by Lisa Smedman
It sounded plausible enough. In the turmoil that followed the president's assassination, all kinds of drek had hit the fan. The "death" of one Tír Taimgire national would have gone almost unnoticed. Except that Mareth'riel Salvail was still alive. Had she somehow not boarded that plane after passing through customs? If so, where had she been for the past four years?
There was something else I didn't understand. "How come this information didn't come up when I ran Jane's retinal scans yesterday?" I asked.
"I don't know," Dass said. "It should have—Lone Star's databases are linked with Customs and Immigration's." She scrolled through the file for a moment in silence, then stabbed a finger at the monitor. "Kumbe!" she said. "Here's the reason. There are no retinal scans of Mareth'riel Salvail in this file. The field for them is blank."
"Huh?" I said. "How can that be? They're a required part of every passport."
Dass shrugged. "They must have been deleted."
"Could we try something?" I asked. "Blow up that image of Mareth'riel Salvail so that her eye fills the monitor, and call up a visual of the retinal scans I did on Jane yesterday. Maybe we can do a manual check on whether the two match."
"Labda," Dass said. "It might work." She entered the request. Then she gave a low whistle as the data materialized inside the crystal-ball monitor of her computer.
"A kigeni—that's strange," she said.
"What?"
I leaned closer and scanned the data myself. Suddenly, Jane had a criminal record. And another name.
The retinal scans that I'd subjected Jane to yesterday now were linked to the file of a woman named Margaret Hersey, a thirty-eight-year-old resident of Sydney, Nova Scotia. According to the report, Hersey was a busker who earned a living by performing illusionary magic on street corners, trying to cajole a few nuyen out of the tourist trade. Because she was SIN-less and because this was the first time she'd run afoul of the law, there was no other personal information available. The arresting officers had to go with the information she gave them.
Hersey had been arrested in Charlottetown earlier this year—on March 16, 2061 to be precise—and charged with unlicensed use of a manipulation spell. She'd cooled her heels in that city's jail until her trial, then been sentenced to three months detention, to be served in Lone Star's maximum-security penal institution in the Halifax Citadel. It was a heavy sentence for a first offense, but perfectly in line with President Haeffner's new "zero tolerance" policy on unlicensed spellcasting. All mages are sent to the Citadel now, no matter how minor their crimes.
Hersey had served out her sentence and been released from prison on July 23—just two days before I found her on Georges Island, all memory of her past erased. Or so someone wanted me to believe.
"This is crazy," I said. The office door was closed, but even so I was whispering. "When I had Records run Jane's retinal scans yesterday, this file didn't exist. But according to what we see on the monitor, the first of the data in this file was entered at the time of Hersey's arrest, nearly six months ago."
Dass nodded absently, still staring at the monitor.
"Somebody's gone to a lot of trouble to link your Jane Doe with this other identity," Dass whispered back. "And they've managed to deck into the Lone Star databases to do it."
We both knew how improbable that was. Lone Star's databases are protected by some of the toughest intrusion countermeasures in the Matrix. The console cowboys of the Division of Matrix Security are authorized to use deadly force: the black IC they've created can fry a decker's brains in a nanosecond flat.
Well, maybe that's an exaggeration. But those countermeasures are frigging lethal, just the same. You have to want something awfully bad to try to crack Lone Star's system. Decking your way in to plant a false arrest record for someone was something you only did if covering up that someone's identity was very, very important.
And they'd done more than just one run against government databanks. They hadn't just planted the false arrest record—which had to have been done yesterday, after I ran Jane's scans and came up with null data. They also deleted Mareth'riel Salvail's retinal scans in the Customs and Immigration databases some time before yesterday.
Which meant that someone had anticipated Jane being picked up by Lone Star, and scans being done. That someone had at first figured that it was best if Jane remained anonymous—then had changed their mind and given her a false arrest record instead.
They were obviously counting on Jane not being able to remember what her real name was. But they decided—belatedly—to cover their hoops.
