METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire Read online

  Like everything else, police work was a holding action against the inevitability of entropy. Even cops went Green from time to time, walked away down the soft path and never came back. Mindy figured that once Dad’s body finally caught up with the death of his mind, she might not feel bound to Portland any more. Or cities anywhere, really, let alone the Cities with their diminishing citadels of wealth and privilege.

  The forests had their attractions, even to an urban child like herself. Once she was an orphan, once Dad’s body had gone the way of his spirit and there was no one left to be proud of her, even if just in memory …

  Mindy wrenched her thoughts back to the subject at hand. The datamat was mocking her. This case was forty years old, and had never been much of one to start with. Victim had no data trail or ID, even by the standards of the time. There was no body. An anonymous complaint from deep within the Greenie community, that would have gone ignored except for the three more that had rolled in that same autumn around the time of a major bombing. Not to mention the fact that some Big Money had focused on the same missing-but-nonexistent person long enough to leave a data trail of its own.

  So, basically, a man who’d never existed walked into an invisible city on the slopes of Mt. Hood, and got himself killed after a couple of weeks of food, singing and hot sex, leaving no body behind afterward.

  “This is retarded.” She slapped the table so hard her French fries jumped as the cracked oval stoneware plate beneath them rattled. Her burger remained slumped, damp, and meaty, inert as such things should be. “Why was this ever a case at all?”

  More to the point, she wondered why it had floated to the top of the very, very deep and scummy pool of cold case files that were the shame and sorrow of any modern police department. Cascadia LEC was no exception.

  The comment wrapper on the file was sufficiently cryptic to be a masterwork of plausible deniability. ‘Min—Big Money’s back on this one. Paid hit? Or unlucky hit man? Check out C-City. – F.’

  Lieutenant Franklin was an ass, but he was her ass. Sort-of dirty in the free donuts and blowjobs way of most cops, but not on the take for anything important except maybe politics. Mindy liked doing cold case work for him because he mostly left her alone and nobody ever tried to buy her off. She didn’t even do the free donuts. And Dad would never have understood if she’d gone on the take.

  Money, it was always about following the money.

  Mindy poked through the associated files, trying to figure which Big Money had been suspected of involvement in the bombings forty years ago, and why there could possibly be any connection today. The banking system was no great shakes, to put it mildly, and she couldn’t imagine anyone keeping a functional financial account in the same damned place for four decades, and using it for nefarious purposes the entire time.

  Not these days, when wine-backed barter certificates were better currency than government coinage, and more stores in what had been the western United States honored Euros, yen or yuan than took Uncle Sam’s dollars.

  She called up Franklin on her phone’s fob, then tapped her earbud to make the call.

  He answered on the second ring. “Yo.”

  “What the hell is this?” Mindy didn’t bother to keep the cranky out of her voice.

  “Detective Fleischer. Always a pleasure speaking to you.” His voice crackled with false bonhomie.

  “Forty-year-old dead files, and not even a body?”

  “Almost four dozen bodies as I recall,” Franklin replied. Neither of them had even been born yet when the Cascadiopolis bombing had gone down.

  “You know what I mean. Some bullshit financial data is all I got, and a note from you to go take a hike in the forest.”

  “You’ve cracked cases starting from less.”

  “Yeah, well.” He had her number—vanity. Cold case work was hard. There were rarely any suspects to sweat, and witnesses had a way of dying off or forgetting between the crime and the questioning. It was more research than cop work. And she was good at it.

  “Look, these financials are more interesting than meets the eye.” She heard some faint noises over the connection, like he was pulling up data. “That forty-year-old transaction was an anonymous wire transfer out of Hong Kong, originating from the old HSBC.”

  “Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.” Mindy was impressed in spite of herself. “They were damned near a sovereign entity in its own right, back in the day.”

  “Yep. Heavy iron finance.” Franklin paused, reading something. “The money landed in a Portland credit union for bearer pickup tied to an encryption key. Bank security imaging at this end was worthless at identifying the bagman, apparently a Muslim female in a very conservative burka.”

