Smith Comes to Town.
Crimson lights winked their silent warnings to air traffic from the tops of opulent skyscrapers, while far below, threading through the forest of steel and concrete giants, the streets of Nu Kabuki-cho pulsed with the energy of a city eager to unwind. Under a sea of neon and high-vis holo screens, myriad faces sought a night's entertainment in a district where anything could be had for the right price.
The crowds threatened to swallow Smith as he walked along the narrow side streets yet he moved with a calm efficiency, always seeming to find that singular path which allowed him to stroll unhindered. Passing cafés, karaoke bars and massage parlours, he was looking for something, this man in the Saville Row suit. A joygirl, dressed in a translucent floral print mini dress approached him, taking him for an easy mark; a salary-man in search of a pretty young thing to take to a love hotel.
“Hey, mister. Looking for company?”
Smith looked at the girl, with her blue lipstick and her matching dress, barely concealing all she could offer. Hers were not the talents he sought that night and so he offered her a tight lipped smile and a shallow bow before sidestepping her attempt to block his path.
His grey eyes narrowed behind antique wire rimmed spectacles, Smith continued his search, filtering through the drunks, the touts, the dealers and addicts, the faces of the two he sought committed to an exacting memory.
At last he found them, crouched on the steps of a game centre, the boy clearly doting on the girl as she chatted animatedly with him. Both appeared to be in their mid teens and wore what Smith assumed to be subculture-appropriate fashion: long spikes of azure hair and a black trench coat on the boy, a thin circuit print vest, knee boots and flared miniskirt for the girl.
Smith moved up to the girl and rested a hand on her tattooed shoulder. She snapped around to grab the offending hand but froze mid-motion as she recognised Smith's face from their earlier call.
“You should be more careful who you touch,” she warned around a mouthful of gum.
“You're quite right.”
His sarcasm seemed lost on her as he wiped his hand with a handkerchief.
“Okay. So, step into our office,” she smiled cheekily and gestured to a toilet door set just inside the game centre. Smith arched an eyebrow almost imperceptibly and nodded.
“Thank you.”
The noise from the various games machines swelled to a cacophonous roar in Smith's ears as he passed the aural dampener units above the arcade's entrance. The boy shoved the toilet door open with feigned nonchalance and sauntered inside, leaving Smith to follow the provocative sway of the girl's peekaboo buttocks into their dingy 'office'.
Promotional flyers had been plastered on the walls in a failed attempt to cover up crumbling, faded green tiles, the ochre glow from an ancient strip light deepening the tobacco-smoke patina of the once shiny fixtures.
Smith regarded the pair in turn, his slate coloured eyes conveying his low tolerance for nonsense.
“Alita and Ganzo, yes?”
The girl ruffled her shock of neon-pink hair and nodded smartly.
“That's us. And you're Smith.”
“Yes. Now, are you certain you are up to the task?”
“Hey, no problem with that,” Ganzo asserted, his shoulders squared as he drew heavily on his cigarette. “We're the best -”
Alita cut him off with a raised hand, an irritated frown on her face. She turned to Smith, her sapphire gaze defiant, challenging.
“You bring the payment?” she asked.
“Of course.”
Smith reached slowly into his jacket, a cruel smile touching his lips briefly as he extended the theatre of exchange, heightening their anticipation. He handed a memory stick to Alita, who produced a small, antiquated laptop from her bag. She hopped up to sit on the edge of a wash basin and, with visibly shaking fingers, inserted the memory stick into the reader. Her face aglow with the light from the screen, her eyes hungrily scanned what she saw there.
Ganzo stepped up to Smith, his posture confrontational once more.
“What about the shit, man? I heard you'd have some for us.”
“Hmph.” Smith sighed. “How unimpressive. Take what you need.”
Smith proffered a small, unremarkable gunmetal case for Ganzo's appraisal. Several vials of vivid green liquid lay on a bed of foam inside and Ganzo removed four, his nervous fingers hovering over the others remaining before thinking better of it. The drug was known on the streets as 'Racer 9', a strong psychoactive stimulant similar in effect to meth-amphetamine. Smith waited for Ganzo to test the vials' purity in a portable analyser. The LCD readout showed 98.5% purity; this seemed good enough for Ganzo and he offered Smith a smile.
“Nice, Mister Smith. Very nice.”
