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From:	srfanfic@*********.com (Brian Downes)
Subject:	Gryznov's Contract
Date:	Tue Jan 30 09:05:01 2001

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

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"Yamatetsu is the worst thing ever to happen to Vladivostok!" the
dwarf decker declared. "Damn their nuyen! There is no price in nuyen on a Russian's
soul!"

"Yes, but you were talking about the Thieves," Presnensky prompted.

"The Thieves know that Yamatetsu is a wolf in sheep's clothing, too. The
Japanese corporations always bring the human Yakazu with them. Vladivostok could be a
monument to Russian ingenuity and business savvy, like Kronstadt, or like Berlin is to the
Germans. Instead, we become the puppets of foreigners."

Presnensky was dogged. "The Thieves want to kill you?"

"Huh? No. I pay off to Byelmodin every week. But right now Tsar Byelmodin
is at peace with the Seoulpa Rings, and that's my problem." The dwarf threw back the
vodka shot that had waited patiently through his political dissertation. "It's the
Seolpa Rings that would like to put me at the bottom of this bay."

Presnensky and the dwarf decker Gryznov sat on the concrete patio of a bar
that overlooked the East Bosphor Strait and Peter the Great Bay. It was almost May, and
the salty and wet wind that blew in off the Pacific was warming. Presnensky could see
several pleasure sails plying the strait, as well as a patrol vessel belonging to the
Directorate of State Security. He could make out the blunt rectangle of a missile pod on
an independent turret on the gray vessel's aft deck.

"And so you have contacted me because you need protection from the
Koreans," Presnensky said. He was sitting in a chair that let him look out on the
beauty of the bay and watch the entrance to the patio. He hadn't accepted any assignment
yet, but whenever he took meets he tried to be careful. Who knew when the dwarf's enemies
might strike? And they would probably think that the life of Anatole Presnensky was a
cheap price if their attack killed their target.

Presnensky had his Ares Smartgun under his leather car coat. It made a fairly
obvious bulge, but this was Russia, and he still had the look of a Directorate man. No one
would ask a Directorate man what that bulge was. And he could counter serious inquiries by
showing his Private Security Consultant license, which he had paid nuyen to the Byelmodin
syndicate to arrange. In Vladivostok, sooner or later everything came back to the Thieves
Who Follow the Code.

Including the story of the troubles of Gryznov the dwarf decker, who paid off
a percentage of his info brokerage profits to Tsar Byelmodin every week.

Gryznov was a man who had trouble with his importance. He was not important
enough to the Byelmodin syndicate for them to damage the fragile peace they had struck
with the Seolpa Rings on his behalf. But he was important enough for the Seolpa Rings, who
were the usual providers of black market information in the city, to take his growing
wealth and reputation as a personal affront.

Gryznov had a high level of computer expertise, and all the knowledge of the
world was stored somewhere on the grids of the global telecommunications matrix. Do you
need the minutes of the last shareholders' meeting of Renraku Asia? Gryznov can find it
for a fee. Do you want to know the buying habits of your mistress or assassination target?
Gryznov can find it for a fee.

"All those Seolpa men are Neo-Communists," Gryznov said. "They
can't accept a fluctuating system of competition. Their stagnant system will lead
inevitably to suffocation. But of course that won't stop them trying to kill me," he
added quickly, lest Presnensky think he wasn't needed. He went on a little bit longer
about competing ideologies before Presnensky interrupted him.

"And so the Rings have made an offer on your life, and you want me to
protect you."

"Yes, until this trouble blows over. I have offended no one. I merely try
to make my portion of business. It's an open marketplace."

"The street whispers that you attacked a Triad computer host with a viral
weapon."

"I only did that after the Koreans tried to sabotage my own
operation!" Gryznov declared indignantly. "Already I was hearing on the street
rumors that Gryznov could not be trusted, that Gryznov was a drunk, that Gryznov was a spy
for Japanese corporations, that Gryznov was not a patriotic Russian! Such offenses I could
not let go unpunished." He drank another shot.

Presnensky had what he needed to know. He let Gryznov continue with his
account, but he didn't learn any information that would be useful. The Rings had defamed
him and he had talked trash about them in return. His car had been smashed up in
retaliation, and someone had seeded the Rings' computer host with tapeworms. The street,
Gryznov said smugly, said that he had done it.

The knives had come out and the Seolpa Rings had put out a contract on
Gryznov. In turn, Gryznov was contracting Presnensky.

"What payment are you offering?"

"Twenty thousand nuyen a week, deposited in the Newworth Bank of the
Cayman Islands in your name. Plus I can get Japanese electronics. Fuchi dataline taps. The
new Fuchi white noise generator."

"I don't need the taps. Can you get me gamma scopolamine?"

"Probably. If not, we'll find another compromise. Antipersonnel
fragmentation grenades? A couple of cases of Stolichnaya? French pornography sims?"

They shook hands on the deal. Gryznov took out his pocket secretary and sent
an email. "The first twenty thousand has been deposited at the Newworth Bank. Here is
the account number and password." He passed Presnensky a sheet torn from a small
three-ring notebook that had two twenty-four character alphanumeric strings printed out in
black rollerball pen.

"Thank you," Presnensky put it in his pocket. "We must get off
of this patio. We are too visible here."

For practical purposes Presnensky moved in with Gryznov. The dwarf had a large
but sparsely furnished apartment on the north side of the city, eight flights up and
overlooking an intersection with a bus stop. Presnensky dropped his duffels next to the
fold-out bed in the living room. He hung a motion detector on the door and trained one on
each window as well, the one in the front room and the one in the dwarf's bedroom.
Gryznov could not sleep in the bedroom because of that window. Presnensky took a foam pad
out of one of his duffels and unrolled it on the living room floor. He would sleep there
while his client slept in the fold-out bed. He hung another motion detector on the bedroom
door.

Another problem was that the only way out of the apartment was the front door.
Attackers who monopolized the hall would have them pinned inside. But Presnensky had faced
this tactical problem before. He showed Gryznov fifty meters of climbing rope and two
quick-release rappelling harnesses.

"I'll never go sliding down that rope," the decker looked at his
bodyguard as if he was crazy for suggesting such a thing.

Presnensky told him, "In the right situation you will, if you want to
stay alive." Something he'd had to adapt to since leaving the Directorate of State
Security was that working alone, he didn't have reinforcements a commcall away. You
learned all sorts of new solutions when you had only yourself.

Presnensky went down to the lobby. The security desk in the lobby was staffed
by a human kid with acne scars. He was just old enough to be licensed to carry the
semiauto loaded with nonlethal gel rounds that rode high on one of his skinny hips.

"Hello there," Presnensky greeted the kid, smiling. "You saw me
come in with Mr. Gryznov?"

"Yes, sir, I did."

"I work for Mr. Gryznov. I wonder if maybe you could do me a favor, if I
gave you my commcode number?"

"I don't know, sir. What favor?"

"If you saw any people who seemed suspicious to you, would you call me
and let me know?"

"What do you mean, suspicious?"

"Korean. Especially groups of Koreans. But groups of strangers, really.
Any unusual groups of suspicious looking strangers."

