Logs for ShadowRN and Associated Mailing Lists

From:	Brian Downes bwdownes@*********.net
Subject:	Bedlam Extraction, by Zen Shooter
Date:	Sat, 9 Dec 2000 00:35:22 -0500

Message no. 1 This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

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Dennis Serot was the kind of fat that sweated, even in the winter. In an
overheated downtown coffee bar, Marbury watched the beads of sweat accumulate at the
Frenchman's temples underneath the brim of his white fedora. The palms of Dennis's hands
were getting damp, too. The Frenchman took long, hard-won breaths that had the rhythm of
a faulty metronome. Marbury was sure that someday Serot would suffocate under the effort
of being him.
"How was the play?" Serot asked.

"Very good. Not brilliant. Thanks for waiting."

Serot grunted and gave a nod. When Serot had called Marbury to set up this
meeting Marbury had made him schedule it three hours later, because Marbury had plans to
see A Christmas Carol at the New Seattle Theater across the lake in Bellevue, where he had
a season pass. He wasn't going to go into dramatic criticism with Dennis, though. Dennis
wasn't exactly a theater aficionado, and the fixer was anxious to get to the point.

A woman on the other side of the coffee bar said to her companion in reference
to Serot's clothing: "Who wears white suits in winter? Maybe he's a pimp?"

Marbury suppressed a smile. "Is your countermeasure on?" Serot
nodded and patted his briefcase on the bench seat next to him. "So I guess you have a
contract for me?"

Serot outlined the contract in his accented English which always made Marbury
feel a little bit like he was having drinks in Cannes.

The employer (who Serot did not have to explain wished to remain anonymous,
and would enforce that anonymity with more methods of death, loud and quiet, than Marbury
could comfortably think about) wanted to come into possession of a human being. That human
being was a female, human, Caucasian, estimated age middle thirties, name Doe10, Jane.
This was the name that had been assigned to her, along with a System Identification
Number, which was more permanent than a name, when she was committed to the Wallace Mental
Institute in Washington, DC. The Wallace Mental Institute was a federal institution for
incarcerating people who had committed federal offenses but had been judged mentally
incompetent to stand trial.

Jane Doe10 had been arrested for computer crime and sundry other charges stemming from a
conspiracy to steal 3.75 million UCAS dollars worth of bearer bonds. She was diagnosed
with acute schizo-affective disorder, and washed up at WMI. That was two months ago, in
October. The employer was willing to pay fifty thousand nuyen in untraceable certified
credsticks issued on the Voltz Interface Bank of Geneva to each member of the team that
extracted Jane Doe10 from the Wallace Mental Institute and delivered her alive to a Mr.
Edward Olsen, in a rental house in Baltimore. It was transparent to Marbury that Mr.
Edward Olsen was a pseudonym, and the datatrail on the house would be lies and ephemera.

"Did the employer say why they wanted Jane Doe10?" Marbury asked.

"You'll need a decker to override the Institute's computer," Serot told him.
"Do you have one?"

"I have No Meat Address. But Qabballah retired. What am I going to do for a
magician?"

For years Marbury had worked with an unorthodox Jewish tzaddikim who's professional name
had been Qabballah but who's real name was Aaron Burgstrauss. But Aaron had gotten
married, taken his third grade of initiation and walked out of the shadows. Last Marbury
had heard, he was considering a position with a temple in Tacoma. Marbury had been on
vacation since then.

"Well," Serot took another effortful breath, "Borsky is out."

"Borsky?"

"Uh-huh. Oui."

"Is in Seattle?"

Serot nodded.

Silence.

"Okay. Give him my wrist commcode and we'll talk."

Marbury got reacquainted with Borsky's charm right away. They had a brief
phone call, and when it was over Marbury realized that he'd agreed to meet Borsky at The
Murdered Mime even though he hated loud bars. There was too much stimulus in too-sharp
focus, like strobing pops of information splashing across his brain. An earring stabbing
him in the eye because he'd seen the same earring on sale at Wordsworth's last week, a
human woman who was five years older than she made herself up to be, and two shades less
drunk. And five conversations within earshot that he couldn't help but follow no matter
their painful, painful inanity.

He spotted Borsky at the bar right away. The shaman was still tall and slight. His hair
was shocking. Like many elves, Borsky had always worn his hair long and in luxurious
waves. Tonight it was a tight stubble against his delicate art-deco skull. Prison did that
to him, Marbury thought automatically.

Marbury slipped by a row of three young Japanese at the bar who had JUNIOR YAKUZA printed
across their foreheads. The yak soldiers in their elegant suits were having a
conversation that Marbury could overhear, but they were speaking Japanese. Marbury was
grateful tonight that Japanese was not a language he understood.

"Hello, Borsky." He could smell that Borsky was using a different brand of soap
now.

"This place hasn't changed," Borsky said, and in those four words Marbury
sensed a change in the shaman. His personality had been beaten almost flat by three years
in a Texas penitentiary, but the little shape it retained was defiant.

"Same bar, same stage, same syndicate grunts. Except it looks like sake has gone and
vodka shooters are popular with the tattoos-and-tantos set." The elf grinned a wide
grin. "It's nice to be back home."

They embraced. "It is nice to see you, Krantz. Wait, is it still Krantz?"

They let go of each other. "No, no, it's been Marbury since '59."

Borsky smiled. "You'll have to tell me that story. I believe that the best stories
are the stories where your name changes at the end. Sometimes I change my name just to get
the story out of it." Marbury saw how carefully the shaman reached for his drink and
realized that Borsky was "looking through Fox's eyes." The textbook term was
astral perception.

"You initiated!" Borsky exclaimed. "Or you got so worked over that all your
magic got squeezed out."

"Initiated. Discovered how to mask my aura. How about you?"

"Didn't have the chance. Do you know what they do to magicians in prison?"

Marbury did. Borsky's eyes refocused, and something subtle happened to his face as he
shifted out of Fox's eyes, because he couldn't stand the pity in Marbury's aura.

"Hard time?" Marbury asked.

"For three years I had recurring nightmares about chewing my own legs off." The
elf threw back his drink, and the charcoal smell of scotch flooded Marbury's nose.
"What else did you learn when you got enlightened?"

"I learned to be stronger."

"Jesus, don't shake my hand then. I hate it when macho slot-heads have to demonstrate
on the poor little Fox shaman's hands."

Silence.

"So the fat man has gotten better dressed since I went away. What's this job?"

Forty-eight hours later Borksy and Marbury were outside the beltway in Washington, august
capitol of the United Canadian and American States, driving through a snow storm that was
burying the urban landscape under wind-stirred layers of gray and white.

"Are we even going to get to this place?" Borsky asked.

"I'm handling it," Marbury said shortly. His hands were getting stiff on the
wheel.

"That would be a glorious shadowrun," Borsky went on. " "We were
nearly to the target when we flipped over on the median and burned to death." "

Marbury pressed his lips together. He was an artist with a shotgun and as a knife fighter
he was the whisper of death. But as a driver he was not a talent, and the idea of burning
to death put a wad of broken glass in his lower intestine.

