Forests of the Night

CHAPTER 19

Nohar didn't know much about human standards for such things, but he was pretty sure that this frank agent was the "babe" the Fed sent to Bobby. He went with the agent quietly. He had no desire to test her capabilities.

Despite a probable resisting arrest charge, he could claim he'd pulled the circuit because he'd thought they were Zipheads out to kill him. Wouldn't convince the cops, but it was enough to keep the charges down to reckless endangerment, discharging a firearm, and whatever Autocab wanted to lay on him.

She called in on her throat-mike and wasted no time getting him to the surface. Despite the long walk alone with the agent, Nohar smelled nothing from her that made him think she was worried about him escaping. He noticed she put on a pair of chrome sunglasses as soon as they left the underground. They didn't seem to affect her vision at all, even though it was close to midnight. They came out by the shore of the Cuyahoga River, in the Flats close to Zero's. There was still a ghostly smell of carnage to the place.

The pink law was there, in force. A few dozen uniforms had scrambled down to the shore and taken up positions covering the exit from the tunnel. They seemed almost disappointed when Nohar didn't come out, gun blazing.

She led him up the rise next to the river, toward the congregation of parked black-and-whites. The pink cops gave her a wide birth and Nohar detected a slight

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odor of fear from them. He wondered if the uniforms knew the agent wasn't quite human.

She ignored the uniforms and headed right for the one puke-green Havier. Harsk was sitting on the hood, drinking a cup of coffee that smelled synthetic. She

smiled, first time her face showed something other than a hard, expressionless mask. It stopped short of being a sneer.

"Detective Harsk, when I say I have the target in custody—the target's in custody. I was assigned to this for a reason."

Harsk grunted and got to his feet. "Isham, don't dick me around. I don't tell the Fed how to blow its nose. Don't tell me how to wipe my ass."

So her name was Isham. Nohar had thought he detected a slight Israeli accent. "These men would be of better use elsewhere."

Harsk was steaming. Isham's smile was widening. Nohar wouldn't be surprised if she could smell Harsk's irritation herself. Harsk grabbed Nohar by his good arm and addressed Isham in a tone of forced civility. "I appreciate you helping us with your expertise." That was a blatant lie, Nohar could tell.

"But I am still going to do things by the numbers. Especially with moreys. Especially after yesterday."

For a brief moment they were both hanging on to his arm. Harsk had a firm grip. He was strong for a pink. But Isham's hand felt like a steel band. When her hand left—it didn't release his arm so much as vanish—there was an ache where it had been. He suspected she had left a deep bruise there.

Harsk squeezed him into the back of the unmarked Havier, algae and all, and slammed the door shut. Soon Nohar was headed to police headquarters.

The two DBA pinks had fallen into a good-cop, bad-cop routine and didn't seem to realize they were stuck in the middle of a cliche. The bad cop was the fat one. His name was Mclntyre. Good cop was a cadaverous FORESTS OF THE NIGHT 201

black man named Conrad. From every indication, both their first names were "Agent."

Nohar had already gone through the numbers with Harsk, who was, if not civil, at least businesslike and professional about things. These two acted like they were going for first prize at the annual asshole convention.

Mclntyre was into rant number five. "We got you by the short-hairs, you morey fuck. There's over thirty grand in cash deposits to your account. You expect us to believe it ain't morey drug money? You suddenly get that kind of cash, in the middle of the burg with the biggest flush manufacturing center we've found to date—and you show up in a firefight with the biggest distributors. Tell us what's going down, tiger, because we're going to trace those bills no matter how well you laundered them."

So far, Nohar had gotten more information from the pinks than they'd gotten from him. Apparently, somewhere in Cleveland was a major flush industry. Somewhere, the DEA didn't know where, was the lab, or labs, that manufactured the flush for the drug trade throughout the center of the country. The Zips were the major dealers of flush on the street level.

Conrad was doing his variation on being reasonable. "We don't want you. We want the labs. Tell us where they are, or give us some names we can work with. We can intervene with the local judicial system, make it easy for you."

He had already protested his ignorance. So he ignored them and studied the acoustic tiles, silently counting the holes that formed abstract patterns in the white rust-stained fiberglass. He wanted to go home, forget about Zips, Binder, MLI. Worse, he was beginning to worry about Stepnie. Someone torched Thomson. Of the people with access to the finance records, that only left Stephie and Harrison.

It was going to be a long night. At least he knew

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Mclntyre was blowing smoke out his ass about the cash. If the money was dirty, they'd know by now, and he wouldn't be in an interrogation room at police headquarters. He'd be in a cell in the federal building. As it was, all they had was the fact any morey with that much cash had to be guilty of something. When Nohar didn't respond, rant number six was on the horizon. Mclntyre never got to deliver on the steaming invective he must have been considering. Harsk

opened the off-white metal door and let in Is-ham, who was still wearing her mirrorshades. Harsk smelted angry. He pointed at the agents and hooked his thumb out the door. "Mclntyre, Conrad, get out here. I have to talk to you." Mclntyre wasn't impressed. "We aren't done here."