The kid just gave him a blank look.

"Do you have a girlfriend, son?" Presnensky put the duffel he'd
brought with him down on the floor.

"Yes."

"Does she like Maria Mercurial disks?"

"Yeah, she does." The kid watched curiously as Presnensky reached
into the bag and came out with three audio disks.

"For her. Here you go. Live in Monaco, Greatest Hits." Presnensky
handed them to the kid, who took them automatically because he couldn't think of what else
to do.

"I don't think this is permitted," the security guard said, a little
uncertainly.

"Oh, and something for you," Presnensky said, taking a fat wad of
cash nuyen out of his jacket pocket. He counted out ten fifties and laid them on the
counter. Then he borrowed a pen from the security kid and wrote his commcode across the
bill on top of the stack.

Three weeks went by uneventfully, uneventfully meaning that no one tried to
take Gryznov's life. Gryznov spent hours every day jacked in to the matrix at his
"office," which was a nearly empty apartment that he rented under a false name
from a woman who would not have cared if the dwarf had signed his lease as Mrs. Yuri
Andropov, as long as his rubles cleared the bank. He never jacked in to the matrix from
home.

During those hours, the apartment was silent. Immersed in his virtual worlds,
Gryznov did not move or speak. His cyberdeck was a rectangle of metallic gray plastic with
a ring of black rectangular buttons marked only in Braille, with a circular touchpad in
the middle. Except for the occasional sound of his fingers on the control surfaces, the
decker made no noise.

During these times, Presnensky surfed the matrix on his UCAS-built Pocket
Secretary and used his laptop to monitor the three microcamcorders he'd epoxied up into
the corners of the ceiling in the hallway. One camera watched the area immediately in
front of Gryznov's door. The other two were eight meters down the hall in either
direction. The cameras were buttressed with more motion detectors.

Presnensky did not find the time boring. He had acquired patience in the
Directorate of State Security. And he was old enough, and had been in the chaotic and
dangerous world of the independent contractor long enough, to feel happy that he was
getting steadily richer for doing next to nothing.

From time to time Gryznov would jack out of his machine to use the bathroom
and then drink vodka with water chasers out of the self-chilling cooler he kept plugged
into the wall. Gryznov had a passion for vodka. There were always at least three
different premium brands in the cooler, and Gryznov would rotate between them, although he
would never drink more than one brand in the same sitting.

Gryznov would talk to Presnensky during these breaks. He'd often get onto
politics; he was certain that his problem with the Seoulpa Rings had its roots in a
conflict of political philosophies. Presnensky would sift the decker's lectures for
relevant tactical info (which he never found) and forget the rest, just nodding and
grunting affirmative while his client went on. The situation was still that the Korean
syndicates had put a contract out on Gryznov and Gryznov had contracted Presnensky to keep
him alive.

Presnensky was not a valiant soldier for the neo-anarchist cause.

Then, on the nineteenth day of Presnensky's employment by Gryznov, while the two of them
were at the office, the former Directorate man saw four people on the screen of his
laptop. Two orks, two humans, walking in a diamond formation. Three of them wore dark
overcoats, the fourth a ski parka. Presnensky did not recognize them as any of the
neighbors. The ork in front, the only female, was carrying a battering ram.

Presnensky sprang across the room and came to rest next to Gryznov, who was jacked in. The
decker had shown him the button to push on the cyberdeck in order to speak to him.
Presnensky pushed it. He said at the cyberdeck, "They're coming through the door! Go
in the bathroom and stay there until I come to get you!"

Presnensky scrambled back to his laptop. With his right hand he popped his Ares submachine
gun out from under his jacket and with his left he switched views on the laptop to the
camera that monitored the door.

Presnensky had carried a lot of things away from his years with the Directorate. Valuable
experience in many skills. Contacts within the organization and in the Russian shadows. A
disaffection with patriotism and true believers. And more than 300,000 nuyen in cybernetic
and bionetic implants that made him superhuman. The yellow crosshair that was the
interface between his Ares and his smartlink implant was blinking wherever he focused his
eyes, activated automatically when he grabbed the weapon's grip. He'd learned to ignore it
a long time ago, although sometimes in his sleep he imagined it.

The laptop changed views just in time to give Presnensky a front-and-back view, one on the
screen, one in front of him, of the door being slammed open. The female ork with the
battering ram stepped aside and the male ork, with a Heckler and Koch submachine gun in
each hand, was stepping up.

Presnensky had set his laptop in a corner of the room near the door. But Gryznov had
needed the matrix jack in the opposite corner and Presnensky's client, freshly jacked out,
specially modified semiautomatic clutched in his short-fingered hand, was trotting right
across the killzone on his way to the bathroom.

Presnensky flung himself between the dwarf and the door. He wasn't more than three meters
from the ork man when the ork opened up with is HKs, spraying the room.

The flare protection circuits in Presnensky's artificial eyes clamped down on the muzzle
flashes, rendering them as a spectral grayish white. He felt bullets walloping into his
body. But he was wearing a plated armor vest underneath a heavy security jacket and even
after that his epidermis was layered with impact-diffusing semiorganic plastics, his
skeleton reinforced with rigid high-impact plastics - both products of the Japanese
corporations his employer so hated. So he was not eviscerated, he did not shatter. He
acquired some deep and ugly looking bruises.

Presnensky fired a burst in return. Unlike the bodyguard, the ork with the HKs received
fire from an enemy who was not spraying a room, but had only one target. And the ork did
not have the benefits of science that Presnensky did. So six Ares Doubleshock Exploding
Bullets chewed a hole through his ballistic armor overcoat and tore a hole through his
chest.

Presnensky swung his muzzle at the next metahuman-shape he could find and when the yellow
crosshair turned a solid red he fired again, shoving the silhouette backwards like a
jackhammer in the chest.

The remaining two attackers scuttled backwards into the hall, retreating from the
ferocious thunder they'd found in that room. When they did that Presnensky did the same
thing, falling back to use the doorway as cover, and before the remaining two in the hall
could quite decide what to do besides fire wildly at a target they could hardly hit,
Presnensky had killed them both.

"Their numbers were discouraging," Presnensky told Gryznov as they aimlessly
drove around Vladivostok a few minutes later.

"Nonsense! You were a great hero! You defeated them easily!"

"That's not what I mean. They were independents, and not very good. But the Rings
will know that their four assassins are dead. Word of that will spread, the price on your
head will go up and that will attract greater talent."

"Where does that end?"

"The next team will have a magician, and I have almost no defense against that.
You'll need to hire a magically talented bodyguard, and some more mercs. I could recommend
some people."

"I can't afford magically talented bodyguards! Paying you is bleeding me dry!"
Gryznov threw his hands up in the air. "What am I going to do?"

"The Seattle Thieves might need a decker . . . "

"I'm not leaving Vladivostok!"

Silence. Presnensky watched in the rearview mirror as he made two left turns. He saw no
one following them.

"Somehow the physical location of your office got out," Presnensky said to his
passenger.

Gryznov grunted.

