Vickers (Corp.s.e.)

TWO

"WHEN DEMOCRACY GOES down the tubes, murder, by necessity, becomes an instrument of policy. If you can't vote 'em out you gotta kill them."

"Don't ride me, Joe."

"You suckers with your intrigues and killings are turning public life into the court of the Borgias."

"Me? I'm usually the one that's being shot at. I just do what I'm told."

"That's what they always say. You're as much a part of it as anyone. You labor in the deepest pits of the corporate fantasy."

"I asked you not to ride me, Joe."

It had just taken twenty minutes for Vickers to feel confident enough to let go his grip on the Yasha, but Joe Stalin didn't seem willing to indulge him. He was greatly upset by the reports of the carnage in front of the Plaza.

"I'm not riding you, damn it. I'm just hoping that you'll eventually get wise. I thought you were supposed to be good at the shit you do. How the fuck could you be mixed up in a mess like that?"

"Amateurs."

"Is that all you can say?"

Joe Stalin turned back to his stove and removed a pan of kippers from under the grill. He inspected them as though daring them to be anything but perfect. Joe Stalin was a mass of contradictions. Despite his anger at the massacre, he had, between the time of Vickers' call and his arrival, organized a gourmet breakfast, Norweigan kippers, Oxford marmalade, coffee and Jack Daniels, which he now placed truculently in front of Vickers.

"Eat."

Vickers hung his head.

"I swear to God, Joe, I'm in no condition."

Joe Stalin brooked no argument.

"Sure you are. Booze, caffeine, sugar, protein, salt. All the right stuff for a homicidal maniac in shock."

Vickers had to admit that the smell was appealing. He jabbed at the kippers with an experimental fork. Joe Stalin grinned. Vickers ate a little. It was good. He ate some more. He sipped his coffee. He sipped his drink. He realized that he was ravenous. He slid his fork under another section of kipper. Joe Stalin grunted like a man who's been proved right and started on his own food.

"You only pretend that your stomach's knotted with guilt. It's a corporate trait to observe the niceties. Suffer as you kill. It's like putting a Henry Moore in the executive parking lot the same time as poisoning the air, right? The truth is that you're a feral animal. You just killed and now you want to eat. Civilization, like beauty, is only skin deep."

Joe Stalin poured himself some more coffee. He spent a lot of time on his own, so whenever he had company he tended to expound. He was such a fine fellow in so many other ways, he felt that he had the right. At the root of his charm was the fact that he was someone who didn't have to worry about money. Back in the early nineties, he had written a piece for Playboy on the Ghoul Children, which had been turned first into a TV documentary and then into a monstrously successful and degenerately violent movie. From that point on, the checks came faster than he could spend them and he had devoted the rest of his life and energies to a singular self-indulgence that had cost him three wives and all but the most irrational of his friends.

As far as Vickers could tell, he was in his mid-to-late fifties. He was seriously overweight and his liver had little excuse for continuing to function. On that particular day, his full head of gray hair was shaggy and uncombed. He had been living in the same filthy sweatsuit for at least a week and appeared not to have shaved during the same period.

The loft, which he rarely left, was more like a natural formation than part of a building. It was like a long, low cavern, dark and encrusted from floor to ceiling with his million-or-so possessions, the gadgets and toys and the random junk. One long wall was filled with a huge accumulation of books and tapes that had long exhausted the shelf space and spilled over onto floor and furniture. A personal robot attempted unsuccessfully to deal with the tide of dust and made soft electronic whimpers. The windows had long ago been sheeted over with steel and the only light came from within. It seemed to gather in isolated pools. Five TV sets were playing as well as two computer displays and the four tiny monitors of the security system. In one strange, homemade construction, organic cultures, like brown stains, were growing on glass plates under a battery of blue-white floods. In the last five years, Joe Stalin's narcosis had spread into outlandish territory. A magnificent antique jukebox pulsed red and amber. It was stocked with genuine 45s from the rock era. Vickers had heard they were worth many thousands of dollars.

The focus of the whole cave was the bright corner area that, with the stove, the sink, the refrigerator and the larger of the computers, served Stalin as a combination of kitchen and study. It wasn't only that Stalin rarely went out. He stayed mainly in this one spot, leaving most of the rest of the loft to the four prowling cats and the robot. In fact, it wasn't too surprising that Stalin didn't leave the loft except when it was totally necessary. It was the top floor of an abandoned factory in a twilight zone that had been promised a half-dozen renaissances but had been let down each time. All had foundered on private graft, public corruption and politics. The nighborhood had fallen slowly but surely to winos, weirdos, shot-spans and gangs of vicious children. The cab driver had been even more unhappy bringing Vickers to the area than he had been at picking him up.

