Hardwired (35 page)

“No. This is a two-for-one deal, Sarah. It should be easy for you.”

“Like I said, tell me.”

“Michael’s moving his money around. We can’t trace it entirely, but the pattern is very odd. Communications people have come in from the Gold Coast. We want you to tell us what he’s planning.”

Cold touches her palate. She forces a slow, superior smile. “That
will
cost extra.”

“You know what it is?” His answer is instant, and she knows that Tempel wants it badly.

She shakes her head. “Maybe I can find out.”

“You don’t know, Sarah? You’re high enough in Michael’s organization to rate a bodyguard, but you don’t know his plans?”

“I rate the bodyguard because I’m liaison with the Dodger out West, not because the Hetman tells me his plans. But maybe I can find out.”

“I’m not sure ‘maybe’ is acceptable.”

“I’m not sure that I understand what it is that you want,” Sarah says. She taps her fingertips on her knee. “Is it the Hetman, or his plans, or both? What if I can deliver one without the other?”

“It’s the same fee, either way.”

She shrugs. “Okay. Then I’ve got no reason to put myself to any more trouble than necessary, do I?”

Sarah decides to let Andre chew that one over for another twenty-four hours, and walks away. The next day, as Sarah walks in, her nose numb with hardfire, he has documents ready for signature atop his little briefcase.

“Stock in Daud’s name,” he says. “Enough to take him wherever he wants to go.”

Sarah crouches down on her haunches and looks over what seem to be engraved stock certificates on paper, each with a serial number, each printed with elaborate designs involving pill bottles, a caduceus, and apothecary symbols. She’s never seen anything like it.

“They’re real,” Andre says.

“They’d better be,” she mutters, but she counts them in her head and smiles a cold smile–– what she’s wanted all along, cool and dry in her hand, the textured paper worth more than money.

“Good,” she says. “When do I see mine?”

“You’ll get an equal amount of stock for the Hetman, as soon as you call us and tell us where we’ll be able to take him out. Half again as much if you can tell us his operational plans.”

“You didn’t hear me, Andre,” Sarah says. “I asked when, not how much.”

“We’ll transfer the stock to your portfolio as soon as we get a call from you.”

“Stock first, so that I can confirm it over the phone. Then the information.”

A minute hesitation from Andre, less than an eye blink. “Very well” he says.

She folds the stock certificates, puts them in her pocket, and smiles. “Thank you,” she says. “It’s been nice doing business. Just so long as you remember that if you want me to trust you, you’d better make sure I stay free, and that I get paid in advance for anything I do.”

He looks at her sullenly. Her smile turns to ice. “See you in the sky,” she says, and walks to Daud’s room.

Daud is smoking a cigarette and watching the vid. When he sees her, he reaches for the control and turns off the video. “What’s happening?” he says. “Where’s Nick?”

“Nick? I don’t know.” Sarah pulls cigarette packs out of her jacket, dropping them into Daud’s table. “Has Miss Deboyce been in to see you today?”

He shakes his head. “Later this afternoon.”

Sarah leans against the table. “If she doesn’t show up,” she says, “I want to know.”

Daud looks up at her in surprise. “What’s going on?” he asks. “Why wouldn’t she show up?”

“Nick’s friend. I’ve been talking to him. He wants something from me. I just want to make sure he’s keeping his part of the deal.”

“Yeah? What does he want?”

“Something I can find out for him.”

Daud’s pale eyes prowl restlessly over the room. One hand rubs slowly along his jaw.

“Nick’s friend is paying for my body designer? But...” He stubs out his half-finished cigarette. “I thought Nick...was paying...” His voice trails away, his face reflecting his growing realization.

“Neither of them has any money, Daud,” Sarah says. “It’s their employer who’s paying for Deboyce, and for a few other things.”

Daud stares at her for a few moments, his eyelids twitching. She takes the stock certificates from her pocket. “I’ve got your ticket, Daud,” she says. “Your ticket out of this life.” Tell him now, she thinks, while he’s desperate enough to say yes.

Resentment crackles in Daud. “What did you do to earn that, Sarah?” he demands. “Who did you sell? Yourself? Someone else?”

“That’s my action,” she says. “Not yours.”

“Your fucking action keeps wrecking my life!” Daud is shouting now. “You keep...” He chokes on his rage, tears spilling from his one organic eye. “I can’t even meet some guy,” he says. “Not without it being someone who’s really after you.”

