Shadowrun: Hell on Water, page 22
The schematic loaded into Lekan’s ARO shows two entrances into the room where this set of icons resides. The squadron has divided, four at one door, two at the other. The two will stay quiet for a time, there mainly to prevent the runners from making a getaway should they decide retreat is their best option.
Then two of the icons representing Lekan’s troops burst forward, entering the room. Lekan leans forward, straining to hear something, anything that might tell him what is going on, until he hears the word he did not really want to hear but was fairly convinced he would.
“Clear,” one of the troopers say. The other one in the room echoes him. “Clear.”
“It’s empty,” Captain Adenoke says. “There is no one in here.”
The red icons sit in the middle of the room, unmoving. Lekan cannot help himself from asking the question that next comes out of his mouth.
“Are you sure they are not on the ceiling or something?”
Captain Adenoke’s answer, Lekan can tell, is delivered through gritted teeth. “They are not on the ceiling. Or the walls. Or the floor. There is no one in this room. No life forms nearby.”
And then, just like that, the red icons in the room disappear.
“Councilor!” Baer says. “Our hackers are having some success against the false codes their hacker put into the system. We’re getting some of them eliminated.”
Lekan zooms his city map out. Sure enough, there are now only five sets of red icons. Three have been cut out.
“Send the teams who were going after those fakes to back up some of the other teams,” he says.
“Sir, it’s still possible that the oyibos are hiding at one of those locations and simply managed to mask the signal.”
“No,” Lekan says. “That’s not how they’re doing this.”
“Sir?”
“They’re leading us on,” he says, staring at the map as another set of icons disappears. “They set this up. They’re trying to show us where to go.”
“That’s an awfully roundabout way to—”
“Of course it is!” Lekan snaps. “They’re pissed at us, which is what happens to most groups of people when you kill one of them. So, they’re going to play their little game, but the point of it isn’t to get them away from us. If it was, they would just leave. Blank out their signal and leave. No, they want us to find them, but in their way.”
“Why in their way?”
“How the hell do I know? To exert some control again. It doesn’t matter. They’re fucking around, and I don’t enjoy being fucked with, even if they eventually plan to give me what I want.”
“But if they’re going to lead us to them, how will we know—”
Baer is interrupted by reports from another team that has reached a set of red icons. The same annoying word is said by them. “Clear,” they say. “Clear.” And the red icons they had been hunting disappear.
Then the others follow suit, and they are all gone. His hackers have chased away all the phantom images, leaving nothing more for anyone to chase.
Until another set of red icons appears, glowing bright red, almost throbbing. Lekan jumps from his feet and points.
“There!” he says. “That’s what they want us to see.” It’s another office building, and it’s four blocks away. A mere four blocks.
He stands. “Get all the teams over there. Everyone at that building.” He glances again at the map. “Except squadron six. Have them meet me in the lobby.”
“The lobby?” Baer says.
“If that’s what they want us to see, then I’m going to see it,” he says. “Squadron six is the one closest to me. They can escort me.”
Baer, as he has been trained, nods and works to make the order happen.
The bottom ten floors of the building are functional. They are financial offices, mostly, spaces where people sit in small rooms for hours on end and figure out how to make money for other people so they can take a percentage of that money for themselves. There are those in his tribe, Lekan knows, who sneer at such work because it produces nothing tangible, it involves nothing that you can hold in your hand. But to Lekan, it is a kind of miracle, that there are ways to move up into some of the higher reaches of society simply by knowing how to shuffle around the world’s resources in the proper fashion.
It is even more of a miracle that some of those people are willing to pay significant bribes and offer other services to him to curry his favor, and it is through these kinds of connections that he is able to walk into the upper, unfinished floors of the building without hindrance.
He would like to simply charge right up to the sixteenth floor, where the RFID tags seem to be, find out what is there and deal with it himself. That is how he became what he is, and he sometimes believes that it was strange that he should abandon the skills and techniques that got him to where he was once he had arrived there. But people had impressed on him how willing they would be to sacrifice themselves for him, and he had become at least partially convinced that allowing them the opportunity to make this sacrifice was fair, and even noble on his part.
So he waits on the fourteenth floor while others move ahead, and those others are pretty numerous by now, having gathered here after conducting their other wild-goose chases on other parts of the Island. If the runners really are here, they will be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. They have no chance of getting away.
Lekan has no doubt that they are not here. He believes something is here. Just not them.
He listens again to the communications as the team moves in, slowly approaching, taking all due cautions. The mages are watching the astral plane intently. As it has been before, in all the other places where signals were supposed to be, they are not seeing any signs of life.
They approach the signals. Lekan watches his AR, waiting for the signals to disappear again. The longer this nonsense goes on, the more pain these runners are earning themselves. He is a man of honor—he will pay them, as long as they have the boxes. They will receive everything they have coming to them, and then they may use those proceeds to pay for nice funerals for themselves.
