'And just about here's where you shoot me in the back,' said ZeeZee, nodding to a spot ten paces from the car.
'No,' Clem shook his head as he leaned across and shoved open ZeeZee's door. 'I'm retiring and you're my pension plan.' Reaching under his seat, Clem yanked out a briefcase. 'The combination's your DOB.' He grinned sourly. 'I don't want to know what's in here. Just make sure you open it well away from my car ...'
'Who's paying you?'
Clem didn't know, but he had no intention of admitting that to ZeeZee.
'Tell me,' ZeeZee insisted. What with remand, taking the plea and developing his designer mad-fuck persona, he'd put a lot of effort into staying alive.
Clem pulled back the slide on the Para Ordnance.
Stay and get shot, run and ditto. It had been a day full of shit choices. But what really scared ZeeZee was that the whole wired-out scenario had Wild Boy stamped all over it and ZeeZee didn't trust Hu Sun's deputy. The Boss — now, she'd have done it differently, smoothly.
'I'm not going unless you tell me,' ZeeZee said, slamming shut his door. No one tried to escape from Huntsville because no one could afford to. A bond was posted prior to arrival. Any attempt to escape automatically forfeited the bond, which was a multiple of the number of years in the sentence times a sliding scale according to the severity of the crime and the perp's previous ... Killing a police informant — ZeeZee didn't even want to think what his bond would have been set at.
Unless it really was Hu San organizing this, busting out of Huntsville was just a quick way to commit suicide. Marginally less dramatic than standing up in court to name the woman. But only marginally ...
'Your choice,' said Clem, raising the automatic. He was smiling.
The briefcase was retro Alessi, with a numerical lock and little purple LCDs that glowed through black glass: Fooler loops were built into its sides and the handle housed a semi-AI whose sole job was to inform airport scanners that the contents were covered by diplomatic protocol.
Holding his breath, ZeeZee started counting to ten in his head and lifted the lid. He reached seventeen before he realized he could stop now. His initial haul from the case was a plane ticket, a white passport and a strip of photos from one of those Kodak booths found at stations. The smiling girl in the shots was young, dark-skinned, middle Eastern. Four different poses, but each frame showed the same wide-eyed teenager.
ZeeZee flicked open the ticket and scanned the details. All the real data was encoded in a strip running along the outer edge of the front cover: the printout inside was just a reminder. It was made out to Ashraf al-Mansur, OA-273 flight to Cairo, with a connecting flight to El Iskandryia, taking off—
In about fifteen minutes, according to ZeeZee's watch. He checked the passport and blinked as his own face stared up at him, only shaved and without the dreadlocks, surrounded by a sea of unreadable foreign type. That the photograph had him wearing a suit and tie he'd never seen before was weird, but what really weirded him out was the simple English phrase across the top of each page.
Everyone had heard of diplomatic immunity.
In a small pocket in the lining of the lid was a platinum HKS, with a holo of his face on the reverse, stamped over with a mesh of laser thread. Finding the card was enough to make ZeeZee ransack every slot, pocket and zipped compartment in the case but he discovered nothing else, except a crumpled Mexican quality-control slip and a torn sachet of silica gel.
The check-in desk for the flight had already closed but ZeeZee stared round in such obvious distress that a girl two desks down trotted off to get an Ottoman Airways official.
'I'm on flight OA-273.'
'I'm sorry, sir, your gate's closed.'
'But I have ...'
'It shut twenty minutes ago.'
Mutely, ZeeZee thrust his ticket at the American woman who took it with a frown, as if actually touching the thing might commit her to something. She flicked back the cover to glance at the counterfoil, then looked at ZeeZee: taking in the blond biker beard and beeswaxed dreadlocks, the pale blue Huntsville jumpsuit and tatty trainers.
'Something wrong?' ZeeZee had trouble keeping anxiety out of his voice.
Yes, there was, but not in the way he meant. Counterfoils were discreetly colour-coded for priority, to avoid bouncing the wrong people off over-booked flights. The scale ran green up though red. ZeeZee's ticket was coded gold.
'Can I see your passport, please, sir?' Her face was white with hostility.
She didn't even bother to take the small booklet ZeeZee tried to hand over. Instead, she made sure her fingers didn't touch his as she handed ZeeZee back his ticket.
'I'll see what we can do about stopping the plane.'
He was waved through Security, which was probably just as well. And then a black kid with three gold nose rings hurled ZeeZee through the crowds filling Departures, horn beeping as ZeeZee gripped tight to a rail that ran around the back seat of the little electric buggy.
'Man, I love that,' announced the kid as he slammed to a halt.
'Some ride,' agreed ZeeZee, clambering off.
'Yeah.' The driver did as near to a skid turn as he could manage with an electric cart on the carpeted floor of an embarkation tunnel. 'A rock god in a hurry. It's the only thing makes my life worth living.'
Once aboard the Alle Volante, ZeeZee was shown to his cabin. A tiny cubicle with a shower stall, chair and the kind of double bed that might just fit two people if both were fashionably thin and intended to spend most of the flight on top of each other. For one person it was ideal.
The catalogue of duty-free goods was the same as it ever was — full of overpriced and ugly items that probably seemed a good idea at the time. ZeeZee skimmed through a dozen screens, adding to his basket a shirt, combats, new shoes, a silver Omega, a black G-Shock and hair clippers, along with a choice of complimentary medical kit that came free because he'd racked up more than $2500. He chose number three, which claimed it was for essential in tropical emergencies and came with malaria patches, surgical glue, unbreakable condoms and a generalized snake-venom antidote.
When the screen asked for payment ZeeZee fed it the number on his new card and in reply got a smiling cartoon valet who assured him all the goods would be delivered within five minutes.
Halfway across the Atlantic, ZeeZee turned up the screen again and found a local Seattle newsfeed. Any reference to his own escape had been relegated to non-news by the murder in Kabul of the mujahadeen general Sheikh el-Halana.
ZeeZee knew all about Sheikh el-Halana: the whole world knew. Two weeks back, fundamentalists had bombed the Ottoman consulate in Seattle, killing thirty-five and destroying the consulate, its computers, its listening centre and most of its records. The FBI had spent twelve days saying nothing, then announced there was little likelihood of getting enough evidence to convict. And now, two days after that announcement, the man widely suspected of being behind the bombing was dead.