city blues 02 - angel city blues (19 page)

I found Jackal at her usual hangout, Nexus Dreams—a jacker bar on Santa Monica Boulevard that pandered to cyber criminals and techno-fetishists. The interior of the club was painted matte black; the walls, floor, and ceiling sectioned into grids by blue florescent lasers. The chairs and tables were molded from transparent acryliflex, edge-lit in painfully-vivid colors. The overall effect resembled a radically-simplified version of the DataNet, where some of the club’s patrons made their larcenous livings.

A stuttering racket of semi-melodic pulses came hammering out of the overhead speakers. Not slash-rock, but the latest strain of pseudo-music to catch on at street level.

Jackal stood in a back corner, among a huddle of chip-heads. She was still keeping her eyebrows shaved and wearing her hair in that weird bowl cut—bare skin all the way up to the tops of her ears, and a thick black mop above that. She was rail-thin, and her sharp cheekbones stood out in almost skeletal prominence.

She spotted me edging through the crowd toward her, and nodded in my direction. She seemed to recognize me without having to load up any of her auxiliary chips. Apparently, she had decided to move me to her permanent memory for quicker access. That might have been a personal compliment. Or it might just mean that I was high enough on her trouble-scale to merit instant recognition and avoidance.

If it was the latter, I could hardly blame her. Our last bit of business together had fried most of the silicon implants in her brain, and had nearly left her dead. But she didn’t seem to be looking for an exit, so maybe I wasn’t on her instant-avoid list yet.

She gave another nod when I was close enough for conversation without actually yelling. “Mr. Bad News himself… What’s on your agenda tonight, Stalin? Chat? Or biz?”

I kept my voice about two notches below a shout. “Biz.”

Jackal took a final swig from her drink, handed the empty squeeze tube to one of the chip-heads, and started for the door.

I followed.

Her whipcord body moved through the crowd with an ease that seemed almost clairvoyant. She shifted and jinked with the rhythm of the not-quite-music, darting through holes that opened and closed in synchronicity with the jittering beat.

My own passage through the throng was not nearly so effortless. I was about two-thirds of the way to the door when it occurred to me that this would be an excellent place for the Nine-fingers gang to take a crack at me. In the semi-darkness, amid the pounding soundtrack and the crush of bodies, it would be child’s-play to get close enough to do me in. A blade between the ribs, or a laser shot through the back of the skull, and I’d never even see it coming. Goodbye to Grandma Stalin’s favorite grandson.

But I made it to the door with all my fingers and toes intact.

Jackal was waiting for me on the sidewalk. Her sleeveless tee-shirt was photo-active, an animation of a chromed robotic mouse scampering on shiny piston legs through a scrolling labyrinth of cereal boxes and other packaged foodstuffs. Her bare arms were spindly, but with a core of wiry muscle. I could see faint tracings of circuitry beneath her pale skin.

 She turned her head as I came out, and I caught a glimpse of the gold alloy jacks in the back of her shaved skull, the tiny receptacles glimmering with reflected light from the club’s abstract holo-facade. The center jack carried an ordinary-looking microchip with a pulsing blue LED. The other two sockets were empty.

She unselfconsciously scratched her left breast. “So… What kind of weird shit have you got up your sleeve this time?”

I pulled out my phone, fumbled with the file browser for a couple of seconds, and called up a vid recording. I held the phone’s display so that Jackal could see it. On the screen, Nine-fingers and Arm-twister strolled through the lobby of Leanda Forsyth’s apartment building.

I let the scene play long enough to give Jackal a good look at the two Asian thugs, and then I toggled to a second vid, this one featuring Messenger-boy, as recorded by one of House’s many security cameras.

“I want to know who these assholes are,” I said. “I’ve got several minutes of video, showing all three of their faces from several angles. Is there some kind of facial-recognition thing you can do? Search databases or something to find out their identities?”

