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DEANDRE AND SIGNE MATERIALIZED through a gap in the crates. Signe’s eyes grew wide, and she gasped a breathy little sigh when she spotted me holding my latex-coated finger to the light.
“Is that for me?” she gushed.
“Down, Signe,” Ding said. “The man found out today his girlfriend died. He doesn’t need your teasing.”
“Who said I was teasing?” She pouted. Men would crawl bare-naked over steaming-hot, broken glass to taste her lower lip.
“Signe...” Ding warned.
Deandre said, “It’s after five, boss. Do you need anything else before we get out of here?”
“No. Thank you, Dee.” Ding glanced at the women for a nanosecond. “Have the boys walk you home.”
“Of course. Mr. Warren, I’m sorry for your loss.” Deandre took the blonde’s hand and led her away. “C’mon, Signe. I have back-to-back interviews for companions tonight, and I need your help with the grading process.”
“I like the front-to-front kind of interviews...”
Ding spoke as much to himself as me, “This says the dinner will be invitation only... a quote-unquote who’s who of politics, entertainment and industry... keynote by Jamil Yamadut, CEO of Renascentia... hmmm ... Top floor of the Huateng Tower, that’ll be a minor bitch to get in.” Louder, he said, “What do you plan to do here, Joe? I don’t see any easy way to peel money out of this deal.”
Plans fired off and died like fizzy rockets. What would hurt these people the most? I was categorically against acts of violence; arson, bombing, and poisoning were out the window. For one thing, I didn’t have the stomach for it, and for another, the point was to score some cash. I ran through a list of major felonies—
“Robbery,” popped out of my mouth.
“Say who?”
“An old-fashioned stick-up,” I told Ding. “I’ll hit that crowd right where it hurts: in their bank accounts.”
“Like Jessie Ventura, with a mask and a gun...?”
“You’re thinking of Jesse James, but yeah, essentially.” The idea scared me and excited me in equal parts. “I sneak in—we’ll have to get the plans for building security—and I stick a knife in old Jamil’s face and threaten to cut his nose off if he doesn’t fork over his bit-stick.”
Ding’s heavy brows drew together, and his puffy eyes scrunched up until they almost disappeared. “A knife?”
“Or, you know, a gun.” I imitated a pistol with my index finger and thumb. “Bang-bang. Gimme your loot or you’re dead!”
“You’ve watched too much late-night vid,” Ding snorted. “And where are you gonna get a gun? You know the feds have that shit locked down.”
“I... I don’t—wait!” I snapped my gun fingers together. “My grandpa’s things. He left a honking big pistol with his stuff, said he hid it during the registration drives of the 20s. It was in my stuff—oh, fuck.”
“What?”
“Miguel gave away all our shit to Goodwill, except for a box of my personal things.” I covered my eyes and fell back into the sofa. “Argh! Was Grandpa’s stuff in there? What time is it?”
“After six.”
Lightning flared outside the window, followed in seconds by a rattle of thunder. Rain washed the glass in sheets. It didn’t appear to be a good night to hike back to 23rd and find out if my grandpa’s ancient firearm was in with the box of crap Miguel kept for me. How stupid could I be, leaving my things behind? What if he decided to dig through the boxes and found a pistol tucked inside with my old family photos and birth certificate and whatnot? A working firearm was worth its weight in gasoline these days. If I’d remembered I had it, I probably would have sold it myself by now and had enough for a few weeks’ grace before poverty set in.
“Can I stay here, at least until tomorrow?” I asked Ding. “On your sofa? I’ll go see Miguel in the morning, find out if I’m armed or not. If I am”—I snarled a shark grin—“then it’s on. My next stop will be the top of the Huateng Tower on May 30th and a date with the fucker who raised the dead, Mr. Jamil Yamaha.”
“Yamadut.”
“Yeah, him.”
Tuesday, May 29th.
I went over my list for the tenth time in the last hour.
Gun. Check.
Bullets. Check. (Cartridges, goddamnit! I could hear my grandpa’s voice in my head every time I said bullets instead of cartridges.)
