Fade To Black Part 24

Shank put the Renault-Fiat Eurovan in gear and drove ahead. The rest of the team was in Thorvin's van, parked a safe distance away. They would stay out of sight, parked among other vehicles, until certain preliminaries had been satisfied.

Rico keyed his headset, and said, "We're moving."

Thorvin acknowledged.

Shank steered the Eurovan into field 17D and brought them to a halt about two s.p.a.ces away from the waiting Elite. A few moments pa.s.sed, then the rear door of the limo opened and a suit got out. He didn't look like nothing special, average height and build, medium age, dark gray suit and gloves to go with it.

Standard corporate style. The style made the slag a real Johnson, anonymous, the perfect front man for a corp. You might see him a thousand times a day on the street, but you'd never remember him because nothing about him was at all memorable.

A second suit appeared, standing up on the far side of the limo. This was no Johnson. Rather, it was the suit's security man, a prime cutter.

Rico got out and met the suit midway between the van and the limo, pausing about two steps away, near enough that they'd both be in trouble if anybody got stupid. They hooked each other over. The suit motioned very briefly with one hand, glancing toward Rico's hip. He spoke with a voice as bland as his looks. "Mall security might spot that shooter of yours."

"We ain't gonna be here that long."

The suit nodded vaguely. "You have the merchandise, I presume?"

"You got the juice?"

The suit slowly drew open one side of his suit jacket, revealing the heavy automatic bolstered under hisshoulder as well as the plastipak of certified credsticks in his inside breast pocket. "The price as agreed in certified sticks."

"I wanna check 'em."

"First I see what I'm buying."

"You see, but you don't touch until I check the sticks."

The suit nodded, letting his jacket swing closed, and said simply, "Agreed."

Minor points, but even minors points counted here. In this game, n.o.body trusted n.o.body and even a little slip could push the panic b.u.t.ton and bring out the shooters. Rico didn't mind letting the slag see Surikov.

He could "see" him from five or ten meters away. He'd be unlikely to try anything, if he had anything in mind, till the range narrowed a bit. Step by step, slow and careful-that was the game plan, the accepted procedure.

Rico keyed his headset. "Ready."

Thorvin acknowledged.

Momentarily, the van came rolling up. Thorvin stopped it, according to plan, on the far side of the Renault-Fiat Eurovan from where Rico stood with the suit. When Filly and Dok emerged with Surikov, they stepped out in front of the Eurovan just far enough to show Surikov's face.

"You're very careful," the suit remarked.

"It pays," Rico replied.

"Once you've checked the credsticks, I want a DNA and retina scan."

"My man checks your equipment."

"That's fine."

Checking the suit's credsticks didn't take long. Rico had a portable verifier on his belt, not a stock model. Piper and Thorvin had put the unit together. Piper said the unit's integral chipware would detect phony bank encoding to a very high degree of certainty. That was good enough for Rico. He slotted the sticks one by one into the unit, waited for a pair of soft beeps, then pa.s.sed them back to the suit. The sticks pa.s.sed inspection.

Another slag emerged from the Toyota Elite. The suit introduced him as a technical aide. The aide showed Rico the pack of scanners he intended to use on Surikov. Rico motioned Dok over. Dok checked the scanners with gear of his own.

"Standard equipment," he concluded.

"Your man goes with my man," Rico said to the suit, "checks the merchandise, reports to you, then we make the swap."

"Agreed."

The final check took about a minute. The aide returned and gave the suit a nod. "Bring me the merchandise and then you get the sticks," the suit said.

"Right."

Here was the moment that counted. Rico took a quick look around. The suit's cutter hadn't changed position. The parking field around them looked clear. Thorvin wasn't giving any alerts based on readings from his own equipment or anything Bandit had to say. The a.s.sumption, then, was that everything looked chill. Rico motioned for Dok and Filly to bring Surikov forward. Their steps, scuffing against the pavement, seemed really loud. They moved slowly, at a measured pace. Seconds stretched out long.

"That's close enough," the suit said, lifting a hand toward Surikov, palm out. Then the slag's forearm jerked and something like a shotgun roared, and Rico realized the sleazebag had a cybergun implanted in his arm.

That explained the gloves. The glove on the right hand covered the firing port. The glove vanished with the roar of the cybergun and a flaring red tongue of fire.

As the roar began to fade, Rico had the Predator from his hip holster gripped in his hand and coming up, coming on-line, and putting a red targeting indicator on the suit's face.

In the background, on the far side of the limo, the suit's cutter was moving.

This time, Rico realized, the game was for keeps.

