Silhouette (6 page)

That turned out to be unnecessary, however, because the projector soon displayed a map of the city, with our location highlighted toward the top and a similar blip flashing in the south. The map then began to enlarge, zooming in on the bottom half until a red circle representing Korcz was in the center of the holo. It then abruptly disappeared, replaced by a live aerial shot of Candlestick Park (affectionately known as the Stick), an old sports stadium south of the city that had been destroyed by the quake but then preserved in its ruined form as a popular tourist attraction. The view began to move closer to the wrecked arena, which looked like some massive monster had emerged out of the water next to it and taken a big bite out of its south side, taking some of the ground with it as well. It reminded me of the way the Colosseum in Rome had looked before Pal-Tel made their “statement to the world” with that tactical nuke.

When the Stick had grown to fill the screen, the projector superimposed a series of green dots, and one red one, which were moving around slowly at various locations throughout the large structure.

“We can't get a visual, because he's inside,” said the third-level. “But this is thermal.” She manipulated a remote, and the view encroached further on the red dot, until it turned into the red shape of a man, and I could see for the first time that he was accompanied by two green shapes, smaller and unremarkable, except that one appeared to be a man and the other a woman. I asked the tech where they were, but she wasn't sure and looked around for some help. One of the onlookers spoke up.

“I think they're just in the tunnels there, where they have those exhibits. You know, the videos and such from the quake. Looks to me like he's just doing the tourist thing. There's nothing else there, that I know of.” I looked back at the third-level, who shrugged, then touched her remote again.

“Whatever he's doing, he's armed,” she said, pointing to the holo. I looked that way and saw the red figure, now enlarged much further so that I could make out the two small blotches of black on his lower back, near the kidneys. The same place I wore my boas. “But his companions don't seem to be,” she added, looking at me to indicate that her job was finished.

“We'll have a little talk with him,” I said, and headed for the garage, barking orders into the glasses along the way to form an assault team of three aeros and a falconer.

 

5

Before noon, my aero, the three others, and a big flying van were approaching the old stadium over the hill just north of it. During the brief journey, I had wondered why Korcz would be hanging around a tourist spot if he had just committed a high-profile murder, and I had been introduced to Twitch, the new head puppeteer for this particular falconer. He told me his nickname had come from his mastery of holo games when he was “younger”—he wasn't old enough yet to say “young.” Then he excitedly added, “But that was nothin' like this, no sir.” His visual in the corner of my glasses revealed him to be a slight black man, his eyes and ears presently hidden by various contraptions as he and his team prepared to launch and guide the birds by remote control.

I also had taken a call from Paul, who looked like he was troubled and trying to hide it, but not quite succeeding. He asked what I was doing, I told him, and then he tried to talk me into letting someone else handle it. He wanted to talk with me at the Ranch, for some reason, and I guessed this was related to the distress behind his eyes. I told him that I would finish my business here, then call him, and he reluctantly agreed.

“The target is currently stationary,” said the third-level back in the Surveillance Center as the Stick came into full view in front of us. I heard her voice in the glasses, which were now open to several channels. “And his accomplices also.”

“Good timing,” I said, then told the aeros to land and the falconer to launch. Out of the rear of the skyvan sprang three small black shapes, like thick meter-long bullets, which then extended their wings and dived after the descending cars. Each one accompanied a different car to its landing spot, then they hovered behind the agents as they entered the building at three different places.

After directing my aero to hold its position, I turned the glasses to all-video and called up feeds from the Eye and the falconer. They filled my view, looking like a movie screen divided in half. On the left was the Eye's thermal view of the stadium, with Korcz appearing as a red figure, his accomplices as green, and the approaching peacers as blue. The falcons were represented by smaller blue blips. The right half displayed an alternating view from the front cameras of each falcon, until I told Twitch's editor to leave it on point for now.

