I shake away the memories with a growled curse. Drek, but it’s tempting to slide into woolgathering when the present’s one big Mexican frag-up. It’s a good thing I'm not running the big Scorpion on a vehicle control rig. From what I’ve heard, if your mind wanders when you’re jacked in, so does the bike. Unpleasant.
So, no more running away from reality. A Cutters team had been sent not to snatch me, but to take me out. If it had been merely a snatch, they’d have used very different tactics. A hit team composed of Cutters raised several distinct possibilities, none of them very pleasant.
First. The Team members
were from
the Cutters, but not
of
the Cutters, if that makes any sense. They could be members of the gang, but not taking their orders from anywhere in the Cutters organization. Maybe another outfit—possibly the Eighty-Eights—paid them or otherwise persuaded them to geek me. Likelihood? Minimal. One Cutters member, I could see it. A full team of four? Nah.
Next. The team was sent by someone in the Cutters, but its mission was not officially sanctioned by the gang. Perhaps there’s an internecine conflict going on between factions within the gang, and the leader of one faction sent his soldiers out to eliminate a member of the rival faction. (The corollary of this is, of course, that the faction who sent the team is maneuvering against Blake, because I’m obviously one of Blake’s good little boys.) Or maybe it’s not even that big. Maybe it’s just someone settling a score. If Bart and/or Ranger were still around, I’d give this one the big gold star. But now? As far as I know, Bart was Ranger’s only loyal supporter, and Bart himself didn’t have any following of his own. Sure, some people were slotted off when Blake brought in Bubba the cracker as war boss, but those people would see no percentage in having me splattered. Conclusion: likelihood minimal.
Finally—and this is the big one, folks—my cover’s
blown.
I’m
blown, Blake and the others have found out I’m
a Lone Star plant, and they’ve decided to off me. A few weeks ago I’d have rated this one as unlikely. Now? After spotting and being spotted by the mysterious Mr. Neno, the odds are suddenly much higher. Yet it wasn’t much more than two hours ago that I was inside the Cutters safe house, catching zees outside Blake’s door. If he knew then, dealing with me should have been a matter of opening his door, leaning out with a pistol, and capping me while I slept. Or, if he wanted to make it slow and messy, using a cel phone to call down to Box and the rest of the Praetorians to come bag me. Taking me would have cost them, but they’d have been able to do it, no mistake about that.
So, this is how I figure it. Sometime between 0130 and, say, 0230, Blake gets word from some trustworthy source that I’m a mole. He whistles for Bubba—or maybe simply bypasses the war boss altogether and calls up a team of soldiers. They’re given the mission and the details, and off they toddle to my doss, to arrive at 0332. The timing is tight, but definitely possible.
Okay, it's possible: now punch holes in it. That’s easy. Why risk the hard option at all? Blake knew I was coming back to the safe house to resume my duties in less than twenty-two hours. Why not wait for me to jander into the safe house, straight into a crossfire or into the sights of a single sniper? Why load for bear and come visiting? (Unless he also had reason to suspect I had no intention of ever coming back and was actually heading for the hills. But set that one aside for later: one riddle at a time here.)
Also—and this might well be my own ego talking—why send just four? Why no back-up? Either Blake really underestimated my capabilities—ah, ego—or the op was a rush job (and why such a rush?), or maybe whoever set it up didn’t have access to all the Cutters’ resources.
By now I’m only a couple of klicks from the southern border crossing into the Salish-Shidhe nation, which means lights and border patrols and much more attention and activity than I want to face at the moment. So I slow down and cruise the bike through the next break in the concrete divider between the two sides of the highway. Then I crack the throttle wide open and head north again. Since I don’t know where the frag I'm going, any direction is just as good at getting me there.
Much as I hate to think about it, I’ve got to admit that the most likely reason someone tried to scrag me is that my cover’s been blown. Quickly, I run through my activities of the last days and weeks. I’ve done nothing, said nothing any different from things I’d done/said plenty of times before. If those things didn’t frag my cover then, why now? The only thing that makes any sense is that Mr. Nemo finally figured out who I was and where he’d seen me, drew a few painfully accurate conclusions, and dumped the whole mess into Blake’s lap.
Motherfragging slitch from hell!
