The final irony was that Greenies turned out to be an exceptionally effective life extender. Thus, the user could look forward to decades (centuries?) of addiction and slow physical disintegration. No one really knew how old Mr. Conover was, but what he had become was obvious to all.
Conover's small grayish-green skull of a head bobbed between narrow shoulders set above a thick torso. His nose was little more than a mass of jagged scar tissue surrounded by livid clusters of red tumors. He puffed constantly at gold-tipped Sherman clove cigarettes which he held in a long mother-of-pearl holder, an affectation which, like his clothes, was another symptom of his compulsion to accentuate his own ugliness. When he smiled, which was often, his thin lips stretched back from a stained jumble of teeth. His appearance always gave Jonny the feeling that he was in conversation with a well-dressed corpse.
The Cadillac moved swiftly along an all but abandoned stretch of freeway. Sand was blowing in off the desert, carried to the city on the backs of freak Santa Ana winds. Carbon arcs mounted on the roof threw the cracked roadbed into stark relief, made the sand look like static on a video screen. Jonny looked out the double-glazed windows, but there was not much to see. They were driving through hills northwest of the city, on the edge of the German industrial sector, a bleak dead zone of strip mining equipment and half-finished bunkers housing the Krupp Corporation's experimental tokamak. The leached hills depressed Jonny, reminded him of a painting by Max Ernst that Groucho had shown him: Europe After the Rain. The landscape brought back uneasy memories of evenings on the Committee shooting speed with Krupp's young shock truppen.
The German's did not have Meat Boys, instead, it was common for young recruits to display their machismo by replacing their limbs with unfeeling myoelectric prosthesis. Jonny had the patchy, drunken memory of a laughing boy holding a cigarette lighter to his fingertips until they melted and dripped away, revealing the silicon sensors and black alloy mesh beneath.
Jonny relaxed on the soft leather seat in the rear of the limousine. Seated next to him, Conover pulled out an ornate silver cigarette case and offered him a smoke. Jonny accepted the cigarette and a light, pulling the harsh, sweet clove smoke deep into his lungs and letting it trickle out through his nose.
It had been months since he last smoked a cigarette (Sumi had guilted him into stopping when a Croaker working out of the back of a taqueria told him he had a shadow on one lung), but his past seemed to be catching up with him at such a rate that Jonny figured he might as well get into the spirit of it. He coughed wearily as the smoke caught in his throat. Resting his head on the seatback, he watched the road slide by. Conover's chauffeur, a heavy-set ex-Guardia Nacional man, was skull-plugged into a radar/navigational unit in the dashboard, following a trail of military sensors under the road bed. Conover was one of the few men in the city Jonny trusted, certainly the only lord. For the moment, he felt safe. Conover leaned over and spoke to him quietly.
'You seem to have brought down the wrath of god, old son. Or at least you pissed off Zamora, which amounts to the same thing. What in the world can you have done?'
Jonny ran a hand through his hair. 'I wish I knew,' he said. 'Maybe I'd feel like I deserve all this special attention.'
'Much as he'd like to, the Colonel does not stage raids just for fun. He must have had some reason for singling you out.' Conover put a hand on Jonny's arm. 'No offense, you're a charming boy, but-'
'The man's insane. He thinks you and I are playing footsie with the Alpha Rats,' Jonny said. 'I suppose that's assuming they have feet. I don't know. This whole thing's crazier by the minute.'
'The Alpha Rats,' Conover said, half as a question, half a reply.
He smoked his pastel Sherman, laughed mildly. 'The Colonel never ceases to amaze me. Did he happen to mention what, specifically, you and I were doing with the Alpha Rats?'
'No. He just said we'd had contact and that we're into some kind of deal,' Jonny explained. He gave up and ground out the cigarette in an ashtray gouged from a crystal lump of Amazon quartz.
His throat burned.
'And that's all he said?' Conover asked.
