Night's Pawn (32 page)

"Wait a minute," said Villiers suddenly. "Are you telling me that someone brainwashed Cara into trying to kill her mother?"

"Yes, I am," said Chase. "That's what I'm saying."

Villiers looked at Lanier. "It could be done, Richard," Lanier said in reply to his unspoken question. "Besides," Lanier continued, "the hospital's preliminary report indicates that she's showing all the textbook signs of what's known as EPS, Executed Program Syndrome. She's done what she was conditioned to do, and now her mind is collapsing."

Shaking his head, Villiers turned back toward the window.

"More reports have been coming in while Simon was talking, Richard," said Lanier. "I think you'll want to hear them."

Villiers didn't turn, but gestured for the man to go on.

Lanier looked over at Chase. "Unfortunately, they seem to confirm some aspects of his story."

"Unfortunately?" said Chase.

Lanier smiled thinly. "It would have been so much easier if you'd been lying and this was all your plan."

"Gee, thanks, Miles."

"Stop baiting him, Miles," said Villiers. "Just tell me."

"Well, for starters, the medical facility has compiled a report on your daughter's augmentations."

"Her cyberware," interjected Chase.

Lanier glared at him. "Certain parts are delta-grade, virtually unique. We're going to try and trace their construction, but I don't hold any hopes."

"Delta-grade," said Chase. "That's amazing. How the hell did she get delta-grade?"

"Exactly the question," said Lanier. "Her datajack and associated circuitry are high-grade, but standard, with one exception. Embedded in the jack's neural modulation circuitry, the part that takes the incoming electronic signal and adjusts it for the actual neural interface, we found a polyphase subcarrier decryption circuit."

"S/wf/" Chase slammed his hand against the arm of his chair.

Villiers looked at him, then back at Lanier. "Which means?"

"As Simon has undoubtedly guessed, one or more of the BTL chips Cara was using contained, in addition to its normal psychoactive functions, a subcarrier signal that was either part of her conditioning or else served to reinforce it once she was out of their direct control."

"What?" asked Villiers angrily. "It was telling her 'Kill your mother' over and over?"

Lanier nodded. "Probably a little more subtly than that, but yes. But saying, 'Kill your mother' doesn't work in and of itself. The subject must also be conditioned to believe that there are valid reasons the mother should die. It's important that the subject's brain be able to accept the command in order to execute it without—"

"Whoever they were," interrupted Chase, turning toward Villiers, "they probably used Cara's estrangement from you and her mother as the foundation for their conditioning. They took whatever emotions were there and magnified them to the point where she could, and felt she had cause to, kill her mother."

Villiers had paled and was again shaking his head in confusion, perhaps despair. "But you said she seemed normal? Wouldn't you have noticed?"

Lanier answered for Chase. "Not necessarily. Her conditioning was probably very deep, and only triggered when certain conditions were met."

"Probably seeing her mother in person," Chase said.

Lanier nodded in agreement. "The other significant piece of cyberware she had is the most important. It was a complete replacement of one of the long bones in her left arm, the ulna, if it matters. It has a synthetic calcium construction, laced with a harder plastic material for support. Inside the bone was a blade, made of the same material so that it wouldn't show up on X rays or any similar kind of material-density scan. The blade was triggered by a pseudo-muscle that snapped it free. There was no exit port built into her wrist, so it cut through her arm as it ejected. It severed the artery on the way out, as I suspect it was meant to, in an attempt to ensure her death.

"One use," finished Lanier, "one shot. Very deadly."

Villiers was sitting down behind his desk, one hand on his face, staring out across the room. He slammed the hand down hard on the desk. "Those mother
fuckers
," he said.

Lanier glanced at Chase. "Luckily there was a mage there who knew some healing."

Villiers nodded.

"A piece of cyberware like that," said Chase, "the delta-grade Miles mentioned, has to be custom-made. You can't just order it from the Wiremasters catalog. It was made for her, made to do that job."

Villiers looked at him. "But why? Why the frag would they want her to kill Samantha?"

"Actually, I think it was targeted at you. Indirectly."

"At me?" said Villiers. "Then why didn't she try—why didn't they send her at me?"

"Because she'd have never gotten to see you," said Chase. "Her mother was much more accessible, and therefore much more vulnerable."

Lanier nodded. "I agree. They were taking their shot at you, through her. Use your daughter to kill your ex-wife, whom you might still have feelings for."

"Two birds with one stone," said Chase. "She kept repeating that. Not a direct analogy, but close enough."

"Why do you think this?" asked Villiers. Chase could see some real anger beginning to smolder in his eyes, not the usual bluster he tended to.

"At the meeting," Chase said, "she seemed to be berating your wife—ex-wife—for something. I didn't have the chance to ask her what it was, but I'll bet it wasn't about her activities, but about yours."

"Mine?" said Villiers,

Lanier nodded again. "Mrs. Villiers has given security a more complete briefing while we've been talking." He tapped his skull. "They've been feeding me the data. Shortly after the start of Cara's conversation with her mother, she apparently began to rant on about Fuchi's dealings with Hanburg-Stein and how that all ended up. It was a 'pre-programmed' speech, but it was apparently very explicit with regard to Hanburg-Stein and our dealings with Der Nachtmachen."

Chase bolted upright in his chair. Had he heard Lanier correctly? "Wait, you just said Der Nachtmachen. Cara's story connected Fuchi with Hanburg-Stein through Alte Welt. Der Nachtmachen doesn't exist anymore."

"I'm afraid you've been deceiving yourself, Simon," said Lanier. "Yes, your personal campaign against them destroyed their leadership, which they deserved for what they did. But the group rebuilt itself, toned down their terrorist activities. I guess they learned, but they are still very much in existence."

