Dervish Is Digital Part 14

"Boosting doesn't last all that long," Konstantin said. "When it wears off and the crash comes, they slip and we get them."

"Thihngs can get real funny in here," the arms dealer said, running a fingertip around the broad rim of the gla.s.s and looking far too happy about it. "Ever occur to you that maybe there's something about AR -- light waves, frequencies, vibrations, resolution, maybe even subliminal messages -- that makes some changes in people's heads, in their brain chemistry. They dose up and it has a different effect.

Sometimes maybe it doesn't work as well. But lots of times, the boost you get is something else. Because your atoms are dancing to a different drummer, so to speak. Sound and vision and a little something extra. Some people stop coming out, they just stay in and hope that someone's seeing to their getting cleaned and fed, like they were in a coma."

"A coma," Konstantin muttered under her breath.

The arms dealer looked at her sideways. "Ever been jammed?"

"What do you know about that, about jamming?" Konstantin asked her a little too quickly.

"I know that you can't do it to someone who's dosed the same way you are. Or close enough for government work."

"What is it?" Konstantin asked. "How's it done?"

The arms dealer plucked her olive out of the martini and held it up between two fingers, smiling at it. "I don't know. But I might know who knows."

"If you're so with it," Konstantin said, "why didn't you use any of that stuff on me?"

"Oh, please. You don't run around firing off your biggest gun all the time." She dropped her olive back into her drink with a small splash. "For one thing, the ammo's real expensive. And for another, you attract attention that way and--"

A small, dirty hand flashed in front of the arms dealer, grabbing the olive out of the martini and spilling the drink. By the time Konstantin could get out a half-strangled "Hey!" the kid was halfway to the door.

Celestine never turned around; she threw her right arm up and back and there was the metallic whiz of cable unwinding as her forearm and hand zipped through the room and caught the kid at the curtain. Still not turning around, she reeled him in, dragging him across the floor and around the table to Konstantin.

"Hey, f.u.c.k-a.s.s," the kid said sullenly, twisting his neck to avoid looking directly at her. The facial tattoos were unmistakable.

Konstantin pried the olive out of his hand and took a close look at it. It didn't seem to be anything except a very faithful if oversized reproduction of an olive. "h.e.l.lo, Goku."

"Friend of yours?" said the arms dealer. "He owes me a drink."

The kid grabbed the olive out of Konstantin's hand and popped it into his mouth. Moments later, he spat the pit out hard, making it bounce on the table twice before it hit the floor and rolled away. "Now he owes me an olive," the arms dealer added.

"He's just showing off," Konstantin said. "Aren't you?" She pushed her face up close to his, trying to make eye contact. He struggled in her grasp and when he finally did meet her gaze, she was shocked to see that the lack of recognition in his eyes was sincere.

She was so surprised, she loosened her hold on him and he broke away from her. Celestine threw her arm at him again, but all she got this time was a sc.r.a.p of his shirt.

"Can you trace that?" Konstantin asked her as the woman examined the bit of material.

"I'm not sure," Celestine replied. "But I've seen it before. In a studio."

"Little b.a.s.t.a.r.d was boosted. You need a boost to catch up," said the arms dealer. "Take a boost.

I can get you one. You'll get everything, including the manufacturer's home address."

Konstantin looked at Celestine, who shrugged. Silently, she nudged Taliaferro.

Readings as to whether that was really our friend Goku are inconclusive, he told her. Not enough coherent interaction.

If it wasn't Goku, who else would it be? And why?

A better question might be, what do you think your best chance is of finding out?

"We've been trying to get an appointment with you for about a month," said the narc. His name was Thorpe and he looked like any of the thousands of anonymous young businessmen who populated the commercial canyons of any large city. Konstantin had always thought of them as the contemporary descendants of cliff dwellers who spent their days clambering around the different levels of skysc.r.a.pers and office buildings with briefcases and portfolios full of talismans, fetishes, and shiny beads. The business suit, fundamentally unchanged for close to two centuries, was exclusively theirs for male and female, much like a judge's black robes or a police uniform, except the skirt as an alternative to trousers had faded away completely.

