city blues 02 - angel city blues (41 page)

When she was sure that the weapon was unloaded, she slipped the magazine into her pocket and spent a minute or so getting a feel for the layout and heft of the weapon.

Then she took a step toward the target wall, left foot coming forward, right foot staying back in the supporting position of a walking stance. Simultaneously, she brought the Nambu up in the two-handed Weaver grip—long out of favor with many law enforcement agencies, but still preferred by most militaries.

She dry-fired a couple of times, and then brought the weapon down. “It’s not as heavy as I expected.”

“A lot of composites in the construction,” I said, “so it’s on the light end. Some of them are a lot heavier.”

She nodded, digesting this new datum.

“You learned all of that from a simulated shooting game?”

“Not a game,” Vivien said. “An immersive training simulator. The one my security staff uses to teach new recruits.”

“Well I’d say it’s a pretty damned good simulator.”

Vivien didn’t quite smile. “I’m glad you think so. Now, stand clear. I’m going to lock and load.”

The Shogun AI was kind enough to project man-sized holographic targets in front of the futon stacks, to give Vivien something to aim at.

She didn’t turn out to be a marksman, but—beyond a tendency to flinch at the sound of the muzzle report—she showed good shooting habits from the very first round. By her third round, she had the flinch reflex pretty much under control, letting her body relax to the knowledge that the explosive sound was coming, rather than trying to steel herself against it.

I let her expend ten rounds from the Nambu, which left twenty for actual use. Not exactly a bottomless supply, but if we got ourselves into a situation where twenty rounds were not enough, we probably wouldn’t be coming out anyway.

I kept the 10mm Miroku for myself. The guard from whom I’d confiscated it had only carried a single 12-round magazine. I expended two of those rounds test-firing the weapon, leaving only ten bullets for action. Despite Vivien’s aptitude and preparation—both of which were considerably better than I’d been expecting—I was still the better shot. I figured I could make those ten rounds count, if I had to.

That brought our shooting practice to a close.

We returned to our suite, took a quick and decidedly non-sexual bath to wash away the smell of the gunshot residue, and then dressed ourselves.

We both wore dark blue business suits, which seemed to be the uniform of-choice for Akimura Nanodyne executives. Vivien chose a knee-length skirt and dark blue semi translucent stockings instead of pants. I couldn’t remember whether or not that was correct for where we were going, but she assured me that it was a common look for female Japanese executives. Possibly not a perfect disguise, but at least it was consistent with the overall culture.

We made a final check of our appearances in the bathroom mirror. Standing side-by-side with our manufactured Asian faces, we looked nothing whatsoever like our true selves.

I still hadn’t gotten used to my new features. Especially not the eyes. They were dark and unfamiliar. I couldn’t see any trace of myself in them at all.

For that reason, if for no other, I needed to survive what was to come. I didn’t want to die wearing a stranger’s face.

I made eye contact with Vivien in the mirror, and nodded.

It was time.

CHAPTER 35

The green holo-map hung in the air near the ceiling of the tram car. We were sliding toward the fourth terminal in the Osaka district, its icon dark on the holo display.

At a nudge from Vivien, I held my stolen security badge against a sensor pad in the doorframe of the car. The terminal icon on the map lit up in red, and the tram car began to slow.

Vivien’s hunch was correct. This terminal was open to employees of Akimura Nanodyne, and we were reasonable facsimiles thereof, if not quite the genuine article.

The car slid to a halt and the doors opened. We stepped out onto the platform and started up the exit ramp without hesitation, as though we were returning to a place we’d been a thousand times before.

At the top of the ramp was a gated security barrier, manned by a pair of stony-faced guards. From their impassive expressions, it was impossible to tell if they were on high alert, or bored senseless by the passage of time and the monotony of an endlessly repetitive job.

Vivien walked several steps behind me, in keeping with a Japanese custom that has somehow lingered into the closing decades of the twenty-first century. This put me in front as we approached the waist-high Lexan barrier.

If the guards challenged me, she would have to scoot in quickly, before my lack of language skills got me into trouble. I was more worried about her. My ID badge was real, even if it didn’t actually belong to me. Hers was a good forgery, complete with a trid of her brand new face, but her security staff hadn’t been able to duplicate the card’s imbedded circuitry. For all its convincing appearance, her badge was electronically inert. It would fail the first time someone tried to interrogate it with an electromagnetic scanner, or whatever it was that Akimura Nanodyne used for such things.

The guards made no move to open the gate as I approached.

What was the protocol here? Was I supposed to hold up my security badge for visual inspection? Did I have to request entry, or sign in, or something? Should I stand at the barrier and try to stare the guards down? Play the part of a self-entitled executive, made impatient by their failure to facilitate my instant passage?

We weren’t in the door yet, and already my infiltration strategy was unravelling.

I was about two meters from the barrier when I spotted the sensor pad to the right of the gate. I flicked my badge over it without slowing, trusting that the gate would open quickly enough to keep me from running into the damned thing.

It did.

I breezed through the opening, trying to look vaguely indifferent, as if I went through this tiresome ritual every day.

Now came the tricky part. Vivien’s inert badge would
not
open the gate. If it closed behind me, we’d be on opposite sides of the barrier when the guards discovered that her badge was fake. Not good.

So I gave into an impulse, and grabbed the gate before it could close—holding it for Vivien like an old fashioned gentleman holding the door for a lady.

The gate’s drive motors began to whine softly, as the mechanism tried to overpower my grip and swing the gate shut.

