2
ISS Commander Sphere Monk looked down from the balcony of a swank Chi- Town apartment at the sprawling Grey blanket of the Burbs and thought: My God, what a hellhole.
The apartment wasn't his. He had come across a Coalition army general stumbling drunk in the Chi-town pub halls, glittery HAPPY NEW YEAR tiara on top of his black dress cap, harassing some society wife on the way home from a party. Monk was going to let it go, until the general exposed himself and Monk recognized the opportunity. He corralled the inebriated brass and got him to zip up, stand still, be quiet. He gave the woman a hundred to shut the hell up about the whole thing, hustled the general out of there. The woman was pretty drunk herself, and Monk was sure she'd have forgotten the incident with or without his intervention.
He steered the man home-to this apartment-and put him to bed, burbling like a toddler, in a huge hand-carved four-poster that must have cost thousands. Monk had been in the army, and he knew the type: lion on the battlefield, baby in the barroom. The general had the piercing, queasy smell of synthetic gin sweating out of every pore, and Monk stopped short of undressing him, dumped him under the covers in full uniform, buttons and death-heads clanking dully, one chromed epaulet flapping undone. From the pictures in the hall, it looked as if the man had a wife and two kids, one boy one girl. The wife wasn't home-at least not in bed. Still out tying one on, Monk guessed.
Monk vaguely knew the general-Canis was the name, if he remembered correctly-although he had never served under him. He mentally inscribed the man's name in the credit column of his favors ledger. Might be useful some day, if the man didn't get decommissioned for drunkenness in the meantime.
Monk checked the place out. Quick sweep of cabinets and drawers. The general lived big. It was the kind of apartment that you see in holo-movies all the time but that no one has in real life. Big rooms, big windows, beautiful paintings, expensive furniture, balcony, full fridge, good beer. The apartment of a man with pull, with status. A man who could snap his fingers and get things done. It was a far cry from Monk's plain, modest quarters several levels down-not that he spent much time at home anyway. Monk saw that the general had some contraband books and vids, but not enough to make a fuss over. All the brass had them anyway.
While Monk was admiring the place, the general's daughter woke up and peeped him from the doorcrack. A minute later, she came swooning out of her room, greeted him in flimsy pajamas, sheer, a size too small and half unbuttoned. Didn't even ask who he was. Tried to pull a Holo-wood low-lita routine on him. Sprawling on the couch with a tub of ice cream, licking vanilla swirl from her fingers for breakfast, pajama top flapping nonchalantly open as if she didn't even notice. Pouting. Asked if he had a girlfriend, a wife, a big gun. She looked sixteen, at most.
Monk was repulsed. Her attempts at seduction would have been laughable if they weren't so earnest. The girl was nothing like Paulina.
The general's daughter was still plain looking despite the best efforts of a half-dozen Chi-Town stylists, hairdressers, manicurists and body- sculptors; still sheathed in a childish covering of baby fat-a good, balanced diet and no shortage of food. None of the leanness or wiriness that would let her pass as anything other than what she was: a stupid, overgrown child.
Like all kids raised in Chi-Town, like sheltered kids anywhere, she stayed young a lot longer than the kids in the dirty alleys. Physically, she could appeal only to a pedophile.
But that was only half of it. It was the eyes. This girl had the dull bovine eyes of someone who watches too much holovision and believes everything she reads in magazines. The eyes of a person who's never had to make a hard decision in her life, never been beaten or kicked, never been abandoned, never had to sleep in the rain, never wished she was too proud to beg, never felt too hungry to be proud; looking down on the Burbs from her ivory perch, believing that life in the gutter could be exciting instead of sad. Ready to pimp herself for thrills instead of survival.
In Monk's book, that made her more of a whore than any diseased alley- crawler in Tent Town.
She was nothing like those girls down there in the Burbs. Nothing like Paulina. Who he had fallen in love with, whose life was in his hands, who had brought him back to life by giving him a reason to live. Nothing.
The general's daughter was an altogether different animal. She was rich, she was spoiled, she was trouble. There was no question about that. Monk took one last look over the balcony, one last look around the apartment-the kind of apartment he would have someday-and he took off without even so much as looking at the whining brat on the couch, desperately trying to be nonchalant about letting her pajamas slip to the floor.
Monk thought about Paulina, and if she had had enough to eat last night.
* * *
Sphere Monk had had a loving family, once. At least, he thought he did. His wife, Katherine, had seemed to love him. They'd been married for ten years now, going on eleven. She had been his high-school sweetheart. They'd sit around sipping Psi Cola, talking about running away together, imagining what their kids would look like, trying out names for girl babies and boy babies. They put the relationship on hold when he went into the army and she got busy building a career as a computer scientist studying the dynamics of emotion-emulation in robotic constructs. He did two four- year tours, back to back; scouting out by the Magic Zone, real dangerous stuff.
One Christmas, Katherine designed a tiny feline bot that sought out Sphere in the field barracks. When it found him, around Easter, it relayed a message: "Sphere Monk, you are the rest of my life. Come back soon. Love, Katherine," and exploded in two to reveal an inner cache of flowers, long dead from dehydration and lack of sunlight.
Monk took shrapnel in his hip and lungs saving two special-ops commandos; lost an eye and some cheekbone to a werewolf (replaced for free by his military health plan); came back to Chi-Town a decorated hero. Thirty-nine confirmed kills. When he got out of the service he settled down, joined ISS. Katherine became an eminent and well-paid mind in her field.
He and Katherine got married. She had waited for him and had hardly even spoken to other men. He had never thought about other women. There was just the two of them in the world and that was it. They talked about kids like it was all they had ever thought about, and it was. She wanted boys, he wanted girls. They both wanted a lot.
Their time together had been happy enough. Katherine worked in the private sector and made six times what Sphere did, and they lived extravagantly. There had been one child, in their fourth year of marriage. It had been born with a massive and irreparable coronary defect, and it died when it was only three days old, wheezing and blue in a tiny incubator unit at Chi- Town General. Sphere and Katherine cried for a week.
The Coalition docs said that the defect had come from Sphere, from his side of the equation. Katherine's DNA was superb, she was perfect breeding stock. She would have made a good mother.but not with him. They fixed the one gene of Monk's that had caused the total malformation of the baby's cardio-pulmonary system, but advised him to refrain from having further children.
"It's a mess in there," the gene doc said, tapping the hieroglyphic morse code of his DNA profile. "It won't be a heart defect next time, but it could be almost anything else. Cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, leukemia, severe diabetes, gross physical deformity, psionics. You're a genetic minefield. Must've had some bad radiation growing up. The odds of you having a normal child are at best a hundred to one. You should think about getting a vasectomy."
He was crushed. Katherine was crushed. No children. Not now, not ever. They thought about adoption. Neither of them wanted that. They stopped talking about adoption. They stopped talking about their future together. They just stopped.
Monk asked her to divorce him, begged her to find another man. Katherine looked through him as if he were a phantom. He pleaded with her, remorseful then angry, then insistent then tender. Katherine held up her hand as if her wedding ring were a great weight. She said, "Sphere Monk, you are the rest of my life."
Monk found he couldn't divorce her, either.
One day Monk came home late from a double shift and found an infant's head on the kitchen table, next to the day's mail and a cup of cold tea. It smiled and seemed happy to see him. He screamed without sound, as in a dream. He knew the face. The eyes, the hair, the cheekbones, everything. It was him from his baby pictures. Its toothless gums worked delightedly as it cooed.
