Choose Your Enemies Carefully

by Robert N. Charrette

  "Quite attractive for a norm," Dodger commented when he noticed Sam’s fixed stare.

  "Janice," was all Sam could say.

  38

  "Find anything interesting?"

  Dodger reached for his Sandler as soon as he recognized the voice, but she was faster. She snatched the weapon from his fingers before he could get a grip. He kicked the chair back as he stood, but she skipped clear. He spun, hoping to get inside her aim, but again she was too quick for him. He eased back against the table, forcing his muscles to relax. Elven reflexes weren’t good enough to dodge bullets at this range.

  Hart smiled at him. "Much more reasonable reaction."

  "What do you want?"

  "To talk."

  "That is obvious. Else, I would not be breathing." She shrugged and lowered the muzzle of the Sandler, but Dodger felt tension in her still. Gauging the distance between them, he briefly entertained the idea of a move, before dismissing it as foolish. He'd seen her in action and knew he wasn’t her match. She would be ready for anything he tried.

  "Speak, then. You have captured my attention." She hesitated before saying, "I want to offer my help."

  Was she serious? After what she had done to him, how could she expect Sam to let her anywhere near him?"He doesn’t trust you anymore. I don’t either." Her smile was sad. "You should understand how compelling previous arrangements can be, Dodger. Have you told him who had you get him involved in this mess, or that you’re still passing his plans on to Estios?"

  "You didn’t tell him, did you?"

  "Not yet, but I could."

  She gripped the Sandler by its barrel, carefully lowered it to the floor, and leaned it against the wall, and stepped away from the weapon. Her actions were likely intended as a sign of her peaceful intent and meant to reduce the tension between her and Dodger. He found himself considering her motivations, and the possibilities only made him more nervous.

  "We can help each other, Dodger."

  "If you really want to help, you’ll go back where you came from. He’s screwed up enough now as it is." Her brow furrowed. "What’s happened? Is he hurt?"

  Her concern seemed genuine, but she was a good actress. She had thoroughly fooled Sam. He considered the wisdom of telling her what was wrong with Sam, and decided that her reaction might provide a clue to the motivation behind her recent actions. If not, there was the slim chance that she might have some data that applied to the riddle of the painting.

  "There was a picture of a norm woman in Hyde-White’s sanctum. He said it was his sister."

  She grasped the situation at once. "A norm woman? I thought she had goblinized. When was the painting made?"

  "The date within the artist’s cartouche was this year’s."

  "And the artist?"

  "His identity is a mystery."

  "So what have you been doing?"

  "He’s been brooding when he hasn’t been rerunning the tapes we got of Hyde-White’s apartment. I’ve been trying to break into the GWN personnel files."

  "With no luck, I expect."

  He was annoyed by her casual assumption of lack of progress. "I am the Dodger. It is only a matter of time."

  "Isn’t it always."

  She reached into her satchel, and he tensed again.

  She offered him a tentative smile along with a raised hand. Her other hand slowly emerged from the bag, holding a slim black chip case. Dodger relaxed as she opened the case and selected an unmarked chip carrier. When she held it out, he recognized the molding as UCAS government issue.

  "Try this in your deck," she said. "It’s a one-shot can-opener. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion."

  Dodger took the carrier. Unable to contain his curiosity behind the thrust and parry of shadowtalk, he asked, "Why are you doing this?"

  "Let’s just say I’ve got an inquiring mind."

  The lure of using her toy did not keep him from running diagnostics on it before slotting it into his deck. Slipping into the Matrix soothed him; in the electron world he had no worries. Well, only one; and it hadn’t shown its mirror face in weeks. His meat was already at her mercy, but he would be safe enough until she got what she wanted.

  He was amazed at the beauty and elegance with which her can-opener cut the GWN ice and slipped him into their files. The hunt was short and successful. He dumped his swag back to the deck and exited the GWN architecture. As he cleared the boundary, the can-opener evaporated. He jacked out.