As a counter to the menace of outside, the loft was nothing short of a fortress. Cameras watched all the possible approaches; traps and alarms lurked in the dark of stairwells and hallways. Steel doors and state of the art locks provided Stalin's final redoubt against the ghoulies, A-boys and gutter-jumpers who would just love to get him and loot his home. Three of the five TV sets were tuned to the Natcom Non-Stop News. The top stories were still the deaths at the Plaza, Tomoyo Nakamora's upcoming bout with the mountain gorilla and the opening by the Tyrell Corporation of a brand new free hospital in Quito, Ecuador.

Reporters had dug up some background on the steroid woman. She had indeed been an athlete. Her name was Jessica McKenzie and she had tried out for the Canadian shotput team in the 1996 Olympics. She had failed. After that, she'd wrestled on local TV in West Texas under the name Diamond Head. Conservation groups were searching Japanese law for a way to stop Ms. Nakamora from being fucked by an endangered species. Tyrell were proving their generosity and compassion in concrete and steel. There was footage of Norman Tyrell with crippled children. Joe Stalin found this part particularly vexatious.

"Will you listen to that bullshit? Will you look at that crap? They liquidated the last viable government, they directly caused the deaths of one-seventh of the population and then they give a lousy hospital and everyone weeps tears of gratitude. Shit, Ecuador isn't even a country anymore. It doesn't even have a puppet government. It's quite literally a Tyrell satrapy."

"Nobody cares. The motherfucker will probably fall down in five years."

Vickers poured his Jack Daniels into his coffee. He knew there was no way to stop Joe once he got going.

"You get what you deserve. Ain't that the heart of freedom?"

"I can't argue with that. We got what we deserved. We built working models of competition and greed. It was deliberate. We took the worst side of our collective personality and designed global systems to accomodate it. Maybe that's why communism failed. It believed that human beings could learn to freely cooperate. The system knew our weaknesses and it turned 'round and seduced us with them. Now they've got us by the balls. Hell, we didn't even need seducing. We were like a bitch in heat."

Despite himself, Vickers smiled at Stalin's willingness to mix genders.

"We laid down and spread 'em. We handed it to them. We begged them to take us and all we had. First it was the environment, the air, water and the land. Then it was medical care and the space program, communications and law enforcement. In the end we gave them national defense and finally the real function of government. We sold ourselves out like a whore on a holiday."

Vickers sighed. "You got to admit, Joe, the corporations work. That's it. There's nothing more to say. You can huff and puff but you know I'm right. The system's dog eat dog, but it's a dog eat dog world."

"That's the only way the corporations can deal with the world. That's their sole principle. The human being will always react in the worst possible way. The human being is greedy, treacherous and venal and always will be. That's the only way they can operate."

"For all the corporate evil you talk about, we ain't had a nuclear war."

"We still may, if the Russians decide to go down in a blaze of glory."

"We've had fewer regular wars."

"Of course we have. When the only principle is that the world is rotten, you don't defend it to the last man. You defend it just as long as defense is viable."

Vickers shook his head. "I don't know what the hell I'm doing standing up for the corporations. Contec's never done anything but screw me."

Joe spread a half-inch layer of marmalade on a slice of wheat toast.

"I'm not really attacking the corporations. Any half-bright executive would agree with me. They might object to the way I framed the argument but that's only more of the damned niceties."

A huge blue Persian cat hopped onto Stalin's lap. He automatically petted it.

"The only time that anyone takes any notice of what's going on is when the niceties break down. That's what happened with that mess in front of the Plaza. The veneer wore thin and we had a look at particularly savage reality."

Vickers grunted. "If they let us run the business our way, things like that would never happen. The way the rules stand now, they let the fucking amateurs climb all over us."

"What's all this us and them talk? You're all part of the same thing. Uh-oh, what do we have here?"

Something had caught his eye on one of the security monitors. It was the one that covered the street door. Three people were approaching, two men and a woman. They were anything but neighborhood. They were dressed for the Upper East Side. The men wore wide-brimmed hats and expensive overcoats cut in the current voluminous A-line fashion. The woman was exactly the opposite. She was an inverted triangle. Tailored pinstripes with wide padded shoulders and a narrow slit skirt. Her hair was swept up into a service-style pillbox. The men's outfits were totally unsuitable for the heavy, swampy weather.

"What do we have here."

Some of the local juveniles were slinking along some yards behind, trailing the trio like jackals that are too confused to actually attack. Stalin reached for a remote. He brought up the magnification.

"You know these people? I almost never have visitors, particularly visitors who dress like that."

Vickers sighed. "Yes, I know them. They're for me."

"Who are they?"

"Two ballerinas and a corpse. The ballerinas have been sent to fetch me. The corpse is to make sure I come."

