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silicon"-- the phrase had an old-fashioned ring for Case-- and the
microsofts he purchased were art history programs and tables of gallery
sales. With half a dozen chips in his new socket, Smith's knowledge of
the art business was formidable, at least by the standards of his
colleagues. But Smith had come to the Finn with a request for help, a
fraternal request, one businessman to another. He wanted a go-to on the
Tessier-Ashpool clan, he said, and it had to be executed in a way that would
guarantee the impossibility of the subject ever tracing the inquiry to its
source. It might be possible, the Finn had opined, but an explanation was
definitely required. "It smelled," the Finn said to Case, "smelled of money.
And Smith was being very careful. Almost too careful."
Smith, it developed, had had a supplier known as Jimmy. Jimmy was a
burglar and other things as well, and just back from a year in high orbit,
having carried certain things back down the gravity well. The most unusual
thing Jimmy had managed to score on his swing through the archipelago was a
head, an intricately worked bust, cloisonne over platinum, studded with
seedpearls and lapis. Smith, sighing, had put down his pocket microscope and
advised Jimmy to melt the thing down. It was contemporary, not an antique,
and had no value to the collector. Jimmy laughed. The thing was a computer
terminal, he said. It could talk. And not in a synth-voice, but with a
beautiful arrangement of gears and miniature organ pipes. It was a baroque
thing for anyone to have constructed, a perverse thing, because synth-voice
chips cost next to nothing. It was a curiosity. Smith jacked the head into
his computer and listened as the melodious, inhuman voice piped the figures
of last year's tax return.
Smith's clientele included a Tokyo billionaire whose passion for
clockwork automata approached fetishism. Smith shrugged, showing Jimmy his
upturned palms in a gesture old as pawn shops. He could try, he said, but he
doubted he could get much for it.
When Jimmy had gone, leaving the head, Smith went over it carefully,
discovering certain hallmarks. Eventually he'd been able to trace it
to an unlikely collaboration between two Zurich artisans, an enamel
specialist in Paris, a Dutch jeweler, and a California chip designer. It had
been commissioned, he discovered, by Tessier-Ashpool S.A.
Smith began to make preliminary passes at the Tokyo collector, hinting
that he was on the track of something noteworthy.
And then he had a visitor, a visitor unannounced, one who walked in
through the elaborate maze of Smith's security as though it
didn't exist. A small man, Japanese, enormously polite, who bore all
the marks of a vatgrown ninja assassin. Smith sat very still, staring into
the calm brown eyes of death across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood.
Gently, almost apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his
duty to find and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great beauty,
which had been taken from the house of his master. It had come to his
attention, the ninja said, that Smith might know of the whereabouts of this
object.
Smith told the man that he had no wish to die, and produced the head.
And how much, his visitor asked did you expect to obtain through the sale of
this object? Smith named a figure far lower than the price he'd
intended to set. The ninja produced a credit chip and keyed Smith that
amount out of a numbered Swiss account. And who, the man asked, brought you
this piece? Smith told him. Within days, Smith learned of Jimmy's
death.
"So that was where I came in," the Finn continued. "Smith knew I dealt
a lot with the Memory Lane crowd, and that's where you go for a quiet
go-to that'll never be traced. I hired a cowboy. I was the cut-out, so
I took a percentage. Smith, he was careful. He'd just had a very weird
business experience and he'd come out on top, but it didn't add
up. Who'd paid, out of that Swiss stash? Yakuza? No way. They got a
very rigid code covers situations like that, and they kill the receiver too,
always. Was it spook stuff? Smith didn't think so. Spook biz has a
vibe, you get so you can smell it. Well, I had my cowboy buzz the news
morgues until we found Tessier-Ashpool in litigation. The case wasn't
anything, but we got the law firm. Then he did the lawyer's ice and we
got the family address. Lotta good it did us."
Case raised his eyebrows.
"Freeside," the Finn said. "The spindle. Turns out they own damn near
the whole thing. The interesting stuff was the picture we got when the
cowboy ran a regular go-to on the news morgues and compiled a precis. Family
organization. Corporate structure. Supposedly you can buy into an S.A., but
there hasn't been a share of Tessier-Ashpool traded on the open market
in over a hundred years. On any market, as far as I know. You're
looking at a very quiet, very eccentric first-generation high–orbit
family, run like a corporation. Big money, very shy of media. Lot of
cloning. Orbital law's a lot softer on genetic engineering, right? And
it's hard to keep track of which generation, or combination of
generations, is running the show at a given time."
"How's that?" Molly asked.
"Got their own cryogenic setup. Even under orbital law, you're
legally dead for the duration of a freeze. Looks like they trade off, though
nobody's seen the founding father in about thirty years. Founding
momma, she died in some lab accident. . ."
"So what happened with your fence?"
"Nothing." The Finn frowned. "Dropped it. We had a look at this
fantastic tangle of powers of attorney the T-A's have, and that was
it. Jimmy must've gotten into Straylight, lifted the head, and
Tessier-Ashpool sent their ninja after it. Smith decided to forget about it.
Maybe he was smart." He looked at Molly. "The Villa Straylight. Tip of the
spindle. Strictly private."
"You figure they own that ninja, Finn?" Molly asked.
"Smith thought so."
"Expensive," she said. "Wonder whatever happened to that little ninja,
Finn?"
"Probably got him on ice. Thaw when needed."
"Okay," Case said, "we got Armitage getting his goodies off an AI named
Wintermute. Where's that get us?"
"Nowhere yet," Molly said, "but you got a little side gig now." She
drew a folded scrap of paper from her pocket and handed it to him. He opened
it. Grid coordinates and entry codes.
"Who's this?"
"Armitage. Some data base of his. Bought it from the Moderns. Separate
deal. Where is it?"
"London," Case said.
"Crack it." She laughed. "Earn your keep for a change."
Case waited for a trans-BAMA local on the crowded platform. Molly had
gone back to the loft hours ago, the Flatline's construct in her green
bag, and Case had been drinking steadily ever since.
It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct, a hardwired
ROM cassette replicating a dead man's skills, obsessions, kneejerk
responses. . . The local came booming in along the black induction strip,
fine grit sifting from cracks in the tunnel's ceiling. Case shuffled
into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of
predatory looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young
office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet
pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs licked their perfect
lips nervously and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered
metallic lids. The girls looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying
gracefully and unconsciously with the movement of the train, their high
heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car's floor.
Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train
reached Case's station.
He stepped out and caught sight of a white holographic cigar suspended
against the wall of the station, FREESIDE pulsing beneath it in contorted
capitals that mimicked printed Japanese. He walked through the crowd and
stood beneath it, studying the thing. WHY WAIT? pulsed the sign. A blunt
white spindle, flanged and studded with grids and radiators, docks, domes.
He'd seen the ad, or others like it, thousands of times. It had never
appealed to him. With his deck, he could reach the Freeside banks as easily
as he could reach Atlanta. Travel was a meat thing. But now he noticed the
little sigil, the size of a small coin, woven into the lower left corner of
the ad's fabric of light: T-A.
He walked back to the loft, lost in memories of the Flatline.
He'd spent most of his nineteenth summer in the Gentleman Loser,
nursing expensive beers and watching the cowboys. He'd never touched a
deck, then, but he knew what he wanted. There were at least twenty other
hopefuls ghosting the Loser, that summer, each one bent on working joeboy
for some cowboy. No other way to learn.
They'd all heard of Pauley, the redneck jockey from the
'Lanta fringes, who'd survived braindeath behind black ice. The
grapevine – slender, street level, and the only one going – had
little to say about Pauley, other than that he'd done the impossible.
"It was big," another would-be told Case, for the price of a beer, "but who
knows what? I hear maybe a Brazilian payroll net. Anyway, the man was dead,
flat down braindeath." Case stared across the crowded bar at a thickset man
in shirtsleeves, something leaden about the shade of his skin.
"Boy," the Flatline would tell him, months later in Miami, "I'm
like them huge fuckin' lizards, you know? Had themself two goddam
brains, one in the head an' one by the tailbone, kept the hind legs
movin'. Hit that black stuff and ol' tailbrain jus' kept
right on keepin' on."
The cowboy elite in the Loser shunned Pauley out of some strange group
anxiety, almost a superstition. McCoy Pauley, Lazarus of cyberspace. . .
And his heart had done for him in the end. His surplus Russian heart,
implanted in a POW camp during the war. He'd refused to replace the
thing, saying he needed its particular beat to maintain his sense of timing.
Case fingered the slip of paper Molly had given him and made his way up the
stairs.
Molly was snoring on the temperfoam. A transparent cast ran from her
knee to a few millimeters below her crotch, the skin beneath the rigid
micropore mottled with bruises, the black shading into ugly yellow. Eight
derms, each a different size and color, ran in a neat line down her left
wrist. An Akai transdermal unit lay beside her, its fine red leads connected
to input trodes under the cast.
He turned on the tensor beside the Hosaka. The crisp circle of light
fell directly on the Flatline's construct. He slotted some ice,
connected the construct, and jacked in.
It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder.
He coughed. "Dix? McCoy? That you man?" His throat was tight.
"Hey, bro," said a directionless voice.
"It's Case, man. Remember?"
"Miami, joeboy, quick study."
"What's the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix?"
"Nothin'."
"Hang on." He disconnected the construct. The presence was gone. He
reconnected it. "Dix? Who am I?"
"You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?"
"Ca – your buddy. Partner. What's happening, man?"
"Good question."
"Remember being here, a second ago?"
"No."
"Know how a ROM personality matrix works?"
"Sure, bro, it's a firmware construct."
"So I jack it into the bank I'm using, I can give it sequential,
real time memory?"
