One Man's War

by Steven Savile

  “Poison,” I said, catching on. “Something that would slow the heart without actually killing him.”

  Tenebrae nodded, “Now you’re getting there.”

  “What can do that?”

  She smiled. “Fugu.”

  I resisted the temptation to say fugu, too. I’d heard the word before. You couldn’t avoid it if you spent any time living in Old Tokyo. Fugu. Pufferfish. A delicacy as likely to kill you as sate your hunger. Over a thousand times more toxic than cyanide, the fish’s vital organs are infused with enough Tetrodotoxin, a bacterial neurotoxin, to kill thirty people. But, in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing, exposure doesn’t have to mean death. There’s an alternative. The fugu poison will basically zombify you, taking out higher brain function and slowing the heart rate to a point that the beating is virtually undetectable with more than a minute between each.

  She’d piqued my interest. It made sense.

  I turned to Mel Kamahi. “I want you to do something for me.”

  “You’re the boss,” she said.

  “Hack into the security at Fate’s Wan Chai plaza.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  I was remembering something I’d seen when I’d broken in to steal the holographic projector and a few other goodies, tossed away in the trash: those expensive take-out boxes from the luxury sushi and sashimi place. One of the specialties of that place was Takifugu. Fugu.

  “Go through surveillance footage for the twenty-four hours before he died. Find out what he had for his last meal.”

  I was right.

  Mel came back to us about twenty minutes later with everything we could have possibly wanted to know about Randall Fate’s final hours—at least the ones he’d spent within the luxury apartments in the Wan Chai super tower. “He ordered sashimi from Kyūbey, kaiseki, delivered to the apartment but switched out the Bluefin for Takifugu. He also requested the offal and paid a premium for it.” I nodded. The restaurants weren’t supposed to sell that sort of stuff, but Fate talked best with money. He could be very persuasive with the almighty dollar in his hand. The offal accounted for how he could be sure the fish would contain the Tetrodotoxin he needed. It was the smoking gun I’d been looking for, and it had been staring me in the face for weeks, I just hadn’t known that all I needed to do was root around in the real trash, I’d been too busy rooting around in the metaphorical trash of Fate’s life. “It gets better,” she promised and triggered a video loop on the small screen rig she’d put on the counter between us.

  Gant and Tenebrae moved in closer so they could see what was going on.

  The angle was strange; the surveillance camera distorted the dimensions of the room, making Fate seem taller than he was. I watched my old mentor—my friend—go to the door and collect his meal from the delivery boy, trading him an overly generous tip for the three boxes of food. Two he took to the counter and dished up, the finely sliced Takifugu sashimi and rice. The third he set aside. She fast-forwarded through him eating and the general minutia of his life until the moment he opened his weapon cupboard and selected an arc-blade, which he carried reverently across to the counter where the third box had remained untouched.

  Fate put on a pair of thin surgical gloves before he opened the box, and even then he did so carefully.

  Inside were two small discs of meat.

  It took me a second to work out what they were.

  He actually looked up at the camera then, and smiled, like he knew I was watching.

  You bastard, I thought, as he took one between forefinger and thumb and ran it slowly and carefully down the length of the arc-blade, then took the other and repeated the motion down the other side of the blade. I didn’t know much about fugu, save for the fact that the build-up of toxins inside the fish was concentrated in its skin, liver, testicles, and ovaries. Fate put the pufferfish’s testicles back in the box and tossed them in the trash.

  “And there you have it,” Mel said. “An imprecise science at best, a massive risk at worst, but that’s how he fooled you all.”

  And that’s why Martagan and Swann were dead: a bastard rubbing a couple of fish testicles on a blade.

  “I guess that pretty much kills any benefit of the doubt I might have wanted to afford him,” I said. Right up until that moment, seeing him prepare the poisoned blade, I hadn’t wanted to believe he was actually capable of betraying us all. Part of me had been praying that Mel would turn up proof that it was all a terrible mistake, and that Fate was actually at the bottom of that hole with Martagan and Swann. That would have been better. But like the old song says, you can’t always get what you want.

