city blues 02 - angel city blues (36 page)

His body jerked once, his hands coming up quickly, then going limp just as suddenly, and dropping into his lap. He was gone now. Off to the moonlit beach, and the endless kilometers of SCAPE-generated shoreline.

I used the remainder of the surgical tape to secure the headset in place. Afterwards, my former guard’s head looked like something between a mummy and a bizarre fashion accident.

The tape held the SCAPE rig perfectly as I pulled the guard out of the chair and laid him on the mesh metal floor.

About five minutes later he was naked, except for his undershorts, the SCAPE headset, and numerous windings of surgical tape.

His clothes were at least three sizes too large for me, but I felt better when my ass was no longer waving in the breeze. His shoes turned out to be a pretty good fit. I got things tucked and belted into what I hoped was a semblance of respectable dress. I let the suit jacket hang open, counting on the drape and swing of the fabric to at least partially draw attention away from the poor fit.

Then I spent a few seconds examining the sidearm that he had so thoughtfully bequeathed me. It was a 10mm semi-auto, of a make I’d never seen before. The markings were in Kanji, and the overall build reminded me vaguely of some of the short-barreled Glock models.

I ejected the magazine, shucked the round out of the chamber, and verified that the weapon was clear. Then I dry-fired it a couple of times, getting used to the mechanics, the layout of the sights, the position of the safety, and the ride-point of the trigger.

When I was fairly comfortable with the gun, I examined the ejected round. The case was some kind of darkly anodized alloy, and the nose looked like hardened plastic. Possibly a sabot with some kind of flechette or impact load inside. Or maybe just a variety of frangible ammunition that I hadn’t encountered before.

I popped the loose round back into the top of the magazine, and shoved the magazine into place.

By this time, my back teeth were floating. My bladder was full to the point of being painful. If there had been a floor drain or a sink, I would have forsaken my upbringing and peed in it. But my discomfort level wasn’t quite high enough to piss on the floor. I’d have to hold it in for a while longer.

I racked the slide of the automatic, flicked the safety on, and tucked it into my borrowed belt where it was covered by the voluminous jacket.

I was as ready as I could make myself. Time to get the hell out of here.

CHAPTER 30

The door opened onto a lighted corridor with a metal mesh floor identical to the one in the room. An industrial area then. Floor structure reinforced for the movement of heavy equipment. The ceiling was a confusion of color-coded piping and electrical conduits, most of it running parallel to the direction of travel. The air thrummed with the low vibration of industrial machinery.

I was about to step into the corridor when a group of six or eight men turned a corner down to my left and began walking in my direction. From the brief glimpse I caught of them, about half of them were dressed in business suits, and the others wore yellow coveralls and hardhats.

I ducked back into the room and stood inside the door with the automatic drawn. If those guys were coming here, things were about to get ugly.

The door remained closed, so apparently their destination was somewhere else.

I counted to ninety and opened the door again. The corridor was clear in both directions. I stepped out of the room, turned right and began walking.

I’d already decided to follow the old
right-turns-only
method that supposedly works for navigating mazes. This place might not technically qualify as a maze, but I had no idea where I was, or how far I might be from an exit to public areas. So it would do for a maze until the real thing came along.

I checked every door I passed, partly in the hopes of finding something useful (like a way out), and partly in search of places to hide in case the need suddenly arose.

After four of five locked doors, I came across two in a row that opened at my touch. The first was stacked ceiling high with shelves of pipe joints, valves, and various gauges of metal tubing. I could duck in here if I had to, but the room was so crammed with hardware that I couldn’t create a useable hidey-hole without moving a cubic meter of hardware out into the corridor. If anyone opened the door, they’d find me standing right inside.

I must have been due for a stroke of luck right about then, because the next door led to a communal washroom with an attached locker area.

I made it into the first stall and then had several seconds of intense fumbling when the fly of my stolen pants didn’t want to open. I was a half-second from ripping the fabric with my bare hands when the pants decided to cooperate. My first stream of urine hit the toilet so hard that I thought the porcelain was going to shatter. The fixture emitted a weirdly musical gargling noise, like someone with superhuman lung capacity trying to play a clarinet at the bottom of a swimming pool.

Some blissful number of seconds later, my bladder was reduced from the diameter of a snare drum to something that could reasonably be expected to fit inside of a person.

With the most urgent order of business taken care of, I was now free to move on to the next item on my agenda: ransacking the lockers.

A fast excursion to the storage room next door yielded a meter-long stretch of steel pipe with a diameter of about two centimeters. Before I could test out its effectiveness as an impromptu crowbar, I had to duck into a toilet stall and close the door while two Japanese men came into the restroom to use the facilities.

They kept up a continual stream of chatter in their own language. I didn’t know if that was good Japanese restroom etiquette, but it grated on my Southern California sensibilities.

Then again, they weren’t hiding in a bathroom stall with a stolen gun, wearing stolen clothes, ready to bash somebody’s head in with a steel pipe.

When the door closed behind them, I went to the lockers to test out my meter-long steel master key. It took me a few tries to figure out the technique, and then I worked my way down the line, prying locks off as I went.

A few minutes later, I was wearing yellow coveralls over the guard’s shirt and pants. His oversized suit jacket was stuffed in a locker, taking up the space formerly occupied by the hard hat and safety glasses that completed my ensemble.

I hadn’t found any work boots, so I was still wearing the guard’s dress shoes. With luck no one would check me out closely enough to examine my footwear.

