Филип Керр - The Second Angel

Rimmer found the fur. Or rather he found two. He guessed the smaller fur belonged to Tanaka. Sneering with contempt — all those guys in Design tried to model themselves on Dallas — Rimmer quickly pinned the infrared emitter onto Dallas’s lapel, just around where his heart would be.

Rimmer spotted his own coat.

‘Found it,’ he called out to the girl, and removed his coat from its hanger.

Back at the counter, he showed her his tag, and then his identity card. Despite having fetched his coat himself, Rimmer still felt obliged to produce a banknote, although, by the time he’d given it to her, his gratitude had yielded to an amused irritation.

‘What the fuck’s the idea of having that thing around people’s coats? Might give ’em fleas or something.’

‘Don’t you like koalas?’

‘Thought they were extinct. Like everything else.’

‘They nearly are extinct. At least in the wild. That’s why this is the year of the koala bear. I think they’re kind of sweet, although some of their personal habits could do with a little genetic readjustment. I was watching this program on TV that said the babies eat their mother’s excreta.’

‘We all have to eat a bit of shit now and then,’ replied Rimmer.

‘The Huxley is an Australasian-owned chain of hotels,’ she explained huffily. ‘The Darwin-Kobayashi Group of companies. Their hologram is a koala bear.’

Rimmer nodded. He’d heard of Darwin-Kobayashi. Heard they weren’t doing so well. Facing bankruptcy, in fact.

‘Very apposite, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘For a company that’s hanging on by its fingernails.’

Grinning with contempt, Rimmer slipped his coat on and went out into the freezing cold and murderous night air.

Cocooned inside her thermoelectric coat, Demea watched Rimmer emerge from the doorway of the Huxley and then look around expectantly, searching, she imagined, for her. Demea kept herself hidden, hoping the bastard might think that she hadn’t shown up. Let him worry, she thought, and stayed on the opposite side of the street, hidden behind the hologram billboard she was using as a break against the biting northerly wind. What did she care for Rimmer’s nerves? Especially since her own composure seemed for once to have deserted her. She had felt strange all day. There was no point in risking him seeing that. If Rimmer thought for one minute that she wasn’t equal to the task, there was no telling what he might do. Kill her, probably.

As Rimmer finally disappeared into the snowflaked darkness, Demea found herself letting out a breath she’d been unaware of having held for so long. It left her feeling slightly dizzy, and for a brief second she thought she might actually faint. Probably her coat was too hot; reaching into the control pocket, she adjusted the temperature gauge, quite unaware her face was covered in a bright red rash, a sure sign that the virus she was carrying was near to claiming her life.

The dizziness seemed to pass. Demea donned her infrared glasses and switched on the laser-guidance system of the fifteen-millimeter automatic pistol she was holding inside the warm breast of her coat.

She waited ten minutes. And then she saw it. Like the burning red eye of some wild monocular animal, growing larger as the bearer of this modern mark of Cain descended the steps of the hotel entrance and reached the sidewalk.

Although she hardly needed to — the gun was so powerful — Demea crossed the road heading straight toward the target, her arm rising in front of her as if she intended nothing more than to draw the attention of the man, who had stopped to take his leave of a second man coming down the steps behind him. As the gun leveled with the infrared emitter, Demea’s bony white forefinger began to squeeze the trigger.

If he’d been director, Rimmer would probably have done things differently. He’d have ordered Dallas’s wife and child killed — made it look like an accident — and left it at that. It wasn’t that there was any love lost between him and Dallas, but after all, with the child removed from the picture, the man would hardly need to touch his blood reserves. The status quo — with Dallas continuing to design his brilliant Rational Environments for Terotechnology — could carry on as before. Of course, there was always the chance that someone as intelligent as Dallas would find out what had happened and then, in revenge, perform some act of sabotage against the company. No doubt the director had decided that the company couldn’t take that risk. You couldn’t blame him. Where a company as large and successful as Terotechnology was concerned, any risk, no matter how remote, would have been unacceptable.

Rimmer sat in his car outside the building where Dallas and his family lived — at least for a short while longer — in their penthouse apartment. It was one of the city’s prime residential locations and, even by the standards of most healthy people, very expensive. Being so pricey meant that there was a high level of security to protect those who lived there, from those who did not. But by the sophisticated standards of a company like Terotechnology, this was fairly simple stuff — just a bombproof gatehouse with a few armed guards and lot of scanning cameras. Effective nonetheless. The only crimes that happened here were the ones committed by the owners themselves.

Rimmer was sure that getting into the penthouse would be easy enough. Getting in without leaving the digitally recorded evidence of his having been there, however, would require just a little bit more ingenuity. But being head of one of the most security-minded companies in the world meant that there was a lot of ingenious technology at Rimmer’s disposal.

First he called the penthouse on a one-time cardphone — you just used it and then threw the thing away. Completely untraceable. It was the Russian maid who picked up the call.

‘The name’s Rawnsley, from Terotechnology,’ he said. ‘Is Mrs. Dallas at home?’

He waited a few seconds while the maid fetched her mistress. Aria Dallas looked worried. Even on the tiny screen of Rimmer’s cardphone. They were a close family, that much was obvious.

‘Good evening, Mrs. Dallas. Remember me? The name’s Rawnsley.’

‘Yes, I think I do,’ she said, uncertainly. ‘Is something the matter?’

‘I’m right outside your building,’ said Rimmer. ‘Look, I’m sorry to alarm you, but perhaps it would be better if I came in.’

‘Oh God, has something happened to Dallas?’

‘There’s been an incident at the company, Mrs. Dallas. Your husband’s fine, but for security reasons I’m obliged to check out a couple of things with you personally. Look, if you don’t mind, I’d prefer to talk about this in person instead of on an open phone. I’m sure you understand.’

‘Of course. I’ll call the guards in the lobby and tell them to let you in.’

‘Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.’

Rimmer crushed the cardphone in his hand and threw it out of his car window. Then he fixed a baseball hat on his head. He hated wearing hats even more than he hated the game, but the reflective metal logo on the front of the cap was in reality a stroboscopic light. Operating beyond the limits of the human visual spectrum, at around eight thousand angstrom units, the asynchronous bursts of light it gave off — at rates of over two thousand per minute — were enough to produce a strobo plane of around twenty inches in diameter immediately in front of the false logo. The building’s scanning cameras operated at a much slower frequency. The effect of the strobo plane was to leave gaps during which Rimmer’s face would simply vanish from sight. He would be effectively rendered invisible to all eyes except human ones.