Damon didn’t pause when his opponent went down. He kicked again and again, as hard as he could. He knew that the man’s IT would take care of the damage, but that didn’t figure in his calculations. He was glad of the opportunity to hit back at his persecutors, knowing that this time there would be no gas grenades to interrupt him.

Until he had laid the man unconscious, Damon had not known how much anger and frustration had been pent up in him, but the exhilaration of the whirlwind action had hardly begun the work of purging it. He felt a perverse stab of disappointment when no one else appeared in the alley’s mouth to provide a further challenge.

He knelt down beside his victim and checked the pouches in the man’s beltpack. There was nothing to identify him; like Damon, he was carrying no identifiers save for a gnomic set of unmarked swipecards. Damon picked these up by the edges, wondering whether it might be worth keeping the swipecards to see what might be retrieved electronically therefrom. He knew, though, that if the man werea policeman it wouldn’t be a good idea to be found in possession of stolen goods. In the end, he replaced the cards in the pouch.

Before Damon went on he landed one last gratuitous kick on the side of the stricken man’s head, just in case he deserved it: one which would leave an ugly and very noticeable bruise.

As soon as he had put a safe distance between himself and the alley, Damon went into a clothing store. He bought a new suitskin off the peg and left his own behind in the fitting room, transferring nothing to the new garment except the two swipecards. After leaving the store he booked into a public gym and took another shower, just in case his hair or skin had picked up any stray nanomachines while he had been getting rid of the inconvenient follower. Madoc had always advised him that the cleverest bugs were the ones that infected you afteryou figured that you’d purged them all.

As soon as he was finished in the gym Damon moved away from the busier streets toward ones which were less well-equipped with eyes and ears, taking shortcuts whenever they became available and changing direction five times to make any attempted analysis of his movements virtually impossible. Then he called into a bar so that he could look up Lenny Garon’s address on the customers’ directory terminal.

He thought it best to move once more before getting down to the serious business of the day, so he slipped out into the street again and wandered into a run-down mall which had a row of terminal booths. All of them were empty.

Damon slotted one of the swipecards and immediately set to work, his fingers flying over the keyplate. He knew that he had less than two minutes in which to make his mark, and that he wouldn’t be able to do much more than five minutes’ worth of sabotage—but the evening traffic was already building up and five minutes would be enough to store up a wealth of trouble.

When he emerged from the mall again every traffic signal for at least a kilometer in all directions was on green, and the jams were building up at every intersection.

He’d estimated that five minutes of downtime ought to be enough to snarl up at least twenty thousand vehicles, creating a jam so tight that it would take at least an hour to clear. The pavements were jamming up almost as badly as the gridlocked vehicles, and tempers were soaring in the late afternoon heat with amazing rapidity.

Damon kept on ducking and dodging until he was certain that he was free and clear of all humanly possible pursuit, and then he began the painstaking business of making his way across town to his destination—the destination that had been coded into the flicker affecting his domestic VEs.

That flicker had used a code which he and Madoc Tamlin had worked out seven years before, so that they might exchange information while under observation, using their fingers or any object with which a man might reasonably fidget. It was a crude code, but Damon still remembered every letter of the alphabet.

L-E-N-N-Y, the flicker had spelled out.

There was only one Lenny the signal could possibly refer to, and only one reason why Madoc might want him to visit the Lenny in question. Whether Madoc was with him or not, Lenny Garon had to have the VE pak which Madoc had stolen from under the noses of the LAPD—the one piece of the mirror man’s carefully constructed puzzle which had been prematurely swept from the field of play.

Damon didn’t imagine for a moment that whatever the VE tape had to show him would be any more reliable than the VE tapes of Silas Arnett’s bogus confessions, but just for once he wanted to be a step ahead of all the people who were trying to push him around. Just for once, he wanted to be able to do things hisway—whatever his way turned out to be, when he’d had time to think and time to make a plan.

Damon knew that he had to advise Madoc to turn himself in, but he had told Diana the truth when he said that he might have to go away, perhaps even to rebuild bridges linking him to his estranged family. Everything depended on what Madoc had found out about Silas’s kidnappers and about what had reallyhappened to Surinder Nahal.

Twenty-four

T

he capstack in which Lenny Garon lived was not one of the more elegant applications of gantzing technology—as was only to be expected, given that it dated back to a time before PicoCon had acquired the Gantz patents and begun the synergistic combination of Leon Gantz’s exclusively organic technology with their own inorganic nanotech. In those days, gantzers had looked for models in nature which their trained bacteria might be able to duplicate without too much macrotech assistance, and they had come up with the honeycomb: six-sided cells laid out in rows nested one on top of another.

The pattern had the strength to support tall structures—Lenny’s stack was forty stories high—but the resultant buildings had zigzag edges that looked decidedly untidy. The individual apartments came out like long square tubes with triangular-sectioned spaces behind each sidewall, into which all the supportive apparatus of modern life had to be built. Bathrooms and kitchens tended to be consigned to this inconvenient residuum, so that the square section only needed one dividing wall separating living room and bedroom.

All this might have seemed charming, in a minimalist sort of way, had it not been for the fact that the entire edifice in which Lenny Garon lived had been gantzed out of pale gray concrete rubble and dark gray mud. Beside the more upmarket blocks that had been tastefully decorated in lustrous pigments borrowed from flowering plants or the wing cases of beetles, Lenny’s building looked like a glorified termite mound.

“Thanks for coming, Damon,” Lenny said, anxiously blinking his eyes as he checked the corridor while letting Damon into a capsule that was only slightly more squalid than the rest. “I really appreciate your giving me the benefit of your experience.”

It took Damon a moment or two to realize that the boy was putting on a show for the eyes and ears that even walls as shabby as these must be expected to contain, in case anyone should ever consult them with a view to identifying accessories to a crime. He didn’t bother to add his own line to the silly charade.

“Thanks, Lenny,” Madoc said to the anxious streetfighter, once Damon was safely inside. “Now take a walk, will you. I’ll pay you a couple of hundred in rent, but you’ll have to forget you ever saw us, okay?”

Lenny was evidently disappointed by the abrupt dismissal, but he was appropriately impressed by the notion that he could sublet his apartment by the hour for real money. “Be my guest,” he said—but he dawdled at the door before opening up again. “I hear you’re an enemy of mankind now, Damon. Good going—anything I can do, you only have to ask.”