"Great form storm spirits!" Borsky shouted. "Sent by our enemies to kill us
with this weather! It's a set-up, man! We're doomed!" The shaman laughed out loud
when Marbury didn't even smile. He slapped Marbury on the shoulder. "Oh, come on,
work with me here. Do you remember Smash Hands? That ork had his sense of humor surgically
removed to make room for more enhancements. I don't think he ever liked me much. What
happened to Smash Hands?"

"He got gunned down in the street in Renton. Street says it was some kind of Humanis
Policlub complication."

Borsky grimaced. "I hope he took some of those racist pricks with him."

"I think he already had. That's what it was about."

They drove the last five clicks in silence, except for a phone conversation Borsky had
with No Meat Address. "How's the weather up there?" Borsky asked.

"Ten degrees and partly sunny," the decker replied. The 3cm x 3cm screen on
Borsky's wristphone displayed nothing but the message NO IMAGE AVAILABLE. Address was
declining to use the video feature of the phone, probably because he wasn't using a phone
at all. He was stealing the call from a UCAS government satellite.

Right now the decker was sitting in thirty cubic meters of space rented from one of the
decidedly weird gangs that controlled the rooftops of the Redmond district of Seattle.
That thirty cubic meters of space was bordered on five sides by a lean-to made out of
scavenged sheets of construction plastic. On top of that lean-to, No Meat Address had
glued a little satellite dish that was now connecting him and his cyberdeck to the
wordwide matrix. Something that would have chagrinned the UCAS government if they had
known about it, because it was their satellite Address was stealing time on.

If it had been heavily overcast in Seattle, No Meat Address's job would have been
tougher. But the weather reports had held true.

"We have a green light on the deal then?" Borsky asked.

"Go on the deal. Repeat, go on the deal."

"Go on the deal," Borsky agreed, and terminated the call. "You hear
that?"

"Yes," said Marbury.

Twenty minutes later the two of them walked through the front doors of the WMI. The snow
had tapered off but the wind was still cold and buffeting, and they hunched inside their
overcoats.

Borsky's trick was this: he could make people believe him. No matter how outrageous his
lies were - mammoth, lumbering, gut-shot brontosaur frauds when presented by Borsky the
Fox shaman were believed by everybody. Borsky could tell a polygraph that he was an
aardvark that walked on its hind legs and the polygraph would end up lending him twenty
nuyen.

So when they reached the armored glass booth that was the front desk of WMI and Borsky
said, "Hello. Justice department. I'm agent Turner and this is agent Hartford. We're
picking up Jane Doe10," even Marbury believed that the elf was a justice department
agent.

"Identification?" The orderly in the booth said for the sake of form. Borsky and
Marbury took out credsticks and passed them through a drawer.

Marbury glanced around the lobby while they waited for the credsticks to clear. They used
the same antiseptic cleanser to scrub WHI that had been used to scrub the 11th floor men's
room of a Shiawase Corporation building in which Marbury had once changed clothes.

Marbury was very smart. He had made a career out of being smart, which was the same as
saying that he had made a career out of being a hyper-alert control freak. There were a
hundred thousand variables in every step of a run, and Marbury stayed alive by reading
them. Like wind in the trees, like tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. Pasts and futures
turned on the weight a man put on his foot. The smell of a woman's cigarette could tell
you the brand and the brand could tell you what plane she just disembarked. The scars on a
man's knuckles carried information about which hand he liked to hit with and then you knew
his weaknesses. Success flowed from seeing clearly and knowing the meaning of what you
saw.

But Marbury knew something else; he knew that the details were fractal. Each detail
carried infinite detail in itself. And no matter how much you could see there was always
something more to see beyond that, and while control was synonymous with security there
were moments outside of that which required instinct. You just had to jump.

To fool the computer that was checking their identities they had to rely on false DoJ
I.D.s. No Meat Address couldn't affect this part of the process. But they'd gotten those
I.D.s from their anonymous employer. They didn't even know why their employer wanted Jane
Doe10 in the first place. They didn't know who their employer was or what they wanted or
if their employer even had the considerable matrix juice necessary to produce fake
credsticks that would fool WMI scanners.

They could be standing on the cheese in an elaborate trap. But Occam's Razor told Marbury
they weren't. If someone had wanted to kill him there were much simpler ways, and the
simple solution was always the best solution.

Unless of course there was someone who wanted to feed Borsky to the UCAS federal
authorities for reasons of their own . . .

"Alright, sirs," the orderly in the armored booth said. He sent their fake DoJ
credsticks back through the drawer. "Let me buzz you through this door and your guide
will meet you on the other side. Your credsticks will open the chokepoint doors."

They both said thank you.

Every space inside WMI was small, glossy white, and the obsessive clean that came from
robots.

The man who met them inside the first chokepoint door wore all white. He was in his late
twenties and had a Cleveland accent, along with a stun baton and a can of Pepper Punch
hanging on the quilted white vest he wore that Marbury figured was armored against blunt
trauma.

"Afternoon, gentlemen. What can I do for you?"

Borsky spoke up and Marbury nodded slightly to give the impression that he agreed.
"Hi there. Turner and Hartford, picking up Jane Doe10."

His gloves were white. His baton and his Punch can were white too. You could get gear
color-coded for your security people at lots of different suppliers. His socks were white
too. He led them down a glossy white corridor. They passed a window made out of a full
centimeter of armored glass that overlooked the snowy highway Marbury and Borsky had just
driven in on.

There were three chokepoint doors between the front entrance and Jane Doe10's cell, not
including the lobby door. If the madhouse went catastrophic, the chokepoints isolated the
problem like a quarantine keeping a disease from spreading. They were approaching the
first one now.

If Borsky and Marbury had been real DoJ agents, their credsticks would have opened the
chokepoints. But they were fakes - Marbury, Borsky, and their credsticks were all fakes -
and although the phony I.D.s had gotten them past the front desk, they wouldn't get them
through the chokepoints.

Borsky stepped up to the first chokepoint door, which was a heavy white door without a
window. He had his credstick in his hand; he fitted it into the slot that would open the
door if he were a real DoJ agent. Which he was not.

Marbury casually fell back half a pace. He thought about the ceramic knife he was wearing
in the small of his back. His eyes flickered over the tiny hairs on the back of their
orderly's neck.

The door hummed and the magnetic lock disengaged. Marbury felt the air pressure change
when Borsky swung the heavy door open and they proceeded through. The orderly closed it
behind them.

"Are we getting close?" Borsky asked the orderly, and Marbury thought Borsky was
spreading the innocence a bit thick.

"Uh-huh," the orderly nodded.

No Meat Address had successfully infiltrated the Institute's computer host. He was
watching them now, through the cameras that were hidden in the walls. And when they
reached the next chokepoint, he would unlock that door just like he had unlocked the last
one, at the precise instant that Borsky stuck his bogus and in this case utterly worthless
credstick in the slot.

