Mirim nodded; Cecelia didn't, but Casper didn't worry about it.
The next corner put them on Market Street, and Casper began looking for somewhere to sit down, somewhere they could eat the lunch they had promised Cecelia.
He was, he realized, really hungry. He'd worked up an appetite.
“We have a problem,” Smith's assistant said.
“Why?” Smith asked.
“It's Dominguez and Groves.”
“What about them?”
“They're dead,” the assistant said. “Beech blew their brains out.”
“Did they get Beech?”
The assistant shook his head. “No. And their back-up lost him.”
“ Damn! ” Smith smacked his fist against the wall. “What the hell happened?”
The assistant relayed the back-up's report-how Dominguez and Groves had seen Beech and Anspack meet Grand, how they'd followed the three of them for a block and then Anspack and Beech had started running, how they'd all gone around the block and Beech had ambushed them.
The back-up had seen most of it, and had tried to pick up the pursuit herself, but she'd guessed wrong somewhere about which way her quarry turned and lost them. She hadn't had a chance to get off a shot.
“ Damn it!” Smith said. “Why didn't Dominguez or Groves just shoot Beech when they had the chance?”
“Crowds,” the assistant said. “At least, that's what the back-up thinks.”
“I said collateral damage was acceptable!” Smith glared. “For Christ's sake… next time, if there is one, tell whoever we send to go ahead and shoot on sight. And give ‘em something heavier-shotguns or full auto, something with real firepower. Something that'll take Beech down no matter how good he is.”
He wondered just how good that was. Beech seemed to be absorbing the Spartacus File pretty goddamn fast.
“Yes, sir,” the assistant said. “Uh… the city police are on the scene of the shooting; should we contact them?”
“No, of…” Smith stopped and reconsidered. “Yes,” he said. “Give them Beech's description and basic history. Tell them we think he's a terrorist. Tell them Dominguez and Groves were FBI, tell ‘em we're FBI-let ‘em think we're going to be really pissed if anyone else gets Beech, you know, the whole ‘Untouchables’ bit. That should motivate them. These city contractors like pissing off the FBI.”
“Yes, sir.” The assistant reached for the phone.
Chapter Ten
“The government's after me,” Casper told Cecelia. “Those two were feds.”
The three of them were seated at the counter of a small coffee shop on the north side of Market Street; bright sunlight gleamed from chrome and Formica on all sides, and half a dozen screens were showing various news, weather, and sports reports.
It was hard to imagine that ten minutes earlier they'd been fleeing for their lives; Casper's words sounded bizarre and paranoid to Cecelia.
She put down her sandwich and stared at him. She hadn't yet taken the first bite. “Why?” she demanded.
“I'm not sure,” he said. “Something to do with the imprinting I got, I think-someone screwed it up somehow.” He saw her expression, and continued, “I don't know why, but they're definitely after me, and they're trying to kill me, not arrest me.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they shot first, without asking me to surrender or saying who they were.”
Cecelia glanced at Mirim, who nodded confirmation. “They just opened fire, back at his apartment-never said a word.”
“Those same two men?”
“No, of course not,” Mirim said. “Casper killed them.”
“But you were at his apartment before he… what were you doing at Casper's apartment?” Cecelia eyed her roommate suspiciously.
“We walked off the job together this morning,” Mirim said, a bit nervously.
“But… oh, never mind. So these two men he just shot came to his apartment?”
“No, two others. Casper killed them, too.”
Cecelia blinked. “He's killed four men?”
Mirim swallowed, and nodded.
Cecelia looked at Casper, who tried very hard to look blank; he didn't know what else to do.
He supposed it must be a shock for her, to hear that her harmless, timid lover had committed not one, but four murders in a single morning-or four killings, anyway, as they were all self-defense.
It couldn't be as much of a shock for her to hear that as it was for him to have lived through it, though; she at least had the option of not believing it.
“None of them identified himself?” Cecelia asked, turning back to Casper.
“Nope,” he said. “Shoot first, ask questions later.”
“Then how do you know they're feds?”
“Who the hell else could it be?” Casper said, suddenly angry. “Those bastards are always trying to run everyone's lives…” He was almost growling.
“Casper,” Cecelia said, and he stopped. She stared at him and picked up her sandwich again. She took a bite, chewed, then said, “You never seemed to have a problem with the government telling you what to do before.”
Casper blinked at her, and tried to think.
Was that true?
It seemed as if it must be, really-after all, he'd put up with everything all these years, put up with the taxes and orders and rules and security checks, whereas now the mere thought of anyone telling him that he had to do something, or mustn't do something, was enough to make him tremble with rage.
The imprint again; it had to be.
What the hell had NeuroTalents done to him? And why?
“You don't know why they're trying to kill you?” Cecelia asked. “Do you think it's a case of mistaken identity?”
Casper shook his head. “I don't think that's it,” he said. “They know I'm Casper Beech, or they wouldn't have hit the right apartment or staked out your office. As for why-I don't know, Celia, but I have a theory.”
“Let's hear it.”
Casper recognized her tone and grimaced; she'd slipped into lawyer mode. Hardly surprising, under the circumstances.
“I went to NeuroTalents for that imprinting a few days ago, remember?”
Cecelia nodded.
“Well, I got the wrong one. I've been programmed with some kind of combat imprint-or maybe it's meant for spies or assassins, I don't know, but that's how I was able to take out four of them.”
“I saw how you… how you killed those two,” Cecelia said. “You caught them by surprise, ambushed them.”
“But how'd I know to do that?”
“People can do amazing things under stress,” Cecelia said. “You see a lot of it in my line of work.”
“And what about the others?” He shook his head. “Besides, I've been having all kinds of weird experiences-I chased off a bunch of muggers the other night, and I'm constantly finding myself watching for booby-traps or planning raids. And there was the speech at the office. No, I got the wrong imprint-and the government must have found out, and wanted to cover up.”
“Seems to me they'd be more likely to want to recruit you than to kill you,” Cecelia remarked.
Casper blinked in surprise.
“I hadn't thought of that,” he said.
“Maybe they didn't either,” Mirim replied.
“Oh, right,” Cecelia said. “You've got someone programmed with some sort of super-soldier neural imprint that you've had made up to your own specifications, and it never occurs to you to see if you can use him for whatever you wanted the imprint for in the first place?”
“I hadn't thought of that,” Casper repeated. “It would be the sensible thing to do, wouldn't it?”
“Then why haven't they tried?” Mirim asked.
“Maybe they know it wouldn't work,” Casper said slowly. “Maybe it's inherent in the imprint that it wouldn't work.” He thought about his speech at Data Tracers that morning, about his automatic negative reaction to mention of the government much of the time. He thought about the Party and the Consortium and he realized he hated them both, where before he'd always considered them something of a necessary evil, the unpleasant cure for the terrorist wars and economic crisis of his childhood years.