The girl at the computer sat kneading her forehead with one hand and typing with the other, while she tried to make heads or tails out of the swatches and snatches of ideas on the screen.
A soft plume of cigarette smoke trickled over her shoulder. She saved her scant work and glanced up.
A small dark man stood over her, leaning his scrawny frame against the back of her chair and resting one bony elbow on her shoulder. He took the cigarette from his lips and eyed the screen. He looked at her.
"I thought you said...you were going to finish...MY story?" he drawled with a fake British accent. He smiled sourly at the screen.
The girl tried to shrug his elbow off. "I'm taking a break from it."
"Veerrry strange way to work," he retorted. He slitted his black eyes and scrutinized the screen. "Wait. Isn't this the work of that young wag from...Oh, dash it all! I should never have entrusted MY story into YOUR hands. Now I have this repulsive young monkey to compete with! I'm too old for competition, jade."
"Besides, once I'm woking on this, you'll have a chance to focus on your love life."
The small man snorted and leaned himself against her back. "What love life?"
"The romance you tried to start years ago, with Offra. Remember?"
"She'd rather dwell on memories of Otto."
"Well, those memories DO include the night a young fellow tried to wedge himself between her and Otto. But she's unattached now and the pain of that memory has been replaced with amusement."
He lifted himself off her. "You mean...Offra wants me?" His black eyes warmed with hope.
"Yes, Jake. Now go to her."
"Gladly." He grinned with mixed excitement and delight, and stepped into the darkness...
The girl at the computer drew in a long breath and set to work...
CHAPTER SIX: STOWAWAY
"If the think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy."
--William Gibson, "Johnny Mnemonic"
Whoever said man gets accustomed to anything never stowed away in an airplane baggage compartment, thought the small man huddled between a bin of luggage and a pile of mail sacks in the belly of the plane. The roar from the aft engines half-deafened him and the continuous low whine form the pressurization system made the implant in his head sing. Data couriering brought him a respectable heap of cash, but the drugs to knock out the neuralgia caused by the implant ate up a good chunk of the commision money.
He couldn't know what information his last client had stored on his chips: dyslexia circuits prevented any access unless someone fed him the password. Still, he'd suffered some data leakage in the past.
Client? Huh! That moniker barely fit the crude-looking thugs who'd loaded him with their probably pirated data and sent him on his way. He'd stowed away to avoid being spotted by accomplices or rivals. Or enemies. Who would think to look for a data courier in the baggage compartment of a plane to Belgium? He'd even left a paper trail to suggest he'd flown first class to Chiba City.
Baggage compartment, hmmm...Perhaps my hiding place is a little too obvious, he thought. He was a baggage compartment himself, carrying digital baggage.
* * * * *
"It's not your typical 'someone's-stealing-our-diamonds' sort of crime wave," Adam continued. "It's the sort that is so bizarre it has to be true.
"In the first robbery, the thieves made off with the entire contents of several dozen Zip disks belonging to a wet-ware neurocircuitry designer."
Leah shrugged. "They could have copied them."
"That weasn't all: the thieves rendered the disks unusable by melting them and leaving the melted disks behind as a taunt."
"Probably typical hacker behavior."
"The police doubt these were ordinary hackers. Hackers tend to work more efficiently.
"Next, a manufacturer of bullet-proof glass had his entire collection of glass fruit stolen."
"Glass fruit?!" Leah laughed out loud. Kent, beside her, snorted as if he might awaken, but she forced herself to stop laughing.
"It's as bizarre as it sounds," Adam continued. "But this was no ordinary glass fruit. These were intricately well-molded pieces, utterly one of a kind, made of a new kind of glass."
"What came next? The theft of a shoe-designer's collection of Madagasgarin sandals?"
"No, the inventor of a new, utterly indestructable polymer reported that a tube of goo had been stolen from a safe in his home laboratory."
"Aha! the butler did it!" She said this to keep from laughing again and maybe awakening Kent this time.
"It would be that simple if he had a butler. Only one person had the PIN number for the locking device on the safe and the combination for its inner compartment."
"And the police think these thefts were all done by the same thief or thieves?"
"The scant evidence that they found suggests they were. These were no ordibary thieves."
"So somewhere, some masterminds have a copied collection of Zip disks, a bunch of glass fruit and a tube of goo. Either they're crazy or they have a strange sense of humor."
"I wish it were that simple, Ms. Norton."
She leaned back in her seat and gazed out the window at the sunset again. The gold disk of the sun had slipped into the shadow of a violet cloudbank.
"I wish I had my camera with me," she said, trying to sound nonchalant and detached, anything to not give away her real thoughts. She felt the envelope in her pocket; she had an idea of what kind of criminal steals information, glass fruit and a tube of goo...
* * * * * *
On the bed in a flophouse hotel in the red-light district of Brussels, the stowaway sat crosslegged, poring over a stack of various fake IDs and passports, scanning each name and face...
Cameron Griesinger, age 34: college HTML instructor and web-page designer...Julian Wiest, age 39: interpreter...John Carraway, age 30, aromatherapy consultant...Hank Oldcastle, age 41: newspaper photogprapher... He decided to go with his own persona: Ben Du Pyle, age 35. He hadn't had time to plan his disguises. On top of that, he couldn't think: the couple in the room on the other side of the beaver-board wall of his room was making so much whoopee they might as well have been in the same room.
He selected his ID and put the rest in the false pocket of his coat. Besides, the photo on his real ID looked the most like him. He got up and went to the washroom to clean up. He propped the ID on the ledge of the sink and compared his reflection in the mirror with it: standard issue narrow-faced Caucasian with a bush of black-brown hair brushed back over his skull to cover the jack just visible over his right ear. Mouth aspiring to cynicism, but his almond-shaped dark eyes betrayed a pathos he kept blinking to hide.
He dried his hands on the frayed towel, stuffed his ID into his breast pocket and reached for the pill organizer on the sink ledge. He popped that hour's ration into his mouth and washed them down with water from the faucet.
He retrieved the envelope on which he had jotted his instructions. He checked his watch and cursed. If he didn't scurry, he'd be late to meet with his receiver, a Madame Fremond...
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