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"That's a good point," the admiral said, subsiding. "But it still doesn't help us get off the planet."
"The laundry's gone," Mullins said. "There's a butcher shop and Aunt Meda's in addition. You know any others, Charlie?"
"Aunt Sadie's?" Gonzalvez said. "There's a flower shop on Holeckova, but this is the first I've heard of Aunt Meda's."
"Aunt Meda's House of Pain," Mullins replied. "It's a whorehouse with a sadomasochistic workout center called 'The House of Pain' as cover. And I know two safehouses. But if much of the network has been burned, who knows if any of them are clear?"
"How come you get the topless dancers and Aunt Meda's and I always get the flower shops and laundries?" Charles asked.
"God loves me and He hates you," Mullins replied. He jerked his head toward the admiral. "We need to get him out so we need to make contact. There's also Tommy Two-Time, but if I've got my druthers I won't bother with a double agent."
"You go," Gonzalvez said. "The Admiral and I will stay here and play gin rummy or something."
"I'll need a contact term for the flower shop," Mullins said. "Just my luck it'll be 'I need some pansies for the prom.' "
"Flowers or friends, Joh
CHAPTER 4
SOMETIMES YOU GET THE BEAR
John walked past The House of Pain on the far side of the street, his head down, feet moving in the approved prole shuffle.
Aunt Meda's had been the last contact on his list and it was open. Contact, however, was problematic. The gym was on a generally unfrequented side street but today, for some unknown reason, there were several people wandering around.
In this corner, wearing an old shabby overcoat and fingerless gloves, nursing a bottle of cheap red wine, was a common street person. Such could be found in the more out-of-the way areas of Prague City but Aunt Meda's was on the better side of the tracks and street people should have been swept up by security. Ergo, it probably wasn't a street person at all.
Coming in the opposite direction from John was another prole. This one was a female and fairly good-looking. In fact, too good-looking. She didn't have the sallow skin from low-quality food that proles generally sported and her prole walk wasn't quite right. There was just a bit too much of the bounce to it.
Ergo, not a prole. Maybe a hooker or dancer dressing up as a prole, but unlikely.
Confirmation that the prole wasn't came when the woman, probably a StateSec officer, brushed against him and subjected him to a fairly professional patting down.
He apparently passed since she continued on her way but as he turned the corner to head back to the safehouse his heart sank; there was a group of local police waiting around the corner, their air car grounded on the sidewalk.
"You!" One of the patrolmen, faceless in heavy body armor and helmet, waved him over as two more took up positions on either side.
"Name," the officer said. It wasn't a question, it was a demand.
"Gunther Orafson," Mullins replied in badly accented French. He proffered his ID tag then spread his legs, placed his right hand behind his head and held the left out, palm up; it was a position that proles learned early.
The officer put the tag in a slot, then waved the pad in front of Mullins' face and over his outstretched hand.
What the system thought it was doing was reading personal information of one Gunther Orafson, assistant boom operator at the Krupp Metal Works factory. It took a retina scan, surveyed fourteen points on his fingers and palm, compared his facial infrared topography to its database and took a DNA scan, all in under two seconds.
What it was actually looking at was some very advanced Manticoran technology.
Gunther Orafson had been stopped years before by someone very like John Mullins, except at the time the Mullins counterpart had been dressed like a local police officer.
Using a device that looked identical to the one this officer was using, he had taken all of Gunther Orafson's vital statistics and put them into a database. One checkpoint, fifteen minutes on a busy day, could garner dozens of identities, and the CIT teams had access to all of them.
Now the results of all that labor bore fruit. The police officer's pad looked at Mullins' eyes, and adjustable implants reflected an excellent facsimile of Gunther Orafson's retinas. The pad sca
The rest was the same. DNA patterns on fingerprint gloves and even a pheromone emitter for the more advanced detectors, everything screamed "Gunther Orafson."
Except his face. And the Peep system was so "advanced" they didn't even bother with a picture on the ID tag.
All of it was dissected and spit back to central headquarters. There it was compared with Gunther Orafson's data and accepted or denied.
The system apparently liked what it saw because it quickly clucked green and spit out the tag.
"What are you doing here?" the officer asked.
It was an abnormal question so Mullins let a bit more nervousness enter his voice. "I live in the seventeenth block of Kurferdam Street. I went to the market on Gellon because I had heard they had meat. But they were out. I am returning to my flat."
"I know where you live you idiot," the officer said, handing the tag back. "Get home. There will be a curfew tonight."
"Yes, Sir," Mullins said with a duck of his head. He continued on his way immediately; despite the fact the cop-thug had probably come from a prole background, proles didn't talk to cops and vice versa.
It had seemed like a routine stop but given the proximity to Meda's it was unlikely. A pity, really. For all her personal . . . quirks, Meda had been a lady.
And, worst of all, it only left Tommy Two-Time; every other contact had been taken down by StateSec.
"Hiya, Tommy," Mullins said, trying not to breathe as he walked in the door. Among the many reasons not to deal with Tommy Two-Time, the regular fecal smell from his overloaded bathroom had to be high on the list. It had to be the worst smelling "herb" shop in the universe.
Thomas Totim was an herbalist. Often that was a high profile profession; in a society where "universal medical care" meant waiting four hours for a drunken doctor to look at your skull fracture, herbalists and midwives were the most medicine that many proles saw in their lives.
The shelves were sparsely populated with a variety of inexpensive herbal remedies while along the left wall a locked case held "harder" or more valuable materials. The far wall was lined with refrigerators, cases and aquariums; many of the odder materials available to the modern herbal doctor had to be used "fresh" from any of thousands of species alien to humanity's home planet.
But Tommy wasn't that kind of an herbalist. He had all the herbs, and he could do a pretty good herbalist patter. But people came to Tommy when they needed something harder than St. John's Wort; the shelves were covered in dust and most of the aquariums were filled with the dying remnants of their original populations.
"Oh, shit," Tommy said looking out the door. "I can't believe you just walked into my shop."
"Long time," Mullins replied fingering a dangling root that was covered in mold. It might be the way it was supposed to be, but with Tommy it was more likely to just be neglect. "What are you scamming this week? Spank? Rock?"
Under the early Legislaturalists many common soft drugs had been legalized. The technical reason was to reduce the rationale for street crime but the unspoken rallying cry was "A drugged prole is a happy prole." There was even a Basic Living Stipend entry for "pharmaceutical drug use."