Eight hours later. Angel was driving circles around the remains of The Rabbit Hole and wondering what had happened to her life.
She’d dug up a relic from Cleveland, a music ramcard, and had the cardplayer jacked up to full volume on the BMW’s comm. It was morey music—mostly the screams of clawed guitars—garage bands that no one outside of Cleveland had ever heard of. Unlike most of the synthvid crap that clogged the comm channels on the West Coast, this music had once existed outside of a computer’s memory.
The screaming chords and pidgin Arabic lyrics were a reminder of when her life had been understandable. Angel wanted to withdraw into the back alleys that had bred her, back when she knew the rules, back when she was going to live forever and the world was a half-dozen city blocks.
Back when she didn’t have enough sense to worry about tomorrow.
Must really be fucked up if you’re nostalgic about living in a burned-out building and a neighborhood that chewed up and spat out a good friend of yours every month or so.
Fucked up was right. This mess was infecting everything. Every facet of her life was becoming distorted.
Even Lei.
Angel slammed a fist into the side of a steering wheel.
Even her best friend, damn it. Her only friend in this town. What was worse, she hadn’t seen the argument coming until she found herself in the middle of it.
The transition had been so seamless that Angel still couldn’t figure out exactly what had happened. Lei had come home, and, at first, Lei was happy to see her back.
At first . . .
Down Market to the coast, up Mission to the scene of the fire—she’d been driving randomly, trying to clear her mind, and she’d been caught in this loop for the past fifteen minutes like a damaged ramcard, repeating the same four bits over and over. Market, Beale, Mission, and Second.
Angel could understand Lei’s point of view. No one should borrow trouble. She shouldn’t keep involving the cops and screwing with Lei’s life. Angel had tried to be reasonable, but somehow their voices kept getting raised.
A visit by an Asian gentleman in Mr. K’s employ hadn’t helped matters. Angel then had to explain how she’d become tied to someone with major league involvement in the shady side of the computer underground. The vindictiveness that revelation had unleashed made Angel run away from the apartment, into the BMW.
She’d been cruising south of Market for nearly two hours now.
Angel had needed to clear her head, and while she could have gotten the same air by walking, she felt better with a few tons of armor around her. That and the Beretta—Lei had made it very clear that she didn’t want a gun in the house anymore. Angel had slipped the gun under the driver’s seat.
Angel tried to think, even though she didn’t really want to.
She turned off Second again, passing the corner of Chinatown, and thought of Mr. K’s message.
Dear Miss Lopez, the letter went, find enclosed the tickets I agreed to replace. Two are not the originals, I’m afraid, since forging the primitive copy protection of the Nonhuman Football League is infinitely easier than reproducing the subtle encryption that masks the data covering two of the ramcards you gave me . . . The letter went on for a whole page like that, the upshot of which was that it was going to take days of computer time to unravel the data, and even then only if Mr. K had the right algorithm in the first place.
This whole situation had her in a dark foggy room with only a few solid objects she could get a grip on.
No question that Byron was a data courier. Between Mr. K fingering his MO, the anomalous data on two of the tickets Byron gave her—the ones, ironically, for the Denver game—and all the veiled references to “delivery” from Byron himself, Angel was finally clear on what he did for a living. Byron carried data from person A to person B, data that was much too valuable to trust to a sat transmission, or worse, the comm net.
Knowing that did little for her piece of mind, since she still had no idea what the data he carried was. She had to wait for some point between tomorrow and never for Mr. K to crack the encryption on those two ramcards before she could find out what Byron was carrying.
At least it was pretty clear where the data came from. Everyone seemed to agree who employed Byron Dorset, Mr. K, DeGarmo, even the paranoid cop Anaka. Byron transported data for VanDyne, a massive conglomerate which was into everything from comm circuitry to defense contracting. A company that, after the quake, inserted itself indelibly into the heart of San Francisco by championing the rebuilding effort. They were responsible for everything from the rebuilt Pyramid and Coit Tower, to that domed monstrosity on Alcatraz that was supposed to be an alien habitat.
The question that nagged at Angel was whether or not Byron was working for VanDyne when his throat got torn out. That question raised the fog level by an order of magnitude.
However, she was left with the fact that Byron had been running things smoothly for ten years. He’d made a few million moving hot data for VanDyne with no problems—up to now.