I thought back to the expression on Jane's face when she'd looked up at the Halifax Citadel, the huge, star-shaped 19th-century fortress that had been turned into a maximum-security prison. If she'd been incarcerated there, that would explain her traumatic memories of being forced to wear a mage mask. And that wouldn't have been the worst of it. From what I'd heard from members of Lone Star's Division of Penology, the mage mask was only the beginning. Mages incarcerated in the Citadel were subject to a number of measures designed to keep them from using their spells to make an escape. Drugs, simsense feeds, doses of stims that overload the nervous system, electroshock, and—although this was entering the realm of rumor—experimental neurosurgery.
Which was chillingly reminiscent of the stories Sandra had told of the experimental surgeries performed on mental patients in the 1900s.
I'd known about Lone Star's penal methods all along, but I'd never given them much thought before. These were penalties handed out to the bad guys. Criminals deserved whatever they got. But Jane was innocent.
Wasn't she?
I wasn't sure what was worse: the thought that Jane was an innocent woman who had been subjected to such treatment by an organization I belonged to— by members of my own pack—or that she was a criminal. And that led to another question.
If Jane had been arrested, convicted of a crime, and served time, where were the original records? And why go to the bother of erasing them and substituting different ones?
The questions were leading me round and round, like a pup chasing its own tail.
I asked Dass for her opinion. She thought about it for several long minutes. When she spoke, her words were careful.
"Here's one for the conspiracy theorists," she said. "What if Mareth'riel Salvail never passed through UCAS customs? What if she was deliberately 'disappeared' during the riots, then kept on ice for the past four years and subjected to treatments that erased her memory? Whoever did that would have to have the power to convince Customs and Immigration to fake her exit record. They would also need to be able to keep her out of circulation for four years and to erase both her memories and her magical abilities. I can only think of one corporation with the power and resources to do all that..."
"No way." I shook my head. What Dass was hinting at was treasonous. "Lone Star doesn't arrest and imprison people without due process," I growled. "We're not some sort of third-world, secret police force."
Dass just stared at me, a worried expression on her face. And that made me worried. If she was seriously suggesting that it was possible for Lone Star to...
I tried to reject the idea, but in a crazy way it almost made sense. Mareth'riel Salvail was obviously an important person—important enough for the government of Tír Taimgire to send someone with diplomatic immunity to fetch her home again. But I just couldn't believe that Lone Star would do what Dass was suggesting.
I suddenly needed some air.
"I've got to get out, Dass. I've got to think."
"Take your time, Rom," she said softly. "But stay in touch, all right?"
I nodded as I fumbled for the door handle. I all but ran down the corridor, then down the front steps onto the sidewalk. I didn't even howl when I heard a squad car leaving the station. Instead I tore off my pants, changed into wolf form, and loped off into the night.
10
Jane was gone when I returned to the hotel room. This time, there were signs of a str
uggle. Fresh signs. Gun smoke was still drifting in the hallway from the weapon that had been used to blow holes around the lock in our hotel room door, and juice was still trickling down the bureau and onto the carpet from a glass that had been overturned.
I charged through the hotel room, using my sense of smell to piece together what had gone down. Jane had probably been sleeping on the bed, since her scent was freshest there. She hadn't opened the door; my note was still pinned to it and I didn't smell any fresh scent from Jane on it or on the carpet near the door. Nor did I see or smell any blood, for which I was thankful.
I concentrated on the spoor of the intruders.
There had been three of them: one woman, two men, all human. Except for one of the males, whose sweat didn't smell right. It wasn't meta—no, that wasn't it either. Instead he smelled mostly human, but with a whiff of something animal as a background note. Not a full shifter—but maybe one of his parents had been a shifter.
All three scents had a sharp tang to them, as if the intruders had stepped in salt water recently. There was also a faint odor of animals. The latter wasn't fresh—it was more as though the animal smell had impregnated the intruder's clothes, over a period of several weeks.