Except for Halim. Halim will live. All Halim is doing is guaranteeing a deeper level of servitude to the Yoruba tribe.
The signals have not disappeared yet, and it is enough to make Lekan wonder if something different is happening this time. And then, as it happens, something different does in fact happen.
“There’s something here,” Captain Adenoke says. “We don’t see anyone, there are no signs of life, but there’s something on the floor.”
Lekan steps forward despite the fact that there is no justifiable reason to do so. “What’s on the floor? Is it packages?”
“Yes, sir,” Adenoke says. “Three of them.”
Lekan is already running. “Is the floor clear?”
“We believe so, sir. We’ll have final confirmation in a moment.”
Lekan believes it would be a good thing if that confirmation came before he made it to the sixteenth floor, but it is not a crucial matter, as he will arrive at the floor in moments regardless of what anyone says to him.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Lekan bursts out of the stairwell onto the sixteenth floor, followed by security personnel who repeatedly and vainly insist that it would be more appropriate for them to be in front of him. He is all motion and fury until his foot hits the concrete floor with a slap and he sees the three packages in front of him. Three wonderful packages, the evidence that will be the basis of the vengeance he plans to enact on the Igbo over the next months.
As he draws closer to the packages, he sees there is something else on the floor next to them. Two things, two small things that he might not have noticed except for the bright red tinge they have. Since they are unexpected, they get his attention. He bends down, looks closer. They are very small. He squints and tries to see just what they are, and if he should care about them. Then he understands, and he stands up straight and takes a step backward. He looks at his AR window showing the RFID tags. He zooms in close. He knows what he is seeing. There are two runners somewhere besides here, and they both now have unpleasant wounds in their ankle where they dug out chunks of their own flesh. He wonders why their hacker did not just cancel the tags or mask their signals or something, but he has to agree this is more dramatic, and to the runners, that might have been reason enough.
Now for the packages. He looks at them carefully, as he knows what they contain, and he also knows that they have been through a lot in the course of the past few days. He does not really need them intact—he is not Tamanous, or some sort of ghoul—but the less decayed the objects are, the better. His quick scan indicates that the objects appear to be what they are supposed to be and they are as intact as they need to be. It is, of course, possible that the runners pulled some subterfuge and substituted someone else’s body parts for the ones they are supposed to be, but while these runners have shown their theatrical side, he does not think they will have gone that far around the bend. But it is easy enough to get a scan of a fingerprint and check it against his databases. It takes seconds, and he discovers that the finger, at least, is legitimate.
He looks away from the packages and smiles.
“We’re taking these away from here,” he says. “Some of you will carry them, but they are never to be more than twenty meters away from me. Anyone carrying one any farther from me will be shot.”
The men understand him so well that they do not even nod. They just stand ready.
Lekan turns back to the boxes and he gets a shock, for there is suddenly someone there. Someone not in the uniform of his security people, or in Yoruba tribal wear, or in any sort of garment he trusts. He has well-honed reactions for this situation, and they kick in, and there is a blue ball that shoots out of his hand and rockets toward the newcomer. It hits the newcomer. Then passes through him. The newcomer does not react.
Lekan looks closer at the image. If he remembers correctly, this is one of the oyibos. The larger one. He forgets his name. Bermuda? Jamaica?
He turns to his people and points at a mage. “Dispel that,” he says, but then a sound comes from the image, so Lekan holds up his hand, and the mage does not cast anything.
The sound is a voice coming from the image. “Here’s what you’re going to do,” the voice says. “There are three packages. They’re out there, in the city. You’re going to find them and take them to Lagos Island. That’s all.”
The words sound familiar to Lekan, and it does not take long for him to place them. When the mission began, he had listened in on the meeting of Mr. Johnson with Halim and Akuchi, to make sure all went as it should, and that was what he was hearing now—words the Johnson had said then. Halim has a good amount of cyberware, and people such as him often make recordings of any business dealings, as that sort of thing is generally useful to have. For circumstances like this one.
The voice covers a few specifics of the deal, and then it is quiet for a moment. Thankfully, run agreements are not full of legalese, and so the recounting does not take long. The pause is brief. Then the voice talks again, and this time it seems to be reciting its own words.
“We did the job,” is what it says. “We brought the boxes here. You have them. You killed one of us, but we did the job. If you decide to tell anyone about us—and I think there’s a chance you will—remember that no matter what else you can say about us, we did the job. We finished it. We’re goddamned professionals.”
Lekan is looking at his packages. He supposes what the oyibos is saying is true. They played their little game, but they did the job, and he cannot reasonably ask for more than that. He may not have to have all the runners except Halim killed after all.
Then the image is gone. Lekan hopes the illusion made the runners feel better about themselves. He knows the packages in front of him have certainly made him feel better about his day. He picks all three of them up and cradles them like a cherished set of small triplets. He walks slowly forward, and his people know to fall in around him. Their job now is to make sure he gets those packages somewhere safe.
