Nosferatu

27

The cab carrying Serrin and Tom curb-crawled Grenzs-trasse twice before Gunther chose to reveal himself, motioning for them to get out of the auto. They paid the driver, pulled up the collars of their coats, and stepped out onto the sidewalk. Serrin didn't like the weight and feel of the credsticks in his pockets, and he was desperate to hear from Kristen about how Michael was doing.

"Your friends are a bit thin on the ground, man," the ork said to Tom as he led them across the street.

"One of them just got hit in the back after buying weapons for you guys if you're taking the job," Tom replied. "He's in intensive."

"You bulldrekkin' me?"

"Sure. I come here with tens in sticks and bills and we're bulldrekking you. We even shot up our own man, right? You want us to take you to the hospital so you can see for yourself?" Serrin snapped angrily.

"All right, all right," Gunther said. He ducked into a back alley and motioned them to follow as he rapped on a slogan-splashed door. It opened and he disappeared into the gloomy interior.

Following him in, Serrin wished that orks were more prone to using deodorant. The six samurai and the woman, the Cat shaman Tom had mentioned, were waiting with a variety of unimpressive pistols leveled at them as they entered. Their dirty jeans and frayed jackets confirmed for the eyes that they gave jack squat about personal hygiene.

"Now you tell us everything," the shamam said. "You lie and I'll know it. You're masking," she said to Serrin,

"that might cover you. But I can read him just fine. Now give it all to me."

"Two things first," Serrin surrendered, knowing he really didn't have much choice. "One, we had a friend shot up real bad about thirty minutes ago and I need to make a call to find out how he is. You can enter the code, verify that it's legit. Second, well…" He paused and ran his fingers through his hair. "This is going to be one long crazy story. You probably won't believe half of it. All I can say is that we can pay you a hell of a lot of money to come with us and scan it for yourselves. Meaning you," he said, meeting the shaman's intense gaze. "You can assense the place when we get there. It's just outside Regensburg. We want to make the hit at dawn."

"That can be done if we start out before midnight," the shaman said casually, turning to Tom. "We've got time to hear you out. Now talk, troll, and make it good."

"You can only see him for a minute," the nurse told her. "He's asleep now, resting. He's very poorly still. Please try not to disturb him." She scowled suspiciously at the marriage registration. This scrap of a girl certainly didn't look like a suitable match for the wealthy man who'd purchased the best coverage money could buy. His clothes, and the money inside them, didn't speak of someone likely to marry this African waif. But the girl had the ID and the doctor had agreed to let her see the man.

Kristen was scared. The police had spoken to her only briefly here at the hospital, but they were obviously puzzled that Michael had not been robbed, which eliminated the obvious motive for the crime. She hoped desperately they weren't going to tail her when she left.

"How is he? Is he going to be all right?" she ventured.

"Doctor Kohler can tell you that. He'll talk to you afterward." The nurse ushered Kristen into the room. "Take care not to disturb him. He needs to rest."

Michael's appearance was shocking, even though she was glad to see he was alive at all. Tubes were sticking out of his nostrils and arm, with a drip rig and the electronic technology of intensive care providing the usual dehumanizing stage for the patient. His body was wreathed in a semi-transparent plastic cocoon, a light pink fluid filtering through it. She thought she could see a couple of places where it was hooked into him, processing body fluids, oxygenating him, calibrating the serum levels of painkillers and keeping the level constant, though of course Kristen had never seen anything even remotely like this before and had no idea exactly what it

did.

His eyes opened. She couldn't hold his hand, sealed away from her as it was. She kissed him on the forehead and brushed away the hair stuck damply to his brow.

"Hi," he said, his voice little more than a croak as she lowered her ear to his mouth to hear. "Listen, it's vital. Record it." She dug into her bag for the little portable disc player and recorder that he'd bought her. A ghost of a grin passed over his face at the sight of it.

Then Michael told her when to expect the call and told her Walter's name. "Serrin take all the money to the samurai?" he managed to ask. She told him no, most of it was still there.

