The MaddAddam Trilogy (122 page)

The cover story for his Seth persona was that he was making a service call at a local branch of a beauty-and-mood-enhancing Corp called AnooYoo, which was a dubious affiliate of HelthWyzer. Health and Beauty, the two seductive twins joined at the navel, singing their eternal siren songs. A lot of people would pay through their nose jobs for either one.

HelthWyzer’s products – the vitamin supplements, the over-the-counter painkillers, the higher-end disease-specific pharmaceuticals, the erectile dysfunction treatments, and so on – went in for scientific descriptions and Latin names on the labels. AnooYoo, on the other hand, was mining arcane secrets from Wiccan moon-worshippers and from shamans deep in the assassin-bug-rich rainforests of Dontgothere. But Zeb could understand that there was an overlap of interests. If it hurts and you feel sick and it’s making you ugly, take this, from HelthWyzer; if you’re ugly and it hurts and you feel sick about it, take that, from AnooYoo.

Zeb readied himself for his mission by putting on a newly laundered pair of brown cords. He rearranged his face into his marginally shambolic Seth persona and winked at it in the bathroom mirror. “You’re doomed,” he said to it. He wouldn’t be sorry to part company with Seth, who’d been foisted on him by Adam in an act of older-brother I-know-better bossiness. He longed to see Adam in person, if only to berate him for that. “You got any fucking idea of what those pants put me through?” he might say.

Time for Seth to go. He ambled in the direction of the front gate, exit pass in hand, humming to himself:

Now to remember the cover story of Seth, junior code plumber. He was being sent to investigate the AnooYoo website, and to discover how it had been tampered with. Someone – maybe a jumped-up teenaged hacker like his own younger self – had altered the online images so that when you clicked on any of the mood-enhancing, complexion-improving
products, a squad of puce and orange insect animations would nibble into them at hyperspeed and then explode, legs twitching, yellow fumes coming out. It was silly but graphic.

HelthWyzer West didn’t want anyone working on the problem from inside their own systems, naturally: the thing, simpleminded though it looked, could be a trap, with its planners hoping for just such an intervention so they could ram in through HelthWyzer’s firewalls and filch its valuable
IP
. Therefore someone had to go to AnooYoo in person: someone minor and – since the gang-riddled pleebs were hazardous – someone expendable. That would be Seth, though at least they were providing a HelthWyzer car, with a driver. Nobody would likely go to the trouble of grabbing Seth for brain excavation: he wasn’t inner circle. But still.

AnooYoo didn’t want to find out who’d done the hack job, or why: that would be too expensive. They just wanted their firewall repaired. Their own guys hadn’t been able to do it, ran the cover story, which wasn’t – to Zeb – ultra plausible. But then, AnooYoo was a cheap operation – this was before its plusher days, when it set up the Spa-in-the-Park – so its
IT
bunch wasn’t the A team, and maybe not even the B or C team: ultrabrights got snapped up by richer Corps. They were more like the F team. Obviously, since they’d failed.

But they were going to have a long wait, thought Zeb, because within the hour he would morph into Hector, and Seth would be no more. He had the chess bishop; it was in his baggy corduroy pants pocket, where he was also keeping his left hand just in case, and if anyone was looking they might conclude he was engaged in an act of self-abuse. Which he simulated in a restrained way, in case the car was equipped with spyware, as was likely. Better a wanker than a defector, and a contraband smuggler to boot.

AnooYoo was located in a seedy piece of real estate on the edge of a grey-market pleeb. So it wasn’t alien to the streetscape to find an overturned SecretBurgers stand blocking the way, with a full-scale red-sauce fracas going on and a corona of yelling and honking surrounding it, plus flying squadrons of airborne meat patties. Zeb’s own
driver leaned on the horn, though he knew better than to roll down the window to yell.

