The Hammer Falls Page 25

  She accepted it and looked inside. A smile erased some of the tension on her face. “Tea!”

  “It’s not fancy, just the floweriest stuff I could find at the market a couple blocks over.”

  “You went out?”

  “Covered my face. Only scared a couple of people.”

  She chuckled. “Hibiscus and rose hips are my favorite. Would you like to come in?”

  He stepped inside and she shut the door.

  “Look, this is a lot bigger than a few cups of tea,” he said. “Tina told me you two have been talking, and I—”

  “Let’s play Italian Mafia Bingo!” Her voice shrilled. “I’ve been doing a little checking on your new benefactors. Prostitution: check! Kickbacks from construction firms: check! Racketeering: check! Black market narcotics: check! Black market tech: check! Bank fraud: check! Money laundering: check! Excise tax fraud: check! The Russians practically invented that one in the Bronx back in the 1970s. This Roxanne Sukova is wanted for human trafficking across half of Eastern Europe. If my parole officer gets even a sniff of this, I will go away forever! No more blue sky, no more road trips to nowhere, no more tea.”

  “You don’t have to do this. Walk away. Right now.”

  “I’ve already crossed too many lines. The best chance I have now is to see it through. In for a penny, in for a gosh-darn metric tonne!”

  She sighed and sagged down onto the bed. “Trask’s operation is dead. There’s nothing here for me now. He hasn’t admitted it to himself yet, but I’ve checked his bank accounts. He could rebuild, but it will take at least two years before he makes a profit again.”

  “I thought you said you couldn’t do anything intrusive.”

  “The lock doesn’t stop me from watching people type in their passwords.”

  Horace laughed. “And here I thought you were just sweet, innocent, little Bunny.”

  “I haven’t been innocent since I was fifteen. Nowadays it’s more like Bunny Who Was Long Ago Sweet and Innocent but Was Corrupted by Invisible Wars, Destroyed by Prison, and Is Now a Revolutionary Trying Hard to Be Reformed but Can’t Because She’s Being Led Astray by the Irresistible Magnetism of a Hopeless Warrior Who Will Never Be Hers.”

  After a long silence, he sat down beside her. “That’s pretty complicated.”

  “The decision trees in my AI boggle the mind.”

  He took her hand and squeezed it. She laid her other hand atop his and clutched it.

  She looked up at him, a moment of hope flickering in her eyes. “You want to stay for a while? I’ll make some tea, you can turn your nose up at it...”

  “I can’t. We’re leaving for Vegas at three a.m. I’m gonna grab what sleep I can.”

  “I understand.”

  A thousand things went through Horace’s mind, things he should say, but all of them sounded unbelievably lame. So he said nothing, took his hand away, and left.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The sky outside the windows of the hyperjet were a brilliant tapestry of silver and milk. Gauzy clouds glowed below in the light of the half-moon. Moonlight gleamed on the pearly wing.

  Soft techno-jazz, crystal clear and vibrant as a featherlight touch, stroked the dim pools of ambient light. The aircraft was the height of luxury, constructed to dampen the noise of the engines so completely that the cabin was as quiet as an empty coliseum. This kind of luxury was not unknown to Horace, although he’d never owned a private hyperjet.

  Horace and Roxanne reclined on a luxuriant couch in the rear of the aft cabin. Her lawyerly attire was gone, replaced by a provocatively-cut dress that looked like an impressionist painting.

  Roxanne’s handservant, Amelie, a lovely French girl, poured drinks for both of them and then departed forward to prepare Bunny and Tina a meal, make them as comfortable as possible, and keep them entertained. Roxanne had forbidden any interruption until landing in Vegas.

  She swirled her glass of pinot noir and relaxed into the couch, facing him. Her musky perfume stroked his nostrils with exotic fingers. “Millennia ago, Roman women of status and means paid handsomely to be bedded by the most powerful gladiators. Of course, the gladiators were slaves who saw none of this money.”

