Fade to Black

23

The brownstone on Treadwell looked like an armed camp. Six cutters stood on and around the steps leading up to the front door. Three of them held submachine guns in the open. Three more stood inside the entranceway, two armed with assault rifles, the third with a light machine gun.

Things were getting real all over.

As always Mr. Victor waited at the center of the house, in the garden. He invited Rico to sit. The houseboy brought coffee.

"I have many more inquiries for the services of your team," Mr. Victor said. "I have intimated that you might be available in the near future, and at prices exceeding twice your usual rates. I have been answered only with enthusiasm. Let me know the moment you are prepared for more work. I will have a job for you that very day."

"Gracias," Rico said. "That's good to know."

"You do not seem pleased, my friend."

"I got problems."

"As do we all," Mr. Victor replied. "We live in troubled times. How may I help you?"

Rico said, "The job for L. Kahn is as good as a snatch. Surikov and his wife both tell me that he went to Maas Intertech as an infiltrator. A spy. That ain't how L. Kahn told it. He said Maas Intertech stole Surikov away. So either he was lying or his client was lying. Either way, the deal's off."

Mr. Victor's expression turned grave. "There will be repercussions," he said. "I regret that under the circumstances I am not able to intervene on your behalf."

"You didn't contract for the job," Rico replied. "It ain't your problem. I just want you to understand why I'm doing what I'm doing."

"Of course," Mr. Victor said. "I understand completely. You know which is the honorable path, my friend. The man of honor takes responsibility for his own acts. He faces the consequences for what he must do. However, there must be some way in which I can aid you. Be candid."

"You could talk to Prometheus Engineering."

"In what regard?"

"That's where Surikov wants to go. He likes their style, some guano like that. Surikov's supposed to be a real hot property. Some hotjack scientist. I figure we could get a finder's fee."

"Call it a delivery charge."

"Si. Whatever."

Mr. Victor seemed to consider briefly, then said, "Perhaps I can do you this service. Let me see what I can arrange. Excuse me for a few moments."

"Si, Gracias."

"De nada."

Rico got up and walked around the perimeter of the garden. He made a point of gazing mostly at the ground or up at the tree limbs and birds overhead, anywhere but toward the table at the center of the garden. Mr. Victor wanted to do his biz in private. Rico had no problem with that. None whatsoever.

Maybe twenty minutes passed before a servant came to lead Rico back to the table. Mr. Victor invited him to sit with a brief gesture. "As it happens," Mr. Victor said, "I have a contact in a position to negotiate on behalf of Prometheus. They are interested in obtaining your man. He is known to them by reputation. They are also interested in his wife."

"She don't wanna go to Prometheus."

"I understand. I merely held out the possibility of the wife being part of the deal. It is no matter. Your fee will approximate what you would have gotten if you had finished the job for L. Kahn."

"You know that? what I agreed to?"

"My friend, it is my biz to know such things."

Rico nodded. If he had hesitated a moment to think, he could have saved himself a question. Mr. Victor had contacts, lots of them, practically everywhere it sometimes seemed.

Had anyone else spoken like this, alluding to privileged info of this type, Rico might have pulled a gun, forcing a confrontation from which there would be no turning back. Mr. Victor he could trust Mr. Victor understood honor and knew when to speak and when to keep his mouth shut.

"This price is acceptable to you?" Mr. Victor asked.

Rico nodded. "Absolutely."

The portable telecom on the table bleeped. Mr. Victor picked up the handset, telling Rico, "Un momenta, par favor."

Rico began to get up, but Mr. Victor motioned for him to remain seated. The phone call lasted maybe half a minute, then Mr. Victor broke the connection and said, "All is arranged. Pickup will be this evening. Your man must pass a DNA and retina scan prior to transfer. Payment will be made in certified credsticks. I trust that is also acceptable?"

Mr. Victor was only asking as a courtesy. It wasn't necessary. Rico nodded. "Muchas gracias"

"De nada. My friend, once this job is done, you will come and see me and I will have a real job for you. Mucho dinero. Your are into the big time, now. Serious nuyen. Congratulations."

"There's one other thing I need."

"And what would that be?"

"A meet with L. Kahn. It has to be by telecom."

"That is easily arranged." Mr. Victor replied. "Allow me to ask what matter you will discuss."

Rico put it on the line.

By the time Ravage was finished, Willy Hogan had several cracked ribs, two broken arms, a broken leg and his face was practically unrecognizable, battered and drenched in blood. Hogan's wife and child shrieked from the bedroom doorway. The others crowding this tenement apartment in Sector 11, a mix of orks and norms, waited motionless, silent.

This was Hogan's payment for taking nuyen and providing no information for it.