But before you could say prestidigitation, the car was mobbed by a dozen Asian Fusions. One of them must’ve had a digilock popper keyed with the HelthWyzer car’s passcode because up shot the lock buttons. In about one second the Fusion thugs had winkled out the thrashing, yelping driver and were going for his shoes and shucking him out of his clothing as if he was a cob of corn. Those pleeb gangs were fast and professional, you had to hand it to them. They’d get hold of the car keys, reverse, and be off like a shot, to sell the vehicle whole or strip it for parts, whichever paid more.

This was Zeb’s moment. It had been paid for in advance: the Asian Fusions were dirty but they were also cheap, and happy to take small jobs. Checking first to make sure the driver’s sightlines were blocked – they had to be, his entire head was now covered in red sauce – Zeb dove out the back door and frog-marched himself down the adjacent alleyway and around the corner, then around another corner, and then a third, where he kept his rendezvous with the designated dumpster.

The brown corduroy pants went into it, good riddance, and some well-aged jeans came out, with accessories to match. Black pleather jacket, black T that read
ORGAN DONOR, TRY MINE FREE
, reflector shades, baseball cap with a modestly sized red skull on the front. Gold clip-on tooth cap, fake ’stache, newly minted smirk, and Hector the Vector was ready to saunter. He’d taken care to keep the chess bishop safely to hand, and now he zipped it into the inside pocket of the pleather.

Off he went, in a hurry but not in any way looking it: best to seem unemployed. Also best to seem up to no good, in non-specific ways.

The Scales and Tails where he was heading was deeper into the pleeb. If he’d gone there in his geekwear he’d probably have had to defend his personal territory beginning with scalp, nose, and balls, but as it was he attracted not much more than a few narrow-eyed assessments. Worth taking on? Not, was the verdict. So his sauntering went unimpeded.

There it was, up ahead:
ADULT ENTERTAINMENT
in neon,
For Discerning Gentlemen
in subscript. Pics of reptilian lovelies in skintight green scales, most of them with impressive bimplants, some in contorted poses that suggested they had no backbones. A woman who could hook her legs around her own neck had something to offer in the way of novelty, though exactly what was unclear. And there was March the python, looped around the shoulders of a red-hot cobra lady who was swinging from a trapeze, and who greatly resembled Katrina WooWoo, the lovely snake trainer from the Floating World he’d so often helped to saw in half.

Not even very much older. So she was still keeping her hand in. As it were.

It was daytime: no customer traffic inbound. He reminded himself of the ludicrous password he’d been saddled with.
Oleaginous
. How to use it in a plausible sentence? “You’re looking very oleaginous today?” That might get him a slap or a punch, depending on who he said it to. “Oleaginous weather we’re having.” “Turn off that oleaginous music.” “Stop being so fucking oleaginous!” None of them sounded right.

He rang the doorbell. The door looked thick as a bank vault, with a lot of metal on it. An eye peered at him through the peephole. Locks clicked, the portal opened, and there was a bouncer as big as himself, only black. Shorn head, dark suit, shades. “What?” he said.

“Hear you’ve got some oleaginous girls,” said Zeb. “Ones that butter you up.”

The guy stared at him from inside his shades. “Say that again?” he said, so Zeb did. “Oleaginous girls,” said the guy, rolling the phrase around in his mouth as if it was a doughnut hole. “Butter you up.” His mouth upended at the corners. “Good one. Right. Inside.” He checked the street before shutting the door. More locks clicking. “You want to see
her
,” he said.

Down the hallway, purple-carpeted. Up the stairs: smell of a pleasure factory in the off hours, so sad. That moppet-shop smell that meant false raunchiness, that meant loneliness, that meant you got loved only if you paid.

The guy said something into his earpiece, which must have been
very small because Zeb couldn’t see it. Maybe it was inside a tooth: some were using those now, though if the tooth got knocked out and you swallowed the thing you might end up talking out your ass. An inner door marked
HEAD OFFICE, BODY OFFICE TOO
, with a shiny green winking-snake logo and the motto “We’re Flexible.”

“In,” said the big guy once more – not a large vocabulary, him – and in Zeb went.

