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  Sanchez pushed the Colt hard against Pietro’s neck. ‘You know how much I have to pay the orphanage if you die… ?

  ‘Nothing. It’s covered by the insurance.’ Sanchez tightened his grip on the gun, knuckles whitening. He was waiting for the boy to shut his eyes, but the boy didn’t, he just kept staring at the little lights on the side.

  One after another, diodes lit in slow sequence along the breech of the Colt as the pimp’s trigger finger kept tightening until even Sanchez knew he was about to kill the boy. Only it didn’t happen like that at all.

  One second the pimp’s smile was hardening, the next the Colt had flashed lightning bright and Sanchez was screaming, long and high like a newly-castrated horse as the gun fell from his nerveless fingers to hit the floor. He was whimpering to himself like a child in pain as he squeezed his hurt fingers first hard, then harder.

  There wasn’t a mark on them.

  ‘Jesus fuck,’ said the Colt crossly, ‘what are you waiting for?’

  Pietro realised seconds ahead of the others that the gun wasn’t just talking, it was speaking to him.

  ‘You want to get killed, you little fuck?’

  Pietro didn’t. He scooped the Colt off the floor and settled his fingers round the handle. Enough diodes lit to decorate a Christmas tree and then died away, leaving only a tiny red light flashing slowly on the left side of the handle, next to the boy’s thumb. It meant the Colt was ready to fire, not that Pietro knew that.

  ‘Take him out,’ demanded the Colt. ‘That’s lesson one, for fucking free. When the time comes to do something, get it done.’

  Pietro looked at the pimp who was staring at his own frozen fingers. Every nerve had been burnt out in a single pulse without any visible sign of damage to the epidermal surface.

  Slowly Pietro raised the gun until he saw the small red dot appear on the pimp’s chest but still he didn’t pull the trigger, just stood there clutching the heavy hiPower. All he wanted was for life to get back to how it was before this started. Getting shouted at, even slapped, that he could handle. But killing someone like Don Sanchez was beyond his reason-and beyond his expectations.

  Anyone who had thought the club was quiet before revised their opinions now.

  ‘Put down that gun…’

  Pietro glanced over his shoulder to find Spanish Phillipe behind him, slate-grey eyes flicking between the boy and Sanchez.

  Decision taken. Inside Pietro’s skull dendritic nerves fired, creating a new matrix that flared and died into a new path that would make it easier to take the same decision next time. Only Pietro didn’t see it like that and wouldn’t have understood the implications even if someone had been there to explain them.

  He just pulled the trigger.

  Bits of Sanchez hit the white-tiled wall behind the pimp, painting it red. But most of the pimp just ignited from inside. It smelt like someone was cooking a roast.

  ‘Roll; said the Colt.

  Pietro didn’t. Instead he stood slack-mouthed looking at what had once been Sanchez and was now a length of rapidly-burning meat. Phospex did that, instantly. Guaranteed.

  ‘Fucking roll’

  Pietro did what the gun demanded, hitting the tiled floor of the pool and rolling between the legs of a shocked bystander.

  ‘In there,’ said the Colt and Pietro went scrabbling into the gap behind the bar. No tiles, just a skim of flaking polycrete that was wet with beer slops and sticky with spilt food. But what mattered was the soft armour plating that ran along the back of the counter. Alternate layers of boron-fibre and kevlar mesh, from ground zero to above waist-height on an adult. Something Pietro didn’t begin to appreciate until Spanish Phillipe’s first hollow-point slammed into the bar and flattened out into a worthless chunk of lead, velocity already spent.

  ‘Not bad,’ admitted the Colt. ‘Now fire the fuck back…

  ‘No,’ it added loudly when Pietro started to stand up. ‘Hit the fucking ceiling.’

  Pietro aimed the hiPower at the roof of the bar and pulled its trigger, sending shards of concrete falling onto the shocked crowd below.

  ‘You want to run on manual or automatic?’ the hiPower asked him.

