of sailors and the specialists who preyed on them. As Case pushed through the doors, he looked for Ratz, but the bartender wasn’t in sight. Lonny Zone, the bar’s resident pimp, was observing with glazed fatherly interest as one of his girls went to work on a young sailor. Zone was addicted to a brand of hypnotic the Japanese called Cloud Dancers. Catching the pimp’s eye, Case beckoned him to the bar. Zone came drifting through the crowd in slow motion, his long face slack and placid.
“You seen Wage tonight, Lonny?”
Zone regarded him with his usual calm. He shook his head.
“You sure, man?”
“Maybe in the Namban. Maybe two hours ago.”
“Got some joeboys with him? One of ’em thin, dark hair, maybe a black jacket?”
“No,” Zone said at last, his smooth forehead creased to indicate the effort it cost him to recall so much pointless detail. “Big boys. Graftees.” Zone’s eyes showed very little white and less iris; under the drooping lids, his pupils were dilated and enormous. He stared into Case’s face for a long time, then lowered his gaze. He saw the bulge of the steel whip. “Cobra,” he said, and raised an eyebrow. “You wanna fuck somebody up?”
“See you, Lonny.” Case left the bar.
HIS TAIL WAS back. He was sure of it. He felt a stab of elation, the octagons and adrenaline mingling with something else. You’re enjoying this, he thought; you’re crazy.
Because, in some weird and very approximate way, it was like a run in the matrix. Get just wasted enough, find yourself in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish cell specialties. Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market. . . .
Go it, Case, he told himself. Suck ’em in. Last thing they’ll expect. He was half a block from the games arcade where he’d first met Linda Lee.
He bolted across Ninsei, scattering a pack of strolling sailors. One of them screamed after him in Spanish. Then he was through the entrance, the sound crashing over him like surf, subsonics throbbing in the pit of his stomach. Someone scored a ten-megaton hit on Tank War Europa, a simulated airburst drowning the arcade in white sound as a lurid hologram fireball mushroomed overhead. He cut to the right and loped up a flight of unpainted chipboard stairs. He’d come here once with Wage, to discuss a deal in proscribed hormonal triggers with a man called Matsuga. He remembered the hallway, its stained matting, the row of identical doors leading to tiny office cubicles. One door was open now. A Japanese girl in a sleeveless black t-shirt glanced up from a white terminal, behind her head a travel poster of Greece, Aegean blue splashed with streamlined ideograms.
“Get your security up here,” Case told her.
Then he sprinted down the corridor, out of her sight. The last two doors were closed and, he assumed, locked. He spun and slammed the sole of his nylon running shoe into the blue-lacquered composition door at the far end. It popped, cheap hardware falling from the splintered frame. Darkness there, the white curve of a terminal housing. Then he was on the door to its right, both hands around the transparent plastic knob, leaning in with everything he had. Something snapped, and he was inside. This was where he and Wage had met with Matsuga, but whatever front company Matsuga had operated was long gone. No terminal, nothing. Light from the alley behind the arcade, filtering in through sootblown plastic. He made out a snakelike loop of fiberoptics protruding from a wall socket, a pile of discarded food containers, and the bladeless nacelle of an electric fan.
The window was a single pane of cheap plastic. He shrugged out of his jacket, bundled it around his right hand, and punched. It split, requiring two more blows to free it from the frame. Over the muted chaos of the games, an alarm began to cycle, triggered either by the broken window or by the girl at the head of the corridor.
Case turned, pulled his jacket on, and flicked the cobra to full extension.
With the door closed, he was counting on his tail to assume he’d gone through the