Nightside City

Chapter Seven

BIG JIM'S DAMN SPY-EYE WAS WAITING OUTSIDE; I DON'T know whether it had been there all along and I hadn't noticed when I came in with Cheng, or whether it had left and come back, but it was there now. I did my best to ignore it.

It didn't say anything; it just watched and followed as I marched down the block.

I was trying to think if there was anywhere else I should go while I was in the Trap, any business to attend to or old friend I should look up, and by the time I reached Fourth I had decided there wasn't. Nobody had looked me up out on Juarez, after all, and I do my business over the com, for the most part. I tapped my wrist and said, "Cab, please."

The transceiver beeped an acknowledgment. Simple-minded gadget; I couldn't afford a good implant. I mentioned that, didn't I, that I'd hocked my wrist terminal? All I had was the implanted transceiver. I think it knew maybe twenty commands, and it couldn't talk at all, just beep. It had its uses, though.

"Going somewhere?" the spy-eye asked.

"Wait and see," I said, without looking up.

Then I changed my mind and I did look up-not at the spy-eye, but at the maze of advertising overhead. Directly above me a woman was lifting her skirt enticingly while Stardust sparkled gold around her; I listened and heard a throaty murmur but couldn't catch the words-if there actually were any. Floaters drifted through her thighs.

Nearby, laser lines flickered in abstract patterns that coalesced every so often into piles of chips. Above the New York an ancient skyline was etched in black and yellow, and floaters cruised its miniature rooftops like tiny cabs.

A carful of tourists cruised overhead, faces pressed against the transparent sides, and I heard the droning of the tourguide blossom, then fade.

A diamond of four red crystal advertisers had spotted me and was circling in, as if in a decaying orbit around my head, waiting to see if I would give them any cue, any clue to my intentions. A gleaming silver-blue messenger buzzed past them, close enough to shatter their formation.

Behind it all the sky was weirdly blue, deep blue streaked with reddish brown, and all but the brightest stars were lost in the light.

I looked for a hint amid the lights and images, a hint as to what anybody wanted with the West End, and how this Orchid was involved, and how the New York tied in, but it was all just the same old siren song. Nobody was advertising sunrise tours or anything else that hadn't been advertised all my life.

Of course, this one street was hardly the entire Trap, let alone the whole city, and advertising was carried by a hundred other media as well as the city's skies.

The cab, gleaming yellow, cruised in to a silent landing at my feet, and the door slid aside.

This one was far from new; the upholstery showed wear and the seat's shaping mechanism whirred as it worked. It was still a Hyundai, of course. Not Q.Q.T., though-Midnight Cab and Limo. Not that it mattered; I was just hypersensitive because of my conversation with the new one from Q.Q.T.

"Where to, Mis'?" it asked.

I gave my address and settled back.

The crystal advertisers surrounded the cab, singing antiphonal praise for some new pleasure shop, but I didn't care; it was easier to ignore them than to ask the cab to lose them, as I actually had something to think about.

Several things, really.

Big Jim Mishima was still carrying a grudge; that was bad news. I glanced out the back, and there was the spy-eye, hanging right on the cab's tail, close below the trailing advertiser.

Westwall Redevelopment was extraordinarily secretive and employed people that the ever-respectable Mariko Cheng called "scum." That might or might not be bad news, but at least it was news.

Paul Orchid-that name seemed ever so slightly familiar. A wire-faced slick-hair, Cheng had called him.

Zar Pickens had said that the new rent collector was a slick-hair, but that didn't mean much; you'll always find faddies around, whatever the current bug is, and slick hair had been hot among the city's faddies for months. Pickens hadn't said anything about a wire job, but still, Orchid might be the rent collector. If not, then maybe Westwall had a thing about slick hair.

My own hair's always been strictly natural finish, but that's more for lack of funds than anything else. I wondered who made the best hair slickers, and whether they had any connection with Nakada Enterprises.

I caught myself. That, I told myself, was going off on a random vector. I might throw the question at the com when I had time, but it wasn't worth my own mental electricity.

Something flashed white overhead; I looked up, too late to tell if it was an exploding meteor or some sort of floater or some idiot hot pilot buzzing the city on his way into port. Another advertiser cruised up, saw the direction of my gaze, and projected a little phallic imagery above the cab as an attention-getter.

I'd seen enough of that back at the Manhattan Lounge; I leaned back and closed my eyes and stayed that way until the cab announced, "Your destination, Mis'."

"Thanks." I slid my card in the reader, and when the fare registered I pulled it back out and put it away. This cab didn't give any hints about tips-it just opened the door, and I stepped out into the wind, right on my doorstep.

The door recognized me and opened, and I went on up to my office. When I got there I saw Mishima's spy-eye doing a silent hover outside my window; I bared my teeth at it, gave it the three-finger curse again, debated making a privacy complaint, then shrugged, sat down at my desk, and looked at the screen.

