Fiddleback Trilogy 2 - Evil Ascending Read online

  He drank a bit more, then continued. "Somewhere, here, there is an institution or training center. Its resources would be nearly limitless, yet it would seem very stingy to those outside. It would seem, on the surface, to be more normal than anything else in terms of daily administration. It would never seek the limelight, but would not draw attention to itself by trying to hide, either."

  Kazuo smiled easily. "You mean, if it were a warehouse, it would look like one and function like one, but never become too successful, yet never so security-conscious that it would become noticed."

  "Exactly. It would have loading-dock workers who moved crates in and out, but never had cause to visit the executive offices. It might be a school that offers basic and advanced courses, but a part of the student body never interacts with those from the general public. It might sponsor a Little League baseball team and even display trophies it had won, but never tour the team through the whole facility."

  Takeshi nodded as his eyes narrowed. "It would be hiding in plain sight, as with Poe's purloined letter."

  "Hai!" Sin set his drink on the arm of his chair and pulled himself forward. "Even so, there will be things that they cannot hide. For example, they might successfully clean up a shooting range so no brass could be found and shred all bullet boxes and targets into pulp so fine it could never be reconstructed. On the other hand, the chances are excellent that the laundry women would be able to smell cordite on the clothes used in the shooting exercise. A delivery person might never see what is in the packages he drops off, but he would notice if the firm only worked with certain companies or, more significantly, seemed to change suppliers on an almost random basis."

  The oyabun ran a hand over his smooth chin. "You want information about a firm that is so ordinary that it seems unremarkable, and you want us to gather this in a passive manner." He shook his head. "You want us to find the firms about which no one is talking, in essence."

  "You have it precisely, which is why I need help." Sin sighed heavily. "There are some things you can look for. This place will have a number of non-natives as long-term clients or residents. One of those residents vanished six weeks or more ago and did not return as anticipated. Guns of every variety are available here, and there is a prodigious amount of ammo used. Gun drills will also take place in odd ways, so rumors of an accidental shooting are possible. Weapons and equipment will have to be smuggled in and out without notice, so access to a private airfield or shipping could be a factor. It will require a lot of power, so independent or high-power demands are likely. It will have communications needs that suggest its own satellite facility."

  Uncle and nephew exchanged a glance that Sin knew was significant, but he could not decipher it. "What?"

  Kazuo shrugged uneasily, "There is one place where all the things you mention could be placed, and it would go unnoticed. Unfortunately, that is also the one place in all of Tokyo where our influence is the weakest: Kimpunshima."

  "The reservation? I hadn't thought about that." Golddust Island. Makes sense for all the wrong reasons. "This could make my job very easy or absolutely impossible."

  Sin knew that, because of the clash of cultures in the 1980s and 1990s, tension had risen between the Japanese and foreigners. A diet full of nationalists forced a number of laws that severely restricted the accepted habitation zones for resident aliens in Japan. The laws served to protect the contamination and dissolution of the Japanese culture, as well as isolating the foreigners so they could only really deal with those the Japanese wished to have represent them.

  The largest of the reservations was Kimpunshima. Built as a floating island in Tokyo harbor, a typhoon had devastated it in the mid-'90s. It had been rebuilt and improved and enlarged until some people began to think of it as the fifth island in the Japanese chain. Various parts of it had been segregated so the streets and neighborhood distribution amounted to an economic map of the world, with the whole of Japan right in scale with Kimpunshima.

  Sin had enjoyed living there for his first two years in Japan, but mainly because he could leave the American sector and find himself in France or Italy or Mexico by taking a tram from one tower to another. Soon, however, he realized that he could not successfully maintain corporate security in Japan while living apart from the Japanese. With the Yamaguchi-gumi's covert help, he obtained one of the rare Imperial Invitations to live wherever he wanted.

  "If you can check to make certain there are no suitable sites outside Kimpunshima, I will try to cover it."

  Takeshi Takagi nodded. "We will do this, Sinclair. We will make our search methodical and precise." The oyabun downed the last of his scotch. "And I think, my friend, that we will need to consult each other at least weekly, on our investigations. To aid you, I even volunteer use of my Simcenter for these meetings."

  As Sinclair rode the private elevator up to his suite, he chuckled again at the way the oyabun had trapped him into golfing each week. He will beat me, there is no doubt about it. He will select a course so difficult that both of us will be forced to play our best. It will be interesting.

  The door opened, and he flicked the lights on with the switch beside the doorway. The huge living room had been decorated with standard Western furnishings, but everything had been carved in a way or upholstered with cloth that was in keeping with Japanese mythology. The suite seemed to him like a halfway house between the West and the East. He found the combination annoying because it suggested a contempt for him by his hosts.

  That was not really surprising to him. The same fierce nationalism that had created the reservations was the fire in the belly of Japan's economy. While Emperor Akihito still headed up the government, Japan had really reentered the days of the shogunate. In this case, though, the shogun waged economic power, not military might, and he sought to dominate the world, not just Japan.