"Guess so," said the construct.
"Okay, Dix. You are a ROM construct. Got me?"
"If you say so," said the construct. "Who are you?"
"Case."
"Miami," said the voice, "joeboy, quick study."
"Right. And for starts, Dix, you and me, we're gonna sleaze over
to London grid and access a little data. You game for that?"
"You gonna tell me I got a choice, boy?"
"You want you a paradise," the Flatline advised, when Case had
explained his situation. "Check Copenhagen, fringes of the university
section." The voice recited coordinates as he punched.
They found their paradise, a "pirate's paradise," on the jumbled
border of a low-security academic grid. At first glance it resembled the
kind of graffiti student operators sometimes left at the junctions of grid
lines, faint glyphs of colored light that shimmered against the confused
outlines of a dozen arts faculties.
"There," said the Flatline, "the blue one. Make it out? That's an
entry code for Bell Europa. Fresh, too. Bell'll get in here soon and
read the whole damn board, change any codes they find posted. Kids'll
steal the new ones tomorrow."
Case tapped his way into Bell Europa and switched to a standard phone
code. With the Flatline's help, he connected with the London data base
that Molly claimed was Armitage's.
"Here," said the voice, "I'll do it for you." The Flatline began
to chant a series of digits, Case keying them on his deck, trying to catch
the pauses the construct used to indicate timing. It took three tries.
"Big deal," said the Flatline. "No ice at all."
"Scan this shit," Case told the Hosaka. "Sift for owner's
personal history."
The neuroelectronic scrawls of the paradise vanished, replaced by a
simple lozenge of white light. "Contents are primarily video recordings of
postwar military trials," said the distant voice of the Hosaka. "Central
figure is Colonel Willis Corto."
"Show it already," Case said.
A man's face filled the screen. The eyes were Armitage's.
Two hours later, Case fell beside Molly on the slab and let the
temperfoam mold itself against him.
"You find anything?" she asked, her voice fuzzy with sleep and drugs.
"Tell you later," he said, "I'm wrecked." He was hungover and
confused. He lay there, eyes closed, and tried to sort the various parts of
a story about a man called Corto. The Hosaka had sorted a thin store of data
and assembled a precis, but it was full of gaps. Some of the material had
been print records, reeling smoothly down the screen, too quickly, and Case
had had to ask the computer to read them for him. Other segments were audio
recordings of the Screaming Fist hearing.
Willis Corto, Colonel, had plummeted through a blind spot in the
Russian defenses over Kirensk. The shuttles had created the hole with pulse
bombs, and Corto's team had dropped in in Nightwing microlights, their
wings snapping taut in moonlight, reflected in jags of silver along the
rivers Angara and Podhamennaya, the last light Corto would see for fifteen
months. Case tried to imagine the microlights blossoming out of their launch
capsules, high above a frozen steppe.
"They sure as hell did shaft you, boss," Case said, and Molly stirred
beside him.
The microlights had been unarmed, stripped to compensate for the weight
of a console operator, a prototype deck, and a virus program called Mole IX,
the first true virus in the history of cybernetics. Corto and his team had
been training for the run for three years. They were through the ice, ready
to inject Mole IX, when the emps went off. The Russian pulse guns threw the
jockeys into electronic darkness; the Nightwings suffered systems crash,
flight circuitry wiped clean.
Then the lasers opened up, aiming on infrared, taking out the fragile,
radar-transparent assault planes, and Corto and his dead console man fell
out of a Siberian sky. Fell and kept falling. . .
There were gaps in the story, here, where Case scanned documents
concerning the flight of a commandeered Russian gunship that managed to
reach Finland. To be gutted, as it landed in a spruce grove, by an antique
twenty-millimeter cannon manned by a cadre of reservists on dawn alert.
Screaming Fist had ended for Corto on the outskirts of Helsinki, with
Finnish paramedics sawing him out of the twisted belly of the helicopter.
The war ended nine days later, and Corto was shipped to a military facility
in Utah, blind, legless, and missing most of his jaw. It took eleven months
for the Congressional aide to find him there. He listened to the sound of
tubes draining. In Washington and McLean, the show trials were already
underway. The Pentagon and the CIA were being Balkanized, partially
dismantled, and a Congressional investigation had focused on Screaming Fist.
Ripe for watergating, the aide told Corto.
He'd need eyes, legs, and extensive cosmetic work, the aide said,
but that could be arranged. New plumbing, the man added, squeezing
Corto's shoulder through the sweat-damp sheet.
Corto heard the soft, relentless dripping. He said he preferred to
testify as he was.
No, the aide explained, the trials were being televised. The trials
needed to reach the voter. The aide coughed politely.
Repaired, refurnished, and extensively rehearsed, Corto's
subsequent testimony was detailed, moving, lucid, and largely the invention
of a Congressional cabal with certain vested interests in saving particular
portions of the Pentagon infrastructure. Corto gradually understood that the
testimony he gave was instrumental in saving the careers of three officers
directly responsible for the suppression of reports on the building of the
emp installations at Kirensk.
His role in the trials over, he was unwanted in Washington. In an M
Street restaurant, over asparagus crepes, the aide explained the terminal
dangers involved in talking to the wrong people. Corto crushed the
man's larynx with the rigid fingers of his right hand. The
Congressional aide strangled, his face in an asparagus crepe, and Corto
stepped out into cool Washington September.
The Hosaka rattled through police reports, corporate espionage records,
and news files. Case watched Corto work corporate defectors in Lisbon and
Marrakesh, where he seemed to grow obsessed with the idea of betrayal, to
loathe the scientists and technicians he bought out for his employers.
Drunk, in Singapore, he beat a Russian engineer to death in a hotel and set
fire to his room.
Next he surfaced in Thailand, as overseer of a heroin factory. Then as
enforcer for a California gambling cartel, then as a paid killer in the
ruins of Bonn. He robbed a bank in Wichita. The record grew vague, shadowy,
the gaps longer.
One day, he said, in a taped segment that suggested chemical
interrogation, everything had gone gray.
Translated French medical records explained that a man without
identification had been taken to a Paris mental health unit and diagnosed as
schizophrenic. He became catatonic and was sent to a government institution
on the outskirts of Toulon. He became a subject in an experimental program
that sought to reverse schizophrenia through the application of cybernetic
models. A random selection of patients were provided with microcomputers and
encouraged, with help from students, to program them. He was cured, the only
success in the entire experiment.
The record ended there.
Case turned on the foam and Molly cursed him softly for disturbing her.
The telephone rang. He pulled it into bed. "Yeah?"
"We're going to Istanbul," Armitage said. "Tonight."
"What does the bastard want?" Molly asked.
"Says we're going to Istanbul tonight."
"That's just wonderful."
Armitage was reading off flight numbers and departure times. Molly sat
up and turned on the light.
"What about my gear?" Case asked. "My deck."
"Finn will handle it," said Armitage, and hung up.
Case watched her pack. There were dark circles under her eyes, but even
with the cast on, it was like watching a dance. No wasted motion. His
clothes were a rumpled pile beside his bag.
"You hurting?" he asked.
"I could do with another night at Chin's."
"Your dentist?"
"You betcha. Very discreet. He's got half that rack, full clinic.
Does repairs for samurai." She was zipping her bag.
"You ever been to 'stambul?"
"Couple days, once."
"Never changes," she said. "Bad old town."
"It was like this when we headed for Chiba," Molly said, staring out
the train window at blasted industrial moonscape, red beacons on the horizon
warning aircraft away from a fusion plant. "We were in L.A. He came in and
said Pack, we were booked for Macau. When we got there, I played fantan in
the Lisboa and he crossed over into Zhongshan. Next day I was playing ghost
with you in Night City." She took a silk scarf from the sleeve of her black
jacket and polished the insets. The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke
confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a
canted slab of freeway concrete.
The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case
watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the
rusting shells of refineries.
It was raining in Beyoglu, and the rented Mercedes slid past the
grilled and unlit windows of cautious Greek and Armenian jewelers. The
street was almost empty, only a few dark-coated figures on the sidewalks
turning to stare after the car.
"This was formerly the prosperous European section of Ottoman
Istanbul," purred the Mercedes.
"So it's gone downhill," Case said.
"The Hilton's in Cumhuriyet Caddesi," Molly said. She settled
back against the car's gray ultrasuede.
"How come Armitage flies alone?" Case asked. He had a headache.
"'Cause you get up his nose. You're sure getting up mine."
He wanted to tell her the Corto story, but decided against it.
He'd used a sleep derm, on the plane.
The road in from the airport had been dead straight, like a neat
incision, laying the city open. He'd watched the crazy walls of
patchwork wooden tenements slide by, condos, arcologies, grim housing
projects, more walls of plyboard and corrugated iron.
The Finn, in a new Shinjuku suit, sarariman black, was waiting sourly
in the Hilton lobby, marooned on a velour armchair in a sea of pale blue
carpeting.
"Christ," Molly said. "Rat in a business suit."
They crossed the lobby.
"How much you get paid to come over here, Finn?" She lowered her bag
beside the armchair. "Bet not as much as you get for wearing that suit,
huh?"
The Finn' s upper lips drew back. "Not enough, sweetmeat. " He
handed her a magnetic key with a round yellow tag. "You're registered
already. Honcho's upstairs." He looked around. "This town sucks."
"You get agoraphobic, they take you out from under a dome. Just pretend
it's Brooklyn or something." She twirled the key around a finger. "You
here as valet or what?"
"I gotta check out some guy's implants," the Finn said.
"How about my deck?" Case asked.
The Finn winced. "Observe the protocol. Ask the boss."
