Transmaniacon (19 page)

Delegate Ladd paid poets to compose songs glorifying the Fist.

Delegate Ladd pointed to the anti-Traditionalist propaganda, left on the scene in leaflet form, accompanying the recent upsurge of terrorist bombings.

Delegate Ladd spread rumors of evidence of large stores of nulgrav metal easily accessible in the lands beyond the Barrier.

Delegate Ladd published a detailed report of the lesser-known activities of ardent Progressivists. Three of them were investigated and subsequently jailed.

Ben Rackey paid an unlicensed pedestrian printer to produce terrorist, anti-Traditionalist leaflets.

Ben Rackey arranged for a leading Traditionalist to be wounded by a sniper—evidence was planted on the scene that the sniper had been a violently anti-Fist Progressivist.

Ben Rackey blocked four attempts by Chaldin to expose him.

Ben Rackey searched for Chaldin's stronghold without success.

Ben Rackey directed the Brothers of Proteus in their terrorist bombing operations, and schooled them in Progressivist rhetoric and spurious Detroit history, should they be caught.

Ben Rackey staged several deliberately unsuccessful sabotage attempts against the Fist, careful to leave evidence that implied pedestrian responsibility––thus shoring up the delegation's determination to complete the Fist.

Ben Rackey smiled.

Delegate Ladd nodded in arrogant satisfaction.

* * *

In Ben's penthouse suite Gloria frowned over the sheets of street-maps and transit courses, working out an escape strategy for the Brothers of Proteus to use on the latest terrorist operation. They planned to sabotage the Mattel Works, the largest munitions factory in Detroit. It wouldn't be easy—it was the city-state's most prized edifice and it was well-guarded. Ben glanced at her, saw her rubbing her eyes. “You're tired,” he said. “Let's take a break at six. I'm done in, too.” Gloria grunted and squinted at the maps.

On impulse, Ben reached out and stabbed the button for the viewscreen. He spoke a code number, and the screen set into the desk-top flashed into the grim features of Kibo, Grand Marshall of the Brothers of Proteus.

“Is it done?” Ben asked.

Kibo began a reply, then stopped short, staring at the upper right-hand corner of the screen. His face went stony. He shot his right hand to something out of range of Ben's camera and seemed to be operating an unseen instrument. Then he looked up and spoke with machine-gun rapidity. “Lord Ladd—this line is tapped. According to my homer, the offender is in your building, probably on the same floor. He will be aware that we are onto him, even now he runs. If we act quickly, however...”

“I'll take care of it,” Ben snapped, flicking the screen off. He ran to the nearest window, threw it wide, and leapt head first into space. He heard the tail-end of a startled shriek from Gloria and then he was falling, the world a metallic vortex. He reached out, turned the tiny knob on his anklet, and hit the nulgrav current.

His reactant web stopped his fall, but he was jarred by the sudden arresting of momentum. He bobbed in the current, floating in mid-air without conscious direction, a hundred feet over the ground. In seconds he recovered himself and negotiated the currents, spiraling down to the back door of the Towers.

He was waiting in the alley when the spy came rushing out.

He didn't have to tackle him; the man was halted by pure astonishment. Ben's needler was ready. “Back up the way you came, friend,” said Ben.

The spy was a man older then he would have expected, cherubically plump, bald but for a thin halo of white hair, a sunburnt head, double chin, bespectacled eyes. He wore the white robes of a Fordian.

Up they went, riding the lift. Ben noted the man wore a nulgrav web and he congratulated himself that his guess had been correct. The stranger had taken the pedestrian route out of the building, assuming that a delegate would not think to look on the ground.
He forgot I am Ben Rackey, too.

Unresisting, but walking with no hurry, the man willingly preceded Ben into the suite. Gloria was staring out the open window, her back to him. Ben snorted.

“I'm right here and intact,” he said, “I switched on the web halfway down, had to get there fast—”

As if bitten, Gloria leapt about to face them, and Ben was secretly pleased to see the beginnings of tears in her eyes. She shrugged and turned away, and he pretended he hadn't noticed the tears.

He marched the stranger to the guest room, and sat him on the bed. Ben called over his shoulder, “Gloria, notify Kibo. Ask him to come.”