  “Yeah.” Mindy poked her datamat. “Image is here. Could be anyone under all that black.”

  “Our new catch, such as it is, appears to be another anonymous wire transfer.”

  “From …?”

  “The Pearl River Islamic Bank. Says here that’s one of HSBC’s successor institutions.”

  “Oh, really?” Mindy paused at the coincidence of the burka from decades earlier and the source of the money that had come through three days ago to a financial co-op in Portland’s troubled Southeast sector. Why had the transaction been flagged at all? “And we just happened to pull it up?”

  “Sometimes you get lucky.” Either Franklin didn’t know, or he wouldn’t give. Nothing in the datamat’s files was going to tell her why either. “Hasn’t been picked up, either,” he added. “Crypto analytics says the public key on this one had been generated from the same seed as the public key on the HSBC transfer back in 2031.”

  Crypto probably courtesy of Edgewater these days, she thought bitterly. The odds of the same public key being a coincidence were somewhere around the odds of Mindy being named the next Tooth Fairy.

  Someone, or something, had woken up after half a lifetime’s sleep.

  “Anything else on that?” she asked.

  “You got it all. I’ll send you the rest of these financials.” He hung up at that—no good-byes, not for Franklin. Moments later the datamat flagged the new files.

  Mindy put in a request for monitoring of the banking co-op’s premises and remote access tunnels. She knew perfectly well that would be prioritized for action sometime two or three years from now, given available resources and the utter lack of urgency about cold cases. Still, it was proper procedure.

  Whatever this case was really about, it had to involve politics. Until that came to her unavoidable attention, she was going to assume that was the lieutenant’s problem. Went with his pay grade and job description better than hers, at any rate.

  In the meantime, she could ‘check out C-City’, as Franklin’s wrapper note had urged. Cascadiopolis, abandoned Green dream on the slopes of Mt. Hood. Not failed, not at all, for the Green daughter-cities now famously stretched from the Brooks Range to the Sierra Madre Occidental. An independent, invisible country without name or borders, crossing the old national boundaries of the original NAFTA member states like smoke from a forest fire.

  But their mother city had been destroyed forty years ago, not so long after the alleged murder of the alleged nonexistent man. An unmarked spot in the forests on the lower slopes of Mt. Hood, it shouldn’t be hard to find, if you had patience, good boots and a willingness to share the forest with bears, mountain lions and half-crazed dope growers toting automatic weapons.

  After paying for her food with a crumpled handful of winos, Mindy went out to her truck, a fuel-cell conversion from an ancient-but-indestructible Mercedes Unimog. The vehicle didn’t move very fast, but it had enough torque to tow a building, or climb short cliffs. And was almost literally bulletproof, which was always an asset in law enforcement.

  Usually someone, somewhere, wanted cold cases to stay cold. In this case, the someone was likely at a safe distance in the somewhere known as Hong Kong, but if they were sending money into Cascadia, it logically followed they had agents her
e.

  Seated in the cab of her truck, Mindy checked all her weapons one by one – riot pistol, needler, stickynet grenades and taser—before setting the old beast humming to life for the long, slow climb into the dying forests.

  * * *

  Children’s jump rope rhyme, collected in Gresham, Oregon, summer of 2042 by the University of Washington Contemporary Folklife Project:

  Tygre, Tygre, burning bright

  All the Greenies have taken flight

  Your hidden city flames at night

  Tygre, Tygre, set it right

  * * *

  Social capital is perhaps the greatest of soft path technologies

  He awoke, dreaming of Asset Tau. So far as Crown knew, the man was dead these forty years. He’d never met Asset Tau face-to-face, but Asset Chi’s after-action reports from that particular operation had been stark to the point of fanaticism. What he’d been able to steal or buy out of Cascadiopolis archives later on had only confirmed Asset Chi’s assertions, while deepening the mystery of Tygre Tygre to the point of myth.