Molly's fingers moved in the shadow of her jacket, a flicker of
jive. The Finn watched, then nodded.
"Yeah," she said, "I know who that is." She jerked her head in the
direction of the elevators. "Come on, cowboy." Case followed her with both
bags.
Their room might have been the one in Chiba where he'd first seen
Armitage. He went to the window, in the morning, almost expecting to see
Tokyo Bay. There was another hotel across the street. It was still raining.
A few letter-writers had taken refuge in doorways, their old voiceprinters
wrapped in sheets of clear plastic, evidence that the written word still
enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country. He watched a
dull black Citroen sedan, a primitive hydrogen-cell conversion, as it
disgorged five sullen-looking Turkish officers in rumpled green uniforms.
They entered the hotel across the street.
He glanced back at the bed, at Molly, and her paleness struck him.
She'd left the micropore cast on the bedslab in their loft, beside the
transdermal inducer. Her glasses reflected part of the room's light
fixture.
He had the phone in his hand before it had a chance to ring twice.
"Glad you're up," Armitage said.
"I'm just. Lady's still under. Listen, boss, I think
it's maybe time we have a little talk. I think I work better if I know
a little more about what I'm doing."
Silence on the line. Case bit his lip.
"You know as much as you need to. Maybe more."
"You think so?"
"Get dressed, Case. Get her up. You'll have a caller in about
fifteen minutes. His name is Terzibashjian." The phone bleated softly.
Armitage was gone.
"Wake up, baby," Case said. "Biz."
"I've been awake an hour already." The mirrors turned.
"We got a Jersey Bastion coming up."
"You got an ear for language, Case. Bet you're part Armenian.
That's the eye Armitage has had on Riviera. Help me up."
Terzibashjian proved to be a young man in a gray suit and gold-framed,
mirrored glasses. His white shirt was open at the collar, revealing a mat of
dark hair so dense that Case at first mistook it for some kind of t-shirt.
He arrived with a black Hilton tray arranged with three tiny, fragrant cups
of thick black coffee and three sticky, straw-colored Oriental sweets.
"We must, as you say in Ingiliz, take this one very easy." He seemed to
stare pointedly at Molly, but at last he removed the silver glasses. His
eyes were a dark brown that matched the shade of his very short military-cut
hair. He smiled. "It is better, this way, yes? Else we make the tunel
infinity, mirror into mirror. . . You particularly," he said to her, "must
take care. In Turkey there is disapproval of women who sport such
modifications."
Molly bit one of the pastries in half. "It's my show, Jack," she
said, her mouth full. She chewed, swallowed, and licked her lips. "I know
about you. Stool for the military, right?" Her hand slid lazily into the
front of her jacket and came out with the fletcher. Case hadn't known
she had it.
"Very easy, please," Terzibashjian said, his white china thimble frozen
centimeters from his lips.
She extended the gun. "Maybe you get the explosives, lots of them, or
maybe you get a cancer. One dart, shitface. You won't feel it for
months."
"Please. You call this in Ingiliz making me very tight. . ."
"I call it a bad morning. Now tell us about your man and get your ass
out of here." She put the gun away.
"He is living in Fener, at Kuchuk Gulhane Djaddesi 14. 1 have his tunel
route, nightly to the bazaar. He performs most recently at the Yenishehir
Palas Oteli, a modern place in the style turistik, but it has been arranged
that the police have shown a certain interest in these shows. The Yenishehir
management has grown nervous." He smiled. He smelled of some metallic
aftershave.
"I want to know about the implants," she said, massaging her thigh, "I
want to know exactly what he can do."
Terzibashjian nodded. "Worst is how you say in Ingiliz, the
subliminals." He made the word four careful syllables.
"On our left," said the Mercedes, as it steered through a maze of rainy
streets, "is Kapali Carsi, the grand bazaar."
Beside Case, the Finn made an appreciative noise, but he was looking in
the wrong direction. The right side of the street was lined with miniature
scrapyards. Case saw a gutted locomotive atop rust-stained, broken lengths
of fluted marble. Headless marble statues were stacked like firewood.
"Homesick?" Case asked.
"Place sucks," the Finn said. His black silk tie was starting to
resemble a worn carbon ribbon. There were medallions of kebab gravy and
fried egg on the lapels of the new suit.
"Hey, Jersey," Case said to the Armenian, who sat behind them,
"where'd this guy get his stuff installed?"
"In Chiba City. He has no left lung. The other is boosted, is how you
say it? Anyone might buy these implants, but this one is most talented." The
Mercedes swerved, avoiding a balloon-tired dray stacked with hides. "I have
followed him in the street and seen a dozen cycles fall, near him, in a day.
Find the cyclist in a hospital, the story is always the same. A scorpion
poised beside a brake lever. . ."
" ‘What you see is what you get,' yeah," the Finn said. "I
seen the schematics on the guy's silicon. Very flash. What he
imagines, you see. I figure he could narrow it to a pulse and fry a retina
over easy."
"You have told this to your woman friend?" Terzibashjian leaned forward
between the ultrasuede buckets. "In Turkey, women are still women. This one.
. ."
The Finn snorted. "She'd have you wearing your balls for a bow
tie if you looked at her cross-eyed."
"I do not understand this idiom."
"That's okay," Case said. "Means shut up."
The Armenian sat back, leaving a metallic edge of aftershave. He began
to whisper to a Sanyo transceiver in a strange salad of Greek, French,
Turkish, isolated fragments of English. The transceiver answered in French.
The Mercedes swung smoothly around a corner. "The spice bazaar, sometimes
called the Egyptian bazaar," the car said, "was erected on the site of an
earlier bazaar erected by Sultan Hatice in 1660. This is the city's
central market for spices, software, perfumes, drugs. . ."
"Drugs," Case said, watching the car's wipers cross and recross
the bulletproof Lexan. "What's that you said before, Jersey, about
this Riviera being wired?"
"A mixture of cocaine and meperidine, yes." The Armenian went back to
the conversation he was having with the Sanyo. "Demerol, they used to call
that," said the Finn. "He's a speedball artist. Funny class of people
you're mixing with, Case."
"Never mind," Case said, turning up the collar of his jacket,
"we'll get the poor fucker a new pancreas or something."
Once they entered the bazaar, the Finn brightened noticeably, as though
he were comforted by the crowd density and the sense of enclosure. They
walked with the Armenian along a broad concourse, beneath soot-stained
sheets of plastic and green-painted ironwork out of the age of steam. A
thousand suspended ads writhed and flickered.
"Hey, Christ," the Finn said, taking Case's arm, "looka that." He
pointed. "It's a horse, man. You ever see a horse?"
Case glanced at the embalmed animal and shook his head. It was
displayed on a sort of pedestal, near the entrance to a place that sold
birds and monkeys. The thing's legs had been worn black and hairless
by decades of passing hands. "Saw one in Maryland once," the Finn said, "and
that was a good three years after the pandemic. There's Arabs still
trying to code 'em up from the DNA, but they always croak."
The animal's brown glass eyes seemed to follow them as they
passed. Terzibashjian led them into a cafe near the core of the market, a
low-ceilinged room that looked as though it had been in continuous operation
for centuries. Skinny boys in soiled white coats dodged between the crowded
tables, balancing steel trays with bottles of Turk-Tuborg and tiny glasses
of tea.
Case bought a pack of Yeheyuans from a vendor by the door. The Armenian
was muttering to his Sanyo. "Come," he said, "he is moving. Each night he
rides the tunel to the bazaar, to purchase his mixture from Ali. Your woman
is close. Come."
The alley was an old place, too old, the walls cut from blocks of dark
stone. The pavement was uneven and smelled of a century's dripping
gasoline, absorbed by ancient limestone. "Can't see shit," he
whispered to the Finn. "That's okay for sweetmeat," the Finn said.
"Quiet," said Terzibashjian, too loudly.
Wood grated on stone or concrete. Ten meters down the alley, a wedge of
yellow light fell across wet cobbles, widened. A figure stepped out and the
door grated shut again, leaving the narrow place in darkness. Case shivered.
"Now," Terzibashjian said, and a brilliant beam of white light,
directed from the rooftop of the building opposite the market, pinned the
slender figure beside the ancient wooden door in a perfect circle. Bright
eyes darted left, right, and the man crumpled. Case thought someone had shot
him; he lay face down, blond hair pale against the old stone, his limp hands
white and pathetic.
The floodlight never wavered.
The back of the fallen man's jacket heaved and burst, blood
splashing the wall and doorway. A pair of impossibly long, rope-tendoned
arms flexed grayish-pink in the glare. The thing seemed to pull itself up
out of the pavement, through the inert, bloody ruin that had been Riviera.
It was two meters tall, stood on two legs, and seemed to be headless. Then
it swung slowly to face them, and Case saw that it had a head, but no neck.
It was eyeless, the skin gleaming a wet intestinal pink. The mouth, if it
was a mouth, was circular, conical, shallow, and lined with a seething
growth of hairs or bristles, glittering like black chrome. It kicked the
rags of clothing and flesh aside and took a step, the mouth seeming to scan
for them as it moved.
Terzibashjian said something in Greek or Turkish and rushed the thing,
his arms spread like a man attempting to dive through a window. He went
through it. Into the muzzle-flash of a pistol from the dark beyond the
circle of light. Fragments of rock whizzed past Case's head; the Finn
jerked him down into a crouch.
The light from the rooftop vanished, leaving him with mismatched
afterimages of muzzle-flash, monster, and white beam. His ears rang.
Then the light returned, bobbing now, searching the shadows.
Terzibashjian was leaning against a steel door, his face very white in the
glare. He held his left wrist and watched blood drip from a wound in his
left hand. The blond man, whole again, unbloodied, lay at his feet.