Second door coming up at the end of the hall. Other white doors lined the sides of the
hall, each with a little reinforced window at eye level. There were faces in some of the
windows. They looked perfectly normal to Marbury.

Marbury could hear absolutely nothing from inside the cells, not even the breath of a
troll they passed, his mammoth head pressed up against his little window, his nostrils
fogging the glass.

"I use my credstick here too, right?" Borsky asked the orderly.

"Yes sir," the orderly said. From the way he said "sir," Marbury knew
that he had already forgotten the phony names they had given.

Chick. Hmmmt. Clunk. The door opened and the group traveled through, the two imposter
mercenaries in the pay of an unknown cause and the oblivious madhouse junior warden from
Mentor, Ohio.

Marbury didn't know much about how to bend other people's computers to your will, but he
did know that every time No Meat Address stole another action on the WMI host, there was a
risk that the computer would notice the irregularity. If the computer noticed enough
irregularities, it would launch its countermeasure programs. Terms like Gray Ice,
Subsystem Authorization, Security User Status swelled and burst in Marbury's brain.

He'd heard them on trideo. He had very little idea what they meant. He knew that if
Address lost his toehold in the WHI host he and Borsky were going to become masters of the
art of improvisation in record time.

The trio reached the third door. Borsky "opened" that one too, with movements so
swift and practiced you'd think he spent his free time rehearsing his Justice Department
impersonation. There was a fraction of a second's delay between Borsky's action and No
Meat Address's unlocking the door, but the orderly didn't notice.

Marbury breathed out.

A few meters later and they were in front of Jane Doe10's cell.

"I'll have to get this one," the orderly said. Their DoJ identities wouldn't
open the cell doors, fake or not.

The Ohioan looked through the window in the cell door, then used his credstick to unlock
the door of the cell. Marbury heard a tiny popping rush of air as the door unsealed.

The inside of the cell was about three meters by five. There was a sink, a toilet, a
mirror made out of polished steel, a plastic desk and chair, and a human woman in her mid
thirties sitting on the bed. She looked up curiously when the orderly came in the door,
and she came along obediently when he told her to. She looked drugged to Marbury.

"Hello, Jane," Borsky greeted her when she came out into the hall. "We're
from the Justice Department and we're here to help."

"What's going on here?" Jane Doe10 asked.

"We're taking a little ride, Jane," Borsky smirked. Marbury shot him a look and
the elf amended, "Prisoner transfer. There's a DA who wants to ask you some
questions."

It was back down the silent hall for them now, on the journey out. The sameness of the
décor was beginning to bug Marbury. The sameness and the silence and the lack of
stimulus was beginning to make his brain overheat. The faces of the prisoners in the
occasional cell window began to look like infected bruises under a skin of glass,
swellings in a wall of white.

They passed smoothly through the first of the three doors. Marbury consciously restrained
his impulse to walk faster. Doe10 slowed them down, walking along in a daze. If it came to
running, they would pretty much have to carry her.

They were coming up on the second door. Marbury saw a man in one of the cells, peering
out, with a white bandage pad taped to his face, scars in his eyebrows and the space in
his eyes hogged up by an utterly alien madness. Marbury made eye-contact with the man for
a flicker of time and moved on. The expression in the man's eyes reminded him vividly of a
time that he'd seen that same expression in the eyes of a small but muscular man in
Detroit who had just jammed an Ares submachine gun into Marbury's crotch. What Marbury
really remembered about that incident was the data he had read in the man's eyes in that
split second: the man was looking into Marbury's eyes to make sure that Marbury knew what
was about to be done to his genitals with an automatic weapon.

The orderly from Ohio was frowning and he put his hand on his stun baton. Marbury's knife
flew into his hand and he slashed across the orderly's weapon arm, opening a wet red gape.
The second door hadn't opened, and the orderly had noticed something was wrong.

"Now is not the time to be brave," Marbury told him. Behind him Borsky was
swearing and the door bleated again as it rejected his credstick. "Keep your hands to
yourself and this will all be over in a minute."

The orderly convulsed. His face twisted bizarrely as muscles rebelled against each other.
His back arched, the back of his head thumped against the obsessively white wall and his
knees went out from under him.

Marbury whirled on Borsky, who was still trying to make the door accept him. "I was
trying to give the guy options!" Marbury hissed.

"What? Don't blame me for that. Guy had a weak heart. In the wrong business if you
ask me." One pointy ear twitched, Fox's mask showing itself.

"What's going on here?" Jane Doe10 asked.

My decker's addiction to a designer drug called Psyche has finally affected his work and
my Fox shaman is having a homicidal fit of claustrophobia, Marbury thought. "You're
leaving with us," he said. "That's what you need to understand."

"This door is not cooperating," Borsky bounced his fist off the door to no
effect whatever. He looked all around the hall they were enclosed in, at the ceiling, at
the floors . . . then he knelt beside the dead orderly.

"Did you see this guy's wearing a tranceiver?" Borsky asked as he went through
the man's pockets.

"Yes." Marbury strained his senses, trying to deduce what was happening on the
other side of the chokepoint door that was trapping them in this small white space.

"Nice pen," Borsky said, holding up a red ink pen. He put it in his own pocket
and stood up. "What's our decker's name again?"

"No Meat Address."

"Is this place wired for audio? Mr. Address? Mr. Address? Hellllooo?"

"I'm sure he's working hard in there. Can you do something to lift this siege?"

Borsky pursed his lips and furrowed his brow. Marbury watched him intently, then
remembered that this was the expression he always got when he summoned spirits.

And then there were four of them. They had been joined by a woman, 157 centimeters tall,
barefoot and dressed in a white lab coat with an I.D. tag clipped to it. The words and
picture on the tag were blurred to illegibility.

"Hide us, Spirit," Borsky instructed the woman.

"Yes, Doctor." The woman replied in a voice that was very thin.

Nothing changed that Marbury could sense. But he knew that their enemies could now walk
right by them without seeing them.

Marbury heard a small noise, a tiny voice. It was coming from the dead man.

Marbury bent over to hear it better. The voice was saying, "Surmounting a little
obstacle here . . . projected timescale to opening remaining . . . doors . . . twelve
seconds."

It was No Meat Address, broadcasting to the orderly's tranceiver from within the
Institute's computer. Marbury repeated the message to Borsky.

"So soon?" The shaman made a show of disappointment.

The maglock disengaged. Borsky grabbed Jane Doe10 by the arm, and Marbury swung the door
open, his knife in his hand.

There were three orderlies standing on the other side of it, each one with Pepper Punch or
a stun baton in their hand. Two of them squinted at an apparently empty hallway. The third
pushed down on the fire button of his Punch can. That third orderly had seen them, in
spite of the spirit's help.

Marbury slipped to one side but he still caught a mist on the side of his face, and he
knew the burning pain was in the mail.