"You have?" Konstantin made a pained face. "I'm sorry, I've never seen any messages from you or your division."

"No, you wouldn't have," Thorpe said, sitting back and putting his feet up on his desk. He wore vintage wingtips. Copies, undoubtedly, but expensive ones. "We've been trying to go through Ogada."

Konstantin nodded. "Yeah, that explains it. He's never said anything to me."

"Protocols," Thorpe said vaguely. "We probably didn't fill out the reply form properly or something and it bounced out of his mailbox, just like all the follow-up inquiries. And we've had our dance cards pretty full. So have you finally made a direct connection between an AR property and a drug dealer?"

"I could probably make a very strong case for the possibility," Konstantin said, her half-smile sympathetic, "but a direct connection? Not yet. Sorry."

"'Not yet?'" Thorpe pulled his feet off the desk and sat up straight. "Does that mean there's a definite hope?"

Konstantin hesitated. "Actually, I came to see if you could release any material evidence you might be storing."

The narc's expression sagged. "For 'research purposes,' right?"

"As part of an undercover operation proceeding partially in AR," Konstantin said. "Proceeding mostly in AR, to tell you the truth."

"Uh huh." Thorpe put his feet back on his desk and slumped as far down in his chair as he could.

"That sounds like one neat trick and a h.e.l.l of a walk on the wild side combined. Pioneering new areas of police work, are you?"

Konstantin leaned forward and put her elbows on his desk. "You sound skeptical."

"You tell me you're conducting an undercover investigation in a place where evidence, even of the hearsay variety, is legally impossible. And what you want, essentially, is for me to function as your dealer,probably so you can track some AR criminal through what someone has probably told you is an area not accessible to anyone who isn't accelerated. Do I have that right?"

"I have a material witness in custody."

That got his attention; Konstantin felt vindicated.

"We've been working in AR together. Whatever falls out in the way of controlled substances is all yours. Credit included."

Thorpe's anonymous face looked doubtful. "You have to understand that we have had an operation of our own in place for some time. We've been cultivating sources, informants, suppliers, trying to infiltrate the higher levels so we're not just busting a lot of people who look like this--" he indicated his suit "--who are just desperately trying to get ahead at work or support households. Locking up the consumers doesn't do a thing, they're a constantly self-renewing source. They're the victims of the so-called victimless crime. Putting them away never solves the problem. Half the time, I think the old-skool guys used to do it just to get their hands on someone else's property. You know, zero-tolerance meant that cops could seize all of a suspect's belongings and, even if the suspect was cleared, they didn't always give them back. Those were dark days."

"Sounds like," Konstantin said patiently.

"Sorry. That kind of abuse of power bothers me. I don't know how they could call themselves narcs. Anyway, we do things differently now. Since you have a material witness in custody -- local?"

Konstantin shook her head. "She's in custody in her locale, but that department has ceded the investigation to me. They don't have a technocrime unit, so they're just monitoring. Or rather, depending on us to monitor for them."

"Yeah, everybody's busy. Anyway, I can release a certain amount of the currently fashionable AR speed for your use, but we'll have to go across town to get it. We're out of everything at the moment."

"You are?" Konstantin frowned, puzzled. "You ran out of evidence?"

"Happens at least once a week," said Thorpe, getting up. He grabbed a keycard out of his top drawer. "You wouldn't believe the demand."

"This is a police front?" Konstantin asked. The unlit neon tubes that spelled out WAXX 24 across the front of the blush-pink stucco building would have registered as an illegible tangle of dirty gla.s.s if she hadn't known better. The slash letters and numerals that spelled out the club's name were interspersed with more neon tubing that formed the outlines of palm trees, c.o.c.ktail gla.s.ses, musical notes, and a grinning half-moon that blew bubbles.

"Infiltrated," Thorpe said, locking the car with a keycard. "We just completed the deal for the lab s.p.a.ce last week." His expression was smug and Konstantin realized she was supposed to be impressed.

Perhaps WAXX 24's real-world aspect had become fashionable again. The last she'd heard, it was only the AR version most people were trying to get into. But then, as was usually the way with places like this, ownership had changed hands a few times since her own less-than-pleasant experience there. The name, however, never changed, probably because you just weren't going to get neon that good any more, at least not on that scale.

