Cybernation

Overhead, lasers flickered through clouds of colored smoke, and the slogan CYBERNATION — WE CAN TAKE YOU ANYWHERE YOU WANT TO GO!” appeared superimposed over the dancers, with the sign-up URL under it.

The scene froze. “That’s the intro. What do you think?” the tech asked.

“Not bad,” Chance said. “But dial down the volume on the music a hair, and when we get the slogan super, I want a wah-wah sting that echoes the bass line. And see if we can vibrate the words a little. Who is doing the voice-over?”

“Foghorn Franklin.”

“Good. He’s perfect. What happens from here?”

“We’re still working on the wire-frame dinosaur stuff, and the space aliens, but we’ve got the harem sequence and the shopping at Harrods almost done. The wire-frame’ll be ready for texture in a couple of days.”

Chance nodded and turned away from the Avid. She glanced at her watch. She hadn’t heard from Roberto yet. She wondered how he was doing.

He was probably doing just fine. She worried too much about the details, she knew that. It was hard to trust people to do what you told them to do, and with good reason. Once upon a time, she had been a corporate manager, on the fast track to the vice presidency of a Fortune Five Hundred company. She’d been making good money, had been well-respected, and had been kicking ass and taking names, but she’d had to quit. People kept screwing up, doing things differently than she’d told them, and it drove her up the wall. The idea of being a decent manager was: You hired good workers and turned them loose, and they didn’t call until the job was done, except if they had problems. The reality of it was: You inherited a lot of deadwood in whatever department you took over, and it was a while until you could figure out who worked and who shuffled papers and pretended to work. Yeah, once you got the lay of the land, you could fire the lazy ones, but then you had to spend time looking for somebody new, and that was always the devil-you-knew-versus-the-devil-you-didn’t. You’d read this great resume, the guy would show up and give a good interview, and as soon as he got the job, he’d turn into a brain-dead lame donkey you couldn’t move with a flaming two-by-four shoved up his butt. Half the time you couldn’t lop off the deadwood in the first place because they’d sue for one kind of discrimination or another — gender, age, race, whatever. You could catch somebody stealing the petty cash, flashing old ladies in the subway, or snorting cocaine in the lunchroom and it wasn’t enough to get rid of them if they had the right leverage.

And office politics? Stupid bosses who’d Peter Principled out? Backstabbing coworkers?

Don’t even hike those trails…

Chance smiled at the memory. Being in charge of most places was no picnic in the park. The reason she had taken this job was that they let her start from scratch, hire anybody she wanted, and she could get rid of anybody who worked for her with two words: You’re gone! There was no appeal. She didn’t have to answer to anybody except the Board, and as long as she met the goals of the business plan — which she herself produced — nobody cared how she got it done. She couldn’t imagine a better job.

Roberto was good, and she should trust him to do what was needed, but she was still too hands-on. She still worried every time her neck was essentially in somebody else’s hands. She’d have to work on that. She needed to relax—’Berto was the best she’d ever found at his kind of work.

But if he didn’t call in the next hour or two, she was going to be bent out of shape.

San Rafael, California

Killing the three was the easy part. After he had gotten everything from Dowling he wanted, and a whole lot he hadn’t cared about, he very carefully choked the man out, using the special hold he’d learned from a Vale Tudo jujitsu fighter in Brazil. Enough so the guy was unconscious, but not so he’d die. Then he had retrieved the bodyguards one at a time, choked them out, and put everybody into the limo. He’d driven to the spot, only half a mile away, choked them all again to make certain they were out. Then he accelerated toward the guardrail overlooking an eight-hundred-foot drop-off, and locked the car’s brakes in a hard skid that stopped right at the edge of the pavement.

He backed it up a few yards. Then he repositioned one of the unconscious guards in the driver’s seat and strapped him in with the seat belt. He jammed the guy’s shoe into the side of the accelerator, and the engine roared. He shut the door, reached in through the window, and shifted the automatic transmission lever into drive.

The car lurched forward and gathered speed. It hit the rail with plenty of momentum, punched through, and rolled out over the long drop-off.

It made a lot of noise going down, tumbled and flipped several times. Santos was able to follow the car’s fall most of the way, until the car’s lights went out, probably because the battery had been knocked loose.

Adios, amigos.

It was not totally foolproof, but nobody would have any reason to look past the obvious: The driver for a corporate vice president, on the way home in the dark on a mountain road, had seen a deer or coyote or some other animal, slammed on his brakes, and too bad, had skidded right off the cliff. Yes, a trained accident investigator might notice that the safety railing was perhaps not damaged as much as a high-speed impact would warrant. But a California Highway Patrol officer would see skid marks that matched the limo’s tires, indicating that he had tried to stop. The men would have died from injuries sustained in the wreck, and there would be no sign of drugs or other injuries that could not have come from the impact, Santos had made certain of that.

Accidents happened. A real CHP officer with any time on the job would likely have seen a dozen incidents just like this, and if that was what you were looking for, then that was what you would see. There would be no reason to think anything else.

Maybe the insurance company would send an expert out to check on things. Even so, such an investigation would take time, measurements had to be made, tests run, reports written, and even then, a conclusion would not be certain.

So, Mr. Acidente Experto, why is it you think this was not an accident?

Well, the guardrail did not show damage consistent with a high-speed impact.

Perhaps the metal in this rail came from a particularly strong batch?

Not according to my tests.

Yes, but — how do you know how fast the car was going when it struck the guardrail, eh?

The length of the skid marks is indicative of substantial velocity.

Ah, but putting on the brakes slowed the automobile down, no? Perhaps enough so that the impact was considerably lessened? Is this not possible?

Yes, it is possible…

As he hiked back toward where he had a hidden car waiting — one with license plates he had swapped with a car in the long-term parking lot of the aeroporto in San Francisco — Santos smiled to himself. If, a week or a month from now, the authorities did somehow become convinced that the limo’s destruction had not been an accident, that would not matter. By then, the information he had been sent to collect would have been used. How? He didn’t really know or care, that was not his problem. He had been sent to get it, he had gotten it, end of story. There was no way to tie him to the incident in any case. He had bought the car under a false name. Nobody knew him here, and nobody who might have seen him would know who he was or where he had gone. He was just another black man, and they all looked alike to whites, no?

He would call Jasmine when he got back to San Francisco, using a disposable mobile phone. A short message telling her answering service the job was complete. That would make her feel better. Missy was wound too tight. The only time she loosened up was in bed, and even then, she never let everything go; there was always a part of her still in control. He intended to get past that eventually. Bring her to pure animal pleasure, no mind left, just howling and quivering in ecstasy. It might take a while, but he didn’t mind — getting there would be half the fun.

And once he had her there, she would be his slave. Then he would dump her and find another. The world was full of women.