It didn’t matter that much. Aziz still had the original, and she could always get it back from him. And the cops had a copy; they’d demanded one as soon as they saw the story. In the meantime, the intruders had probably been fooled into thinking they’d gotten the original. One datachip looked much the same as any other, and the one Carla had used for the copy was bronze, just like the original. Since it contained the spell formula the intruders were looking for, they probably wouldn’t be back. They’d taken all her other memory chips, too, even though all they had to do was pop them into the telecom unit to see what was on them. But perhaps they’d wanted to be in and out quickly.
It was annoying to lose the other chips. The sim-sense games had been expensive, and the home trideo she’d shot of her niece couldn’t be replaced. As for the rest of the chips, they were all blank except. . .
"Oh, drek." Carla moaned, closing her eyes. "Not my personal stuff."
But they’d found it. The drawer where Carla hid her "private" recordings had been overturned. The chips she’d stuffed into the back of it, behind her neatly folded sweaters, were gone.
She sat on the bed, looking up at the ceiling—at the spot where decorative, tinted glass blocks hid the lens of a holocamera. The closed-circuit camera was automatically activated every time anyone came into the bedroom. Carla used it to record her romantic encounters, then later would replay and savor her favorite moments. She wasn’t sure if it was the reporter in her, compelling her to record her affairs, or some weird sexual kink. But it didn’t matter now. Somewhere, somebody was no doubt having a good laugh at her expense, titillating themselves by watching her private recordings. Or perhaps the chips were already on their way to a porn shop. Or perhaps to a rival trideo station for broadcast on the evening news.
Carla groaned and threw her head into her hands. How could she have been such an idiot? She should have erased those chips long ago, or disconnected the holo camera before the intruders . . .
The intruders! The camera would have recorded them! Carla dragged a chair over to the spot beneath the hidden camera and clambered onto it. Reaching up, she swung aside the false front of the glass block. She hit the power-off key for the camera, then popped the chip out of it. Carrying it to the living room, she slotted the chip into her home editing equipment and hit the Play icon. She had to skip around a little bit; the first track she viewed showed her sitting on the bed, staring up at the camera, while the next one she jumped to was of a romantic evening from three weeks ago. But at last she found the right track. She watched, leaning forward for a good look at the screen as the first of the intruders entered the bedroom.
The camera was looking down on the room, and thus it caught the top of the man’s head and shoulders from an overhead angle. But by using the logic-rotation system built into the holo unit, Carla could fill in the rest, patching together a composite from the images the camera captured as the intruder moved around the room.
He was human—a Native American—perhaps in his mid-twenties. His hair was crewed to sharp points, and he had a black bird tattooed across the back of his right hand. His left hand was gleaming chrome. He wore jeans, a brown leather jacket with fringed sleeves, and heavy black boots. He had paused only briefly to scan the room, then moved immediately to the dresser and began methodically opening and dumping its drawers.
After a minute or two, a voice called from another room. Carla paused the recording, skipped back a few seconds, then boosted and sharpened the sound.
"Found anything, Raven?"
The crew-cut intruder sorted through the clothes on the floor, picking out datachips. "Yeah." he answered. "But there’s more than one. Any idea what color it was?"
"It looked bronze in the broadcast." the other voice instructed. "But grab anything you can find. They might have used another chip for the story, just to be cute."
"Do you really think this is worth it, Kent?" Raven called back. "The reporters might have lied about what was on the chip. We may not find anything here to interest Ren—"
"Don’t be such a fragging pessimist." the off-screen voice said. "Of course the spell is valuable. And even if it’s not, what do you care? I’m paying you well enough, aren’t I?" The voice grew louder as a figure moved into the camera’s field of view. Once again, Carla let the recording run, selecting pieces to edit together into a composite image.