Thorpe used his keycard on the faux-wood entrance, led her through a dark bra.s.s-and-velvet lobby-bar to a door that looked like an airlock. "Saucer Room," he told her as he took her through a pa.s.sageway that skirted the large round dancing area. "It's some old motif from two owners ago or something. We spent a lot of nights dancing around in the Saucer Room, cultivating our presence, making friends. Hardest duty I ever pulled." He grinned over his shoulder at her. "Completely ruined me for nightlife. Still can't figure how people would do this to relax, because for us it was nothing but hard work all night long, having a good time."

They came to an alcove with a skinny elevator door. Thorpe found another keycard for it. They stood self-consciously back-to-back in a s.p.a.ce no bigger than an old-fashioned telephone booth which took them down six floors and opened onto an area that had once been an indoor swimming pool. The pool, tiled and still smelling faintly of chlorine, was filled with long rows of tables where workers in white plastic anti-contamination suits stood pushing mounds of what looked to Konstantin like browngranulated sugar around with pharmacists' paddles. Konstantin started to ask a question and Thorpe shook his head sharply.

No one looked up at them as she followed Thorpe around the edge of the pool, past a set of bleachers where about a dozen people were having a coffee break, or so Konstantin a.s.sumed that was what they were doing. They were drinking coffee and a few were eating a sandwich or some other snack, but none of them were talking, not even in whispers. Apparently there wasn't much of a social aspect to this area of the drug trade.

Thorpe took her through another door at the far end of the pool and up a short flight of stairs to a gla.s.sed-in terrace, where a man and an androgyne were sitting on either side of a small table, watching the area below. They looked from her to Thorpe, who shook his head. "One of ours. This is Dore Konstantin, of the fabled technocrime unit."

"Technocrime?" The androgyne's smooth, milky-white face took on an amused expression. Every androgyne Konstantin had ever met seemed to have perfect skin. "Do we finally have a solid connection between an AR service provider and a drug supplier that will stand up in court?"

Thorpe made a seesaw motion with one hand. "She says there's hope."

"I take it this means it's all right to talk," Konstantin said.

"Oh, yeah, up here it's fine," Thorpe told her. "It's just a discipline thing. Most of those people down there are day-workers, they aren't in on it. We found that the kind of people you get for this kind of job, they do best in real structured work environments."

"It's something that wouldn't occur to you right off," added the man, "but when you give it some thought, you know it's the best way to keep order. No talking on the premises means they pay attention to what they're doing and don't screw up the proportions of filler to pharmaceutical, as it were." He smoothed an ebony hand over his white silk shirt, sending moire rainbows through it. In contrast to Thorpe's American salaryman, he was the picture of wealthy leisure, his leggings either genuine leather or the best subst.i.tute Konstantin had ever seen. The androgyne was in one of those monochromatic layered tunic/kimono/pajama/toga combinations that most androgynes favored. Konstantin found herself picturing Celestine in one, even though Celestine wasn't an androgyne and had never expressed any desire to be one within Konstantin's hearing, muttonchops notwithstanding.

"We also get a little amus.e.m.e.nt sometimes," said the androgyne. She pointed toward the bleachers, at a skinny man standing up and preparing to throw the remains of his coffee break in a nearby waste bin. "That guy there? He's an investigative journalist. He thinks he's working undercover in a mob operation. n.o.body can talk to him except one of us, of course, and only when he's not working the pool, so we feed him all kinds of s.h.i.t."

"How do you know he's a journalist?" Konstantin asked.

"I got a good memory for faces," the androgyne told her. "A lot better than his."

Konstantin frowned at Thorpe, who shrugged and laughed a little. "Maybe he's actually trying to change careers. Step up to big pay in the drug trade."

The androgyne shook her/his head; the beads woven into the cream-colored dreadlocks rattled against each other. "Every day when he reports to the pool, we take a look at how the story's shaping up on his archiver. He actually takes it with him and leaves it in his locker. If we really were the mob, he'd have been dead before lunch on the first day." S/he chuckled. "Besides, who the h.e.l.l would pose as an investigative journalist?"

