Berry ducked away from the red stream of laser light in a move that was part reflex, part neuro-electronics, not that he could tell the difference any more. But it was slipping on a pile of dog shit that really saved his ass.

"Nice town," he grunted as he rolled and dived behind a dumpster piled high with faded pastel console covers and broken masonry blocks in primary colours, the jumbled detritus of some industrial accident or, perhaps, just the systemic side effect of the rampant urban renewal that was turning Saigon into the unofficial capital of the latest Asian tiger. Batting at a nasty brown stain on his jacket, Berry could still hear the residual buzzing sound of vaporised water molecules in the air. It was a humid night.

Who and why? Berry leaned against chipped blue sheet metal, slid the Glock MicroAssault out of his jacket pocket and checked the clip. If they've got image amps, he's not sticking his head out to look, so he listens for clues. He shifts a few millivolts to audio: there's some ambient shit, scooter streets away, some rats or similar scrabbling in the dumpster; nothing lethal in this context. No footsteps, no deep breathing. Maybe its time to talk.

"Who are you?" Berry shouts, his own voice coming through distorted in his augmented hearing like a B-movie God.

There now, footsteps, moving off to the left, one set. But is that all? Berry does some estimating, transfers the Glock to his left hand, leans over and picks up the electronic guts of some dead console. He weighs it in his hand, listens for the footsteps. Yes. They are smooth, steady and careful - professional. Good; predictable.

Berry leant forward and heaved the console guts up high over his left shoulder. Then he sprang to the edge of the dumpster and peered around its battered corner just in time to see the startled movement of a figure about ten metres away as the electronic scrap just missed and smashed on the ground with a satisfying spray of glittering componentry. Berry fires a burst, and it impacts from knee to forehead. Even with body armour, he's gonna be hurt, this anonymous assassin. The figure goes down with a grunt and Berry risks a quick scan of the environs. Nada.

He pulled his head back and a beam flashed where it was, but a little wild. There's a scattered pattern of scorch marks in the brick wall behind him, deadly micro-murals. Thank you, Berry smiles and does a bit more estimating. He crawls back from the dumpster, keeping it between him and the guy with the laser. Then, when he can see the neon Daewoo sign above a shop front, he totals it with a long burst. It disintegrates in an explosive shower of glass and sparks and brittle noise.

There's a loud, high scream from under it. Berry angled around the dumpster, saw someone crawling out from under the sparking wreckage of the sign. He sees a woman's face behind the nightscope.

She's lost her laser, stands up brushing dirt and glass off her tight-fitting camosuit and pulls off the image amplifier helmet. About twenty-five with dark close-cropped hair, she looks like a local. She glares at Berry a long second and steps towards the still body of her partner. That one is obviously dead; too much blood. She bends over the body, straightens and turns back to Berry .

"My husband," she says quietly in good English.

"Well I hate to be a marriage wrecker, Mrs...." - she just glares at him - "but you'll understand I'm sometimes a little unfriendly when accosted on a dark night in a strange city. Now, perhaps you could tell me why, exactly, this unpleasantness took place?"

"Go fuck yourself, Berry ," she says.

"Aha, so it was me you were after. Why?"

She looks back at her husband's body, turns and spits right in Berry 's eye, or would have if he'd not turned enough to dodge it. Grinning, he puts his finger to the spittle on his cheek and dabs a little on his tongue.

"Nope, not some exotic oriental poison, just spit. Chicken for dinner, eh?"

The kick is nothing subtle and Berry grabs her ankle, holds it in front of his face. He'd noticed her inching forward, getting in range, but it wouldn't have mattered anyway. There is fear in her face now.

"Hmm, Nike Nightstalkers," he says, examining the boot in front of him. "Nothing but the best. You and your husband ran an up-market little operation here, Mrs...?"

She says nothing, just shifts her other foot to keep balance. He lets her go.

"Look, whoever you are, you're gonna have to tell me why you tried to off me, comprenez? I imagine you're from around here, but I've never been here before, so it can't be anything personal. So who wants me dead?"

