Wear Iron (11 page)

So where did that leave him now? What was his move?

Mooney took another swallow from his hip flask, ignoring the strange, rotten taste of the liquid—so much worse than usual—and the cold stare of the waitress. He stared out of the window, watching the Judges moving up and down the long queue. The hell with Rico anyway, he thought—he didn’t have to be a part of this if he didn’t want to be. He could walk away now, head for a new sector, change his name—he wasn’t like Strader, stuck with his bad debts and the warrant on his head. The Jays didn’t have a damn thing on him. So how would Rico even know if Mooney decided to—

—and suddenly, Mooney was looking right at Rico.

Somehow, he was right there, outside the window, strip-searching some poor dummy who’d brought a rod along—not to mention a little primo brain chowder, by the look of it. Only wasn’t Rico supposed to be inside? How was he going to let Tellerman in to do his thing if he was out here instead of working the gates? What the hell was going on here?

Mooney stared, wondering if maybe he had it wrong somehow—like maybe this was just coincidence, some other jaybird with a similar build, some schnook who’d look nothing like Rico Dredd at all, if Mooney could only get a clear look at him. Yeah, that had to be it. In just a second the Jay would turn around and there’d be a different name on the badge, a different face—

—and then the Judge outside the window noticed him staring and stared right back.

It was Rico, all right.

But it wasn’t.

The name on the badge was
DREDD
—Rico’s name. The face was Rico’s, too—but somehow it was meaner, if that was possible. Mooney never imagined a situation where he might miss Rico’s unnerving smile, and now here it was, literally staring him in the face.

“Something the matter, creep?” the Judge outside the window snarled, lip curling. He sounded just like Rico, too, but where Rico’s gravel-pit voice constantly sounded amused, like he was always laughing at a private joke, Mooney couldn’t imagine this version ever finding anything funny.

“I—I—” Mooney stammered, eyes like dinner plates.
I don’t understand what’s going on, Rico,
he wanted to say, but somehow he couldn’t make his mouth work.

Rico—Rico-but-not-Rico—leaned closer, his upper lip pulling up into a vicious sneer of irritation. He barked like a drill instructor, making Mooney flinch in his seat. “I said spit it out, meatball! If you’ve got something to say to me, say it!”

“I—I—I’m sorry, sir! I was—I was just looking—” Mooney turned his eyes away from the strange, scowling, barking man with Rico’s face and kept them firmly on his cup of synthi-caf, hoping maybe the vision would go away if he didn’t look at it. “I’m sorry, sir. I-It won’t huh-happen again.” He could feel a drop of sweat working its way slowly down over the folds at the back of his neck. His armpits were drenched.

“Damn right. On your feet, punk. I want to get a closer look at—” The Judge turned, hearing he sound of gunshots coming from down the street, and suddenly Mooney was forgotten—a lower priority, put to one side. When he looked up from his synthi-caf, the man with Rico’s face was gone.

“Jovus,” muttered Mooney, taking another long pull on his tainted hooch. He wondered if he’d finally had too much of it—crossed some threshold into seeing things. Or worse—what if that
had
been Rico? What if he’d been transferred to working the queue with the rest of the Jays on duty, and the whole plan was kaput? Maybe the whole strange exchange had been some coded message, some attempt to warn Mooney off before the riot started.

Mooney craned his neck, hoping to catch another glimpse of Rico—he was sure now that was who it had been—but there was no sign. He fumbled with the frayed cuff of his sleeve, feeling around for his wrist-com—he could at least put a call through to Strader—but he realised suddenly that he’d been so spooked after the way Rico had woken him that he’d left it on his bedside table, doing double duty as an alarm clock. With a sinking feeling, he realised he was incommunicado for the duration.

“Aw, man,” he muttered, slumping in his seat. “Rico’s going to kill me.”

Fourteen

R
ICO WAS GOING
to kill Bud Mooney.