"What the hell are ballerinas?"

"Ballerinas? Internal Security. Corporation secret police. In this case they're the flunkies of the person I work for. They're the two guys in the hats and coats. They're even starting to look like the Gestapo."

"And the woman?"

"She's the corpse. Ilsa van Doren. Nasty Ilsa, our very own she-wolf. She once put a target away by substituting nitric acid for his Visine."

"She's come to kill you?"

Joe Stalin seemed a little anxious. Vickers shook his head.

"No, just to remind me not to play hookey."

By this time the trio had reached the street door and were inspecting its defenses. One of them was looking straight into the camera.

"What do I do with them?"

Vickers smiled. The smile was nasty.

"You can let them inside the first door."

Joe Stalin pushed a button on the remote. The trio looked surprised as the door clicked open. They gingerly eased into the hallway. The Internals drew their weapons. Both had Yashas. They started up the first flight of steps with the woman hanging some way back. Vickers snorted in djsgust.

"Will you look at those ballerinas? Under those coats they're weighted down with body armor. Damnfool incompetents."

"She's a high stepper, though."

"Oh sure, Ilsa's a real high stepper."

The three were moving up the building at a steady rate. Vickers glanced at Stalin.

"Can you hold them up any?"

"Not until they reach the main door on this floor."

"How about annoying them some?"

"Without bodily harm?"

"Something like that."

"I've got a string of pressure horns. I could douse them with noise."

Vickers grinned.

"That would be ideal."

"Say when,"

The three were cautiously climbing the final flight of stairs. At the halfway point, Vickers nodded. Stalin thumbed another button. They could hear the scream of the horns through the steel door. On the monitors, the two corporation cops clapped their hands over their ears and dropped to their knees. The woman, however, stood calmly waiting, four or five stairs behind them.

"The bitch is smart. She came with ear filters." Vickers gestured to Stalin. "Ease up on them a bit."

The two Internals were fumbling in their pockets and stuffing plugs into their ears. Vickers shook his head.

"Cut it off." He stood up. "I'll meet them at the door. You better stay out of the way."

"I don't want any of my stuff damaged."

"I don't want me damaged. Just stand back. Nothing's going to happen."

Vickers faced the door. He had left his Yasha on the table in among the remains of the breakfast. He signaled to Stalin to turn off the locks. He reached forward and snapped back the manual bolts, then hastily retreated a couple of paces. The two ballerinas came in taking Tiger Mountain. They were all over Vickers like a pair of cheap suits. One stuffed his Yasha hard under his chin. They seemed bitter about the blast of pressure noise. Vickers stood perfectly still with a resigned expression on his face. When Ilsa came through the door, he addressed himself exclusively to her.

"Will you call off these idiots before they kill me by accident?"

Ilsa van Doren's lipstick was a contemptuous scarlet, flawlessly applied.

"Accidental death seems to be today's special around you."

Once in the back of the official car, Ilsa revealed a need to maintain brittle, non-stop conversation.

"Do you ever push yourself, Mort?"

Vickers was suddenly very tired. He wasn't actually under arrest, but there was the release of tension. He was no longer responsible for what was going on around him. He hardly had the energy to understand what she was saying. He found himself staring at her legs. Her stockings were patterned with tiny stars.

"You know what I mean?"

Despite the perfect makeup and tailoring, she still chewed gum when she talked.

"Don't you play games? Try and beat your own record, so to speak? You know what I mean, do a hit the hard way to prove something to yourself?"

"I usually find that the easy way's hard enough for me."

"There are times when I just want to do something different, just to see how it would be. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to cause the target any unnecessary pain. I just like to vary the routine so I stay sharp."

Vickers couldn't stand any more of this killer to killer conversation. He locked his fingers like he was handcuffed, bowed his shoulders and pushed his hands down between his knees.

"Honey, you're sicker than I am."

"You'd better sit down, Mort."

Victoria Morgenstern's office had one large window that overlooked East 58th Street and the enormous air conditioner on top of the multiple parking lot opposite. Steam rose from it constantly, adding its own contribution to the soup that passed for air in the city. In the far distance, he could see passenger aircraft coming and going to and from La Guardia. Vickers stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the view. Behind him, Victoria tapped impatiently on the glass top of her desk with long purple fingernails.

"Sit down, damn you."

Vickers turned. His expression was one of cold, exhausted non-cooperation.

"I want to know what I'm doing here. You didn't need to send those three assholes for me. I'd have come in my own good time."

"I needed you."

"To throw to the wolves?"

"Don't be ridiculous."

"I'm not. I'm thinking ahead. Everybody's getting so twisted about what happened at the Plaza, I figure someone's going to be sacrificed."

"It'll blow over."

