The Hammer Falls Read online

  “By the way, there’s a toxic gas cannon up my ass, if you’re feeling saucy.”

  “Quit while you are ahead, fuckhole,” the guard growled in a thick Russian accent.

  He hovered in an empty corner of the grand entry hall and muttered into his microphone. “Ms. Sukova, I can’t get your netlink. The car is locked.”

  A moment’s pause, then in a singsong lilt, “I’ll be right there.”

  A minute later, she confronted him in the foyer with a withering glare and a sneer of disdain meant for the guards to see. “I cannot believe you were so stupid, Frankie.”

  The guards stared with narrowed eyes, curious and alert now from this unknown drama.

  Roxanne pulled Horace outside and approached the car at an easy walk. The door locks clicked. Horace opened the door for her, and then followed her inside and shut the door.

  “Bunny, are you there?” Horace called.

  The bulkhead between passengers and driver slid downward, revealing the back of Bunny’s head, slumped and askew, her face slack and sagging against the control yoke. Horace jammed his thick torso through the opening and touched her. “Bunny.” Shook her shoulder. “Bunny!”

  He felt for a pulse at her throat and found it hammering along like a rabbit’s warning thump. Her eyes were half-lidded, fluttering. “She’s alive, but out of it. Some kind of seizure maybe.”

  “Drag her into the back.”

  After releasing the safety straps, he cupped her under both arms as gently as he could and dragged her into the rear. They arranged Bunny on a seat and Roxanne prepared a tumbler of ice water. Bunny’s face was strained, tight, her eye movements oscillating under half-closed lids at an impossible frequency.

  She tipped a trickle of ice water between Bunny’s lips.

  Bunny choked and gasped and her arms began to flail, but her eyes did not open. A hoarse, ululating cry ripped from her throat, a cry of fear and confusion.

  “What the fuck’s going on?” Horace said, grabbing for her wrists, pinning them together.

  Roxanne sat on her legs, holding them down while they squirmed under her. Water sloshed from the tumbler. Then he dashed the water into Bunny’s face.

  Another ragged gasp and the thrashing ceased. Bunny blinked, opened her eyes, glanced at them, licked her lips, her chin and eyebrows dripping.

  “Uh,” she said, “What are you guys doing?”

  “You were having some kind of seizure,” Roxanne said. “What do you remember?”

  “Why am I all wet?” Her head sagged back, and her eyes began to flutter again. “I’m late! I’m late! For a very important date! No time to say hello, goodbye! I’m late! I’m late! I’m late!”

  “Bunny, no!” Horace shook her.

  Her gaze snapped back into focus, and her teeth chattered, but not from cold. “What? It’s just too much! Too...”

  “Stay with us, sister.”

  Her behavior was that of someone sedated into incoherence, except that the muscles of her face, instead of hanging slack, were twitching, tightening spasmodically into a succession of rictus masks.

  “What the hell is wrong with her?” he said.

  “Something to do with unlocking her AI, perhaps. It does remind me of the adjustment period of my own implants, but greatly amplified. Her brain is having trouble processing the deluge of information. It’s like having a whole new sense group turned on, or in the case of a cyberpath, several sense groups, like turning on the lights in a house that has been dark for years.”

  “Can you see anything with your own implants?”

  “I’m not a slicer. I don’t have those kinds of capabilities.”

  “I hope she doesn’t blow a few million synapses. How long is she gonna be like this?”

  “Unknown. But we must get back inside. The bouts are going to begin soon, and Tina cannot entertain the senator forever.”

  “We can’t just leave her like this.”

  “You stay here, try to keep her in the here and now. I have plenty of enemies inside, but no one is going to attempt to assassinate me. At least for now.” She slid toward the door, then paused, her gaze holding on him for a long moment. Then she came to him, cupped his cheek, and kissed him on the mouth, long and warm and moist.

  Then she was gone, and Horace was left with a twitching, spasming, muttering cyberpath. “Oh, my fur and whiskers! I’m late, I’m late, I’m late!” Another face-full of water roused Bunny again.

  “Stop that!” she sputtered.

  “Then stay with me.”

