Forests of the Night Read online

  Fearless was reaching behind, into the waistband of his cutoffs. Nohar knew instinctively that the rat was going for a gun. Nohar was about to jump Fearless-he could clear the distance easily before the rat got his hand untangled from his pants—but the action was broken by a burst of high-pitched rapid-fire Spanish from down the street, by the old bus.

  They all turned that way to face a snow-white female rodent. She wore the same abbreviated leather vest and denim cutoffs. Her naked tail was writhing, and she sounded pissed. Nohar immediately pegged

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  her as a superior. Bigboy and Fearless seemed to forget about him and began talking back to her in Spanish as well. All babble to him, he just hoped she was cussing the fools out.

  Cat-and-mouse is not a smart game to play when you are the mouse.

  The three rodents were talking among themselves, and Nohar began to slowly

  withdraw from the rodent

  fiasco.

  Nohar had nearly gotten to the door to his apartment. Bigboy and Fearless had slunk away, but the white one stayed.

  "Rajasthan!"

  The white rat was addressing him directly. She wasn't making any threatening

  moves, so Nohar stopped and

  waited.

  "You are a lucky cat, son of Rajasthan—" How did she know, how could she—"What do

  you-"

  "I speak! You listen.*' The force of the rat's voice actually made Nohar stop his question in mid-breath. The tiny rat's body could produce a voice that would intimidate a rabid ursine. "The finger of God has just touched your brow, son of Rajasthan. Those that control want your life for their reasons. They buy you much tolerance."

  The rat paused, and for once Nohar had nothing to say. She just stood there, staring at him with eyes mat looked like high-carbon steel. Nohar turned toward his door—

  "Pray you that God doesn't forget you, Nohar. If the blessing is lifted, Zipperhead will have you."

  Nohar punched the combination on his door. He had given the rats enough of his time.

  "/'//have you, Nohar,"

  As Nohar ducked inside, the white rat added, "You, or someone you love."

  He slammed the door shut. It was a shame. She hadn't been bad-looking. Her triangular face ended in FORESTS OF THE NIGHT

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  a delicate nose—but she was a die-hard creep just like her idiot subordinates. She also wore cheap pink perfume. Why would a morey wear that kind of crap? Nohar had hurried away from the smell as much as the spiel. He took a few deep breaths of relatively clean air before he started up the stairwell.

  The humidity was making his door stick again, and it took him a few seconds to unwedge it. The damn thing was heavier than it should have been because it had a steel plate in it, a relic of the previous tenant. Nohar would have questioned the wisdom of sticking an armored door in a wooden door frame.

  Cat ran up to the door and immediately began rubbing against his foot. "So you hungry or lonely?" Nohar asked the yellow tomcat as he picked it up. A loud purr from under his hand told him to figure it out for himself. Nohar pushed the door shut with his foot and ducked into the living room. Cat started butting his head into Nohar's chin, and, after glancing into the kitchen to check Cat's dishes, Nohar decided Cat wasn't hungry.

  "Sorry I took so long, I got distracted by the local color." Cat closed his eyes as Nohar scratched him behind the ears. "But, lucky us, I got one hell of an advance from a client before the first of the month."

  Cat started grooming Nohar's thumb.

  "Yeah, right. Look, you little missing link, I have to put you down so I can get this damn pink clothing off. So don't start mewing at me—"

  Nohar put him down and Cat started mewing.

  He undressed and looked at the comm. Two messages waiting now.

  "Comm on," he said to the machine as he started peeling clothing oif of his damp fur.

  "comm on."

  Nohar reclined on the couch. Cat took up a perch on his chest and purred. "Classify. Phone messages."

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  "two messages. July twenty-ninth, three-oh-five p.m. from detective irwin harsk, calling from—"

  "Play."

  Static, then Harsk's bald black head appeared on the screen.

