Pulling up to the checkpoint, he notes that his Olds is now straddling a portable claymore mine. If he's the wrong guy, it'll turn the car into a steel doughnut. But he's not the wrong guy. He's the right guy. He's got a priority job, a heap of documents on the seat next to him, wrapped up tight and pretty.
He rolls the window down and a top-echelon Mafia guardsman nails him with the retinal scanner. None of this ID card nonsense. They know who he is in a microsecond. He sits back against his whiplash arrestor, turns the rear-view mirror to face himself, checks his hairstyle. It's not half bad.
"Bud," the guard says, "you ain't on the list."
"Yes, I am," Jason says. "This is a priority delivery. Got the papers right here."
He hands a hard copy of the Turfnet job order to the guard, who looks at it, grunts, and goes into his war wagon, which is richly festooned with antennas.
There is a very, very long wait.
A man is approaching on foot, walking across the emptiness between the Mafia franchise and the perimeter. The vacant lot is a wilderness of charred bricks and twisted electrical conduit, but this gentleman is walking across it like Christ on the Sea of Galilee. His suit is perfectly black. So is his hair. He doesn't have any guards with him. The perimeter security is that good.
Jason notices that all the guards at this checkpoint are standing a little straighter, adjusting their ties, shooting their cuffs. Jason wants to climb out of his bulletpocked Oldsmobile to show proper respect to whoever this guy is, but he can't get the door open because a big guard is standing right there, using the roof as a mirror.
All too quickly, he's there.
"Is this him?" he says to a guard.
The guard looks at Jason for a couple of seconds, as though he can't quite believe it, then looks at the important man in the black suit and nods.
The man in the black suit nods back, tugs on his cuffs a little bit, squints around him for a few moments, looking at the snipers up on the roofs, looking everywhere but at Jason. Then he steps forward one pace. One of his eyes is made of glass and doesn't point in the same direction as the other one. Jason thinks he's looking elsewhere. But he's looking at Jason with his good eye. Or maybe he isn't. Jason can't tell which eye is the real one. He shudders and stiffens like a puppy in a deep freeze.
"Jason Breckinridge," the man says.
"The Iron Pumper," Jason reminds him.
"Shut up. For the rest of this conversation, you don't say anything. When I tell you what you did wrong, you don't say you're sorry, because I already know you're sorry. And when you drive outta here alive, you don't thank me for being alive. And you don't even say goodbye to me."
Jason nods.
"I don't even want you to nod, that's how much you annoy me. Just freeze and shut up. Okay, here we go. We gave you a priority job this morning. It was real easy. All you had to do was read the fucking job sheet. But you didn't read it. You just took it upon yourself to make the fuckin' delivery on your own. Which the job sheet explicitly tells you not to do."
Jason's eyes flick in the direction of the bundle of documents on the seat.
"That's crap," the man says. "We don't want your fucking documents. We don't care about you and your fucking franchise out in the middle a nowhere. All we wanted was the Kourier. The job sheet said that this delivery was supposed to be made by one particular Kourier who works your area, name of Y.T. Uncle Enzo happens to like Y.T. He wants to meet her. Now, because you screwed up, Uncle Enzo don't get his wish. Oh, what a terrible outcome. What an embarrassment. What an incredible fuckup, is what it is. It's too late to save your franchise, Jason The Iron Pumper, but it might not be too late to keep the sewer rats from eating your nipples for dinner."
"This wasn't done with a sword," Hiro says. He is beyond astonishment as he stands and stares at Lagos's corpse. All the emotions will probably come piling in on him later, when he goes home and tries to sleep. For now, the thinking part of his brain seems cut loose from his body, as if he has just ingested a great deal of drugs, and he's just as cool as Squeaky.
"Oh, yeah? How can you tell?" Squeaky says.
"Swords make quick cuts, all the way through. Like, you cut off a head or an arm. A person who's been killed with a sword doesn't look like this."
"Really? Have you killed a lot of people with swords, Mr. Protagonist?"
"Yes. In the Metaverse."
They stand for a while longer, looking at it.
"This doesn't look like a speed move. This looks like a strength move," Squeaky says.
"Raven looks strong enough."
"That he does."
"But I don't think he was carrying a weapon. The Crips frisked him earlier, and he was clean."
"Well, then he must have borrowed one," Squeaky says. "This bug was all over the place, you know. We were keeping an eye on him, because we were afraid he was going to piss Raven off. He kept going around looking for a vantage point."
"He's loaded with surveillance gear," Hiro says. "The higher he gets, the better it works."
"So he ended up here on this embankment. And apparently the perpetrator knew where he was."
"The dust," Hiro says. "Watch the lasers."
Down below, Sushi K pirouettes spastically as a beer bottle caroms off his forehead. A bundle of lasers sweeps across the embankment, clearly visible in the fine dust being drawn out of it by the wind.
"This guy - this bug - was using lasers. As soon as he came up here - "
"They betrayed his position," Squeaky says.
"And then Raven came after him."
"Well, we're not saying it's him," Squeaky says. "But I need to know if this character" - he nods at the corpse - "might have done anything that would have made Raven feel threatened."
"What is this, group therapy? Who cares if Raven felt threatened?"
"I do," Squeaky says with great finality.
"Lagos was just a gargoyle. A big hoover for intel. I don't think he did wet operations - and if he did, he wouldn't do it in that get-up."
"So why do you think Raven was feeling so jumpy?"
"I guess he doesn't like being under surveillance," Hiro says.
"Yeah." Squeaky says. "You should remember that."
Then Squeaky puts one hand over his ear, the better to hear voices on his headset radio.
"Did Y.T. see this happen?" Hiro says.
"No," Squeaky mumbles, a few seconds later. "But she saw him leaving the scene. She's following him."
"Why would she want to do that!?"
"I guess you told her to, or something."