Biowar

18

Fortified by a serious lunch — and still lacking any real information about Kegan’s or Pounds’ whereabouts — Karr decided the next order of business was to find out about the men who’d trailed him in the car earlier. He circled back to the spot where he’d told the driver to meet him, discovering that the goons had split up, with one now on a motorbike. Obviously they were quick learners.

“Hey,” said Karr, jumping into the car’s front seat.

“You’re back,” said Luc Dai.

“Told you. Drive ahead.”

“Then?”

“Find a tourist trap where I’m likely to be ripped off,” Karr said.

The driver twisted his head. Karr smiled at him, then reached down and pulled up his pants leg. He loosened the strap that held the gun there, sliding in the handheld behind it. Modesty prevented slipping the computer down his pants to his thigh, where the second of the three guns he carried was secreted.

“You want to be robbed?” asked the driver.

“Just mugged. Doesn’t everyone?”

They’d gone about a half-mile when Karr spotted a broad avenue that would do perfectly. He told the driver to let him out, then meet him on the other side of the block. Luc Dai shook his head but pulled over nonetheless.

“Get ready,” said Chafetz as Karr closed the car door and turned toward the street vendor selling trinkets.

“Born ready.” Karr could hear the high-pitched whine of the motorbike in the distance. He stepped over to the stall and pointed at a trinket, taking his wallet from his pocket just in time to have it snatched from his hand by the thief.

Karr shouted and grabbed for his assailant, making sure to just miss. When both the bike and the car were gone, Karr made a show of gathering himself, then walked down the block toward the spot where Luc Dai was to meet him. He had the driver take him to a spot where he could rent a motorbike, then dismissed him for the day. With the Art Room tracking the thieves, Karr took the time to haggle over the rental fee for the largest bike in the inventory, which he still dwarfed. By the time the deal was completed, the goons had stopped at a building several blocks from the hotel.

“We think it’s a warehouse,” said Chafetz, giving him directions. “Did the CIA draw these maps or what?”

“Taking the name of the competition in vain?” Karr asked.

Chafetz guided him through a maze of tiny alleys in the capital city, tracking the thugs into a district thick with sweatshops, some ultramodern, some that would have seemed out-of-date in 1700. Finally he got to within a few buildings of the factory. If you ignored the vegetation peeking out from the torn macadam and the relative lack of graffiti, the area could have been the backside of any American city, with dilapidated buildings and rusting wrecks of trucks.

Karr parked the bike and leaped up on a Dumpster at the back of a low-slung concrete-block building, climbing up on the roof and then mounting the ladder of a water tower to look at the warehouse where the goons had stopped. He reached into his pocket and took out a small pair of folding opera glasses, along with a wire to hook the feed into his handheld and ship it back to the Art Room. The optical portion of the glasses was capable of 20X magnification; the unit could also use an infrared, or IR, sensor roughly twice as powerful as Generation 3 military units. Karr selected infrared to try to look through the thin wall of the warehouse; he saw two figures near a window at the front but wasn’t positioned well enough to see farther into the facility. Neither of the figures had guns.

“We’re running down the owners of the warehouse,” Chafetz told him. “But I doubt that’s significant. Can you get close enough to get visuals on the people as they come out?”

Karr craned his neck toward the building. He could hop from one roof to the other.

“Doable,” he told her. Then he hopped from the ladder, took a short windup, and jumped to the next roof. A taller building sat next to it; he could just barely reach high enough to pull up and get over. This one had a good view of the warehouse and the alley in the back.

He moved his glasses around, scanning the warehouse. Most of the interior was empty, but a small part of the front comer of the building had interior walls and thick insulation, probably so it could be air-conditioned efficiently. This made seeing through it problematic, though the Art Room was able to find and enhance five shadows, IDing four as people and the fifth as a cat.

A Toyota was parked in the back. Karr reached to the back of his belt and took out one of his flies, a small eavesdropping device that could fit on a fingernail. From his left pocket he removed a device that looked like an old-fashioned Pez dispenser. Instead of candy, however, the device dispensed a sticky plastic that Karr rolled into a ball. He placed the fly at the top, then tossed the wad gently on the roof of the car. It splatted, looking like an odd bird dropping. He keyed his handheld to wake up the bug, got a beep indicating it was working, then went back to scanning the warehouse.

“Duck,” said Chafetz suddenly.

The kids who had followed them and stolen his wallet came out the front, scootering away. Two other men got into the Toyota and backed quickly out of the alley.

“You want the Toyota,” said Chafetz.

“Great. Keep tabs on it for me while I go get my wallet,” said Karr.

“Uh…”

“Uh what?”

“They threw it in a barrel and lit it on fire. I’d guess it’s pretty crispy by now.”