  Even for William Silas Crown, empiricist, atheist and pessimist.

  He’d believed in little throughout his long life except money, greed and the profound cupidity of human beings. Crown would be damned if he was going to get religion on his deathbed. But the myth of Tygre had haunted him for decades.

  Crown didn’t believe in myth, either, but he could put his money where his spirit seemed tempted to go. Hence the J. Appleseed Foundation, a project of the decades since. Something of a bet against himself, given the nature of the work Crown Enterprises, LLC had for the most part engaged in—shoring up the old economic system, looking for ways to restore the primacy of capital and the concomitant social benefits.

  Except capital had gone from primacy to primate shit over the years, and the concomitant social benefits had taken a long walk off a short, oil-soaked, storm-lashed pier. Restorationism had grown less and less attractive, less and less interesting.

  Maybe the Greens had been right all along. He’d been willing enough to invest in their soft path technologies, on those occasions when the IP could be captured. Greens tended to view open source as a panacea, which was idiotic—who could possibly profit from that? Not even the IP creators themselves.

  But maybe they weren’t such idiots.

  “Can I ever leave this room again?” he asked aloud. A not-quite-rhetorical question.

  Hubbard responded first. “Is your remaining alive a necessary condition?”

  “Alive, conscious and self-aware,” Crown specified.

  Heinlein laughed, another of its overprogrammed eccentricities. When had the expert systems become so much like Crown himself? “Do you plan to survive the trip?”

  “Only long enough to reach my destination.”

  Hubbard again: “What is the desired destination?”

  “Cascadiopolis.” Crown was overtaken by a coughing fit. “Or one of the …” Breathe, breathe, breathe! “… daughter-cities.”

  “Ciudad St. Helens is the closest known daughter-city,” Hubbard said after a moment.

  “Could I make it there?” Crown asked, his pulse quickening.

  “You would have about a seventy percent chance of arriving dead or further incapacitated,” said Heinlein. “That is a first-order approximation assuming an armored mobile ICU, no serious traffic interruptions or road violence, and your continued medical stability.”

  “Right.” Crown didn’t even have the energy to be disappointed. He was never getting out of this room. “I want to talk to someone from J. Appleseed.” He paused for a long, slow series of ragged breaths. “In person.”

  “Your contact with the Foundation has always been heavily screened,” Kornbluth reminded him.

  “I don’t care. I’m dying, and they’ll soon have enough money to buy all the privacy they need.”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  “Who’s that old terrorist they keep around?” Another pause for breath, then he gathered headway for the next sentence. “The one they treat like an oracle.”

  “Perhaps you refer to the gentleman known as Bashar,” said Kornbluth. “J. Appleseed does not ‘keep him around’, though he is retainered handsomely from Foundation funds. Your description of him as an oracle is likely somewhat apt.”

  “Where is … Bashar …?” They’d met briefly, Crown and Bashar, forty years ago the one time he’d visited Cascadiopolis. By coincidence—or perhaps not—two days before the bombing. The city was already emptying when Crown had gone there.

  “Somewhere else.” Kornbluth sounded strangely reluctant for an expert system. “Bashar is a person of permanent interest to Cascadia LEC, but he is a very experienced Green, and passes through most of the surveillance nets without registering.”

  “In other words … no one knows where he is.”

  “Two days ago, Bashar tripped a monitor in Damascus, Oregon.”

  “Here?” Crown was not often surprised these days. Damascus was a Willamette Valley farming town not far east of Portland. “He’s not in Seattle?” The J. Appleseed Foundation kept its main offices and core assets in Seattle and surrounds.

  Kornbluth had no answer to such a null query, but Heinlein spoke up. “He’s quite possibly headed to the remains of Cascadiopolis.”

  “Why?” Crown asked.

  Unfortunately, that question had no discernible answer.

