Shadowrun 44 - Drops of Corruption Read online

  Spargoyle’s eyes were open, but unfocused, with dilated pupils. His mouth opened and closed soundlessly— or at least, without making a sound that could be heard above the noise of the club.

  Bannickburn walked up to him and put a hand on his shoulder. It felt hard and cold, like stone. Some pretty good equipment, he thought.

  “Spargoyle!” he said, giving the shoulder a shake. “Hey, Spargoyle!”

  He received no response. He glanced at Kross and Cayman. Both men slowly nodded. They knew what they needed to do.

  If he’d known what Spargoyle had taken, Bannickburn could have been a little more precise in designing an antidote. But, most likely, the dwarf was enjoying the effects of a veritable cocktail of alcohol and numerous narcotics. They’d have to provide a more general cure.

  They all agreed one dose of jazz wasn’t going to do it—that would probably only take the edge off the other drugs Spargoyle had taken, leaving him comfortable and sleepy. Bannickburn hated to use this much of his stash in a single dose, and there was, of course, the risk that they could explode the dwarf’s heart. But this was the path most likely to give them the reward they wanted, and Bannickburn couldn’t bring himself to care too much about Spargoyle anyway.

  X-Prime had drawn the short straw, so he got to administer the jazz poppers. Cayman and Kross had spread Spargoyle on the sidewalk, and the gray man lay there, blending in with the pavement fairly well. X-Prime knelt next to him, maneuvering the inhalers.

  “His mouth’s strong, and his jaw’s like a steel trap,” X-Prime complained. “I can’t get them in.”

  “Do one after the other, idiot,” snapped Cayman. “Will that have the same effect?”

  “Yeah, unless it takes you two fragging hours to put the second dose in.”

  “All right, all right. Here goes.”

  X-Prime placed the first popper in the dwarfs mouth and squeezed the inhaler. The reaction was almost immediate. Spargoyle remained unconscious, but he started twitching around. His head bobbed back and forth, and X-Prime had trouble getting the second popper placed.

  “I knew I should’ve done both at the same time,” X-Prime muttered.

  “For hell’s sake,” Cayman said. He stepped forward, grabbed Spargoyle’s large, heavy head between his steaklike palms, and held him still. “Do it!”

  X-Prime squeezed the second popper, then took a few steps back.

  “Okay,” he said. “Show should start in a few seconds. Or he’ll die. Either way, something will happen.” Bannickburn watched Spargoyle carefully. The dwarf had stopped twitching with the second dose of jazz. He exhaled, air seeping from him like he was a leaky tire. Then he lay still as stone. His lungs didn’t fill, his chest didn’t rise. The team members exchanged worried glances, and Bannickburn took a step forward.

  With a whoosh, Spargoyle inhaled. Then exhaled. Then his breaths came more and more rapidly, a rasp growing louder in his throat. He blinked once, then several more times. His eyes focused and his head moved, back and forth, back and forth, looking around, trying to take in his surroundings. His shoulders twitched, banging against the sidewalk with solid thuds.

  “Wha-wha-wha-wha-what?” Spargoyle said.

  He sat up, his head still pivoting this way and that. He put his palms on the ground, and his arms trembled from the mere effort of supporting him.

  “Hey, Spargoyle,” Bannickburn said. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t ... I ... I don’t . . . What’s happening?” Spargoyle said. “I feel ... I feel . . .”

  “Weird?” Bannickburn said.

  “Nauseous?” X-Prime said.

  Spargoyle leaped to his feet. “Good! I—I—I feel good!” He did a small jig on the sidewalk, and his stone shoes made him sound like a tap dancer. “Whoa! No hangover at a//! This is greatl” Then he stopped dancing. “Who are you guys?”

  “We’re the guys who made you feel good,” Bannickburn said. “I’m Miller.”

  Suddenly Spargoyle put his guard up, knowing that strangers generally don’t do nice things for no reason. He tried to set his mouth in a hard line, but the effect of the Jazz they’d given him was too strong. His entire face kept twitching as if bees were crawling on him.

