It took Angel a while to find Mr. Dittrich. Fortunately, whatever urban violence plagued her home town hadn’t affected the data lines into the city. Her only problem was sifting through a succession of different Bobs, Bobbies, Roberts, Robs, and Bobbis. Not to mention a half-dozen Dittrich’s who only bothered with a single first initial.
Her tenth call was forwarded to a place called Budget Surplus. The call was answered by a chubby, red-bearded human. “Budget Surplus, can I help you?”
On the bottom of the video, under Anaka’s comm’s date-time-status stamp, the picture was scrolling a hyperfast line of gibberish. Something that looked like neoelectronic hieroglyphs was whizzing by under this Bobby’s face.
“You know a tiger named Nohar?”
“May, may not. Who’re you?” There was a weighty look of suspicion in this pink’s eyes, but there was an impish smile under the red mustache.
A square block of the scrolling hieroglyphs froze. The block was to the far left, and the remaining line of pixel gibberish redoubled its speed.
“My name’s Angelica Lopez—”
“Angel?” One of the pink’s eyebrows arched.
Two more blocks of garbage froze, traveling from left to right. The rest of the line was now a total blur, it was changing so fast.
“Yes. Nohar told me, sort of, that I should talk to you.”
“Now why—” Dittrich paused and his gaze flicked downward. It was the first sign that he could also see the line of strange flickering characters on the bottom of the screen. As he paused, a few more blocks froze. He looked back up. “—would you be forwarded to someone of my talents?”
“Well—”
“Shh,” Dittrich said quietly, raising a hand to his lips. He was staring at the scrolling line on the screen. Three more blocks of it froze, the line of gibberish seemed almost to form a coherent pattern. Angel could hear Dittrich say to himself, “I love this.”
The rest of the line suddenly fell like a row of dominoes. The bottom line of the screen froze.
Suddenly the picture blanked, briefly became a negative version of itself, turned black and white, and reversed.
The picture was now a substantially lower resolution black and white image of Dittrich grinning from ear to ear.
“What the hell was that?” Angel asked, hoping that she hadn’t somehow busted Anaka’s comm.
“A little security.” Dittrich shrugged. “I’m in a sensitive line of work.”
“What did you do to my comm?”
“Oh, that. The lower quality pictures frees up the data signal to handle all the encryption data.”
“What?”
“I did a long-distance reprogramming of your comm’s computer. Don’t worry it’s not permanent. And—” Dittrich glanced off to his left, “—unless your name is Kobe Anaka, that’s not your comm.”
Angel sighed. “You do know Nohar, right?”
Dittrich nodded. “And you’re the hell-bunny he scraped off the remains of Musician’s Towers way back when.”
Angel opened her mouth to say something, but instead simply nodded.
“Any friend of Nohar’s . . . What can I do?”
She took a deep breath and dove into the story again. Dittrich stopped her when she got to the pile of ramcards on her dining room table. “Whoever they are, they’re looking for some sort of data file.”
“Okay,” Angel said, unsure.
“They haven’t found it yet.”
“How’s that follow?”
“There’s nothing at the condo, and at your apartment they’re interrupted before they can put things back—hmm. You know what it sounds like to me?”
“What?”
“Your Byron was a data courier. He moved things VanDyne didn’t trust to the data net. Stuff too hot for anyone to trust to a wire. High-risk, high-reward, easily could make a few million doing that. Did he give you anything on a ramcard? A movie, music, software, love poetry—”
Angels’ hand found its way into her pocket. The season tickets were still there. She pulled them out of her pocket and looked at the rainbow-sheened cards with the Earthquakes’ logo on them. She stared at them with growing realization. “You bastard, Byron.” All that time, was she just being used?
Dittrich nodded. “I think Nohar wanted me to give you a line on a fellow hacker out there on the coast.”
“Yes, someone to help sort out this mess.”
“Before I do so—a warning from an old hand at the information game.”
Angel looked up and waited for Dittrich to go on.
“Data that valuable’s likely to be just as dangerous.”
• • •
Angel left Anaka asleep on his futon. She’d decided that it was pretty much a sure thing the cop was going to sleep through the rest of the day. Alcohol and exhaustion had finally caught up with the man.
