Black Madonna s-20 Page 3

  “Always wanted to visit Jamaica,” Michael mused.

  “I wouldn’t,” Geraint said sharply. “Murder rate ten times higher than New Orleans and an average life expectancy of thirty-four for indigenous males. Go to the Leewards or the Windwards if you want a Caribbean holiday.”

  “It isn’t exactly a pressing concern right now,” Michael said with a smile as he lifted the cup to his lips. “Crikey, you’re right. This is good.”

  “Well, here we are,” Geraint said. “Enough of that to get us through the night and I have nearly sixty opticals of Palestrina and Josquin, which should keep you happy.”

  “Thank you,” Michael said again. The Welshman had an excellent memory for the likes and tastes of others and was an unfailingly generous host. “What about Dinah?”

  “In Paris for another collection,” Geraint said slightly dismissively. “She’s a fashion writer.” His tone said one of them was probably a fashion accessory for the other; more likely both were. Michael did not press the point further.

  “And Serrin?”

  “I’m hoping he’ll be here tomorrow,” Geraint said. “The weather’s appalling on Lewis, but the forecast for tomorrow is better and he should be able to fly down. I thought we could have dinner here.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Michael replied. “I may be sending him off on a wild goose chase, but I’ve got a whole caseful of arcane drek and he might be able to give me enough leads to come up with a psychological profile of our nutter. Our very talented nutter, I should probably add.”

  Geraint smiled and sank an ivory-handled knife into the blue-veined Stilton cheese, extracting sufficient crumbly chunks to liberally coat one of the thin wafers just before the Magnificat reached its final Amen. There were a few moments of silence before the Kyrie of the following Mass rose gently from the small but powerful speakers secreted around the room.

  “Port?” Suddenly Geraint’s look was different. There was an element of mischief on his angular, handsome face, a look that said, in effect, “I haven’t seen you in years. We may have work to do, and time may be pressing, and these may be very elegant surroundings, but we’re going to get smashed anyway, horribly hog-whimperingly smashed.” There was also the undercurrent of That way you’ll tell me everything I might be interested in.

  “Which vintages are you currently recommending?”

  “I thought we might start with the 2002 and work our way forward, although we could always start with the agreeably nutty 2033 tawny and work backward,” Gerajnt suggested.

  Michael bit into the cheese-smeared cracker, wiped a crumb from the side of his mouth, and smiled back at his host. “Mix them all in a bucket and bring me a plastic straw,” he said.

  “Peasant,” His Lordship laughed and set off for the mahogany cabinets on the far side of the apartment, “So, tell me what happened to Renraku.”

  Michael waited for Geraint to return with the first bottle, the lead-foiled cork crusted into the neck, before giving him a copy of the chromalin.

  “What the frag is this?” Geraint said.

  “That’s our nutter’s signature. Now I’ll tell you what Renraku said he did, and then we should consider how we’re going to go about finding out what he actually did.” Michael got up and unlocked the first of the small steel cases he’d brought in with his suitcase. Geraint’s eyes widened at what he saw when Michael threw back the lid.

  “Very, very nice,” he said approvingly.

  “Modular Fairlight,” Michael said. The cyberdeck was worth well over a million nuyen, and it had taken him some months to modify it to accept the vicissitudes of travel. The cases had traveled on their own first-class seat during the flight. The idea of putting them in a cargo hold simply never entered his head.

  “It’ll take me an hour or so to set up” Michael said. “Then we should go a-prowling.”

  “Oh, thank you so very much,” Geraint said dryly. “So that your work can be traced from here. What an ungrateful guest I have.”

  “Come on, you know me better than that,” Michael said swiftly. “We’ll be operating from a different location every thousandth of a second, unless there’s someone specific you’d like to be nasty to. so that I can leave a traceable signal from their location instead.”