  "Sorry I didn't catch you, Nohar." There was a smile on Harsk's face and Nohar couldn't decide if it was ironic or sarcastic. "I thought I'd tell you that another little red light is flashing by your name. The DEA computer has this 'thing' about large cash transactions. Ten thousand dollars? The Fed is curious, and so am I. We're watching you, so—on the off-chance the cash is legit—remember to withhold your income tax."

  That was damn quick, even for the Fed. The DEA must have a tap on the ATM down the street. It was irritating, but not that surprising. Harsk knew he was clean, but he'd let the Fed wonder just out of a sense of perversity. The comm was asking if he had a reply,

  "Yes. Record," Noharcleared his throat, "Harsk, don't call back until you have a warrant. End. Mail. Reply."

  Nohar closed his eyes and clawed the back of the couch. He told the comm to play the earlier message without really paying attention to it. He wasn't looking directly at the screen when he heard a husky female voice.

  "Raj?"

  "Pause!" His eyes shot open and he turned to look at Maria Limon. The call had come in close to two in the morning, during his meet with Nugoya. In the pressure of the moment, Nohar had forgotten to call Maria and cancel their date—

  This wasn't the first tune either. Nohar had a sinking feeling.

  She was at a public phone. He could see the streetlights behind her. There was a frozen shimmer on the screen where the lights were reflecting off the black

  fur under her whiskers. Apparently the Brazilians had FORESTS OF THE NIGHT

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  been more creative with their moreaus. She'd been crying. Nohar doubted his tear ducts could be triggered emotionally.

  Maria's golden eyes, her pupils almost round, seemed to level an accusation at him.

  Cat tilted his head and gave Nohar a curious look.

  "Replay."

  Static, then Maria's face reappeared on the screen. Nohar watched as one delicate black hand wiped away the moisture on her cheek. The hand fell and she looked directly at Nohar.

  "Raj? I'm sorry about this. I should have the guts to face you, but I can't. You'd say something and we'd end up shouting at each other, or fucking each other— or, God help me, both—I can't do this anymore. I still care for you, but if we keep seeing each other, I won't—" Maria's voice broke, and more tears came. Maria was a strong person. Nohar had never seen her cry before. "Good-bye, Raj, I have to leave while the memories are still worth something to me."

  Maria's face vanished as she broke the connection.

  Nohar felt like someone had just kneed him in the balls, and he was feeling his stomach drop out just before the pain came.

  They had known each other for only two months. It shouldn't have been a surprise. He had been expecting something like this all along. She was right. Cat must have sensed some of his agitation, because he started butting his head against Nohar's face and licking his cheek. Cat stopped after a few seconds and regarded Nohar with his head cocked to one side. Cat's expression seemed to be asking him what was wrong.

  Nohar stayed quiet for a long while before he told the computer to put the message into permanent storage. He tried to call Maria, but her comm was locking out his calls. Maria would want a clean break. He could probably talk her out of it once, maybe twice, more. She didn't want him to.

  He spent a few moments in relative silence, strok-

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  ing Cat and listening to the high-frequency hum of the comm.

  Instead of turning the comm off, he called up Maria's message, and paused it. He paused it where the claw on the index finger of her right hand had caught a tear. The small sphere of liquid
was nestled between the hook in her claw and the pad on her finger. It refracted the unnatural white of the streetlight behind her, causing arcs of light to emerge from one golden half-lidded eye.

  It was the kind of image that made Nohar wish he had a scrap of romance in his soul.

  CHAPTER 4

  After a while, Nohar decided he had better things to do than stare at Maria. "Load program. Label, 'Log-on library.' "

  "searching . . . found."

  "Run program."

  Maria's face disappeared as the computer started the access sequence. It showed the blue-and-white AT&T test pattern as it repeatedly buzzed the public library database, waiting for an open data channel. It was close to prime time for library access. It took nearly fifteen minutes for the comm to lock onto the library's mainframe.

  Even when the Cleveland Public Library logo came up, there were a few minutes of waiting. The screen scrolled messages about fighting illiteracy, and how he should spend his summer reading a book. Nohar knew that a few thousand users on a clunky time-sharing system at the same time tended to slow things down, but it still seemed the delay was directed at him.