The second man was a pale-skinned elf with thinning blond hair tied back into a scraggly ponytail. He looked to be in his late thirties, and wore baggy trousers, a white shirt, and a black opera-style rain cloak. A fiber-optic cable with a universal port hung out of one pocket, and his hands were sheathed in surgical gloves—probably to avoid leaving fingerprints.
He bent over to fish out a datachip that had fallen under the dresser. Carla, watching the screen, winced as he slipped it into a pocket. She hoped it wasn’t the recording of the guy who’d wanted to . . .
Raven was talking again. "So let me get this straight. The mage hired you to extract him so that his bosses wouldn’t geek his family after he spilled the beans on their hush-hush research project. He was gonna ask the newsies to make the interview look like a tape they’d gotten from his kidnappers, right? So how come he got himself scragged?"
The elf leaned against the door frame. His eyes scanned the room warily. "You sure you disconnected the security system?" he asked.
Carla held her breath, hoping they wouldn’t stop talking.
The first man glanced up, a smug expression on his face. "I’m sure. Ain’t that why you hired me, chummer? For that—and to crawl around on the floor, searching for chips so you wouldn’t get your nice clothes dirty?"
The elf gave him a thin smile. "You want to know why he got geeked? Use your wetware. It’s simple. Obviously Mitsuhama learned what their golden boy was up to and decided to shut him up. But in doing so they let the genie out of the bottle. Now everyone knows the secret—even if they don’t know whose secret it is. That was sloppy of them, overlooking the datachip in his pocket."
From inside the closet, the other man made
tsk
tsking
sounds. "Silly fraggers." he said in a mocking voice. "Rule number one: always check the pockets." He stepped out of the closet, one hand rifling the pockets of a pair of Carla’s pants. He tossed them playfully at the elf, then began rummaging through the other garments.
"So you didn’t do the hit?" Raven asked. "I thought you said you sold out Mister Mage."
"Not to Mitsuhama, I didn’t. And now my employer is getting nervous. He wants to see some results for his down payment."
"You’re sure the guy who was geeked in the alley was your boy? He might have figured your double cross and hired some other runners to fake his death."
"I’m sure it was him." the elf answered. "His wife confirmed it when I called her the next morning."
"Just like that?"
The elf chuckled. "I told her I was a reporter."
Carla, watching, nodded to herself. No wonder Mrs. Samji had felt pestered with "horrible questions." These two looked as if they would be anything but subtle.
On-screen, the elf nodded to himself. "We can still turn a profit on this one if we can find the chip. My ‘Mister Johnson’ would probably like that even better than a potentially uncooperative mage. A datachip doesn’t take as long to give up its secrets."
The first man closed the closet door. "That’s it." he said. "Nothing else in this room to search."
The elf consulted his watch. "We’ve been here twenty minutes." he said. "We’d better get going if we’re going to make our second stop." He stepped out of the bedroom.
"Are we going to the shop?" Raven asked, following him.
"Too late for that." the elf answered. "Last night it—" The recording ended abruptly as the Native American stepped out of the bedroom. The screen flickered, then showed Carla entering the room, narcoject pistol in hand.
She hit the screen’s Pause icon, then skipped back to review the last few seconds. A time code in one corner of the screen showed the hour, minute, and second that the recording had been laid down. It had ended precisely at 2:16 p.m.—more than five hours ago. The two intruders could be anywhere by now.
Carla jumped when her phone beeped. She pulled it from her pocket, flipped it open, and saw Masaki’s face on the tiny screen. He looked wild-eyed and nervous. A trickle of sweat ran down his temple. He wiped it away, then broke into a hurried rush of words as Carla activated the visual pickup.
"Thank god you’re all right, Carla." he wheezed. "What’s wrong, Masaki?"