  I hope he was really well paid for it, that’s all I can say.

  It wouldn’t help him.

  He might be richer than god, but I was more wrathful.

  All things considered, I almost pitied him.

  Part Four

  Tempted Fate

  I’d known Fate for most of my adult life. At times I joked that I knew him better than I knew myself. I was wrong, obviously. He still had the capacity to surprise me, but did I have what it took to surprise him?

  A confidence trick exploits basic characteristics of the human psyche: dishonesty, honesty, vanity, compassion, credulity, irresponsibility, naïveté, or greed. One of them, all of them, or some of them together. It depended on the mark. There were two ways it could work, but both came down to the same thing, getting the mark to trust us. Not necessarily the easiest, but the best way, was to get Fate to trust us by giving him our confidence. Exposing ourselves to him. Or at least making him think we were doing that. That meant he needed to believe we were trustworthy.

  What did I know about Randall Fate?

  I knew what he liked, and what he didn’t.

  But more importantly, I knew what he couldn’t resist.

  For one thing, he had a predilection for unconventional beauty.

  That was the kind of detail you needed to know if you were going to bait a honey trap.

  I wasn’t sure Tenebrae’s Nubian physique and hard polished ebony lines would do it for him, but he was a man, and she was what I had to work with. Plus, I’ll be absolutely dead straight, I couldn’t imagine anyone saying no to her—and not because of her exotic looks, but purely because of the force of her personality. The woman oozed power and confidence, two huge aphrodisiacs in my line of work, but it was the grace with which she moved that was absolutely contagious. So I had faith. But we had to do this without Fate working out I was the one pulling the strings in the background. That meant being clever. And given the fact that he’d had me chipped, one of us was decidedly more savvy than the other. I was banking on him not knowing that Tenebrae’s broker had paid a street urchin good cash to have the chip implanted subcutaneously, and then told to keep moving about the city to spread a false trail for me. The watcher becomes the watched and all that.

  The best way to lure Fate out was a double whammy, hit him with the full package, the sex and the money. Present an opportunity that promised lots of both, and hope the fish took the hook. That would mean Mel needed to make our assassin credible, sorting out credentials that couldn’t be easily broken, and setting up Gant as her muscle. Given the color of her skin, Akachi was the obvious corporation, but we couldn’t go with the obvious because we couldn’t be sure Fate didn’t have a man inside there. There were too many suppositions for my liking, but I wasn’t a conman by nature. I’d heard the catchphrases, of course: ABC, Always Be Conning, and my favorite, win at all costs, lose if it helps you win, and always, always, cheat.

  We were going to need a lot of stuff for this to work. Right now all we had was the mark. We needed a lot more than that. There are six stages to a con, the first, the foundation. You need to lay the groundwork, which is what we were doing now. Get things in place. To hook Fate, we were going to need to play to three core traits: his dishonesty, his vanity, and his greed. We couldn’t do anything until we had all that in place.

  “W
e’re going to need your broker as a go-between,” I said to Tenebrae. “Do you think he’ll be up for the role?”

  “Absolutely. He likes to get his hands dirty.”

  “Good. We’re going to need a place. Somewhere ostentatious. Luxurious. The kind Fate would dream of, you know?”

  She nodded. “Leave it with me. What else do we need?”

  I gave her a list.

  This is how a good con works:

  After you’ve laid the foundations, the next stage of a con is the approach, which has to be the riskiest part of it. Get it wrong, and you’re blown out of the water. We couldn’t set it up so that Tenebrae just plunked herself down beside Fate in a bar and randomly started hitting on him. He wouldn’t buy that. It needed to look more… coincidental… like it was ideal. That would take some planning.

