Snow Crash (18 page)

It looks as though T-Bone is going to get out of this with nothing worse than a sewn-on hand and some rehab work, because you can't stab a person to death that way, not if he is wearing armor.

T-Bone screams.

He is bouncing up and down on Raven's hand. The knife has gone all the way through the bulletproof fabric and now Raven is trying to gut T-Bone the same way he did Lagos. But his knife—whatever the hell it is—won't cut through the fabric that way. It is sharp enough to penetrate—which should be impossible—but not sharp enough to slash.

Raven pulls it out, drops to one knee, and swings his knife hand around in a long ellipse between T-Bone's thighs. Then he jumps over T-Bone's collapsing body and runs.

Hiro gets the sense that T-Bone is a dead man, so he follows Raven. His intention is not to hunt the man down, but rather to maintain a very clear picture of where he is.

He has to cut through a number of rows. He rapidly loses Raven. He considers running as fast as he can in the opposite direction.

Then he hears the deep, lung-stretching rumble of a motorcycle engine. Hiro runs for the nearest street exit, just hoping to catch a glimpse.

He does, though it is a quick one, not a hell of a lot better than the graphic in the cop car. Raven turns to look at Hiro, just as he is blowing out of there. He's right under a streetlight, so Hiro gets a clear look at his face for the first time. He is Asian. He has a wispy mustache that trails down past his chin.

Another Crip comes running out into the street half a second after Hiro, as Raven is pulling away. He slows for a moment to take stock of the situation, then charges the motorcycle like a linebacker. He is crying out as he does so, a war cry.

Squeaky emerges about the same time as the Crip, starts chasing both of them down the street.

Raven seems to be unaware of the Crip running behind him, but in hindsight it seems apparent that he has been watching his approach in the rearview mirror of the motorcycle. As the Crip comes in range, Raven's hand lets go of the throttle for a moment, snaps back as if he is throwing away a piece of litter. His fist strikes the middle of the Crip's face like a frozen ham shot out of a cannon. The Crip's head snaps back, his feet are lifted off the ground, he does most of a backflip and strikes the pavement, hitting first with the nape of his neck, both arms slamming out straight onto the road as he does so. It looks a lot like a controlled fall, though if so, it has to be more reflex than anything.

Squeaky decelerates, turns, and kneels down next to the fallen Crip, ignoring Raven.

Hiro watches the large, radioactive, spear-throwing killer drug lord ride his motorcycle into Chinatown. Which is the same as riding it into China, as far as chasing him down is concerned.

He runs up to the Crip, who is lying crucified in the center of the street. The lower half of the Crip's face is pretty hard to make out. His eyes are half open, and he looks quite relaxed. He speaks quietly. “He's a fucking Indian or something.”

Interesting idea. But Hiro still thinks he's Asian.

“What the fuck did you think you were doing, asshole?” Squeaky says. He sounds so pissed that Hiro steps away from him.

“That fucker ripped us off—the suitcase burned,” the Crip mumbles through a mashed jaw.

“So why didn't you just write it off? Are you crazy, fucking with Raven like that?”

“He ripped us off. Nobody does that and lives.”

“Well, Raven just did,” Squeaky says. Finally, he's calming down a little. He rocks back on his heels, looks up at Hiro.

“T-Bone and your driver are not likely to be alive,” Hiro says. “This guy better not move—he could have a neck fracture.”

“He's lucky
I
don't fracture his fucking neck,” Squeaky says.

The ambulance people get there fast enough to slap an inflatable cervical collar around the Crip's neck before he gets ambitious enough to stand up. They haul him away within a few minutes.

Hiro goes back into the hops and finds T-Bone. T-Bone is dead, slumped in a kneeling position against a trellis. The stab wound through his bulletproof vest probably would have been fatal, but Raven wasn't satisfied with that. He went down low and slashed up and down the insides of T-Bone's thighs, which are now laid open all the way to the bone. In doing so, he put great length-wise rents into both of T-Bone's femoral arteries, and his entire blood supply dropped out of him. Like slicing the bottom off a styrofoam cup.