The guard’s automatic was now riding in the right hip pocket of the coveralls. I carried a data pad in my left hand as a prop, and the steel pipe in my right hand in case I needed to get someone’s attention.

I checked myself out in the row of mirrors over the sinks. My hair was dark brown rather than black, but I wore it short and the hard hat cast a rim of shadow over it, making the color somewhat more indeterminate. The safety glasses did a bit to conceal my lack of epicanthic folds, and there was a lanyard around my neck bearing an ID trid. I didn’t resemble the face in the three-dimensional image very closely, nor did I look particularly Japanese. But at least I wouldn’t look distinctly un-Japanese at first glance. And that was probably the best I could hope for.

My disguise was put to the test in very short order. A group of men and women in lab coats were walking past just as I opened the door to the corridor. My instinct was to duck back into my restroom hideaway and wait for them to go by. But the best way to avoid attention is to look like you belong exactly where you are.

I stepped into the hallway, edging past the tail end of the group, and scrutinizing the screen of the data pad as though it contained vital information about my next work assignment.

Move along, folks. Nothing to see here. Just another happy grunt worker, doing whatever the hell it is that we do to earn our pay around here.

No one gave me a second glance.

I walked three or four meters, and then turned on my heel as though I had suddenly thought of something I needed to take care of back in the other direction. I fell into step behind the gaggle of lab coats, matching my pace to theirs so that I seemed to be with the group, but lagging a little behind.

It was the convoy principle. A man tagging along with a crowd is always less conspicuous than one guy walking alone. So much for my
right-turns-only
theory of navigation...

We passed other people, singly and in small groups. Most in coveralls or lab coats, but a few in business attire. As far as I could tell, none of them seemed to pay particular attention to me.

Even so, I kept waiting for the alarm to be raised. For uniformed security men to appear, shouting in Japanese for me to freeze. Or for strong hands to grab me from behind as I walked.

I trailed along in the wake of my lab coated convoy through five or six turns into different corridors. I was still completely lost, but at least I was putting some distance between myself and the room where I’d been held hostage.

Then the convoy came to a shuffling halt in front of a doorway with a biometric sensor array. I walked past as the lab coats queued up to present their palms and retinas for scanning.

I kept walking, and took the next right turn in the corridor. About ten meters down, a shape on the left wall caught my eye. It was an information placard. I had passed at least fifteen just like it during my wanderings, but I got a better look at this one and stopped.

It was a photoactive diagram of this building—or facility, or whatever it was—with a flashing man silhouette to show my current location and animated arrows illustrating the shortest routes to emergency exits.

I didn’t know whether to laugh, or shoot myself. There were placards like this all over the damned place. I’d been ignoring them on the assumption that any signs would be in Kanji, or one of the other Japanese alphabets. It hadn’t occurred to me that safety markings are almost always iconic, for instant visual recognition when there is no time for reading.

Some detective, huh? Not exactly Holmesian powers of observation.

Well, I could beat myself up over it later. For the moment, I was busy memorizing my path to freedom.

Two left turns later, I walked through a set of automatic double doors that marked the boundary between the industrial area and the office zone. Scarred plastic wall plating and mesh metal floors gave way to blonde wooden paneling and faun colored carpet.

Now I began drawing stares, as I was clearly not dressed for the public sections of the building. Someone spoke to me in a peremptory tone, probably ordering me back to the industrial catacombs from which I had crawled.

I began walking faster. Through another door, wooden this time, and into a large and beautifully appointed two story lobby, with several meticulously cultivated stands of bamboo and a freestanding waterfall.

A liveried security guard spoke sharply and moved in my direction, but I was on a beeline for the beveled glass doors at the lobby’s main entrance. I was to the doors and through them before the security man caught up to me.

I hit the front walkway at something just short of a trot, dropping the pipe, the hardhat and the safety goggles as I moved out into sunlight of the louvered sky. I hung onto the data pad. The security man didn’t follow me.

I put at least fifty meters between me and the building before I looked back over my shoulder. The holographic sign above the main doors spelled out ‘Akimura Nanodyne,’ in a sliver-blue font that could have been designed in a wind tunnel.

Then I was on the sidewalk, merging with the foot traffic, and steadily putting distance between myself and the building from which I had just escaped.

Judging by the architecture and the prevailing standard of dress, I appeared to be in the Osaka district, the colony’s commercial and industrial sector. The crowd here was about forty-percent gaijin. If not for my canary yellow coveralls, I could have blended in seamlessly.

There didn’t seem to be a lot of vehicles on the street. A smattering of taxis, a few hover-limos, and the occasional private sedan. Barely enough to make a decent traffic jam, even if you shoehorned them all into the same stretch of road at the same time.

I found a corner coffee shop, where I ordered a pastry and a large cappuccino to go. While the counter boy was wrestling with the steamer, I slipped into the restroom and shucked the coveralls. The sleeping guard’s oversized pants had enough loose fabric for me to slip his gun into the front pocket. The bulge was noticeable, but not instantly identifiable as a weapon. The coveralls went into the trashcan, and then I went back out to face the world.

The counter boy didn’t ask about my quick-change act. I rewarded his lack of curiosity with a generous tip. I paid with a credit chip from the guard’s wallet.

The pastry and cappuccino went untouched into a trash receptacle a block down the street. I really wanted them both. I was hungry enough to eat my shoes, and I was badly in need of a heavy dose of caffeine. But I had gotten into this mess by accepting food and coffee in a public establishment.