Later, I told myself firmly, think about that later. Lord knows, I had enough to worry about at the moment, like getting out of me oyabun's enclave with all my anatomy intact. By now, all of Tokudaiji's samurai would know of the hit. They'd know that two people had gone in, a chauffeur and some pale-skinned reprobate name of Montgomery. They'd be cranked up, and they sure wouldn't be in any mood to accept the excuse, "Hey, chummer, I had nothing to do with it…" Thanks, Scott. And thanks to you, too, Jacques Barnard, you fragging slot.
I had to move, and I had to move fast. It was still less than a minute since the gunshots, and only seconds since the explosion had gutted the library. Tokudaiji's sammies would be operating on instinct and training-both probably well-developed-but things would only get worse when they had a chance to think as well as react. By the time they got their collective drek together, ideally I'd like to be several counties away. Looking around to get my bearings, I took off in the old high-low crawl again, heading directly away from the house through the heart of a large flower bed.
It wasn't long before I ran out of bushes and had to cover some open ground. About ten meters of open ground, as it turned out, which separated me from some pretty thick-looking jungle. Ideal. A quick look around me, and I burst from cover.
Which startled the frag out of the Armante-clad guard who was just coming around the corner of my flower bed. He was fast as greased lightning, swinging his submachine gun around to cut me in two. But fear had me so hopped up that I was even faster. Also, the fact that he saw a wild man with rolling eyes and hibiscus twigs in his hair probably set him back for a millisecond or two. I dug in and cut to the right, planning to put my shoulder into his gut. He danced back just in time, so I slammed him in the throat with my forearm.
My left forearm. The forearm of the boosted-strength cyberlimb that Jacques Barnard had paid to have installed. Trachea and hyoid bone and vertebrae gruntched under the brutal impact of synthskin-clad titanium. The samurai went one way, his SMG went another, and I went a third, hesitating only long enough to put a round from the Browning into his chest just for good measure. At a full run I plunged into the jungle. Behind me I heard the fluttering whop-whop noise of a small helicopter spooling up.
Don't ask me how the frag I got out of there in one piece, chummer, I couldn't tell you. I made it, but I don't think I'll ever fully recall the details. Whole whacks of time, minutes upon minutes, were total blanks for me. I know I crawled through tropical jungle. I know I dodged homicidal guards. I know I eventually climbed a fragging palm tree to jump over a fragging ferrocrete wall. I know I ran through more jungle-how far I ran, I don't know-tearing the crap out of the clothes Scott had supplied me, and coming this close to blowing out an ankle. I know I eventually came to a narrow public road in a residential area where I boosted a car and basically got the frag out of there. But the images-the memories-are disjointed, like scenes in a badly edited simsense-disorienting and confusing.
I was driving my stolen car, a tiny Chrysler-Nissan Buddy three-wheeler that had seen better days, roughly west when the emotional reaction hit me. I pulled over to the side of the road, killed the electric motor, and got the bubble top open just in time to yarf up my breakfast all over the curb. My right hand was shaking as if I had some kind of palsy; my left would only move in ragged jerks, which was the cyber analog of the same thing. I felt cold and tight all over, as though I'd put on skin that was half a size too small and that had just recently been pulled out of a refrigerator.
Emotional shell shock, that's what it was, coupled with the very real symptoms of "adrenaline overdose." While it ran its course, I was incapable of feeling anything, fragging near incapable of thinking. If Ekei Tokudaiji with his head split like a melon, had walked up to me, I'd have shaken his fragging hand.
The shakes and the nausea and the chills went away even¬tually the way they always do. After ten or fifteen minutes, I was almost back to normal except for the dull, thudding headache and queasy stomach of adrenaline hangover. I'm getting too old for this drek, I told myself. I wasn't a young lion anymore. Frag, I was thirty-five going on thirty-six… and feeling half a century older than that, at the moment. I was losing the edge. Losing? Frag me, I'd lost it. How long had it taken me, back there in Tokudaiji's library, to register the fact that Scott wasn't going to geek me, too?
It wasn't entirely age and diminishing capabilities, though, was it? There was more to it than that. I looked down at my left hand and clenched it into a fist again and again.
It was still with me, wasn't it? The emotional baggage of that cluster-frag beneath Fort Lewis, the op that had cost me my arm and Hawk, Rodney, and the others so much more. I was still fragged up by it. My timing was gone, my instincts were… well, were they fragged, or was it just that I didn't trust them? I didn't know. When that first gunshot had gone off next to my ear, the emotions that had paralyzed me hadn't been the emotions of the moment-if that makes any sense at all. They'd been loaded with resonances of the emotions of those distant moments when friends had been dying around me and when my left arm had been fried to charcoal. Somehow I'd never really recovered. It was as if I'd lost much more than my arm in Fort Lewis. Part of my self-image, part of my worldview, perhaps… part of my soul? It was that loss which hadn't allowed me to put it all behind me and move on.
I could have done things different, I recognized suddenly. What do people always say when you fall off a motorbike? Get back on the fragging thing right now, get back in the fragging saddle. Had I gotten back in the saddle after my "fall?" Not a frigging chance, omae. I'd slipped the Seattle border and fled on down to the slower pace of Cheyenne. And I'd built myself a rep as the master of minimal exposure. Had I climbed back on that bike? No, chummer, it's as if I'd run from it and never again gone near anything that moved faster than a slow stroll. My choice, and at the time it had seemed the reasonable one. But now I was out of my safe little no-exposure comfort zone, and I'd be paying for that choice.
I buttoned the C-N Buddy back up again and pulled back onto the road. I was still too close to the scene of the crime; I had to extend, had to put distance between me and Tokudaiji's samurai. I also had to think things through and decide on my best course of action, but I could think just as well driving as I could staring blindly into space.
Ten minutes later and I was heading northwest on Route 83, the coastal road that circumnavigates the island. At any other time, I'd have relished the view. Now I hardly even saw it, I had so much on my mind.
What the frag had gone down back mere at the oyabun s compound? What the frag had I gotten myself into?
Obviously, a conspiracy to geek the oyabun-no prizes for guessing that much. Barnard had used me as a kind of Trojan horse, hadn't he? Used me to penetrate Tokudaiji's security, to draw the yak boss out, to let Scott get close enough to cap him.
And more than that. Obviously, Barnard-with Yama-tetsu's resources behind him-had set up the magical provisions that Scott the hit-ork had needed to do the job. The physical illusion spell or whatever the frag it was, that had let him sneak a fragging Remington Roomsweeper through a tight search. The shattershield spell that he must have used to slam down the magical barrier that an important target like an oyabun would have as a matter of course. A lot of that drek, you could pour the mana into a spell focus or a fetish of some kind, something, say, like the pot-bellied little guy on Scotty's lapel. Scott himself would have to be a mage or a shaman-probably the latter, I figured, following in his mother's footsteps-to trigger it (that's the way I understood it, at least), but he wouldn't have to have much juice of his own.
So I was the cover, the camouflage under which the assassin got close enough to grease his target. Okay, I could scan that.