"Yeah? It'll blow over quicker if there's a scapegoat. Am I the scapegoat, Victoria?"

"Sit down, Vickers."

"Well, am I?"

"Of course you're not. You're much too valuable to be thrown to the wolves. It has, however, cost the department an arm and a leg in both finance and favors to keep the wolves confused about you. If any thing's to be salvaged from this total loss, we are going to have to put you straight back to work."

"I'm not going back to work. I'm not ready. I need to rest up."

Control occupied a single floor in a perfectly normal midtown tower. From the outside, it could have been any low profile business, personnel movement, data shuffling, something non-dramatic. The sign on the door read "Designated Projections-A Contec Enterprise." Nobody would look twice at it. There was another office in the subbasement. This could only be reached by a private elevator from the underground parking lot. It was the S&I Department. Screening and Interrogation. It was where the real spite came out. Vickers had gone down there once and refused to ever go again.

"Sit, Vickers."

Vickers finally sat. The pattern of their relationship was such that he always wound up obeying her in the end. Victoria Morgenstern was certainly the most forceful woman he had ever met. She was also an extrememly beautiful woman just starting on the journey into middle age. Perhaps her nose and her chin were a little too pointed, but these only served to reinforce the first impression that here was someone with whom it would be foolish to mess. The tailoring of her lilac suit was almost military in its severity. Her only possible concession to femininity was the way she wore her jet-black hair unfashionably loose and long.

"I'm not going back to work. I'm not emotionally capable. I'm not accepting another assignment minutes after the last one."

Vickers' voice was icy. Victoria pretended not to have even heard him.

"On one level, all this could be looked on as something of a gift. There's a situation that's been building for some time. It could be that you've inadvertently provided us with a solution. Or, to be more precise, you have provided the basis of a cover that will enable you to solve the problem for us."

"You're not listening to me, are you."

"No."

"If I go out on a job right now, I'll screw up. I'll probably be killed."

"If you look at it another way, you're lucky to be alive." She touched the intercom on her desk. "Rebecca, dear, please bring in the disk in the red sleeve."

Vickers assumed that Rebecca was the one that he'd spoken to on the phone. It was a quirk of the Morgenstern style. She always had a dopey sex object in the front office. This one was blonde and had big tits. She indulged the current vogue for toreador pants and those halo haircuts. Vickers first reaction had been bimbo and he saw no cause to revise it. Victoria didn't do anything with the disk. She placed her clasped hands on top of it and regarded Vickers with a look as cold as his own.

"Have you finished sulking?"

"I'm not going out on an immediate assignment and that's that."

Victoria appeared not to have heard him.

"Do you remember the bunker craze?"

"Of course I remember the bunker craze. How could anyone forget it? Billions were pissed away."

Billions had indeed been pissed away. Some dozen or so years earlier, it had finally dawned on the military-industrial complex that there were, in fact, finite limits to a continuous arms build-up. They had already moved into the realm of the absurd with stuff like the Hidey-Seekey "minisile" system and the J20. Their next-best answer was to move into space. At this point, the corporations themselves had dug in and resisted. The Big Four had just come into their full power. They were moving aggressively into space. There was serious money to be made beyond the atmosphere and they didn't want the military in the way. They didn't need random nuclear fireworks, EMPs or stray hunter-killers interrupting their highly profitable work. The military had no option but to accept the area bounded by the moon's orbit as a practical DMZ. They really had no counter-argument. The Russians, the eternal bogeymen, were now so close to bankrupt that they hardly could maintain even a token space program. The Chinese had been so infiltrated by corporate economics that only the most rabid could consider them a threat.

One problem remained, however. Limiting the toys available to the military was one thing. Drastically cutting the profits of the toymakers was quite another. This could turn one division of a corporation against another. This could not be countenanced. All of the Big Four and most of the smaller outfits enjoyed fat arms contracts. Something had to replace them. The solution was to burrow. The sad symbolism of this was not missed.

Before you can burrow, you have to convince someone to pick up the tab. As with all the other truly huge and truly worthless projects, it was the hapless population that would be billed for the insanity. The first move had to be to soften them up. For this, a brand new fear had to be created. Red Armageddon was the phrase. Even the Pope was pulled in on that one. The fantasy was the Last Twilight of communism. The scenario went thus: As the Soviet system fell to pieces, as the famines raged and the vast, hungry and totally disorganized Red Army couldn't put down the dozens of local uprisings, a gang of ruthless, bloody-handed Commissars would decide that everything would go out in a blaze of glory. They would let off the entire nuclear arsenal. In this refined nightmare, the old fashioned idea of deterrence, of MAD, no longer signified. The only solution was protection. As the Pope put it, "Our most sacred duty is to ensure the survival of both our culture and our species."

