For an instant, Angel wanted to run. Just start running blindly and never stop. But her feet remained rooted to the aisle well past the point when her panic faded and she could think.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” she asked again. She was sick of surprises, sick of being caught off guard.
Anaka moved over a seat and gestured for her to sit down next to him. “You seem to forget, I’m the one who returned those tickets to you.”
“Oh, yeah.” Briefly, she felt really silly. She was getting as paranoid as everyone accused Anaka of being. “How’d you know I’d be at the game?”
“I didn’t.” Anaka shrugged. “Seemed likely, considering the emphasis the letter put on it.”
“You read—” She clamped down on the self-righteous question. Of course he’d read it, how else would he have known who to return it to? “Why’d you come here?”
“I don’t know . . .” Angel bent over and got a good look at him. He was in sad shape. His eyes were bloodshot. The suit he wore was different, but just as rumpled as the last one she saw him in. Even over the pungent odors of hot dogs, beer, and ten thousand moreaus, she could tell he hadn’t been anywhere near a shower in days. His face seemed thinner, his chin shadowed, and his movements had the deliberate quality of someone who knew he was on the verge of collapse. He stared up at her and there was a pleading look in his eyes. “Come in, Angel, to the station with me.”
Angel looked at him coldly. “Fuck you, Anaka. I’ve already tried to do that once.”
Anaka turned and rested his forehead against the seat in front of him. It was so long before he responded that she thought he had fallen asleep. Meanwhile the PA system blared, “Welcome to the Hunterdome and Earthquakes’ football.”
During the applause, Anaka said, “I don’t know what else to do.”
Angel barely heard him. The motto of the Earthquakes was that they’d “make the ground shake,” and the bass speakers of the dome’s sound system did a good job of making everything vibrate.
A minor 2 to 4 quake could hit right now and no one would notice. Those who did would probably put it down to a special effect.
“You have to help me—”
“Help you what?”
“Stop them!” Anaka was shaking, and it wasn’t just the noise level in the dome.
Above them, over the field, the massive holo was firing up. Ten-meter-tall armored moreys went through their ritualized violence up there on virtual turf. It then began feeding in the net simulcast.
“You’re the only one,” Anaka said, “who knows. Who isn’t a part of this.”
Angel put a hand on his shoulder. How the hell could she tell him that she’d given up fighting, that the best thing she was hoping for was a clean exit. “You need some rest—”
He shook free of her grasp. “How the hell can you say that?”
“Anaka—”
“After all this, I’d think you’d understand.”
Angel got a prickly feeling at the back of her neck. The feeling that something had gone terribly wrong. Anaka was on the verge of hysteria. Something bad had happened.
She put a hand back on his shoulder as the teams began to take the field. While the announcer went through the roster and the holo threw up stats in all their three-dimensional graphic glory. “Tell me what happened.”
He looked at her sideways through half-closed eyes. “Oh, you know. You probably always knew. It was your lover that started all this.”
“Cut the crap and tell me what happened after that goddamned shootout!” Her own voice now held a note of panic and desperation, and perhaps that cut through to Anaka.
“Okay.” Anaka even chuckled a little, a sound that frightened Angel almost as much as the look in his eyes. “What happened.”
He looked out into space, as if he were studying the graph of Al Shaheid’s past performance quarterbacking for the Denver Mavericks.
When the Mavericks won the coin toss, Anaka repeated, “What happened?” as if he was asking himself the same question.
“After you left me,” Angel prompted.
He nodded. “Had to redo everything. Surveil VanDyne from a distance. Oh, God, I wish they’d found my tap—”
“They didn’t?”
“A passive, noninvasive, optical sensor next to one of their trunk lines. I think it was too simple for them to find.” He shook his head. “Kept monitoring police air traffic. That’s how I found out how Pat Ellis died—”
“Doctor Ellis?” The name felt like a hand clutching her chest. That poor dumpy pink woman, the woman who was so afraid.
“—car was found in a ravine up in the San Bruno Mountains. Been there since Sunday. An ‘accident.’ They ran her off the road.”
Chalk another one up for the feline hit squad. It sounded like their style. Even though she was pretty sure that was the case, she asked Anaka “Who?”
“The same people who told her to burn Byron Dorset’s body, who put the wrong person in charge of the autopsy.” He looked at her as if all this was obvious. “That was two—no, three days ago.” He looked at his watch.
The Mavericks got the first down. It looked like the beginning of a drive, and the crowd didn’t like it.
Anaka was still looking at his watch.
Angel shook his arm. “Then what?”