  He shifted on the couch, trying to become more comfortable. Waiting always made him aware of his tail.

  Two minutes passed. Then, with a little electronic fanfare, the menu came up—though you couldn't quite call the animated figure a "menu." The library system called their animated characters "guides." The software was trying too hard to be friendly. It verged on the cute.

  The "guide" facing him on the screen wore a sword

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  strapped to his side, and was in the process of contemplating a human skull when he seemed to notice No-har's intrusion. The effect was spoiled by a glitch in the animation. A rolling blue line scrolled up and down the screen, shifting everything above it a pixel to the left. Nohar sighed. He had no desire to spend his time with a manic-depressive Dane. Especially after that call from Maria.

  He spoke before the prince had time to object. "Text menu."

  The only library "guide" he liked was the little blonde human girl, Alice.

  The text menu came up and the first thing he did, despite Smith's admonition to start with Johnson, was to conduct a global search for information on Midwest Lapidary Imports. He wanted some sort of handle on his client's employer, which was also the home of the alleged suspects.

  There was only a fifteen second pause.

  The computer came back with the report, "Three items found."

  Nohar shook his head. Only three? With a global search? That meant there were only three items in the entire library data base that even mentioned MLI.

  Nohar played the first item and got a newsfax about diamond imports, legal and illegal. The focus on the article was how hard it was to keep track of the gems. It had a graph that dramatized the divergence between the gems known to have come into the country, and those known to be in circulation. In the last fifteen years, a hell of a lot more gems had been in circulation than could be accounted for. It was, in fact, causing a depression in the diamond market.

  The article blamed the Fed and new smuggling techniques. The least likely smuggling method Nohar read about was casting the diamonds in the heat-tiles on the exterior of a ballistic shuttle. Midwest Lapidary was only mentioned peripherally in a list of domestic diamond-related companies at the end of the article.

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  The second article was actually about MLI, but it was only barely informative. It was from some subscriber service and was just a sparse paragraph of electronic text. MLI, a new company, incorporated in 2038. Wholesale diamond sales. Headquartered in Cleveland. Privately owned. Address. That was it.

  Smith was right about these guys keeping a low profile. Nohar pictured most new corporate enterprises announcing themselves with trumpets and splashy media campaigns. It looked like MLI was trying to hide the fact it even existed.

  The third item was a vid broadcast from December 2, 2043. The broadcast was dated. The guy with the news was still following journalistic fashion from the riots. Grimy safari jacket, urban camo pants, three-day-old stubble, sunglasses. The outfit had nothing to do with the story. The guy was standing in a snowdrift outside a pair of low office buildings faced in blue tile.

  Nohar recognized a stretch of Mayfield Road behind the buildings. The guy was only a few miles to the east of Moreytown.

  Hmm, Nohar thought there was a prison there.

  The guy was trying very hard to have the voice of authority. "I am standing outside the offices and the laboratory of NuFood Incorporated. Today, came the surprising announcement that NuFood had been bought by a local diamond wholesaler, Midwest Lapidary. There had been speculation that NuFood had been on the verge of bankruptcy when it sold its assets and patents to Midwest Lapidary for an undisclosed amount. Shortly after the sale, NuFood's two hundred employees were laid off in what Midwest Lapidary called in a press release, 'a streamlining measure.' "NuFood, you may recall from a Special Health Report earlier this year, is the company with patents on the dietary supplement, MirrorProtein. While NuFood has had success creating synthetic food-products resembling natural items, which the human body cannot process, it has had continuing problems with the PDA 50

  S. ANDREW SWANN

  in getting its products approved. Sources say this created the financial difficulty that led directly to the sale of the company. No one from Midwest Lapidary could be reached for comment."

  That was a big help.

  50 Smith was right. He needed to start with Johnson and work back. Johnson was Binder's campaign manager, so Nohar did a global search using both his name and Binder's.

