The Credulity Nexus (10 page)

A wry smile
lifted one side of Freymann's mouth. “Oh, yeah? Which one?”

“
The big one in your purse. The one taped
to your thigh must be pretty small.”

She shook her
head, amused. “I'm keeping the big one. If she's there, you get the
pea shooter.”

He smiled at
her and held out his hand.

She smiled
back. “Later. I'll keep it warm for you.”

He'd been
right, he told himself. She looked a lot better when she
smiled.

-oOo-

Maria Dunlop
turned the box over in her hands. “Don't open it, whatever you do,”
Blake's letter had said. She remembered Blake from LA. A big guy,
like Rik. A good guy. Nice to be around, always relaxed and
unruffled. The letter that came with the box didn't sound like
Blake. It sounded scared and angry.

“
I don't know what Rik thinks he's playing
at, but I can't keep it here,” it said. “Hide it somewhere real
safe – somewhere no-one will ever find it, ever. Hide it and forget
about it. When Rik gets in touch, I'll send him to you. Don't tell
anyone you've got it. Not anyone. I hate to do this to you, but
you're the only one I know Rik can trust.”

Blake's letter
said Rik had gone off the grid, but she still kept trying to reach
him. None of the netIDs she had for him worked any more. She turned
the box over again. It was a solid metal container with strong
clasps. There were no markings on the outside. No clues as to what
it might contain.

“
What has that stupid man got himself into
now?” she grumbled aloud.

No-one heard
her. She was sitting on a bench in a park by the bay. The afternoon
was cool and bright, and sunlight sparkled off the quiet waters.
She needed to be alone to decide what to do. Her boyfriend, David,
was no use to her. In fact, they'd hardly spoken except to argue
since Rik had shown up the other day.

David was OK,
she supposed, but seeing him standing next to Rik had made her
realise what a vapid and empty creature he was compared to her ex.
Rik was the real thing. David was just a third-rate knock-off. She
was going to ask him to move out as soon as she got back to the
house.

“
That's just bloody typical!” she muttered.
Rik was nothing but trouble – showed up for five minutes and threw
her whole life into chaos again. And now this!

She thought
about tossing the box into the bay and telling Rik to go fish for
it. What could be in it that had upset Blake so much? Did she even
want to know? She put it down on her lap and raised her eyes to the
sky. A pale sliver of moon was visible, even though the day was
bright.

It had been
just like Rik to run away. Things had been good between them.
Better than good. But Rik couldn't handle good. The better it got,
the more Rik got into a funk, waiting for something terrible to
happen. It made him twitchy and reckless. He started behaving
badly. It was like he was so convinced that it couldn't last, he
started trying to screw it up before life screwed it up for
him.

She ran her
fingers across her forehead, remembering the pain of watching him
pull away – his drinking, getting them into debt, disappearing for
days on end – like he was challenging her to go on loving him, no
matter what. She hung on when they lost the house, but when he lost
his job with the LAPD, she finally gave up the fight, got out, and
went to New York to start a saner life without him. She sent the
divorce papers to Rik care of some seedy bar in Heinlein. It was
the only address he had at the time.

Maybe that's
where she should send the package. She had no idea where she might
hide it and, anyway, she didn't want Rik showing up again to claim
it. It had surprised her how pleased she'd been to see him. And
he'd looked so sad and lonely. She could see how much he still
loved her. It had broken her heart to see the pain in his eyes.

But, with Rik,
love wasn't enough. Some men weren't meant to be happy. The more
you gave them, the more they squandered it. The more they loved
you, the more they barricaded themselves against you.

She stood up
in her agitation. “Bastard!” she said between clenched teeth,
startling a young mother and her children who were walking by. She
really, really wanted to throw the stupid box into the bay, but she
couldn't. Whatever trouble Rik was in, the box was something he
needed to keep safe. That's why he'd sent it to Blake and that's
why Blake – even though it had pissed him off – hadn't dumped the
thing either, but had sent it on to her.

She dropped it
into her pocket and set off back to the house. First things first,
she'd give David his marching orders, then shut the house up and go
see her sister. Theresa lived in a big old place upstate, and was
always asking her to go visit. Maybe she would take a couple of
days' vacation and leave the package with her when she came
back.

Maria took a
last look at the bay and drew a deep breath. Once she'd got rid of
the package, she could focus on getting her feelings back to some
kind of equilibrium again. There were days – plenty of them – when
she wished she'd never met Rik.

Rivers
Valdinger was not a patient woman. Sitting in the back of a van
while Celestina's goons searched the hospital was not her idea of
getting the job done. That's why she was now twenty storeys up,
peering through a window at a grey-faced old man in a hospital
bed.

She touched a
black fingernail to the glass and traced out a metre-high oval with
it. Under the diamond edge of her nail, the glass crackled and
crepitated as she scored a fine line across it. Placing a palm at
the centre of the oval, she tapped around its edges with her
knuckles, making a clean, fine break all the way through.

When she
pushed, the oval moved into the room, held firmly by the gecko-skin
nano-filaments on her hand. She followed it in and set the big
piece of glass down quietly. The grey-faced man was still asleep.
Hell, he was dead for all she knew. Or cared.

According to
the updates she was getting from Celestina's heavies, Blake Bonomi
was in a room on this floor. Comatose, they said, but the wife was
still with him. Well, the wife would have to do.

Rivers crossed
the room. From high on the wall, one arm and one leg brushing the
ceiling, she pulled the door open a crack and put her head through.
There was nobody in sight. She pulled the door wide and slipped out
into the corridor, moving fast along one wall.