Monk fell bloodless against the doorjamb. Katherine walked into the room, flushed glowing cheeks and blue eyes lit up with motherly happiness. Under her arm she clutched a headless infant torso, working some sort of tool or probe into the vacant neck, into the blinking lights and wiry servos and data ports bristling under a caul of plasti-flesh. She saw Monk's face and her smile evaporated. Monk stared horror into her eyes.
"What?"
Monk couldn't stop his hands trembling, his lungs moaning. He looked at Katherine.
"Sphere, I built it," she said pleadingly.
Monk launched forward and punched his wife in the mouth. She reeled across the room. Blood flew from her lips and nose and she dropped the kicking torso which landed with the distinctly muffled slap of baby fat on linoleum. Katherine fell on the carpet at the foot of the glass bookcase. The baby head on the table started crying.
Katherine refused to move or get up. She lay on her side, stone- faced, staring at the leg of a dining-room chair. The shrieks of the disembodied head on the table ratcheted up in volume. Monk went out and closed the door behind him. He went to a bar and drank until he woke up in a Burbs movie theater rest room under a dried pasty sheet of his own vomit. He did not remember how he got there.
Monk started staying away from home. He worked two, three, four shifts in a row. Volunteer for work whenever and wherever it was offered. He'd take anything: ISS police cases, temporary military commissions, private detective jobs for old army buddies. He'd sit around and write reports just for the hell of it. Anything to keep from going home. He'd be away from Katherine for days at a time, sleeping in the station, sleeping on undercover assignment, sleeping in APCs out in the field. He became known for his diligence and hard work. His superiors called him "a born Specter." He began to see promotions and medals handed his way. He got congratulatory postcards and phone calls from important people that he'd never met. Without any real ambition, without caring, he began to move up the ladder.
Katherine quit her job. Their collective income plummeted. They moved into an apartment small enough for them to pay the bills and save a little on Sphere's salary alone. Katherine experimented with religion, therapy, drunkenness, drug addiction, yoga, karate, the clarinet and finally with other men.
Everybody knew it. It was all over the department. Sphere became the subject of bartender gossip and locker room jokes: How many ISS Specters does it take to screw in a lightbulb? One. Just Sphere Monk. All the rest are too busy screwing his wife.
The fall came fast. Sphere, too far gone to be hurt by any of it. Barely noticed. Drunk, starting to slip. Logging eighty-nine hours of on-duty per week. Barely slept. Drunk all the time. Looking ragged. Passed some internal line and kept going. Showed up drunk in civvies at the commencement of academy graduation. Tried to make a speech. Made a scene.
It didn't take long for word to get around: Sphere Monk is all washed up.
Private pain, then public scandal. Promotions, citations and congratulations all stopped. Upper-echelon department heads and politicians shied away from Sphere as it became evident his personal life was a mess and, worse, he was unable or unwilling to keep his mess private.
Then Katherine fell in love. When it happened, it was with someone that Sphere hardly knew-a two-bit ISS Specter from the other side of the Chi- Town honeycomb, a vicious bull-shouldered scumbag named Sonny Blount who was open-secret on the take, a hustler with a badge. A real idiot, too, according to popular opinion in the department. All brawn, no brain. The guy was a monster. He was mean and he was violent and he didn't give a shit about anybody but himself. He was great at getting confessions.
And he absolutely hated the department's honest, once-dependable workhorse and decorated war hero named Sphere William Evans Monk.
Katherine fell for him, hard.
They began seeing one another. Blount's name soon was implicated in illegal arms shipments to rebel groups. Unlicensed psychics, juicers, magic-users, historians. Real bad people. Blount claimed he was being framed, but the investigating officer-ISS Specter Sphere Monk-had evidence. He had him cold.
Blount's connections in the department could have saved him; they had before. They could have had the whole thing swept under the rug, buried, but Monk made sure Blount couldn't dodge the bullet. Monk may have become a mess, but his reputation was still good for at least that much. Even a war hero disgraced has some pull. And he was a good Specter. He wrote the indictment so that no one could help Blount without dirtying themselves in the process.
Monk had Blount bounced off the force for good. He tried to fit him in a capital case, treason, hoping for the death penalty, but it wouldn't stick. At no time during the trial was the personal connection between the two men revealed.
After the hearing, they spoke face to face for the first time, bumping into each other in a courthouse restroom, Blount's bulk towering over Monk's lean, scrappy frame. Blount in expensive designer civvies, Monk in full Coalition ISS dress uniform, unshaved and bleary-eyed.
"Disappointed?" said Blount.
His hate was razor sharp, Monk forced himself formal: "You're a disgrace to the uniform. You got off easy. If I see you again, I'll run you in and have the Psi's give you the third degree."
"She hates your guts, you know. That ain't any of my doing. You think it is, but you better look in the mirror if you want to know why she's going crazy. I could have you ripped apart, I still might. You're doing a pretty good job of it yourself in the mean time." Blount didn't seem angry. He smiled at Monk.
Sonny Blount broke it off with Katherine, dropped her cold. Department gossip hinted that Blount had gotten her pregnant and bullied her into getting an abortion. Maybe there was truth to that. Sphere doubted it. He had his own theory when he'd drank enough: Blount was punishing him by giving him his wife back, broken, emotionally crippled. Unable to do anything but hate him, hate his goodness, hate his screwed up DNA. Sphere took to sleeping at his desk. He hardly ever went home. Sometimes he called up drunk to weep apologies. The other end of the line always remained dead silent for minutes that seemed hours. Then a click.
Sphere fell in love. Boozing incognito in some dim, wood-paneled Burbs bar filled with hawkish predators and brain-dead locals drinking straight synthetic ethanol and antifreeze. Monk found himself being chatted up by a young woman over shots of homebrewed potato vodka. She was a hooker. He knew, he didn't care. She was nice to look at. She was short, with a skinny frame, long brown hair, and twinkling chestnut eyes that looked too good to be anything but store bought. They were real, though. She said her name was Paulina. He told her he had a badge, he was ISS. A Specter. She didn't even flinch.
"Everybody's gotta make a living," she said, and she toasted him, drinking her shot and his. She smiled. She made a gun with her fingers, pressing the soft barrel of her index finger into Sphere's chest. "Bang," she said as the hammer fell.
Sphere took her back to a bungalow that could be rented hourly. She took her skirt off, left her shirt on. They made love. They talked. After the heels and the makeup came off, he saw that she wasn't a woman at all. She was fifteen. She was, in ISS parlance, a "low-lita": a young Burbs girl, orphaned, homeless, destitute; prostituting herself for food; specializing in looking old beyond her years to snag a slumming thrill-seeker from Chi- Town and, hopefully, get pregnant with some citizen's child and maybe move on up to the good life.
That was the plan, at least. Mostly, the low-litas had to be fished out of the canal, floating face down, bloated beyond all girlishness with the wet rot unique to waterlogged corpses. Two or three turned up dead every week. No one took much notice.
The next week, he went back to see her again. Not her customer; her suitor, eventually her lover. He brought her flowers and food. They told each other the story of their lives. Her story was much longer. They delved into each other's foibles, their embarrassments. She showed him that the left cup of her brassiere was empty, stuffed with a plastic bag full of birdseed. He looked perplexed.