  “What do you want?” Spargoyle said.

  Cayman was keeping a careful eye on Bannickburn’s left side, while Kross watched the right. That left Bannickburn free to talk.

  “We hear you’ve got some stuff coming in. Bound for Seattle.”

  The dwarf shrugged with a sound like the grinding of a millstone. “I got lots of stuff going to Seattle.”

  “Of course you do. This is a small shipment. A single bottle. For a guy named Yeti.” Yeti, according to Bailey, was the guy tagged to pick up the bottle for the Finnigans.

  Spargoyle’s eyes jumped here and there, but mostly he tried to focus them on Bannickburn. He leaned forward. “The bottle?” he said. “Do you have it? Did you hear about it? Where is it?” This was another effect of the jazz—Spargoyle couldn’t speak cautiously if he tried. The words just spilled out as soon as they occurred to him.

  “I thought your job was to know where it is. You didn’t lose it, did you?”

  “No! No, I never lost it! I never got it! It never came to me!” His face, still twitching, edged gradually to an expression of dismay. “Oh, no. Oh, man. You guys are Finnigan guys, aren’t you? From Yeti? Oh, man. Okay, I know, I know, I’m not supposed to know this is a Finnigan job, but I know, okay? O’Malley doesn’t have the lightest touch in the world, right? And now the stupid bottle’s late, and I don’t have it, and you’ve come to break my fingers.” His eyes widened. “Or kill me. Fragging drek! You’re going to kill me, aren’t you? Over a bottle of water! What the hell is it about a bottle of water! It’s not my fault! I never found the guy! Never saw him! And I looked, okay? I tried to find them when they didn’t show up, but I didn’t. But I tried, okay? What more could I do?”

  Spargoyle had given Bannickburn a role to play, and it was a role that made Spargoyle nervous and defensive. Bannickburn saw no reason why he shouldn’t run with it.

  “Is that what you were doing in the club where we found you?” he said. “Looking for the bottle?”

  “Yeah! Of course . . .” Spargoyle’s voice trailed off as he realized that argument wouldn’t hold much water. “Okay. Okay. I’m going to level with you guys. I wasn’t looking for them in the club. I went there to unwind, all right? But I’d been looking. I’d been really looking. Don’t I get some time to rest? You want me looking twenty-four hours a day? That’s impossible! I need, you know, some time to do my thing.”

  “Uh-huh,” Bannickburn said. He looked over his right shoulder. “Hey, Kross!” They had a fake name all worked out for him, but Bannickburn decided not to use it, for no better reason than he liked to irritate the ork. “What do you think? A broken finger for every hour off the job? Or would we run out of digits too fast?” “His dermal sheath might make it tricky,” Kross said. “But I’d be happy to give it a try.”

  “Hey, hey, hey, no need for that, okay?” Spargoyle said. “Maybe you could break them, maybe you couldn’t, but why bother to find out? We’re all on the same side here, aren’t we? I want to get the water to Yeti, and you do, too. Let’s find the water, all right? Then you can punish me all you want, if you still think I need it, okay?”

  The jazz was definitely having an effect on Spargoyle, but Bannickburn guessed that wasn’t the only explanation for his behavior. He was a genuinely nervous, weaselly little fake gargoyle. Maybe that was the reason for all the modifications—if he could look scary, then he might not actually have to be scary.

  “All right,” Bannickburn said magnanimously. “I can give you a little more time. Why don’t you tell me what you did when the water didn’t show up?”

  Spargoyle looked around nervously. “When it didn’t show up? Okay. Um. What I did. Well, the first thing I did is, I sat down, and I said ‘Where’s the fragging water?’ And I thought for a while ab
out what might have happened to it, and I came up with a lot of good ideas of where it might have gone and stuff.”

  Spargoyle continued this way for a while, making it clear that he had, in fact, done just about nothing to find the missing shipment. Bannickburn shook his head. The Finnigans must be desperate for any foothold they could get in the Tir if this was the kind of guy they worked with.