As soon as Hoenikker at the Edmonds Institute had mentioned the unfortunate need for a working paper trail for Rockford Tellerman—the need for a patsy, in other words, just in case—that whole section of the plan had fallen neatly into place in Rico’s mind. The hard part, as it turned out, had been getting the second detonator into Mooney’s stomach—Tellerman had swallowed his on command, along with half the bottle of liquid explosive, but all Rico had needed to do there was present it as a working vaccine for the death signals that were even now being beamed into human brains by... well, Rico had never worked that out. He suspected Tellerman hadn’t either.

Anyway, that kind of strategy just wouldn’t have worked with Mooney—he was a terrified bowl of easily-manipulated jelly, but there were limits.

Instead, Rico had broken into Mooney’s hab one more time, tranquilised Buddy-boy with a mild sedative to keep him in dreamland, and then simply—and a little roughly—forced the thing down his gullet. Mooney had woken up—the sedative couldn’t be that strong or he’d be useless today—but he hadn’t suspected. And assuming he was drinking the usual amount from that hip flask of his, he was getting enough to the explosive into his system to make a decent-sized bang. Mooney wouldn’t be a problem.

Tellerman, on the other hand... right now, he was the biggest issue. Over the past five hours, tickets sales had passed the ninety thousand mark, and Rico still hadn’t seen hide not hair of him. Rico had spent a couple of days, in between patrols, coaching Rocky on how important it was to choose a particular entry point to go in through—with the number of tickets that were being sold for the event, there were no fewer than thirty Judges performing the weapon scans, running their wands over the human cattle as they filed into their gaudy pen. If Tellerman had gotten confused—gone to the wrong place, been scanned by the wrong Judge...

...wait. There he was.

Rico had been right—with his hair cut and a decent suit, Tellerman could pass for an unassuming newsreader. Looking at him now, after a triple dose of his meds, you wouldn’t know about his problems at all—he was smiling, happy, just another productive member of society, or as close as Mega-City could manage. You could put him to work in a bank, Rico thought—sure, he’d natter about death signals over the water cooler, but by this city’s standards that was almost normal. Watching Tellerman follow his orders—the way he obediently separated himself into the correct queue when it subdivided, the way he let a young couple with a kid go first so Judge Trelawney would scan them instead of him, the way he approached Rico as quietly and gently as a lamb—Rico had to wonder how Hoenikker dealt with her conscience. Maybe Tellerman couldn’t be cured, but it was obvious he could be managed.

Then again, she probably didn’t have a conscience. Rico certainly didn’t.

His scanner-wand flashed red when it passed quckly over Tellerman’s belly—Rico kept his thumb over the light, making sure nobody else saw, then clapped Rocky on the shoulder, ushering him through, making no sign they’d ever met. “Good to go,” he muttered.

Tellerman smiled, and leaned close for a moment. “Thank you so much for everything. I haven’t felt this good in years. It’s going to be so great not to have to worry about the death signals—”

Rico clapped him on the shoulder again, a little harder, checking to see if anyone had heard. “Good to go.
Sir.
”

Tellerman walked into the Stadium, smiling beatifically. A saint among men.

Meanwhile, the remote for the detonators sat in Rico’s belt pouch, small and malevolent.

Waiting.

Fifteen

I
N THE MONEY
room, Strader was starting to feel the adrenaline—like an old friend. Events were moving faster now, but still running to plan. He’d bound Cleveland and Hartsdale with the zip-ties, wrists and ankles, then gagged them with the tape. Cleveland had thrashed around plenty at first, but when Strader had shown him the gun for the second time—making it clear, in his low voice, that he wouldn’t hesitate to keep Cleveland quiet the hard way—the kid had settled down. Meanwhile, Hartsdale was being as good as gold.

On the monitors, Strader could see ten men—there must be a separate women’s event—being led out onto the pitch. He tried not to look for too long—the sight of that blubber, undulating its way forward, the sweat on those pink and brown rolls of flab glistening horrifically in the sunlight, it all made him want to be sick. But the arrival of the competitors onto the field of play meant that all the spectators—the lucky 100,000—were now in the stands, which meant things were probably getting ugly outside. He could expect Prowse and Ramirez pretty soon.

