Last Two Days in the Bahamas

by

Brian Downes

The double swinging doors of the Trade Routes lounge were propped open on rubber-footed legs. A breeze pushed air into the restaurant, to be stirred further by the white ceiling fans revolving swiftly and silently. The view led down the hill and the rooftops and streets of Nassau, to the coral blue waters of the harbor, populated with cruise ships and tiny pleasure craft. Further away than that was the green vegetation and white and pink rectangles of the mansions of Paradise Island.

1030 hours; the bar had just opened and there weren’t many people inside. The black ork barman, wearing a uniform red Trade Routes Lounge polo shirt and crisply laundered khakis, had the leisure to lean on his bar with his arms crossed, and watch the large display trideo on the right end of the counter.

There was a matching trideo on the left end of the long bar, and a man sat in front of it, watching the news. There was a pina coloda in a curvy glass in front of him, and an expensive pair of sunglasses.

The man was human, and white. White enough to show that if he’d been in the Bahamas long, he spent an unusual amount of time inside. He was thirty-two.

The woman was a few years younger, with softly spiky blonde hair and an even, all-over tan that looked like the end-product of meticulous basting on New Providence Island’s famous beaches, but might have been the result of melanin-boosting treatments, too. She wore a white dress as soft as her hair, with spaghetti straps and pastel flowers at the knee-length hem. The sunglasses that were ubiquitous on islanders and visitors to the islands, unless they had flare protection cybernetics in their eyes, rode on top of her head. Her purse was unpretentious faux leather.

She took a seat near him and ordered water and the breakfast fruit plate: pineapple slices, red grapes, watermelon, strawberries, cottage cheese.

“Hi,” she said to him.

“Good morning.” He looked her over from her sandal flats to the break of her spaghetti straps over the ridges of her collar bones. Her tan was encouraging her natural freckles.

“I’m Prima,” she said with open friendliness, and put her hand out, her thumb sticking up with the perky energy of a Human Resources junior executive.

His smile was slower. “Denzel. New Jersey Italian.”

“I’m sorry?”

“New Jersey Italian. You are.”

She was surprised. “Yeah, I am,” the New Jersey sprang out in the “am.” “You can tell that from “Hi”?”

“Yeah, I’m a linguist.” He shrugged to clear the subject.

The New Jersey sound faded as she recovered from her surprise. “Or I was Jersey Italian, many years ago. I took classes to get rid of that bray.”

He reassured her. “You did a good job. I can barely hear it.”

“You picked it out of “Hi”.”

“Yes, I did, but really, it’s barely noticeable.”

She laughed. He laughed. They both looked at the trideo to cover the pause afterwards.

“So, what do you do with linguistics?” She asked him. She held a dripping triangle of pineapple slice between her fingers. It went into her mouth.

“International shipping and receiving,” he told her with an ease like long practice.

“Really? Most of the mercenaries I know say they’re in shipping and receiving. Are you a mercenary?”

One of his eyebrows crept up his forehead. “Why would you think I was a mercenary?”

“You say you’re in shipping and receiving, and you’re watching the business news.” She pointed at the trideo display. The news topics selected were CORPORATE HEADLINES, SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY and LAW ENFORCEMENT. A genetics lab in North Carolina was pursuing a project to clone paranimals like Hell Hounds and Piasma and sell them as guard animals. Novatech was breaking ground on a new office building in Boston. A freighter was on fire somewhere, with a corvette warship flying Russian colors in the foreground.

“Hmm. All things are possible,” the man said. He studied her face. “Where are you from? More recently than New Jersey, I mean.”

“I was in London for a while, but I probably spent as much time in Paris as I did London. Finally rented a flat there and kept both places.”

“What did you do?”

“I asked you first,” Prima said. “Do you want a grape?” She pointed to one on her plate. He took the other and popped it in his mouth.

“I asked you second. Maybe I’m not at liberty to say what I did.” He’d turned his chair to face her at a 45 degree angle.

“Surveillance and debriefing, for the most part. Electronic snooping and information gathering.”

“You must be a quiet mover.”

“Not always. I put a bug in that grape, so I can listen to your tummy rumbling. So what did you do, Mr. Denzel?”

“Denzel Hardwood.” He smiled enigmatically.

“Oh, come on!” she cried. “I showed you mine!”

“I’m telling you, I’m telling you already,” he laughed, and took some pineapple from her plate. “Some small arms.”

“So you are a mercenary. No . . . street samurai?”

“Ha. hardly. I used to work with a guy who could bench press two of me. Some small arms. Negotiator. Linguist. Literate.” She chuckled knowingly. “You’d be surprised what linguistics will tell you. You can learn all sorts of things about people by listening to them talk.”

“I’ve always agreed with that.”

“Maybe not the way you’re thinking. For example, someone comes to you and says he’s a lifetime Chiba man for Renraku. But when he speaks in English, you can hear that he learned it in an environment full of people with New York accents. What does that tell you? Either he attended virtual classes at NYU for no good reason -- when Tokyo university is across the bay -- or he’s a lying prick with tigers and dragons tattooed up and down his body.”

“Oh my God,” she said. “I’ll make a point to remember all my cover stories should include New Jersey!”

That really made him laugh. He held up his curvy glass. Orange juice had come with the fruit plate; she picked it up, and they clinked their glasses together. Her teeth were not perfectly white.

“So,” she went on. “Where did you work?”

“American southwest. L.A., mostly.”

“Oh, my God,” she exclaimed with ringing feeling, “how awful about that earthquake! Did you lose many friends?”

“A couple. A few.” He didn’t make eye contact, but he didn’t toy with his glass or do any other nervous motion with his hands. “Or lost contact, anyway. The place was a nightmare of shedim by January. Did you know that after Pueblo Corporate Council took control of the city, post-quake, they were hiring independent shadowrunner magicians to try to deal with the walking dead who were everywhere? But with the situations in San Francisco and Denver, and the enormous body count in L.A., there weren’t a lot of runners to be had. The PCC had to put in a rush delivery order to Ares Arms for half a million rounds of small arms ammunition, and just blast the things apart.”

“Wow. I’m really sorry.”

He drank from his glass. “We all reinvent ourselves.”

“The comet caused so many problems. I mean, even the earthquakes aside. My last job in the U.K., our team was holding someone for questioning. We had our subject for fifteen hours. Suddenly, screaming, sweating, convulsions -- fever went to one hundred degrees and blood pressure went crazy. I had to call all over the East End on short notice for a saline drip, and trust me I got bent over the table and raped on the price.”

The turn of phrase from her delighted him with surprise. “SURGE?” He guessed.

