Shadowrun: Shadowplay Part 21

He drifted inside, only to be stopped at the door by the bouncer from h.e.l.l-an Amerindian troll whose asymmetrical head brushed the high ceiling of the entranceway as he demanded some ID. Falcon slotted his credstick, silently grateful for Sly's decision to make David Falstaff twenty-one years old, handed over a crumpled five-nuyen bill for the cover charge, and jandered inside.

The salad show was in full swing, the two blondes on stage looking cosmically bored by the whole production. There were a couple of vacant seats down in "gynecology row" bordering the raised stage, but he chose a small corner table near the rear, giving him a more strategic view of the whole establishment. When the waiter came by, Falcon ordered a shot and a beer, then continued splitting his attention between the show and the audience.

The place was busy but not packed. The guys down in gynecology row were paying rapt attention to the goings-on not two meters in front of their noses, but the rest of the crowd seemed more concerned with their own biz. The feel of the place reminded him of Superdad's, a real hole out in Redmond that catered about equally to blue-collar voyeurs and to street operators looking for a safe meet. With a quickening of interest, Falcon scanned the faces of the crowd a little more intently. If this was like Superdad's, a good percentage of the "audience" would actually be shadowrunners, trying to score some biz. (How active is Cheyenne's shadow community? he wondered. Then wondered some more about how to find out. Go up and ask someone? Excuse me, sir, but are you a shadowrunner? Are you planning anything illegal in the near future?) When his drink order arrived, he paid with a fistful of coins. The waiter watched with exaggerated patience as Falcon had to hold up the individual coins to the stage lighting to read the denominations. Then, with a mutter of, "Tourists," the slag wandered off.

"Hoi there, honey. New to town, huh?"

Falcon turned. There was a woman standing behind him. Short and pleasantly rounded in all the right places, with frizzed auburn hair. She wore a short, low-cut dress in emerald green, off the shoulders, prevented from coming all the way off only by a generous expanse of bosom. Subtle face paint, in colors that accentuated both her hair and the color of the dress she almost wasn't wearing. Broad smile on a face that looked only a couple of years older than Falcon's. Bright green eyes, steady and appraising, that made him up his estimate of her age by more than a decade.

"Feel up to buying a lady a drink, huh?" she asked. Her voice had a musical southern lilt to it.

"Uh ..." Falcon hesitated for a slow five-count. Then, "Why not?"

She pulled up a chair, settled herself comfortably close to him. Crossed her legs, showing a goodly expanse of pale thigh. Another Anglo, he couldn't help but notice. Falcon started to wave for the waiter, but the woman put a surprisingly large hand on his arm. "I'll get it, honey." And then she whistled between her teeth, painfully loud near his ear. When the waiter looked over, she pointed to the table. The waiter nodded and headed toward the bar. "Sammy knows what I drink," she explained needlessly. I bet he does, Falcon thought.

They waited in silence until the waiter delivered her drink-a fruity-looking thing with a small paper parasol standing in it. She watched as Falcon fumbled with the bills, paid the waiter the ten nuyen he demanded. Only when Sammy had departed did she speak again.

"Have you got a name, sugar?"

"David Falstaff," he answered. "And you?"

"Bobby Jo Dupuis." She p.r.o.nounced it "Doo-pwee," the second syllable pitched a major seventh above the first, and almost piercing enough to make his fingernails split. "Good ol' Bobby Jo." She laid a hand on his arm again, squeezed gently. "So, where you from?"

"Bellingham," he answered, "up in Salish-Shidhe." The woman's hand on his arm made him a little uncomfortable, but he was too embarra.s.sed to move it.

"Going to be in town long?"

"Maybe."

"Business or pleasure?" She began to ma.s.sage his arm gently.

"Biz," he answered quickly. Then he hesitated. Maybe this was a chance to find out something useful about the shadows of Cheyenne. "I guess how long I stay in town depends on whether I find something to make it worth my while, you know what I mean? Something to keep me here." He shrugged, tried to sound nonchalant. "That's kind of why I came in here. Am I in the right place to find something that's going to keep me busy?" She squealed with laughter. "Sugar, you sure as h.e.l.l found yourself the right place. And you found yourself the right person, too. Good ol' Bobby Jo's sure enough the girl for you if you want to keep yourself real busy, you get my drift?"

This was definitely not going the way Falcon had expected.

"Ya know," the woman went on conversationally, "I really like this place, but . . . well, maybe it's not the best place for conversation, you know? Like, for two people to really get to know each other." She began to stroke his calf with the side of her foot. "You got a place around here where we could, you know, talk, sugar?" she purred.

