by Jack Dann
We dropped out of bright sunshine into gray fog and rough air. Two rows in front of us a woman said that EuroWeather was forecasting a beautiful May Day for Paris. Carol squeezed my arm, hard.
"We'll be there," I said. "Tomorrow."
Carol turned to me, smiling. Harsh interior lights showed lines in her face and gray streaks in her hair, but at the age of forty and after ten years of very close quarters, she still knocked sparks off me like steel off flint. I leaned over and kissed her neck just below the line of her jaw.
The plane slewed sideways, we broke through low clouds, and green Virginia countryside showed briefly before we touched lightly onto wet tarmac.
One of the airport's mutant reptile buses wheeled out to meet us, then felt with blind stalks for the side of the plane. Five minutes later we all filed aboard, and it rolled us through a gray gothic dream. There should have been trolls and dwarves riding the service vehicles, waving phosphorescent wands to guide us in. Instead there were the orange-suited workers in their yellow earmuffs and the somber geometry of the Saarinen terminal sitting half-hidden in the fog.
Shoulder harness in place, I read as Carol drove the rented Buick as though it were a GT Porsche, taking it across the three lanes of the Beltway and slotting it into a space that didn't seem to be there.
Charley Kelly's summary of our client's recent history didn't really tell me much Charley himself hadn't on the phone. Moshe Bergman had quit BioTron, one of your major multinationals, in a sort of high-tech huff after his work on biocomputers had been ignored, then scorned—there had even been talk of his having cooked crucial experiments. Now the irate Dr. Bergman was looking for investment capital to develop his process, which had all sorts of weird and profitable potential: eyes for the blind, brain implants, artificial intelligence.
That's where Econtel, Inc.—Carol and I—came in. Tipped by Charley Kelly, who heard about Bergman through a friend at BioTron, we had contacted Bergman and were ready to present him with an investment package. Our cut would be from five to ten points, depending on the extent of our involvement.
We were delaying a Parisian vacation for twenty-four hours to take care of this little piece of business. Then we had reservations on the Air France SST and plans to drive through Bordeaux in a rented BMW Electro.
"You're not going to believe this," I said. Carol was busy edging out a guy in a maroon Saab next to us who wanted to get off at the Key Bridge. "According to Charley, Bergman's hired himself a bodyguard."
"Whatever for?"
"Thinks BioTron is out to get him."
"Certainly—employing telepathic dogs, no doubt, to steal his valuable processes. Christ, I hope he is not a scientist nutter."
"Kelly says he's mildly eccentric, is all. Anyway, Charley's arranged for us to meet the bodyguard, who will answer all our questions. Ex-CIA, Charley says. Might be interesting."
"You can talk to the cowboy, I'll catch up on some sleep."
We checked into the new Hyatt in Alexandria—near National Airport and the shuttle to Kennedy, where we would catch the SST. The room had pink linen walls and bright Matisse prints; teak Scandinavian dresser, desk, table, chairs, and platform bed. I left Carol in the shower.
I hate driving, so I took the Metro to Silver Spring where I was to meet Bergman's bodyguard, a man named Oakley. He and Bergman were staying at a rooming house nearby.
We met at the Chesapeake Bay Crab Bucket. Just by the Georgia Avenue Metro, it featured yellow Formica and fly-speckled mirrors, and you probably wouldn't want a real close look at the kitchen, but the crab cakes were fine, and so was the Rolling Rock beer.
Oakley, on the other hand, seemed to be about ninety-nine percent pure neurotoxin. He made a point of letting me see his pistol, a "hot sight" Colt.357 he told me, almost as soon as we sat down. "Good weapon for this kind of work," he said, holding open his coat to flash the knurled butt end of the Colt.
He was in his middle fifties, a big man with rough skin, thick wrists and jet-black hair which had to have come from a bottle. He said he had retired from "the Company" two years ago but still trained attack dogs for them at a kennel in Falls Church. "Those suckers have got to be brutal," he said. "So you get them big, man, and you hurt them. Pick one up over your head and drop the son of a bitch on the ground. Lay him out good so's he can't breathe. Do it a few times and he knows who's in charge. Get him to do anything. And they do good work, man." He sucked on a Winston and looked at me with intent black eyes. "If Ramos had let me put the dogs in the dining room like I wanted to, they'd never have gotten to him."