Ben turned back to his guest. Still pointing the needler at the stranger's chest, he sat in a chair across from him.

The spy managed a fairly convincing sputter, “If you are going to...to
rob
me, Sir, I suggest you get on with it.”

Ben laughed and shook his head. “Try again. If you're an innocent bystander why do you walk a pedestrian route while you're wearing a web?”

“I—I might ask you the same thing.”

“Ah, but I never claimed to be an innocent bystander. I am not at all innocent, frankly. I've killed many men. I'll kill you and then I'll yawn. How do you want to die? Quickly, I assume. No reason to draw out the process, I'll be glad to accommodate you. Quickly it is, then—”

Ben raised the gun and set the sights between the two sad blue eyes.

“What—what is it you want to know?” came a tremulous voice.

“No,” said Ben. “That's not going to work, either. Now you're going to try the tearful confession bit on me. But you'll give me false information which only a sucker would believe, merely because you'd acted scared. No, I want to know who your employer is. Now look, face it: I'm too smart for you. I'll kill you if you don't cooperate. Let's be honest. Let's start with your name. What is it? Your real name. Do not lie, not a little bit, not even about your name. ‘Takes one to know one,' the saying goes, and I'm the world's best liar.”

The man cleared his throat. Something went out of his face and what remained was unyielding and mocking.

“My name is Regnor, Finlan Regnor.” He was not lying.

“I've heard of you. You're a hit man. You watch your victims for a long time before killing them, to make sure it's fool-proof. Very professional.”

“Thank you.” He cleared his throat and inclined his head politely. “And I've heard of you. You're the best.”

“You're very kind. But if I were the best you'd never have heard of me—anonymity is part of the trade. That's one reason I wanted to retire, you know. It's very dangerous for a Professional Irritant to get sloppy and pick up a reputation. You work for Chaldin.”

Ben had caught him off guard; the man blinked twice before shaking his head and putting on a puzzled look. “Chaldin?”

“Cut it out. How much did you hear?”

“I—uh,” Regnor began.

But when the door burst open behind, Ben was sitting too close. The door struck his chair hard and the needler, held loosely, went flying from his hand.

Instantly, Regnor was up and moving. Kibo plunged through the door and after him, but Regnor tossed a small explosive ahead of him. The bedroom window exploded outward and Regnor dived through the gap, falling toward a nulgrav current. “So he knows that trick, too,” Ben muttered, getting up. He turned to Kibo, “You brought a nulgrav car?”

“Yes—but why not follow him out the window?”

“We couldn't make up for his head start that way. In the car we can move faster. Lead me to it.”

They ran out through the living room, through the other bedroom and out onto the balcony. One of the Brothers of Proteus was waiting at the wheel of the dart-shaped, three-man car. Ben climbed hurriedly through the door-hatch, Kibo close behind. They settled into the seats, and before the hatch was closed they had cast off, swishing round the triangular building in search of Regnor.

“I need this fish,” Ben said. “I need what he knows. He's with the Order. He's an assassin.”

Kibo nodded and they descended, slowed to search the swarm of elite on the upper currents.

Ben spotted Regnor heading South, toward the nearest exit from the city.

“We can't just grab him, it would attract too much attention. I shouldn't have come along—I'd be recognized. As Ladd.” said Ben. “Did you bring the scrambler?”

As answer, Kibo reached under the seat and came up with a glass tube, long as his index finger, with a dark blotch at one end. He gave the scrambler to Ben, who opened the car's side window.

They pulled up beside the current, dodging traffic signs, ignoring a floating warning light that said
Off Channel, Alter Course.

They paced Regnor, Ben keeping the scrambler propped on the top of the door frame, trying to get a clear shot. The glass tube was small, inconspicuous, no one who looked their way would be likely to recognize it as a weapon. And, in fact, it was no weapon, by strict definition. It fired a small, soft projectile which affixed itself to its target, gripping tenaciously and scrambling the receiving nodes of the target's nulgrav web, cutting off his support.

They were twenty feet over pedestrian level now. Warning signs flashed all around. .

Regnor had seen them and was trying to keep to the center of the crowd.

They were getting curious looks from the traveling aristocrats. He had to get a clear shot or take his chances, soon. He got a glimpse of Regnor through a rift in the crowd, and fired.