“I know that now. I thought I had a ghoul or a shapeshifter or a new hybrid of vampire strapped to the bed ! You can laugh, but I spent another three thousand pounds sterling on across-the-board viral tests for myself at a corporate clinic in the Smoke -- meaning London -- and that’s not counting the brribes.”

“They say to be prepared for the unexpected,” Denzel said. “I say that anyone who can say that with a straight face doesn’t know how “unexpected” is defined in the shadows.”

“That is absolutely true,” she agreed. “Mr. Hardwood . . . ”

“Yes?”

“Do you swim?”

“This was a gift from a friend,” Prima explained to Denzel on the beaches of the Elysium Inlet Island Club. The beaches were the color and texture of talcum powder. The water looked like hard candy in some flavor that came in blue. Blueberry. “This club is private. They don’t even have real accommodations here, just the cabanas you saw up the beach. A lot of the members come in by private hovercraft, speedboat, Hughes Airstars tricked out with mahogany and Amazonian leather. Yearly dues are 300,000 nuyen, and they won’t let just anybody join. There’s some kind of screening process.”

“Sounds like a place I used to know in Palm Springs.”

“Where’s Palm Springs? I’ve heard the name, but . . . ”

“Mojave Desert outside L.A. It’s a corporate playground and negotiating table.”

“I never got out to CFS. This place is tres expensive, but I know this teenage decker in Amsterdam who -- completely taking me by surprise -- manufactured me a two year membership. All I did was put him on to a man I knew who was running his own computer parts concession out of a Transys Neuronet building! He went, like, insane with gratitude, I thought. The rumors are that this place buys its matrix intrusion countermeasures straight from Pueblo Corporate Council.”

“Then I’ve been profiting off this place for years.”

“What?”

“I’ve still got an active identity as a Pueblo citizen shareholder. You‘re teenager pulled a hell of a job. Pueblo is world class in the IC field.”

“World class,” she nodded. She was wearing her sunglasses on her face now. Her bikini bottoms were red Brazilian cut. The top was on the sand. She had tan lines on her breasts, but they were fading in the sun. Her complexion looked to him like the kind that was in serious risk of shriveling up and frying off if care wasn’t taken, but she’d covered herself in oil. If she got her tan with this method, she had experience.

He was wearing drawstring cargo shorts.

When he had told her he swam in the Trade Winds Lounge, they’d gone upstairs to their separate rooms in the hotel and picked up their beach things. On the trip to the beach, Prima asked Denzel, “So. Are you down here on the job, on the lam, or retired?”

Denzel took a deep breath, and looked around at the streets and buildings passing by them. They were riding in what was called an airbus in Nassau; a ragtop hovercraft that could seat about eight. “Retired.” He said.

“Retired, retired? One last big score and now the life of Riley?”

“You don’t sound like you believe me.”

“I’ve never met anyone who made one last big score before. I’ve known a lot of people who believed in it.”

“Most of those people are in the organ donor tanks,” he said. He watched a kettle drum trio whoosh by them.

“How’d you guess?”

“How about you? Lamming, working, or retiring?” He asked her.

“Retiring, but only as long as I can afford it. Meaning only as long as the money holds out and only as long as I can stand to watch opportunities pass me by back in the world. Right now, I could make very real money on the streets of any major city in North America, just bugging survivalist and doomsday cult people and selling the information to law enforcement providers. With the comet, everybody thinks Judgment Day is next week.”

“I’ve often challenged myself to imagine what it would be like if all the people I think of as insane are in fact right, and I’m the man with my head up my ass.”

“If they’re right, the end of the world will take care of itself. But if they’re wrong, a girl will still have to buy the groceries.”

They arrived at the Elysium Inlet Island Club after a trip of an hour and a few odd minutes, which brought them to sunbathing and talking about intrusion countermeasure programs written by people with reddish skin and strong black hair, with feathers and transistor beads woven in for decoration.

Denzel stood up and slapped sand from the seat of his shorts. “So, do you swim?” He asked Prima. She smiled, took the hand he extended, and let him pull her to her feet so that they could walk towards the surf.

They had brought several things with them: a cooler with six bottles of beer, bought impulsively at the last minute at the beverage store on the corner next to the hotel. Suntan lotion (manufactured in China by a subsidiary of the Chinese megaconglomerate, Wuxing), Pocket Secretaries and wrist phones, beach towels, and artificial gill masks. These were Prima’s. She said she had two because skin diving wasn’t fun to do alone. They put the gills on and walked into the mild surf, knifing smoothly underneath the waves when they got in past their waists.

The bottom sloped away gently here, toward the nadir at the bottom of the bay, and the long slope back up to the shore of New Providence Island. Visibility was about twelve meters. They swam along and were quickly in three or four meters of water, an arm’s length from the bottom. Coral and rock were jumbled there, mazes for vivid fish that flashed gold as they shot back and forth below them, whole squads of them turning in synchronicity.

Prima was very beautiful in this environment, her bare breasts faintly highlighted by her tan lines, her blonde hair a shifting nimbus around her head. She looked like a wild spirit who’d never needed anything more than a scrap of bikini and the artificial gill she wore.

Denzel gave a passing thought for the dangerous things that lived in the ocean. The famous Megalodons of the Nature Channel swam in every ocean of the world, eating anything that moved. But he wasn’t worried. The twelve to fifteen meter Megs never came into shallow water like this. Besides, the Bahamas lost no time discretely telling potential tourists that the Division of Marine Metabiology worked very hard monitoring and controlling what was swimming with their visitors.

After forty-five minutes underwater, Denzel gave an “up” signal to Prima and they surfaced together about thirty-five meters out from the beach.

Prima pushed her gill mask up onto her forehead. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” She asked.

“Yeah, great,” Denzel replied. “Visibility’s good.”

“These gills are only safe down to seven meters, so we’re getting a little far from the bottom out here,” she said.

“Yeah. Why don’t we parallel the shore a little way?”

“Okay.”

They began to swim lazily east, with the Elysium Inlet Island Club on their left and distant New Providence on their right, across the bay.

“So, I want you to tell me how you got to be semi-retired,” Denzel told her. They swam with their heads above water. She gave him a look that was a little disapproving. “At such a young age,” he added.

“Huh,” was all she said, with an amused set to her mouth.

“We’ve got this theory that nobody actually ever pulls down that one last big retirement score, don‘t we? Prove us wrong. Give me contrasting data. You know, broaden my analysis.”

She laughed at his use of corporate suit-speak here, while the two of them, deniable skullwar assets, floated in warm Caribbean water.

“Okay, I’ll prove you wrong. It was a financial leverage situation. There was a company called La Compagnie du Javier. It was widely expected that they would be reclassified from a size B to a size single A within a year. Their corporate headquarters were in Paris. A British company saw that Javier was coming up, and they wanted to grab a slice.

