Fade to Black

22

Shank guided Marena Farris to the door at the end of the second-floor hallway, then into the room there. She seemed weak, dazed. Bandit followed them in. Shank guided the woman to the bed, made her sit, then looked at the shaman.

"I'll watch her," Bandit said.

"Rico told me to do it."

Bandit lifted the Mask of Sassacus up before his own face and whispered words of power. The past few days had given him some time to further examine the mask and to experiment with it. He had harmonized its power with his own.

Aloud, he told Shank, "You must be hungry. Why not get something to eat?"

Shank grunted, nodded. "Yeah, you got a point. Thanks, chummer."

"Do not think of it."

"Think of what?"

"Just kidding."

Shank paused a moment, looked at Bandit, then grinned ferociously and left. Bandit considered the mask, then noticed Marena Farris slowly turning to face him. She would not see the mask. It was cloaked. Only Bandit could see it.

Marena Farris appeared emotionally upset. She moved her hands about her face, covering her mouth, her eyes, wiping at her brow, her cheeks. She spent several moments pressing her hair back from her face. Her eyes looked red, her face flushed.

"Care for a cigarette?" Bandit asked.

Marena Farris shook her head.

Bandit shrugged and took a cig from his open pack, then ignited it with a lighter from his duster pocket. He didn't actually draw the smoke into his lungs, only into his mouth, then blew it out. He was a practiced smoker. He practiced the habit because people seemed to become more at ease when they saw him doing something so mundane. That was his only reason for smoking. To appear somewhat mundane.

He smoked Millennium Reds. One of the most common brands available. They could be gotten anywhere.

Between one drag and the next, he gazed at Marena Farris as she appeared on the astral plane. She looked back at him, though only on the physical plane, it seemed.

"You have an interesting aura."

Marena Farris smiled a polite kind of smile. Not very enthusiastic. Not very interested. Perhaps a bit pained. Was it an attempt at deception or a reflection of her true feelings? On the astral plane, she was a storm of color, a boiling cauldron of light, of life energy. In Bandit's experience, such a tumultuous aura reflected tumultuous emotions or thoughts, sometimes both. The intensity and diverse coloring of the aura said more about the individual, their strength, their will, the force of their life.

"What's going to happen to me?" Marena Farris said.

Bandit wondered how she meant that… Did she mean now? tomorrow? next year? Did she wonder what would happen to her when her body grew too worn and decayed to support her biological existence? "I wonder," Bandit replied, pausing to take another drag of the cig. "You're much older than you seem."

She gasped softly, then.

As in surprise.

"What… what do you mean?" she asked quietly.

"What do you think?" Bandit replied.

"Well, yes," she said, slowly. "Yes, you're right. It's true. I am. Older than I look. Why… do you ask? Why am I telling you this?"

"You'd like to tell me more."

"Yes, I would." She stopped and smiled again and nodded. Then frowned. "I don't understand."

"There's nothing to understand."

"Yes, yes, there is. I'm sure of it."

"You just like talking to me."

"Yes, I do. But there's more. You're…"

"No."

"You are." Her expression grew pained. She gasped for breath as if running a race. "You're… doing things to me. Stop it. Stop it, please! It hurts…" Incredible.

Bandit lowered the mask. Marena Farris dropped her head to her breast. Her hair tumbled down around her face, concealing her features completely. But not her aura. Bandit looked at that again just to see how it had changed, but it was difficult to read. Certain aspects of it were puzzling, out of sync, conflicting with the whole. Conflicting with aspects of her aura that seemed to imply that she had a great latent potential for magic. Great enough that she might have made a powerful mage, had she begun the study early enough.

Then again, her potential was not entirely latent. She had some very minor raw ability. Unrefined, untrained. A sensitivity to spells of influence, a sort of natural resistance, and great strength of will.

Bandit wondered if she might not be one of those people, successful people, powerful people, who are often credited with great personal charisma, charm, influence, and a thousand other traits that mundanes found so difficult to describe.

Magic by other names.

It would be interesting to spend more time with Marena Farris. Bandit could see the value in it clearly. If nothing else, her own natural resistance would help him reveal the true depth of power possessed by the Mask of Sassacus.

The bedroom door swung inward.

Rico entered. "Looking for you," he said. "Have a seat, I wanna talk to our guest."

Bandit found himself a chair.

Heading into this, Rico tried to keep an open mind.