They had come down the hallway from the direction of the staircase, and had left the same way. With Jane—although the fact that her scent had gaps in it suggested that they were half carrying her, half dragging her along.
Correction: the intruders were leaving the same way. As I raced down the corridor, nose to the carpet, I could hear gunfire in the lobby below. They must have been mixing it up with the hotel's security staff.
I ran to the door at the top of the stairs and lost precious moments when I was forced to shift back into human form to work the handle. I leaped down the three fights of stairs, opened the door at the bottom, and changed into wolf form just before leaving the staircase. No sense in presenting more of a target than I had to.
The lobby was empty this time of night, save for the two security guards, who were out on the sidewalk by now, taking pot shots at a car across the street. As I streaked across the lobby, staying low so as not to draw friendly fire, I got a good look at the car. My heart sank. It was a taxi—exactly like hundreds of others in the city, with nothing to distinguish it.
As the car screeched away into the night, leaving an acrid cloud of burned rubber, I tried in vain to see whether Jane was inside. But I was too low to the ground in my wolf form, and everyone inside the vehicle had ducked down.
I skidded to a halt halfway across the lobby, claws scraping on the slate floor. Then I ran the other way, looking for a side exit. Again I lost time as I changed into human form to open doors. By the time I was out in the alley at the side of the hotel, the taxi was nowhere in sight. Even the sound of its engine was lost among the other rumbles of late-night traffic.
I snapped at the air in frustration. Then I forced myself to think. The hotel security guards would have called Lone Star by now, to report an incident that would have looked to them like a corporate extraction. They would also probably report the taxi as a stolen vehicle; they may even have gotten its license number. If a Lone Star patrol car had spotted the taxi...
I listened, but didn't hear any sirens.
Then I thought about it some more. The kidnappers had smelled of salt water. And the smell was fresh. They'd gotten their feet wet recently. That probably meant that they'd come to Halifax by boat. Assuming they planned to escape the same way, that meant they were headed for the harbor. And not just any part of the harbor; in order to have been forced to get their feet wet, they must have run a small boat in close to shore and waded in from it.
The waterfront of Halifax was heavily industrialized, every meter of it taken up with container piers, railway sidings, military dockyards, and passenger ferry wharves. There was only one place close to the hotel where a small boat could pull in to Halifax, unnoticed by the harbor patrol: Point Pleasant Park.
The park is only a datachip-sized fragment of what it used to be. The high-rise towers and condominiums of the Pleasant Housing Corp crowd the trails that used to be lined by trees, and much of the waterfront access has also been privatized. The only public access areas are the southwestern corner of the park, where the city has preserved the old gun emplacements from a war that happened some time in the previous century, and the picnic areas and boat-launch ramps on the other side of the park, just south of the containment piers. The latter would be where the kidnappers were headed.
I had no choice but to head for the park on foot. The kidnappers had taken the elf's nuyen—the money clip had disappeared from the bedside table—and there was no way a naked human would be able to persuade a cabbie to pick him up, let alone give him a free ride. So I raced in the direction of the park, running as hard as I could.
I can run pretty fast, so I stood a good chance of catching up to the kidnappers before they made the switch from the cab to their boat, especially if they kept the taxi to legal speeds, so as not to attract attention. But it was a long run. By the time I got to Point Pleasant Park, I was panting heavily. My tongue was so heavy it felt like it was hanging down to my paws.
I took a short cut along a cobblestone path that led through the condominiums, heading for the beach. Hopefully, if any of the Pleasant Housing Corp security patrols saw me, they'd assume I was somebody's dog, out for a run. I made a mental note to wear a collar, in future, so I could pass as a dog more easily.
I slowed to a lope as I approached the beach. Then I wagged my tail in delight when I saw that my guess had been right. The taxi was parked near the picnic tables, its lights off but its engine still ticking. A few meters off shore, a speed boat bobbed on the tide as it drifted in toward the sandy beach. Its engine idled softly and foam bubbled at its stem, as if it had just been brought back in to shore. I could smell its exhaust.