"We should assume that your home address is blown, too, and find out how that
information got out." There. A green van was - no, it was turning off now.

"What's it matter how it got out? Information always gets out."

"No," said Presnensky firmly, "it doesn't just "get out". It gets
leaked."

"Of course it leaks! It always leaks! Trying to keep information under control is
like trying to keep water in a sieve. What's it matter which hole it escapes
through?"

Presnensky scowled, and made two right turns in quick succession. There was silence.

"Pull into this hotel," Gryznov instructed him.

The hotel was a storage chest for people who didn't belong anywhere else, and couldn't
financially afford acceptance. There was a tiny convenience store attached to the lobby,
where Gryznov bought a liter of vodka from a one-armed Chinese woman after renting a room
at the hotel's automated desk with a certified credstick. He'd paid for two weeks in
advance.

Gryznov wanted to use the elevator, but Presnensky insisted on the stairs. "You're
carrying two huge duffel bags," the dwarf pointed out.

"To me the weight is nothing. We are not getting into a steel box controlled by the
razzle-dazzle pocket calculator this place calls a central computer. What could you do to
us in there, if you had a minute online?"

"I have short legs. I hate stairs," the decker grumbled. But he couldn't argue,
and they walked up three flights.

They were in the room for ten minutes. Gryznov spent the time with his cyberdeck plugged
into the telecom jack. Then they walked back out.

"This is a popular method, to rent a hotel room and use it as a jackpoint. But what
most young deckers forget, because they think they are perfect and untraceable, is that
most hotels have security cameras. Then when they get traced and their enemies know their
physical location, the hotel takes their picture as they leave. So the first thing I did
was edit the hotel's security datastore and monkey with the cameras so that they have no
pictures of either you or I."

"You paid for two weeks," Presnensky noted as they left the hotel by the back
door.

"And I told them no maid service. But I have rented us a new hotel room. Near the old
petrochemical plant. And I have begun negotiations to take a meeting," the dwarf said
with a satisfied grin.

"With who?"

"Information wants to be free, my friend. We must struggle to keep our sieve
full."

The new hotel room was in the bungalow style, but without any of the charm the word
"bungalow" implied. It's plastic siding was dirty and the front door didn't seem
to hang on its hinges quite right. The feeling of miserable half-efforts was completed by
the fast, chilly wind and shockingly cold rain that was falling intermittently when they
moved in.

Presnensky insisted and insisted that Gryznov hire a magically talented bodyguard, but the
dwarf refused. His pockets weren't infinitely deep, he said. And besides, he'd found in
the matrix that the price on his head had quadrupled to one hundred thousand nuyen. Who
could they trust now? So they were forced to rely on secrecy to keep them safe, and the
smallness of the chance that anyone knew where they were. Presnensky went out once and
bought enough groceries for three weeks, which more than filled the two small cupboards
and the half-sized refrigerator in the bungalow's kitchenette.

Six days they spent in the bungalow, and Gryznov spent eight hours a day jacked in.
Presnensky put his cameras back up outside under the gutters, and monitored the parking
lot and back door from his laptop. He did not use his pocket secretary to surf the matrix
for fear that the use would be triangulated and his location pinpointed. His secretary was
registered under one of his false names, but the first lesson of the Directorate had been
that caution should be couched in caution folded into paranoia. After which you shouldn't
trust anybody or anything.

Presnensky took hour-long naps at irregular intervals, to make it more difficult for
ambushers to catch him sleeping. So he was awake at 0645 on a chilly, foggy morning when
the black troll arrived.

He saw her coming on the screen of his laptop. X meters tall, the long, heavy arms of her
metatype swinging casually at her sides as she walked across the parking lot towards his
front door. Her big block of a head looked casually to one side, then to the other.
Presnensky knew that she was searching for ambushers. Her black hair was in a pony-tail.
Her skin was the color of a chocolate bar. She wore a green windbreaker with white stripes
up the sleeves. She was carrying a shoebox wrapped in brown paper in one hand. Her one
hand was the size of both of his.

Presnensky crouched behind a coffee table in the living room and pointed his Smartgun at
the front door. He ordered his laptop to cycle through camera views, but he saw no one
else.

When the troll woman reached the front door, she knocked gently.

Presnensky wasn't sure what to do about that, exactly. He'd just decided to ignore it when
Gryznov walked out of the back bedroom he'd been sleeping in, wearing only boxer shorts
and a dirty T-shirt.

"Who is that?" he asked sleepily. He made no remark about his bodyguard's
posture behind the coffee table.

"Troll female, black, approximately twenty years old, shoulder length hair - what the
hell are you doing?"

"Don't worry. I know her." Gryznov opened the front door. "Good
morning," he said. Presnensky could only see their visitor up to her collar bones,
for she was much taller than the door. She said something Presnensky didn't hear, then
passed the shoebox to Gryznov. "Goodbye," Gryznov said pleasantly, and closed
the door.

Presnensky watched the troll woman go away on the laptop's screen.

"You know her?" Presnensky asked. "And stand to one side of the door,
please."

Gryznov moved. "A little. Her name is Ula. She brought me some things I need."
He unwrapped the shoe box.

"How can you trust her?"

Gryznov barked a laugh. "I "trust" her because if anything happens to me,
the Robot Mail Truck at the Helix in Amsterdam will send naughty data about her little
clique to Newsnet, the Independent News Network, the Moscow Times, the World Free Off
Shore Broadcasting Endeavor and the Directorate of State Security." The shoebox was
mostly full of tissue paper. Gryznov fished out two optical chips in their cases. He held
them up to the morning light that filtered through the curtains. "Great," he
grunted at their labels. "These are just what I need. By two o'clock we should have
the appointment we need to get out of here and stop eating granola bars for breakfast,
hey?"

At 1403 Gryznov, having just jacked out, was standing on a step-stool at the sink trying
to staunch his bleeding nose. Presnensky kept repeating "What happened? What are the
consequences of this?" while his employer tilted his head back and cleared his
throat.

"Nothing, nothing. Don't worry about it. Give me some Tylenol out of the medkit. I'm
fine. And I've got some data that is going to get the price off my head. Give me the
Stolichnaya to wash those down with."

Soon it was arranged. That afternoon at 1730 they would receive a man and one bodyguard.
Gryznov had promised the man that he wouldn't tell anyone who the man was, not even
Presnensky. Presnensky would stay at his post in the front room while Gryznov negotiated
with the man in his bedroom, and when he was done the decker wouldn't have to worry about
assassination any more.

Presnensky understood the need for privacy between Gryznov and his visitor. He swept the
bungalow for bugs as a precaution and found none.

1725: Presnensky saw an expensive American muscle car painted metallic blue pull up in the
bungalow's parking lot. Two human males got out of it and approached the door. One of the
men was wearing big gold rings on each hand. The other man had the neck and shoulders of a
wrestler and a severe hair cut. Their clothes were young and statement-expensive.
"Your five thirty is here," he said quietly to his employer.

Gryznov had given instructions that the visitors not be searched, so Presnensky just
eyeballed them as they passed through the front room. Neither of them looked armed, but
their jackets could have hidden a lot. Bull-neck had a gold chain around his neck with
what looked like the polished tooth of some huge animal in a gold setting dangling from
it.