Javier’s president was a woman who’s personal executive security was very tight. She knew that the company’s growth made the company, and her, potentially very big targets for espionage, assassination, blackmail, magical manipulation, whatever, you know the deal.”

Denzel deadpanned, “Yeah, I know the deal.” They both chuckled. A wavelet spilled saltwater into Denzel’s mouth. He spit it out.

“So we looked around for other potential targets, and it took us about five minutes to find vice president Jean Chittiene, who wasn’t as heavily protected, but, according to analysis of public information on La Compagnie du Javier, should know almost as much. Policy in case of assassination or incapacitation of the president, the VP can step right in and you never lose a beat.

Chittiene kept a yacht at Le Havre on the English Channel. He loved cruising, went whenever he could. We learned that he kept the boat at Le Havre, with all it’s ugly shipyards and hardworking industry, because Le Havre was a quick two hundred klicks from Paris instead of the nearly seven hundred to Monaco or Marseilles.

Discussion among my cell -- ”

“Your cell?”

“That’s what the French gendarmes call shadowrunner teams. The street picks it up, you know.”

“Sure.”

“Discussion among my cell is like this. The client wants information that will give them an opportunity to buy a controlling interest in Javier. We know this VP has that information. So our plan was wait for him to get on his boat, then grab the boat and use it as our interrogation platform. We could sail around for days if we wanted to. The boat is fully loaded with fuel, galley supplies, whatever we need. The trick is taking control of the boat. The next trick is holding the boat. The next trick is the interrogation, but that shouldn’t be a problem. Then we’ve got to get off the boat. We’re looking at some substantial operational costs, hiring specialists, but a board seat on Javier is very valuable to the client, and they give us low six figures up front as a good faith and expenses payment.”

“Whoa. That’s a lot of faith.”

“But a very big payoff if it goes right. And it did.

We didn’t have anybody in our cell who could sail. We sort of figured that nothing very demanding was going to be necessary, but better to err on the side of caution. We make some inquiries and we find a Cockney smuggler who’s willing to captain the yacht for us. He’s got merchant marine credentials from Saeder-Krupp, the United Kingdom and Ares Macrotechnology, but who cares? Those are faked or bought. But my London fixer says he can sail, so we take him on for fifty thousand. His French is very poor. I don’t trust him, so I assign Kohlski to baby-sit him once we take the boat.”

“Kohlski was, who?”

“Yeah, I’m getting ahead of myself. My cell was me, Kohlski, a former Polish police SWAT kid, twenty-four. Ranggold, who came up off the streets of Manchester with no formal training, your basic, standard disorganized crime thug, but a good guy and a real character. And McCormack, a troll mountain shaman from some long-forgotten hamlet outside of Perth, Scotland. But no sailors, hence the Cockney.

Then we needed to be able to abandon the yacht when we were through. Kohlski and I came up with the idea that an airlift would give us the best mobility.”

“But you don’t have any chopper pilots,” Denzel noted.

“Right. More negotiating for specialists. The Cockney says he has a contact, but there’s no way I’m going to fly me and my team away with him and his best friends at the controls. So back to my London fixer. My London fixer was a real genius. He put us on to a woman who could do it for sixty-five thousand. I never saw her face, but her accent was Oxbridge.”

“Ha. Chopper pilot and literature scholar.” “Oxbridge” was a term that combined the U.K.’s two most prestigious universities, Oxford and Cambridge. Denzel thought to himself, I bet I could tell an Oxford accent from a Cambridge one if I had ten minutes.

Prima laughed, too. “I don’t know. But she flew the heli great. You want to head in now?”

“Yeah, but let’s go along the bottom,” Denzel said. He pulled his gill mask down over his face. Prima mirrored the gesture, and they submerged together.

They swam back to the shore, enjoying the view of coral, a lost anchor, schools of fish and an octopus peeking out of its rocky den. Denzel pointed it out to Prima. They admired it for a couple of minutes until, it withdrew suddenly into it’s hole.

“So did it all come off without a hitch?” Denzel asked as they waded back toward their beer cooler.

“Yeah, pretty much. We knew ahead of time when the target was putting to sea one evening. We got into the marina as visitors quite easily, then we just made a running leap onto the boat. Stun batons, silenced pistols, and surprise. We overran the yacht in about two minutes. No fatalities.”

“No fatalities? At all?”

“None at all. We treated the wounded on the other side.” Sitting back on her beach towel, Prima pulled a T-shirt emblazed with the words “Greetings from the Bahamas” over her head. “Our Cockney turned us south and we sailed along the coast of France. Interrogation setup was a little unusual. The client wanted the information from the subject as pure as possible. Worried about me screwing it up, I guess. And they wanted it as soon as possible. So I set up a video camera for real-time video and audio transmission of the interrogation, and fed it out through the yacht’s comm array to a satellite, where the client picked it up. Six hours later we had all we wanted. We tossed a grenade into their bridge electronics and called the heli pilot. She came out and pulled us off. We left the yacht anchored within sight of the coast of France. We found out later they were rescued after about eighteen hours. By then, the client had bought their controlling interest of Javier, Inc., using the data I provided. We were paid in the seven figures. Divided four ways after expenses, I could afford to retire for a while.”

“And it all came off without a hitch,” Denzel observed.

“It was a good day. Bad days end with big raging gunfights.”

“And organ donations.”

She laughed out loud.

Prima fell on her back and stretched her arms out over her head. She purred, “So . . . what are we doing for dinner?”

They ate boiled shrimp cocktails and drank rum and sodas on a windy patio after dark, the waiter scurrying out to them with one eye on the sky, expecting a squall. But the squall never came. A few hours later in her suite, they left the double doors to the balcony wide open, revealing to them a vision of Nassau, the stars, the black ocean and the lights of other islands and ships, nearly hallucinatory in its beauty.

Watching this panorama, Denzel ruminated, “There’s something different about views like this. You see them all the time in sims. But in the real, there’s something the programmers can’t get quite right.”

“Hmmm,” Prima responded. She was lying face-down on the rumpled white bed sheet, her hair au naturel. She was naked except for the thong panties she hadn’t discarded even while they’d made love. The warm night had made them sweat. She lazily rubbed her ankle with her foot.

Denzel was naked as well. He sat cross-legged on the bed next to her, drinking from a bottle of water he’d taken from the ice bucket on the bedside table.

He said, “For years I’ve wanted to come to the Bahamas. Shit, as a fifteen year-old kid I had dreams of taking my girlfriend to some place with lots of blue water and drinks served in coconuts.”

