Black Rain

by Matthew B. J. Delaney

“Actually, we’re putting together a protest in support of Ituri human rights.”

  Phillip’s eyes widened. “What? Hey . . . whoa . . . slow down.” Phillip’s mind snapped to attention. “What does that mean?”

  “The country has no potable water, electricity, or food, the stuff of basic existence. And that’s all because General Mazomba has kept a civil war going to consolidate his corruption of power.”

  “Whatever you may think, protesting is not a good idea,” Phillip said. “In fact, it’s a very bad idea. I’ve got a major deal going with this guy. How does it look if my own brother attacks his policies?”

  “My name won’t be on anything. Your profits will be safe.”

  Phillip shook his head, looking sober for the first time that morning. “I’m serious. Don’t rock the boat. I need this to come together. It’s important.”

  “How much time do you need?”

  “There are a million people starving, or dying of AIDS, or whatever. Plenty of causes to wave your biodegradable flag at without getting involved in mine.”

  “These people need help.”

  Phillip sighed. “Always trying to save the world, brother.”

  “Sometimes I think I’m just a caricature to you.”

  “It’s too early in the morning for such long words.”

  “You’ve got a busy morning.” Jack checked his watch. “I have to go upstairs now.”

  Phillip smiled. “I’ll remember to recycle.”

  CHAPTER 10

  The ring of the sync startled Phillip. An image of General Mazomba appeared.

  “Coming, coming,” he said aloud to no one as he carefully dripped Visine into each eye. Dropping the bottle into his desk, he coughed to clear his throat, smoothed the front of his suit, and answered the call.

  “Good morning,” Phillip said.

  The general did not look pleased. He pressed his fingertips together. “I am wondering why my people here are telling me that your brother was asking questions about our refugee population.”

  Phillip kept his face impassive. “Go on.”

  “I am one of your brother’s biggest football fans. But what you need to know is that your brother’s activities are highly displeasing to me.”

  “Everything is under control,” Phillip said reassuringly.

  “Why should I believe that? Because you tell me it is?” The general’s tone was scathing. “If you want this deal to go through, I must not have such problems.”

  “I assure you, there will be no problems.”

  “I have a lot of mao invested with you,” the general said. “Don’t make me regret my decisions.” Something that sounded like gunfire cracked in the background. There was a click, then instrumental music played as Phillip found himself on hold.

  Somehow, once again, Phillip thought to himself, Jack was in his way. Casting a shadow over him and all his plans. And it wasn’t fair. His kid brother had an advantage no one else had. His secret was what gave him the edge. And if people only knew, they’d understand why things were so much easier for Jack.

  His eyeScreen chimed. Pancrease had fallen another two points. Somewhere, someone was probably dying from pancreatic cancer. Wasting slowly away, his or her body sickened from chemotherapy. And somewhere a loved one spent sleepless nights, sorting through old sync images, up late worrying. But Phillip wasn’t that guy. He was on the other side, the guy in the expensive suit, with the Cuban cigar clenched between his teeth. Phillip was the fellow who was about to make a fortune off pancreatic cancer.

  Only not now, because the Samp didn’t work.

  The sync clicked again, and General Mazomba appeared once more. Two beads of sweat had formed down the side of his cheek.

  “If your brother shames me publicly, if these things happen, I can only blame you for them. You understand this?” General Mazomba paused, staring thoughtfully at Phillip. “So maybe it’s time to do something about it.”

  CHAPTER 11

  The deceased, Dr. Martin Reynolds, had lived in one of the newer conurb apartment complexes in Battery Park City. The doorman, a burly Synthate in a black suit, had the touch key and let Arden and Sanders into the space. The place was large and looked barely lived in. The condenser was half full of clean water. A vidScreen 3Deed a vintage image of the Golden Gate Bridge while through the fluxglass, the recycle stations in New Jersey burned gas flames.

  Arden turned toward the doorman. His bioprint flashed to an image of an abandoned house. “Did the Reynoldses have many visitors?”

