city blues 02 - angel city blues (23 page)

“I think that’s what we’re having.”

I could see her reign in the urge to snap at me. “A particular conversation,” she said. “Remember the last time we talked? Just before you pulled the plug, I told you I could help you with your case.”

“Yes…”

“I wasn’t speaking in general terms,” Dancer said. “I meant the Forsyth case. I know about it, and I can help”

“Okay, I’m listening…”

“I got you the job,” Dancer said. “Or I shoved it in your direction, anyway.”

She waited for me to respond. I didn’t.

“They were working on the same thing,” she said.

“Who?”

“Rhiarra and Leanda Forsyth. They were both investigating FANTASCAPE. The technology, and the people behind it. Now, Rhiarra is dead, the Forsyth girl is missing, and I’ve been brainlocked. Three loose ends, tied up in a neat fucking package.”

“How do you know what Leanda Forsyth was investigating?”

“She interviewed my wife several times. Rhiarra was her source.”

“For what?”

“How much do you know about SCAPE?” Dancer asked.

“Not much,” I said, “but I’m learning fast.”

“Well, one of its big selling points is the lack of POV identity.”

I patted my pockets and found my cigarettes. “I assume you’re going to tell me what that means.”

“Basically, there’s no way to identify the point of view subject of a SCAPE recording. If you play back a clip, you relive the sensory experiences of the man or woman who wore the cranial rig when the recording was made. For the duration of the clip, you
become
that person. Their experiences become your experiences. Unless the POV subject does something that specifically reveals his identity, he remains anonymous.”

From what I’d seen of SCAPE technology, that sounded about right. “Go on…”

“So that’s a two-edged sword,” Dancer said. “From the consumer standpoint, it’s a major selling point. When Joe Fatass plays a porn clip, it feels like
he’s
boning the bimbo of the month. A taller, more muscular version of himself—with a schwantz the length of your forearm—but still
him
. Good old Joe Fatass, doing the deed. Joe has no way of recognizing or identifying Johnny Studmuffin, the porn actor who actually did the boning.”

I lit the cigarette and took a long slow drag. “I can see how that could be an advantage, from a marketing perspective. What’s the other edge of the sword?”

“The criminal angle,” Dancer said. “There’s a big market for SCAPE recordings of criminal activity. Snuff clips. Rape clips. Torture clips. People who fantasize about doing all kinds of nasty shit, but they don’t have the balls to take the risks.”

My own encounter with SCAPE torture was still fresh in my mind. “Yeah. I know something about that.”

“Your average illegal SCAPE recording amounts to a perp’s-eye view of the crime in-progress. It contains all the evidence we need to prosecute the shithead. Everything, that is, except his identity.”

I nodded. “Your perpetrator is the POV subject, so he’s anonymous.”

“Bingo,” Dancer said.

“Alright, I guess I see the problem,” I said. “But how does any of this connect to Leanda Forsyth?”

“Rhiarra worked in the Cybercrimes Lab. She was developing an algorithm to extract numerical patterns from subconscious waveforms imbedded in the memory matrix of every SCAPE recording.”

“What does that mean?”

“Rhiarra tried to explain it to me,” Dancer said. “If I understand it right, there’s a cluster of nerve cells in a certain part of every human brain—the inferior temporal goddamnit, or something. It keeps track of memorized numerical information. Citizen Identification Numbers, account numbers, phone numbers, birthdates, addresses, all kinds of fucking numbers carried around in each person’s brain. And that jumble of numerical crap gets captured as subliminal background noise when a SCAPE recording is made.”

“Your wife was working on a way to pull those numbers out of a SCAPE recording?”

Dancer’s hologram nodded. “Yeah.”

I ran the idea through my head, but I was apparently too dense to make the connection. “So where does that get us?”

That earned me a sideways look. “Are you sure you’re a detective? You’re not just bullshitting people, and taking their money?”

“I never claimed to be good at this,” I said. “Just tell me what it means, okay?”

Dancer rolled her eyes. “The numbers stored in your brain are like a fingerprint. At least in large groups. What Rhiarra used to call ‘robust unstructured data sets.’ In other words, any particular multi-digit number in your head may also be known by other people. But the overall collection of numbers is known only to you. I know your phone number, your address, and your Citizen’s ID number, so we share at least a few numerical patterns. But I don’t know your Mother’s birthdate, your savings account number, or the street address of your favorite bar.”

“If you can cross-reference all those subliminal number patterns, you can identify the POV subject.”

“Exactly,” Dancer said. “Not an ID that will stand up in court, but enough to put the perp on our radar, and maybe justify a search warrant.”

“This sounds like the kind of stuff that LAPD would want to keep in-house. Why did your wife go to the media?”

A look of pain flickered across Dancer’s holographic features. “Rhiarra’s funding was being cut. Somebody up high was trying to marginalize her. Squash her research. Keep her quiet.”

“So she leaked the story to a reporter.”

Dancer’s voice was grim. “Yeah. And they killed her for it. Made it look like a sex crime, to divert attention away from the real motive. They probably killed the Forsyth girl too.”

“Do you have any idea who
they
are?”

“No,” Dancer said. “Not yet. I got my hands on two of the bastards that raped and killed her, but they were just muscle boys. Following orders. I never found out who the real players are.”

“What about the third perp?”

