city blues 02 - angel city blues (24 page)

There were no empty chairs in the waiting area for Gate 52, but I wasn’t planning to sit there anyway. I walked past the next two waiting areas, to the seating for Gate 55.

I picked an end seat that commanded a good view of the concourse. To my left sat two olive-skinned boys wearing data-shades. Both pairs of shades were linked to a single red plastic module the size of a deck of cards. They seemed to be playing a game.

Arm-twister’s only line of approach was down the length of the concourse. Dancer and I should both see him coming.

He wouldn’t be able to get a gun past security, so at least I didn’t have to worry about that. But he might be carrying any of the wide array of lethal objects that won’t set off the sensors: scan-transparent composite knives, or neat coils of that carbon-graphite wire that’s only two or three molecules thick, and converts easily into a garrote that will cut through a human neck as cleanly as a laser.

Knives and garrotes didn’t really worry me. He’d have to get close to use them. I didn’t intend to let that happen.

We watched the concourse. About fifteen minutes passed, with no sign of Arm-twister, or anyone who looked like an accomplice. Just a scattering of disinterested passengers.

The boys kept up a quiet but continuous chatter in what may have been Portuguese, their low babble punctuated by occasional bursts of subdued laughter. Their laughs were synchronized, as were their yelps of surprise, and grunts of concern—all driven by the software packaged in their little red cartridge.

My boarding pass bleeped. I looked at the readout; the countdown flashed at 00:00. I stood up, searching the terminal for Arm-twister. He was nowhere in sight.

I started toward Gate 52, trying to scrutinize every person whose paths even remotely intersected mine.

Dancer spotted him first, standing near the gate, milling around with the passengers who hadn’t boarded yet. He kept glancing at his watch and then scanning the terminal on tiptoes, as though searching for a late friend who might be in danger of missing the launch.

I sheared off to the left and headed back up the concourse, away from the boarding area.

“He’s following you,” Dancer said. “Not running, but covering ground pretty fast.”

The men’s room came up on my left. Random instinct led me through the open doorway and into a short privacy vestibule that blocked the restroom from public view. A tall African man in a rumpled business suit walked past me on his way out.

I went inside.

“This is no time for a piss break,” Dancer said.

I ignored her, scanning the room quickly. White tile, bio-florescent light-bars, stainless steel counters, mirrors, porcelain fixtures. The doors to the stalls were all ajar; there were apparently no other passengers. There were no other doors.

I set my travel bag on the counter. It was an unnecessary encumbrance, and I hadn’t packed anything that was likely to be useful in a fight.

“You planning to take him down?” Dancer asked.

“Please be quiet,” I said. “Unless you have a good idea, I need to concentrate.”

I started checking the stalls, searching for anything that might conceivably be used as a weapon. Maybe I’d get lucky and find something that someone had left behind by accident. Like a combat laser, or a neutron bomb.

First stall: nothing. Second stall: nothing again. I moved to the third stall. My right foot hit a slippery patch on the floor and skidded across the tile. Suddenly, my feet were going out from under me. I grabbed the stainless steel door frame of the stall and managed to catch myself before I hit the floor.

I pulled myself back to my feet, careful to avoid the slippery area. I looked at the floor; my foot had left a comma-shaped smear of transparent liquid on the tile, much thicker than water, gooey even. What was that stuff? I lifted my right foot and examined the sole of my shoe: another swatch of the clear goo, flecked around the edges with foam. It was that liquid hand soap from the sink dispensers.

I rushed to the counter, and began trying to remove the plastic reservoir from the nearest soap dispenser. I tried pulling it, then unscrewing it, but the damn thing wouldn’t budge. Time, goddamn it! I didn’t have time for this.

I was a heartbeat away from trying to rip the entire fixture out of the wall when I found the catch that released the reservoir. I spilled maybe a quarter of the liquid soap down the sink, but the rest got poured on the floor, right where I wanted it—just inside the entrance. The clear liquid was nearly invisible against the tile.

I threw the empty reservoir into one of the stalls and swept the room with my eyes. The soap wasn’t enough. I needed more.

I spotted it in the corner, under the sink counter: a small green spray can.

I heard footsteps in the vestibule.

“Show time!” Dancer whispered.

I bent down, snatched the can out from under the counter, and jumped into the first stall. I closed the door and held it shut with my hand but didn’t latch it.

Hopefully, if Arm-twister saw feet in the stall and a closed door, he would assume that I was using the toilet.

The spray can turned out to be solar block, one of those little travel-sized cans that complies with the restrictions imposed by the transportation security spooks. A warning label on the back showed an eye with a tear pooled up in one corner. I shook the can gently. It felt empty, or nearly so. Damn.

My fingers wrapped around the little cylinder and pulled it tight into my palm; maybe it would add some heft to my fist if I had to throw a punch.

I heard the sound of shoe heels on tile; then a slithery sound like a greased zipper being closed. A throaty gasp—that inarticulate child-like exhalation of air that signals an unexpected fall.

I snatched open the door of the stall and spun toward the intruder. A millisecond before my eyes locked on him, it occurred to me that this might not be Arm-twister. It might be some innocent passenger coming to relieve a call of nature, unaware of my visions of ambush.

But it was Arm-twister. He slammed into the tile with a meaty thunk.

I took a quick step to close the gap between us, and launched my right foot toward the underside of his chin.

A fall like that should have dazed him—knocked the wind out of his lungs—but his hands came up with incredible speed, folded themselves through some fluid martial arts maneuver, and brushed the force of my kick to the side.

The re-directed power of my kick carried me through a half-turn to the left, throwing me off balance and knocking the canister of solar block out of my hand. My right shoulder crashed into the door frame of the toilet stall with bone-jarring force.

