A few days later, I called the number on the business card just out of curiosity. And that’s how I came to know Nicholas Finnigan. (When I reported all this to my controls at the Star, they gave me royal drek for the whole thing, of course. But frag them.)
“Morning, Nicholas,” I say. I grin, and can’t help adding,
“Doing any more research into buying ordnance?”
He chuckles warmly. “I believe the lesson you taught me on that subject is still in force,” he says. “ ‘Write what you know’ is all very well, but I’ve come to accept that ‘knowing’ from secondary research is sufficient in some areas.”
I shake my head. Finnigan always talks that way, and you’ve got to stick with him to the very end of his convoluted talk to know what the frag he’s saying. Good guy, though. Under other circumstances, I’d enjoy him as a friend, not just as a contact. “Good to hear,” I tell him. “Keep it that way, and keep out of trouble.”
There’s a momentary pause, and the alarms go off yet again. “Perhaps you should follow your own advice, Richard,” he says slowly.
“Keeping out of trouble?”
“Yes,” he says. “It seems you might need some remedial work on that.”
"What’s going down?” I ask, but the cold knot in my stomach is telling me I already know. How the frag did Blake or the Cutters get a line on Nicholas?
But his next words blow that train of thought off the rails. “What do you know about Lightbringer Services Corporation?” he asks me.
“What?”
“Lightbringer Services Corporation,” he repeats. “I have a business card right here in front of me.”
I shake my head. “Doesn’t mean squat,” I tell him. “Sounds like something from the Tir. though.”
“The LTG number and Matrix address are local,” Nicholas tells me, “yet the name does have resonances of the Land of Promise, I agree. And the rather earnest young gentleman who gave me the card was an elf.”
“What ‘earnest young gentleman’?” I want to know. “The one who came here looking for you earlier this morning, Richard.” His voice is casual, but I can tell he knows this is serious. “He and his two friends, who stayed in the car. He seemed very eager to learn what I knew about you.” He snorts. “I think he was very disappointed to discover that was next to nothing.”
“Did he believe you?” The words are out of my mouth before I know what I’m going to say.
A moment of silence on the other end, then Nicholas says slowly, “Hmm, I see. I rather think he did. Otherwise we might not be having this conversation, is that what you mean?”
I relax a little. Nicholas doesn’t actually know squat about me, but fragged if I know what he’s guessed. I’ve never told
him anything, not even my cover story, and he’s never
asked. “What else did the elf want?”
"Well, he told me that you might find yourself in a great deal of trouble, Richard, trouble that could well be fatal. Oh, he didn’t say that in so many words,” he amends quickly, “but that is most certainly the inference he wished me to draw. He implied that he and his friends were on the side of the angels, as it were, and that if you were to make contact with me I should inform them immediately. Hence the business card. I made all the correct concerned noises, of course.” He chuckles wryly. “I really think he believed he had me gulled.”
“Huh?” I blink at that.
I
know it’s a setup. How does he? Nicholas laughs again. “Oh, his lines were well-scripted, and he delivered them very convincingly, but I’ve read them before, many times. For heaven’s sakes, I've
written
them. Our elven friend was what one might call a ‘blind probe’. Anyone who’s read any of my books—or any of the classics of the genre, like Ludlum—would understand all too well. If I were plotting this, I’d have my house watched, with sufficient assets to zero or incapacitate you should you come to visit. I would also bug my phone, of course. You are using a public phone, I take it?”
I blinked again. “Yes.”
“Then I would suggest we keep this call short,” he goes on in the same intellectual, detached tone. “Calls are easy to trace.” He’s right, and I feel my paranoia click up another notch. But there are still things I’ve got to know. Normally I’d ask specific questions, but I realize I probably don’t have to with Nicholas. “How do you read it?” I ask.
“Our friend—Pietr Taleniekov is the name on his card, though his accent is purest sprawl—is a corporator through and through,” Finnigan states, like it’s holy writ. “I would not be surprised to find out that there is, in fact, a Lightbringer Services Corporation in existence, and that there is a Pietr Taleniekov on their payroll. What would further not surprise me is that the elf who spoke to me has only borrowed that name and corporate identity.