  “Now that is tempting,” Geraint said with a clear intake of breath. “Perhaps young Jenkins…”

  Michael laughed, the cork was drawn, and the deck components began to take shape on the teak table white the light port was decanted and left to stand for a while. The Englishman and Welshman began to talk, of old times, college days, drunken sorties, shared acquaintances, and all the things friends say when they haven’t seen each other in many years.

  * * *

  Midnight approached. Outside, in a car bearing diplomatic plates and therefore not subject to the irksome parking restrictions of the ultra-exclusive neighborhood, an Italian took his first sip from a flask of a coffee far humbler than that his Lordship could offer, and settled back to keep an eye on the place. He was understandably nervous, as all in his organization were tonight, and he didn’t know what to expect.

  He certainly wasn’t expecting to be shot by the Inquisition before the week was out, but then, as any Englishman with a sense of humor and history could have told him, nobody ever expects the Inquisition.

  3

  “Very, very nice,” Geraint said again. “Can’t get these on any market I know of.”

  “Cute, isn’t it? I got the personamorph program from certain corporate contacts. Lets us slip into their sculpted system and become an absolutely integral part of it,” Michael said as he worked to complete the cyberdeck coupling. It wasn’t easy connecting his Fairlight to Geraint's humble Fuchi Cyber-7, and there would be delays in communication, but it was a far better option than his friend just jacking in for the ride.

  “I think that’s done,” he said finally standing back to admire his handiwork. “Now for the monitors. Green lead on the datajack, blue lead over your heart, old man.”

  “What are these for?” Geraint said, somewhat apprehensively.

  “Cardiomonitors. We’re headed into IC thick and deep enough to sink a whole flotilla of Titanics, and if you get zapped by bad black stuff this will jack you out before your brain can fry or the T’n’B rips your heart out of your chest,” Michael replied with bloodthirsty relish. “Saved my skin a couple of times.”

  “I’m not really sure I should have let myself in for this,” Geraint said disapprovingly. Good job we kept the port down to two glasses.”

  We’ll finish the bottles later,” Michael replied, settling himself down in the Chippendale chair and flexing his arms.

  “Let’s get down to it, Hello, Chiba.”

  “What the frag is this?” Geraint said unenthusiastically. “What a ghastly, tacky pinstripe suit you have there.”

  Michael checked out his own persona, the icon that et him navigate the Matrix even as his own meat body sat jacked into his deck. He looked rather like a cheap gangster from a bad black-and-white trid from way back, the kind where the main character calls everybody ‘Blue eyes’ or ‘Sweetheart’.

  “We appear to be someplace like Nebraska,” Geraint said disapprovingly “That is, somewhere entirely devoid of interest or value.”

  Michael peered up the long gray road ahead of them. “This is more fascinating than it seems,” he mused. “We’re not even into their system yet and there’s a radiating sculpted effect. This shouldn’t happen. Renraku’s been doing some very interesting things.”

  “Never mind the interesting things they’ve been doing, let’s find out about the interesting things someone’s been doing to them,” Geraint retorted, adjusting his fedora and setting off down the highway. There was a roadblock before them, a gaggle of 1930s black American autos and a group of policemen awaiting them at the system access node.

  “Since when has Renraku sculpted their system to look like an old gangster movie?” Geraint whispered.

  “Since
now,” Michael replied. “This must be a direct response to the system invasion.”

  “A bit tacky, if you ask me,” Geraint said. “Oh, well, get that sleaze program working.” They advanced on the police squad.

  “Ain’t nobody goin’ up that road without authorization, bud,” the harrier program instructed. Michael put a hand into his pants pocket with exaggerated slowness, so as not to activate any alert IC, and flourished a badge with the symbol of Chicago’s finest on it.

  “Authorization from the mayor himself, Mac,” he said. palming it again swiftly. The policeman looked a little dubious and then waved them past the platoon of armed goons standing behind him.

  “That was easy,” Michael chuckled as they headed down the road and on to the dataline junctions.

  “Great when we have to go back and get past that attack IC,” Geraint said plaintively. The goons had been carrying disagreeably large heavy machine guns. Renraku had gotten heavy since the system invasion.