Ding had coded me into the loft’s access system before he left, so I had the run of the vacant, three-story building, rattling around like a BB in a cup. He took all his furniture, so I scavenged a mattress and some blankets, as well as some odds and ends to use as chairs. I hit the thrift store for some spare clothes and recovered my personal stuff—including Grandpa’s shiny steel pistol (revolver, goddamnit!)—from Miguel, and made a cozy rat’s nest in a corner where Ding once kept a bed the size of a ferry boat.
Untraceable bank account. Check.
Bit-stick keyed to said account. Check.
One good thing about hanging in Ding’s vacant loft: the shower ran hot water as long as I wanted, and the soap dispensers were full. I used it two, sometimes three, times a day. It was a strange sensation, lathering up under a fine spray of hot water, butt-naked in an open space big enough to park a fleet of cars. Decadent? Sort of. But more like I was being watched from the shadowed corners of the echoing room. Creepy, bad V-Real type of stuff.
Waiter’s uniform. Check.
When Ding left, he slipped me a few thousand on an open stick, for operating expenses. I’d burned through some of that laying my hands on a genuine Huateng Tower catering staff uniform and the ID card that went with it. The rest was eaten up running down the current whereabouts of Chuck Simmons, former Huateng Security Director and current undead picker of tomatoes in Moline, Illinois.
Coercing Chuck to stick his finger in the replication device... Not a pretty sight.
What little money I had left went toward food, which ran out a week ago. Since that time I’d rummaged through empty shelves, hoping to discover something I might have previously missed, and haunted the food pantries and missions. Made soup from ketchup packets filched from fast food restaurants.
Twenty-four hours before the big day. Check.
Electricity-generating bugs crawled inside my stomach and zapped me when I least expected it. My fingers tingled at odd moments, or a ball of dread would curl up in my chest and block the oxygen from my lungs.
The last thing Ding said to me before he left?
“Joe, you weren’t cut out to be a crook, you know that, right? High school pranks are one thing, but a true-to-life outlaw...” He patted me on the shoulder while staring at a portable holo-projector strapped to his wrist. His high voice failed to echo as we stood next to the elevator in the loft. “You’re straighter than a metal ruler, man. You understand this adventure you’re on, it won’t come to a good end.”
“Thanks for the pep talk, coach.”
“A real criminal,” Ding continued, “has to accept the consequences, which in this case would be some heavy jail time. You’re not good with consequences, Joe. You never have been. Besides, you told me you didn’t love Chelle anymore. Why risk going to jail for her memory?”
“Hey, I’ve done jail. It wasn’t so bad.”
“You did three weeks in a county lock-up with some political activists. Think about twenty-plus years in a state penitentiary with three-strike killers and maximum-sentence mobsters. Dudes with the moral code of a pile of snakes. Give this up, man, and come with us. There’s plenty of room.”
“And be a deckhand on the SS Narcissism?”
Ding shrugged one shoulder. “There’re worse things in life. Worse places, for sure.”
I had laughed my friend off and watched him go, later wondering why I’d been so stupid, turning down a cruise on a luxury yacht with Deandre, Signe, and one of the smartest guys I’d ever met. Why stay here and risk everything, sticking it to the company responsible for a product that, in all likelihood, killed my high school sweetheart? Would it bring her back? Not as a Revvie, I mean.
No, I’d bought a one-way ticket on the Guilt Bus, and I was staying on it until the crazy-mad driver plunged over the cliff.
Pling!
I jumped at a tinny sound from the far side of the vacant loft. It was well after sunset, and about two-thirds of the lights were off, leaving an island of light where I lived and worked. Darkness owned the remainder of the third floor. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard something up here I couldn’t explain. Buildings settled, right?
From the day after Ding and his people left, I’d been completely alone in his loft, which was the first time I could ever recall being truly and totally without another person living in the same space.
It creeped me the fuck out, big time.
