The man on the patio nodded. “Dear Patricia Killiam, a victim of her own creation. A certain tragic poetry, nyet?”
The screaming began again, a soul-tearing screech from the barn, and Vince stopped on the stairs leading onto the patio.
“Pay no attention to that,” said his host with a wave of one hand.
An image materialized in Vince’s display space of a man bound and gagged. He was naked, his body laced in welts and old scars, but his face was obscured with black goggles, a large spike protruding from one eye. Vince frowned. “That’s—”
“—Sledge,” continued the broad-shouldered man. “Yes, the one you met when you first arrived.” Sledge began screaming again, some unseen agent twisting his body in agony. “He was the one who contacted the Federals, led them to the Saint John ceremony. Led them to you, in fact. We’re just teaching him a small lesson in loyalty.”
The image of Sledge faded, but the screaming remained. Vince braced himself and continued up the stairs to the patio. The man stood and extended one hand. “How rude of me. My name is Mikhail.”
Vince shook his hand. What were the rules of conduct when meeting a notorious gangster? Probably erring on the side of caution was advised. Vince scanned reports from Hotstuff on Mikhaiclass="underline" rose up through the ranks of the Russian mafia in the late twentieth century after starting a career in Stalin’s security apparatus. Some even hinted that he’d been a tank commander in the Red Army’s defeat of the Nazis outside Leningrad, the battles in which he’d probably lost the first parts of his own body. The best guess was that he was now just a brain in a box somewhere, but exactly where, nobody knew. He was one of the oldest people alive—if the term could really be applied to him anymore.
“Some call me Sintil8, but I think we can dispense with facades, Mr. Indigo.” He let go of Vince’s hand and motioned for him to sit down opposite him at a rough-hewn wooden table. “And before you ask, Connors is safe. We are directing your proxxi to her location now.”
Vince surveyed the area. His threat assessment systems had no information. Vince was reduced to using his meat-mind, and he strained, his inner voice looping through warnings. Looking behind him, nobody was visible, nothing apart from the trees and mountains behind the dirt trail that led out of the farm. Then again, he was only seeing—only sensing—what Mikhail wanted, allowed, him to see. There was no getting around the fact that he was entirely at the gangster’s mercy. Vince half-shrugged and took a seat.
“Drink?” asked Mikhail, and without waiting for an answer summoned someone inside. “Aberlour is your favorite, yes?”
A mandroid, this one a stump of flesh suspended on two thin metal legs with matching arms, appeared with a bottle of scotch and two tumblers, setting them down between the two men. It made to leave but Mikhail raised an arm.
“Susan,” said Mikhail to the mandroid, “I’d like to introduce you to Mr. Vincent Indigo.” He paused, smiling. “But I think you might have already met on Atopia.”
The mandroid—Susan—turned to Vince, attempting a smile with the scarred remains of her mouth. Red photoreceptors glittered in the back of her empty eye sockets. “A pleasure, Mr. Indigo,” she said, her voice a rasping electronic signal that entered Vince’s consciousness from behind.
Vince squinted, staring back into her skull-face. Yes, Commander Strong introduced him to this mandroid when they were working on deciphering the storms threatening Atopia three months ago. He reached out to shake her hand, feeling cool metal. She turned, releasing his hand, and disappeared back into the farmhouse.
Mikhail poured the scotch into the tumblers, watching Vince. “So you are searching for William McIntyre’s body, yes?” he asked, handing one of the glasses over. Raising his own, he nodded, cheers, and took a drink.
Vince stared at Mikhail. He’d imagined tracking down Sintil8 and sending an agent to gather information from a distance. This was much more intimate. He didn’t think dissimilating would help. It was time to lay the cards on the table. “Yes,” he replied.
Mikhail raised his glass again and drank. “Good.”
Vince considered the drink in his hand. If Mikhail wanted to kill him, he’d had ample opportunity, and anyway, he reminded himself, this was a synthetic projection. He took a sip. It tasted like Aberlour. Vince settled into the chair. “Did you help Willy’s proxxi steal his body? Smuggle it out of Atopia?”
Mikhail pursed his lips. “Yes.”
“How did you get it out without leaving a trace?”
“Susan was there, with others, of course.” Mikhail smiled. “And the Spice Routes—the darknets—even Atopians needed their secrets.”
Vince nodded and took another drink. At last, some progress. “Okay, so then why?”
“Because he discovered something very useful to me.”
Vince studied Mikhail’s face. He’d been one of the most powerful opponents of Atopia from the very start, lobbying to have access to the brain’s pleasure pathways removed from its protocols. As one of the greatest purveyors of pleasures in the physical world, and arms dealer to all sides of the Weather Wars, the organizations he worked with stood to lose a lot of money when Atopia launched itself into the world.
“You mean Jimmy Scadden stealing people’s minds in the pssi system?” Vince asked. “Were you hoping to use that to stop its release?”
“Perhaps.” Mikhail cocked his head to one side. “But there was more to it than that.”
Vince took another sip from his scotch. “And what was that?”
Mikhail nodded. “Why Jimmy committed these acts.”
“And why did he?”
“That is something we are going to find out together, Mr. Indigo.” Mikhail sat back in his chair with his drink.
“Together?”
“I don’t think we’ll find Willy’s body otherwise. Not in time, anyway.”
“For what?” Vince asked, and then it struck him. “Wait, you don’t know where Willy’s body is?”
Mikhail shook his head.
Now things were making some sense. Bob had the information from Patricia. Mikhail needed them, needed their help to get what he wanted. “Okay, I get it.”
“Good.”
“So now we’re working together, what is it that Willy’s proxxi has that is so important?” Vince didn’t really expect him to answer, but wanted to see what he’d say.
“Mr. McIntyre’s body holds the key to something I have been searching for a very”—Mikhail looked skyward—“very long time. When I was a young man, I fought against the Nazis.”
As Mikhail spoke, he uploaded data packets into Vince’s meta-cognition systems. It was better to show than to tell. Images of burning villages flashed into Vince’s display spaces, place names and dates flooding his short-term memory. The playback switched to a bleak wooden shack, of bodies stacked one atop the other.
“I was captured, interred in one of their POW camps, and did what I had to in order to survive.”
Vince watched an image of an emaciated young man, missing an arm, walking through a pack of SS officers. They were smoking and chatting, laughing, oblivious to the intruder in their midst as he lifted cigarettes and packs of chocolates from their pockets.
“But they soon learned of my…” Mikhail paused. “Let’s say, special skills.”
An image filled Vince’s mind of the same young man, strapped to a wooden board, his head pinned back and probes inserted and clipped to him, the room filled with oscilloscopes and electronic devices.