"It's the only thing that looks right under a t-shirt," she told him.
She said she had had breast cancer at age ten, a mastectomy at eleven. Radiation or contaminated food or environmental toxins, she didn't know. Public service said the Burbs environment was safe and healthy. She knew that was bullshit. Her surgery was paid for by a Burbs charity organization. They gave her a room during her convalescence during which they tried to recruit her as an informant on her fellow Burbs dwellers. Three weeks, and then back out on the street. Here's some vitamins, try not to get infected, they told her. When she hit puberty, her one good breast grew in only slightly, but she still looked lopsided. That's where the bag of birdseed came in. Sphere called her his little amazon. Kissed the broad rumpled scar.
Sphere spent all his free time with her in the Burbs.
One day she wasn't at their bar when he expected her to be. Wasn't at their bungalow. Wasn't anywhere. Sphere went crazy. Scoured the Burbs. Every night checking the med station morgue for Paulina's corpse. Every sleeping moment he nightmared: her, ripped open, mangled by monster or street gang or psycho juicer.
Two weeks went by. He had every jurisdiction from Lone Star to Quebec sending him images of DOAs fitting Paulina's description. In the Burbs, he put out a bulletin with her picture on it. WANTED FOR QUESTIONING, it said. A Burbs Peacemaker found her sleeping in an old unused coal bin when he went to take a leak. She was taken into custody.
In custody: he had to at least go through the motions of grilling her in the interrogation room before he could have her turned loose. He didn't know why she had disappeared on him. He felt hurt. In the cold steel room he came at her with an unsoftened interrogation tone. Hard core, in her face, all shouts and barks and growls.
He asked her why she had been avoiding the ISS. She said she didn't even know the Specters were looking for her. He asked how old she was. She said fifteen. He asked her how old she really was. She said fifteen. He asked if she had anywhere to live. She said no. He asked if there was anyone looking for her. No one who wants to find me, she said. He asked if she was a "low- lita." She asked what that was. He said it was a girl who screws Chi-Town citizens and then shows up on their doorstep with a baby, looking to get in. She said that that was not her. He asked her if she thought he was blind or stupid. She said no. He asked her how she did not fit the description of a low-lita.
She looked at him, bullet-hard chestnut gaze penetrating deep into his own eyes, said: Because I'm pregnant with a citizen's baby now, and I haven't told him.
Sphere froze. He backed off. His heart pumped: take her in your arms. It pumped: you want this. It pumped: genetic minefield. His knees were weak. He asked a few more perfunctory questions and she was released. They met later at the bungalow. He asked why she ran. She told him to go away, that she would only wreck his life and his career. He kissed her and told her to shut up. He told her about his DNA. They talked about it a long time. They talked about the future.
Reascending. Sphere Monk started putting in normal hours at work. He slept home most nights. Stopped drinking, tried to. Katherine's affairs, if they still went on, were conducted more privately. Sphere was regaining the good favor of the commanders up top. Slow. He was again a model officer. Word traveled: drunk Monk is jockeying for an administration job, a promotion with all the gold stars and sweet perks. He's looking for an office and a little pull in the department. Crossing every t, dotting every i and kissing every ass.
After a while, some fish nibbled.
* * *
Colonel Carol Black, head of PSInet division, looking elegant and demure in a gray flannel suit and steel-rimmed glasses, shoe-polish-black hair pulled back in a savagely tight ponytail. Lieutenant Jack Cavanaugh, notorious NTSET goon and Chi-Town skullcracker, going gray at the temples; sunglasses, plain black coat and tie over an athlete's build, stirring a bloody mary with the pinky of a steel hand.
Lunch at a nondescript, low-level Chi-Town food court. Mawkish shopping- music thrummed in the drab, neon-speckled eating hall.
Black: "Happy New Year."
Sphere nodded, ordered scrambled eggs and toast from a passing waiter. He said to Cavanaugh, "A little early for shades, isn't it?"
Cavanaugh lifted the frames slightly. His eyes were clear and alert, but the eyelids and sockets were yellowish, like an old bruise. "New implants," he said. "Still a little photosensitive."
"I'm glad to see that you've decided to take me up on my offer," said Black.
"You haven't made an offer," said Monk. "You just asked me to meet you here. I'm here. Make me an offer and I'll think about it."
Black raised an eyebrow and Cavanaugh grinned. The waitress brought Sphere's eggs, watery and underdone. Sphere ate and studied his interlocutors. Black: portrait of competence; educated, well-spoken, smart. The kind of woman that gave psychics a good name. She'd headed up PSInet for as long as he could remember. A reputation of being overly harsh with her own kind. That was probably in her best interests. Sphere knew she could do things for him. She was very influential and very sneaky.
Then "Crazy" Cavanaugh: still kicking after two decades of taking risks that, statistically, should have caught up with him long ago. He'd personally bagged more demons and monsters than whole army companies. He wasn't just like the other guys in NTSET, he was NTSET. Hunting down illegal supernatural entities in Chi-Town sewer pipes was like a walk in the park for him. Sphere knew his rep as an army hawk was all smokescreen: he was wilier than Carol Black in a lot of ways, and could be even more dangerous with a single phone call than with a laser rifle. He was connected up, down, all over the place.
Getting old-the gray told you that-and doing less trigger-work and more black-bag stuff. He looked like a grunt but had more power than he let on. If half of the rumors were true, then just about every big deal that went down in Chi-Town had Cavanaugh's hand in there somewhere. He was a Man to Be Seen With.
The two made for a strange pairing. Black the image of propriety and correctness-she looked as if she even farted by the book. Cavanaugh the kind of guy that ate the book for breakfast and asked for seconds. Both manipulative and ambitious, that linked them. That led them to Sphere.
"How would you like to ruin some lives," said Cavanaugh.
Sphere shrugged. "Whose life?"
"We're not ruining lives," said Black. "I've been given a mandate by the Proseks to set up a new task force to investigate the involvement of Chi- Town citizens and Burbs dwellers with certain revolutionary groups and illegal organizations. Terrorists and scholars, mostly. We're to gather intelligence on these organizations and compile incriminating dossiers on their members. This information will eventually be forwarded to the Proseks themselves."
Sphere said: "And what will our great leaders do with this intelligence?"
"Jack off to it, probably," said Cavanaugh as he tapped a passing waiter for another bloody mary and saluted no one in particular.
"So far, we've been striking on the outside of these organizations," said Black, ignoring Cavanaugh. "The periphery. The men and women we have already executed have all been little fish. They knew nothing. And every trial and execution only strengthens the resolve of these people. The more we persecute them, the more they feel their cause is worthy, the easier it is for them to persuade impressionable minds to support their cause. We need to get inside these organizations. To find their leaders and get some leverage on them. To tarnish and discredit them. To tear them down from within."
"And this is what the Proseks want you to do," said Sphere. "When the threat of death fails, the threat of blackmail will succeed, is that it?"
"Something like that," said Black.
"What do you do?" said Sphere.
"I will coordinate the operation, act as a liaison between you two and the Proseks, and interrogate all informants that you manage to turn."
"What about him?" indicating Cavanaugh.
"Same as you. It'll be a two-pronged attack. The two of you will go to work on groups of dissidents. Infiltrate them, and find out everything you can about their members and leaders. Then we will use this information to squeeze the cell leaders, to get them to reveal the names of the big men in the organization."