  Janice Verner’s name was on a list of special consultants for GWN that he scrolled onto the display screen of his cyberdeck. Most of the other names meant nothing to Dodger; they had never before appeared in all his searching through portions of the Matrix associated with the members of the Hidden Circle. The one name he recognized was that of Karen Montejac. Unfortunately, Hart noticed his reaction to the name.

  "You know her?" she asked.

  "The, ah, lady works for a ... a former client."

  "So, what’s the connection?"

  "There isn’t one."

  Hart wouldn’t let it go. "Guessing, or do you have evidence?"

  "I have deferred the evaluation of connections to a higher authority who has ruled out the possibility."

  The look on Hart’s face told him that she didn’t like his answer. From her earlier threat, he suspected that she knew he was referring to the professor. She finally nodded in acceptance, apparently willing to concede to the professor’s judgment.

  "What is in the Verner file?" she asked.

  Dodger brought it up on the screen. It took only a little manipulation to crack the lock. The first entry was a transit pass for a corporate flight from Hong Kong to Mexico City.

  "Not Yomi?" Hart asked musingly, then she smiled. "There’s your answer to your problem. The date on that flight is after Sam’s sister’s exile. If Hyde-White recruited her, it would have been at the gulag, and she would have been whatever she had turned into by then, no longer a norm woman."

  "The painting may have been done from an old picture."

  Hart snorted. "Even if it were, what reason would he have for wanting it? She wouldn’t, if she’s like most people who go through the change. No, Sam was meant to see this painting. The fat druid’s a manipulative bastard and likes playing mind games."

  "How do you know that?"

  "Personal experience," she said bitterly. "Trust me. The portrait’s got to be a fake, a ploy to throw him off stride."

  Something seemed out of place to Dodger. "How would Hyde-White have known Sam was going to see it?"

  Shrugging, Hart said, "Maybe he was going to plant it somewhere else."

  Her explanation still seemed to be missing a chip. "Why do it at all?"

  "I don’t know. But I do know that the fat man’s a devious bastard and a class-A manipulator. He’s the one who really started the Circle, you know. Even led the research that got them the wicker man ritual. He’s the real power behind the Circle."

  "As Merlin was behind Arthur," Dodger said, remembering the imposed imagery of the Circle’s computer architecture.

  "What?"

  "Nothing. Just a literary allusion. So, what to we do about this?"

  "You tell Sam, and then keep me posted. I’ve got other things to do."

  Dodger’s suspicions flared again. "More trouble to cause?"

  "You betcha," she replied jauntily. "When you see him, give him these."

  Hart dug a wrapped packet out of her satchel. The bundled had filled most of the bag’s volume and, when the soft sides collapsed. Dodger could see the outline of a gun. He took the offered bundle. From his weight and balance, he suspected a second weapon was wrapped within its softness.

  "Why should I?" he asked as she headed for the door.

  She kept walking, saying over her shoulder, "He’ll need them."

  * * *

  Sam didn’t know what he expected to see, but he kept rerunning the tapes Willie had made from the trideo monitors in Hyde-White’s residence. Willie watched th
em with him, getting twitchier with every repetition. The copy spun to an end and Sam reached for the controls to rewind the tape.

  "Ain’t ya seen enough?"

  "One more time, Willie."

  "Jeez. Ya been through through it a billion times. Look, Twist. I’m not a forensic expert, but I am a woman. I'd say there was a woman living in that residence. Ain’t that what ya want to know?"

  Sam nodded abstractedly as the tape clicked over and started to play again. "But what kind of woman, Willie? A norm, or something else?"

  "Do I look like a parabiologist?" Willie bounced up from the floor, grabbed a half-full bottle of Kanschlager, and downed it. "The blowups show a lot of hair scattered around, but, frag it, that don’t tell us anything without chemical analysis. The fat druid and his woman could have a dog; there’s enough gnawed bones in the kitchen."

  "It didn’t smell like a place where a dog lived."

  "Well, then, a cat! Jeez, Twist, what do you want?"

  "I want to know about my sister. They told me she had goblinized." Would Sato have lied about that? No, the doctor had said she was in the kawaru ward, so it had to be true. But what about later? Maybe she had died, been killed by Hyde-White and his flunkies. Maybe that was why Renraku had never let him communicate with her.