Molly stepped out of the shadows, all in black, with her fletcher in
her hand.
"Use the radio," the Armenian said, through gritted teeth. "Call in
Mahmut. We must get him out of here. This is not a good place."
"Little prick nearly made it," the Finn said, his knees cracking loudly
as he stood up, brushing ineffectually at the legs of his trousers. "You
were watching the horror-show, right? Not the hamburger that got tossed out
of sight. Real cute. Well, help 'em get his ass outa here. I gotta
scan all that gear before he wakes up, make sure Armitage is getting his
money's worth."
Molly bent and picked something up. A pistol. "A Nambu," she said.
"Nice gun."
Terzibashjian made a whining sound. Case saw that most of his middle
finger was missing.
With the city drenched in predawn blue, she told the Mercedes to take
them to Topkapi . The Finn and an enormous Turk named Mahmut had taken
Riviera, still unconscious, from the alley. Minutes later, a dusty Citroen
had arrived for the Armenian who seemed on the verge of fainting.
"You're an asshole," Molly told the man, opening the car door for
him. "You shoulda hung back. I had him in my sights as soon as he stepped
out." Terzibashjian glared at her. "So we're through with you anyway."
She shoved him in and slammed the door. "Run into you again and I'll
kill you," she said to the white face behind the tinted window. The Citroen
ground away down the alley and swung clumsily into the street.
Now the Mercedes whispered through Istanbul as the city woke. They
passed the Beyoglu tunel terminal and sped past mazes of deserted back
streets, run-down apartment houses that reminded Case vaguely of Paris.
"What is this thing?" he asked Molly, as the Mercedes parked itself on
the fringes of the gardens that surround the Seraglio. He stared dully at
the baroque conglomeration of styles that was Topkapi.
"It was sort of a private whorehouse for the King," she said, getting
out stretching. "Kept a lotta women there. Now it's a museum. Kinda
like Finn's shop, all this stuff just jumbled in there big diamonds,
swords, the left hand of John the Baptist. . ."
"Like in a support vat?"
"Nah. Dead. Got it inside this brass hand thing, little hatch on the
side so the Christians could kiss it for luck. Got it off the Christians
about a million years ago, and they never dust the goddam thing,
'cause it's an infidel relic."
Black iron deer rusted in the gardens of the Seraglio. Case walked
beside her, watching the toes of her boots crunch unkept grass made stiff by
an early frost. They walked beside a path of cold octagonal flagstones.
Winter was waiting, somewhere in the Balkans.
"That Terzi, he's grade-A scum," she said. "He's the secret
police. Torturer. Real easy to buy out, too, with the kind of money Armitage
was offering." In the wet trees around them, birds began to sing.
"I did that job for you," Case said, "the one in London. I got
something, but I don't know what it means." He told her the Corto
story.
"Well, I knew there wasn't anybody name of Armitage in that
Screaming Fist. Looked it up." She stroked the rusted flank of an iron doe.
"You figure the little computer pulled him out of it? In that French
hospital?"
"I figure Wintermute," Case said.
She nodded.
"Thing is," he said, "do you think he knows he was Corto, before? I
mean, he wasn't anybody in particular, by the time he hit the ward, so
maybe Wintermute just. . ."
"Yeah. Built him up from go. Yeah. . ." She turned and they walked on.
"It figures. You know, the guy doesn't have any life going, in
private. Not as far as I can tell. You see a guy like that, you figure
there's something he does when he's alone. But not Armitage.
Sits and stares at the wall, man. Then something clicks and he goes into
high gear and wheels for Wintermute."
"So why's he got that stash in London? Nostalgia?"
"Maybe he doesn't know about it," she said. "Maybe it's
just in his name, right?"
"I don't get it," Case said.
"Just thinking out loud. . . How smart's an Al, Case?"
"Depends. Some aren't much smarter than dogs. Pets. Cost a
fortune anyway. The real smart ones are as smart as the Turing heat is
willing to let 'em get."
"Look, you're a cowboy. How come you aren't just flat-out
fascinated with those things?"
"Well," he said, "for starts, they're rare. Most of them are
military, the bright ones, and we can't crack the ice. That's
where ice all comes from, you know? And then there's the Turing cops,
and that's bad heat." He looked at her. "I dunno, it just isn't
part of the trip."
"Jockeys all the same," she said. "No imagination."
They came to a broad rectangular pond where carp nuzzled the stems of
some white aquatic flower. She kicked a loose pebble in and watched the
ripples spread.
"That's Wintermute," she said. "This deal's real big, looks
to me. We're out where the little waves are too broad, we can't
see the rock that hit the center. We know something's there, but not
why. I wanna know why. I want you to go and talk to Wintermute."
"I couldn't get near it," he said. "You're dreaming."
"Try."
"Can't be done."
"Ask the Flatline."
"What do we want out of that Riviera?" he asked, hoping to change the
subject.
She spat into the pond. "God knows. I'd as soon kill him as look
at him. I saw his profile. He's a kind of compulsive Judas.
Can't get off sexually unless he knows he's betraying the object
of desire. That's what the file says. And they have to love him first.
Maybe he loves them, too. That's why it was easy for Terzi to set him
up for us, because he's been here three years, shopping politicals to
the secret police. Probably Terzi let him watch, when the cattle prods came
out. He's done eighteen in three years. All women age twenty to
twenty-five. It kept Terzi in dissidents." She thrust her hands into her
jacket pockets. "Because if he found one he really wanted, he'd make
sure she turned political. He's got a personality like a
Modern's suit. The profile said it was a very rare type, estimated one
in a couple of million. Which anyway says something good about human nature,
I guess." She stared at the white flowers and the sluggish fish, her face
sour. "I think I'm going to have to buy myself some special insurance
on that Peter." Then she turned and smiled, and it was very cold.
"What's that mean?"
"Never mind. Let's go back to Beyoglu and find something like
breakfast. I gotta busy night again, tonight. Gotta collect his stuff from
that apartment in Fener, gotta go back to the bazaar and buy him some drugs.
. ."
"Buy him some drugs? How's he rate?"
She laughed. "He's not dying on the wire, sweetheart. And it
looks like he can't work without that special taste. I like you better
now, anyway, you aren't so goddam skinny." She smiled. "So I'll
go to Ali the dealer and stock up. You betcha."
Armitage was waiting in their room at the Hilton.
"Time to pack," he said, and Case tried to find the man called Corto
behind the pale blue eyes and the tanned mask. He thought of Wage, back in
Chiba. Operators above a certain level tended to submerge their
personalities, he knew. But Wage had had vices, lovers. Even, it had been
rumored, children. The blankness he found in Armitage was something else.
"Where to now?" he asked, walking past the man to stare down into the
street. "What kind of climate?"
"They don't have climate, just weather," Armitage said. "Here.
Read the brochure." He put something on the coffee table and stood.
"Did Riviera check out okay? Where's the Finn?"
"Riviera's fine. The Finn is on his way home." Armitage smiled, a
smile that meant as much as the twitch of some insect's antenna. His
gold bracelet clinked as he reached out to prod Case in the chest.
"Don't get too smart. Those little sacs are starting to show wear, but
you don't know how much."
Case kept his face very still and forced himself to nod.
When Armitage was gone, he picked up one of the brochures. It was
expensively printed, in French, English, and Turkish.
FREESIDE – WHY WAIT?
The four of them were booked on a THY flight out of Yesilkoy airport.
Transfer at Paris to the JAL shuttle. Case sat in the lobby of the Istanbul
Hilton and watched Riviera browse bogus Byzantine fragments in the
glass-walled gift-shop. Armitage, his trenchcoat draped over his shoulders
like a cape, stood in the shop's entrance.
Riviera was slender, blond, soft-voiced, his English accentless and
fluid. Molly said he was thirty, but it would have been difficult to guess
his age. She also said he was legally stateless and traveled under a forged
Dutch passport. He was a product of the rubble rings that fringe the
radioactive core of old Bonn.
Three smiling Japanese tourists bustled into the shop, nodding politely
to Armitage. Armitage crossed the floor of the shop too quickly, too
obviously, to stand beside Riviera. Riviera turned and smiled. He was very
beautiful; Case assumed the features were the work of a Chiba surgeon. A
subtle job, nothing like Armitage's blandly handsome blend of pop
faces. The man's forehead was high and smooth, gray eyes calm and
distant. His nose, which might have been too nicely sculpted, seemed to have
been broken and clumsily reset. The suggestion of brutality offset the
delicacy of his jaw and the quickness of his smile. His teeth were small,
even, and very white. Case watched the white hands play over the imitation
fragments of sculpture.
Riviera didn't act like a man who'd been attacked the night
before, drugged with a toxin-flechette, abducted, subjected to the
Finn's examination, and pressured by Armitage into joining their team.
Case checked his watch. Molly was due back from her drug run. He looked
up at Riviera again. "I bet you're stoned right now, asshole," he said
to the Hilton lobby. A graying Italian matron in a white leather tuxedo
jacket lowered her Porsche glasses to stare at him. He smiled broadly,
stood, and shouldered his bag. He needed cigarettes for the flight. He
wondered if there was a smoking section on the JAL shuttle. "See ya lady,"
he said to the woman, who promptly slid the sunglasses back up her nose and
turned away.
There were cigarettes in the gift shop, but he didn't relish
talking with Armitage or Riviera. He left the lobby and located a vending
console in a narrow alcove, at the end of a rank of pay phones.
He fumbled through a pocketful of lirasi, slotting the small dull alloy
coins one after another, vaguely amused by the anachronism of the process.
The phone nearest him rang.
Automatically, he picked it up.