  The Synthate shook his head. “Not many, sir. They were quiet. Well liked.”

  “Anyone suspicious ever hang around the building?”

  “Guy came by, maybe a week or so, wandered into the lobby high on something. Euphoria, probably. Had to kick him out.”

  “What’d this guy look like?”

  “Natural. Broker-looking guy.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Not really. Just Euphoria crazy talk. Knocked over one of the plants out front. Said he was meeting a friend. Wouldn’t say who. Kicked him out, he never came back.”

  The Synthate shut the door as he left and the two detectives began an inspection of the apartment. Sanders stopped to watch a 3Dee of Reynolds and his wife at a grow garden, a line of Synthates at attention behind them. They were a handsome couple, like models from a skin spray vidImage.

  “What are you hoping to find here?” Sanders asked.

  “Don’t know.” Arden ran his fingers over the smooth glass edges of a liquor cabinet. He found a highball glass and poured himself something to tide him over. He downed the liquid in a gulp and turned back toward the living room. “Maybe nothing. He doesn’t seem like the type to bring his work home with him.”

  The view through the bedroom window was blocked by a slow-moving wind power farm. The five diamond-shaped kites slowly slid south while 3Deeing ads for a Governors Island pleasure parlor. A buoyancy bed floated in the corner. Some clutter lined the top of one of the dressers. An open perfume bottle, crumpled Kleenex with lipstick marks, some loose change. Over the mirror, someone had written “Memory Core?” in black Sharpie ink.

  “Memory Core?” Sanders said. “What do you think that is?”

  “No idea.”

  More vidImages 3Deed on the wall, most of them of the Reynoldses with various important people.

  “What do you make of this one?” Sanders indicated an image of Dr. Reynolds standing next to a square-jawed man with a thick mustache, a backdrop of laboratory equipment behind them.

  “Let’s take a look.” Arden touched the image and enlarged it until it 3Deed almost life-size in the center of the room.

  Sanders studied the image. “The guy with the ’stache is George Saxton, right?”

  “I think so.”

  “What do you make of the lab behind them?” The space behind the two men was crowded with genetic recombination equipment. “Look at the floor. That doesn’t seem like a Genico lab.”

  The floor was constructed of what appeared to be broken cobblestone. Arden indicated the bottom edge of the image where a rusted metal rail was barely visible. “What do you think that is?”

  “Looks like a train track.”

  “What’s a train track doing in a Genico laboratory?”

  Something else caught Arden’s eye. In the far right of the image was a bronze plaque affixed to a crumbling brick wall. Arden focused in on the section. There was writing on the plaque, barely visible under layers of dirt.

  “Can you make that out?” Arden indicated the image.

  “Looks like numbers.”

  Arden rotated the image in midair, and the plaque suddenly came into focus.

  A.D. 1870

  “This definitely isn’t in the Genico building,” Arden said. “Wherever it is, it’s underground and very old.”

  “Why would Genico have a lab somewhere like that?”

  “They would if there was something they wanted to keep secret.”


  “Like what?”

  “Reynolds would have known.”

  “Maybe that’s why he got killed.”

  Arden scanned the vidImage to his sync memory. If this was some kind of secret off-site lab, he doubted anyone at Genico would ever tell him anything. But there was definitely something that Genico wanted to keep hidden. Arden waved his hand and the image of Reynolds and Saxton shrank back down to frame size.

  Sanders casually poked through an immaculately folded stack of clothes in one of the Reynoldses’ drawers. He pulled out a diamond necklace and fingered it thoughtfully for a moment before putting it back in the drawer. “How much do you think old man Saxton knows?”

  “Probably everything. We’ll never get to him, though. Real question is, how much do you think his kids know?”

  “Don’t know,” Sanders said. “This guy Saxton looks old school. He’s probably a keeps-his-own-counsel type. Kids might not know anything.”

  The window power farm had moved off to the east, exposing the view through the bedroom window. Arden looked out across the city of lights, all the way north to the blackness of the Synthate Zone and Central Park beyond. This place was beautiful, something Arden couldn’t have afforded even with ten years’ salary.