A sudden feeling of panic bubbled up inside Falcon's chest. He looked around wildly for some way out, for some kind of help.

And that was when his eyes lit on a familiar face. On the far side of the room, a big man with broad, bulging shoulders was making his way through the crowd toward the front door. Apparently he'd just emerged from some back room behind the stage. He wasn't looking around him, apparently hadn't spotted Falcon. Frag it, Falcon thought, it's Knife-Edge. The leader of the Amerindian runners who'd tried to ambush Sly, the ones with whom Nightwalker had been working in the sprawl.

Falcon snapped his head around, away from the big runner. Ducked down low toward the table, grabbed his untouched shot gla.s.s and sucked back the contents. He tried not to choke at the fire in his throat. Keeping his hand, holding the gla.s.s, in front of his face, he watched Knife-Edge from the corner of his eye. The big man still didn't look around him, just worked his way through the crowd to the door, then disappeared outside.

Falcon jumped as Bobby Jo squeezed his leg, high up on his thigh. "Honey, you look like you done seen a ghost."

Not quite, he thought, remembering how the hidden sniper's shot-the one that had blown Benbo's chest apart-had cored Knife-Edge front to back. I wish he was a ghost. . . .

The runner was gone, the door swinging shut behind him. Falcon jumped to his feet. Bobby Jo, thrown off-balance because of her crossed legs, teetered for a moment, eyes wide, grabbing at the table to keep herself from pitching to the floor. "Hey!" she squealed in a teeth-hurting soprano.

"Sorry, Bobby Jo," he mumbled. "Gotta go."

Falcon hurried toward the front door, heard the woman hissing viciously behind him, "Pudlicker! Pudlicking hoopfragging pansy kid ..." Then, thankfully, he was out into the night, the cold breeze blowing away the alcohol fumes, leaving his head clear.

Knife-Edge was already half a block away, heading east on Pershing, back toward Twenty-third Street. The big runner was walking quickly, but Falcon thought he could detect a trace of a limp. (Only a trace? After the hit he took? There had to be healing magic involved.) The ganger started after him, trying to look casual while also using knots of pedestrians to shield him from view in case Knife-Edge should glance over his shoulder.

It wasn't as easy as it looked on the trid, he decided, after catching the third hard elbow in the ribs when he accidentally b.u.mped a pa.s.serby. Trying to keep concealed was slowing him down, and the large figure of Knife-Edge was already almost a block ahead. At this rate, Falcon would lose him before they'd gone another two blocks. What the frag should he do?

Knife-Edge didn't seem to be watching for tails. Since leaving the bar, Falcon hadn't seen him glance over his shoulder once, and the angles were wrong for the runner to use store windows and other tricks. After thinking about it for a moment, he changed his tactics, closing the distance until he was only about a half-block behind his quarry. At that range, it probably didn't matter that he wasn't sheltering behind pedestrians. If Knife-Edge ever did glance back, what were the chances he'd recognize one face in the crowd at a distance of fifty meters? Not good, he figured. On the other hand, Knife-Edge's size and his distinctive gait-thanks to the unknown sniper-made it unlikely that Falcon would lose sight of him.

They pa.s.sed the Sioux National Theater again. A performance had apparently just ended, and a flood of men and women looking much better-dressed than the pedestrians further west on Pershing were crowding the sidewalk, signaling for taxis or retrieving their own cars from valets. For a single, tense moment, Falcon thought he'd lost Knife-Edge. He pushed through the crowd, winning some curses and another elbow in the ribs. Where is he? Falcon thought, then spotted his prey again. He wasn't more than forty meters ahead, still heading east.

On the other side of Twenty-third Street, the number of pedestrians began to diminish. A mixed blessing: the odds of losing Knife-Edge were greatly decreased, while the chance that the runner would spot his shadow were increased. Falcon backed off as far as he dared, pretending to look in a store display until Knife-Edge had opened the gap by another twenty or so meters.

As the traffic on the sidewalk changed, so did the buildings that flanked it. The grotty bars were replaced by high-tone stores and boutiques, all closed at this time of night. Then, as Falcon hit a cross-street called Windmill Road, the buildings changed again to become tall office complexes mixed together with what looked like governmental structures. He glanced over at a large building across the street. Bureau of Justice, read the big bra.s.s letters beside the door. Yep, he thought, we're into government-land. He swung his gaze back to the figure of Knife-Edge ahead of him.

And couldn't spot him. The runner had vanished.

For a moment Falcon panicked.