Dancer gave me the most predatory smile I’ve ever seen. “I had big plans for that boy. I was going to get him somewhere quiet… Just me, him, a pair of wire cutters, and a laser torch. Peel him like a fucking onion.”

“And you were going after him when Internal Affairs caught up with you?”

“Yeah,” Dancer said. “They got to me before I got to him.”

“Do you know what he looks like?”

“Of course. He’s a Nip. Like the other two.”

“A
Nip
?”

“Yeah. A Nip. A Jap. Or a person of Asian descent, if you’re too much of a pussy for straight talk.”

“He ran to a Japanese orbital colony. Do you remember which one?”

“I don’t remember the Nip name, but the English translation was something about a garden.”

“Chiisai Teien?
Little garden
?”

Dancer nodded. “That was it.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah… The fucker’s only got nine fingers.

CHAPTER 18

It took me until late the next afternoon to wrangle a visa to Chiisai Teien. By the time I had clearance to travel, the orbital flights were booked solid. No open seats to my destination for at least a week.

I made a call to Vivien. She made a call or two on her end, and an available seat magically appeared on the ten p.m. JAS shuttle.

I thanked her and terminated the call. Time to pack.

I made it through initial security at LAX with about twenty minutes to spare. I felt naked without the Blackhart, but there wasn’t a prayer of getting it past the hard object scanners, the olfactronic sniffers, and the latest batch of semi-intrusive gadgets from the transportation security spooks. It wouldn’t have done me much good anyway. Where I was headed, the vacuum of space was kept out by thin metal walls. It wouldn’t be smart to go throwing around large caliber slugs.

The printing on my boarding pass was photo-active; a digital readout in the lower left corner counting down the minutes and seconds before the first call for Flight #2216. A flashing green arrow appeared near the right edge. Like a compass needle, the arrow pointed toward Gate 52, no matter which way the boarding pass was turned. I found a slidewalk moving in the direction of the arrow, and stepped on. A handful of people rode the belt with me, all of them locked into that sort of lethargic self-interest that makes the rest of the world functionally invisible.

Dancer’s Scion rode in the pocket of my windbreaker, cobbled to my phone by a few centimeters of fiber optic cable and a couple of wraps of nano-pore tape. Her special bug was snugly inserted in my left ear, giving us easy voice communication, and providing her fly eye camera with a view of the world.

So far, her contributions had been limited to occasional comments about the posteriors of selected female passengers—drawing my attention to examples at both ends of the fitness spectrum. Given Dancer’s extraordinary physique in her pre-brainlock days, she undoubtedly knew more about female gluteal muscle tone than I did.

The slidewalk glided past a row of windows. Fifty or sixty meters from the terminal, a shuttle squatted on the runway, its blunt snout pointed toward the night sky. Under the harsh glare of the runway lights, the ablative coating of its heat shield had a faintly dingy look, the product of a hundred searing reentries.

Someone had once referred to the first-generation Lockheed Martin Wayfarer as a ‘potato with Cadillac tail fins.’ The description applied equally well to the Wayfarer III sitting on the runway nearly forty years later. The rounded silhouette of the fat triangular lifting body bore little resemblance to the sleek aerodynamic shapes that had dominated the space program in the Twentieth Century.

My focus shifted from the runway outside to the reflections on the surface of the windows. Superimposed over the shapes of the shuttle and ground equipment, I saw translucent images of myself and the other riders on the slidewalk.

“Heads up!” Dancer said in my ear. “There’s a Nip about ten people behind you. Maroon jacket, and a blue carryon bag. Rough type. Muscle boy. Watching you like a hawk.”

I let my gaze drift back down the line of reflections until I spotted him. It was Arm-twister, and Dancer was right. His eyes were locked on me.

“Thanks,” I said softly. “I see him.”

“That one of the Asian goons you were telling me about?”

“Yeah. I call this one Arm-twister.”

“You think he’s coming after you?”

“Maybe,” I said. “He wants me dead. Or his bosses do anyway.”

The row of windows came to an end, giving way to sand-colored corridor walls. I could no longer see Arm-twister’s reflection, and my brain began to conjure up images of him creeping up behind me on the belt, reaching into his carryon for some nasty implement that had somehow eluded the scanners.

It was just nerves. Dancer could keep an eye on him, whether I could see him or not. If Arm-twister tried to make a move, she’d give me plenty of warning.

The slidewalk ended in a foyer just shy of the final security checkpoint. I stood in line again, and waited my turn to walk through five consecutive metal arches crammed with scanning equipment. With my gun locked up in the weapon safe at home, I was clean. I strolled through the electronic barricade, my gray travel bag not causing so much as a hiccough from any of the alarms.

On the other side, I was scanned yet again, by a bald headed security man with a sensor wand and a rack of steroid-fueled muscles. He waved the wand around my body and carryon bag, watching the readouts intently in case the sensors sniffed out any stray molecules of prohibited drugs or explosives. After a few seconds, he waved me through.

I was tempted to hang around to see if Arm-twister made it through the weapons detectors. Instead, I lengthened my stride and tried to put some distance between us before he could clear security.

I was a dozen or so steps away when I heard the zip-squeal of an alarm behind me. A quick peek over my shoulder showed a heavyset woman arguing with the bald security man. Apparently, she was reluctant to surrender whatever it was that had triggered the sensors.

I put on a little more speed and used the delay to widen my lead on Arm-twister. My eyes continued to give the faces around me the once over; I couldn’t afford to assume that Arm-twister was working alone.