Marena Farris lifted her head and met bis eyes. She looked distraught enough to cry, scared, too. It made her seem more human.

Her Fuchi file said she was forty-three, but she didn't look anywhere near that age. Maybe twenty-five. She had the kind of looks that leapt out and demanded a man's attention, no question about it Her face was pure exec, cool and sophisticated, flawless. Her figure was beyond belief. She had all the makings of a primo slut or prostitute, the kind of woman who got whatever she wanted, regardless of what it took. She'd started at Fuchi as a corporate joygirl, a sort of combination hooker and geisha, but had broken out of that mold in just a few short years. The corp had educated her, boosted her up the ladder.

Rico noticed how the light from the room's only lamp gleamed on the moist skin beneath Marena Farris' eyes, and he decided how to proceed. An honorable man would plumb his own depths searching for mercy. Understanding. Compassion. But Rico couldn't afford it.

"What's your story?"

She hesitated, blinked like she didn't understand, the looked at him steadily and said, "Please don't kill me."

Rico clenched his teeth. "Gimme a reason."

"I'm worth more alive."

What the hell was she talking about? Rico straggled to keep his face deadpan, concealing his surprise. Did she think she'd been kidnapped? That someone intended to kill her? Rico thought he ought to explain, only he didn't wanna explain, not till he got the truth out of her. "You always say hello to a slag by trying to waste him?"

"What else could I do?" Farris seemed to get choked up. Her voice wavered. Tears spilled from her eyes. She moaned, looking around like she wanted to find some way out. "You had me, you brought me straight to him. He obviously hired you for that." She paused a moment, hand at her brow. Her fingers trembled visibly. "I can't believe this is happening. Isn't there anything I can say? I'll give you any amount of money, twice whatever he paid you, if you'll get me out of here."

Rico hated playing games like this, especially with a woman, especially with one who looked like she expected to be killed at any moment. It made him feel dirty-like slime. It didn't really matter that she was a suit, a corporate. She was still a woman. If so much wasn't at stake… Rico clenched his teeth. "You got money?"

The question nailed her attention. Her eyes went wide. She nodded. Adamantly. "Yes, I have a lot of money. I don't… I don't care how much you want. Just let me go. Please let me go."

"Later," Rico said. "We'll talk about money later. I wanna know some things first."

She nodded, looking like she'd willingly tell him anything. Rico wondered whether to believe it.

"How'd you figure it out?" Rico said. "What we got in mind."

Farris lowered her face to her hand, stared at the bed. She seemed about to cry again. "I've known for some time that Ansell loathes me. He can be very vengeful. That's why he volunteered-"

"Volunteered? For what?"

Farris looked at him again. "You don't really need to know that. It's proprietary,"

Rico stepped toward the bed. "I'll tell you about proprietary. I almost got my cojones blown off coming after you. So you're gonna tell me what you know. Everything."

"Please… I took an oath."

A real corporate thing to say.

Rico sat down on the edge of the bed facing her. A new rise of fear showed plainly in her eyes, yet something in the way she held her head, the angle of her chin, seemed almost like a challenge. Defiant. That changed when the razorspurs slid out of the rear of Rico's arm and snicked softly into position. Farris' eyes caught the movement. She looked, then looked again. When Rico lifted his forearm, moving those blades toward her throat, she stiffened, lifted her hands to her face, and leaned away.

Another moment and she was squirming.

She gasped. "Please!"

When she started shaking. Rico drew back. She was hard to read, and harder to figure. One big contradiction from start to finish. She could peddle that body of hers in any bar in the sprawl without even trying, yet she seemed sharp, maybe sharp enough to go anywhere, right to the top. She didn't seem like the type to be physically brave, and yet this same woman had just grabbed a gun and tried to blow away her own husband. What the hell kind of sense did that make? None. None whatsoever. Surikov didn't seem to understand it. Rico sure didn't.

"Consider yourself threatened," he said. "Now talk."

Farris was more than just a few moments calming down. If it was an act, it was a fragging good one. Every move flush, a seamless performance. Right down to the way she pursed her lips, as if forcing herself to at least seem in control of herself, when really she was shaking. Rico wasn't sure if he believed her act or not.

"You said your husband volunteered. Volunteered for what?"

"A special program," Farris said in a voice that seemed weak with emotion. "He didn't have to do it. He did it to get away from me. To spite me."

"Spite you why?"

"Because things didn't work out."