20

The Enforcers turn the entire block into a mobile cop headquarters with cars and paddy wagons and satellite links on flatbed trucks. Dudes with white coats are walking up and down through the hop field with Geiger counters. Squeaky is wandering around with his headset, staring into space, carrying on conversations with people who aren't there. A tow truck shows up, towing T-Bone's black BMW behind it.

“Yo, pod.” Hiro turns around and looks. It's Y.T. She's just come out of a Hunan place across the street. She hands Hiro a little white box and a pair of chopsticks. “Spicy chicken with black bean sauce, no MSG. You know how to use chopsticks?”

Hiro shrugs off this insult.

“I got a double order,” Y.T. continues, “cause I figure we got some good intel tonight.”

“Are you aware of what happened here?”

“No. I mean, some people obviously got hurt.”

“But you weren't an eyewitness.”

“No, I couldn't keep up with them.”

“That's good,” Hiro says.

“What did happen?”

Hiro just shakes his head. The spicy chicken is glistening darkly under the lights; he has never been less hungry in his life. “If I had known, I wouldn't have gotten you involved. I just thought it was a surveillance job.”

“What happened?”

“I don't want to get into it. Look. Stay away from Raven, okay?”

“Sure,” she says. She says it in the chirpy tone of voice that she uses when she's lying and she wants to make sure you know it.

Squeaky hauls open the back door of the BMW and looks into the back seat. Hiro steps a little closer, gets a nasty whiff of cold smoke. It is the smell of burnt plastic.

The aluminum briefcase that Raven earlier gave to T-Bone is sitting in the middle of the seat. It looks like it has been thrown into a fire; it has black smoke stains splaying out around the locks, and its plastic handle is partially melted. The buttery leather that covers the BMW's seats has burn marks on it. No wonder T-Bone was pissed.

Squeaky pulls on a pair of latex gloves. He hauls the briefcase out, sets it on the trunk lid, and rips the latches open with a small prybar.

Whatever it is, it is complicated and highly designed. The top half of the case has several rows of the small red-capped tubes that Hiro saw at the U-Stor-It. There are five rows with maybe twenty tubes in each row.

The bottom half of the case appears to be some kind of miniaturized, old-fashioned computer terminal. Most of it is occupied by a keyboard. There is a small liquid-crystal display screen that can probably handle about five lines of text at a time. There is a penlike object attached to the case by a cable, maybe three feet long uncoiled. It looks like it might be a light pen or a bar-code scanner. Above the keyboard is a lens, set at an angle so that it is aimed at whoever is typing on the keyboard. There are other features whose purpose is not so obvious: a slot, which might be a place to insert a credit or ID card, and a cylindrical socket that is about the size of one of those little tubes.

This is Hiro's reconstruction of how the thing looked at one time. When Hiro sees it, it is melted together. Judging from the pattern of smoke marks on the outside of the case—which appear to be jetting outward from the crack between the top and bottom—the source of the flame was inside, not outside.

Squeaky reaches down and unsnaps one of the tubes from the bracket, holds it up in front of the bright lights of Chinatown. It had been transparent but was now smirched by heat and smoke. From a distance, it looks like a simple vial, but stepping up to look at it more closely Hiro can see at least half a dozen tiny individual compartments inside the thing, all connected to each other by capillary tubes. It has a red plastic cap on one end of it. The cap has a black rectangular window, and as Squeaky rotates it, Hiro can see the dark red glint of an inactive LED display inside, like looking at the display on a turned-off calculator. Underneath this is a small perforation. It isn't just a simple drilled hole. It is wide at the surface, rapidly narrowing to a nearly invisible pinpoint opening, like the bell of a trumpet.

The compartments inside the vial are all partially filled with liquids. Some of them are transparent and some are blackish brown. The brown ones have to be organics of some kind, now reduced by the heat into chicken soup. The transparent ones could be anything.

