city blues 01 - dome city blues (44 page)

“The run isn’t finished yet,” Jackal said.  “Not till we get what we went in for.  How would you like to be the PI who
almost
cracked the case?”

I didn’t say anything.

“That’s what I figured,” Jackal said.  “And I’m not going to be the jacker who
almost
drilled an AI.”

I started to say something, but she cut me off.  “Shut up, Stalin.  I’m tired, and I want to get a couple of minutes rest before we do this.”

She lay with her eyes closed until Lance returned.

He walked in with an External Memory Module tucked under one arm and a coil of ribbon cable in his hand.  “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“I’m certain.”

Lance laid the EMM on the bed next to Jackal and held up the connector end of the ribbon cable.  “You know the drill.”

Jackal turned her head to the side.

Lance peeled the elastic bandages away from the jacks in the back of her skull and plugged the gold-pinned connector into an empty socket.

Lance picked up the EMM.  “Ready?”

Jackal swallowed, and whispered, “go!”

Lance punched a key on the EMM.

The LEDs on the unit began to flash sporadically, and Jackal’s back arched in instant response, lifting her body until only her shoulders and heels made contact with the bed.  Her head jerked to one side and then the other, her eyes rolling back until only the whites showed.  Saliva sprayed from her parted lips.  She released a raw, throat-rending growl through clenched teeth, and her arms began to jerk and twitch.

Lance stabbed his finger at the EMM, aiming for the button that would purge the bad code from Jackal’s implant, but a violent spasm sent her left arm lashing out, knocking the unit out of his hand.  Another jerk of her arm tipped the wheeled equipment rack over, sending the dermal stimulator units crashing to the floor.

Lance and I both dove for the EMM, which dangled and jerked at the end of the ribbon cable.

After two seconds of scrambling, Lance got a grip on the EMM.  He reached out to shut the unit off, but Jackal’s hand lashed out again.  Her fingers locked around his wrist and squeezed.

“Don’t...”  The word came out as a strained hiss.  “Don’t... touch... it...”

Her arms stopped flailing and went as rigid as her spine.

We stared at her frozen body for perhaps ten seconds, the passage of time marked only by the tense and rapid breaths she took through her nostrils.  Then slowly, her body began to relax.  The tension went out of her muscles and surrendered her to gravity.  She settled back into the bed.

“Getting...”  Her ocular muscles relaxed, letting her eyes roll downward until the corneas were visible again.  “I’m getting... a handle on it... now.”

“We’ve got to flush that code out of there,” Lance said.

“No...” Jackal said.  “It’s okay...  I’ve isolated the... dangerous parts, now.”

“I knew this was a bad idea,” Lance said.

“Maybe,” Jackal said.  “But I think... it worked.”

“What have you got?” I asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Jackal said, still breathing heavily.  “I’m running through the data now.  There are some pretty serious gaps where the code got scrambled, but I think I can piece it together.”

I might be only heartbeats away from learning the name of the Puppeteer.  Then the worm would turn, and the hunter would become the hunted, just as soon as I knew the name of my enemy.

“It looks like I was avoiding the protected core data,” Jackal said.  “I was concentrating on peripheral information flow.  Trying to swim with the data stream, blend in.”

She grimaced.  “Big block of data missing there...  I was skimming some unclassified correspondence files.  Whoa... Gotcha!”

“Can you get a name?” I asked.

“I couldn’t find out who that mainframe officially belongs to,” she said.  “They cover their tracks too well.”

“Damn!”

“But I can tell you who’s using it,” Jackal said.  Her voice, tired as it was, had a child-like taunting quality about it.

“Who?”

“A medical R&D company over on Hawthorne Boulevard,” Jackal said.  “It should be pretty simple to find out who owns it.”

I almost smiled.  Here it was: the payoff.  “What’s the name of the company?”

“Neuro-Tech Robotics,” Jackal said.  “Does that ring a bell?”

“Neuro-Tech?” Lance asked.  “No kidding?  That’s the same company that built my surgical robots.”

My knees nearly buckled.  I groped for support, blundered into a wall, and leaned heavily on it.  Henry Clerval—the man behind the murders of twenty-something teenage girls, the man who was offering a fifty-thousand mark reward for my own murder, the man I had come to call the Puppeteer—was the owner of Neuro-Tech Robotics... my life-long friend, John Hershell?

I felt like the floor had dropped out from under me.  “No,” I said.  “You’re wrong.  It’s not Neuro-Tech.”

“I’m sorry,” Jackal said softly.  “But that’s the way it stacks up.”

“There are holes in the data,” I said.  “Big holes.  You said so yourself.  Go back and look at it again.”

“I can re-run the data,” Jackal said.  “But it won’t play out any different.  We traced the murder callback to the AI, and the AI belongs to Neuro-Tech Robotics.  That’s where all the arrows point.”

“I don’t give a damn where the arrows point!  Re-run the fucking data.  It’s not Neuro-Tech.”

Lance grabbed my left arm just above the elbow.  “Come on,” he said.  “Gwen needs to get some rest.”

He gently tugged me toward the door.

