Montezuma Strip (4 page)

Not so very long ago people had wasted time tapping out their commands on keyboards. Nobody used keyboards anymore except
hobbyists. With the perfection of voice recognition circuitry you just talked to your box and it replied in a voice of your
choice. A whole industry had been created just to supply custom voices. Your box could reply in the measured tones of Winston
Churchill, or Sheila Armstrong, or even Adolph Hitler. Or your dead father. Or your favorite seamyvit star.

He probed and dug and inquired without wondering who might be listening in. He took it for granted this room was smothered.
GenDyne Security would’ve seen to that.

Mermaid was stuffed with notions, ideas incomplete, concepts partly rounded, files that dead-ended, rotating neural highways
and biochem cylinders. Most of it was far above a cop’s venue, but so far he hadn’t encountered anything he couldn’t recognize
as incomplete. Even so he found himself glad they’d pushed Hypatia on him. If anything slipped past his notice she’d pin it
for him. He didn’t have to ask. Having been allowed inside another Designer’s private sanctum, she was studying eagerly. But
so far she gave no indication they’d stumbled into anything unusual or out of the ordinary.

Nothing worth vacuuming a man for.

“Hey?”

“Hmmm?”

“C’mon, Cardenas. Give it a rest. You’re starting to put down roots.”

He blinked. He hadn’t been asleep, not really. Just dozing, his mind lazy and open to the steady flow of verbosity from the
wall. He sat up and saw Charliebo resting his head in her lap. A glance the other way showed it was dark outside. He checked
his bracelet. Tiny lights flashed accusingly at him. It was after nine. He’d been sponging for eight straight hours.

“I’m not tired.”

“The hell you’re not.”

Slowly he eased out of the chair. His muscles protested. His bladder was tight as a slipknot.

“Where’s the…?”

“Down the hall.” She stood, grinning at him. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

“Show me what?”

“Just the door, man. Just the door.”

She took him to a French restaurant. Cardenas had never been to a French restaurant in his life. Spanglish was near enough
to French to enable him to read half the menu and Hypatia translated the other half. Ten minutes later he gazed helplessly
across the table.

“Isn’t there
anything
in this place that doesn’t have some kind of sauce on it?”

“I’ll take care of it.” She ordered for both of them. The place was fancy enough to afford live waiters. Cardenas waited until
the man left.

“What am I getting?”

“Poulet. Polio. Plain. Don’t worry, I wouldn’t poison you with Bernaise or worse.”

He pushed the menu aside. “The only thing I’m worried about is the bill.”

“Don’t. This was my invite so I’m paying.” He went through the motions of protesting. “Look, my salary’s five times yours.
Don’t go ancien-macho on me.”

“Not a chance. Why the largess?”

“Suspicious little northie, aren’t you?”

“Consider my profession.”

“I’m doing it because you didn’t ask me. Because even though you didn’t want me around back in Crescent’s office you still
talked to me. Civil. Because you didn’t make a pass at me. Because I like your dog. Enough reasons?”

“I’m too old to make passes at girls.”

“That may be, but then I’m no girl. I haven’t been a girl for a long time. Also, you spoke to my face instead of my chest.”

“I wanted answers from you.”

She giggled. It was an extraordinary and utterly unexpected sound, fluting up from the depths of that mature shape, as though
for a few seconds it was suddenly home to a wandering seventeen-year-old.

“That’s not what most men want.”

Not knowing what to say next, he found himself looking toward the entrance. The curving plastic tunnel led up and out to the
street above. They were down in fancy undersand, where corporate execs came to do business, where the flash-men sat selling
and stealing, and sylphs sold themselves to worms from Asia and Europa. Occasionally the patrons ate.

“Worried about your dog?”

He looked back to her. “I could have brought him in with us. Claimed impaired vision. That’s what Charliebo’s trained for.
Sometimes I do it.”

“Unnecessary. He’s fine in the checkroom. I told the girl there to filch him some kitchen scraps. She said she’d be glad to.
Charliebo’s a lover. He’ll probably enjoy this dinner more than you will.”

His eyebrows rose. “I didn’t hear you say anything about scraps. Thanks.”

