The only question was: how far did it go? Whose finger had been on the trigger?
The trilling of his phone made him start, and he grabbed it clumsily from the inner pocket of his suit jacket. The motion drew some arched looks from the other execs; it clearly marked him as a new boy.
His vu-phone was the latest model, a replacement for the one he’d lost, with top-of-the-line encryption and executive level pass codes. On the readout was a name he hadn’t expected to come across again. “Incoming Calclass="underline" Burt Tiplady.”
“Yes?”
“Frankie?” It was rare to hear that tone in Burt’s voice, his usual braggadocio replaced by nervous indecision. Digital whispers across the satellite link to Los Angeles fluttered under the words of his former superior. “Or do I have to call you Mr Lam, now you got yourself promoted?”
“No… Burt, what do you want?”
“Been trying to get you for the best part of a day. Seems all your baggage ain’t caught up with you yet.”
Frankie sighed. “Burt, this is a bad time. I’m right in the middle of something.”
“Uh, well,” Tiplady’s voice wavered, and Frankie knew what was going through his mind. He wasn’t sure how to react. Lam had been his subordinate for a long time and he was finding it hard to take on the notion that their roles were now reversed. “It’s just that, there was a comm that came in on your old office email here. One time signal, couldn’t forward it.” An embarrassed cough. “The thing is, I kinda accidentally opened it.”
“Accidentally,” Frankie repeated.
“Yeah. Uh. Sorry.”
He frowned. The last thing he wanted was this dolt wasting his time with trivia. There were bigger things at stake than some lost piece of junk mail.
“It must have got held up in that big server outage last week, delayed in the system I reckon. It… It’s from your brother.”
Frankie felt his blood turn to ice water. “Read it to me.”
“It’s not much, just a couple of words. It says, uh, ‘Don’t ever come home.’ Did you piss him off, or something?”
The room suddenly seemed tight and confined. Too late, Alan, said a voice in his head, I’m already here. “Burt, listen to me. Erase it and close down the line, okay?”
“Sure, sure,” said the other man. “Say, listen, I was wondering if maybe you could put in a good word for me with head office, now you’re there? Y’know, if you might-”
Frankie folded the phone shut and sat there for long moments in the darkness, surrounded only by the murmuring of the other users. After a while, he toggled the datascreen’s security protocols menu and asked it to locate Blue Snake for him.
She was at the docks, it replied, conducting an unspecified errand for the CEO. Frankie studied the area on a digital map, and with careful deliberation, he began once again to dial his old phone number.
Rikio shoved him into the dark interior of the cargo container and Ko stumbled on the metal floor, his sneakers slipping on damp patches. The cold and rainy weather made the inside of the container feel like an icebox. The youth bounced off a wall and coughed. Every physical exertion made the injury in his chest hurt like fire. The front of his grey shirt was stained purple with blood.
“I’m bleeding…” he said.
At the doors, Rikio threw him a pitying look. “That’s the least of your problems right now.”
Ko shivered, at last a real sense of the depths of shit he was in coming to him. “Are you gonna kill me?” The words came out in a scared little boy voice. Rikio’s lip curled but he didn’t reply. “Dude, we used to play on the street together. You know me. We were friends.”
“We were never friends, Ko,” the gunman said sadly. “We were just kids. Doesn’t mean I owe you anything. ”
Ko started back toward the doors. “Riki-”
The Ushanti’s nickel-plated muzzle came up. “You stay right there. You just be quiet and you stay right there.” Rikio stepped out of the container and closed the hatches, throwing the bolt shut.
Even though he knew it was pointless, he tried the doors. Ko opened his mouth to call out, but the words died in his throat, escaping as a faint whimper. No one would hear him. No one would care.
He slumped to the floor and sat against the wall. Chinks of light from rust holes provided illumination as Ko went through his pockets, in lieu of having anything better to do. Scraps of paper and an old matchbook from the Dot. A couple of loose bullets-fat lot of good they would do him now-and a wallet with a handful of yuan. And…
Ko’s fingers closed around the cellphone in the instant it rang. He snapped it open in panic, suddenly terrified that Hung’s men would hear it.
“H-hello?”
“Is that you?” Frankie frowned the moment he asked the question. It was a dumb thing to say.
“Yeah.” The kid was muted and fearful. “This how you get your laughs, huh? Fuck with me and my family, and then phone up to gloat about it?”
“Where are you?” Frankie had the digi-map of the docks open in front of him. “Where did Blue Snake take you?”
“Dancing Dragon Pier. Big Hung’s docks. Like you don’t know.”
Frankie nodded to himself, running an image transform program. The satellite image became an infrared pattern of cold blues and moving orange blobs. One peculiar shape-green instead of human-red-was standing among a group of others. Tze’s guardian? “Tell me where you are. Exactly.”
“Inna cargo pod. Freezing an’ bleeding to death. Why are you asking me this shit?”
Frankie took a breath. What had they taught him in the academy? The best time to negotiate with a hostile source was when you had them on the ropes. “Remember what I said before? I have a job for you.”
“Huh.” Despite his dire predicament, Ko felt the urge to laugh. “You got great timing, mister wageslave. Pretty soon, I ain’t gonna be in any shape to do anything for anybody.” The soft glow of the phone cast faint shadows around the gloomy interior.
“I had nothing to do with what happened to the girl… Your sister.” The voice on the other end of the phone seemed genuine, or at least as far as Ko could tell. These corps, they lie for a living. “I could help.”
Ko fought off a shiver. The cold was leaching into his fingertips and toes. “What do you care? I’m just a thief, neh? A streetpunk for you suits to roll over like some bug. You don’t know me. What d’you want, huh?”
“You said you had connections with the triads, yes?”
“Yeah,” he nodded woodenly. “I know people in the Wo Shing Wo, the 14K, others. Not that it has done me any favours.” Ko coughed and spat out blood.
“I can get you out of there,” said the voice, “if you trust me. In return I want you to get some information. There was a hit… I need to know who ordered it.”
“You can’t do it yourself, mister big shot?” snorted Ko.
“I can’t take the risk of investigating myself. I need someone like you. I can’t be connected.”
“Like me,” murmured Ko, masking a wheeze. “Oh yeah. I see where this is going. You want some no-namer to do your dirty work, someone… disposable?”
“That’s about the size of it, yes.”
Ko forced a smile. “Yeah. You got yourself problems you don’t want your boss knowing about, so you gotta come down to the gutter to deal with it.” He shifted, fighting down the pain. “Sure. I’m your man. But I want something else.”
“I’m going to save your life,” insisted the corporate. “That’s not enough?”
“No. I want money. After what that rat shit Tze did to my sister, it’s gonna take some heavyweight paper to make her well again. You clean that mess up, too.”
Frankie choked back a laugh. “You’re in no shape to be setting terms.”
There was a dry, painful chuckle. “I gotta guy ten metres away from me with a machine gun gonna drill me any second now. I got nothing to lose. Pay up or get some other chump to be your errand boy.”