Jackal reached for the phone and held it closer to her eyes as the vid of Messenger-boy looped and began again. “Maybe…”

She flipped back to the vid of Nine-fingers and Arm-twister, showing an instinctive familiarly with the user interface of my phone. She regarded the pair of goons marching across the apartment building lobby. “These guys look like muscle.”

“They are. Is that a problem?”

Jackal handed me the phone. “Yeah. Hardcore criminal types tend to avoid licensed surgical boutiques. Unless these guys have single-digit IQs, the faces they’re wearing aren’t registered to their real identities. Which means that any database tagged to their facial patterns will only give us whatever bogus IDs they
want
us to have.”

“There’s no way to track them down?”

“That’s a different question,” Jackal said. “Based on these vids, I probably can’t tell you the identities of your three muscle boys. But I may be able to get you periodic pings on their locations.”

“How?”

“Same basic technology. Facial recognition. But instead of trying to backtrack a bunch of phony IDs, I hack the aggregator feed from the government anti-terrorism spooks.”

I motioned for her to continue.

“There are about fifteen-bazillion security cameras in this town,” Jackal said. “Government facilities, corporate warehouses, banks, apartment buildings, LEV depots, public data terminals, cash machines... There’s a surveillance camera attached to everything but the crack of my ass, and the Federal Department of Rectal Investigation will probably sneak one in back there the next time I go in to have my butt cheeks realigned.”

“We can talk about your butt-cam another time,” I said. “What’s this aggregator thing?”

“A lot of those cameras are on the grid,” Jackal said. “
Most
of them. Private locations—people’s houses, and shit like that—are usually exempt. But the rest are legally compelled to give the Feds real-time access to their vid feeds. The government spooks use semi-intelligent aggregators to filter the imagery from all these millions of vid sources, to pick out the faces of known terrorists, major criminals, and other bad actors. If somebody on the government’s shit list walks past a cash machine at three in the morning, it rings the cherries in some federal mainframe, and a response team is rolling about thirty seconds later.”

“How well does it work?”

“In Government Fantasy Land, it’s a smooth and efficient system,” Jackal said. “But in the real world, it doesn’t work worth a damn. It turns out that the actual bad guys aren’t stupid enough to run around wearing faces that are known to the fucking Feds.”

“So, it’s a piece of shit,” I said. “What good is it to us?”

“There’s nothing wrong with the hardware and software,” Jackal said. “The only problem is that the high-profile crooks and crazies tend to change their faces more often than you change your underwear.”

I finally saw what she was getting at. “And my three knuckle-draggers are probably from the shallow end of the pool. Which means that they’re low-profile enough that they don’t
need
to change their faces so often.”

Jackal nodded. “Exactamundo.”

“You can use the aggregator feed to track their movements?”

“Not continually,” she said. “If I try to run a full-time program, the Feds will spot it and shut it down. But I think I can slip in low-priority subroutine that triggers at semi-random intervals. Maybe give you a ping on your phone, every hour or two. Let you know if and where your three shit-birds have been spotted.”

“Sounds good to me. How heavy is this? Are you sure you want to risk hacking the Feds?”

Jackal grinned. “Won’t be the first time. But it
is
dicey, and you
will
be paying accordingly.”

“Name your price,” I said. “I’m on an expense account.”

She reached for my phone again. I handed it over. She pulled out a slender cable, connected one end to my phone, and the other end to one of the jacks in the back of her head. “Before I go snooping through your files, is there anything on here you don’t want me to see?”

I shrugged. “Might be some pictures of me getting romantic with a goat. You know... What-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation kind of stuff.”

“I’ve already got those,” Jackal said. “The goat uploaded them to the web, so pretty much everybody has seen ‘em by now.”

She unplugged my phone and started typing on the screen. “I’m putting my number into your speed dialer. It’s a throwaway, good for a couple of weeks. Try to avoid drunk-dialing me if at all possible.”

