Unfortunately for the runners, one of the reasons Lagos Island is as safe as it is, is because the security personnel are generally are of a high caliber. The people on the ground are often low level, of course, because that is the way of the world, but there are others who are possibly the best at what they do, and that means that if they have a shot to take, they can take it without feeling anger or aggression or really very much of anything. They can pull a trigger, and their aura will not change at all.

  And that is what happens. There is a shot, and it kicks into the road just behind Akuchi. The runners react quickly, because there is only one possible reaction to have. They run, moving quickly away from the gate. There is another shot, it seems like it comes from the same place as the first, though it is difficult to tell with the echoing noise of the Island’s skyscrapers, but this bullet does not come close to Akuchi or anyone else, because there is a glowing wall that has just appeared behind them, and the bullet hits that wall and clinks to the ground. Cayman turns to see if guards besides the sniper are running after them, or doing anything, but they are going about their normal business, watching more people pass through the gates, apparently not caring about the shots behind them or the wall Agbele Oku had abruptly erected. Pedestrians and vehicles are passing through the gate, and if the wall was in their way they move around it, smoothly and easily. It has remarkably little effect—aside, of course, from protecting the runners from a shot that might have killed one of them.

  Cayman decides he will wonder more about what was happening when they are safe, but that moment had not yet arrived. He looks ahead of him and sees the type of businesses that would serve people who were about to go out into the uncivilized wilds or those who had just returned from them—carry-out food, med supplies, commlink tuning-up and repair, and other things of that sort. They offered the same tradeoff you always face when you are on the run from someone who would like to kill you—the gain of shelter and a modicum of protection, the loss of moving from an open space to a confined space.

  “Is anyone following us?” Cayman says.

  “Not that I see,” Groovetooth and Agbele Oku say at the same time.

  “I say we stay outside then,” he says, and no one disagrees.

  They keep up a very fast pace for about half a kilometer, and then, without a signal or spoken word, all of them slow to a jog. There are people on the street, and they are staring, but Cayman cares very little about anything any of them do, so long as none of them have a weapon drawn.

  “Anything?” he says.

  “Not yet,” a number of voices say—possibly every member of the group but him.

  “Okay.” He shakes his head. “We’ll figure out what that was all about later. Let’s drop the package off, get paid, and get out.”

  No one disagrees.

  They are on the sidewalk, and vehicle traffic has picked up, since they are in a place that people want to be. There are helicopters and other small aircraft darting here and there overhead, touching down on the top of buildings and dropping off or picking up those who will indulge themselves with the luxury of visiting the city without setting a foot on the ground of Lagos. There is even AR, mostly commercial signage, making the street look lively and shiny.

  They are moving quickly and attracting the occasional stare, but that matters not at all to them. They feel the pressure of the gate behind them, of the shots that were fired, and the farther they get from those bullets, the better. They, whoever they are, might try to kill Akuchi again on the way out of Lagos Island, but that will be later, at a time when they all should be a bit richer. Perhaps they will take a taxi, since they are in one of the few parts of the sprawl that has ready access to them.

  There is a taxi right now, in front of them, parked on the side of the road, waiting for a passenger, or disgorging a passenger. In fact, it seems to be the latter, as the rear door is opening and someone is stepping out. The person is not dressed in business wear, but rather in full traditional Yoruba outfit, with a lovely blue buba and a yellow gele wrapped around her head. It is difficult to see the woman in the middle of all the fabric, but she seems round-faced and cheerful. She smiles as she emerges from the cab and nods at the strangers walking by her, and most of them walk quickly by her except for Akuchi, who is blocked, so he tries to step around her but she moves with him, and she smiles again, this time awkwardly.

  He takes a quick step so he can be past her, but he notices a curious thing—his right leg does not seem to want to respond the way he would like it to. At the moment he notices this, he feels a hot, searing pain in his thigh, and he looks down, and there is blood, lots of it. He looks back at the woman and catches what he did not see before—there seems to be a small gun in her right hand, lost in the folds of her buba.

  She is still smiling. “I dressed like this,” she says, “so you would know.” Then she fires again.

  It might have been a small consolation to Akuchi to see red blossoms erupt from the woman as Cayman, Halim, and even X-Prime fire on her, killing her on the spot. Except he cannot see this, he cannot see anything, because the second shot from the Yoruban woman took him in the forehead, and he is falling to the ground, and will not see anything ever again.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Three hours before the bridge

  Groovetooth had heard stories of the old days, stories of when cyberdecks were large and cumbersome instead of sleek and light, when deckers were bound by cords and plugs and sometimes were left to do their own thing while the people they were working with did theirs.

  She had some familiarity with that period—she had some memories of hardwired Matrix connections, and Lagos was a primitive enough place that some people still jacked in—but all in all, it was history to her, and she was happy to leave it behind.

  Yet there she was, in Festac Town, sitting at a table in an Matrix café, watching the progress of the other members of her team while they were out doing stuff. But with people spread out across the sprawl, someone needed to be the central communication and monitoring hub, and that was the job she was built for.

