“Oh, I found him, all right.” McNihil’s voice turned harder. “Whether you wanted me to or not.”
“What… what’re you talking about?” Another wave hit the building, sending Harrisch sprawling onto his hands and knees. He looked up to see McNihil walking forward, stepping across the open patches of roof, until the asp-head loomed right in front of him.
“It didn’t matter,” said McNihil, voice grating like stone on stone. “Whether I found the prowler that still had Travelt inside it. Because either way… you got what you wanted.”
“You’re crazy.” But he knew the asp-head was fearsomely sane. Inside himself, Harrisch felt the molecules of adrenaline breaking into some other, frightened chemical, oozing out of his pores and draining into his bladder. Time to go, the still-thinking portion of his brain announced to the rest. “Maybe we should talk about this later.” Much later. “I’ll make an appointment for you.” Harrisch let his words go rattling on, unhooked from any thought processes, hoping that McNihil would be sufficiently distracted. He reached inside his coat and started punching a familiar number into his tight-cell phone. “You can tell me all about it-”
“Not a good idea.” McNihil leaned down, his hand striking and grabbing Harrisch’s wrist. “You’re pissing me off.” Without straining, McNihil pulled the captured hand toward himself, the phone loosening in Harrisch’s grasp. McNihil took the phone, letting Harrisch fall back onto the rooftop’s rolling surface. “Looks like something on the DZ switchboard.” McNihil looked at the digits on the device’s LCD readout, then back down at Harrisch. “Calling for a ride home?”
Something in the look in the other’s eyes terrified Harrisch; his spinal column contracted like a spring-driven mechanical device. It was only a momentary relief when McNihil turned and slung the phone in an underhand pitch, back to November. She caught it in both hands.
“Hang on to that,” instructed McNihil. “Don’t hit the connect button just yet.”
November had followed McNihil’s example, managing to let go of the stairwell enclosure’s support. Standing near the center of the rooftop, surrounded by the gaping holes that had already been torn in the structure, she rode out the building’s shuddering motions, knees slightly bent for shock absorbers. “All right-” She’d glanced at the phone before tucking it inside her jacket. “You need help with him?”
This has all gone wrong, thought Harrisch, somewhat dazed. Control of the situation had slipped out of his grasp, or had been snatched away as easily as the tight-cell phone. I wasn’t expecting this. The notion of having a final confrontation, all by himself here with McNihil, was seeming less of a good idea by the second. Obvious now, but he still wasn’t sure how it’d come apart like this. There had only been, at best, a fifty-fifty chance that McNihil would still be alive now, let alone in any kind of functioning condition; Harrisch had actually entertained the notion that he might have to bring along some kind of medical crew, a first-aid team to scrape up whatever might’ve been left of the asp-head, inject him with whatever cardiac and cerebral stimulators were necessary to bring him to even partial consciousness. But that would’ve brought on the scene more potential witnesses than Harrisch would’ve been prepared to deal with; he’d been glad that it’d worked out that the DZ corporate pilot had had to split for the time being, leaving him here on his own. It was one thing to have somebody like that November person around as a witness; she could be eliminated if she somehow became trouble afterward. But if he’d had to take out people on the DynaZauber payroll, like pilots and med techs, the corporation’s human-resources department would’ve given him more grief than it would’ve been worth.
“Naw-” McNihil shook his head as he called over his shoulder to November. “But thanks for asking.” He turned back to Harrisch at his feet, reached down, and pulled the DZ exec upright. “Me and this guy go back a ways. We know how much-how far-we can trust each other.”
“You’re not scaring me-”
November watched as Harrisch snarled at the asp-head. McNihil’s fist at his collar choked some fragment of determination through the exec’s throat. She didn’t figure that what he’d said was true, but it looked as if Harrisch was at least determined not to let McNihil walk over him without a show of struggle.
“You don’t-” Harrisch gasped for breath. “You don’t even know-”
“Know what?” McNihil lifted the exec up onto tiptoe, then back down a couple of inches, relaxing the pressure against Harrisch’s windpipe. “What is it you think I don’t know? Because by now, believe me, I know a lot of things.”
“You idiot.” Chin thrust back by the asp-head’s knuckles, Harrisch still managed to get a sneer up and running on his own face. “You don’t know just how badly you’ve been connected over. By me. You were connected even before you took the job.”
“What’s he talking about?” November came up beside McNihil, maneuvering her way across the bucking rooftop. The moans and shuddering low-octave noises from the street level grew in volume and intensity, like a real ocean scudding into white-topped waves, as she peered at Harrisch. “He told me the same stuff, about you and this job, back at the hospital.”
“It’s TOAW.” McNihil didn’t look over at her as he spelled out the acronym. “That’s what it’s been all along. That’s what the job was about all along.” He let go of Harrisch, shoving him a step backward. “His big secret, that he didn’t think I’d be able to figure out.”
“What if you did?” Rubbing his bruised throat, Harrisch glared venomously at McNihil. “Even if you did find out, there’s nothing you can do about it. Not now.” A wild sense of triumph seemed to surge up inside Harrisch’s chest. “It’s too late. And you made it happen that way, just the way I wanted it to. Just by your being here-that was all you had to do.”
“‘TOAW’?” That puzzled November. “What’s that supposed to be?”
“His big secret,” said McNihil disgustedly. “And his little joke. It’s the kind of thing that these high-level corporate minds think is funny. It’s connecting hilarious, all right.” He nodded toward Harrisch. “You want to tell her what it stands for? Or should I?”
“Be my guest.” Harrisch left his own hand at his throat. “Why should I care?”
“It’s what came after DynaZauber’s TIAC project,” said McNihil. “You know that one?”
November nodded. “Heard something about it.”
“They got this fixation at DZ. Schoolyard humor.” McNihil shook his head. “TIAC stood for ‘turd in a can.’ It was DZ’s notion-at least back then-of their ultimate consumer strategy. A general principle, to just make sure that the customers get the least amount of goods or services for their money. Max out the packaging and you can forget about the actual contents. But it wasn’t enough.” He’d glanced over at November beside him, then turned his gaze back to Harrisch. “Was it? There’s always room for improvement; their kind of ‘improvement,’ at any rate. Thus, we go from TIAC to TOAW. The T stands for the same thing-you guys down at DZ must’ve thought all that was hilarious, huh?”
Harrisch shrugged. “Anything that gets the point across is good communication. Short and sweet.”
“Short, maybe; sweet, I’m not so sure about. Since the whole thing stands for ‘turd on a wire.’” McNihil gave a tilt of the head toward November. “Maybe a little poetic reference there as well; these aren’t totally uncultured people, you know-”
Suddenly, the whole building seemed to turn onto a pitched angle. Catching herself against the asp-head’s shoulder, November saw Harrisch being thrown onto one side, sliding across the roof’s crumbling sheets of tar paper; the exec managed to dig his fingers in, stopping himself just short of one of the broken gaps, as the echoes of the wave that had slapped the building rumbled away.