Fearful Symmetries

Against his better judgment, Nohar found himself driving farther west, across Santa Monica, into the residential area of Beverly Hills. He drove the green Maduro past twenty-million-dollar homes, feeling as if a signal flare followed him down the street.

Pedestrians, joggers, dogwalkers—all turned to look. Nohar couldn’t tell if the stares were for him, or for the car. He passed a number of walled estates that didn’t even have access to the street, aircars were the only way in or out.

Royd wasn’t in a mansion, for which Nohar was thankful. He lived in a more subdued neo-Tudor building whose most ostentatious feature was the oval driveway and the multicar garage.

Nohar pulled straight into the driveway. He had thought about this on the way here and had decided he was going to go through with it, despite the fact that this was probably the pinkest neighborhood on the planet. Nohar was gambling that with Royd’s association with moreaus, the neighbors wouldn’t have the automatic reflex reaction and call the cops because a morey was in the driveway.

If anyone was watching him—and he was certain they were—the suit probably bought him some slack. Since he had no hope of going unnoticed, his only possible tack was to be unashamedly blatant and look as if he knew exactly what he was doing here.

He killed the engine and felt a sudden unease that was more than just the neighborhood. He tried to shake it, but he had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Nohar felt the urge to gun the engine and head for Mexico.

Instead, he quietly took the Vind from under the seat and slipped it back into his holster. Then he stepped out of the car and strode up to the front door.

His first thought was to try the call button, and if that failed, do a survey of the security on the door and try forcing it as quickly and quietly as possible.

The call button was on the door, and when Nohar reached up to press it, the door swung open. The bad feeling came back, magnified.

The house was thick with blood smell. Nohar ran through the rooms in the house, tracking down the carnage he smelled. He passed through a living room, a den, a dining room. . . .

Nohar lowered the gun and stared through the door into Royd’s kitchen. Royd was taped into an antique chair someone had dragged in from the dining room. Nohar could see the scuffs on the kitchen tile. They had propped him up against the wall next to a huge stainless-steel cooktop. More than the blood now, Nohar smelled burned flesh.

Nohar took a few tentative steps into the kitchen. The sink was filled with expensive cutlery, most showing rainbow-burnished edges where someone had heated them red hot. A few dish towels sat in the sink too, stained red. The water in the bottom of the sink was colored a translucent pink.

Nohar looked at Royd. He hadn’t seen anything as bad since the last time he had seen a victim of “shaving,” a nasty ritual practiced by morey gangs when they thought one of their fellows was getting too close to the pinks. . . .

When they shaved someone, they took off most of the top layer of skin. Only most, since the victim usually died halfway through the procedure.

What had been done to Royd was worse. They—whoever they were—had systematically removed bits of flesh from Royd’s arms, torso, and face, cauterizing the wounds so they wouldn’t bleed. When they were finished, they had just slit his throat and let his life drain away.

From the smell, Royd had been here since before the attack on Nohar. The poor bastard hadn’t called out the hit. Which begged the question, who did?

It was beginning to look like the only answers he would get would be from this missing kid, Manuel, and the person who hired Royd to find him.

He backed out of the kitchen. This was great. Someone did call the cops on him, and with a body in the house. He wasn’t worried so much as annoyed. Dealing with the police was one huge waste of time. He knew that he could look forward to a few hours of interrogation until they discovered that his gun hadn’t been fired, and that Royd had died long before he showed up, then he’d face a few more hours as they grilled him about the arson of his cabin and why he didn’t call it in to anyone. . . .

He let his breath out in a sigh that was more like a growl. There was no way around it at this point. He headed toward the front door. The sirens were almost on him when he stepped into the foyer. He could hear car doors slamming as he stepped outside.

Instinct had Nohar diving back through the open doorway before it fully registered that the cops were shooting at him. Above him, chunks of Royd’s front door began splintering as slugs tore through the even, vat-grown wood.

Nohar scrambled backward along the floor as he heard glass breaking inside the house. Adrenaline began pushing him, and he felt the urge to draw his gun and return fire. He suppressed the urge. Escape was his only real option. Escape, and figure out what triggered the goddamn cops.

More glass broke to either side of him. Then, for the moment, the cops stopped shooting. Nohar took the opportunity to get to his feet and head toward the rear of Royd’s house. He ran back toward the dining room.

He smelled the ozone before he saw it, and was diving for cover before it started firing. Thirty-two caliber slugs tore into the walls of the dining room, blowing a china cabinet into shards of glass and porcelain. Hovering above the table was a police drone. It was a tiny remote-controlled helicopter that carried a multispectrum video camera and a built-in submachine gun. With its ovoid body, and dual offset rotors, it looked like a flying rat face, the camera one eye, the gun the other, the rotors its ears.

He did the only thing he could, diving under the dining room table, directly beneath it. He heard it buzz as it tried to reacquire him. He rolled on his back, drew the Vind, and fired three shots—a quarter of the clip—through the table, straight up. The room echoed with the triple explosion from the twelve-millimeter handgun, and the smell of powder-burned wood drifted down from the holes punched through the table.

On the dining room table, the drone had fallen cockeyed, dormant, pointing toward the windows it had crashed through. Ozone smoke leaked from the shattered camera, and its twin counter-rotating rotors were still slowly turning.