I set the glasses so that one tap could bring the falcon view to full screen, and tried it. Immediately I was hit by the odd sensation of virtual motion, as I seemed to be floating about five feet behind the point man, following him through a big, curved tunnel inside the stadium where people used to walk to find their seats, buy food and drink from the concessions, and use the bathrooms. A few of the food stands were still food stands, but others had been converted to walk-in exhibits commemorating the various effects of the quake. There were tourists walking the hall and observing the displays—a thin crowd that parted easily when they caught sight of the goggled soldier and the sleek black metal bird moving through them.

“This is a flatmovie-viewing room,” said the peacer I was following. I knew it was he because “A-1” appeared in the corner of my glasses while he spoke. He moved over to the wall to his right and drew his gun. The falcon I was looking through swung out and around until it faced a door that said
PRESS CLUB THEATER
and the park employee standing next to it in his conspicuous uniform. He was dressed like the old popcorn and hot dog vendors who had worked the crowd during sporting events, and he was frozen stiff, staring openmouthed at the menacing black machine.

While the point man gestured with his gun, softly but firmly telling the nervous man to step away from the door, I switched back to the dual screen and took in the thermal. The second peacer was arriving at the other entrance to the theater, farther down the same tunnel, and the third was positioning himself on the other side of the theater. I wondered where this was, so I asked the editor to give me F-3. In a moment, I was looking through another bird at the third peacer, who was outside. He was crouched near a door on the high, thin walkway that had been extended from the elevated press boxes on the intact, north side of the stadium, so that the visitors who were bold enough to traverse it could see the whole inside of the stadium, including the wrecked south side, in all its glory.

“Go full for a second,” Twitch said to me, and I did, the falcon's view filling mine. He tilted it down, giving me a vertigo-inducing look over the thin railing, then swept the stadium briefly, reminding me of my one visit here as a tourist, which was quite enough, thank you very much. The stadium's owners had chosen to leave the ruins basically as they lay (fallen light rigs, bloodstains and all) after the quake had rudely interrupted a concert, killing more than two thousand people and wounding more than ten thousand. By a gruesome twist of fate, that particular daytime event was being broadcast live, so numerous cameras with independent power sources captured hundreds of images of people being crushed, impaled, and dissected by falling debris, or thrown to their deaths from the upper levels. The recovered footage was now shown daily to spellbound sightseers in several theaters like the one Korcz was in now.

I reverted to the split screen and told Twitch, in my business voice, to send in F-1. On my right screen, I was back in the first falcon, which floated past the point man and into the door he had opened. At first, the interior was all black, but then Twitch turned on the infrared and I could see, from the side, quite a few people situated in ascending rows, staring at the screen. He turned the falcon to show both agents readied near the two entrances, then flew it to a spot in the air between the screen and the people.

Through the bird's speaker, and in an electronically modified voice that boomed louder than the movie, Twitch told everyone to remain in their seats and be calm. Then he maneuvered to the left middle of the audience, and I saw the small blue blip nearing the red and green ones on my left screen.

“Mr. Valeri Korcz,” the hovering falcon said as I switched to full screen so I could have a better view of the man, whose two accomplices turned out to be an elderly couple. “Please put your hands in the air and move slowly to the end of the row. No harm will come to—”

And then all hell broke loose. Korcz dived
behind
his aging friends, and Twitch proved true to his name, firing immediately. The soft shell streaked right between their heads and hit Korcz on the hip, exploding in a cascade of green gas. The old couple, and whoever else was sitting close enough, slumped over, unconscious. But Korcz must have exhaled with impeccable timing (not an easy trick), because through the cloud I saw him disappearing off the screen. Twitch must not have seen it, because he didn't move the bird right away, so I switched back to dual screen and watched the red blip dive for the back right corner of the room. The two peacers, and the second falcon, gave chase as Korcz stepped over seats and gasping people until he finally barreled through the exit, finding himself on the high walkway about fifty feet from the crouching third agent.

