The Spartacus File

Chapter Eight

“They've almost certainly got a car waiting out front,” Casper said, “and if they know what they're doing there's another in back. We go out the side.”

“But there isn't…” Mirim began, looking along the narrow ground-floor hallway.

“We make one,” Casper said, as he made a sudden whirling movement, bringing his foot around incredibly fast, kicking at an apartment door just below the doorknob.

Wood cracked, and the door burst open.

“How…” Mirim began.

“If they could do it to mine, I can do it to someone else's,” Casper explained, as he pulled her through a dingy living room.

The window was nailed shut, but Casper didn't worry about that; he used the butt of his newly-appropriated pistol to shatter the glass, then kicked out the screen. A moment later he had lowered Mirim to the alley below and jumped down after her.

“That way,” he said, pointing to the back of the building. “If they do have someone there, chances are he'll be expecting us less, and the alley's less exposed than the street.”

Mirim started to run: Casper caught her and held her back. “Not yet,” he said. “Just walk. Look as casual as you can. Look for other people; if we can get in a crowd somewhere we'll be safer.”

At the back of the building Casper steered Mirim down an alleyway along the back of the next building over; she didn't dare look at the parking lot at all, but he took a seemingly-casual glance.

The dark blue late-model car with the man behind the wheel was blatantly obvious to him. It was also clear that the man was watching the back door, and hadn't even noticed the man and woman slipping away down the side.

“Amateurs,” Casper muttered.

Mirim glanced at him, but kept walking without saying a word, and Casper flushed.

After all, he was an amateur-at best! A week before he hadn't even been that.

What the hell was going on? How had he learned all this stuff? Those videos didn't account for it-even the self-defense one hadn't covered the moves he had made, it didn't say anything about using guns, and he had acted without conscious thought, as if the result of long training.

And why had he downloaded those files in the first place?

And what was that he'd said about acquiring a target and squeezing?

He looked down at the gun in his hand. It felt right there, comfortable and familiar-but he'd never used a handgun in his life. He knew at a glance, though, that this was a Browning Hi-Power, a good, solid weapon, perhaps a bit old-fashioned, but still very effective.

To use it, or any handgun, you focused on the front sight, not the target. You squeezed the trigger, you didn't pull it or jerk it.

That hadn't been in the video. How did he know that? It was almost as if he'd been imprinted with the knowledge…?

“Damn,” he muttered to himself. Mirim glanced at him.

They'd reached the end of the alley; he turned, heading for the subway station.

“Where are we going?” Mirim asked, and Casper could hear a slight tremor in her voice-which was understandable, under the circumstances. A moment earlier he'd have been amazed at his own coolness under fire, but now he'd figured it out. Why hadn't he seen it sooner?

Only one explanation made sense.

“NeuroTalents,” he told her.

“What?”

“NeuroTalents,” he said. “They screwed up somehow-it's the only explanation.”

“Only explanation of what?”

“Of how I could do all that stuff,” he said. “Of how I know how to use this.” He hefted the pistol, then realized that he shouldn't be showing it in broad daylight, and tucked it into the waistband of his pants, under his shirt.

Mirim still looked puzzled, and he explained, “They must have screwed up my imprinting, when I went in to learn the new software,” he said. “I didn't learn it-I couldn't do a thing with it at work this morning. But I knew what to do when that man attacked us. And I knew what to do when some gangbangers tried to mug me last night.”

“ What? You were mugged? You didn't…”

“I wasn't mugged,” Casper corrected her. “I said they tried. I stopped them, same as I stopped those men back at my apartment.”

“Those men… Yeah, Casper, who were they?”

“I don't know,” he admitted. “I haven't figured that part out yet. But I must have learned this stuff at NeuroTalents.”

“NeuroTalents teaches people to fight? They have imprints for that?”

Casper shrugged. “They must,” he said, as he led the way down the steps into the subway.

As they waited on the platform, Mirim asked, “So what are you going to do at NeuroTalents?”