Nohar heard the buzz of another drone under the sound of gunfire. It was coming from the den and the living room, toward him.

Nohar kept his gun out as he dove through the kitchen door. The second drone banked into the dining room after him. Nohar dove around the door for cover. He heard it closing on him as he hugged the wall.

The thing was less than a meter square and cleared the doorframe as it entered the kitchen. It started to sweep the room, looking for him, but it stopped when its camera locked on Royd’s body. Nohar was hoping for that. There was still a human operating the thing, as susceptible to surprise as anyone.

Nohar leveled the Vind at the backside of the drone’s chassis and let go with two more shots. The camera exploded and the thing tumbled, slamming into the side of the sink and falling upended at Royd’s feet.

Nohar heard the sound of something whistling through the air—Multiple somethings. Either tear gas, trying to drive him out, or concussion grenades to stun him while they took the building. Neither one was something he wanted to stick around for.

The kitchen had a doorway into the garage. He made for it, past Royd, little worried about stray hairs or DNA at this point. He reached the door as he heard multiple hissing explosions throughout the house, and the first acid touch of the gas hit his eyes and nose.

He hadn’t run from the cops since he was fourteen. It always caused more trouble than it solved. But the cops here seemed hell-bent on killing him. Cooperating with authority only went so far.

It was getting hard to see, even in the garage. His eyes watered, and he began coughing. The gas was leaking from the house, through the cracks around the door. Inside it had to be intolerable.

He held a hand over his nose and mouth and looked around the garage. There was only one other way out, the doors pointed out on the driveway, straight at the cops. There wasn’t anywhere else to go.

It took Nohar a few agonizing minutes to short out the lock and get into the BMW. By that time the alarms were going off and the car’s computer was already calling the police—as if that mattered. Once in, he hacked the auto-navigation feature and jacked up the minimum speed to sixty klicks an hour.

Nohar could barely see through his stinging and watering eyes as he got the Jaguar open. By then, he felt he didn’t have much time left. He ducked into the

BMW, engaged it in drive, and let the navigation computer take over. Nohar took cover in the Jaguar as the garage door began opening.

The cops began strafing the garage, Nohar could hear the Jaguar taking hits. He could smell melted composites. But he also heard the BMW’s engine rev up. Heard it accelerate out toward the cops. The gunfire got a little more frantic.

While he heard all this going on, Nohar desperately worked on the dash, trying to get the Jaguar moving. He ripped panels covering the control circuits, found the security system, and pulled that card out. He tore a wire from the comm to jump the power connection that had run through the card. With his big hands it took him five times with his claws fully extended to get the jumper in place.

About then he also heard the sound of something going smash out in the street. Nohar risked a look out the windshield. The Jaguar’s windshield was pock-marked with bulletholes, and through the spider cracks he saw that the BMW had taken a full header into one of the copcars. The Patrol cars were the traditional Dodge Haviers, but the BMW was a luxury car, heavier, and probably had twice as much metal in it. The nav computer was still driving, pushing the T-boned Havier slowly down the street with it. The police were pouring lead into it as if they were the Islamic Axis and the BMW was the entire state of Israel.

He had a chance to get out while the cops were distracted. Nohar set the attitude on the fans near forty-five degrees, and maxed the accelerator.

The Jaguar shot out of the garage like it was a ballistic shuttle on too low an arc. It skimmed over the driveway, barely gaining enough altitude to clear the flashers on top of the cop cars. Gunfire followed the aircar, but most of the shots went wild.

Nohar didn’t have any attention to spare for the cops anyway. He was shooting straight at an old ranch house across the street, and not gaining enough altitude to clear it. He banked, barely clearing the right side of the roof. The sound of breaking glass followed the whine of the aircar’s engines. Nohar didn’t know if it’d been a wild shot from the cops, or if he had hit something.

He shot out from between a pair of houses, over a swimming pool. The backwash from the Jaguar’s fans splashed chlorinated water through someone’s garden.

Nohar hit the headsup, and the windscreen lit with fragmented navigation displays. The one thing that showed clearly on the shattered windscreen was the speedometer. With the aircar’s thrust mostly going forward, he was topping one-forty klicks an hour.

The headsup display flashed facets of red at him. It was a warning, probably that he was flying illegally low over Beverly Hills. Nohar checked the rear video and saw two police helicopters on his tail.

The Beverly cops probably only had two helicopters. Ten to one that the copters meant that it was the LAPD after him. . . .

There was little chance he could escape the airborne pursuit. The Jaguar’s computers were screaming for the cops, its transponder a gigantic red flare on LA’s air traffic control screens. He couldn’t gain any altitude, because as soon as he was clear of civilians, the copters riding his ass would probably frag him.

Pretty damn soon he’d be surrounded by police aircars. He had to ditch this thing quickly, somewhere he could get out from under the copters’ eyes.

He began to turn west toward the mountains, away from where most of the cops would be coming. He was inviting fire from the bastards tailing him, but he was going to have to risk it. He hugged the hillside as he followed the slope of the Santa Monica Mountains. The copters didn’t shoot.

The aircar cleared a line of trees, and he saw what he was looking for. The algae-slick surface of a reservoir glistened in the midst of the woods.