city blues 02 - angel city blues (8 page)

I nodded toward the triangular chip, still lying on Tommy’s broad palm. “Can you get your hands on a SCAPE deck? I need to find out what’s on that thing.”

Tommy said, “It won’t be cheap. The technology is just filtering down into the consumer market, so it’s still pretty pricey.”

“Don’t worry about the cost,” I said. “It’s a business expense, and my client can certainly afford it. You can invoice me for your time, and don’t cut me any old-friend discounts. You do honest work, and my client will be glad to pay for it.”

“You working for somebody who won the lottery?”

“Let’s just say that money isn’t an issue.”

“Works for me,” Tommy said. He stood up and we shook hands. “I’ll get back to you when I find a deck. And then, we’ll see what’s recorded on your mystery chip.”

CHAPTER 4

The TransNat Telemedia building looked like an architectural knock-off of the famed Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Sixteen hexagonal stories—each one progressively smaller than the floor beneath it—were stacked on top of each other like the layers of a geometric wedding cake. The design gave each floor of the building about twenty-meters of open terrace around its perimeter. Except for the roof of the very top level, the terraces were planted with grass, trees, and about every species of flower and bush imaginable, interspersed periodically with cozy little rock gardens and tiny waterfalls. The side walls of the various stories were mirrored glass, reflecting the greenery and water, and making the roof top gardens appear even larger than they really were.

The roof of the uppermost floor was home to about three hundred antennas, from huge satellite dishes, to rail-thin vertical bean stalks, to skeletal pyramid shapes that I couldn’t identify.

Overhead, the afternoon sun had hit one of those angles where its image is caught and reflected in the faceted polycarbon panels of the dome. The effect was painfully bright, but too beautiful not to look at. For a few seconds, the sky seemed to shimmer and sparkle with a hundred miniature stars. And then a cloud passed over the sun and the magic was gone.

After the exterior of the building, the lobby was a bit of an anticlimax. It was impressive in scale, but not particularly imaginative in design. The floors were ferroconcrete, molded to simulate weathered stone. Corinthian columns (more fake stone) supported the ceiling at ten meter intervals. Indirect lighting left the ceiling in shadow, and created occasional pools of somewhat brighter illumination. Predictably, each little oasis of light was furnished with a circular arrangement of chairs and couches.

A low-level flunky met me at the reception desk. He introduced himself as Caldwell Drake. He looked to be something just short of thirty, and his face had the unremarkable handsomeness of computer-optimized cosmetic surgery. The design probably even had a name, like
Rugged Guy #6
(a registered trademark of
New Look
surgical boutiques). He wore black jeans and a translucent synlon jacket over a collarless black shirt of synthetic satin. The jacket was imbedded with strands of fiber optic wire that pulsed with luridly bright colors as he moved, creating the impression of animated neon pin stripes.

He moved with a strangely artificial grace that almost seemed to be choreographed. Following him across the lobby, it came to me that Mr. Drake was either a dancer or a martial artist. I decided that—whichever it was—he would be skilled in the movements and forms, and totally helpless if he ever had to improvise.

He led me to a row of elevators, the nearest of which opened automatically as we approached. We stepped inside.

“Floor, please?” The voice was pleasant and feminine. If it was computer-synthesized, as I suspected, I certainly couldn’t tell.

Drake looked up at the ceiling, as though the owner of the voice was actually up there somewhere. “Five.”

“Thank you.” The doors slid shut and the elevator began to rise. I was instantly puzzled. I had been expecting one of the upper floors, where a mover and shaker like Thurman would undoubtedly keep his office.

I mentally shrugged. Okay, a conference room, then. Probably something huge and impressive, and just reeking of corporate wealth and influence. Some place where Thurman’s home court advantage would be glaringly obvious.

The elevator opened, and I followed Drake down a long hallway to an unmarked gray door. He laid his hand on the door but didn’t open it. “I should explain about Mr. Thurman,” he said in a quiet voice. “He’s not exactly an ordinary guy.”

“I’ve already heard it,” I said. “Mr. Thurman is a very important man, and he’s busy as hell. I promise to make this a quick as possible.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Drake said. “Mr. Thurman is a… prodigy.”

He said the last word with particular emphasis, as though it should mean something special to me.

I nodded. “Meaning what? He’s a genius?”

Drake shook his head. “Not a genius. A
prodigy
. Mr. Thurman has been… genetically optimized.”

I felt myself frown. “Genetically optimized? For what?”

Drake tilted his head a fraction to the side. “Creativity. Multi-modal cognitive association. Synergistic thought construction.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’ll have to see for yourself,” Drake said. He opened the door. “I just didn’t want you to be totally unprepared.”

“Thanks,” I said. I wondered how he thought that confusing the hell out of me was supposed to equate to preparation.