“Now you’re here. But you didn’t bring your girlfriend.” He could see the two circular cybernetic jacks in her temple now. They’d been there all day, of course, but they stood out as round shadows against her features, which were pale in the night time light.

“No, but I guess I sort of found one. What’s in here?” He playfully reached for the drawer in the bedside table.

“Mmm. What do you think?” She watched him with one eye as his hand went into the drawer, and came out with an unreflective black pistol with a long gray silencer attached.

“Oh ho ho, look at this.” He waggled the Colt Manhunter in the air, then turned the end of the silencer toward his own face, crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue. “What’s this for?”

She laughed throatily. “Ha ha ha. Mosquito repellent. What have you got in your room?”

He was struck by how much the muzzle of the silencer resembled the input jacks in her head. He reached out with his free hand and touched the jacks.

“I keep a wiffle ball bat in my room. I have routed many enemies with it. What kind of jacks are these?”

“Renraku datajack and chipjack.”

He bent down and kissed them, the ceramic and plastic rings the same temperature as her skin. With the other hand he bumped the semiautomatic back into the drawer.

“I felt that smartgun input pad in your palm a few minutes ago,” she whispered.

“We’ve all got our modifications, baby,” he breathed against her neck.

“So, how did you retire?” She asked. But he didn’t answer her then.

They ordered cereal and fruit from room service the next morning at nine thirty. Prima threw on khakis and a tank top. Denzel wore his pants from yesterday without shirt, shoes, or briefs. They sat at a small table in front of the open balcony doors that way.

She reached across the table and brushed the tips of her nails along a slightly curving scar below his ribs on the left side. “Souvenir of the business? Geez, that‘s got to be eight centimeters long.”

“When it happened I hardly felt it. There was a nasty burning sensation, and sort of a split feeling, but that was all. Bled like I was trying to fill up a bathtub. I was thinking I’d have the scar removed. There are several cosmetic surgeons listed in the Nassau database.”

“So it hasn’t been there long?” She asked.

“No.” Denzel shook his head, and opened his mouth to speak again.

In Los Angeles, before the Big One of December 2nd, Denzel Hardwood had worked with a five-member team. Himself: face, negotiator, tactician. Victor Haydu, Adversary Shaman, man of wit, culture, and attitude problems. Victor was their magical power, and an elf, formally of the Land of Promise to the north. He claimed he’d left looking for more work. The Tir Tairngire shadows were kind of a closed shop.

Dulce and Sarita were ork sisters climbing up off the streets of Harbor and Coast Town in Los Angeles. Denzel regarded them as the best kind of street creature; smart, ambitious, and able to tell when to keep their dicks in their pants, in a manner of speaking.

They kept their look, though. Leather racing jackets, black hair in braids, and eight or ten earrings each. Dulce wore gold hoops. Sarita wore diamond studs.
Both girls were skilled motorcyclists. Dulce was an expert attitude adjuster with a Remington pump-action, and a decent self-taught combat medic. Sarita was more cerebral. She was a kitchen sink bomb builder. Denzel had been leery of that at first. He didn’t want to lose a hand because some chica loca out of Harbor had miscounted her ingredients. But the first two cars Sarita wrecked on cue for them put Denzel’s fears to rest.

Last man on the team was Jumps from Clouds, from the Pueblo Corporate Council. His family was from the Hopi tribe, and J.C. took his heritage seriously. He wore Native American jewelry, Native American designs, and kept a peace pipe he’d carved himself in his car. He stopped short of the Old Ways movement; about ten kilometers short. J.C. was their wheelman. In his own words, he could fly a car through a thunderstorm and drive a helicopter down a sidewalk and never hit a magazine stand. Next to that peace pipe in his vehicle was a wireless matrix terminal so he could monitor police frequencies and keep up on the Sovereign Tribal Council news and the Native American Personal Ads. He piloted his vehicles through a vehicle control implant in his skull.

It was a situation where a vice was a virtue that brought Denzel’s team to their last big retirement run. Victor Haydu, the Adversary shaman, hated all authority. A lot of the time, a shadowrunner’s best course of action with armed authority figures was to stay cool, nod, smile, be compliant and obsequious. But Haydu would almost cross the street to spit on a cop. Haydu swore furiously at police helicopters, even if they were kilometers away. He had to be kept entirely away from cops.

Haydu also tended to hate governments. Grudging respect was mixed in with his caustic hatred for the Mafia, Yakuza, the Chinese Triads, and labor and trade unions. He hated religions, especially the Catholics. And he hated the United Talismongers Association of California.

“Bastard fucks,” he ranted to Denzel in an L.A. sushi bar. “Absolutely illegitimate bastard fucks.” He added another phrase in Sperethiel, which was a language Denzel didn’t speak.

Denzel was eating California rolls. “What does that mean?” He asked.

“It’s Sperethiel for “bastard fucks,” loosely translated. Who do they think they are? Despicable. They’re magicians themselves! They should know that we’ve already got every kind of government piling red tape on us. Do you know that the CAS is considering a law that would require a special permit each time you travel to the metaplanes? As if Dixie owns the fucking metaplanes!”

“Vicky, when was the last time you filed for a permit for anything?” Denzel asked.

“These Talismongers’ Association pricks know there are so many restrictions on the average magician we can’t breathe, but here they are trying to run magical California like they’re the Fairy Godfather. Getting the northern wilderness declared magical preserves. They’re stockpiling more magical raw materials than any two great dragons!”

Denzel chewed his seaweed and rice with slow thoughtfulness.

“Oh . . . really?” he asked.

Denzel did a little research on raw magical materials. It was a subject he knew nothing about, except for two facts: raw magical telesma, like crystals, certain rocks, plants, and pure metals, were necessary for the production of magic wands, swords, daggers, and whatever else. This necessity made this stuff worth money.

A little run-of-the-mill matrix surfing on the subject opened his eyes to just how much the stuff was worth. And how portable it was. In short, what a delectable target it made. After it was gathered and refined using certain special techniques, one “unit” of radical gems weighed only 100 grams, and was worth two thousand nuyen. One unit of radical gold weighed 100 grams and was worth 40,000 nuyen. Orichalcum, the mother goddess of enchanting materials, weighed only ten grams by the unit . . . and one unit was worth 88,000 nuyen.

This meant that Denzel could fit three million nuyen worth of orichalcum in his pocket and still have room for his credstick and breath mints.

Furthermore, the stuff was very difficult to trace. And unlike a lot of expensive data, it didn’t go stale on the shelf. You could put orichalcum on the shelf for ten years, and it wouldn’t lose any value. By contrast, if you stole Yamatetsu Asia’s plans to buy up manufacturing facilities in Lucknow, India, they’d be worthless in three months when the transaction became history.