L. Kahn watched without really watching. He had other matters on his mind. Hogan, a former Fed, a supposedly skilled technician, had been just one of the many ways in which L. Kahn had arranged to keep tabs on the team hired to extract Ansell Sunkov from Maas Intertech. The client had ordered multiple backup, and L. Kahn had delivered, yet every one of those backups had met failures of varying degrees.

The mission assigned to the backups was simple: track the runners who had Surikov, be prepared to move in ' if anything went wrong. How difficult could that be? L. Kahn had little patience for incompetents or self-styled experts like Willy Hogan. Even less when he was feeling, pressure from above. He had ambitions. He would not be scammed by the many jokers and con artists running around the Newark plex.

Ravage finished her task, leaving Hogan sprawled in his own blood, just barely alive. L. Kahn turned and found his way back to his black Toyota Elite limousine. Ravage climbed in after him. Once inside the car, she tapped the intercom and told the chauffeur, "Drive."

They were soon down the great ditch of the Garden State Parkway and into the tunnels of the Westfield transitway. L. Kahn looked at the boy lounging on the seat beside him. His name was Jared. He wore a bluish synthleather bodysuit He was cruel and cunning but malleable. And very attractive.

Unfortunately, the phone picked that moment to bleep. L. Kahn directed his eyes to the limo's center console. The telecom screen there opened a window to display the image from an incoming call. A second window displayed the code of the originating phone, and the location-Sector 9, proximate to the border with the Passaic metroplex and immediately adjacent to Sector 20. The so-called "Executive Action Brigade" had finally located the runners in Sector 20.

L. Kahn reached out and tapped the telecom key to accept the call. When he saw the dark-skinned Hispanic face that appeared on the screen, he forced himself to remain calm.

"Mr. Rico" this one liked to be called.

"You lied," Rico said.

L. Kahn felt a twinge of anger and puzzlement, but suppressed it Half-truths and lies were an integral part of the biz. Even a rank amateur should know that. What mattered most was the money, money and power. What inspired this razorguy Rico to cloak everything he said in pretentious moral language, L. Kahn did not understand. "You will make delivery tonight," L. Kahn said simply. Twenty-three hundred hours. Sector 17."

"Wrong."

"You refuse to make delivery?"

"Like I told you at the start, I don't do snatches. I'm no dog you can just order around, amigo. We know who your client is and the man don't wanna go. Your money's on its way back to you. The deal's off."

"Turn the subject over to me and I will forget you said that."

"Not today, amigo."

"Your lives will be forfeit."

"We was born that way."

The image on the screen froze and held as the disconnect icon appeared. L. Kahn maintained his composure for a few moments longer, then cursed. That face glaring out of the screen, it was too much to endure. He should have known that pretentious slot Rico would be trouble. A shadowrunner with ethics.

Who could believe it?

L. Kahn leaned back in his seat, growled with frustration, then smashed his boot heel through the telecom display screen.

The order came at 19:40 hours.

Ten minutes later, Skip Nolan stood in the dingy, litter-strewn alley behind the street of ghetto rowhouses in Sector 20, North Caldwell. Like the four men and two women of Team A, he wore the armored assault uniform of the Executive Action Brigade.

The Team B leader signaled ready. Team B would take the front and upstairs portions of the narrow rowhouse where the runners had holed up. Team A would take the rear and basement areas. Somewhere up above, in the night, Bobbie Jo had the whole block under surveillance. No one had entered or left the house for hours. Ground-based surveillance teams had seen lights going off and on and curtains moving and figures silhouetted against window shades. The house was hot, making infrared analysis difficult, but no one had any fears that the runners might have slipped away again. A vibration detector dropped onto the roof of the house had picked up people moving around inside, and a laser snooper had picked up conversation off one of the windows. And on top of all that, the runners' van was parked right behind the house.

The runners were there, no question about it, and now, according to orders, they were going to be taken down. Skip didn't know why the Brigade should suddenly go from a surveillance role to an interdiction role, but he wasn't planning to worry about it. That wasn't his job. Taking down runners in the Newark metroplex wasn't so different from scoring smugglers along the C.A.S.-Pueblo border or supporting a coup in Guatemala. The world was full of conflicting interests. When forces clashed, somebody lived and somebody died, and maybe once in a while the right people got what they deserved.

He keyed the mike of the headset worn under his helmet. "Team A, Team B… let's rock."

Two men swung a portable ram, smashing the rear door of the rowhouse right out of the frame. As the door went down, a third trooper flung a stun and smoke grenade that went off with a bang. Squad One rushed into the kitchen, weapons tracking from side to side, then called "clear" and moved on. Another grenade banged from the front of the house. Skip followed Squad One through the swirling smoke as far as the stairs to the basement and there pointed Squad Two up the hall toward the front of the house.