Over and over, Angel thought about the damn tickets. She did not want to think that Byron was using her like that, planting crap like that on her—
The more she thought about it, though, the more it was starting to look like Byron was acting the playboy. While she had been taking things seriously, he’d been taking it as just another fling. She was just another female he’d charmed, the only real distinction being that she was the last. She hadn’t been in a relationship, she’d been in an effing lottery.
She surprised herself by actually considering not accepting the money.
“Come on, let’s not be a fool twice,” she said to herself as she hit the switchbacks on Lombard Street.
“Oh, God,” she said as she hit the first turn. She started cursing rapidly in Spanish as she slowed to a crawl and maneuvered the large BMW down the insane curves. She would have avoided this stretch if she’d been thinking.
She had one brief close call with a Dodge Portola pickup on the last turn. A long, red-flagged length of white PVC pipe that hung out the back of the truck bed actually swept over the front hood of her car, barely missing the windshield. It took all the self-control Angel had not to slam on the brakes in the middle of the turn.
She came out the other end of the bend without impaling her car on the pipe.
Cursing herself, she continued down Lombard, and almost ran down a cable car trolling through the intersection at Columbus. The BMW froze, half in the intersection, as the car passed by in front of her going at its slow, sedate, pace. It caught her attention that there was not a single moreau on the car.
Horns began to blare behind her.
She turned down Columbus and suddenly, for the first time since coming to Frisco, began to worry about the neighborhood. Nob Hill and points north were solid pink. Always had been solid pink. That usually didn’t bother her . . .
Today was different.
She drove down Columbus, toward Chinatown, toward the Pyramid, and she could feel the pinks looking at her. She could feel the drivers around her thinking she didn’t belong in that kind of car, didn’t belong this far north of Market.
Suddenly, this city didn’t seem so different. Frisco might not have any concrete barriers blocking off access to the morey neighborhoods, it might not have a morey curfew, it might even have one or two morey cops, but the eyes that followed her down Columbus Avenue could have been from Cleveland, or LA, or New York.
She was sitting at the light at Montgomery, just in front of the Pyramid, and something hit her windshield.
Angel heard a smack, and some liquid splashed across her field of view. She looked to the left, and she saw a knot of pinks on the crosswalk. One of them had thrown a bulb of coke, or coffee, or some dark beverage at the BMW’s windshield.
“Go home,” she heard one say.
There were seven or eight of them, and what scared Angel was the fact that they weren’t skinheads. They looked like fairly normal pink adolescents.
They had crossed to stand in front of her car, and they stopped.
One gave her the finger, two others put their hands on the hood and began rocking the car up and down on the shocks.
“Oh, shit,” Angel whispered. She checked to make sure the doors were locked. As she did, the humans began to surround the car.
“Where’d the rat steal this—”
“Don’t want your kind here—”
“Looking for some kind of trouble—”
The humans began to hit the car with their fists.
The light changed and the car behind her began to lay on the horn. Christ, Angel thought, couldn’t he see the mess she was in? She punched the BMW’s comm to call the cops, but the damn thing only broadcast static. She looked up and saw a pink with a denim jacket and a T-shirt with an “Alex Gregg in ’60” logo on it. He was whipping the end of her severed antenna across the hood of the car.
One of the pinks jumped up on the hood and started to jump up and down, and Angel heard a window behind her shatter.
That was fucking enough.
She slammed the BMW into reverse, flooring the accelerator and turning the wheel. The rear wheels bit pavement and her car shot back to the left, across the double yellow line. The computer on the BMW began to flash all sorts of collision avoidance lights and traffic warnings at her.
The pink on the hood took a header backward and fell headfirst into a storm sewer drain. Two pinks on the left jumped back, out of the BMW’s way and into the other lane.
An old Dodge four-door was turning in from Washington and slammed on the brakes in the center of the intersection to avoid running down one of the pinks. A motorcycle crunched into it broadside. The cyclist tumbled over the hood of the Dodge and landed on a few of the pinks who were still standing in the crosswalk.