I cut short his loving memory of his years with Alejandro Ramos. Other than admiring the sheer horror of it, I wasn't much interested in his Company scrapbook. I wanted to know about Bergman. I said, "What's happening here, Oakley? Is Bergman involved in some kind of corporate spy crap?"
"I don't know, man. The guy's a wimp, and when I met him, he was scared bad, so I figured I could make some easy change by stringing him along a ways. But that's not how it went. His condo out in Rockville was solid jammed with voice bugs. So I moved his ass out of there."
I put some cash on the table and said, "We're just businessmen, you know, trying to make a few bucks . . . think of us as pilot fish here in the water with the big corporate sharks. We do not, absolutely do not, fuck around with them."
"Look, I ain't telling you your business, but there's been nothing since I moved him. Perfectamente nada. So I figure I just flushed some old bugs—I'm sure BioTron runs routine surveillance on high-level employees. I really don't think anything's happening, man."
"Okay, we'll try it a little bit, just a taste. But if you find out any different—like something funny is going down—you come tell me, and I'll pay your fee. My wife and I, we're just not into killer dogs in the dining room, you know what I mean?"
"Sure, man, I'll let you know. But I don't think you have to worry. I've been running all the tricks, just to keep busy, and nobody's there. Believe me. . . ."
Carol was asleep when I got back to the room. I showered and crawled into bed beside her. In the curtained twilight I curled against her back. "Umm," she said and pressed against me. "What did you find out?" she asked.
She was awake now, so we discussed Bergman's problems. We agreed to go quick and dirty, to get the package out on the wire tonight if possible. Ordinarily we'd have spent at least a few days waltzing a client and lining up the most likely investors, but not this time. "I'll finish up the prospectus," she said.
She sat at the round teak table, face bright against the gray sky, peach nightgown glowing under a hanging cylinder of chrome. While I settled in for a nap, she worked our hopped-up computer, a SenTrax Optix, and put the final touches on Bergman's package.
Some time later she crawled into bed next to me.
We were both beginning our final semester in graduate school at UCLA when we met. She was getting an M.B.A., and I was finally picking up the M.S. in Telecommunications that I had started five years before. Early marriages along the way had gone sour for both of us. No children.
We told each other these things and a lot else at the party in Santa Monica where we met. At the time she favored black sheath dresses and bright red nails, plastic talons two inches long which cut holes in the air as she talked. Simple, mean, and fetishistic—she punched all my buttons anyway. My knees shook when she leaned close.
Through that whole spring we talked. We walked among the trim green lawns and bright flowers of Westwood, where Japanese gardeners with an angel's touch groomed the property of the middle classes. Our previous plans—Data General for me, Bank of America for Carol—shrank to nothing.
Databanks, genetic tailoring, the Japanese space program, optical computers, weather satellites, the commodities markets—we talked of these things, and Carol sketched a possible world in the air with red nails.
After graduation we got a place in the Fairfax District, among the delis, kosher groceries, and Hebrew language newspapers. We started Econ
tel, Inc. in our living room and ran it there for the next few years—surfing the Third Wave, you might say, with an audience of bearded Hassidic Jews.
Later we moved to Berkeley and bought a two-story brown shingle that cost one hell of a lot more than I'd ever figured myself paying for a house or anything else.
I felt her gown sliding between us as she pulled it over her head, and there was the familiar hot light touch of her breasts against my skin.
Around ten o'clock Oakley showed up with Bergman, who turned out to be a tall, skinny fellow in a cheap suit and the kind of nasal New York accent that cuts to the bone.
He seemed content with the deal we presented. A fat budget for his lab to operate for a year if necessary—Charley had said, "By then, he's either cracked it or gone bust." Forty-nine percent of patent monies to his backer, forty-five to him, five to Econtel, one to Kelly.