  Horace’s eyes drank her in: the full lips, the bottomless eyes, the body sprung from every heterosexual man’s most fervid dreams, the glossy raven hair brushing cleavage straight from heaven, and he felt nothing but the coldness, the shell, and the murderous darkness within it.

  “Can you imagine it?” she said. “Fresh from bloody victories, still stinking of sweat and triumph, these men were as gods. Women came and rutted upon them because there were no men like them in the world. Not their patrician husbands, not their nubile slave boys, but these great beasts of men whose sole purpose was to kill and die.”

  Horace fingered his glass of Ardbeg, the smoky flavor of the scotch on his tongue much like the sound of her voice, the smell of a nearby bonfire yet unseen. The comparison between pit fighters of today and gladiators of ancient times was a well-trodden one, often discussed in the early meetings of the marketing people as Death Match Unlimited had begun to coalesce into a wildly profitable venture. And it had been much of the Business’ appeal when he was still young and full of spunk. None of his high-powered bed partners had ever paid him in currency, but in favors in other realms that could be just as lucrative.

  “I signed on to be a piece of meat,” he said. “Some uses for that are more fun than others.”

  “There are so few gods left in this world.” She leaned into him, her nostrils quivering.

  “Once in a while, a great while,” he said, “I run across a goddess who knows what she is. Even more rare, she doesn’t abuse it.”

  She clinked his glass, and their eyes met for long moments. On any other day, he would have been ecstatic to have a woman like Roxanne looking at him that way, leaning close enough that her musky perfume formed a trail his nose wanted to follow. It wouldn’t have mattered what business she was in.

  Her gaze turned away, as if she had been looking for something and not found it.

  Horace eased back from her luscious scent, trying to clear his head. “So, you and Vince.”

  “Come now, are we back in junior high? Surely you don’t think Vince and I are an item.”

  “I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes.” Much less piss off yet another powerful mobster. Jealousy had ruined careers all around him. The stakes here were much higher.

  “Vince is protective of me. A great many men feel such things for me. The rest hate me for being a powerful woman. Each type requires a different approach.”

  “I can’t say you need much protecting.”

  “Very perceptive. Nevertheless, it is sometimes a useful role to play.” Her eyes met his for a long, thoughtful moment as she swirled her wine gently in its glass. “And speaking of roles, there is much to do before the event, preparations to make.”

  “Give me a vibro-axe and point me in the right direction.”

  “I admire your enthusiasm, but even you would have zero chance of success in a direct attack. Even getting into the same building with him will require special preparations. You will need to wear a prosthetic.” Producing a black, plastic packet from her briefcase, she handed it to him. “This is a fingertip, made of synth-skin. Bond it to the end of your index finger. It contains a few drops of blood and a fingerprint tied to your fake identity. Mogilevich is incredibly security-minded. Everyone’s DNA will be scanned against a database.”

  He set it aside for later. “So who am I going to be?”

  “You’re Frankie Rocketfist, a former pit fighter, of course, who has joined the bodyguard trade. Hardly a person to raise an eyebrow at an event like this. Pit fighters of your size are unusual, but not unheard of. Synth-skin and battle armor will conceal your tattoos. Poor Frankie never made it out of the minor leagues. If your personal history is checked—and it will be—enough of a background identity, fabricated matches and such, has been constructed to
fool a cursory inspection. We’ll be meeting my surgeon in Vegas to modify your face.”

  “What? Surgeon? I thought you were going to use movie makeup.”

  “Facial recognition systems can see through external prosthetics. You would be flagged instantly. No, we’re going to implant temporary bone and cartilage structures under your skin, plus a neural chip in your motor cortex that will alter your posture.” She touched his face with warm, gentle fingers. “Nose, brows, cheekbones, chin, gait.”

  He cracked a half grin. “You don’t think I got enough chin?”