Another grenade detonated upstairs. Squad One called out that the basement was clear. Skip started toward the front of the house, but already he felt the uncertainty gnawing at the pit of his stomach. One room after another came up clear. Still no weapons fire, no report of confrontations, no sign of the runners. In another moment or two, the Team B leader would call the second floor clear and then Skip would know that the worst had happened yet again. The place was empty. The only bodies present belonged to the E.A.B.

How the hell had those fraggers gotten away?

"Bitches stay in the car."

None of the women complained, and that was well. The call regarding the change in the runners' status had come at an untimely moment in Maurice's studies. The last thing he wanted to do was waste time traipsing around die metroplex after a group of recalcitrant runners, but unfortunately he had no choice.

Gathering his coat around him and hefting his walking stick, Maurice stepped from his Mercedes limo. The night was cool and quiet, but rife with a tension that hinted at things to come. Claude Jaeger stepped up beside him. Maurice looked at the faint shimmering in the air before him and shifted to his astral senses.

Vera Causa stood facing him. She smiled and turned to indicate the house directly behind her, saying mind-to-mind, This dwelling gives a fine view, master.

Maurice looked at Jaeger. "Clear this house."

"Is that an order?" Jaeger replied.

"Consider it a recommendation."

Jaeger nodded and walked over to the rowhouse's front door. The woman who answered the door fell without a sound, then Jaeger proceeded to neutralize the rest of the occupants. Maurice moved through the house to the kitchen. Through the transparex-panes of the rear door, he could see the dark, litter-strewn alley behind the house and the mundane forces now gathering.

Vera Causa indicated the rowhouse directly opposite. That was the runners' safehouse. The runners' van waited there. Finding the house and the van had not been difficult. A spirit such as Vera Causa moved with the speed of the astral. She could pursue a supersonic jet halfway around the globe. The forces of the Executive Action Brigade had literally led his ally here.

Taking refuge in the wastes of Sector 13 had provided the runners with more safety than they knew. Vera Causa had refused to enter the area, despite Maurice's command to follow them from their meeting with L. Kahn at Newark International. Maurice himself found that blighted region discomfiting to approach on any but a purely mundane level. It had therefore been necessary to forego any direct action. Continuing to monitor the Brigade had led them here to Sector 20 and the district of North Caldwell.

Maurice watched with interest as the dark armored figures wearing the flash of the Brigade gathered at the rear of the house and prepared to force entry.

The runners had a shaman, called "Bandit." Despite Maurice's best efforts, he had been unable to learn much about this shaman. Many people in the plex seemed to know his name, but few admitted to anything beyond a basic physical description and facile rumors. An astral glance at Bandit's aura and the foci he carried, such as Maurice had caught at the airport, might lead one to conclude that Bandit had little true ability in the Art, and even less in terms of true power.

That was obviously an inaccurate perception, Maurice now saw. The rowhouse occupied by the runners was protected by a powerful ward, a lattice of blue-green energy that throbbed in brilliant counterpoint to the rhythms of the natural energies pulsing and flowing through the night in this part of the plex. Any magician could cast a ward, but only one of considerable ability could cast a ward as strong as the one now burning before him.

This indicated to Maurice that the shaman must be masking his aura, and to do that he must be a powerful magician, an initiate, in fact.

This changed things considerably. It made Bandit a potentially dangerous opponent, and it urged Maurice to caution. The ward could certainly be defeated, but that would likely cost Maurice energy, and he had not come prepared to begin any sort of conflict at anything less than his full measure of vitality. The appearance of this unexpectedly powerful ward warned him to wait and watch.

The Brigade's troopers stormed the house, smashing down the rowhouse's rear door and entering like soldiers. The ward of course had no effect on their entrance, providing only a barrier against spells and astral surveillance. No form of sorcerous traps appeared to be keyed to it.

They seem confused, master, Vera Causa remarked.

They?

The soldiers.

An insightful observation, Maurice thought, for a spirit so recently conjured. Vera Causa's rapid progress along the learning curve gave him cause to wonder yet again. The raid of the safehouse soon ended. The runners were not found. Maurice projected onto the astral and moved into the alley to watch and listen to troopers there. They appeared disturbed.

The runners, it seemed, had not been observed since they had entered their safehouse. They had gone inside and stayed there. They had not departed via their van or any other vehicle. They had not climbed out through the roof and made their way across the rooftops to another location. How, then, had they escaped? Maurice circled the safehouse, stepping through the walls of the adjoining rowhouses and out to the street in front of the safehouse, then around and back to the alley. The building walls adjoining the safehouse were intact, so the runners had not simply broken into an adjoining structure and slipped away. Only one direction remained in which they could have gone, and that was down.

Maurice descended into the earth, and here he found the answer to the Brigade troopers' questions.