“He got out to go into a bar and have a drink,” Squeaky mumbles. “What an asshole.”

“Who did?”

“T-Bone. See, T-Bone was, like, the registered owner of this unit. The suitcase. And as soon as he got more than about ten feet away from it—
foosh
—it self-destructed.”

“Why?”

Squeaky looks at Hiro like he's stupid. “Well, it's not like I work for Central Intelligence or anything. But I would guess that whoever makes this drug—they call it Countdown, or Redcap, or Snow Crash—has a real thing about trade secrets. So if the pusher abandons the suitcase, or loses it, or tries to transfer ownership to someone else—
foosh
.”

“You think the Crips are going to catch up with Raven?”

“Not in Chinatown. Shit,” Squeaky says, getting pissed again in retrospect, “I can't believe that guy. I could have killed him.”

“Raven?”

“No. That Crip. Chasing Raven. He's lucky Raven got to him first, not me.”

“You were chasing the Crip?”

“Yeah, I was chasing the Crip. What, did you think I was trying to catch Raven?”

“Sort of, yeah. I mean, he's the bad guy, right?”

“Definitely. So I'd be chasing Raven if I was a cop and it was my job to catch bad guys. But I'm an Enforcer, and it's my job to enforce order. So I'm doing everything I can—and so is every other Enforcer in town—to protect Raven. And if you have any ideas about trying to go and find Raven yourself and get revenge for that colleague of yours that he offed, you can forget it.”

“Offed? What colleague?” Y.T. breaks in. She didn't see what happened with Lagos.

Hiro is mortified by this idea. “Is that why everyone was telling me not to fuck with Raven? They were afraid I was going to
attack
him?”

Squeaky eyes the swords. “You got the means.”

“Why should anyone protect Raven?”

Squeaky smiles, as though we have just crossed the border into the realm of kidding around. “He's a Sovereign.”

“So declare war on him.”

“It's not a good idea to declare war on a nuclear power.”

“Huh?”

“Christ,” Squeaky says, shaking his head, “if I had any idea how little you knew about this shit, I never would have let you into my car. I thought you were some kind of a serious CIC wet-operations guy. Are you telling me you really didn't know about Raven?”

“Yes, that's what I'm telling you.”

“Okay. I'm gonna tell you this so you don't go out and cause any more trouble. Raven's packing a torpedo warhead that he boosted from an old Soviet nuke sub. It was a torpedo that was designed to take out a carrier battle group with one shot. A nuclear torpedo. You know that funny-looking sidecar that Raven has on his Harley? Well, it's a hydrogen bomb, man. Armed and ready. The trigger's hooked up to EEG trodes embedded in his skull. If Raven dies, the bomb goes off. So when Raven comes into town, we do everything in our power to make the man feel welcome.”

Hiro's just gaping. Y.T. has to step in on his behalf. “Okay,” she says. “Speaking for my partner and myself, we'll stay away from him.”

21

Y.T. reckons she is going to spend all afternoon being a ramp turd. The surf is always up on the Harbor Freeway, which gets her from Downtown into Compton, but the off-ramps into that neighborhood are so rarely used that three-foot tumbleweeds grow in their potholes. And she's definitely not going to travel into Compton under her own power. She wants to poon something big and fast.

She can't use the standard trick of ordering a pizza to her destination and then pooning the delivery boy as he roars past, because none of the pizza chains deliver to this neighborhood. So she'll have to stop at the off-ramp and wait hours and hours for a ride. A ramp turd.

She does not want to do this delivery at all. But the franchisee wants her to do it bad. Really bad. The amount of money he has offered her is so high, it's stupid. The package must be full of some kind of intense new drug.

But that's not as weird as what happens next. She is cruising down the Harbor Freeway, approaching the desired off-ramp, having pooned a southbound semi. A quarter-mile from the off-ramp, a bullet-pocked black Oldsmobile cruises past her, right-turn signal flashing. He's going to exit. It's too good to be true. She poons the Oldsmobile.