Presnensky waited. Now and then he heard the voices of the two humans and the decker dwarf
coming from the bedroom, but he couldn't make out what was said. Someone laughed loudly on
two occasions. The former Directorate man sat where he could watch the front door, the
hallway to the bedrooms, and his laptop. He tossed back one vodka shot and chased it with
a bottle of purified water.

The window behind him shattered and the curtain rings yanked against the rod with a
hair-raising noise of plastic on plastic. He pivoted on his heel with his Smartgun
springing into his hand, the yellow crosshair popping up in front of his eyes and
disappearing just as quickly as his weapon twisted out of his hand and flew across the
room. For a fraction of a second he thought about going after it but the wiry Japanese
woman with beads woven into her shoulder-length hair launched a volley of short punches
into his ribs and he knew there was no use in chasing the gun.

The woman's hands were a speeding blur, and Presnensky felt like a drum solo was being
played on his body. He staggered backwards, the only thing he could do if he was going to
keep his feet. It was rare that Presnensky fought anyone in the course of his profession
that his artificially augmented muscles and Directorate hand-to-hand training didn't
completely dominate, but it was about all he could do to block this woman's attacks. Each
hit was a stinging thunderclap. When he did land a skidding blow he discovered a layer of
armor underneath her black turtleneck.

"Alarm!" He managed to scream, although it cost precious breath.
"Alarm!"

Then the front door flew into the room, very matter-of-factly carrying its hinges and
deadbolt with it. A man-thing that was comparatively wasp-waisted compared to the titanic
swell of its shoulders and arms walked into the room like a thing on a mission. It had
grass growing out of its back.

This was the talent he was afraid one hundred thousand nuyen would buy, and the water
always runs out of the sieve. And that moment of distraction took him to the floor gasping
for breath with lungs squeezed by a kick that had compressed even his reinforced ribcage.

The earth elemental ignored him as it strode through the room, its monolithic weight
causing the floor to buckle beneath it. It was headed for the bedrooms. The one thing
Presnensky knew about spirits was that wherever a spirit went, the magician who summoned
it was not far away. And they could be as much trouble as their creatures.

"Hiai!" The Japanese woman would have crushed him with her knee if he hadn't
rolled out of the way and up to his feet an instant ahead of her. She was back on her feet
like a returning recoil spring and attacking him again.

He heard the shocking sound of gunfire from the back of the house, and he knew that
everything was irretrievable. Gunfire would never hurt that thing.

His enemy kicked him in one thigh and his whole leg went numb from pain, buckling under
him. She besieged him with blows about the head. His ears filled with roaring, and his
heart quailed with the expectation of death.

Then the ceiling was suddenly stippled with shafts of light. This mystery happened at the
same time as a sudden sharp blow crashed into his right shoulder from above, and he
recognized that he'd been shot. The ceiling was full of bullet holes. His attacker had
been slapped down to the floor by the invisible force that had penetrated the ceiling. The
roaring in Presnensky's ears was a HELICOPTER, and someone onboard that helicopter was
firing a MACHINE GUN through the ROOF.

Deafened, Presnensky reeled to the nearest window and headfirst rammed himself through it,
his own blood silently appearing in spots on the floor around him like fleas jumping off a
dog.

He lay out in the flowerbed next to the bungalow as the helicopter, which was hovering
fifty meters above his head, moved on from machine-gunning the front room of the bungalow
with its chin-turret to destroy, Presnensky judged by the sound of it, a car parked behind
the hotel. The car died in a thunderous metallic pounding of bullets into auto body, with
a counterpoint of shattering glass.

He knew he was badly hurt. He could move, but he didn't want to. He figured movement would
attract the attention of the helicopter.

He lay in the flowerbed, quite comfortably, really, considering. He wasn't sure for how
long. Not more than five minutes. Ten.

Gryznov came and found him there. The dwarf brought vodka.

It was Grigori Byelmodin whom Gryznov had been meeting with when the assassin team had
moved in. Grigori was nephew to Tsar Byelmodin, and rumored to have the run of the
Byelmodin syndicate's gambling operations in the mainland part of the city. Presnensky had
suspected that the visitors where Thieves when they arrived. There was no other criminal
group in Vladivostok that had the power to show itself off as conspicuously as that
metallic blue muscle car.

Gryznov had brought Byelmodin to the meeting by stealing data on his own initiative that
he knew Grigori would want, and then telling him he had it. Gryznov had asked for one
thing in exchange for it; a position with the Byelmodins as an information broker. He
wanted in the family. He knew that if he were an official part of the syndicate the
Seoulpa Rings would rescind the death order. They'd never put their peace with their
Russian counterparts at risk over one small decker, after all.

Byelmodin had come to see the data, and with one bodyguard, as promised. The helicopter
gunship had been Grigori's little secret, in case of emergency; another little secret was
that his bodyguard was a shaman of the Bull totem. The earth elemental had smashed down
the bedroom door, and the shaman had instantly crushed its mind with invisible sorcery.
The thing had simply vanished, dissolved in the same magical energies that had made it.
The gunfire had been Gryznov and Byelmodin firing out the bedroom window at the two
assassins out back, in the car.

Whether Grigori would have given Gryznov the position he wanted was now a moot point. The
scion of the Byelmodin syndicate had nearly been killed in an attack paid for by the
Seoulpa Rings. Coincidence or not that he'd been in the area of effect, the Rings had to
give up their grudge against Gryznov for the sake of the peace.

Byelmodin gave Gryznov the position anyway.

"What was the data you had that he wanted so much?" Presnensky could not
restrain his curiosity.

"I have been sworn to secrecy," Gryznov held up one hand in a
that's-the-end-of-it way. Dwarves were famous for their stubbornness.

The body of the Japanese woman was not found. There was a lot of blood on the floor, but
at least some of it was Presnensky's.

Presnensky's left eye was damaged. It wasn't tracking motion correctly. It gave a choppy
and extremely irritating series of still images whenever it got in the mood. He had it
fixed. He paid an emergency room surgeon to treat his bullet wounds (there were two - he
hadn't noticed the graze to his leg) and the deep, aching bruises the Japanese woman had
inflicted on him. They were very delicate. The slightest wrong move would send his muscles
into spasms.

He paid the surgeon again, this time not to file the legal paperwork. The doctor told him
he should take a week's rest. He decided to spend it in the Caymans.

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<DIV> 
           

“Yamatetsu is the worst thing ever to happen to Vladivostok!”  the dwarf decker
declared. “Damn their
nuyen! There is no price in nuyen on a Russian’s soul!”
           

“Yes, but you were talking about the Thieves,” Presnensky
prompted.
           

“The Thieves know that Yamatetsu is a wolf in sheep’s
clothing, too. The
Japanese corporations always bring the human Yakazu with them. Vladivostok could
be a monument to Russian ingenuity and business savvy, like Kronstadt, or like
Berlin is to the Germans. Instead, we become the puppets of
foreigners.”
           