“Seems much longer . . .” He looked up from the watch, seeming very weary. It was then that Angel noticed Anaka’s pants for the first time. They were stained, still wet in some places. Angel leaned over, and finally, through the hundreds of overlapping odors, she could make out the smell of blood.
“What—” she started, but Anaka was back into his story.
“Kept hearing White over the radio. Knights this, Knights that. He had two dozen skinheads in jail when you were kidnapped. He rounded up the rest afterward.” There was a sad expression on his face. “He really was a good cop, before they got to him.”
Angel looked up at Anaka. Her hackles felt like spikes on the back of her neck. Something very, very bad was happening—had happened.
“Who got to White?”
“The aliens, of course.”
A chill traced icy talons down her back and stabbed itself into her gut.
Below, the Earthquakes had halted the drive short of a touchdown and progress was going in the other direction. The crowd was on the verge of a standing ovation every time the Earthquakes’ canine quarterback, Sergei Nazarbaev made a first down.
“What happened to White?” she asked after three plays, afraid of the answer.
Anaka jerked like he had forgotten they were having this conversation. “He’s dead,” he said, sounding a little surprised, like it was a newly discovered fact. “Damn shame, he was a good cop. Before they got to him.”
“How—” she stared, but Anaka went on as if there hadn’t been a pause in their conversation.
“I was so stupid,” Anaka slammed his fist on the top of the chair ahead of him. Fortunately, it wasn’t occupied. Angel saw the blow draw blood, but Anaka seemed oblivious. “I saw all the communications to Alcatraz. But I didn’t really see anything until that damned computer called you.”
“Yesterday,” she said. It was already ages ago.
“The signal burst through and overloaded the tap. Even though it wasn’t encrypted, I only got a few bits of what it said.”
Anaka lapsed into another silence. Angel didn’t prompt him. She was afraid of what he might say. She kept telling herself that it wasn’t what she was thinking, there was a better explanation.
But she kept looking at Anaka, at the blood on his pants, his shaking hands, the dead glassy eyes—No, she said to herself, not that.
The Earthquakes’ drive was stopped, and the score was tied with a field goal apiece.
“What did you get?”
“Huh?” Anaka looked at her.
“The tap, what did you get when you tapped—”
“Oh.” He wiped his forehead with the hand he’d struck the seat with. It left a trail of blood on his face, and he looked at it with an expression of surprise. “Sorry, I’ve been a little distracted.”
A little?
“I saw enough of what that machine said. And suddenly, it all made sense to me—”
Makes one of us, Angel thought.
“All this time I thought it was human corruption. Graft, bribery, organized crime, big money . . .” Anaka smiled at her. The smile scared Angel more than if he’d leveled a gun at her. “It was a revelation. The aliens. They were behind everything!”
Angel nodded slowly.
“I was on the cusp of this when White called me and said that one of the Knights had finally broken. I knew that I had been vindicated. VanDyne would come tumbling down, and the evil things controlling the government would be unmasked. Alcatraz isn’t a prison—it’s a control center.”
He’s gone nuts. Fully around the bend. Angel sat back and could barely say what she was thinking. “You said White was dead.”
Her voice was a whisper, and she had no idea whether Anaka had heard her. He went on. “I was wrong about White. They had gotten to him before I did. When I got to him, I could see how those things could manipulate the minds of their victims. He kept on about how one of the Knights had rolled over on Alexander Gregg’s campaign manager. He didn’t see the big picture at all—and his eyes—oh, God, it was his eyes. It wasn’t White in there anymore.”
“You said White was dead,” Angel repeated, loud enough for Anaka to hear.
“All of them. The whole department was gone. They tried to keep me from leaving, but I had to get out. I couldn’t let them do to me what they did to White.” He looked down at his pants and rubbed one of the nearly invisible spots of blood. It was still damp, and Angel saw his finger come away wet. Angel focused on a hair that adhered to the blood. It was short, gray, and tipped with a tiny glob of what could have been flesh or clotted blood. “He looked so surprised. It was the hardest thing I ever did.”
“Oh, God.” The shudder in her voice reached all the way into her diaphragm. This had pushed Anaka over the edge, all the way over. This had all come too close to his own paranoid nightmares, and it had burst his little reality dam. She could see one thing, anything, setting him off, making him decide that she was one of them.
She stood up and began sliding away from him. She needed to find a cop. The police had to be busting their asses to find Anaka. He was oblivious, studying the hair that was glued to his finger.
Keep staring, she thought. Stare until we get a hold of a white jacket in your size—and maybe some Thorazine.
She was so intent on Anaka that she backed into somebody.
As Angel turned, she got an intense feeling of déjà vu.