Bandit discerned nothing of any interest on or around the parking field or for a kilometer or more in any direction. The spells he used uncovered no imminent threats, no enemies. The only thing that really seemed to merit his attention was the suit's limousine.

In astral s.p.a.ce, the distance between Thorvin's van and the limo was negligible. Bandit crossed it in practically no time at all. Getting further than that was another matter. The limo at first seemed like an ordinary car, but that wasn't quite true. Something about it was wrong, out of character for a car. Severalminutes of probing brought Bandit an answer. The limo was protected by a powerful ward. He hadn't realized this before because the ward was masked, hidden, deliberately concealed. This was very unusual.

Concealing a ward was difficult. It suggested to him that someone or something of great value must be inside the limo. Unraveling the ward would be a worthy challenge.

Before he could finish, however, he a.s.sensed the violence erupting around him on the physical plane, and gained a sudden insight as to the reason for the limo's astral ward.

He returned to his physical body, looked toward Thorvin, and said, "I think there's a mage in that car."

"What CAR?" Thorvin shouted over the roar of gunfire.

"The limousine."

The blast of the cybergun caught Dok completely off-guard. He saw the suit lift a hand palm-out, then that hand disappeared behind a flaring of fiery red. The blast a.s.saulted his ears. He caught himself in mid-stride, saw Rico's gun coming up and felt Surikov falling, pulling him off-balance.

Dok tightened his hold on Surikov's arm, but it was pointless. The man dropped like meat, collapsing onto his back. Dok staggered, men caught his balance, looking down in time to see the results of the suit's single shot unfolding. The blast from the cybergun had shredded Surikov's neck. He was dead or close to it.

Dok began bending toward the man and opened his mouth to shout,. but too late. It happened too fast.

Surikov's eyes quivered like gelatin, then began boiling. A dark, viscous fluid began trickling from his ears.

Steam swirled. The man's face began collapsing in on itself. Dok knew exactly what was happening. He'd seen effects like this before. Not every cortex bomb was designed for explosive force. Some were rigged with white phosphorous or burn-gel. They might be keyed to life signs, or to a remote, and they left nothing behind but a puddle of simmering goop.

Filly shouted into his face.

Autofire erupted.

The Predator hammered the night like a cannon. The suit staggered backward, head snapping back, blood splas.h.i.+ng his chest, Rico turned and hurled himself into a dive.

Heavy weapons thundered. Rico recognized the rapid-fire stammering of the minigun atop Thorvin's van and the higher-pitched bursts of Shank's M22A2 a.s.sault rifle. There was also a quick, clattering burst that might have been from an SMG. Rico thought of the suit's cutter. Probably him.

He tucked and rolled and came up running. All he had to do now was make it to Thorvin's van without getting his cojones shot off. Slot in and run.

One minute everything was calm and peaceable-like. In the next, Surikov was down and Rico was blasting away with that heavy auto of his, and targeting indicators were popping up all over the place and heavy autofire was coming in from every direction.

So much for any advance warning!

Never trust a freaking shaman for anything!

Thorvin revved bis supercharger and spun the weapons pods up top. Hostiles were coming up right out of the ground, like from manhole covers and storm drains. He set his minigun to stammering and fired a broad pattern of minigrenades, smoke and concussion both. What really worried him was the pair of bogies just now appearing on his radar overlay.

"PAIR OF BIRDS INCOMING!" he roared.

Make my freaking night.

Bandit stepped out through the open side door of the van and took a quick look around.

Just beyond the Eurovan that Rico and Shank had brought along was the suit's s.h.i.+ny black limousine.

Bandit couldn't see the suit anymore. The slag had fallen, and Bandit had an idea he might be dead.

Racc.o.o.n did not care much for killing or for any kind of fighting, but this was probably an exceptional situation. Things did not look good.

A few steps in front of him, between him and the Eurovan, Shank was shooting away on full auto.

Then the mana s.h.i.+fted. It had nothing to do with Shank. Bandit sensed what was coming before he had any real right to know. He lowered his head a little and leaned toward his left to peer around the front end of the Eurovan. From there, he saw something move on the far side of the suit's limo. The mage was emerging, standing up, using the limousine for cover. A dark hood cast his features in shadow, but not his aura. Bandit's eyes widened as he saw the pulsating power hi the mage's astral form. They widened still further as he a.s.sensed the power of the spell the mage was drawing together.This was very bad.

Swirling energy coalesced and condensed, growing more intense, more menacing. The world seemed to slip toward blackness as the mana mounted rapidly toward a climax. Bandit wondered what would happen when that climax finally came, but decided against waiting to find out. He had a very, very strong feeling that he would not like the effects of the mage's spell one bit.