Before I could think up a pithy reply, she handed my phone back. She coiled the cable around her fingers, and slipped it back into her pocket.

“I guess we’ve got a deal,” she said. “I’ll get started on my shit-bird tracker, and you tell your client to warm up his bank chip.”

“
Her
bank chip.”

“Whatever,” Jackal said. “As long as the transaction goes through, I don’t care if your client is a three-headed baboon.”

“She’s a goat,” I said. “The one from the pictures.”

Jackal gave me a fake grimace. “That’s one ugly goddamned goat, Stalin. I think I’m gonna have to charge you double.”

CHAPTER 15

A cop car pulled up to the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Olive, just as I was reaching the intersection. Unlike the tactical units we get at my end of town, this one actually looked like a car. It bore the usual LAPD color scheme and markings, but it lacked the armor and external weaponry that I was used to seeing. Still, there’s a certain implied menace when a police car singles you out, even if you aren’t doing anything wrong.

The front passenger door gull-winged open and a cop stepped out onto the sidewalk about five meters in front of me. She wore a thin flak vest, but the rest of her uniform seemed to be ordinary synthetic fabric. No ballistic carbon nano-weave. No visored assault helmet. She looked like a regular police officer, doing ordinary police duty. The stenciled name tag on her vest said, “Warren.”

She stepped directly into my path, and turned to face me head-on, giving me enough room to stop gracefully without walking right into her. The expression on her face was businesslike, but polite. “Are you David Stalin?”

I was tempted to sidestep her, and keep walking, just to see what she’d do. Instead, I came to a stop and nodded. “Yep. You caught me. I confess to everything.”

I may have seen the tiniest flicker of a smile, but it was gone so quickly that I couldn’t be sure.

“Mr. Stalin, can you come with us please?”

“That depends,” I said. “Are you taking me into custody?”

“Not at all, sir,” she said. “It’s a request, not an order. You’re not accused of anything, and you’re perfectly free to refuse.”

Now that was something I wasn’t used to hearing from LAPD.

“If I go, what’s our destination? West Hollywood Headquarters?”

“No, sir. Dome 2. Someone wants to meet with you.”

“Someone?”

Officer Warren may have actually blushed. It was difficult to tell under the amber glow of the streetlights.

“We don’t know
who
, sir. I assume it’s a senior member of the department, but we haven’t been briefed on the details. All I know is that there’s a city-wide call out to all ground units. Our instructions are to locate you, and transport you to an address in Dome 2. Assuming that you’re willing, of course.”

“Of course. And what if I’m
not
willing?”

“Our instructions are to issue the invitation. If you decline, we notify HQ, and they cancel the alert. I guess they go back and tell the VIP that you’re not interested.”

“You’ve got my curiosity up, now,” I said.

This time, I definitely got a smile.

“Ours too,” said Officer Warren. “I’ve been on prowler patrol for three years, and I’ve never heard of a squad car being pressed into taxi duty.”

“Must be a heavyweight VIP,” I said.

Warren nodded. “That’s what my partner and I are figuring. But if you don’t take advantage of our complimentary LAPD Limo Service, we’re never going to find out.”

She opened the rear door with a flourish, as though the cop car was actually a limousine. There were sensors imbedded in the doorframe.

“I’m carrying a sidearm,” I said. “I’m licensed for concealed carry. I just don’t want you to be surprised when I climb into the back seat and alarms start going off.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” Warren said. “I won’t ask you to surrender your weapon, but try not to shoot anything while you’re in the car.”

“Fair enough,” I said. I stepped past her and slid into the rear seat. True to my prediction, red tattletales began flashing on the driver’s control console, and a metallic buzzer gronked repeatedly.

The driver silenced the alarm, but the red warning lights continued to wink furiously. Apparently there was no way to disable the visual alert, so the car’s computer persisted in reminding the cop at the wheel that there was a large caliber handgun in the rear passenger area of his vehicle.