"Yeah?"
Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some orbital
microsofts he purchased were art history programs and tables of gallery
sales. With half a dozen chips in his new socket, Smith's knowledge of
the art business was formidable, at least by the standards of his
colleagues. But Smith had come to the Finn with a request for help, a
fraternal request, one businessman to another. He wanted a go-to on the
Tessier-Ashpool clan, he said, and it had to be executed in a way that would
guarantee the impossibility of the subject ever tracing the inquiry to its
source. It might be possible, the Finn had opined, but an explanation was
definitely required. "It smelled," the Finn said to Case, "smelled of money.
And Smith was being very careful. Almost too careful."
Smith, it developed, had had a supplier known as Jimmy. Jimmy was a
burglar and other things as well, and just back from a year in high orbit,
having carried certain things back down the gravity well. The most unusual
thing Jimmy had managed to score on his swing through the archipelago was a
head, an intricately worked bust, cloisonne over platinum, studded with
seedpearls and lapis. Smith, sighing, had put down his pocket microscope and
advised Jimmy to melt the thing down. It was contemporary, not an antique,
and had no value to the collector. Jimmy laughed. The thing was a computer
terminal, he said. It could talk. And not in a synth-voice, but with a
beautiful arrangement of gears and miniature organ pipes. It was a baroque
thing for anyone to have constructed, a perverse thing, because synth-voice
chips cost next to nothing. It was a curiosity. Smith jacked the head into
his computer and listened as the melodious, inhuman voice piped the figures
of last year's tax return.
Smith's clientele included a Tokyo billionaire whose passion for
clockwork automata approached fetishism. Smith shrugged, showing Jimmy his
upturned palms in a gesture old as pawn shops. He could try, he said, but he
doubted he could get much for it.
When Jimmy had gone, leaving the head, Smith went over it carefully,
discovering certain hallmarks. Eventually he'd been able to trace it
to an unlikely collaboration between two Zurich artisans, an enamel
specialist in Paris, a Dutch jeweler, and a California chip designer. It had
been commissioned, he discovered, by Tessier-Ashpool S.A.
Smith began to make preliminary passes at the Tokyo collector, hinting
that he was on the track of something noteworthy.
And then he had a visitor, a visitor unannounced, one who walked in
through the elaborate maze of Smith's security as though it
didn't exist. A small man, Japanese, enormously polite, who bore all
the marks of a vatgrown ninja assassin. Smith sat very still, staring into
the calm brown eyes of death across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood.
Gently, almost apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his
duty to find and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great beauty,
which had been taken from the house of his master. It had come to his
attention, the ninja said, that Smith might know of the whereabouts of this
object.
Smith told the man that he had no wish to die, and produced the head.
And how much, his visitor asked did you expect to obtain through the sale of
this object? Smith named a figure far lower than the price he'd
intended to set. The ninja produced a credit chip and keyed Smith that
amount out of a numbered Swiss account. And who, the man asked, brought you
this piece? Smith told him. Within days, Smith learned of Jimmy's
death.
"So that was where I came in," the Finn continued. "Smith knew I dealt
a lot with the Memory Lane crowd, and that's where you go for a quiet
go-to that'll never be traced. I hired a cowboy. I was the cut-out, so
I took a percentage. Smith, he was careful. He'd just had a very weird
business experience and he'd come out on top, but it didn't add
up. Who'd paid, out of that Swiss stash? Yakuza? No way. They got a
very rigid code covers situations like that, and they kill the receiver too,
always. Was it spook stuff? Smith didn't think so. Spook biz has a
vibe, you get so you can smell it. Well, I had my cowboy buzz the news
morgues until we found Tessier-Ashpool in litigation. The case wasn't
anything, but we got the law firm. Then he did the lawyer's ice and we
got the family address. Lotta good it did us."
Case raised his eyebrows.
"Freeside," the Finn said. "The spindle. Turns out they own damn near
the whole thing. The interesting stuff was the picture we got when the
cowboy ran a regular go-to on the news morgues and compiled a precis. Family
organization. Corporate structure. Supposedly you can buy into an S.A., but
there hasn't been a share of Tessier-Ashpool traded on the open market
in over a hundred years. On any market, as far as I know. You're
looking at a very quiet, very eccentric first-generation high–orbit
family, run like a corporation. Big money, very shy of media. Lot of
cloning. Orbital law's a lot softer on genetic engineering, right? And
it's hard to keep track of which generation, or combination of
generations, is running the show at a given time."
"How's that?" Molly asked.
"Got their own cryogenic setup. Even under orbital law, you're
legally dead for the duration of a freeze. Looks like they trade off, though
nobody's seen the founding father in about thirty years. Founding
momma, she died in some lab accident. . ."
"So what happened with your fence?"
"Nothing." The Finn frowned. "Dropped it. We had a look at this
fantastic tangle of powers of attorney the T-A's have, and that was
it. Jimmy must've gotten into Straylight, lifted the head, and
Tessier-Ashpool sent their ninja after it. Smith decided to forget about it.
Maybe he was smart." He looked at Molly. "The Villa Straylight. Tip of the
spindle. Strictly private."
"You figure they own that ninja, Finn?" Molly asked.
"Smith thought so."
"Expensive," she said. "Wonder whatever happened to that little ninja,
Finn?"
"Probably got him on ice. Thaw when needed."
"Okay," Case said, "we got Armitage getting his goodies off an AI named
Wintermute. Where's that get us?"
"Nowhere yet," Molly said, "but you got a little side gig now." She
drew a folded scrap of paper from her pocket and handed it to him. He opened
it. Grid coordinates and entry codes.
"Who's this?"
"Armitage. Some data base of his. Bought it from the Moderns. Separate
deal. Where is it?"
"London," Case said.
"Crack it." She laughed. "Earn your keep for a change."
Case waited for a trans-BAMA local on the crowded platform. Molly had
gone back to the loft hours ago, the Flatline's construct in her green
bag, and Case had been drinking steadily ever since.
It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct, a hardwired
ROM cassette replicating a dead man's skills, obsessions, kneejerk
responses. . . The local came booming in along the black induction strip,
fine grit sifting from cracks in the tunnel's ceiling. Case shuffled
into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of
predatory looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young
office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet
pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs licked their perfect
lips nervously and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered
metallic lids. The girls looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying
gracefully and unconsciously with the movement of the train, their high
heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car's floor.
Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train
reached Case's station.
He stepped out and caught sight of a white holographic cigar suspended
against the wall of the station, FREESIDE pulsing beneath it in contorted
capitals that mimicked printed Japanese. He walked through the crowd and
stood beneath it, studying the thing. WHY WAIT? pulsed the sign. A blunt
white spindle, flanged and studded with grids and radiators, docks, domes.
He'd seen the ad, or others like it, thousands of times. It had never
appealed to him. With his deck, he could reach the Freeside banks as easily
as he could reach Atlanta. Travel was a meat thing. But now he noticed the
little sigil, the size of a small coin, woven into the lower left corner of
the ad's fabric of light: T-A.
He walked back to the loft, lost in memories of the Flatline.
He'd spent most of his nineteenth summer in the Gentleman Loser,
nursing expensive beers and watching the cowboys. He'd never touched a
deck, then, but he knew what he wanted. There were at least twenty other
hopefuls ghosting the Loser, that summer, each one bent on working joeboy
for some cowboy. No other way to learn.
They'd all heard of Pauley, the redneck jockey from the
'Lanta fringes, who'd survived braindeath behind black ice. The
grapevine – slender, street level, and the only one going – had
little to say about Pauley, other than that he'd done the impossible.
"It was big," another would-be told Case, for the price of a beer, "but who
knows what? I hear maybe a Brazilian payroll net. Anyway, the man was dead,
flat down braindeath." Case stared across the crowded bar at a thickset man
in shirtsleeves, something leaden about the shade of his skin.
"Boy," the Flatline would tell him, months later in Miami, "I'm
like them huge fuckin' lizards, you know? Had themself two goddam
brains, one in the head an' one by the tailbone, kept the hind legs
movin'. Hit that black stuff and ol' tailbrain jus' kept
right on keepin' on."
The cowboy elite in the Loser shunned Pauley out of some strange group
anxiety, almost a superstition. McCoy Pauley, Lazarus of cyberspace. . .
And his heart had done for him in the end. His surplus Russian heart,
implanted in a POW camp during the war. He'd refused to replace the
thing, saying he needed its particular beat to maintain his sense of timing.
Case fingered the slip of paper Molly had given him and made his way up the
stairs.
Molly was snoring on the temperfoam. A transparent cast ran from her
knee to a few millimeters below her crotch, the skin beneath the rigid
micropore mottled with bruises, the black shading into ugly yellow. Eight
derms, each a different size and color, ran in a neat line down her left
wrist. An Akai transdermal unit lay beside her, its fine red leads connected
to input trodes under the cast.
He turned on the tensor beside the Hosaka. The crisp circle of light
fell directly on the Flatline's construct. He slotted some ice,
connected the construct, and jacked in.
It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder.
He coughed. "Dix? McCoy? That you man?" His throat was tight.
"Hey, bro," said a directionless voice.
"It's Case, man. Remember?"
"Miami, joeboy, quick study."
"What's the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix?"
"Nothin'."
"Hang on." He disconnected the construct. The presence was gone. He
reconnected it. "Dix? Who am I?"
"You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?"
"Ca – your buddy. Partner. What's happening, man?"
"Good question."
"Remember being here, a second ago?"
"No."
"Know how a ROM personality matrix works?"
"Sure, bro, it's a firmware construct."
"So I jack it into the bank I'm using, I can give it sequential,
real time memory?"
