Seoul Survivors (32 page)

Outside the clouds were moving on the gray scale from cigarette smoke to petrol smog. Damien let the silence lengthen. In his bowels, he felt a powerful, tugging desire to get up and walk out. But he overruled the impulse. Despite her twisted mind, this woman obviously had buckets of cash—cash that he desperately needed. And even if he did decide he'd rather go to jail than sell his DNA to some warped sex gamers, he couldn't leave the office just yet. There was too much he wanted to know.

“Excuse me, Dr. Kim, but when you were looking for samples before, was that also for the ProxyBods? Sydney said it was for your fertility clinic.”

Sydney jumped up in her chair. “I didn't mean to—”

Pebbles raised a hand. “I didn't want her to frighten you with a crude approximation of the truth. If you'd agreed, of course I would have revealed the actual circumstances of the donation. I hope you can forgive the tiny subterfuge.”

She sounded less than convincing. But then, could you expect sincerity from a ProxyBod? Damien narrowed his eyes. “Okay. But why should I trust you now? How do I know that you won't be cloning me, or letting these embryos grow up into sex slaves, or whatever?”

“
Damien
.” Sydney hissed. But Pebbles shushed her with a finger to the lips.

“I'm glad you're asking questions, Damien. Naturally you have concerns. But let me assure you that clones of living humans have no appeal to the gaming sector. For one thing, they wouldn't want any of their products to be held accountable for any crimes you might commit. And of course you'll have a watertight legal guarantee that GRIP will protect your genetic fingerprint.”

Outside, the clouds were now charcoal-black. On the vast network of roads beneath them, drivers were switching on their headlights, preparing for a storm. And was it his imagination, or could he see lights flickering on the mountainside, the Hammer tent town turning on its solar-powered lanterns and torches? Inside, the overhead lighting dimmed, and a couple of standing lamps lit up, casting shadows across Dr. Kim's desk. Damien wiped a finger of sweat from the back of his neck. Maybe a heater had come on.

“I'd rather know what Immigration have decided before I get involved in anything here,” he said as neutrally as possible. Beside him Sydney repressed a groan. Why did she care so much? “I don't even know exactly how much they want to fine me.”

“I have the MoPho number of the officer in charge.” The scientist reached for the phone on her desk. “I'm sure he won't mind if I call him at home.”

With a rigid forefinger, the ProxyBod punched a number into the handset. As she conducted a rapid-fire conversation in Korean, Damien inspected the turtles. What was he hoping for? A sign? They were huddled in their shells, like moon rocks.

“
Ne, ne
.” The ProxyBod put its hand over the mouthpiece. “They've calculated your earnings based on the schedule they found in your apartment,” she hissed. “The fine is twenty million won. For every five hundred thousand you can't pay, they'll jail you for a week.”

Damien sank back in his chair. It lovingly squeezed his hips. Which didn't help his math. Not that the figures took a genius to compute. Unless he could find a tenant for his flat or took up this crazy offer he'd be doing months in a Korean jail when the Hammer struck. On top of whatever he'd get back in England once he was eventually deported. If England was still there, that was, and not under six feet of water.

“How much have you got?” Sydney whispered. He shook his head. She was perched on the edge of her seat now, looking incredibly anxious, and yet also, somehow, in a state of wild anticipation. Dr. Kim obviously had the girl wound around her little ProxyFinger. Before he could wonder why, Pebbles abruptly ended her phone conversation and handed him the receiver. He took it gingerly, and held it to his ear.

“Dr. Kim very important to Korea,” RoboCop barked. “She want help you. We want you help Dr. Kim, then leave Korea. No fine, no deportation. Only order to leave. Okay, bad boy? We find you two times teaching English, Dr. Kim not help you. Understan-dee?”

“Understand.” Damien hung up. Sydney was looking at him expectantly. It was impossible to read the expression on the ProxyBod's face. Stay calm, he thought. Stay calm.

“I just have to promise to be good, and I walk,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant.