Presnensky was dogged. “The Thieves want to kill
you?”
           

“Huh? No. I pay off to Byelmodin every week. But right now Tsar
Byelmodin
is at peace with the Seoulpa Rings, and that’s my problem.” The dwarf
threw back
the vodka shot that had waited patiently through his political dissertation.
“It’s the Seolpa Rings that would like to put me at the bottom of this
bay.”

           

Presnensky and the dwarf decker Gryznov sat on the concrete patio of a
bar that overlooked the East Bosphor Strait and Peter the Great Bay. It was
almost May, and the salty and wet wind that blew in off the Pacific was warming.
Presnensky could see several pleasure sails plying the strait, as well as a
patrol vessel belonging to the Directorate of State Security. He could make out
the blunt rectangle of a missile pod on an independent turret on the gray
vessel’s aft deck.
           

“And so you have contacted me because you need protection from the
Koreans,” Presnensky said. He was sitting in a chair that let him look out on
the beauty of the bay and watch the entrance to the patio.  He hadn’t
accepted any assignment yet,
but whenever he took meets he tried to be careful. Who knew when the dwarf’s
enemies might strike? And they would probably think that the life of Anatole
Presnensky was a cheap price if their attack killed their target.
           

Presnensky had his Ares Smartgun under his leather car coat. It made a
fairly obvious bulge, but this was Russia, and he still had the look of a
Directorate man. No one would ask a Directorate man what that bulge was. And he
could counter serious inquiries by showing his Private Security Consultant
license, which he had paid nuyen to the Byelmodin syndicate to arrange. In
Vladivostok, sooner or later everything came back to the Thieves Who Follow the
Code.
           

Including the story of the troubles of Gryznov the dwarf decker, who paid
off a percentage of his info brokerage profits to Tsar Byelmodin every week.
           

Gryznov was a man who had trouble with his importance. He was not
important enough to the Byelmodin syndicate for them to damage the fragile peace
they had struck with the Seolpa Rings on his behalf. But he was important enough
for the Seolpa Rings, who were the usual providers of black market information
in the city, to take his growing wealth and reputation as a personal
affront.
           

Gryznov had a high level of computer expertise, and all the knowledge of
the world was stored somewhere on the grids of the global telecommunications
matrix. Do you need the minutes of the last shareholders’ meeting of Renraku
Asia? Gryznov can find it for a fee. Do you want to know the buying habits of
your mistress or assassination target? Gryznov can find it for a fee.
           

“All those Seolpa men are Neo-Communists,” Gryznov said.
“They can’t
accept a fluctuating system of competition. Their stagnant system will lead
inevitably to suffocation. But of course that won’t stop them trying to kill
me,” he added quickly, lest Presnensky think he wasn’t needed. He went
on a
little bit longer about competing ideologies before Presnensky interrupted
him.
           

“And so the Rings have made an offer on your life, and you want me
to
protect you.”
           

“Yes, until this trouble blows over. I have offended no one. I
merely try
to make my portion of business. It’s an open marketplace.”
           

“The street whispers that you attacked a Triad computer host with a
viral
weapon.”
           

“I only did that after the Koreans tried to sabotage my own
operation!”
Gryznov declared indignantly. “Already I was hearing on the street rumors that
Gryznov could not be trusted, that Gryznov was a drunk, that Gryznov was a spy
for Japanese corporations, that Gryznov was not a patriotic Russian! Such
offenses I could not let go unpunished.” He drank another shot.
           

Presnensky had what he needed to know. He let Gryznov continue with his
account, but he didn’t learn any information that would be useful. The Rings had

defamed him and he had talked trash about them in return. His car had been
smashed up in retaliation, and someone had seeded the Rings’
computer
host with tapeworms. The street, Gryznov said smugly, said that he had done
it.
           

The knives had come out and the Seolpa Rings had put out a contract on
Gryznov. In turn, Gryznov was contracting Presnensky.
           

“What payment are you offering?”
           

“Twenty thousand nuyen a week, deposited in the Newworth Bank of
the
Cayman Islands in your name. Plus I can get Japanese electronics. Fuchi dataline
taps. The new Fuchi white noise generator.”
           

“I don’t need the taps. Can you get me gamma
scopolamine?”
           

“Probably. If not, we’ll find another compromise.
Antipersonnel
fragmentation grenades? A couple of cases of Stolichnaya? French pornography
sims?”
           

They shook hands on the deal. Gryznov took out his pocket secretary and
sent an email. “The first twenty thousand has been deposited at the Newworth
Bank. Here is the account number and password.” He passed Presnensky a sheet
torn from a small three-ring notebook that had two twenty-four character
alphanumeric strings printed out in black rollerball pen.
           

“Thank you,” Presnensky put it in his pocket.
“We must get off of this
patio. We are too visible here.”
 <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns =
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p>
           

For practical purposes Presnensky moved in with Gryznov. The dwarf had a
large but sparsely furnished apartment on the north side of the city, eight
flights up and overlooking an intersection with a bus stop. Presnensky dropped
his duffels next to the fold-out bed in the living room. He hung a motion
detector on the door and trained one on each window as well, the one in the
front room and the one in the dwarf’s bedroom.  Gryznov could not
sleep in the bedroom
because of that window. 
Presnensky
took a foam pad out of one of his duffels and unrolled it on the living room
floor. He would sleep there while his client slept in the fold-out bed. He hung
another motion detector on the bedroom door.
           

Another problem was that the only way out of the apartment was the front
door. Attackers who monopolized the hall would have them pinned inside. But
Presnensky had faced this tactical problem before. He showed Gryznov fifty
meters of climbing rope and two quick-release rappelling harnesses.
           

“I’ll never go sliding down that rope,” the
decker looked at his
bodyguard as if he was crazy for suggesting such a thing.
           

Presnensky told him, “In the right situation you will, if you want
to
stay alive.” 
Something he’d had to
adapt to since leaving the Directorate of State Security was that working alone,
he didn’t have reinforcements a commcall away. You learned all sorts of new
solutions when you had only yourself.
           

Presnensky went down to the lobby. The security desk in the lobby was
staffed by a human kid with acne scars. He was just old enough to be licensed to
carry the semiauto loaded with nonlethal gel rounds that rode high on one of his
skinny hips.
           

“Hello there,” Presnensky greeted the kid, smiling.
“You saw me come in
with Mr. Gryznov?”
           

“Yes, sir, I did.”
           

“I work for Mr. Gryznov. I wonder if maybe you could do me a favor,
if I
gave you my commcode number?”
           

“I don’t know, sir. What favor?”
           

“If you saw any people who seemed suspicious to you, would you call
me
and let me know?”
           

“What do you mean, suspicious?”
           

“Korean. Especially groups of Koreans. But groups of strangers,
really.
Any unusual groups of suspicious looking strangers.”
           

The kid just gave him a blank look.
           

“Do you have a girlfriend, son?” Presnensky put the
duffel he’d brought
with him down on the floor.
           

“Yes.”      

           

 “Does she like Maria
Mercurial disks?”
           

“Yeah, she does.” The kid watched curiously as Presnensky
reached into
the bag and came out with three audio disks.
           

