Smith began to make preliminary passes at the Tokyo collector, hinting that he was on the track of something noteworthy.
And then he had a visitor, a visitor unannounced, one who walked in through the elaborate maze of Smith's security as though it didn't exist. A small man, Japanese, enormously polite, who bore all the marks of a vatgrown ninja assassin. Smith sat very still, staring into the calm brown eyes of death across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood. Gently, almost apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his duty to find and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great beauty, which had been taken from the house of his master. It had come to his attention, the ninja said, that Smith might know of the whereabouts of this object.
Smith told the man that he had no wish to die, and produced the head. And how much, his visitor asked, did you expect to obtain through the sale of this object? Smith named a figure far lower than the price he'd intended to set. The ninja produced a credit chip and keyed Smith that amount out of a numbered Swiss account. And who, the man asked, brought you this piece? Smith told him. Within days, Smith learned of Jimmy's death.
`So that was where I came in,' the Finn continued. `Smith knew I dealt a lot with the Memory Lane crowd, and that's where you go for a quiet go-to that'll never be traced. I hired a cowboy. I was the cut-out, so I took a percentage. Smith, he was careful. He'd just had a very weird business experience and he'd come out on top, but it didn't add up. Who'd paid, out of that Swiss stash? Yakuza? No way. They got a very rigid code covers situations like that, and they kill the receiver too, always. Was it spook stuff? Smith didn't think so. Spook biz has a vibe, you get so you can smell it. Well, I had my cowboy buzz the news morgues until we found Tessier-Ashpool in litigation. The case wasn't anything, but we got the law firm. Then he did the lawyer's ice and we got the family address. Lotta good it did us.'
Case raised his eyebrows.
`Freeside,' the Finn said. `The spindle. Turns out they own damn near the whole thing. The interesting stuff was the picture we got when the cowboy ran a regular go-to on the news morgues and compiled a precis. Family organization. Corporate structure. Supposedly you can buy into an S.A., but there hasn't been a share of Tessier-Ashpool traded on the open market in over a hundred years. On any market, as far as I know. You're looking at a very quiet, very eccentric first-generation high orbit family, run like a corporation. Big money, very shy of media. Lot of cloning. Orbital law's a lot softer on genetic engineering, right? And it's hard to keep track of which generation, or combination of generations, is running the show at a given time.'
`How's that?' Molly asked.
`Got their own cryogenic setup. Even under orbital law, you're legally dead for the duration of a freeze. Looks like they trade off, though nobody's seen the founding father in about thirty years. Founding momma, she died in some lab accident...'
`So what happened with your fence?'
`Nothing.' The Finn frowned. `Dropped it. We had a look at this fantastic tangle of powers of attorney the T-A's have, and that was it. Jimmy must've gotten into Straylight, lifted the head, and Tessier-Ashpool sent their ninja after it. Smith decided to forget about it. Maybe he was smart.' He looked at Molly. `The Villa Straylight. Tip of the spindle. Strictly private.'
`You figure they own that ninja, Finn?' Molly asked.
`Smith thought so.'
`Expensive,' she said. `Wonder whatever happened to that little ninja, Finn?'
`Probably got him on ice. Thaw when needed.'
`Okay,' Case said, `we got Armitage getting his goodies off an AI named Wintermute. Where's that get us?'
`Nowhere yet,' Molly said, `but you got a little side gig now.' She drew a folded scrap of paper from her pocket and handed it to him. He opened it. Grid coordinates and entry codes.
`Who's this?'
`Armitage. Some data base of his. Bought it from the Moderns. Separate deal. Where is it?'
`London,' Case said.
`Crack it.' She laughed. `Earn your keep for a change.'
Case waited for a trans-BAMA local on the crowded platform. Molly had gone back to the loft hours ago, the Flatline's construct in her green bag, and Case had been drinking steadily ever since.
It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct, a hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man's skills, obsessions, kneejerk responses... The local came booming in along the black induction strip, fine grit sifting from cracks in the tunnel's ceiling. Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered metallic lids. The girls looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and unconsciously with the movement of the train, their high heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car's floor. Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train reached Case's station.
He stepped out and caught sight of a white holographic cigar suspended against the wall of the station, FREESIDE pulsing beneath it in contorted capitals that mimicked printed Japanese. He walked through the crowd and stood beneath it, studying the thing. WHY WAIT? pulsed the sign. A blunt white spindle, flanged and studded with grids and radiators, docks, domes. He'd seen the ad, or others like it, thousands of times. It had never appealed to him. With his deck, he could reach the Freeside banks as easily as he could reach Atlanta. Travel was a meat thing. But now he noticed the little sigil, the size of a small coin, woven into the lower left corner of the ad's fabric of light: T-A.
He walked back to the loft, lost in memories of the Flatline. He'd spent most of his nineteenth summer in the Gentleman Loser, nursing expensive beers and watching the cowboys. He'd never touched a deck, then, but he knew what he wanted. There were at least twenty other hopefuls ghosting the Loser, that summer, each one bent on working joeboy for some cowboy. No other way to learn.