I walked through the door into a narrow hall way. The walls and ceiling were tiled with hundreds of hexagonal cells of white acoustic foam. The floor was covered in a thick gray carpet that swallowed the sound of my footsteps. The door swung shut behind me with a click that was rendered nearly inaudible by the acoustic insulation.

At the end of the strange hall, perhaps ten meters away, was another door, tiled in the same honeycomb cells that covered the ceiling and walls. I walked to the door and opened it.

The room was hemispherical in shape, a gently curving dome that reminded me of the 3D surround-vision screens that had been popular before vid technology made the leap to holographic imaging. And, like one of those old 3D screens, every centimeter of this one was alive with video. But this was not just one giant movie. The inside of the dome was sub-divided into several hundred vid screens, each showing a different movie, or program, or commercial. The air was a solid wall of jabbering sound; the audio track for every one of the video feeds was playing at the same time. It was not uncomfortably loud, but the unrelenting babble seemed to confuse my brain. I began to feel slightly dizzy.

“It helps if you look at the floor,” said a man’s voice.

I turned my head toward the center of the room and the source of the voice. A man sat, or rather reclined, in a chair-like contraption that looked like a cross between a dentist’s chair and the contoured acceleration couch of a suborbital shuttle.

“Either that, or concentrate on one or two screens,” the man said. “It is difficult for an unconditioned mind to assimilate large quantities of simultaneous and conflicting optical and audio stimuli.” He reached for the arm of his chair and made some sort of adjustment. “I can turn the audio down a little. It should help.”

The babble faded to a murmur, still audible, but not nearly as difficult to deal with.

I walked closer to him. “Thanks. It does help.”

I stopped about three meters away from his strange chair. He touched the armrest again and the chair swung about twenty degrees to his right and reclined itself a little farther.

“Please don’t be offended if I don’t make a great deal of eye contact,” he said. “My peripheral vision is highly developed. I can see you quite clearly, unless you happen to be almost directly behind me.” His speech was clipped: his words clearly and quickly annunciated, without very little inflection.

His chair swung farther to the right and angled him up to a more upright position. I quickly discovered that this was to be the pattern of our visit. Every few seconds he would spin in one direction or another and take in a different area of the video dome. I had no way of knowing if he made these movements at random, or whether he was following some sort of logical sequence.

I watched him. His forehead was a bit larger than most, and the ridge of his eyebrows was more pronounced than usual, but he didn’t look like one of the bulbous-headed Brainiac characters that seem to inhabit science fiction vids. If anything, the heavy brow line made him look a bit Neanderthal. His brown hair was limp and rather badly cut, as though he didn’t have patience for anything so frivolous as personal appearance.

“I appreciate your taking the time to see me,” I said. “My name is David…”

His chair swung abruptly to the left, showing me the other side of his face. “I am Gary Thurman, and you are Mr. David Stalin. I am Leanda Forsyth’s primary supervisor, and you are a Private Detective investigating her disappearance. Please don’t take it personally if I forego the niceties. As you can see, I am working. I will begin by answering all four of your major questions, and we can fill in the little ones afterwards.”

“I don’t mean to sound dense,” I said, “but what makes you think I have four big questions? I might have three, or sixteen.”

Thurman’s chair spun to face me. We locked eyes for a fraction of a second. “You and I are in much the same business,” he said. His chair moved again and our eye contact was broken. “We dig around in peoples’ trash cans in search of fragments and details. We sift through seemingly unrelated odds and ends until we have enough information to synthesize a gestalt. If we do our jobs properly, that gestalt will bear at least a passing resemblance to the truth. In short, I suspect that you will ask the same fundamental questions that I would ask.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll play along. What questions am I going to ask?”

Thurman’s chair swung nearly 180 degrees. “Number one,” he said. “Do I know where Leanda is? An affirmative answer to this question contains a built-in assumption that she is working on some deep undercover project which makes her disappearance either necessary or desirable. Unfortunately, the answer is
no
. Leanda is not working in any undercover capacity, or at least not for TransNat Telemedia. Nor are we hiding or protecting her.”

“Question number two—Was Leanda working on anything that might threaten or anger some unnamed person or persons? Specifically, do I know of anyone with a motive for kidnapping Leanda? I’m afraid the answer to this question is also
no
. I am confident that, given more time and seasoning, Leanda would have graduated to higher profile stories. But she simply wasn’t there yet. We hadn’t yet assigned her to anything with high enough stakes to make her a target.”

I gestured for him to continue. Apparently his peripheral vision really was excellent, as he seemed to catch my movement, even though he was looking away from me.

“Question number three,” he said. “What was it like to work with Leanda? Was she one of the boys, so to speak? Or did she wave her family’s money and influence in everyone’s face? I can only give you my opinion on this matter. Leanda had talent and she earned her pay. She never brought up her family, and—if the subject did come up—she was quick to point out that her parents had made
their
own ways in the world, and she was making
her
own way.”