"If Serrin can't call himself, you'll have to make the meet. Take the marriage ID." Another painful smile played over his lips. "You know where the money is?" She nodded and told him to be quiet, to rest now. The nurse was hovering in the doorway.

"Hey, kid, if I die you're going to be a wealthy woman," he said, and coughed.

"Don't you dare say that!" She wanted so much to hug him, to throw her arms around him and make everything right. But the most she could do was touch his lips with her fingertips before the nurse ordered her to go.

Kristen stood alone in the corridor outside, smelling the eternal disinfectant reek of the hospital all around her, holding on to her bag, refusing to cry.

"Frau Sutherland?" She turned to look at the doctor; a dapper man with a fashionable haircut and something that in a different age might have been a dueling scar on his right cheek. Not on the chin, she was glad to see, remembering Serrin's description of the man who had tried to kidnap him. He looked like the kind of doctor who probably paid more attention to pretty young nurses than to patients.

"How is he? What's going to happen?" she blurted, feeling so helpless.

"He is stable, Frau Sutherland, that much I can say. Your husband's injuries are not fatal unless there are unforeseen complications. He will undergo exploratory surgery tomorrow and we have a trace on a donor for a kidney transplant. The spleen damage is more serious, but his insurance covers a prosthetic implant that should fulfill almost all the functions of that organ."

Kohler looked very pleased with himself, but only for a moment. "Unfortunately, we aren't sure whether he's taken spinal damage. Fragments of the bullet have lodged very close to the spine. Some we may not be able to remove even with microsurgery because it's simply too dangerous. We won't know until after the surgery tomorrow morning."

"Will he be " She didn't want to say the words. Paralyzed. Crippled. Confined to a wheelchair.

"As I said, we won't know anything until tomorrow and perhaps not for another twenty-four hours after that while we wait for the results of the diagnostic tests. If you wish to remain here in the hospital overnight, we have facilities. The insurance covers it."

"I can't," she blurted out and saw his shocked reaction. "I mean, Michael was going to meet someone um, family relations. I will have to tell them. And there are friends."

"Of course," Kohler said, his voice expressing as much disapproval as his expression. "We have the number of your hotel. We'll call if there's any change." He gave her directions to the exit.

Passing under a clock in the lobby, Kristen looked up to see that it read 19:40. All she could do now was hope desperately that Serrin would call back to the hotel in the next two hours.

"No details on Mr. Sutherland are publicly available," the robotic voice informed him from the telecom. "Infor" Spirits, I'm his best friend. I only want to know if he's alive or dead, dammit," Serrin yelled, then forced himself to calm down. "His, er, wife was intending to visit him. Can I speak to her?"

"I cannot confirm or deny that any of Mr. Sutherland's relatives have or have not been in attendance on him at this time," the voice droned back. "Thank you for your inquiry." With that, the connection broke.

"I can't fraggin' believe it!" the elf shouted. "I mean, is there some special archipelago somewhere in the world where they breed people like that?"

"Kristen will be back at the hotel," Tom said calmly. "Call her there."

"No more calls." The shaman, who'd given her name as Mathilde by now, was adamant. She took the portaphone away from the elf before he could key in the hotel number.

"But, look, Michael was cutting a deal for weapons and armor. We've got to find out what he got," Serrin pleaded. "We may have to meet someone. A date he made and can't keep."

"Then you'll just have to make do with what we've got," Mathilde said emphatically. "And you've got a lot more convincing to do. So far, from what you've told me, you're in Cape Town because you've been scammed by a woman reporter in New York and then someone tried to kidnap you in Heidelberg. Now you run into some street girl thinks you're Darkvine or something just 'cause she's seen your face in the paper. Sounds like a crazy, bored fool running round the world chasing the shadow of his own butt to me."

Another hour, with the complete story, didn't change anything. The orks simply passed from skepticism to the borderlands of plain hostility. Serrin realized that he and Tom just didn't have any evidence. No hard facts. No proof.

"The bottom line," he said, "is that it's amp; " He paused for a few moments doing some mental arithmetic. Allow Michael a hundred for his deals. If it was more, Serrin could lay his hands on enough to make up the difference.