  “Oh, my dear Horace, you’re going to look and walk like a Neanderthal brute when we’re through. The uglier you are, the less anyone will look at you. And of course, the surgery will be healed and assimilated immediately with regenites. No swelling or redness. And when we are through with all of this, when this vast clusterfuck is over, the implants will be removed and you will be your old, beautiful self once again.”

  “Beautiful, eh?”

  “Hardly in a movie star or supermodel way, but...” Her fingers stroked him again. “You are like a mountain. Timeless, capped with snow that slowly erodes you.” She stroked the salt-and-pepper hair that had begun to obscure his scalp tattoos. “Standing taller than anyone around you, an Everest that lesser men die on.”

  “That’s awful poetic, sister.”

  She smiled, like a peek of sun through a forest canopy. “I was a literature major before law school.”

  “You don’t hear much poetry these days.”

  “And that is one of the great tragedies of the twenty-first century. The plutocrats and gangsters who run this planet, men like Mogilevich, have little use for things that don’t make them money. Poetry hasn’t made money for anyone since the days of Shakespeare. And that disdain trickles down to the masses, who lack enough patience and education to appreciate anything beyond limericks and marketing jingles.” The more she spoke, the more her face seemed to open up, like light emerging from within a slowly opening vault. “Sublime pleasures have gone out of fashion. The world has become shallow, and our entertainments with it. Empty three-dimensional heads talking at one another or screaming.”

  “You sound like a professor, not a mobster.”

  “I considered a career in academia, but it is not a place that effects change easily. It is too cloistered, too austere. I wanted something more direct. I got into this business somewhat by accident. I simply found myself one day in a position of advantage, and in a moment of...let us call it epiphany, I seized the opportunity. I have been building upon that for almost thirty years.”

  “Thirty years! What, did you start in the womb?”

  She smiled again, and each time the warmth grew. “You flatter me. You know as well as I that the richest women can look twenty-five well into their sixties.”

  “Darlin’, my hat’s off to your fountain of youth, because I was pretty sure last night you were about half my age.”

  “There were fifty-year-old women in Club Neo, still chasing their dreams of fame and celebrity because, for them, fortune is not enough.”

  That possibility had not occurred to him. “What would be enough for you?”

  “To die knowing I had done something to stem the fatal tide of selfishness that has turned the human race into a plague of locusts, devouring the planet and each other until there is nothing left but to devour ourselves. I want to reverse some of the damage these oligarchs and plutocrats have done. I want to make a few things right.”

  “So said every asshole dictator in history.” His voice sounded harsher than he meant it, but she did not appear to take offense.

  “Well said, Horace. That very thought is something I wrestle with daily. What makes me better than Napoleon, Mao Zedong, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, the entire Kim Dynasty? They were pragmatic, educated, idealistic. It is unlikely I shall ever be Queen of Planet Earth, but there are a few victories that could change the course of human history. Chief among those would be mounting the head of Yvgeny Mogilevich on a spear and feeding his corpse to sharks.”

  Her voice had remained measured and conversational throughout her entire speech, but at her last words, Horace glimpsed in her eyes a hatred so deep and hot and seething that a shudder went through him, as if inside the vault of her core was a blast furnace. Her hatred of Mogilevich was not vague or based on ambition or jealousy, as toward an obstacle, an irritant, or an opponent.

  It was personal.

  “Why do you hate him so much?” he said.

  “He is my father.”

  Horace jumped across the cabin and faced her. “Jesus Christ!”

  She took a sip of wine and remained still, regarding him.

  His head spun. What had he gotten himself into? He paced back and forth, his gaze fixed upon her. His emotions blazed through jungles of anger, betrayal, fear. Her eyes followed him placidly. Mumbled oaths and curses poured out of him. For several minutes, he paced and she simply waited, unmoved, unmoving.

  When his agitation subsided, she said, “If you are finished, may we continue? Please.”

  He hung against the bulkhead, feeling that the woman before him had just become the largest gaboon viper he had ever seen, coiled and torpid, but oh-so-deadly.

  “Come now, Horace. That you now know this changes nothing.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t?” His fists clenched.

