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PART TWO. THE SHOPPING EXPEDITION
"You want you a paradise," the Flatline advised, when Case had explained his situation. "Check Copenhagen, fringes of the university section." The voice recited coordinates as he punched.
They found their paradise, a "pirate's paradise," on the jumbled border of a low-security academic grid. At first glance it resembled the kind of graffiti student operators sometimes left at the junctions of grid lines, faint glyphs of colored light that shimmered against the confused outlines of a dozen arts faculties.
"There," said the Flatline, "the blue one. Make it out? That's an entry code for Bell Europa. Fresh, too. Bell'll get in here soon and read the whole damn board, change any codes they find posted. Kids'll steal the new ones tomorrow."
Case tapped his way into Bell Europa and switched to a
standard phone code. With the Flatline's help, he connected
with the London data base that Molly claimed was Armitage's.
"Here," said the voice, "I'll do it for you." The Flatline
began to chant a series of digits, Case keying them on his deck,
trying to catch the pauses the construct used to indicate timing.
It took three tries.
"Big deal," said the Flatline. "No ice at all."
"Scan this shit," Case told the Hosaka. "Sift for owner's
personal history."
The neuroelectronic scrawls of the paradise vanished, re-
placed by a simple lozenge of white light. "Contents are pri-
marily video recordings of postwar military trials," said the
distant voice of the Hosaka. "Central figure is Colonel Willis
Corto."
"Show it already," Case said.
A man's face filled the screen. The eyes were Armitage's.
Two hours later, Case fell beside Molly on the slab and let
the temperfoam mold itself against him.
"You find anything?" she asked, her voice fuzzy with sleep
and drugs.
"Tell you later," he said, "I'm wrecked." He was hungover
and confused. He lay there, eyes closed, and tried to sort the
various parts of a story about a man called Corto. The Hosaka
had sorted a thin store of data and assembled a precis, but it
was full of gaps. Some of the material had been print records,
reeling smoothly down the screen, too quickly, and Case had
had to ask the computer to read them for him. Other segments
were audio recordings of the Screaming Fist hearing.
Willis Corto, Colonel, had plummeted through a blind spot
in the Russian defenses over Kirensk. The shuttles had created
the hole with pulse bombs, and Corto's team had dropped in
in Nightwing microlights, their wings snapping taut in moon-
light, reflected in jags of silver along the rivers Angara and
Podhamennaya, the last light Corto would see for fifteen months.
Case tried to imagine the microlights blossoming out of their
launch capsules, high above a frozen steppe.
"They sure as hell did shaft you, boss," Case said, and
Molly stirred beside him.
The microlights had been unarmed, stripped to compensate
for the weight of a console operator, a prototype deck, and a
virus program called Mole IX, the first true virus in the history
of cybernetics. Corto and his team had been training for the
run for three years. They were through the ice, ready to inject
Mole IX, when the emps went off. The Russian pulse guns
threw the jockeys into electronic darkness; the Nightwings suf-
fered systems crash, flight circuitry wiped clean.
Then the lasers opened up, aiming on infrared, taking out
the fragile, radar-transparent assault planes, and Corto and his
dead console man fell out of a Siberian sky. Fell and kept
falling....
There were gaps in the story, here, where Case scanned
documents concerning the flight of a commandeered Russian
gunship that managed to reach Finland. To be gutted, as it
landed in a spruce grove, by an antique twenty-millimeter can-
non manned by a cadre of reservists on dawn alert. Screaming
Fist had ended for Corto on the outskirts of Helsinki, with
Finnish paramedics sawing him out of the twisted belly of the
helicopter. The war ended nine days later, and Corto was shipped
to a military facility in Utah, blind, legless, and missing most
of his jaw. It took eleven months for the Congressional aide
to find him there. He listened to the sound of tubes draining.
In Washington and McLean, the show trials were already un-
derway. The Pentagon and the CIA were being Balkanized,
partially dismantled, and a Congressional investigation had fo-
cused on Screaming Fist. Ripe for watergating, the aide told
Corto.
He'd need eyes, legs, and extensive cosmetic work, the aide
said, but that could be arranged. New plumbing, the man added,
squeezing Corto's shoulder through the sweat-damp sheet.
Corto heard the soft, relentless dripping. He said he pre-
ferred to testify as he was.
No, the aide explained, the trials were being televised. The
trials needed to reach the voter. The aide coughed politely.
Repaired, refurnished, and extensively rehearsed, Corto's
subsequent testimony was detailed, moving, lucid, and largely
the invention of a Congressional cabal with certain vested in-
terests in saving particular portions of the Pentagon infrastruc-
ture. Corto gradually understood that the testimony he gave
was instrumental in saving the careers of three officers directly
responsible for the suppression of reports on the building of
the emp installations at Kirensk.
His role in the trials over, he was unwanted in Washington.
In an M Street restaurant, over asparagus crepes, the aide ex-
plained the terminal dangers involved in talking to the wrong
people. Corto crushed the man's larynx with the rigid fingers
of his right hand. The Congressional aide strangled, his face
in an asparagus crepe, and Corto stepped out into cool Wash-
ington September.
The Hosaka rattled through police reports, corporate espi-
onage records, and news files. Case watched Corto work cor-
porate defectors in Lisbon and Marrakesh, where he seemed
to grow obsessed with the idea of betrayal, to loathe the sci-
entists and technicians he bought out for his employers. Drunk,
in Singapore, he beat a Russian engineer to death in a hotel
and set fire to his room.
Next he surfaced in Thailand, as overseer of a heroin factory.
Then as enforcer for a California gambling cartel, then as a
paid killer in the ruins of Bonn. He robbed a bank in Wichita.
The record grew vague, shadowy, the gaps longer.
One day, he said, in a taped segment that suggested chemical
interrogation, everything had gone gray.
Translated French medical records explained that a man
without identification had been taken to a Paris mental health
unit and diagnosed as schizophrenic. He became catatonic and
was sent to a government institution on the outskirts of Toulon.
He became a subject in an experimental program that sought
to reverse schizophrenia through the application of cybernetic
models. A random selection of patients were provided with
microcomputers and encouraged, with help from students, to
program them. He was cured, the only success in the entire
experiment.
The record ended there.
Case turned on the foam and Molly cursed him softly for
disturbing her.
The telephone rang. He pulled it into bed. "Yeah?"
"We're going to Istanbul," Armitage said. "Tonight."
"What does the bastard want?" Molly asked.
"Says we're going to Istanbul tonight."
"That's just wonderful."
Armitage was reading off flight numbers and departure times.
Molly sat up and turned on the light.
"What about my gear?" Case asked. "My deck."
"Finn will handle it," said Armitage, and hung up.
Case watched her pack. There were dark circles under her
eyes, but even with the cast on, it was like watching a dance.
No wasted motion. His clothes were a rumpled pile beside his
bag.
"You hurting?" he asked.
"I could do with another night at Chin's."
"Your dentist?"
"You betcha. Very discreet. He's got half that rack, full
clinic. Does repairs for samurai." She was zipping her bag.
"You ever been to 'Stambul?"
"Couple days, once."
"Never changes," she said. "Bad old town."
"It was like this when we headed for Chiba," Molly said,
staring out the train window at blasted industrial moonscape,
red beacons on the horizon warning aircraft away from a fusion
plant. "We were in L.A. He came in and said Pack, we were
booked for Macau. When we got there, I played fantan in the
Lisboa and he crossed over into Zhongshan. Next day I was
playing ghost with you in Night City." She took a silk scarf
from the sleeve of her black jacket and polished the insets. The
landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of
childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted
slab of freeway concrete.
The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport.
Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.