It was turning our lives, and LA, into somewhere I couldn't be any longer. That was the worst thing. I loved LA. It was my place, our place: And now all I could see was a mesh of balanced loyalties, a grid of sites where I'd perpetrated crimes I hadn't wanted to commit. It was like watching the Cresota Beach changing room dismantled, brick by brick, by people who'd never been inside it.
I wanted out, and for that I needed money.
Ricardo knew some of this, and he pitched Transvirtual to me first. He said he needed two people with him in the bank, and he trusted us. An easy job, in and out, and then a three-way split. I said I'd think about it, assuming I was going to say no.
Then Helena asked me about it. Ricardo had gone to her separately, and she was hot to trot. Soon I started to get the impression that if I wasn't willing to play, if Helena's wimp husband wanted to stay at home, maybe they'd find somebody else. That, plus the need to get out sealed it. I said yes.
I still find it difficult to think about that day. It happened very fast, and I was very frightened. We got inside the bank and made all the customers lie on the floor, and the alarm didn't go off. I covered the floor—the big guy was supposed to put the fear of God into the customers while Ricardo and Helena loaded the bonds into bags. It all seemed to be working. It was all going fine, and though I was wearing a mask, I was trying to use my eyes to communicate that fact to the people on the floor. Just lie still and shut the fuck up, and everything will be okay. Nobody wants any death here, least of all me. As Helena switched from one bag to the next she gave me a wink, and for an instant I had a sudden, taut glimpse of unexpected success, like turning into the homestretch with only one man in front and realizing you've got something extra left in your legs.
Then Ricardo started shooting.
When the first crack rang out, I nearly shit myself, assuming that security or the cops had turned up. Then I saw a red mess around the head of the woman lying at Ricardo's feet, and my entire body went cold. Helena, who was still grabbing money, turned and stared, hands still.
A man lying by the far wall screamed. Ricardo whirled and shot him, too, like a guy picking a tin can off a log.
I abruptly decided that the job had gone wrong enough, and that Helena and I were out of there. I shouted to her, and Ricardo turned on me. His first shot hit me in the shoulder, crunching me into the wall. He came striding my way then, waving his gun and screaming—and shot again. I barely felt it, because my mind was taken up watching Helena. She was frozen in place.
Turns out she'd been screwing Ricardo. Ricardo explained both this and his disinclination to give me my third of the money, using all our names, which is how witnesses were able to identify us so conclusively. He may have been handsome and equipped with a big dick, but Ricardo wasn't exactly bright.
He could shoot, though: His third shot got me square in the chest, even though I was trying to crawl backward out of the way. And maybe I wasn't in line for any kind of Smartness Award either: because why would Ricardo have suggested a three-way split in the first place, when he could have offered a husband and wife fifty-fifty, unless he liked his chances of having access to two-thirds?
With some kind of group mind, the bank customers realized that the bad guys weren't friends anymore and that all bets were off. Under the circumstances, staying on the floor didn't seem like quite so good an option. Ricardo started firing into the resulting melee; Helena just stood, mouth open, realizing her world had exploded in her face, for once in her life drained of all ability to act. I might even have felt sorry for her, but I had problems of my own. I scrabbled onto my hands and knees, blood spilling all over the place, and tried to head toward the exit. I don't think I would have made it, except one of the customers helped me. Can you believe that? Middle-aged guy, red-faced, looked like a construction worker. I was reeling all over the place, sliding in my own blood, and this guy just grabbed my elbow and dragged me with him. He knew I was hurt, and he helped me.
The last thing I saw before I tumbled out of the door was Helena screaming at Ricardo, her gun pointed at his head. I guess he got out somehow, because it was Ricardo who was killed by the car bomb later that night. The mob whacked him. He'd ripped the plan for the heist off a made guy before torturing and killing him. Like I said, Ricardo was phenomenally stupid. Helena must have somehow squared things with regard to herself and me, because we didn't get whacked. I suppose I owe her that.