“For her. Here you go. Live in Monaco,
Greatest Hits.”
Presnensky handed them to the kid, who took them automatically because he
couldn’t think of what else to do.
           

“I don’t think this is permitted,” the security
guard said, a little
uncertainly. 
           

“Oh, and something for you,” Presnensky said, taking a
fat wad of cash
nuyen out of his jacket pocket. He counted out ten fifties and laid them on the
counter. Then he borrowed a pen from the security kid and wrote his commcode
across the bill on top of the stack.
 <o:p></o:p>
           

Three weeks went by uneventfully, uneventfully meaning that no one tried
to take Gryznov’s life. Gryznov spent hours every day jacked in to the matrix at

his “office,” which was a nearly empty apartment that he rented under
a false
name from a woman who would not have cared if the dwarf had signed his lease as
Mrs. Yuri Andropov, as long as his rubles cleared the bank. He never jacked in
to the matrix from home.
           

During those hours, the apartment was silent. Immersed in his virtual
worlds, Gryznov did not move or speak. His cyberdeck was a rectangle of metallic
gray plastic with a ring of black rectangular buttons marked only in Braille,
with a circular touchpad in the middle. Except for the occasional sound of his
fingers on the control surfaces, the decker made no noise. 
           

During these times, Presnensky surfed the matrix on his UCAS-built Pocket
Secretary and used his laptop to monitor the three microcamcorders he’d epoxied
up into the corners of the ceiling in the hallway. One camera watched the area
immediately in front of Gryznov’s door. The other two were eight meters down the

hall in either direction. The cameras were buttressed with more motion
detectors.
           

Presnensky did not find the time boring. He had acquired patience in the
Directorate of State Security. And he was old enough, and had been in the
chaotic and dangerous world of the independent contractor long enough, to feel
happy that he was getting steadily richer for doing next to nothing. 
           

From time to time Gryznov would jack out of his machine to use the
bathroom and then drink vodka with water chasers out of the self-chilling cooler
he kept plugged into the wall. Gryznov had a passion for  vodka. There were
always at least three
different premium brands in the cooler, and Gryznov would rotate between them,
although he would never drink more than one brand in the same sitting.
           

Gryznov would talk to Presnensky during these breaks. He’d often
get onto
politics; he was certain that his problem with the Seoulpa Rings had its roots
in a conflict of political philosophies. Presnensky would sift the decker’s
lectures for relevant tactical info (which he never found) and forget the rest,
just nodding and grunting affirmative while his client went on. The situation
was still that the Korean syndicates had put a contract out on Gryznov and
Gryznov had contracted Presnensky to keep him alive. 
Presnensky was not
a valiant
soldier for the neo-anarchist cause.
Then, on the
nineteenth day of
Presnensky’s employment by Gryznov, while the two of them were at the office,
the former Directorate man saw four people on the screen of his laptop. Two
orks, two humans, walking in a diamond formation. Three of them wore dark
overcoats, the fourth a ski parka. Presnensky did not recognize them as any of
the neighbors. The ork in front, the only female, was carrying a battering
ram.
Presnensky sprang
across the room
and came to rest next to Gryznov, who was jacked in. The decker had shown him
the button to push on the cyberdeck in order to speak to him. Presnensky pushed
it. He said at the cyberdeck, “They’re coming through the door! Go in
the
bathroom and stay there until I come to get you!”
Presnensky
scrambled back to his
laptop. With his right hand he popped his Ares submachine gun out from under his
jacket and with his left he switched views on the laptop to the camera that
monitored the door.
Presnensky had
carried a lot of
things away from his years with the Directorate. Valuable experience in many
skills. Contacts within the organization and in the Russian shadows. A
disaffection with patriotism and true believers. And more than 300,000 nuyen in
cybernetic and bionetic implants that made him superhuman. The yellow crosshair
that was the interface between his Ares and his smartlink implant was blinking
wherever he focused his eyes, activated automatically when he grabbed the
weapon’s grip. He’d learned to ignore it a long time ago, although
sometimes in
his sleep he imagined it.
The laptop changed
views just in
time to give Presnensky a front-and-back view, one on the screen, one in front
of him, of the door being slammed open. The female ork with the battering ram
stepped aside and the male ork, with a Heckler and Koch submachine gun in each
hand, was stepping up.
Presnensky had set
his laptop in a
corner of the room near the door. But Gryznov had needed the matrix jack in the
opposite corner and Presnensky’s client, freshly jacked out, specially modified
semiautomatic clutched in his short-fingered hand, was trotting right across the
killzone on his way to the bathroom.
Presnensky flung
himself between
the dwarf and the door. He wasn’t more than three meters from the ork man when
the ork opened up with is HKs, spraying the room. 
The flare
protection circuits in
Presnensky’s artificial eyes clamped down on the muzzle flashes, rendering them
as a spectral grayish white. He felt bullets walloping into his body. But he was
wearing a plated armor vest underneath a heavy security jacket and even after
that his epidermis was layered with impact-diffusing semiorganic plastics, his
skeleton reinforced with rigid high-impact plastics – both products of the
Japanese corporations his employer so hated. So he was not eviscerated, he did
not shatter. He acquired some deep and ugly looking bruises.
Presnensky fired a
burst in
return. Unlike the bodyguard, the ork with the HKs received fire from an enemy
who was not spraying a room, but had only one target. And the ork did not have
the benefits of science that Presnensky did. So six Ares Doubleshock Exploding
Bullets chewed a hole through his ballistic armor overcoat and tore a hole
through his chest.
Presnensky swung
his muzzle at the
next metahuman-shape he could find and when the yellow crosshair turned a solid
red he fired again, shoving the silhouette backwards like a jackhammer in the
chest.
The remaining two
attackers
scuttled backwards into the hall, retreating from the ferocious thunder they’d
found in that room. When they did that Presnensky did the same thing, falling
back to use the doorway as cover, and before the remaining two in the hall could
quite decide what to do besides fire wildly at a target they could hardly hit,
Presnensky had killed them both. 
 <o:p></o:p>
“Their
numbers were discouraging,”
Presnensky told Gryznov as they aimlessly 
drove around Vladivostok a few minutes later.
“Nonsense! You were a great hero!
You defeated them easily!” 
“That’s not what I mean. They were
independents, and not very good. But the Rings will know that their four
assassins are dead. Word of that will spread, the price on your head will go up
and that will attract greater talent.”
“Where
does that end?”
“The
next team will have a
magician, and I have almost no defense against that. You’ll need to hire a
magically talented bodyguard, and some more mercs. I could recommend some
people.”
“I
can’t afford magically talented
bodyguards! Paying you is bleeding me dry!” Gryznov threw his hands up in the
air. “What am I going to do?”
“The
Seattle Thieves might need a
decker . . . ”
“I’m not leaving Vladivostok!”
Silence.
Presnensky watched in the
rearview mirror as he made two left turns. He saw no one following them.
“Somehow
the physical location of
your office got out,” Presnensky said to his passenger.
Gryznov
grunted.
“We
should assume that your home
address is blown, too, and find out how that information got out.” There. A
green van was – no, it was turning off now.
“What’s it matter how it got out?
Information always gets out.”
“No,” said Presnensky firmly, “it
doesn’t just “get out”. It gets leaked.”
“Of
course it leaks! It always
leaks! Trying to keep information under control is like trying to keep water in
a sieve. What’s it matter which hole it escapes through?”
Presnensky
scowled, and made two
right turns in quick succession. There was silence.
“Pull
into this hotel,” Gryznov
instructed him. 
 <o:p></o:p>
The hotel was a
storage chest for
people who didn’t belong anywhere else, and couldn’t financially
afford
acceptance. There was a tiny convenience store attached to the lobby, where
Gryznov bought a liter of vodka from a one-armed Chinese woman after renting a
room at the hotel’s automated desk with a certified credstick. He’d
paid for two
weeks in advance.
Gryznov wanted to
use the
elevator, but Presnensky insisted on the stairs. “You’re carrying two
huge
duffel bags,” the dwarf pointed out.
“To me
the weight is nothing. We
are not getting into a steel box controlled by the razzle-dazzle pocket
calculator this place calls a central computer. What could you do to us in
there, if you had a minute online?”
“I have
short legs. I hate
stairs,” the decker grumbled. But he couldn’t argue, and they walked
up three
flights.
They were in the
room for ten
minutes. Gryznov spent the time with his cyberdeck plugged into the telecom
jack. Then they walked back out.
“This is
a popular method, to rent
a hotel room and use it as a jackpoint. But what most young deckers forget,
because they think they are perfect and untraceable, is that most hotels have
security cameras. Then when they get traced and their enemies know their
physical location, the hotel takes their picture as they leave. So the first
thing I did was edit the hotel’s security datastore and monkey with the cameras
so that they have no pictures of either you or I.”
“You
paid for two weeks,”
Presnensky noted as they left the hotel by the back door.
“And I
told them no maid service.
But I have rented us a new hotel room. Near the old petrochemical plant. And I
have begun negotiations to take a meeting,” the dwarf said with a satisfied
grin.
“With
who?”
“Information wants to be free, my
friend. We must struggle to keep our sieve full.”
 <o:p></o:p>
The new hotel room
was in the
bungalow style, but without any of the charm the word “bungalow”
implied. It’s
plastic siding was dirty and the front door didn’t seem to hang on its hinges
quite right. The feeling of miserable half-efforts was completed by the fast,
chilly wind and shockingly cold rain that was falling intermittently when they
moved in.
Presnensky
insisted and insisted
that Gryznov hire a magically talented bodyguard, but the dwarf refused. His
pockets weren’t infinitely deep, he said. And besides, he’d found in
the matrix
that the price on his head had quadrupled to one hundred thousand nuyen. Who
could they trust now? So they were forced to rely on secrecy to keep them safe,
and the smallness of the chance that anyone knew where they were. Presnensky
went out once and bought enough groceries for three weeks, which more than
filled the two small cupboards and the half-sized refrigerator in the bungalow’s