Instantaneously, the thug’s right heel lashed out like a piston and drove my left foot out from under me. The kick slid his body a half-meter across the soapy floor, weakening the impact on my ankle and probably saving me a few broken bones. It still carried enough power to knock me off my feet. And suddenly I was going down, falling to the floor, into the bastard’s grasp.

We thrashed around in the soap-slick, each of us battling for a grip on the other, and struggling for purchase on the slippery tile.

His left hand latched onto my throat; his right hand whipped past my ear to grab the base of my skull. He wasn’t wasting time with a choke-hold. He was going to snap my neck.

I flailed in his grip, trying to get a knee into his groin, a finger into his eye, anything to get his hands off my neck.

A dark shape on the floor caught my eye: the solar block. I scrambled for the can, grabbed it, nearly lost it again, and then found my grip on it.

The tension in his body relaxed, a split-second hiatus before his muscles fired with the energy to wrench my spine.

I shoved the spray nozzle in the direction of his head, jammed the button, and prayed that there was a little bit of something left in the can. A short aerosol blast shot out and caught him across the face.

Arm-twister squealed when the chemical spray hit his eyeballs. His hands instinctively whipped up to cover his burning eyes.

I managed to get my right knee under me. I grabbed a handful of his short black hair, yanked his head toward me, and then rammed it into the floor just as hard as I could. The wet slap of his skull on the tile echoed off the walls. I did it again, and again... and again. After the third or fourth slam, his body went limp.

I staggered to my feet and tried to catch my breath.

“Is he dead?” Dancer asked.

I watched him for a second. A trickle of blood ran from his left nostril down his cheek, but his chest was rising and falling.

“No,” I said. “Not yet.”

I rifled through his pockets, coming up with a wallet and a phone. These went into the side pouch of my bag. Then, I stepped over his unconscious body, and walked out into the concourse.

I hurried across the terminal and joined the end of the boarding queue for Flight #2216. I was still breathing hard, and limping slightly from Arm-twister’s kick to my ankle. My clothes were smeared with liquid soap in several places, and the front of my right pants leg was damp. No one seemed to notice or care. I wondered if the marks of the thug’s fingers were still visible on my windpipe.

Adrenaline burned at the base of my throat, and I could feel the micro-tremors in my stomach that signaled the approach of a full-blown case of the shakes. My war face was starting to come off; I couldn’t afford to drop it yet, not until I was safely out of here. I forced myself to amble slowly down the access tunnel toward the passenger module behind the rest of the sheep.

I hung back far enough to be certain that I was the last to board. A vacuously pretty flight attendant motioned for me to hurry. She closed the door behind me.

Dancer said something about the woman’s breasts, but I had her mentally tuned out.

The module was wide, the ceiling too low for walking around comfortably. I had to duck my head to keep from bumping it.

My seat was 26E. I worked my way toward Row 26, somewhere near the middle of the module.

The seats were encapsulated; they looked like man-sized plastic eggs stood on end, with the front third of the shells sliced away to create oval doorways. The capsules were anchored to the floor by complicated looking hydraulic cradles.

I found 26E and wiggled backward through the oval opening into the padded vinyl seat inside the egg-capsule. The air smelled of old plastic underlain by the sweat of former passengers, not overpowering but detectable.

A pair of data-shades hung in a pocket near my right hand. A red LED mounted above the pocket flashed continually to get my attention. My hands were trembling as I picked up the data-shades and put them on.

The pocket also contained a pair of disposable earphones in a clear acryliflex envelope. I unwrapped the earphones and seated one of them in my right ear. I stuffed the envelope into a recycling slot.

A computer-generated image appeared in the shades, an iconic representation of a man sitting in an acceleration capsule. “Hello,” he said. “Welcome to Japan Aerospace Flight #2216.”

His voice was so smarmy that I immediately fumbled for the volume control on the arm of my seat and dialed him down to silence. The shakes were coming on now, and I didn’t even try to stop them.

His lips still moving with unheard greetings and instructions, Icon-man reached up above his head and pulled down a six-point safety harness. I felt above my head for the harness’ real-world twin. My hands were shaking so badly that the hardware on the safety webbing jingled as I pulled it down. I followed Icon-man’s pantomimed directions for connecting each of the six latches. It took me at least ten times as long as it took him.

The cushions of my seat immediately inflated, snugging me comfortably but securely against the harness.

Icon-man’s computer-generated egg-capsule powered over onto its back, so that he was facing the quilted insulation covering the ceiling of the passenger module. My seat followed suit, the hydraulic cradle lowering my egg onto its back until I faced the ceiling. I laid there in my cocoon, trembling against the straps of the safety harness until the shakes finally abated, leaving me feeling drained.

After a couple of minutes, the module’s internal life support system kicked in with an audible hiss. The increase in pressure caused my ears to pop.

Icon-man disappeared, replaced by a rear-looking camera shot from the runway tug attached to the wheeled sled that carried our passenger module.

The module lurched slightly as the access tunnels broke loose and retracted.

The view shifted to a forward-looking camera as the tug towed our sled across the runway toward the plump arrowhead shape of a shuttle. It might have been the same shuttle I’d seen through the windows before.

The shuttle grew in the data-shades until perspective began to transform it from a bloated cartoonish caricature of a spacecraft to a thing of awe. The tug continued to pull us closer, finally stopping between the shuttle’s vertical stabilizers, a camera angle that left us staring up the enormous rectangular exhausts of the shuttle’s aerospike engines.

The view returned to the rear-looking camera, and we watched as the sled’s hydraulics tilted the entire passenger module on to its end. The cradles of the acceleration capsules operated simultaneously, rolling the eggs to keep us lying on our backs the entire time. The synchronization was so perfect that I felt practically no sense of movement.