Fade To Black Part 7

There was of, course, one minor fluctuation, one small disturbance in the flux of astral s.p.a.ce, originating from within the warehouse to his right, but this he had expected.

He had come prepared.

He returned to his physical body, his mundane form. This brought him a sense of dissatisfaction, no less than the necessity of leaving his studies tonight in order to "practice" his Art in the sordid world of the mundane. As he regained his sense-awareness of the physical plane, he sat once again in the rear of his Mercedes limousine. The limousine waited, lights out, in an alley off some street in Sector 2, near the airport, the ocean terminals and piers. "Biffs remain in the car," he said. The five women sharing the rear of the limo with him grumbled briefly in discord. Much as he might have expected. They were his wives. They attended to the innumerable inconsequential details of daily living, thereby freeing him to pursue his arcane inquiries. They had also produced a number of children, who, in time, would also serve him. They expected to accompany him everywhere, imagining that their service to him earned them various inalienable rights.

On a night like this, when certain undeniable facts of existence invaded the hallowed domain of his research, he would grant no lat.i.tude, tolerate no dissension. The biffs would do as he said or else face the consequences. Fortunately for all of them, Daniella, his first wife, had the capacity of understanding to order them all into silence.

Daniella would keep them in line.

With one meticulously manicured finger, Maurice pointed. The door to his right clicked and swung open. The faint s.h.i.+mmering in the air by the limo's ceiling drifted out through the open door. Maurice followed it outside.The night was cool, the air rank with offensive odors. The ground vibrated faintly as with the distant rumble of machinery or pa.s.sing subway trains. Maurice tucked his ivory-handled walking stick under his arm and tied the sash of his dark, caped coat A trivial exertion of will returned him to his astral perceptions.

He found his ally, radiant with etheric energy, facing him from just an arm's length away.

The ally, recently summoned, was proving to possess a peculiar blend of naivete" and eccentricities.

Though bound to Maurice's will, his service, the spirit showed signs of developing a uniquely willful personality. It preferred to be addressed as a female. With Maurice's permission, it had a.s.sumed an astral form like that of a curvaceous young white woman with long, gold-brown hair, and wearing a flowing halter-top dress that fell to mid-calf. It wished to be called "Vera Causa." Maurice found this troubling.

The spirit spoke to him mind-to-mind, asking, Your desire, master?

Guard, Maurice thought.

Yes, master, the spirit replied. I guard you always. Master is kind and spirits are grateful.

Indeed.

Returned to his mundane physical perceptions, Maurice extended his walking stick and moved up the alley. To his right the big black metal door of a warehouse stood partly open. He paused to examine both door and doorway, which appeared to be unguarded, astrally and otherwise. Master, be cautious, his ally warned. Danger here. Much violence.

That was certainly true.

The open doorway led directly to a landing at the top of a flight of stairs. A faint luminescence from the radiance of the surrounding city carried in through the doorway to dimly illuminate the landing. The stairs, however, descended into pitch blackness. Maurice called forth his magelight with a flick of one finger. The light swelled radiant and full, growing from a mere pinpoint to the size of a globe mounted atop the head of Maurice's stick.

Lifting the stick out before him, Maurice descended the stairs. Again, his ally warned of danger, of the violence that lingered here. Maurice knew the source of this violence. It was the man he had come to see.

The stairs led into a corridor unlit but by Maurice's magelight. Some distance ahead another door waited partly open. Maurice paused to examine it, then stepped through.

That put him in the main chamber, a room two or three times the size of the average simsense theater.

At the distant end burned a single candle. Just beyond the candle's small flame stood a man stripped to the waist. He had a ma.s.s of wavy blonde hair and a well-muscled, athletically proportioned body. He stood with his feet together, arms at his sides, face turned toward the black of the ceiling hanging closely overhead.

Behind the man, Maurice perceived the huddled form of a woman, nude. Quite dead. "You come again."

The voice carried quietly throughout the s.p.a.ce. It was that of the man. He went by many names, but, as Maurice knew, bis real name was Claude Jaeger. His aura was a seething torrent of dark-hued energies.

