The Lazarus Drop

By Paul Moomaw

Nathanial Blue, freelance trouble shooter, gets a contract from an unnamed government agency to drop into Mexico, find and rescue a Hungarian scientist who may have the secret of interstellar space travel, and haul him back to the relative safety of the USA. What Blue doesn’t know, until it is almost too late to matter, is that the government agency that hired him is almost as dirty as the bad guys on the other side, and that he is not meant to make it back alive. “A fast-paced adventure thriller set in the near future in Mexico, The Lazarus Drop combines the old “Sam Spade” narrative with modern technology. Nathaniel Blue, the hero, steals the show with his good/bad guy, very human personality . . . I fell in love with Blue; I hope we haven’t seen the last of him.” — S. Joan Popek, Reviewer “Nathaniel Blue is a strong hero (who is) totally aware of his faults, and he seems to enjoy the havoc they sometimes wreak—the more challenges the better.” — Jamie Engle, eBook Connections.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TheFictionWorks
• Release date: Nov 23, 2010
• ISBN: 9781581245455

Book preview

Author

Chapter 1

You know how it is sometimes. You meet a guy, and right away you don’t like him; and you know you never will. That was the way I felt about Nordeen the minute he opened the door. There was a job, if I wanted it, Stuart had said. I did, because my bank account was reaching the point where the machines keep your credit chip uncomfortably long, and chuckle worriedly over it before they give it back. It involved learning Spanish in a hurry, he had said, which wasn’t so good, because that meant a painful brain dump. But it was a government hire, which was usually good, because the feds have never learned not to pay twice as much as anything is worth. If I wanted it, Stuart had said, I should go see a man named Paul Nordeen, presently taking up space at The Hole in The Wall.

You know the Hole in The Wall, the plushest hotel in greater Los Angeles, which means the plushest just about anywhere—a skinny pyramid that straddles the Greenhouse Wall, poking into the smoggy air like a tarnished needle; the one you see on the holovid news with big shot diplomats, politicians, and billionaires floating in and out in private aircars.

Stuart knew I wouldn’t say no, of course. Stuart knows me better than I know myself. He’s been my boss for 15 years, although he insists he’s not my boss. He calls it being a job broker, and points out that I am always free to turn down any job he offers. I don’t bother to point out in turn that I’ve never had the nerve to exercise that alleged freedom. He would say that’s my problem, not his. The fact remains, before he picked me up from the alley where I was hiding from LA’s finest, I had never had a steady income. Now I own my own plex—just a modest one-bedroom, but it’s paid for—I can afford a few of life’s small luxuries, and I don’t have to duck when I see a cop.

I didn’t say no, and found myself bright and early one morning—that’s bright and early Nathaniel Blue time, which translates into any time before lunch—standing in the ankle-deep, peach-colored hallway carpet in front of Nordeen’s suite, pushing the button and taking it on faith that it rang a bell somewhere, because I couldn’t hear a thing.

Nordeen opened the door, and everything about him was wrong. He was too short, too sleek, and too tan—the kind of tan that comes from expensive biodermal treatments. He had a sharp-featured face, carefully framed by color-coordinated, coffee-and-cream colored hair, and amber eyes that should have contained fossilized insects. Even his suit was tan, and set off by just the right amount of discrete, but obviously expensive, gold jewelry. He was the kind of guy who would have his underwear pressed, and would always make sure no one was looking before he picked his nose.

You’re Blue? he said. He had a dry, waspish voice that went with all the tan, the kind of voice that says the owner wants you to know he never made a mistake in his life.

That’s me, I said, and walked in, walked right at him, in fact. I wanted to establish a position right away, push him back, make him give ground. And at ninety keys and a hundred and ninety centimeters, I’m not exactly a midget. But he didn’t budge, I have to hand him that, and we wound up standing, nose to nose, breathing on each other. I had him in the nose department, at least. Mine is my most prominent feature, the kind they used to refer to as Roman, when there was still a Rome, before the Oppressed Children of Allah ruined the neighborhood, opting for nuclear self-immolation and picking the Coliseum as the portal to heaven. It’s the first thing people notice, even before they get to my dazzling smile, warm green eyes and curly chestnut locks, not to mention my lovable personality.