"What things?"

She hesitated and swallowed visibly. "Our relationship," she said. "Our marriage."

Rico figured that much had to be true. If it hadn't been true, it was now. Unless Surikov didn't mind almost getting wasted by his wife. "Tell me about this special program. You said your husband volunteered."

"It's a secret."

"You wanna get hurt?"

She lowered her head, shook it, and said, "It was a program to infiltrate Fuchi competitors. Security services have been doing that… doing it forever. The problem is… your average security operative lacks the qualifications to get at the data you really want. The agent typically ends up on the competition's security staff or else posted in some security function to an executive, with only very limited access to proprietary material. The Fuchi program changed all that. We developed an interdisciplinary scheme for training scientists and researchers to work as security operatives, and to work effectively. That's basically what it was about."

"Keep talking."

Something crossed her face, maybe dismay. "The program was very involved," she said softly, almost moaning. "It was five years in the making. I was part of it from the beginning. Ansell resented the hours I logged. He's very possessive. He wanted me to be with him whenever he was free from his work. My work didn't matter to him. I tried working from our condo and ultimately went on leave, but by then it was too late. He resented me, resented everything about me, and that resentment turned vile. It turned into hatred."

"So he volunteered for your program."

"It was… it was a way to use my own work against me. He felt that I had betrayed him. This was his revenge. Knowing how it would make me feel."

Rico wondered how much of this was true. Farris' file said that she had worked on some special project for going on five years. More than that, he didn't know. A lot of what Marena Farris was telling him wouldn't likely appear in any files. "Surikov's a big deal biotechnician. You're telling me Fuchi put this slag, this asset, into some experimental program and sent him straight to the enemy. I don't buy it."

"Ansell's qualifications made him perfect for the role. That was the point of the program, to get astute people into the competition's camp, people who would know what they were seeing, who could report in specific detail on how competition research was developing." She hesitated a moment, wiped her eyes. "Yes. Ansell Surikov is a highly qualified scientist with an enviable reputation. Fuchi has many highly qualified scientists with good reputations. None of mem are irreplaceable."

"Where'd they send him?"

"Kuze Nihon. A subsidiary, Maas Intertech. That's located in New Jersey."

"How long you been on leave?"

"About… about three years."

Her Fuchi file agreed. "Why do you rate your own personal security team?"

Farris hesitated, "I… I was never told why. In the beginning, I assumed it was because I had always been loyal to the corporation. I'm still an asset, even if I am on leave. I haven't resigned."

"What makes you an asset?"

"I'm a psychologist."

Her Fuchi file verified that. Fuchi had sent Farris to several universities in the U.C.A.S., and she'd earned a degree in psychology. It had seemed odd to Rico that a corp would spend money like that on a corporate hooker, but apparently it wasn't as strange as he thought. Piper said that a lot of the megacorps used their more sophisticated joygirls and joyboys a lot like shrinks. Some even worked as spies for corporate security.

That whole train of thought made Rico wonder if he was sitting next to something as potentially nasty as a trapdoor spider. Farris looked and acted upset, and yet the things she was saying told him that the brain behind her dark brown eyes was alive and working just fine. Did she really believe that her husband had hired help to murder her? That much didn't make much sense.

"Psychologists at Fuchi get personal security teams?"

"I suppose I'm a special case. Certain people hinted that threats had been made against Fuchi, against security personnel in particular. I accepted that. Later, as I put my life back together, I began to wonder if perhaps the threat had something to do with Ansell. Perhaps he had been found out. Perhaps Kuze Nihon was using threats against me to make Ansell work for them."

"Why would he care?"

"You would have to know Ansell to understand that."

"Try me."

She seemed puzzled for a moment. Whether puzzled by the demand or puzzled that it should be made, Rico couldn't tell. She said, "Ansell doesn't respond well to coercion. He's out of his element here, so you've probably found him-easy to deal with. In the corporate environment, where he's at home, he's highly independent of mind and intensely aware of his own personal purview. He believes he should be allowed to pursue his work utterly without supervision or constraint. He views even the slightest intervention by management as a complete usurpation of his rights as a scientist. That same egocentric perspective dominates his personal life as well. A threat against his wife would be no less a threat against him as a man. It wouldn't matter if he cared whether his wife lived or died. What would matter is his power to control what happened."

"If anybody's gonna ice you, it'll be him."

"That would be his view. Highly simplified."