She’d bumped into a pale pink who looked like a Fed, down to the barely concealed throat-mike. A pink with a nearly transparent white crew cut and red irises. She was looking at the same pink she had bumped into in Frisco General, the same pink who’d been pointing a vid unit at her house, the same pink she’d avoided to visit Lei at St. Luke’s. The same two meters of suit punctuated by the bulge of artillery under his arm.
“I apologize for my tardiness, Miss Lopez.”
The albino Fedboy was the guy from Denver.
Behind him were two more expressionless pinks in way too expensive suits.
“Ah, uh—” What the fuck was she supposed to do now?
“I am glad that you came. There was a feeling in the organization that you wouldn’t honor Dorset’s commitments.”
Damn it all, this was why she was here! She wanted to scream at them that there was a crazy man behind her, three seats away. She wanted to move out of here, get this over with, but the albino pink was blocking the way back to the aisle. “Can we do this somewhere else?” Angel said in a harsh whisper, looking back at Anaka to make sure he was still occupied.
Anaka was looking at the game, the back and forth between two tied teams.
“We prefer a public place, as did Mr. Dorset. Too much potential for violence.” He smiled. “It’s best if neither of us are concerned.”
I’m concerned right now, you twit, she thought. What did they think she was going to do?
“Let’s get this over with, then.”
Whitey nodded, took out a small computer, and slipped a ramcard into it. He tapped it a few times and showed her the display. It was a measure of her self-control that she didn’t gasp at the amount. The number just didn’t register, except that it had more than six zeros and no decimal point.
Angel nodded and reached into her pocket for the tickets.
Behind her she heard Anaka scream, “THEY’RE HERE!”
Angel could feel the world begin to tumble into slow motion. Anaka’s manic cry went out and seeded something in the crowd around them. Angel saw the moreaus—scattered thinly in the expensive box seats—around them start turning in their direction.
Whitey stepped back, withdrawing the hand comm. The two suits behind him in the aisle were shoving their hands into their jackets. She turned around to face Anaka, her gaze sweeping past the field.
A cheer was rising in the whole dome. There’d been some kind of turnover near the Mavericks’ end zone and Sergei was running down the sidelines with the ball. Throughout the dome the chant was, “Sergei. Sergei. Sergei.”
The chant around Angel was, “He’s got a gun.”
The moreys were already scrambling away, over the seats and each other. Before Angel had turned completely around, Anaka had tackled her from behind, grabbing her around the chest and running at Whitey like Sergei was running the nearly eighty yards to his own end zone.
“Sergei. Sergei. Sergei.”
Whitey stepped back, stumbling. Whitey’s red eyes glared at Anaka, who must’ve looked the crazy-man part. The two suits had pulled their weapons, matte-black automatics, and leveled them toward Anaka.
Anaka was using her as a shield. “You’re not going to take me!”
“Sergei. Sergei. Sergei.”
Anaka had one arm around her chest, the other one shook a huge chromed automatic at the suits. She recognized the weapon as a well-kept antique Desert Eagle—a handheld Israeli fifty-cal cannon.
Her feet didn’t quite brush the ground, and her leverage sucked, but she drew up her legs and kicked backward as hard as she could manage.
Tailored for a grand or not, her pants split right up the middle, and she felt her feet make contact right above Anaka’s knees.
“Ser-gei. Ser-gei. Ser-gei.”
Anaka let go immediately, and she heard the gun discharge. The explosion deafened her and she could barely hear the screams over the ringing. She landed, rolled past the suits, and ended up facing toward the apex of the dome in time to see the most horrifying thing she had ever witnessed.
It was impossible, so it had to be shock, or temporary deafness, but the world was silent except for her heartbeat and her breathing—more felt than heard. Above her, the holo was going, the live net feed that was being simulcast cross-country. It was on a delay, so she was seeing action on the field five seconds in the past.
Sergei was home free. He was running down the sideline; the nearest Maverick was twenty meters away. He ran like a being possessed, faster than Angel had ever seen him, or any other morey move. His head was down, tongue lolling through the face mask, tail streaming behind him, clutching the ball to his side. He had already run forty yards. He had just crossed the fifty yard line. Nothing could stop him.
Then, in the midst of his triumph, Sergei’s shoulder exploded. The expression of canine triumph turned into a grimace as he tripped. His hand went to his spraying shoulder, the forgotten football tumbling on his forty yard line.
Sergei fell, facefirst, into the thirty-eight yard line. He skidded on a slick of his own blood. He stayed there, motionless, still clutching his shoulder, the bloody football within arm’s reach.
It was only then that some goober in the booth decided it would be a good idea to cut the holo picture and the feed to the net. Even as the holo blinked out, leaving only the silvered underside of the Dome, Angel realized that it was much too late.