Sydney snapped her fingers. “I told you Da Mi could work miracles!”

“Out of curiosity, Dr. Kim, what did you offer him in exchange for my skin?”

“I didn't have to offer anything,” the scientist replied, coolly. “I'm on the board of the National Security Commission and we know a lot about this particular office. They've been lining their pockets
with portions of the fines, then doctoring the books. In general we turn a blind eye because we don't want to halt their good work, but I just alluded to the regrettable shortfalls in his total revenue and he got the picture.”

Sydney clapped her hands. “I wish we could have seen his face.”

“The important thing is that Damien now has the chance to earn a sizable addition to his nest egg. If you can spare the time right now, I can pay you today.” With a hand-movement worthy of Elizabeth the First, the ProxyBod gestured at a door to Sydney's left.

Outside, far off at the rim of the city, behind the dark mass of clouds, a veil of watery light was floating down over the peaks of the mountains west of Seoul. All he had to do was conjure up a few thoughts of Lara Croft naked and he could take off into that pale sunset, carrying his own private tent town on his back, and never come back. If, on the other hand, he kept his dignity intact and his jeans zipped up, he'd have to go straight into hiding in the Azitoo beer cellar, dependent on Jake and Sam's cock-eyed conviction he could sublet his flat in a week.

It was a no-brainer, really. But still Damien paused. A deep intransigence, born of three decades of stealthily getting his own way, stirred in the marrow of his bones. Maybe this Kim creature did have him over a barrel; maybe he did have to walk through that door and try not to think of England . . . but he was damned if he was going to do so without at least trying to find out exactly what was going on. Sydney knew a big chunk more than he did, that much was clear, and he wasn't going to cough up his baby juice before he'd had a chance to get her on her own.

“Well, Da Mi,” he said, dropping the name like a ping-pong ball on a marble floor. “I'd appreciate a little time to think it over. Nothing against Pebbles, don't get me wrong. It's just that selling your semen isn't like getting your haircut. To tell the truth, I feel a bit queasy about it. I don't know that I'd even physically be able to oblige.”

With grim satisfaction, he noticed Sydney's eyes dart in alarm to the ProxyBod.

“I understand your reluctance, Damien,” Da Mi smoothly replied. He wondered if she was as unruffled in person, or if they had simply edited panic out of Pebbles' operating system. “Many people have concerns about making genetic donations. Please take all the time you need. And by all means, come in tomorrow, with your own inspirational literature if you like.”

“It'd be so shitty for all your work here to be for nothing,” Sydney blurted. “I'd help you out if I could, but all my money's tied up in my apartment.”

Damien stood up. The flexi-chair sorrowfully exhaled. “Thanks, Sydney. But maybe it's time for me to pay the piper, all that jazz.”

“That's a very philosophical attitude,” Da Mi said. “But let me give you my card. If you feel your principles bending in the night, please do give me a call.”

Damien took the card and stashed it in his pocket with the envelope. She knew he was bluffing. And she knew he knew she knew.

“Do you want to go for coffee, Damien?” Sydney scrambled to her feet and tugged on her jacket.

“Maybe.” He'd been letting her get her own way for far too long.

“Cool! Here, wait up.”

“Goodbye, Da Mi. Goodbye, Pebs.” Determined to leave on an insouciant note, Damien turned to wave at the ProxyBod. She was taking a turtle out of the tank. Holding the creature by its underbelly, she stretched it out toward him. It craned its weird white head out of its shell and nodded, wisely, once.

Johnny took another swig of Jack Daniel's, straight from the bottle, and cut the Sinatra CD dead in its tracks. No offense, Frank, but he didn't need to hear some mopey old song about lonesome towns. Not after Pusan Thursday, Kyongido on the weekend and now Sunday night back in Seoul, totaling figures. ConGlam was sinking a ton of dough into VirtuWorld and they wanted projections of revenue down to the last
won
. Straight after submitting the Tourism Report, he'd been asked to itemize and estimate the potential impact of the park's techno-novelty, the Peony cute-factor, the ever-increasing disaster insurance costs and the probable Christian backlash. Johnny's gut feeling was that demonstrations at the gates would bring publicity, and the park should at least break even the first year. In three years he'd be a millionaire; he'd be a billionaire in ten.

