The Credulity Nexus (11 page)

“
What good am I to you now?” he asked. His
voice was low but tense. “You know I don't have a clue where the
package is. You know that the only person who might know will
either be dead in a few minutes, or in FBI custody. So let me go
save Brie.”

“
Rik, I want to save Brie too, but running
around armed out there will only get you killed.”

Rik turned
away, almost snarling in his frustration.

“
You know I'm right, Rik. Believe me, I
understand how much you want to help your friends. I'm with you.
I'll help. But we've got to do it the right way.”

What was she
saying? This wasn't part of the mission brief. It had just come
out. Looking at the big sap tearing himself apart, all helpless and
frantic, tugged at something inside her that she’d kept safely out
of reach for many years.

The car swung
onto a ramp and into a tunnel. Slowly, it made its way down into an
underground car park, winding through the rows of parked cars with
funereal care. Rik slammed a fist against a window, but kept his
jaw clenched and said nothing.

As soon as the
car was parked and its door locks clicked open, Rik was outside and
running. Freymann hurried after him. They crashed through an exit
door and up the concrete stairs, emerging into bright California
sunshine with high-rise hospital buildings all around them. Rik
paused to get his bearings, and Freymann grabbed his arm.

“
You've got a plan, right?” she
asked.

“
Maybe.”

Rik set off in
a direction that wasn't straight towards his friend, and that was
enough to satisfy Freymann that he'd actually thought about what he
was doing. Despite her heels, she managed to keep close behind him
as he sped across the hospital campus, following a wide arc that
brought them round to the back of the ICU building. Before they got
there, Rik stopped dead, and Freymann almost ran into the back of
him.

“
There are Feds around the entrance,
there,” he said, pointing to the half-dozen men and women who had
taken cover to watch the delivery bay. He moved to the shelter of a
row of dumpsters, looking around all the time. Freymann followed
his gaze, trying to see what he was looking for.

“
There,” he said, pointing out a black van
parked down the street against the adjacent building.

“
What's so special about–?”

But Rik was in
motion again. With a groan, she set off after him. Following a
convoluted route, well out of sight of the Feds, they emerged close
to the black van. Rik ran straight up to it and in through the back
doors. Freymann was right behind him.

Light barely
penetrated the van's heavily-tinted windows and it took a moment
for them to adapt to the sudden gloom.

“
Do you mind telling me what we're doing
here?” Freymann asked, although she'd already guessed.

Rik held up a
hand for silence as he scanned the interior, making her clench her
jaw and scowl at him. A take-charge guy was great – on a dinner
date – but this was work and she was the boss here. Still, she
couldn't help joining in the visual sweep of the van.

There were a
couple of long bench seats in the back and two swivelling bucket
seats at the front. A small netNode lay on one of the benches,
abandoned by whoever had used it last. Rik reached for the little
silver box, but she got to it first. She tried to interface her
cogplus with it, with only limited success. A display told them
that access was denied. She handed it to Rik, but he had no luck
with it, either.

“
You think the guys who are after your
friend came in this van?” Freymann asked. “Why?”

Rik looked at
her for the first time since they left the parking garage. “Because
the crooks always use a black van when they're planning to snatch
somebody. Just like the Feds always use a white one.”

“
What? Are you nuts?”

Leaning back
in his seat and tossing the netNode aside, Rik flashed a grin at
her. “It was a hunch, that's all. It's the only vehicle nearby that
looks right for the job. Look, it's like this. Either the guys
after Brie are on their own, in which case you're right, the Feds
will get them. Or they're with the upload, in which case, you're
wrong. The Feds don't stand a chance.

“
But that black-skinned killing machine
will want to get Brie away from the cops so that she can
interrogate her. Which means she's probably going to bring Brie
back here and drive her somewhere. Either that, or the upload came
on her own, probably didn't use a vehicle at all, and will head off
across the roofs or something with Brie on her shoulders. In which
case, we're left sitting in some stranger's van, looking like
assholes.”

“
Great! So in this brilliant plan of yours,
the very best scenario is that the upload comes bursting through
that door any second, possibly with a couple of friends, blows us
away, and drives off to interrogate Brie?” She didn't know quite
why she was giving him such a hard time. She'd come to the same
conclusions herself, more or less. Maybe it was because what she
said was true. Either they were wasting their time, or they were
trapped in that van like fish in a barrel.

Rik bent down
and began groping under the seats. “Yep. And that's why we're going
to need...” With a grunt, he heaved two mean-looking machine guns
out and threw one to Freymann. “...these!”

She felt her mouth fall open, even as her
hands and eyes automatically checked the magazine and chambered a
round.
Son
of a bitch!
“How the
hell did you know... No. Don't tell me. It was a hunch,
right?”

He gave her
that wide, impish grin of his. She could get used to seeing that
smile, she thought. And, before she knew it, she found herself
grinning right back.

Rivers and her
unhappy companions didn't waste time trying to make Brie talk. They
just bundled her up, tied her wrists, gagged her and headed for the
door. By the time the two men dragged her into the corridor, Brie
had already given up struggling. Rivers knew the guys were right:
the hospital cameras would have identified her and alerted the
police the fist time she stepped into a corridor. They needed to
get out fast and deal with the woman later.

So turning to
find three large men staring at them was an unpleasant surprise. At
first, Rivers thought they might be more of Celestina's goons, but
the three newcomers looked as shocked as she was by the encounter.
Everybody drew their guns. Rivers drew both of hers. They all
looked at the upload to see what she would do.

To everybody's
surprise, she turned her back on the interlopers and spoke to her
companions.

“
Keep the woman alive,” she told them. “If
she dies, I will kill both of you.” Brie goggled at Rivers in
horror and began to struggle again.

