Free A Talent For The Invisible (v1.1) by Ron Goulart

brisk stride. His smile returned and he even paused an instant to pat a little golden-haired boy in a guerilla suit.
    At the corner Conger turned right and ran for half a block. No one had paid him much attention so far. There was a throbbing light strip immediately above him. Artists & Writers’ Pub the sign said, pointing into an alley. Conger went that way.
    Overhead he heard a new sound, a hovering whine. He glanced up to see an aircruiser dropping down ahead of him, almost scrapping the plastic bricks on each side of the narrow alley.
    A lyric poet and a muralist emerged from the pub. “Holy moley!” said the poet when he noticed the descending hopper.
    Conger heard steps behind him and knew, without turning, that Ting had found the alley. The cruiser blocked him from going ahead.
    “She has nice bone structure,” said the painter.
    “No, no, much too thin,” said the poet. “I say, give me a Rubensesque woman every time. A Rubensesque woman, a loaf of sprouted-wheat bread, a flask of …”
    “Come on and get in,” Angelica suggested to Conger. She had opened the left hand boarding door.
    Conger waved goodbye to the hesitant Ting and squeezed around the ship to climb in. “Nice seeing you again.”
    The hopper began rising. “I was going to come in after you in another few minutes. I figured you’d come up with a way to get out of the studio on your own, though. I don’t like to be too intrusive.”
    On the control panel of the ship a monitor screen was mounted. It showed now Big Mac stumbling around the loft, rubbing at his head.
    “NSO knew about Inza, too,” said Conger.
    “Since about the time you did. One of our field men planted that scan bug in there early this morning. I got here after they’d killed her, too late to stop them,” said Angelica. “By the way, why are you carrying that big picture of a Navajo Indian?”
    “I’m hoping he can tell us where to go next,” said Conger.

CHAPTER 12
    As the hopper skimmed the twilight jungle Conger fiddled with the huge painting he had swiped.
    Angelica, who had set her aircruiser on an automatic course back to Rio, sat turned toward him with one slender hand resting on his shoulder.
    “When I was watching that poor girl’s studio on the monitor, Jake; I could see you,” she said. “But that couldn’t be, at that distance, because I’m immune.”
    “A good part of the time the invisibility trick doesn’t fool television gear,” said Conger, “or an assortment of other electronic devices. As the 21st Century progresses it gets tougher and tougher to be an invisible man.”
    “Did you volunteer?”
    Conger poked another section of the Indian painting’s frame. “Yeah, at the time it seemed like more fun than a desk job. You know how things look to you when you’re still in your twenties. And then I’d gotten to know Vince Worth.”
    “He was killed, wasn’t he?”
    After several seconds Conger answered, “I guess he was.”
    “You’re not sure Worth is dead?”
    “Well …” The ornate picture frame made a low clicking sound, the speech box behind the canvas began to talk.
    “… seems like that’s redundant, Mac,” said the recorded voice of Jerry Ting.
    “You’d get along a lot better in life, slopehead, if you didn’t always question orders,” said the black AEF agent.
    “Still, Mac, AEF paid Sandman all that dough to bring Enzerto back to life. That wasn’t— what?—not more than five months ago. Now they want him dead again.”
    “There’s always a lot of fluctuation in politics, clutchbutt. As of today they want him knocked off.”
    “We could have saved a lot of money …”
    “Soon as we finish up here in the colony we got orders to travel up to Central America, to Urbania, and finish off Enzerto,” said Big Mac. “Seems he’s become real friendly with the junta there, which is not good.”
    “Okay by me, Mac. I was only …”
    “Come on, buttwipe, we got to make another check of the streets. In case