Maurice had encountered homicidal maniacs with clearer auras, but Jaeger was far more dangerous than any lunatic killer. Death clung to him, not hie a leech, but as the source of bis power.

With a shout, Jaeger suddenly turned and lashed out, perhaps with a kick. The movement was so swift, Maurice could not be certain. A dark shape to Jaeger's right, about the sire and shape of a fire door, rang like a bell. Sonics slapped the walls of the surrounding chamber and reverberated. The door, or whatever it was, fell to the floor, clanging loudly, separating into two pieces.

"Does this form of exercise please you?"

Jaeger turned toward Maurice with a face as cold as the concrete underfoot. "It is not exercise," he said. "And, yes, it pleases me greatly." He paused for a moment, men said, "Would you care to try? I have another door."

Maurice considered briefly, then dismissed the thought Jaeger followed the path of a child, that of a physical adept His art, as he called it, was devoted to improving his physical power. His exercises included breaking inanimate objects and living bodies such as human beings. The practice of the art eluded explanation for the simple reason that the art itself was absurd. It was eminently practical, no doubt but had no value beyond the purely mundane. Jaeger himself was like a weapon, effective, but essentially devoid of the desire for truth or for anything more than mere physical stimulation.

"We have work," Maurice said.

"What work?" Jaeger snapped harshly.

Maurice ignored the intemperate tone. He had difficulty enough trying to decide how he might best elaborate, what words would achieve the desired effect. As a general rule, the spoken word displeased him.

Speech could be unbearably precarious, intolerably inexact. He much preferred the mathematical precisionof the arcane arts, the One True Art. It alone could be trusted.

Quietly, and precisely, he said, "Our client is staging a sensitive operation. We are to back up the back-up, you might say. In case something should go wrong."

Softly, resonantly, Jaeger chuckled. "I would say it in terms very different from those, mage."

Maurice supposed that was so.

10.

Unlike the old, three-story brick building on Mott Street, the big CMC stepvan really did belong to the New Jersey Consolidated Light and Power Corporation. It was painted in the corporate colors of blue and yellow, marked with various ID numbers, and loaded with equipment.

New Jersey C.L. & P. had lost track of the stepvan for the moment, Piper had arranged for that.

According to her, the corp had one of the worst matrix security systems of all the corps in the Jersey-New York megaplex, but whether that was true or the corp just wasn't up to her standards, Rico didn't know. In the end, it probably didn't matter.

Rico took the pa.s.senger-side seat, braced one foot against the dash, and gave Shank a nod. Shank hit the remote that set the big bay door in front of them to trundling up, then drove them toward Doremus Avenue, at the north end of the port, where they picked up the Jersey Turnpike.

It was just after 23:30 hours. The truck lanes were laden with heavy, swift-moving traffic-ma.s.sive two- and three-trailer tandem rigs, container rigs, Roadmaster articulated and straight trucks, cargo vans and stepvans. Rico turned his head to glance back at the trio on the bench seat to his rear: Bandit, Filly, and Dok. Like him and Shank, they were outfitted with day-glo orange hardhats and vests, all marked for C. L.

& P. The five of them were just another repair crew in a sludge-bloated ocean of technicians and crumbling infrastructure. No one would look at them twice.

The highway carried them across the Pa.s.saic River and onto the Kearny Peninsula, one of the most heavily industrialized areas in the plex. Rail yards, factories, storage tanks, and warehouses, all constructed on a mammoth scale, slid past on either side of the highway. The warning lights of factory stacks and the flame-stroked steeples of chemical plants rose high into the orange-phosphorous glow of the night.

Another bridge and the Hackensack River, then into Secaucus, another industrial zone, this one sprawling up the backbone of Jersey and Union Cities, and on up the Hudson to well beyond the G.W.

Bridge.

The backside of Union City was far enough.

Shank turned the stepvan down the ramp to Paterson Plank Road, then up West Side Avenue.

North of the sewage plant, the road became a broad boulevard. It was a kind of Executive Row, like a little slice of Manhattan tucked in between chemical and food processing plants and the compacted, decaying streets of Union City's Zone 2, West New York. Broad plazas glowed with light. Fountains glittered and sparkled. s.h.i.+ning towers rose like polished chrome from the halos about their foundations to dominate the skyline.