We were due to see Deck for a drink that evening. For some reason Helena still turned up. I was coughing up blood in a motel, having bullets dug out of me by Woodley's remotes. In the background some newscaster was telling me how many people were dead in the bank, how young some of them were. As I stared at their photographs on the screen, light-headed with shock and smack, I saw I'd got my wish. I had no choice anymore. My new life wasn't going to be quite what I'd hoped for, however, and I would be living it alone.
At that moment I was suddenly jerked out of my past by the sound of someone knocking heavily on Deck's front door. Woodley had finally arrived, just as I was thinking of him. My last coincidence, just as trivial as the other two. I made a mental note to try to get my money back from Vent, then remembered I wasn't going to need much finance in prison. I got up unsteadily, went over and pulled the chair from under the handle. It swung open slowly.
Standing there, looking very confused, was Deck.
"What the fuck has happened to my door?"
IT WAS A MANLY HUG, but it was tight and lasted awhile. Eventually Deck disengaged himself. He looked spacey, his eyes a little red, and he had the air of someone who was watching the world with enormous care, in case it tried to screw him.
"Okay," he said. "I just found myself walking down the boulevard with no recollection of how I got there. Last thing I remember, in fact, is Laura wigging out on the sofa and then trying to beat you up. Something weird has happened in my apartment, and I assume it probably involved me. Am I right?"
Pretty good summary, I thought. "Yes."
"How long have I been away?"
"Little over twenty-four hours."
"We take a lot of drugs or something?"
I laughed. "No."
"Well, Hap, you'll always be the commissar of strangeness to me, so how about you explain what happened."
It took some time. Deck absorbed it quite well: I'm not sure what it would take to knock him off balance. If you told him a table in front of him had just ceased to exist, all he'd do is take his drink off it, just in case. When I mentioned the glimpses I'd had of verdigris-colored walls, he frowned a little, as if that tickled something in the back of his mind, but he couldn't find it. He didn't remember what he might have talked with Laura about, who else had been there, or anything else about the other place.
"So there's no sign of Laura?" he asked.
"Not yet," I said. "And now they've got Helena, too."
He blinked at me. "You've been hanging with Helena?"
I nodded, expecting him to be disapproving.
"Cool," he said, closing his eyes tightly for a moment, as if they were hurting a little. "She was the one."
Which made me wonder, if everyone else knew that, why it had taken me so long to work it out. "And may be again," I said. "If we can get her back."
Deck looked around his living room for a moment, as if profoundly glad to be home. Then he nodded. "Any sign of a plan yet?" There was a knock at the door.
"Sort of," I said. "And here comes part one."
I opened the door, and Woodley walked in, looking like an old and cantankerous scarecrow. Deck raised an eyebrow.
"Any plan featuring this old twonk strikes me as in need of immediate revision."
"And a good evening to you, too, young fellow," Woodley retorted. "I say good evening, though it is, of course, the wee hours of the night, as tends to be the case with you two disreputable hounds. So." He peered hard at both of us. "What do you want? You look in perfectly good health, given the nature of your so-called lives."
"Do Deck first," I said.
"Say what?" Deck asked. "And do what to my what, exactly?"
"Yours will be far more recent," I said. I got him to sit backward on the edge of the sofa and pointed at the back of his neck. "I think it's going to be there somewhere."
"What on earth are you talking about, dear boy?" Woodley looked baffled.
I took a deep breath. "Some guys have a way of finding me wherever the hell I am. They came for me in a plane and got a friend of mine instead—and at that moment her head was on my shoulder. What I want you to do is take a look for any sign of something artificial in Deck's body, around the neck."
The old guy opened his bag. "How long ago would it have been introduced into the body?" he wheezed.
"Within the last twenty-four hours."
Woodley waved a piece of equipment at me. "Shouldn't be too difficult. This will show up any cell trauma, no matter how small. All right, then, young man, hold still. This won't hurt."
Deck looked up at me dubiously but bent his head forward. Woodley fiddled with some dials on the unit, which was about three inches square with an LCD panel, and then ran it smoothly over the skin. He had to move it back and forth for several minutes before something appeared on the screen. A tiny green dot.
"What's that? "I asked.