  “I can’t tell I’m leaving! Oh, my gosh, I’m scared! It wasn’t like this before!”

  “If it’s been twenty years, your brain isn’t the same anymore. Mine sure as hell isn’t. Talk to me. Stay with me.”

  “It’s like Jimmy is bouncing around inside my brain. All the trillions of little tasks I wished he could do before but couldn’t, he’s trying to do all at once now. It’s like I’m in a fog of static, but all the bits of static have meaning and purpose, and I can’t grab any of them, and when I got the implants it wasn’t like this—I could learn it all little by little, ease into it; now it’s like being thrown into a hyperfighter when all you’ve ever driven is a tricycle...”

  “You can do it, Bunny. You’ve done it before. This is who you used to be.”

  “I’m scared I won’t be able to handle it, turn the throttle down; I won’t be able to help you, I won’t be able to get us out of here...”

  “You’ve already done more than you had to. You are a superhero.”

  “Don’t give me that. I’m just a girl from Paducah.”

  “And I’m a small-town kid from Nebraska. Everybody comes from somewhere. Try to focus on my voice. Just right here. There’s a whole world out there and it stops at your skull. Just be Bunny for a few minutes. Just breathe.”

  She took a deep breath and relaxed against his lap. Her breathing slowed, and he could no longer feel the pulse surging through her wrists. He laid her hands on her chest.

  “Tell me about Nebraska,” she said.

  So he did. He told her about the small town he grew up in, a town that had begun as a farming community in the nineteenth century, but by the time he was born had long since entered its death spiral, as there were no farmers around anymore except the indentured servants of a few megacorps. Except for picking fruit and vegetables, nearly all farm work was done with great robotic machines that ran on artificial intelligence and GPS, and the rest was done by migrant, labor-class workers. The megacorps owned most of the land, waiting on a few stubborn old holdouts to die so they could seize the rest, the children long since having gone off to the cities to try to make a living. From this, a big lunkhead with more muscles than brains, with the kind of physical stature that inspired either abject fear or the kind of amazement reserved for circus freaks, headed to the city like almost everyone he knew, wandered into a mixed martial arts gym, and the rest was history.

  The boxing ring inside Mogilevich’s house had scratched the surface of many of those memories. His first bouts had been in such rings, thick with the smells of sweat and muscle ointment, styptic powder and blood, leather and canvas, long before the genetic enhancements had turned his hands into hammers.

  The first time he ever got into the ring, felt that rush of the clash, the strife, the victory that came when every breath was a string of razor blades in his lungs, when his arms had been reduced to slabs of limp steak, he knew it was what he was put on this planet to do. He won more than he lost, but he did lose a few, and all of those gave him lessons for next time.

  “Why fighting?” Bunny murmured, dream-like, clinging to real-time consciousness as if it were a life-preserver. “Why not something nice like a brush salesman? My first boyfriend was a brush salesman.”

  He laughed at that. “Some of us are just born in the wrong century.”

  The protrusions of her implants were hard against his fingers. “Some centuries are just born wrong.”

  Then she sat up,
blinking her eyes, rubbing them, chewing her lips, clutching the sides of her head and working at it as if it were a cross-threaded bolt.

  He watched her warily for signs of another seizure.

  “I’m getting Jimmy under control.... He’s at least listening to me now.... I can’t do any slicing yet, but the worst is over. I hope.”

  “Don’t scare me like that again or I’ll have to kick your ass.”

  “Is that any way to talk to a lady?”

  “Ass kicking is pretty much my only skill.”

  With what looked like incredible effort, she composed herself and looked into his eyes. “Then go back inside and do it.” Her gaze flicked from his eyes to his mouth three times, and then she clasped her hands between her thighs and looked away. “I’ll be here when you come back out.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Horace refrained from bantering with the guards when he went back inside this time. The gathering room beyond the foyer had cleared out, so he snatched a couple handfuls of hors d’oeuvres left on platters and crammed them into his mouth.