But it was a hollow victory. The spreadsheet was swimming out of focus as another blinding migraine crept up behind his temples. He pushed the mouse aside. These headaches were a bloody plague. He massaged his middle finger, just below the tip, like Veronica had taught him all those years ago, but the once-rare migraines were too severe these days. He was trapped inside the pain, inside his head, inside Korea.

He dimmed the lamp, switched off the music and stretched out on the sofa. Once, he'd been able to ride high for weeks on a hit, but the euphoria of dealing with Ratty and Co. had worn off quickly, leaving him with a lingering sense of paranoia. He should've chopped up the body. It didn't do to get sloppy, even when you only had to worry about the Seoul Police, who could be bribed for far less than Ratty had tried to extort from him. Next—and worse—he'd overstepped in Pusan, and Kim—of course—had complained. ConGlam had sent him an official reprimand; they'd referred to the Incident and even called him, asking him to “explain himself.”

The conversation had been like a nightmare version of that session with Beacon:
What if you haven't done anything wrong?
Okay, so technically he shouldn't have finished off that skinny girl in the alley—she was just a frightened kid, running away from Mommy Kim, and who could blame her? His orders had been to knock her
out and take her back to the village, but she'd bitten him and he'd got mad. He was in a stinking alley full of dogshit and fish-heads—everyone has their fucking limits, he'd yelled at LA:
I'm sorry she got to me; I'm sorry she pissed me off, okay?

Okay, Sandman, okay; calm down. Just help out with the funeral, they'd told him—and take a couple days off, soon. First, though, they'd assigned him this punishment report—so no chance of a break when he could actually use one.

The funeral had gone well, much to his surprise. He'd thought the Doc would throw a hissy-fit when he arrived, but she'd just scoured him with an evil look and otherwise ignored him. Those peasant baby factories, on the other hand, were into American hunks; all their fluttering and giggling had taken the nervous edge off the day, made him feel like the old Sandman again. And after his carpeting, the women's admiration had given him a thin thread of hope. His success with the surrogates would be his ticket back into VirtuWorld: he needed to get a few shifts softening up the sisters, taking them on daytrips to Seoul, that kind of thing. That slut Sydney was under so much surveillance now that the only way he was going to get close to her was by being at the heart of the park operations. It might take months—years, even—but if he played it nicey-nicey, it would happen.

The headache was leveling off. There was something to this acupressure shit; steady, firm and patient, that's what Veronica had said. And if he could maintain similar pressure on VirtuWorld, who knows, things could all swing his way again. For one thing, the Doc had been strangely tight-lipped about the start-date for the Peonies. No one was allowed to discuss it, but any idiot could tell there was a problem with the King. According to Johnny's spies in LA, the fabled Hugh Grant had yet to sign; he wanted more money, of course, but also confirmation that the kids would do him credit in the image department. It was worth hanging around just to see how that played out. If Kim couldn't find some pansy-faced patsy, maybe the crown would be Johnny Sandman's again. GRIP's genetic defect diagnosis of his semen was a crock of shit, he'd bet his Caddy on that.

Johnny twirled a pencil around on his thumb and forefinger, the way Koreans did incessantly, then snapped it in two. It broke as neatly as the North Korean girl's neck.