She just glares at him. He glances around at the dark street, the dead body, her, the still sputtering wrecked sign, and something catches his eye. He walks a few metres over to the wreckage, bends down and picks it up: "Ouch! Fuckin' glass splinters..." and she sees what it is.

"Steyr-Optik hand laser. Thirty seconds at full beam before requiring recharge, I hear. Stylish," Berry says. "You know, I have this theory that people choose the weapon that frightens them most. "He casually waves the Glock. "I know I do." He swaps the Glock and the laser, points the laser at her right knee.

"Who wants me dead, Missus?"

She looks like her blood has turned to some quick-drying resin, leaving her suddenly stranded in a wooden body; nothing moves but the eyes.

Berry gestures towards the corpse. "He's dead. You will be if you don't talk. You don't have an option." Then he says, "Maybe there's no charge left in this thing," and a beam flashes, fusing a piece of broken glass into the pavement. "Nope, still works."

He sees her slump. "Menshikov. Arkady Menshikov. He contracted us to kill you."

Berry frowns. "Arkady Menshikov? I don't know any Arkady Menshikov. Russian, right?" She nods.

"Why? Did he say?" She shakes her head.

Berry scratches his own head with the laser. "Hmm...curious. Anyway, what now Mrs...?"

She looks directly at Berry . "Let me go. I'll tell Menshikov we killed you, then I'll leave Saigon . You kill Menshikov, and its even, okay?"

"Where is he?"

"His office is on the top floor, Fuji Building , Saigon CBD. It's the office of RPS Manufacturing. Menshikov's a VP there."

"Aha, the plot thickens. Maybe this Menshikov's just the messenger boy."

"I don't know. We only dealt with him."

"Okay, so the deal is you tell Menshikov I'm deceased and you leave town. Won't he want some evidence, like an ear or something?"

"Yes," she sighs. "He said you have a ring on your left hand. We were to bring that to him."

"With my finger, I presume."

"Yes."

"Then he could check the prints, be sure I was dead."

She glances around at her husband's body. "We could put the ring on one of Tran's fingers. If I give him the ring on a severed human finger, he'll assume its yours."

Berry stands quietly for several moments. "I don't know, Mrs Tran-"

"Ng. Ng, not Tran."

"Mrs Ng, this is getting very complicated. I would have to take your word for it that this Menshikov is after me, then I'd have to trust you to tell Menshikov I'm dead, and I'd also have to trust you not to come after me yourself. After all, I just killed your husband."

"Actually, my husband was a pig. He made me do this work, and he beat me. I'm not sorry he's dead."

"Nice marriage."

"This is Saigon , Mr Berry . I was a naive girl from Dong Hoi come to the big city. You do what you have to."

Berry lies with his head on pearl grey pillows piled up on a huge black silk-covered bed in Room 703 of the Saigon Hilton. He is wearing earplugs wired to a Sanyo multitranceiver and he sips from a half full bottle of Heineken beer. Near his hip a Sony Mapmate displays some alphanumerics and a scale map of the Saigon CBD. Through the plugs he hears:

"Mrs Ng, nice to see you." Deep male voice, slight but discernible Russian accent. "I trust the operation went well."

"Yes, Mr Menshikov, with one small snag. Mr Ng was killed."

"I am sorry to hear that, Mrs Ng. As I warned you, he has - had - a formidable reputation."

"Here is the evidence of completion you required, Mr Menshikov."

"Oh, aah, thank you Ms Ng. Yes, yes, that's it. Please put it over there."

A half-hour later Berry is on his second beer and still listening:

"This man we killed, then, he was going to assist this Mattelart in his attempts to form a trade union?"

"This is what we feared, Mrs Ng, yes. Another glass of Vodka, my dear? Ah yes. Yes, why else would a man with his reputation be meeting with a nobody like Mattelart? You know Mrs Ng, you really have very lovely legs."

Christ, Berry thinks, I hope this doesn't go too far or Menshikov will find the bug.

"Ugh!" says Mrs Ng. "He was disgusting! So gross."

"All that fat's good for you in a cold climate," Berry says. She shudders.

"You don't enjoy your work, Mrs Ng? Anyway, I told you to get him drunk, not horny." She scowls at him, gets out of the chair and walks around the bed, looking out the window at nighttime Saigon .