To perform this sacred duty a consortium was formed between the largest corporations and the national governments of the West. The corporations would build ten very large underground bunkers that could withstand nuclear attack and maybe even a square-on asteroid hit. They would house the art, science and philosophy and enough representatives of the human race to repopulate the planet when the dust settled. The Pope was promised a place in the one under the Atlas Mountains provided he could wing it in from the Vatican in time. All that the governments had to provide was the money of their citizens. It was one of their last acts before they slipped into powerless limbo and the corporations assumed all of their functions.

It took five years to complete the ten bunkers. Their creation produced the final, spluttering surge of old style full employment. When they were finished, the Big Four simply took them over. They were manned, they were stocked and, from that point on, they were publicized as little as possible. They waited quietly for any available apocalypse.

"There were billions pissed away."

Morgenstern slipped the disk into her desk unit. Two pictures appeared on the worktop screen. She rolled them around so they were facing Vickers.

"You know these men?"

Vickers stared from beneath raised eyebrows.

"You want me to kill these two? Have you gone crazy?"

"I asked you if you knew them."

"Of course I know them. The old one's Doctor Kurt Lutesinger, the main architect of the bunker plan. The other one is Anthony Lloyd-Ransom."

"Lloyd-Ransom now commands our bunker under the desert in Nevada."

"I didn't know that."

"Few people do. There isn't much about the bunkers that's for public consumption."

"I'm hardly the public."

"You are where the bunkers are concerned."

"Why are you showing me these pictures?"

"It appears that they may be on the way to creating a problem."

Vickers shook his head. "No." Victoria's eyes narrowed.

"What do you mean, 'no.' Is this more of the I'm-too-sensitive-for-another-assignment garbage?"

"I'm not ready for another assignment but this is something different. If you're sending me after these two, you're up to something that's in no way kosher. Lutesinger is the biggest of the big and now you tell me that Lloyd-Ransom has got himself pretty damned elevated. They're not only biggies, they're Contec biggies. Anything that involves people like that isn't normal corpse work."

"You've taken out our own people plenty of times. That damned bigmouth chemist on the donut was Contec."

"I'm not talking about some lower-echelon troublemaker who has to go. I'm talking major league. When it's heavyweights like this it's called taking a side. I don't do corporation vendettas or wars between divisions. The whole corpse unit has always worked that way. We've never been compromised. I don't know what you're involved in, Vicky, but I'm not going with you."

She hated to be called Vicky but she didn't react to the goad. She reached into the top righthand drawer of her desk and took out a pack of unfiltered Camels. She put one in her mouth and lit it. Vickers had never seen her smoke before. She inhaled and coughed.

"This isn't a vendetta. This is an operation that has the full sanction of the corporation-the whole corporation."

"What operation?"

"We have lately had a suspicion that Lloyd-Ransom, and possibly Lutesinger, too, have crossed a line beyond which their behavior is no longer acceptable."

"Suspicion? Possibly? Not acceptable? This is double-talk. What are you really saying?"

Morgenstern looked uncomfortable. "It looks like Lloyd-Ransom is turning the bunker into his own private kingdom. Lutesinger may be in it with him. Have you ever met Lutesinger?"

Vickers shrugged. "I was once in the same room as him at some kind of reception. I wouldn't say I'd met him."

"How about Lloyd-Ransom?"

Vickers scowled. "I know him."

There was a long pause. Vickers waited. Morgenstern seemed unwilling to go on. Finally she took a deep breath. "The board itself has decided that, for the moment, we have to work on the premise that Lloyd-Ransom and Lutesinger are attempting to put a major corporate facility to unauthorized use."

"A whole bunker?"

"A whole bunker."

"That beats stealing the pencils. What am I to do?"

"We want you to infiltrate the bunker, observe and ascertain if there is any foundation for what's suspected."

Vickers couldn't quite believe what he was hearing. "Me? Observe? I don't observe, I kill."

"We don't yet know if killing will be necessary."

Vickers' eyes narrowed. "You don't know? If you're sending me into the bunker to find out what's going on, it's sure as hell others have been sent in before me. What happened to them?"

"There were two previous agents."

Vickers' expression was grim. "I asked what happened to them."

Morgenstern toyed with the pack of Camels. "We don't know."

Vickers started to lose his temper. "What do you mean you don't know?"

"Remember who you're talking to."

Vickers pursed his lips. "I want an answer."

"There isn't one. For all practical purposes, the bunker is a sealed enclave. Lately there has been no communication."

"People come in and out, don't they? Crews are rotated, aren't they?"

"The ones we've questioned claim everything's normal."

"So what about your agents?"

"They weren't my agents. They were from the intelligence group."

"Don't split hairs."

"They didn't come back. They may have been killed or just co-opted."