He immediately conference called his team and proposed that they meet in a neighborhood bar called the Left Coast Lounge.

Inside the low-rent and little-scrutinized watering hole, the five of them sat around a table with a good view of the front door and a good path out the back. Denzel briefly outlined the opportunity presented by the United Talismongers Association.

Victor Haydu, the Adversary shaman, was keenly delighted at the idea of ripping out a huge chunk of wealth from the arrogant UTA. He then shifted gears dramatically, to tell them that the magical security would be so heavy that they would all be squashed like bugs on the windshield of a barreling thaumaturgical eighteen-wheeler, and rarely seen on the material plane again.

Dulce and Sarita were definitely motivated, but they were cautious of such a big target. They didn’t know much about magic, either, except that it could be decidedly deadly and/or mind-warping.

Jumps from Clouds was on board right away. He had lots of faith in his technology. He didn’t believe that there was much in the world he couldn’t run over or shoot down from the driver’s seat.

“Well, Vicky, what would you do if you had lots of magical power and had to protect a cache of enchanting materials?” Denzel asked his shaman.

“I don’t know. I’m not a magical security expert,” Haydu snapped. “I’d ward everything. I’d hang glomoss on all the walls. I’d use it for flooring. I’d get a hermetic to summon fire and earth elementals and put them on patrol. I’d bolster the elementals with watcher spirits. Of course, spirits can be countered with spirits. And sorcery . . . and heavy mundane firepower . . . ” The elf spread his hands.

The other four looked back and forth among themselves. Then they all looked at Denzel. “I think that can be done,” Denzel said.

“I haven’t even mentioned personnel,” Haydu said severely. “Sorcerers behind one-way mirrors, teams of blinding-fast adepts with diamond-filmed swords, and who knows what else?”

“Speed and precision,” Denzel responded. “Anything can be done with enough speed and precision. And raw firepower, of course.”

There was a shopping list to be filled. They bought forty special Cavalier Arms anti-vehicular shotgun shells from a Yakuza weapons dealer who was a contact of Denzel’s. The shells were for Dulce, but Denzel had to go to the meeting because the dealer refused to sell specialty items like the shells to metahumans. Denzel drank tea with the man in a formal ceremony in his office. The shells came in their original, brand new boxes, but they were covered over with rice paper held in place not by adhesive, but origami folds.

Their rigger, Jumps from Clouds, had a relationship with a semi-anarchic group called the Republic of 10,000 Years in the Mojave Desert. The Republic of 10,000 Years made money as a sort of desert Motor Lodge for the felonious, being completely incurious about those they refueled, fed, and allowed to sleep in their vehicles on the perimeter of their improvised encampment.

The Republic was also a clan of crazies who were addicted to the sound of explosions.

Denzel went out to their village with J.C. The two of them bought twenty-five hand grenades of various types from them.

Denzel’s team “gained access” to a very sophisticated sequencer for opening electronic locks. You could buy most houses for what the thing was worth. Exactly how they got to use the sequencer -- they didn’t actually buy the thing -- was a subplot so obscure and corrupt that Denzel passed right by it with barely a mention in the account he gave Prima.

Victor Haydu had a contact who connected him to a hermetic mage who lived in the Valley. The hermetic’s price for summoning two powerful elemental spirits, one of earth and one of fire, was thirty thousand nuyen. Denzel and Victor paid him in cash.

Once the hermetic put the spirits under Denzel’s control, the fire elemental owed him three services, and the earth elemental owed him two.

Victor could summon spirits as well, but he was a shaman, not a hermetic mage. His tradition called on nature spirits, not elementals. Victor would do that as soon as they were inside the UTA building. But the United Talismongers were sure to have a lot of magical power on hand, and Denzel wanted to supplement his team’s magical resources beyond the Adversary shaman.

The blueprints of the UTA headquarters and the vault in its basement they bought, for a lot of money, from a gang of matrix pirates called the Dead Deckers Society. At first, the DDS bridled at being asked to do a steal that was beneath their elitist self-image, but the money Denzel was offering and the chance to humiliate the “other team” -- magicians -- swayed them in the end. The Deckers also got them partial information on the security at the UTA building.

Denzel’s team was out-of-pocket more than 100,000 nuyen in up-front costs. But with the things they’d bought, combined with the equipment they’d already owned, they were ready to launch the operation.

They planned T-time for 0321 in the morning of a certain day. There would be fewer people in the UTA building then. The odd hour was picked because it was unportentous. Everyone expected an attack at dawn or the stroke of midnight. But 0321 was an hour when no one was alert, except for obsessive lovers and things that were allergic to daylight. It would give them a good two and a half hours under darkness to do the job and get away. Denzel calculated that they’d need less than half of that time.

Jumps-from-Clouds liked to fly fast, so the helicopter arrived at 0320.15 by Denzel’s watch. Denzel was crouched behind J.C., looking over the rigger’s shoulder and out the chopper’s windscreen. Briefly, he saw the heli reflected in the top story windows of the UTA building at a distance of fifteen meters. He saw the chin gun on the chopper light up with the familiar flickering flash of an automatic weapon . . . then the bullet holes slapped into the windows and the windows collapsed, as the chopper vibrated to the ripping noise of the machine gun.

Denzel turned around to look at his teammates in the passenger area of the aircraft. He could feel the heli rising and moving forward. The sound of the chin gun had stopped.

A green light overhead turned red, and the side door slid open. Outside, the roof of the UTA building was sliding by below them at the rate of one meter per second.

Dulce jumped out the door and landed in a crouch on the roof. She was wearing a charcoal gray armored jacket and helmet. A bandoleer of the Cavalier AV shells was wrapped around her body, and she had an Ares Predator II strapped down to her bulging right thigh in a tactical holster. Her pump twelve gauge was slung on her arm, but the instant she was steady on the roof, she transferred it to a firing position and swept it back and forth, looking for targets. Dulce also had a bunch of hand grenades around her waist.

Her sister made the leap right after her, her arms wrapped tightly around a black nylon zipper bag full of equipment. Sarita was dressed very similarly to Dulce. Sarita didn’t land so well. She fell, using her body to protect the equipment bag. Her armor and her ork hide saved her from injury.

Denzel was next. Wearing armor identical to the women’s, he jumped and rolled and came to his feet with his Ingram subgun in his hand, facing the opposite direction than Dulce. His side of the roof was clear.

Haydu floated down to the roof by sorcery in a gracefully styled overcoat so long that it swept the ground when he walked. Underneath it he had on a white bullet-proof vest. He didn’t wear any helmet, nor firearms, nor explosives. His personal aesthetics didn’t permit it. He was wearing a necklace with four charms on it. The charms were made from wood and bone, cast iron and feathers.