“I'm so happy you approve,” Smith intoned dryly.
“Well, I fucking don't approve of this!” Alita pouted as she turned her screen for Smith to see. “Look! Aside from the brief, every damn thing on this chip is encrypted! What is this bullshit? It'd cost me more to crack this than I could ever make off the back of it.”
“Indeed. The necessary keys will be yours on completion of the task. Now, have you followed my instructions?”
“To the letter,” Ganzo assured.
“Then you have the tools with you?”
Alita nodded and nudged a pair of in-line skates protruding from her bag with her foot.
“Yeah, but why the mono-filament knives? A regular ceramic would do the job just fine.”
Smith sighed with the apparent exasperation of someone who often had to explain the obvious to the oblivious.
“His people must believe it to be the work of the Japanese. Not a couple of street waifs for hire. Now remember: police involvement would be an undesirable complication. You are to avoid them at all costs. Is that clear?”
“Crystal.” Ganzo's chest inflated with pride. “Listen bud, we're the fastest there is on those things and we can always go where the heat can't follow. You get me?”
Smith fixed him with a cold stare.
“Just make sure you complete the brief.”
The implicit threat in Smith's tone hung in the air long after he left the two teens to prepare for their assignment. He stepped back out into the night and walked briskly away from the arcade, his passage again strangely unhindered by the crush of people around him.
His presence unsettled others on some primal level, he knew. He enjoyed that knowledge, used the advantages it brought him. Smith pulled out his phone and placed a call to his employer as he pushed past a young couple, commandeering the taxi they had hailed. The image of their stunned, slack-jawed indignation amused him as he rode away. His call connected and his smile disappeared.
“It's done.”
Ganzo was trying his best not to stare at Alita's panties as she sat cross legged, fingers dancing across her laptop's keyboard. As if that wasn't distraction enough, her breasts were just a little too visible through the fine fabric of her vest. They'd come close to doing it last night. He was certain of it. Maybe tonight, after the job...
He shook his head and moved to stand behind her. He should at least try to be professional. Alita was staring at a grainy image of some guy, maybe forty, unfashionable winter coat, really bad glasses. To the right of the balding comb-over guy, a long stream of data fed the particulars of the mission to them: time, place, maps and schematics.
“That him, Leet?”
“Who else would it be, dumbass?”
She was teasing him. A sign of affection, he knew. He hoped. Alita looked over her shoulder at him with that faraway, dreamy look in her eyes she had whenever she was thinking about getting famous.
“The payout from this could be our first big time way out of here and onto the pro-corporate circuit. Can you imagine doing AR recordings for one of the big companies, Ganzo? How chilled would that be?”
Her enthusiasm usually rubbed off on him, but tonight he wasn't so sure.
“Yeah, Leet. You'd like that, I guess.”
She seemed to miss the melancholy in his voice and just kept on grinning at him.
“So, where's it gonna happen?” he asked her.
“He'll be leaving Madame Soong's place in five. We'd better move.”
Ganzo nodded his agreement and moments later they both had their skates strapped on and their knives ready in their waistbands. He handed Alita a vial of Racer 9 and then snapped a dose under his nose. The green liquid vaporised on contact with the air and he inhaled deeply, allowing the drug to coarse through his system.
Alita leant in to treat him to a wet kiss on his cheek and, as that delicious sensation spread within him, his vision blasted along a tight focus tunnel as the Racer 9 kicked in. Ganzo was aware of his pulse syncopating and swelling in velocity and suddenly he felt capable of anything.
They set off at pace through the bustling streets, weaving, sliding and kick-jumping around the blurred faces bobbing along around them. As they dropped into the subway, a series of rail slides and twirling jumps carried them at breakneck speeds past the homogenised commuters, over the barriers and into the lower levels.
Ganzo made out the sign for Madame Soong's, a flickering holoboard rotating images of naked girls. He followed Alita's line as they dashed towards the hostess club and his fingers found the grip of the lethal looking knife she had given him. He was utterly focused now, his balance supreme as he replicated Alita's every graceful move. It was time to go to work. Time to make Alita proud. Time to prove he wasn't the loser everyone said he was.
Ami Kaneda sipped her vaguely cherry flavoured, distinctly over priced cocktail and wondered what she was doing wrong. It was her third night working at Madame Soong's hostess bar and up until now, every one of her customers had left happy, drunk and light of cash. Not this guy.