“I warned you. I told you Nick might not be real.”

“I don’t care if he’s real. I just want him to be
here
.”

Sarah steps forward and reaches out for him. He doesn’t resist. She drops the stock certificates into his lap and presses him to her, holding his head against her abdomen as he weeps. She tries to concentrate on her tickets, on the vision of the clean alloy places floating in space, limitless in room, in resources. The life that can be lived there, free of the soil of Earth, of the taint of gravity. So far away they are visible only as bright stars among the constellations of the sky.

But another star intrudes in her thoughts, a bright blue fire against the sky, propelling a needle darkness in defiance of Orbital power. Cowboy, his plastic eyes reflecting the diamond stars of Sarah’s vision, riding his delta high in the cool thin cloudless air, his awareness spread out from the crystal in his head to the long polymerized bones of the big aircraft body, the hydraulic muscle, laser-optic nerves...Sarah looks down at the stock certificates lying in Daud’s lap and wonders about her debts.

Michael, she thinks, would understand. He knows the life she’s lived, knows what she’s wanted these long years, knows that what she needs is beyond his ability to deliver. Realizes that she owes him nothing, that every service she’s done him has been paid for, that she can’t say no to her heart’s own desire.

It’s different with Cowboy. He’s tangled up in loyalties of his own, ideals that she can’t afford. His plan to bring down Couceiro, she thinks, is too unlikely. It depends too much on Roon’s unstable desires, no more to be trusted than the rest of them. Best to deal with the one who’s paying cash up front. If Cowboy doesn’t know any better than to run for it when things fall apart, then it’s his problem.

No sentiment, she thinks. Cowboy said it himself. Friends when we can afford to be.

She looks down at Daud, stroking his short dark hair in whorling patterns. A hovercraft moans past on the limited expressway behind the hospital. “I’ve got us our tickets,” she says. “I lost them, but now I got them back.”

We’ve Got the Thing That People Are Looking For…

We’ve Got What People Are Talking About…

We’ve Got the Look That People Demand...

We Call It

COOL STONE

“Sarah.” It’s Reno’s drowning voice. “I want to help. I want to join the war.”

She’s in the car again, moving along the torn Florida streets. She gazes up through soundproof glass to see her guard’s eyes flicker in the rearview mirror, looking for tags. “How can you?” she asks. “What can you do? You’re so vulnerable. ”

“I’ve learned some things, living where I am. About breaking into computer systems. I can try to crash into their communications, or into their files. Find out what they’re planning. ”

“Their computers are too well protected, Reno. They’re not like the government computers you’re living in–– the Orbitals can afford the best security. If you were a programmer, I’d say go ahead. The worst they could do is trace you, and by then you’d be gone. But you’re
living
in there. They could wreck you.”

“Sarah, I’m learning things. I’ve got every available piece of data on Tempel in my memory. The patterns are beginning to make sense. I know where they’re weak. All I need is access.”

“Access.” Sarah laughs. “Getting access has been the problem all along, Reno.”

“I could be stuck here forever. If you people lose, there’s no way I could get out.”

The desperation in Reno’s voice twists something in Sarah, cutting short her laughter. She feels the blast from the air conditioning chilling her skin. “What do you need, Reno?” she asks.

“Get me into their system. If you can’t break in, buy somebody at Orlando–– there’s enough dirt working there, some of them have to have access.”

“We’ve been trying that all along, Reno. Yeah, okay, we can get you into their outside crystal. But there are only a couple dozen in Florida who have access to the main Tempel comp. And they’ve got ten wired guards apiece and hardly ever leave the compound.”

“I don’t need that. Once you buy somebody, that doesn’t mean he knows what to look for. There’s too much data for one person to correlate.”

“Sarah, listen.” Reno’s voice rises coldly from the receiver, like bubbles in liquid oxygen. “Florida is one of the places where the Orbitals are all tangled up, where their lines of demarcation don’t apply. Tempel has a lot of action here, and it’s not all public. They’re not hiding it from us so much as from their competitors. If I got into their system, I could start putting things together. A chit for truck rental, and the fact of a shuttle coming down, and a telephone record of a call to Pittsburgh, and tickets for some high-priority security people coming down the well–– that all adds up to a shipment heading north, Sarah. A person wouldn’t see that, wouldn’t have the time to sift through the data. But I could. I could find out for the Hetman where they’re hiding their shipments, how they’re distributing the merchandise to their thirdmen, maybe even the routes they’re using.”