"Pop!" Borsky said matter-of-factly, and all three of the orderlies shouted and
threw their arms up in front of their faces. Marbury didn't understand why, but you
learned to accept these things when you worked with magicians.

They shouldered past the orderlies, Marbury shoving them out of the way with Borsky, Doe10
and the spirit following behind. Marbury stabbed two of them in the thighs to discourage
pursuit, deliberately missing the arteries both times, even as the splitting pain rose up
in his skull and the tears ran out of his eyes and the snot out of his nose from catching
the Pepper Punch.

The next two doors were already unlocked, and with the spirit concealing them they went
right by the two orderlies in the lobby booth. "Confuse those two," Borsky
ordered the spirit as Marbury threw open the doors that led outside. And Borsky and the
weeping adept and Jane Doe10, the anonymous schizophrenic who was worth 100,000 nuyen to
an anonymous corporation, jogged across an icy parking lot to the rental getaway car.

They switched cars in a Washington suburb and headed for Baltimore in a blue minivan. It
was 2017 hours when they drove by a middle class two-story with two four-door sedans in
the driveway.

"What do you think, eagle eye?" Borsky asked.

"Looks very suburban."

"Very sitcom. What's the name of that show -- ?"

"Lights on upstairs and down. What do you see?"

"No spirits, no barriers outside," the shaman said.

"You want to do an astral fly by of the interior?"

"Nah. Hell with it. Let's drop this package off!" The elf made a
dusting-off-his-hands gesture.

Marbury parked the minivan on the side of the street, snow slushing away from the tires.
"How do you want to do this?"

Marbury sat with Jane Doe10 (who's hands were tied with duct tape) and watched the grainy
snow blow back and forth across his field of vision. One of those gifts of Marbury's
magic was that he could see in the dark as well as a cat. So with the engine of the
minivan running, he sat at the wheel and watched Borsky walk across the street that was
lined with single-family two-stories.

Borsky went up to the rendezvous house, stood to one side of the door and knocked. The
door opened. A human male in a white turtleneck sweater, black flannel shirt and
conservative blond haircut answered the door. The two had a brief conversation; then
Borsky called Marbury's wristphone.

"This is the place. Bring in the guest."

Marbury led Jane Doe10 across the street. They'd bought a ski-parka for her when they
touched down in Washington. Not knowing her size, they'd erred on the side of bigness. She
looked like an escaped mental patient in the huge quilted coat that swallowed her hands,
and her white sweatpants with WMI stenciled down one leg. Hopefully people would think it
was her company or her gym or something if they saw it.

Borsky and the blond man were waiting for them with the door open. "Come
inside," the blond made said cheerfully. All four of them went into the house, and
the blond closed the door behind them.

There were two more people in the living room, both elves, both in cable-knit sweaters and
khakis. One, a woman, sat on the couch, next to a down comforter piled up next to her
right hand. Marbury was sure there was a large weapon under there, probably some sort of
submachine gun with a sound suppressor.

There were four credsticks on the end table next to her.

The other one, a man, leaned casually in the doorway across the room from the front door,
his arms crossed over his chest. Those crossed arms said MAGICIAN to Marbury. Any one who
was preparing to defend themselves with a firearm or a melee weapon would keep their hands
free. The man in the doorway was ready to defend himself with sorcery.

"Jane Doe10?" The blond one asked their kidnap victim.

"Yes?!" She snapped, glaring around. Marbury wondered if she was due for another
dose of medication.

"Take off your coat, please."

She did, petulantly. The blond gave her a cursory examination. He noted the letters on her
drawstring pants.

"It's her," the blond said to his companions. "And she's in good
health."

"Okay," said the elven woman on the couch. She picked up the credsticks she had
near at hand and extended them to Marbury. Marbury stepped forward to take them.

"Four credsticks in twenty-five thousand nuyen amounts," the woman said.
"As agreed. The extraction was satisfactory."

"Thank you," Marbury murmured. He put the credsticks in his overcoat pocket and
looked carefully around. There was nothing more to say. The three secret agents in
sweaters were waiting in silence for them to leave.

Marbury gestured to Borsky and headed for the door. Borsky stuck out his hand to the blond
and smiled broadly. "Meeting you has been an enriching experience, Mr. Johnson. Happy
holidays."

"Happy holidays," Mr. Johnson said back automatically.

Borsky nodded and smiled all around. "Good night. Merry Christmas."

"Good night," they replied.

Borsky followed Marbury out into the snowy street, beaming all the way.

"I am back, Krantz," Borsky crowed as he fastened his seatbelt back in the van.
"I have re-arrived. I am Borsky the Fox! I am going to get a very large apartment
downtown with that fifty grand. I'm going to park airplanes in it - "

"You called that guy Mr. Johnson?" Marbury asked as he put the van in drive and
pulled away from the curb.

"Yeah. So what?"

"Did he tell you his name was Johnson, or were you just being smart?"

"He told me his name was Johnson. They all say their names are Johnson. So
what?"

"Did he give a first name?"

"No. He didn't invite me to his daughter's confirmation, either, unfriendly slot. Who
cares?"

"His name was supposed to be Edward Olsen."

Borsky started swearing immediately and didn't stop for thirty seconds. "So who the
hell did we just give that mental patient to?"

"Borsky, I don't even know who we were supposed to give her to in the first place, so
I can't guess who would want to steal her from the anonymous people who paid us to steal
her in the first place."

"So where were the people we were supposed to sell her to in the first place?"
The shaman asked.

"It's a big house. Probably piled in an upstairs bedroom."

"Are those credsticks any good?"

"Three to one odds against. They just stole her. Why pay for her? Unless they want to
make it look like we deliberately betrayed our employers . . . "

Borsky started swearing at increased volume. Marbury had sensitive ears and it made the
adept wince. "Shut up, will you? Shut up! You're not helping anything!"

"Why didn't you do something about this inside the -- ! Because we were outnumbered
and outgunned and weren't we going to drag her anyway, if our contacts were dead,"
Borsky said numbly.

"You've grasped it."

"So what do you think?" Borsky asked as they approached the freeway onramp that
would take them to the border with the Confederated American States and reserved seats
back to Seattle on an early morning flight.

"What do I think?" Marbury said. "I think we haven't heard the last of
this."

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<DIV>            
Dennis
Serot was the kind of fat that sweated, even in the winter. In an overheated
downtown coffee bar, Marbury watched the beads of sweat accumulate at the
Frenchman’s temples underneath the brim of his white fedora. The palms of
Dennis’s hands were getting damp, too. 
The Frenchman took long, hard-won breaths that had the rhythm of a faulty
metronome. Marbury was sure that someday Serot would suffocate under the effort
of being him.</DIV>
           

“How was the play?” Serot asked.
           

“Very good. Not brilliant. Thanks for waiting.”
           

