Eye and Talon (11 page)

'I'm flattered.' Iris supposed she and Vogel had at least that much in common. She looked up to the tentlike vault of the space. Someone, probably Vogel himself, had stitched together enough of the blimp's tattered sheath remnants to shelter this small area from the weather. The ,rain drummed against the metallic fabric, then gathered in its folds and valleys, forming thick rivulets that sluiced along the wind-billowed sides. In the massed, yellowish candlelight, the effect was primitive and cavelike, as though this small pocket of LA had devolved even further to archaic times. 'But don't think you have to go to any special effort.'

'For you, sweetheart, it's no trouble.' Vogel tugged at a section of the fabric, draped over some large object beneath. 'God knows I want you to be happy.'

'What's this?' With the fabric removed and piled on the sagging floor, the object was revealed as a broken section of wall, extending farther than Vogel's height and covered with a regular pattern of minute, translucent bumps.

'Section of the advertising panel that used to be on the exterior of the blimp. Back when it was a going concern, pre-crash, the UN's off-planet emigration program used it to bombard the citizenry with all those lovely images of what life is like out in the far colonies. Along with that unctuous sincere voice spieling out those promises:
A chance to begin anew
, yack yack. Probably worth bringing this puppy down just to get rid of that particular bit of urban pollution. Life's hard enough in LA without being constantly told about how much better it's supposed to be somewhere else.'

'Suits me fine.' Iris shrugged, watching him plugging in a series of cables to the bottom of the panel. 'If you don't like it here, why not leave? Like you said, the UN's always looking for more emigrants.'

'I'm not that stupid.' Vogel's expression soured as he fussed some more with the cables. He licked the multiple-pronged end of a plug before sticking it into its matching socket. 'There are things,' he said darkly, 'I know about the UN emigration program . . . that you don't.'

'What kind of things?'

'Maybe you'll find out someday. If you're unlucky.' Sparks sizzled off the back of Vogel's hand as he twisted the plug and socket closer together. 'Besides . . . I can't leave. I've got work to do here.'

'So do I.' Iris found a spot she could lean back against without slicing herself. 'So maybe we should get down to it. Whatever you brought me here to see.'

'Relax,' said Vogel. 'Show's about to start.' He dropped the cable, connected to his satisfaction, and kicked it beneath the lower edge of the suspended panel section. With his thumb and forefinger, he snuffed out some of the candles he had so carefully lit only a few minutes before, dropping the panel into shadowed darkness. 'I'm sure you'll enjoy it.'

The panel lit up, eye-stinging bright, as Vogel jabbed the largest button on a fist-sized, portable data-playback unit that had been spliced into the tangled cables. From somewhere else in the blimp's crumpled steel framework, Iris could hear a gasoline-powered electrical generator cough and wheeze into chugging life.

She shaded her eyes against the sudden glare. 'Could you turn it down?'

Just a second.' Vogel's blurred outline was visible against the light. 'The pixel elements have to run through a hardwired display cycle before we can get to the good stuff. The stuff that I put in.'

The glare shifted downward in intensity; through the fingers in front of her eyes, Iris could see shapes forming on the panel section. She dropped her hand and saw the pixels blurring together, then sharpening into the off-world vistas that the UN's advertising sections had used to entice potential emigrants. A disembodied male voice boomed from a tangle of cabinetless, raw speaker drivers that hung from one of the overhead steel ribs:
'A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies . . . the chance to begin again—
'

'Enough of
that
crap,' growled Vogel. The voice went silent as he punched another set of buttons on the portable playback unit. The panel went dark, then was instantly filled with another image.

That Iris had seen before. The bright golden eyes of Scrappy the owl, like fire-heated coins, glared out from the panel. Enough of its surroundings were visible, with the soft, shifting glow of candlelight against expensive wood, to show that its perch remained in the former Tyrell Corporation headquarters.

'Where'd you get this?' It hadn't been that long since she had seen this particular playback, summoned by the surresper in her own apartment. 'This data record is an official police document.' She didn't know that for sure, but it was worth assuming. 'Penalties for unauthorized possession can be pretty unpleasant.'