"It's a hundredThousand on tfte deatTArhundredThousand^

mation is never released except to immediate kin."

for you guys. That assumes a minimum of, say, fifteen samurai. And you, Mathilde. We got to have someone there to check it out and confirm it."

"A hundred thousand deutschmarks?" She was incredulous.

"A hundred thousand nuyen," he shot back. "Two hundred thousand deutschmarks."

"This guy can't be for real. That's the kind of money only a heavy-hitter would get for scragging half the Berlin Council. If anyone cared enough," Gunther said. "I'd kill for that much. Frag, I'd blow my own fraggin' head off for a hundred thousand."

"That's a flat payment. It buys us people willing to go all the way on this one. You know and I know that we could buy drek-hot mercenaries with that much. But they aren't what we need. We've got to stop this guy," Serrin pleaded.

"Oh, and you can keep everything and anything Michael might have bought. If his deal can't be cut and that'll be your fault we could go higher than a hundred grand. But then we'd want more bodies."

Mathilde was thinking hard. Serrin and Tom saw that the samurai looked to her for leadership. She was smaller, less tough, than any of them, but they seemed to follow her lead. Apart from Gunther, the others had barely even opened their mouths.

Tom got up to stretch his legs. The little chair was giving him a hard time.

"Mathilde, can I have a word with you? Privately, I mean," he said gently. He thought he heard the sound of a safety catch being released.

She looked at him and waved a dismissive hand to the samurai. "Sure. But no tricks. You hear any bad noises, boys, smoke him."

She led the troll into the front room of the rundown building. The ceiling had a gaping hole in it, and water trickled down from upstairs, dropping onto the floor from a light fixture with a carbonized bulb fused into it. Crouched slightly against the far wall in the fading light from outside, she waited for him to speak his piece. Mathilde really did look feline in the shadows.

"I know the story sounds crazy, but now you can get into my mind. I'd be surprised if you didn't see a mark on me," he said to her. She crouched a little further; he knew she'd registered whatever Shakala had laid on him.

"I'll try to relive it. Try to daydream it. Try to let you enter into it," he said. She nodded and waited. The troll sat on the wet floor and closed his eyes.

Anger started to rise in him as he pictured the way the Cheetah shaman had taunted him. He tried to vision it clearly, and then the memory of the cuts and wounds came back for real. He half-panicked as the anger rose, wondering whether his own imaginings were going to send him beserk. He forced his will down on the emotion, stifling it, but then it just took him over.

He was lying face down again, the cheetah ready to sever the vertebrae of his neck. But he let himself go totally empty, everything flooding out of him, leaving only calm and serenity. He saw himself talking to Shakala afterward, as if floating above and looking down at himself in conversation.

Then something new took over. He was standing at the site of the ruined, burned-out, defoliated research plant. The zombies shuffled up to him, arms outstretched, faces blank and agonized in the same paradoxial instant. As they approached, a wave of emotion rolled over him from the smoking buildings like a slow-motion tidal wave. Rooted to the spot, he couldn't turn and run.

Emanating from some kind of cold presence he couldn't identify came contempt, cold hatred, a bleak nihilism so engulfing that for a dreadful instant he thought he was going to die. What made it so awful was the absolute impersonality of it. It didn't give a speck of dust for him. It didn't even notice him. It just rolled on its way, bleaching and razing the life and soul out of anything in its path.

He vomited then, shaking in a cold sweat. He hugged himself, wrapping his arms desperately around his own chest, then forcing himself back against the wall to reassure himself that he was really in this room, that he could feel the dampness of the floor, that blood still flowed in his body, that he was still alive. Across the room,

Mathilda's face was a mask. She didn't move for a full minute while he continued to hug himself in an effort to control the violent shaking.

"You found something bad," she said, voice almost a whisper. "I'm not saying I believe the story. But I know you're for real. I think we can make a deal."

She got to her feet and came over to Tom, who wasn't able to get up. She opened the door and called in some of her orks.

"I think we got work tonight," she told them as they helped Tom to his feet, supporting him until he could stand on his own.

