questions?'
Nohar pulled the shirt over his head. It ended up twenty centimeters short of his waist. 'What do you want to know?'
Stephie looked up. Her fingers still traveled over the demonic feline form that graced the back of the jacket. 'Well, you called Bobby your first and only pink—'
Nohar felt like he'd gotten blindsided by a baseball bat. 'No. That's not—I mean . . .'
She laughed. 'I'm sorry. I didn't want to sound accusatory.' Stephie stood up, leaving the jacket on the chair. 'I was just wondering who Bobby was.'
Nohar was still recovering. 'Bobby, Bobby Bit-
164
S. ANDREW SWANN
trich. I met him when I was trying to make it through high school. We were both sort of misfits— Though as we got older, he fit in more and more, and I fit in less and less ... '
He lapsed into silence.
Stephie walked up and put her hand on his arm. 'Are you okay? Did I hit another bad memory?'
He shook his head. 'No, not at all.'
He grabbed the jacket and hobbled down the stairs. He was wondering why he hadn't thought of it sooner. Stephie was following. 'Where are you going?'
'I have to call Bobby.'
'Are you sure it's the time to look up old friends—'
Nohar didn't answer until he got down to the comm. 'I think he might be able to help me.'
He switched off the news. 'Move it, Angel—'
Angel said something unkind in Spanish as she moved off the couch. 'Damnit, Kit, you could ask.'
She stalked off to the kitchen, probably to take out her aggression on some poor vegetable. Nohar ignored her as he called the number for Robert Dittrich. It buzzed once, then he got a test pattern as the home comm forwarded the call.
'Budget Surplus, can I help—' Bobby displayed a rapidly growing smile of recognition.
Nohar was happy to see a friendly face. 'Christ, what's going on with you? The Fed is looking for you—'
'I need your help as a prime hacker.' 'You know I never engage in illegal activity—'
Bobby winked. 'Can you help?' 'Come down, we'll talk.'
Stephie's car was out of the question. Everyone—the cops, the Zips, MLI—everyone would know it on sight. Nohar called a cab.
Angel didn't object when Nohar left. She seemed a FORESTS OF THE NIGHT
165
little resentful. Nohar supposed he'd been a little too curt with her, but he had other things on his mind.
The cab that showed up in front of Manny's house was an anachronism. It was a prewar Nissan Tory. The thing was almost as big as the Antaeus, but the huge hood covered batteries and a power plant that took up nearly half the car's volume. Nohar got into the back of the cab before he realized it had a driver. A black human woman, her hair dyed red and strung into dreadlocks, was staring at Nohar with a wide-eyed expression. Nohar decided it had been too much to ask them to send a remote into this neighborhood.
'Shee-it.' She was articulate, too.
'Don't tell me, you've never given a ride to a morey before.'
'Dispatch didn't tell me no—'
Nohar slipped his bank card into the meter and tapped out his ID on the keypad. In addition, he typed in one hell of a tip. He could afford it. 'Well, I didn't tell them. Is there a problem?'
She saw the numbers come up on her display. She spent a few seconds composing herself. 'Sorry Mr. Rajas than, didn't 'spect someone like you 'sail. Where you going?'
Money was a great equalizer.
Budget Surplus was a dirty little marble-fronted warehouse that hugged a nook between—really under—the Main Avenue bridge, and one of the more obnoxious mirror-fronted towers of the West Side office complex. It took more than a little creativity to find the grubby dead-end street that was the only access to the building.
The cab pulled up and Nohar typed in a hundred, on top of the tip. ' 'Will waiting for me be a problem?''
The cabbie shook her head. 'No problem at all. Take your time.'
Nohar stepped out of the yellow Tory and felt like he'd been abandoned at the bottom of a well. One side was the warehouse, one side the black-dirt underside
166
S. ANDREW SWANK
of the bridge, the other two sides flat sheets of concrete forming the foundation of the office building— whose doors would open on more wholesome scenery. When Nohar entered the building, it no longer seemed small. The interior was one huge room. Windows made from dozens of little square panels let in shafts of bright sunlight. Despite the sun, the corners of the building were covered in darkness. Standing in the light, Nohar found the shadows impenetrable. Endless ranks of metal shelving dominated the space, tall enough
to barely give clearance to the slowly rotating fans hanging from the corrugated ceiling.
Nohar heard the slight whine of an electric motor. Then Bobby's wheelchair made a sudden appearance through a gap in the shelving that was invisible from Nohar's vantage point. The shelf Bobby rounded held nothing but oscilloscopes ranging in age from the obsolete to the archaic. Bobby wheeled forward and thrust his hand in Nohar's direction. Nohar clasped it. He released Nohar's hand and maneuvered the chair around. 'Let's talk in my office.'
Nohar followed the chair as it wove its way through the acres of shelving. He smelled the omnipresent odor of old electronics—a combination of static dust, ozone, transformers, and old insulation. Shelves held dead picture tubes, keyboards, voice telephones, spools of cable—optical and otherwise—and rows and rows of nothing but old circuit boards. Mainframes were stacked against the walls like old footlockers filled with chips and wire.
Bobby's office was defined by four shelves that met at right angles with a single gap in one corner that would have been difficult to detect if Nohar wasn't looking for it. The shelves of electronics tended to camouflage themselves, any open space looking over more of the same. The illusion was of endless parallel rows, when the reality—demonstrated by their erratic maneuvering—was anything but. His suspicions of the eccentric layout were con-FORESTS OF THE NIGHT
167
firmed by a rank of four monitors behind Bobby's desk. The monitors were connected to security cameras looking down on the floor. The arrangement of shelves resembled nothing so much as a hedge maze.
Bobby whirred behind his desk—a rusty cabinet trailing optical cable, it had the Sony logo on it—and motioned to a chair that was another chunk of techno-flotsam. Nohar sat down. It was hard to get comfortable, buttons in the armrests dug into his elbows.
'We shouldn't be bothered here. Now you can tell me what's going on.'
Nohar told Bobby what was going on.
An hour later, Bobby leaned back in his wheelchair and shook his head. 'I thought the shit had hit the fan with Nugoya. I guess there's shit, and then there's shit.'
Nohar had almost forgotten about his run-in with Nugoya.
'You picked the right politico to involve in this.' Bobby whirred around the desk toward one of the shelves. The shelf he picked was dominated by a large bell jar-looking thing; it sat on a sleek black box. Nohar recognized the box as an industrial card-reader. 'Even though all politicians are slime.'
'Why the right one?'
Bobby parked himself next to the bell jar, and drew a metal cart from another invisible gap in the shelving. Three different processor boxes rested on the cart. There was an ancient Sony that was held together with duct tape. On top of it was a more compact Tunja 2000, On a shelf, by itself, was a huge homemade box. Frozen rainbows of ribbon-cable snaked from box to box.
'Can't get more right than Binder—' Bobby snickered. 'Hate Binder. Wish you were investigating his absence from the mortal coil.'
'Why?' Nohar could understand Bobby's dislike for Binder. But Nohar had never heard him express a S.