Her eyes dropped. Beneath her forearms the thermosensitive Lexan tabletop changed color as the plastic responded to the subtle
shifts in her body temperature.

“I like Charliebo. I’ve always preferred animals to people. Maybe because I haven’t had much luck in my relationships with
people.” She looked back up at him. “Aren’t you going to ask me about my wonderful marriages?”

“Hadn’t planned on it.”

“For a man you’re pretty understanding. Maybe I should’ve kept away from the pretty boys. The first one was a Designer. Good,
though not as good as me, not anywhere near Crescent’s class. But he was slick. Did furniture. Did me, too. Designed me right
out of his life. The second one lasted four years. I guess I went to the other extreme. Max had a body like a truck and a
brain to match. After a while that got old. It was
my turn to move on.” She palmed a handful of shrimp crackers from a bowl. “That was ten years ago.”

“Maybe you should have stuck with it awhile longer.”

“You’re one to talk.” She looked around wildly. “God, I wish I had a cigarette.”

“I saw a den up the block as we were coming down here.” He did not offer the expected criticism.

“Can’t anyway. Company doctors tell me I’ve got ‘thin lungs’, whatever the hell those are.”

“Sorry. You get anything from what we saw and heard today?”

She shook her head sadly. “Typical cop. Can’t you leave your business outside for a while?”

“I’ve done pretty good so far.”

“I didn’t sponge a thing. Nothing in Mermaid lively enough to prick a neuron. Oh, lots of fascinating design work, enough
to awe just about anybody except Wally himself, but nothing worth killing for.”

He found himself nodding agreement. “That’s what I thought. I spent most of my time looking for what wasn’t there. Blocks,
wells, verbal codes, Janus gates. Didn’t find any, though.”

“I warned you. How can you sponge a code? Don’t they sound the same as everything else?”

“To most people.”

“What do you mean, ‘to most people’?”

He met her eyes once more. “Hypatia, why do you think they put me on this case? Why do you think Agua Prieta had to bring
somebody all the way over from Nogales?”

“Because you’re good?”

“I’m more than that. Hypatia, I’m an Intuit.”

“Oh. Well.”

Her expression stayed carefully neutral. She didn’t look at him like he was some kind of freak. Which of course he wasn’t.
He was just infinitely more sensitive to sounds and verbal programming than practically everyone else. But the sensationalist
media delighted in putting their spotlights on
anything that hinted of the abnormal. Intuits were a favorite subject.

Cardenas could hear things in speech nobody except another Intuit would notice. Previously that was something useful only
to actors, lawyers, and judges. With the advent of verbal programming it was recognized as more than a talent. It became a
science.

In the late twentieth-century primitive machines had been devised that were crude mimics of natural Intuits. When the majority
of information programming and storage switched from physical to verbal input, the special abilities of those people identified
as Intuits were suddenly much in demand. Because people could hide information with delicate phraseology and enunciation.
They could also steal. The impetus came from the Japanese who after decades of trying to solve the difficulty of how to program
in characters leapfrogged the entire problem by helping to develop verbal programming.

Not all Intuits went into police work. Cardenas knew of one who did nothing but interview for major corporations, checking
on potential employees. As living lie detectors their findings were not admissible in court, but that didn’t prevent others
from making use of their abilities.

Six years of blindness had only sharpened Cardenas’s talent.

He’d attended a few Intuit conferences, where the talk was all about new vorec circuits and semantics. Little was said. Little
had to be, since there were no misunderstandings between speakers. Among the attendees had been other cops, translators for
multinats and governments, and entertainers. He remembered with special pleasure his conversation with the famous Eskimo Billy
Oomigmak, a lieutenant with the Northwest Territories Federales. An Inuit Intuit would be an obvious candidate for celebrity
status and Billy Oo had taken full advantage of it. Cardenas had no desire to trade places with him.

“Can you read my thoughts?”

“No, no. That’s a common misconception. All I can do is
sense the real meaning of a statement, detect if what’s being said is what’s being meant. If somebody utilizes phraseology
to conceal something either in person or through an artvoc, I can often spot it. That’s why there are so many Intuit judges.
Why do you think…?”