“I'll tell them they screwed up and that I want it fixed…” Casper began. His voice trailed off as realization sank in. He looked at Mirim and blinked.

“You can't undo an imprinting,” Mirim said. “It's like learning any other way-you can't unlearn something.”

“But I…” Casper hesitated.

He had signed the waiver; he couldn't sue NeuroTalents. The most he could do would be to demand that they give him the right neural imprint, on top of whatever this was they'd done to him-and what good would that do? Was Data Tracers going to take him back after that little farewell speech he'd made?

Somehow, he doubted it.

And something else occurred to him. There were people coming after him, trying to kill him.

Data Tracers wouldn't have done that; they'd have destroyed him financially and socially if they decided to seek revenge, they might have had him arrested, had his bank account confiscated, his net accounts shut down, his apartment “searched” to destroy all his belongings, rumors spread-but they wouldn't have sent gunmen to shoot him.

And they couldn't have acted so quickly, in any case.

The credit firm he was paying for his parents’ debts wouldn't want him dead; he couldn't pay any more if he were dead. He didn't have enough of an estate to be worth confiscating. Even if they already knew he'd lost his job, they'd want him to find another, they wouldn't kill him.

So someone else had sent those men. Not Data Tracers, and not Citizens’ Legal Credit.

And no one had ever had any reason to kill poor, inoffensive Casper Beech-until now.

The only thing different about him now, other than his lost job, was the imprint, so that had to be why they were after him. They must have caught the mistake at NeuroTalents.

So would NeuroTalents send gunmen after him?

Maybe they would-it didn't seem likely, but maybe they would. And in that case, he sure didn't want to walk into NeuroTalents’ offices and give them a sitting target.

Would they try to kill him just to cover up their mistake? That seemed pretty extreme. Consortium members were generally assumed to have disposed of troublemakers on occasion, but only as a last resort.

Maybe there was something else.

Maybe there was something about the imprint that made him dangerous-something more than the fact that it proved they'd screwed up.

He grimaced. Well, yes, there was something dangerous, he thought. He'd just killed a man with a splinter, for Christ's sake! That was pretty goddamn dangerous, to have someone running around who could do that.

He'd killed a man with a splinter-he felt suddenly ill at the thought. It hadn't bothered him at the time, or when he wasn't thinking about it, but now he remembered the feel of it, the fluids spilling from the ruptured eye…?

He leaned against a pillar, waiting for the nausea to pass; Mirim glanced at him uneasily.

Just what the hell had they imprinted him with?

What did they have an imprint like that for in the first place? NeuroTalents’ business was imprinting people with job skills-what kind of job called for the sort of fighting ability he'd learned?

He'd heard stories about corporate assassins, killers kept on the regular payroll, but he'd never really believed them-he'd assumed that any corporate killings were done by freelancers. But even if there were corporate assassins, would it be worth creating an entire imprint to manufacture them?

How could there be enough corporate assassins to make imprinting economically feasible? There'd be bloodbaths in every research lab or corporate penthouse in the country if that was going on.

That just didn't make sense. So that wasn't what he was. That was something of a relief.

But then, what was he? A soldier?

The army used imprinting for part of their training, certainly, but by all accounts that was for things like driving tanks, not unarmed combat. And they did their own, they didn't contract it out to NeuroTalents.

But maybe someone else in the government had hired NeuroTalents. Maybe one of those organizations in the Department of Homeland Security, the ones the public wasn't supposed to hear about, had decided to use NeuroTalents to train their people.

That made sense. All too much sense.

It would do as a working assumption, then-he'd been imprinted with the training to be a spy, a secret agent. And maybe his brain hadn't been ready for it-maybe that was why he'd had such a bad reaction to the imprint. He wasn't meant to be able to kill people.

But on the other hand, he was certainly good at it now. Wouldn't those two men have had the same sort of imprinting?

Maybe he'd gotten something special. Maybe that was why whoever was responsible was after him.