As she cruises down the ramp behind this flatulent sedan, she checks out the driver in his rearview mirror. It is the franchisee himself, the one who is paying her a totally stupid amount of money to do this job.

By this point, she's more afraid of him than she is of Compton. He must be a psycho. He must be in love with her. This is all a twisted psycho love plot.

But it's a little late now. She stays with him, looking for a way out of this burning and rotting neighborhood.

They are approaching a big, nasty-looking Mafia roadblock. He guns the gas pedal, headed straight for death. She can see the destination franchise ahead. At the last second, he whips the car around and squeals sideways to a halt.

He couldn't have been more helpful. She unpoons as he's giving her this last little kick of energy and sails through the checkpoint at a safe and sane speed. The guards keep their guns pointed at the sky, swivel their heads to look at her butt as she rolls past them.

The Compton Nova Sicilia franchise is a grisly scene. It is a jamboree of Young Mafia. These youths are even duller than the ones from the all-Mormon Deseret Burbclave. The boys are wearing tedious black suits. The girls are encrusted with pointless femininity. Girls can't even be in the Young Mafia; they have to be in the Girls' Auxiliary and serve macaroons on silver plates. “Girls” is too fine a word for these organisms, too high up the evolutionary scale. They aren't even chicks.

She's going way too fast, so she kicks the board around sideways, plants pads, leans into it, skids to a halt, roiling up a wave of dust and grit that dulls the glossy shoes of several Young Mafia who are milling out front, nibbling dinky Italo-treats and playing grown-up. It condenses on the white lace stockings of the Young Mafia proto-chicks. She falls off the board, appearing to catch her balance at the last moment. She stomps on the edge of the plank with one foot, and it bounces four feet into the air, spinning rapidly around its long axis, up into her armpit, where she clamps it tight under one arm. The spokes of the smartwheels all retract so that the wheels are barely larger than their hubs. She slaps the Magna-Poon into a handy socket on the bottom of the plank so that her gear is all in one handy package.

“Y.T.,” she says. “Young, fast, and female. Where the fuck's Enzo?”

The boys decide to get all “mature” on Y.T. Males of this age are preoccupied with snapping each other's underwear and drinking until they are in a coma. But around a female, they do the “mature” thing. It is hilarious. One of them steps forward slightly, interposing himself between Y.T. and the nearest proto-chick. “Welcome to Nova Sicilia,” he says. “Can I assist you in some way?”

Y.T. sighs deeply. She is a fully independent businessperson, and these people are trying to do a peer thing on her.

“Delivery for one Enzo? Y'know, I can't wait to get out of this neighborhood.”

“It's a good neighborhood, now,” the YoMa says. “You should stick around for a few minutes. Maybe you could learn some manners.”

“You should try surfing the Ventura at rush hour. Maybe you could learn your limitations.”

The YoMa laughs like, okay, if that's how you want it. He gestures toward the door. “The man you want to talk to is in there. Whether he wants to talk to you or not, I'm not sure.”

“He fucking asked for me,” Y.T. says.

“He came across the country to be with us,” the guy says, “and he seems pretty happy with us.”

All the other YoMas mumble and nod supportively.

“Then why are you standing outside?” Y.T. asks, going inside.

Inside the franchise, things are startlingly relaxed. Uncle Enzo is in there, looking just like he does in the pictures, except bigger than Y.T. expected. He is sitting at a desk playing cards with some other guys in funeral garb. He is smoking a cigar and nursing an espresso. Can't get too much stimulation, apparently.

There's a whole Uncle Enzo portable support system in here. A traveling espresso machine has been set up on another desk. A cabinet sits next to it, doors open to reveal a big foil bag of Italian Roast Water-Process Decaf and a box of Havana cigars. There's also a gargoyle in one corner, patched into a bigger-than-normal laptop, mumbling to himself.

Y.T. lifts her arm, allows the plank to fall into her hand. She slaps it down on top of an empty desk and approaches Uncle Enzo, unslinging the delivery from her shoulder.