There was a crunch as the BMW kissed fenders with the car behind it, then Angel shot backward in the opposite lane, up Columbus the way she’d come. There was screaming from behind her, and she saw that one of the pink kids had put his arm through her rear passenger side window. He was now hanging on to the door, his other hand frantic for some sort of handhold. Angel grinned as she shot backward through the intersection at Jackson—fortunately, the light was with her—and slammed on the brakes just on the other side of the light.
The pink tumbled from her door, and Angel made a squealing left turn on to Jackson.
It might have been a dumb idea, but she looped around Jackson Square and came down Washington to view the destruction from the other end. She shouldn’t have been worried about the kids. They deserved what they got. However, she still found herself hoping that no one got seriously hurt. If nothing else, she didn’t want any more trouble with the cops.
She drove by the intersection in front of the Pyramid, and everyone seemed to be standing around, ambulatory— Except for the kid who’d taken the header into the storm drain. He was lying in the street, unmoving.
Angel didn’t stop to give the survivors a chance to tear her apart.
She turned down Stockton and followed the length of Chinatown as the night darkened around her.
When she hit the tunnel, she realized she was shaking. She took a few deep breaths and told herself that she’d deal with it later. She’d talk to the cops later, too, after she found the contact Dittrich gave her.
What the hell was happening to this city?
She left the claustrophobic confines of the tunnel and the night seemed even darker now. She was surrounded by post-earthquake Chinatown, south of the so-called Gateway Arch. Nothing around her now was more than twenty years old. It was all chrome pagodas and flickering neon. There seemed to be something quintessentially Asian about garish street signs.
And here, where Chinatown was busy crowding Market, there were moreaus. Lots of moreaus. A quarter of the refugees from the Asian war were nonhuman, and half of those were Chinese. Angel drove by towering ursoids, the typically long-limbed Asian rabbit strains, dark-haired canines, as well as some exotic species that she couldn’t place.
The name Dittrich had given her was Kaji Tetsami—a name that didn’t belong down here. A Jap in Chinatown was about as out of place as a rabbit at a mosque. But, as she turned on to Post Street to approach a postmodern steel and glass neo-Asian monstrosity she realized that her navigation wasn’t off. The address Dittrich gave her was in the southwest corner of Chinatown. The rich part that held a lot of descendants of old Hong Kong refugee money.
The address was, in fact, the neo-Asian monstrosity she was approaching. It was a residential tower that took up most of a city block, and if her estimate of the thing’s height was correct, Tetsami lived close to the top of the building. Maybe the top.
She pulled into the parking garage, and was stopped by a transparent, probably armored, barrier. She sat and idled, wondering what the hell she was supposed to do. She didn’t see a comm box around, only two lanes of concrete and one video camera.
“Please lower your window,” came a voice from nowhere.
Angel did so, looking for where the voice was coming from. The sound was amplified and echoey in the concrete chamber, but she couldn’t locate the source, even with her oversized ears.
“Name?”
“Angel Lopez,” she said, trying to find the guard, the voice pickup, or the speaker. She ended up deciding that it was all in the camera.
“Who do you wish to see?”
“Kaji Tetsami.”
There followed a long silence. It grew to such a length that she thought that their speaker or their voice pickup might be broken.
“I’m here for a Mr. Tetsami. Hello?”
She got no response.
She had shifted the BMW into reverse and was about to pull back out of the garage when the transparent door rolled up into the ceiling.
“Parking space five-zero-seven,” said a different amplified voice.
Angel pulled into the garage, and noted the door closing immediately behind her. She took one turn into the structure and saw a guardhouse. It sat behind armored windows that had a human watching a few dozen vid screens. As she passed it she noted an open door behind the rent-a-cop. She saw part of a rack and at least three shotguns and a small submachine gun.
She drove through the garage past Porsches, Mercedes Benzes, other BMW’s, a Ferrari, a Maduro—
The lane split into two ramps. The one going up had a sign saying “050-499.” The one down said “500+.” The one down was labeled “authorized personnel only.”
She turned down the lower ramp and began the descent. Another armored door was raising as she approached. She drove past it and found herself in a much smaller sublevel of the garage.
The BMW was barely ten yards into the garage when she saw the dozen armed rent-a-cops lining the walls. They all had their hands on their weapons and, as Angel looked back behind her, the door was already closed.
“Oh, shit,” she whispered to herself.