The guards exchanged surprised looks. They were about a microsecond from intervening when I threw them a wink and cut my eyes in Vivien’s direction. I tried for a leer of medium wattage, trying to broadcast a signal on the males-only frequency.
Don’t cramp my style here, guys. Just showing a little extra courtesy—trying to get in this girl’s panties. Don’t make me look bad, okay?

Vivien picked up on my play instantly. She waltzed through the open gate, smiling if my odd gesture of politeness was the cutest thing she’d ever seen.

I gave the guards a quick raise of my eyebrows. Thanks guys. If I get laid tonight, I’ll have you to thank for it.

And then we were past them, and striding purposefully into the dragon’s lair. Two company execs, on our way to do important work.

It was a struggle not to look over my shoulder, to find out if the guards were calling some command post to report our strange behavior.

There was nothing we could do to stop them, so we just kept going, hoping for the best.

We were entering the facility at a little after 5:30 pm, when many of the executives and much of the administrative staff were either gone for the day, or preparing to leave. That was the plan, anyway. If our theory was correct, there should be fewer members of the senior cadre around to question our comings and goings, but not so few that our presence would seem noteworthy.

It appeared to be working. We encountered other people almost immediately, but no one seemed to be giving us a second look.

Vivien edged closer and spoke softly. “What now, Fearless Leader?”

“We need to find the offices of the big dogs,” I said. “Specifically, we’re looking for the office of Mr. Akimura Jiro. Along the way, if we happen to pass a giant flashing sign that says, ‘
This way to the bad guys,
’ you might want to let me know.”

Vivien was carrying the stolen data pad as a prop. She stroked the screen to life, and—true to my predictions—the device was working again, pulling information from the corporate data feed. Vivien began tabbing rapidly through pages of kanji. “Hmmm… Looks like senior corporate officers are on the eleventh floor.”

That surprised me. “I would have expected them to be on the penthouse level.”

“The eleventh floor
is
the penthouse level,” Vivien said. “That’s about as far away from the base of the habitation ring as you can get, before the falloff in centrifugal gravity starts to become uncomfortable for most people.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s find an elevator.”

Vivien played with the data pad for another couple of seconds, and then looked up. “This way.”

She led me through three or four turns, and down a stretch of hall to an elevator lobby that I never would have found on my own. There was a small group of people waiting for the elevator, or I would have thanked her on the spot for coming along. She’d been right, of course. I couldn’t do this without her.

Back in LA, I did this kind of thing all the time. I could social engineer my way into most places, and then it was just a matter of walking around like I owned the joint. No problem. But here, I couldn’t open my mouth or find the elevator without giving myself away. I wouldn’t last ten seconds without Vivien at my elbow.

The elevator doors opened, and we ambled into the car with the rest of the herd. The other passengers spoke to the woman nearest the control panel, no doubt asking her to select the icons for their destination floors. One man leaned past the woman and waved his security badge over a sensor pad. The icon for the eleventh floor illuminated.

Vivien leaned in and repeated the man’s performance using her own security badge. With no internal circuitry, the fake card didn’t register with the electronic sensor, but there was no way for our fellow riders to know that. Her casual gesture had communicated both our intent to get off on the eleventh floor, and our (presumed) right to do so.

A nice move. Smart, and subtle. The woman had good instincts.

People got off by ones and twos at various floors along the way. By the time we reached eleven there were only four of us left in the elevator: me, Vivien, the man who’d originally selected our floor, and a woman bound for seventeen—up there in the zone of reduced gravity.

When the doors opened, the man walked out of the elevator and turned right, so Vivien and I automatically turned left. We passed a trio of young women who were headed for the elevator—all of them dressed in the vest-blouse-skirt arrangement that had been the de facto uniform of Japanese “Office Ladies” for at least the past century. Their eyes tracked us as we walked by.

I had a bad half-second wondering if we’d made some mistake, and the women had seen through our fake identities. Then I realized what was going on. They weren’t looking at
us
. They were looking at
Vivien
. This wasn’t about blown disguises; it was about social class.

These women were administrative assistants—relegated to answering phones, fetching beverages, and making copies of documents. By contrast, Vivien’s style of dress and body language made her easily recognizable as a member of the executive caste. The Office Ladies must have been wondering how she had broken through the barriers that continued to make female corporate officers a rarity in Japanese business culture.

Vivien returned their inquisitive looks with a glare, and the trio of women practically stepped on each other trying to get into the elevator.

When the doors closed behind them, Vivien looked around and began reading the name plaques affixed to the doorframe of each office.

At the end of the hall, she spotted a burnished oak door that was at least a half-meter wider than the others. She nodded toward it. “Akimura Jiro. Senior Vice President of Strategic Competencies.”

“What does that mean?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “Probably nothing at all. It’s the kind of meaningless grandiloquent title that corporate tycoons hang on their useless children. If the kids are any damned good, they start low in the company structure—some useful but unglamorous position—and work their way up the ladder. By the time they inherit the big chair, they’re ready for the challenge. But the worthless kids—the idiots, and slackers, and self-entitled brats—are handled differently. They’re either kept completely out of the company business, or they’re given some high-level make-work job with a cushy corner office and a fancy title.”

She nodded toward the name plaque. “Senior VP of Strategic Drivel. Our boy, Jiro, is your basic shit-for-brains corporate heir, with a double-digit IQ and a seven-figure salary.”

I nodded. “Let’s go plunder his office.”