"Guess so," said the construct.
"Okay, Dix. You are a ROM construct. Got me?"
"If you say so," said the construct. "Who are you?"
"Case."
"Miami," said the voice, "joeboy, quick study."
"Right. And for starts, Dix, you and me, we're gonna sleaze over
to London grid and access a little data. You game for that?"
"You gonna tell me I got a choice, boy?"
"You want you a paradise," the Flatline advised, when Case had
explained his situation. "Check Copenhagen, fringes of the university
section." The voice recited coordinates as he punched.
They found their paradise, a "pirate's paradise," on the jumbled
border of a low-security academic grid. At first glance it resembled the
kind of graffiti student operators sometimes left at the junctions of grid
lines, faint glyphs of colored light that shimmered against the confused
outlines of a dozen arts faculties.
"There," said the Flatline, "the blue one. Make it out? That's an
entry code for Bell Europa. Fresh, too. Bell'll get in here soon and
read the whole damn board, change any codes they find posted. Kids'll
steal the new ones tomorrow."
Case tapped his way into Bell Europa and switched to a standard phone
code. With the Flatline's help, he connected with the London data base
that Molly claimed was Armitage's.
"Here," said the voice, "I'll do it for you." The Flatline began
to chant a series of digits, Case keying them on his deck, trying to catch
the pauses the construct used to indicate timing. It took three tries.
"Big deal," said the Flatline. "No ice at all."
"Scan this shit," Case told the Hosaka. "Sift for owner's
personal history."
The neuroelectronic scrawls of the paradise vanished, replaced by a
simple lozenge of white light. "Contents are primarily video recordings of
postwar military trials," said the distant voice of the Hosaka. "Central
figure is Colonel Willis Corto."
"Show it already," Case said.
A man's face filled the screen. The eyes were Armitage's.
Two hours later, Case fell beside Molly on the slab and let the
temperfoam mold itself against him.
"You find anything?" she asked, her voice fuzzy with sleep and drugs.
"Tell you later," he said, "I'm wrecked." He was hungover and
confused. He lay there, eyes closed, and tried to sort the various parts of
a story about a man called Corto. The Hosaka had sorted a thin store of data
and assembled a precis, but it was full of gaps. Some of the material had
been print records, reeling smoothly down the screen, too quickly, and Case
had had to ask the computer to read them for him. Other segments were audio
recordings of the Screaming Fist hearing.
Willis Corto, Colonel, had plummeted through a blind spot in the
Russian defenses over Kirensk. The shuttles had created the hole with pulse
bombs, and Corto's team had dropped in in Nightwing microlights, their
wings snapping taut in moonlight, reflected in jags of silver along the
rivers Angara and Podhamennaya, the last light Corto would see for fifteen
months. Case tried to imagine the microlights blossoming out of their launch
capsules, high above a frozen steppe.
"They sure as hell did shaft you, boss," Case said, and Molly stirred
beside him.
The microlights had been unarmed, stripped to compensate for the weight
of a console operator, a prototype deck, and a virus program called Mole IX,
the first true virus in the history of cybernetics. Corto and his team had
been training for the run for three years. They were through the ice, ready
to inject Mole IX, when the emps went off. The Russian pulse guns threw the
jockeys into electronic darkness; the Nightwings suffered systems crash,
flight circuitry wiped clean.
Then the lasers opened up, aiming on infrared, taking out the fragile,
radar-transparent assault planes, and Corto and his dead console man fell
out of a Siberian sky. Fell and kept falling. . .
There were gaps in the story, here, where Case scanned documents
concerning the flight of a commandeered Russian gunship that managed to
reach Finland. To be gutted, as it landed in a spruce grove, by an antique
twenty-millimeter cannon manned by a cadre of reservists on dawn alert.
Screaming Fist had ended for Corto on the outskirts of Helsinki, with
Finnish paramedics sawing him out of the twisted belly of the helicopter.
The war ended nine days later, and Corto was shipped to a military facility
in Utah, blind, legless, and missing most of his jaw. It took eleven months
for the Congressional aide to find him there. He listened to the sound of
tubes draining. In Washington and McLean, the show trials were already
underway. The Pentagon and the CIA were being Balkanized, partially
dismantled, and a Congressional investigation had focused on Screaming Fist.
Ripe for watergating, the aide told Corto.
He'd need eyes, legs, and extensive cosmetic work, the aide said,
but that could be arranged. New plumbing, the man added, squeezing
Corto's shoulder through the sweat-damp sheet.
Corto heard the soft, relentless dripping. He said he preferred to
testify as he was.
No, the aide explained, the trials were being televised. The trials
needed to reach the voter. The aide coughed politely.
Repaired, refurnished, and extensively rehearsed, Corto's
subsequent testimony was detailed, moving, lucid, and largely the invention
of a Congressional cabal with certain vested interests in saving particular
portions of the Pentagon infrastructure. Corto gradually understood that the
testimony he gave was instrumental in saving the careers of three officers
directly responsible for the suppression of reports on the building of the
emp installations at Kirensk.
His role in the trials over, he was unwanted in Washington. In an M
Street restaurant, over asparagus crepes, the aide explained the terminal
dangers involved in talking to the wrong people. Corto crushed the
man's larynx with the rigid fingers of his right hand. The
Congressional aide strangled, his face in an asparagus crepe, and Corto
stepped out into cool Washington September.
The Hosaka rattled through police reports, corporate espionage records,
and news files. Case watched Corto work corporate defectors in Lisbon and
Marrakesh, where he seemed to grow obsessed with the idea of betrayal, to
loathe the scientists and technicians he bought out for his employers.
Drunk, in Singapore, he beat a Russian engineer to death in a hotel and set
fire to his room.
Next he surfaced in Thailand, as overseer of a heroin factory. Then as
enforcer for a California gambling cartel, then as a paid killer in the
ruins of Bonn. He robbed a bank in Wichita. The record grew vague, shadowy,
the gaps longer.
One day, he said, in a taped segment that suggested chemical
interrogation, everything had gone gray.
Translated French medical records explained that a man without
identification had been taken to a Paris mental health unit and diagnosed as
schizophrenic. He became catatonic and was sent to a government institution
on the outskirts of Toulon. He became a subject in an experimental program
that sought to reverse schizophrenia through the application of cybernetic
models. A random selection of patients were provided with microcomputers and
encouraged, with help from students, to program them. He was cured, the only
success in the entire experiment.
The record ended there.
Case turned on the foam and Molly cursed him softly for disturbing her.
The telephone rang. He pulled it into bed. "Yeah?"
"We're going to Istanbul," Armitage said. "Tonight."
"What does the bastard want?" Molly asked.
"Says we're going to Istanbul tonight."
"That's just wonderful."
Armitage was reading off flight numbers and departure times. Molly sat
up and turned on the light.
"What about my gear?" Case asked. "My deck."
"Finn will handle it," said Armitage, and hung up.
Case watched her pack. There were dark circles under her eyes, but even
with the cast on, it was like watching a dance. No wasted motion. His
clothes were a rumpled pile beside his bag.
"You hurting?" he asked.
"I could do with another night at Chin's."
"Your dentist?"
"You betcha. Very discreet. He's got half that rack, full clinic.
Does repairs for samurai." She was zipping her bag.
"You ever been to 'stambul?"
"Couple days, once."
"Never changes," she said. "Bad old town."
"It was like this when we headed for Chiba," Molly said, staring out
the train window at blasted industrial moonscape, red beacons on the horizon
warning aircraft away from a fusion plant. "We were in L.A. He came in and
said Pack, we were booked for Macau. When we got there, I played fantan in
the Lisboa and he crossed over into Zhongshan. Next day I was playing ghost
with you in Night City." She took a silk scarf from the sleeve of her black
jacket and polished the insets. The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke
confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a
canted slab of freeway concrete.
The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case
watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the
rusting shells of refineries.
It was raining in Beyoglu, and the rented Mercedes slid past the
grilled and unlit windows of cautious Greek and Armenian jewelers. The
street was almost empty, only a few dark-coated figures on the sidewalks
turning to stare after the car.
"This was formerly the prosperous European section of Ottoman
Istanbul," purred the Mercedes.
"So it's gone downhill," Case said.
"The Hilton's in Cumhuriyet Caddesi," Molly said. She settled
back against the car's gray ultrasuede.
"How come Armitage flies alone?" Case asked. He had a headache.
"'Cause you get up his nose. You're sure getting up mine."
He wanted to tell her the Corto story, but decided against it.
He'd used a sleep derm, on the plane.
The road in from the airport had been dead straight, like a neat
incision, laying the city open. He'd watched the crazy walls of
patchwork wooden tenements slide by, condos, arcologies, grim housing
projects, more walls of plyboard and corrugated iron.
The Finn, in a new Shinjuku suit, sarariman black, was waiting sourly
in the Hilton lobby, marooned on a velour armchair in a sea of pale blue
carpeting.
"Christ," Molly said. "Rat in a business suit."
They crossed the lobby.
"How much you get paid to come over here, Finn?" She lowered her bag
beside the armchair. "Bet not as much as you get for wearing that suit,
huh?"
The Finn' s upper lips drew back. "Not enough, sweetmeat. " He
handed her a magnetic key with a round yellow tag. "You're registered
already. Honcho's upstairs." He looked around. "This town sucks."
"You get agoraphobic, they take you out from under a dome. Just pretend
it's Brooklyn or something." She twirled the key around a finger. "You
here as valet or what?"
"I gotta check out some guy's implants," the Finn said.
"How about my deck?" Case asked.
The Finn winced. "Observe the protocol. Ask the boss."
Molly's fingers moved in the shadow of her jacket, a flicker of
jive. The Finn watched, then nodded.
