Tails You Lose (12 page)
She'd almost forgotten how mentally agile and perceptive another Superkid could be: Ajax immediately scanned between the lines. The conclusion he reached, however, was the wrong one.
"You want her to double for you while you go undercover," he guessed, his blue eyes glowing mischievously. "That's what you meant when you said you were 'on leave' from your job at PCI."
Alma
decided to go with it. "That's right. I'd use Aimee or Agatha, since you're in touch with them—but it doesn't sound as if they're available right now. I thought, instead, that you could help me to track down the Superkid who's been spotted here in town. It could be Abby, or Akiko—or even Aella, if she somehow survived Chicago. Whichever one of us she is, I need to find her ASAP."
Ajax
had picked up on her sense of urgency; he had already risen and was walking toward his telecom. "I'll get in touch with Ahmed for you," he said, picking up the telecom's interface cable. "He's an expert when it comes to surfing the Matrix; when I talked to him a month ago, he said he might have a lead on another one of us. If anyone can find out who your Vancouver 'twin' is, it's him."
Alma
forced herself to wait patiently while Ajax slotted the telecom cable into the port in his left temple and contacted Ahmed via the Matrix. When he unplugged the jack at the end of their silent conversation, Ajax looked shaken. He sat down and poured himself another sake and then drained it.
"Ahmed's got the goods, all right," he said. "He managed to track down Akiko. It took him awhile; she changed her name to Jacqueline Boothby. She's in the Confederated American States, in a
"How long has she been there?" Alma asked. When Ajax gave her a strange look, Alma realized that it had been an odd question. But he answered just the same: "She's been in prison for two years—throughout numerous appeals. She's due to be executed three days from now, on the twenty-seventh."
Alma
nodded. Assuming that Aella really was dead, that left only one of the girls from Batch Alpha unaccounted for: Abby.
"What crime was Akiko charged with?" she asked.
"First-degree murder. She slashed the throat of a man who was convicted of raping her, six years ago. The day after he got out on parole, Akiko killed him."
Alma
's heart skipped a beat as she heard how the murder was committed. Involuntarily touching a hand to her throat, she wondered if Akiko had also been framed.
"How do they know Akiko did it?" she asked. "Was she convicted on the basis of DNA fingerprinting?"
Once again, Ajax scanned between the lines. "You're suggesting that it might have been another Superkid from Batch Alpha, right?" he asked. He shook his head. "But that wasn't it. Akiko killed the man in front of a bar filled with witnesses, then sat down at his table to wait until the police arrived. When they arrested her, she presented them with a signed confession she'd prepared in advance—that's what got her the first-degree charge. She's a murderer, all right."
He refilled his sake cup and sighed. "It makes me wonder about the rest of us."
Alma
nodded, thinking about the shadowrunner and the gruesome way in which Gray Squirrel had been killed. When Alma finally located the Superkid who had framed her, she wondered what sort of demon she'd find.
So far, so good. Akira Kageyama had bought the excuse, and Night Owl was in. As she rode the elevator down to his underwater condoplex, she cradled the plastic packing case in her hands. She didn't want the contents to break. Not yet.
The elevator was studded with four round portholes, allowing her to look out through the stainless-steel, open-mesh tube that was the elevator shaft. The rain-splattered surface of Burrard Inlet was already high overhead, and the water was rapidly darkening from green-gray to black. Dark blurs that were either large fish or seals swept past the elevator shaft, and a clump of seaweed that had been caught on the bottom of the elevator bubbled its way to the surface. Inside the elevator, all Night Owl could hear was the steady whir of machinery and the soft hiss of circulating air. As she leaned back against the rear wall, the empty holster dug into the small of her back. She felt naked without her handgun—but "naked" was the only way you could hope to enter the dragon's den.
That's what the condoplex was—literally. Built back in the 2050s, it was designed to be one of the many residences of Dunkelzahn, the great dragon who had earned far more than his fifteen minutes of fame after being elected president of the UCAS in 2057. The worm had built the condoplex on a whim, just offshore from the expensive waterfront properties of West Vancouver, after reading in a Chinese storybook that dragons lived in crystal palaces under the sea. This particular whim had cost nearly twenty million nuyen to build, and he never did get the chance to move into it. Just a few months after it was completed, the Big D was flatlined. Later, it turned out that he'd willed the Vancouver doss to one Akira Kageyama, a "financial advisor" who'd been chummers with the big worm.
Street buzz had it that some of the artworks in the condoplex were priceless—and not just because they were old. The first time Night Owl had visited this doss, she'd nearly salivated at the thought of boosting something from the hoard, which was rumored to contain more than one magical focus. She'd been smart enough, that time, to realize that you didn't tread on the tail of a dragon—even one that was five years dead. But now she was going to do just that.
Walls slid up around the elevator as it clunked to a stop at the bottom of the shaft. The door slid open, and Night Owl's ears popped as the pressure equalized. She stepped out onto a plush carpet, between walls of frosted glass.
Night Owl had prepared for this run by popping a hearing amplification plug inside her right ear; she didn't want anyone sneaking up on her when she was boosting the statue. Through the amp, she could hear the distant sound of water dripping. The condoplex was plagued with leaks; Kageyama had spent hundreds of thousands of nuyen over the past five years trying to get rid of them, but as soon as one leak was patched, another appeared. The sound set Night Owl's nerves on edge. Being underwater already made her claustrophobic enough.
