Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [11]
The hologram portrait of Inspector Hiru Yamanaka was blurred but recognizable. Although Damon had never seen an Interpol ID before he was prepared to assume that it was authentic; he handed it back without even switching it through his beltpack.
“This is Sergeant Rolfe,” said Yamanaka, obviously assuming that once his own identity had been established his word was authority enough to establish the ID of his companion.
“Whatever it is,” Damon said, as he unlocked the door, “I’m not involved. I don’t run with the gangs anymore and I don’t have any idea what they’re up to. These days, I only go out to fetch the groceries and help my girlfriend move out.”
The men from Interpol followed Damon into the apartment, ignoring the stream of denials. Inspector Yamanaka showed not a flicker of interest as his heavy-lidded gaze took in the knife stuck into the doorjamb, but his sidekick took silently ostentatious offense at the untidy state of the living room. Even Damon had to admit that Diana’s decampment had left it looking a frightful mess.
As soon as the door was shut Yamanaka said, “What do you know about the Eliminators, Mr. Hart?”
“I was never that kind of crazy,” Damon told him affrontedly. “I was a serious streetfighter, not a hobbyist assassin.”
“No one’s accusing you of anything,” said Sergeant Rolfe, in the unreliably casual way cops had. Damon’s extensive experience of LAPD methods of insinuation encouraged him to infer that although they didn’t have an atom of evidence they nevertheless thought he was guilty of something. Long-serving cops always had a naive trust in their powers of intuition.
“You only want me to help with your inquiries, right?”
“That’s right, Mr. Hart,” said Yamanaka smoothly.
“Well, I can’t. I’m not an Eliminator. I don’t know anyone who is an Eliminator. I don’t keep tabs on Eliminator netboards. I have no interest at all in the philosophy and politics of Elimination.”
It was all true. Damon knew no more about the Eliminators than anyone else—probably far less, given that he was no passionate follower of the kind of news tape which followed their activities with avid fascination. He was not entirely unsympathetic to those who thought it direly unjust that longevity, pain control, immunity to disease, and resistance to injury were simply commodities to be bought off the nanotech shelf, possessed in the fullest measure only by the rich, but he certainly wasn’t sufficiently hung up about it to become a terrorist crusader on behalf of “equality and social justice for all.”
The Eliminators were on the lunatic fringe of the many disparate and disorganized communities of interest fostered by the Web; they were devoted to the business of giving earnest consideration to the question of who might actually deserve to live forever. Some of their so-called Operators were in the habit of naming those whom they considered “unworthy of eternity,” via messages dispatched to netboards from public phones or illicit temporary linkpoints. Such messages were usually accompanied by downloadable packages of “evidence” which put the case for elimination. Damon had scanned a few such packages in his time; they were mostly badly composed exercises in hysteria devoid of any real substance. The first few freelance executions had unleased a tide of media alarm back in the seventies—a blaze of publicity whose inevitable effect had been to glamorize the entire enterprise and conjure into being a veritable legion of amateur assassins. Things had quieted down in recent years, but only because the Operators had become more careful and the amateur assassins more cunning. Being named by a well-known Operator wasn’t a cast-iron guarantee that a man would be attacked—and perhaps killed, in spite of all that his internal technology could contrive—but it was something that had to be taken seriously. It didn’t require much imagination on Damon’s part to figure out that Interpol must be keen to nail some guilty parties and impose some severe punitive sanctions, pour encourager les autres