“Gino, please,” Uncle Enzo says, nodding at the delivery. Gino steps forward to take it from her.

“Need your signature on that,” Y.T. says. For some reason she does not refer to him as “pal” or “bub.”

She's momentarily distracted by Gino. Suddenly, Uncle Enzo has come rather close to her, caught her right hand in his left hand. Her Kourier gloves have an opening on the back of the hand just big enough for his lips. He plants a kiss on Y.T.'s hand. It's warm and wet. Not slobbery and gross, not antiseptic and dry either. Interesting. The guy has confidence going for him. Christ, he's slick. Nice lips. Sort of firm muscular lips, not gelatinous and blubbery like fifteen-year-old lips can be. Uncle Enzo has a very faint citrus-and-aged-tobacco smell to him. Fully smelling it would involve standing pretty close to him. He is towering over her, standing at a respectable distance now, glinting at her through crinkly old-guy eyes.

Seems pretty nice.

“I can't tell you how much I've been looking forward to meeting you, Y.T.,” he says.

“Hi,” she says. Her voice sounds chirpier than she likes it to be. So she adds, “What's in that bag that's so fucking valuable, anyway?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Uncle Enzo says. His smile is not exactly smug. More embarrassed, like what an awkward way to meet someone. “It all has to do with imageering,” he says, spreading one hand dismissively. “There are not many ways for a man like me to meet with a young girl that do not generate incorrect images in the media. It's stupid. But we pay attention to these things.”

“So, what did you want to meet with me about? Got a delivery for me to make?”

All the guys in the room laugh.

The sound startles Y.T. a little, reminds her that she is performing in front of a crowd. Her eyes flick away from Uncle Enzo for a moment.

Uncle Enzo notices this. His smile gets infinitesimally narrower, and he hesitates for a moment. In that moment, all the other guys in the room stand up and head for the exit.

“You may not believe me,” he says, “but I simply wanted to thank you for delivering that pizza a few weeks ago.”

“Why shouldn't I believe you?” she asks. She is amazed to hear nice, sweet things coming out of her mouth.

So is Uncle Enzo. “I'm sure you of all people can come up with a reason.”

“So,” she says, “you having a nice day with all the Young Mafia?”

Uncle Enzo gives her a look that says, watch it, child. A second after she gets scared, she starts laughing, because it's a put-on, he's just giving her a hard time. He smiles, indicating that it's okay for her to laugh.

Y.T. can't remember when she's been so involved in a conversation. Why can't all people be like Uncle Enzo?

“Let me see,” Uncle Enzo says, looking at the ceiling, scanning his memory banks. “I know a few things about you. That you are fifteen years old, you live in a Burbclave in the Valley with your mother.”

“I know a few things about you, too,” Y.T. hazards.

Uncle Enzo laughs. “Not nearly as much as you think, I promise. Tell me, what does your mother think of your career?”

Nice of him to use the word “career.” “She's not totally aware of it—or doesn't want to know.”

“You're probably wrong,” Uncle Enzo says. He says it cheerfully enough, not trying to cut her down or anything. “You might be shocked at how well-informed she is. This is my experience, anyway. What does your mother do for a living?”

“She works for the Feds.”

Uncle Enzo finds that richly amusing. “And her daughter is delivering pizzas for Nova Sicilia. What does she do for the Feds?”

“Some kind of thing where she can't really tell me in case I blab it. She has to take a lot of polygraph tests.”

Uncle Enzo seems to understand this very well. “Yes, a lot of Fed jobs are that way.”

There is an opportune silence.

“It kind of freaks me out,” Y.T. says.

“The fact that she works for the Feds?”

“The polygraph tests. They put a thing around her arm—to measure the blood pressure.”

“A sphygmomanometer,” Uncle Enzo says crisply.

“It leaves a bruise around her arm. For some reason, that kind of bothers me.”

“It should bother you.”

“And the house is bugged. So when I'm home—no matter what I'm doing—someone else is probably listening.”