  As he paused to chew and swallow before heading back to the fight room, the empty room let him notice the artwork that festooned the carved, fluted hardwood walls: Renaissance paintings that looked worth more than entire counties where he came from, with a tastefulness that surprised him. He was no art expert, but he recognized greatness when he saw it. He didn’t know what he had been expecting from Mogilevich’s taste—velvet paintings of pin-up girls and dogs playing poker maybe—but here was a trove of priceless art.

  A round of applause from the automobile gallery drew him away from the display and into the larger room beyond. The tables were filled now with the august guests and the eye candy they brought along to nibble. The air was redolent with scents of cigar smoke, clove cigarettes, car wax, and cologne worth its weight in gold.

  Horace glided silently around the perimeter toward the table where Roxanne sat with Tina and the senator. He took his place there, catching the women’s eyes, and stood sentinel with his hands clasped before him, emulating all the other bodyguards he had ever seen.

  The senator looked somewhat less jovial now. Tina’s altered face, more difficult to read than ever, registered tension and a trace of worry. What had happened while Horace was gone? Roxanne was leaning close to the senator, giving him plenty of generous looks, coaxing him back into a pleasant mood.

  Tina caught Horace’s eye again and swallowed hard, but kept quiet.

  All the tables were occupied except one, two tables from where Horace stood. The lights around the chamber dimmed except for those directly above the ring. The hubbub of conversation diminished. Heads bobbed closer and spoke quieter.

  From a door on the opposite side of the gallery, three figures emerged, and glowing red halos—targeting reticles—appeared around them in his HUD vision.

  Flanked by two bodyguards, Yvgeny Mogilevich strode toward the ring with the gait and bearing of a man half his age. The mob boss smiled and nodded to his guests, pointedly shaking a few hands as he passed between the tables, pointedly ignoring a few others.

  As he approached, Horace immediately recognized the father of the man he had killed in a limousine just over a week ago. His hair was white, combed back from a prominent widow’s peak. Flinty eyes, buried in leathery wrinkles, scanned the crowd, brushing over Horace for a moment. Mogilevich’s features were blunt, stolid, square-chinned, with a wide mouth and strangely thick lips, a face that might have been ruggedly handsome had there been a microgram of humanity in it. Nevertheless, there was still a magnetism about him.

  His dark gray tuxedo bore the cut of a hundred years ago. Diamond-and-pearl cuff links glittered at his wrists. A silk handkerchief that matched his glimmering necktie was tucked precisely in his breast pocket. He climbed the steps to the ring and grabbed the ropes to duck between them, fingers glimmering with encrustations of gold and gems like barnacles.

  Horace’s blood turned to dry ice at the sight of Joey Luca at Mogilevich’s side. Joey Luca, the former pit fighter he’d killed in the back of Dmitri’s limousine. The heart injector felt like a brick against his chest, constricting his breathing. If there was anyone in the room most likely to recognize “Hammer” Harkness, it was Joey Luca.

  Mogilevich stepped to the center of the ring. “Welcome, all, to my little event!” His voice was cordial, scratchy, filled with powerful inner strength, and amplified to fill the cavernous space. It was the same voice that had spoken the words “I’m going to fuck you. And I’m going to keep fucking you until I can’t fuck anymore.”

  Applause rippled around the tables.

  “I am not a man of words—”

  “You are a man of action!” came a voice from the tables, to a smattering of laughter.

  Mogilevich smiled at this. “Indeed. So let us begin!”

  A dozen waiters emerged in a column from one of the doors, each carrying what looked like an elaborately decorated egg the size of a human head. As the waiters dispersed among the tables, Horace saw each of the eggs was unique and breathtakingly beautiful, a masterpiece of porcelain and jewels, gold and silver filigree. He suddenly felt as if the Royal Crown Jewels of England were passing through the crowd. The eggs looked old and yet timeless, exquisite works of art the value of which he could not even imagine. The waiters paused at each table, opened the eggs like clamshells, and withdrew crystal glasses of clear liquid, distributing these to the guests. Roxanne, Tina, and the senator all received one.

  Mogilevich received his glass last and raised it. “But before we begin, a toast! Vashe zdorovie!”

  Bunny’s voice shot with panic into Horace’s earbud. “Don’t drink it!”

  “Vashe zdorovie!” replied the guests raising their glasses.

