[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

He reaches out a hand and she takes it, presses it to her.
"Where have you been?"
She looks at him, the way his face is warring with itself, gratitude mixed
with resentment. "I had to run, Daud," she says.
"You left me alone." She strokes his hand gently, the new pink flesh. "Damn
you," Daud says. "Why did you go? You said it would only be a couple of days."
"Things went wrong."
She tries to kiss him on the cheek. He twists his head away. She pulls back
and holds onto his hand.
"They're cutting my dose," he says. "It hurts. My legs, everything. I can't do
the exercises they give me."
Sarah looks down at him, seeing the outline of the thin new legs under the
sheet. "They can't let you out of here till you can walk right," she says.
"I can't walk at all unless I get my dose."
"Daud," she says, trying to keep her voice gentle. "I'm not bringing you
anything. Not hormone maskers, not endorphins."
Daud pulls his hand away. Sarah tries to talk to him, but he refuses to
answer. She watches his throat and cheek muscles working and feels her own
anger and frustration rising. She reminds herself that these kinds of games
are all that Daud has left, that he's playing them because he wants to know
she still cares enough to put up with them, but the anger rises too quickly,
and before it explodes she turns and stalks away.
The cool corridor air whispers to her, and this time she knows its message.
The city is closing in, and there is no one to guard her back.
TEMPEL PHARMACEUTICALS ANNOUNCES HUNTINGTON'S CURE
TEMPEL STOCK GOES WILD IN MARKET
Cure Described as "Search-and-Destroy Virus"
Thibodaux is a crystaljock, an intense thin man who crouches over his deck in
Cowboy's car, deep in some inner trance as he frowns and taps at the keyboard
in his lap. Cowboy knows him
file:///F|/rah/Walter%20Jon%20Williams/Williams,%20Walter%20Jon%20-%20Hardwire
d.txt (72 of 137) [7/17/03 11:28:34 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Walter%20Jon%20Williams/Williams,%20Walter%20Jon%20-%20Hardwire
d.txt slightly from a few years ago, when Thibodaux had a panzerboy lover
who'd later got himself blown away in some South Dakota wheat field. "Okay,
man," Thibodaux says. "That holding company in
Montevideo has been alerted. We're, ready to move."
"Go," Cowboy says. He takes a stud from the Cajun's deck and faces in.
The trick, Cowboy knows, is not moving the funds-that's easy, once he gives
Thibodaux the codes. The trick is losing the tracers that the laws have put on
his accounts in order to follow his every transaction and alert the police to
his location.
They're operating from Cowboy's car with Thibodaux's deck studded into a
public phone standing on its aluminum post on West Alameda in Santa Fe. The
Page 96
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
laws might be good enough to trace the series of commands, and Cowboy doesn't
want to use any of the lines to which he has regular access.
There's already a close smell in the car, nerves beginning to spark with
adrenaline.
Thibodaux clicks into the eye-face and calls Cowboy's robobroker. Cowboy
releases the first code from his crystal and within a period of two seconds
all of Cowboy's stock holdings are dumped in a complicated and seemingly
random way onto the markets of Singapore, London, and Mombasa Nova.
Approximately three seconds later they have all been traded for other stocks.
While the sales are being completed, Thibodaux gives Cowboy a signal and
Cowboy gives the second code from his chips. Cowboy's titles to various
deposits of precious metal, actually held in deep Bastillq security in various
banks throughout the western U.S. are shuttled onto the commodities markets in
Tobago.
The data strings representing Cowboy's new stockholdings, bought in three
different places, are encoded and bounced off geosynchronous Earth satellites
owned by Mikoyan-Gurevich, Toshiba, and the Gold Coast Maximum Law Corporation
I.G. Then they are sold at three more different exchanges for Mexican pesos,
CFA francs from Bangui, and Icelandic kronur.
Meanwhile, Cowboy's gold and silver have been traded for Ugandan shillings,
shillings that are shuttled to Manila, where they are deposited in a face bank [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]