  Pietro shrugged. He hadn’t the faintest idea what the Colt was talking about and figured it wouldn’t make any difference if he did… Sooner or later they were going to slaughter him…

  ‘Okay then,’ said the Colt, ‘you want automatic?’ It paused, sighed… ‘I’ll take that as a yes.’ The gun bucked in Pietro’s hand and another slug exploded into the ceiling, dropping chunks of the floor above into the club below. And it kept firing until Pietro could see straight into the room overhead and then into the room above that. ‘Okay,’ said the gun. ‘Now open that door and fast…’

  The boy looked around but couldn’t see a door. Behind and to both sides were white-tiled walls. In front was the counter. There was no door.

  ‘In the fucking floor.’

  Pietro looked down and saw a square hatch set under the bar. It was edged with steel. ‘That’s not a door, it’s a hatch,’ he told the Colt.

  There was a moment’s silence. And when the hiPower spoke again its voice was quiet, infinitely patient. ‘I suggest you open it. Whatever it is. Before someone else decides to kill you.’

  Chapter Five

  Right Here, Right Now

  Colonel Emilio smoothed his already-neat moustache and then pinched the broad bridge of his nose, hard…

  He had a headache. It wasn’t the Saturday morning warmth that bled in from the great square of the Zocalo outside or the familiar stink of the cellar. Or the sight of the bloody wreck of a suspect sitting in front of him. A man apparently given to talking to himself as he committed murder.

  No, what was giving the neatly-dressed, thickset cavalry officer problems was that he had one dead ex-Guerrilla leader-plus boyfriend-murdered on the Paeso and the man tied to the chair was refusing to take the situation seriously. And unfortunately no amount of expensive tailor-made nanetic artery-widening in the Colonel’s brain could do a thing about it.

  Colonel Emilio got headaches, always had done ever since he was a child. He just wished he hadn’t got one today. But then what could you expect with a suspect who gave his name as Black Jack d’Essiarto.

  ‘Who ordered the hit on Isabella Rosa?’

  ‘I’ve already told you,’ Axl said as lightly as anyone could with three teeth missing. ‘I’ve never heard of Isabella Rosa. And I killed Kachowsky for Don Alonzo d’Estevez.’

  There was no significance in the fact that Axl was being questioned in a small cell off a cellar that had once, centuries before, been used as a prison by the Inquisition in Mexico. It was just that upstairs at La Medicina the cells were all in use and this was where the police dumped the overspill, which is what he was.

  Just another late arrival in the hell that was the morning after the night before at DFPD headquarters.

  The Colonel walked slowly around the chair to which the man was tied with self-knotting ropes. The slow click of his heels on the granite floor wasn’t meant to intimidate the prisoner or make him fear that he was about to be attacked by the Colonel from behind-the Colonel had a sergeant to do that for him if he wanted, but he didn’t.

  No, the Colonel was walking in circles because he was bored, like a dog trapped in a too-small courtyard, and he was beginning to think the piece of human wreckage in front of him was telling the truth.

  Everyone at La Medicina always did in the end. Tell the truth, that was. Though it was usually DSP or sodium pentathol that brought them to it. Violence was as inefficient as it was unnecessary, though from the state of the man’s face the Colonel could tell that his troopers still hadn’t quite grasped that.

  ‘Alonzo d’Estevez died six weeks ago,’ said the Colonel slowly, not for the first time. His heels continued to click on the stone flags as he kept circling the small cell, thinking about what the man had said. What kind of idiot would kill someone on the instructions of a man alr
eady in his grave?

  But what else was there? You only had to look at the prisoner to know that he didn’t move in the same world as Leon Kachowsky. And what about all that talking to himself while the murder was happening… Spirit voices?

  Was it Voudun?

  The prisoner didn’t look like a candidate for hardcore/Vou. Colonel Emilio stopped pacing and checked the edge of the man’s shirt, rubbing it between his fingers. Old but soft and finely woven, not smartcloth but some kind of lightweight silk all the same, Italian possibly or Spanish.

  The boots were scuffed from where the man had been dragged face-down across the floor, and both the heels and soles were badly worn but the stitching was hand done.

  Colonel Emilio began to be more interested. This man wasn’t Voudun. Vou was for the poor, for the dispossessed, for barrio-dwellers seeking emotional release within Vou’s soulCore synthesis of Catholicism and Animism…a release fuelled by cheap psychotropics and cheaper hardcore.