"Someone from Internal Affairs," Konstantin said before she could think better of it.

No one said anything for what seemed like half a day and might have been all of half a minute, if that.

"So how can we aid and abet the war on technocrime?" the androgyne asked finally, the stricken expression on his/her face fading only a little.

"Our colleague needs some evidence to use in her investigation," Thorpe said. The other two detectives sagged visibly as the tension went out of both of them.

"Well, all right," said the man, relief large in his voice. "I don't mind that, but I coulda done without the scare." "We're very superst.i.tious here," said the androgyne solemnly. "There's three things you don't mention around narcs: the nine-billionth name of G.o.d, and IAD."

"That's only two," said Konstantin.

"IAD counts as two things on the list, so with the you-know-what of G.o.d, that makes three. Those things will send your planet spinning out of orbit and into a black hole or something even worse."

"I don't think I'm clear on this," Konstantin said, looking to Thorpe for help.

He spread his hands. "And I'm afraid you'll have to stay that way. Obviously, there are built-in problems about explaining it better. But I can give you a quick-and-dirty on our operation," he added before she could insist. "This, as you can see, is where we process the product. Which means we step on it a few times, take out that troublesome potency that causes shrinkage of the profits. Today they're working on the AR addict's best friend, boost. Sometimes we get in psychoactives, occasionally there's a shipment of chill-powder for some niche market. But we've found the demand for boost is bottomless.

Probably because these guys--" he indicated his suit "--use it as much, sometimes more depending on what the stock market looks like."

"Where does it come from?" Konstantin asked.

The three detectives laughed. "We're working on tracing the routes."

"Oh. Well, who buys it?"

The man laughed some more. "What do you mean, who buys it?"

"I meant, who buys it when it first comes in, from wherever it comes from."

The androgyne and the other man traded looks and then stared at her as if she were crazy. "This is our operation. We buy it."

"I thought the drug lords bought it," Konstantin said, confused.

"They do," said Thorpe. "After we buy it and step on it, they buy it from us."

"But you don't know who you're buying it from, or where."

"We have very strong leads," the androgyne said. "Like a lot of people, you don't understand how long it can take to build a case that'll stand up in a court of law, with all the hard evidence and all that."

Konstantin looked down at the pool workers for a moment, but the answer wasn't down there, either. "But how do you get the stuff if you don't know who to buy it from or where?"

"Drug lords use their connections for us. We've just got to tie the two ends together, and so here we are in the middle, trying to do just that."

"What if you pulled out?" Konstantin asked.

"Pulled out of what?" asked the man. The look on his face said he was sure she was out of her mind.

"Pulled out of the middle. Just quit, told the drug lords to get their own operations going, and then you just followed their connections--"

"Well, first of all," said the androgyne, "that would tip them right away that we were cops, and we'd have to spend the rest of our lives running from one witness protection program to another. That wouldn't be a very long time, either. But even if they were all stupid and didn't get it, we pull out, it throws everything into chaos and they still come looking for us to kill us in the most painful and slowest ways they can think of. Plus, all our connections and evidence is all down the drain." The androgyne lowered one eyebrow and raised the other. "I personally cannot imagine what would make you suggest something like that."

"I'm just not a narc, I guess," Konstantin said after a moment.

"I'll go get your evidence for you," said the man, standing up and giving Thorpe a worried look.

"Maybe all this makes you uncomfortable, huh? I mean, technocrime and AR, it's not like when you're working there, you're really doing anything. Anything risky, I mean. It's not like you could get killed."

"No," Konstantin said, refusing to sound apologetic. "But I have noticed that wherever drugs are involved, the fatality rate has a tendency to rise. If I can find out something about that by working in AR, maybe someone else won't get killed, either."

She could tell they weren't impressed. Thorpe drove her back to headquarters, but refused to talk to her. Was he actually put out with her, she wondered, or was it just a discipline thing. At least she'dmanaged not to blurt out the nine-billionth name of G.o.d, though she was sure that if she'd stayed there any longer, she might have managed to do that as well.

"The only way these guys know you're serious," said the arms dealer, "is if you do the time.