  The burden of her job was made considerably lighter by the fact that the action she was following was quite entertaining. X-Prime and Cayman were rummaging through dumpsters in Ikeja, Agbele Oku and Akuchi were on the road to Alimosho for some sort of rendezvous with the sort of people who schedule meetings in Alimosho, and Halim was running over people not far away in the slums of Ajengule.

  He was the most fun to keep track of, though it would have been considerably better if he were doing his business in a part of town that was better endowed with security cameras. For the most part, she was limited to monitoring his actions through his own equipment, and Halim was either not set up to send her a visual feed, or he simply didn’t feel like doing it. But every comm had a microphone, and so she could usually hear what was going on when she turned her attention to it, and she could even ask questions, and maybe one out of three things she asked was actually answered.

  But the microphone on Halim’s comm had decent quality, and her imagination was good enough to fill in some of the blanks left by her not being able to see what was happening. She had learned to tell the difference between a punch to the gut, a smack to the head, a kick to the crotch, and a sword slash across the torso. That last one, it was fairly easy to tell from the others. She even thought, sometimes, that she heard the ringing impact of sword on bone as Halim cut into a ribcage.

  There was one of those cuts—a strong thunk, followed by a ringing that took nearly a full minute to fade, that was followed by a kind of quiet as the sounds near the microphone faded and left only the background noises of people walking and talking and doing their business, sensible people whose noises were not loud in the microphone because they kept their distance from Halim.

  “That sounds like it’s it,” Groovetooth said.

  “For now,” Halim said.

  “These ones have the box?”

  “Yes.”

  She exhaled. Progress—taking one step closer to payday—was good.

  “I guess you need to head northeast now.”

  “Yes. There might be more of them chasing me. Whoever they are.”

  “I’ll watch when I can,” she said. “It’ll be easier once you’re out of the slums.”

  “I’m already moving.”

  She returned her attention to the window that showed a map of Lagos. It was the result of a complex series of activities and reports from programs and agents, but like any truly worthwhile complex activity, the end result was simple. Five points on a map—one white, one tan (those two were the oyibos), one black (Halim), one blue (Akuchi), one red (Agbele Oku). The dots did not stay visible all the time—dead zones were inevitable, or her agents lost the others as they hopped from one makeshift network of nodes to another. But for the most part, she had them pinned, and she could watch their dots make their way around the city.

  And there was another set of dots. They were gray. There were very few people in the sprawl who could track those dots. There were codes and keys that Groovetooth had that allowed her to track these particular individuals, and those codes were given to very few people. There was a point when Groovetooth had done five jobs for Tamanous, and she’d sent all sorts of agents digging into whatever nodes she had access to, and she still didn’t have the codes. It was only when they put her on retainer that she got the higher-level access. They had only given her limited access, of course, but she used that crack to open the door wider for herself, of course. She figured they must have known she would get more. She was a decker, that was what she did—taking a kilometer when she was given a millimeter was part of the job description. So she had a few sets of codes, and while some of them had been discontinued, she had enough to log in to some of their networks.

  Which wasn’t, in the end, all that useful most of the time. Perhaps Tamanous wouldn’t worry so much about secrecy if they realized how few people who were not organleggers cared about what organleggers were up to. But if you are in the information business—and who is not?—you hold on to any bits of data you have, and wait for the right time to use them.

  Most of the Tamanous activities going on out there were not of a concern to her. They were doing what they do, and she was grateful that the things they do no longer have considerable overlap with the things she does. But there was one group that she was keeping her eye on, for several reasons. It is a group of hitters.

  Tamanous, like every other organization in the known world, has reason to occasionally hire people to do work that their regular staff could not perform, or was unwilling to perform, or should not, for various reasons, including deniability, perform. But they also had work that demanded they keep a certain amount of hitters on staff, because when you do the sort of work in which Tamanous is regularly involved, you often find yourself in need of having to convince people to leave you alone and let you do your business without interference. And so there are the hitters.

  Groovetooth knew most of the Tamanous hitters in Lagos, since she found that they were very useful people to know. There was one team she had her eyes on, and that was Capstone’s team.

  Capstone is an ork, though not the most imposing specimen of his kind. In fact, there are several hitters on the Tamanous payroll who are more physically intimidating than Capstone, but none of them have his tracking ability. Capstone finds people. Whoever they are, wherever they are in the sprawl of Lagos, however fast and in whichever direction they are traveling, Capstone finds them. He always knows the right speed to travel, the correct angle to take to find who he is looking for. It is uncanny. If it were not for a lamentable stim habit and the unfortunate tendency to decide that there were some jobs that were just not worth his time, Capstone would be on the payroll of a much more powerful organization than Tamanous. But he was not, and this day he was out and on the prowl, and apparently had decided that whatever assignment he had been given was worth his time.