"How does he go from spiting you to wanting to kill you?"

"Presumably, Maas Intertech realized he was an infiltrator and began using him as such, limiting his access, feeding him false data to pass along to Fuchi. They would naturally put restrictions on his research and he would resent this. Probably, he would blame me, for if I had not encouraged his spite, he would not have gotten into a situation like that. It's all my fault, you see."

"So he'd come after you for revenge."

"Isn't it obvious?"

"You make him sound like a psycho."

"Then I haven't been clear." Farris paused, wiped at her eyes some more. "Perhaps I should explain that the desire for personal power is a defining factor in many men, just as the desire to form cooperative relationships is a factor in many women's development and personalities. Ansell is as rational a man as you might ever meet He functions very effectively in the corporate milieu. His personal power is extremely important to him, but he's not inflexible, not compulsive, in the clinical sense. At times, he deliberately exaggerates his need for control, as a ruse he uses merely to achieve a degree of control that he'll be comfortable with, knowing all the while that certain of his demands will be refused."

"Rational men don't dust their wives."

"If you really believe that, you've been misinformed."

"Yeah?"

"Rational people sometimes do irrational things. I'm explaining myself to you at length when I should probably be saying as little as possible."

"You been threatened."

"Yes, I know." She pressed a few curling strands of hair back from the side of her face. Her fingers gave a tremble-so slight Rico almost missed it. "Fear may be a rational response to danger, but it does not necessarily motivate rational behavior." She paused again and swallowed. "I want to cooperate fully because I'd rather you were my ally than someone I should fear. I try to avoid classic behaviors like that, and yet I find that I can't Right now, it's practically a compulsion."

"Right now" bothered Rico a good deal less than what might be somewhere ahead of him.

Marena Farris was going to be trouble.

Hell, she was already trouble.

"Was she lying?" Rico asked softly when they came out of the room onto the second floor hallway.

Bandit nodded and said, "Yes. She lied."

"About everything?"

"No."

Rico wanted to know more, specifically when Marena Farris had lied and when she had told the truth. Bandit wondered how to answer. Spells of detection, especially those involved with detecting truth and lies, were not like spells for casting mana bolts and fireballs, which either worked or didn't work as the caster intended. Spells for assensing truth most often yielded mixed results, perhaps because most people spoke in a mixture of truth and falsehood.

There was also the question of whether such spells assensed the objective truth or merely the truth as the target of the spell knew it. Had Marena Farris lied in certain respects or simply recited lies she had mistakenly accepted as truth?

"What did she lie about?" Rico asked.

Bandit replied, "Take your best guess." He was no multiphased lie detector, and he disliked trying to function as one.

Rico grimaced, seeming displeased.

"Your wife says you volunteered for the program."

Surikov frowned, looked unhappy, even angry. "Volunteered? I did nothing of the kind. I was ordered to enter the program! I had no choice whatsoever."

"They musta had some kind of hold on you."

"A hold? Of course they had a hold! If I'd refused them, I'd have ended up in the Antarctic somewhere, running computer-directed tests on plankton."

Surikov looked and sounded like he would have considered that a real tragedy, and Rico could believe it. He'd heard this kind of talk before. People like Surikov grew up on the inside of the corporate infrastructure. They didn't know any better. When the Master Suit gave orders, nobody disobeyed. You did what the bosses told you or you suffered the consequences. Even a slag with serious ego problems wouldn't want any black marks on his record because that would be bad for his career. And corporates didn't seem to see much difference between the words "life" and "career."

If one went down the toilet, the other followed.

"You said you were snatched outta Fuchi Multitronics."

"Is there a difference? I was given no options. Whether I was kidnapped or thrust out upon my path, I had no choice. I was badly used. The morality of it is identical."

There was a difference, though. Fuchi might try to retrieve Surikov in either case, but this was not just "either" case. In this particular case, which was the only "case" that really mattered, L. Kahn had claimed that the client wanted to retrieve the subject of a kidnapping, and if that was a lie-as Surikov and his wife both claimed- then Rico had every right to call off the deal with L. Kahn.

Suddenly, his course seemed surprisingly clear.

If he got out of this alive, he'd have to make some kinda statement, a statement about fixers who lied. Something L. Kahn would not like. Something people would hear about.

