somewhere before anyone could use it to track me down.
I shuffled down the sidewalk as fast as I could. Less time on the street, the less packets maybe, but any one packet could be enough.
The door of the shop swung easily and I slipped inside.
Lou's Gear-Up was just that: if you had the money, Lou had the gear. Looked like the Radio Shack when I was a kid. Aisles of stuff, from pods to comms to scanners to spy gear to just about every sort of electronic toy you could imagine. Bright, overhead fluorescents and an above-average security system. Bars over the windows.
I was here a good fifteen minutes earlier than I had told the kidnappers. I had some business to take care of first.
The guy behind the glassed-in counter was nondescript, a nobody. Early middle age, starting to bald, rounding in the belly even faster than I was, his practiced, eager-bland expression offset by a shrewd pair of eyes that looked me over carefully and dismissed me as mostly harmless.
I pulled out a credstick and stuck it under the guy's nose.
'Ten K nuyen. Crank your ECM as high as it'll go.' I didn't care. Wasn't my nuyen. Donna wasn't stupid: her first call had been to Ares Internal Security. I'd asked for a half-dozen 10K credsticks and the AIS chick I worked with didn't even blink as she handed them over.
Naturally, he immediately became suspicious.
'Relax, dude,' I said, 'A guy is going to show up here, we're going to talk a little, then we leave. I just don't want anyone listening in, 'K?'
The little wheels in his head cranked for several seconds before he reached under the counter, came up with a packet of cheap hearing aid batteries and slid them across the counter. The guy was pretty good at this, but not good enough to keep me from seeing him snatch the 10K 'stick from my hand, palm it, and drop a different stick into the cash drawer. Good enough for the security cameras in the store, though.
He rang it up and handed me a paper receipt that showed a purchase of a whole five nuyens. The paper was brown around the edges. Must have been in the machine for a long time. No one used credsticks anymore.
Just old fossils, like me.
The guy smiled and stepped down to the end of the counter, where he tapped on the keyboard of a pretty hefty old deck. Then he nodded at me.
I didn't put a lot of DMSO on that credstick, so the rohypnol would seep into his bloodstream slowly. If I timed this right, the guy wouldn't remember much of anything but, more importantly, wouldn't be inclined to get involved in anything that was about to happen.
With luck, that also wouldn't be much, but why risk any more complications than I already had?
'Where are the personal secretaries?' I asked.
The guy had a sort of dreamy look on his face when he drifted back to my end of the counter and tapped the glass over a half-dozen handhelds on the top shelf.
'Which ones are secure?'
His hand wavered a bit as he pointed out the three at the end. I may have given him a bit more than I'd wanted. I just hoped he wouldn't pass out before the deal was done.
Now, there was a chance that just upping the security on the place was enough to trigger warning flags someplace. A chance, but who knew what sort of skull gear the kidnappers would be walking in with?
Five minutes early, an elf walked into the shop.
Nasty-looking elf. No apparent gear but what did he have in his head? He was alone and, if this was the guy, he was supposed to be alone, at least while we were in the shop. Can't say the purple hair and subcutaneous LEDs were exactly inconspicuous, but he was an elf.
I'd been underground for years. What did I know about fashion?
'You the man?' the elf asked me.
'If you got the kid,' I said, 'I am.'
'Yeah, I got the kid. You got the stuff?'
What this was all about was something that Ares had cooked up in one of their labs, just simple corporate espionage. I give them the files, they give me my grandson. As long as they didn't tweak to the kid being my grandson, things would be just fine and very businesslike.
'Course, I'd get a bonus from Ares if I managed to get the boy back without handing over the files. And another bonus if I found out who this bunch of faeries were working for. Priority was the kid, though. Donna had apparently become pretty important to Ares and their primary interest was to keep her happy, more than anything else.
I stepped to one side and pointed out the three secure secretaries. 'Pick one.'
The elf looked at me like I was crazy. 'Nobody uses that obsolete crap anymore.'
'I do,' I said, tapping the socket behind my ear. 'Couple generations old. You want the data, it goes into the sec. When I get the kid, you get the sec released.' I shrugged. 'No other way to get it out of my head.'
The elf peered at the three units. 'Secure, eh? Double biometrics lock and the whole bit?'
I shrugged. 'Sure. It all still works. That's why they still make them.'
The nice thing about these little secure secretaries is that someone could dissect them but not before they overwrote the data ten or twelve times. The data would be secure enough for the next hour or two, long enough for me to collect the kid and get away, even if everything else went to hell.
Pointing at the Schraeder, the elf straightened up.
I stuck out my lower jaw and nodded. 'Good choice. You know your gear.'
Schraeder was a very minor player in the corporate world, but that meant they had to try harder. Rugged, reliable, and hard to spoof the security features. I waved the guy behind the counter over and indicated the Schraeder. He reached in and handed it over without even asking for payment.
I probably had given him too much of the roofie. Then again, he already had one of Ares' 10K sticks, so what the hey? He could afford to cover the cost of the Schraeder. Long as he didn't pass out on me.
Someone way back in the 20th Century had invented packaging that you could not open without power tools. It was good to see that they'd improved things since then. I nearly tore off a fingernail getting the damn package open.
The rear of the sec had half a dozen interfaces, none of them compatible with my old, old headware. I poked the sec under the slightly-crossed eyes of the counter guy. 'What you got that interfaces to a MD-45?'
He weaved a little but finally a hand rose up and he pointed at a rotating kiosk farther back in the store.
But first.
I rubbed my thumb on the pad I'd glued onto my belt, getting a good dose of ruffie on it. Wouldn't hurt to make the elf relax a bit. Better if he relaxed a lot.
I put my thumb on the biometric pad of the sec and waited for the beep, then handed the unit to the elf.
Secs are pretty standard stuff. Nobody wants to have to relearn a new sec, so they all work alike. Feed the biometric reader, then set up your security.
The elf planted its thumb on the pad and waited for the beep.
I took the unit back. Now I had to stall a bit. It would take a few minutes for the drug to work its way into his system.
Fortunately, I didn't have to pretend that I was having trouble finding the right adapter. I knew there had to be one but damned if I could find it the first time through or the second. I must have turned that kiosk four of five times.
Naturally, the bloody thing was hiding behind a different adapter that someone had hung on the rack in the wrong place. And this one was also wrapped in Impenetrable Plastic.
I always carry my own cable and snapped it to the adapter and felt around behind my ear for the skin pad I had had grafted over the plug to my datalock-quite expensively, if I may say so. Then it was just plug and play.
Like I said, I had been a courier back in the day. Lots of fine storage in my skull, most of it secure in a datalock. All of it obsolete.
Good enough for me, though.
I was just about as obsolete. Tried my damnedest to keep my hands from shaking.
The clock I had started in my head when I got out of the Spirit was starting to get into the yellow zone. I had