Vickers slumped in his chair. "Fucking great."

"You asked."

"And you want me to be number three."

Morgenstern nodded. It was as if she didn't actually want to say it. A long silence settled on the room. Steam from the giant air conditioner gusted past the window in unravelling swirls. Vickers slowly shook his head.

"How come nobody foresaw this? Megalomania is hardly an obscure disease. How come some kind of control body wasn't set up to guard against a particular group taking over a bunker? It's kind of an obvious move."

Vickers had only seen Morgenstern look uncomfortable on three previous occasions.

"Of course there was. There's always a regulating body. Just like any other regulating body, though, it was a compromise between the heartbleeds and the freebooters. A committee was set up but it was filled with incompetents and crazies. It was powerless. Lutesinger walked all over them."

Vickers leaned back in his chair and treated Victoria to the long, hard stare of the bitter professional. Her continuing discomfort afforded him a certain measure of twisted satisfaction.

"So what you're telling me is that Contec has lost a bunker."

Morgenstern nodded. "It's a slight exaggeration, but yes, that's pretty much the case."

"And you want me to go in and get it back for you."

Victoria allowed herself the slightest sigh of resignation.

"At least find out how we could get it back for ourselves."

Vickers knew that he had her. On a much more basic level, though, she had him. There was no way that he could pass up this job. He began to raise difficulties.

"Lloyd-Ransom knows me. He knows what I am. It won't be a case of just walking up to the door and knocking."

"We hadn't expected it to be."

"I imagine that you've formulated some kind of a plan."

Victoria smiled. "Indeed we have."

They had gone to the larger briefing room, just Vickers and Morgenstern. There had been no escort, no secretaries, no aides or flunkying subordinates. The details of the plan were for his eyes only. At the start of the session, Victoria had asked him to neither interrupt nor lose his temper. As the session progressed, this had proved not to be easy. The plan, as it was progressively unveiled, had proved to be a monster.

At the start, it had all been fairly innocuous. Victoria had been softening him up with a lot of background basics, profiles of the individuals involved and the layout and capacity of the bunker itself. He hadn't realized that they were quite as vast as they were, but it was hardly eye-opening stuff. He would have printouts of all that material and he would be able to study it at his leisure. He began to make small gestures of boredom. They stopped, however, when Victoria moved on to the actual details.

Someone had devoted a great deal of time and thought to wringing the last drop from the incident at the Plaza. Someone deep in the security think-tanks had made the connection and seized the opportunity. From their point of view, the massacre was the starting point of an ideal cover. From where Vickers sat, it was humiliating and dangerous. The first move was for Contec to publicly acknowledge that one of their security people was the target of the attack. Without admitting any measure of liability and promising to stand by their man, the corporation would express their distress at the terrible tragedy.

Of course, the signals they were giving out were quite the reverse. The implication that lurked just below the surface, plain to those in the know, was that they were embarrassed by the killings and fearful that the involvement of one of their employees would stink up the corporate image. Thus they were beating their detractors to the punch by making the admission themselves. Since the world was clearly looking for a live scapegoat, the security exec in question would be dropped down the long chute.

Vickers would be held, under guard, at a fairly anonymous New York hotel pending a final dispatch of the problem. The Holiday Inn at Kennedy Airport had been chosen for the purpose. There'd be sufficient leakage of the supposedly secret action to again let the cognisenti know what was being done. At the appropriate moment, however, Vickers would escape. Behaving like a revenging corpse on the run, he'd take a flight to Las Vegas. In Vegas, he'd hide out among the tourists and wait to be contacted by one of Lloyd-Ransom's agents.

"What maniac thought up this scheme?"

"You don't need to know that."

"It won't work. It's insane. How do we even know that Lloyd-Ransom has agents in Las Vegas?"

"We know."

"And even if he does, why should they come anywhere near me? What the hell would someone who's got his own bunker want with a newly dumped corpse?"

"It would appear that Lloyd-Ransom is recruiting himself a smart, heavy goon squad. You'd be ideal."

"Thanks."

"We don't quite understand why and we don't know the details, but it appears that Herbie Mossman is somehow helping him in this endeavor."

Vickers was genuinely surprised.

"Herbie Mossman? The Herbie Mossman? Herbie Mossman of Global Leisure? He's involved in all this?"

"Global Leisure is a much more exotic corporation than ours. They still take pride in a sordid past, and they still enjoy the semblance of an adventure. We will make sure that he knows of your situation. You'll be the bait and we're confident he'll rise to it."

"Bait frequently gets eaten."

"If you don't have any more questions…"

"Sure, I've got a whole lot more questions. For a start, what about this escape?"

"What about it?"

"Do the people doing the guarding know what's going on?"

"No."