Spies, assassins-it all sounded like something out of an old video.

“So where are we going?” Mirim asked, as the sound of an approaching train reached them.

“Your place,” Casper replied.

Mirim nodded.

By the time they actually boarded the subway car, however, Casper was having second thoughts. If the government was trying to kill him-and of course it was the government; who else but the Party would have the arrogance to set assassins loose on the streets of Philadelphia?-then they'd probably already done their research. They'd probably know he was dating Cecelia. They might know that Mirim had left the Data Tracers offices with him.

And Mirim and Cecelia shared that apartment.

If they had any brains at all, the people who were after him would be watching the apartment. They might be holding Cecelia hostage, as bait for him.

He shook his head. No, he thought, Cecelia wouldn't be home at this time of day, she'd be at her office. He glanced at his watch-she'd be going to lunch soon, he judged.

Maybe they could arrange a rendezvous; somehow, he didn't think anyone should be going into that apartment.

Instead, he got off at City Hall, pulling Mirim after him.

“Where are we going?” she asked for the third time.

“We're going to meet Cecelia,” Casper told her. “Your apartment's probably being watched.”

The man called Smith was not happy with what he heard when one of the back-up men checked in.

The agent who'd been waiting out front had eventually realized that something was wrong, that the pick-up wasn't going as planned; if Beech had been there he should have been taken care of quickly, and if he wasn't, either Lambert or Finch should have come out and said so, so the man in the car would know it was a stake-out.

He'd heard gunfire and breaking glass, he was pretty sure, and that should have been the end of it, but he waited and waited and Lambert and Finch did not emerge.

So he'd gone in, and he'd found Finch with bullet holes in his chest and Lambert with a chunk of wood rammed through his eye, and he'd gone back out, quickly, with his pistol ready, to warn Eberhart out back, and then he'd returned to his car and called in.

Smith was not happy at all.

This should have been easy. Beech shouldn't be ready for them yet-the file should still be fragmented, working in fits and starts. Lambert and Finch should have polished him off in seconds.

Maybe it hadn't been Beech at all, maybe Lambert and Finch had stumbled into a drug deal or some other illicit activity and been mistaken for cops-the neighborhood was bad enough, certainly.

But in that case, where the hell was Beech?

He wasn't at his apartment. He wasn't at the woman's apartment. He wasn't at Data Tracers. Where else would he go? Smith accessed the file on Beech and skimmed through it.

He saw three more possibilities.

First, Beech might have figured out what had happened and gone to NeuroTalents to complain.

Second, he might have headed to his girlfriend's law firm-either to see her, or to discuss filing suit against NeuroTalents or Data Tracers.

Third, he might have decided to take shelter with friends or relatives-only his records didn't show any living relatives, and the only friend mentioned was Cecelia Grand.

Those would all want attention. It meant calling in more manpower, but that was better than letting Beech stay alive and loose with the Spartacus File gradually integrating itself in his brain.

And that brought up the question of just how good, how dangerous, Beech already was. It would take a neurophysicist and an imprint programmer with a complete scan of Beech's brain to predict that with any accuracy; the theory was that he would need weeks or months to absorb everything, but Polnovick had begun his rampage within twenty-four hours. The theory might well be wrong.

Beech might be a rank beginner who got lucky, or he might already be the equivalent of an experienced rebel leader, or he might be anywhere in between, and Smith didn't know which it was. Could Beech spot Covert agents reliably, or had Lambert and Finch just been sloppy? Was Beech wary now, alerted by the attempt on his life? Would it be possible to get near him?

A sniper didn't need to be near him, of course, but the sniper that morning hadn't managed to dispose of Beech. Had that been merely coincidence, or had Beech somehow already been alerted?

Or was the Spartacus File simply making him very, very cautious?

If Beech was on the lookout, for whatever reason, how could Smith get at him? Smith kept half his mind on that question as he issued orders to cover Grand's office.