Suddenly, Byron gets creamed.
Angel knew that all this was far removed from the drug deals and gun running that had been rampant in her home neighborhood. However, she was familiar with the pattern. If something that established suddenly went wrong that badly, it generally meant one thing.
Someone fucked up.
Almost always, that someone fucked up by wanting more money. Angel suspected Byron’d fucked up.
She passed the ruins of The Rabbit Hole and thought herself deeper into the fog.
The information on those tickets was worth a lot to somebody. Mr. K was investing millions worth of computer time against that payoff. So, how does this get Byron’s throat slashed by a feline morey on Eddy Street?
Angel’s head was beginning to hurt. There was so much bullshit she needed to explain.
“Go slow,” she said to herself. “One step at a time.”
Go with the assumption that Byron fucked up. How do you fuck up a job that sweet? Simple answer, you want more money. It was a simple rule from her days on the street. You get greedy, you get dead. For some reason, Byron must have bucked the program he’d been following for ten years, and it got him killed.
Angel knew that she was making too many assumptions, but assumptions were all she had to go on. Besides, the way Byron laid this whole mess on her, it was nice to think he’d brought this all upon himself.
So, the next step was to figure out what Byron had been supposed to do before he screwed up. That was fairly simple. He was a courier. He was supposed to deliver the data to someone. Angel could even picture where the drop would have been. Byron had made a point in his letter about attending the Frisco-Denver game, and—to drive the point home—the data in question was on the tickets to that very game. Once there, a simple exchange of ramcards with some Denver fan would be ridiculously simple.
Something got screwed before that rendezvous.
That gave her two suspects for the killing if Byron was trying some sort of double-cross, VanDyne and the anonymous guys from Denver. Whoever offed Byron must’ve freaked when he didn’t have the data on him. VanDyne would want it back, and the guys from Denver would want the stuff they were paying big bucks for.
That didn’t explain a hotel on Eddy Street, damn it.
“Calm down, one step at a time, right?”
Think.
Fact, Byron got offed by a feline morey. Assume the cat killed Byron for the data. That would explain why Byron’s condo had been trashed. The smell there could have been feline, canine, or—
Angel slammed on the brakes and pulled to the curb. The realization had hit her like a defensive tackle rushing out of the fog. There had to be more than one set of players after those cards at the same time.
It was obvious.
The killers, the cat among them, wanted the data. They must have been sure Byron had the data on him. They didn’t know Byron’s MO of distancing himself from the hot stuff. Anyone familiar with Byron’s courier duties, like Mr. K, would have known that Byron would stash the data off on someone else until the final transfer. Someone who had known Byron over the course of his ten years as a courier would have known that it was likely that Byron would only have his hands on the vital ramcards at the Denver game during the scheduled trade off.
That meant that the killers, cat included, weren’t VanDyne or the guys from Denver. Otherwise they would’ve known better than to kill Byron before he gave up the location of the ramcards.
Once they offed Byron and saw their mistake, they trashed his condo looking for the stuff. These guys were hasty, sloppy, and violent.
That meant they were not the folks who’d very cleanly broken into Angel’s apartment—twice. They were not the ones who methodically read over every ramcard in her house, and were careful enough to cover their scent with some spray disinfectant. The killers who trashed Byron’s condo probably didn’t know enough to search her place.
The folks searching Angel’s apartment, looking for the ramcard Byron had slipped her, just weren’t prescient enough to know that she had dropped the shit in the morgue at Frisco General. These guys might fit the bill for the guys from Denver, the people Byron was supposed to hand the cards off to.
So far she had three players.
There was VanDyne, the origin of the hot potato. There were the guys from Denver, who seemed to have been shafted by Byron. Then she had the feline hit squad that only barely seemed to know what it was doing.
None of this explained why Byron was offed on Eddy Street, or why he was supposed to be meeting with the Knights of Humanity.
Could the Knights be the guys from Denver? That was bullshit. A Knight attending a NonHuman football game was asking to be the lead on tomorrow’s newscast. Also bullshit, they weren’t VanDyne—or they shouldn’t be if VanDyne was in the practice of hiring moreys.
And the Knights certainly weren’t hiring feline hit squads.
Angel looked up from the wheel and sighed.