“Still,” he went on firmly, “he is a corporator with all that implies'—a ‘suit,’ you might call him. He and his superiors want you, for some reason—dead or captured, I don’t know which—and they have extensive resources and sources of information, else he would never have found me. My conclusion is that you are truly in deep trouble, Richard, but I further conclude that I have been ‘compromised’ as a source of aid. I am truly sorry.”
The cold fist that’s squeezing my heart grips tighter. “You’re compromised again,” I tell him, and my voice isn’t much more than a whisper. “You’re right, they’re probably tapping your phone. They know you’ve warned me off.”
“Very true," he says evenly, “and my only reassurance that these shadowy forces will take no action against me is that they are corporate in nature. As we all know, corporations will do nothing that has no ‘percentage’ for them.” He chuckles again. “To quote a fine line I read somewhere, ‘Revenge don’t count no beans’. I wish I had written that."
"You will,” I tell him. I glance at my watch—I’ve been on the line for three minutes and change. If there’s a tap on Finnigan’s line, it’s time to rip this joint before the troops arrive. “Keep your head down, chummer.”
“Yours also, my friend.” He pauses. “Tell me about it later, if you can. It might make an entertaining book.”
“You got that,” I tell him and hang up. If there is a later.
* * *
There’s always room for another squatter under the overpasses of the Highway 5 interchange, always another two square meters for someone else way the frag down on his luck. None of the regulars talks to newcomers, they just move out of your way—most of them, at least. With some you have to show some teeth before they back off—but you can feel the sense of kinship, the diluted, distant sense of fraternity that might almost be camaraderie if it wasn’t so miserable and despairing. After my call to Finnigan, I knew I couldn’t crash on his floor, just like I knew I couldn't hit a flophouse anywhere in the sprawl. I also knew I needed to sleep somewhere, and right fragging now, if I wanted to be any good to myself when I placed my next call in the sequence. The only place I could think of where I had any hope of shelter without having to worry about Lone Star patrols or curious night clerks was the squat-city under the interchange. There’s always room at the bottom.
So here I am, bundled up in my leather jacket, lying on the cold fragging ground, but unable to get to sleep. There’s too much drek thrashing around in my head. Pietr Tal-something, elf suit from Lightbringer fragging Services Corporation . . . like drek. Who is he and what does he want
with me? Finnigan figures the elf is corp, though probably
not the corp he claims, and I'll go with his reading. I don’t think a Cutter, say, could impersonate a suit well enough to fool the old writer. Which corp, then?
Given one guess, I'd say the same corp—the Tir-based outfit—that met with Blake a week back, the one that sent the delegation that included the Mr. Nemo who made my face. Makes perfect sense that far, at least.
But how the frag did that corp track down Nicholas Finnigan? I've never mentioned Finnigan to anyone in the Cutters (for obvious reasons, considering how we’d met). I did file a report with the Star, of course, describing the aborted weapons buy, and that report did mention Finnigan by name. (I had to do it: I had to explain why the Star shouldn’t worry about some outfit buying Gremlins, that it was only a drekheaded writer getting a little carried away with his research into how weapons deals go down. Slot!) But all my reports are—of course—kept very deep in the shadows, encrypted and restricted and all that drek.
For some corp to weasel Finnigan’s name out of my file as a person I might turn to for help—frag, they’d have to be way deep inside the Star. Very deep infiltration—deckers digging their grubby electronic fingers into the blackest files in the Lone Star pyramid. And that scares the living frag out of me, let me tell you.
I’ve got to tell my controls at the Star. I’ve got to tell them everything, from the mysterious corp contact with the Cutters to the possibility that their own data fortress has been compromised. (I don’t know the name of the mysterious corp, but I’ve got to call them something. The label’s irrelevant—how about IrreleCorp?) And I’ve got to take into account the possibility—no matter how slim—that this corp might have a mole inside the Star, possibly even one of my controls. I sigh and stare up at the underside of a highway off-ramp, ten meters above me. If this is the kind of drek Finnigan writes about, I’m glad I’ve never read any of his books. Interlacing my fingers behind my head into some semblance of a pillow, I close my eyes and wait for dawn.