Sarah remembers the white-brained ex-pilot drifting in and out of the interface, talking in a dreamy voice about nodes, systems, the way the Orbitals fit together. If it doesn’t work, she thinks, Reno’s no worse off. If it works, he puts pressure on Tempel.

Sarah likes the idea of the Tempel people under pressure. It will make her more valuable to them.

“Okay, Reno,” she says. “I’ll talk to the Hetman about it.”

HOPE IS OUR BUSINESS

Sarah is surprised to see Mslope sitting quietly by Daud, sharing a cigarette with him as the laser hums and the scars on Daud’s back turn to ash and mist. “I couldn’t stay away,” Mslope says, reaching down to touch Daud’s nape. “They said I probably should. I changed their minds about it.”

There is something in Daud’s look that stops Sarah’s reply. They know, she thinks, how useful it is to give Daud hope. But now that he has it, she can’t take it away.

“Good,” she says. Her hand comes out, touches Daud’s cheek. “I know he’s missed you.”

FROM OUR WEIGHTLESS PLATFORM WE ENCOMPASS THE EARTH WITH TWO HANDS. OUR MINDS TURN TO HOPE AND SORROW.

--Mitsubishi I.G.

Maximum Law people sniff the salt air like attack dogs, alert to the scent of violence. Sarah can only smell the Pride of Barbados hiding the Hetman’s bungalow from the ocean, that and the tension in the air. Tonight one of Tempel’s mudboy employees is going to give Reno a window into the Orbital crystal.

Michael, not trusting anyone, is alone except for Sarah. He leans over his home deck, chain-smoking Russian cigarettes and firing torpedoes of snapcoke into his brain. Sarah stands behind him looking out the sliding glass doors, hoping to see a glimpse of blue past the screen of Poinciana.

“There’s– a lot of traffic going in and out,” Reno reports. His hollow voice, blending at times into a continuous background hiss, comes out of Michael’s comp. “There’s good security even on their low-level crystal–– I’ve tried to ride in some incoming data, but I always get cut off.”

“It’s six o’clock,” Michael says. His eyes glitter like old glass. “He should be calling.” He puffs on his cigarette. Sarah watches the sun casting hard-edged baroque shadows through the wrought-iron patio furniture.

“Give him time,” she says. “He’s got to be alone when he calls.”

Sarah turns around, seeing the Hetman in profile as he turns to his ashtray. Lined eyes, trembling hands.

A dead man, she thinks. Cool sorrow whispers through her. She turns away, watching the heat roll up off the patio in waves.

I can’t afford not to, she thinks. Michael would understand.

“I have the call,” Reno says. “I’m going.”

THERE’S A NAME FOR WHAT WE DO.

WE CALL IT CYBORG PRIDE.

“My people are getting impatient,” Andre says, his voice reaching Sarah through swirls of angry hardfire. Sarah has begun to notice things about him: a little scar by one ear, disappearing into the hair, a once-broken knuckle he probably got in a fight. That all his shirts have pocket protectors built into the pockets. That he always carries exactly three pens.

“I’m doing what I can. Michael isn’t an easy man to catch.”

Andre’s face is stone, relentless. “There is a time limit on our offer. It’s getting closer.”

“If you’re suspecting a traitor, you’re right,” Sarah says, and watches Andre’s face as he tries to absorb the shock. She knows why they’re suddenly so impatient. Reno found two shipments and deduced the location of a major drug warehouse in his first few hours in Tempel’s comp. Michael’s people took all three seamlessly, without a loss.

Andre’s eyes fix her within rings of stainless steel. “I need to know who.”

“It’s someone deep,” she says. “Someone with a lot of access. Michael turned him, or her. I don’t know how.” Which should keep them chasing shadows for weeks.

Then: “How do you know?”

“I saw Michael last night. He was high, very pleased with himself. He let it slip.”

Andre looks at her for a long while. “What were his exact words?”

Sarah shakes her head. “I was high myself, Andre. Exact words I don’t recall.”

“Think. Tell me what you remember.”

Sarah looks at the floor, feigns concentration. Her nerves flitter with hardfire. “Yeah,” she says. “Okay. He said, ‘I’ve sent out our friends. Three hits. I’ve turned one of their execs and I know their every move.’”