  “You knew what I am before you got onto this aircraft. All that has changed is that I let you have a glimpse of who I am.”

  “I’m in the middle of a goddamn family tiff! What, are you trying to get your inheritance early?”

  “Hardly. He does not even know who I am. Perhaps if I get the opportunity to cut his throat, I will tell him as he bleeds out at my feet. My mother was one of his ravaged castoffs. There are doubtless many children in the world spawned from his foul seed. But she made sure I knew who my father was and what he had done to her.” Her eyes misted for a moment, and another sip of wine went down harder than it should have. “To him, I am simply an acquaintance with whom it is profitable to do business.”

  “What kind of business is that?”

  “You’re asking a woman to divulge all of her secrets?” She laughed, and he wished that he didn’t find it so goddamn appealing.

  “What about the charges of human trafficking?”

  Her eyebrows rose. “Oh, you’ve been doing your homework. It should come as no surprise to you at this point that Mogilevich owns half of the police forces across Europe and western Russia. You can call those charges sour grapes. He buys and sells women and little girls like cuts of meat. Poor women, refugees from the corporate wars, their starving children. Let us just say I commandeered a rather large shipment of women and little girls bound for the sex industry across North America and Asia. I stole them, made them disappear, and gave them new lives. Nevertheless, the whole affair was spun and twisted to look like I was the one doing the trafficking. None of this can be proven, of course.”

  “But he invites you to his parties.”

  “You know the old adage about keeping one’s enemies closer, yes? He pretends that he does not know of my involvement. I pretend that he is not responsible for the murder and enslavement of millions. It is all a game of lies. Calculations and risk assessments. If we manage to kill Mogilevich, make no mistake—I stand to make untold sums of money by seizing as many pieces of his empire’s corpse as I can. It took me years of maneuvering to be invited to this event. This is my third invitation to his blood sport. He is so secure in his power, he does not see me as a significant threat, which is exactly how I want it. To him, I am merely a beautiful upstart, a curiosity, like a supermodel who can do quantum mathematics.”

  “Why me? Why haven’t you tried to kill him before now?”

  “I have never been in the position before. Certainly I could have hired an assassin, but everything would have gone to Dmitri. But now, with Dmitri out of the picture, all bets are off, as they say.”

  “But why me?”


  “You have nothing to lose and everything to gain if you succeed. Everything. We have not discussed this specifically, so allow me to lay it out for you. If we succeed, you will have a new heart, a real one grown from your own tissue. I will even see to the regeneration of your friend Lilly, if she lives long enough.”

  “That’s very generous. But I want a couple more things.”

  A belly laugh rolled out of her. “A mafiya queen offers you the world, and you want the moon as well!”

  “Not for me, you understand. Bunny. You said you have influence in certain circles. After the way you busted me out of jail, I’m guessing one of them is maybe the parole system.”

  She leaned closer, running fingers through her thick mane, eyes glinting.

  “Bunny is a slicer with a huge chunk of data locked away somewhere she can’t get to. I’m pretty sure that data would be very incriminating to certain people, but it’s locked up and her parole officer is a corrupt trickle-dick. You want to change the world, you can start there.”

  An eyebrow went up at that. “I knew she was extraordinary. She and little Tina as well. Else I would have simply used my own people. She and I will talk. And what about your little rainbow friend? I presume you want something for her?”

  He sighed a little. “I can’t give her what she wants.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Her father back.” His words surprised him, not only with their abruptness, but also with their truth.

  She considered this for a moment. “How ironic. I want mine atomized and all memory of him expunged from the history of humankind.”

  “Remind me not to get on your bad side.”

  “I would advise against it.” She looked into him again with that unabashed discernment and intense curiosity. “I must say, Horace, very few men surprise me, but you do. I have met a few pit fighters. In a callous world, they are among the most callous. It is an effect of turning the greatest of human drama and tragedy—death—into a game. Human life has less and less value these days. But you, you care about people.”