Noir (24 page)

The kid shrugged, unconcerned. “I phone down to Lima, have ’em yank the base. Forty-eight hours from now, you make your call and there ain’t squat to down. All you got is one ugly cuff link.”

Little things were working away, which the kid didn’t even know about. McNihil could feel them in his pocket; not in any ordinary tactile sense, but just by knowing. Like ants crawling on a lump of sugar, but so much smaller; it only took seconds for the chip to be engulfed by the swarming, programmed micro-organics, and then just a bit more time for them to link up into their structured layers of membrane.

“You’re the clever one.” McNihil gave a nod. “You’ve got this one all figured out.” He reached into his hip pocket for his wallet, being careful not to jostle the still-fragile activity in his coat. “If there’d been more guys like you a while back, the asp-heads and all that crowd wouldn’t have gotten very far. You could’ve been the Lenin of an information-access revolution.”

“Connect that. I’m an independent operator. I look out for my own ass.”

“Yeah, I can tell.” The micro-organics had finished linking up with each other across the chip’s surface. McNihil could sense a low-level electrical charge seeping out of his pocket. “Dealing with you has been a real education.”

“It’s not over yet.” One bony-knuckled hand with grease-shiny fingers extended toward McNihil. “You still gotta pay.”

The wallet held only the cash that had been prepared for this transaction; McNihil hadn’t wanted to contaminate any of his own walking-around money. He extracted the bills, folded them in one hand, then laid the wad on the kid’s palm. “Don’t spend it all on popcorn.”

“I might.” The kid didn’t even bother to count it. As McNihil had figured, the dollar amount wasn’t important to him. The cash was his own green trophy. “Fun talking to you, old man. You taking off now?”

Angry shouts, crowd noises, fell from the speakers on the theater’s walls. McNihil turned and looked at the screen again. A mob of cartoon Londoners—fishmongers, cockney pearlies, comical bulb-hatted bobbies—were chasing the tragically misunderstood teenage Ripper through the fogbound streets. The massed chorus number told of how the townspeople’s own sexual frustrations kept them from accepting poor Jack’s attempts at finding love.

McNihil shook his head. “I think I’ll stick around for a bit.”

In the kid’s hand, the folded cash had already been activated. Nothing that the kid could sense, but McNihil knew it had happened. When he’d signed on as an asp-head, so long ago, he’d had the skin temperature of his hands surgically lowered—microscopic heat dissipaters, inert threads of directional-flow fibers, ran back through the centers of his forearms. The disadvantage was that up north, any farther around the top of the circle than here in Seattle, or down around the ice floes of the bottom curve, his metacarpals stiffened and ached like sonsabitches. The advantage—the reason for the modification—was that McNihil could hand an evidentiary prop like the treated money to somebody without triggering the heat-release chemicals that the bills had been impregnated with. By now, the kid’s hands, wherever they fell in the cash’s 98.6°-centered range, had sent the self-dispersive substances all the way past his elbows. The stuff went so deep into the pores that it couldn’t be washed off with acetone. Deeper, even; enough seconds had passed for it to have reached the bones. McNihil could haul the kid’s skeleton in and put it under the flickering UV’s—he’d done that to others, back in the old days—and he’d still be able to prove the kid had taken the money. The bait, the hook, the trap. The kid didn’t know it, but he’d already been stamped with the Cain mark of his sin.

McNihil pointed to the screen. “I want to see how this comes out.”

“It’s a pretty good one.” The kid had tucked the money into his jeans pocket. “I liked last month’s better, though. Something about oppressed workers of the world …”

“
The Communist Manifesto
,” said McNihil. He hadn’t bothered to go see it.

“Yeah—there were all these little chains with big-eyed faces, dancing and singing around the guys in the factories. It was cool.”

Pulling himself up in the theater seat, McNihil moved one foot to the side, a measured distance closer to the kid’s feet. Not enough to touch, but to knock over the half-finished soft drink that McNihil had spotted there when he’d sat down. The paper cup spilled its contents, complete with half-melted ice cubes, across the already-sticky floor.

“Was that yours?” McNihil pulled his foot back, as the kid looked down at the mess. “Sorry—I’ll get you another one. I was heading out to the lobby for a minute, anyway. I’ll be right back.”

