employer.' The old man stood, more graceful than his age would lead her to believe, and went to a small safe at the back of the room. When he returned, he dropped a small stack of ivory disks on the desk. 'Tokens,' he said, gesturing to the disks. 'Each one will admit one person to the auction. Your employer can contact me directly for more details, if he-or she-wishes.' He said it with distaste. The message was clear; don't send any more shadowrunners.
Mamba picked up the small disks. There were five. She nodded to the old man, but he'd already dismissed her. Mamba bristled, but the odds were still against her… and she did have a job to finish.
She was escorted out of the mansion, back out to the street, the vine-covered gate closing behind her.
It'd been just over an hour since they'd left the Nubian in his room. He was probably awake by now. Or would be soon.
Mamba began walking back to where she left Pharisee.
'Everything's frosty,' the technomancer said. 'I watched through your AR glasses' camera. I can't believe we did it.'
'Stop hacking my commlink,' Mamba retorted. 'And we still have to get these damn tokens back to our employer. Hell, we still have to get out of Lagos. Before Medjay catches us.'
'Oh, is that his name?' Pharisee teased.
Mamba ignored her, her mind already calculating, planning the next move. She was in control again. Catch an okada to the mainland, and from there to the airport. Getting through Lagos without tangling with the Igbo-who were probably still out for her blood-would be challenging. Getting out of Lagos before Medjay found her would likely be even more impossible.
Without realizing it, as she walked down the manicured streets and back to the dangerous blight of the feral city, Black Mamba smiled. Out of civilization; back to her comfort zone.
And towards a good fight.
Dead Names
So far, William H. Keith has published over eighty novels, including military novels, geopolitical spy thrillers, and science fiction, writing under his name and several pseudonyms. As 'H. Jay Riker' he wrote the long-running SEALs: The Warrior Breed. As 'Ian Douglas,' Keith wrote the Heritage, Legacy, and Inheritance military-SF series, following the exploits of the U.S. Marines into the far future. Most recently, he's been writing spy thrillers in collaboration with best-selling author Stephen Coonts. Bill currently lives and writes in the mountains of western Pennsylvania.
I have to say right up front that I didn't believe our Mr. Johnson. I mean, I've seen some freaked-out scat in my time, but this was just too hardwired weird for school.
'What?' I yelped at the guy. 'You're doodoodling me, man, right?'
We were sitting in the High Tox, the bar I'd chosen for the face-to-face. I guess I yelped a bit too loud when I heard what the op was, because I noticed Tony surreptitiously reaching for the scattergun he kept behind the bar. I met his eye, shook my head a little, and he relaxed.
But it was good knowing I had back-up with this bozo. He just meatjackin' couldn't be cruising the Real!
'I'm very serious, Mister, er, Faceman,' my contact said. 'Roger Nakamura is supposedly paying forty million nuyen to Zayid if he can pull this off. My sponsors wish to intercept the… ah… package. At the source.'
I leaned back in my chair and sipped my drink. A banzai boomer, neat, bitter, the way Tony knows I like it. I needed to think this through. The Johnson had to be scamming us, had to have an angle.
The thing is, I'd worked for this Johnson before, and he'd always been a straight burner. He'd been the one who leveraged the Yokahama smartdust deal for us, and that had been pure sugar, a quick in-and-out that netted each of us forty-K nuyens, easy money.
And it had been a while since our merry band had scored. This time, our Mr. Johnson was offering us 200 K. We needed the money, and it wasn't like we could afford to be picky.
The bastard was grinning at me. 'You don't believe me, do you?'
'Truth?' I asked. 'Hell no. I think someone's playing with your head, man.' I didn't add that I was still trying to see how the Johnson might be trying to scam us. This thing just wasn't adding up.
'Ah. But if it's true. If Zayid has found the Gate… think of what it might mean!'
'Look,' I said. 'It's reality-check time, okay? Has anyone told your sponsors that this thing isn't real? It's a freakin' work of fiction, for the gods' sake!'
'That,' Mr. Johnson said, 'is a matter of what you believe, isn't it?'
'Aw, c'mon, Slick! The effing Necronomicon? Get real! Lovecraft was a writer, okay? He invented the thing for his damned stories!'
'And if enough people believe in a thing, Mr. Faceman, it takes on a certain amount of hard-cache reality. You know that.'
Of course I knew that. Everybody since 2011 knew that. But, damn it… this was fiction!
H.P. Lovecraft. The guy was all but unknown when he was alive, a minor horror writer in the pulp magazines of the day. He acquired quite a following in the years after his death, though, spawning a sub-genre all his own, populated by monstrous gods or godlike monsters that cared nothing for humanity save how they were going to eat us for dessert. Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos. Hastur the Unspeakable. Azathoth, the daemon sultan bubbling and blaspheming at the center of infinity. And, of course, Great Cthulhu himself, lying dreaming in sunken R'lyeh.
Jesus. All those stories from the 1920s and '30s, set against a backdrop of hopelessness, nihilism, madness, and despair. God doesn't love you; He's going to squash you like a bug. Or better. God loves you, because you taste great with a little BBQ sauce. Maybe that's why old HP was so popular with the younger set, even now, a century and a half later.
And Lovecraft had invented the Necronomicon as a singular plot McGuffin, an ancient tome of dark magic replete with forbidden knowledge, including the incantations and formulae necessary for calling forth dread Cthulhu and his kind. It was supposed to have been written by Abdul Alhazred, the Mad Arab. Hell, anyone who speaks Arabic ought to get a clue right there. No Arab would ever be named 'Abdul' in real life. That's Western racist ignorance. It means 'slave of-' and needs to have a name tacked on at the end. 'Abdullah,' for instance, 'Slave of God.' Do you understand? Lovecraft made it up… and he got it wrong!
'Let me get this straight,' I said after a moment. 'Nakamura has hired this Arab magician or technomage to open some sort of a gateway to… what did you call it? An alternate reality?'
'Or a parallel dimension, if you like.'
'And this Zayid character is supposed to find an actual, physical copy of the Necronomicon and bring it back.'
'Exactly.'
'And you want us to hijack the book before Zayid passes it on to his boss.'
'Just so. Can you do it?'
'Not if the book doesn't exist!'
'Ah, but it does exist. It must. Don't you see? For 150 years, millions of readers, the fans, the devotees of H.P. Lovecraft, have read those stories, and they have believed. Believed! Did you know that fifty years after Lovecraft's death, libraries at places like Harvard and Oxford were deluged with search requests for that book? Perhaps a dozen works were actually published under that title, adding to the confusion.'
'You… you're saying that because a bunch of losers believed the Necronomicon was real, it is?' I looked him up and down. 'That's just whacked! You been doing too much BTL, man?' I was serious. Folks jazzed on better-than- life sims could pick up some weird delusions, sometimes.
'I assure you I'm completely rational,' Mr. Johnson said. 'And in earnest. Belief is everything. So, will you take the job?'
Belief? Was that all it took to create reality from fiction? Belief?
