James Swallow - Ghost in the Shell - The Official Movie Novelization

Thinking quickly, she went for the high ground. The Major gripped the edge of a wall and, in a few swift motions, she was up atop one of the tiers. Moving fast and low to present a smaller silhouette, she dashed along the top of the structure, still scanning the basin for the shooter. Below her, she caught sight of the gunman’s footfalls in another patch of murky water. He was close.

She nodded to herself. Two could play at this game. The Major ran to the sheer drop at the edge of the tier, throwing herself into the air. In mid-drop, she triggered her own thermoptic camo, turning her into a spectral shape as she landed hard on the ground and crouched low.

She heard his footsteps come to a sudden halt—the gunman could not have missed the sound of her touchdown—and the crunch of his boots as he turned in place.

Even when cerebral cyber-enhancements are hacked to add strength and endurance, a human body has limits. The Skinny Man had reached his. He turned off the thermoptic feature on his rain coat—a cheap unit, it had been sputtering for the length of his run—and looked around.

He pivoted and saw no one, but fired his machine gun again, letting off a sustained, screaming arc of bullets that ripped through the air as he spun. He emptied the remainder of the snail-drum magazine into nothing, until the SMG’s slide locked open and the steaming barrel glowed cherry-red with heat. He stormed forward, looking for a way out of the too-open space.

As if jerked away on an invisible cord, his gun was suddenly whipped out of his hand. It went spinning away to land in the water. From out of the air, or so it seemed, came a lightning-fast series of kicks and punches that cracked him across the face, drawing blood, and struck him across the chest and the back of the legs. He reeled backward, grabbing at nothing, before he fell to his knees and spat out a mouthful of thick, crimson-laced spittle. The Major, her own thermoptic suit engaged, shimmered like clear glass under water. She flipped Skinny Man into the air. He came crashing down onto his face in the shallow seawater.

He cried out in pain, but somehow still kept moving. Pulling a knife from his clothes, he slashed at the air, trying to find the Major. Instead, the Major seized his arm and twisted it, forcing him to drop the knife. She flipped him into the air again, and once more, he landed in the water.

The man was now greatly disoriented from the hack, by the blows delivered by the Major’s hands, and by his skull twice connecting with the concrete under the layer of seawater. The Major grabbed him a third time, dropped him on his feet and resumed hitting him. One punch sent Skinny Man flying back through the air to land a third time face-down in the water.

Like a magic trick, the Major deactivated her thermoptic rig and was revealed, standing over him in full fury with her fists clenched. She struck out at him again in another blistering flurry of body blows and he went down hard, wheezing in pain.

He tried struggling to his feet, but she kicked him and he went down into the water anew. The Major grabbed a fistful of his soaked collar, turned him onto his back and walloped him twice in the face.

She let go of the man, but it was only to catch her breath for a moment. Then she pulled him up by the collar again. “Where’s Kuze?” the Major snarled.

Skinny Man’s head rolled around and he blinked, trying to focus on her. An odd change passed over his face and he flinched, staring wide-eyed at her. Before, his gaze had seemed distant and clouded. Now he was confused and afraid, as if he was a sleepwalker that had just awakened from a trance.

“Why does he want to kill Ouelet?” the Major demanded.

“I… I don’t know anything!”

The Major found this unacceptable. She heard Batou running up behind her, but she ignored his approach. All the conflicted emotion she had held in check earlier now came rocketing out in the form of pure rage. She towered over the cowering man and began punching him in the face until he couldn’t take any more and fell back into the water, on the verge of losing consciousness. The Major started to fish him out so she could hit him again.

Batou ran up behind her and grabbed her before she could inflict more punishment. “Enough!”

The Major glared at him.

“Enough!” Batou repeated. She shoved him but he pushed her back and stated the obvious. “We need him alive.”

The Major stalked away, still furious, and Batou fished the beaten man out of the water.

Secured on a lower level of the ops center, the cube rooms were used for interrogation of high-value targets and the kinds of enhanced criminals that the regular cops were not equipped to handle.

Skinny Man didn’t think he could stand to answer the questions even one more time. “Please… I’ve been through this.” And he had. He’d been here for hours, in a large shatterproof glass box inside an interrogation room. The blank-walled space lacked the classic desk, chair and mirrored window décor that characterized most police interview rooms. Instead, there was just the cube. His arms were restrained by a yellow straitjacket that fastened in front and his quik-ports were wired to an echo box in the ceiling, where a camera-sensor pod was also mounted. His ankles were shackled to each other and those were connected to a zeta-cable that ran from his receptor port to an encryption box mounted on the floor. There was a heavy lock around his neck, one of his eyeballs was bloody, and his feet were bare on the grid floor, which pressed painfully into his soles. Bio-monitors tracked his skin conductivity, pupil dilation, blush response and a hundred other scan vectors, seeking signs of deception—but for the moment, all he appeared to be was terrified and confused.

The woman who had battered him half to death was pacing circles around him, interrogating him over and over.

“You have the wrong guy,” Skinny Man protested, blinking owlishly.

“So tell us who we do have,” the Major rejoined.

“My name is Lee Cunningham.”

“Where’d you get the weapons?” the Major asked.

“I don’t know,” Skinny Man said. The Major’s gaze flicked to the monitor readings, where a digital needle showed very small tremors over the time-base. She frowned. According to the readout, he thought he was telling the truth.

Still, she pressed on. “Who loaded them onto the truck?”

“I don’t know anything about weapons, all right?” Skinny Man exclaimed. “I told you. I was pickin’ up my daughter. She takes violin lessons.”

“What’s her name?”

Skinny Man was exhausted and nervous. It showed in his breathing.

The Major held up a holographic portrait of Skinny Man and showed it to him. “Is this her?”

“Yeah.” The suspect couldn’t even recognize himself, but the most alarming thing was that he thought he was looking at a child. “Isn’t she a little angel?” He beamed at the photo, as if it really did show a little girl he adored.

The Major scanned his face for any sign of mockery. “This is your daughter?” the Major persisted.

“Right,” Skinny Man agreed.

Observing, Togusa drew in a whistling breath of incredulity. The poor guy had lost all connection to reality and didn’t know it.

“Do you have kids?” Skinny Man asked the Major, trying to find common ground.

The Major put the holo-portrait away and began circling again. “Where do you live?”

“I can’t remember,” Skinny Man confessed. “I—I think, I—I think it’s a tall place.” He looked to her for confirmation, stammering in his growing misery. “Is, is it a tall building? It’s a tall place, right?”

The Major skipped over that and went for the throat. “You don’t have a child.” Skinny Man stared at her in shock. “You don’t have a wife,” the Major continued. “You live alone. It’s just you.”