Everything seemed to fit together so smoothly, and then she hit a wall.
She was only a few blocks short of the coast. Up that way was VanDyne HQ itself, across the street from the Hyatt Memorial. That started her thinking in a new direction.
She hit the controls on the BMW’s comm, cutting the music and activating it for outgoing calls. She frowned in frustration when she realized that her car’s antenna was still sitting in a gutter somewhere around the Pyramid. She killed the engine, turned the wheels toward the curb, and looked for a public comm.
The search took her halfway around the cycle she’d been traveling. She ended up having to loop around the postquake Sheraton to get to a comm on Market. She pulled up to it, the BMW facing down the hill and toward the Bay.
There was really no rule that prevented her from calling VanDyne herself and asking about Byron. It was the kind of thing she felt stupid about not realizing sooner.
The comm squatted in a spanking new booth sitting within its own blue aura. She got out of the car and listened to the foghorns in the distance, the surf, gulls—almost felt normal.
Then she realized that the salt air off the bay carried the smell of old smoke, and as she closed on the comm booth she saw new graffiti, “Off the Pink.”
“Off the Pink,” half a block down from the Sheraton.
Angel shrugged and ran her card through the comm’s reader and called up the directory. The World Headquarters for VanDyne Industrial was just a few blocks up Market. Right on the coast, and pretty damn close to all the BS that had happened to her.
There was a brief thought that those punks in The Rabbit Hole could have been there for Byron, and not just fucking around. No, that didn’t quite make sense, did it?
She glanced up Market as she started to call. “Wha?”
Was it paranoia, or was that four-door Chevy Caldera parked up the street the same one that had been behind her at the last light? If so, it had followed her around the Sheraton. On the comm, someone was saying, “Van Dyne Industrial, can I help you?”
Angel ignored it, and walked back to her car. Okay, she thought in Lei’s direction, I’ve gone totally paranoid. Angel tried to stay calm, but she was running by the time she got to the BMW.
She slammed the door behind her and jerked the car into the street, flooring it. The BMW shot down Market, toward the Bay. Angel took a few deep breaths and groped under the seat for the gun.
It wasn’t there.
And there was an unfamiliar smell in the back seat.
The BMW had made it half a block by the time she turned around. Had she been that stupid?
Her unwanted passenger was already returning to an upright position. In one hand was Angel’s Beretta, in the other was an FN P101—a small machine pistol with a trapezoidal barrel whose hole was the diameter of Angel’s index finger. He was a feline the size of a jaguar but with fur a uniform tawny color.
Angel’s foot was still pressing down on the accelerator as he leveled the machine pistol at her. For some reason she noticed the hands. Large, powerful hands with gloss-black claws that reflected the streetlights shooting by.
“Stop the car.”
It’d been the fucking broken window. This bastard had just walked into her back seat. She hadn’t bothered to turn on the damn alarm. Stupid, stupid, stupid all around.
The toes on her right foot kept the accelerator pressed to the floor. Her eyes stayed locked on the moreau in the back seat as the BMW’s transponder beeped warnings at her. The car was heading for a red light.
The cat in the back seat showed some teeth. Angel was beginning to read some emotion in those shadowy yellow eyes. The smell of stress was feline, but a different flavor of feline than Angel was familiar with.
“Stop the car,” he repeated. “We don’t want this to get messy.”
What the fuck was she doing? The bastard had a gun, two of them, in fact, one of them hers, and she wasn’t even looking at the road—
Hell, the road was clear the last time she looked.
“You don’t know what messy can be.” God help her, she was grinning.
The BMW’s computer went nuts with the warning beeps when she zoomed through a red light at the intersection of First Street. Horns dopplered past her and the thought crossed her mind that they were going to shoot by VanDyne in no time now.
“Damn it, stop the car! I’ll shoot if—”
There was a crunch when Angel came up on a car too fast for the collision avoidance system to compensate. She scraped by and turned her attention forward. The Bay was rushing up like a fog-shrouded abyss.
“Shoot me, then! You think I give a shit any more, you cock-sucking dweezil? Pull the goddamned trigger. I just hope your candy-ass can swim.”
They were almost on top of the bay.
This was crazy.
Angel hit the control that popped open all the locks on the car. VanDyne’s headquarters was the last building on the right, then the Main Street-California intersection, a short concrete embankment, then water.