Okay, okay, relax, chill. The important thing is to decide what to do right now, at this moment.
Officially, according to SOP and all that drek, I should report immediately to my controls at the Star. Use a phone if I have to, but let them know I’m blown. Then they’ll call me in or give me the location of a safe house—a Star safe house this time—where I can hunker down until we’re all comfortably confident that nobody’s still gunning for me or until I figure out a safe way out of the sprawl. (Back to Milwaukee? Who knows?) That’s the officially sanctioned thing to do, and it’s also the smart thing to do.
But it involves admitting to my controls that I’ve failed, that I’ve slotted up. Frag the fact that—apparently—a face from my past made me. Frag the fact that I couldn’t have done anything to prevent it, that it’s just a matter of the dice coming up snake-eyes at long last. Nobody’ll blame me, nobody’ll censure me, there’ll be no official reprimands on my record or unofficial slaps on the wrist. My controls will curse a blue streak and grind their teeth and pound their desks because the op’s come to a premature end, but they know and I know that there’s no blame attached to me. I’m Teflon on this one, and the drek just slides off. The point is ...
Frag it,
I’ll
blame me. I hate to frag up, I hate to lose. It makes me a snaky sonofabitch to play squash with or to spar with in the gym, but it also makes me a damn good cop. I’ll do whatever it takes to win, and I’ll move heaven and fragging earth before I’ll admit defeat.
Translation? Frag SOP until I’ve explored my other options.
I can just hear you asking: What options, huh, omae? That’s the thing I don’t know and I
won’t
know until I’ve scoped the situation out a bit more. Like, I’ve got it figured that I’m probably blown with the Cutters, but it’s stupid to pull the plug on a good op until I’m sure.
But how do I go about finding out? Phone up Blake? Yeah, sure. “Hey Biakey, have you guys figured out I’m a Star undercover cop yet? No? Wiz. Chill, cobber. Catch ya tomorrow night.” Boom. Yeah, right.
Then again, maybe a phone call isn’t such a bad idea, come to think of it. Not to Blake, no way. But how about to Paco? The young ganger owes me big-time—or he thinks he does, which is the same damn thing. I’ve saved his hoop twice in recent days. His sense of honor, that normally drekheaded Latin machismo thing, won’t let him forget that. He’ll cut me slack if anyone will—enough slack to talk to me, at least—and I’m good enough at “gliding” (Lone Star speak for “lying through your chops”) that if he’ll let me get one word in I can probably get him to listen to the whole spiel.
Plus, I know he's got his own cel phone, and I’ve got his number.
Of course, I don’t have my cel on me. Fragging good thing, too—there’s a tracer built into every cel phone. How the frag else do you think the cel network knows which cellular transmitter to send your calls to, huh? Every time your phone registers with a new cell, the system knows where you are within a couple of square klicks. Plus, I hear that a few software refinements in the cel system can let someone narrow it down a lot more than that. (Oh sure, this is real heavy-duty technomancy we’re talking here, cracking into the cellular network. The Star can do it—hell, they do it regularly—but I don’t think the Cutters have the resources, though I’m not willing to bet my life on it.) So, my cel phone is still sitting somewhere in my doss at the Wenonah, but only because I forgot to snag it in my hurry.
I check the next big green highway sign. I’m right on top of the next exit—South Seventy-second Street in Tacoma— and I take the ramp way too fast. Then I’m cruising east through the low-rent district of Tacoma—relatively speaking, of course, it’s worlds better than fragging Ravenna, let me tell you—looking for a phone booth.
* * *
Paco’s number is ringing and ringing, and I’m left with nothing to do but mutter, “C'mon, c’mon, c’mon” under my breath like some fragging mantra. The phone booth leaks, but at least all the parts of the phone itself are still where
they’re supposed to be, another thing which separates this
part of Tacoma from Ravenna. As a sop to my rampant paranoia, I’ve stuck a wad of chewing gum over the optical pickup. (Yeah, yeah, I know: Paco’s got a portable cel phone, audio only, so why bother? Here’s why. I don’t know what happens to the phone’s video feed when a call is made to an audio-only unit. Maybe the feed just gets spewed off into oblivion, another data stream pouring into the old bit bucket. But maybe, just maybe, it’s on the circuit somewhere, accessible to someone who’s tapping into the call with a phone that
does
have a vidscreen. And maybe some feature in the vid image will let that tapper figure my physical location faster than he can actually trace the call. Yeah, I know, I’m a paranoid slot, and I admit it gladly. But I’m a live paranoid slot, which is the way I want to stay.)