The room was an office of sorts, equipped with a lot of video screens and some expensive overstuffed furniture that was making a muffled statement, and a mini-bar. Zeb eyed the bar longingly – maybe there was a beer, all this running around and pretense had made him thirsty – but this was not the time.

There were two people in the room, each deep in a chair. One was Katrina WooWoo. She wasn’t in her snake outfit: only an oversized sweatshirt that said
BITCH
#3, tight black jeans, and a pair of silver stilettos that would cripple a stilt dancer. She smiled at Zeb, one of those stage smiles she could always maintain while hissing. “Long time,” she said.

“Not that long,” said Zeb. “You still look easy to pick up and hard to put down.”

She smiled. Zeb had to admit he longed to wend his way into her scaly underthings – that boyish yen hadn’t faded – but he couldn’t concentrate on such goals right then because the other person in the room was Adam. He was wearing a dorky caftan affair that looked as if it was put together by spastic ragpickers for a stage play about leprosy.

“Fuck,” said Zeb. “Where’d you get that pixie nightshirt?” It was best not to show surprise: it would give Adam an advantage he didn’t, at the moment, deserve.

“I note your tasteful T-shirt,” said Adam. “It suits you. Nice motto, baby brother.”

“Is this place bugged?” said Zeb. One more baby brother quip and he’d deck Adam. No, he wouldn’t. He never could bear to hit the guy, not full-out: Adam was too ethereal.

“Of course,” said Katrina WooWoo. “But we’ve turned everything off, courtesy of the house.”

“I’m supposed to believe that?”

“She actually has turned it off,” said Adam. “Think about it. She doesn’t want any of our footprints on her establishment. She’s doing us a big favour. Thanks,” he said to Katrina. “We won’t be long.” She stilt-walked out of the room, teetering a little, casting them a smile over her shoulder: not a hissy smile this time. She was evidently keen on Adam, despite the caftan. “There’s some food later, if you want it,” she said. “In the girls’ caf. I need to get changed, showtime coming up.”

Adam waited until she’d closed the door. “You made it,” he said. “Good.”

“No thanks to you,” said Zeb. “I might’ve been lynched because of those nerdy brown pants.” He was in fact very pleased to know that Adam was still alive, but he wasn’t going to straight-out admit it. “I looked like a fucking fuckwit in those fucking things,” he added, piling on the profanity.

Adam ignored that part. “Have you got it?” he said.

“I take it you mean this fucking chess piece,” Zeb said. He handed it over. Adam twisted the head, and off it came. He turned the bishop upside down: out slid the six pills: red, white, black, two of each colour. Adam looked at them, then put them back into the bishop and reattached the head.

“Thank you,” he said. “We have to think of somewhere very safe for this.”

“What is it?” said Zeb.

“Pure evil,” said Adam. “If Pilar’s right. But valuable pure evil. And very secret. Which is why Glenn’s father is dead.”

“What do they do?” said Zeb. “Supersex pills or what?”

“Cleverer than that,” said Adam. “They’re using their vitamin supplement pills and over-the-counter painkillers as vectors for diseases – ones for which they control the drug treatments. Whatever’s in the white ones is in actual deployment. Random distribution, so no one will suspect a specific location of being ground zero. They make money all ways: on the vitamins, then on the drugs, and finally on the hospitalization when the illness takes firm hold. As it does, because the treatment drugs are loaded too. A very good plan for siphoning the victims’ money into Corps pockets.”

“So those are the white ones. What about the reds and the blacks?”

“We don’t know,” said Adam. “They’re experimental. Possibly other diseases, possibly a faster-acting formula. We aren’t even sure how to find out in any safe way.”

Zeb took this in. “This is large,” he said. “I wonder how many brainiacs it took to think that up.”

“It’s a small, designated group within HelthWyzer,” said Adam. “Directed from the top. Glenn’s father was being used by them. He thought he was working on a targeted cancer-treatment vector. When he realized the nature of it, the full scope, he couldn’t go along with it. He slipped these to Pilar, before …”