He is somewhere near the elevator doors when his right arm starts to grow warm. He thinks it might just be from the packages leaning against it, perhaps they are hitting a nerve wrong, but he shifts that package slightly and the warming only increases. And then there is smoke.
His arms reflexively jerk open, and the packages fall to the floor. One of them cracks open, and flames shoot out from the inside.
“Put it out!” he screams at his mages. “Put it out!”
The mages respond quickly. The fire shrinks, then becomes a wisp of smoke, then is gone.
Lekan is down on his knees without thinking about it, his hands are stretching forward, pawing through the now-cold ashes inside the open box. He cannot see anything useable. The bastards must have set it to burn from the inside out. The body part—if his memory of the inspection he conducted a few moments ago is correct, the package he is holding had contained the scalp—is ash. He knows it will be the same for the others. The heart will be completely gone. The hand, at least, will have left behind some traces of bone.
All thoughts of mercy for the runners are now gone. He is not even sure he will keep Halim alive long enough to use him. If they were in front of him now, he would cheerfully order the execution of all five of them, and he would hope that their demise would be bloody.
“The spell,” he says, looking furiously here and there at the rather befuddled security force that surrounds him. “The image they send here. Trace it. Find who cast it. They can’t be far away.” His head moves faster, looking back and forth at all of them. “Find them. And do not let them leave this island.”
He walks quickly toward the elevator, stooping to pick up the box that has the now-cooling bones of the hand. The other packages, these he kicks as he goes by them.
Chapter Thirty
There is a wonderful thing about the world that people can be engaged in the latest, cutting-edge activities, but in the end their livelihood might depend on something as primitive as running. They may take advantage of the latest breakthroughs in magical research to befuddle and bemuse whatever opposition they may face, they may have access to bleeding-edge technology that allows them to sneak into places where they have no business being, they may be surrounded by gizmos and powers and all sorts of things, but they still may be reduced to something as simple as churning their legs as fast as they can, pounding the hard ground with their feet, breathing rapidly, keeping it up long enough to build up a sweat, and they may use the opportunity to make a connection to their ancestors, who long ago managed to be the ones in their group who stayed alive because they were fast enough to outrun the lions or cheetahs of the savannah—or, to be accurate, they were fast enough to find a small crevice or a tall tree where they could go and the lion or cheetah could not, and they could get there before they were harmed. The effort of the two legs are something that unite all generations of humans over the centuries, and running for your life should be considered a noble occupation that connects you to many of your greatest ancestors.
Cayman and Agbele Oku, they have the chance to make this connection as they are tearing down some stairs and running through a lobby and charging into the streets of Lagos. They know they would have a brief moment for a head start, but they also know that brief would be the operative word, and that they should take as much advantage of the moment as they can.
They run by the security guards, and those guards do nothing but look at them and smile slightly, because these guards are often amused at the way people hurry through this lobby as though they were on world-shaking business when in fact they were caught up in something that maybe five people in the world cared about, all five of whom were in this building. The guards found this inflated importance to be pathetic, and they watched people run through their lobby with a growing sense of superiority. Now, it is true that the two people running through the lobby were grubbier and better armed than most who were on the premises, but the guards were under no orders to stop people simply because they looked odd and were in a hurry. So they watched them go and smirked.
Cayman and Agbele Oku heard the alarms and the noise and subsequent tumult indicating the guards had been informed that they should, in fact, be concerned about the two people who had just passed through their lobby, but by that point it was too late, as the two of them were on the sidewalk, running toward a small, white car and jumping inside. The engine of the car revved, and it leaped heedlessly into traffic, assuming that other cars would move out of the way if only because that was the way things typically worked. X-Prime sat in the back, Halim was in the front, and Groovetooth drove, for it was Groovetooth who had found the car, and Groovetooth who had the programs that were helping the car move smoothly through traffic. The car was a final gift from Akuchi, who had sent the vehicle ahead and had it wait on the Island in case it was needed. All of them in the vehicle give a silent tribute to Akuchi, and they are unified in the belief that the best tribute to Akuchi would be to put the car to some kind of dramatic use—a use that, ideally, would anger the Yoruba tribe. Groovetooth accelerates, and they are gone.
The streets of Lagos Island, unlike those of the mainland, are drivable. Pedestrians agreeably stay on the sidewalks and do not stride into the street at random times, and drivers drive with the calm assurance that they do not need to hurry too much because wherever they are going, things will wait for them. Groovetooth moves to a speed that is faster than the pace of the cars around her but not overly so, because she is firm in the belief that you do not call attention to yourself unless it is absolutely necessary. She passes cars on the left, she passes them on the right, she moves gently ahead, while AROs measure gaps for her, telling when it is safe to move and when it is not, and she trusts their data completely.