Denzel had to admit Victor cut quite the figure. Too bad they weren’t at a fashion show.

Jumps-from-Clouds and the heli were already disappearing into the night and the city lights to the west. Without running lights, the chopper vanished from sight very quickly. The team could call for the chopper through their comm gear when they needed to be picked up. Until then, J.C. would hide in ground clutter so as not to attract police attention or interceptors.

Dulce started pulling rope out of her equipment bag. In a few seconds, they’d be rappelling down to the shot-out windows below them.

They’d decided on this approach for a variety of reasons. While their objective was in the basement, the research labs and administrative offices were on the upper floors. By going in by way of the roof, they would cause confusion as to what their objective was. But primarily they had gone in through the roof because the roof was less well guarded by automatic security systems than the first floor. The UTA building was designed to withstand a penetration attempt from the ground, not the air. In addition, the security had been designed to foil more stealth-type burglaries. Not commando raids.

Dulce secured the ropes. The two orks and Denzel grabbed the lines and prepared to go down the side of the building.

“How’re we doing, Beta?” Denzel asked. The team used Greek letters for code names over their encrypted comm system. Denzel’s helmet had his comm built in. Haydu wore his on his collar.

“Fine,” Vicky answered him. That was their magical status report.

“Epsilon, this is Alpha. How we doing?” Denzel spoke into his comm.

“Alpha, everything is A-okay. You have mission time of seventy seconds.” J.C. responded, his voice carried by radio transmission from the now distant helicopter to the speaker next to Denzel’s ear.

“Roger that. Okay,” he signaled to Dulce, Sarita, and Victor. “Let’s go.”

And the four of them jumped off the roof, Dulce first.

Dulce braced her feet against the wall just below the shattered window. Her shotgun was in her hands and she was looking for targets inside. Denzel and Sarita swung down right behind her, smoothly passing through the open window frames and landing inside the magical laboratory. Haydu levitated in behind them.

Denzel set a fragmentation grenade for ninety seconds. He set it down on a nearby desktop, then set a second for one hundred seconds and threw it at the other end of the room. The others jogged through the dark laboratory and exited into the hall. Denzel was just behind them, nearly through the door, when he heard Sarita through his helmet comm. “Spirit!” She grunted. “Shit, I mean spirits and close!”

Pump! Denzel heard a handgun go off, then Sarita gave a groan like she’d been hit, but not too hard. Rounding the corner into the hallway, he could see Dulce’s back large in front of him, and beyond her a confused muddle of charcoal gray armored fabric and living earth, the flesh of a pair of earth elementals, things with protuberances like heads, but lacking mouths, noses, and eyes.

If the girls were in front of him, Victor must be behind him. Denzel threw himself against the opposite wall so that he could fire past Dulce, and open up a sight line for Vicky; shamans couldn’t cast sorceries on anything they couldn’t see. Cram! Sha-shunk. Cram! Dulce was blasting away with her twelve gauge.

Vicky, both over the comm and from a meter behind: “Fool ork, save your ammo.”

Dulce: “I’d stop if you’d start!” Cram! Sha-shunk.

Sarita, from where she was lying on the floor, firing her Predator between her knees: “Beta! A little help!” Pump! . . . Pump!

Denzel saw Dulce’s skill as a shotgunner appear as pocked craters the diameter of a scotch glass on the first elemental’s face. But mundane bullets weren’t getting very far. The spirit was shoved backwards, but it was only an inconvenience.

Luckily, Victor was starting. A black man in business casual attire appeared from thin air next to the elf. His features were blurry; he had no mouth.

“Go get ‘em,” Victor told the man. And the black man flew forward, feet barely touching the floor, and threw his fists and knees into the first elemental. Denzel felt a chilling tingle as part of the man -- or building spirit, as Denzel knew it was -- passed through him on the way by.

The elemental disappeared. The black man remained, dancing around as if he were fighting an invisible foe.

The second guardian earth elemental was now right up on top of Dulce and Sarita. The women had given up shooting at it, and instead were devoting all their effort to deflecting and dodging the hail of hammer blows the thing was delivering with its fingerless fists. The black man/building spirit lurched abruptly through one of the walls and disappeared, apparently pursuing its unseen opponent.

In the hopes of buying a little time, but with little expectation of any real affect, Denzel switched his Ingram to full auto via cybernetic command through his smartlink implant and hosed the attacking body of earth. The thing backed up and went down on one knee -- and to Denzel’s surprise, it gave a great convulsion like it had been scorchingly electrocuted, and was in great pain. Showers of dirt rolled off the elemental and it physically shrank.

“Beta to Alpha, that wasn’t you, it was me,” Haydu broadcast regally.

“Whatever the fuck works,” Denzel replied. It was just like Haydu, who was proud beyond all control of himself, to assume that Denzel cared who put the thing down, provided it went down. He wasn’t going to stuff and mount it.

Haydu’s magical attack had reduced the elemental’s strength. It was no longer immune to their gunfire. A flashing chorus of reports smashed the life out of it.

Things got complicated from there. Denzel discovered that the elementals he’d rented from the Valley boy weren’t much use, because the UTA had magically shielded their headquarters not with one big ward, but with two separate wards on each floor. Denzel could walk right through the wards as if they weren’t there -- Denzel wasn’t magical. But his rented spirits used up one of their services to him each time they passed through a new barrier.

He found out about this problem in a hurried conversation with Haydu. They solutioned by saying that if the spirits turned out to be absolutely necessary, Denzel could go out a window and come back in another one. Doing that, he’d only cross one ward and lose only one service from each elemental.

They kept throwing grenades behind them on random timers. The explosions set off the fire suppression in those rooms. The confusion they created bought them time.

They ran into the security personnel in the basement, in the vault room. A roaring gunfight in a small space lasted twelve seconds and left the walls pocked and scarred like a Stuffer Shack in El Infierno. The two-man security team was a troll with a UCAS-built assault rifle and a little human Asian with a -- nasty surprise! -- laser pistol. Second nasty surprise -- the Asian burned Sarita’s left arm all but off with a hit in the middle of the bicep.

Ideally, Denzel would have liked to talk the security into surrendering. But it all happened so fast and furiously. The air filled with the smell of superhot cement and tile dust when the laser missed and blasted a hole in the wall. Those guys got killed.

Sarita was their electronics expert. It was her job to get into the vault. Right now, she couldn’t handle standing up.