While McNihil was in the men’s room—the tiled floor was nearly as sticky as in the theater proper—the micro-organics finished their job in his pocket. The last item on their programmed agenda was to form a tympanum a few molecules away from the pirate chip’s surface, stiffen, then reverse magnetic polarity rapidly and repeatedly enough to sound a tiny, bell-like note, soft and high enough that only the nerve implant in an asp-head’s inner ear could pick it up. That was the only signal that McNihil needed. It meant that the clever little creatures had finished breaking down the chip’s code, the enveloping membrane had run it through a fast-forward simulation of two days’ worth of time, and matched the resulting access key with the checksum already written in the micro-organics’ cores. There was no need to call anywhere in Peru; McNihil’s pocket held enough of the world to hang the kid in.

At the snack bar, which wasn’t more than a narrow sheet of plywood laid across folding metal sawhorses, he picked up a couple of drinks. The bored-looking girl behind the improvised counter hardly seemed to notice as McNihil took from his other pocket a gelatin capsule, snapped it in two, and poured the white powder into one of the cups. There were no other customers waiting behind him; with a plastic straw, he stirred the contents so that the powder was dispersed and invisible.

“Here you go.” Setting himself back down in the theater, McNihil
handed the drink to the kid. The one he hadn’t messed with he kept for himself.

“Thanks, man. I’m dying here.” The kid had finished the last of the popcorn, and had thrown the empty tub into the strata of litter on the theater’s floor. “They put too much salt on this stuff. I guess that’s so you’ll spend more money on drinks, huh?”

You are a clever bastard
—McNihil kept his reply silent. He figured the ironic intent would be lost on the kid, anyway. From the corner of his eye, he could see the cartoon figures on the screen, teenage Jack and the one London whore who’d always loved and believed in him, singing a treacly duet. Jack’s cartoon knife glittered like a narrow mirror, as McNihil watched the kid tilt the cup to his mouth.

Nothing for the kid to taste, nothing wrong to detect. The powder was inert, not even as close to living as the programmed micro-organics in McNihil’s coat pocket. From being dispersed through the drink, the powder had been activated, re-formed into a gel, and settled at the bottom of the cup, waiting for its next trigger.

“You know,” mused the kid, “that one last month, with them Communist guys—those people were right. Even if they were cartoons. Everything should be free.”

McNihil set his own drink down on the theater’s sticky floor. “It should, huh?”

“Yeah …” The kid nodded slowly, on to something. “Because it all
wants
to be free.”

“Does it?”

“Sure. You know … like the way information wants to be free.”

“Information wants to be free, huh?” McNihil didn’t wait for an answer. “Well, here’s some info you can have for nothing.” He swung his fist in a hard, flat arc, landing it straight to the kid’s nose, which exploded in a bright flower of blood.

He caught the kid’s drink before it could spill. The kid had both hands to his face, red leaking between his fingers. McNihil leaned forward, grabbing the T-shirt collar in one hand, bringing the plastic cup up to the kid’s face with the other. The Tanaka hydro-gel with which he’d doped the kid’s drink was keyed to McNihil’s parasympathetic system; the gel would respond to a shift in certain physical indicators, blood pressure and adrenaline level being chief among them. McNihil had been carefully keeping his emotions under control—he had worked
so long as an asp-head that it was easy for him—but now he’d let them go. Pumped them up, just by letting the pure loathing he had for copyright infringers come boiling out of the little box he kept inside his skull.

The gel came alive as though it were part of him. He knocked the kid’s bloodied hands aside, as the stuff inside the cup swelled with explosive speed.

There was no time for the kid to react with anything more than the eyes going wide behind the glasses, his mouth taking in a quick gasp of air. His last one, for a while at least; the hydro-gel shot up from the bottom of the cup, spraying the remaining liquid and ice across the kid’s face. It trickled from his ears and down the tendons of his neck as the gel swarmed over all the human skin it was programmed to find. The gel expanded from its compression state, soaking up the spilled drink and moisture from the air, transforming itself into a sticky mass larger than the kid’s head.

McNihil leaned back from the scene he was watching. Dispassionately now; once the hydro-gel had been triggered by his worked-up emotional state, there was no need to maintain it. He let his anger subside, pulling his blood pressure back down with it.

