Yes, now that made a nasty kind of sense. I could easily imagine some Yamatetsu covert op monitoring events- maybe through some kind of bug on Scott's person-waiting for the right moment to press the little red button on the transmitter beside him. Bang goes Scott, taking with him all evidence that could be used to trace the responsible party. (Part of that evidence, of course, was one Dirk Montgomery…) That could be why Scotty let me go: because he expected that we'd both be getting out of there in one piece. The only reason I was alive to think this through now was that the covert op was asleep at the switch, a few seconds slow on the button.

Oh joy. Now that made things really tight, didn't it? If my line of reasoning was anywhere near correct, I was a walking, breathing piece of evidence that could connect the oyaburis assassination directly with Jacques Barnard. So now, not only did I have yakuza payback teams to worry about, I also had my theoretical Yamatetsu covert ops looking to tie up me loose ends in their operation. Oh, and just for good measure, toss in the Hawai'i National Police Force as well. Presumably murder is against the law in the Kingdom, and they might have some interest in the matter. Suddenly, I was very popular, wasn't I?

So what the frag was I supposed to do now? I pulled the C-N Buddy over to the side of the road, and I stared out over the Pacific as despair rolled over me like a dark and cold wave. Where the frag was I supposed to go?

I was hooped-well and truly hooped.

Options-let's work through them one at a time. I could go back to the Diamond Head Hotel-null! Suicide, basically. Yamatetsu would be waiting for me there, as would the yaks if they had any brains at all. My only hope of surviving the experience would be if the yaks and the corps were too busy geeking each other to geek me. Not an attractive bet.

I could hightail it for Awalani Airport and grab a suborbital the frag out of here. Hell, I still had my open corp ticket, didn't I? Sure, I could jump aboard a plane and leave all my grief behind me-null! I knew from experience just how much security surrounded those birds. There was no fragging way in hell that Barnard, or the yaks either, for that matter, wouldn't know I was hopping a plane out. At Awalani, in the middle of the flight, or at whichever airport I chose as my destination, there'd be that gentle tap on me shoulder that's more shocking than a punch in the teeth. I'd be dragged away, and then there'd be the bullet in me back of the head. Or who knows, maybe I'd be turned to stone and get to join the statues I saw in the background during Barnard's telecom call.

The more I drought about it, the more hooped I was. I hadn't really paid attention when Scotty had told me why there were so few wannabes in the Hawai'i shadows-no running room if things go for drek. Now I was learning from personal experience that he was right, and I didn't like the feeling at all.

What options did I have? Was there any other way off the islands? Not that I knew about, on the spur of the moment. Was there anywhere I could hole up until this all blew over? Not that I knew about, on the spur of the moment. Was there anyone who had contacts and resources that could help me out? Not that I knew about, on the spur…

Wait a tick. Maybe mere was one: It was a long shot, but when things get desperate "risk amelioration" isn't much of an option.

"Kia ora!" I practiced as I pulled the Buddy back onto the road, trying to get just the right tone of bellicosity into my voice. "Kia ora!"

9

But before I paid my respects to bruddah Te Purewa-ne Mark Harrop-at Cheeseburger in Paradise, there were a couple of other things I needed to take care of. Like, hooking up with any and all resources that might prove useful even if they weren't in the islands.

That morning, when I'd gotten ready to cruise out to the meet in Scott's limo, I'd debated whether or not to bother bringing my pocket 'puter. Hell, I'd reasoned if I needed communications or data retrieval or whatever, the rig in the back of the Rolls would put my personal 'puter to shame. Out of habit, though-and a sense of cussedness, perhaps-I'd brought the scratched little unit along in my pocket.

Thank the Spirits for habit and cussedness. At a little village called Kaaawa, I pulled over and used a public phone booth outside a ramshackle grocery/ice-cream/tourist foo foo store. First order of biz-after polarizing the transpex so no one could see in-was to disable the vid pickup, which I did in the most efficient way by smacking it a good one with the butt of the Browning I'd inherited. Second was to haul out my trusty 'puter, jack it into the phone's data port, and trigger the sophisticated-and hideously illegal-smoke and mirrors program that my old chummer Quincy (how long since I'd seen that slag?) had once blown into the little unit's EPROM chips. Phone and 'puter clicked and hummed for a few seconds while Quincy's code seduced the LTG system. Finally, with a beep that was the electronic equivalent of, 'Take me, stud, but be gentle," the phone succumbed to the 'puter's entreaties and I had the run of a very small corner of the PA/HI RTG.

First things first. Convincing the innocent, trusting phone system that I was an authorized Hawai'i Telecommunications Corporation senior manager, I set myself up a private and secured mailbox in HTC's automated datamail system. (This was only a temporary setup, unfortunately; I didn't have the time or the resources to make it permanent. At some time, a month or two down the road, some watchdog program would start barking when it noticed that nobody was paying for the datamail box even though it was still active. HTC would immediately close it down, but by that point it shouldn't matter to me. In a month or two, I'd either be dead or off the islands.) This datamail box was the electronic equivalent of a "blind maildrop" in espionage fieldcraft. People could leave messages for me there, and I could retrieve them at my leisure, but there was no way, theoretically, that any interested party, like Jacques Barnard, could track down my actual location even if he compromised the mailbox.

Step two: Get in touch with the people that I wanted to leave me messages. The first of those was simple. One of the ever-wiz little utilities on my Quincy-modified 'puter let me send off a text-only message through a series of cold relays to a certain telecom in deepest, darkest Renton. The message contained no names, nothing that could compromise either sender or recipient. The header addressed the message to the president of Demolition Man Building Services Inc. The body text of the message was the digital address of my new datamail box cyclically encoded (again thanks be to Quincy, forever and ever amen). The way I figured it, only one man still alive would recognize the reference and know who was trying to reach him. When he got back into the sprawl. Argent would pick up the message and hopefully contact me through my blind drop.

The second person was harder, but again Quincy's code-bashing helped me out. Within minutes I'd whipped up a simplistic little gofer of a smartframe and fired it off through the Matrix to the Cheyenne LTG. Once there, the gofer would search for any references to one Sharon Young and deliver her a message.

The content of that message was more problematic than the one to Argent. Young and I didn't have much in the way of background; we certainly didn't have any codes in common as I did with Argent. My message had to meet two criteria. First, it had to identify me without using names. Second, it had to communicate my blind-drop address in code. And third, it had to contain the key to that code in such a way that only Sharon Young would recognize it as such and be able to decrypt the address.