Nothing had changed. No mysterious stranger had zipped me the fare to Prometheus. No messages had registered at all.

I hadn't expected any, of course, unless Mishima had decided to make some clever comment.

I hadn't expected the damn spy-eye to stick with me, either; it had said I wasn't welcome in the Trap, but I wasn't in the Trap anymore, I was back in the burbs. So what the hell was it doing hanging outside my window?

I turned my chair to face it. "Hey, you hear me?"

"Yeah, Hsing, I hear you," it said, over a chat frequency that I heard by wire instead of ear-it knew my hearing wasn't as good as its own, and with that window between us I needed the help. I had the standard emergency receivers in my head, of course, even if I couldn't afford a decent wrist unit.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" I asked.

"Just keeping an eye out," it said.

"Spying on me, you mean."

"Hey, it's my job," it said, but the phrase didn't sound right in the eye's flat machine tone. "I can't help it," it said.

"I thought you were only going to watch me while I was in the Trap," I argued. "Out here isn't Big Jim's turf, it's mine."

"I got a change of orders," it said. "I'm supposed to stick with you until I find out what you were doing in the Trap in the first place."

"You're breaking the privacy laws," I pointed out.

"No, I'm not, because I'm not a legal person; I have no free will. My boss is breaking the law."

"Well, somebody is, and we can't have that, can we?" I blacked the window and turned on the full-spectrum shielding.

I waited a moment, then opened a peephole.

The spy-eye was still there, not doing anything, just hanging outside my window, waiting.

Mishima owed me for this, I decided, but this wasn't the time to worry about it. I'd take one problem at a time, and right now my problem was the West End.

I typed Paul Orchid's name into my personal search-and-retrieval net and got back a file headed "Paul (Paulie) Orchid."

That beeped something somewhere, and I remembered him. I never heard him called just Paul, but Paulie Orchid I had encountered before. I hadn't paid much attention, never checked his background. He was your standard small operator who thinks he's going to be big someday, but who never makes it. A couple of years back I'd brushed up against him two, maybe three times, but never met him in person. I had no real gripes about him. The times I'd called him he'd had nothing to tell me except a come-on, but I never found any reason to think he'd held out. He just hadn't been involved.

This time he was involved.

I checked his address-the current one was better than I'd have expected, a tower apartment on Fifth. A crosscheck on the address told me he had a roommate by the name of Beauregard Rigmus, known as Bobo; I'd never head of Rigmus before, and I was a bit surprised to see a male name there. I'd have expected Orchid to have a woman; he'd made it obvious enough that his tastes ran in that direction. Even if this Rigmus weren't a lover, he might get in the way of overnight guests. Unless Orchid and Rigmus shared, which I suppose they might have. Or unless it was a bigger apartment than I thought.

I touched keys and put in a credit search, just a basic one to begin with. It bounced off a privacy request, a serious one-no information to be given out without documented consent.

I had another searcher on hand that carried a phony consent code-one that did extra stuff underneath while it was working, more than would be legal even if the consent were real. Like anything illegal it had risks, so I hadn't started out with it, but I tried it, with the more intrusive functions optioned back out.

It vanished. Completely. Nothing came through, legal or otherwise. I couldn't get the name of his bank, or his employer, or personal references. No data, period.

Not only that, the program disappeared on my end, as well; it just folded up and died, dropped out of the system as if it had never been there. I couldn't check for tampering, or whether anyone had seen it coming; it was just gone, and I didn't know who knew what.

I didn't like that at all. Whatever Orchid was up to, he didn't want anybody asking questions. I was pretty sure, from what I'd read and what I'd remembered, that he wasn't bright enough to have programmed that himself, so I figured he must have bought some serious security somewhere.

That brought some questions to mind. For example, where'd he get the juice? Orchid had always been smalltime.

And what was he doing that needed that sort of security?

What was I getting into?

Whatever it was, I was in, now. If someone had invited me back out again, I'd have given it serious thought- whichever way it went, bribes or threats, I'd have had an excuse to drop the whole case, and a bribe might have helped the credit balance. Even if I had decided to stick, at least I'd have had a chance at picking up a little more information from whatever approach was made.

I waited at the screen for a few minutes, but nothing came in. It occurred to me, waiting there, that I hadn't eaten lately, that my stomach was uncomfortably empty and it was a reasonable time for dinner, so I got myself some bargain-brand paté, the lousy stuff that Epimetheus grew. I couldn't afford imported food, and tailored paté was about all anyone ever grew on Epimetheus-that, and vat-culture tofu that was worse than the paté. They'd tried to make food out of the native pseudoplankton, but the biochemistry was all wrong, much too toxic to clean up economically, and they needed cheap food for the workers, so the bioengineers whipped up that paté. The stuff I ate was even cheaper than most and tasted like the inside of an old shoe, but it stayed down and kept me going. I ate it, and I waited, and nothing happened. I couldn't wait forever. I touched keys.

