Fixx smiled. “You let me worry about that.”
The thief blew out a breath. “Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate what you did for me, but the Good Samaritan thing, it’s getting a little old now. Why don’t you just go on about your business and let me deal with mine?”
The sanctioned operative’s eyes flicked to him over the rim of the espex. “Maybe you are my business, kid.”
He slapped his hands on the dash in exasperation. “Why? What the hell do you want with me, Fixx?”
One hand left the steering wheel and dipped into a jacket pocket. It returned with the tarot card, the Knight of Wands. Fixx held it up.
“That’s it?” Ko snorted. ’“Cos of some stupid card trick you suddenly gotta stick to me like glue?” He tried to snatch the card from the op’s fingers, but Fixx did a magician’s flourish and made it disappear. “That’s jagged, man! You think your freaky-ass cards and your pocket full of chicken bones makes you some kinda wizard?”
“Houngan,” corrected Fixx, but Ko wasn’t listening.
“Whatever you think you know about me-”
“Ain’t about you,” the other man said. "Nor me neither. It’s about the way things come together. We got parts to play.
Ko’s face flushed with annoyance. “Who told you that, huh? Some voodoo hoodoo? Some-”
“Ghost?” Feng was there in the back seat. Ko could smell the dry scent of his leather armour.
Fixx saw the fractional glimpse he gave the rear-view mirror and looked as well, eyes narrowing. He sniffed.
Ko was still talking, the words spilling out of him. “Maybe you don’t see nothing, huh, did you ever think that? Maybe people are right when they call you spooky and weird, maybe the phantoms are all in your head and you’re just too looped to know it…” He trailed off, silenced by his own words.
Fixx gave him a quizzical look. “You all right, kid?” The navscreen chimed.“ We’re here.”
Ko’s face darkened, and taking care not to let his eye line cross the back seat again, he popped the latch as the vehicle halted at the kerb. “One thing,” said the youth, “if you’re coming with me.”
“Yeah?”
“Quit calling me ‘kid’.”
Fixx tabbed the autodrive control and set the Korvette to take itself somewhere secluded. “Whatever you say, slick.”
The deal, such as it was, came together in a flurry of text messages, back and forth in the dimness of the meditation cell. The wageslave was waiting for Ko’s call, and he could taste the man’s anxiety even through the strings of letters and numbers. There would need to be money, real yuan cash and not some fairy gold eDollars that would vanish from the account the moment the transaction was done. The corp made promises, and the thief turned the screws on him.
Not just cash, wageslave. More than that.
This chance would never come again, Ko was sure of it. He made the man secure stratojet transfers, nameless and no-questions-asked tickets that would get Ko and Nikita out of Hong Kong and to any major city in the world. The thief thought about the Zarathustra Clinic, the glossy brochure of the clean white buildings in Zurich and Aspen.
Ko laughed off the corps attempts to get him to meet on Hong Kong Island. Nah. That was the corporate heartland over that side of the bay. Ko wanted the meet to go down on his turf, Kowloon side, the domain of the Street. He thought about how Hazzard Wu had dealt with a similar situation in Cat Street Killer, the last reel was the nightclub duel. Yeah…
They’d meet at The Han. The place was high profile and exclusive, catering to top echelon corps, media types and the richest members of Hong Kong’s criminal dominions. You had to have an AmEx Plasma card just to get in, so he’d heard. Wageslave could make that happen, he promised. Ko’s name would be on the guest list. Of course, he hadn’t reckoned on needing a “plus one”.
Feng still did not speak to him, silent since the incident at the docks, and he seemed to be there less and less. Ko had lost the last few Peacefuls in his pockets to the waters in the bay, and couldn’t even give the swordsman the smallest of offerings by way of apology. The warrior retreated to the shadows and faded.
Fixx and the Sifu caught him trying to sneak out. He heard them talking in riddles, something about “black skies over the peak”, the old man’s voice tight with anger as he spoke of “monsters on the streets” and “poisoned blood”.
He told them, after a fashion, how it was going to go down.
“Smells like a trap,” Fixx noted. “More at stake than you know.”
But Ko didn’t care. He wanted out, him and Nikita gone. The city, his life, everything he knew had turned on him, piece by piece.
“I’m done here,” he told them, and he meant it.
Any other nightclub, and the red carpet outside would have been crammed with paparazzi and camera drones; but the management at The Han had a discreet flicker-field screen extending out to the street. It formed a tube of runny air, appearing like smoke hazing through glass, fogging the image of anyone who passed inside. Coupled with an EM frequency jammer, discretion was assured.
Most people didn’t even know exactly where the club was. There were no advertisements for it, no address listed on the matchbooks. It was a stealth venue, sandwiched between two equally nondescript buildings. Rumour had it that there were even fake entrances dotted all around Hong Kong, just to throw off the riff-raff and the uninvited. If you didn’t already know where it was then you had no business being there.
The doorman was aptly named. He was as large as one, dark aged oak. He held up a hand the moment he got a good look at Ko’s clothes. The AV feed in his monocle had a programme embedded that served solely to judge the fashion index of those who wanted to enter the club. “Name?” he rumbled.
Ko thought himself clever when he told the wageslave what identity to place on the guest list, but now it came to say it out loud, he felt a little silly. “Uh. Hazzard Wu. ”
There was the very smallest raise of an eyebrow, and the man nodded, ticking off an item on an embedded d-screen. “Good evening, Mr Wu. Nice to see you again.” He beckoned Ko with one hand and warded off Fixx with another. “And you are?”
“A gatecrasher.” The sanctioned operative stabbed out with a single finger and struck a nerve point near the doorman’s clavicle.
“Ah,” was all the big man could manage, as his muscles seized up and left him twitching there, rooted to the spot.
Fixx uncurled a hundred yuan note and slipped it into the doorman’s jacket pocket as they walked past. “Thanks, bro.”
There were bars that dealt drinks and food, oxygen and pills. Boys and girls in costume drifted through the clientele distributing orders in stone cups or rough-hewn glasses that looked like cubes of ice. Music and drugfog hazed the air, weaving around the flaps of ceiling fans worked by nubile girls. Ko walked in deliberate slow motion, keeping to Fixx’s right, working hard not to be dazzled by what he saw around him. The club was modelled on the interior of a warlord’s grand hall from ancient China’s feudal past, but in a weird neo-tech style that blended lunar steel with resin statues and old tapestries. The “historic fusion” look was very now among the PacRim in-crowd.
Some part of him, the core of his working-class streetkid soul, felt so utterly and completely out of his depth that the tingle of a flight reflex shuddered through his legs. One look at the opulence inside The Han and Ko had never felt so common in his whole life.
“Can almost smell the riches,” Fixx said out of the corner of his mouth.
Ko nodded, watching men at the bar with yakuza electro-tattoos emerging from their collars. No money appeared to be changing hands; the staff at The Han obviously knew whom they were charging.