Things flickered in the corner of my vision, disappearing when I looked. Noises. Clicks. Pings. Plops. I got to where I half-expected one of Dickens’s freaking ghosts of Christmas whenever to show up and rattle some chains at me and show me my dark and scary future in an Illinois state correctional facility.
Ding had paid the power bill through the 30th, but some innate sense of conservation and frugality had forced me to leave the lights turned off at night. The switches were way the hell over by the elevators, on the Dark Side, where boogeymen dropped their keys and snickered, waiting for hapless dolts like me to come get their heads chopped off and their bodies used for puppets in hell.
“I have a gun. I’m not afraid to blow your spooky balls off, Mr. Boogeyman.”
No sound came back. Nothing giggled, tittered, or chuckled.
I strained my eyes for a while longer, trying to see beyond the circle of light that made up my makeshift bedroom and living quarters. Ordinarily, I’d hop on over to the switches about now, turn off all the lights and go to sleep without any problem. Which was exactly what I should do right now. Yes, sir. Hop up. Go turn off the lights. Climb into my cozy, mildew-reeking mattress, and get some much-needed rest. Tomorrow was the big day, after all.
Yep. Get right on up and turn off the lights like a big boy.
. . . or not.
I found the list and reviewed it again.
Gun. Check.
Cartridges. Check.
Waiter’s uniform. Check.
Creeeeaak.
“You’ve gotta be shitting me.”
***
I SLEPT WITH THE LIGHTS on.
***
RAMIREZ ENTERED HIS office at 7:05 a.m. and started updating paperwork at 7:06. At 7:07 he glanced at the left corner of his desk and frowned. A chip in the wood veneer the size of a man’s fingernail had popped loose. It stuck up three or four millimeters, enough to snag his attention... or anything else he might brush over it, like a suit jacket. Ramirez squeezed it down with his thumb.
It stayed put until 7:09. Ramirez squeezed it down and held it for a count of five. No good.
He owned no glue of any kind. Tape would look like shit. Ramirez huffed a curse and left his office to rummage in the department admin’s desk. She wouldn’t be in until nine, at the earliest, which forced him to dig through unruly piles of junk in her drawers, until he located a half-expended tube of Super Glue.
When he got back to his office, the phone was warbling a business-like tune. Ramirez punched the answer button without checking the incoming caller display. “Ramirez.”
“Hold for Director Proctor.”
Ramirez stiffened. His boss, the Director of Homeland Security, rarely called; when she did, the news was never good.
Techno-punk hold music played while he waited. And waited some more. During the pause, he mastered the glue’s stuck cap and dropped a tiny crystal pearl of adhesive under the chip. Pressed it down. A thin bead squeezed out around the edges, which he swiped away.
“Tu madre,” he hissed when the sticky crap smeared his thumb.
“Excuse me, Ramirez?” Proctor’s thin, nasal voice whined over the speakerphone. “Am I interrupting your day, perhaps?”
“Ah... no, ma’am, I was not referring to you. It was another irritation. I mean, an irritation not related to you in any way.” Ramirez winced and shut up. Better to throw out the shovel than keep digging, he decided.
The director held the pause for a ten count. “We have a problem, Agent Ramirez. I understand you currently have an operation underway regarding the so-called Children of Liberty.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He rubbed absently at the tacky gunk on his thumb, trying to scrape it off with a fingernail. After another long pause, he added, “They are a group of subversives who have taken their name from the pre-Revolutionary War group, the Sons of Liberty. They were—”
“Enough, Agent. I’m fully versed in the Revolutionary War.”
Because you no doubt lived through it. Ramirez said only, “Yes, ma’am.”
“They have a mole inside the cabinet,” the director continued. Her querulous old-maid voice made every pronouncement sound like it was coming from a crazy neighbor lady who lived in a house everyone avoided.
“A mole?” Ramirez repeated, picturing at first a small varmint in the furniture. Then it clicked. “You mean an informer? In the president’s cabinet?”
“Exactly that.”
A sick feeling eeled up from his stomach. How? How could such a group get someone so highly placed? The glue on his thumb had shredded like so much dead skin. He picked at it, removing bits smaller than a pinhead.
