Body, Inc. Read online

  Ingrid bridled but said nothing. Over the decades national boundaries and much else had changed in Africa, but evidently not certain long-held cultural attitudes toward women.

  The endless parade of makeshift structures flashing past the transport reflected the entrepreneurial skills of the locals and their ability to improvise construction despite a paucity of financing. Unable to expand horizontally because of the lack of available land, grown children built atop the homes of their parents, and parents atop those of their parents. Gazing in wonderment at the crooked, precariously leaning structures, it seemed to Ingrid that a brisk wind could bring down the entire district. But somehow, millions of impoverished citizens found ways to stabilize their clapboard and sheet metal and fiber dwellings, their half prefab businesses, and their salvaged shops.

  The Wets might be poor and unstable, but it was not dull. Solar and wind and biomass powered the millions of lights that came to life as the sun began to descend over Table Mountain. Thousands of improvised walkways linked an equal number of buildings. Sometimes these informal paths floated on the water itself, elsewhere they hung like thick plastic vines connecting second- and third- and even fourth-floor levels. The transport raced past several ground-floor structures larger than most of the others. These blazed with cold fury, brazenly announcing the delights to be found within in a dozen languages or more: Xhosa, San, Afrikaans, Zulu, Baka, Himba, Shona and Ndebele, every imaginable derivative of the Bantu languages, every worldwide variant of English, Hindi and Tamil and Bengali, French.…

  “French?” Ingrid mused in surprise. The pygmy restaurateur explained.

  “Some of the shebeen owners think it lends a touch of class to their joint.”

  “What’s a shebeen?”

  “Whorehouse.” Whispr was less fascinated by the lights of the Wets than the glow that seemed to perpetually emanate from the doctor. He would much rather look at her than their surroundings. To someone like himself who hailed from a poor neighborhood one slum was much the same as another. Even one lying halfway around the world that was as well lit as the Cape Wets.

  “Sometimes can be.” Their helpful acquaintance sounded slightly miffed by the sinewy Namerican’s explanation. “More often it is just a drinking place, like an informal club, where one can meet friends, play games, and …”

  “Whore around.” Whispr’s attention reluctantly shifted from his view of the doctor to the dark bulk of the flat-topped mountain whose eastern flank the transport track was curving south to avoid.

  Anxious to compensate for her companion’s lack of tact, Ingrid tried indirection. “Do you work in a shebeen?”

  Her attempt failed disastrously, as evidenced by the small man’s reply.

  “Madame, I am the sous chef at Chez Sebeli in Fish Hoek.” Turning away from her, he moved toward the door. “And this is my stop. Yours is the one after the next. Do not worry about the fading light. Simon’s Town is a tourist place. It is well patrolled and safe after dark. The beach is lovely in the moonlight, but stay out of the water.”

  Ingrid blinked. Not that she had a nocturnal swim in mind. Not after their long flight from Florida. But she was curious. “Why?”

  “Government white pointers,” the affable sous chef explained. “Or great whites as you call them. Fully maniped and on beach patrol. Looking for illegal immigrants, but they have been known to have trouble in the dark distinguishing honest residents from interlopers. Once bitten, it is impossible to retract a bite.” With that he was out and gone through the softly hissing doors, an energetic small shape from Central Africa who had found his calling and made good in the SAEC.

  “White sharks.” Ingrid mulled over the intimidating image. “Somehow I don’t think the government has much trouble with illegals trying to swim ashore here.”

  Whispr shrugged. The near vertical mass of Table Mountain had consumed the entire western horizon and the cold dark sheet of False Bay the other, leaving only a few lights directly ahead of them to mark the last of the shrinking peninsula that pointed ultimately toward Antarctica.

  “How would they know how many tried and failed?” he told her. “Truly desperate people will try anything, no matter the risk.”

  She had to smile. “Even to searching out a doctor to remove police traktacs?”

  “Even to enduring such a doctor’s sarcasm,” he snapped back irritably. He lusted after Seastrom, he desired her with every iota of his being, but he would have liked her a lot more if only she wasn’t so damned smart.