  In the 1800s, Japan had tried to reject the gun and return to the days of the samurai, complete with total isolation. That had been a mistake and, in some ways, was blamed for Japan's defeat in World War Two. Having been rebuilt in a Western image, traditionalists fought against that warping of Japanese society. They sought to preserve what they had by sucking the rest of the world dry of the things Japan needed to sustain itself.

  That created a number of paradoxes for those who would be shogun. They had to maintain the emperor because he was the soul of Japan, yet his inherent influence over the people could make him a very dangerous person if he spoke out against their plans. The corporators also had to tolerate the Yakuza, because they were the staunchest nationalists of all and were more than capable of doing the things necessary to keep the lower classes in line. They had to accept contact and trade with the West while studiously avoiding its seduction. It was a walk across a tightrope with both ends burning and alligators waiting below.

  Dangerous, yes, but the view from up there is unequalled.

  Smiling, Sin hit the glowing red button on the hardwood cabinet to the right of the elevator. From its hidden recess, the message printer dropped two sheets of paper into a wire basket. Picking them up, he saw the first was from Erika inviting him to a party over on Kimpunshima in the American sector. The second was from Lilith Acres telling him her departure for Japan would be delayed a week.

  Sin deposited Lilith's message in the shredder slot and heard the gears grind it down into micro-fine confetti. He reread Erika's note and smiled. Good timing, Erika. I think I will accept your invitation. If Kimpunshima is tied into this whole thing, going in as your guest is probably a better cover than even Coyote could arrange.

  During the entire journey from Nevada to Flagstaff, Rajani had assumed that finding Dorothy and Mickey's father would be the easiest part of the operation. In the early 1980s, before she had entered stasis, she had come to know enough of the world to be able to plot out a course of action that would result in reuniting the children with their father. While she had been kept apart from the normal world outside Area 51, or a half-dozen other secret facilities where she was
studied and educated, the outside world had come to her in rich color and stereo sound.

  At first she had been dead set against returning the two children to the man who had sold them, but the love for him that both kids showed puzzled her. Dorothy appeared very reluctant to discuss her father, and Rajani could tell being sold had hurt her deeply, but more because of the separation it caused than of the betrayal of the bond between them. Dorothy explained it had been a hard time because it was the anniversary of her mother's death, and her father's girlfriend was brutally murdered by a co-worker who had pushed her into a pulping mill.

  Realizing she had no choice but to return them, Rajani thought she would simply direct the children to the police in Flagstaff. Despite stasis, she remembered seeing ample evidence—on television—that the police would gladly pack the children into one of their black-and-white vehicles and take them directly home. When she began to suggest this strategy, Dorothy nixed it instantly. "The state of Arizona is last in social spending, Rajani. In Rumanian orphanages, they tell the kids to clean their plates because there are starving children in Arizona who would love to have whatever they leave."

  For a moment or two the sharp resentment Rajani sensed from Dorothy seemed out of place, but she recalled plenty of cases she'd studied in which the disadvantaged were suspicious of authorities. So, despite what she knew of the police from "Cagney and Lacey" and "Barney Miller," she fell back to a second line of defense. Unfortunately, Magnum, PI and Jessica Fletcher did not have phone listings in Arizona, and the local paper had no ad in it for the Equalizer.

  Realizing she was on her own didn't depress her. She found her mission oddly revitalizing after the long trek south and east. If I cannot find their father, how can I expect to locate this Coyote or help defeat Fiddleback? Resolved to finding a way into Flagstaff and acknowledging that even the A-team would find this difficult, she set about organizing a plan.

  Daizaimoku, she quickly discovered, owned the whole city and controlled the vast majority of it. To protect its interests, the multinational corporation had fortified the city with a series of trenches and walls that reminded Rajani of pictures she'd seen of Berlin—except these lacked the gay and happy graffiti that suggested hope to those on the wrong side of the wall in Germany. Armed men walked the walls, and patrols with slavering monster-dogs made a circuit on a random schedule on the ground outside the tallest wall.

  "Daisymuck controls the east and south gates. The Mormon enclave controls the west gate and the Indians control the north. No way we're getting in either of the last two—we're not Indians and I don't want to be caught by the Mormons." Dorothy defiantly folded her arms across her chest. "We came out of the east gate, but that's because Andy stopped by his place first. We lived closer to the south gate."

  Rajani frowned as she considered and rejected strategies. Squatting around a small fire amid the vast refugee camp outside Flagstaff, she found concentrating virtually impossible. Dirty, scrawny children ran pell-mell through the tent-and-cardboard city, screaming in terror or squealing in play. Roving gangs of men and women cruised through the camp like schools of sharks looking for prey to rob. Brain-blasted derelicts wallowed in their delusions, mumbling to themselves and jealously guarding collections of worthless trinkets as if they were the keys to the universe.

  "I have seen the guards let some people into Flagstaff, Dorothy. Why would they do that?"

  "Proxxers, like my dad."

  "I don't understand."