All of the interior walls in the condoplex were on rollers and could slide back and forth like the rice-paper screens in Japanese houses. Kageyama had rearranged his entrance hall so that it was long and narrow, leading to double doors that had an elaborate dragon design sandblasted on them. Somehow, the dragon seemed to breathe fire: tiny sparks of red flickered out of its nostrils and spread in a fan shape through the glass, then slowly faded away. Each of its hands appeared to be holding a doorknob that had been set with an enormous pearl.
A drone rolled to a stop in front of her, just outside the elevator. It extended a telescoping pole topped with what looked like an octagonal mirror, framed in red plastic. When the "mirror" reached Night Owl's eye level, the monitor screen shimmered into life as Kageyama's image appeared on it.
The first time she'd met Kageyama, Night Owl had been struck by how ordinary he looked. She'd expected Vancouver's best-known millionaire to be as flamboyant and striking as the condoplex he'd inherited. But Kageyama had a face that would have blended into any crowd. His straight, blue-black hair was neat and short, his face was neither too round nor too narrow, his eyes a nondescript shade of green.
""Konichiwa
, Night Owl," he said. "I like the mask you've painted on yourself tonight. The silver becomes you. Does that case hold the egg?"
Night Owl nodded and flipped open the hasps that held the packing case shut. She knew better than to hide anything inside the case; Kageyama might trust her, but he wasn't so stupid that he let large packages into his home without seeing what was inside. Setting the case carefully down on the ground, she opened its lid so that the drone's security camera could scan the contents.
The drone's cameras tilted, allowing the camera to get a better angle of the egg that was nested in a bed of spongelike foam inside the case. About the size of a football, the oval egg had a leathery surface and an iridescent sheen. Lighter patches on the surface bulged outward slightly, like weak spots in an overinflated ball. Waves of heat shimmered in the air above the egg, courtesy of a chemical heat pad Night Owl had placed underneath it.
"What kind do you think it is?" Night Owl asked. "Chimera? Firedrake? Leatherback turtle?"
She glanced up at the drone's monitor screen and saw that Kameyaga's pupils had dilated.
Got
him
, she thought. She already knew what was in the case: the egg of something called a Lambton lizard, boosted from an illicit apothecary shop in Chinatown that dealt in black-market animal parts. She'd already told Kageyama where the egg had come from. What she'd failed to mention was that it was long since dead. A healthy spray coating of scent-receptor-blocking agents was masking its odor.
"It warrants a closer look," Kageyama said. "Follow the drone."
Night Owl closed the case and cradled it in her arms as she followed the drone. It led her through the double doors—which opened automatically—and into the maze of rooms and corridors that followed.
All of the walls, ceilings and floors in the condoplex were made of glass. Most of the floor was either carpeted or frosted for privacy, but there was the occasional patch of clear glass that gave a view down into the level below. Crossing them was like walking on air. Other clear patches looked down into aquariums filled with gigantic gold and white koi.
Some of the sliding panes of glass were set with geometric chunks of red or green or blue glass that glittered like multifaceted gems. Other walls were constructed from double panes of glass through which swirling currents of plankton-laden water flowed, glowing a soft blue—a living barrier against astral intrusion.
The rooms were filled with antique furniture: enormous, mirror-fronted wardrobes, velvet-upholstered chairs, and tables with elaborately carved legs with claw-and-ball feet. All of the furniture was a deep, polished red-brown or black and was made of real wood: mahogany and teak, Kageyama had told her on her previous visit. Night Owl ignored it, searching instead for anything that looked like jade.
Everywhere she looked, she saw artwork. She passed through one room that smelled thickly of oil paint; it was filled with enormous paintings so dark you could hardly see the people in them. In another room, three marble pedestals each displayed an ancient-looking, chipped clay pot, painted with figures that reminded Night Owl of the Aztechnology logo. One long hallway was lined on either side with stone carvings of multiarmed humans, posed as though they were dancing. Flecks of blue paint freckled their arms and faces. Another hallway was dominated by mannequins dressed in the armor of ancient samurai. Each area had background music, piped into concealed speakers, that was appropriate to the cultural artifacts on display.
Still other rooms held more modern pieces of art: blown-glass neon from the 20th century, atomic sculptures that could only be seen through an electron microscope, and holographic renderings of performance art that spouted fragmented sentences that were supposed to be poetry.
The first time she'd seen Kageyama's art collection, Night Owl had wondered what sort of chiphead would spend good nuyen on the stuff. Now she looked it over more carefully. Somewhere in this collection of overpriced junk was the statue she'd been sent to boost. She caught a glimpse of three jade-green shapes through the smoked glass of one wall, but the drone led her in a different direction before she could make out what they were. If she remembered correctly, the room held Chinese artwork. She put it at the top of her mental checklist of places to scan.
The drone finally led her to a room with a clear glass wall and ceiling that looked out onto the ocean. A trickle of seawater ran down the inside of the viewing wall, puddling on the floor. Just outside, brilliant halogen lights illuminated the water, lightening it to a dark forest green. Bullheads and skate swam close to the floor of the ocean, sending up clouds of sand as they scavenged for food. Bright red crabs scuttled from rock to rock, and pinkish-yellow sea anemones waved delicate tendrils in the air, sifting the ocean for scraps. In the distance, far overhead, the hull of a freighter slid silently past, a darker patch of black against the surface.
Night Owl carefully set the packing case on the only piece of furniture in the room: an enormous, leather-padded bench near the viewing wall. The drone hovered for a moment and then disappeared back through the only door leading to the room. A moment later, Kageyama entered.