Rivers watched
the woman squirming for a moment, then turned to the newcomers
again. Behind her, her companions stared edging backwards along the
corridor.

“
Who are you guys?” she asked, stepping
towards them. “Cordell's people, I would guess. Now, do you want to
turn around and run, or would you like to see how fast I
am?”

“
That's far enough, lady. Just hand over
the woman. We don't want no shooting match.”

The speaker
sounded nervous. He didn't take his eyes off Rivers for a
moment.

“
Your boss didn't tell you to expect an
upload, did he?” It seemed like a reasonable guess. “Otherwise
you'd have come armed with something more than those little
pop-guns. Am I right?”

“
You ain't indestructible,” the gunman
said.

Rivers smiled.
“I'll give you points for bravado, but not for intelligence. Now
run along. I'm in a hurry. The cops are going to be here any– Oh,
shit!”

The clatter of
heavy boots coming from the stairwells at both ends of the corridor
could only mean one thing.

“
FBI! Lay down your weapons! Hands above
your heads! Do it! Now!”

Federal agents
came storming into the corridor from both directions, shouting the
same instructions over and over. Cordell's thugs turned to face the
ones behind them. Celestina's men did the same, leaving Rivers and
Brie in the middle. It took Rivers a fraction of a second to weigh
up the situation. The Feds were wearing state-of-the-art body
armour. Neither she nor the hired guns had a weapon that would do
more than inflict a few bruises on them. On the other hand, the FBI
had clearly been expecting to meet an upload. They had heavy-duty
machine guns which could, she knew, be loaded with armour-piercing,
explosive munitions. In addition, they had buzz guns, which fired a
stream of tiny hypersonic pellets that would cut through her body
like a laser torch through tinfoil.

Getting away
with the woman was out of the question. She'd be lucky to get away
with her life. But she wasn't going to let them take her.

The Feds were
still shouting and the goons were still wondering what to do.
Rivers raised both her guns, pointed them at both groups of FBI
agents at once, and fired.

It took a
moment for people to react, and then all hell broke loose. But in
that moment, Rivers dropped her guns and launched herself at the
corridor wall. It was an internal wall, just studs and
plaster-board. Using the grip of her gecko-skin soles as leverage,
and the amazing strength of her wonderful new body, she smashed her
way through it with very little effort. While the Feds and the
goons exchanged fire, she sprinted across the ward in which she
found herself, tossed a resuscitation trolley through a window and
climbed out through the hole it made onto the outer wall of the
building.

By the time
the police had fought their way past the gunmen and followed her,
she was long gone.

-oOo-

“
So who do you really work for?” Rik asked
as he and Freymann waited in the van.

The woman
looked at him with intelligent brown eyes and gave a small shrug.
“MI6. It was Shah's idea. Bring you over here, get hold of the
package, and take it home.”

“
Shah's Five, right?”

She gave a
cock-eyed grin. “Inter-agency co-operation. It happens
sometimes.”

“
But you're really an American, yeah? No
Brit does a New York accent that good.”

“
As American as you are.”

Rik wondered
if that was a dig at him. He'd taken lunar citizenship when he
married the Drew sisters. Now he had dual nationalities. “No
conflict of interest?”

“
Nya. We're all on the same side these
days. Americans, Europeans, Aussies, Canadians, Lunies... Even the
Russians are on the side of the Angels since the reforms. The
sooner they declare a world government, the better, if you ask me.
The real divisions aren't national any more. The lines we draw now
are based on political systems and religions.”

Rik took a
closer look at the woman opposite him. He was starting to see more
there than he had expected to find.

“
That still doesn't explain why you're
working for the Brits and not the home team.”

She gave him a
steady look. “See the beaky nose? The swarthy skin? I got them from
my Iranian, Muslim mother, not my whiter-than-white Jewish father.
America's still too tangled up with Middle Eastern politics to
completely trust someone with my background. For the Brits,
petro-politics is all history now. They're not a player any more.
Besides, they've got a bigger Muslim population over there than
Palestine these days.”

Rik looked at
her large, dark eyes, prominent cheekbones and wide mouth, suddenly
seeing her Persian ancestry. He'd vaguely assumed her features and
colouration were Jewish, biased by her surname, he supposed. Now he
knew better.

“
And how come you've decided to 'fess up
about not being CIA after all this time?”

Freymann
actually laughed. “Because it was getting to be embarrassing, and
you're not such a big, dumb asshole as you look. Anyway, I figure
we can work together a lot easier with our cards on the table. We
both want to get that package off the streets and to keep it out of
the hands of whoever's looking for it, right?”

Rik was
noncommittal. “You got any backup out here?”

“
In LA? Hell, no! We've got a listening
post and a couple of people to run errands, that's all. So no
cavalry, if that's what you were hoping.”

“
Something like–”

The van sagged
on its suspension as something heavy landed almost silently on its
roof. Rik and Freymann had their guns up in an instant; he covered
the front and she took the back. Rik's breathing stopped, but his
heart pounded on his ribs like a panel beater.

The driver's
door opened and the upload slid into one of the bucket seats, her
coal-black body sinuous and fast. Rik pushed the barrel of his
machine gun into the small of her back.

“
Don't turn around,” he told her, seeing
the upload's body stiffen. “Just drive us away from here. We've
both got Heckler-Koch MG6 light machine guns pointed right at your
precious brain-box. I don't really know how fast you are, lady, but
these things fire fifteen rounds a second. That's thirty chances of
killing you every single second. Do you want to play Russian
roulette with a machine gun?”

Without a
word, Rivers started up the van, took manual control, and moved
off. At the first available turning they took a left. The FBI
troops waiting behind the hospital building glanced at them. Rik
watched one man put a finger to his ear, obviously asking for
instructions. By the time he started shouting at the others to get
after the van, it had turned out of sight around another
building.