Just past Sixty-ninth Street, Shank slowed the stepvan, flipped on the amber warning blinkers, and swung the vehicle across the boulevard. He drove the truck, one wheel at a time, up over the curb and onto the gold-lit plaza set in front of the imposing headquarters of s.h.i.+awase Compudyne, a division of the s.h.i.+awase Corporation of Kyoto, j.a.pan. There was one very important feature of Compudyne's North American operations. Rico stepped from the stepvan to find it right there beside the truck. Set amid the golden tiles of the plaza was the round black insert of a manhole cover.

Shank tugged the cover up and dragged it aside. Dok and Filly began setting up the requisite safety-orange guardrail to surround the open hole and then pulled out the orange-and-red-striped compressor that would pump fresh air into the hole. Rico opened a Sony palmtop computer marked for New Jersey C. L. & P., paused to glance around the plaza, then began tapping the palmtop's keys.

Five minutes pa.s.sed. Shank climbed down the hole and into the utility pa.s.sage under the plaza. Dok and Filly pa.s.sed several duffel bags of gear down to him, then began setting up the air compressor. Rico was still tapping the palmtop's keypad when some slag came out of the s.h.i.+awase headquarters building to investigate.

The slag wore a suit and a plastic-laminated ID marked for s.h.i.+awase Compudyne security. Rico kept tapping keys on the palmtop till the man stepped up beside him.

"What's tox?" the security officer asked. "There a problem?"

Rico paused to look the slag up and down, then went on tapping the palmtop's keys. "Central office says we got a trickle discharge on a Kay-seven quad feeder. Probably just rats, but we gotta scan it. Might take a couple of hours.""You got a work order or something?"

"That's top secret," Rico replied. "I could tell you, but then I'd have to waste you."

The guard looked at him sharply. "What?"

No sense of humor. Frowning, Rico looked at the slag again, and said, "Yeah, I got an order. What's it to you?"

"Just doing my job, chummer."

"What job?"

"s.h.i.+awase security." The slag pointed at the ED slung from his lapel. "Maybe you're really eco-freaks planning to terror-bomb the place. Gotta scope it out. You scan?"

Rico grinned sarcastically and shook his head. "You freaking guys are all alike." He tapped some keys on the palmtop. "You wanna see my order? Here's my order. You can call that number there if you wanna scan it deep."

"Thanks." The slag looked at the palmtop's display, then pulled an ultrathin cellfone out of his jacket pocket "This'll just take a sec, chummer."

"Null sheen. I get paid working or talking."

The line rang twice.

"Thank you for calling the repair bureau of New Jersey Consolidated Light and Power. All our customer service representatives are busy. Please hold the line and the next available representative-"

"Repair operations. Jane speaking. May I help you?"

"Yeah, hoi, my name's Mike Kosaka. I'm with the security department of s.h.i.+awase Compudyne. I've got one of your crews on my premises. I'd Wee to verify what they're doing here."

"Whenever repair crews are dispatched, sir, they are issued a work order code. Please ask the crew supervisor for that code."

"Uhh ... hang a sec ... That'd be gee as in gulf, two-four-nine-oh-seven-five."

"One moment, sir."

"Sure."

"... That is a valid work order code, sir. Repair supervisor Ramos and his crew have been dispatched to your location to investigate a suspected line malfunction. This should not involve any interruption of service to your facility. Estimated time for completion is approximately four hours. Have you any other questions, sir?"

"Ah, nope. That'll do it. Thanks."

"Thank you for calling New Jersey Consolidated Light and Power."

"You happy now?" Rico said.

The security officer smiled and nodded. "Thanks for your time."

"I get paid for working or talking," Rico said. The security officer nodded again and turned to go. Rico looked to Dok and Filly, and said, "Let's get that air line going."

Filly plugged the orange-and-red-striped air compressor's power line into the socket on the side of the van, and the compressor sputtered to life.

A smartframe handled the telecom call-a program construct requiring only a modest amount of active memory. The moment the call was complete, the frame switched itself off.

By then, Piper was streaming down the datalines of the Secaucus Local Telecommunications Grid.