The runners included an ork, and that implied some connection to the ork underground-and that could mean many things. The Newark sprawl had a population of orks the equal of any city in the urban Northeast, perhaps the whole of North America, and they were always busy. Maurice had information indicating that many had begun going underground shortly after the Awakening, the better to escape the oppression of fanatical humans. Their subterranean constructions had since become quite extensive. Some sections of the city were honeycombed with tunnels and passages that appeared on no official schematics. And the orks had dug deep in many places. Deeper than any rational human would care to descend.

The deeper one went, the greater the sense of claustrophobia the tunnels bred. It posed a threat to sanity that Maurice did not care to challenge. And tonight there was no need.

A tunnel passed directly beneath the safehouse, a mere few meters below ground level. It appeared to be an old tunnel, braced by wooden beams. In places the walls were crumbling into mounds of sawdust and earth. The runners had doubtless used this tunnel to escape the perimeter set up by the Brigade.

Maurice considered. He doubted that the runners would remain in these tunnels long. Their leader would not allow it.' To do so would be to invite forces like the Executive Action Brigade down into the tunnels, and that would put others, innocents, such as orks, at risk. The runners would therefore surface as swiftly as possible and seek other accommodations, a new safehouse, before continuing on their course.

The Executive Action Brigade was obviously at a loss. Their technological methods had failed. It would, therefore, be Maurice's task to find the runners' new safehouse. Fortunately, he had the means to do so.

He returned to his waiting limo.

The heavy metal grille of the storm drain was set into the ferrocrete of the gutter, but it also had an opening set into the curb like a shallow arch.

That arch gave a good view of the fronts of the rowhouses opposite, but only to someone jacked into a Mitsuhama control deck and using the sensors of a modified Sikorsky-Bell microskimmer for eyes. That someone was Thorvin-who else? The moment he saw the pair of dark blue vans turning the corner down by Hamilton, he fired a signal to Filly.

"Showtime!"

Her signal to get the hell out.

The vans came rushing up the block and squealed to a sudden halt in front of the safehouse. To say Thorvin had been expecting this would be a freaking understatement.

He'd been expecting exactly this kind of a commando-style raid ever since he'd discovered the microelectronic bug some piece of scag had glued to the underside of the van. A nasty little piece of silicon that bug was. The sneaky kind. A real snitch. Virtually undetectable until it was activated, at which point it fired a microburst location signal.

The minute that snitch came on-line, the van's detection system went wild, and the rest was history.

Getting out had been a problem. They couldn't just leave. They'd needed someplace to go to and not just anywhere would do. They had a flabby scientist and a weak-limbed corporate biff to chaperone around. And the moment Rico told L. Kahn to eat squat, the whole world would come down on top of them. Including their backup on the job, or whoever had been tailing them. Move in to grab Surikov and Farris and ace the team. That's why corps hired backups. And that's why Rico had decided on the trick. Keep everyone concentrating on the house in Sector 20's North Caldwell for as long as possible, and meanwhile get Surikov and Farris to safer precincts, which they'd done last night.

The van behind the house was an integral part of the trick. It was a decoy, of course, a virtual twin of Thorvin's super-charged vehicle, though only from the outside. Thorvin had thought Rico must be frizzed when he ordered up a twin of the Rover, but what the frag? That's what bosses were supposed to do. Plan ahead. Prepare for the unexpected. Even if it meant looking brain-numb. This particular part of the plan hadn't cost much. A day of hunting around through the sprawl's scrapyards, some welding and paint, and he had put together a look-alike, right down to the registration tags. The decoy's engine barely had enough power to drag the body more than a block at a time, but then motivating power didn't matter.

The rest of the trick was easy. Leave someone in the safehouse to move around, turn lights off and on, talk to themselves. Act like a crowd of people. Shank and Filly volunteered. They'd be moving now to the trapdoor in the basement, which led into the tunnel under the house. If Shank and Filly had any sense, they'd be moving extra-fast, because the commandos out front were already out of their vans and applying a portable ram to the safehouse's front door.

Thorvin watched the commandos go through the safehouse door. A close-up view got him a look at the flash on their uniforms. No black annis patches here. Nothing even hinting of Daisaka Security. The logo of the freaking Executive Action Brigade appeared on every left shoulder, every one that Thorvin could see. That was interesting. Thorvin had heard of the E.A.B. They'd recently been involved in clearing gangers outta certain parts of Sector 17 where certain corps had condoplexes. The E.A.B. made decent commandos, but they weren't exactly specialists at being subtle.

Why would anyone hire the effing E.A.B. for backup on a job like this? Thorvin wondered while descending to the concrete conduit that shuttled rainwater down the length of the block. It joined up with the sewer line running along Hamilton Drive. Before long, Shank and Filly came up the shaft from the tunnel below.

Thorvin keyed his mike. "How'd it go?"

"Smooth as effing ice," Shank replied.

"So why would anyone hire the freaking E.A.B. to tail us on a job like this?"

"Why the hell not?" Filly replied. "They come cheap."