Going after Paulie Orchid didn't look like the fastest approach after all, and the way that searcher had vanished had me a bit edgy about it anyway, so I took another angle entirely, something I probably should have tried right off. I went after the money.

There's a nice thing about money-it leaves a trail. Always. Sometimes the trail's hidden pretty deep, but it's never gone completely. If you dug deep enough, you could probably trace every damn credit on Epimetheus back to old Earth, right back to the twenty-second, maybe the twenty-first century.

Before that there's too much data loss, and some people still used primitive money-nonelectronic, I mean-but who cares? I didn't need to go back two or three hundred years. I needed to go back six weeks.

It was simple enough. Those six corporations had all been keeping their business secret. Their nominal officers were almost all software, written for the purpose and with no history to trace; that was standard for dummy corporations, had been for centuries. They had no business addresses available; that wasn't unusual, either, for outfits that had no regular business. The names of their stockholders were not available to the public-again, no surprise. I couldn't get at them through people or places, unless I went after Paulie Orchid.

But they had paid out money for property. That meant that money had come in from somewhere. If I traced the money back, I might learn something.

So I touched keys and plugged in to keep a closer-than-screen watch on developments, but I didn't ride wire. I kept my eyes open and functioning, just taking the data as data.

I picked a transaction at random, Nightside Estates buying a foreclosure from First Bank of Eta Cassiopeia, and went after it.

I opened an account at First Cass, bought a share of their stock, and then applied for an audit of operations for a "random" date as a check to protect my investment. I had a file that did this stuff automatically and gave all the right answers to the queries, and meanwhile I did a little illegal maneuvering to intercept queries going elsewhere and feed back the right answers to those. In about twenty minutes I had an account number for Nightside Estates at Epimethean Commerce.

That was interesting, since I knew that ECB hadn't handled their sale as an in-house funds transfer. That meant the accounts for the dummy corporations were scattered.

Once you've got an account number these things are easier; it took only ten minutes to break into the account records at ECB. Of course, it was completely illegal, where my maneuver at First Cass had only been a matter of expediting a process.

Most bank data security is pitiful; they do so damn many out-of-house transactions that there are always a dozen routes in.

Besides, there are a dozen different legitimate reasons to get at information-bankruptcy proceedings, lawsuits, whatever-so they don't bother with high security.

Of course, that's only true for information; try and touch any of that money without human authorization, and they'll get tough.

I got the account records, though. Nightside Estates had an inactive account-net balance of zero. The account had existed for thirty-two days; there had been three deposits and three withdrawals, in matching amounts. In short, somebody had put money in the account a couple of hours before beginning each real estate purchase, just enough each time to cover the entire transaction, from escrow deposit to deed registration.

The question was, Where had the deposits come from?

This was getting trickier; I thought I sensed some of the bank software watching me, and the security stuff I had evaded wouldn't play dumb forever, but I kept digging.

The third deposit had come from Paulie Orchid's personal account at First Cass; that was interesting, but not very helpful unless I went after him, after all. I noted his account number into my own com, then went on.

The other two deposits came from a number-only account at Nightside Bank and Trust.

I noted that, too, then pulled out quick.

I waited a minute for the system to clear itself and any pursuit to have its chance, and then went in, on wire this time-number-only accounts are usually a high-security item.

I knew I couldn't get a name; that would be in files too secret and too well-guarded for me to crack without a lot of work and risk. It's also what most people would go after, so the security programs watch for it. I was subtler than that-nothing too tricky, but a little less obvious. I went through the records of statements transmitted, trying to find an address that had accepted a statement from the account I was after.

I found one, too-a com address, not a street. I unplugged, fed that com address back into the system for a little research, and was able to give it a street address.

At that point I figured I might need to go out and do a little fieldwork, because usually, from what I had, you can't get an exact room or apartment without getting into the building, but I was wrong. The street address was a house-a single-family dwelling in the East End.

I couldn't put a name to it from any directory-full privacy on everything. Whoever this was, he or she wasn't making it easy. I ran it through the tax records office, though, and finally got a name.

The name was Sayuri Nakada.

I looked at that for a long, long moment, acutely aware of the spy-eye hanging around outside; I hoped nobody had a new way of cracking a window shield that I hadn't heard about yet. If I was going to be dealing with Sayuri Nakada, I didn't want it on public access.

I mentioned Nakada earlier when I was talking about the New York, of course, but I hadn't really expected the trail to lead right to her. Even if you'd never heard of the New York, the name Nakada ought to get a beep out of the system, and Sayuri was the only Nakada in the city. She was the family's representative on Epimetheus, overseeing everything they did on the planet. She hadn't been around all that long, but she was definitely an established part of Nightside City's elite.

I knew who was buying the West End, it seemed. That explained the connection with the New York, anyway.

What it didn't explain was what the hell she wanted with the West End. I knew who; I didn't know why.

More than anything, I needed to know why.