Engineman - Eric Brown [201]
She nodded. If she was aware of the ridiculous scrawl on his forehead she didn't lose her cool and show surprise. She wore a silver lamé mackintosh, belted at the waist, and when she leaned forward to deposit ash in the tray on the desk with a single tap of a long-nailed finger, the lapels buckled outwards to reveal tanned chest and the white sickle scars of a double mastectomy, the latest thing in body fashion.
"I want to hire you for one hour, for which I will pay you twenty-five thousand dollars."
"I'm not an assassin," Dan said.
"I assure you that I want no-one killed."
"Then what do you want?" He reached out to the chessboard on the desk and pushed white Bishop to Queen's four: follow her.
"That was a rash move, Leferve." She advanced a pawn, and smiled.
Dan toppled his king. "Now, perhaps you could supply me with a few details. Who are you, and what kind of work do you have in mind?"
She glanced around the office. "This is hardly the place to do business. Perhaps we can discuss these points later, over lunch."
Below the level of the desk, Dan gestured for me to go. He saw the writing on his arm and, instead of showing anger, he smiled to himself at this childish exhibition of my affection and concern.
I slipped from the office without the woman noticing me.
I took the downchute to the boulevard, ran through the rain and rode up the outside of the opposite towerpile to the flier rank. I found Claude and slipped in beside him. Claude had been an ex-spacer with the Satori Line, and in his retirement he piloted a taxi flier part-time. He sat back in the seat with his fingers laced behind his bulky occipital computer. "Action, Phuong?"
"When it shifts, follow that flier."
I pointed across the gap to the landing stage. The woman's flier was an ugly Soviet Zil, two tons of armoured, bullet-proof tank. No wonder the building had quaked when she landed. A uniformed chauffeur stood on the edge of the building and stared out at the lighted night.
Three minutes later the woman emerged and strode across the landing stage. The chauffeur hurried to open the door and the woman slipped quickly inside.
The Zil fired its 'aft jets, and I experienced the sudden pang of physical pain and mental torture that always hit me whenever I forgot to close my eyes. Even the sound of burners filled me with nausea.
I was fifteen when I took a short cut through a rank of fliers and the sudden ignition of twin Mitsubishi 500s roasted me alive. Only the skill of the surgeons and my parents' life-savings had saved my life and financed the reconstruction of my face so that it was as pretty as the rest of my body was hideous. I'd been rushing to meet a young Arab I thought I loved. He'd dropped me not long after.
The Zil lifted ponderously and inched out over the boulevard. The jets fired again and it banked with sudden speed into an air-lane, heading north.
"Easy does it, Claude."
He flipped switches and growled to his on-board computer, and we lifted. He steered barefoot and I was forced into the cushioned seat as we accelerated in pursuit.
Traffic was light, which had its advantages: although we had to keep our distance to remain inconspicuous, the Zil was easy to trace in the empty Paris sky. Lights spangled the city far below, but against the darkened dome our quarry's burners glowed red like devils' eyes.
Three minutes later the flier swooped from the air-lane and banked around the silvered bends of the Seine. Claude touched my hand and pointed to one o'clock. A small air-car flew alongside the Zil in a parallel lane. "Been following her since we took off," he told me.
The Zil decelerated and went down behind the high iron railings of a riverside mansion. "Passy," Claude commented. "Expensive. What now?"
The one-man flier, having followed the woman to base, banked and fired off across Paris.
"Move in, Claude. And when you've dropped me, follow that flier. I want everything you can get on it, okay?"
The mansion was a large square building as old as the revolution. Antiquity, though, was not its most notable