Haydu was on her before Denzel gave the order. “Okay, okay, let’s see what we’ve got, sweetheart,” the shaman said. Kneeling over the wounded ork, his voice was suddenly soothing and paternal, bedside manner at eleven out of ten. It was a spine-tingling contrast to the skull-beating roar of the gunfight just past, not to mention Vicky’s usual personality. Sort of. In his long coat, he was a big black healing bat. “Well, this jacket’s ruined. But I think we can manage to replace it. Oh! Uh-oh! Mess! Mess! That black bit is bone. Yes, definitely bone.”

Then he put one hand on the awful wound, and wrapped the other tightly around one of the charms on his necklace, and cast a spell of healing while Dulce and Denzel waited tensely.

“Alpha, you want to go with plan B?” Dulce asked. Denzel could tell how nervous she was because she took her eyes off the door to talk to him. Her shotgun never left the door, though.

Plan B was to blow the vault. But Denzel doubted that the explosives they had were adequate. “Negative plan B, Gamma. Just give Beta another twenty seconds.”

Denzel watched with a kind of gory fascination as Sarita’s sturdy muscle and bone pulsed and squirmed, grew and knit together, until finally what was left was a pink, hairless, burned-looking patch of skin about twenty square centimeters. Welcome to the 6th World, Denzel thought.

Sarita gobbled some painkillers out of her kit, and went after the lock on the vault. She knelt heedlessly in the mess of empty shells and blood and dead bodies. Dulce had to drag the dead troll away from the vault door so that her sister had room to work.

After the firefight, the vault was an anticlimax. Within two minutes of cutting the case off the lock controls with a miniature torch and attaching the sequencer, Sarita had the huge gray door swinging silently open on powered hinges.

“Alpha to Epsilon, what’s our police situation?” Denzel looked with trepidation at his watchphone. They’d been inside for more than nine and a half minutes.

There was no response.

“Alpha to Epsilon?” Denzel repeated.

“ -opy, Alph- ” Jumps from Clouds’ voice snapped in Denzel’s ear. The reception in the basement wasn’t good. “Can you -ear me, Alpha?”

“Go ahead, Epsilon.” They were all in the vault, sweeping card board boxes off shelves and into their equipment bag and the heavy duty kitchen garbage bags they’d carried in their pockets. Radical gold. Radical emerald. Radical copper. The orichalcum was in a safe inside the vault. Sarita was packing on the thermite now to burn off the door.

“--lice kn-w you’re in there, and ground units are ------ng now to form a perimeter. The explosions are scaring them. Air -- -- th- ”

“Say again, Alpha. All after perimeter.”

“Air support is on the way. I’m stand--- by.”

“Everybody stand back, si?” Sarita said, running away from the safe herself.

Denzel threw his arm across the face shield on his helmet and turned his back. Two seconds later, the vault room was overwhelmed by the unbreakable white light and thundering noise of the burning thermite.

“And that was it?” Prima asked him. She was in her bra and thong, standing next to the bed with her clothes for the day spread out on it. She picked up her shirt and put her arms through it.

“When I looked at my watch a second ago, I realized I’d been talking for forty-seven minutes. So, you know, I thought I should wrap this presentation up speedily.”

“No, go on,” she encouraged him.

“This must be a sadly boring story.”

“Come on, fuck you. You can’t tease me like that. What happened with the police cordon? What did you do about that?”

“Airborne firepower. J.C. had been hiding out in the city clutter. I called him in via radio. He zapped the unsuspecting police chopper with a missile and forced it into an emergency landing. Couple of more missiles erased some police cruisers. Machine gun fire kept the heads down while we boarded, but we did get walloped by a heavy weapon or something. Vicky got chewed up and fell out of the chopper, and in the same hit I got this hole in my stomach from a piece of shrapnel. Dulce and Sarita jumped out, threw Vick in the chopper, and we went out of there at an altitude of about five meters as fast as J.C. could dodge between buildings. End of a long story. I‘ll just go change, and we’ll be ready to go.”

They went out in Nassau that afternoon. That day the sun was bright, but rich, heavy clouds were flying by overhead on the wind, and they showered the capitol city now and then, once every ninety minutes or so.

Going in and out of stores in the shopping district, they bought unnecessary things. She bought a couple of book discs. He bought a beautiful watch set with diamonds and white gold. She bought two dresses, and two blouses made of silk. In a T-shirt shop, she stuck her hands deep into a tub full of squirt guns and came up with two red ones modeled to look like Ingram Warrior 10s. She leveled them both at Denzel. “Freeze! Lone Star Security!”

“Very funny. You got me, copper.”

She bought the squirt guns on a whim. They were only eight nuyen apiece.

They had steaks for lunch at a chain restaurant from Atlanta.

He went back to the jewelry store where he’d bought the watch, and bought her a pair of teardrop sapphire earrings in platinum settings. She kissed him right in front of the counter, pushing her warm body against his so that the salesman looked away discretely, and in spite of the rich elderly couple with the New York accents and the little boy they had with them who were browsing.

They went back to her room in the early evening. She brought up a bottle of rum and a two liter of soda she’d purchased downstairs, and she mixed drinks for each of them and added ice out of the ice bucket.

“It’s so hot out there in the street. I’m going to wash my face.” She went into the bathroom, taking the squirt guns with her.

Denzel opened the balcony doors and stood there, looking down at the people and the vehicles in the streets. He could hear birds cawing in the trees. He could hear the cool, pure water running into the sink in the bathroom. He felt the hot beating of the tropical air against his face, while the air conditioning beat against his back.

“Heya,” Prima said cheerfully behind him, and soaked his shirt between the shoulder blades with one of the squirt guns. Fsst-fsst-fsst-fsst! The gun went as her slender finger pumped the trigger.

“Hey!” He protested. He pivoted to face her so that the last shot hit him in the left side of his chest. He stopped, and frowned thoughtfully. “That sort of . . . stings.”

“You can feel that?” Her voice was one part maternal concern and one part scientific curiosity.

“Yeah. Yeah,” he decided, nodding. “I can feel that. What was in it?”

“The name is really long. It’s a sedative, and a mild paralytic. It works within seconds. And some DMSO,” she added, “to get it through your skin.” She had her black Manhunter, with the long gray silencer, in her other hand. Denzel was looking at it end-on.

Denzel took a deep, unsteady breath. “What is this about?”

“We’ve kind of got to wait thirty seconds before we can really start this conversation. The drug needs to take effect. I think you ought to -- ” One of Denzel’s knees ttried to fold out from under him. He grabbed a nearby chair , and almost took it over with him before he got his balance back under control. “Ought to sit down,” she finished.

Denzel got shakily into the chair. He looked down at his chest and saw the red dot of her laser sight over his heart, trembling with the smallest motion of her hand.

“Your orks weren’t girls,” Prima began after a pause to let the drug work. “They were boys. And they weren’t sisters. They weren’t even related. And both of them died on that perimeter.”