  “Why give all this up?” Arden waved his hand toward the view. “Reynolds had a pretty good life here. Beautiful wife. Great apartment. Lots of cash in the bank. This wasn’t just some random jacking in an alley somewhere in Synthate town. Guy was assassinated. But for what?”

  Sanders shook his head. “Something must have been important enough.”

  Arden thought back to the Black Rain attack. Lot of people got sick that day. Lot of people died. That might be important enough to cause waves. Maybe that’s what got Reynolds killed.

  “Hey,” Sanders said. “Look at that.”

  Sanders pointed back to where the vidImage of Reynolds and Saxton in the laboratory had displayed near the bed. The 3Dee was gone, replaced with a generic view of the Rocky Mountains. Arden moved quickly into the kitchen, just in time to see the vidImage of Reynolds and his wife in front of the grow garden vanish from the refrigerator, replaced by a display of a kitten dozing on a pillow.

  “Someone accessed the Reynoldses’ home network,” Sanders said.

  “Looks like they’re cleaning up,” Arden said. “Someone’s got something to hide.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Phillip stood in the threshold in the York Conference Room of Genico. The York looked like the smoking room from an Agatha Christie novel with its overstuffed leather chairs and great stone fireplace. Framed portraits of the Genico founding board members hung from the wall.

  The biggest painting of them all was placed just over the fireplace. On the canvas was a tall, broad-shouldered man. The bulges of muscle on his chest and arms made him look more like a soldier than the head of the Genico brokerage department.

  This man was Harold Lieberman.

  Lieberman himself had a Synthate party girl bent over the conference table, fucking her from behind. She was beautiful, straight black hair, her green eyes blank. A bioprint of a vacant house trembled on her shoulder. Lieberman’s hair was slicked back from his forehead and shone in the lamplight. He possessed an olive complexion, with thick eyebrows and dark eyes. In the corner stood a hulking Synthate named Rasputin. He stared hard at Phillip.

  “Please,” Lieberman said, “have a seat.” He waved to one of the leather chairs as he continued with the girl. “I’m almost done.” The girl let out a final cry as Lieberman grunted and finished. Then he pulled away. Rasputin handed him a handkerchief and a bottle of water. The head of trading wiped the sweat from his forehead, then sipped the water. “When I was on Wall Street, we used to hit the rub and tugs downtown on lunch. Now I just don’t have the time. You want some?”

  “Water?”

  “No, the girl.”

  Phillip shook his head. “No, thank you, sir.”

  The girl pulled down her dress, then quietly left the room through a side door. Phillip sat and Lieberman belted his pants, leaning against the table, sipping his water. “My father worked in the meat markets. He was a butcher. It’s easy to defy expectations when nothing is expected of you. A rich man’s son can have a lot to live up to.”

  Phillip desperately tried to push the image of the naked old man from his mind.

  “I’ve looked at your trading record. You are an average trader, and, until now, your sole distinction that I’m aware of is that you are losing an inordinate amount on Pancrease.” Phillip opened his mouth to protest, but Lieberman held up his hand. “I don’t give false praise. But don’t worry. Your father has ensured your future. Had you been born the son of a lesser man, you might have actually had to work for your success.”

  Phillip was starting to become tired of the insults. “Where is this conversation headed?”

  “How’d you like to distinguish yourself?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You live in a kingdom that soon will be looking for a new successor,” Lieberman said. “Your father intends to step down.”

  “What?” Phillip asked, genuinely surprised. The old man had said nothing to him.

  “Such a moment is always a dangerous time for a kingdom. The turning over of the reins. Ideas that have been in favor, the people implementing them . . . suddenly men of our kind find themselves facing opposition, having to justify themselves . . .”

  “But Samp trading drives this company. And you made this place with my father. The two of you built Genico together.”

  “Of course. I’ve known your father for a very long time. We go way back. He’s a good man. But, alas, good men are not well suited for this line of business.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Your father has chosen your brother, Jack, to succeed him.”