  “Sir,” Kornbluth spoke up. “Sir. We may have some answers on why Patriot, Inc. has been attaching assets to the J. Appleseed Foundation.”

  “Answers?” Crown laughed, a slow, wheezing gasp. “And here I thought … my life was made of … questions.”

  * * *

  Nothing had torque like an electric-drive Mercedes truck. Mindy proceeded with agonizing slowness up an old logging road that was well on its way to being a gully. The rewilding crews had taken out OR-224 a year earlier, which had made even the nominally easy part of the drive rather a bitch. And that was before the deep woods. Eventually she’d run of out roadbed, then out of traversable wilderness. For now, she trundled onward. Her inertial navigator—no GPS backtrace for Raymond Fleischer’s little girl—had her on a questionable route toward the probable location of Cascadiopolis. And whatever it was Franklin thought she might find walking the ground where the bombing had happened all those years ago.

  Admittedly, all routes were questionable up here, either long abandoned logging and fire roads, or leading towards little dells full of pot and gun-toting neo-hippies. Who looked and smelled a lot like Greens, admittedly, until the bullet caught you in the braincase, if you were lucky; or the kneecap if you were unlucky.

  She had a South African riot pistol on the seat against such eventualities. Basically a bastard cross between a Tommy gun and a twelve-gauge, the weapon was quite capable of shredding an entire offensive line at a range of three or four meters, and utterly worthless past about ten meters.

  Who the hell could see in a straight line any further ten meters in these woods, anyway?

  Still, what she sought was tucked into a ridgeline somewhere between Estacada and Welches. That meant a lot of country. The in-nav was programmed with the best data Cascadia LEC had on the area, but it wasn’t much. The cops ignored the dope growers so long as the dope growers only shot at each other. Kill a tourist, different story.

  Unfortunately she wasn’t a tourist, either.

  Being a cop was a shitty job even on a decent day, but she usually knew who the bad guys were, the rules weren’t too hard to understand, and she was doing good in the world. The cold case work, well, hadn’t someone once said justice delayed was justice denied? She undenied justice for people who were otherwise beyond help. And really, for the sake of her Dad.

  As the Unimog churned through some deep mud under an overhanging stand of blackberries, Mindy contemplated some of the places cold case work had brought her. Three bodies at the bottom of an abandoned missile silo outside Moses Lake, Washington; from two completely differe
nt case files at that. The double-header had earned her years of jokes, and grudging respect, in Cascadia LEC’s Portland field office out of which she was nominally based. The Chimney Bandit, courtesy of poetic justice stuck at long last in his favorite entry route—he’d had his rape toys in his satchel as he’d struggled and screamed and starved, only to be found down a deep, sooty brick-lined hole by Mindy four years after the fact. The pair of escaped murderers living for however many years inside the wreck of the LNG tanker Globus Red Velvet just off Cape Disappointment.

  And plenty of trips through the deep woods for one reason or another. Cascadia west of the rain shadow was basically nothing but deep woods, even in these hot, hot years. But this trip was different. She was chasing history, not a perp. Not to mention peering into one of the wellsprings of what it meant to be Green today.

  Temptation? Curiosity? Her reasons were surely mixed, but coming out here was about more than a cold case file, even one as famous as this bombing. Dad would have approved, she thought.

  Her truck groaned over a ridge and onto a slope that was more gravel than mud. Mindy let go of the riot pistol to wrestle the wheel, lest she roll it into the yawning ditch just to her left.

  Trap?

  Or just bad road …

  * * *

  Half a day later, and perhaps twenty-five kilometers as the crow staggered, Mindy was as close as four wheels were going to get her. The stumps of an ancient trestle bridge were barely visible in a small canyon at her feet, while behind her stretched a suspiciously level stretch of forest floor that smacked of railroad right-of-way. The ridge beyond the canyon showed evidence of a decades-old burn.

  Now if she could only find the remains of the trilithon, the old ‘Granite Gate’, Mindy would know for certain she was in the right place.