They'd been
waiting for her at LAX when the hopper landed. Somewhere in her
wonderful new body, Celestina's doctors had implanted a tracker.
Rivers had suspected as much, but now she knew. A team had picked
her up from the tarmac in a catering van and driven her to a small
engineering shop nearby. They already had people tailing the PLEO
and his companion. Nobody knew who the companion was, but she had
to be with one government agency or another. It was the tail that
led them to Blake Bonomi and the mystery of who had put the guy in
a coma. Celestina's people swore it wasn't them.

All this
uncertainty bugged the hell out of the young upload. She had built
her whole career on careful and meticulous planning, researching
every job down to the last detail. Now she had to work with people
she didn't know, hunting down a guy she had little background on,
competing with Cordell's people, government agencies, and now some
mystery killers who'd tried to rub out Bonomi – whoever the hell he
was! Rivers didn't like any of it.

“
Bonomi had the package,” one of
Celestina's goons had told her, briefing Rivers before the trip out
to the hospital. They watched security video from the hospital,
showing the encounter between Rik and Brie. “But he's dumped it or
hidden it somewhere.”

“
And you think the wife knows where it is?”
Rivers had asked. “So why didn't the PLEO get it out of her? Why
did he just take her word for it and move on?”

There had been
no satisfactory answer. “And where's Drew going? Maybe he knows
more than you think he does?”

That's when
they told her they'd lost track of Rik after he'd left the
hospital.

The temptation
to beat the lot of them to a pulp and carry on alone had been
strong, but in the end, what could she do? She'd lost track of the
primary target, and the only lead she now had was Bonomi's wife.
Besides, incompetent as these guys were, they also worked for
Celestina, and Rivers didn't want to fall out with one of the
meanest, richest gang-bosses in the Solar System. Not if she didn't
have to.

They'd wanted
her to stay at their base while they went to question Brie Bonomi.
Rivers politely but firmly explained what they could do with that
idea. Then they'd insisted she stay in the van while they went
inside. Yeah, right. Like she'd trust these bozos to tie their own
shoelaces.

She found her
two new friends walking along a corridor that led to the ICU. She
managed to crawl along the ceiling and drop down in front of them
before either of them noticed she was there.

“
Holy crap!” one of them said, his hand
halfway to his holster. The other just stared, open
mouthed.

Rivers looked from one to the other, her
smooth, black head making quick, economical movements. “If you two
were any more careless, you'd have shot each other by now. And
what's this?” She tilted her chin at the lucie, standing quietly
nearby, smiling mindlessly at them. “Ditch it,” she told them, not
waiting for
a
n
answer
, and
set off ahead of them
.

“
You'll bring the cops down on us,” one of
them grumbled at her back. “These places are full of cameras.
Alarms will be going off all over the city.”

“
You think I can't handle a few
cops?”

“
I think you'll get us all killed, that's
what.”

She waved a
dismissive hand. “So get lost, if you're scared.”

As she walked
on ahead, she imagined the two goons looking at one another and
then at her back, silently agreeing between themselves it was more
than their lives were worth to walk out on the job. They knew
Celestina was taking a personal interest. They all moved together
down the corridor, the lucie fading away at their command.

Rivers stopped
them outside Blake’s door and switched her vision to overlay
infra-red. She couldn't make out much detail inside, but she was
fairly sure there were two person-sized heat signatures near the
middle of the room. She stood back to let the goons go past.

“
OK, boys,” she said. “In you
go.”

-oOo-

When Rik and
Freymann arrived at the hospital, their car wouldn't take them to
the entrance. Instead, it drove them towards one of the
multi-storey car parks.

“
Police override,” the display said,
playing an animated FBI logo. “The FBI apologises for any
inconvenience. Your co-operation in this matter is required under
Section 25 of the Police (Emergency Powers) Act, 2037. Thank you
for your understanding.”

They were
being driven around a police perimeter that uniformed LAPD officers
were setting up. Beyond it, they could see FBI agents in body
armour jumping out of armoured personnel carriers and rushing into
the hospital building. Rik pounded at the car's controls, trying to
make it stop, but its electronic brain was temporarily under the
FBI's control, and its only response was to ignore him
completely.

“
The guys who who are after Blake must be
here already,” Freymann said.

“
You think?” Rik heaved at the door handle,
but the car was not letting them out.

Freymann
worried about what Rik might do. By the looks of things, someone
was picking off his friends, probably his relatives too. Rik didn't
strike her as the kind of man who would sit back while people he
loved were in danger. He struck her more as the type whose first
and only instinct was to try to save them. The type who would turn
into a raving berserker if anything thwarted that instinct. She
needed to calm him down.

“
We can't go barging in there, Rik. The
place is full of federal agents.”

“
What if the upload's in there,
too?”

“
Then the Feds can do more to protect your
friends than we can.”

Rik did not
look convinced. “Give me a gun.” He pushed a massive hand out
towards her.

“
Not a good idea. Not now.” She had already
made up her mind that when the time was right, she would give him
the gun, with no compunction at all. Almost from the minute she
first saw him, she felt like she could trust him – a feeling that
had grown over the past few hours. She was convinced that Rik was
not the bad guy in all this. In fact, he seemed like a nice guy
caught up in events that were out of his control.

“
I'm going to shoot out the windows. Give
me a gun.” He looked like he planned to take one if she didn't
comply.

She reached
into her bag and drew her handgun. She pointed it at Rik's chest
and flicked off the safety. Trust or not, she wasn't going to let
him wreck everything.

“
Just settle down, big guy. If you shoot
out the windows, the car alarm will go off. Then the Feds will want
to take a look. We don't want that.”

Looking
daggers at her, Rik slowly subsided. “What's it to you if the Feds
haul my ass off? You've done your job.”

“
Not until I get that package.”

He glowered
into the Freymann's eyes. Her gaze, like the gun barrel, was steady
and unwavering. She had no intention of shooting him, but she sure
as hell wasn't going to let him know that.