Velvet Dogma About 3300 wds (5 page)

The Amazonian warrior returned before he could finish. "He said come on back."

"You said you didn't know me then," she said as they stepped past. "Well, you don't know me now."

"You're right," he said without looking at her. "Sorry about that."

The apology fell flat and did little to ameliorate her increasingly worsening attitude.

They tramped down a hallway stacked with boxes on either side until they came to an old fashioned door. Andy knocked. Following a grunt from within, he opened the door. Rebecca followed and closed it behind her. As she took in the scene, everything fell into place. The lingerie shop was a front. The room was filled with electronics of all shapes and sizes. Some were new and still in their shrink wrap, and some stolen, wires still dangling frayed and cut. The long walls to her left and right had workbenches crammed with tools of all shapes and sizes. Projects in all phases of completion competed with vidScreens for dominance of the space. Row upon row of shelves hugged the walls above these benches. These too were filled to bursting.

A square workbench with a hollow center took up the back third of the room. This bench was just as crowded as the others, but lights pierced the working space, illuminating swirls of cigar smoke, rising from several ashtrays around the square. In the center sat an imperious Asian, intelligent eyes pinned in a hideously unattractive face. Moles crested broad ears. Pocks marked heavy cheeks. A wedge-shaped nose sprawled above sausage-shaped lips which gripped a long cigar, the smoke curling into the air like a reverse tornado.

"Do you have it?" asked the man in a low drawl. "Please tell me you have it."

"I do."
 
Andy pulled the vid he'd taken from David's apartment from his back pocket and tossed it. The man caught it and immediately moved to a work station where he began to attach wires. "But that can wait, Panchet. I want to introduce someone to you."

"Introduce?"
 
Panchet glanced up irritably from his work and examined Rebecca as if he'd never seen her before. Suddenly he dropped what he was doing and moved to the edge nearest where Andy and Rebecca stood. "Is this her?" he asked with more than a little awe.

Rebecca exchanged looks with Andy, who rolled his eyes.

"Yes, this is her. Panchet Rao, Rebecca Mines. Rebecca Mines, this is Panchet Rao."

They exchanged greetings.

"Does she know? Is she—"

Rebecca caught Andy shaking his head. When he saw that she'd seen him, he stopped.

"She knows about her brother, Panchet."

"So sad."
 
Panchet puffed on his cigar as his fingertips did a nervous dance atop his belly. Then he fixed Rebecca with his bright eyes. "David was a good boy, you know. He told me that he wanted you to be proud of him. He told me that you should—"

"Panchet. We don't have the time for that."
 
Andy again shook his head, this time not trying to hide it. "We have more pressing problems. Namely this," he pointed at Rebecca's collar.

"Ahh!"
 
Realization dawned in the man's eyes. "Have a seat over there and I'll get that off in a moment."

Rebecca found a chair and sat. The man was mildly comical. An obsequious Asian with a southern accent wasn't the persona he projected. Suddenly Panchet rose above the workbench and moved through the air directly towards Rebecca. She threw up her hands in surprise as he descended, his legs replaced by a circular gravBoard. He came to an abrupt stop within inches of her.

"Don't worry about me. I can steer this thing better than my own legs," he said proudly.

Rebecca lowered her arms and gave an embarrassed grin.

Panchet beamed back at her as he went to work on her collar. Smoke from the cigar still wedged in his mouth surrounded them, but she didn't dare move. Rebecca let her gaze stray to where his legs had been. Like the gravBoarder in the alley, ultra-thin cables snaked from the board into sleeves embedded in what remained of the man's legs, primarily the upper thigh. The board itself hovered without any apparent means. No exhaust. No thrust. No air or spatial disturbance. If it was truly gravitational thrust, someone must have discovered a way to tap into gravitational radiation, or more probably a method to use gravitrons.

She stopped as she realized she'd been thinking in scientific terms. She'd been the dull, non-threatening prisoner for so long, she'd almost forgotten she'd been able to hold her own at scientific conventions. Her specialty had been quantum propagation theory—the idea that viral algorithms could be used as tools for information gathering. But science was science. Just as an English Major had a passing knowledge about Camus and French literature, a Math Major could understand earth sciences and their interaction with propulsion theory. Still, the thrill of actually using her intelligence was exhilarating. Arguably the worst part of prison hadn't been the physical confinement, but the mental.

A few minutes ago she felt nearly helpless. She'd been following, depending on someone a nearly a stranger to help her. No longer did that need to be the rule.

"There. That won't be broadcasting anymore."

After Panchet unsnapped the collar, her hands immediately went to massage her neck.

Panchet examined the collar a moment, then tossed it towards one of the working surfaces. It caught like a horseshoe on a clamp and hung there. "So what happened?"
 

Andy gave the two-minute version of the story, occasionally interrupted by Panchet. Finally the Asian hovered back to his space between the benches. He punched a few things and snapped on a POD. Three minutes later he puffed hyperactively on the cigar, nodded twice, then tossed the POD atop a pile of gear.

"Good news and bad news."

"Let's have the good first," said Andy.

"The police aren't actively searching for you."

"We pretty much knew that."

"What's the bad news?" Rebecca asked.

"Describe the folks who attacked you."

"They wore black," Rebecca told him. "There were at least five of them. They knew martial arts. We really weren't close to them."

"Did they say anything?"

"They spoke Chinese," Andy put in.

"Do you remember what they said?"