Then he saw the large figure. The samurai had left the sidewalk, was climbing a shallow flight of steps to the door of a blocky-iooking office building just ahead. Two large bushes flanked the bottom of the stairway, which explained why Falcon had momentarily lost sight of the man. He dropped to one knee, pretended to busy himself adjusting the velcro fastener of his runner, while actually keeping his eyes on his quarry.

Knife-Edge stopped at the door, reached into his pocket and extracted something too small for Falcon to see. With whatever it was in his hand, he reached out to the door. Then, with the other hand he pulled the door open. A pa.s.scard. Falcon thought, what else? The big man stepped into the building, the door shutting behind him, and that was that.

Falcon didn't move immediately, still "adjusting" the shoe's fastener. He couldn't imagine what he was supposed to do now. All Falcon knew was an overwhelmingly important need to find out where Knife-Edge was going and what he was doing in Cheyenne. But how could he do that? He saw the runner disappear into an office building, sure, but how many businesses would you find in the average office building?

Was there any way of narrowing it down? It was obvious Falcon couldn't get into the building itself if Knife-Edge needed a pa.s.scard. . . .

Maybe it would help to learn to which floor the runner had gone. Which would require looking in through the gla.s.s front door of the building, watching the indicator over the elevator.

Which meant he had to hurry. Falcon jumped to his feet and ran, stopping only when he reached the large bush at the bottom of the stairs. Cautiously, he looked around the bush.

Yes, this was the perfect vantage point. He could see into the lobby, and had an uninterrupted view of the bank of elevators. Even better, it looked like an elevator car hadn't yet responded to Knife-Edge's call. The big runner was standing there, waiting, his back to the front door and to Falcon. The ganger checked: yes, there were indicators over each of the elevator doors, and yes, they were big enough for him to read from this distance.

What building was this anyway? He glanced away for a moment, checked the logo and the big letters mounted over the door.

The logo was a stylized intertwining of the letters O, M, and I, the words explicating what those letters meant.

Sioux Nation Office of Military Intelligence, they read.

Office of Military Intelligence. Oh holy frag. . . . For a single instant, Falcon stood frozen there.

An instant too long. As if cued by some kind of instinct, Knife-Edge glanced back over his shoulder for the first time.

Falcon felt the runner's gaze on him, saw his eyes widen in recognition. Saw the man's hand come up holding something. No, not a gun: a tiny radio. Saw him start to speak into it.

And suddenly Falcon was un-frozen, could move again. Move he did. He turned and sprinted back the way he'd come, back toward the crowds and the tacky neon and the girlie bars and Bobby Jo Dupuis. Away from the Office of Military Intelligence and the runner who wasn't a runner after all and the official, uniformed skull-crushers he must have at his beck and call.

He heard something behind him, the crash of boots on concrete. Running footsteps-heavy running footsteps. He risked a quick look over his shoulder.

And wished he hadn't. There were four of them after him, Mohawked trolls in semi-military uniforms, heavy-duty handguns out. Where'd they come from? Falcon wondered. Had they been fragging summoned? But of course it didn't matter where they'd come from. They weren't more than twenty-five meters behind him, armed to the tusks, and coming like bats out of fragging h.e.l.l. "Stop!" one of them roared. "Stop or we shoot!"

In your dreams, I'll stop. Falcon poured on the speed.

A gun boomed behind him, then a bullet smashed off the sidewalk at his feet. Fragments of concrete flayed his legs through his trousers. Warning shot? he wondered. Or trying to wing me? It didn't matter anyway, he realized. With Knife-Edge back there, capture was as good as death, wasn't it? Something went whirr-thup past his ear, the gunshot itself sounding an instant later.

Ahead he saw a narrow pa.s.sageway between two boutiques. He took the corner at maximum speed, scrabbling for traction and almost losing it. Then accelerating for all he was worth down the narrow, echoing lane.

He had to get out of here now, he realized. With the unbroken walls on either side of him-ferrocrete, construction composite, or maybe something even more resilient-any bullets shot down the alleyway would ricochet wildly back and forth. Which, of course, increased the chance that they'd strike something valuable-namely, Dennis Falk a.k.a. David Falstaff.

Behind him, the parallel walls amplified the thundering bootsteps of his pursuers. Two guns spoke simultaneously, the bullets whining off into the darkness. Neither shot was close enough for him to feel or hear the pa.s.sage of the actual round. But that wouldn't last, he knew. All the odds were with the trolls behind him, and n.o.body lasted long betting against the house.

But what were his options? Judging from the sounds, he thought he was opening up the gap. The troll guards were like greased h.e.l.l on the straightaways, their long legs eating up the ground. But when it came to any kind of maneuvering, even their strength couldn't overcome their bodies' almost ludicrous inertia. When Falcon had taken the turn into the alley, he'd extended his lead by at least ten meters, maybe a lot more, which the trolls were currently regaining with every step they took.