A dozen rings, fifteen, and I’m reaching up to break the connection. But then there’s a click and I hear Paco’s voice, muzzy with sleep. (Oh yeah, it’s before 0400 in the morning, isn’t it?) “Whafuck jawant?”
“Paco,” I say through the scrap of cloth torn from my shirt. (Not enough to spoof a full-on voiceprint recognition system, but it’s better than frag-all.) “Paco, mount up!” It’s what I yelled to him and the others at the warehouse when I was firing up the Bulldog to escape from the Star FRT assault. I hope he’ll remember it and make the connection.
He’s on it like a pit bull. “Go, ’mano,” he replies, his voice clearer. “Give me two, ’kay? Call back.” There’s a click and he’s gone. Gone looking for a quiet place to talk, if my luck’s holding. Gone looking for Blake or Box, if it’s not. I stare at the face of my watch, and feel rain dribbling from my hair down my neck.
Exactly one hundred twenty seconds later, I key the call in again. He answers on the first ring. “You’re hot, ’mano,” he says without prelude. “Melt-down hot, nova hot. What the frag d’you do, jam Blake’s lady?”
I feel a chill creeping down my spine again, and it’s not the rain. “What do they say I did, Paco?”
“They don’t, chummer. They just say you’re down by law.” Down by law: Cutters talk for what the Star would call “out of sanction” or “beyond salvage”. Translation: open
season, teams out. maybe a bounty on my head.
“Why?”
“Got me,” he says. “Everybody’s sucked up tight on it, won’t say squat. Just that you’re out.” He hesitates. “What did you do?”
“Fragged if I know, priyatel,” I tell him, pouring every gram of sincerity I can fake into my voice. “All I know is that a team of hitters—including our old chummer Marla— just tried to take me out at home. Came as Great Ghu’s own surprise to me, let me tell ya.”
Paco chuckles grimly at that.
“Particularly since I didn’t do anything to get myself geeked.” I pause. “Look, Paco .. .I begin.
And, like before, he's on to the idea even before I’ve got it out my yap. “You’re thinking setup?”
“Could well be,” I tell him. “I stepped on too many toes, or maybe Bart or Ranger got nervous toward the end and planted a data time bomb somewhere, then weren’t around to make the regular phone call to keep it from going off.”
“Yeah, that works,” he says slowly. “You want me to put out feelers?”
“Real carefully,” I confirm. “If I’m really that nova-hot, I don’t want you to get burned.”
He laughs at that. “I can take care of myself, ’mano.” He pauses again. “Call me back at this number at . . . make it oh five-thirty.”
“That enough time?”
“Should be,” he confirms. “Keep your head down till then.”
“You got that,” I tell him, but he’s already hung up.
I leave the booth and swing back onto my bike, fire it up, and cruise off slowly. Yeah, looks like I’m blown big-time. Maybe it’s time to place that call to the Star ...
But, hey, why not wait till after oh five-thirty? Blown is usually like knocked-up, it doesn’t happen halfway. But maybe the convincing lie I threw at Paco—that I’m a victim of a post-mortem smear campaign by Ranger and/or Bart— isn’t a lie at all. I might do the same thing if I thought a rival within the gang was trying to geek me. Clutching at straws, I know, but sometimes the longest of odds pay off.
* * *
If I didn’t know better. I’d say my watch had stopped. The hour and a half between 0400 and 0530 seemed to drag on for a least a fragging lifetime, and only the growing pinky-red smear of the coming dawn to the east confirms that time hasn’t come to a screeching halt. My body and brain are both reminding me in no uncertain terms that I had less than two hours sleep before the Wenonah hallway became a shooting gallery, but I can’t let myself pay any attention. The soykaf I’m sipping from a vending-machine cup is hot enough to scald my mouth, and tastes like it’s got enough chemicals to ensure me a nice collection of cancers by the time I’m thirty-five, but pain and disgust are the only things keeping me going at the moment.