The Resurrected Man (34 page)

Jonah tried to stand, but found that he could not. His thigh muscles were locked tight, powerless.

“I—uh, thanks again,” he said as Kuei assisted him. This time his wrists were tied too. A heavy, thick hood went over Marylin's head an instant before one also went over his. Hands guided him out of the room, but not before he heard the clang of the mass-freighter's doors slamming shut.

“I think he'll send the body,” Jonah said via prevocals. “It's in his best interest to do so, and he's not stupid.”

Marylin didn't respond.

“Marylin? Can you hear me?”

Silence.

His first, panicky thought was that they'd been separated—or worse, that she might be hurt. Then he heard her cough, muffled by the double thickness of the hoods but distinct. The tone brought back memories of the times they had worked together. In the field, a cough or a gesture could communicate a sentence's worth of information when speech and prevocals were impossible. Like now.

He coughed back, relieved to know he wasn't the only one having trouble. The hoods were obviously shielded to prevent them being pinged again. He didn't know how deeply the MIU sweep could penetrate, but he doubted it would make it through two layers. Even more remote was the chance of finding them again once they'd been moved.

Van doors opened ahead of him. Someone guided him into the back and made sure he was seated before Marylin followed. No one spoke in English, but there was plenty of discussion. Mancheff was arguing with Kuei and another man. The argument ended only when the time came to seal the van. Kuei remained in the back while Mancheff went elsewhere. The van shifted seconds later, as though the WHOLE leader had taken a seat in the front, but Jonah couldn't be certain. The interior was soundproofed.

He jerked sideways when the van moved forward, and he bumped into someone's shoulder.

“Here we go again,” Marylin muttered.

“Some tour we're getting,” he replied. “Any idea, anyone, where we're going this time?”

“Be quiet.” Kuei's voice was soft but insistent.

Jonah sighed and leaned against the wall of the van.

An unknown time later, he woke with a jerk and an elbow in his ribs.

“Sit up, Jonah. You're squashing me!”

His covered head banged against the wall behind him. “Ow! Shit.”

“Don't kill yourself.”

“I've been asleep?”

“Snoring, too.” Marylin's voice was annoyed and weary. “At least one of us got some rest.”

He went to rub his skull, but his hands were still tied. Afterimages of the dream made him edgy. He had been on his knees in a desert with a gun to the back of his neck. The barrel had pushed him down until his face was pressed against the sand, then further still until the sand had bubbled over his head and swallowed him whole. The dream had left him with the twin sensations of falling and being buried alive.

Exactly when he'd gone to sleep, he couldn't remember. At first, he had tried to catch up on the Twinmaker files, but he had been feeling disoriented enough without studying stationary images with the decidedly nonstationary van rocking around him. And as his new overseer was neither equipped with audio translation nor in possession of an audio library, he was unable to catch up with news and music from the last three years. That had limited his options dramatically. At some point he must've closed his eyes and attempted the only one left.

And now—

“I need to piss,” he said.

“That makes three of us.” Kuei's accented voice was loud in the van. Again Jonah found it hard to reconcile the sound with her face. “We'll stop soon, I'm sure.”

The uncertainty in her voice worried him. He checked his overseer. They had been driving for several hours already, presumably without a break. “Where?”

“A safe-house,” said the woman. “I don't know which one. The plan is to keep you a little longer, in case we need something to bargain with.”

Jonah remembered the argument as they had left the hangar. “That's what Mancheff told you he'd do?”

“It's what
I
would do, and he usually gets there in the end.” Kuei shifted in her seat. “Assuming nothing goes wrong.”

“How do you know it hasn't?”

“
Putaine
, hang on!” Something clicked and Kuei spoke into an intercom. The voice at the other end might have been Mancheff's. Jonah crossed his legs and concentrated on the babble of French, trying to pick out even one word that might be significant.