'I'm so scared.' With his lanky arms folded across his chest, Vogel slowly shook his head. 'If the LAPD got on the case of everybody who cracked into their files, that's all they'd spend their time doing. Let's face it, the cops don't have the money to spend on the kind of security systems that would keep the average twelve-year-old from going through their files, looking for celebrity dirt and fatal gun-wound photos from the autopsy archives. So I'm not sweating it. Besides' one eyebrow raised — 'how do you know I'm
not
authorized?'

'Because,' said Iris, 'then you'd be a cop. Like me. And you're not.'

'Touché. I can see why they give you the hard jobs to solve.' With his thumb, he pointed to the panel behind him. 'Like your problematic owl.'

'I'm beginning to think it was less of a problem before you came along. Look, you said you had something to show me, some kind of information I could use.' Iris nodded toward the owl's magnified image on the panel screen. 'If you're only going to show me stuff I already know about — such as what an owl looks like — then I'm not impressed. I was doing better on my own.'

'Like I said. The good stuff's about to start.' Vogel punched another button on the playback unit. 'Settle back and enjoy the show.'

The image of the owl, in two dimensions rather than the 3D in which she had seen it at her apartment, was equally impressive as it unfurled its broad, powerful wings and took off from its perch. As the similarly flattened, coldly smiling image of the late Dr Eldon Tyrell watched, the owl flared its claws and pounced upon the white rat on the Oriental carpet, then flapped to its perch with its struggling meal.

'Seen it,' said Iris. 'Big deal.'

'Ah; of course.' Vogel gave a nod. 'I expected you had. But what you've seen is the owl in question,
as it was
. Where and when, in the past. But let me show you something new.'

Another punch of a button, and the scene on the panel changed. Subtly: leaning forward from the sharp steel rib behind her, Iris had to peer closely to make out any difference at all. The light in the scene had changed; it was different and more complete in its spectrum from the blimp chamber's surrounding candlelight. And it gleamed from the perch on which the owl sat, turning its avid predator gaze from one angle to the next.
Wood
, thought Iris. The perch at the Tyrell Corporation had been made of metal.

'Where was this recorded?'

'As I said. Something new.' Vogel had moved back from the panel and stood next to Iris, gazing at the image before them. 'In fact, current. At the present location of the owl in question. This is where it's at, the thing you're looking for.'

Iris glanced over at him. 'And you know where that is?'

'Again, as I said. I have useful information for you.' Vogel displayed his thin, mocking smile once more. 'You see? You're not sorry now, that you met up with me.'

'Maybe.' Iris regarded him with suspicion. 'Information doesn't do me any good, if it doesn't translate into action.'

'True. As wise men have spoken, the word is the deed.' Vogel ran his thumb over the buttons on the playback unit's remote control; a wire dangled from it and ran to the portable machine by the panel. '
Aber in Anfang war der Wort
: the word still comes first. Which you have now received. Or at least in part: you know that the problematic owl is not lost, except perhaps to you. /know where it is; too bad you're the one looking for it.'

'So we make a deal,' said Iris. She had been expecting as much. 'Tell me what it is you want in exchange for the owl's location.'

'Not as easy as that.' Vogel shook his head. 'Even if I told you what you think you want to know — which I have every intention of doing it wouldn't do you much good.'

'Why's that?'

'You'll see; let me lay a little more information on you.' Vogel's thumb fidgeted over the remote control's buttons, punching in a quick sequence. 'You'll
love
this.'

Iris watched the panel screen. The image of the owl dwindled into the background as the camera angle pulled back to a wider shot. Now the image on the panel included a couple of bored-looking, hardfaced men, sitting on cheap folding chairs in front of the owl's perch. The floor around them was littered with battery-depleted pornoids, the glossy nude images gone gray and static, a set of discarded gin rummy hands and greasy Chinese take-out containers speared with disposable plastic chopsticks. None of that concerned Iris; what interested her was the matched pair of blackly gleaming automatic rifles, safeties off, lying across the men's knees.

'Who are these guys?' The men were wearing identical dark gray trouser-and-jacket outfits, with vaguely military overtones but no distinguishing insignia. 'Private security?'