"Out, now!" Harsk was pissed. The DEA pinks obviously didn't expect this from someone they saw as a local functionary. They collected their recording equipment and left.

That left him alone in the room with I sham. She skidded a key ring at him across the formica table. It came to a stop right in front of him. She indicated his handcuffs.

"Take those off."

She didn't wait for him. She turned around to face the large mirror on the wall opposite Nohar. She took off her sunglasses, knocked on it twice, and pointed back toward the door. "I'm waiting."

The comment wasn't addressed to him.

Nohar didn't want to be alone in a room with this woman.

He thought he heard a door open out in the hall. She had just dismissed the cops stationed behind the oneway mirror. By the way her head nodded and moved, he could tell she was watching the cops leave.

"Now we can talk in private." She turned around to face him and smiled. He finally saw her eyes in the light. They looked like a pink's eyes at first, with round FORESTS OF THE NIGHT

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iris and visible whites. But there were few, if any, pinks with yellow irises, and none with slitted pupils.

"Aren't you going to remove those?"

He had forgotten about the cuffs. He picked up the keys and fumbled them off. "What's a frank doing working for the FBI?"

She put her sunglasses back on. Now there was no visual cue to her nature. But she was still not a pink. For one thing, she didn't have a scent. For another, her breathing was silent. This woman could be behind him and he would never know she was there.

She paused a moment before she spoke. "The executive isn't as picky about humanity as some people would like. If it wasn't for the domestic ban on macro gene engineering, they'd build their own agents.''

Nohar slid the cuffs and the keys back across the table. He tried not to let his nervousness show, but she could probably smell it as well as he could. "So they pick up whatever trickles over the border? *'

"Let's get down to business. I want information."

Nohar sighed. "I told the DEA I knew jack—"

That evil smile widened. If she had been a morey, the display of teeth would make him fear for his life. "Those schmucks never dealt with moreys before. They're convinced all moreaus know each other and are involved in the drug trade."

She reached into a pocket and tossed a grainy green-tinted picture on the table. It showed a shaggy gray canine in desert camouflage. It had been taken with a light enhancer.

Even with the rotten resolution, there was no question it was Hassan.

"I am searching for a canine calling himself Hassan Sabah. Contract assassin, specializes in political killings. Started in the Afghan occupation of North India. Works for every extremist cause you can name. Japanese nationalists, Irish republicans, South African

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white supremacists, Shining Path social humanists in Peru—"

Every group she mentioned was punctuated by a picture dropped on the table: the car bomb that took out the Chinese political director in Yokohama; the hotel fire that killed three UK cabinet ministers in Belfast; the half-dozen Zulu party leaders hacked apart by machetes in Pretoria; the barracks of

lepus-derived infantry taken out by a remote truck filled with explosives in Cajamarca . . .

"Hassan smuggled himself into the country last year with the Honduran boatlift. The Fed didn't know he was in the country until a native of Belfast living in Cleveland recognized this canine." Isham tapped Hassan's picture with one of her slightly-pointed nails. "He's in the country, and he's involved with the Zip-perheads."

"Why aren't you talking to your tip?" Nohar had an idea why. A morey from Belfast meant a fox.

Isham flipped out another picture, confirming No-har's suspicion. The picture snowed a morey vulpine, very dead. The fox had a small-caliber gunshot wound, close range, right eye.

"She was our witness. Whelp fox from North Ireland. Had the bad luck to be in a street gang that called itself Vixen— I see you know what happened to Vixen. Never got the chance to contact her."

She leaned back and glanced, over her sunglasses, at the one-way mirror. Then, satisfied, she went on. "The Fed only has suspicions of what Hassan is doing. But it scares Washington. Joseph Binder's Senate campaign seems to be his latest target. The Fed thinks a radical morey organization is operating out of Cleveland. The terror attacks by the Zipperhead gang give credibility to the suspicion."

"You want information on Hassan."

"We put you and Hassan in the same area on at least three separate occasions. When Hassan killed a local pimp named Tisaki Nugoya. During the attempted as-FORESTS OF THE NIGHT

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sassination of Stephanie Weir, former assistant to the late Daryl Johnson. And the arson attack that killed Desmond Thomson,"

"Hassan was there?"

"One of the security guards lived long enough to give us a tentative ID."

Maybe he could bargain. "What do I get for talking to you?''

Isham took oif her glasses and looked at Nohar as if she was examining a corpse to determine the cause of death. "You'll get my good will."