"While we were at work today, someone broke into my apartment and turned it upside down. As soon as I saw the mess I shut the door and called the cops. I had them go in first. I’m not taking any chances, after the yaku—" He glanced warily around as if expecting the yakuza to leap out at him from a corner at any moment, then wet his lips. "—after our run-in with those goons on the street the other night. They must be looking for the chip. You’d better not go back to your apartment. If they find you there alone—"
"I’m sitting alone in my apartment right now, Masaki." Carla said. She smiled at his shocked expression. "And thanks for the warning, but it’s too late. My place has been trashed, too. And probably by the same people."
"Have you called the cops?" Masaki asked.
"Oh, come on, Masaki. You must know how useless that would be."
"I guess so." Masaki agreed. Then he shot her an accusing look. "I thought you said those goons wouldn’t come after us if we aired the piece."
"It wasn’t them." Carla said. "It was runners."
"Who?"
"Shadowrunners." Carla explained. "They saw our story and came after the chip, hoping to steal it and sell the spell formula. They were originally hired to fake a kidnapping of Farazad. He told them he wanted a cover for an unauthorized leave of absence, but the extraction was probably designed to prevent Mitsuhama from taking revenge on him after he went public about their research project. Farazad had planned to disappear the morning after his interview with you. But it looks like the runners he hired got greedy and were planning to sell him to the highest bidder."
Masaki gave Carla an incredulous look. "How do you know all this?"
Carla nearly told Masaki of the recording made by her hidden camera. But then she paused. Masaki liked to gossip; if Carla told him she had a camera in her bedroom, the story would be all over the newsroom before Carla had poured her morning soykaf. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to say, over an uncoded frequency, that she had good, clean images of two professional shadowrunners on file. Given the right scanners, anyone could listen in on a cel phone conversation.
"I have my sources." Carla said, winking.
"You say they wanted to sell Farazad? Who to?" Carla thought back over the conversation her camera had captured. What had the shadowrunner named Raven said? He’d started to say a name—something like "ren." Carla had thought it to be a man’s name. Renny. Or Reynolds, perhaps. But now she realized what it had to be. "Ren" wasn’t a who, but a what. A corporation.
"Renraku." she whispered.
Masaki caught the whisper. "Renraku Computer Systems? That fits. They’re Mitsuhama’s chief rival. They’d naturally want to know what the competition was up to."
"And now they do." Carla answered. "The runners got what they came here for."
Masaki frowned, then realized what her comment meant. "You mean they got your copy of the spe—"
"Masaki!" Carla said abruptly. "I think we’d better save this chatter for tomorrow morning in the newsroom."
Masaki’s eyes widened. "Oh. Right." He tried to feign a casual air. "Well, good night, then. See you tomorrow."
The screen of Carla’s cel phone went blank.
Pita sat in a corner of the main branch of the Seattle library, wedged into a space between two stacks of archaic twentieth-century books. She’d run here after escaping from the Yakuza at the hotel, and hadn’t set foot outside since. The library offered everything a street kid needed—warmth, shelter from the rain, washrooms to clean up in, free entertainment, and the cafeteria had plenty of vending machines that offered Growliebars, soykaf, and nutrisoy snacks. Best of all, the library was open twenty-four hours a day. The only trick was in avoiding the security guards, who would turf out anyone they caught sleeping.
The secret was to keep moving from one area of the building to the next. Pretend you were scanning a chip at one of the data displays in the reading room, and had fallen asleep because it was boring. Then catch a nap in one of the viewing booths on the second floor. Then off to the children’s department, where animated holos played continuously. The volume was a little intense, but the padded benches were soft. Then over to the reference department, where you could use an old piece of datacord to make it appear you were jacked into one of the municipal decks. If you could sleep sitting up, it was easy to look as if you had merely closed your eyes to eliminate noncybernetic input.
But the best place to crash was in the tiny, cramped section that contained old-fashioned hardcopy—books. The aisles were narrow and cluttered, and hardly anybody could be bothered with the cumbersome task of turning pages and manually scanning each one. The data display units, with their instantaneous keyword searches, animated holo graphics, and automated download systems were vastly more popular.