  Turning away from him she leaned close to the transparent wall of the transport car to catch the last twinkling lights of the outrageous physical and human morass that was the Cape Wets as it receded behind the transport. The night was incapable of consuming the millions. She had been wrong in her assumptions, and wrong early.

  This place was nothing like Savannah.

  Horizontal strips of light cutting the backside of Table Mountain revealed the locations of holiday apartments while off to the north and northeast the frozen nova of the Wets drowned out the light of the moon. But to the south the stars of the southern sky were becoming visible. Out in the salt-stung vastness of False Bay seals snugged down for the night, safe until morning on their barren rocky islands from the depredations of Natural great whites. Meanwhile a handful of the great predators who had been extensively maniped maintained their nocturnal patrol for illegal immigrants, unlicensed fishermen, and hard-bitten smugglers.

  When the sea level had started to come up, old Simon’s Town had simply been moved lock, stock, commuter transport line and historical buildings a little farther up the steep mountainside. Continuing to occupy the original town site, more recent additions had been constructed over the water. These were not the rickety, tumbledown structures that grew like stalagmites of sheet metal and fiber and resin in the Cape Wets. Well founded on sturdy supports; hotels, restaurants, gift shops, commercial buildings, and expensive residences reflected architectural influences that ranged from old Boer farmhouses to ultramodern windsail powerfices.

  Standing on one of the walkways that connected their pleasantly modest hotel to the main street on the sloping mainland, Ingrid contemplated the moonlight on the bay. She was chilly. The season was the reverse of what she had left behind in Savannah. Tomorrow she would have to buy some warmer clothes. Turning away from the enchantments of the bay, which were as much olfactory as visual, she nodded to the northwest.

  “This is charming, but we can’t spend much time here. We need to get into the city proper so you can start making inquiries.”

  “Yeah, about that,” he began, “just how exactly did you have in mind for us to proceed?”

  She stared up at him. “You’re the one with the street smarts. That’s why you’re here.” When he didn’t reply she sighed and continued. “SICK has two corporate headquarters: one in Joburg and one here. I was able to confirm that much while using the box on the plane. But I couldn’t find anything that shows the locations of their research facilities.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Stands to reason. Big companies boast about the discoveries they make, but not where they’re made.”

  “Then,” she continued with becoming if naïve cheerfulness, “we’ll have to infiltrate their headquarters to find the location of their principal research facility.”

  Turning to face her, his slim form nearly disappeared in the overhead lights that dimly illuminated the walkway. As always, he looked as if a strong wind could pick him up off the faux wood planks and blow him out to sea. His tone was somber.

  “Listen to me, doc. I’ve lived most of my life on the streets. I can riffle and flan with the best of them. I can zift a pocket or purl a purse and disappear before the mark knows what’s happened.” Reaching into a pocket he withdrew the flattened, flexible, form-fitting bottle from which he periodically sucked the fortified liquid that helped to keep his manip-thinned body properly fueled. As he pressed it to his nearly nonexistent lips he sensed that the curving containe
r was almost empty. Tomorrow they would have to find a store that sold specialty foods for customized Melds like himself. Lowering the bottle he wiped his mouth with the back of an attenuated hand.

  “But I’m not an industrial spy. I don’t have the right physical tools to break into a box node, much less the headquarters of a company like SICK. And you”—he looked her up and down, admiring her in the rising moonlight—“you don’t have the mental ones.”

  She stiffened. “I might surprise you.”

  “Yah. You’ve surprised me already, or we wouldn’t be standing here at the ass-end of Africa having this conversation. I just don’t want to be surprised when some security lod snaps your arms behind your back and securestrips your wrists before hauling you off to the company query cage for a private interrogation session with Mr. Volt and Mr. Watt.” A sudden thought made him grin. “Of course, you could buy yourself something slink and low and distract the security while I slip inside.”

  She bridled. “You never give up, do you?”