"Yeah," she said, "I know who that is." She jerked her head in the
direction of the elevators. "Come on, cowboy." Case followed her with both
bags.
Their room might have been the one in Chiba where he'd first seen
Armitage. He went to the window, in the morning, almost expecting to see
Tokyo Bay. There was another hotel across the street. It was still raining.
A few letter-writers had taken refuge in doorways, their old voiceprinters
wrapped in sheets of clear plastic, evidence that the written word still
enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country. He watched a
dull black Citroen sedan, a primitive hydrogen-cell conversion, as it
disgorged five sullen-looking Turkish officers in rumpled green uniforms.
They entered the hotel across the street.
He glanced back at the bed, at Molly, and her paleness struck him.
She'd left the micropore cast on the bedslab in their loft, beside the
transdermal inducer. Her glasses reflected part of the room's light
fixture.
He had the phone in his hand before it had a chance to ring twice.
"Glad you're up," Armitage said.
"I'm just. Lady's still under. Listen, boss, I think
it's maybe time we have a little talk. I think I work better if I know
a little more about what I'm doing."
Silence on the line. Case bit his lip.
"You know as much as you need to. Maybe more."
"You think so?"
"Get dressed, Case. Get her up. You'll have a caller in about
fifteen minutes. His name is Terzibashjian." The phone bleated softly.
Armitage was gone.
"Wake up, baby," Case said. "Biz."
"I've been awake an hour already." The mirrors turned.
"We got a Jersey Bastion coming up."
"You got an ear for language, Case. Bet you're part Armenian.
That's the eye Armitage has had on Riviera. Help me up."
Terzibashjian proved to be a young man in a gray suit and gold-framed,
mirrored glasses. His white shirt was open at the collar, revealing a mat of
dark hair so dense that Case at first mistook it for some kind of t-shirt.
He arrived with a black Hilton tray arranged with three tiny, fragrant cups
of thick black coffee and three sticky, straw-colored Oriental sweets.
"We must, as you say in Ingiliz, take this one very easy." He seemed to
stare pointedly at Molly, but at last he removed the silver glasses. His
eyes were a dark brown that matched the shade of his very short military-cut
hair. He smiled. "It is better, this way, yes? Else we make the tunel
infinity, mirror into mirror. . . You particularly," he said to her, "must
take care. In Turkey there is disapproval of women who sport such
modifications."
Molly bit one of the pastries in half. "It's my show, Jack," she
said, her mouth full. She chewed, swallowed, and licked her lips. "I know
about you. Stool for the military, right?" Her hand slid lazily into the
front of her jacket and came out with the fletcher. Case hadn't known
she had it.
"Very easy, please," Terzibashjian said, his white china thimble frozen
centimeters from his lips.
She extended the gun. "Maybe you get the explosives, lots of them, or
maybe you get a cancer. One dart, shitface. You won't feel it for
months."
"Please. You call this in Ingiliz making me very tight. . ."
"I call it a bad morning. Now tell us about your man and get your ass
out of here." She put the gun away.
"He is living in Fener, at Kuchuk Gulhane Djaddesi 14. 1 have his tunel
route, nightly to the bazaar. He performs most recently at the Yenishehir
Palas Oteli, a modern place in the style turistik, but it has been arranged
that the police have shown a certain interest in these shows. The Yenishehir
management has grown nervous." He smiled. He smelled of some metallic
aftershave.
"I want to know about the implants," she said, massaging her thigh, "I
want to know exactly what he can do."
Terzibashjian nodded. "Worst is how you say in Ingiliz, the
subliminals." He made the word four careful syllables.
"On our left," said the Mercedes, as it steered through a maze of rainy
streets, "is Kapali Carsi, the grand bazaar."
Beside Case, the Finn made an appreciative noise, but he was looking in
the wrong direction. The right side of the street was lined with miniature
scrapyards. Case saw a gutted locomotive atop rust-stained, broken lengths
of fluted marble. Headless marble statues were stacked like firewood.
"Homesick?" Case asked.
"Place sucks," the Finn said. His black silk tie was starting to
resemble a worn carbon ribbon. There were medallions of kebab gravy and
fried egg on the lapels of the new suit.
"Hey, Jersey," Case said to the Armenian, who sat behind them,
"where'd this guy get his stuff installed?"
"In Chiba City. He has no left lung. The other is boosted, is how you
say it? Anyone might buy these implants, but this one is most talented." The
Mercedes swerved, avoiding a balloon-tired dray stacked with hides. "I have
followed him in the street and seen a dozen cycles fall, near him, in a day.
Find the cyclist in a hospital, the story is always the same. A scorpion
poised beside a brake lever. . ."
" ‘What you see is what you get,' yeah," the Finn said. "I
seen the schematics on the guy's silicon. Very flash. What he
imagines, you see. I figure he could narrow it to a pulse and fry a retina
over easy."
"You have told this to your woman friend?" Terzibashjian leaned forward
between the ultrasuede buckets. "In Turkey, women are still women. This one.
. ."
The Finn snorted. "She'd have you wearing your balls for a bow
tie if you looked at her cross-eyed."
"I do not understand this idiom."
"That's okay," Case said. "Means shut up."
The Armenian sat back, leaving a metallic edge of aftershave. He began
to whisper to a Sanyo transceiver in a strange salad of Greek, French,
Turkish, isolated fragments of English. The transceiver answered in French.
The Mercedes swung smoothly around a corner. "The spice bazaar, sometimes
called the Egyptian bazaar," the car said, "was erected on the site of an
earlier bazaar erected by Sultan Hatice in 1660. This is the city's
central market for spices, software, perfumes, drugs. . ."
"Drugs," Case said, watching the car's wipers cross and recross
the bulletproof Lexan. "What's that you said before, Jersey, about
this Riviera being wired?"
"A mixture of cocaine and meperidine, yes." The Armenian went back to
the conversation he was having with the Sanyo. "Demerol, they used to call
that," said the Finn. "He's a speedball artist. Funny class of people
you're mixing with, Case."
"Never mind," Case said, turning up the collar of his jacket,
"we'll get the poor fucker a new pancreas or something."
Once they entered the bazaar, the Finn brightened noticeably, as though
he were comforted by the crowd density and the sense of enclosure. They
walked with the Armenian along a broad concourse, beneath soot-stained
sheets of plastic and green-painted ironwork out of the age of steam. A
thousand suspended ads writhed and flickered.
"Hey, Christ," the Finn said, taking Case's arm, "looka that." He
pointed. "It's a horse, man. You ever see a horse?"
Case glanced at the embalmed animal and shook his head. It was
displayed on a sort of pedestal, near the entrance to a place that sold
birds and monkeys. The thing's legs had been worn black and hairless
by decades of passing hands. "Saw one in Maryland once," the Finn said, "and
that was a good three years after the pandemic. There's Arabs still
trying to code 'em up from the DNA, but they always croak."
The animal's brown glass eyes seemed to follow them as they
passed. Terzibashjian led them into a cafe near the core of the market, a
low-ceilinged room that looked as though it had been in continuous operation
for centuries. Skinny boys in soiled white coats dodged between the crowded
tables, balancing steel trays with bottles of Turk-Tuborg and tiny glasses
of tea.
Case bought a pack of Yeheyuans from a vendor by the door. The Armenian
was muttering to his Sanyo. "Come," he said, "he is moving. Each night he
rides the tunel to the bazaar, to purchase his mixture from Ali. Your woman
is close. Come."
The alley was an old place, too old, the walls cut from blocks of dark
stone. The pavement was uneven and smelled of a century's dripping
gasoline, absorbed by ancient limestone. "Can't see shit," he
whispered to the Finn. "That's okay for sweetmeat," the Finn said.
"Quiet," said Terzibashjian, too loudly.
Wood grated on stone or concrete. Ten meters down the alley, a wedge of
yellow light fell across wet cobbles, widened. A figure stepped out and the
door grated shut again, leaving the narrow place in darkness. Case shivered.
"Now," Terzibashjian said, and a brilliant beam of white light,
directed from the rooftop of the building opposite the market, pinned the
slender figure beside the ancient wooden door in a perfect circle. Bright
eyes darted left, right, and the man crumpled. Case thought someone had shot
him; he lay face down, blond hair pale against the old stone, his limp hands
white and pathetic.
The floodlight never wavered.
The back of the fallen man's jacket heaved and burst, blood
splashing the wall and doorway. A pair of impossibly long, rope-tendoned
arms flexed grayish-pink in the glare. The thing seemed to pull itself up
out of the pavement, through the inert, bloody ruin that had been Riviera.
It was two meters tall, stood on two legs, and seemed to be headless. Then
it swung slowly to face them, and Case saw that it had a head, but no neck.
It was eyeless, the skin gleaming a wet intestinal pink. The mouth, if it
was a mouth, was circular, conical, shallow, and lined with a seething
growth of hairs or bristles, glittering like black chrome. It kicked the
rags of clothing and flesh aside and took a step, the mouth seeming to scan
for them as it moved.
Terzibashjian said something in Greek or Turkish and rushed the thing,
his arms spread like a man attempting to dive through a window. He went
through it. Into the muzzle-flash of a pistol from the dark beyond the
circle of light. Fragments of rock whizzed past Case's head; the Finn
jerked him down into a crouch.
The light from the rooftop vanished, leaving him with mismatched
afterimages of muzzle-flash, monster, and white beam. His ears rang.
Then the light returned, bobbing now, searching the shadows.
Terzibashjian was leaning against a steel door, his face very white in the
glare. He held his left wrist and watched blood drip from a wound in his
left hand. The blond man, whole again, unbloodied, lay at his feet.