Serot grunted and gave a nod. When Serot had called Marbury to set up
this meeting Marbury had made him schedule it three hours later, because Marbury
had plans to see A Christmas Carol at the New Seattle Theater across
the
lake in Bellevue, where he had a season pass. He wasn’t going to go into
dramatic criticism with Dennis, though. Dennis wasn’t exactly a theater
aficionado, and the fixer was anxious to get to the point.
           

A woman on the other side of the coffee bar said to her companion in
reference to Serot’s clothing: “Who wears white suits in winter? Maybe
he’s a
pimp?”
           

Marbury suppressed a smile. “Is your countermeasure on?”
Serot nodded and
patted his briefcase on the bench seat next to him. “So I guess you have a
contract for me?”
           

Serot outlined the contract in his accented English which always made
Marbury feel a little bit like he was having drinks in Cannes.
           

The employer (who Serot did not have to explain wished to remain
anonymous, and would enforce that anonymity with more methods of death, loud and
quiet, than Marbury could comfortably think about) wanted to come into
possession of a human being. That human being was a female, human, Caucasian,
estimated age middle thirties, name Doe10, Jane. This was the name that had been
assigned to her, along with a System Identification Number, which was more
permanent than a name, when she was committed to the Wallace Mental Institute in
Washington, DC. The Wallace Mental Institute was a federal institution for
incarcerating people who had committed federal offenses but had been judged
mentally incompetent to stand trial.
Jane Doe10 had
been arrested for
computer crime and sundry other charges stemming from a conspiracy to steal 3.75
million UCAS dollars worth of bearer bonds. She was diagnosed with acute
schizo-affective disorder, and washed up at WMI. That was two months ago, in
October. The employer was willing to pay fifty thousand nuyen in untraceable
certified credsticks issued on the Voltz Interface Bank of Geneva to each member
of the team that extracted Jane Doe10 from the Wallace Mental Institute and
delivered her alive to a Mr. Edward Olsen, in a rental house in Baltimore. It
was transparent to Marbury that Mr. Edward Olsen was a pseudonym, and the
datatrail on the house would be lies and ephemera.
“Did the
employer say why they
wanted Jane Doe10?” Marbury asked.
“You’ll need a decker to override
the Institute’s computer,” Serot told him. “Do you have
one?”
“I have
No Meat Address. But
Qabballah retired. What am I going to do for a magician?”
For years Marbury
had worked with
an unorthodox Jewish tzaddikim who’s professional name had been Qabballah but
who’s real name was Aaron Burgstrauss. But Aaron had gotten married, taken his
third grade of initiation and walked out of the shadows. Last Marbury had heard,
he was considering a position with a temple in Tacoma. Marbury had been on
vacation since then.
“Well,” Serot took another
effortful breath, “Borsky is out.”
“Borsky?”
“Uh-huh.
Oui.”
“Is in
Seattle?”
Serot
nodded.
Silence.
“Okay.
Give him my wrist commcode
and we’ll talk.”
 <?xml:namespace prefix = o
ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"
/><o:p></o:p>
           

Marbury got reacquainted with Borsky’s charm right away. They had a
brief
phone call, and when it was over Marbury realized that he’d agreed to meet
Borsky at The Murdered Mime even though he hated loud bars. There was too much
stimulus in too-sharp focus, like strobing pops of information splashing across
his brain. An earring stabbing him in the eye because he’d seen the same earring

on sale at Wordsworth’s last week, a human woman who was five years older than
she made herself up to be, and two shades less drunk. And five conversations
within earshot that he couldn’t help but follow no matter their painful, painful

inanity.
He spotted Borsky
at the bar right
away. The shaman was still tall and slight. His hair was shocking. Like many
elves, Borsky had always worn his hair long and in luxurious waves. Tonight it
was a tight stubble against his delicate art-deco skull. Prison did that to him,
Marbury thought automatically.
Marbury slipped by
a row of three
young Japanese at the bar who had JUNIOR YAKUZA printed across their
foreheads.  The
yak soldiers in
their elegant suits were having a conversation that Marbury could overhear, but
they were speaking Japanese. Marbury was grateful tonight that Japanese was not
a language he understood. 
“Hello,
Borsky.”  He could smell that
Borsky was using a
different brand of soap now.
“This
place hasn’t changed,”  Borsky said, and in
those four words
Marbury sensed a change in the shaman. His personality had been beaten almost
flat by three years in a Texas penitentiary, but the little shape it retained
was defiant.
“Same
bar, same stage, same
syndicate grunts. Except it looks like sake has  gone and vodka
shooters are popular with
the tattoos-and-tantos set.”  The
elf grinned a wide grin. “It’s nice to be back
home.”
They embraced.
“It is nice to see
you, Krantz. Wait, is it still Krantz?”
They let go of
each other. “No,
no, it’s been Marbury since ’59.”
Borsky smiled.
“You’ll have to
tell me that story. I believe that the best stories are the stories where your
name changes at the end. Sometimes I change my name just to get the story out of
it.” Marbury saw how carefully the shaman reached for his drink and realized
that Borsky was “looking through Fox’s eyes.” The textbook
term was astral
perception.
“You
initiated!” Borsky exclaimed.
“Or you got so worked over that all your magic got squeezed
out.”
“Initiated. Discovered how to mask
my aura. How about you?”
“Didn’t have the chance. Do you
know what they do to magicians in prison?”
Marbury did.
Borsky’s eyes
refocused, and something subtle happened to his face as he shifted out of Fox’s
eyes, because he couldn’t stand the pity in Marbury’s aura.
“Hard
time?” Marbury asked.
“For
three years I had recurring
nightmares about chewing my own legs off.” The elf threw back his drink, and the

charcoal smell of scotch flooded Marbury’s nose. “What else did you
learn when
you got enlightened?”
“I
learned to be stronger.”
“Jesus,
don’t shake my hand then.
I hate it when macho slot-heads have to demonstrate on the poor little Fox
shaman’s hands.”
Silence.
“So the
fat man has gotten better
dressed since I went away. What’s this job?” 
 <o:p></o:p>
Forty-eight hours
later Borksy and
Marbury were outside the beltway in Washington, august capitol of the United
Canadian and American States, driving through a snow storm that was burying the
urban landscape under wind-stirred layers of gray and white.
“Are we
even going to get to this
place?” Borsky asked.
“I’m handling it,” Marbury said
shortly. His hands were getting stiff on the wheel.
“That
would be a glorious
shadowrun,” Borsky went on.  “ “We
were nearly to the target when we flipped over on the median and burned to
death.” ”
Marbury pressed
his lips together.
He was an artist with a shotgun and as a knife fighter he was the whisper of
death. But as a driver he was not a talent, and the idea of burning to death put
a wad of broken glass in his lower intestine.
“Great
form storm spirits!” Borsky
shouted. “Sent by our enemies to kill us with this weather! It’s a
set-up, man!
We’re doomed!” The shaman laughed out loud when Marbury
didn’t even smile. He
slapped Marbury on the shoulder. “Oh, come on, work with me here. Do you
remember Smash Hands? That ork had his sense of humor surgically removed to make
room for more enhancements. I don’t think he ever liked me much. What happened
to Smash Hands?”
“He got
gunned down in the street
in Renton. Street says it was some kind of Humanis Policlub complication.”