Rather than wait, he murmured two words and pointed. From his finger shot a slender stream of energy that blended with the forces gathering around the mage. Momentarily, the mage hesitated and wiped at his eyes. Then he coughed, and then he was growling and clasping his hands to his face as he hacked and coughed and rasped for breath. The stench of the vapors that now swirled around him would spread quickly. The nauseating odors took effect at once.

The mage abruptly bent over and vomited.

Bandit nodded. Another lesson learned. Powerful, complex spells had their uses. Racc.o.o.n preferred to keep things simple wherever possible. Here, simple made complex irrelevant. Or almost irrelevant. For another moment, the energies the mage had conjured continued to gather, uncontrolled, building toward a new climax, a chaotic release of immense power.

This could be bad.

Really bad.

A crackling detonation rushed across the night sky, growing in strength and volume until suddenly it erupted and a searing bolt of pure white energy struck down out of the night. Dok felt more than saw it.

The hairs running up his spine to his neck stood on end. A tremendous blast shook the ground. A roaring explosion followed. A blinding white light flared. For an instant, it was like watching a nuke explosion on trid. Out the corners of his eyes, Dok glimpsed what he thought was the suit's Toyota limo leaping off the ground, disintegrating into whirling, razor-edged bits of shrapnel.

Somewhere between that first immense blast and the roaring explosion that followed, Dok felt Filly b.u.mp into his side, and suddenly she was falling right in front of his feet.

Caught in mid-stride, halfway around the front end of the Eurovan, Dok pitched forward and plunged to the pavement. He heard Shank bawling, "COVERRRRR!" He heard that roaring explosion and caught a glimpse of the disintegrating limo. He thought for sure that Filly must've stumbled. Or maybe she'd heard that first ground-shaking blast and just instinctively went p.r.o.ne.

Shrapnel or bullets or maybe both slammed against Dok's ballistic-insulated chest and shoulder and arm as he scrambled around on bis hands and knees to get back to Filly. She was bleeding. There was blood in the hair at the back of her head, and she wasn't moving. Suddenly the worst seemed like a possibility, but Dok knew, G.o.d now he knew, that it would be just like Filly to take a hit, even a bad one, without ever making a sound. She was one tough woman.

He seized her from under the shoulders, began dragging her toward the van. No time-no time for first aid now! He had to get her into the van-into the van and then do whatever he had to do! Patch her up good. Keep her alive till they got to a clinic somewhere, if it was really that bad!

It was hard to breathe, so hard ...

Suddenly, Rico was there, grabbing Filly around the hips and helping to heft her in through the van's side door.

No time to lose.

None at all.

28.

They were most of the night shaking their pursuit and checking and rechecking that they were clear.

The few things Bandit said about the mage who had been at the meet made the slag sound like some incredible master of the arcane arts. Like the guy could've laid waste to the whole parking field, everything in it, and half the Willow Brook Mall if he'd only had the time to get the magic together. Maybe the way things ended pointed out the advantage of learning your stuff on the street, instead of in some high-tower occult academy. On the street, you learned that you were either quick or dead. That was one thing about Bandit. As much as he sometimes seemed to be living in some other world, he knew how to be quick, and he knew when quick meant everything.

Good instincts, Rico thought.

What else could you call it?

Thorvin sent the van flying down the transitways. They crisscrossed the plex and doubled back too many times to keep track. Rico found it hard, impossible, to keep track because he couldn't believe how themeet had ended. It made no fragging sense.

There was also the action in the rear of the van.

Dok worked on Filly for more than an hour, long after it became obvious to Rico that what little Dok could do with the gear on hand just wouldn't cut it. Maybe if he'd had a full surgical kit with respirators and all the drek like in the average emergency ward, maybe then something too good to believe might have happened. The way things were, with all their a.s.ses on the line, they had to get clear, and everything else took second place.

Filly never moved. She didn't breathe. She didn't show the least sign of life. Whatever had hit the back of her head had penetrated bone. It had probably been over in an instant, before she could feel the pain, before she even knew what hit her.

If it was gonna happen, that was the way it oughta happen. That was how Rico wanted to go. Here one moment, gone the next. A death with some dignity.

That didn't help Dok.

"She lived how she wanted, amigo," Rico finally said , "She was true to herself and true to you. She was real. She had to be there. She wouldn't've let you go alone. No effing way, compadre."

Shank grunted, nodded agreement, and told Dok,', "We're with you, bro."

Dok turned his head toward the ceiling and closed his eyes and said nothing. Clamped his eyes tightly shut and clenched his teeth together till the muscles in his jaw were twitching. Trying hard to keep things inside. Rico knew what that was like. He also knew it was no use. Some feelings were just too powerful.