Hammerjack (32 page)

The cab dropped him off in front of Mount Sinai Medical Center. The gothic structure loomed over Yin as he stepped into the wet street, its spires shooting up past the city’s traverse grid to impale the night. Yin hated hospitals. He hated the idea of the needy, the sick, the dying—not because they reminded him of his mortality but because they personified his humanity. To him, the blood pumping through his veins was a disease, his heartbeat was an annoyance, and his physical urges—regardless of the pleasures they provided—were a prostitution of his potential. Such things made him a slave of self. This place was the embodiment of all that.

Yin darted into the building, hitting the elevator and taking it straight up to the security level. When the doors opened, he found the entire floor infested with uniformed CSS. Flashing his credentials at the nearest guard, he asked for the person in charge. The guard said nothing but pointed out a corporate man at the end of the corridor before going back to the business of harassing other civilians.

Yin observed the man closely. Though they had never met, he was familiar with the type: spotless, officious, always making his position known to those around him. It was obvious from the endless stream of orders that poured out of the man’s mouth, assigning various menial tasks to the soldiers and hospital staff. As Yin approached, a few of the officers addressed the man by name.
Bostic,
they said. Yin had him pegged for a corporate legal counsel.

“I understand you have one of my people,” he said to the man, leveling an icy stare as he put on another show with his credentials. Beyond that, Yin did not bother to introduce himself. “She is alive?”

Trevor Bostic sized him up and accurately concluded that Yin was power.

“Barely,” he replied. “She works for you?”

“Yes,” Yin told him. “Where might I find her?”

“In recovery, down the hall.” Cautiously, he asked: “Who is she?”

“An associate.”

Yin made it clear that he would offer no more information.

“There are a lot of questions,” Bostic told him. “She’s already been implicated in a terrorist incident at Shinto America. We have yet to ascertain the extent of her involvement.”

“She is not a terrorist.”

Bostic hesitated, but did not contradict him.

“We still need to interrogate the prisoner,” he said. “As soon as we’re finished, I can talk to my superiors about releasing her to your custody.”

“That will be suitable.”

“You want to see her now?”

“If you don’t mind.”

The corporate man obviously
did
mind, but showed Yin toward the intensive care unit anyway. The extra security was conspicuous, soldiers carrying enough firepower to suppress a small urban revolt. They also looked strung out. Anxious faces and wary eyes confronted Yin as he walked past, following him in lockstep before moving on. Yin despised such foolishness, though in this case he understood it.

Two more guards stood post outside the room. Bostic waved them aside, sliding a code key through the slot next to the door and releasing the locks. Slipping the key back into his pocket, he pushed the door open. Inside was dim, but not dark. Quiet, but not silent. Soft beeping from a heart monitor drifted past them, out into the corridor.

Bostic showed Yin inside. Standing like a shadow less than a meter behind, he watched Yin approach the prone figure on the hospital bed—ready to yell for the guards at the slightest provocation. The woman there appeared peaceful, her angular features softened by sleep and the pale light that cascaded from the vital monitors.

“It’s a goddamn miracle she survived,” Bostic said. “The hovercraft she flew went through the windows, right into the side of the building. We’re thinking suicide mission—though no faction has claimed responsibility.” Bostic sounded like he was reading from a balance sheet. “Her pilot was killed.”

“Nobody has talked to her?”

“She was unconscious when she arrived.”

Yin crouched down and examined the woman closely. She had suffered dozens of cuts and scrapes. Derm transplants covered every bare patch of skin.

“What do the doctors say?”

“She’ll make it,” Bostic told him. “They informed us about the Mons virus.” There was a long pause. “She’s a free agent, isn’t she?”

Yin stood back up and turned around.

“You will leave us.”

Bostic was surprised—but also knew when he was outgunned. The lawyer acquiesced with a simple nod, then left.

Yin watched the door close. He waited a few moments for silence to gather, closing his eyes and pacing himself. His breathing matched the steady, autonomic rhythms of the woman behind him, his heart synchronized to the pulse of the monitors.

He was ready.

Yin took an ECM seal out of his jacket pocket and placed it by the door. He then went back to the bed, affixing an emulator chip to the vitals monitor. After recording two full minutes of output, he retooled the interface so that it would accept broadcasts from the emulator. It was then just a matter of looping the signal so that it repeated itself, sending false readings back to the nursing station. Avalon was isolated.

Yin absorbed her exotic form. Avalon was rarely at rest, and seeing her so vulnerable excited him. She was truly naked—deprived of her sensuit, her reflexes gone, stripped of the elements that made her so dangerous. Giving in to his urges, Yin touched the side of her face. Avalon’s flesh felt as cold as his own, which only drove him harder. He thought of the young hustlers he had brought to his chambers, of how they had been so withdrawn from their own bodies, of how they had been so
helpless
in his hands.

Their blood flows freely, Avalon. Does yours?

To indulge that impulse would have been sweet. This, however, needed to be clinical. Avalon had been a good soldier. He owed her at least that much.

The instrument he selected was a molecular hypospray. Yin held it up to the diffuse light, contemplating the small ampoule filled with clear liquid and the swift, merciful death it would deliver. He could invoke no suffering, which was a loss; but Yin found a way around that by focusing on the end rather than the means.

He placed the hypospray against her neck.

A sublimating mist of poison, meant to be subcutaneous, materialized in the air instead. Yin felt a vise tighten around his wrist, and pain forced his fingers open. The hypospray tumbled out of his hand, then clinked against the floor as it rolled away.

The medicinal cloud drifted into Yin’s face. He wiped the stinging liquid from his eyes, but by then Avalon had taken hold of his throat. Oxygen flowed sparingly to his brain—enough to keep him conscious, but barely.