  Sam didn’t want to believe it. He felt sure he would know if she was dead—he was a fragging shaman with fragging mystical powers! If he couldn’t sense the death of his own sister, his only living relative, what good were those powers? Still, he had been a reluctant shaman and had avoided a lot of what he needed to know about his gifts. He couldn’t be sure that the magic would let him know if she was dead.

  The portrait in Hyde-White’s sanctum didn't have to he his sister. It could be a coincidence. So why didn't he believe that?

  He tried to picture the painting in his mind. He wanted to remember a detail, any detail that would confirm or deny the subject’s identity. All he succeeded in doing was calling up the horrid smell again. That awful stench seemed somehow . . . familiar.

  In his memory, it had another quality that was absent in the chill confines of the sanctum. Sam knew he had smelled the odor before; suddenly, he knew where. It had not been in the mundane world, but in the realms of the spirits where the Man of Light had worn fire like fur, and exuded that stench.

  Sam remembered what the Man had said about manipulating his emotions and meddling with his memories. Had Dodger seen the same woman in that portrait?

  * * *

  "Hyde-White, old man. Good to see you," Glover exclaimed. "Recovered from your injury?"

  "Almost."

  Janice knew better. Though Hyde-White still wore bandages and limped, Dan Shiroi had long ago recovered from the injuries dealt him by a ravaging band of shadowrunners. She disliked the fat shape Dan wore. She was not skilled enough to pierce his mask and so, like his coconspirators, she could only see the obese bulk of Hyde-White even though she knew Dan’s lean, furred shape hid within it. His obsession with masks no longer bothered her. She understood and embraced the necessity. She looked forward to the day when he would teach her enough to mask her own shape as effectively as he did his own, and she would be able to deceive the slimy Glover and his like.

  "Your pet appears as ravishing as ever," Glover said archly.

  When he thought he was unwatched. Glover regarded her with the disgust one usually reserved for things that crawled out of one’s food. She suspected he knew her true form; he was a druid, after all. She also suspected that his attitude was more than the prevailing English class consciousness. The man seemed to have a pathological hatred for metahumans. But then, did that make him different from the average norm?

  Glover struck her as a petty, small-minded man despite his grandiose plans for the country. She didn't like him, and wished Dan didn't find it convenient to associate with him. The other druids were nearly as bad.

  Dan had told her how his Hyde-White identity was involved in the plot to replace the monarch. She had thought the plan put him too near the spotlight of publicity, but had dropped her arguments when he explained that his participation would place him in a position to influence policy regarding their metatype. The risk seemed worth it; they needed every protection they could get from the swarming norms. Even if it meant using such unsavory persons as Glover.

  With her presence at these increasingly frequent dinner parties, she had come to see just how well Dan had the druids under his influence. They treated Dan like a revered elder. Alone at his home, she and Dan had laughed at them, especially Glover. The arch-druid was so devoted to Hyde-White and the cause. Glover, who hated all metahumans, fawned on one regularly without ever knowing the truth. It was a rich joke.

  Much better than the hoary jests exchanged by the rest of the druids once she and Dan joined them. There was the usual round of pleasantries from which she was excluded. The snubbing didn’t bother her; she only came for Dan’s company, and the food.

  The seemingly interminable interlude in the lobby ended and Barnett, the hosting druid, opened the doors to the feast hall. The site was one of his company’s conference centers, and he seemed unduly proud of it. Janice found the decorations tasteless and boring. The table, on the other hand, was set with superb style.

  The selection of condiments and sauces was extensive, offering a wide variety of flavorings for the main course of rare meat which dominated the setting. To either side of the golden platter with its mound of bitesized morsels, were baskets of sourdough rolls, excellent for sopping juices. Save for the guest’s place, each diner’s setting included a delicate ewer containing his or her favorite beverage. The guest’s plate was flanked with two glass goblets, one brimming with iced water and the other gleaming with a dark wine.