Granted, he was spending with the best of them, drinking the most expensive Oban single malt for himself while ordering whatever she asked for. But no matter how many times he emptied his tumbler he showed no signs of being even a little tipsy. Worse, he showed no indication of happiness.
When he had picked up a news site hardcopy and started to read, Ami had started to feel worried that maybe her boss would notice and scold her for not being entertaining enough.
She scooted around the booth so that she was sat right next to him, her thigh pressed against his, her body angled so her cleavage was practically under his nose. Nothing.
Ami resolved to seek a refund for the 'pheromonally enhanced' perfume she had dropped a fortune on. She just couldn't figure out what made this guy tick. She was up to date with the news, as all good hostesses should be and yet her attempts to engage him in conversation had failed.
This plain looking gaijin was going to get her fired.
He glanced at his watch and nodded slightly before folding his news printout impeccably. Without so much as a glance in her direction, he edged his way from the booth and started walking towards the exit. Ami struggled for a moment with the conflict between her training, which demanded she do her utmost to keep customers in the club, and her own relief to see him go. She sensed something slightly unwholesome about this oddly silent gaijin and so she settled on letting him leave the club.
As he passed through the door, a younger man with clean looks and an obviously fat wallet moved to sit nervously at the bar. Ami swayed over to him and smiled sweetly. It looked like she would be able to afford that new necklace after all.
Ganzo split from Alita's line and approached the target from a different angle to her. The guy had his back to them, which was ideal. Made for a nice, clean kill. They'd done several jobs like this before and he knew that Alita would go in through the ribs, which left him to cut the jugular, just to be safe.
They were about three metres out from the guy when everything went horribly, irreversibly wrong. Somehow he wasn't there any more. Ganzo skidded to a halt and stared in confusion as he realised the guy had closed the gap to Alita before she could strike and now he was inside her striking circle. Inside her defences.
The man they had been sent to kill wore a cold, expressionless mask as his hand jabbed into the soft hollow where Alita's collarbone met her shoulder. Her arm fell limp, useless, and her role shifted from hunter to target as the man took her knife away from her.
He wielded her blade with a casual ease and brought it in a lightning arc across her inner thigh, making a deep, efficient cut there, wheeling away from her in the same instant so that no arterial spray found his coat.
Ganzo screamed in denial, his body frozen, impotent, as he watched this unassuming man murder the girl he loved so much. He never saw what the man did to him. He only saw that impassive face for the briefest instant before something impacted his chest and a cold pain flared there.
Tears filled and blurred his vision, threatening to obscure Alita from him as he slumped to the floor. He felt the hot liquid pumping from him and knew that he was dying. If he only did one thing right in his life, this would be it: Ganzo pulled himself along the floor until he could grasp Alita's hand. To his complete joy, he felt her squeeze his fingers with her thumb one last time.
Smith stared at his reflection in the darkened glass and watched the rain sluice down the window, his mind absently trying to find some patterns there. The hush of his suite was broken by the hiss of the front door opening. The silhouette he saw framed there was clearly that of Simmons, his employer. Smith felt a tremor run through his body as his heart experienced a palpitation.
He moved over to the desk and picked up his lighter, an antiquated Zippo in brushed chrome. Smith had carried it with him since his military days and had always found the act of slowly spinning it between his fingers soothing. Simmons moved silently across the room and fixed Smith with an impenetrable stare.
“You really should have sent better product. I asked for a challenge. You understand my need to train, Mister Smith.”
“I do. I assure you, they were advertised as the best in the local area and you had requested -”
“An accurate simulation of the gang using in-line skates in Singapore,” Simmons insisted. “They will be professionals. You sent me children. If I want to play with children I will fetch a rifle to a playground.”
Smith noticed the slight tremble in his hands as he worked a Dunhill from its pack. He lit it with the Zippo and inhaled deeply.
“You know, smoking will kill you,” Simmons remarked.
Smith snorted derisively before he could stop himself.
“They made these things safe years ago, removed all the toxins.”
Simmons' lips quirked in a faint smile.
“Well... if the cigarettes aren't going to kill you, maybe the contact poison on your lighter will. My flight is in an hour. Goodbye, Mister Smith. Enjoy your smoke.”
THE END.
Copyright © A. Flood 2010
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