"You got two options," Rico said. "You go where your husband's going, or you wait till I'm ready to let you go." Marena Farris watched him from the bed in the second-floor bedroom with eyes that got really big and round and an expression that seemed as expectant as it was fearful. "Does that mean… you will let me go?"

"Not till I'm ready."

"But you will let me go, eventually?"

"When the time's right."

Farris slumped a little, lifting a hand to her face, closing her eyes. "It's so hard to believe you won't just kill me," she said in an undertone. "But that's what you're saying, isn't it? You're not going to kill me?"

Rico clenched his teeth. "I don't do murder."

Farris gasped. She did that a couple of times, head down, hand still over her face. Maybe she was crying. Soon, she lifted her head and wiped at her eyes. "Where is Ansell going?"

"It ain't settled yet."

"You're not taking him back to Fuchi, are you?"

Rico wondered if he should tell her. His first instinct was to say nothing. She didn't need to know. It did make him wonder, though. She'd just tried to kill the slag and now she wanted to know what was happening with his life?

Before he could decide what to say, Farris said, "You should bring him back to Fuchi."

"Why?"

"It's the best environment for a man like Ansell. It really is. I'm not saying that just because I happen to work there. Fuchi's research facilities are the best, and the research program is tailored for scientists of Ansell's ability. I don't really think he'll be happy anywhere else."

"That's his problem," Rico said. "His decision. Your decision I already laid out for you. Which is it?"

"If you aren't taking Ansell to Fuchi, I'd rather you just let me go. Someplace safe. Near a telecom."

Right.

"She ain't going with you."

"She isn't? Why not?"

"Because that's her decision."

Surikov frowned, then looked at Rico expectantly. "You've got the guns," he said, quietly. "You could force her."

Rico clenched his teeth. "I don't think so."

"I could make it worth your while."

"Forget you even thought it."

"What about Marena Farris?"

Rico looked up as Piper pulled another soyburger out of the wave and turned to the micro-sized kitchen table. You'd think that in an ork safehouse, the kitchen would be the biggest part of the house. Not so. Rico finished chewing on a mouthful of burger, and said. "We're gonna hang on to Farris a while."

"How come, boss?" Shank asked.

Rico watched the ork devour a burger in one bite. "Because we don't have to let her go yet."

"And if Fuchi comes, we'll have a hostage."

Rico didn't like that word, didn't like hearing Piper say it. Taking a hostage had never been part of his plan. He wanted to let Farris go, right now. And he would, except…

"Corporates use everybody." Piper said, delivering more food to the table. "It's only right that we should use them. They should know the terror and violence that ordinary people live with every day. They should know what it's like to live in constant fear of death. What it's like to be considered valueless."

"Nobody's gonna lay a hand on her."

"Fuchi won't know that That's the point, jefe."

The real point was subtler. Rico felt sure of what had to come next, but he had doubts, serious doubts, about Surikov and Farris, and especially about Farris.

No one spoke chiptruth-no way, no how. Everybody lied to at least some degree. The question was did he have as much of the truth as needed to go ahead? Rico had the feeling he was missing some essential part of the puzzle, some basic truth that would make everything crystal clear if only he had the sense to see it. Maybe it was just paranoia. He had no choice but to proceed with making a deal with Prometheus for Surikov, it was that or sit on his butt, and yet he couldn't help wondering if something Surikov or Farris might be holding back would cast everything, the whole situation, in a brand new light.

Let Farris go? Sure, he'd let her go, just as soon as he knew that nothing she knew could hurt him or the team or the deal for Surikov. That would cost her time and inconvenience and maybe a whole lot more, but she owed Surikov that, that much at the very least. In another situation, she'd be heading into court on charges of attempted murder. Here, she was getting off easy, no matter what happened.

"This run's turning into a freaking nightmare," Thorvin growled. "I don't trust either one of the freaking fraggers, Surikov or Farris."

"Shut up and eat," Shank remarked.

"Eff you, ya freaking trog."

"Short an' squat."

"Anybody wants out," Rico said, "say it now. We're gonna be up to our necks in guano before this is done."

"Ain't we already?" Shank said.

"No one wants out," Piper said. "We're with you, jefe. You know that."

"Yeah," Shank said, with a nod. "Sure."

Rico looked at Thorvin. The rigger hesitated, about to take a bite of soyburger, then looked at Rico out the corner of his eyes. "Miss a chance to kick some corporate butt?" he muttered. "You must be freaking dreaming, ya freakin'…"

Rico nodded.

Point made.