I nodded. “I’ve come to beg a favor.”
The porcine little eyes widened just a bit and then settled elastically back to half-mast. “A favor, Mr. Cates? Alima, honey, go do a credit check on Mr. Cates while he tells me his tale of woe.”
A Middle Eastern-looking woman sitting on the floor hoisted herself up with animal grace and disappeared into the interior of the hotel.
“I’m not suggesting there’s no payoff for you,” I said quickly, trying to maintain my smile, my calm, and my hardass look all at once. It was exhausting. “But there’s no immediate payoff. Long-term, I’m willing to offer you a fair price. Double a fair price.”
Marcel studied me. “Mr. Cates, your name is out there, so I believe you’ve got a big job on the hook. Okay. Let’s stipulate you got a big payday coming. What do you need from me?”
I shrugged. “I need to get to London.”
Marcel laughed. After Dick Marin’s sudden barks, this sounded decadent and bottomless. His whole body jiggled with amusement. “Oh, Mr. Cates,” he said finally. “That’s rich. Transport’s normally expensive. In these unsettled times, it’s fucking impossible. I don’t care what you’ve got on the hook. You can’t afford it.”
I swallowed. “You’ve heard of me?”
Marcel shrugged, still giggling, wiping his eyes. “By reputation, Mr. Cates. A fair Gunner. Reliable. No Canny Orel, maybe, but competent.”
Canny Orel again-he was becoming my patron saint. Rumored to have killed over a hundred contracts in his time and retired rich. His name had been out of circulation for a while. When they’d been active, Orel’s organization had killed everyone-criminals, cops, politicians-with legen-dary impunity. You never knew with old stories like that, that tended to grow with the telling. But even if you subtracted three-fourths of what you heard as bullshit, they’d still been a bunch of hardasses I wouldn’t want to mess with. Anyone who had any kind of legit link to the Dъnmharъ was instantly promoted to Chief Asskicker in the room. “You know my rep. You know I don’t fuck around.”
Marcel shrugged again, all the good humor draining from him. “A desperate man can forget his rep pretty fast.”
The Middle Eastern woman re-entered the room, crossed to Marcel, and leaned in to whisper to him. Marcel’s piggy eyes widened again. He looked at me for some time before speaking.
“Mr. Cates, your credit is good. I think I can get you on a flight tonight. We will have to arrange a price.”
I blinked. “What the hell did she find out?”
Marcel smiled. “Only that your credit is good, Mr. Cates. Our price?”
Thank God, I thought, for loose lips. Marcel must have heard my payday was huge. And very real. I flipped open a small notebook and tossed it to him. “Write down a number. I’ll pay you when my work is done.”
He paused for a moment, still studying me, and then began to laugh as he laboriously wrote numerals onto paper, with a schoolboy’s care. When he tossed the book back to me, he was laughing full-strength again. “Mr. Cates, are you ready to impersonate someone very rich, someone very powerful, someone authorized to fly to London during a riot?”
I glanced at the number he’d written, struggled to hide my horror, and shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”
Marcel kept laughing, and soon his entourage joined him. “Ah, Mr. Cates, what will you do about your clothes?” Marcel finally exploded. “The nobility is not accustomed to traveling through the sewers!”
I looked down at myself. I was caked in filth from head to foot.
I grinned back up at Marcel. “Well, fuck. It’s a riot. I’ll steal some goddamn clothes.”
XVII
ALL HUMAN BEINGS, SAVED OR UNSAVED
It was about the time they served the coffee that I really started to freak out.
Marcel had come through in spades. He didn’t just get me passage, he got me first-class passage-handed over with a fake ID and a stern command to find myself some appropriate clothes and clean up a little. That part was simple enough. Night had fallen and the SSF was closing in methodically, not rushing things, probably because they were enjoying themselves too much. I followed a small band of merrymakers through the streets uptown and waited for them to sack an appropriate house. The owner was one of the foolish rich shits who’d decided to stay and defend his property; he popped up, silver-maned and wearing a silk smoking jacket, with a brand-new automatic Roon in each hand like he was Buffalo Bill or something. He nailed about four of the merrymakers before they stormed his windows, and the last I saw of him he was running down the street with his hair on fire.
His house quickly followed, and the merrymakers scurried out like rats in twos and threes, bearing away anything that could be sold quickly. I waited until they were all gone, judged the fire, and then went in for a quick shower and a change of clothes. Rich people fireproofed their homes, which stopped fires altogether for a few years, and even when the antiflame compounds aged and started to break down it slowed a fire down considerably-it took hours for them to burn down, and I knew you could pack a bag and take a nap before a fire became a real concern. It was burning slowly but steadily when I emerged, shaved and rubbed pink by expensive towels, wearing one of the poor sap’s suits.
I couldn’t bring myself to wear his underwear, and the merrymakers hadn’t left anything else of value.
It would have been nice to steal a hover and arrive at the airport in style, but the SSF had grounded New York and would have knocked me out of the air immediately, so I had to hoof it. The System Cops had the Madison Square AirPad under their control, so air traffic was still moving in and out for VIPs and necessary commerce. It was a long walk, but I was passed through the gates by two bored Crushers-luckily, strangers to me-who were as polite to me as any had ever been, if still grouchy. They called me “mister” and told me to have a nice day after running yellow eyes over my ID. It was the clothes-no one saw much more than a clean guy in an expensive suit. If they looked closer they might notice the bad teeth, the scars, the accent-but they didn’t look close. You could hand them a hand-written ID with the name spelled wrong and they’d pass you through if you looked rich. Looking rich was a skill any criminal worth his salt learned early.
Then it was straight onto the heavy-duty long-range hover, a comfortable seat behind an attractive, porcelain-skinned red-haired woman I recognized from the Vids, and a glass of beer pressed into my hand, all within the first five minutes. The seat was soft and supple. The air inside the hover was clean and crisp. The fabric of the poor sap’s clothes was dry and sumptuous against my skin.
I began to freak out.
The woman, a few years older than me but gorgeous, twisted around to smile at me. I’d seen her reporting the news a few times, her face ten feet high, her smile permanent and frighteningly unchangeable. “Time to get out, huh? These people.” She shook her head in dismay. “They’re so ignorant. Burning down their own city. I think the System Police should just ship them all somewhere.”
I swallowed anger. The fact that this rich bitch thought New York was my city made me want to grab her by the nose and smash her head into the armrest. Instead I smiled. “It’s the SSF’s fault. They’re too slack.”
She nodded, but didn’t seem to like my smile. It might have been my teeth, which hadn’t had the benefit of a dentist. Ever. “Yes. I quite agree,” she said, facing forward again without another word. I imagined I could smell the soap on her skin. Or maybe that was my skin; I was so clean I itched.
The meal service started, brought soundlessly by human-looking Droids who smiled but couldn’t speak, and my will to retire rich tripled. Rich was the only way to live in the System. When you were rich, the System Pigs called you sir and wished you a good day. When you were rich, they served you breakfast on the hover-real eggs, real bacon, and sweet lord, when the coffee came, hot and strong in a cup so white I had to squint at it, I lost all reason. I promised myself I would do anything it took to be rich. And then it occurred to me that I was already doing whatever it took.