Regnor tumbled into space, and down. But from third class level it was only twenty feet down to street level and he landed atop a cluster of pedestrians, bringing four of them to the ground. In the back of the car, Ben and Kibo quickly changed into pedestrian garb and climbed down to the nearest rooftop, instructing the driver to wait there until they signaled for him.

When they reached the street, they regretted it.

Regnor dressed as a Detroit demagogue, was the object of a small but promising riot. None of Ben's doing. Since Regnor was contained by a cluster of some two hundred clawing pedestrians, Ben could not get to him.

“Should have stayed in the car and grabbed him from above,” Ben said.

“No,” said Kibo, pointing out the power lines. “We couldn't have made it through. But it doesn't matter, does it? They're likely to kill him. They don't get a fallen, helpless aristocrat every day. By the time Security gets here they'll have crushed him but good…”

“I want to question him. He might know Chaldin's plans for me, how he plans to alert the delegates to my cover, that sort of thing. I need him. Anyway, it looks like they're not going to kill him yet, they're carrying him. Somewhere. But Security will be here soon. If they take him and question him, my real name might pop out. Then that will be it for the operation. So, Kibo, signal your brothers. A spontaneous strike—and quick. Large scale. Time to really earn your money. Hit them hard. That will draw Security away from the riot and from Regnor...”

Kibo nodded and spoke rapidly into his hand-radio.

In less than five minutes a series of explosions erupted a few blocks away. Sirens sang out. Kibo nodded to himself and whispered huskily, earnestly: “Long Live Progressivism!”

Ben almost laughed. But it was too hot for joviality and Regnor was almost out of sight, carried by the crowd on its multitude of limbs around the corner. Ben and Kibo struggled after.

The dusk was coming, but somehow it seemed to intensify the heat, and the sweat of the pushing, elbowing herd of humanity was cloying with pent hostilities. Through years of practice and association with it, Ben could pick out the scent of the glandular discharge resulting from anger—he could distinguish it from the scent of a normal sweat.

They were pressed into the throng, and they were just two more threads in the spreading weave of fury. Ben felt his heart, pounding with it, his throat dry with it, his eyes narrow with the mob's anger.

He and Kibo forced their way to within twenty feet of Regnor. Kibo shouted something, but Ben could not hear it over the uneven roar of the crowd. He glimpsed Regnor. The man was white-faced, bleeding from the nose and torn lips, but still alive.

They pushed past wood and brick bordellos with doors fashioned to resemble huge labia, past shop alcoves, arcades hung with Detroit's famous multi-weave hammocks and skin-macramé soulprints, niches inset with oversized, sputtering models of the V-8 internal-combustion engine, the earthly avatar of the God Ford. Here and there in the crowd black letters hovered perpetually, upheld and arranged by compensating nulgrav currents projected from throat-shackle webs worn by those convicted of petty crimes; the criminal was free, but everywhere he or she went they were followed by their signs, rotating, starkly proclaiming:

Shoplifter
or
Chronic Liar
or
Con-man
or
Chronic Drunk,
or
Friend-maker.

The letters followed the pedestrian shoplifter or chronic liar or con-man or drunk or the garrulous; everywhere, everywhere, at home or public, so the lawbreaker would never be without derision. The letters were immutable and their shadows crawled over the sullen faces of the convicted in penumbral stigma.

Dragging the man it believed was a fallen patriarch, the mob poured out from the narrow way, onto a wide square a quarter of a mile to the side. Into this mall Regnor was carried, bobbing like a cork on a stream. To the left a stalk of four fluted exhaust pipes towered five storeys over an open-air church––open-air so the worshippers could survive the carbon-monoxide fumes from the incense burned there––presiding in chrome over raucous string music and shouts of square dancers. It was Sunday. Every Sunday was a pedestrian holiday. “Swinger yer partner rounder round!” chanted the nasal square-dance fiddler.

Above and directly ahead, five storeys high, a huge vidscreen showed the holiday football games, transmitted live from the pedestrian stadium by the Southern Wall. The mammoth figures on the tremendous screen overflowed onto the field, convulsions of scrimmaging giants that became an inspiration to the crowd in the square to further the growing riot. As those toting Regnor shouted: “Looker wot we gotter! It rains patriarchers now! Falls from skyer!”