  Then there’s the build-up, which is where we’d need to stir up Fate’s curiosity, get him interested in what we were selling. That was the part where I was relying on his vanity to kick in, not just greed. Sure the offer of profit would be there, and obvious, but you can make money on any gig. To be sure of hooking him, we needed him to believe we were talking about something next-to-impossible. Something only the best of the best could pull off, hence why we’d gone looking for him. Then that burning greed and his blazing vanity together would be enough to warp his judgment. I needed him to make some bad decisions—to be honest, the same kind of bad decisions he’d been making over the last year or so. I was banking on them not being part of a long con of his own, but rather a difficult-to-break pattern of behavior.

  Next comes the convincer, the pay-off, where we let him think he’s winning. Money works. A few small wins to play on both greed and gullibility. The whole objective here is to get rid of any lingering doubts he might have. We needed him all in, so if we had to pay for the privilege, so be it, it’d be money well spent.

  Which opens up the Hurrah. No decent con is complete without a grand spanner in the works; a sudden crisis that turns up just at the right moment to push the mark over the last hurdle and give him no choice but to dive all in. Then it’s all about good faith, as the con you’re in absolute control for the In-and-In, the end-game where you fleece the mark for everything he’s got.

  Of course, you couldn’t do it alone—at least not well. Especially not the plan I had in mind, which was going to take corroboration. Fate was many things, but he wasn’t gullible. That’s where the assassin’s broker would come in. He was our external validation.

  There are as many cons and variants of cons as there are conmen. Some, like the Spanish Prisoner, were as old as the hills and had been through dozens of iterations over the years, adapting to the times. Others play on romance, like the Sweetheart Deal, which preyed on the lovelorn with the ultimate promise of marriage as the prize, the ‘sweetheart’ stuck in her own country, victim of the vile corporation, and needs cash to get out. It’s obvious, and it’s sad, but people still fall for it because they want to believe in love. They almost deserve to be scammed, like the horny little souls who fall for the Badger Game. What is it they say about a fool and his money? Lure the mark into a compromising position, be it boys, girls, or a little half-n-half, whatever their proclivity, and then blackmail them.

  I’d done my research.

  There’s nothing like being thorough. That was part of the foundation. The truth was there were countless cons, bait and switch, pigeon drops, flim-flams, rip deals and jam auctions and stuff that until a few days ago had meant nothing to me. None of them would work out of the box. Not with Fate. They’d need to be massaged into a workable con, and even then the risk was he’d see us coming and try to turn it around on us, to make the conners the conned.

  In fact, I was banking on it.

  It was time to play.

  Tenebrae’s broker, a man called Imsen, worked hard on the procurement, actually managing to secure us the penthouse on a Dubai super tower owned by Ayako-Mizuki, and then furnishing it as the ultimate Gene Sculpt Clinic. There are plenty of those about, of course, but nothing quite like what we were selling. We needed staffers of course, and a doc who knew what he was talking about, which all took money, but that we had in spades thanks to the fact Gant had cleaned out all of my ‘dead man’s accounts.’

  Basically what we were doing was setting up what con artists would call a ‘Big Shop’—it had to be believable, and stand up to more than just a surface-scratching inspection.

  It was and it would.

  Now it was all about his vanity.

  Imsen set up a meet with Tenebrae. The meet was in a controlled environment. We had surveillance in place so I could watch it all, and Gant was on hand to crush Fate if things got out of hand.

  It would have been easy to just kill him there and then once we’d drawn him out of the woodwork, but that wasn’t enough. It needed to be a fate worse than death. Anything else and he was getting off too easily. But I’ll admit I was tempted to just put a bullet in his head and be done with it.

  The broker sat down at the bar. He had a rolled up newspaper as a prop to identify himself; very old school. No one bought newspapers these days, they had their steady stream of the woes of the world pumped directly into their datasets and rigs and whatever else they used to stay connected. It was quaint. I liked the touch. He unfolded it and waited. We had three cameras covering the angles, watching, and Gant was behind the bar, polishing out an empty—and sparklingly clean—glass with a towel. Behind him, there was a stained glass window of St Jude, patron saints of losers. Sorry, lost causes. Not that there’s a big difference.