The gun pressed into the back of her head. It trembled slightly. Angel smelled cat and gun oil.
The second she saw the VanDyne building—a refurbed Federal Reserve Bank—shoot by, she slammed on the brakes and pulled the BMW as hard to the right as she could. Half the computer’s red lights lit on the dash as the air filled with the high-pitched scream and acrid smell of fishtailing rubber.
The cat was thrown back and to the side, slamming somewhere into the passenger footwell.
The rear of the car kissed the concrete embankment—blowing a chunk of it into the bay—and she was shooting down Spear at about eighty klicks an hour. She saw movement in her rearview mirror and slammed on the brakes again. The cat was thrown forward—
Angel popped the door and ran, leaving the BMW to roll to a stop in the wrong lane.
Her thoughts were lagging about five steps behind her actions. She was still wondering if running was a good idea when she’d cleared the four lanes of Spear in two-and-a-half running steps.
She hit the curb when she heard the squeal of more tires back on Market. It was the black Chevy four-door screaming into the turn against the light.
Her foot touched the curb and one of the metered power feeds on the curb erupted into a shower of sparks. The echo of the gunshot was still dying when she cleared the sidewalk and dived over the barrier into VanDyne’s parking garage.
Cars, but no sign of manned security. The one guardbox by the gate was empty. As she glanced at it, the windows exploded, showering her with tiny cubes of polymer as she passed it. She leaped on the hood of a new Plymouth Antaeus and jumped from there, over a railing, to an upper level of the garage. Behind her she heard the Caldera crash through the barrier.
She had nowhere left to run but up. She was running so fast now that every third step she had to hit the ground with her hands to change direction.
She was cornered. What the hell was she going to do when she hit the top of the garage?
It was, at most, fifteen seconds she spent like that—running flat out, the sound of the Caldera gaining on her, her field of vision taken up by about a square meter of concrete that rushed by a dozen centimeters from her nose.
She must have run up a half-dozen levels, barely ahead of the Chevy, when she heard a noise ahead and to the right. Angel looked up in time to see a Dodge Electroline van peeling out of its parking spot. It backed and slammed itself across the traffic lane, crunching its end into an opposite retaining wall in the process.
“Shit!”
She was running too damn fast to stop, so she jumped. She got a brief view of the side of the van—Infotech Comm Repair or some such—before she slammed into the ceiling above the van. She hit with the back of her right shoulder and bounced, sending a shivering splinter of pain down that side of her body. It didn’t do much to slow her forward momentum. She hit the roof of the van, which was still rolling forward a bit after bouncing off the retaining wall.
She had enough time to realize she was in deep shit as she rolled off the other side of the van. This time she managed to lead with her feet. She ended up on all fours on the opposite side of the van as she heard the Caldera round the last turn.
On the other side of the van, she heard the side door crash open.
She was still trying to figure out if the van was an innocent bystander or another one of the fuckers out to get her when guns started going off all over the place.
Angel only had a slice of view out from under the van, but she could see the Caldera. Three people, all moreaus. They’d angled the passenger door toward the van, and some sort of canine was firing one of those nasty looking machine pistols toward her and the van.
The van was returning fire.
Boy, was it returning fire.
In response to the first short bark from the anonymous canine’s machine pistol a deafening chatter came from inside the van. It sounded like a jackhammer on steroids. Angel could follow the trace of the shot from the billows of concrete dust that blew in its wake. A cloud of gray dust tore in the direction of the black Chevy and twisted through the right front fender with the sound of shearing fiberglass.
She couldn’t hear the Chevy’s tire go, she could just see the gust of wind as it exploded. After that, sparks began grinding from the rim as the driver of the Chevy began reversing. That move probably saved the Chevy’s engine, if not its front-end alignment.
In three seconds it was over, and the only sound in the garage was the scraping echo from the rim of the Chevy as it escaped downward. The suspension on the van rocked as the occupant jumped out of the door on the other side.
Angel got up from her position on the ground, and prepared to bolt—
And Kobe Anaka rounded the front end of the van, still wearing the same damn suit and still looking like he needed a world of sleep. He was holding a smoking assault rifle.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” she said, too shocked to run.
From his look, it was a mutual question.