  22

  Spargoyle had a few names, and a few other vague ideas about who might be involved in getting the water to him. They followed every lead the dwarf gave them, and every one turned up dead. And all had died from the same cause—Portland police came after them, the suspect ran, and the police gunned—or, in some cases, fireballed—them down. The Finnigans’ operation was being wiped clean.

  None of this, of course, did much for Spargoyle’s sense of well-being. The dwarf became increasingly agitated with each newly discovered death.

  They found the last one—a withered, narc-addicted elf named Squidlnk—only half an hour after the police had found him. They only got close enough to see the flashing lights and beacons marking the crime scene; Spargoyle had used his cybereyes to confirm that Squidlnk was indeed the victim lying in the middle of the area, and then the four men quickly departed.

  “Oh, man,” Spargoyle said as he sat in Spindle’s van. “Oh man oh man.”

  They’d dosed him three hours ago. The jazz had long worn off, and Spargoyle was deep in a post-high funk. But even if he’d still been riding high, all the deaths they’d discovered would be making him nervous.

  “They’re gonna come after me.” The dwarf’s voice was flat, lifeless, more in keeping with his stony face. “They’re getting everyone connected with this. Oh, man.”

  “Well, at least you know that if the police come for you, you probably shouldn’t run,” Cayman said jovially. “Just let them take you.”

  “I don’t stand a chance either way,” Spargoyle replied.

  Bannickburn had long ago stopped paying attention to Spargoyle’s complaints, instead keeping his mind on the task at hand. “Everyone connected with the bottle is dead. But we haven’t found the bottle. Which means either the police have it, or it never made it into the city. Since the police are still chasing people down, I’d guess they don’t have it.”

  “Right. It’s not here.” Something like hope glimmered deep in Spargoyle’s eyes. “That means I can’t be blamed for not having it, right? It never came into the fragging city, and I don’t have a visa to get into the rest of the Tir. Whoever didn’t bring it in—it’s their fault.”

  “Fine,” said Bannickburn. “Sure. I absolve you of all responsibility.” He waved at Spargoyle in a vaguely crosslike pattern. “Go away now.”

  “How long do you think he’s got before the police catch up to him?” Cayman asked as he watched Spargoyle plod away.

  “Fifteen to twenty minutes,” Bannickburn said. “We’d better get some separation between him and us.”

  “He’s the only living connection to the water,” Kross said as the three men hurried back to Spindle’s van. “And he knows nothing. How are we going to find the water if it’s still in the Tir?”

  “From the police. I’m sure they’ve been gathering information as they go.”

  “And they’ll share that with us?”

  “Not willingly, no,” Bannickburn said. “But it’s information, and it’s on record somewhere. That, I’m pretty sure we can find.”

  “Then how do we get into the Tir to find the damn bottle?” Cayman asked.

  “I’m still working on that.”

  Bannickburn stood at a gate in the south part of the wall, where 1-205 met the Clackamas River. While Jackie had looked into what the Portland police knew, he had been poring over any available maps and descriptions of the Portland Wall that he could find. All his analysis led to two conclusions—first, trying to scale the wall was a fool’s errand. Maybe it could be done, but attempting to spoof security at one of the gates seemed like the best way to get to the other side. The second conclusion was that anyone trying to spoof security should do it at the gate with the least protection in the city, which was where he stood now.

  Of course, when it came to gates leading from Portland to the rest of the Tir, saying one gate had thinner security than the other was a little bit like saying one megacorp was less greedy than another. Even the most altruistic megacorp is far greedier than an average six-year-old, just as the gate in the Portland Wall with the least security still had enough guards to outnumber the total armed forces of certain small nations. So Bannickburn walked toward the gate with exaggerated care.

  “The most I can give you is fifteen minutes,” Jackie whispered in his ear. “Or thereabouts.”

  He raised a small microphone to his mouth. “If that’s all I’ve got, that’s what I’ll use,” he said.

  “What’s the line look like for those heading into the Tir?”

  “Small line. Two people right now,” he said. Since a main highway entered the Tir at this gate, most of the traffic was vehicular. A single line to the side was for pedestrians—those who wanted to walk through the wall without enduring the detailed vehicle scans that often made the wait interminable. Bannickburn headed for this line.