  Mogilevich turned toward Roxanne and Tina with an ingratiating smile. “And because we are graced with the presence of such stunning beauties, za milyh dam.”

  Bunny kept talking. “I’m suddenly picking up dozens of new signals. They’ve got to be coming from the vodka.”

  Mogilevich raised his glass to the other six women in the audience, and everybody drank. Tina and Roxanne raised their glasses and appeared to drink, but Horace’s vantage point let him see that they did not even touch the liquid to their lips.

  Bunny continued, “Probably location transmitters, small enough to swallow unnoticed. Good way to keep tabs on everyone.”

  Red text from Roxanne appeared in his vision:

  GOOD TO HAVE YOU BACK, BUNNY. HOW DID YOU SEE THIS?

  Bunny’s voice was coherent but still shaky, and there was a strange, electronic distortion in her words. “I’m tied into your implants, Ms. Sukova, straight into your visual cortex. I hope you don’t mind. And by the way, everything we’re transmitting is now encrypted and passing through the house repeaters. It’s designed to look like random burst noise. Hopefully the entities monitoring the signals won’t notice for a while. And even if they do, it’ll take them time to decrypt it.”

  Mogilevich was speaking, “—rules are simple. Two men enter the ring. One man leaves. No weapons. Unlimited three-minute rounds. Victors receive a million dollars, and the attention of our friends from Death Match Unlimited.” He gestured toward Darryl Stone, who sat at ringside with a tall, buxom supermodel beside him.

  Horace suppressed a snarl of disgust. In his day, there was no way Death Match Unlimited would have slipped between the sheets so blatantly with someone like Mogilevich.

  Bunny continued, “I’m working on a couple of other things, too, but I have only one access point into the house systems, through this repeater. It’s like trying to build a ship in a bottle or a mainframe through a keyhole.”

  With a flourish, the host said, “Now, I give you tonight’s master of ceremonies.” With that he climbed down from the ring and circled toward his table, the second table away from where Roxanne and Tina sat.

  And into the ring stepped Colin Ross, the Scottish singer, actor, and international playboy w
hose professional, financial, and sexual exploits made metric tonnes of grist for the tabloid mill and billions of dollars for the entertainment industry. He had gotten his start in an Edinburgh face club. Dressed in a perfectly-tailored tuxedo, black hair perfectly coiffed, face tanned and devilishly handsome with a physique worthy of Michelangelo, Ross climbed into the ring and waved to the guests. Hoots, whistles, applause greeted him.

  A look of beatific amazement bloomed on Tina’s face at the sight of him.

  Waiters again circulated through the crowd with gilded cards, which appeared to be the bout card for the evening, and distributed them to all the guests. Money began changing hands as wagering commenced amidst boisterous conversation.

  This felt wrong, all of it. Ten men were going to die tonight, with no hope of resurrection, unless Horace acted, and thousands more over the course of Mogilevich’s life if he failed, including Lilly and her children, Roxanne, Tina, Bunny, and probably Trask, too, for the sake of cleanup. His hand itched so powerfully to walk up behind Mogilevich and put an electro-fiber blade in the back of the gangster’s skull that he had to be careful not to deploy the weapon in his bracer accidentally.

  Ross’ deep voice and cultured Scottish burr greeted the guests. “In case you don’t know who I am, I’m Colin Ross, of stage and screen, raconteur, entrepreneur, and a few other French words.”

  Applause filled the gallery.

  Roxanne was still chatting quietly with the senator, touching his thigh, leaning in close. The senator was beginning to warm up again under her deft ministrations.

  Tina announced, “Apologies, but I must visit the little girls’ room before the excitement starts. Excuse me.”

  She stood and flowed free of the table, chair, and senator, coming toward Horace. “Sonofabitch slid his hand up my crotch!” she hissed, her voice a razor of anger. “Practically stuck his finger in there! This is one of those days I wish my coochie had teeth!” Then she breezed away toward one of the doors the waiters used.

  In Horace’s vision, the map of a floor plan appeared, indicating the location of a toilet, and a green dot indicating Tina’s presence moving toward it.