A bit of chitchat, then everybody's signatures and thumbprints went on the contracts. I set up the SenTrax and began by tapping into BIONET, the news service subscribed to by anyone interested in commercial bioscience. Potential investors might not be on it, but their scouts would be. An outline of the process, computer projections for the lab work, references to the NIH and Patent Office files—all were made available along with a financial summary.
The next few hours are frozen in my memory—the four of us blithe in the champagne glow that comes from putting a project out on the network, never mind that we weren't likely to hear anything for weeks. Bergman was being courtly in an awkward way with Carol, who was all dark blue silk and French perfume, and even Oakley seemed relaxed.
Then Oakley said he wanted to get some more equipment from the car; he'd checked the phone for taps but thought he'd sweep the room as well—I think we all smiled at this. "I'll go with you," I said. "I need to call a client—should have done it before we tied up the phone lines." Carol was talking to Bergman, and as I left she gave me a wink and a smile.
The glass-sided elevator dropped twenty stories down the side of the building. Oakley jittered with tension next to me—poor bastard, I thought, not happy unless in the grip of operational paranoia. Interior doors slid back, and we went out, Oakley right toward the parking lot, me left into the lobby.
In a pay booth in the deserted lobby—it was close to two in the morning—I spent half an hour explaining to F. L. Daugherty—a metal-rich eccentric who lived in Boise, Idaho, where it was only eleven—that even blue-chips could take a turn for the worse.
I was alone in the elevator going back. Street lights made small jewels in the mist on the glass. Across the Potomac, the Washington Monument winked to drive airplanes away, the Jefferson Memorial sat bathed in floodlights. I thought that we had done fine—none of the maddening complexities that can turn a simple proposition into a long-term puzzle, just a quick hit and on to Paris. I could almost smell the buttery pastries and dark coffee. . . .
When I began to step into the hallway, there was Oakley in a crouch, his back to me, both hands extended in front of him holding the Colt.357. "What the hell is going on?" I asked, and he said, "They're snatching Bergman and your wife. Stay in the elevator—get the fuck out of here." The Colt jumped in his hand and made one of the loudest noises I've ever heard.
The doors slid closed, and I pressed G and descended to the ground floor, ears ringing.
When the doors opened, I sprinted across the lobby and out to the parking lot, where I stood watching the elevator go back up to the twentieth floor.
It was all so far away. I could just see an indistinct shape, someone in the elevator, then crazywork cracks spread over the glass, and the box began its quick trip down the side of the building. As it got lower, I saw that the glass was splashed with red. I ran back into the lobby.
Oakley lay with his back against the outside wall, bleeding from arm and face and torso. His pistol barrel pointed at me, then drooped. "Oh Jesus Christ," I said. The elevator smelled of burned gunpowder and was splashed with bright fresh blood.
"Go man," he said. "Now. They got them both."
"I'll call an ambulance and the police "
"No! Go away now No police, or maybe your wife and Bergman are dead. Call I, you want, tell them a shooting, but mostly get the fuck out of here."
The Metro station fifty yards away had closed, so I just kept running. I passed under an overpass and turned left, ran up a flight of cement stairs and stopped in front of the sign that said Amtrak.
The station seemed centuries old, with its painted slat seats and wood and plaster walls. Half a dozen people wandered around the platform outside, and a young girl—maybe twenty, sullen and pale, wrapped in a dark blue cape—sat on one of the benches.
Three pay phones were against the wall—no privacy booths. I dialed 911, then whispered, 'There's been a shooting—lobby of the Alexandria Hyatt." I listened long enough to make sure the operator had heard me, then hung up on his agitated questions.
One concession to the information age—a dark train board with red LEDs gave station stops and showed the southbound Miami Express was right on time—in half an hour or so it would come into Alexandria. Behind an iron-barred window, a dark-haired clerk asked if he could help me. He was very cheerful. "Charlotte, North Carolina," I read off the list of stops. I had to tell him something. I paid the fare in cash.