So, was he supposed to turn now, try and gun them all down, the way the hero does it in a trideo show? Forget it! That might work on the trid, but in the past three days Falcon had learned a lot about just how much relationship the trid had to real life. Slim and none. If he stopped, if he tried to return fire, he might crease one or two of the trolls-if he was real lucky-before they reduced him to a cloud of airborne blood droplets and a smear of tissue on the ground. No, thank you.

A wider opening to the right. Without even looking, he blasted around the corner at full bore.

Another alley, wider, stretching off into the distance. This one was wide enough for trucks to drive down to collect garbage from the dumpsters that sat like sleeping beasts every block or two.

For a moment, Falcon could easily have convinced himself he was back in Seattle, back in the part of the sprawl he called home. The Kingdome would be that way, the Renraku Arcology over there.

And then, suddenly, time seemed to telescope, to collapse on itself. He wasn't in Cheyenne. The span of time that had taken him from Seattle to here might never have existed. He was back in the alleys of Seattle, with a pack of trolls on his tail, trolls who wanted to kill him. Sure, part of his brain knew they were military sec-guards. But, by the spirits and totems, they might as well have been the Disa.s.semblers d.o.g.g.i.ng him near the docks. For some reason, the sense of familiarity energized his body, gave him the juice to run even harder.

The way he'd lost the Disa.s.semblers that time was by wearing them down. In any straight race he would lose. So the trick was to throw a couple of cuts and turns into it.

To his left, he saw another opening, another alley. He almost laughed out loud as he cut hard left, every muscle in his body cooperating like parts of some perfect racing machine. Two more bullets went spang! off the concrete around him, but he didn't slow down. The trolls were already fifteen meters further back. Another opening yawned, this time to his right. As he rounded the corner, this time he did laugh out loud. Another fifteen meters.

He didn't know how long the chase went on, soon losing track of his direction or of how far back the pursuers were. He knew from the echoes of their pounding boots and once in a while the sound of a shot that they were still on him, but nothing got anywhere near him anymore. He was glad for the sounds of pursuit; without that to cue from, his random cuts and turns through the back streets and alleys of Cheyenne might accidentally have taken him straight back into their faces.

And then it didn't matter how long he'd been running. All that mattered was how much longer the chase would go on. The cold air was tearing at his throat, searing his lungs. The muscles of his legs burned like fire.

That was the difference between these slags and the Disa.s.semblers, he thought, listening to the steady sounds of pursuit. These guys were in shape.

Maybe in better shape than Falcon. He might be opening the gap, but that was purely because of the speed differential. The further he ran, the more convinced he became that they'd be on him the moment he stopped.

They'd be on him and they'd kill him. Or worse, he thought, remembering what was left of Agarwal.

He hurled himself around another corner, almost plowing full-speed into an open dumpster. He skidded to a stop.

Why not?

He vaulted into the dumpster, sinking calf-deep into the noisome contents. Reaching up, he dragged the heavy lid down. Unlike the ones in Seattle, these hinges weren't rusty; the lid was going to close all the way. Working quickly, he jammed something under the metal top, leaving an opening almost a hand's-breadth wide. Then he crouched low, put his eye to the gap, and waited.

What the frag am I doing? he thought suddenly, the answer hitting him as hard as one of those speeding road trains he'd pa.s.sed on the nighttime highways. The realization was terrifying. He was acting as though his pursuers were the Disa.s.semblers, him trying to repeat the same trick that had saved his hoop back in Seattle.

But these slags weren't the Disa.s.semblers. They were trained fragging security guards, probably military-trained. And he thought he was going to shake them off as easily as some chipped-out homeboy trolls from the docks?

Falcon reached up, set his palms against the heavy metal lid, prepared to push it open. This fragging stupid detour had cost him too many seconds, too many meters. If he was really lucky, he'd be out of the dumpster with the same lead he'd started with outside the OMI building.

But he wasn't lucky. Before he could lift the lid a centimeter, the sound of boots against the concrete became louder, clearer. In panic, he peeked through the gap he'd left.

The trolls had rounded the corner, were no more than a few steps from his hiding place. All were breathing hard, but none looked trashed. Falcon guessed that, if necessary, they could keep up the chase as long as he could.

But they won't have to, will they? He ducked as low as he could and still watch the outside. He struggled to keep his labored breathing quiet.

The leader of the trolls didn't waste his breath in speech. In the dim light, his hand flashed through a quick sequence of complex gestures. They didn't mean anything to Falcon, but they were obviously expressive to his comrades. One nodded.