"Us? Infiltrate?" Sphere was incredulous. "I've been a cop and a soldier for almost twenty years. They can smell that on you, even if I grow out the buzz cut. And him-" again indicating Cavanaugh, "-he's nuts. Besides, there isn't a revolutionary within two hundred miles who hasn't had a friend shot in the back by Crazy Cavanaugh. They all know his face. They all know his knuckles."
"I know that my reputation precedes me," said Cavanaugh, tipping an imaginary hat with exaggerated severity. "Oh, I've cracked enough worthless jaws to become famous among the festering community of grumbling traitorous filth that surrounds our glorious state. It is something I have always felt complimented by. And no, you and I will not personally be infiltrating any organizations."
"If not us, who?"
"We will each be operating a mole, a young man or woman with a fresh face and an aptitude for work of this sort. We will need someone who can pass for an idealist-which obviously leaves both of us out-but who can observe and maneuver like a true spy. I've got my man already."
"And me?"
"I imagine you'll recruit yours from your department."
"From my.?" Sphere paled at the thought of working closely with anyone from his department. How many ISS Specters does it take to screw in a light bulb? "I'm not sure." he began.
"In this matter, you'll have carte blanche within ISS," said Black with assurance. "You may choose whomever you like."
Sphere gathered all this in. Nodded to himself, slowly. "Now lets talk about what I get out of this."
Black sipped her tea. Then she put a clunky badge on the table and rapped on it with her knuckles. "Promotion to Deputy Chief Inspector. On your own, you probably could have had it without my help.if you hadn't self- destructed in a cloud of alcohol and disgrace." With her fingertip, she pushed the death-head shield across the table towards Sphere Monk. "It would put you back on the inside track with ISS, this time with a substantial head start. You could be head of the whole department in five, six years maybe. Chi-Town would be yours."
Sphere laughed heartily. It was the most genuine laugh he had had in a long time.
"Stay with ISS? Not a chance. What I want is to be done with ISS completely. Done with the whole cops and robbers thing. Done with killers and thugs and druggies and D-bee scumbags and cyborgs and psychics. If I do this, I want you to get me out of ISS and into a desk job. Someplace where I can sit on my ass all day and drink coffee and never have to worry about getting shot at or eaten by demons."
Cavanaugh began to rock back on his chair and stare at the ceiling absently, deep in thought. Eventually, he suggested: "ISS Anti-Contraband Service?"
"And have to look for drugs and illegal magic scrolls in d-bee asses all day? Take away family Bibles from little old ladies? Be serious."
"I can sense you already have something in mind," said Black. "Why don't you just say what it is?"
Sphere knew she could just go in and take the information out of his brain if she really wanted to. He felt the tight, hypodermic pinprick of her mind investigating the porous perimeter of his surface thoughts. He willed himself calm, willed himself not to vibe duplicity, fear to her. He resolved never to give her a reason to take a serious peek inside his skull.
"Crouch is old," said Sphere, willing the vibe crass. He gave it his best evil-eye poker face. "He'll retire soon, if he doesn't drop dead first. I'd like his job when he finishes."
Cavanaugh stopped rocking. The front legs of his chair snapped against the tiled floor with an audible TANG across the food court. He leaned forward on the table.
"Crouch who?" said Black.
"Santley Crouch," said Cavanaugh. He looked with quizzical, bruised eyes over the top of his sunglasses at Sphere Monk. "The head of the immigration board. He's the guy who decides who gets to leave the Burbs and who has to rot there."
"Interesting choice," said Black. The pinprick retreated. "Why?"
The question was directed at Sphere, but Cavanaugh picked it up: "It's a peach assignment. You pretend to flip through applications while collecting bribes and kickbacks from the people you give citizenship to. Everyone in the Burbs will do whatever it takes to get on your good side. So will everyone in Chi-Town because everyone's got someone that want to get citizenship for. As long as you keep things on the quiet side, you'll be set for life. Like Crouch." Cavanaugh munched a celery stalk.
Sphere pretended to look impressed. He looked at Black and did not affirm or deny Cavanaugh's statement.
"Sounds like an intelligent choice," said Black.
"A strange one, too," said Cavanaugh, "for the golden boy of the department. It takes a low man for that kind of work. I wouldn't mind it myself, you know, but there's not enough action for my blood."
"Everyone used to know me as the golden boy," said Sphere. "Not any more. Now they know me as the drunk who used to sleep in the station locker room all the time. Let's put our cards on the table. You know I've been having some.personal troubles lately. Otherwise you would have picked someone else. You asked me here because you heard I'm trying to get my life back on track, but the train's already left the station. You heard I'm desperate for a promotion, but that I've already blown my shot. You heard that without some help I'm dead in the water, career-wise."
"Yes, I've heard all that," said Black.
"You'd need to be frigging deaf not to hear it," said Cavanaugh, hailing a waitress for another bloody mary.
"And," said Monk, not finished yet, "and, I'm guessing the reason this whole thing is being done with a light touch-by infiltration instead of extermination-is that you're thinking you might be investigating some important and well-connected Chi-town citizens, maybe even some family friends of the Proseks, and this whole thing could very easily turn around and bite you on the ass."
Black frowned. "It wasn't something I was planning on. The goal of the operation is the compromise of these organizations and their leaders, not necessarily their destruction. They could be manipulated by the Coalition to great advantage."
"And," said Monk, "If the whole thing does blow up in your face, you'd need some credible fall guys to take the flack for you-say, an aging NTSET psycho and a fallen-angel ISS Specter with a very public history of personal problems."
"Heyyyy," said Cavanaugh, grinning. "He's not as stupid as he looks."
"That's not part of the plan either," said Black.
"What she means," said Cavanaugh, "is that it's up to us not to get bitten on the ass. I know I can handle it. I'm not so sure about you."
"I have the utmost confidence that you will both be able to handle it in your own respective ways," said Black, a little too confidently, a little too patronizingly.
The food-court's background music changed to a more upbeat electro-Latin groove, an afternoon ersatz-salsa bop. The hundreds of hungover diners at the food court groaned in unison at the shrill, bright squeaks of the synthesized horn section.
"Well," said Cavanaugh. "Now that we've given you the whole routine. Are you in?"
"Can you get me Santley Crouch's job?"
"I'll look into it," said Black. "If he's retiring, like you say, I'm sure the vacancy can be held for a decorated war hero like yourself. Especially after becoming the first ISS Specter to infiltrate an illegal ring of dissidents operating within Chi-Town."
Sphere Monk accepted that as the best answer he was going to get. He rolled the pros and cons around in his head for a minute, feeling weight come down real hard on the con side. Cavanaugh and Black were serious operators; he was the odd man out. If things went badly, he knew it'd be his neck in the noose. Monk made the only decision he could.
"Yeah, sure, I'm in," he said. He thought it was a bad idea, but he knew it might be his last chance, his only chance. He thought of Paulina, and thought of their unborn child. He didn't want his kid being born in the Burbs, or Paulina being cut half-assed Caesarian by some drugged-out bodydoc with dirty hands. She already needed medical attention but there were no obstetricians in the Burbs. The baby wouldn't wait forever. The clock was ticking. He couldn't wait.
"As soon as I find my man, I'll be ready to go."