'You might say that.' Standing beside her, Vogel regarded the screen. 'Not your average rent-a-cops, though.'

She nodded in agreement. 'Not with that kind of firepower on hand.' Iris recognized the make and model of the autos,. pre-devolution Czech hardware, from having worked one during a training session at the LAPD's firing range. 'Shit like that, you'd expect from the UN peace-enforcement squadrons.'

'This gear's better; the registration finktags have been disabled. See where the transmitter bumps have been filed away?' Vogel pointed. 'They can fire off these puppies all they want, and the central ammo-discharge agency wouldn't know squat about it.'

Iris glanced over at him. 'That's a capital-class felony. Just being in the same room with illegally modded gear like that.'

'Exactly.' Vogel smiled at her. 'So these guys must be really stupid, or really motivated. Which do you think it is?'

'Who's paying them that kind of money?'

'Maybe nobody.' Vogel shrugged. 'Maybe they're ideological types. With some non-financial reasons for what they're doing and risking.'

'Wait a minute.' Her gaze went from the panel screen to Vogel again. 'So you
don't
know who they are. And who they're working for.'

'Does it matter?' A tinge of impatience sounded in Vogel's voice. 'Get real. What difference is it going to make, knowing what's in their heads or who's signing their paychecks, when you're looking down the business end of one of those automatics?'

She mused it over in silence.
This job
, thought Iris,
is getting hinkier by the minute
. What had that sonuvabitch Meyer steered her onto? Heavy people, that whole Tyrell Corporation bunch, had had the owl in the first place, and heavier people, unknown and mysterious parties, apparently wanted it. And seemingly heaviest people, who could hire gun-toters like the ones shown in the image on the panel, had the owl right now, and were very likely not going to give it up with a mere please and thank you.
It's that valuable
? — she couldn't figure how it could be. Rare and expensive, sure, but not something anyone guarded with an illegal army.

Though maybe there were only the two she had seen on the panel. 'How many others are there?' She gestured at the panel. 'Besides these?'

'That I know about? Maybe six or seven total, that I've seen coming and going, including these two beauties. But I haven't been monitoring this feed — which is live, by the way — for very long, and I don't have access to any other video sources at this location. So there may be others.'

'That's not good.' There were a lot of variables that would have to be dealt with, all of them with lethal potential. The unknown made her uncomfortable; it was one thing not to know what to expect when running down an escaped replicant, a whole other thing when looking at an organized, well-financed operation such as this. A replicant's options, violence-wise, were limited and tending toward the diffuse, even when they ran in packs, as sometimes happened. Someone hunting a replicant faced the possibility of getting killed, all right, but if it happened it would be through the blade runner's own ineptitude or miscalculation or sheer bad luck. Iris had no worries along those lines; she was still, after all, alive. Which counted for a lot in this game. The dead were that way because they had been losers before they began. She had a hunter's black and efficient karma in her bones; she could feel it there, the same way the owl undoubtedly knew how sharp its own claws were. But she was also alive and in the game, she knew, because she had shrewdly picked her targets; escaped replicants were her natural prey, as mice and other small vermin were to the owl.
Go up against something larger and tougher
, she told herself,
and you're the one who gets retired
.

'You're wondering,' said Vogel astutely, 'if you can pull this one off. Since it's not quite the same as what you've handled before.' Iris nodded. 'Maybe I'm out of my league here.'

'Over your head. And every other good coward-enabling cliché. That's the problem with you blade runner types. You have it too easy; hunting down replicants is a piece of cake. Just licensed slaughter; they've got no real survival skills. How could they? A four-year lifespan is long enough to get desperate, not smart.'

'You think it's so easy?' Iris glared at him. 'You do it, then. See how long
you
last at it.'

'Simmer down,' said Vogel. 'Replicants aren't the problem here, are they?' He indicated the panel screen with a jerk of his head. 'Deal with the problem in front of you. We're talking real human beings here, as tough and bad as you, if not more so. And with real weaponry, even bigger than that cannon you tote around next to your heart. They've got what you want. You can either decide to go for it, or not.' Head tilted to one side, he watched for her reaction. 'What's it going to be?'