Night's Pawn (4 page)

Chase watched the pair until they hung south on Tenth Avenue. The brunette gave him another half-glance as they turned. He waited a few moments for his pulse to come down enough to catch his breath. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Sighing, he turned and crossed the street, hoping to put distance between him and them. The last thing he needed was involvement in some incident in Terminal. He was carrying the wrong IDs for such troubles.

Not that he didn't deserve them, he thought. He'd spent too long wearing dark suits in the middle of the desert. The corporate liaison life had fogged his brain. Maybe there was still some nerve gas left in Tel Aviv and he'd gotten a lungful. His mental flagellation complete, he decided to frag security and get a drink.

At this late hour of the afternoon, the check zone between Terminal and the Lower Westside was calm and quiet, letting him breeze through easily on his resident pass. He moved angrily, making the street-sellers bypass him for more hospitable-looking marks. He crossed Eighth and went underground, grabbing an "A" Express toward downtown. The evening work cycle was just beginning and the rush-hour migration begun. He hopped out at East Fourteenth and hiked the rest of the way.

It had been nearly six months, but he was sure his destination would be exactly where he'd last seen it. All kinds of troubles had failed to move it for all these years, and he couldn't think of much that could. The alley looked about as he remembered, except for a couple of newcomer cats rousting some rats near a pile of fiber cases. They watched him scornfully as he passed. Brave souls.

A fresh piece of scrawl gleamed at him from the loading dock, something in German about causes, effects, and sexual organs. Policlub stuff, no doubt; it was tough to avoid the drek.

The stairs next to the dock were as trash-strewn as ever, but there seemed to be no new stains. He stood at the bottom, for the thousandth time reading the No Entrance sign on the steel door. After a moment a cheap, weather-beaten speaker tacked onto the door frame squawked, "What?" Chase knew the voice to be much deeper than the speaker allowed.

"Open the door. I gotta take a piss."

The speaker gave a distorted chuckle that sounded more like a bark, then Chase heard the electronic locks slip aside. The door had only just begun to swing open before he'd slipped inside. His low-light optical system kicked in as he entered the darkness and patted the arm of the man who'd let him in. "William,
mi amigo
, you look like hell."

The ork smiled, a sharp, gap-toothed monstrosity that forty years ago would only have been possible in fairy tales. "It's what I get paid for."

Chase tapped the ork hard on the shoulder, and knocked him back a half step. William chuckled. "You're a nasty critter for an old man, Church."

Chase shrugged expressively and continued on. Drek, he thought. He'd forgotten that around here they knew him as Church. Too many places, too many names.

The ork called after him. "Teek already knows you're here, so don't try sneaking up on him."

The short corridor led him to the slightly raised area that bordered half the place. There was really only one room, but it had been divided up with partitions and sound-dampening wall sections. If customers wished, they could sit in the main area near a stage that occasionally presented live acts, but more often displayed cheap, sixty-four color holograms of some exotic dancer. The more select could pick the raised area or else a sectioned-off area where they might pass the time. Without fail, midnight or midday, there were always people there. It was a biz club, which meant that anyone present was quite obviously in the biz. Chase wasn't in that line of work anymore, but came anyway.

In the last few years, Manhattan had become the place around which Jason Chase revolved, the site of his brightest as well as darkest days. Those who knew him, and who he really was, tried to get him to be anywhere else but Manhattan, but the memories didn't care where he was standing.

Teek's was neutral ground, a place that didn't connect with anything on either end of the scale. Chase came there for the atmosphere, the sixty-four color women, and Teek.

"Well, jack me into a light socket, his holiness is among the blasphemous," came Teek's voice suddenly.

Chase had been heading toward the bar, and turned as the owner of the voice approached, hands thrust into the pockets of his Indian-weave cardigan, a wide smile on his face. Teek was moving away from a group of sharp-suited Japacorp types who seemed somewhat displeased at the interruption. Chase felt no pity for them.

"Damn right, and I've got a pocket full of absolutions hot off the presses. Figured you might be needing a couple by now."

Chase let Teek pass, then followed him to the bar. He seemed shorter, maybe more stooped, maybe a little more shuffling. Things had happened. Chase suddenly thought that maybe he should have made some calls first.

"So," said Teek as he stepped up behind the polished, genuine mahogany bar and began to pull out glasses and bottles. The usual bartender, a moderately cute girl named Shawna, gave Chase a quick wave from the other end of the bar. He returned it with a smile. Teek rarely worked the bar anymore, but when he did the staff knew to give him wide berth. "That's quite a tan you've got there."

"Been doing some business under the sun," said Chase. "Putting my language talents to good use."

Teek swept the room with his gaze, let it light briefly on a couple of patrons, then glanced back at Chase. "Just talking? That seems so unlike you."

Chase laughed. "Hey,
amigo
, I was slow and old ten years ago. I've got tech in me older than the geniuses who are designing the latest stuff." He grinned. "I'll tell ya, it's certainly a pleasure to know that I can spend my golden years working off the bennies of my reputation."

"Golden years, huh? You're barely middle-aged."

Chase laughed ruefully. "If I were still working they'd be referring to me as 'venerable' or some other drek." He shook his head. "Not for me. I walked while I could."

Teek smiled. "How long you in town this time?"