Denzel’s eyes were a bit unfocused.

“Victor Haydu is Victoria Haydu. She came out okay. Maybe a few scratches or wings, but nothing serious. No one has seen Jumps Across Rivers since the big one hit L.A. And you never went near the United Talismongers of California Free State. You ripped off Water Falling Thaumaturgical Laboratories in Albuquerque. That’s in the Pueblo Corporate Council. The details about the Lab’s security, I don’t know. They didn’t tell me.”

“You work for Falling Water?” Denzel asked.

Prima pursed her lips, and studied Denzel thoughtfully for a few regardful seconds. Then she resolved her dilemma. Her face became smooth and carefully balanced, like the Human Resources executive he’d first took her for when she’d put out her hand with its energetic little thumb in the Trade Winds Lounge.

“I work for someone who pays me to ask questions, not answer them,” she said.

“You’ve even got the ascent -- accent -- of someone who’s spent a lot of time in Europe.”

“There’s only one question today, Denzel. So this can go very quickly and very easily, if you let it.” She paused to let him speak if he wanted.

“There’s a . . . a chilly sensation at the back of my neck,” he said, squirming a little in his chair.

“That’s the drug affecting your brainstem. You’re going to spend twelve hours in that chair on one dose. I could give you another dose if I needed to keep you another twelve. I can keep on giving you doses. But it gets dangerous. If the preceding doses haven’t had about a week to work their way out of your system, following doses present a growing risk of permanent brain and nerve damage. So, today’s question is, where‘s the rest of it? Don’t say “the rest what?” We know you only sold a small part of the radical materials you stole. Not even fifteen percent. Where’s the rest of it?”

Denzel creased his brow as he tried to think. “You’ll just kill me if I tell you.”

“I don’t kill anyone if it can be avoided. I think it’s inelegant.”

“Don’t jerk me off,” Denzel snarled. He felt insulted.

“I’m not. I’ll simply administer another dose so that you’ll be secure in that chair for another twelve hours. My employers don’t give a damn about you, Mr. Denzel Hardwood. They only want the remaining nineteen million nuyen worth of their property back.”

Denzel didn’t want to give it up. Prima was a skilled interrogator with the patience of a Fate. It took about a hundred minutes.

Denzel told her that they hadn’t sold all of the material at once, because it was very difficult to find someone willing to buy twenty one million nuyen of black market enchanting materials off of you all at once. Comparatively, it was easy to sell a million or so each year. She said she’d suspected that, and had suggested it to her employers.

The remaining treasure was in Unit 40, U-Store It Securely, Baltimore, UCAS.

“You’ve made a very good choice,” Prima told him reassuringly. She was tossing a few things into a bag. “This could have been a lot more awful for you. As it is, think about it. When the drug wears off, you’ll walk out of here a free man with professional skills that are in demand all over the continent. It’s not bad for you, really.”

“Thanks. I see the smarts in that,” Denzel said dryly.

Prima was at the door, settling her sunglasses on the top of her head. The pistol was in her handbag. “It was a great working vacation,” she told him. “Really, I mean that. Maybe we’ll meet again somewhere else, under circumstances where we’re, you know, less at odds, professionally.”

“Maybe.” Denzel shrugged with his eyebrows. “Like the Chinese say. From meetings and partings one can never escape.”

“See ya, Denzel.” Prima walked out into the hall, and closed the door behind her.

Denzel vaulted out of his chair, and with the one leap was at the balcony doors. He pulled them open, then swung himself over the railing. He was clinging to the side of a Bahamian resort hotel, four stories above the ground.

We’ve all got our modifications, baby, he’d told her last night, in bed. A smartlink was one of his. So were artificial kidney filters that swept drugs out of his blood. It was modified to let alcohol through, but it stopped Prima’s interrogation drug cold.

He’d felt the sting as it went through his skin. He’d faked the symptoms she’d told him to expect. With a pistol pointed at his chest and no armor to hedge his bets, Denzel knew that a struggle was stacked against him. He’d told her the truth about the riches inside the storage unit in Baltimore because he thought it was pushing his luck to fake being drugged. He didn’t think he could hide another lie from her. He’d held out as long as he had to make it look convincing.

Now he had to catch her before she got out of Nassau with the information.

He swung down onto the balcony below him and pulled the door open. He dashed across the hotel room and let himself into the hall -- a dwarf woman had been sleeping on the bed, but she didn’t bother Denzel and Denzel returned the favor.

Another modification: Denzel’s musculature was heavily augmented with vat-grown fibers genetically altered to be more elastic and quicker responding than human muscle. Denzel could carry a gold medal out of any Olympic sprinting competition, if the enhancement didn’t already disqualify him. He was depending on those imp[anted fibers to get him downstairs before Prima.

He sped down the hall to his room. Slipping his credstick into the lock he shoved the door open and ran to the bedside table. He yanked the drawer open, took his Ruger Thunderbolt pistol out, shoved it into the front of his pants and threw his shirt tail over it.

He ran out of the room without closing the door. He took the back stairs out to the street.

By the time Prima Waters was coming out the front doors of the hotel, having completed her business at the check-out desk, Denzel was trotting up to the edge of the balcony of the second-floor patio dining room of Captain Kidd’s, a restaurant and bar fifty meters down the street from the hotel. This also made it downhill from the hotel, so that Denzel was only a meter or so higher than Prima was as she raised her hand to hail a taxi.

Denzel’s eyes were cybernetic replacements, highly sophisticated cameras manufactured in the Republic of Quebec by Cross Applied Technologies. The eyes he was born with he’d traded in nearly ten years ago. They were probably walking around in some organ donor recipient in L.A. somewhere.

An accessory in Denzel’s CATco eyes was electronic magnification. He activated it now, and in a fraction of a second Prima Waters was presented as ranks of somewhat grainy pixels marching up his field of vision as if she were no more than five meters away. It was night, but his light enhancers eliminated any problem. With the Thunderbolt in his hand, his smartgun implant was showing him a crosshair centered over her throat.

Denzel raised the gun and started firing methodically until his smartgun implant read 00 in the ammunition counter. The noise so startled the dinner patrons of Captain Kidd’s that they didn’t know what was going on at first, and when they figured it out they spilled away from him in all directions.

Witnesses would report a white man who’d fired a machine pistol four times at someone or something in the street, then leaped over the balcony before anyone really had a chance to do anything, and fled the scene on foot so fast that the police were skeptical of the witnesses’ veracity.

On the victim, dental records were a loss. “Prima Waters” was identified some time later through DNA and fingerprints sent to Interpol. She was wanted in Amsterdam in connection with a CFO kidnapping the previous year under the name Shelby Vance.