  “My brother?”

  “Actually, your stepbrother, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Yes, yes . . . he is,” Phillip said, distracted.

  Lieberman studied Phillip with a careful eye. “You aren’t pleased.”

  Phillip snapped to attention, a warning alarm sounding in his head. “Just surprised.”

  “Perhaps you’d thought there might be a different successor? Perhaps you had thought it might be you?”

  “I wouldn’t be so presumptuous.”

  “Then you would not be the man of conviction that I thought you would be. It’s only natural for a prince to want to become king. Perhaps this prince feels the same?”

  Phillip was quiet for a long minute, and then said, “Help me out. What’s your angle?”

  “The obvious one. I know about your brother. He could destroy this company.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that perhaps it’s time for you to become king.”

  CHAPTER 13

  There was a note 3Deeing in Jack’s office. Jack would meet Phillip and Dolce on the roof. Phillip collapsed into a chair and studied his surroundings. The room was a monument to adventure. 2Dees showed Jack posed in front of the Great Wall, on the stone steps of Machu Picchu, near the edge of the Tannhauser Gate.

  In the corner a small gray packed parachute and yellow helmet, a souvenir from Jack’s base-jumping days, sat on top of some kind of leather strapped West African drum. Phillip’s eyes flicked to a 2Dee of Jack in his Miami Hurricanes uniform during the Orange Bowl victory. Taken on the field, it showed Jack grinning happily, holding his helmet in one hand while hugging a radiant looking Dolce with the other. Behind him was the mass confusion of the rest of the jubilant Miami players.

  “Cheers to you, mate,” Phillip said. Bending over, he snorted some powder into his nose from a little Ziploc he always carried with him. Mama touched him immediately, and the wave pulsed from his nose down through the rest of his body. Phillip sat up in the chair and stared at the football 2Dee again. He moved toward the image and took it down from the wall.

  Jack the star. Dolce beaming up at him. O
verhead, ticker tape fluttered down, frozen in its timeless fall. Almost lost in the background, Phillip could see his father giving a rare smile and looking prouder than his biological son had ever seen.

  He focused again on Jack and slowly brought the picture up toward his eyes. The details faded out of focus, and Phillip moved the image closer still, until he could see each individual pixel of color among the thousands. Here, lost in the pixelated world, things began to make sense. Each pixel played its part in obscurity. Each was nothing. Just like every other pixel. And each easily removed.

  “I know your secret . . .” Phillip whispered to the photograph.

  A sharp knock on the door surprised him. The pixels disappeared as he focused for a moment, then turned toward the doorway. Dolce stood there, annoyingly beautiful as usual. She owned a yoga studio in Soho and taught classes a few times per week. Breathe through your eyes, eat lots of broccoli, read Alan Watts. She was that type of person. Part philosopher, part athlete.

  While she and Phillip had grown up being close, Dolce had always been closer to his brother. The two of them had kept their relationship secret for years until it became too obvious to hide anymore. Phillip had feigned happiness, or maybe indifference, but inside he counted another resentful strike against Jack. She was the ultimate symbol of success before they even knew what success was.

  “That’s the Orange Bowl, right?” Dolce breezed into the room, looking at her sync. “He played well in that game.”

  Phillip hung the picture back on the wall. Jack had a record game that day. Phillip turned toward her. “Jack lived lucky. Death can’t even touch him.”

  Dolce looked up. “You mean the accident?”

  “T-boned by a truck at seventy miles an hour. Didn’t work out so well for James Dean. Jack Saxton wakes up in the hospital without a scratch.”

  “God chooses a path for all of us in life.”

  “And that’s who you think chose Jack’s path? God?” Phillip tested.

  “I believe God to be a divine force in all of us. The essential spark of life. However that spark came to be, yes, I believe that to be God’s hand at work. So if Jack lived when he should have died, if his spark continued, then God made that happen. Whether we understand or not. God is everywhere. And in everything.”