Nordeen’s nose was like I had already decided he would be, sort of skinny and pinched. But he took the first round. He stood there like a statue until I had lost my momentum, and we both knew it.

Then he smiled, a victorious glint in his eye. I’m Nordeen. You can come in now.

I followed him to a couple of chairs by a window. We were in the upper reaches of the hotel, with a view of the ocean, dotted with colorful boats, far below through the haze.

Are you partial to any particular chemicals? He waved toward a central bar. This place offers just about anything you can imagine, from sugarcoated coca leaves to moon dust.

I’ll have a whiskey. In a glass, with ice.

He smiled his tight little smile again. A primitive, he said. He made the drink, handed it to me, and took one of the chairs. He didn’t sit in it, he arranged himself in it.

I hear you’re supposed to be hot shit, he said. I’m not impressed so far, but it’s not my money.

I don’t like you either. I slouched into the other chair with my drink. But I’ll let you offer me a job.

Fair enough. We need an escort. There’s a man in Mexico who needs to get to the States.

So why can’t he hop a glider?

First, and Nordeen held up a perfectly manicured finger, he may not believe he needs to get to the States. Are you a fast talker?

Ask any woman who knows me.

Most of them would say no, but Nordeen didn’t have to know that. He held up another finger. Second, his current host will take a dim view of this whole business. He may create difficulties, and he has the wherewithal to do that in a big way.

I knocked off the remains of my drink and held the glass out with a thirsty look. Nordeen took it and got up to replenish it. A point for me, I thought; he didn’t tell me to do it myself.

Go on, I said, as he handed me a new drink.

The man’s name is Erno Imry. He’s a Hungarian mathematician with some pretty important stuff locked up in his head.

Nordeen tossed me a bubblecorder. The details are in that, omitting some things you don’t need to know until we hire you, if we do. I’ll give you the brief version, then you take off and spend some time with that before you decide if you want the job.

I nodded and stuck the machine in a pocket.

Imry got fed up with the Serbian Hegemony’s red tape last year and took a hike. He went to India, and set himself up to work there. But someone kept taking shots at him—we don’t know who, the assumption is a hire from Belgrade—so he moved again. This time he was headed for Brazil, but he never got there. Last we heard he was in Mexico.

And you want him in the States, instead.

We want to talk to him, make him an offer, that’s all. We’ve never had a chance to do that. When he was in Hungary, they had him practically under house arrest. We tried again after he went to India, but before we could make any contact with him there, he disappeared.

Why can’t you just lean on the Mexican government and get him released to your loving care?

Nordeen gave me a condescending smirk. Which Mexican government? If he was around Mexico City, still in the jurisdiction of the so-called central government, we could try. But Imry’s in Michoacan, and we have zero influence there. In fact, the head man in Michoacan is playing around with the Chinese, which we worry about. We also have to consider the Brazilians. If it was India, we wouldn’t care. Nobody gives a shit about India. But the Brazilians are allies. They’d make a stink if they knew we were trying to talk Imry into coming over to us, instead of accepting their hospitality.

So that’s where I come in?

That’s where you come in. We need someone to insert, pull Imry before the people who have him sell him back to the Serbs, and escort him to a place where we can make him a quiet offer.

How quiet?

Enough that if things blow up in your face, we just never heard of you.

If he says no?

Then we tell Brazilia we’ve rescued him, ship him south, and console ourselves with the diplomatic points for that. Frankly, we don’t think he’ll say no. We think we can make him a better offer than the Brazilians, especially when it comes to security. They have shitty security.

What makes this guy such a hot item?

Nordeen motioned toward the bubblecorder in my jacket. It’s all in there. Who he is, where he is, stuff like that.

He stood up and started walking toward the door. I got up and followed.

The bubblecorder will suffer a case of terminal amnesia about this time tomorrow, but that gives you plenty of time to soak up what’s in it and think things over.

He opened the door and bestowed another smirk on me.

Give me a call, if you think you can handle the job. He closed the door in my face.