Rebecca racked her memory. She was good at remembering. She'd been known to remember things she didn't even know she remembered. Andy began to speak, but she waived at him to be silent.
Shin
. They'd said the word
shin
. "Does
shin
ring a bell?"

"It could," muttered Panchet as he chewed savagely on his cigar. "
Shin
or
xin
could mean many things. What's the rest of it?"

Then it snapped into place.

"They said
gei wo ni de xin
."
 
Rebecca crossed her arms and smiled proudly. "What's that mean?"

"It means
give me your heart
."
 
Andy and Rebecca exchanged glances. "Hold on a minute. What's the address of your brother?"
 
Panchet snatched up a homemade POD with several wires hanging loose. He shoved it on his head and began to sub-vocalize commands as Andy recited David's address.

"What time were you there?"

Andy supplied the time. "Are you going to check for an IDvid?"

"Definitely."

"Wait. What's an IDvid?" she asked.

"Some say you can walk from one end of this country to the other and remain constantly on cameras," said Panchet. "George Orwell's nightmare became a reality, and if you want to blame someone, blame the Chinese. The good thing is that because of the cameras, the number of actual police has been reduced to a fraction of what it was before you were incarcerated.

Panchet clasped his hands under his chin. "Now, although China did it, they never reduced the amount of police on the streets. They couldn't. They had so many people they didn't know what to do with them. So it was really England who can boast being the first on a grand scale to put video cameras up everywhere, recording, recording, recording. They'd pretty much given up on real police work, figuring that they couldn't stop crime, but they could track down the culprits afterwards. Remember the Terrorist Bombings they had the summer of 2005? Remember there were four who failed at a second bombing? The English police ended up backtracking the videos until they found out where the bastards lived, then on live TV arrested them. North America has done it for a while now. Mark my words. Someone sometime soon will glimpse your picture on vid and follow you back to the past then forward to the present. The collar certainly helps. What's a giveaway, although I don't think they have the access codes, are the organ IDs. Even without the codes, there's biometrics to worry about. Do you know that you can be detected by facial contours and body type? The camera shoots your picture, sends it to a computer, and the computer conducts algorithmic matches until it finds one.

"All right. Let's see what we have."
 
Panchet swung over to the wall nearest them and inserted one of the wires into a mounted vidScreen. The fish-bowled image of a street appeared. "This is from an omni-directional camera outside the apartment. If I select a specific quadrant, such as the one including your brother's apartment, we can get a good idea what's going on."

They watched the vid for several moments until the windows exploded inwards. But they saw no people, no attackers.

"What the—"

"Easy, Andy. What you saw isn't necessarily all there was to see."
 
Panchet subvocalized and the scene reversed. "All right, look here. See these ropes?"
 
They watched as ropes unfurled from the roof. "Now watch how they go slack right after the windows seem to implode. That's because they were no longer supporting any weight."

"Invisible?"
 
Rebecca scowled. "I don't buy it."
 

"Not invisible, Ms. Rebecca, unviewable."

"What?"
"Invisibility is for fairy tales. Unviewability can be had if you have enough money."
 
Panchet disconnected the POD and tossed it aside. "I apologize if I'm being intentionally obtuse, but I wanted to be sure."

"Be sure of what?" asked Andy.

"Of who was chasing you."

"And?"
 
Rebecca was becoming impatient.

"These are high profile Chinese gangsters. They work corporate mostly, but can be hired out for the cost of a small country."
 
He hovered to a board with blinking lights. He pressed several buttons, shook his head, and pressed some more. "They are called Hei Xin. It mean's Black Heart, and their calling card is that phrase—
gei wo ni de xin
."

"Give me your heart."

"Why do they say that?" asked Andy.

"Because that's what they want, literally. Your heart. They're organ pirates. Body thieves. Whatever you want to call them, they were there for something immensely valuable."

"My organs," murmured Rebecca.

"Which ones?" asked Panchet.

"All of them. Kumi said that all my organs had been levied."

"And now you're a target."
 
Andy eyed Panchet. "Is there anything we can do?"

The Asian shrugged. "Someone is hiding something," he said.

"What?"

"The reason they levied all the organs is because one is more special than all the rest. They're hiding it."

"But why? If the organ was that special, she'd find out on a body scan."
 
Andy paced across the room and pointed to the screen. He snapped his fingers. "But they hadn't planned on her surviving long enough for that. They wanted her dead."

"Surprise," said Rebecca weakly.

"You must keep her out of the ID."
 
Panchet frowned solemnly. "And I am afraid to say that you must also leave."

Rebecca started to open her mouth, but snapped it shut as she caught Andy's lead.

"No problem, my friend. Thank you for all your help."

Panchet nodded, then said the strangest thing to Rebecca. "Nice to meet you, Ms. Rebecca. Thank you for everything you've done. We are better for it."

Again she started to say something, but this time she was physically pulled from the room by Andy. When the door closed, she jerked her arm free.

"Don't handle me like that again!"

"We need to leave. We've put them in danger."

"Fine. But don't do that again, Andy. I don't like being jerked around."

He raised an eyebrow, then shook his head. He didn't say a word, merely walked ahead of her.

She hurried to follow, thinking of the things she wanted to say to him.

T
hey found a noodle kiosk and sat awhile for tea and
pho
. Probably mediocre by street standards, the tastes amazed Rebecca's palate. Maybe if they added more lemon grass to the institution food, people would want to stay. As she slurped the noodles, she thought about what had happened. So much had happened since yesterday she felt overwhelmed. Was she really free? Was David really dead?