Eye and Talon (10 page)

'That's why you need me.' Vogel's words broke into her gloomy thoughts. I'm here to help you.'

Iris refocused on him; the center of his thin smile was still tinged with red. 'Meyer sent you?'

'Meyer?' Vogel shook his head in disgust. 'That putz? He's out of the loop, sweetheart. He can get you
into
trouble, but he can't get you out of it. Not the way I can.'

This sucks
, thought Iris. She hadn't become a runner, gone through the grueling training involved, both from the department and in the cold, precise ordering of her mind, just so she could wind up under somebody else's control. Crap coming down the division's chain of command, from the shadowy ones on top and then handed out by Meyer to her and the rest of her colleagues, was something she'd been able to get used to. That chain was something she might be able to climb one day, and in the meantime the crap-to-gold ratio was weighted on the side of getting to do what she wanted. Which was to hunt escaped replicants, and not some frickin' bird. And especially not under the thumb of some civilian she could take apart in two seconds.

'You know —' Iris spoke slowly and gave him a practised hard stare. 'If you've got information I need, I've got ways of getting it out of you.'

Vogel returned the stare without flinching. 'No, you don't. Not this time. Not with me.'

This was a steel needle, a tiny cold element at the center of his eyes, tinged blue by the flickering neon light that had worked its way down the alley. Iris recognized the bit, not real metal but something just as hard and sharp; she'd seen it in the mirror, in her own eyes. So she knew he was telling the truth. She wouldn't be able to get it out of him.

'All right,' said Iris. 'You win.' She figured that if it didn't work out, she could hand him major payback, painful and final, later on. And then they'd be done, like other, even briefer relationships she'd had in the past. 'So talk.'

Another shake of the head. 'Not here.'

'Wow you've got privacy concerns?'

'Like you said: it's a matter of getting comfortable.' Vogel dabbed another spot of blood away from his mouth, using a folded handkerchief he'd dug from the pocket of his duster. He held the red-stained cloth toward her, as though demonstrating stigmata. 'Now I got the moral right to insist on
my
turf. Plus I've got something to show you. So if you're done showing off your testosterone, let's go.' He turned and headed toward the mouth of the alley, then glanced over his shoulder at her. 'Coming or not?'

Iris could see past him, to the
souk
's throng of dealers and merchandise. They all looked real; the trick was in figuring out which ones weren't.

'I'm with you,' said Iris, and started walking.

'That was some good footage.' The remote camera operator nodded in appreciation. He leaned back in the swivel chair, so he could see more of the monitor screens arrayed in front of him. 'Got some good action off her.'

Somebody else was looking at the monitors; the camera operator had to swing his chair out of the way of the director, balancing himself with his hands against the edge of the control board. The director brought his face close to the icy glow of the screens, as though he wanted to see through the rows of pixels and into the darkness behind them.

'I don't know . . .' The director's face, tending toward jowly at the best of times, now grew even heavier with the weight of his thoughts. He reached out one broad-fingered hand and rolled the tracking ball in the center of the board; the monitor with the red ACTIVE indicator lit up above the screen, showing the backs of the female blade runner and the taller man walking beside her, filled with a closer angle on their images. The brighter, more lurid lights of the replicant-animal
souk
spilled past them. 'The details . .. you really gotta sweat the details ...'

'You mean that?' One of the camera operator's fingernails tapped at the monitor's glass. The lower left corner of the screen's image had a splotch of blackish red on it, from where the force of the female blade runner's fist had sent a spattered drop of blood flying onto the hidden lens. 'We've got plenty of area and character texture that we can map and dub in. We can track the cover-fill to match the other cameras. It'll look just like the real thing.' He shrugged. 'Or as much as anything does, these days.'

'That's not what I'm worried about,' said the director. He chewed on the knuckle of one hand, while he waved the other dismissively at the blot on the screen. 'What the hell? Might as well leave that in. It's a nice effect; adds to the impression of realism. The audience will think we planned it that way. So it's better than real, even if that's all it is. Real, I mean.' He punched up another camera, hidden at the edge of the alley's wall; another screen in the stacked ranks of monitors showed the female blade runner and her new companion heading out of the
souk
, shoving their way through the crowd and the phony animals. The angle caught a bit of a three-quarters profile as she walked by the unnoticed camera. She would have been pretty enough — in a coldly near-perfect way — to have starred in some other, more obviously fictional, kind of drama if she had occasionally smiled. But the director knew that would have spoiled the particular effect he was going for. 'What concerns me is the loss of control. That's the worst.'