I took the hotel’s floating staircase back to the ground floor and went outside. The Wall was crowded as always. It is the favorite spot for everyone, including myself, to pass idle time—a giant levee that has preserved the City of Angels from the rising waters of the Greenhouse Effect, converting it into a brash peninsula which juts, dirty air and all, from the dry, brown mountains of California’s diminished coastline.

The air probably will never change, and no one tries, any more, to explain it. Back in the dark ages of the early 20th Century they blamed backyard incinerators, and banned the domestic burning of trash. When the air got dirtier anyway, they blamed it on the internal combustion engine. Now the internal combustion engine has become a memory, like dinosaurs and privacy, and the smog still lies over the city, and they don’t blame it on anything anymore, or talk about ways of getting rid of it. But on the Wall the air is often reasonable, swept by the ocean breeze.

My favorite spot on the wall is the Pavilion of Strangers. It is an oasis of solitude, an expanse of grass, shrubs and widely spaced tables sporting only one chair each, with a view—ocean lapping at one side and City Hall hiding behind the other—that beats the hell out of the dingy courtyard visible through the single window of my plex. An energy fence surrounds the pavilion and keeps the crowds away. Even the rollerbabies, who seem to be everywhere else with their bright skintights and their surgically implanted character masks, have to detour around it. The authorities also bow to custom and do no business inside the boundaries of this pavilion. The police once waited patiently on its perimeter for three days while a fugitive took advantage of the balmy climate to camp out there, calmly eating and drinking and occasionally waving to his pursuers, until he finally hit the limit on his credit chip. Then he had to leave and the purple-and-blues made their arrest.

I went there now, threading my way through the brightly dressed vacationers, idlers and con artists, past the Grotto of Secret Delights and the Pavilion at the End of the Night. The biggest crowds, as usual, were at the Twentieth Century Pavilion. Everybody seems to be a nostalgia buff these days. Maybe it’s because the twenty-first hasn’t been that great, and the twenty-second, only three years away now, looks even scarier.

I paid my way into the pavilion, picked a table close to the water, and ordered a whiskey from the roboserver. Then I leaned back to enjoy the view, plugged in the bubblecorder’s ear piece, and started listening as an impersonal voice, happily not Nordeen’s, reeled off facts.

Imry wasn’t just anybody. He was working on a new mathematical theory; and the consensus among people who understand such things was that it just might provide the big breakthrough to faster-than-light space flight. I’m pretty much an earth worm, but even I could grasp the excitement of that possibility.

Imry was my age, 50, and single. He was born in Budapest, educated in Moscow and Peking, and had taught in Berlin. That was where he started the work that had everyone so excited. He had been back in Budapest, tightly cloistered in some government institute for several years. Then he had managed, a year ago in June, to go to India for a conference. He had slipped out of his New Delhi hotel in the middle of the night, with a little help from some Indian friends, and turned up the next day at the Indian Ministry of Science.

During the following eleven months, parties unknown had tried to kill Imry twice and kidnap him once. That was when he decided to change residences again, and headed for Brazil—in a commercial hovership, because the man whose theories might take us to the stars was afraid to fly.

There had been no official word of him since, but what the voice referred to as impeccable sources reported that Imry’s vessel had been waylaid off the coast of the Free State of Guerrero, in western Mexico, and that he had been escorted under armed guard from there to the Free State of Michoacan, where he was now the reluctant guest of one Romulo Noriega, also known as, The General, who was titular head of the Free State of Michoacan.

Noriega wasn’t a general, and never had been, the report said. He had been an enlisted man in the Mexican Army when that country collapsed under the weight of poverty and its own teeming population, abandoned by a United States and Europe reeling under the double blow of global pandemics and the Greenhouse Effect. A number of opportunistic politicians, like Quejada in the northeast, Contreras in Chihuahua, and Gabaldon in the Yucatan, picked up the pieces and formed their own fiefdoms. Noriega snuggled up to Rene Cataldo, the landowner and industrialist who had originally grabbed power in Michoacan. He used that position to build his own network of support, then burned Cataldo and took over.