He was stressed out, he thought as he chucked the pencil halves across the room into the garbage can. ConGlam was treating him
like shit. They'd dangled all those fucking carrots to make him take that Beacon course and now he was working twice as hard for twenty percent more in his pay-packet, he was diluting his vital instincts by saying “sorry” to every spotty receptionist in Seoul, and he'd brought home a bitch who'd teamed up with his arch-enemy to kick him in the balls: that's what. There was no
empa-fucking-thizing
coming his way from Sydney or Kim, was there? Or from LA. The head honchos didn't know the prize they had in Johnny Sandman; they didn't appreciate his natural, raw ability to rule the streets of Seoul. They were trying to divert his testosterone, his wits, his
fucking genius
, into number-crunching and hand-shaking; and in the process they'd nearly fatally confused him. He didn't know who he was anymore. He'd nearly botched a straightforward hit simply because he was so overworked he hadn't wanted to hang around until the small hours to finish the job. And then he'd lost it in Pusan and once again ended up at the mercy of their precious Doctor Kim.

He was getting angry now. Good. He took another hit of whiskey. He had to focus on the rage. Rage was his rocket-fuel, always had been, since Day Dot. Veronica had once tried to get him to
talk about it
—how he must be
angry with his father
for beating him,
angry with his mother
for drinking herself to death. What Ronnie had never understood was that rage had jet-propelled him out of that house and into the world. Rage had thrust him into the army, and powered him through six tours of duty. Rage, in the end, had catapulted him out of
her
cheating embrace and into the ganglands of LA. There, rage had kept him honed and lethal and, at long last, got him noticed by the big boys at ConGlam. Sure, he was the Sandman: he had charm and street-savvy and a Mack truckload of smarts. But it was rage that had always buttered his bread, bounced his balls and saved his bacon. If he let his rage go—if he even just
diluted
it one drop—he might as well dig the Sandman's grave and go lie down in it with a sign around his neck saying “please cover with dirt.”

Kim had been uppity from the beginning, but before, when she'd dissed him, ConGlam had either backed him up or told him not to worry: just ignore her and get on with what he did best. Now, though, they were fucking
siding
with her; fucking
telling him off
—who the fuck did they think they were? Was this what he had to look forward to; was “Head of Korean Operations” just a fancy title for Doctor Kim's stooge? Was he going to have to suck up to her and
her moon-faced North Koreans for years just so he could teach Sydney a lesson one day? And did he really want to slave his guts out, risking prison, for a company that gave him no fucking respect? Yes,
respect
, Beacon:
that's
what Johnny Sandman's Big Fucking Picture is all about, not fucking job titles or “meeting someone special”—don't make me
barf
—but getting the respect that is due a fucking trend-spotting, deal-fixing, globe-trotting marketing
maestro
with bulging biceps to boot.

He realized he was slamming his fist into the sofa arm. Fuck. His head was killing him again. He switched off the lamp and lay back down on the cushions.
Breathe deep
, he told himself.
Close your eyes
.

He woke from a semi-stupor to the flashing and buzzing of his MoPho. It was Kim.

“Sandman!” she hissed, “I'm sending you a sound-file. ConGlam have heard it already. They want you to listen to it, and then call me back immediately.”

She rang off; he'd been too groggy to snap back at her. The room was still dark and the migraine was a dull ache at the periphery of his vision.
So much for taking a break, hey, Conglam?
he muttered to himself as he plugged his MoPho into its docking station and opened STravers0286.

“Hullo, Sydney,” said some guy with a prissy English accent. “Thanks for waiting.”

A chair scraped a concrete floor. Inane pop music dribbled in the background: a nightclub, obviously.

“That's okay. I was talking to the owner. She wants me to do a fashion show here soon.” Johnny imagined the pout on those pink lips and something sharp, a shrapnel piece of memory, twisted in his chest. Migraine or not, he was going to need a drink for this. He reached over and poured himself two fingers of Jack. In the nightclub, English ordered a gin and tonic for himself and a MalibuCannibal, whatever the fuck that was, for Sydney.

Johnny took a fortifying glug of whiskey. Sydney was bragging about how she'd told the owner to turn a certain alcove into a gallery. She was such a little madam, fancying herself in charge of everything. Once he'd even promised to lend her capital for a shoe shop; the bitch wouldn't remember that now, he'd bet on it.

He lit a cigarette.