They'd all heard of Pauley, the redneck jockey from the 'Lanta fringes, who'd survived braindeath behind black ice. The grapevine -slender, street level, and the only one going -had little to say about Pauley, other than that he'd done the impossible. `It was big,' another would-be told Case, for the price of a beer, `but who knows what? I hear maybe a Brazilian payroll net. Anyway, the man was dead, flat down braindeath.' Case stared across the crowded bar at a thickset man in shirtsleeves, something leaden about the shade of his skin.
`Boy,' the Flatline would tell him, months later in Miami, `I'm like them huge fuckin'~ lizards, you know? Had themself two goddam brains, one in the head an'~ one by the tailbone, kept the hind legs movin'~. Hit that black stuff and ol'~ tailbrain jus'~ kept right on keepin'~ on.'
The cowboy elite in the Loser shunned Pauley out of some strange group anxiety, almost a superstition. McCoy Pauley, Lazarus of cyberspace...
And his heart had done for him in the end. His surplus Russian heart, implanted in a POW camp during the war. He'd refused to replace the thing, saying he needed its particular beat to maintain his sense of timing. Case fingered the slip of paper Molly had given him and made his way up the stairs.
Molly was snoring on the temperfoam. A transparent cast ran from her knee to a few millimeters below her crotch, the skin beneath the rigid micropore mottled with bruises, the black shading into ugly yellow. Eight derms, each a different size and color, ran in a neat line down her left wrist. An Akai transdermal unit lay beside her, its fine red leads connected to input trodes under the cast.
He turned on the tensor beside the Hosaka. The crisp circle of light fell directly on the Flatline's construct. He slotted some ice, connected the construct, and jacked in.
It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder.
He coughed. `Dix? McCoy? That you man?' His throat was tight.
`Hey, bro,' said a dire
ctionless voice.
`It's Case, man. Remember?'
`Miami, joeboy, quick study.'
`What's the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix?'
`Nothin'~.'
`Hang on.' He disconnected the construct. The presence was gone. He reconnected it. `Dix? Who am I?'
`You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?'
`Ca -your buddy. Partner. What's happening, man?'
`Good question.'
`Remember being here, a second ago?'
`No.'
`Know how a ROM personality matrix works?'
`Sure, bro, it's a firmware construct.'
`So I jack it into the bank I'm using, I can give it sequential, real time memory?'
`Guess so,' said the construct.
`Okay, Dix. You area ROM construct. Got me?'
`If you say so,' said the construct. `Who are you?'
`Case.'
`Miami,' said the voice, `joeboy, quick study.'
`Right. And for starts, Dix, you and me, we're gonna sleaze over to London grid and access a little data. You game for that?'
`You gonna tell me I got a choice, boy?'
6
`You want you a paradise,' the Flatline advised, when Case had explained his situation. `Check Copenhagen, fringes of the university section.' The voice recited coordinates as he punched.
They found their paradise, a `pirate's paradise,' on the jumbled border of a low-security academic grid. At first glance it resembled the kind of graffiti student operators sometimes left at the junctions of grid lines, faint glyphs of colored light that shimmered against the confused outlines of a dozen arts faculties.
`There,' said the Flatline, `the blue one. Make it out? That's an entry code for Bell Europa. Fresh, too. Bell'll get in here soon and read the whole damn board, change any codes they find posted. Kids'll steal the new ones tomorrow.'
Case tapped his way into Bell Europa and switched to a standard phone code. With the Flatline's help, he connected with the London data base that Molly claimed was Armitage's.
`Here,' said the voice, `I'll do it for you.' The Flatline began to chant a series of digits, Case keying them on his deck, trying to catch the pauses the construct used to indicate timing. It took three tries.
`Big deal,' said the Flatline. `No ice at all.'
`Scan this shit,' Case told the Hosaka. `Sift for owner's personal history.'
The neuroelectronic scrawls of the paradise vanished, replaced by a simple lozenge of white light. `Contents are primarily video recordings of postwar military trials,' said the distant voice of the Hosaka. `Central figure is Colonel Willis Corto.'
`Show it already,' Case said.
A man's face filled the screen. The eyes were Armitage's.
Two hours later, Case fell beside Molly on the slab and let the temperfoam mold itself against him.
`You find anything?' she asked, her voice fuzzy with sleep and drugs.
`Tell you later,' he said, `I'm wrecked.' He was hungover and confused. He lay there, eyes closed, and tried to sort the various parts of a story about a man called Corto. The Hosaka had sorted a thin store of data and assembled a precis, but it was full of gaps. Some of the material had been print records, reeling smoothly down the screen, too quickly, and Case had had to ask the computer to read them for him. Other segments were audio recordings of the Screaming Fist hearing.
Willis Corto, Colonel, had plummeted through a blind spot in the Russian defenses over Kirensk. The shuttles had created the hole with pulse bombs, and Corto's team had dropped in in Nightwing microlights, their wings snapping taut in moonlight, reflected in jags of silver along the rivers Angara and Podhamennaya, the last light Corto would see for fifteen months. Case tried to imagine the microlights blossoming out of their launch capsules, high above a frozen steppe.
`They sure as hell did shaft you, boss,' Case said, and Molly stirred beside him.