  Fate walked into the bar. It sounds like the beginning of a joke. It wasn’t funny. My heartbeat was just a little bit faster. I hadn’t seen him since he’d died. Or hadn’t died. It was still hard to wrap my head around that. I’d carried him out of there, dosed up on fugu fish toxins. I’d grieved for him. And the fucker had been laughing at me and working out how to spend the cash he’d been paid for turning me over to GenX. I’d thought for a while that it was Akachi looking for payback for the absolute clusterfuck of Africa, but it wasn’t. The money came from GenX, just like the half-arsed hit squad that took out Swann and Martagan. Fate was entirely in their pocket. He was a company man through and through.

  But he was also one vain, greedy bastard.

  He looked around. Old habits die hard. Know your surrounds. Ways in, ways out. Check out how many possible areas of conflict there are inside, where the obvious threats lie. Knowledge is the key to staying alive when you’re walking into unknown and possibly hostile territory. Fate identified the broker and crossed the sticky floor to where he sat. Fate sat down beside him without a word. He looked across the bar at Gant, and for a second I was worried I saw a flicker of recognition in his eyes, but he ordered a drink and paid, so whatever he thought he saw, he dismissed.

  “How’s death working out for you?” the broker said. It was a pre-arranged signal. It meant they were good to talk freely. Fate had his own pre-agreed answer, “Pushing up daisies is overrated,” if it was good, “I’m beginning to fester,” if it wasn’t.

  He didn’t say anything for a few seconds, checking out the room again in the backward land of the glass behind the bar.

  “Pushing up daisies is overrated,” he offered, eventually.

  The broker nodded slowly and unfolded his newspaper. There was something inside it, but even with three camera angles, I couldn’t get a clear sight.

  “I won’t waste your time or mine, Mister Fate. I have a proposition for you. I’m hoping it will be of interest. It will certainly be lucrative.”

  “Speak to me,” Fate said.

  It was weird hearing his voice again. Not exactly like a ghost, but there was definitely an element of the other side about it in that he’d gone from being a friend to being an enemy.

  “It’s quite simple, I represent some very wealthy men who are looking to take advantage of some developments in technology you may be familiar with, notably genetic repatter
ning.”

  “I’m aware of the concept,” Fate conceded, giving nothing away.

  “They have procured the services of a willing host,” the broker said, “and are willing to offer a lot of money for you to act as the blueprint, taking your skills and memories and transforming an ordinary woman into a super soldier with all of your skills and abilities, Mister Fate.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because they want the best,” the broker said, without missing a beat.

  “I’m not buying it,” Fate said, and my heart stopped beating. It would all fall apart, right there, right then, if he walked out of there without taking the bait. “There are hundreds of Bleeders out there you could have taken this offer to, some better than me, the law of averages says that, a lot of them more desperate than me, so I’ll ask you again, why me?”

  “And I’ll give you the same answer, Mister Fate, because my client wants the best. They are aware of your record. You don’t get to live through fifty successful missions without learning a lot about how to live as well as how to die, even if you don’t actively recall all of this information you’ve absorbed from these experiences, it’s all still locked away in there. They’d be paying for your successes.”

  “And the more recent failures?”

  “You can learn more from a failed mission,” the broker said calmly, “than you can from a dozen successful ones.”

  He was good. I believed him. But did Fate?

  “So what exactly are they buying? I mean what are we talking about? Do they stick a probe in my brain and root around?”

  Okay, we’d got his attention. That was the hardest part. Now to reel him in.

  The broker smiled. “Nothing quite so barbaric, I assure you. They are very much at the proof of concept stage so they would be offering you twenty million, a one-shot deal, to store your brain patterns on their system.”