High Bloods (22 page)

“Of course I am. Because Out-of-Phase Hairballs are extremely rare. I know of six documented cases in twenty-five years. Now there have been two occurrences within four days. Two kids. Lovers. What are those odds?”

“Not worth calculating,” the gloves-wearing woman said within her mystical haze of cigarette smoke. “And not at all necessary. At least three million LUMOs have already come off the line and most have been shipped to WEIR clinics in SoCal. If they should be recalled, what is there to look for? But that also is wasted effort. That the design is good is beyond question. A recall and lengthy reevaluation of the LUMO’s integrity would accomplish but one thing. It is all a matter of critical timing for Miles Brenta and for Nanomimetics.”

“No LUMOs, no big bucks for Brenta,” I said. “And there’s a domino effect. The patents his company holds on the old-model Snitchers expire in a few months. When that happens, anyone can tool up and manufacture Snitchers without paying licensing fees and royalties.”

“Free-market economics will prevail,” Paulo said dryly. “No monopoly, and no LUMOs. NANOMIM will be undersold everywhere.”

“Bad luck and bad timing,” I said. “Maybe. But if that’s how it goes down, then we come to the Really Bad Thing.”

Beatrice was still holding on to me. I felt her shudder.

“How bad?”

“A sizable percentage of the newly manufactured but old-style Snitchers likely would be counterfeit, knockoffs from sweat-shops
in twenty countries. Those Snitchers might work. Probably they would fail in wholesale lots and at unpredictable times.”

“Oh my God,” Bea said softly. “But—there’s no need to recall the LUMOs. Maybe a couple of them failed, but the design is good. Isn’t that what you both said, Paulo?”

She let go of me and reached for the little baggie on the desk containing the nodule that a pathologist in Rome had excised from the cold flesh of a corpse. She held it up.

“LUMOs are a major advance in technology and micro-whatever. So there wouldn’t be a market for old-style anymore. Only WEIR buys Snitchers.”

“There are thousands of WEIR clinics,” I said, “but no central purchasing agency. The usual bureaucratic shuffle-and-deal. Clinic managers don’t mind putting a few extra thousand into their own pockets. The yearly audits are a joke. Anyway, a flood of counterfeit Snitchers isn’t the immediate worst-case.”

Bea looked at all of us in turn. She was dead for sleep and we were making her miserable. She blinked her tearing eyes. The smoke in the room was getting to be oppressive.

“There’s something worse than the Really Bad Thing?” Bea said finally.

“That item you’re holding,” I said, “is responsible for at least four deaths. So far. But I’d bet a pound of pure Mexican silver and a bottle of thirty-year-old Scotch that it isn’t a LUMO. It’s something else entirely.”

fter a further twenty-minute session with Paulo and
the gloves-wearing woman I retrieved my gun, Range Rover, and Bea, and drove us to Beverly Hills, taking Laurel Canyon to Ventura, then Coldwater up into the hills where Coldwater merged with Mulholland for a mile or so before dropping south and into the Privilege through the Trousdale gate, which looked like a set left over from
The Ten Commandments
. With date palms.

Almost as soon as we had left the bungalow in North Hollywood Beatrice curled up as comfortably as she could manage with her long legs in the bucket seat next to me and went to sleep. She didn’t want to talk and she didn’t want to hear me talk. It had been a long rough night and she’d had her fill of shocks and forebodings; a few hours of oblivion were a necessity for her now.

For much of the way home I thought I was being followed. Motorcycle. Hanging back about a quarter of a mile behind us. Three-thirty in the morning and there was almost no other traffic. Because of the luminosity of the sky from the nearly full moon (Observance minus about forty-three hours), I could make out in my rearview the crouched shape of the biker low in the saddle.

At the Mulholland summit the biker turned west and became no more than a pencil of light amid the dark hills. I felt a little disappointed. Maybe I had wanted it to be Elena.

I left the Rover in front of the house on Breva Way. I had to shake the complaining Bea hard to get her out of the Rover. I walked her inside and down the black slate hall to my bedroom. Bea undressed to her bikini briefs with her eyes closed and a little help from me and collapsed on the futon with an unconscious sigh. I covered her with a satin throw and went to take a shower. There was a sour odor of old cigarette smoke clinging to my skin; I could taste it at the back of my throat.

The meth was keeping me awake and reasonably sharp. The hot shower and hotter sauna soothed my aches and scrapes. What was left of my headache vanished. I got dressed, made myself a cup of green tea with Kabuchka and ate a few rice crackers with almond butter. I reviewed the plan that I had more or less convinced the spooks from Rome would work. How well it would work depended on how far I was willing to stick my neck out. And it would still be necessary to convince Booth Havergal that I knew what the hell I was doing.

I left a DO not disturb sign on my bedroom door for the housekeeper, locked Bea inside the house, and drove to ILC on Burton Way for the six o’clock staff meeting I had called. I got there a little after five-thirty. There was a hint of daylight in the east and the birds in the greenspace eucalyptus were tuning up. The early PE trams were humming along the divider strip rails. I counted six satellite uplink trucks parked on the side street and there were lights in my eyes as I drove down to the basement parking levels beneath ILC headquarters. Bucky Spartacus’ final performance had shocked the world; the media were swarming.

I had enough time to e-mail Booth Havergal a full account of my activities of a few hours ago, including my meeting with Cale DeMarco and the spooks of Rome. It was possible he didn’t know they were in the neighborhood.

Then it was time for the meeting I’d called. My priority this morning was the armored truck last seen on the Crestline Highway, presumably with Mallory Scarlett inside. I sent two teams out to Crestline with instructions to enlist the local law and park rangers in our
mal de lune
investigation and come up with something. ILC business took precedence over all other law-enforcement activities. And the lunar clock was at Observance minus forty hours.

