"Give me your number and I’ll have Mr. McKenzie get back to you when it's convenient," the woman said, her voice as prim as her pinched expression on the telecom screen.

"No," Skater replied. "I'll get back to you so you can give me a number where I can reach him. I wait more than ten minutes and you can tell him it's no longer convenient for me." He broke the connection and looked around the group. Archangel was at her deck, managing the relocate and deception programs that would mask the telecom's signature through the regional telecommunications grids. Wheeler was monitoring the feedback, ready to cut off the power if something nasty started whispering up the lines at them.

At the end of ten minutes, he called the LTG number McKenzie had left again.

"Do you have that number?" he asked without preamble.

"Yes." She read it off and didn't look or sound happy about doing it.

"Slotting high-headed bastard," she said. Abruptly the line clicked dead at the other end.

Skater listened intently to discern any other noises that might suggest someone or something else was on the line. There was nothing. A few seconds later white noise filled his ear. He glanced at Wheeler.

"We're green."

Skater punched in the number and waited to play it out. Conrad McKenzie was no lightweight on the Seattle crime scene. As brutal as he was cold-blooded, he'd carved a grim empire out for himself and his Family. Duran had added to their store of knowledge, recounting the time McKenzie had killed a yak opponent who'd been trying to muscle into a territory McKenzie had operated when younger. McKenzie had found out everything he could about the man, then tracked down his family and slaughtered them. Then he'd crippled the yak himself, destroying bone joints that took months to rebuild and burning the man with a blowtorch so he had to spend more months in tissue vats. At the end of that time, when the yak was almost recovered enough to walk by himself, McKenzie had him murdered outright. The message was clear. Animosity between the Mafia and yaks in Seattle ran deep and strong, but McKenzie apparently wanted to prove he wasn't a man to slot over.

Elvis had overheard some street buzz that McKenzie was semi-retired of late, having set himself up in a kind of judiciary position, settling disputes between lesser crime bosses. If McKenzie had dealt himself a hand in the freighter deal, the stakes were scraping the ozone.

"Skater?" The voice that answered was deep and whiskey-roughened, devoid of feeling.

"Run it down for me," Skater said. "The clock's ticking and I'm not going to stay on the line long enough for you to trace the call."

McKenzie laughed, a harsh sound. "I've been contacted by a certain party who would like to buy back the goods you liberated from them. I have no interest. I'm merely the go-between."

"Why would they come to you?" Skater asked.

"Because I have a reputation in this city as a man who can deliver what I promise. They are without many resources here in Seattle. I, however, am not."

"And you're doing this out of the goodness of your heart."

"Wrong." McKenzie seemed not to notice the sarcasm.

"I'm in this for a percentage, which I intend to collect from you and the elves."

"If you're doing the brokering," Skater pointed out, "you should take your cut from them."

"I am. But I'm nicking you for another ten percent they don't know about."

"No."

"No?" The harsh laugh sounded again. "Listen, nitbrain, you don't have a lot of choices at the moment."

"I don't have to sell the files to the elves."

"I guess not. You could hang on to them and keep running till they catch you. And they will, I promise you that, because we've already negotiated a finder's fee if I have to help them. You scan?"

"We've made it this far."

"You've been lucky so far, that's all. And the trouble with luck is that it runs out. You've got the elves after you, the yakuza, Lone Star, and from what I hear, some other small time losers. Do you really want to add me to the list?"

"Maybe you're already there," Skater said.

"I was there," McKenzie promised, "I'd be pissing on your corpse right now."

"How much are the elves offering?"

"Three million nuyen."

"Bump them," Skater said. "Double it."

"Done." McKenzie sounded happy. "I don't mind taking twenty percent of six million nuyen instead of three. They may balk, but they don't really have a choice. My finder's fee would run them more than that. You might have jam enough to stay out of my people's hands for a few days more, but don't count on more than that"

Skater didn't argue.

"But for a percentage both ways," McKenzie said, "and zero sweat involved, I'm willing to be a go-between."

"Why should I believe that you could leverage the elves off me and my team once the deal goes down?"

"You shouldn't," McKenzie said. "Get your nuyen up front and start running like hell."

"Doesn't sound all that enticing."

"Do you have any options here? I was you, that's the way I'd handle it. Face it, you're in way over your heads. And the drek's just getting deeper. I'm offering you a way out."

Skater ignored the comment, trying to regain some momentum of his own in the conversation. Time was running out. "How'd you get my drop number?"

"Let that be a lesson to you," McKenzie said. "I know more about you than you think. So, do we have a deal?"

"I'll call you," Skater replied, "and let you know."

McKenzie gave a dry chuckle. "You've got cojones. I’ll give you that. And you better call me soon. Skater, or don't bother." The connection broke, becoming a steady buzz of static.

"Doesn't sound like he gives a good slot one way or the other," Wheeler commented.

"No, he doesn't." The man left Skater with a chill and a tightness in his stomach that wasn't going to go away. He felt like he was being asked to stick his head into the mouth of a dragon.

"I don't know enough of the science involved to tell if it's a design for a virus," Archangel said. "I got into the files with a couple of homegrown decode utilities I got from a chummer. I've never tried anything like this before, but he said he uses them to reconstruct scrambled files from crashed disks. By cracking the IC with a high-octane deception program that makes me act like a System Access Node and challenges the files as they follow the sleazes, they identify themselves long enough for my browser to log on and reassemble the bits and pieces I get."

Skater was hunkered down beside her, staring hard at the confusion of chemical symbols and esoteric terms that had surfaced from the files they'd taken off the elven freighter. The rest of the team ringed them. With the turn of events, sleep was no longer an option.

"Whatever it really is," Archangel said, "it's a hybrid."

Another image surfaced on the monitor, showing a stylish though modest building deep in the heart of a metropolitan area that had seen better days.

"Portland," Elvis said. "I've done some biz there. Back when the place was a boom town."

"These are the corporate headquarters of NuGene," Arch¬angel told them. "Their primary field of interest, as we've already seen, is in biomed research and development."

"What type of biotech?" Wheeler asked.

"Well," Archangel said over her shoulder, "they started out developing biomed facilities, but after 2052 turned strictly R amp;D. They haven't come out with any major commercial products yet, but basically they specialize in wetware-transplants, gene therapy, tissue tech, and regeneration. Repairing cellular damage. Mostly muscle tissue, tendons. Ultimately, they'd like to induce damaged tissue to renew itself organically." Archangel turned back to the screen. "But no one knows what they've accomplished. They've operated solely in the Tir, never gone beyond its borders."