researcher had taken his abrupt leave, and it was from a sizable if surreptitious account that Mr. Nayari was personally paying Chal for his services. Given the size of the daily retainer Chal was charging the company, it was not unreasonable for the vice president to expect results. While Chal could not yet supply these, he felt it incumbent on him to provide an explanation for his lack of progress thus far. 'Sagramanda is a big city,' he knew, would not be accepted as a sufficient excuse.
He was passing the old cemetery, with its stone monuments and thick vegetation, when the weapon was pointed at him. Its appearance was accompanied by a whisper.
'Step in here, please, sir, or I will have to shoot you where you stand.'
From off to one side, another young man materialized out of the bushes to come up behind Schneemann. Eyeing the speaker and his weapon, Chal nodded tersely, wiped several fingers over the left breast pocket of his one-piece beige jumpsuit, raised his hands, and stepped off the sidewalk and into the underbrush. Once out of public view, he found himself confronted by three young men.
Defying the heat of midday, they wore long white leather pants electrostatically charged to repel dirt. Two flaunted matching white cotton tank tops while their companion, the one holding the weapon, wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the dancing image of a popular singer. All were shorter and considerably darker of skin than the larger, mixed-race Chal. One had the sloe-eyed features of a Nepali. If pressed by the police, they would smilingly insist that the stripes that streaked their pants legs were only decoration. Among Sagramanda's gang culture, such stripes stood for the number of people the owner of each pair of pants had beaten up or robbed. Red stripes for male victims, green for women. One of the trio displayed an inordinate number of green stripes, of which he was no doubt proud.
Chal's attention remained concentrated on the single visible weapon. It was a wire shocker. He had to smile at the irony of it. Whatever hath that multitalented dead American Thomas Edison wrought? he mused to himself not for the first time. It was doubtful the famous inventor had ever envisioned anything as compactly diabol ical as the wire shocker.
'Wallet,' the young man nearest him demanded curtly. 'Do not try to hide anything from us or it will go harsh with you.'
Expertly feigning fear, Chal nodded again. 'The decoy is in my breast pocket; the real, secured one is up inside my right pants' leg.'
Seeing that their victim was going to cooperate, the youth holding the wire shocker relaxed slightly. His cronies advanced hastily, one kneeling to remove the outed security wallet from their impassive prey's pants' leg, the other reaching for Chal's top pocket. Being naturally anxious to conclude their mugging as quickly as possible, they worked fast and in tandem. Both made contact with their target at the same time. There was the sharp, crackling sound of a powerful electrical discharge. The two stunned gang members found themselves shocked backward, down, and out.
By lightly pressing his fingers in a particular pattern over his left breast pocket, Chal had activated the sealed superconductive wiring woven into the fabric of his jumpsuit. Fully powered up, the thin, flexible, lightweight batteries sewn into the back of his jumpsuit not only provided protection to his spine, they were also capable of delivering a charge of several hundred volts to anyone who touched him once the system had been activated. Their wearer was not affected because he was fully grounded through the soles of his special shoes, to which the jump suit's integrated defensive mechanism was linked.
Its effect was instructive. The youth who had reached for Chal's other top pocket was blown into a clump of bushes. Receiving a slightly bigger jolt, the kneeling Nepali now lay on his back. Several fingers on his clutching right hand were burned black. Smoke issued from the tips.
Motivated by a mixture of fear and fury, the third youth instinctively fired his weapon. Connected to its gun by a superthin conducting wire, the penetrating dart struck its target square in the stomach. Glancing down at where it had pierced his jumpsuit to embed itself in the Nanocarb-Kevlar undersuit he always wore, Chal eyed the dart with interest as its potentially lethal charge was dissipated by the combination of outer jumpsuit and inner defensive material. Had the dart packed an explosive instead of an electrical head, his unpretentious looking but very expensive clothing would have success fully dissipated its deadly effects as well.