ISS Commander Sphere Monk looked down from the balcony of a swank Chi- Town apartment at the sprawling Grey blanket of the Burbs and thought: My God, what a hellhole.
The apartment wasn't his. He had come across a Coalition army general stumbling drunk in the Chi-town pub halls, glittery HAPPY NEW YEAR tiara on top of his black dress cap, harassing some society wife on the way home from a party. Monk was going to let it go, until the general exposed himself and Monk recognized the opportunity. He corralled the inebriated brass and got him to zip up, stand still, be quiet. He gave the woman a hundred to shut the hell up about the whole thing, hustled the general out of there. The woman was pretty drunk herself, and Monk was sure she'd have forgotten the incident with or without his intervention.
He steered the man home-to this apartment-and put him to bed, burbling like a toddler, in a huge hand-carved four-poster that must have cost thousands. Monk had been in the army, and he knew the type: lion on the battlefield, baby in the barroom. The general had the piercing, queasy smell of synthetic gin sweating out of every pore, and Monk stopped short of undressing him, dumped him under the covers in full uniform, buttons and death-heads clanking dully, one chromed epaulet flapping undone. From the pictures in the hall, it looked as if the man had a wife and two kids, one boy one girl. The wife wasn't home-at least not in bed. Still out tying one on, Monk guessed.
Monk vaguely knew the general-Canis was the name, if he remembered correctly-although he had never served under him. He mentally inscribed the man's name in the credit column of his favors ledger. Might be useful some day, if the man didn't get decommissioned for drunkenness in the meantime.
Monk checked the place out. Quick sweep of cabinets and drawers. The general lived big. It was the kind of apartment that you see in holo-movies all the time but that no one has in real life. Big rooms, big windows, beautiful paintings, expensive furniture, balcony, full fridge, good beer. The apartment of a man with pull, with status. A man who could snap his fingers and get things done. It was a far cry from Monk's plain, modest quarters several levels down-not that he spent much time at home anyway. Monk saw that the general had some contraband books and vids, but not enough to make a fuss over. All the brass had them anyway.
While Monk was admiring the place, the general's daughter woke up and peeped him from the doorcrack. A minute later, she came swooning out of her room, greeted him in flimsy pajamas, sheer, a size too small and half unbuttoned. Didn't even ask who he was. Tried to pull a Holo-wood low-lita routine on him. Sprawling on the couch with a tub of ice cream, licking vanilla swirl from her fingers for breakfast, pajama top flapping nonchalantly open as if she didn't even notice. Pouting. Asked if he had a girlfriend, a wife, a big gun. She looked sixteen, at most.
Monk was repulsed. Her attempts at seduction would have been laughable if they weren't so earnest. The girl was nothing like Paulina.
The general's daughter was still plain looking despite the best efforts of a half-dozen Chi-Town stylists, hairdressers, manicurists and body- sculptors; still sheathed in a childish covering of baby fat-a good, balanced diet and no shortage of food. None of the leanness or wiriness that would let her pass as anything other than what she was: a stupid, overgrown child.
Like all kids raised in Chi-Town, like sheltered kids anywhere, she stayed young a lot longer than the kids in the dirty alleys. Physically, she could appeal only to a pedophile.
But that was only half of it. It was the eyes. This girl had the dull bovine eyes of someone who watches too much holovision and believes everything she reads in magazines. The eyes of a person who's never had to make a hard decision in her life, never been beaten or kicked, never been abandoned, never had to sleep in the rain, never wished she was too proud to beg, never felt too hungry to be proud; looking down on the Burbs from her ivory perch, believing that life in the gutter could be exciting instead of sad. Ready to pimp herself for thrills instead of survival.
In Monk's book, that made her more of a whore than any diseased alley- crawler in Tent Town.
She was nothing like those girls down there in the Burbs. Nothing like Paulina. Who he had fallen in love with, whose life was in his hands, who had brought him back to life by giving him a reason to live. Nothing.
The general's daughter was an altogether different animal. She was rich, she was spoiled, she was trouble. There was no question about that. Monk took one last look over the balcony, one last look around the apartment-the kind of apartment he would have someday-and he took off without even so much as looking at the whining brat on the couch, desperately trying to be nonchalant about letting her pajamas slip to the floor.
Monk thought about Paulina, and if she had had enough to eat last night.
* * *
Sphere Monk had had a loving family, once. At least, he thought he did. His wife, Katherine, had seemed to love him. They'd been married for ten years now, going on eleven. She had been his high-school sweetheart. They'd sit around sipping Psi Cola, talking about running away together, imagining what their kids would look like, trying out names for girl babies and boy babies. They put the relationship on hold when he went into the army and she got busy building a career as a computer scientist studying the dynamics of emotion-emulation in robotic constructs. He did two four- year tours, back to back; scouting out by the Magic Zone, real dangerous stuff.
One Christmas, Katherine designed a tiny feline bot that sought out Sphere in the field barracks. When it found him, around Easter, it relayed a message: "Sphere Monk, you are the rest of my life. Come back soon. Love, Katherine," and exploded in two to reveal an inner cache of flowers, long dead from dehydration and lack of sunlight.
Monk took shrapnel in his hip and lungs saving two special-ops commandos; lost an eye and some cheekbone to a werewolf (replaced for free by his military health plan); came back to Chi-Town a decorated hero. Thirty-nine confirmed kills. When he got out of the service he settled down, joined ISS. Katherine became an eminent and well-paid mind in her field.
He and Katherine got married. She had waited for him and had hardly even spoken to other men. He had never thought about other women. There was just the two of them in the world and that was it. They talked about kids like it was all they had ever thought about, and it was. She wanted boys, he wanted girls. They both wanted a lot.
Their time together had been happy enough. Katherine worked in the private sector and made six times what Sphere did, and they lived extravagantly. There had been one child, in their fourth year of marriage. It had been born with a massive and irreparable coronary defect, and it died when it was only three days old, wheezing and blue in a tiny incubator unit at Chi- Town General. Sphere and Katherine cried for a week.
The Coalition docs said that the defect had come from Sphere, from his side of the equation. Katherine's DNA was superb, she was perfect breeding stock. She would have made a good mother.but not with him. They fixed the one gene of Monk's that had caused the total malformation of the baby's cardio-pulmonary system, but advised him to refrain from having further children.
"It's a mess in there," the gene doc said, tapping the hieroglyphic morse code of his DNA profile. "It won't be a heart defect next time, but it could be almost anything else. Cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, leukemia, severe diabetes, gross physical deformity, psionics. You're a genetic minefield. Must've had some bad radiation growing up. The odds of you having a normal child are at best a hundred to one. You should think about getting a vasectomy."
He was crushed. Katherine was crushed. No children. Not now, not ever. They thought about adoption. Neither of them wanted that. They stopped talking about adoption. They stopped talking about their future together. They just stopped.
Monk asked her to divorce him, begged her to find another man. Katherine looked through him as if he were a phantom. He pleaded with her, remorseful then angry, then insistent then tender. Katherine held up her hand as if her wedding ring were a great weight. She said, "Sphere Monk, you are the rest of my life."
Monk found he couldn't divorce her, either.
One day Monk came home late from a double shift and found an infant's head on the kitchen table, next to the day's mail and a cup of cold tea. It smiled and seemed happy to see him. He screamed without sound, as in a dream. He knew the face. The eyes, the hair, the cheekbones, everything. It was him from his baby pictures. Its toothless gums worked delightedly as it cooed.
