Who Hunts the Hunter (31 page)
“And if he claims ignorance?”
Amy feels a bead of sweat trickling down her side. She feels her heart thumping faster and harder in her chest. If Dr. Phalen can’t provide some acceptable rationale for what she’s discovered, she’s finished. If Phalen’s part of some conspiracy and he lies to her ..."Then I guess I would have no choice but to put it all before Janasova.”
“Who will immediately run to the audit staff.”
“Yes. I know that.”
“Have you considered your own culpability in this?”
Amy nods, then meets Feliz’s gaze directly, or at least the glare of her shades."If I’ve contributed to someone’s effort to defraud Hurley-Cooper, I’ll face the consequences, whatever they may be. I’m not going to try to cover this up. That’s why I’m here, that’s why I’m telling you all this. I want you to know that I made the discovery, and that I’m doing everything I can to get at the truth.”
“Of course, if Tokyo decides you’re to blame, I may not be able to save you.”
“I know that.”
Feliz nods, just slightly."Then let’s concentrate on what must be done. I agree, question Dr. Phalen. His is the responsibility, even if the routine administration of the Metascience Group falls to Dr. Hill. Insist on a meeting at once. Invoke my authority at your discretion. Meanwhile, I’ll consider what I might do to research this matter further."
"Research it how?”
“Have you any suggestions?”
Amy hesitates, feeling a warm flush rising up the back of her neck. Only one thought comes to mind, the one thought she would never dare say aloud. She could talk to her brother. Scottie probably knows some shadowrunner who would eagerly dig up dirty secrets on anyone she might name."I’m sorry, no,” she says."No suggestions.”
Feliz nods.
Meeting concluded.
Once the door slips closed behind Amy Berman, Mercedes Feliz reaches under her desk to touch the print scanner beside her knee. The bottom right drawer to her desk slides open. The Fuchi-Dektron Admonisher set into the drawer informs her that no one is attempting to eavesdrop on her office, and, if they are, they’re listening to the Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 by Bach, that or white noise. The display on her Sony palmtop confirms what it told her first thing this morning, that no one has attempted to compromise the Admonisher.
She has no absolute proof that Enoshi Ken or the KFK auditors have made any attempt to monitor her activities, but as she told Amy Berman just moments ago no proof is ever absolute.
How Amy Berman discovered that some employee is maintaining an account at a bank other than the First Corporate Trust is anyone’s guess. She must have stumbled over it somehow. She’s far too resolute in her own brand of ethics, too much the humanitarian, to ever engage in any flagrantly illicit activity such as might reveal hidden bank accounts. It’s her greatest weakness. It’s also the quality that makes her of special value to Hurley-Cooper Labs.
She’s like glue—set and stubborn—determined to hold things together, to keep people moving in the same direction. She’s a motivator and a negotiator and an efficient executive. She’s too valuable an asset to risk losing because of some fool’s attempt at petty larceny. This discovery indicative of fraud must be costing her.
It might well cost her a career.
Mercedes jacks into her palmtop and brings up her security files. Just as no proof is absolute, no person employed by Hurley-Cooper Labs or any other corporation is absolutely virginal. In the Sixth World, such people do not exist. Everyone has at least one small blemish somewhere in their record, and that includes not only herself but the people, both scientists and administrative staff, who work for the Metascience Group.
For the good of Hurley-Cooper, not to mention her own career, Mercedes has made use of such resources as she has to delve into the backgrounds of those who work in the most proprietary areas.
She scans her lists. Drs. Liron Phalen and Ben Hill are about as clean as the average person. Phalen changed corps once in violation of contract. Hill once got drunk and crashed his car into a neighbor’s garage. A few other individuals in the Metascience Group are reputed to have various affiliations, through friends or family, that might be deemed questionable. Mercedes loads a select group of names including those of Phalen and Hill onto a datachip, then jacks out and keys her desktop.
Two minutes later, Zach Wanger comes in. His official title is Assistant Director for Site Security. His true responsibilities involve more than electronic surveillance, alarms, and uniformed guards. No one would guess it, at a glance. He looks rather like a good-time boy, grown up but still a child, always ready to party. Mercedes puts the datachip on her desk and gestures for Wanger to take it.
“What’s this?”
“You’ll find a list of people on that chip,” Mercedes explains."I need background information on every one of them. Pay particular attention to finances. I want to know what they’re worth, where their assets are invested, and where their money comes from. I want any large inflows of funds tracked back to the point of origin.”
“How large is large?”
“We’ll say fifty thousand nuyen.”
“How soon do you need all this?”
“Immediately.”
“Crash priorities cost nuyen.”
“You’ve got a budget. Use it.”
As she wakes, Tikki hears a murmur of voices too vague and too distant for words to come through clearly, and a soft thump like that of a door slipping closed. The air she breathes stinks of two-legs and something else, some chemical, swiftly fading away.
Muscles twitch, one massive paw lashes out.
Someone shouts, “Get out!
GET
OUT
!”
The bare room of platinum gray has changed. One of the wall panels has become a door and is waiting, not closed, but wide open. A pair of two-legs in long white coats are battling each other to get through the opening. Tikki lunges up and hurls herself across the room. Before she can strike, the two-legs have gone a step further and the door snaps shut in her face.
She rams it, staggers sideways, abruptly sits. Intense pain. Water floods her eyes. Her rasping breath rises into a throaty rumbling as the fractured bones in her chest knit back together. She sneezes violently. A little blood slips from her nose, splatters the floor. The pain is soon gone, like the water in her eyes.
The two-legs escaped her this time, but now she knows where the door is. She considers the door, then moves to sit beside it, her flank against the wall.
Time passes.
