Damon figured that there’d be plenty of time for discussion once he and Madoc had the two men safely under control in Lenny’s capsule, so he didn’t stop. He slashed at the man’s throat exactly as he had done before, and made some sort of connection before something slammed into his back and pitched him forward onto his knees.

His instinct was to lash out backward, on the assumption that someone had charged into him, but there was no one there—and the pain in his back grew and grew with explosive rapidity, giving him just time to realize that he had been shot yet again: hit by some kind of dart whose poison was making merry hell with his nervous system. His IT was undoubtedly fighting the effect, and the pain soon slackened to crawling discomfort—but he didn’t lose consciousness. His rigid body hit the ground with a sickening thud, but the dart hadn’t been loaded with the kind of poison that would force his senses to switch off.

As the two men snatched him up and scuttled toward the stairs, though, he began to wish that it had.

Twenty-five

D

amon never did lose consciousness, but the consciousness he kept had little in reserve for keeping track of what was happening to his paralyzed body. He knew that he had been loaded into the back of a car which roared off at high speed, and he knew that when the car eventually stopped he was taken out again and bundled into a helicopter—but the only part of the journey that really commandedhis attention was the time they tried to force his paralyzed limbs into a different configuration so that they could strap him into one of the helicopter’s seats. He heard a great deal more than he saw, but most of what he heard was curses and oblique complaints from which he wouldn’t have learned anything worth a damn even if he’d been able to concentrate.

What he wasconscious of, to the expense of almost everything else, was the battle inside his body for control of his neurones. He knew that the sensation of being occupied by hundreds of thousands of ants burrowing their way through his tissues wasn’t reallythe movement of his nanomachines, but it was hard to imagine it any other way. It wasn’t especially painful, but it was severely discomfiting, both psychologically and physically. He was reasonably certain that he would come through it safely and sanely, but it was an ordeal nevertheless.

Damon found a little time to wonder whether the two hit men—which was what they presumably were, given that they certainly didn’t seem to be cops—knew what effect the weapons they carried might have on moderately IT-rich victims, and whether they cared, but it wasn’t until he began to recover fully possession of himself that he was able to pay close attention to their conversation. By that time, the thrum of the helicopter’s rotors had bludgeoned them into taciturnity—a taciturnity that might have lasted until they landed had not the man he’d ambushed in the alley noticed that Damon was recovering from the effects of the shot. That was enough to restart the catalogue of complaints; his luckless pursuer obviously had a lot of grievances to air.

“You’ve got a real problem, you know that?” the tall man said. “You hear me? A real problem.”

Damon fought for the composure necessary to move his head from side to side and blink his eyes. When he eventually succeeded in clearing his blurred vision, he was surprised to see that the bruise on the man’s face was in better condition than it had any right to be. Somewhere along the line, he’d slapped some synthetic skin over it to provide his resident nanotech with an extra resource. The expression surrounding the bruise was one of whiney resentment.

Damon was sitting in a seat directly behind the helicopter’s pilot. The shorter man who’d come to Madoc’s apartment with the man with the fading bruise was sitting beside the pilot; the copter only had the four seats. Reflexively, Damon moved his reluctant hand toward the lock on his safety harness, but the tall man reached out to stop him.

“Careful!” he said. “You got me in enough trouble as it is. Anything else happens to you, I’ll be out of a job for sure. Pleasesit tight. None of this was supposed to happen. If you’d just given me time to talk. . . like I said, you got a real problem, lashing out like that all the time. It’s crazy!”

Damon felt an impulse to laugh, but he wasn’t yet in any shape to act on it. He tried to edge sideways so that he could look out of the porthole beside his seat, but the effort proved too much. Beyond the pilot, though, he could see dark green slopes and snow-capped peaks as well as sky. He thought he recognized Cobblestone Mountain directly ahead of the copter’s course, although it was difficult to believe that they’d come so far in what had not seemed to be a long time.

“It isn’t funny,” the tall man complained, having deciphered the attempted laugh. “I guess I might have asked for it, the first time, waiting till you were in the alley before I tried to catch up and not realizing you’d gone in there to jump me—but what was all that stuff at the kid’s apartment? We toldyou we weren’t the police. Stupid kid could have got himself badly hurt.”

By the time this speech was finished Damon had got his head far enough up to take a peep through the porthole, but it didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know. They were in the hills, heading for the Sespe Wilderness.

“What happened to Madoc?” Damon asked weakly.

“We left him laid out on the kid’s bed, with the VE pak cradled in his arms. The police will have them both by now—and don’t blame us for having to do it that way. All we wanted was to get the tape to where it was always supposed to go. We would have let Tamlin go his own way if you hadn’t practically started a war. The kid’s in hospital again, but he’ll be okay. You’ll have to talk to him about his attitude—he doesn’t have the IT for that kind of action.”

“You didn’t know I was there, did you?” Damon whispered, just to make sure. “I thoughtI left you in no shape to follow me.”

“Damn right. Dirty trick, kicking a guy in the head when he’s down. When I woke up I had to get new instructions. I was told to go get the tape, so that we could deliver it to Interpol, just as we intended when we left it with the burned-out body. You really are a nuisance, you know that? Thanks to you, I am having the worst day of my life. All I wanted to do was talkto you—and now you’ve reallymessed things up.”

“You followed me into the alley because you wanted to talk to me?”

“Sure. Once you’d got rid of Yamanaka’s bugs my employers figured it was safe to have a private word. You could have had it in town and been free and clear by dinnertime, if you hadn’t taken it into your fool head to start a shooting match in a public corridor.”

“ Youstarted a shooting match,” Damon pointed out. “Lenny only started a brawl.”

“Either way,” the tall man said in an aggrieved tone, “the cops will have dug out every bug in the walls by now and run the tapes. Your face, my face . . . and the face of my colleague here, who had no option but to pull his gun before your friend carved him up. All you had to do was let us in, but you had to wade in and we had to defend ourselves any way we could. Violence escalates—and now we’re allin Yamanaka’s file. You could have cost us our jobs.”

“How sad,” Damon muttered. “Who exactly isyour employer?”

“I can’t answer that,” the tall man complained. “All I wanted was a quiet word, and now I’m up for kidnapping. They have my face. They never got my face before, but who knows what’ll happen now? I could be in real trouble.”