  Dorothy sat down beside her and checked both ways to see no one was watching. She dug deep into her clothing and pulled out a laminated blue identification card. It had the Daizaimoku logo in hologram on it and her name and thumbprint in red. Micro-fine type on the front and back defined all the rights and privileges she earned by possessing the card.

  Dorothy's voice dropped into a hoarse whisper tinged with fear. "This is my Daisymuck ID card. It's blue because I can't vote, but I got it because my dad has signed his vote proxies over to the Corp. For his vote we get to eat, have housing and stuff. It ain't a whole lot but . . ." Dorothy's stomach growled.

  "It's something." Rajani likewise kept her voice low. "Can't that get you back into the city?"

  She shook her head. "Only in the company of a valid adult card. The folks that get in have a card from somewhere else that can be exchanged for one with Daisymuck. I have Mickey's card, so we could return if you had a white card."

  Rajani smiled slowly. "If I had a card, I could go in and they'd give me a Daizaimoku card, right? Then I could go in and out at will? I could come out and get you?"

  Dorothy nodded slowly. "Yeah, but finding a card to exchange is tough." She slipped her blue card into her clothes again as a sharp-eyed gang of adults wandered past. "The rovers are looking for cards that will get them in, too."

  "Couldn't I, ah . . ." What is the word I'm looking for? ". . . forge one?"

  Even Mickey giggled at that idea.

  Dorothy looked at her closely for a second, then shook her head. "For a gangbanger from Eclipse, you sure can be a Snow White. These cards have special fibers worked through them to prevent forgery. The microtype is virtually impossible to duplicate. Not only that, but if they detected a forgery, they'd take you out and shoot you."

  "For forgery?"

  Dorothy nodded solemnly. "Daizaimoku owns the votes of the proxxers. They use them to make the laws. They could be using them right now to pass a law that says squatting outside Flagstaff is a capital crime, and they could shoot all of us."

  "But that would be illegal." Rajani blinked in surprise. "This is still the United States, isn't it?"

  "Sure, so 10 years from now some court somewhere says what happened was wrong and someone gets fined. Big deal. They own Flag, they write the laws, they administer justice—their justice." She reached over and tousled her brother's hair.

  "Let me look at your card again." Rajani forced all distraction away as Dorothy produced the small, blue card. Rajani took it from her and studied it closely. She memorized how it looked and what it said. She cataloged its weight and texture and temperature. She flipped it over and back, then looked over the layout on the card again. Once she had every little detail fixed in her mind, she slipped the card back to Dorothy.

  "What's another corp they would likely have seen here, but wouldn't find so familiar that they'd be able to spot a fake right off the bat?"

  Dorothy shrugged. "Maybe one of the Phoenix corps, like Sumitomo-Dial or Genentech-Carbide." She looked around through the litter surrounding their little campsite. Amid a small pile of metal scraps that Mickey had gathered up, she found the bent top of a tin of Vienna sausages. She straightened it out against her thigh, then handed it to Rajani. "There, Genentech-Carbide All-Natural Simulated Koktail Weenies. Their logo's in the corner."

  Good, even close to the right size for the card. Rajani used her right thumbnail to score a line in the piece of metal, then she tore the aluminum along that line. She scraped the torn edge along a rock to dull it, then quickly brandished it. "What do you think?"

  Dorothy shivered and pulled Mickey close. "I think you stand a better chance of finding a kinky guard and working a deal with him than getting them to accept that as an ID card."

  Rajani glanced up at the night sky. "Another hour or two, and then I go." She smiled a devilish grin. "This will work. Trust me."

  Rajani waited until the wee hours of the night to make her approach. Out of range of Mickey's constant anxiety, she opened herself up to the thoughts and feelings of the three men on duty at the southern gate. The two armed guards who challenged those who approached both seemed sleepy, though their level of mental activity started a slow climb as she approached. The third man, sitting in a glassed-in cage in the center of the 15-foot-thick wall, had a flat-level of brain activity which Rajani had come to associate with a drug-induced coma or watching television.

  "Need a card exchange." Rajani flashed her fake ID at the man approaching her. He hesitated, and she sensed c
onfusion in him. She pushed her hat back on her head, and he looked up into her eyes. Locked!

  She projected into his brain a composite image made from Dorothy's ID card and the logo from the wiener tin. His confusion spiked into panic, but she sent sensations of embarrassment at having made a mistake and welcome relief at having recognized that fact. The man blushed, then shook his head. Right along with her, he wondered how he could ever have thought this harmless woman was a threat.

  He waved her on through the gate to the interior man. As she approached him, Rajani forced her racing heart to calm. Dr. Chandra's experiments had shown her to be very competent in manipulating and reading living creatures. Unfortunately for her, unlike other alien species, she showed no aptitude whatsoever for computer cracking or being able to mentally guide and influence machines.

  A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. In this case, it's Immigration Officer Grant, here. Rajani smiled sweetly at the man in the cage and saw the small image of a television reflected in his glasses. As he looked up at her she sensed resentment at being disturbed, but she let him know she'd be no trouble at all. A routine card issue, she would be hardly more time than the vertblok cutting into the movie on the TV.