The kid’s scrawny hands were still clawing at the transparent gel enveloping his head, all the way to the back of his skull. It had flowed onto his hands and down onto his wrists, welding them to the suffocating mass. The kid’s mouth was still gaping open; the gel trembled with his scream, but let no sound through.

A few of the other scattered theater patrons had roused themselves and looked over at what was going on. They watched in silence, either unconcerned or grateful that it wasn’t happening to them.

Past the kid’s mired fingers, the face that could be seen through the wavering, inch-thick layer of hydro-gel had turned red, as though even more blood were about to start seeping out of the kid’s pores. McNihil knew what came next, the red turning to black, the lungs laboring for breath that couldn’t penetrate the clear mask, anoxia and death. The heart stopping, and then the delicate cells of the brain collapsing into each other like fruits forgotten and rotting in a refrigerator bin—but faster. McNihil didn’t want that; he wanted the kid alive for at least a while longer. Trophying out a brain-dead corpse yielded unsatisfactory results.

McNihil reached over and grabbed the kid by the neck, his own fingertips sinking partway into the hydro-gel. He didn’t have to worry about it fastening onto his own skin; the gel had already locked onto the kid’s sweat and wasn’t interested in any other human touch now. Something reduced to less than human stared out of the panicking eyes under the gel; the kid’s consciousness had been devoured by animal fright. The scent of warmer liquid rose in the theater’s dark air as the kid’s urine soaked down his jeans leg and mixed with the spilled drink on the floor.

With his other hand, McNihil poked his way through the kid’s hands, caught by the gel. A crooked fingertip was enough to tear open a small breathing hole, right above the kid’s flattened nostrils; the gel had stiffened enough that it wouldn’t flow to refill the little gap. McNihil flicked the dollop of bloodstained matter away from his fingernail; it landed like soft crystal on the back of the next row’s seat, then dribbled snotlike downward.

“Let’s go, pal.” McNihil hauled the kid upright and dragged him toward the theater aisle. “We’ve got more business to take care of. I think you know what kind.”

A whinnying noise, sheer terror, came from the kid’s exposed nasopharynx. That, and the eyes that had managed to open even wider beneath the hydro-gel, was eloquent enough.

The girl behind the improvised snack bar cast a bored gaze at McNihil as he dragged the kid through the lobby and out onto the street. If she hadn’t seen it before in reality, she’d seen it over the wire, and that was close enough.

Strangled, muffled noises continued to be emitted from McNihil’s human parcel as he hit the sidewalk outside the theater. The kid’s urine-damp legs thrashed, heels against the cracked cement. McNihil wished he had torn a slightly smaller hole in the gel; the kid was getting just a bit too much oxygen into his lungs.

In the world outside the theater, time had rolled into its own dark hours. McNihil could see a trace of the dwindling sunset tingeing the petroleum-mottled ocean to the west; the ancient buildings of the city’s center were folding into deeper shadows. Human silhouettes wavered across the empty storefronts and up the alley walls; the bare-dirt park had become one bonfire, the uprooted 747 a skeletal carcass in the middle of the flames, like some sacrificial totem of a forgotten age.

The scene didn’t look good to McNihil. There was a much bigger crowd in the streets than when he had gone into the little fly-by-night theater.
Riot time
, he judged. The crowd was feeding the fire leaping above their heads; ragged figures hauled scraps of lumber and other fuel, broken furniture and commercial fixtures from the unoccupied buildings surrounding the area, and threw them in with a bright swirl of sparks and cinders. The roar of the fire gave the mob’s instigators something to shout over, to bring their voices to the properly impassioned hoarseness. McNihil spotted the bearded figure who’d operated the panhandling gantry, now standing on an overturned trash dumpsker, upraised fists shaking with every word.

McNihil quickly debated whether he should go back to the End Zone Hotel, where he’d left his gun and tools, all that ponderous metal that would’ve set off the theater’s security devices, or head to the train station with the stifled, struggling kid in tow. He decided against the latter; with this kind of civil disturbance in progress, every cabbie had probably—and wisely—fled to the outskirts of town. It’d be a long walk to the station, especially with an untrophied kid slung over his shoulder.

The crowd gave no attention to anyone dragging a gel-bound captive down the sidewalk. McNihil kept close to the buildings, but was still jostled by newcomers streaming into the action zone. The fire mounting at the center laid a shifting orange glow over the sweating faces, the sparks dancing in their overstimulated eyes.