The woman met her gaze with a stony face for a few seconds, then sighed. “I may have one similar.” She turned and went through a white door in the rear wall. Cat felt her unlock it with a command, but she was concentrating too hard on the other customer’s buffered payment transaction to pay close attention. The data was huge and heavily encrypted. It felt like trying to remember an encyclopedia, just holding it in her head. A few seconds later, the jeweler came out holding a black box.
“I’ll take it,” Cat said, before the woman even had a chance to open it.
“But don’t you want-”
“Look, I am late for my hair appointment. Just let me pay for it.” Cat tried to compose her face in a semblance of haughtiness, with no idea if she was succeeding. She had to get out of here before she dropped packets or someone noticed the robot was dead.
The woman frowned. “Fine, come with me.”
They walked toward the payment console in the mid-point of the long counter, the jeweler on one side, Cat on the other. Cat felt her temples beginning to pound, and a sheen of sweat broke out on her face from the effort of concentrating on the long data stream. The woman started the process of wrapping the box. “Please pay,” she said, as she initiated the transaction on the console.
Cat felt for the time signal, and interrupted it, substituting her own false time data. The payment console probed her ID, and Cat faltered. In the convenience stores she’d robbed, there had never been an ID exchange, just the payment data. She had to think of something quick. Cat reached out into the street, looking for a person with an open implant. The payment console was pinging her again. She grabbed an ID off someone on the sidewalk, realized it was a man, and then reached again, getting a female one. She provided the credentials to the console, just before the request timed out again.
Then the machine requested payment. This part was easier. Cat made micro-adjustments to the time signal, getting it to align perfectly, and replayed the buffered transaction. The console accepted the payment, and Cat allowed herself to take a breath. The jeweler held out a white bag that rippled like liquid porcelain. Suddenly her eyes went big. “But you have paid too much,” she said with alarm.
“That’s a tip for you,” Cat said and grabbed the bag out of the woman’s hand. “Thank you.” She sailed out of the door just as a man came in. He moved sideways to hold the door open for her, and bumped into the security bot. “Thanks,” Cat said. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the dead security bot begin to tumble over, crashing into the ground with an impossibly loud thud that shook the store windows. She forced herself to keep going at a steady pace and not look back, even as a commotion started to break out behind her.
Two avenues over she hopped on a street car, took it fifteen blocks, then walked down an alley and grabbed the next bike cab she saw. She had the biker drop her off two blocks from the subway, and took it to the stop nearest her hotel. She was dying to look in the bag, but she’d wait until she got inside her room. Walking the last block, she was suddenly conscious of the rippling liquid porcelain bag: it screamed money. She turned sideways into a space between a Chinese laundry and a ramen noodle joint. She found a cheap plastic bag in a dumpster, and exchanged it for the expensive one. She threw the jewelry store bag into a pile of yesterday’s noodles. She paused, salivating from the smell. God, she was hungry. She wasn’t above eating from a dumpster if she had to, but preferably not food that had been sitting out all night, probably already visited by rats. She turned her back on the noodles and continued on to her building.
Inside her room, she ripped the box out of the bag. She sat on the bed and carefully pried the black polycarb box open.
“Holy shit,” she said out loud. “Oh my God!” She pulled the necklace out of its velvet backing. It lay heavy against her hand, a solid rope of maybe thirty diamonds held together with white gold or platinum. She had no idea what it was worth, but she was pretty sure she wouldn’t be dumpster diving ever again.
She fell into the bed, cradling the necklace and laughing in relief.
16
“It’s time to call the boss,” Slim said.
Tony looked up from where he sat on the bed, the backlight from the video game he cradled in his hands turning his face blue. “You do it. I don’t like talking to him.”
“That’s not the protocol. We call him together or he’s gonna suspect something, and then he might decide he doesn’t need either one of us.”
Tony sighed and put the game in his pocket. “I’m not doing that again, I will not kill a bunch of people like that.” Tony felt bile rise up at the thought of what they’d done. One goddamn hit and run when he was eighteen, and look what his life had turned into. Everything could have been different.
Slim walked up to Tony and stood in his face. “That’s what we do. We kill people for Adam, and he protects us and pays us. Or do you want to go back peddling heroin and motorcycle parts and living off our bikes?” Slim smoothed his dress shirt and suit jacket. “Look, we’re respectable now.”
Tony stood up, his six-foot-four-inch frame towering over Slim. “I was OK with the memory extractions.” He rubbed his forehead. “But that thing with the enforcement team, that was wrong.”
Slim glanced at his handheld computer. “Look, we’re going to miss the window in the firewall.” He jabbed at the computer with scarred fingers. The screen flashed “Initiating Connection,” and Slim lay the computer down on the dresser where it could see them both.
The pocket computer scanned them, saw they didn’t have implants, and projected a virtual screen onto the wall. An image of a blocky ivory-colored battle bot appeared, fluid metal rippling smoothly over its joints.
“Report,” the robot said.
Tony scooted sideways on the bed until Slim was closer to the camera. Slim look at Tony with disgust, then turned to the screen. “We found the enforcement team. They were exactly where you said they’d be.”
“And?” The robot’s face rippled and looked hungry.
“We used the emitter and knocked them all out, right in the hotel. But the memory extraction didn’t work. They must’ve had encrypted implants. We killed some and let the rest watch, still nothing. So we tortured the last few, including Sonja, but none of them said a thing.” Slim shook his head. “There was something about those people.”
Adam rippled on the screen, making Tony nervous. It was obvious he was disappointed. “Never mind them. I have a different project for you.”
Tony relaxed just a bit. Adam wasn’t going to kill them.
“There’s someone in Los Angeles I want you to find, a girl named Catherine Matthews.” Adam displayed a photo. “She’s doing something to the net, manipulating it in ways I don’t understand.”
“Where does she live?” Slim asked.
“Unknown. She’s the primary subject of a police investigation into three murders. She left Portland twenty-four days ago, spent two weeks in San Francisco, and is now in LA.”
“What do we do when we find her?”
“Call me for backup. I’ll send a team to extract her.”
“She’s just a girl, boss. We can take her.”
Adam switched to another photograph, this one of four people. Slim looked closer. Three were being zipped into body bags, and the last had a broken leg. “OK, she’s dangerous, but we can handle dangerous. We just took care of that enforcement team, right?”
Adam reappeared and glared at Slim, liquid metal flowing around his face in terrible ways. “You will notify me. Do not attempt to capture the girl on your own, and whatever you do, don’t use the memory extraction machine on her. I am leaving a port open for you around the clock in the firewall. Find her, call me, and the extraction team will be there in an hour.”