Chase stared at him. There was nothing he could say. No words.

"There isn't really any Alte Welt, Jason," Lanier continued. "It's one of their fronts. All of this, every bit of it, has been carried out by the hand of Der Nacht-machen."

29

"That's absurd," said Chase. "You don't know that."

Lanier sighed. "I'm afraid it all fits too well. The story Cara told you is correct, more or less, except that Fuchi's dealings were with Der Nachtmachen, not Alte Welt. By our reports, Alte Welt exists solely for the purpose of voter registration. The truth was distorted to ensure that you'd get her to her mother."

Chase shook his head. "I don't buy it."

"I'm afraid it's true, Simon," said Lanier. "Der Nachtmachen, under previous leadership, is known to favor exactly these the kind of tactics. As you know, they aren't against killing innocents."

There was something deep within Chase that rose up in him, demanding that Lanier be silenced. It would be so easy for him to just reach across and… but no, that wouldn't work here. Lanier was lucky.

"If it matters at all, Simon, what they did to your wife weighed heavily on my decision to work with them," said Villiers.

Chase turned very slowly to look at him. He said nothing.

"I wouldn't approve it until I was satisfied that their leadership had changed. I took a lot of convincing," Villiers told him.

"It's true," said Lanier. "In fact, it wasn't until we'd dredged up a particularly amazing piece of information that Richard was convinced."

"Oh?" said Chase. They were fools. Their information was wrong. Der Nachtmachen was ashes in the wind.

"Amazing, I suppose on one level, though not by modern standards," said Lanier. "Der Nachtmachen was a cellular group. When you took them on in Berlin, you eliminated their upper echelon: Lieber, Veitman, Kaufmann, and then Steadman years later. I guess he was hard to track."

"I didn't kill Steadman."

That seemed to surprise Lanier. "Oh? We just assumed you had. Regardless, you quite neatly chopped off Der Nachtmachen's head, and that set off a bitter internal struggle that might have splintered the group completely, except that someone else stepped in."

Chase shifted in the chair. A dark thought was beginning to form at the back of his mind.

"This is the extraordinary part," Lanier continued. "The individual who stepped in is a great dragon. A Western dracoform by the name of—"

"Alamais," said Chase softly. Had this been what Shiva was trying to tell him obliquely that night in Denver? Damn the man.

Again Lanier was surprised. "You know this? But you just said—"

"I didn't. I just made a connection. I'd received some information, information I didn't think was related, that Steadman had been killed by the same person who'd ordered a hit on a woman named Shavan. She apparently used to run a group called The Revenants. Another Euro-policiub, I would imagine. She was killed in Seattle a few years ago."

Lanier seemed suddenly distracted and Chase paused. Lanier motioned him to continue. "Please, go on. My people are telling me things while you talk…"

"The reason she was killed was because she was about to cut a deal for corporate backing with Saeder-Krupp. Lofwyr, the great dragon that runs Saeder-Krupp, is Alamais' brother. Alamais had Shavan killed to stop that from happening. Apparently he and his brother are at odds over the particulars of the European Restoration."

Lanier looked over at him. "This is news to us. We'd assumed that you'd killed Steadman, or had him killed, as the completion of your vendetta. What little we have on Shavan indicates that she was killed in a place called Dante's Inferno in Seattle, though that was covered up to protect the reputation of the owner of the neutral meeting place where the death occurred.

"The Revenants were absorbed by Der Nachtmachen a year later, or rather, former members of The Revenants began to show up at Der Nachtmachen meetings. Those kind of groups don't do acquisitions the way corporations do."

Villiers cut in after sitting back and listening for a bit. "If what Simon was told is true, then Der Nachtmachen had Steadman killed. Why the hell would they do that?"

"I was never able to find Steadman in Berlin," said Chase. "He went underground. By then I'd…I'd had enough of the killing and didn't go after him." He paused a moment. "But maybe Der Nachtmachen kept operating, only in secret."

Lanier nodded. "That makes sense. That would also mean Alamais' story was a lie."

"A partial truth," said Chase. "Steadman's death was probably Alamais' bid to consolidate his hold on the policlub."

"Steadman was killed by a bullet," said Lanier. "The report we have from the Germans indicates some evidence of magic used on the body after death, but they seemed to think it was used to parade the body around, zombie-like."

Chase nodded. "They puppeted him long enough to soften the transfer of command."

"That's disgusting," said Villiers.

Lanier shrugged. " Resourceful."

"Wait," said Chase. "Was all this public knowledge? I would think a dragon taking over a policlub would rate at least a mention on the network news."

"No, it was all kept very quiet," said Lanier. "Der Nachtmachen's name had been dragged through the mud. Fronts, like Alte Welt, were set up to cover its activities. Splinters of the Der Nachtmachen organization still continued outside Europe, but those had changed into real policlubs using the radical Der Nachtmachen name.

"The core organization continued in secret, gradually rebuilding. According to what we've been told, Alamais was worried that admitting his leadership of the group might cause some concern among the membership. Instead, he issued orders through a front. Some members apparently still don't know he's in charge."

"A front?" asked Chase.

"A second-in-command, though to all appearances, he was the man in charge," Lanier told him. "He's the one we dealt with."

The dark thought at the back of Chase's mind loomed larger. "What's his name?" Chase asked.

"He referred to himself only as Alexander," said Lanier.

The dark thought bloomed as all sense of reality, of control, slipped away from him. The room actually seemed to waver for a moment.

"Could Alexander have been Adler?" asked Villiers, referring to the German who'd seduced Cara.

Lanier shrugged. "Possibly. It would be more likely that—"

"Do you have a picture of Alexander?" Chase cut in. He was staring out at the Chiba skyline, trying to sound calm, to stay calm. He was barely succeeding, and the other two noticed it.