Borsky grimaced.
“I hope he took
some of those racist pricks with him.”
“I think
he already had. That’s
what it was about.” 
They drove the
last five clicks in
silence, except for a phone conversation Borsky had with No Meat Address.
“How’s
the weather up there?” Borsky asked.
“Ten
degrees and partly sunny,”
the decker replied. The 3cm x 3cm screen on Borsky’s wristphone displayed
nothing but the message NO IMAGE AVAILABLE. Address was declining to use the
video feature of the phone, probably because he wasn’t using a phone at all. He
was stealing the call from a UCAS government satellite.
Right now the
decker was sitting
in thirty cubic meters of space rented from one of the decidedly weird gangs
that controlled the rooftops of the Redmond district of Seattle. That thirty
cubic meters of space was bordered on five sides by a lean-to made out of
scavenged sheets of construction plastic. On top of that lean-to, No Meat
Address had glued a little satellite dish that was now connecting him and his
cyberdeck to the wordwide matrix. Something that would have chagrinned the UCAS
government if they had known about it, because it was their satellite Address
was stealing time on.
 If it had been heavily
overcast in
Seattle, No Meat Address’s job would have been tougher. But the weather reports
had held true.
“We have
a green light on the deal
then?” Borsky asked.
“Go on
the deal. Repeat, go on the
deal.”
“Go on
the deal,” Borsky agreed,
and terminated the call. “You hear that?”
“Yes,” said Marbury. 
Twenty minutes
later the two of
them walked through the front doors of the WMI. The snow had tapered off but the
wind was still cold and buffeting, and they hunched inside their overcoats.
Borsky’s
trick was this: he could
make people believe him. No matter how outrageous his lies were – mammoth,
lumbering, gut-shot brontosaur frauds when presented by Borsky the Fox shaman
were believed by everybody. Borsky could tell a polygraph that he was an
aardvark that walked on its hind legs and the polygraph would end up lending him
twenty nuyen.
So when they
reached the armored
glass booth that was the front desk of WMI and Borsky said, “Hello. Justice
department. I’m agent Turner and this is agent Hartford. We’re picking
up Jane
Doe10,” even Marbury believed that the elf was a justice department
agent.
“Identification?” The orderly in
the booth said for the sake of form. Borsky and Marbury took out credsticks and
passed them through a drawer.
Marbury glanced
around the lobby
while they waited for the credsticks to clear. They used the same antiseptic
cleanser to scrub WHI that had been used to scrub the 11th floor
men’s room of a Shiawase Corporation building in which Marbury had once changed
clothes.     
Marbury was very
smart. He had
made a career out of being smart, which was the same as saying that he had made
a career out of being a hyper-alert control freak. There were a hundred thousand
variables in every step of a run, and Marbury stayed alive by reading them. Like
wind in the trees, like tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. Pasts and futures
turned on the weight a man put on his foot. The smell of a woman’s cigarette
could tell you the brand and the brand could tell you what plane she just
disembarked. The scars on a man’s knuckles carried information about which hand
he liked to hit with and then you knew his weaknesses. Success flowed from
seeing clearly and knowing the meaning of what you saw.
But Marbury knew
something else;
he knew that the details were fractal. Each detail carried infinite
detail in itself. And no matter how much you could see there was always
something more to see beyond that, and while control was synonymous with
security there were moments outside of that which required instinct. You just
had to jump.
To fool the
computer that was
checking their identities they had to rely on false DoJ I.D.s. No Meat Address
couldn’t affect this part of the process. But they’d gotten those
I.D.s from
their anonymous employer. They didn’t even know why their employer wanted Jane
Doe10 in the first place. They didn’t know who their employer was or what they
wanted or if their employer even had the considerable matrix juice necessary to
produce fake credsticks that would fool WMI scanners.
They could be
standing on the
cheese in an elaborate trap. But Occam’s Razor told Marbury they
weren’t. If
someone had wanted to kill him there were much simpler ways, and the simple
solution was always the best solution.
Unless of course
there was someone
who wanted to feed Borsky to the UCAS federal authorities for reasons of their
own  . .
.
“Alright, sirs,” the orderly in
the armored booth said. He sent their fake DoJ credsticks back through the
drawer. “Let me buzz you through this door and your guide will meet you on the
other side. Your credsticks will open the chokepoint doors.”
They both said
thank you. 
Every space inside
WMI was small,
glossy white, and the obsessive clean that came from robots.
The man who met
them inside the
first chokepoint door wore all white. He was in his late twenties and had a
Cleveland accent, along with a stun baton and a can of Pepper Punch hanging on
the quilted white vest he wore that Marbury figured was  armored against blunt
trauma.
“Afternoon, gentlemen. What can I
do for you?”
Borsky spoke up
and Marbury nodded
slightly to give the impression that he agreed. “Hi there. Turner and Hartford,
picking up Jane Doe10.”
 His gloves were white.
His baton and his
Punch can were white too. You could get gear color-coded for your security
people at lots of different suppliers. His socks were white too. He led them
down a glossy white corridor. They passed a window made out of a full centimeter
of armored glass that overlooked the snowy highway Marbury and Borsky had just
driven in on. 
There were three
chokepoint doors
between the front entrance and Jane Doe10’s cell, not including the lobby door.
If the madhouse went catastrophic, the chokepoints isolated the problem like a
quarantine keeping a disease from spreading. They were approaching the first one
now.
If Borsky and
Marbury had been
real DoJ agents, their credsticks would have opened the chokepoints. But they
were fakes – Marbury, Borsky, and their credsticks were all
fakes – and
although the phony I.D.s had gotten them past the front desk, they wouldn’t get
them through the chokepoints.
Borsky stepped up
to the first
chokepoint door, which was a heavy white door without a window. He had his
credstick in his hand; he fitted it into the slot that would open the door if he
were a real DoJ agent. Which he was not.
Marbury casually
fell back half a
pace. He thought about the ceramic knife he was wearing in the small of his
back. His eyes flickered over the tiny hairs on the back of their orderly’s
neck.
The door hummed
and the magnetic
lock disengaged. Marbury felt the air pressure change when Borsky swung the
heavy door open and they proceeded through. The orderly closed it behind
them.
“Are we
getting close?” Borsky
asked the orderly, and Marbury thought Borsky was spreading the innocence a bit
thick.
“Uh-huh,” the orderly nodded.
No Meat Address
had successfully
infiltrated the Institute’s computer host. He was watching them now, through the

