PICO TARANTI
2380 CE
Pico rode a hovercab out of Shanghai, taking the express route north along the great river until ahead the spiky roof antennas rose black like crow’s claws against the industrial nightglow. The sheet of recordings lay tucked in her floppy black bag. Her hands trembled. Just when she’d pulled the tiny recording unit out from under the table, she’d turned and seen Gene looking her way from across the room.
What if Gene suspected something? If Wen Xi heard even one word from Gene, he’d have the State Investigation Bureau call on her, and she’d spend the rest of her life out in the Taklimakan, drying to a prune digging in the sand. Jesus. Pico clenched one hand in the other, to stop the shaking.
“Ma’am, you warm enough?” An American drawl. The hoverman raised a hand to flick on the cabin heaters.
“No, I’m fine. Just drop me over there at the Carrick, will you?”
“All right.” The driver pulled to a stop at a stretch of walkway glowing green.
Pico waved her tagger twice and said, “Twenty percent,” adding the tip to the fare. She climbed slowly from the hover, trying to keep her sore ankle from buckling as she stepped out.
“Thanks.” The driver closed the exit hatch, executed a spin-turn, and headed away. The gusts from the hover blew street dust in Pico‘s face; she turned and ducked.
Pico strode into the lobby of the Carrick, a Chinese hotel determined to preserve the centuries-old illusion of Western chic, as if doing so were a holy deed. Signed photographs of European faces stared dully out at her, the edges of the photos crisped and brown, roasted by their age. Pico waved to the desk clerk, turned down a narrow corridor of low-cost rooms, reached the fourth door on the left, and rapped once, then twice. The varnish on the door was cracked and blistered.
“It’s open.” A low, musical male voice.
She entered the room and closed the door behind her. “Why do you pick these crappy places, JJ?”
“Because when they follow you, they think you’re just off for a screw,” the voice answered. “They go to the bar, hang out, talk about their boss. They’ll never break in here unless the tabloids start paying them for photos.”
A shock ran through Pico‘s chest. “They’re following me?”
“Of course. You thought they weren’t?”
“Well, yes.” She pulled the recording sheet from her bag. “Here.”
“Turn on the music.” His voice purred as if he were wrapping himself around her. He sat down cross-legged on the floor.
She flicked at the battered soundbox. A slow blues began its insistent pulse behind a groaning man’s words. Weariness rose in her. She flopped on the oversprung bed, wrapping its gaudy spread around her middle, and watched JJ plug her recordings into his grabber box.
He grinned, making a bouncing gesture at her with one hand, trying to get her to make the bedsprings sound as if they were having sex. She turned away and ignored him. He usually ignored her. This time, for no reason she could work out, his eyes wandered over her and didn’t leave. It scared her; she wanted to walk out, but they’d already agreed that someone on the hotel staff would report that.
Someone. Someone had caught Jaco three years ago when he’d tried to carry classified environmental data sheets on a flight out of Shanghai airport. Jaco was out south of Urumchi now, getting reeducated by the desert sun for the next forty years.
Someone had seen to it that Yen Mei had had enough toxic metals mixed in her prison drinking water that she died in a state of total paralysis, her hair gone, her skin blistered.
Someone had walked past Adrienne Matisse in a quiet street in Yokohama, and she had inhaled once, coughed, and died. Someone had made Adrienne‘s body disappear from the morgue before her family could claim the body for an autopsy. Someone.
Then there was the someone who’d left Enrico dead in a Roman courtyard, a letter opener through his jugular. No, Pico didn’t want to think about that, about Enrico, about their last lovemaking when the sunbeam touched the foot of his bed looking over the Lungotevere, his last kiss…