“Well, I can certainly relate to that,” Uncle Enzo says.

They both laugh.

“I'm going to ask you a question that I've always wanted to ask a Kourier,” Uncle Enzo says. “I always watch you people through the windows of my limousine. In fact, when a Kourier poons me, I always tell Peter, my driver, not to give them a hard time. My question is, you are covered from head to toe in protective padding. So why don't you wear a helmet?”

“The suit's got a cervical airbag that blows up when you fall off the board, so you can bounce on your head. Besides, helmets feel weird. They say it doesn't affect your hearing, but it does.”

“You use your hearing quite a bit in your line of work?”

“Definitely, yeah.”

Uncle Enzo is nodding. “That's what I suspected. We felt the same way, the boys in my unit in Vietnam.”

“I heard you went to Vietnam, but—” She stops, sensing danger.

“You thought it was hype. No, I went there. Could have stayed out, if I'd wanted. But I volunteered.”

“You volunteered to go to Vietnam?”

Uncle Enzo laughs. “Yes, I did. The only boy in my family to do so.”

“Why?”

“I thought it would be safer than Brooklyn.”

Y.T. laughs.

“A bad joke,” he says. “I volunteered because my father didn't want me to. And I wanted to piss him off.”

“Really?”

“Definitely. I spent years and years finding ways to piss him off. Dated black girls. Grew my hair long. Smoked marijuana. But the capstone, my ultimate achievement—even better than having my ear pierced—was volunteering for service in Vietnam. But I had to take extreme measures even then.”

Y.T.'s eyes dart back and forth between Uncle Enzo's creased and leathery earlobes. In the left one she just barely sees a tiny diamond stud.

“What do you mean, extreme measures?”

“Everyone knew who I was. Word gets around, you know. If I had volunteered for the regular Army, I would have ended up stateside, filling out forms—maybe even at Fort Hamilton, right there in Bensonhurst. To prevent that, I volunteered for Special Forces, did everything I could to get into a front-line unit.” He laughs. “And it worked. Anyway, I'm rambling like an old man. I was trying to make a point about helmets.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Our job was to go through the jungle making trouble for some slippery gentlemen carrying guns bigger than they were. Stealthy guys. And we depended on our hearing, too—just like you do. And you know what? We never wore helmets.”

“Same reason.”

“Exactly. Even though they didn't cover the ears, really, they did something to your sense of hearing. I still think I owe my life to going bareheaded.”

“That's really cool. That's really interesting.”

“You'd think they would have solved the problem by now.”

“Yeah,” Y.T. volunteers, “some things never change, I guess.”

Uncle Enzo throws back his head and belly laughs. Usually, Y.T. finds this kind of thing pretty annoying, but Uncle Enzo just seems like he's having a good time, not putting her down.

Y.T. wants to ask him how he went from the ultimate rebellion to running the family beeswax. She doesn't. But Uncle Enzo senses that it is the next, natural subject of the conversation.

“Sometimes I wonder who'll come after me,” he says. “Oh, we have plenty of excellent people in the next generation. But after that—well, I don't know. I guess all old people feel like the world is coming to an end.”

“You got millions of those Young Mafia types,” Y.T. says.

“All destined to wear blazers and shuffle papers in suburbia. You don't respect those people very much, Y.T., because you're young and arrogant. But I don't respect them much either, because I'm old and wise.”

This is a fairly shocking thing for Uncle Enzo to be saying, but Y.T. doesn't feel shocked. It just seems like a reasonable statement coming from her reasonable pal, Uncle Enzo.

“None of them would ever volunteer to go get his legs shot off in the jungle, just to piss off his old man. They lack a certain fiber. They are lifeless and beaten down.”

“That's sad,” Y.T. says. It feels better to say this than to trash them, which was her first inclination.

“Well,” says Uncle Enzo. It is the “well” that begins the end of a conversation. “I was going to send you some roses, but you wouldn't really be interested in that, would you?”