  The pause was closer to a full minute this time. His tail fell asleep. Nohar stood up to massage the base of his tail. Cat took the opportunity to jump up on the couch and snuggle into the warm dent in the cushions.

  The screen flashed the results of the search. Over six thousand items, more like it. No way he could peruse all of it on-line, so he slipped in a ramcard and downloaded the whole mess of data. He leeched nearly fifteen megs in half that many minutes.

  He now had his own little database on Binder and his campaign.

  By five, his examination of the public information on Binder gave him no reason to alter his first impression of the guy as a right-wing reactionary bastard. It seemed Binder had something bad to say about every group or organization that didn't count him as a member; women, foreigners, liberals, intellectuals, blacks and hispanics, Catholics, the poor, the homeless, por-nographers, the news media—the list was endless. Despite the vitriol that coated every word the man uttered, three groups in particular gained his very special attention. In order of the invective he threw upon them, they were: moreaus, franks, and all their genetically-engineered ilk, whose rights he was actively involved in trying to repeal; homosexuals, whose sexual preference Binder seemed to rank primary in his personal list of mortal sins; and the U.S. federal government— the only place Binder and Nohar seemed to touch common ground—whose propensity for spending money FORESTS OF THE NIGHT

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  was only equaled by Binder's impulse to slash any spending program he could lay his hands on.

  Nohar found it hard to believe he was investigating the murder of this guy's campaign manager.

  The data on Daryl Johnson was more scattered. Nohar couldn't get a fix on his beliefs. All he got was the fact that Johnson was loyal to Binder and had been with the congressman since the state legislature. He had been recruited out of Bowling Green in the autumn of 2040. The same time as most of Binder's inner circle. Johnson's three classmates were: Edwin Har-rison, the campaign's legal counsel; Philip Young, the campaign finance chairman; and Desmond Thomson, the campaign press secretary. Johnson graduated at the age of twenty-three, late. Apparently because of a shift in his major, from chemistry to political science. A bit of a jump. That would make him the ripe old age of thirty-nine when he died
.

  Not so ripe, Nohar corrected himself. This guy was human, so thirty-nine was barely on the threshold of middle age. Thirty-nine was better than the life expectancy of some moreys.

  He was a little more familiar with the situation he was dealing with. That was all. His client wanted to find out if MLI was behind the Johnson killing. So far, he didn't have any connection between the two, other than Smith's assertion that the missing three mega-bucks came from MLI.

  Time to start making some calls. Thomson looked like a good choice. The press secretary would be used to talking to people, if not actually to saying anything.

  If he was going to talk to a pink, he'd better put some clothes on. He snorted. Clothes were a needless irritation that wouldn't have been necessary on a morey case. Getting dressed, just to make a phone call, was just plain silly.

  He pulled a button-down shirt from a small pile in the corner of his bedroom. The storm had reduced the light in the apartment, so Nohar couldn't quite make

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  out the color of the shirt. It was either a very light blue, or a very off white. Nohar put it on, claws catching on the buttons, and decided to forgo the pants. The comm was only going to show him from the waist up, as long as he didn't stand up.

  He ducked into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Pointless, really. What did a pink know about grooming anyway? Still, Nohar licked the back of his hand and ran it over his head a few times, smoothing things out.

  After that, he sat on the couch, shooing Cat away. He set the comm to record and told it to call Desmond Thomson at Binder campaign headquarters. He routed the call through the comm at his office so his credentials would be shown up front.

  Oddly enough, though it was only a little after five, no one at Binder headquarters seemed to be answering. After nearly a minute of displaying the Binder Senate campaign logo, the comm at Binder headquarters forwarded his call to Thomson's home. Nohar shrugged. It didn't matter as long as he got through to Thomson.

  Thomson surprised the hell out of him by being black. In fact, Thomson had been the bearded pink that had tricked Nohar's eyes into seeing a morey in the crowd at the funeral. Thomson's hair and beard were shot with gray. He had the bearing of a pro wrestler and the voice of a vid anchorman. "Mister,"