  “Not to worry,” Michael smiled. “We’ll be leaving in an armored car, old boy.”

  They sidled into the outskirts of town, and down the narrow road saw a series of fortified buildings.

  “The bank, I would think,” Michael said. “Time to send off a browsing probe.” He opened his violin case and a slightly mangy pigeon circled out into the skies above, coming briefly to rest on a distant roof, then hopping from one to the next. From one of the buildings in the middle distance, a sheriff emerged, wearing his badge of office and wielding a machine gun that made the weapons of the SAN IC look like popguns.

  “System decker.” Michael said dismissively. His armor program, and that of Geraint, had already equipped them with bulletproof jackets, and the Englishman had other surprises in store for the Renraku decker prowling the system. What worried him was whether this was just a random appearance, or whether the system was already alerted to their presence, and how long it would take the decker to alert it now.

  As the sheriff leveled his weapon to fire, smoke exploded around him and a harmless burst of gunfire chattered off somewhere into the skies as the two intruders ran down the other side of the Street to the bank. The stumbling figure barely emerged before they’d shot the locks off the bank doors, and above him the pigeon had already been replaced by Geraint’s eagle, a scanner program searching for reinforcements Michael’s smart frame had already given the sheriff something else to worry about as they ran into the building.

  “Hold it right there, lawman,” the frame-persona drawled, “or your guts will have more holes than a Swiss cheese.”

  “Love it,” Michael grinned as he activated the evaluate program and switched to sensor mode. Geraint covered his back, gun leveled at the swinging bank doorway. “Now, Tracey my dear, crack that code,” Michael said.

  The second smart frame got to work on the encrypted barrier, decoding and analyzing, Michael desperate to get at the data in the vaults. He got through just as the evaluate program gave him the final feedback.

  “Bugger, it’s not here,” he growled. “We’re going to have to wait for the dove to fly back. Well, let’s face it-it would have been too easy to find it here.”

  Obligingly, the bird flew back into the room, as a confused system decker exchanged attacks with a smart frame in the road outside.

  “I think I hear sirens” Geraint said anxiously.

  “Bollocks,” Michael said flatly as he took the tourist map from the bird’s beak. “Down the high street and make for the travel agency. Travel agency? I like that! Very eccentric humor. They must have an Englishman on the programming staff.”

  “Not that I know of,” Geraint said. “Listen, there are sirens.”

  “So there are, old man. Well, let’s get moving. The back door, I think.”

  They got out of the datastore and raced down the side road, into the commercial district, Cars sped along the highway, data packets headed along the vast freeway of Renraku’s innermost computer systems.

  “Look, never mind subtlety,” Michael said, extracting a grenade from his case and lobbing it at the doors of the

  travel agency. “No more sleazing. Let’s just frag everything that moves.”

  “Sometime I wonder whether you haven’t been living in America too long,” Geraint muttered, keeping his gun leveled at their backs. The doors blew off the in a splendidly agreeable cloud of dust and debris. Michael was already halfway into the place.

  “Find it, find it!” he urged on his evaluate program. The customized program, specifically instructed to search for data on system intrusions, was already scurrying to the locked cupboards. It took the form of a rat in the sculpted system. Halting before one securely fastened cupboard in the distance, the rat raised up on its hind legs, sniffed, and twitched its whiskers.

  Michael pried the lock off the door, and began shoveling files into his voluminous case. The first gunshots began to splinter the windows.

  “Get to the fragging back door!” Geraint urged as he let off a flurry of his own shots at the advancing figures just visible outside. The armor won’t last forever.” He scooped up a last handful of files as they blew their way out the back door and found themselves in an alleyway.

  “Whoops,” Geraint said as he looked at the cul-de-sac. A platoon of police were running at them from the far end.