  He affected innocence. “What? You want to get inside SICK’s offices, I’m just suggesting one possible avenue of approach.”

  “Let’s take that car down a different street.” She hesitated. “For now, anyway. I’ll consider your suggestion only if we can’t think of something better.”

  I can’t think of anything better, he mused to himself as he envisioned her in the kind of seductive outfit he was proposing. Outwardly he gave no indication of where his imagination was straying. Leastwise, he hoped he wasn’t.

  “Okay. You’re paying the bills.”

  “We’ll go into the city,” she reiterated firmly, “and you can start asking questions. You know how to ask. I know the address of SICK’s administrative center: that’s in the public box for anyone to see. What we need to find is the location of its main research facility: whether it’s also here in Cape Town, or in Joburg, or somewhere else.”

  “Not the kind of information your average drift entrepreneur is likely to have readily at hand. But I suppose we might find somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who knows how to get at that information.” He didn’t mince words. “Especially if you’re willing to pay for it.”

  She sighed heavily. “That’s becoming a familiar mantra of yours. How much is it likely to cost us? Me,” she corrected herself.

  He shrugged. “No telling. I don’t know the local rates for that kind of inforeveal. Anyway, what price knowledge, right?”

  Reaching out, she gave him a shove. “Easy for you to say. It’s not your life savings we’re spending here.”

  Turning away from her he headed up the walkway toward the town’s single main street. His arm tingled where she had pushed him.

  Then another hand was pushing him—far more forcefully. One of two very large black-and-white men slammed him up against the side wall of the two-story hotel while the other confronted a stunned Ingrid. Even in the fading light of early night Whispr thought he recognized them.

  They had been on the transport car from the airport.

  Given half a chance Whispr might have been able to defend himself. At six feet and barely a hundred pounds he was never going to overwhelm an assailant, but his melded body possessed a wiry strength than had been increased due to recent manip work. He tried to kick out with his recently enhanced legs. But his attacker had one huge hand pressed against the thinner man’s throat, reducing the flow of air to Whispr’s lungs and weakening him. Too shocked by the suddenness of the assault to run, Ingrid stood frozen in place.

  The hand that was not clutching Whispr’s throat held a heavy, thick-bladed knife while the other assailant brandished a neuralizer. The electronic weapon looked old, battered, and ill-maintained. That did not mean it was incapable of delivering a debilitating shock. Gasping for air Whispr still retained enough sense to wonder at the choice of weapons. They made no sense. For one thing, both appeared to be of local manufacture. For another, their primal nature and poor condition conflicted with everything he had learned about the professional assassin who had nearly slaughtered him and Seastrom back in south Florida.

  Retreating from the black-and-white skin-swirled man before her, Ingrid looked longingly at the water below. She was an excellent swimmer. If she could get over the railing before he grabbed her she felt sure she could elude him in the dark dankness below.

  But there was the small matter of the patrolling and not always scrupulous white sharks.…

  “I’m not giving up the thread,” she stammered as she took another step backward. “Not after all this. Not after all we’ve been through on its behalf. You’ll have to kill me to get it!”

  Bug-eyed now, Whispr gasped in her direction, “Don’t—give them—any—ideas!”

  The thug wielding the neuralizer blinked. “Yerhali—thread? What ‘thread’? What you talk about, Natural? Give us you cards and jewelry and we let you go.”

  Realization now offered competition for the bright lights that had begun to flash before Whispr’s eyes. His and Ingrid’s initial assumption had been wrong. These were not minions of the hired assassin Napun Molé. Nor were they associates of the three melded women who had beat up Dr. Seastrom’s elderly friend and mentor Dr. Sverdlosk. Having barely just arrived in this new corner of the world it appeared that he and his companion were being assaulted by common street crims. This wasn’t a contract ambush: it was an ordinary riffle. Which did not in any way diminish the threat posed by the knife glinting in front of his face or the neuralizer aimed at the doctor.

  “Doc—Ingrid,” he sputtered, “they just want our valuables. That’s all. They’re not interested in threa—in anything else.”