A minute later Sydney broke the ice with a chainsaw. “I can't believe you'd rather pay that fine and get deported,” she whined.

“Sydney,” English replied, “I'm beyond skint, and I'd supply the goods in a second if I thought Da Mi was on the level. But she just so obviously isn't.”

Johnny stiffened. Something was happening, some chance was about to present itself; he could feel it nipping at the back of his neck.

“What do you mean?” Sydney asked, all innocence.

“C'mon, there's a thousand whiter-than-white blokes in Seoul who'd donate buckets of semen and play Virtuoso games for hours if she gave them even a fraction of the cash she offered me. Why is she picking on someone who's up to his neck in shit? I don't trust her—there's got to be something she's not saying, don't you think?”

Semen?
Right.
This was Hugh Two, then, or he would be, once Kim got her fangs into him. The guy was clever, though: not accusing Sydney, but clearly wise to the fact that the girl could tell him what the Doc wouldn't. Johnny turned up the volume a fraction. Kim thought she was so fucking smart, flashing the ProxyBod card, but she'd obviously overplayed her hand if some pathetic London homo could see right through her.

Inhaling a lungful of smoke, he prepared to concentrate on Sydney's response, but a female Korean voice twittered and glasses rang softly on the tabletop.

“
Kamsahamnida
.” Sydney's Korean accent had improved, Johnny noted. “Please, Hae Lim, this is my friend Damien. Damien, Hae Lim is the owner of Music Intelligence.”

“Damien, I very happy to meet you. Your friend Sydney, very beauty. Primitive Ice Queen. Her movement stay in my mind.”

Johnny gagged. Who wasn't that slut blowing?

Damien attempted to be gallant and pay for the drinks, but the owner refused to let him. Johnny could hear her kitten heels tapping against the floor as she left.

“
Konbae
,” Sydney toasted. The glasses clinked gently.

There was a pause on the tape. Johnny noted his cock was getting hard. Thinking about Sydney could still do that to him sometimes. “So,” Sydney said, a shade too brightly, “you have suspicions of evil genius Da Mi?”

“Sydney, I want to ask you one question. Okay?”

Oooh
, Johnny smirked, rubbing his cock through his jeans with the ball of his hand.
Damien's playing hardball now
.

“Okay.”

“Did you tell Da Mi I had privates in Chamshil?”

“What?
No!
What are you saying, Damien?”

“Nothing—nothing, I just think it's strange that I get picked up by Immigration at that job near LotteWorld and then
your
friend just happens to have the inside track on that particular officer. That's all.”

There was another long pause. Johnny grinned.
Wiggle your way out of this one, Sydney
, he thought.
Perhaps you'd better cry
.

And sure enough, when she did speak, it was in a wobbly voice, all misty-eyed, sulky, and vulnerable. Yeah, he knew that voice all right. A real passion-killer. At the sound of it his burgeoning lust evaporated. “Maybe I mentioned it—I can't remember, but that still doesn't mean she set you up, Damien. There's a crackdown right now; it's been in all the papers. And Da Mi's a pretty important person, with loads of connections. You're really lucky I know her.”

“So you honestly don't think she set up that raid?”

“No,” she sniffled, “of
course
not. Damien, please believe me: I thought Da Mi could help you. Look, if you don't trust her or me, why don't you just walk away?”

There was another long silence. Johnny cracked his knuckles. Something serious was about to happen, or Kim wouldn't have sent him the tape.

Damien sighed. “Sydney, I'm sorry; I didn't mean to accuse you of anything—but you're just a kid, and it seems to me you're mixed up in something you don't understand.”

“I can look after myself.” She didn't sound so sure.

Damien spoke softly. “Sometimes, when you don't know I'm looking, you're kind of sad and lost. You're my mate. I don't like to see you like that.”

Oh Jesus, was she crying? The sound disintegrated into a general snuffling and scraping of chairs. Johnny could hear the swish of fabric now, next to the mic. Were they fucking
kissing
?