Noriega, the report said, entertained thoughts of reuniting Mexico under his own enlightened rule. The best intelligence—read educated guess—was that he had plucked Imry at the behest of the Serbians, in return for financial and military assistance. Now he was holding on to the Hungarian, trying for more goodies by playing Belgrade off against Beijing. That offered the United States a brief window of opportunity before (a) Noriega ended his game voluntarily, or (b) one or the other of the major players got tired of the game and did something nasty.

In the meantime, everybody was busy denying that any of this was happening.

The voice droned on, and I let my gaze wander, my attention caught briefly by a trio of brightly-garbed rollerbabies just outside the energy wall which surrounds the Pavilion of Strangers. Their plastic helmets glinted and the wheels of their electroglide skates screamed as they circled a pedestrian. One of them had used the surgeon’s skills to have a third eye implanted in the middle of his forehead. It was ruby red and twice normal size, but it tracked with the rollerbaby’s other eyes. The second had turned his face into a blue-feathered bird of prey, but with a long, green snake’s tongue slipping in and out of the open beak. The third appeared to be a woman, with dead white skin, oversized purple lips out of a nightmare, and a Medusa’s head of writhing snakes where her hair should have been. Their prey was a tall, rotund man, who stood in their midst, looking worried. He should, I thought. You never know with rollerbabies. Sometimes they just want to play, and sometimes they get vicious. It depends on what they’ve shot up with that day.

I have a special problem with rollerbabies. They give me nightmares sometimes, or at least, trigger the return of a very old nightmare. To me they are the spiritual descendants of the Wreckers, who turned my life into a nightmare when I was seven. Wreckers started out toward the end of the 20th century as homeless workers, people who were employed and made a decent living, but who could not afford places to settle, so they pooled resources and bought large houses on wheels known as recreational vehicles. They lived in the parks, staying as long as each park’s regulation allowed, and then moving to the next. Most had a circuit of half a dozen parks, all within striking distance of their places of employment. They called them Reccers, then, after their vehicles. Early in the 21st century, the government got tired of hearing complaints, and threw the Reccers out of the parks. By the time I was born, they were known as Wreckers, and had earned the name—roving bands of marauders who stole, raped and murdered their way across the country.

I learned about Wreckers on my seventh birthday, and my life has never been the same. It was my father’s birthday, too, and we always had a double party, with lots of friends—little kids for me, grown up friends for my father. It was dark, and the party was almost over. I don’t believe anyone ever found out how the Wreckers got past the security gates and into the compound, I just remember four strangers grabbing my mother. One of them said that he liked parties, and he was going to show us how he and his friend partied.

He had a high, whiny voice. It is burned into my memory. I no longer see his face, but I would recognize that voice even now. It is part of the nightmares. I remember running to my father and trying to hide between his legs, and then the crazy pulling my mom’s clothes off, and my father pushing me away and trying to protect her. The wreckers killed them both, and when I don’t have nightmares about what happened, I dream about finding the bastards some day and killing them, slowly, with all of the skills I have learned since going to work for Stuart.

They sent me to live with my grandfather. He is a kind, gentle man, and he did his best to help me re-build a life; but somewhere between dawn and midnight of my seventh birthday, I stopped believing in kindness and gentleness. By the time I reached my adolescence, I was out of control, and my grandfather stopped trying, although we have never let go of each other completely. I stay in touch and assure him that my life is going well, even when it isn’t, because I think that is what he wants to hear. In the meantime, by my eighteenth birthday, I had discovered life between the cracks, where the law is just another complication to be dealt with by whatever means comes to hand. I still live between the cracks, and am quite comfortable there, especially now that I have Stuart’s support and resources.

I stared at nothing for a while, then finally managed to shake the images and return my attention to the tape, which was telling me of the existence of potentially available human resource in the form of a revolutionary underground in Michoacan. The report didn’t specify where they might be found. I assumed Nordeen would have the details there.

The government was very interested in having Imry in the United States, as his work presented an obvious political, military and economic advantage to whatever country he allied himself with. The government took a special interest in dissuading Imry from taking up residence in Brazil, which had been flexing its already considerable political,