The planar geography of the matrix here reflected the real-world terrain. System constructs like giant factories and ma.s.sive towers rose toward the starry dark and the distant nebula of access nodes to the regional grid. Piper noted the hexadecimal addresses pa.s.sing around her, then cut a hard left to the matrix equivalent of Executive Row.

Constructs like office towers and mansions soared up around her. The one she wanted looked like a small castle crowned with a decahedral globe, the insignia of Kuze Nihon, a multinational conglomerate headquartered in Tokyo. The castle itself and the computer systems it represented belonged to Maas Intertech, headquartered off West End Avenue in Secaucus.

Piper drove straight at it They wouldn't see her coming.

Once the slag in the suit departed, a pair of guards in crisp blue uniforms appeared hi front of the paired doors of the main entrance of s.h.i.+awase Compudyne. The obvious implication was that s.h.i.+awase had decided, for whatever reason, to tighten up security a little, or at least put on a nice show. The guards stood there like soldiers on parade. They didn't bother Rico one bit.

Tune to start breaking some laws. Rico didn't care much about the law, because the law worked for the corps and the people who wrote the laws, the ones with money and power. Right was right and wrong was wrong. Any man with morals knew what was right and what was wrong, and, with a little thought,could figure what had to be done about it. Sometimes it took a few busted laws to get things set the way they should be.

Whether the law agreed or disagreed was something for leeches like lawyers to argue about Bandit followed the last of the bags of gear into the hole. Dok, meanwhile, had dropped the big orange-and red-striped hose from the air compressor into the hole, then joined Filly in feeding a line like a heavy-duty extension cord into the hole. The air line and power cord were just stage dressing, making things look right, no less than Rico getting into and out of the stepvan numerous times and tapping the keys of the palmtop.

Five minutes more and Rico put his genuine C. L. & P. hardhat on again and climbed down the metal rungs of the access shaft to the utility pa.s.sage below.

The pa.s.sage was almost three meters high, but little more than a meter across. That was just the available s.p.a.ce. Cables, pipes, and conduits ran up one wall and down the other, making the ceiling maybe a half-meter lower than it otherwise would have been. Small lighting fixtures ran down the right-hand wall at intervals of about ten meters. These were lit.

At Rico's feet lay several black duffels. He picked up the one marked with a big numeral one and started up the tunnel. Even with the bag of gear, walking was no problem. Trying to run through a s.p.a.ce this narrow would be another story, but Rico wasn't planning to do any running.

About a hundred and fifty meters up the tunnel, Shank had hung an IR blackout sheet from the ceiling.

No one looking up the tunnel would see beyond that sheet, regardless of vision enhancements. Rico checked while approaching, s.h.i.+fting his Jikku eyes to IR. The sheet's only purpose was to prevent anyone who came down the manhole from immediately detecting what was happening beyond the sheet.

Another hundred meters further on, a second tunnel led off to the left at ninety degrees. Shank waited there at the corner, suited up and ready for action: ballistic mask, flak vest, Colt M22A2 a.s.sault rifle slung from his shoulder, Wallacher combat axe and other gear slung from belts and crossed bandoliers.

"Status," Rico said.

"Don't ask me," Shank grumbled. "All he's done is stand there like that."

Dressed in his black trench coat and wearing his sword, Bandit stood about five meters into the side pa.s.sage. Maybe an arm's length in front of his face the tunnel ended in a brick wall. The pipes and conduits lining the tunnel pa.s.sed right through the brick barrier.

The plan called for Bandit to use his shaman abilities to scan ahead into the tunnel beyond the brick barrier. Just as a precaution. Once sure the tunnel was clear, they would take down the brick barrier. Rico watched Bandit and wondered. The problem was being able to tell when the shaman was actually doing magic, when he was out of body, and when he was just staring, thinking, maybe working out some problem.

If there was a problem, Rico wanted to know about it now. "Bandit," he said.

Abruptly, Bandit shook his staff. The elaborately decorated head of the staff briefly rattled, then Bandit murmured something soft and low, his voice rising and falling like a song. The song descended into silence. Bandit stood stock-still for several moments, then swung his staff to the horizontal, and held it pointing at the brick barrier.