The editor put me in the third falcon just in time to see Korcz simultaneously reach for his guns and dive backward—another impressive move. The peacer in front of me fired two stopper rounds, but because of the slight curve in the walkway, his moving target was partially obscured, and both of the softsteel Xs grazed the railing just enough to be detoured.

What wasn't obscured at all by the railing, however, was Korcz's angle on the hovering falcon, and he earned kudos again by sending a barrage of bullets its way. All I could see through the camera was the flash of his muzzles in the distance, and then darkness, as it became obvious that at least one of the projectiles had smashed the lens. Others must have impacted elsewhere on the bird, because it fell to the walkway, distracting the crouching peacer long enough for Korcz to climb over one of the old press boxes and into the upper-level seating. I gathered this from the thermal view, because the right side of the glasses was dark until the other falcons emerged from the theater and fanned out toward the area where Korcz had disappeared.

“A-2, go back into the tunnel and stay parallel with his location,” I said. “There's nowhere to go up there, so we just have to keep him from leaving.”

The peacer and his falcon obeyed, heading back through the theater, while the other two men pressed up against the press boxes and moved cautiously forward, waiting for the remaining bird to locate Korcz. It did, not long after, and the man was running wildly through the seats toward the west, away from the agents' position. I watched him from a distance, because Twitch had pulled the falcon way back, not wanting to lose another one of his toys. I soon grew thankful for the wide angle, however, because at its left edge I could now see Korcz's objective.

The mad run was not mere desperation, after all.

I moused the glasses until the falcon's view was reduced to the far left and I could see through the rest. I grabbed both ends of the gun belt embedded in the seat behind me, snapped them together at my stomach, and pulled the holstered boas around to the front. I throttled forward, toward the top of the stadium, and slightly to the left as I gauged where Korcz would be by now.

When the aero crested the top of the old ruin, I saw the tiny shape of the man, running with his back to me, well on his way to the floor of the stadium, where he could escape out the other side. As I presumed, he had been running for one of the stadium's huge light poles, which had fallen across the upper level and been bent, but not broken, its upper length and the lights attached to it stretching all the way down to the field. Korcz was using it like a ramp, running down it with the concentration and steel nerves of a high-wire artist. The two peacers on the catwalk were firing at him, but the stopper rounds weren't very accurate at that distance, and only a few even hit the metal around him. Twitch, taking this all in through his falcon, spoke up.

“D'you want I should make a rush at him and gas him?” he said anxiously.

“No, just hang,” I answered. “And tell the castle to send a few more cars, in case this doesn't work.”

I was still behind Korcz, but getting closer, and I had lowered the aero down near the rusty metal of the fallen pole. I slowed it slightly, hoping he wouldn't hear the hum until I was upon him, and not wanting to kill him just yet. As he grew larger in the windshield, I brought the car down even farther and pointed the front bumper at his back.

About a car length before I would have hit him, he suddenly looked back and then dropped, bouncing off the pole and down into the remains of the light array resting on the field. I couldn't see whether or not he had lost the guns, so I switched the aero to hover and nudged it to the left a bit. As it was stopping and banking slightly, I slid to the passenger side, lowered the window, drew both of the boas, and stuck them out in front of me as I extended up and over the top of the car. Though my head, shoulders, and arms were exposed to the light array, the rest of me was safe behind the heavy fibersteel of the aero. I scanned the bulky, smashed mess with my eyes and with the guns, squinting at the reflections shining from it. My finger gripped the trigger of the right boa, with its fourteen caseless stopper rounds, but my other one only rested on the guard of the left gun, which held twenty killers.

When nothing stirred in the debris, I retreated slightly into the car and tapped the glasses until the thermal view appeared at the left. Before I could enlarge it, I noticed the red spot moving away from a blue one, and pushed myself back up. Korcz had jumped out from under the array and was running away from me across the field, unarmed. I tucked the left boa under my right forearm, closed my left eye, and fired two stoppers at him. After my hand came down from the second kick, I saw his collapsed body curling up on the ground, in the middle of a cloud of dust.