  “Maybe.” The heavyset thug blocking access to the street was not as slow on the uptake as he looked. “Now you got me curious, visitor. What is this ‘thread’ you talk? It is something valuable?”

  Though she continued to contemplate the potential safety of the water below, Ingrid held her ground on the raised pathway. “N-no, he’s just talking about—some thread I bought. Some gold thread. To fix a dress of mine. It’s not all that valuable.” She eased a little closer to the railing. It, and the water below, were close now. She was coming to the conclusion that she was more afraid of this moonlit mugger than any sharks that might be lurking in the shallows.

  Further reinforcing her rising opinion of their attackers’ mental acuity the man threatening her took a corresponding step forward, waving the aged neuralizer as he did so.

  “If you try to jump in the water I will shoot you. With your limbs paralyzed, you will drown.” He eyed her closely. “You do not look like a dress-type lady-person to me. Pretty, yes, but also practical, I think. I also think you must tell us more about this ‘thread.’ ”

  She had no doubt that his threat to use the neuralizer on her if she jumped was real. But if she managed to get over the railing first he would have trouble aiming at a moving target in the dark. One thing she knew for certain: she could not spend long minutes debating which course to take. Her leg muscles clenched in expectation and she had half turned toward the railing when a cry rang out.

  “Biza amapolisa!”

  Both muggers whirled. The shout was repeated, this time from multiple throats. They cried out in perfect unison, as though the call had risen from a single throat. The thug holding Whispr muttered something to his companion. They growled at each other for a moment. Then he sheathed his knife while his colleague pocketed the neuralizer. Both men started toward the street. As they hugged the wall of the hotel they and the threat they posed receded into the darkness. It was not so dark that Whispr failed to note the looks on their faces as they fled. It was an expression he knew well, and the same on this continent as on the one he had just left behind.

  Something had frightened them.

  After pausing another moment to make sure the two rifflers were really gone, Ingrid came over to Whispr’s side. She stood close to him but was careful not to make contact. The cry of “Biza amapolisa” continue
d to resound in the darkness.

  “What is it—what’s going on? Why did those guys run away?”

  “Wish I knew.” He struggled to see deeper into the night. “That second word that’s being shouted sounds kinda like ‘police.’ Maybe somebody saw what was happening and is yelling for the cops.” He went silent again, listening. “Lots of somebodies, actually. I’ll be damned if it doesn’t sound like a bunch of kids.” His expression squinched as he tried to focus on the unseeable. “Almost sounds like they’re singing.”

  “Who cares? All that matters is that they’ve scared off our assailants.”

  “I suppose,” he mumbled. “Except I don’t like singing, and I don’t like kids.”

  “Once again I get to reflect on what a jolly traveling companion I’ve been saddled with.” She offered him a twisted smile.

  He took no offense. “Jolly won’t get you inside SICK’s research facilities.”

  The singing-shouting finally stopped. She inhaled deeply of the bracing salt air. “Well whatever it was, at least now we’re safe.” She stepped briskly past him. “We can still go into the city and you can get started with your questions.”

  Whispr followed reluctantly. “We nearly got riffled, we only just got off the plane, and you want to go wandering around a foreign city at night?”

  Her smile penetrated the darkness. “Isn’t that when someone like you is most likely to run into the kind of people we need to pump for information?”

  “Yeah, but …” He waved at the looming shadow of Table Mountain. “Those two may still be out there.”

  She shook her head. “Gone, they’re gone. I can sense it.”

  “Oh, so now you can sense the presence of others? Was that part of your medical training?” His gaze rose past her. “If that’s the case then how come you didn’t sense them.”

  A cluster of figures stood on the near side of the street, blocking the way to the transport kiosk. Whispr tensed, then relaxed when he saw that the pack confronting them consisted entirely of children. A rapid survey suggested that with one exception all were between the ages of eight and thirteen. The one exception approached Ingrid. Whispr started to step between them, stopped himself when he saw that the man wasn’t wielding a weapon. Only a smile.