"Can I make that call now?" Serrin pleaded.

"Yes," Mathlilde agreed. "But keep it short."

Maybe he believed her and maybe he didn't. But talking by telecom let her actually show him the money.

"Okay, lady, maybe we can cut it. I heard about the shooting on the trid. Seventy-five was what we agreed," the man said. "He paid me thirty down, forty-five to come. I got the full inventory. Now, you want some basics to go with it. We're talking another deal here."

"Sure," she said. She'd planned this out, with nearly two hours to do it. All told, in money and credit there was a hundred and forty in Michael's room. Subtract the forty-five, allow an extra seventy for Serrin to pay the samurai, and that left only twenty-five thousand to spare. She'd spent a moment wondrously contemplating such a huge amount. A week ago, she'd never seen even a fraction of that in her whole life. Now she had to act like she handled such sums every day. But at least she knew the actual figure Michael had agreed to and that the dealer was lying about the price. He was squeezing an extra ten grand out of her, but she was keeping the knowledge as an ace up her sleeve.

"Run me through the full details of the inventory again," she said.

"My dear lady, is this some kind of trap? If it is

"Come on. you got your deposit, didn't you?" He looked mollified; her heart had begun to race the moment

it looked like he might call off the deal. She gulped down her relief.

She was amazed that she could remember so much from the small talk of the few samurai she'd met in Cape Town. Not that she'd ever have expected to put it to use like this.

"We'll need pistols and ammo, obviously. And full armor jackets," she said, waiting for his response, trying to sound as convincing as possible.

"I got Ares Viper Silver, madam," he grinned. "The very best. Only a thousand per a full clip."

"Discount for bulk."

"How much muscle are we talking about?" he shot back.

"Say fifteen," she said. Serrin and Michael had said they'd try for at least a dozen samurai. Just as well to add a few extra. Fifteen thousand she couldn't afford. She had to haggle him down.

"Thirteen."

"Twelve. Throw in four spare clips for each one and we'll call it thirteen."

"Four each? You're crazy, lady, that would be fifteen hundred alone."

"Thirteen five, max."

"Fourteen, lady. Maybe call it thirteen five if you want to be real nice to me when we meet? Depends how good you are," he leered. Kristen thought this slag didn't sound anything like the smooth operator Michael had described. The bastard thinks he can talk to me like that 'cause I'm black, or maybe 'cause I'm young, she thought. Or maybe he's just another woman-hater.

It's like being back home, she thought, repelled by the man's expression. She said she'd give him fourteen if he performed an anatomically impossible act she described in loving detail. He laughed.

"Lady, I like you. You got a good attitude. Let's say thirteen five for fifteen Ares Vipers with four spare clips apiece. Now, for the armor jackets amp; "

After the haggling was done, they fixed a meeting time of ten-fifteen. The problem was that Kristen was overdrawn, with a total bill of thirty grand. She couldn't get him down any lower.

"There's one last thing," she said. "You lied about the deal. It was sixty-five; thirty up front and thirty-five to come. You shouldn't make the mistake of underestimating someone just because of appearances."

The gulp was audible. She loved every instant of his pause for breath.

"Okay, lady. Apologies. Let's say I refund nine of the ten I bulled you about and keep one for the sake of my reputation. Now, where do we want this stuff delivered to?"

Frag it, she thought. I can hardly have a band of samurai wheeling in crates of grenades and ammo into the hotel lobby. What do I do? Only one idea came to her.

"The Meld In. That's where. Let's make it for ten-thirty. That gives me a little time to finalize all the details."

"You better be there, dear lady. That's sixty-six grand you owe me."

Kristen punched the Disconnect key and fumbled for one of Serrin's cigarettes from a new pack. I've got to get down to that place and find someone, she thought. Otherwise, I'll be alone, sitting on over a hundred thousand nuyen worth of heat.

Anyone with an eye to the main chance is going to slit my throat and take the whole slotting heap. Serrin, where are you?

She was out the door and into the elevator by the time the telecom began to beep. She never heard it.