cameras that were hidden in the walls. And when they reached the next
chokepoint, he would unlock that door just like he had unlocked the last one, at
the precise instant that Borsky stuck his bogus and in this case utterly
worthless credstick in the slot.
Second door coming
up at the end
of the hall. Other white doors lined the sides of the hall, each with a little
reinforced window at eye level. There were faces in some of the windows. They
looked perfectly normal to Marbury.
Marbury could hear
absolutely
nothing from inside the cells, not even the breath of a troll they passed, his
mammoth head pressed up against his little window, his nostrils fogging the
glass.
“I use
my credstick here too,
right?” Borsky asked the orderly.
“Yes
sir,” the orderly said. From
the way he said “sir,” Marbury knew that he had already forgotten the
phony
names they had given.
Chick.
Hmmmt. Clunk. The
door opened and the group traveled through, the two imposter mercenaries in the
pay of an unknown cause and the oblivious madhouse junior warden from Mentor,
Ohio.
Marbury
didn’t know much about how
to bend other people’s computers to your will, but he did know that every time
No Meat Address stole another action on the WMI host, there was a risk that the
computer would notice the irregularity. If the computer noticed enough
irregularities, it would launch its countermeasure programs. Terms like Gray
Ice, Subsystem Authorization, Security User Status swelled and burst in
Marbury’s brain.
He’d
heard them on trideo. He had
very little idea what they meant. He knew that if Address lost his toehold in
the WHI host he and Borsky were going to become masters of the art of
improvisation in record time. 
The trio reached
the third door.
Borsky “opened” that one too, with movements so swift and practiced
you’d think
he spent his free time rehearsing his Justice Department impersonation. There
was a fraction of a second’s delay between Borsky’s action and No Meat
Address’s
unlocking the door, but the orderly didn’t notice.
Marbury breathed
out.
A few meters later
and they were
in front of Jane Doe10’s cell.
“I’ll have to get this one,” the
orderly said. Their DoJ identities wouldn’t open the cell doors, fake or
not.
The Ohioan looked
through the
window in the cell door, then used his credstick to unlock the door of the cell.
Marbury heard a tiny popping rush of air as the door unsealed.
The inside of the
cell was about
three meters by five. There was a sink, a toilet, a mirror made out of polished
steel, a plastic desk and chair, and a human woman in her mid thirties sitting
on the bed. She looked up curiously when the orderly came in the door, and she
came along obediently when he told her to. She looked drugged to Marbury.
“Hello,
Jane,” Borsky greeted her
when she came out into the hall. “We’re from the Justice Department
and we’re
here to help.”
“What’s going on here?” Jane Doe10
asked.
“We’re taking a little ride,
Jane,” Borsky smirked. Marbury shot him a look and the elf amended,
“Prisoner
transfer. There’s a DA who wants to ask you some questions.”
It was back down
the silent hall
for them now, on the journey out. The sameness of the décor was beginning to bug
Marbury. The sameness and the silence and the lack of stimulus was beginning to
make his brain overheat. The faces of the prisoners in the occasional cell
window began to look like infected bruises under a skin of glass, swellings in a
wall of white.
They passed
smoothly through the
first of the three doors. Marbury consciously restrained his impulse to walk
faster. Doe10 slowed them down, walking along in a daze. If it came to running,
they would pretty much have to carry her.
They were coming
up on the second
door. Marbury saw a man in one of the cells, peering out, with a white bandage
pad taped to his face, scars in his eyebrows and the space in his eyes hogged up
by an utterly alien madness. Marbury made eye-contact with the man for a flicker
of time and moved on. The expression in the man’s eyes reminded him vividly of a

time that he’d seen that same expression in the eyes of a small but muscular man

in Detroit who had just jammed an Ares submachine gun into Marbury’s crotch.
What Marbury really remembered about that incident was the data he had read in
the man’s eyes in that split second: the man was looking into
Marbury’s eyes to
make sure that Marbury knew what was about to be done to his genitals with an
automatic weapon.
The orderly from
Ohio was frowning
and he put his hand on his stun baton. Marbury’s knife flew into his hand and he

slashed across the orderly’s weapon arm, opening a wet red gape. The second door

hadn’t opened, and the orderly had noticed something was wrong.
“Now is
not the time to be brave,”
Marbury told him. Behind him Borsky was swearing and the door bleated again as
it rejected his credstick. “Keep your hands to yourself and this will all be
over in a minute.”
The orderly
convulsed. His face
twisted bizarrely as muscles rebelled against each other. His back arched, the
back of his head thumped against the obsessively white wall and his knees went
out from under him.
Marbury whirled on
Borsky, who was
still trying to make the door accept him. “I was trying to give the guy
options!” Marbury hissed.
“What?
Don’t blame me for that.
Guy had a weak heart. In the wrong business if you ask me.” One pointy ear
twitched, Fox’s mask showing itself.
“What’s going on here?” Jane Doe10
asked.
My
decker’s addiction to a
designer drug called Psyche has finally affected his work and my Fox shaman is
having a homicidal fit of claustrophobia, Marbury thought. “You’re
leaving with
us,” he said. “That’s what you need to
understand.”
“This
door is not cooperating,”
Borsky bounced his fist off the door to no effect whatever. He looked all around
the hall they were enclosed in, at the ceiling, at the floors . . . then he
knelt beside the dead orderly.
“Did you
see this guy’s wearing a
tranceiver?” Borsky asked as he went through the man’s
pockets.
“Yes.” Marbury strained his
senses, trying to deduce what was happening on the other side of the chokepoint
door that was trapping them in this small white space.
“Nice
pen,” Borsky said, holding
up a red ink pen. He put it in his own pocket and stood up. “What’s
our decker’s
name again?”
“No Meat
Address.”
“Is this
place wired for audio?
Mr. Address? Mr. Address? Hellllooo?”
“I’m sure he’s working hard in
there. Can you do something to lift this siege?”
Borsky pursed his
lips and
furrowed his brow. Marbury watched him intently, then remembered that this was
the expression he always got when he summoned spirits.
And then there
were four of them.
They had been joined by a woman, 157 centimeters tall, barefoot and dressed in a
white lab coat with an I.D. tag clipped to it. The words and picture on the tag
were blurred to illegibility.
“Hide
us, Spirit,” Borsky
instructed the woman.
“Yes,
Doctor.” The woman replied
in a voice that was very thin.
 Nothing changed that
Marbury could sense.
But he knew that their enemies could now walk right by them without seeing
them. 