Chase gave a careless shrug in reply, watching Teek mix up a couple of drinks, their usuals. He was surprised to see the older man's Special Forces ring back in its old place on his right hand. Sometimes he wore it, but more often he did not. Chase knew the feeling, but his own ring had been sitting at the bottom of the Black Sea for twenty years. "There's nothing in the works right now, plus I seem in dire need of a rest."

Teek's eyebrow raised. "Oh?" Half a lemon liquefied in his hands and splashed into one of the glasses.

"I'm not in Terminal cinco minutos when I almost get thrashed by a pair of thrill gals. The blonde was a pro, but I think the brunette was new."

Teek's eyebrow dropped and a grin began. "A pair, eh? Blonde and brunette? Blonde's got a light purple undertint and favors short skirts, usually black, Aztlan style? Brunette's close-cropped, Euro-style, likes red, sometimes black too?"

"You know them?"

Teek shrugged. "Semi-professionally only. A few months back they used to come in here and work some of the rear booths. When I came back I asked them to stop. Didn't want the wire." He finished mixing Chase's drink and slid it over.

"I'm sorry," Chase said after a moment.

Teek looked full at him, maybe for the first time since the other man had arrived. "You hadn't heard? I just assumed you had."

"No, I hadn't. When was it?"

"Four months ago. I took a month off, wandered around a bit to work out the cold. It wasn't unexpected. The drugs finally stopped helping, and he was dead within days. Just like the doctors said."

"If I'd known, I'd have come back for the services. Marko was a good man. I'll miss him."

Teek nodded. "I know, but there was no service, really. I was afraid of who'd come. Too many old ghosts."

"I understand."

Teek almost smiled. "Yeah, I'll bet you do." He finished making up his own drink and took a long sip. Chase let him savor it before changing the subject.

"So why'd you throw the girls out? I don't remember you being that morally discerning before. Though I guess with that pair…"

"No, those two aren't dangerous that way. They're loopers."

"Loopers?"

"Sim looping." Teek read the blank stare in Chase's face and laughed. "You have been away." He finished his drink and started another. "They've got a three-way hookup or some such rig. The two of them and their client rig up and sense-tap each other doing whatever they feel like doing at the time."

"You've got to be kidding. What the hell does that kind of hardware cost?"

"Not anywhere near as much as a few months ago. From what I understand they've got a basic portable sensory recording deck that's been rigged to route the sense signal to another unit instead of recording it. Instant feedback. Since the link is two-way I imagine it can lead to an escalating loop that builds until the circuit breakers trip. Aficionados call it 'shooting the hoop' or something."

"Is it illegal?"

Teek shrugged. "Not yet, too fresh. The signal the portable equipment handles is pretty crude, well within legal levels. There've been no direct psychological effects that I know of, but…"

"You suspect otherwise."

He shrugged again and looked off toward the back of the bar. "I've had enough of twisted realities myself, thank you very much. I know what that stuff can do the gear's hot enough. There's a new batch of psycho-traumatic sense chips hitting the market every week. I understand Knight Errant recently grabbed up a bunch that have a behavior-modifying secondary signal. Anarchist Euro-policlub drek, but strong enough to make an impact on some."

"Great."

"Figures we'd start importing the crazy stuff. Couldn't bring over the British sewing circles or beer-chuggers. No, this is America. Gotta have the radicals."

Chase shook his head. Teek was treading on dangerous memories. "Bomb the lot, I say. See how
they
like it."

Teek looked at him for a moment, then smiled lightly. "So speaks the voice of experience."

Chase shrugged and looked at his friend. "You play the game, you live by the rules."

3

A week passed easily.

His apartment was as he'd left it, the little he had still intact. The Home Secretary expert-system had done its job of answering electronic mail and paying bills, but sometime over the last few months the ventilation system had decided to back up, throwing a pall of dust over nearly everything. He surprised the building management company with a quick call and got a promise that they'd clean the place up the next day.

They did, and he spent that day and the next, and the one after that, just knocking around. He fired up the brewkaf machine and sampled the diverse selection of coffees he'd forgotten the cupboards contained. He laughed often at the easy banality of his life.

Three days back, and his Vienna contact forwarded a couple of job offers through a blind route. Each offer came tagged for the name they knew him by, and got routed by the private, secure systems of the Vienna data haven to similar systems in Denver. From Denver it bounced to Manhattan via a protected mail-forwarding system in Boston. It was safe, but not foolproof. If someone wanted Chase bad enough they could track it all, but there were enough safeties along the route that he'd probably know they were coming. He planned to live his life very pleasantly and with the only risk of surprise visitors being the roaches that occasionally made the trek up from downstairs.

On the fourth day, Teek called.

"I thought you'd want to know that someone's been looking for you," he said, his face looming six times its normal size on the telecom screen.

Chase sat up. "Oh?"

"I wasn't here. Nick was working the door—you haven't met him—but he told me when I came in."

"Nick, whom I do not know, knew my name well enough to tell you someone had been looking for me?"

Teek laughed. "One of my employment criteria is the ability to memorize lists of names. People I keep track of."

"Great."

"Nick thinks she was a streeter, or close to it. She asked if he'd seen you lately, and he said no, never having had."

"Good," Chase said.