Strader turned back to the sorting machine, watching it count up the last of the thousands and hundreds—a few fifties—as they came in, sorting them neatly into bricks of cold cash for the convenience of the bank they’d never arrive at. The skin-suit, which he’d laid out on the floor, was packed tightly with the various denominations, the fleshy latex or neoprene or whatever the hell it was straining a little at the joints and seams. True to Mooney’s word, it weighed about six hundred pounds—it’d take all three of them to lift it, once the other two got here.

All notes, of course. Strader had been a little worried about the amount of coinage that was coming through at first—the one, two and five cred tokens, cast in heavy plasteel, that were clattering down a side chute on the machine and into separate bins. Since they couldn’t take it with them, every coin that tumbled down into those bins might mean less profit once the score was divided up, and with Rico unlikely to want less than his already mammoth share, that meant less to pay off the Cowboy at the end of all this. Then again, the queue snaked past several vending machines, all connected in the same way the ticket booths were, and there were the automatic bars and snack machines inside the Herc to think of as well—people mostly used coins for those, so maybe it worked out. They’d find out when they got back to Mooney’s hab, their temporary safe house—always assuming they made it out alive and with the cash in hand.

There was still everything to play for.

Strader froze, cocking his head, listening—and then pointed his gun back at Cleveland. The kid’s eyes went wide, and he almost cried out into the gag—until Strader put a finger to his lips. He’d heard the sound of footsteps in the corridor outside—not the squeak of the security guards’ plastic soles, but something much heavier. The tramp of a Judge boot.

His eyes flicked to the side, checking on Phil Hartsdale, making sure he was going to be good too—then narrowed. Phil—good old Phil, the smart one, who’d followed orders like a pro—wasn’t moving. And he hadn’t moved for a few minutes now. He took a step forward and leant down, putting two fingers against Phil’s thick neck, feeling for a pulse.

Nothing.

Phil was dead. Could be anything from a heart attack to a brain embolism, but he’d had it without making a sound. Even in death, he hadn’t made any trouble. Well, almost no trouble—Strader sniffed the air, detecting the faint but unmistakable odour of human feces.

And now Strader had a problem, because Corey Cleveland had been watching all this. And he’d worked it out.

Suddenly, he was thrashing again, banging his heels against the floor, the back of his head against the wall, making what sound he could through his nose—anything to try and get the attention of the heavy footsteps passing the door. Strader cursed under his breath and gave Cleverland a hard backhand—no dice. It just made him flail around more.

The footsteps were right outside now—and if the Judge on the other side of the door tried the handle, or noticed the dead keypad, it was all up. Cleveland’s eyes were bulging with the effort—he was doing his best the scream his lungs out into the gag. Now that Hartsdale was dead, there’d be no calming him.

Strader hesitated for a moment, weighing the risks—then put a single bullet through Cleveland’s left eye and into his brain. The silencer helped, but there was no such thing as a silent gun—if you were close enough to the sound, you’d know exactly what it was you’d heard.

The heavy footsteps stopped.

Strader held the gun on the door, trying not to look at Cleveland leaking onto the carpet.

The handle of the door began to move.

The moment stretched. Strader’s eyes flicked up at the monitor, a flash of movement—

—and he saw that the camera was panning over the crowds, that they were panicking, running, stampeding. Rising out of one of the stands was a plume of smoke.

There was a crackle of static outside the door—the shrill sound of an order barked—and the heavy footsteps took off down the corridor at a run.

Strader slumped against the wall and let go a long, ragged breath.

Sixteen

T
HROUGH THE DINER
window, Mooney watched the news spread through the queues—there were no more tickets, the last lucky sucker had been let in, they’d spent hours standing in line like geeks for nothing at all—and he wondered if the riot would kick itself off without him.

Then he exploded.

The diner window blew out, sending spinning chunks of glass shrapnel out into the street, to slice through faces, bodies, throats and arteries. A vast swathe of people pushed forward, terrified and screaming—and the rest of the crowd pushed angrily back against them.

The riot was on.

Seventeen

I
T TOOK A
lot of effort for Rico not to laugh. The timing had been absolutely beautiful—he’d seen Tellerman, smiling his saintly smile up in the back seats, and Muttox pushing his way through the same row, daystick at the ready, yelling at a couple of young juves fighting over a mock-ice. And he’d realised there would never, ever be a better moment than this.