  Groovetooth had this fear that Capstone’s assignment and her job had an area of overlap, and that troubled her. The sources of her worry were vague, built on snippets of conversation with people who were very practiced in telling you only what they wanted you to know, giving you just a taste, so that you were left only with a nagging suspicion that there was something more you should know, but you could not quite piece together just what that something was.

  One of these conversations happened with an ambulance driver Groovetooth had ridden with a couple of times, but who did not drive anymore because the amount of money he lost through crashes had started to exceed the amount of money he helped bring in through his driving. He no longer had a working vehicle to his name, and was in the process of drinking away what little cred he had left. If Groovetooth decided to ponder his future, she was fairly certain he would be on the streets within two months, then dead of malnutrition or gang violence in four. Or perhaps, once he started wandering the streets late at night, he would become an involuntary organ donor for the organization that had provided the money he was currently using to keep himself permanently intoxicated.

  Though there might be other useful resources in his body, Groovetooth was certain his liver would be completely useless.

  Despite his collapsing and drunken state, this rigger, who called himself Birdcage, had too long been in the habit of being careful with information to loosen his lips now. He could barely form coherent words, but when he did, those words did not betray a hint more information than he wanted them to.

  They had been in a warehouse that had been abandoned so recently that the electricity had not been shut off yet. Soon the power would go, the wiring would be harvested, and the building would become one of a thousand squatter habitations spread across the sprawl. But for now, there was free juice, and deckers flocked to it to recharge and to use its relatively stable grid access.

  Groovetooth was there to enjoy the luxury of a Matrix connection that did not come and go with the breeze. Birdcage was there because he knew that when deckers were in a good mood and absorbed in their work, they were often generous with whatever liquor they may have acquired.

  Birdcage was, in the grand tradition of former work acquaintances who were no longer working, reminiscing about the past.

  “Hearts,” he said. “Hearts are the worst. I mean, everything, yeah, is rush, rush, rush, all the time, but hearts are the worst. Every time I had a heart, some jack-off was flashing AR messages at me the whole time. Looking for updates, telling me to hurry, on and on and on. It just, it just, you want to know what it makes me? It just makes me glad that they still don’t know fuck-all about transplanting brains, right, because if we were shipping brains, how annoying would they be then? They’d be all up in my ass like a procoltolgis…a proloctogy…a…a…what’s those things? Like an ass doctor, that’s what they’d be like.”

  “You’re right,” Groovetooth said, partly because agreeing with a drunk is easier than arguing with him, and partly because he was, in fact, right. “I understand that is why Tosin does not work for them any more. Remember what happened?”

  “Damn right I remember,” Birdcage said. “He shot someone right in the heart.”

  Groovetooth laughed. “They had worked hard to find that one. That was a person with a rare blood type, abi? So they found a match, someone they thought no one would miss and who would have a decent heart, and they send in Tosin, and the guy fought back and surprised the hell out of Tosin, so he shot the guy. Shot him in the heart.”

  “They said it was a fifty thousand nuyen-bullet. What an idiot-hole.”

  “Hired goons,” Groovetooth said. “If you hire someone off the street, you must remember that most of the time there was a reason why they were on the street to begin with.”

  “Yeah,” Birdcage said, nodding, and then, somehow, his eyes seemed less red, and his gaze was more focused. “The good ones, they’re on a payroll somewhere. Because they know what they’re doing.”

  “Well, there’s good ones on the street, too, I guess. You know, people who don’t want to get tied down. It’s just not always easy to sort out those ones from the posers and the—what was that you just said?—the idiot-holes.”

  “But the ones on a payroll, they know what they’re doing,” Birdcage said, almost repeating himself, but doing it with a certain emphasis on each word. “Those are the ones you have to watch out for.” Is that what he said? Or was it “Those are the ones you have to watch out for.”

  “What? What do you mean?” Groovetooth said, but Birdcage had sipped the clear, extremely high-proof liquid in his glass, and that sip seemed to carry the weight of five shots, because his eyes became glassy again, and the red returned in full force, and the letters of the alphabet now seemed entirely unwilling to cooperate with Birdcage’s tongue in the task of forming intelligible words.

  That had been one conversation, and there had been others, and the cumulative impact of all of them was the unavoidable sensation that her old colleagues were after her. Or if not exactly after her, then looking to interfere with her work in some way. So when she saw Capstone was out, she kept an eye on him, and hoped her path would not intersect hers.

  Though if it did, she hoped he would be on skates. He was really something to see on those skates.

  But while she was watching her dots, she did not have time to focus on Capstone, because things were happening. Akuchi and Agbele Oku were meeting with some Daughters of Yemaja, and some of them had comms that Groovetooth’s agents were working their way into. The information she was gathering did not have concrete evidence of approaching shedim, but she could feel them out there, as if their malevolence carried through the Matrix like an evil brand of resonance. So Agbele Oku and Akuchi have both shedim and Daughters to deal with. She sent them a brief message about this, with a lame “let me know if there is anything I can do” kicker as an attempt to be useful. They did not respond.

 

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