Apart from his full bladder and the ominous dream, his shoulders and back were stiff and the air was stifling under the hood. Somebody had had the forethought to dose him up with oral hygiene agents at some point during his treatment, so at least his breath didn't smell. And
still
, against all logic, he wasn't hungry. All in all, he decided, things could have been a lot worse. They certainly had been on other occasions.

“Do you remember the Banytis case?” he whispered to Marylin.

She grunted. “All too well.”

“Don't sound so wounded. You had it easy, remember?”

Her reply was another grunt, which, he supposed, he deserved for bringing up that particular memory.

Tepko Banytis, a crooked accountant from Broome, had been under 24-hour EJC surveillance for a month before an edgy client hired JRM to take a more active look at his affairs. The business front had proven a tough nut to crack, requiring multiple attempts to infiltrate a virus through increasingly resistant firewalls and into the system's core mainframe. Once there, fraud and trafficking had been easy to expose, but more than electronic data was needed to clinch the case. They'd needed to get someone inside the building to plant devices designed to catch Banytis in the act.

Jonah himself had been the one to go in, covered in nanoware applicators containing the bare minimum of metal—so they wouldn't trigger detectors—and livewired on every possible level. Marylin had waited outside, watching both the exterior of the building and Jonah's VTC feed. As most of the equipment they were using was illegal, or at least restricted to official EJC operatives, they worked alone. The EJC
wouldn't ask questions if the end results were sufficient to convict Banytis of
something
, but if they were caught in the act they would suffer deregistration at the very least for violating Privacy—possibly criminal charges.

At first, everything had gone smoothly. Jonah had slipped through Banytis' security with help from software patches and had made it into the basement level of the building. From there he had planned to distribute the nanoware through the air-conditioning ducts, positioning each one by teleoperation and sticking around long enough to ensure that the devices were assembling correctly. But Banytis had returned earlier than expected, and Marylin had been distracted while providing Jonah with technical advice. By the time she had raised the alarm, Banytis had entered the building with another man, an accomplice by the name of Eli Gliem. Instead of going to his office as usual, the two of them had gone down into the basement, almost as though they had known that Jonah was there and had come to catch him in the act.

That wasn't what happened at all, but it was the first thing Jonah thought upon hearing their footsteps descending towards him. He had barely enough time to take cover under the stairs. As Banytis and Gliem walked into view, heading directly for his hiding place, he thought for certain he'd been found—and almost called Marylin to go for help before realising that something was wrong.

Banytis was holding a gun on his old friend, and Gliem himself wasn't looking too good. When they reached a point right in front of Jonah, Banytis said, “Here's as good as anywhere,” and raised the gun. The gun went off and Gliem fell to the floor with a bullet through the back of the head. Banytis waited a second, then rolled the body further under the stairs to a point where it was actually touching Jonah's foot.

Then Banytis had hurried off, out of the building and back to his car. It turned out later that he had chartered a private jet under a false name to Borneo, where he'd planned to disappear. Indeed, he might have made it had he not somehow completely failed to see Jonah
watching in the shadows. Jonah had, of course, recorded the murder and instructed Marylin to forward the footage to the EJC. A squad of LEOs picked Banytis up a kilometre from the airport.

That would have been the end of it but for Banytis' reactivation of the security system as he left the building. Not wanting to alert him to the presence of an intruder, Jonah had been forced to remain under the stairs for ten minutes while Marylin overrode security. In that time, he had become acutely conscious of Gliem's body at his feet. Not just because it was a rapidly cooling corpse but because, like most corpses, its sphincter muscles had relaxed and the resulting odour was almost painfully strong…

“If you're going to suggest that Banytis might be behind all this,” Marylin said after a moment, “forget it. He was executed a year ago.”

Jonah nodded to himself. He hadn't consciously been thinking along those lines, but his unconscious might have. Revenge was a possibility he'd not considered before. As far as he knew, there were few people he'd offended deeply enough to warrant this sort of vendetta, and none with the right kind of know-how or connections. But it was worth bearing in mind. No possibility could be ignored until the case was closed.