Having shot his electronic wad, the wide-eyed surviving youth dropped his now-useless discharged weapon, turned, and ran. Chal could have shot him several times before he fled out of range, but there was no need. He had delivered a lesson that might or might not be absorbed. Whether it was or not was of no consequence to him. Sagramanda was home to thousands of such youths. Statistics showed that there were already enough who would not make it to adulthood. He saw no reason to add to the total.
Testing the wire that connected the dart in his belly to the gun lying on the ground, he made sure that it had spent its charge before yanking it out of his body armor. Without bothering to look down, he stepped over the supine body of the half-paralyzed Nepali. Gazing in unblinking shock at his burned fingers, the youth was already beginning to twitch spasmodically. In less than an hour he and his companion of the bushes would be back on their feet. Unsteady, in pain, but alive. Their delayed recovery would give them time to contemplate the ironic nature of their surroundings.
Emerging from the cemetery brush, an unperturbed Chal resumed his interrupted stroll up Park Street. From the time he had disappeared within until the time he had reemerged, his expression had not changed. None of the other pedestrians looked at him; no one glanced in his direc tion. What people did in the bushes was their own business.
Though clad in bronze-hued glass from New New Delhi and green marble from Rajasthan, the tower that housed the Sagramanda administrative offices of the company that had engaged his services had been designed to look like an ancient Chandela temple. Multiple smaller spires surrounded and supported the sixty-story main structure. Instead of the sculptures of sensuous apsaras, or celestial maidens, who decorated the real temples in places like distant Khajuraho, the office tower and its subsidiary spires boasted glowing virtuals that promoted the giant multinational's many divisions and diverse products. While the virtuals did not stray far from their projection units they gave the structure, especially at night, the appearance of being under assault by angels.
Heavenly commerce, Chal thought as he entered the first of several double-doored layers of building security. How Indian.
With his suit deactivated, he set off no immediate alarms. The ultrathin, concealed superconducting wires that were part of the weave were of course picked up by detectors, as were the twin flexible battery packs that were woven into the back of his jumpsuit. When a swift, professional analytic scan by building security revealed that they were connected to nothing explosive and that the batteries had fully discharged, he was allowed to proceed. The woman who accepted his weapons for safekeeping while he was on business within the building kept looking from the sophisticated devices, several of which were beyond her experience, to their owner. Clearly, she wanted to ask about them, and about him. He left her unsatisfied, with only a polite smile.
He did not feel naked or unarmed as he walked toward one of two express lifts. Not every lethal weapon had been checked with building security. For example, he still had his arms and legs.
The live receptionist on the fifty-ninth floor greeted her sinewy visitor with a pleasant 'Soobden'-good day. Jaded as he was, Chal tended to look at people once, size them up, and file the information. On this occasion he was moved to look twice. Not because the woman was exceptionally beautiful in her early maturity, which she was. Not because the full-length sari she was wearing rippled of its own accord, programmed as it was with its own integrated flex-breeze, to alternately stand away from and cling to her supple body. No, he looked a second time because one glance was not enough to enable him to identify the long, slender gun she wore strapped to her long, slender left leg underneath the distractingly motile sari.
Though he could have put the question to her as a matter of mutual professional interest, it would have been impolitic to pry. Nothing in her demeanor suggested the presence of such an impressive weapon in such an intimate location. Doubtless if he acted in a threatening manner the device would present itself for closer inspection- probably by being thrust swiftly and efficiently in his direction.
Giving no indication that he was aware of its existence, he announced himself. Outward demureness ably masking her concealed aptitudes, she allowed as how he was expected, and that
he should go in. Softly voicing a command (in perfect Etonian English, he noted), she caused a pair of security-camouflaged doors to appear in the wall behind her desk. A thousand years ago one would have assumed a Chaldean witch had performed sorcery. Today it was simply a matter of rear ranging batches of preprogrammed photons. Flashing her a faint and oddly knowing smile, Chal eased around the reception desk and all of her
