Spin State - Chris Moriarty [99]
“Really, Major. The problem with being as honest as you clearly are is that it doesn’t equip you to lie competently when necessary.”
“Hah!” Li said. Her defensive software had finally managed to outflank Korchow’s block. They were back on tape again.
“Well,” Korchow said, standing up. “It was a pleasure talking to you.” He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a narrow card, and set it on the table in front of her. “My card. I run a store in the capital. Antiques. Compson’s World is a treasure trove of remarkable artifacts. I’d be honored if you paid me a visit and allowed me to show you what the planet has to offer.”
“I doubt I’ll have time,” Li said. She plucked the card off the table and tried to hand it back to him.
“No, no,” he said. “It is one of my firm beliefs that one should never close any door in life until one is quite certain that one does not want to walk through it.”
Li watched him slip through the crowd and vanish. Then she looked down at the card in her hand. It was made of some matte fiber that looked like, but was not, paper. And instead of printed words and pictures it bore a precise geometric lacework of punch holes. A Hollerith card.
She’d seen Holleriths before, and she recognized the implicit status message. It was written in decimal code, and in a format that no machine for two centuries had been able to process. It embodied a technofetishist, antiquarian, nose-thumbing aesthetic. And it assumed that anyone you handed the card to could recognize and process the antique code without an external computer.
She was certain, looking back over their conversation, that Korchow was KnowlesSyndicate. Knowles was the diplomat’s syndicate, the spy’s syndicate. Their A Series were mavericks within the close-knit conformity of Syndicate society, artists of information and manipulation, as formidable as they were unpredictable.
The surface address punched into the Hollerith card put Korchow’s shop in Helena. Behind the punch holes the card’s surface bore an intricate engraved logo that reminded Li of the patterns in Cohen’s Persian carpets. Where had she seen that design before? On an advertisement? She searched her hard files for a match and found one in the top layer of her actives. Recent, then.
She accessed the file, saw the digital image of a leather-bound journal with a dozen business cards tucked into the front flap pocket. And there, peeping out from behind several slips of shiny fiche, was the corner of Korchow’s Hollerith card.
The notebook was leather. Brown leather as soft and expensive as butter. Sharifi’s.
On-screen, the Cuban had carried Hamdani deep into the count, fouling off pitch after pitch, though Hamdani was throwing everything he had at him. It was only a matter of time until he turned on one of those not-quite-fast-enough fastballs.
“Walk him, you idiot,” Li muttered. “Don’t throw the game away.”
But Hamdani wasn’t going to walk him. Couldn’t bring himself to walk him, though he must know in every cell of his aging body that he’d already been beaten. He wound up, looking stiffer and older than Li had ever seen him look. The ball left his hand a split second too early and floated across the plate square in the middle of the strike zone.
The Cuban saw it as soon as Li did. His eyes snapped around. His arms extended. His broad back turned toward the camera as he rounded on the ball. The bat cracked like rifle fire, and Li didn’t need to hear the roar of the crowd to know it was all over.
The windup. The pitch. It’s gone.
She stood up and tucked Korchow’s card into her pocket, feeling the prickle of unseen eyes on the back of her neck. Then she walked—slowly, carefully, expressionlessly—back to her quarters.
The next morning, four hundred and seventy-six hours after the rescue crew found him in Trinidad South 12, James Reynold Dawes came out of his coma and started talking.
As soon as she found out, Li shuttled down to the Shantytown hospital to see him. When she got there, Sharpe and Dawes’s wife were standing in the corridor outside his room arguing with