  ‘So,’ the Colonel said with a sigh, ‘a dead man told you to murder Kachowsky… ?’

  ‘He wasn’t dead when he gave the instructions and it wasn’t murder,’ Axl said it firmly enough for the Colonel to stop dead and stare into his violet eyes. They were as hooded and impassive as those of any slum Indian but Axl met the Colonel’s gaze without faltering. Not bad for someone half unconscious from loss of blood.

  ‘It was a hit,’ Axl repeated. ‘Ordered by Don Alonzo d’Estevez.’

  ‘Who is dead…’ The Colonel’s words trailed away into silence. This wasn’t the first time they’d been round that particular loop.

  ‘You had the money in advance?’

  The man nodded.

  ‘Then where is it?’

  ‘Debts,’ Axl said shortly as if that explained everything, head shaking abruptly to say the conversation was closed.

  Little. . . The Colonel stepped forward and then stopped himself, eyes widening. The fool shouldn’t have jerked his head like that, it was too much of a give-away. Grow back that hair, take twenty years off the face and scrape away the city grime…

  Staring down at the man tied to the chair, Colonel Emilio smiled for the first time that morning. He already knew the answer to his next question, but he asked it anyway.

  ‘Your real name?’

  For a second, Axl considered lying. Then, just as quickly he rejected the idea. Surprising the Colonel, but not himself. Honesty was something he majored in. Honesty and stupidity, and few things were more stupid than ending up in the cellar of La Medicina.

  ‘Borja,’ he said. ‘Axl O’Higgins Borja… And I’d like to see the Cardinal.’

  If Axl noticed the look that crossed the Colonel’s face, he didn’t let it show. He’d seen that look before, just not for a long time. Part fear at the Cardinal’s name, part contempt as if to say, ‘Have you heard what they say about you and the Cardinal?’

  Yeah. He had. But that was years ago and it wasn’t even true back then.

  ‘You know what the Cardinal liked about me?’ Axl asked.

  The Colonel didn’t and wasn’t at all sure he wanted to. Which was fine because Axl wasn’t about to tell him, not for real, not all of it.

  ‘I know how to die,’ Axl said flatly.

  ‘Any one of my soldiers knows that,’ the Colonel said abruptly.

  ‘No,’ Axl said as he shook his head. ‘They know how to kill, anyone can be taught that. Learning how to be killed takes a special kind of teacher. Ask the Cardinal…’

  * * * *

  The Colonel was back inside the hour. In that time, Colonel Emilio’s fat sergeant had found Axl a very young police surgeon who stapled shut his ruptured lip, fitted new tooth buds and put a handful of cheap silver spiders to work sucking dead blood from the swelling round his right eye.

  Six ribs were cracked, according to the doctor, one of his retinas was almost detached and a chip of bone had freed itself in the second vertebra of his neck.

  ‘You know,’ said the boy, ‘in the long term he should get something done about that vertebra ... if there is a long term.’ He glanced from Axl to where the sergeant stood doing fist clenches to build up her already-vast biceps and padded silently out of the cell door.

  After the doctor came a shower, in a marble-tiled room one floor up. The room was filled with stucco mouldings to the ceiling and a vast marble fireplace in the middle of one wall. Shower stalls stood at one end, a bank of cheap Sony tri-Ds filled the other. And naked to the waist at the screens were two cops blasting Chinese mercenaries off the red-tiled roof of a warehouse. Relaxing after a hard morning’s work.

  The cops shot double handed, racking up four baby Uzis between them that unleashed a steady stream of flame. And the cheap synth soundtrack didn’t even keep time with their movements.

  Axl snorted.

  In RL the mags would have blipped out themselves inside five seconds and the cops would have been overrun before they had time to reload, but DeathGuardIV wasn’t RL, it was that month’s best-selling battle sim.

  Neither cop looked round, not when Axl came in and not when he stripped off to step into a shower, letting waves of tepid water soak the blood from his body and face. Most of the spiders were already dead, their job done. The others died as they were washed off his skin, metal legs waving.

  The only person who watched was the sergeant and for all the interest she showed he could have been dead meat already.