He stopped. She had a hand over her mouth, stifling a laugh. Obviously she knew Intuits weren’t mind readers. She’d been teasing
him. He pouted without realizing how silly it made him look.

“Why’d you take me out, anyway? Charliebo aside.”

Her hand dropped. She wasn’t smiling now, he saw. “Because it’s been a long time since I was out with a real grown-up, Angel.
I like children, but not as dates.”

He eyed her sharply. “Is that what this is? A date?”

“Fooled you, didn’t I? All this time you thought it was a continuation of business.-Tell me: how’d they let somebody as small
as you on the force?”

He almost snapped at her, until he realized she was still teasing him. Well, he could tease, too. But all he could think of
to say was, “Because there’s nobody better at breaking into a box.”

“Is that so? You haven’t proven that to my satisfaction. Listening and probing at triple verbal’s impressive, but you still
didn’t find anything.”

“We don’t know yet that there’s anything to find.”

“If there isn’t?”

He shrugged. “I go back to Nogales where I can’t hear GenDyne scream.”

“Dinner,” she said as their main course arrived. Cardenas’s chicken was simply and elegantly presented. He hadn’t realized
how hungry he was. Eight hours of sponging had left him drained. He hardly heard her as he reached for his silverware.

“Maybe later we’ll see how efficient a prober you really are.”

He intuited that easy, but didn’t let on that he had. Steam hissed from the chicken as he sliced into it.

* * *

Each day he went into the GenDyne box and each evening he left the corporate offices feeling more baffled and disturbed than
when he’d gone in. Not that Mermaid wasn’t full of accessible, fascinating information: it was. It was just that none of it
was of the slightest use.

Hypatia was of inestimable help, explaining where he didn’t understand, patiently elaborating on concepts he thought he understood
but actually did not. GenDyne assigned her to him for the duration of his investigation. It pleased him. He thought it might
have pleased her. After a week even she couldn’t keep his spirits up. He could be patient, he was methodical, but he was used
to progressing, even at a creep. They weren’t learning anything. It was worse than going nowhere; he felt like they were going
backward. Nor could he escape the feeling that somebody somewhere was laughing at him. He didn’t like it. Cardenas had a wry,
subtle sense of humor, but not where his work was concerned.

Anything that smelled of potential he recorded for playback later at half speed, then quarter speed. His senses were taut
as the high string on a viola. He listened for the slightest off pronunciation, the one quirky vowel that might suggest an
amorphous anomaly in the data. He found nothing. Mermaid was clean, neat, tidy, and innocuous as baby powder.

On the eighth day he gave up. The solution to Crescent’s murder wasn’t going to be found in his files.

It was time to look for parallels. He’d spent too much time at GenDyne, but he was used to finding hints, clues, leads wherever
he searched and this utter failure rankled. Perhaps the Parabas box would be more revealing. It was time to access Noschek’s
work.

Half on a whim he requested Hypatia’s assistance. It was a measure of the importance GenDyne attached to his work that they
agreed immediately. As for Spango, she was delighted, though she concealed her pleasure from the dour company official who
pulled her off her current project to give her the news. It was like a paid vacation from designing.

When the people at Parabas were told, they went spatial. They’d sooner shut down than let a GenDyne Designer into their box.
Important people in LaLa talked reassuringly to their counterparts in Sao Paulo. It was agreed that finding out what had happened
to the two Designers was paramount. There were certain safeguards that could be instituted to ensure that Parabas’s visitor
saw only the contents of Noschek’s files. Parabas consented. Agua Pri was overruled. Hypatia would be allowed in. But nobody
smiled when Cardenas and his GenDyne “spy” were admitted to the dead Designer’s office.

It was larger than Crescent’s, and emptier. No charming domestic scenes floating above this desk. No expensive colorcrawl
on the walls. Noschek had been a bachelor. Barely out of Design School, top of his class, brilliant in ways his employers
hadn’t figured out how to exploit before his death, he’d been the object of serious executive headhunting by at least two
European and one Russian multinat in the three years he’d been at Parabas.

Hypatia’d read his history, too. As she looked around the spartan office her voice was muted. “Nobody becomes a Senior Designer
before thirty. Let alone at twenty-five.”