'Yeah.' Jonny hesitated before saying anything about Zamora's demand that he turn Conover. Just saying the words, Jonny felt, implied a kind of betrayal. But how will it look, he wondered, if I don't say anything and he finds out? 'Zamora's really got the hots for you,' he said. 'He cut me loose and told me I had to deliver you in forty eight hours or-'
'— Or we get the little scene back at the warehouses. Tell me, did Easy Money ever come up in your talk?'
'I don't think so.'
'Take a moment. I want you to be sure. Did Colonel Zamora mention Easy Money?'
'No, never.'
'You didn't seem so sure a moment ago.'
'Well, I wasn't then; I'm sure now,' said Jonny. He looked at the smuggler lord.
'Good,' said Conover, nodding in satisfaction. 'Forgive me for being insistent, but it's important that I get to Easy before the Committee. He's made off with something of mine and I do not want Zamora involved, on any level, with its recovery.'
'For what it's worth, Groucho, the Croaker, said Easy's gone to work for Nimble Virtue.'
Conover reached forward and picked up a bottle of tequila from a well-stocked traveling bar set into the seatback before them.
Next to the bar was an array of sleek matte-black Japanese electronic gear; Jonny recognized a Sony compound analyzer, a cellular videophone and a voice-activated PC. Conover poured a shot of tequila into a glass and handed it to Jonny.
'I'd heard about Nimble Virtue,' said Conover. 'In fact, I've been trying to set up a meet with her, but the witch is on the run. Paranoid, that woman is. My sources say she might have a pied a terre in Little Tokyo, but only time will tell.'
Jonny finished his tequila and Conover refilled his glass. 'Right now, though, why don't you relax and tell me, from the beginning, everything that went on with you and Zamora. Take your time, we have a bit of a drive ahead of us.'
Jonny took a gulp of the liquor, bracing himself with its cool heat. He was not wild about the idea of reliving that night, but he knew had known it was coming, ever since the smuggler lord had picked him up. Conover, meanwhile, was using a tiny spoon to scoop a fine white powder from a glass vial he pulled from the back of the bar. That done, he cut the pile the into several neat lines with a gold single-edged razor blade.
As the lord snorted up a couple of the lines, Jonny began to talk, telling Conover everything he could remember, from the moment Zamora had picked him up, until he had found himself alone behind the prison, confused and outraged. It was painful; all that had happened since came crashing down on him. Ice was gone. Sumi was gone. Skid was dead. He even found Groucho's absence disturbing.
When he finished, Conover had him run through the whole thing again, focusing on Zamora's theories about their connection to the Alpha Rats. After going through it a second time, Jonny was drained.
Conover patted his arm, and nodded. 'A very good job, Jonny.'
'Thank you,' he said.
'You look like you could use a break.'
'I could use a new life. But what about Zamora and the Alpha Rats?'
Conover handed the tube he had used to snort the coke to Jonny. 'It all sounds fascinating. I never would have suspected the Colonel of having an imagination. It almost makes me wish it were true. Without you to pull out of the fire, Jonny, my life would be unbearable. Don't let anybody try and sell you on immortality. There simply isn't enough of interest to make it worthwhile. Do your time and get it over with; that's the best way. It's not polite to be the last one to leave a party.'
Jonny snorted up the white lines and asked: 'Then there's nothing to all this spaceman stuff?'
Conover shook his head, his eyes fixed miles and centuries away. 'No, nothing,' he replied. Then he said something else; Jonny thought it might be: 'Empty.'
Jonny found himself beginning to feel a certain odd sympathy for the smuggler lord. For all his power, Conover had trapped himself in the decomposing body of a junky fop through a single miscalculationhis urgent will to live. On the other hand, Mr. Conover was no fool. Had it really been a mistake? Jonny wondered.
Or was it a stage in some other, infinitely more complex and subtle plan that Jonny and the rest, condemned to a pitiful handful of years, could not see? If the smuggler lord was working on something else, Jonny hoped it was