  * * * *

  ‘Borja.’

  Without turning round, without even seeing Colonel Emilio’s face, Axl knew just from the voice that he might want to see the Cardinal but the Cardinal didn’t want to see him. So be it ...

  So be what? Part of Axl wanted to outraged but it was a very small part and most of him couldn’t be bothered to make the effort.

  ‘Justice must be upheld?’

  Behind Axl, the Colonel grunted. They both knew what JMBU meant. JMBU wasn’t merely the slogan that ticker-taped lazily along the bottom of every newsfeed during televised trials. It was the foundation on which the Cardinal had ruled Mexico for nearly fifty years.

  It was legitimisation for judicial murder, for abrogation of civil rights. JMBU justified manipulating difficult judges, nationalising some industries and privatising others, the usual detritus of centuries of Central American realekonomik.

  ‘But not before my day in court?’ Axl could already imagine it. A week of having his life raked over on newsfeed. Maybe as much as three weeks if CySat’s liaison officer at the Ministry of Justice could work out how to throw in a couple of twists.

  ‘No public trial.’

  Axl turned round at that.

  The Colonel’s voice was flat, uninflected. He was wearing a pair of wrapround Spiros that hadn’t been there when he went out an hour before. And he stood well back from the prisoner, hands behind his back, as if fate could be contagious. Or maybe it was the fact that Axl was naked.

  ‘Military trial?’ Without thinking about it, Axl climbed back into his trousers. Even freed clones got their five minutes in front of a civil magistrate. Which didn’t usually make a difference to the result, but that wasn’t the point.

  Colonel Emilio didn’t answer.

  Fuck it, thought Axl. Maybe he should have paid out for a misery-bypass in Santa Fe after all, that time he’d had his conscience removed. Though removal was the wrong word, ‘amygdala block’ was more accurate. It would have made sense to get his capacity for misery chopped back at tie same time, but then that particular threshold had always been set too low. Red meanies, black dog, insomnia, the blues-Axl got them all.

  Amygdala amendment was cheaper than seeing a therapist and infinitely more secure. The only therapist Axl had visited had been a Jungian with an unnaturally developed sense of right and wrong. And after a single session and three days of the man’s increasingly frantic calls to Axl’s house AI, Axl had been reduced to threatening to kill the man if he didn’t turn over his case notes and leave town.

  So, thought Ax
l as he perched himself on the edge of a window sill and watched the two cops still knocking gooks off the roof, justice must be upheld, must it? Inside he didn’t feel nearly as sick as he’d expected.

  But then hell, death and he had been like… Axl wasn’t too sure how to define their past relationship. Suffocatingly close was probably an accurate enough description.

  Just next to him was the fireplace, neo-classical, flanked by two marble dryads, one male and one female, blank eyed, both naked from the waist up. It was difficult to see them properly because an old-fashioned lecture screen had been nail-gunned in front, the bolts driven into the marble at chest height.

  That would have been done years back, obviously enough, but no one had bothered to remove the useless screen. There were also books lined up on the over mantle, all of them flaking and crumbling with age and no one had bothered to remove those either. Time’s debris-there was a lot of it about.

  ‘You got the job of trying me?’

  The Colonel nodded. No apologies, no excuses. Axl was grateful for that.

  ‘Today?

  Colonel Emilio spread his hands. From his short brushed-back hair to his green eyes, he might have been Austrian somewhere back in the gene pool, but he had the hand gestures of someone born in Mexico.

  ‘The Cardinal decided this?’

  Of course he did. Stupid question.

  Outside in the central courtyard police recruits paraded in full uniform. They carried Browning pulse/Rs with flip-out bayonets, sawtoothed ceramic blades neatly folded back under each barrel. Grey polymer helmets protected their heads while smoke-grey visors hid their faces.

  It was the battle armour of an army devoted to crowd control not the solving of crime. Everyone from the meanest peon to the Cardinal, from the visiting delegation from WorldBank to the crowd being controlled knew that.

  Fear was the key, thought Axl, but then when wasn’t it? My fear, your fear, the Cardinal’s fear...

  Particularly the Cardinal’s fear.