kitchenette.
Six days they
spent in the
bungalow, and Gryznov spent eight hours a day jacked in. Presnensky put his
cameras back up outside under the gutters, and monitored the parking lot and
back door from his laptop. He did not use his pocket secretary to surf the
matrix for fear that the use would be triangulated and his location pinpointed.
His secretary was registered under one of his false names, but the first lesson
of the Directorate had been that caution should be couched in caution folded
into paranoia. After which you shouldn’t trust anybody or anything.
Presnensky took
hour-long naps at
irregular intervals, to make it more difficult for ambushers to catch him
sleeping. So he was awake at 0645 on a chilly, foggy morning when the black
troll arrived.
He saw her coming
on the screen of
his laptop. X meters tall, the long, heavy arms of her metatype
swinging
casually at her sides as she walked across the parking lot towards his front
door. Her big block of a head looked casually to one side, then to the other.
Presnensky knew that she was searching for ambushers. Her black hair was in a
pony-tail. Her skin was the color of a chocolate bar. She wore a green
windbreaker with white stripes up the sleeves. She was carrying a shoebox
wrapped in brown paper in one hand. Her one hand was the size of both of
his.
Presnensky
crouched behind a
coffee table in the living room and pointed his Smartgun at the front door. He
ordered his laptop to cycle through camera views, but he saw no one else.
When the troll
woman reached the
front door, she knocked gently.
Presnensky
wasn’t sure what to do
about that, exactly. He’d just decided to ignore it when Gryznov walked out of
the back bedroom he’d been sleeping in, wearing only boxer shorts and a dirty
T-shirt.
“Who is
that?” he asked sleepily.
He made no remark about his bodyguard’s posture behind the coffee
table.
“Troll
female, black,
approximately twenty years old, shoulder length hair – what the hell are you
doing?”
“Don’t worry. I know her.” Gryznov
opened the front door. “Good morning,” he said. Presnensky could only
see their
visitor up to her collar bones, for she was much taller than the door. She said
something Presnensky didn’t hear, then passed the shoebox to Gryznov.
“Goodbye,”
Gryznov said pleasantly, and closed the door.
Presnensky watched
the troll woman
go away on the laptop’s screen.
“You
know her?” Presnensky asked.
“And stand to one side of the door, please.”
Gryznov moved.
“A little. Her name
is Ula. She brought me some things I need.” He unwrapped the shoe box.
“How can
you trust her?”
Gryznov barked a
laugh. “I “trust”
her because if anything happens to me, the Robot Mail Truck at the Helix in
Amsterdam will send naughty data about her little clique to Newsnet, the
Independent News Network, the Moscow Times, the World Free Off Shore
Broadcasting Endeavor and the Directorate of State Security.” The shoebox was
mostly full of tissue paper. Gryznov fished out two optical chips in their
cases. He held them up to the morning light that filtered through the curtains.
“Great,” he grunted at their labels. “These are just what I
need. By two o’clock
we should have the appointment we need to get out of here and stop eating
granola bars for breakfast, hey?” 
At 1403 Gryznov,
having just
jacked out, was standing on a step-stool at the sink trying to staunch his
bleeding nose. Presnensky kept repeating “What happened? What are the
consequences of this?” while his employer tilted his head back and cleared his
throat.
“Nothing, nothing. Don’t worry
about it. Give me some Tylenol out of the medkit. I’m fine. And I’ve
got some
data that is going to get the price off my head. Give me the Stolichnaya to wash
those down with.”
Soon it was
arranged. That
afternoon at 1730 they would receive a man and one bodyguard. Gryznov had
promised the man that he wouldn’t tell anyone who the man was, not even
Presnensky. Presnensky would stay at his post in the front room while Gryznov
negotiated with the man in his bedroom, and when he was done the decker wouldn’t

have to worry about assassination any more.
Presnensky
understood the need for
privacy between Gryznov and his visitor. He swept the bungalow for bugs as a
precaution and found none.
1725: Presnensky
saw an expensive
American muscle car painted metallic blue pull up in the bungalow’s parking lot.