Then, to Falcon's horror, the troll walked straight to the dumpster. Reaching out with a hand the size of Falcon's head, he grabbed the edge of the metal lid.

25.

2312 hours, November 15, 2053 Sly checked her watch. It had been a hard couple of hours. After Falcon left, she'd gone back into the Matrix, staying out of areas that probably had serious security, yet digging a little deeper than the first time.

It was an axiom of shadow work that the best way to find something hidden was not to look for it directly. Instead, you watched other things that might be affected by the item you were after. You looked for unusual reactions, strange perturbations that were not logical. And when you found the perturbations, the chance was good that what you were actually seeing was the effect your hidden target had on things around it. If you looked in enough areas, cataloged enough perturbations, you could often mentally calculate the exact location of your original subject. Someone had once told Sly that this technique came from astronomy, and was responsible for the discovery of one of the outer planets-Pluto, she thought it was. Astronomers had measured strange perturbations in the orbits of other planets, and postulated that they were caused by the gravity of another, as yet undiscovered, world. They calculated where that new world would have to be to cause the measured effects, pointed their telescopes to that part of the sky, and bingo.

Sly had done very much the same thing, but instead of planetary orbits, she examined the activities of local corporations, specific types of news reports, and activity on public computer bulletin board systems. She looked for patterns a.n.a.logous to the slight wobbles in a planet's motion that the astronomers had noted, and she found them. What they told her was that something large and very influential was operating beneath the surface of Cheyenne business activity.

A large and active shadow community. It couldn't be anything else.

Where did the runners come from? she wondered curiously. Did they learn their chops here or were they imports? How many of the Seattle runners who'd dropped out of sight and who she'd a.s.sumed were flatlined had actually pulled a quick fade and reappeared in Cheyenne?

Once she had a sense of the size and activity of the shadow community, it wasn't too hard to plug in to it, at least peripherally. Large electronic credit transfers to various sources gave her the LTG number of a local "salvage consultant" and part-time fixer named Tammy. And from her, Sly purchased the LTG number for the local Shadowland server.

During her search, she'd come across something else, something she hadn't been actively seeking, but interesting just the same. A name kept popping up, apparently the name of someone who was occasionally active in the Cheyenne shadows, an infrequent player but very influential when he did play. Montgomery. No first name, and no further details. Could that be Dirk Montgomery? Buzz on the streets of Seattle said Dirk had made a really big score-the score, the Big One that every runner dreamed of-and had slipped into the light to enjoy his spoils in retirement. If that was true, why was he still hustling? And why was he in Cheyenne?

She shrugged, then put those speculations aside as irrelevant. It was probably a different Montgomery anyway.

Sly toyed with the deck's brain plug, glanced over at the bed where Falcon had been sprawled. To her surprise, she found herself wishing the kid were back. At least he would have been someone to talk things over with.

The idea of decking into the local Shadowland system frightened her, she had to admit, but she didn't know why. It wasn't as if she'd be going up against any ice. (There was ice a.s.sociated with Shadowland, of course, to protect it from corp and government deckers who'd like to close it down. But as long as she didn't try anything drek-headed like commandeering the system or erasing important files, she wouldn't even know the intrusion countermeasures were there.) It was just that Shadowland was symbolic. It represented her old life, the life of the shadow decker. The life that had almost killed her, that had slotted up her mind for more than a year, and that still caused her occasional nightmares.

Stupid, she told herself. Logically there was no more risk in logging onto Shadowland than in making a phone call. She'd already done something much more risky by trying to hack into Zurich-Orbital.

Yes, another part of her mind replied, but then you had Smeland running cover, didn't you? This time there's n.o.body to watch your back.

She shook her head. She knew that she'd be able to find dozens of reasons-logical or emotional-why she shouldn't do what she knew she had to. So the trick is, don't think about it, she told herself. Quickly, before she could change her mind, she snugged the plug into her datajack and typed the first command string into the deck.

Erehwon, the place was called. It was a "virtual bar," something Sly had heard about but never experienced personally. Back when she'd been running the Matrix for a living, people had talked about creating "virtual meeting places" in the network. But if any such places had actually existed then, neither she nor anyone she'd known had ever visited one.

Of course, that was five years ago, an eternity when it came to technical developments. Virtual meeting places- forums, discussion groups, and so on-were commonplace, an accepted way of life. Instead of meeting physically around a conference table or using limited intermediaries like conference calls and two-way video, people with datajacks could meet virtually. All partic.i.p.ants in a meet would project their persona icons into a selected locale in the Matrix, and then carry on their discussions there.