  “Wait until there’s only one person waiting. Then get in line and let me know you’re there.”

  “How am I going to get far enough away in fifteen minutes?”

  “It’ll probably only be ten once they actually send you through.”

  “How am I going to get far enough away in ten minutes?”

  “That’s a good question,” Jackie said. “Guess you’ll be relying on your wits.” She paused. “Been nice knowing you.”

  “Thanks. You’ll make sure the water doesn’t sneak into the city while I’m away, won’t you?”

  “Of course.” Then her voice sounded almost serious. “Come back safe.”

  “Bloody well right I will,” he said, then noticed that there was only one person in the pedestrian line. “It’s time,” he said, and walked forward.

  Bannickburn’s team didn’t have the time or money to invest in enough fake identification to fool Tir border guards, who were notoriously difficult to dupe. Instead, their plans hinged on Jackie—she would have to interfere enough with the checkpoint’s decks so that they let Bannickburn’s relatively poor fake through.

  Anything she did wouldn’t last long. The Tir’s systems were too strong, too filled with layers of redundancy, to stay hoodwinked for long. Hundreds of slave utilities, constantly monitoring system performance, would notice the oddity of Jackie’s intrusion soon enough. They’d shut down any blocks she’d put up, review what she’d done while mucking around in the system, and make any needed corrections—like red-flagging Bannickburn’s ID as a fake and sending an alarm to Tir security that an intruder was loose and needed to be tracked down. Then the fun would really start.

  He wouldn’t be going in without resources, of course. His survival might depend on knowing the right times to use the items he carried with him. But compared to the numbers and power of the Tir Tairngire Defense Force, his resources seemed like little more than a few bits of string and a piece of chewing gum.

  There was one more complication. Much as he’d like to steer completely clear of the TDF, he had the same objective they did. Jackie had pulled some information from the Portland police about where they suspected the bottle of water was. The TDF had the same info, and would likely be heading toward the same place as Bannickburn. They were on an inevitable collision course— unless Bannickburn could get there first. Since he was on foot, he had doubts about that.

  He approached the border guard, exuding the same arrogance as the elves he had observed. The man scanned him for weapons, which was why he hadn’t bothered carrying any. A chem sniffer checked for explosives or other dangerous chemicals, but thankfully it wasn’t looking for the kind of chemicals Bannickburn had—the kind that were dangerous mainly to himself. Bannickburn curtly answered th
e litany of questions, submitted to a retinal scan, then waited for Jackie’s fake results to appear to the guard.

  It only took seconds. “All right, Mr. Cummerbund. Proceed.”

  “Thank you,” Bannickburn said, brushing quickly by the guard. Good old Cummerbund, he thought. He’d been using variants of that identity for over a quarter of a century, and it had never let him down.

  He suppressed the urge to use all of his defensive measures at once—ingest every drug he was carrying, activate every focus—but that would probably stop his heart and alert any half-awake defense officer (especially any watching the astral plane) to his presence. Instead, he settled on a simple plan of action—he jumped into one of the cabs waiting on the other side of the gate.

  He checked his chrono when he got in. He had maybe seven minutes until Jackie’s block broke down and he became a wanted man. He could get just outside Gladstone, to the end of the urban electrical grid and the taxi’s range, before the alert came out. Hopefully.

  Traffic was light in the Portland suburbs. Most people with business in the city lived in the city to avoid the bother of passing the wall every day. And most Tir citizens without business in Portland chose not to live anywhere near the city, leaving the suburbs sparsely populated.

  The cab took him five kilometers before Bannickburn’s seven minutes ran out. From that instant, he was on edge. That, naturally, was the moment his driver decided to strike up a conversation.

  “You sure you just want to go to the edge of town?” she said. The driver was a female ork, crammed into the driver’s seat, and hunching over the steering wheel. “Plenty of places I could take you where you could get a car. Drive wherever you want. I leave you at the edge of the grid, you’ll just be walking.”