'What do you mean?' The camera operator glanced over at him. 'Everything is under control.' He gestured at the monitor screens. 'There's nothing that can happen we're not going to get tape on.'

'Don't be an idiot. That's not the problem.' The director slowly shook his head. 'We're not using digitized actors here. Those lucasoids will do whatever you want, whatever you program them to do. That's their nature. But not these guys.' He gestured again at the screen. 'Especially
her
. We've introduced an uncontrolled element into our mix — and not only uncontrolled:
unforeseeable
. And that can be disastrous. Believe me, I'd know; I've worked this blade runner stuff before. Very sticky. And dangerous; people can get hurt. Bad hurt, as in dead.'

'Let's get rid of her, then.' The camera operator's shoulders raised in a shrug. 'We can do without her. Like you said, digitized actors are a lot more obedient. And let's face it' — his smile looked both sick and ugly — 'nobody will miss her. And we are in that kind of territory where we can get her ass iced pretty quickly. It's one of the simpler production problems.'

'Thanks for the advice. Now shut up.' The director's words turned vehement. 'You don't even have a frickin' clue about what we're doing here. This is
not
your usual production.'

'Whatever.' Obviously miffed, the camera operator folded his arms across his chest. 'You want to jerk around with real stuff, instead of taking the easy and better route? Not my problem. You're the boss.'

'That's right.' The director let his gaze wander across the myriad screens, a wall of images from the various camera feeds scattered around LA. 'Like God in His domain . . .' He reached out and placed his wide fingertips on the glass separating him from the images of the female cop and her new companion, pushing their way through the anonymous crowds. 'I call the shots.'

The camera operator raised an eyebrow as he glanced sidelong at the figure beside him, but said nothing. This job, he might have spoken aloud, was no worse than any other.

Just different.

A vast, oblivious deity seemed to smile down at them from above.

They weren't far from where the remnants of the escaped replicant Enesque had been scraped from the sidewalk. Iris could recognize the surrounding buildings from recently imprinted memory. The artificially generated cloud, lower than the darker and stormier ones above, remained clinging halfway up the towers, as though it had hissed steamlike out of the retrofitted ductwork. Looming overhead, as she and Vogel rounded one building's corner, was the geisha's immense image, smiling as mysteriously as before, daintily placing the tiny pill in her mouth, lips as red as her lacquered nails. The gesture had always struck Iris as vaguely sacramental, a sinister communion.

'You see? Lot less crowded around here.' Leading the way, Vogel glanced over his shoulder at Iris, his own smile less pleasant than that of the Asian woman above. 'Back at the
souk
you can hardly breathe. Not that you'd particularly
want
to.'

She had noticed the density of human bodies starting to thin out as they'd passed by the exact building where she'd had her final, elevated tussle with Enesque. Coming around to the opposite side of the building, the sidewalks were practically deserted. 'What's the deal?'

'Superstitious dread,' answered Vogel. He kept walking, hands in the pockets of his duster and shoulders hunched forward, as though leaning into a wind. 'That's a very powerful motivator for a lot of street types. They don't have the same kind of keen, logical,
scientific
minds that you and I do. So when something big happens in a specific place, an event with spooky overtones, they tend to get their fear and reverence impulses mixed up, and give the whole zone a wide berth. Like a reverse pilgrimage: the place is holy, so you
don't
go there.'

'What was so big that happened around here?' Iris didn't figure it could have been anything to do with her tracking down and retiring the replicant Enesque. That was too much of a business-as-usual event for anyone to get excited about it.

'See for yourself.' Vogel stopped at the corner of the next building and pointed ahead.