The smile was gone. "Nohar, you are going to walk. Make me happy."

Nohar scratched his claws across the linoleum and decided he didn't want Isham as an enemy. "I'll tell you, but it's mostly second-hand . . ." He gave her the story, as he saw it, leaving out the MLI angle in deference to client confidentiality. Saturday the 19th, Young had let Hassan into Johnson's house. Johnson gets whacked by Hassan's Levitt. Thursday the 24th, while Stigmata is being wiped up by the Zipheads, Hassan takes position up on Musician's Towers during a thunderstorm and blows Johnson's picture window. Thursday the 31st, Young empties the Binder finance records, torches them, and himself, on the 1st. Monday the 4th, the Zips attack the coffeehouse. Hassan and Terin are together in the four-wheeler.

She completed the list. "Today, Desmond Thomson is a victim of a firebomb in his condo and Edwin Har-rison's BMW explodes on the Shoreway—" "Harrison'sdead?"

"Haven't you followed the news?" Nohar remembered the cabbie mentioning something about a bomb on the Shoreway. "Him and twelve other commuters during the morning rush hour. So far, because of you, Weir is the only one to survive an attempt by Hassan. Do you know where she is?"

"No." He didn't want to lie. He didn't know how for he could push Isham, but he didn't want to get

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Manny involved with this. "She gave me a lift to my old neighborhood. I don't know where she and the rabbit went after that."

Isham seemed to know it was a lie. * 'I want to know if you find out where she's hiding out. The Fed would like to put her under protection—"

The conversation stopped because a muffled yell was coming from the hall. It

was Mclntyre. "What?"

The room was supposed to be soundproof, but No-har could hear the conversation if he concentrated. From the pause in Isham's speech, she was eavesdropping as well.

"I said," Harsk's voice, "the tiger walks. Your own fault. Screwed your own collar, if there was a collar to begin with. Acted worse than a couple of rookies."

"You can't talk like—"

"Maybe if I put it like this. Fuck you, fuck your little proprietary DBA investigation, and fuck inter-agency cooperation if you're going to fuck up like this around here!"

"Detective Harsk—" That was Conrad.

"Shut the fuck up! DA sent the word. No prosecution on the coffeehouse, self-defense. None on the gun. Check your files, he's had a license since 2043. As far as recklessness is concerned, you're the glorified dimwits that stormed,into Autocab dispatch and not only disabled the override comm, but the emergency shut-off as well. DA's position is, since you didn't identify yourself, and the emergency shutoff was disabled, Ra-jasthan was justified." "You don't understand," Conrad again, "this is our first lead—"

"The charges from Autocab—"

Hask almost sounded pleased. "K>« don't understand. You have shit. Autocab is going to press charges—again,?? you two. It might come as a surprise, but not everybody likes to have the DBA walk in and take over. Not to mention the fact the Transportation Safety Board is upset with you. Cutting the override FORESTS OF THE NIGHT

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on a remote vehicle is a felony. Because you two goobers couldn't identify yourself to the suspect, the cab goes flying blind into traffic. You're lucky you don't face kidnapping charges. You're not too far from assault with intent."

"You don't really believe he thought it was the Zips—"

"You unbelievable shits! Just because it's a morey, doesn't mean you can forget all that bothersome civil rights crap. The collar still has to fly in court. You blew it. Now get the hell out of my station and back to your stakeout in Moreytown—or better, back to the rock you crawled out from."

"Your superiors are going to hear about this."

"What a coincidence, your superiors already have. A district chief named Robinson would really like a word with you two.''

That ended the conversation. Nohar turned back to Isham. He was confused. "IF DBA started this, why were you the arresting officer?''

"Only one with experience tracking moreaus. Trained by Israeli intelligence." The evil smile was back.

Harsk burst into the room. "Agent Isham, where the hell you get off dismissing the observing officers? It's against operating procedure for an officer to be left alone with a suspect—"

"I'm not one of your officers, and Rajasthan is no longer a suspect."

"Christ, woman, are you pulling this shit just to piss me off? Nohar, you're walking. The DBA guys are fucked worse than a ten-dollar whore, and the DA doesn't want to press charges."

Nohar stood up. "Thanks."

"Don't thank me yet. Because of you, and Binder, I got internal affairs clamping down on my ass—even if it was those Shaker cronies of Binder's that dicked around the Johnson murder. This Ziphead crap has got City Hall in a panic, the vids are having a field day—

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And I got suspicions it's all because you stuck your nose where it don't belong. If it was my choice, I'd lock you up and never let you go.

' 'As it is.'' He turned to Isham. ' 'If the special agent would kindly leave me and the tiger alone. Nohar, we have things to discuss, in private."

Harsk led him out of the interrogation room.