“Could be a staffer,” Proctor was saying, “or it could be one of the cabinet members themselves. There’s forty-two of the damned people to vet, not counting their gaggle of staffers, so it’s taking some time to find the leak.”
“How can I help?” Ramirez scrubbed his tacky thumb on the desk’s rough underside.
The director sighed. “I’m going to give you some background here that you’re not cleared for, Agent Ramirez, because sources tell me you’re the right man to get this done.” The line went silent, and Ramirez held his tongue. “The mole managed to plant a button-cam inside the cabinet meeting room minutes after the counter-electronics sweep. They recorded a very... um, sensitive meeting. The video file from this meeting has been delivered to Millicent MacCauley, of that we can be sure. Electronic traces and drone surveillance confirm she picked it up from an Internet café in downtown Chicago. From there, we of course lost her.”
Ramirez winced. MacCauley. “I had the little bitch in jail. We chipped her, but...”
“They killed the chip.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He drew a deep breath and asked, “Am I allowed to know what was in the file?”
Director Proctor told him. Ramirez grew colder as she spoke, to the point he had to repress a shiver.
“Madre de Dios,” he breathed.
Ramirez checked the progress of his Super Glue removal and hissed in pain. Somehow he had managed to scrape the pad of his thumb so raw, droplets of blood seeped through the skin. Bits of glue hung in ragged shreds.
***
WEDNESDAY, MAY 30th.
The big day.
I rode a bus downtown, dressed in my waiter’s uniform, three pounds of pistol tucked into my waistband, its hammer digging a crater in my gut. I kept one hand wrapped around the bit-stick in my pocket.
The Huateng Tower occupied two blocks along Michigan at Grand. One of the thirty or so Chinese-owned buildings in downtown, the Huateng featured one hundred and sixty stories of office space, with ground-floor restaurants and a high-end fitness club. The top floor was given over to a ballroom of epic proportions—or so claimed the web info. Renascentia’s corporate headquarters occupied eight of the floors, between 101 and 109.
When I hopped off the bus in front of the skyscraper, I craned my neck like a tourist and tried to see the top of the building, but low clouds blocked my view. I had learned through recon (we super-criminals use terms like that) that to reach the service entrance, one had to go through the lobby doors, turn left, and follow the outer wall around to a nondescript door with a card reader access panel. On my dry run several days ago, I tested my ID card on the reader. The door clicked open, and I ventured inside far enough to find the elevator before I backed out. So much for their high-class security.
Now it was time for the real thing. My feet stuck to the sidewalk and refused to stir.
A lake breeze brought a cool, humid touch to the springtime temperature, a comfortable 70 degrees. The city smelled of concrete, dust, and open dumpsters. Downtown was a ghost town at eight p.m., with the exception of the ubiquitous street people. Every third building was either closed or condemned and boarded up, and more trash rustled through the street than pedestrians. For the first time in a while, I wondered if Ding might have been right. Maybe the money was drying up and the country was headed for bankruptcy. I’d seen pictures of a vibrant and active downtown Chicago taken less than fifty years ago, with people jamming the streets, cars everywhere, and shops, restaurants, and theaters going full bore.
What’s more, why was I standing in front of the Huateng with a pistol sticking down my pants like some solid-steel erection, instead of marching inside and fulfilling my destiny? Now was not the time for philosophical discourse. Now was the time for Grand Theft Automaton.
Get going, Joe. You ain’t got all night. I glared at my right foot and forced it to move. There ya, go. One foot in front of the other.
I entered the Huateng and followed my route to the service entrance. Click. The door opened. Sixty paces later, I arrived in front of the freight elevator. Three Revivants joined me when the doors clattered open. They stank like they’d wallowed in dog shit.
I stabbed the button for the top floor and waited while the steel doors groaned and slammed shut.
One of the Revivants grinned at me and said, “Brainsss. Hhnh-hhnh-hhnh.”
Oh great. A comedian.