Two human males got out of it and approached the door. One of the men was
wearing big gold rings on each hand. The other man had the neck and shoulders of
a wrestler and a severe hair cut. Their clothes were young and
statement-expensive. “Your five thirty is here,” he said quietly to
his
employer.
Gryznov had given
instructions
that the visitors not be searched, so Presnensky just eyeballed them as they
passed through the front room. Neither of them looked armed, but their jackets
could have hidden a lot. Bull-neck had a gold chain around his neck with what
looked like the polished tooth of some huge animal in a gold setting dangling
from it.
Presnensky waited.
Now and then he
heard the voices of the two humans and the decker dwarf coming from the bedroom,
but he couldn’t make out what was said. Someone laughed loudly on two occasions.

The former Directorate man sat where he could watch the front door, the hallway
to the bedrooms, and his laptop. He tossed back one vodka shot and chased it
with a bottle of purified water.
The window behind
him shattered
and the curtain rings yanked against the rod with a hair-raising noise of
plastic on plastic. He pivoted on his heel with his Smartgun springing into his
hand, the yellow crosshair popping up in front of his eyes and disappearing just
as quickly as his weapon twisted out of his hand and flew across the room. For a
fraction of a second he thought about going after it but the wiry Japanese woman
with beads woven into her shoulder-length hair launched a volley of short
punches into his ribs and he knew there was no use in chasing the gun.
The
woman’s hands were a speeding
blur, and Presnensky felt like a drum solo was being played on his body. He
staggered backwards, the only thing he could do if he was going to keep his
feet. It was rare that Presnensky fought anyone in the course of his profession
that his artificially augmented muscles and Directorate hand-to-hand training
didn’t completely dominate, but it was about all he could do to block this
woman’s attacks. Each hit was a stinging thunderclap. When he did land a
skidding blow he discovered a layer of armor underneath her black
turtleneck.
“Alarm!” He managed to scream,
although it cost precious breath. “Alarm!”
Then the front
door flew into the
room, very matter-of-factly carrying its hinges and deadbolt with it. A
man-thing that was comparatively wasp-waisted compared to the titanic swell of
its shoulders and arms walked into the room like a thing on a mission. It had
grass growing out of its back.
This was the
talent he was afraid
one hundred thousand nuyen would buy, and the water always runs out of the
sieve. And that moment of distraction took him to the floor gasping for breath
with lungs squeezed by a kick that had compressed even his reinforced ribcage.

The earth
elemental ignored him as
it strode through the room, its monolithic weight causing the floor to buckle
beneath it. It was headed for the bedrooms. The one thing Presnensky knew about
spirits was that wherever a spirit went, the magician who summoned it was not
far away. And they could be as much trouble as their creatures.
“Hiai!”  The Japanese woman
would have crushed
him with her knee if he hadn’t rolled out of the way and up to his feet an
instant ahead of her. She was back on her feet like a returning recoil spring
and attacking him again. 

He heard the
shocking sound of
gunfire from the back of the house, and he knew that everything was
irretrievable. Gunfire would never hurt that thing. 
His enemy kicked
him in one thigh
and his whole leg went numb from pain, buckling under him. She besieged him with
blows about the head. His ears filled with roaring, and his heart quailed with
the expectation of death.
Then the ceiling was suddenly stippled with shafts
of
light. This mystery happened at the same time as a sudden sharp blow crashed
into his right shoulder from above, and he recognized that he’d been shot. The
ceiling was full of bullet holes. His attacker had been slapped down to the
floor by the invisible force that had penetrated the ceiling. The roaring in
Presnensky’s ears was a HELICOPTER, and someone onboard that helicopter was
firing a MACHINE GUN through the ROOF.
Deafened,
Presnensky reeled to the
nearest window and headfirst rammed himself through it, his own blood silently
appearing in spots on the floor around him like fleas jumping off a dog.
 <o:p></o:p>
He lay out in the
flowerbed next
to the bungalow as the helicopter, which was hovering fifty meters above his
head, moved on from machine-gunning the front room of the bungalow with its
chin-turret to destroy, Presnensky judged by the sound of it, a car parked
behind the hotel. The car died in a thunderous metallic pounding of bullets into
auto body, with a counterpoint of shattering glass.
He knew he was
badly hurt. He
could move, but he didn’t want to. He figured movement would attract the
attention of the helicopter.
He lay in the
flowerbed, quite
comfortably, really, considering. He wasn’t sure for how long. Not more than
five minutes. Ten.
Gryznov came and
found him there.
The dwarf brought vodka.
 <o:p></o:p>
It was Grigori
Byelmodin whom
Gryznov had been meeting with when the assassin team had moved in. Grigori was
nephew to Tsar Byelmodin, and rumored to have the run of the Byelmodin
syndicate’s gambling operations in the mainland part of the city. Presnensky had

suspected that the visitors where Thieves when they arrived. There was no other
criminal group in Vladivostok that had the power to show itself off as
conspicuously as that metallic blue muscle car.
Gryznov had
brought Byelmodin to
the meeting by stealing data on his own initiative that he knew Grigori would
want, and then telling him he had it. 
Gryznov had asked for one thing in exchange for it; a position with the
Byelmodins as an information broker. He wanted in the family. He knew that if he
were an official part of the syndicate the Seoulpa Rings would rescind the death
order. They’d never put their peace with their Russian counterparts at risk over

one small decker, after all.
Byelmodin had come
to see the
data, and with one bodyguard, as promised. The helicopter gunship had been
Grigori’s little secret, in case of emergency; another little secret was that
his bodyguard was a shaman of the Bull totem. The earth elemental had smashed
down the bedroom door, and the shaman had instantly crushed its mind with
invisible sorcery. The thing had simply vanished, dissolved in the same magical
energies that had made it. The gunfire had been Gryznov and Byelmodin firing out
the bedroom window at the two assassins out back, in the car.
Whether Grigori
would have given
Gryznov the position he wanted was now a moot point. The scion of the Byelmodin
syndicate had nearly been killed in an attack paid for by the Seoulpa Rings.
Coincidence or not that he’d been in the area of effect,  the Rings had to give
up their grudge
against Gryznov for the sake of the peace.
Byelmodin gave
Gryznov the
position anyway.
“What
was the data you had that he
wanted so much?” Presnensky could not restrain his curiosity.
“I have
been sworn to secrecy,”
Gryznov held up one hand in a that’s-the-end-of-it way. Dwarves were famous for
their stubbornness.
The body of the
Japanese woman was
not found. There was a lot of blood on the floor, but at least some of it was
Presnensky’s.
Presnensky’s left eye was damaged.
It wasn’t tracking motion correctly. It gave a choppy and extremely irritating
series of still images whenever it got in the mood. He had it fixed. He paid an
emergency room surgeon to treat his bullet wounds (there were two – he
hadn’t
noticed the graze to his leg) and the deep, aching bruises the Japanese woman
had inflicted on him. They were very delicate. The slightest wrong move would
send his muscles into spasms. 
He paid the
surgeon again, this
time not to file the legal paperwork. The doctor told him he should take a
week’s rest. He decided to spend it in the Caymans.
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