"Who does know what's really happening?"

"You, me and five other people whom you'll probably never meet."

"That's just great. Nobody will be pulling any punches."

Victoria smiled. "No one."

"So how much force do I use when I go through my chaperones at the Holiday Inn?"

"Anything that's necessary. It has to look good."

"The easiest way is usually the most extreme."

Victoria didn't say a word. Vickers' eyes narrowed.

"Who is guarding me?"

"Van Doren and the two Internals who picked you up. You think you can get by them?"

"Of course I can get by them. Particularly if you don't care whether I waste Ilsa or not."

"Naturally, we'd rather you didn't."

"But you don't care either way? Is dumping Nasty Ilsa policy or personal?"

"That's something else that's none of your damn business."

In the back of the car, Ilsa was pawing through a red folder. It was the same red as the disk sleeve. It was full of printouts. The two ballerinas were in the front. One was driving and the other was staring back at Vickers with his hand under his coat clutching his Yasha. The men were as skittish as Ilsa was cool. As they turned into the Midtown Tunnel, she glanced up from the folder and grinned at him.

"You know what this is?"

"Some poor bastard's file?"

"It's yours, sucker."

She held up a color eight by ten that had been taken some eighteen months earlier. Vickers grunted.

"Does it make interesting reading?"

"You're a loser, Vickers. If you get much worse, you'll be scarcely human."

"I get by."

"Barely."

"Are you going to ride me all the way to the end of the line?"

"Sure, why not. Isn't it all part of the fun?"

An NYPD cruiser cut in front of them with its lights flashing and sirens howling. Vickers scrunched lower in his seat. He was becoming increasingly certain that not only did Ilsa not know what the real deal was but that she'd also been given the impression that she'd be the one to kill him when the time came. The bitch was a sadist. She liked to talk her targets into the ground before she greased them. She was leafing through the folder again looking for more ammunition.

"You were married."

"It didn't work out."

"She took an overdose."

"She found out how I made a living. Before that she'd been convinced I was a bucket salesman."

"How did you feel when she died?"

"I had a lot on my mind at the time. There's been plenty of other bodies since."

"Is that why you've got this thing about hookers and video tapes?"

"Doesn't it say anything about hair dryers and ten volt batteries?"

For an instant, van Doren was totally taken in. She scanned down the page as if searching for the relevant item. Then she realized and caught herself. Her eyes slitted, promising Vickers that he'd pay for the lapse. While she was still off balance, he shot the question.

"Are you having an affair with Victoria?"

To his complete surprise, she actually colored. Was this a hang-up that hadn't been crash-therapied out of her?

"That's none of your goddamned business, Vickers."

Vickers settled back in his seat to enjoy the rest of the ride. Some kind of orange smoke drifted across the highway. Despite his overall sense of doom and betrayal, he had to admit that life was at least taking a turn for the interesting.

Vickers glared Wearily at the nearest ballerina.

"Why don't you make yourself useful and call room service. The scotch is almost gone again. Get some food while you're at it."

He was pretending to be much drunker than he really was. Red, late afternoon sun streamed through the half-open curtains. He was slumped in a deep armchair with his back to the light. The suite on the top floor of the Holiday Inn was starting to turn funky. Nobody had been allowed in to clean for the three days that they'd been there. Only room service with hotel booze and hotel food. Beyond the windows, the planes thundered in and thundered out again. The television played constantly and boredom was closing its grip. Control called three times a day but the lengthy instructions amounted to little more than that they should stay put and do nothing. There was also nothing to indicate to Vickers that he should make the break that was dictated by the master plan.

While he waited for a sign, he did his best to make Ilsa and the two Internals believe that he was practically harmless. He behaved like a man who truly believed that he was going to die and had given up. He drank a lot, stared out of the window and watched a lot of TV, impatiently flicking from channel to channel. He didn't shave, he didn't bathe and he didn't change his clothes. The two Internals started to behave like they were his private death watch. Their names were Malmud and Klauswitz. Out of their trademark hats and armored coats, they were almost human. They came on cheerfully sympathetic and kept offering to play cards with him.

Klauswitz shrugged as if he personally believed that Vickers had drunk enough but wasn't going to say so. Ilsa, who was standing watching the planes come and go, glanced at him with contempt.

"Soaking it up to the bitter end, Mort?"

"It stops me having to think."

"You're a loser, Mort."

Ilsa didn't exactly look like a winner herself right at that moment. She had started out bandbox fresh, going to extremes to keep her seams straight and each hair in place. Two days into the waiting, though, she had been hit by the general boredom and lowering of standards. She had taken to wearing her hair like she'd just gotten out of bed, walking around in a silk slip and chain smoking. When this had started, Vickers had wondered if she was going to go all the way and actually sleep with her target.