I almost snatched my arm away from him, but on some level, I realized that he was right.  I let him lead me out of the room.

Lance released my elbow when we were in the hall.  “You’ve obviously got some things to work out,” he said.  “But don’t take your problems out on Gwen.  She nearly died chasing your riddles through the net.  And then she was willing to risk it again when you didn’t get what you wanted.”

“But she’s wrong,” I said.  “She’s got to be.”

Lance turned back toward Jackal’s recovery room.  “I really couldn’t care less whether she’s right or wrong,” he said.  “My concern is her health.  You’re not helping any by climbing up her ass.”

I found my way out to the alley and lit a cigarette.  Okay, okay.  Think it out.  Work it through...

It was a coincidence.  It was some kind of frame-up. 
Something
.  I would call John, talk to him.  He would tell me the truth.  I
knew
he would.

But what could he say?  That he just happened to be the owner of the company that was trying to murder me?  That there was a perfectly good reason that all those little girls had to die?

Emptiness settled in my belly like an icicle.  It brought with it a comforting numbness.  I leaned against the wall of the boutique, staring off into nothing.  I couldn’t think.  I couldn’t feel.  I didn’t want to.

The pain seemed to come from far away.  At first, I couldn’t locate it; I couldn’t even tell if it was real.  But it grew stronger and more insistent.  It was a burning, in my hand, my fingers.  The burning refused to be ignored.  It reached down into my fog of self-pity and brought me around like a slap in the face.

“Ow!  Jesus!”  I shook my right hand until the cigarette butt fell free and rolled on the pavement.  I ground it out with the toe of my shoe.

I looked at my hand.  The cigarette had burned down to my skin, blistering the backs of my index and middle fingers.  For such a small injury, the burns hurt like hell.

I was glad for the pain.  It had shaken me out of my stupor.  It helped melt the icicle in my stomach, helped me turn it to fire.

Jackal was still awake when I opened the door to the recovery room.  She tried to smile.  “I didn’t know if you were coming back.  You left your bag.”

I picked up the travel bag and slung it over my shoulder.  “Thanks.”

“I’m going to re-run that data,” she said.  “Maybe you’re right.  I could have made a mistake.”

“You don’t need to re-run it,” I said.  “We both know you were right.  I just wasn’t ready for it.”

“Is it somebody you know?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “An old friend.”

“I figured it was something like that,” Jackal said.  “I’m sorry.”

“No,” I said.  “
I’m
sorry.  I asked the questions.  It’s not your fault that I didn’t like the answers.”

Jackal closed her eyes.

“Sleep now,” I said.  “You done good.”

Down the block from Second Looks, I bought a news printout from a vending machine.  The top story had moved on to a terrorist attack on the Russian Royal Family.  There was still no mention of Rieger’s murder.  That might mean that the body hadn’t been discovered yet.  Or, it might mean that the police were sitting on the story.

If God was listening to my prayers, the cops were still in the dark.  I was counting on it; I needed to borrow Rieger’s car.  It was time to take the fight to the bad guy’s home-turf, and public transportation didn’t seem up to the challenge of providing a silent approach or a reliable get-away.

It took me fifteen minutes to catch a cab.  I gave the driver the address of Kurt Rieger’s apartment building in Dome 11.  He drove a lot faster than necessary, but I didn’t care.

Los Angeles slid by my window unnoticed.  I felt around inside myself for my anger.  It was still there, a hard little ember in my chest, smoldering with the quiet insistence of the cigarette burns on the backs of my fingers.

My right hand stole into my jacket just far enough to verify the presence of the Blackhart. 
I’m coming, John.  In just a little while.

The garage under Rieger’s building was deserted.  His BMW was still parked in slot 11-A.  The key chip was still behind the fire extinguisher, right where I’d left it.

I unlocked the car and slid behind the wheel.  At the touch of a button, the gull-wing door powered shut behind me.  I stuffed my purple travel bag into the front passenger seat.

I plugged in the key chip.  The wraparound dashboard flared blue with plasma display instrumentation.  The computer chirped and bleeped softly for a couple of seconds as it ran full-spectrum diagnostics and sequenced the car’s various systems on line.  The car’s soundproofing was excellent; I could barely hear the turbines as they spun up.

I decided not to cut in the blowers right away; I hadn’t driven in close to five years, and I’d never driven anything anywhere near as advanced as Rieger’s car.  I spent a minute or so cycling the double pistol grips of the control yoke through their full ranges of motion.  The control surfaces on the front air-foils and rear spoilers flexed in instant response, the angry mosquito whine of the control servos oddly louder than the muted wail of the turbines.

My reflection stared back at me from the rear view mirror.  The blonde buzz-cut and two-day beard made me look like Kurt Rieger’s brother on a downhill skid.  My face seemed different now, more gaunt, cheekbones prominent.  I didn’t remember those creases at the corners of my eyes.  I lit the last of the Mexican Marlboros and glanced at the mirror again.  I saw the face of a stranger.

I thumbed the button that kicked in the blowers and felt the BMW rise softly as the apron inflated.  I backed slowly out of the slot, and drove out of the garage.  The police could now add grand theft auto to my list of crimes.