“There's somewhere we can stop not far from here,” Kuei said in English. “Can you hang on another ten minutes?”

“We'll have to,” Marylin said. “A drink would be good, and some fresh air, too.”

“Don't push your luck.”

Jonah smiled under the hood. It sounded like captive and captor had been annoying each other during his extended nap. If anyone was going to push for fair treatment, it would be Marylin, a stickler for form and process. He, on the other hand, could see both sides. Kuei wasn't going to take any chances, not when capture could well mean the death penalty. If that meant Marylin and him suffering slightly in order to live another day, then so be it; he could indeed live with that.

It had been the same three years ago. Marylin had hated the irregularity of private practice, even while she revelled in its freedoms. The Banytis case had finished her. She hadn't liked the blatant illegality of the entire enterprise, and had used the fact that ordinary implants had been enough, in the end, to prove the case to hammer home her point. He, on the other hand, had argued that if they hadn't taken a chance and broken the law in the first place, they would've missed the act entirely and Banytis could have escaped.

She had refused to back down. And neither had he. The argument—far from their first—had raged throughout the night after Banytis had been committed to trial. They should have been celebrating—had indeed started out that way. Looking back on it now, he realised how complacent he'd become about their affair. The argument that resulted in the end of everything had begun in bed and ended with her leaving.

She had delivered her decision at the office the next day, cool and businesslike. Her resignation was effective immediately; he could deposit the overtime he owed her in her usual account, minus a reasonable percentage for the inconvenience. And as for
them
, she had been thinking for some time about devoting more of her time and energy to Luiz, the man who was supposed to be her full-time partner. She owed him something, she thought, after the extra hours she had pulled just recently. Maybe a holiday, or just some time together. She was sure Jonah would understand when she said it was nothing personal…

Crap.
When she had left the office, he had thrown an active sculpture, a gift from his father, at the door. It had splattered like wet sand, clumps dripping to the ground, others sticking to the wood and trying in vain to reassemble. Sensing a metaphor in action, he had gathered the pieces together, but too much had been lost in the carpet. The micromachine fragments of the statue refused to coalesce. The best it could manage was a three-legged horse with no tail and an enormous cavity in its side. In the end, he threw it out.

He wondered if things might ever have become so bad that he would apply that metaphor fully to his life. Had he taken InSight as an attempt to kill himself? Or to dive into a frozen time—perhaps one when he and Marylin had been happy? That, after all, was what InSight was
supposed
to do: encapsulate and replay memories at the user's whim. It was only a small design flaw that had caused the damage that might have left him completely brain-dead had he been left alone just a few months longer.

He remembered missing her. That, and the argument. Everything else—how he had felt after Lindsay had died, whether he had needed her more then or less—was gone.

And everything
since
then, after his awakening in the bath, was tainted by that cocktail of loss and guilt.

She cleared her throat, dragging him back to the present. He hoped she wouldn't push Kuei too hard. It was all very well to insist on the proper procedure when insulated from reality by underlings and regulations. In the real world, however, when confronted by a scarred maniac with a gun, it was usually best to follow orders, no matter how irrational they were. At first.

The vibration of the engine ebbed slightly as it took a gentle turn downhill.

“We're going to stop here for a few hours,” Kuei said. “We all need rest, and a chance to think.”

He disagreed completely on the last point, but remained quiet.

“The longer you keep us,” Marylin said, “the more likely we'll be found.”

“No. We can keep you shielded and out of GLITCH's eye indefinitely. And as far as the LEOs go—” Jonah heard a distinct smirk in the woman's tone “—you're in our country, now.”

“But you
will
let us go?”

“Eventually, yes. Once Karoly has everything he wants from you.”

Jonah braced himself as the van decelerated further and negotiated
a hairpin bend. They were still heading down. Underground? That would explain why the woman could be so confident of keeping them shielded.