* * *
Something whines at me and I’m bolting upright, reaching
instinctively for my H & K, Then I try to reswallow my
heart, and tell the wire to go back to sleep. The sound was my watch alarm, which means it’s 0945. It also means I actually managed to catch some sleep even though the aches in my joints and the fog in my head seem to deny it. I check myself over—gear and body parts—to make sure no enterprising squatter has made off with anything while I was nulled out. Deciding that I’m intact, I hobble over to my bike, swing aboard, and we’re off again.
The rain’s less now than it was yesterday, which means there are more people on the streets. Whether that’s a blessing or a curse, I’m not certain. Crowds are good for hiding, but it’s a knife that cuts both ways. It’s harder for a hunter to spot me among a pack of people, but conversely, it’s also tougher for me to make a would-be assassin before he can put a bullet into my head. Well, frag all I can do about it, so I put it out of my mind.
Another fragging phone booth, this one on Union, uphill from Highway 5, on the fringe of the “Pill Hill” region. I’m trying to grow eyes in the back of my head as I punch in another LTG number and wait. At the dulcet tones of Lone Star Personnel’s automated attendant, I jam in a five-digit extension, and listen while a snythesized voice tells me, “You have reached a non-working extension.” Yeah, right. It clicks at me but doesn’t hang up, and I enter my five zeroes.
First comes a silence that seems to last for hours, then the phone’s vidscreen lights up and I see a face I know. Shoulder-length black hair, creamy skin, eyes almost as dark as the hair—a face that you’d call beautiful if it ever showed the faintest hint of human emotion. Sarah Layton, senior manager in the Star’s Organized Crime (Gangs) department, and one of my controls.
I’m a little surprised. Layton’s the woman my contact sequence is intended to reach, but I’m not supposed to get her yet. There’s normally one more cut-out in the sequence. She wouldn’t have changed the procedure without good reason. But what the frag, I’ve got other things on my mind.
“What’s down?” she asks, managing to cram a huge whack of cool disapproval into those two words.
I don’t answer her directly, just tell her, “Get ready to receive.” I slot my datachip, already prepared in its carrier, into the phone’s data-access port and instruct the phone to send it. While the data’s spewing through the Matrix, I scan the people passing on the sidewalk for any face that might be taking too much interest in my actions. Within seconds the phone beeps, and I know my report’s been filed.
“Scan it,” I tell Layton before she can say anything. “Show the others, get them to scan it too. I want a teleconference, all of you on the line.” I check my watch again. “Make it eleven-thirty. That should be enough time. This relay.” And I’m off the line and on my way out of the booth before she can even open her mouth to bitch about it.
This really isn’t the kind of conversation you want to have in a fragging phone booth right out on the fragging street. But there are some times when you just don't have any choice.
Yes,
another
phone booth, this one without chewing gum or anything to cover the vid pickup. For this call, I want to see and be seen.
The phone’s vid display is in split-screen mode, showing four distinct “panes.” Three contain faces, and one’s blank in case we need to show data or other visuals. I know all three faces, and if anyone I don’t know shows up, I’m out of there so fast I’ll leave a vacuum behind me.
In the top left is Sarah Layton. The slag next to her is about the same age—late forties, I’d guess—but nowhere near as well preserved: thinning, graying hair, bags under his eyes like an old hound-dog. That’s Vince McMartin. Below Sarah is “the White Flash,” one Marcus Drummond. He’s a decade younger than the other two, a real burner of a corporate warrior, climbing the old ladder fast enough to avoid the knives constantly directed at his back. Thin and sallow, with eyes that don’t miss a fragging thing. His hair’s cropped almost buzz-cut short, and it’s pure white. (For a moment his hair reminds me of the elf goddess with the Tir corp delegation, and I check Drummond’s ears. Nope, no points.)