Zendyne | Page 8

faux-glitzy lottery booths and squalid drug dens, scrabbling for a dream ticket or a hit of shard.
Shame the dream is only temporary, Stranger thought. Tough. Shit happens.
Tonight, his job was to interview the rentacop about some lost property and a remarkable doll, and then to make sure that the rest of the man��s day turned out to be very unlucky indeed.
He watched the client enter the elevator and then zoomed in for a closer, horribly pixelated view of the floor indicator. The elevator ascended smoothly and stopped at thirteen.
The client lived in apartment 134.
Stranger waited for thirty precisely judged seconds before entering the lobby.
He��d already scoped out the defenses. There was a security scanner blocking access to the elevators, and two female guards with Slavic features and helmet-linked autoguns. If things went smoothly, he wouldn��t have to deal with these ladies, but it was all in the day��s work to Stranger. A client could hide inside as many Russian Doll security layers as he liked; none of it would help. Nothing ever helped, not against Stranger, not once you were on his list.
He slid an artfully scuffed Zendyne ID across the front desk. "Personal document delivery for Mr. Kelly. Could you tell him I��m here, please?"
The lobbybobby glanced at the card, taking in the fake name that was printed alongside the authentic barcode. "Certainly, Mr. Mottram." He turned away and spoke softly into his headvox before turning back to Stranger. "Could you let him know what��s it��s concerning?"
"He was supposed to sign some papers before he left work." Stranger patted the courier bag that was slung from his shoulder. "Today��s the deadline for this quarter��s stock allocation. The company likes everyone to participate. I need to get it filled and back to the office ASAP."
"Just a moment." The flunky whispered into the headvox again, then looked up at Stranger. "Apartment 134." He nodded towards the guards. "You��ll need to go through security clearance first, if you don��t mind."
"Not at all."
The scanner stayed politely silent as he walked between its sensors, but one of the Russian Dolls decided to frisk him anyway. Stranger often had that effect on her kind. His bulk and his buzzed hair probably didn��t help. The sightfold made him look odd, too, but he had no choice about that: the artificial eyes it concealed were too distinctive �� and too costly �� to plausibly belong to a company messenger.
In the meantime, the low-res prosthetic did a good enough job, and even the most flinty-hearted security guard would think twice before asking a visually impaired visitor to remove his ��fold.
"Sorry to have troubled you," the woman said.
Stranger nodded courteously as he walked past her to the elevator.
Once safely inside, he took off the ��fold and initiated the other changes, watching himself in the mirror as the elevator ascended. By the time he reached the thirteenth floor, his body had transformed itself: he��d lost several kilos of body fat, which made him feel good, because being overweight always took the spring out of his step. In return, he��d gained a form-following layer of concealed body armor and a long, black blade, which made him feel even better.
For the moment, the knife was inactive, gripped in his right palm and concealed behind his forearm.
The door to apartment 134 was already open. The client stood just inside the threshold, his face lit with a welcoming smile that faded into embarrassment as he failed to ignore the strangeness of his visitor��s eyes. "Mottram?"
Stranger nodded, once.
"It��s so nice of you to come all this way just for this stock option thing. Makes me really appreciate starting at Zendyne." The client reached forward, offering his hand.
Stranger held the other man��s gaze as he stroked the blade across the proffered fingers, tracing a line along the knuckles. The artificial eyes �� with their extraordinary peripheral vision �� let him observe the severed digits as they fell like a handful of plump sausages that had been splashed with red ketchup and dropped on the carpet. There was a barely perceptible patter as they arranged themselves among the woven rose petals.
The blade was exquisitely sharp: the man didn��t even notice what had happened until Stranger was inside the apartment with the door securely closed. Then he looked down with a puzzled expression on his face.
"You need to take care of that, and you need to stay quiet," Stranger said.
The client��s face showed incomprehension, followed by shock and then by panicky understanding. "Please. My wife."
"And where would Mrs. Kelly be?"
"In the bathroom."
"You��d better lock her in. You really wouldn��t want her to meet a man like me."
This client caught on more quickly than most: he nodded and fetched a dining chair with his uninjured hand. He propped it under a door handle that led off the cramped hallway.
"Good,"