Iris caught up with him and looked where he was pointing. An open space stretched out among the buildings; not as big as the souk, but large enough to contain an impressive pile of wreckage. Curved steel girders, interconnected into a crumpled framework, darkened with both rust and ashy scorch marks, had gouged their way through the street's asphalt and concrete, drawing jagged trenches into the hidden soil meters beneath. Scraps of tattered metallic cloth fluttered from the metal, more like unraveling bandages than flags.

'Oh.' Iris had a notion of what the wreckage represented, what it had been before the crash. 'It's the blimp.' The fragments of cloth sheathing had been the tip-off, along with the spiky antennae that could be seen protruding from junction points on the steel frame. Underneath the limited spectra of the widely spaced mercury-vapor streetlamps, glass shards glittered jewellike on the ground, from the broken lenses of the undercarriage's swiveling searchlights. 'This is where it came down.'

'Correction. This is where it was
brought
down.' With one raised fingertip, Vogel traced a quick diagonal slash through the air. 'By the rep-symps.' He glanced inquiringly at her. 'Savvy the word?'

'Get real. This is stuff I got in basic training. You're talking replicant sympathizers.'

'Very good,' said Vogel. 'Glad to see you're up to speed on these things. I wasn't sure you would be, since we're talking history rather than current affairs. Nobody's seen a lot of the rep-symp groups recently.'

'Maybe they wised up.' Iris gave a shrug. 'Maybe the penny finally dropped for them, that replicants aren't anything to be sympathetic about'

'Maybe.' Vogel slowly nodded. 'Or maybe somebody wised them up. Did their thinking for them, in a terminal way. So they wouldn't be bothering anyone else with their crazy ideas. Get what I mean?'

'If anybody iced those solid citizens, it wasn't the blade runner division. We've got more important things to take care of. Like the escaped replicants this crowd was so nuts about. Not that they accomplished anything on the replicants' behalf.'

'That's the official line, huh?' Vogel smiled indulgently at her. 'The rep-symps were just nuisances? Maybe so, but you gotta admit, some of 'em did a good trade at that sort of thing. Quite a spectacle when they brought down this UN advertising blimp. It'd been cruising around above LA for years, so long that when it crashed it had pretty much become a regular part of the urban landscape.'

'Sorry I missed the fireworks.'

Vogel kept smiling. 'There'll be more. Come on.'

He led the way, out from the relative shelter that the buildings' exterior had provided. The rains had picked up again, the monsoon liquefying above the entire Los Angeles basin. With her hair plastered against her skull and the back of her neck, Iris sloshed across the poorly drained asphalt behind Vogel. Approaching the blimp's wreckage produced a chill under her skin several degrees lower than the water seeping through her jacket's seams. It looked less like some corrosion-ravaged techno-artifact than a ruined, Gaudiesque cathedral wrapped in night shadows, the glaring streetlamps substituting for the appropriate cloud-streaked moonlight. Its angular net of shadows fell across Iris as she stopped and looked up the framework's elliptic curve. The crossing lines were like a sketch of a cage, superimposed upon her own elongated silhouette.

'Come on in.' Vogel had used some of the crumpled framework's lower crossbars, the ones that had cut angled trenches through the street's asphalt, as a rough ladder to the dead blimp's midsection. He lifted a flap of the metallic fabric and gestured to the darkness inside. 'It's cozy. You'll like it.'

Both statements were inaccurate. When Iris had climbed up after him, then down into the blimp's partially collapsed abdomen, she found that
cozy
translated to
claustrophobic
. 'Like being swallowed by a whale,' she said aloud.

'Not that bad.' Using a vintage World War II military-issue Zippo, Vogel started setting candles alight; fastened by their stalactite-like drippings, the wax tapers were studded all over the metal ribs surrounding him and Iris. The flickering ambient light they provided slowly increased as Vogel moved around the ramshackle space, bearing the tiny flame in one hand. 'I call it home.'

'Charming.' With her fingertips, Iris tested the curved horizontal rib behind her back; its edge was as sharp as a honed knife. Falling asleep here would be like nesting among razorblades. 'You must get interesting visitors.'

'You're the first.' Vogel flicked off the Zippo's flame and restored the small metal rectangle to his pocket. 'I'm not by nature a sociable creature.'