  Scattered among the auxiliaries to the main course were small dishes of vegetables and fruits. They added a splash of bright color to the table, but Janice no longer found such foods appetizing. Her changed metabolism was exclusively carnivorous.

  The guest was already seated at the table across from the seat of honor, which was always given to Dan at these affairs. The seats for her, the druids, and their companions were ranged along the opposite side from the seated man, flanking Dan’s chair on either side.

  The guest didn’t look up as the feasters entered. In the subdued lighting, Janice at first did not notice the extensive bruising on his face; but as she took her place, his battered visage was obvious. His dark clothes were tattered and stained, and his posture made them hang on his gaunt frame as if he had been shrunken within them. He had the air of a man resigned to an unpleasant fate.

  "You could have gotten our guest a change of clothes," Dan said to Glover as he seated himself.

  "I did," the archdruid replied. "He refused them."

  "Perhaps you should have offered sackcloth and ashes," suggested Ashton.

  His remark raised general laughter around the table. Janice didn’t get the joke and didn’t join the merriment. No one noticed.

  "You are impolite, my friends," Dan chided gently.

  "Pietro Rinaldi is our guest. If he wishes to attend in casual dress, I will not spurn him from my table." Rinaldi looked up when Dan said his name and his eyes widened slightly when they rested on the speaker. He looked next at Janice and she smiled at him, hoping to set him at ease. He shivered and his gaze slid away to skim over the lavish meal set upon the table.

  Dan handed the great platter of meat to Glover, starting it down the side of the table away from Janice. As he awaited its return, he engaged their guest in conversation.

  "I was pleased to learn you had been persuaded to stay with us, Pietro. An opportunity to interact with a person of your quality and distinction is far too rare a pleasure."

  Dan waited for Rinaldi to speak, but he rudely remained silent.

  "Come now, Pietro. It will not imperil your soul to talk to me."

  Rinaldi glared at him before saying, "Will it not? I know what you are."

  "Ah. Your gift
of sight. Your fellow Sylvestrines told me that it was very strong. It must be difficult, always seeing things and never having the experience to truly understand them. You have my sympathy."

  "Spare me," Rinaldi said. Janice thought the tone of his response was rude. "I understand your kind well enough."

  "Do you, Pietro. I hardly think we have been represented fairly in the arcane libraries in which you have studied. I expect you have seen nothing but biased accounts, half-truths, and ill-informed speculations. But rather than arguing about what you think you know. I'd like to talk with you about something you know very well.

  "You see, I know about you, Pietro Rinaldi. I know the facts of your career and numerous small details of your history. But more importantly, I know what kind of man you are. You are a doer, a man of action.

  "As I learned of how your gift had been limited, I was saddened. To find yourself only able to watch the magic that makes the world live . . . such a limitation is a criminal shame. You are not a watcher, Pietro. It must gnaw at you to always see and never do."

  "I have accepted my lot."

  "Fine words, and a noble sentiment. I’m sure your superiors approved and encouraged that attitude. However, acceptance of the inevitable is no virtue. Virtue requires sacrifice, does it not? At the very least it requires voluntary abstention. But your inability to touch the real magic is far from voluntary."

  As her own had been, Janice remembered. She had yearned for the magic, and had despaired when she was told she hadn’t been blessed with the ability.

  Rinaldi said, "I learned long ago not to aspire to what cannot be."

  Dan shook his head. "You mean, what you were told could not be. Are you really sure that you can never have the magic flow through your hands?" Janice had been sure until she met Dan. He had shown her the way.

  "Pietro, your ignorance made things safer for them. With your access to magic limited, you were no threat to them."

  Dan accepted the platter back and forked several juicy chunks onto his plate. "Knowing what I am, you know that I walk ways different from those of the bulk of humanity. Those paths have taken me to places of arcane knowledge. The power I have touched in those places transcends moral strictures, and I have learned how to share that power. I can offer you a way to transcend your own strictures. Magic, Pietro! If you accept my ways, the binding can be broken. I can lead you into the realms of power and show you the secret paths. I can give you the magic you long for. All I ask is that you embrace us and our cause." Dan held out the plate of meat. "Eat with us."