The voice from the ceiling speaks again. It’s strange, metal-toned, computer-modulated, neither female nor male."I know what you are and who you are,” it says."You’re Striper. You’re a killer. You get paid to kill people. You work for the yakuza and the triads. You’re a real chiller thriller. How do you like your room so far?”
Tikki bares her fangs and roars.
More noise comes."Sometimes you kill people for free. You must enjoy it. You must like killing. I bet it gives your life meaning. It’s how you know you’re alive, by killing people.”
Tikki flicks her ears irritably. Listening to this noisy two-leg is like having a cloud of flies buzzing incessantly around her head. She’d stand up and roar again, but she realizes there’s no point. She’s on a one-way comm line. She’s totally in the blind. Nothing she does is going to have any discernible affect.
“I wonder if you know how many you’ve killed.”
Tikki bares her fangs, mimicking a human smile.
As the subway roars out of the tunnel passing beneath the East River, the world beyond the grime-smeared windows of the train changes from black to colors of brown and gray.
Bandit watches the dark clouds, the passing buildings, the throng jammed into the subway car around him. Everything he sees and hears adds to his concerns. The afternoon has turned dark. The landscape of the city bears the scars and open wounds of decades of careless neglect and violent abuse. The people immediately around him struggle to contain nervousness and fear.
There is danger ahead. Bandit can feel it waiting, lurking, perhaps around the next corner. Amy’s problem involves far more than ordinary suits scagging their corporate benefactor.
The train comes to a thundering, shrieking halt at Smith Street. A brief walk brings Bandit to the Brooklyn waterfront. He turns down an alleyway between two ancient brick and mortar buildings. Halfway along, amid mounds of festering garbage and the cast-off remnants of generations past, he comes to a doorway.
In the shadow of the doorway stands a large figure, an ork. His name is Grinder. He follows Shark. His face is as hard and expressionless as a nail. His coat is long and black. The fetishes hidden in his pockets, but clearly visible on the astral plane, burn with power. He speaks in a flat monotone."Why do you come?”
Bandit replies, “I must speak to the old one.”
“There is danger.”
“Yes.”
A moment passes.
“You may enter.”
The door swings inward on silent hinges grown black with grease and grit. The door and the walls around it are imbued with powerful wards. One step beyond the doorway is another door, and, to the left, a narrow stairway. To enter this place unasked, even for one like Bandit, is to invite certain death.
Bandit turns and heads up the stairs. He has been here only a few times before, but he knows the secrets of this place are many, the things of interest and of value innumerable. The temptation to investigate these secrets, perhaps take certain things back to his lodge, examine them, and learn what there is to learn is intense, but Bandit knows he must resist. They-Who-Watch would catch him at once, even as he reached out his hand. He will learn far more, in the long run, by practicing patience.
Four stories up, the stairway ends at a narrow door. Bandit reaches out for the knob, but the door swings open, untouched.
Beyond the door is the roof, maybe fifteen meters across and twice as deep. At the rear of the roof is a small shack that seems made of panels scavenged from macroplast crates. The shack has only half a roof and three walls. The interior glows with the soft orangey radiance of a small fire. A smoky trail of incense rises from the fire to the dark clouded sky above.
The interior walls of the shack are hung with hides, drums, knives, wands of bone, masks, and medicine bags. The chests and boxes positioned along the rear wall of the shack are filled with every manner of fetish: minerals, herbs, animal parts, bits of fur and feather and hair, small stones, twigs, crystals, and more.
Old Man sits cross-legged on a rug, facing the fire from the rear of the shack. His thin gray hair flows over his shoulders; his clothes seem made of natural leather. He wears necklaces and beads and bones and looks vaguely Amerind. The medallion at the base of his neck bears the likeness of a black bird. This is Raven, the transformer, the living contradiction."You again,” Old Man says in a voice as dry as sand, as creaky as old wooden boards, and yet vibrant with power."Let an old man get some rest,” he says."Go away.”
Bandit pauses at the edge of the rain-and grit-spattered rug that marks the limits of the old one’s medicine lodge. Quietly, he says, “I must speak with you.”
“I’m just an old man. Don’t come to me looking for answers. If I ever had any, I probably forgot them before you were born.”
Old Man is sometimes cranky, especially when he wants to sleep. Like Raven, he can also be greedy and selfish. Bandit understands. The shaman must find his own path. It is not Old Man’s path to do what another must do. He offers help where help is needed, but only when it is needed very badly, and only when he desires to offer help. When he thinks it’s right to help. Bandit sits cross-legged at the edge of the rug and waits. He will wait as long as he must."Come into the lodge,” the dry, creaky voice says.
By then, it seems like night. The sky is near-black and the dirty lights of Brooklyn gleam through the looming dark, and the fire inside the lodge glows a brooding red. Bandit crosses onto the threshold of the rug and sits facing Old Man from across the fire.
“You came here to tell me something,” Old Man says."What do you think you want to tell me?”
“I found something.”
“What kind of something?”
Bandit hesitates, then says, “Monstrous evil.”
The words seem to make the danger real, realer than before. Bandit isn’t sure what danger the evil presents, but he knows it is threatening. He can feel it. Somewhere in the dark. A powerful presence that perhaps watches him at this very moment from beyond the boundaries of Old Man’s medicine lodge."What kind of evil?” Old Man says."What do you think you’ve found?”
“It’s a book.”
“What book?”
“The
Roggoth’shoth
.”
A long time passes. The red of the fire grows more intense. The column of incense curling upward swells to fill the lodge. Old Man begins softly chanting, rhythmically tapping a small drum clutched in his lap. Bandit feels the magic happening long before he has any idea of where it’s leading. He feels the world of the medicine lodge changing. He feels the power rising like a tide.