Molly stepped out of the shadows, all in black, with her fletcher in
her hand.
"Use the radio," the Armenian said, through gritted teeth. "Call in
Mahmut. We must get him out of here. This is not a good place."
"Little prick nearly made it," the Finn said, his knees cracking loudly
as he stood up, brushing ineffectually at the legs of his trousers. "You
were watching the horror-show, right? Not the hamburger that got tossed out
of sight. Real cute. Well, help 'em get his ass outa here. I gotta
scan all that gear before he wakes up, make sure Armitage is getting his
money's worth."
Molly bent and picked something up. A pistol. "A Nambu," she said.
"Nice gun."
Terzibashjian made a whining sound. Case saw that most of his middle
finger was missing.
With the city drenched in predawn blue, she told the Mercedes to take
them to Topkapi . The Finn and an enormous Turk named Mahmut had taken
Riviera, still unconscious, from the alley. Minutes later, a dusty Citroen
had arrived for the Armenian who seemed on the verge of fainting.
"You're an asshole," Molly told the man, opening the car door for
him. "You shoulda hung back. I had him in my sights as soon as he stepped
out." Terzibashjian glared at her. "So we're through with you anyway."
She shoved him in and slammed the door. "Run into you again and I'll
kill you," she said to the white face behind the tinted window. The Citroen
ground away down the alley and swung clumsily into the street.
Now the Mercedes whispered through Istanbul as the city woke. They
passed the Beyoglu tunel terminal and sped past mazes of deserted back
streets, run-down apartment houses that reminded Case vaguely of Paris.
"What is this thing?" he asked Molly, as the Mercedes parked itself on
the fringes of the gardens that surround the Seraglio. He stared dully at
the baroque conglomeration of styles that was Topkapi.
"It was sort of a private whorehouse for the King," she said, getting
out stretching. "Kept a lotta women there. Now it's a museum. Kinda
like Finn's shop, all this stuff just jumbled in there big diamonds,
swords, the left hand of John the Baptist. . ."
"Like in a support vat?"
"Nah. Dead. Got it inside this brass hand thing, little hatch on the
side so the Christians could kiss it for luck. Got it off the Christians
about a million years ago, and they never dust the goddam thing,
'cause it's an infidel relic."
Black iron deer rusted in the gardens of the Seraglio. Case walked
beside her, watching the toes of her boots crunch unkept grass made stiff by
an early frost. They walked beside a path of cold octagonal flagstones.
Winter was waiting, somewhere in the Balkans.
"That Terzi, he's grade-A scum," she said. "He's the secret
police. Torturer. Real easy to buy out, too, with the kind of money Armitage
was offering." In the wet trees around them, birds began to sing.
"I did that job for you," Case said, "the one in London. I got
something, but I don't know what it means." He told her the Corto
story.
"Well, I knew there wasn't anybody name of Armitage in that
Screaming Fist. Looked it up." She stroked the rusted flank of an iron doe.
"You figure the little computer pulled him out of it? In that French
hospital?"
"I figure Wintermute," Case said.
She nodded.
"Thing is," he said, "do you think he knows he was Corto, before? I
mean, he wasn't anybody in particular, by the time he hit the ward, so
maybe Wintermute just. . ."
"Yeah. Built him up from go. Yeah. . ." She turned and they walked on.
"It figures. You know, the guy doesn't have any life going, in
private. Not as far as I can tell. You see a guy like that, you figure
there's something he does when he's alone. But not Armitage.
Sits and stares at the wall, man. Then something clicks and he goes into
high gear and wheels for Wintermute."
"So why's he got that stash in London? Nostalgia?"
"Maybe he doesn't know about it," she said. "Maybe it's
just in his name, right?"
"I don't get it," Case said.
"Just thinking out loud. . . How smart's an Al, Case?"
"Depends. Some aren't much smarter than dogs. Pets. Cost a
fortune anyway. The real smart ones are as smart as the Turing heat is
willing to let 'em get."
"Look, you're a cowboy. How come you aren't just flat-out
fascinated with those things?"
"Well," he said, "for starts, they're rare. Most of them are
military, the bright ones, and we can't crack the ice. That's
where ice all comes from, you know? And then there's the Turing cops,
and that's bad heat." He looked at her. "I dunno, it just isn't
part of the trip."
"Jockeys all the same," she said. "No imagination."
They came to a broad rectangular pond where carp nuzzled the stems of
some white aquatic flower. She kicked a loose pebble in and watched the
ripples spread.
"That's Wintermute," she said. "This deal's real big, looks
to me. We're out where the little waves are too broad, we can't
see the rock that hit the center. We know something's there, but not
why. I wanna know why. I want you to go and talk to Wintermute."
"I couldn't get near it," he said. "You're dreaming."
"Try."
"Can't be done."
"Ask the Flatline."
"What do we want out of that Riviera?" he asked, hoping to change the
subject.
She spat into the pond. "God knows. I'd as soon kill him as look
at him. I saw his profile. He's a kind of compulsive Judas.
Can't get off sexually unless he knows he's betraying the object
of desire. That's what the file says. And they have to love him first.
Maybe he loves them, too. That's why it was easy for Terzi to set him
up for us, because he's been here three years, shopping politicals to
the secret police. Probably Terzi let him watch, when the cattle prods came
out. He's done eighteen in three years. All women age twenty to
twenty-five. It kept Terzi in dissidents." She thrust her hands into her
jacket pockets. "Because if he found one he really wanted, he'd make
sure she turned political. He's got a personality like a
Modern's suit. The profile said it was a very rare type, estimated one
in a couple of million. Which anyway says something good about human nature,
I guess." She stared at the white flowers and the sluggish fish, her face
sour. "I think I'm going to have to buy myself some special insurance
on that Peter." Then she turned and smiled, and it was very cold.
"What's that mean?"
"Never mind. Let's go back to Beyoglu and find something like
breakfast. I gotta busy night again, tonight. Gotta collect his stuff from
that apartment in Fener, gotta go back to the bazaar and buy him some drugs.
. ."
"Buy him some drugs? How's he rate?"
She laughed. "He's not dying on the wire, sweetheart. And it
looks like he can't work without that special taste. I like you better
now, anyway, you aren't so goddam skinny." She smiled. "So I'll
go to Ali the dealer and stock up. You betcha."
Armitage was waiting in their room at the Hilton.
"Time to pack," he said, and Case tried to find the man called Corto
behind the pale blue eyes and the tanned mask. He thought of Wage, back in
Chiba. Operators above a certain level tended to submerge their
personalities, he knew. But Wage had had vices, lovers. Even, it had been
rumored, children. The blankness he found in Armitage was something else.
"Where to now?" he asked, walking past the man to stare down into the
street. "What kind of climate?"
"They don't have climate, just weather," Armitage said. "Here.
Read the brochure." He put something on the coffee table and stood.
"Did Riviera check out okay? Where's the Finn?"
"Riviera's fine. The Finn is on his way home." Armitage smiled, a
smile that meant as much as the twitch of some insect's antenna. His
gold bracelet clinked as he reached out to prod Case in the chest.
"Don't get too smart. Those little sacs are starting to show wear, but
you don't know how much."
Case kept his face very still and forced himself to nod.
When Armitage was gone, he picked up one of the brochures. It was
expensively printed, in French, English, and Turkish.
FREESIDE – WHY WAIT?
The four of them were booked on a THY flight out of Yesilkoy airport.
Transfer at Paris to the JAL shuttle. Case sat in the lobby of the Istanbul
Hilton and watched Riviera browse bogus Byzantine fragments in the
glass-walled gift-shop. Armitage, his trenchcoat draped over his shoulders
like a cape, stood in the shop's entrance.
Riviera was slender, blond, soft-voiced, his English accentless and
fluid. Molly said he was thirty, but it would have been difficult to guess
his age. She also said he was legally stateless and traveled under a forged
Dutch passport. He was a product of the rubble rings that fringe the
radioactive core of old Bonn.
Three smiling Japanese tourists bustled into the shop, nodding politely
to Armitage. Armitage crossed the floor of the shop too quickly, too
obviously, to stand beside Riviera. Riviera turned and smiled. He was very
beautiful; Case assumed the features were the work of a Chiba surgeon. A
subtle job, nothing like Armitage's blandly handsome blend of pop
faces. The man's forehead was high and smooth, gray eyes calm and
distant. His nose, which might have been too nicely sculpted, seemed to have
been broken and clumsily reset. The suggestion of brutality offset the
delicacy of his jaw and the quickness of his smile. His teeth were small,
even, and very white. Case watched the white hands play over the imitation
fragments of sculpture.
Riviera didn't act like a man who'd been attacked the night
before, drugged with a toxin-flechette, abducted, subjected to the
Finn's examination, and pressured by Armitage into joining their team.
Case checked his watch. Molly was due back from her drug run. He looked
up at Riviera again. "I bet you're stoned right now, asshole," he said
to the Hilton lobby. A graying Italian matron in a white leather tuxedo
jacket lowered her Porsche glasses to stare at him. He smiled broadly,
stood, and shouldered his bag. He needed cigarettes for the flight. He
wondered if there was a smoking section on the JAL shuttle. "See ya lady,"
he said to the woman, who promptly slid the sunglasses back up her nose and
turned away.
There were cigarettes in the gift shop, but he didn't relish
talking with Armitage or Riviera. He left the lobby and located a vending
console in a narrow alcove, at the end of a rank of pay phones.
He fumbled through a pocketful of lirasi, slotting the small dull alloy
coins one after another, vaguely amused by the anachronism of the process.
The phone nearest him rang.
Automatically, he picked it up.
"Yeah?"
Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some orbital