The microlights had been unarmed, stripped to compensate for the weight of a console operator, a prototype deck, and a virus program called Mole IX, the first true virus in the history of cybernetics. Corto and his team had been training for the run for three years. They were through the ice, ready to inject Mole IX, when the emps went off. The Russian pulse guns threw the jockeys into electronic darkness; the Nightwings suffered systems crash, flight circuitry wiped clean.
Then the lasers opened up, aiming on infrared, taking out the fragile, radar-transparent assault planes, and Corto and his dead console man fell out of a Siberian sky. Fell and kept falling...
There were gaps in the story, here, where Case scanned documents concerning the flight of a commandeered Russian gunship that managed to reach Finland. To be gutted, as it landed in a spruce grove, by an antique twenty-millimeter cannon manned by a cadre of reservists on dawn alert. Screaming Fist had ended for Corto on the outskirts of Helsinki, with Finnish paramedics sawing him out of the twisted belly of the helicopter. The war ended nine days later, and Corto was shipped to a military facility in Utah, blind, legless, and missing most of his jaw. It took eleven months for the Congressional aide to find him there. He listened to the sound of tubes draining. In Washington and McLean, the show trials were already underway. The Pentagon and the CIA were being Balkanized, partially dismantled, and a Congressional investigation had focused on Screaming Fist. Ripe for watergating, the aide told Corto.
He'd need eyes, legs, and extensive cosmetic work, the aide said, but that could be arranged. New plumbing, the man added, squeezing Corto's shoulder through the sweat-damp sheet.
Corto heard the soft, relentless dripping. He said he preferred to testify as he was.
No, the aide explained, the trials were being televised. The trials needed to reach the voter. The aide coughed politely.
Repaired, refurnished, and extensively rehearsed, Corto's subsequent testimony was detailed, moving, lucid, and largely the invention of a Congressional cabal with certain vested interests in saving particular portions of the Pentagon infrastructure. Corto gradually understood that the testimony he gave was instrumental in saving the careers of three officers directly responsible for the suppression of reports on the building of the EMP [17] installations at Kirensk.
His role in the trials over, he was unwanted in Washington. In an M Street restaurant, over asparagus crepes, the aide explained the terminal dangers involved in talking to the wrong people. Corto crushed the man's larynx with the rigid fingers of his right hand. The Congressional aide strangled, his face in an asparagus crepe, and Corto stepped out into cool Washington September.
The Hosaka rattled through police reports, corporate espionage records, and news files. Case watched Corto work corporate defectors in Lisbon and Marrakesh, where he seemed to grow obsessed with the idea of betrayal, to loathe the scientists and technicians he bought out for his employers. Drunk, in Singapore, he beat a Russian engineer to death in a hotel and set fire to his room.
Next he surfaced in Thailand, as overseer of a heroin factory. Then as enforcer for a California gambling cartel, then as a paid killer in the ruins of Bonn. He robbed a bank in Wichita. The record grew vague, shadowy, the gaps longer.
One day, he said, in a taped segment that suggested chemical interrogation, everything had gone gray.
Translated French medical records explained that a man without identification had been taken to a Paris mental health unit and diagnosed as schizophrenic. He became catatonic and was sent to a government institution on the outskirts of Toulon. He became a subject in an experimental program that sought to reverse schizophrenia through the application of cybernetic models. A random selection of patients were provided with microcomputers and encouraged, with help from students, to program them. He was cured, the only success in the entire experiment.
The record ended there.
Case turned on the foam and Molly cursed him softly for disturbing her.
The telephone rang. He pulled it into bed. `Yeah?'
`We're going to Istanbul,
' Armitage said. `Tonight.'
`What does the bastard want?' Molly asked.
`Says we're going to Istanbul tonight.'
`That's just wonderful.'
Armitage was reading off flight numbers and departure times.
Molly sat up and turned on the light.
`What about my gear?' Case asked. `My deck.'
`Finn will handle it,' said Armitage, and hung up.
Case watched her pack. There were dark circles under her eyes, but even with the cast on, it was like watching a dance. No wasted motion. His clothes were a rumpled pile beside his bag.
`You hurting?' he asked.
`I could do with another night at Chin's.'
`Your dentist?'
`You betcha. Very discreet. He's got half that rack, full clinic. Does repairs for samurai.' She was zipping her bag. `You ever been to 'Stambul?'
`Couple days, once.'
`Never changes,' she said. `Bad old town.'
`It was like this when we headed for Chiba,' Molly said, staring out the train window at blasted industrial moonscape, red beacons on the horizon warning aircraft away from a fusion plant. `We were in L.A. He came in and said Pack, we were booked for Macau. When we got there, I played fantan in the Lisboa and he crossed over into Zhongshan. Next day I was playing ghost with you in Night City.' She took a silk scarf from the sleeve of her black jacket and polished the insets. The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete.
The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.
7
It was raining in Beyoglu, and the rented Mercedes slid past the grilled and unlit windows of cautious Greek and Armenian jewelers. The street was almost empty, only a few dark-coated figures on the sidewalks turning to stare after the car.
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