It didn't happen. The only outbreak of that kind of activity was when Ilsa and Malmud had ordered a mess of cream cakes and locked themselves into one of the bedrooms. The whole thing was done with such slickness it was plain to Vickers that this wasn't the first such interlude.

Ilsa managed to generate a level of tension that only evaporated when she took her turns to sleep. When Ilsa was away, the men let out a collective sigh and relaxed. They were developing the strained camaraderie of a condemned man and his jailers.

Ilsa turned in early on that third afternoon. She retired for a few hours of sack time just after sunset. The three men started a game of five card stud. About an hour into the game, the phone rang. Klauswitz picked it up.

"Yeah?" He looked a little surprised. "Are you sure about this?"

He held out the phone to Vickers. "It's for you."

Vickers was equally surprised.

"Who is this?"

"It's Victoria. Shut up and listen. It's time for you to get out of there. There's an Amjet leaving for Las Vegas in two hours. Be on it. A car and driver will be waiting outside the hotel in one hour. It's a beat-up Ford Fabian. It'll take you to the right terminal. Everything has been seen to. That's all. You can hang up now."

Vickers had a dozen questions but he couldn't voice them in front of Malmud and Klauswitz. He placed the phone carefully back in its cradle. Klauswitz looked at him curiously.

"What did Morgenstern want?"

"Basically she was telling me not to panic."

"She was probably talking about the TV statement."

"Probably."

The previous day, Contec had made its electronic confession. Anton Fellful himself had appeared on all the major channels expressing the regret of the corporation. It had been the first tangible sign that anything was happening on the outside.

The poker game was resumed. On paper, Klauswitz and Malmud owed Vickers some fourteen thousand dollars. There was much strained laughter about who would live to collect it. This game didn't, however, last for very long. It quickly started to deteriorate as Vickers appeared to grow drunker and drunker. Finally it broke up. Vickers went on drinking, Malmud stared at the TV and Klauswitz stripped down his Yasha and started to clean it.

At the peaks of his drunk act, Vickers would launch into long disjointed stories of his past exploits. The two Internals humored him by pretending interest. After all, how much longer did he have. One of his favorites was the tale of when he and Mad Jack Cardew were in Cameroon together. He reached the slurring climax of the story just as Klauswitz was reassembling his gun.

"By the time we reached Yaounde, the second biggest city, it was pretty damn clear that although we'd toppled the government, the bunch we'd put in their place was ten times worse. M'Tubo had given his troops their head, and let me tell you that their head went a long way beyond ordinary barbarism. They were going feral all over the town while M'Tubo himself was sitting in the town hall or whatever, blind drunk and yelling bloody murder at the head of some local biggie. He'd got it set up on a table. Did I tell you that the head had been cut off a few hours earlier? Anyway, Cardew, who's past caring by that point, was almost as roaring drunk as M'Tubo, walks in and starts calling M'Tubo sixteen kinds of asshole."

Klauswitz snapped the clip back into the reassembled Yasha. All the green LEDs were alight.

"M'Tubo didn't seem to mind too much and he tells Cardew to fuck himself an' points out that he was now so powerful that he could shit where he liked."

Klauswitz put down the Yasha on the coffee table on which they'd been playing poker. Vickers grinned briefly and went on.

"So Cardew starts laughing at him. M'Tubo's got this nickel-plated machine gun laying on the table beside the head. It went everywhere with him. He'd damn nearly started to think of it as his symbol of office. Cardew points at the machine gun and tells M'Tubo that he wouldn't be able to shit at all if he, Cardew, simply picked up the gun and blew him away. Cardew and M'Tubo both have a good laugh about this and then Cardew does exactly that. He picks up the machine gun and blows the bastard clean across the room."

As if by magic, the Yasha was in Vickers' hands. He was no longer drunk. Without a moment's hesitation, he shot Klauswitz in the head. The next instant he had it pointed at Malmud.

"If you don't want to end up like M'Tubo and your pal, you'd better not move a muscle, kidlet."

Malmud raised his hands. "I'm not arguing."

"Do you have a set of handcuffs?"

"Of course."

"Cuff your hands behind your back and get down on the floor."

The bedroom door opened. Ilsa was silhouetted against the light. She was naked. Her voice was sleepy.

"What the hell's going on out here?"

Vickers covered her with the Yasha.

"Put your hands on your head or I'll cut you in half."

"Fuck you, Vickers."

"Just put your hands on your head."

Mad as she might be, she knew enough to do only what she was told. As she raised her arms, he couldn't help noticing what nice breasts she had.

"I believe that I'm expected to kill you but, instead, I'm going to give you a break. If I was you, I'd take the matter up with your boss-or your girl friend-whichever way you think of her."