I stood in the fog and drizzle about a hundred yards up the platform, waiting for the train. Across the street, on a hill that loomed above the station, a tall, spired building, lit up by huge floodlights, stood foreshortened, grotesque . . . mausoleum, civic building, some sort of pointless lodge or temple. Soon a bright glow swished back and forth across the tracks, and a slow-moving train fronted by three diesel engines pulled in.
"To your left," the woman in red Amtrak uniform said when I showed her my ticket. "Watch your step."
Soon after the train pulled out, I blanked. Sitting in a nearly empty couch, I stared at a "Dining Car Other Direction" sign at the end of the car and fell into a trance that I didn't come out of until the train began to slow as it pulled into the station at Richmond, Virginia a little after four a.m.
I got up and went into the vestibule between cars. A few people waved from the bright platform as the train pulled away. Rain spit against the glass . . . as it had the elevator . . . oh god, I thought, no—
The train had been moving quickly between opposite-moving lanes of a highway, but it slowed . . . I could see office buildings peeking over the top of an embankment. I pulled the release handle that freed the opening mechanism and cranked the door open, the steps out and down. I jumped out into the night.
Some more time got lost in there. I remember walking along the tracks in the narrow strip formed by double link fences, coming to where a trestle soared high over rocks and black water, then climbing the high link fence, and I remember a group of young black men standing in front of an all-night grocery who watched with predators' attention as I passed. Nothing else.
When the sun rose, I was standing on a street corner in front of a hologram arcade. A sign in the window read:
BEAT THE DEVIL
BOGART IN FULL HOLO!
SEE THE MOVIE—PLAY THE GAME!
The rain had stopped at some point, so I was merely damp and wrinkled. Still I waved at two cabs before one stopped, and then the old black man in the driver's seat was wary—he kept his window closed and yelled, "Where you going?"
"Airport."
"Needs to see me some money, ace."
I held up my wallet and spread it to show him credit cards and bills. He was to end up with a fifty dollar tip, my thanks for his buying my ticket to San Francisco on the 7:15 non-stop.
It was late morning when we got into SFO, and I dithered. I had to go home—not for clothes and comfort but for some things I really needed, for means to strike back. I took a shuttle bus into the city, then the BART train to Berkeley, where without thinking I got off at the Clairmont Station and went down the steps to College Avenue.
And
ended up in front of the Hardtack Coffee House. I stepped through the dark glass door. Smells of coffee and tobacco smoke and an atmosphere not of day or night. Name your game: chess, go, backgammon, checkers, simulator, cini-max. Behind a nondescript white-painted stucco front, there was a huge room with square tables of dark wood, tops charred by decades of frenzied smokers, among them some of the best games players in Berkeley, some of the best in the world.
It was a trip into my past. Back when I was a silicon kid, one of the few places we could find people—in the flesh, that is—was the Hardtack. I must have been thirteen when I first discovered the hackers, phone phreaks, network bandits, all the computer cowboys living in the optic fibers, wave guides, old-fashioned copper wires. I tapped into HUMAN HEADZ, the most accessible of the underground networks, and began to meet them one by one. The Zork, from New Jersey, who would stack up long-distance tandems around the globe just to listen to his own voice echoing through the night. E-Muff, from Berkeley, a consistent thorn in the side of the U.C. Computer Police. U-3 Kiddo, a group from Portland who planned free gas and electricity for one month for all Bonneville Power Authority customers—power to the people.
Through them I was admitted to the inner circles and the gossip, rumor, and mad delusion that passed in the midnight hours. The Princess and Ozmo and Dwarf had gotten married over the net but had sworn never to meet in person—it was a purely spiritual connection that gave total intimacy through the wires. Frostie had disappeared in Paris, taken away by Interpol, and would never be heard from again. Bright Water the Hiroshima-Nagasaki group, had sworn vendetta against Boeing because their B-29s had dropped the bombs. Captain Muck had broken into a C3 system at Omaha and planned to launch a first strike if he didn't—finally—get laid.