"Don't know yet," Woodley said, then tapped a button. "Ah, It's a very small square of some indeterminate material, purpose unknown."
"This your specialty?" muttered Deck.
"It's lying half a centimeter under the epidermal layer," Woodley continued, "wedged in muscle. The cell trauma reading is very low. Are you sure this hasn't been there a good deal longer?"
"Yes," I said. "Now, can you get it out?"
"Certainly," the old coot replied, and let his remotes out of the bag. They loitered uncertainly, not scenting any blood to point them in the right direction. I picked them up and perched them on Deck's shoulder.
"Are you sure about this?" he asked. Woodley meanwhile retreated into the kitchen with his monitor and gloves.
"This is how they're tracking us down," I told him quietly. "They had me tagged years ago, and now they've got you, too. We take these out, they don't know where we are."
"What makes you think they still care?"
"They've got unfinished business."
Deck sighed. "Weird week I'm having."
"Okay," Woodley called from the kitchen. "Now, hold still. Oh—and this probably will hurt."
One of the remotes extended a feeler toward Deck's neck and sprayed it with a fine film of liquid—presumably local anaesthetic. The other extruded a tiny scalpel blade from a forward leg and made a tiny incision. Deck flinched, but only a little. I would have flinched enough to send the remote into orbit. I decided I didn't want to watch especially closely.
I turned back around when I heard Woodley mutter "Got it" from the kitchen. One of the remotes was busily swabbing up the small amount of blood on Deck's neck and spraying a different liquid on the tiny access wound. The other already held something up triumphantly in its claw. I tried to take it, but scalpels immediately appeared from all its other legs.
"Give it to me," I said. The remote shook its tiny head.
"If you're going to have a fight with that thing," Deck observed calmly, "could it be somewhere other than on my neck?"
"Woodley—make it give it to me." Woodley did something on his keyboard, and the scalpels slowly retracted—the remote making it clear that it had its eye on me and I'd better watch myself. I held out my hand and it dropped the implant into it.
The object in my palm was about three millimeters square. One side was silver, the other a metallic aquamarine. It was almost two-dimensionally thin: When I turned it, it seemed to disappear, only the coolness of its surface telling me it was still there between my fingers.
"Seen one of those before," the old man announced after a bit, in an odd voice. "Many years ago. Found it when I was digging shrapnel out of some poor boy's head. Thought I put it in the tray with the shell casings, but when I looked later, it was gone. Enemy technology, is it?"
"Sort of," I said.
"Wish I'd known," he mused. "I could have sold it."
I found a small box on Deck's table and placed the implant carefully inside. Then I took my jacket off and sat down. "Okay," I said. "Now mine."
Woodley ran the machine over the back of my neck. He fiddled with dials for a while, then ran the machine over again. "Can't seem to find it. Are you sure you've got one?"
"I know I have."
"There's no sign of cell trauma anywhere in the area, apart from a small amount of bruising, which I assume is symptomatic of your general lifestyle."
"It will have been there awhile," I said.
"Even so . . ."
"A very long while."
Woodley made harrumphing noises, implying he was either thinking or had a filing cabinet stuck in his throat, then turned and scrabbled in his bag. He brought out another machine, opened the box where I'd stowed the implant, and held the device over it. I watched tiny lights flash on and off: "What are you doing?"
"Getting a pattern analysis of this little devil's constituent elements," he said. "If it's sufficiently distinctive, I might be able to scan for them in your neck."
"Good thinking, wizened one" Deck said. "Hap, maybe your plan wasn't so dumb after all."
Apparently satisfied with what his machine was telling him, Woodley made some adjustments to the trauma scanner, then ran it over my neck and shoulders again.
"Ah-ha," he said eventually. Then: "Oh."
"What?"
"I have a reading of similar compounds. At some stage you have had a similar device implanted into your body."
"Cool. Hack it out."
He pursed his lips. "Can't do that, I'm afraid. It's been assimilated—or, rather, I suspect it has assimilated itself."
"What do you mean?"
"The device has migrated from the original point of insertion. There are trace amounts of foreign compounds showing the path."