If Clarke got that far, she'd never see them coming.
"What about the noise?" Lubin asked.
"Industrial waterfronts are loud at the best of times," Kinsman told him. "Like an echo chamber, all those flat reflective surfaces. You know how you feel when someone shines bright lights in your eyes? Same thing."
"Are they just complaining, or will it interfere with the op?"
"Both. It's not too bad now, but when the storm sewers start draining you're gonna have a dozen whitewater sources pounding into the lake all along this part of the seawall. Lots of noise, bubbles, stuff kicked off the bottom. Under ideal conditions my guys can track a ping-pong ball at a hundred meters, but the way it's going outside—I'd say ten, maybe twenty."
"Still better than anything else we could deploy under the same conditions," Lubin said.
"Oh, easily."
Lubin left Kinsman to her charges and grabbed his pack off the floor. The storm assaulted him the moment he left the hut's soundproof interior. The downpour drenched on contact. The sky above was as black as the asphalt below; both flashed white whenever lightning ripped the space between. Lubin's people stood on conspicuous duty along the seawall, punctuating every vantage point. The rain turned them slick and black as rifters after a dive.
Shoot to kill was a given. It might not be enough, though. If Clarke made it this far, there were too many places she could simply dive off an embankment. That was okay: in fact, Lubin rather expected it. That was what the subs and the snoops and the dolphins were for.
Only the subs were useless close to shore, and now Kinsman was saying the dolphins might not be able to acquire a target more than a few meters away …
He set his pack down and split it open.
And if the dolphins can't catch her, what makes you think you can?
The odd thing was, he actually had an answer.
Burton was waiting when Lubin got back inside. "We've rounded up a bunch of—oh, very nice. A salute to the enemy, maybe? In her final hour?"
Lubin assayed a slight smile, and hoped that someday soon Burton would pose a threat to security. His eyecaps slid disconcertingly beneath lids not quite reacclimated to their presence. "What do you have?"
"We have a bunch of people who look a lot like you do right now," Burton said. "None of them have actually seen Clarke—in fact, none of them even knew she was in town. Maybe the Anemone's losing its touch."
"The anemone?"
"Haven't you heard? That's what people are calling it now."
"Why?"
"Beats me."
Lubin stepped over to the chess board; half a dozen cylindrical blue icons shone at points where civilians were being held to assist the ongoing investigation.
"Of course, we're a long way from sampling the whole population yet," Burton continued. "And we're concentrating on the obvious groupies, the costumes. There'll be a lot more in civvies. Still, none of the people we've interrogated so far knows anything. Clarke could have an army if she wanted, but as far as we can tell she hasn't even begged a sandwich. It's completely off-the-wall."
Lubin slipped his headset back on. "I'd say it's standing her in good stead now," he remarked mildly. "She seems to have you dead-ended, anyway."
"There are other suspects," Burton said. "Lots of them. We'll turn her up."
"Good luck." The tacticals in Lubin's visor were oddly drained of color—oh, right. The eyecaps. He eyed the blue cylinders glowing in the zone, tweaked his headset controls until they resaturated. Such clean, perfect shapes, each representing a grand violation of civil rights. He was often surprised at how little resistance civilians offered in the face of such measures. Innocent people, detained by the hundreds without charge. Cut off from friends and family and—at least for those who'd have been able to afford it—counsel. All in a good cause, of course. Civil rights should run a distant second to global survival in anyone's book. The usual suspects didn't know what was at stake, though. As far as they knew, this was just another case of officially-sanctioned thugs like Burton, throwing their weight around.
Yet only a few had resisted. Perhaps they'd been conditioned by all the quarantines and blackouts, all the invisible boundaries CSIRA erected on a moment's notice. The rules changed from one second to the next, the rug could get pulled out just because the wind blew some exotic weed outside its acceptable home range. You couldn't fight something like that, you couldn't fight the wind. All you could do was adapt. People were evolving into herd animals.
Or maybe just accepting that that's what they'd always been.
Not Lenie Clarke, though. Somehow, she'd gone the other way. A born victim, passive and yielding as seaweed, had suddenly grown thorns and hardened its stems to steel. Lenie Clarke was a mutant; the same environment that turned everyone else into bobbing corks had transformed her into barbed wire.
A white diamond blossomed near Madison and La Salle. "Got her," the comlink crackled in a voice Lubin didn't recognize. "Probably her, anyway."
He tapped into the channel. "Probably?"
"Securicam snapshot down in a basement mall. No EM sensor down there, so we can't confirm. We got a three-quarter profile for a half-second, though. Bayesians say eighty-two percent likely."
"Can you seal off that block?"
"Not automatically. No master kill switches or anything."
"Okay, do it manually."
"Got it."
Lubin switched channels. "Engineering?"
"Here." They'd set up a dedicated line to City Planning. The people on that end were strictly need-to-know, of course; no hint of the stakes involved, no recognizable name to humanize the target. A dangerous fugitive in the core, yours is not to question why, full stop. Almost no chance for messy security breaches there.
"Have you got the fix on La Salle?" Lubin asked, zooming the chessboard.
"Sure do."
"What's down there?"
"These days, not much. Originally retail, but most of the merchants moved out with the spread. A lot of empty stalls."
"No, I mean substructures. Crawlspaces, service tunnels, that sort of thing. Why aren't I seeing any of that on the map?"
"Oh, shit, that stuff's ancient. TwenCen and older. A lot of it never even got into the database; by the time we updated our files nobody was using those areas except derelicts and wireheads, and with all the data-corruption problems we've been having—"
"You don't know?" A soft beeping began in Lubin's head: someone else wanting to talk.
"Someone might have scanned the old blueprints onto a crystal somewhere. I could check."
"Do that." Lubin switched channels. "Lubin."
It was his point man on the seawall. "We're losing the tanglefoam."
"Already?" They should have had at least another hour.
"It's not just the rainfall, it's the storm sewers. They're funneling precip from the whole city right out through the seawall. Have you seen the volume those drains are putting out?"