Monk fell bloodless against the doorjamb. Katherine walked into the room, flushed glowing cheeks and blue eyes lit up with motherly happiness. Under her arm she clutched a headless infant torso, working some sort of tool or probe into the vacant neck, into the blinking lights and wiry servos and data ports bristling under a caul of plasti-flesh. She saw Monk's face and her smile evaporated. Monk stared horror into her eyes.
"What?"
Monk couldn't stop his hands trembling, his lungs moaning. He looked at Katherine.
"Sphere, I built it," she said pleadingly.
Monk launched forward and punched his wife in the mouth. She reeled across the room. Blood flew from her lips and nose and she dropped the kicking torso which landed with the distinctly muffled slap of baby fat on linoleum. Katherine fell on the carpet at the foot of the glass bookcase. The baby head on the table started crying.
Katherine refused to move or get up. She lay on her side, stone- faced, staring at the leg of a dining-room chair. The shrieks of the disembodied head on the table ratcheted up in volume. Monk went out and closed the door behind him. He went to a bar and drank until he woke up in a Burbs movie theater rest room under a dried pasty sheet of his own vomit. He did not remember how he got there.
Monk started staying away from home. He worked two, three, four shifts in a row. Volunteer for work whenever and wherever it was offered. He'd take anything: ISS police cases, temporary military commissions, private detective jobs for old army buddies. He'd sit around and write reports just for the hell of it. Anything to keep from going home. He'd be away from Katherine for days at a time, sleeping in the station, sleeping on undercover assignment, sleeping in APCs out in the field. He became known for his diligence and hard work. His superiors called him "a born Specter." He began to see promotions and medals handed his way. He got congratulatory postcards and phone calls from important people that he'd never met. Without any real ambition, without caring, he began to move up the ladder.
Katherine quit her job. Their collective income plummeted. They moved into an apartment small enough for them to pay the bills and save a little on Sphere's salary alone. Katherine experimented with religion, therapy, drunkenness, drug addiction, yoga, karate, the clarinet and finally with other men.
Everybody knew it. It was all over the department. Sphere became the subject of bartender gossip and locker room jokes: How many ISS Specters does it take to screw in a lightbulb? One. Just Sphere Monk. All the rest are too busy screwing his wife.
The fall came fast. Sphere, too far gone to be hurt by any of it. Barely noticed. Drunk, starting to slip. Logging eighty-nine hours of on-duty per week. Barely slept. Drunk all the time. Looking ragged. Passed some internal line and kept going. Showed up drunk in civvies at the commencement of academy graduation. Tried to make a speech. Made a scene.
It didn't take long for word to get around: Sphere Monk is all washed up.
Private pain, then public scandal. Promotions, citations and congratulations all stopped. Upper-echelon department heads and politicians shied away from Sphere as it became evident his personal life was a mess and, worse, he was unable or unwilling to keep his mess private.
Then Katherine fell in love. When it happened, it was with someone that Sphere hardly knew-a two-bit ISS Specter from the other side of the Chi- Town honeycomb, a vicious bull-shouldered scumbag named Sonny Blount who was open-secret on the take, a hustler with a badge. A real idiot, too, according to popular opinion in the department. All brawn, no brain. The guy was a monster. He was mean and he was violent and he didn't give a shit about anybody but himself. He was great at getting confessions.
And he absolutely hated the department's honest, once-dependable workhorse and decorated war hero named Sphere William Evans Monk.
Katherine fell for him, hard.
They began seeing one another. Blount's name soon was implicated in illegal arms shipments to rebel groups. Unlicensed psychics, juicers, magic-users, historians. Real bad people. Blount claimed he was being framed, but the investigating officer-ISS Specter Sphere Monk-had evidence. He had him cold.
Blount's connections in the department could have saved him; they had before. They could have had the whole thing swept under the rug, buried, but Monk made sure Blount couldn't dodge the bullet. Monk may have become a mess, but his reputation was still good for at least that much. Even a war hero disgraced has some pull. And he was a good Specter. He wrote the indictment so that no one could help Blount without dirtying themselves in the process.
Monk had Blount bounced off the force for good. He tried to fit him in a capital case, treason, hoping for the death penalty, but it wouldn't stick. At no time during the trial was the personal connection between the two men revealed.
After the hearing, they spoke face to face for the first time, bumping into each other in a courthouse restroom, Blount's bulk towering over Monk's lean, scrappy frame. Blount in expensive designer civvies, Monk in full Coalition ISS dress uniform, unshaved and bleary-eyed.
"Disappointed?" said Blount.
His hate was razor sharp, Monk forced himself formal: "You're a disgrace to the uniform. You got off easy. If I see you again, I'll run you in and have the Psi's give you the third degree."
"She hates your guts, you know. That ain't any of my doing. You think it is, but you better look in the mirror if you want to know why she's going crazy. I could have you ripped apart, I still might. You're doing a pretty good job of it yourself in the mean time." Blount didn't seem angry. He smiled at Monk.
Sonny Blount broke it off with Katherine, dropped her cold. Department gossip hinted that Blount had gotten her pregnant and bullied her into getting an abortion. Maybe there was truth to that. Sphere doubted it. He had his own theory when he'd drank enough: Blount was punishing him by giving him his wife back, broken, emotionally crippled. Unable to do anything but hate him, hate his goodness, hate his screwed up DNA. Sphere took to sleeping at his desk. He hardly ever went home. Sometimes he called up drunk to weep apologies. The other end of the line always remained dead silent for minutes that seemed hours. Then a click.
Sphere fell in love. Boozing incognito in some dim, wood-paneled Burbs bar filled with hawkish predators and brain-dead locals drinking straight synthetic ethanol and antifreeze. Monk found himself being chatted up by a young woman over shots of homebrewed potato vodka. She was a hooker. He knew, he didn't care. She was nice to look at. She was short, with a skinny frame, long brown hair, and twinkling chestnut eyes that looked too good to be anything but store bought. They were real, though. She said her name was Paulina. He told her he had a badge, he was ISS. A Specter. She didn't even flinch.
"Everybody's gotta make a living," she said, and she toasted him, drinking her shot and his. She smiled. She made a gun with her fingers, pressing the soft barrel of her index finger into Sphere's chest. "Bang," she said as the hammer fell.
Sphere took her back to a bungalow that could be rented hourly. She took her skirt off, left her shirt on. They made love. They talked. After the heels and the makeup came off, he saw that she wasn't a woman at all. She was fifteen. She was, in ISS parlance, a "low-lita": a young Burbs girl, orphaned, homeless, destitute; prostituting herself for food; specializing in looking old beyond her years to snag a slumming thrill-seeker from Chi- Town and, hopefully, get pregnant with some citizen's child and maybe move on up to the good life.
That was the plan, at least. Mostly, the low-litas had to be fished out of the canal, floating face down, bloated beyond all girlishness with the wet rot unique to waterlogged corpses. Two or three turned up dead every week. No one took much notice.
The next week, he went back to see her again. Not her customer; her suitor, eventually her lover. He brought her flowers and food. They told each other the story of their lives. Her story was much longer. They delved into each other's foibles, their embarrassments. She showed him that the left cup of her brassiere was empty, stuffed with a plastic bag full of birdseed. He looked perplexed.