His limbs went limp. Avalon relaxed her grip slightly, after she had made her point. The featureless mosaic of her eyes conveyed the same message.

“You should have more patience, Yin,” she said. “This really is presumptuous of you.”

“Forgive me,” he forced out.

Her ashen lips parted into a scowl. She released him.

Yin drew back. He stumbled, coughing and clutching his wounded neck. The damage could have been worse, but he was still arrogant enough to resent it.

“That was unnecessary,” he said. “You could have spoken up.”

“I didn’t hear you asking.”

“You know how this works,” he reminded her. “None of us is to be taken alive. I couldn’t take the chance that you would reveal what you know to Special Services.”

“You forget who I am.”

“I have
never
forgotten,” Yin retorted. “You know as well as I do how they interrogate prisoners. You would have done the same if the situation were reversed.”

Avalon reached down and felt along the floor, following her memory of where the hypospray had fallen. She found the small device and held it up, so Yin could contemplate his mistake.

“The
situation
would have never arisen, had I been adequately informed,” Avalon fired back. “Dr. Alden has allies—resourceful allies. Had I known, I would have taken precautions.”

Yin’s eyes narrowed.

“What are you talking about?”

“A hammerjack,” she said. “Whoever it was took control of the pulser before I could deliver Alden to the Zone. He then knocked both of our hovercraft out of the sky. Quite a trick for a pilot in an unarmed ship.”

Yin felt weak again and pulled a seat up next to the bed.

“Alden
did
end up in the Zone,” he explained. “I tracked his signal to a hotel in Chelsea and dispatched a squad of agents to intercept him. None of them returned.” He paused for a sober moment and considered what he already knew, in light of what Avalon told him. “Witnesses reported seeing a woman with him.”

“I’ll have to revise my estimation,” Avalon said. “The hammerjack is undoubtedly that woman. Do you have a profile?”

“Nothing specific. But I know who she is.”

Avalon leaned in toward him as he spoke the name. Even without her sensuit, Yin believed she would be able to tell if he was lying.

“It’s Heretic.”

It sounded like truth. Still, she appeared dubious.

“Are you certain?”

“It
is
Heretic,” Yin insisted. “Signature analysis confirmed the lines of communication between her and the runner she was using to smuggle the flash prototype.”

“Do you have any idea who she really is?”

“I suspected it was somebody who had worked in our ranks,” he confessed. “If Heretic is a woman, that narrows down the list of suspects.”

“Just tell me her
name
.”

“Lea Prism.”

Avalon rolled back over, blank eyes facing the ceiling. “Lea Prism,” she repeated under her breath, each time a precise calculation of motive and intent. “How much does she know about the process?”

“She helped design it.”

“Which means she will discover the information Alden is carrying—and she will know how to make use of it.”

Yin was reluctant to confirm her suspicions. More than ever, he wished he could have killed her. But even in her sightless state, he dared not risk another move against her.

Besides,
Yin thought,
she may yet prove useful.

“I will find her,” Avalon said decisively. “Where I find her, I will also find
him.
”

“That won’t be easy,” Yin said. “Alden disappeared from the Special Services register shortly after he left the Zone. We never reacquired the signal.”

“His tracer implant?”

“Neutralized. They could be anywhere by now.”

“They wouldn’t have gone far,” Avalon said. “Alden would have to stop somewhere nearby to rid himself of the implant. Somewhere with the facilities to perform complex neural surgery.” She thought about it for a while longer. “What mode of transportation did they use to get out of the city?”

“A cargo pulser. The Port Authority logs show it was bound for Montreal. Nobody was on board when it arrived.”

“What about the airports?”

“Our people are jacked into security systems all across the continent. So far, nobody has seen either one of them.”

“And they won’t,” Avalon decided. “Alden is extremely familiar with your procedures. He won’t risk boarding any international flights, and he will stay off the Axis as much as possible to conceal his signature.” She took a breath. “He’s hiding now. He won’t come out until he’s ready to make his move.”

Yin was intrigued. There was a current of obsession beneath the veneer of her logic, something Yin had never expected. He wondered how much of it was dedication to the cause, and how much of it was vengeance. In her own way, Avalon was very much a slave to her desires. Perhaps that explained her association with the
Inru,
which had always been a mystery to him.

“What do you propose?”

Avalon threw the empty hypospray at him. It landed in Yin’s lap.

“Just get me a sensuit,” she said.

Yin didn’t ask how she planned on getting out. “I can have one here in two hours,” he offered. “What about your injuries?”

“Nothing a flesh barn can’t fix.”

“Very well,” Yin said. “I will make the arrangements.”

“I’ll also need transportation,” she added. “A hovercraft, waiting for me at LaGuardia. Have the Transit Authority in Montreal bag that cargo pulser until I can get up there and have a look at it.”

“Of course.”

“And I will do this
alone,
Yin,” Avalon warned. “No pilots, no partners—no one. If I catch anybody following me, I will kill them. I don’t care who it is.”

“I understand.”

“I hope you do.”

She closed her eyes, the monitors dropping back off to comatose levels. Yin watched her for a time, feeling foolish for the way she had tricked him. He didn’t like it, any more than he liked her giving orders—but he resolved to tolerate her insolence so long as she got him closer to Alden.

Avalon was correct in her assumptions regarding Heretic, but she was nowhere close to knowing the full story. In truth, the process she had spoken of was already at work. The data Yin had taken from Dex Marlowe’s files confirmed it. How far it had gone was a matter of speculation—which made locating Alden even more crucial. Heretic would see it, and she would show Alden, and when that happened there was no telling what Alden would do. At best, he would end his own life and be done with it.