Marbury heard a
small noise, a
tiny voice. It was coming from the dead man.
Marbury bent over
to hear it
better. The voice was saying, “Surmounting a little obstacle here . . .
projected timescale to opening remaining . . . doors . . . twelve
seconds.”
It was No Meat
Address,
broadcasting to the orderly’s tranceiver from within the Institute’s
computer.
Marbury repeated the message to Borsky.
“So
soon?” The shaman made a show
of disappointment.
The maglock
disengaged. Borsky
grabbed Jane Doe10 by the arm, and Marbury swung the door open, his knife in his
hand.
There were three
orderlies
standing on the other side of it, each one with Pepper Punch or a stun baton in
their hand. Two of them squinted at an apparently empty hallway. The third
pushed down on the fire button of his Punch can. That third orderly had seen
them, in spite of the spirit’s help. 
Marbury slipped to
one side but he
still caught a mist on the side of his face, and he knew the burning pain was in
the mail.
“Pop!” Borsky said
matter-of-factly, and all three of the orderlies shouted and threw their arms up
in front of their faces. Marbury didn’t understand why, but you learned to
accept these things when you worked with magicians.
They shouldered
past the
orderlies, Marbury shoving them out of the way with Borsky, Doe10 and the spirit
following behind. Marbury stabbed two of them in the thighs to discourage
pursuit, deliberately missing the arteries both times, even as the splitting
pain rose up in his skull and the tears ran out of his eyes and the snot out of
his nose from catching the Pepper Punch.
The next two doors
were already
unlocked, and with the spirit concealing them they went right by the two
orderlies in the lobby booth. “Confuse those two,” Borsky ordered the
spirit as
Marbury threw open the doors that led outside. And Borsky and the weeping adept
and Jane Doe10, the anonymous schizophrenic who was worth 100,000 nuyen to an
anonymous corporation, jogged across an icy parking lot to the rental getaway
car. 
 <o:p></o:p>
They switched cars
in a Washington
suburb and headed for Baltimore in a blue minivan. It was 2017 hours when they
drove by a middle class two-story with two four-door sedans in the driveway.
“What do
you think, eagle eye?”
Borsky asked.
“Looks
very suburban.”
“Very
sitcom. What’s the name of
that show -- ?”
“Lights
on upstairs and down. What
do you see?”
“No
spirits, no barriers outside,”
the shaman said.
“You
want to do an astral fly by
of the interior?”
“Nah.
Hell with it. Let’s drop
this package off!” The elf made a dusting-off-his-hands gesture.
Marbury parked the
minivan on the
side of the street, snow slushing away from the tires. “How do you want to do
this?” 
 <o:p></o:p>
Marbury sat with
Jane Doe10 (who’s
hands were tied with duct tape) and watched the grainy snow blow back and forth
across his field of vision. 
One of
those gifts of Marbury’s magic was that he could see in the dark as well as a
cat. So with the engine of the minivan running, he sat at the wheel and watched
Borsky walk across the street that was lined with single-family two-stories.
Borsky went up to
the rendezvous
house, stood to one side of the door and knocked. The door opened. A human male
in a white turtleneck sweater, black flannel shirt and conservative blond
haircut answered the door. The two had a brief conversation; then Borsky called
Marbury’s wristphone.
“This is
the place. Bring in the
guest.”
 <o:p></o:p>
Marbury led Jane
Doe10 across the
street. They’d bought a ski-parka for her when they touched down in Washington.
Not knowing her size, they’d erred on the side of bigness. She looked like an
escaped mental patient in the huge quilted coat that swallowed her hands, and
her white sweatpants with WMI stenciled down one leg. Hopefully people would
think it was her company or her gym or something if they saw it.
Borsky and the
blond man were
waiting for them with the door open. “Come inside,” the blond made
said
cheerfully. All four of them went into the house, and the blond closed the door
behind them.
There were two
more people in the
living room, both elves, both in cable-knit sweaters and khakis. One, a woman,
sat on the couch, next to a down comforter piled up next to her right hand.
Marbury was sure there was a large weapon under there, probably some sort of
submachine gun with a sound suppressor.
There were four
credsticks on the
end table next to her.
The other one, a
man, leaned
casually in the doorway across the room from the front door, his arms crossed
over his chest. Those crossed arms said MAGICIAN to Marbury. Any one who was
preparing to defend themselves with a firearm or a melee weapon would keep their
hands free. The man in the doorway was ready to defend himself with
sorcery. 

“Jane
Doe10?” The blond one asked
their kidnap victim.
“Yes?!” She snapped, glaring
around. Marbury wondered if she was due for another dose of medication.
“Take
off your coat, please.”
She did,
petulantly. The blond
gave her a cursory examination. He noted the letters on her drawstring
pants.
“It’s her,” the blond said to his
companions. “And she’s in good health.”
“Okay,” said the elven woman on
the couch. She picked up the credsticks she had near at hand and extended them
to Marbury. Marbury stepped forward to take them.
“Four
credsticks in twenty-five
thousand nuyen amounts,” the woman said. “As agreed. The extraction
was
satisfactory.”
“Thank
you,” Marbury murmured. He
put the credsticks in his overcoat pocket and looked carefully around. There was
nothing more to say. The three secret agents in sweaters were waiting in silence
for them to leave.
Marbury gestured
to Borsky and
headed for the door. Borsky stuck out his hand to the blond and smiled broadly.
“Meeting you has been an enriching experience, Mr. Johnson. Happy
holidays.”
“Happy
holidays,” Mr. Johnson said
back automatically.
Borsky nodded and
smiled all
around. “Good night. Merry Christmas.”
“Good
night,” they replied.
Borsky followed
Marbury out into
the snowy street, beaming all the way.
 <o:p></o:p>
“I am
back, Krantz,” Borsky
crowed as he fastened his seatbelt back in the van. “I have re-arrived. I am
Borsky the Fox! I am going to get a very large apartment downtown with
that fifty grand. I’m going to park airplanes in it
– “
“You
called that guy Mr. Johnson?”
Marbury asked as he put the van in drive and pulled away from the curb.
“Yeah.
So what?”
“Did he
tell you his name was
Johnson, or were you just being smart?”
“He told
me his name was Johnson.
They all say their names are Johnson. So what?”
“Did he
give a first name?”
“No. He
didn’t invite me to his
daughter’s confirmation, either, unfriendly slot. Who
cares?”
“His
name was supposed to be
Edward Olsen.”
Borsky started
swearing
immediately and didn’t stop for thirty seconds. “So who the hell did
we just
give that mental patient to?”
“Borsky,
I don’t even know who we
were supposed to give her to in the first place, so I can’t guess who would want

to steal her from the anonymous people who paid us to steal her in the first
place.” 
“So
where were the people we were
supposed to sell her to in the first place?” The shaman asked.
“It’s a big house. Probably piled
in an upstairs bedroom.” 
“Are
those credsticks any good?”

“Three
to one odds against. They
just stole her. Why pay for her? Unless they want to make it look like we
deliberately betrayed our employers . . . ”
Borsky started
swearing at
increased volume. Marbury had sensitive ears and it made the adept wince. “Shut
up, will you? Shut up! You’re not helping anything!”
“Why
didn’t you do something about
this inside the -- ! Because we were outnumbered and outgunned and weren’t we
going to drag her anyway, if our contacts were dead,” Borsky said
numbly.
“You’ve grasped it.”
“So what
do you think?” Borsky
asked as they approached the freeway onramp that would take them to the border
with the Confederated American States and reserved seats back to Seattle on an
early morning flight.
“What do
I think?” Marbury said.
“I think we haven’t heard the last of this.” 
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