectric activity. It's like they just..."
"Cooked themselves." Walken strode over to the desk. Gingerly he reached out with the shotgun to push Stadil's corpse backward. When it fell back it left a bloody, melted mess upon the keys of a portable computer. Its holographic display had been shorted out and the projector lens in the corner of the machine's case was scorched and clouded.
"What is that," breathed Kelley from behind him. His voice was high and tight. "Jesus Christ, is that his face?"
The portable's input jacks were filled by the cables running out to each of the fallen bouncers and to Stadil, whose skull, charred and scorched but grinning in gleeful mockery of their attempt to capture him, remained connected to the ruined machine by a single interface cable.
"What the hell happened here?" Even Exley, usually a bastion of calm, sounded a little shaken.
There were no words, at least not for a moment, but Walken found himself quickly enough. "I have no idea," he said, his voice suddenly tired. "But I am sure as shit gonna find out."
The night had been a complete washout. The Doll, the Koreans, Stadil and his boys were all dead and with very little explanation as to why. Walken, accompanied by Brighton, Kelley and Exley, searched every inch of the place. They found a sub-basement, a small thing no bigger than a closet, whose hatch had been guarded by several now inert Buzzer drones.
They found a trio of very high-performance computer cores mounted in an armored housing and with their own power supply and dedicated access link. It was this mysterious trio which Kelley believed contained Stadil's records. They were Cemsys Sevens, which collectively cost more than a luxury condominium uptown, five-foot towers of plastic and heat-ablating alloys crammed with ultrafast processing capacity and high-capacity holographic memory. Or at least, they were when they were functioning. They were nothing more than junk now, fried just like their owner and his merry band. It wasn't expected that anything could be salvaged from it.
As for the dead men upstairs, they were strangely peaceful. Outside of Stadil's fleshless grin they had gone down without so much as a grimace. Walken had watched with a grim fascination as he looked over each one of them, staring upward with eyes made milky from the heat that had flooded their skulls.
He had seen the phenomenon before, when a high-energy charge was routed through a neural interface cable straight into the brain to which it had been connected. In every case that he had seen it had been an accident where some poor bastard trying a major dump of data made a wrong turn and cooked himself instead.
Or sometimes it came from power problems that occurred in the squats from which black-market consoleers liked to work their trade. He'd even heard of military systems that could trigger an overload from afar. The thought of them dying while plugged into the network summoned the image of disembodied minds, cut off from their bodies, floating far away into the endless matrices of the Network.
This was not accidental. Six men had been plugged into the same computer; six men had all died from brain-burn. The math on that just didn't work. At least one or two of them should have died from basic electrocution and surely one of them should have survived, even as a vegetable. And yet, there they were.
Walken himself disconnected the computer from the corpses and bagged it, with its keyboard caked with the drying remains of Stadil's face, into an overlarge red evidence bag. He thought the color fit. Outside of the pistols that his men held there wasn't much else in the office outside of the gaudy antiques, which had also proven to be utterly pedestrian. It was absolutely maddening.
That was all with which Walken had come away from the Ballroom; some burnt-out computers and a whole lot of dead motherfuckers. Dead motherfuckers and a load of questions about them all. The Koreans. The Doll. Whoever or whatever had killed them all. He wondered if it had been the same force, or perhaps a conglomeration of murderers, knives out and pointing at them for reasons of their own.
He did not know if what he had witnessed tonight had been coincidence or conspiracy. The images of all those dead souls, each one killed in equally brutal and mysterious ways, swirled around in his tired brain. He needed to get away from it, but he couldn't force himself to do so.
It was Wolsey who had forced him home. Wolsey had told him to get some rest. What was left of the night was the province of the forensic teams and CivPro's people were no doubt laboring like pasty ghouls over the scenes ready to send evidence back to Hammond's laboratory at headquarters. He wanted to be there, to hover over them like a spectral taskmaster, to see the results as they were spat from the machines. The mystery that had been woven and presented to him demanded his attention and had rooted itself in his gut like starvation.
There had always been mysteries in his line of work, and many had been engaging. This scenario was a rock that he had suddenly found in the road and now that he had lifted it he had exposed the mysterious insects which shuddered in its shadow. He knew only their general appearance, their basic genus. What species of mysteries they were he could not yet say, but like any good entomologist he would discern the true nature of their ecology.
The car drove back through the industrial outskirts where the Ballroom had been, back toward the city. To get home, he had to make his way through the New City and God only knew how much he hated that.
But it was not quite time to go home. Walken needed to think about the case a bit more before he went to bed and thinking about work was not done at home. Thinking was done in the shadow of the Space Needle. Seattle Center had long ago been compressed into the square of land around the Needle and renamed Needle Park. It had been eclipsed by newer, taller structures of Martian steel and shining glass - the once-dominant spike was really no longer a feature of the city skyline. It had become a protected landmark, which meant it stood in its park, compartmentalized and put out of the way while more modern buildings were assembled to scratch the sky all around it.
He had always liked the idea of the Needle. Like him, it wasn't afraid to stand apart from the rest which stood around it. Like him, it didn't go away. It remained true to itself, as he so desperately tried to do. The world made it a very difficult prospect.
And yet, there it was. And so was he, sitting in his car, which sat parked outside the edge of Needle Park.
He needed sleep before he again went out among the savages. Thinking would help him get there. As he sat in the car seat, though, he found that he couldn't think at all. The enormity of the entire case had suddenly vanished to a tiny point in his mind, compressed by the weight of exhaustion. He reached for the seat controls, reclined the back to the point that he was almost laying flat in its cabin. His eyes traced the padded ceiling, the tan fabric given a vaguely greenish cast from the light thrown up by the console. He thought about nothing for a time.
He lay there for a while, embraced by the foam of the car seat. His eyes traced the nearby buildings and found a towering billboard displaying product lore. 'GENEFEX,' it read, big floating capitals suspended over the image of a beaming, gorgeous woman, then across the bottom: 'RENEWAL FROM THE INSIDE OUT.'
This newest movement to trample over the natural order had been helmed by what News Now had dubbed 'The Sexiest Scientific Mind of the Millennium — Ghia Merducci, the very same vision smiling down at the street from on high. Fifty years ago she had pioneered a revolution in modern genetic science by developing the first real gene surgery techniques. She spent the last forty years looking like she was twenty-five; not bad for someone who was said to actually be eighty-seven.
Her company, Genefex, was in the business of genetic engineering. Custom biogenetic products, that sort of thing. Most importantly it was in the clock-stopping business, providing clinical immortality for the ultra-haves. Each year, for a price equivalent to the gross national product of a Fourth World nation, you could sign up to have her particular flavor of scientific voodoo put on you: blood replacement, cellular refurb, the whole works. You'd never get old so long as you kept paying. Her success stories included video stars, captains of industry and (or so it was murmured) certain very glamorous heads of state. Not the biggest star on the set these days, but she definitely had a very bright place in the sky.
Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle) Page 6