Four dark figures—one of them being yanked along by the arm—were wading out to the boat. The smaller two figures climbed aboard, hauling themselves up and over the side, while the larger figure held a woman who strained against his grip, kicking up splashes in the shallow water as she was dragged out to the boat. Then she twisted so that her face was illuminated by the lights of the condominiums behind me. I recognized her at once.
Jane!
Without meaning to, I yipped in excitement. Heads turned as the kidnappers looked at me. And I got a good look at them.
The female kidnapper was small and wiry, with short hair that was slicked back against her head as if it were wet. She was flat-chested and boyish-looking; the only way I recognized her as female was from her scent.
The men also had dark hair, and features that looked Native American. One—the fellow who held Jane's arm—was large and blubbery, but moved as if he had a lot of muscle underneath those layers of fat. On his face was a scar that looked like a large puncture mark through his cheek. The other man—the one who'd already climbed into the boat—was small and fierce-looking, and grinning nervously. He seemed younger than the other two, more twitchy. Behind him stood a human male with buzz-cut hair and cybereyes that reflected the light like a cat's. His pale white arms were covered in dark tattoos. He stood hunched over the helm of the speed boat, wires snaking up from its console to datajacks under his ear. He would be the group's rigger, then.
I chose the large male in the water as my target. I ran across the sand and charged into the ocean, my feet kicking up salt spray as I leaped over the low waves. If I could just take the big guy down, Jane would have a chance to run. This time, at least, she'd recognized her abductors for what they were. Unlike golden boy, they hadn't tried to pretend they were her friends. I just hoped they wouldn't shoot her in the back when she bolted on them.
I hit the big fellow square in the chest and sank my teeth into his shoulder. As I'd hoped, his hands dropped from Jane's arm and he staggered backward. I tasted blood as I worried his shoulder with my teeth, and bit even deeper. The blood tasted good. Kind of blubbery, but rich
and sweet. It had been a long time since . ..
I heard the snick of cyberware just in time to let go and get clear. Long spikes erupted from his fingertips, each connected to the other with rubberized webbing in between. Pain lanced through my side as he raked me with the tips of the razor-sharp spikes, tearing open my flesh. My blood dripped into the water, where it mingled with his in the prop wash. A wave splashed against my side, adding the sting of salt to my wound.
I leaped out of the way of the large fellow, who lashed out at me with his spike-web hands. The razor-sharp implants hissed through the air, grazing the hairs on my ear tufts. The fellow's shoulder was a dark wet patch of blood, but it didn't seem to be slowing him down any.
Jane, meanwhile, had made a run for it.
"Frig!" the woman shouted. "Forget him, Shark! Go after Jane. Get her in the boat!"
My ears swiveled round. Jane? Had she just said
"Jane"? How did she know her name?
I had other things to worry about. The big fellow dove forward into the knee-deep water and swam with smooth, powerful strokes after Jane. The webbing between his fingers made him as fast as a fish.
The boat roared after him, cutting me off from the action. The little man and the woman stood in the stem, pistols in their hands. Angry gouts of red flame spat out of their weapons, and bullets tunneled into the water beside me with wet thuds.
Drek! I was out of my depth—literally. My leap at the big guy had carried me out far enough that my wolf legs no longer touched bottom. Forced to swim on the surface, I was an easy target. I could survive a wound or two if they didn't hit any vital spots—the gash in my side had already stopped throbbing and would begin knitting together soon. But at this distance, if the pair in the stem knew where to aim, they could easily deliver a killing shot that would sever my spine.
I changed into human form and dove under the water, jerking my body to the left once I was submerged. They'd expect me to keep swimming along the shore; instead I swam away from the beach, into colder, deeper water. Only when my lungs were ready to burst did I surface and take a quick look around.