"It's the only thing that looks right under a t-shirt," she told him.
She said she had had breast cancer at age ten, a mastectomy at eleven. Radiation or contaminated food or environmental toxins, she didn't know. Public service said the Burbs environment was safe and healthy. She knew that was bullshit. Her surgery was paid for by a Burbs charity organization. They gave her a room during her convalescence during which they tried to recruit her as an informant on her fellow Burbs dwellers. Three weeks, and then back out on the street. Here's some vitamins, try not to get infected, they told her. When she hit puberty, her one good breast grew in only slightly, but she still looked lopsided. That's where the bag of birdseed came in. Sphere called her his little amazon. Kissed the broad rumpled scar.
Sphere spent all his free time with her in the Burbs.
One day she wasn't at their bar when he expected her to be. Wasn't at their bungalow. Wasn't anywhere. Sphere went crazy. Scoured the Burbs. Every night checking the med station morgue for Paulina's corpse. Every sleeping moment he nightmared: her, ripped open, mangled by monster or street gang or psycho juicer.
Two weeks went by. He had every jurisdiction from Lone Star to Quebec sending him images of DOAs fitting Paulina's description. In the Burbs, he put out a bulletin with her picture on it. WANTED FOR QUESTIONING, it said. A Burbs Peacemaker found her sleeping in an old unused coal bin when he went to take a leak. She was taken into custody.
In custody: he had to at least go through the motions of grilling her in the interrogation room before he could have her turned loose. He didn't know why she had disappeared on him. He felt hurt. In the cold steel room he came at her with an unsoftened interrogation tone. Hard core, in her face, all shouts and barks and growls.
He asked her why she had been avoiding the ISS. She said she didn't even know the Specters were looking for her. He asked how old she was. She said fifteen. He asked her how old she really was. She said fifteen. He asked if she had anywhere to live. She said no. He asked if there was anyone looking for her. No one who wants to find me, she said. He asked if she was a "low- lita." She asked what that was. He said it was a girl who screws Chi-Town citizens and then shows up on their doorstep with a baby, looking to get in. She said that that was not her. He asked her if she thought he was blind or stupid. She said no. He asked her how she did not fit the description of a low-lita.
She looked at him, bullet-hard chestnut gaze penetrating deep into his own eyes, said: Because I'm pregnant with a citizen's baby now, and I haven't told him.
Sphere froze. He backed off. His heart pumped: take her in your arms. It pumped: you want this. It pumped: genetic minefield. His knees were weak. He asked a few more perfunctory questions and she was released. They met later at the bungalow. He asked why she ran. She told him to go away, that she would only wreck his life and his career. He kissed her and told her to shut up. He told her about his DNA. They talked about it a long time. They talked about the future.
Reascending. Sphere Monk started putting in normal hours at work. He slept home most nights. Stopped drinking, tried to. Katherine's affairs, if they still went on, were conducted more privately. Sphere was regaining the good favor of the commanders up top. Slow. He was again a model officer. Word traveled: drunk Monk is jockeying for an administration job, a promotion with all the gold stars and sweet perks. He's looking for an office and a little pull in the department. Crossing every t, dotting every i and kissing every ass.
After a while, some fish nibbled.
* * *
Colonel Carol Black, head of PSInet division, looking elegant and demure in a gray flannel suit and steel-rimmed glasses, shoe-polish-black hair pulled back in a savagely tight ponytail. Lieutenant Jack Cavanaugh, notorious NTSET goon and Chi-Town skullcracker, going gray at the temples; sunglasses, plain black coat and tie over an athlete's build, stirring a bloody mary with the pinky of a steel hand.
Lunch at a nondescript, low-level Chi-Town food court. Mawkish shopping- music thrummed in the drab, neon-speckled eating hall.
Black: "Happy New Year."
Sphere nodded, ordered scrambled eggs and toast from a passing waiter. He said to Cavanaugh, "A little early for shades, isn't it?"
Cavanaugh lifted the frames slightly. His eyes were clear and alert, but the eyelids and sockets were yellowish, like an old bruise. "New implants," he said. "Still a little photosensitive."
"I'm glad to see that you've decided to take me up on my offer," said Black.
"You haven't made an offer," said Monk. "You just asked me to meet you here. I'm here. Make me an offer and I'll think about it."
Black raised an eyebrow and Cavanaugh grinned. The waitress brought Sphere's eggs, watery and underdone. Sphere ate and studied his interlocutors. Black: portrait of competence; educated, well-spoken, smart. The kind of woman that gave psychics a good name. She'd headed up PSInet for as long as he could remember. A reputation of being overly harsh with her own kind. That was probably in her best interests. Sphere knew she could do things for him. She was very influential and very sneaky.
Then "Crazy" Cavanaugh: still kicking after two decades of taking risks that, statistically, should have caught up with him long ago. He'd personally bagged more demons and monsters than whole army companies. He wasn't just like the other guys in NTSET, he was NTSET. Hunting down illegal supernatural entities in Chi-Town sewer pipes was like a walk in the park for him. Sphere knew his rep as an army hawk was all smokescreen: he was wilier than Carol Black in a lot of ways, and could be even more dangerous with a single phone call than with a laser rifle. He was connected up, down, all over the place.
Getting old-the gray told you that-and doing less trigger-work and more black-bag stuff. He looked like a grunt but had more power than he let on. If half of the rumors were true, then just about every big deal that went down in Chi-Town had Cavanaugh's hand in there somewhere. He was a Man to Be Seen With.
The two made for a strange pairing. Black the image of propriety and correctness-she looked as if she even farted by the book. Cavanaugh the kind of guy that ate the book for breakfast and asked for seconds. Both manipulative and ambitious, that linked them. That led them to Sphere.
"How would you like to ruin some lives," said Cavanaugh.
Sphere shrugged. "Whose life?"
"We're not ruining lives," said Black. "I've been given a mandate by the Proseks to set up a new task force to investigate the involvement of Chi- Town citizens and Burbs dwellers with certain revolutionary groups and illegal organizations. Terrorists and scholars, mostly. We're to gather intelligence on these organizations and compile incriminating dossiers on their members. This information will eventually be forwarded to the Proseks themselves."
Sphere said: "And what will our great leaders do with this intelligence?"
"Jack off to it, probably," said Cavanaugh as he tapped a passing waiter for another bloody mary and saluted no one in particular.
"So far, we've been striking on the outside of these organizations," said Black, ignoring Cavanaugh. "The periphery. The men and women we have already executed have all been little fish. They knew nothing. And every trial and execution only strengthens the resolve of these people. The more we persecute them, the more they feel their cause is worthy, the easier it is for them to persuade impressionable minds to support their cause. We need to get inside these organizations. To find their leaders and get some leverage on them. To tarnish and discredit them. To tear them down from within."
"And this is what the Proseks want you to do," said Sphere. "When the threat of death fails, the threat of blackmail will succeed, is that it?"
"Something like that," said Black.
"What do you do?" said Sphere.
"I will coordinate the operation, act as a liaison between you two and the Proseks, and interrogate all informants that you manage to turn."
"What about him?" indicating Cavanaugh.
"Same as you. It'll be a two-pronged attack. The two of you will go to work on groups of dissidents. Infiltrate them, and find out everything you can about their members and leaders. Then we will use this information to squeeze the cell leaders, to get them to reveal the names of the big men in the organization."