  “This program cost me half a million nuyen and it had better bloody well work,” Michael muttered grimly as he yanked open the doors of the mechanic’s shop opposite and raced into the gloom. He opened the door of the vehicle and started the ignition. Geraint had already flung himself into the passenger seat and flattened himself as close to the floor as he could. The armored car advanced into the street, performed a tire-screeching ninety-degree turn and raced toward the policemen. It scattered them far and wide, sprays of bullets bouncing off its armor as Michael raced the thing toward the outskirts of town again. Then, extraordinarily, he stopped and opened the driver’s door. A policeman was approaching from the side of the road.

  “What the hell-”

  “Trojan horse, old man,” Michael said as he handed over his case to the smart frame. “They almost certainly have special locks on data loss, and we may have trouble getting out with the data not ending up degraded. But Simon here won’t have any problems.

  “Simon?”

  “Give them names, helps me remember what does what. Simple Simon-simple to get data out with.”

  “Doesn’t make any sense to me,” said the mystified Geraint.

  “Doesn’t have to, it only needs to make sense to me.” Michael pointed out. “Now we have a roadblock to get past and, by the sound of it, half of Renraku’s best are on our tails.” The sirens got louder behind them.

  “Now, let’s go knock down that barrier!”

  “Well, it wasn’t traceable of course,” Radev said consolingly as he lit another of his endless chain of cigarettes. “But then we wouldn’t expect it to be. If it had been, we’d have been very disappointed. After all, we do pay him to get into other people’s systems without being traced, so at least we know he does what he does for us rather well.”

  “Fine,” Kryzinski growled. “And the data?”

  “The data in the proximity of the invading personas was transformed by the morphic encrypters at one hundred percent efficiency,” Radev smiled. “He will learn that what we told him was almost correct. If it had matched exactly he’d have been suspicious, of course. Now he’ll think we had a slightly more serious system invasion than we told him we had, and we won’t have to worry about being compromised by our own operative.”

  “Good.” Sam sighed happily. “He’s good, we’re good, everything’s just fraggin’ hunky dory. Apart from twenty billion nuyen or you can all expect to wear brown pants for a fortnight.”

  “We’ll have to see Sutherland’s initial report,” the Bulgarian replied. “It should conform to the initial assessment we have and then we can proceed from there.”

  Kryzinski yawned and looked at the clock. He
resented having to work beyond his normal shift to be on hand when Sutherland’s anticipated system intrusion occurred.

  “I’m going home to get some sleep,” he sighed. “That’s enough excitement for one day.”

  “Our bosses will be pleased,” Radev said consolingly, giving him a nicotine-stained smile.

  “They’d fragging better be!” Kryzinski said fervently.

  Michael keyed in the final instructions for the frame-analyzers and sat hack triumphantly. Getting out of the system had been easier than he’d expected. The tar pit program that had nearly trapped their car had been the least he’d expected and the attack utilities barking gunfire at the roadblock had been almost disappointingly easy to fend off. Now it was five in the morning and dawn was still an unfulfilled promise. Fresh coffee was just arriving, and gleaming dark bottles of port seemed to be making suggestive invitations to him from the table opposite, but after two days of slotting around with his body clocks, certain minor visual hallucinations were entirely acceptable. Geraint, having already used some minor booster or stabilizer through the cannula implant in his neck, took a shot of something psychoactive to prevent that happening, but Michael preferred a less direct route. Caffeine and alcohol into the gut would do fine, and he lit one of Geraint’s gold-banded cigarettes to add to the cocktail.

  “They never saw it. What a bunch of dodos!” he smirked.

  “Don’t get arrogant,” Geraint warned. “Wait to see what the discrepancies are. Don’t celebrate the data haul until you’ve seen it.”

  “What we came out with was vanilla,” Michael protested. “What the Trojan horse will come out with is-”

  Text was already filling the thirty-inch auxiliary screen. It scrolled through the initial sections of the inhouse Renraku evaluations in synchrony with the accelerated lasprint output until Michael keyed the screen to hold. He read fast. The blood drained from his face.

  “Holy Mother of God!” he croaked, his hands grasping the edge of the table as if it were the edge of a cliff and he was about to fall off. “Look at this.”