It was almost seven
A.M.
when I sat down with a mug of coffee in our Virtual Reality lab for a look at 3-D simulations made from the amphitheater digital surveillance files, concentrating on those from the crowded two-acre backstage lot. When you don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s tedious and boring work.

But after only a few minutes’ worth of compressed-time simulations I caught a glimpse of something I wanted to see again. The techie working with me provided an enhanced image that didn’t leave much doubt in my mind. The figure was taller than the doorway he was framed in, so he had to stoop to look out. That characteristic and the starbus he was visiting had caught my eye: it was the bus Bucky Spartacus had borrowed for the concert.

On a monitor I saw Lew Rolling walking past the Virtual Reality lab and paged him. When he joined us he leaned on the back of my chair and looked at our Virtual of the man on the starbus: he had an ascetic, lugubrious face like you see in deathbed paintings by El Greco or Velásquez, a face made longer by the kind of beard they were wearing in those days.

“Could be Raoul Ortega,” Lew said.

“It is.”

“Where is he?”

“Visiting Bucky Spartacus before the show.”

“So they knew each other?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. It’s a tight little circle, getting tighter all the time. With Miles Brenta and probably NANOMIM at the nexus.”

I had a text message from Booth Havergal, responding to my report.

“Been to the woodshed?” Lew said with a laugh.

“Like most days. Sometimes Booth leaves me a mousehole to crawl through. Can you get me a copy of Miles Brenta’s schedule for today from his office?”

Lew got on it. I reread Booth’s memo, looking for my mouse hole. Not this time. If he didn’t want me leaning on Fran Obregon in my inimitable fashion, I could sort of agree on the need for caution. But with what I knew so far Fran was dirty and when I could corroborate that I would skin her alive. The thought made me temporarily happy.

I ordered a helicopter for ten o’clock, hoping I’d be finished reviewing VR surveillance by then.

The next sequence of interest that turned up almost had me jumping out of my seat.

“Again,” I said to the techie beside me.

According to the time code what I was looking at had happened within moments of Bucky Spartacus’ other, impromptu, hairy performance onstage.

I saw Miles Brenta exit the backseat of his limousine and take several running steps toward the backstage area. I saw Fran
poke her head out as the beefer leaning against the trunk of the limo whirled and went after his boss. Fran followed.

They practically had to wrestle Miles Brenta to the ground. Even without a close look at his face it was obvious to me that he was screaming.

The techie repositioned the Virtual Reality figures to enhance Brenta’s face. I could almost read the horror in his eyes.

“Son of a bitch,” I said. “He didn’t know. Give me Fran now.”

The enhancement of Fran as she took a good grip on one of Brenta’s arms revealed no such emotion, not even a hint of shock. She might have been thinking about what to make at her next pottery class.

“But
she
knew,” I said.

I watched Fran Obregon and two beefers, because that’s how many of them were needed to pull Brenta back into the limo, which raced away even before the door was shut. The last VR image was Obregon’s hand reaching for the door handle.

“Freeze,” I said, and sat back in the lab chair with my fingers locked behind my head. I was grinning as I stared at the VR detail of her outstretched hand: the chicly jeweled fingers, the expensive bracelets looped around her wrist.

“Shake hands with the devil, baby,” I said. “It won’t be long now.”

I was halfway to San Jack Town at nine hundred feet over Seco Grande when Lew Rolling got back to me and said that Miles Brenta had canceled his schedule and was spending the day at home in Paradiso Palms, presumably in seclusion.

The prison hospital operated by WEIR was a collection of two-story adobe-style tan cubes with narrow tinted windows and solar panel roofs angled to acquire sunlight all day. Covered walkways connected the buildings. The complex was just north
of San Jacinto; a quarter mile farther north the Colorado Aqueduct glittered like a silver vein in a thin concrete arm.

Two helo pads were located well away from the psychiatric unit, so the comings and goings of choppers wouldn’t disturb the loony birds in residence. There was no shade but the facility provided hose connections to one-ton mobile APUs for cooling. Otherwise after only a few minutes on the ground the cabin temps could hit a hundred sixty degrees at noon on a hot day. And it was another hot day.

I rode the minibus to administration and checked in. El Gordo had been X-rayed and treated on arrival, then removed to an isolation unit where he was reported to be sedated but able to talk.

WEIR already had run his prints and I had his sheet. Four aliases, birth name Roberto Gallego, birthplace Guanajuato, Mexico. He had a trip to the main joint at Rocky Peak on his ledger, murder two bargained down to manslaughter, eight and out.

And at the moment he had a hairline fracture that would heal without intervention, a lump on the side of his head the size of a lemon. Twenty-two stitches had closed the trenchlike gash on his face opened up by the front sight of my Glock. His right eye was swollen shut. Probably he would have trouble breathing through his nose for the rest of his life, but what life expectancy he had came down to the toss of a coin, and I was doing the tossing.

There was a guard on his door. The charges were everything I could think of from suspicion of murder on down. When I mentioned the charges he showed me the underside of his lip like a nickering horse.

“
Abogado
,” he said.

“Ortega knows you’re here,” I said. “By now he probably would’ve sent you a mouthpiece with a basketful of forget-me-nots. But the word is out you’re in a coma and probably won’t be needing anything but a priest and a cheap funeral. That’s my favor to you, comprende, Roberto?”

“Fock tu madre.”

“But any time I say, hombre, you’ll have a rapid recovery. Before you know it you’ll be out of your cozy room here and into the general population at the Peak. Where if you’re not on the SN yard you might last, what, a day and a half? Before one of your fellow Diamondbackers gets the word and shanks you through the solar plexus.”