"Us? Infiltrate?" Sphere was incredulous. "I've been a cop and a soldier for almost twenty years. They can smell that on you, even if I grow out the buzz cut. And him-" again indicating Cavanaugh, "-he's nuts. Besides, there isn't a revolutionary within two hundred miles who hasn't had a friend shot in the back by Crazy Cavanaugh. They all know his face. They all know his knuckles."
"I know that my reputation precedes me," said Cavanaugh, tipping an imaginary hat with exaggerated severity. "Oh, I've cracked enough worthless jaws to become famous among the festering community of grumbling traitorous filth that surrounds our glorious state. It is something I have always felt complimented by. And no, you and I will not personally be infiltrating any organizations."
"If not us, who?"
"We will each be operating a mole, a young man or woman with a fresh face and an aptitude for work of this sort. We will need someone who can pass for an idealist-which obviously leaves both of us out-but who can observe and maneuver like a true spy. I've got my man already."
"And me?"
"I imagine you'll recruit yours from your department."
"From my.?" Sphere paled at the thought of working closely with anyone from his department. How many ISS Specters does it take to screw in a light bulb? "I'm not sure." he began.
"In this matter, you'll have carte blanche within ISS," said Black with assurance. "You may choose whomever you like."
Sphere gathered all this in. Nodded to himself, slowly. "Now lets talk about what I get out of this."
Black sipped her tea. Then she put a clunky badge on the table and rapped on it with her knuckles. "Promotion to Deputy Chief Inspector. On your own, you probably could have had it without my help.if you hadn't self- destructed in a cloud of alcohol and disgrace." With her fingertip, she pushed the death-head shield across the table towards Sphere Monk. "It would put you back on the inside track with ISS, this time with a substantial head start. You could be head of the whole department in five, six years maybe. Chi-Town would be yours."
Sphere laughed heartily. It was the most genuine laugh he had had in a long time.
"Stay with ISS? Not a chance. What I want is to be done with ISS completely. Done with the whole cops and robbers thing. Done with killers and thugs and druggies and D-bee scumbags and cyborgs and psychics. If I do this, I want you to get me out of ISS and into a desk job. Someplace where I can sit on my ass all day and drink coffee and never have to worry about getting shot at or eaten by demons."
Cavanaugh began to rock back on his chair and stare at the ceiling absently, deep in thought. Eventually, he suggested: "ISS Anti-Contraband Service?"
"And have to look for drugs and illegal magic scrolls in d-bee asses all day? Take away family Bibles from little old ladies? Be serious."
"I can sense you already have something in mind," said Black. "Why don't you just say what it is?"
Sphere knew she could just go in and take the information out of his brain if she really wanted to. He felt the tight, hypodermic pinprick of her mind investigating the porous perimeter of his surface thoughts. He willed himself calm, willed himself not to vibe duplicity, fear to her. He resolved never to give her a reason to take a serious peek inside his skull.
"Crouch is old," said Sphere, willing the vibe crass. He gave it his best evil-eye poker face. "He'll retire soon, if he doesn't drop dead first. I'd like his job when he finishes."
Cavanaugh stopped rocking. The front legs of his chair snapped against the tiled floor with an audible TANG across the food court. He leaned forward on the table.
"Crouch who?" said Black.
"Santley Crouch," said Cavanaugh. He looked with quizzical, bruised eyes over the top of his sunglasses at Sphere Monk. "The head of the immigration board. He's the guy who decides who gets to leave the Burbs and who has to rot there."
"Interesting choice," said Black. The pinprick retreated. "Why?"
The question was directed at Sphere, but Cavanaugh picked it up: "It's a peach assignment. You pretend to flip through applications while collecting bribes and kickbacks from the people you give citizenship to. Everyone in the Burbs will do whatever it takes to get on your good side. So will everyone in Chi-Town because everyone's got someone that want to get citizenship for. As long as you keep things on the quiet side, you'll be set for life. Like Crouch." Cavanaugh munched a celery stalk.
Sphere pretended to look impressed. He looked at Black and did not affirm or deny Cavanaugh's statement.
"Sounds like an intelligent choice," said Black.
"A strange one, too," said Cavanaugh, "for the golden boy of the department. It takes a low man for that kind of work. I wouldn't mind it myself, you know, but there's not enough action for my blood."
"Everyone used to know me as the golden boy," said Sphere. "Not any more. Now they know me as the drunk who used to sleep in the station locker room all the time. Let's put our cards on the table. You know I've been having some.personal troubles lately. Otherwise you would have picked someone else. You asked me here because you heard I'm trying to get my life back on track, but the train's already left the station. You heard I'm desperate for a promotion, but that I've already blown my shot. You heard that without some help I'm dead in the water, career-wise."
"Yes, I've heard all that," said Black.
"You'd need to be frigging deaf not to hear it," said Cavanaugh, hailing a waitress for another bloody mary.
"And," said Monk, not finished yet, "and, I'm guessing the reason this whole thing is being done with a light touch-by infiltration instead of extermination-is that you're thinking you might be investigating some important and well-connected Chi-town citizens, maybe even some family friends of the Proseks, and this whole thing could very easily turn around and bite you on the ass."
Black frowned. "It wasn't something I was planning on. The goal of the operation is the compromise of these organizations and their leaders, not necessarily their destruction. They could be manipulated by the Coalition to great advantage."
"And," said Monk, "If the whole thing does blow up in your face, you'd need some credible fall guys to take the flack for you-say, an aging NTSET psycho and a fallen-angel ISS Specter with a very public history of personal problems."
"Heyyyy," said Cavanaugh, grinning. "He's not as stupid as he looks."
"That's not part of the plan either," said Black.
"What she means," said Cavanaugh, "is that it's up to us not to get bitten on the ass. I know I can handle it. I'm not so sure about you."
"I have the utmost confidence that you will both be able to handle it in your own respective ways," said Black, a little too confidently, a little too patronizingly.
The food-court's background music changed to a more upbeat electro-Latin groove, an afternoon ersatz-salsa bop. The hundreds of hungover diners at the food court groaned in unison at the shrill, bright squeaks of the synthesized horn section.
"Well," said Cavanaugh. "Now that we've given you the whole routine. Are you in?"
"Can you get me Santley Crouch's job?"
"I'll look into it," said Black. "If he's retiring, like you say, I'm sure the vacancy can be held for a decorated war hero like yourself. Especially after becoming the first ISS Specter to infiltrate an illegal ring of dissidents operating within Chi-Town."
Sphere Monk accepted that as the best answer he was going to get. He rolled the pros and cons around in his head for a minute, feeling weight come down real hard on the con side. Cavanaugh and Black were serious operators; he was the odd man out. If things went badly, he knew it'd be his neck in the noose. Monk made the only decision he could.
"Yeah, sure, I'm in," he said. He thought it was a bad idea, but he knew it might be his last chance, his only chance. He thought of Paulina, and thought of their unborn child. He didn't want his kid being born in the Burbs, or Paulina being cut half-assed Caesarian by some drugged-out bodydoc with dirty hands. She already needed medical attention but there were no obstetricians in the Burbs. The baby wouldn't wait forever. The clock was ticking. He couldn't wait.
"As soon as I find my man, I'll be ready to go."