"Did you get what you wanted, Berry?"

"Well, yes, I suppose so. Unless you and Menshikov somehow rigged the whole thing to fool me. I know you went to Menshikov's office, courtesy of the homing signal in the bug. And I know that was Menshikov's voice - I matched it to some net stuff. And I now know why he tried to have me killed."

"He thinks you came here to help this Mattelart form a union among his workers."

"Yes, what a stupid fuck up."

"Huh? How so?" she says, turning back to him.

"Mattelart is an old friend of mine. I just thought I'd pay him a visit and take a look at Saigon . I'm just a tourist, Mrs Ng."

"A tourist? But Menshikov said-"

"No, I've retired from all that now, although some people don't seem to believe it."

"Retired from what?"

"Forget it. And so Menshikov bugged Mattelart's phone and so he knew I was going to meet him in his office and he told you I'd be at a certain address at a certain time and to follow me and kill me. Perfect setting for a murder, run-down light industrial area with not too many people about at night."

She folds her arms. "Okay, Berry , you've got your bug back and you know what's going on. I'm going home to Dong Hoi." Mrs Ng grabs her blood red velour jacket off a chair and heads out the door.

“Merde!I'm so sorry my friend." Mattelart and Berry sit in the Frenchman's office drinking Fosters Lager from cans.

"For fuck's sake, Jules, forget it. In a way I brought it on myself. People just can't believe I've left it all behind. Anyway, Menshikov thinks I'm totalled, and you can't kill a man twice. Who is this guy anyway?"

"Ha, that fat pig is the local hatchet man."

"For RPS, you mean?"

"And the rest! You must know this country is the latest capitalist playground since the government introduced the policy of doi moi back in the 1980s. Its like Korea and Taiwan and Thailand and the rest all over again - instant industrial development! But at what a cost!. No industrial safety codes, child labour, wages at slavery level, and no unions to do anything about it. The big transnationals aren't that bad - they take the long term view and value stability - but there's also a bunch of smaller companies that will cut any corner to grind out bigger profits. And of course the Russians and the Chinese, having seen it all in their own countries, are at the head of the pack."

"And they're afraid you'll help organise union opposition?"

"Exactly. They even set up a secret fighting fund - substantial cash according to my sources - and gave it to Menshikov to work against unionising. Mainly it's bullshit like threats, intimidation, but people have disappeared..."

Berry looks around him at the squalid room Mattelart calls an office. It has plywood walls with the olive green paint flaking so bad it almost looks like some wall pattern. A huge blackboard covers one wall, calenders and ILO posters another. A beat up old PC and printer and a standard telephone sit on the scratched wooden table next to the beer.

"What are you doing here, Jules? I mean, can you really make a difference?"

Mattelart shoots Berry a wry smile. "You know me, mon ami, a sucker for not yet lost causes."

"You know what I think, I think its some colonial guilt thing. I reckon you're trying to make up single handed for two hundred years of European imperialism."

Mattelart's reply is cut off by the door opening. A young Vietnamese woman enters carrying a cardboard box full of papers. Mattelart satnds and takes it off her, places it on the table.

"Cherry Thieu, meet John Berry. Cherry is secretary of the not yet officially recognised Saigon Garment Trades Workers' Union ." Thieu smiles a greeting and gently shakes Berry 's hand.

Mattelart says, "Look Berry , we're just on our way to do some organising. Come along, it'll be an education." Berry starts to decline, then looks at Mattelart who's wearing this grin that suddenly reminds Berry of Grenoble.

"Oh what the fu-," Berry glances at Ms Thieu, "uh, okay." Berry and Mattelart smile at each other as Thieu precedes them out the door.

The factory is made of corrugated sheet metal nailed onto a simple wooden frame sitting on a rough concrete slab. Mattelart tells Berry there is no serious ventilation and sanitary facilities are basic.They are out the front in the street and Berry is glad the rain has cooled things off a little. It is the nominal lunch break and a small group of women, some very young, stand and sit listening to Thieu talk. The rest of the workers, most of them, huddle inside and watch warily from the door.

Suddenly the workers' attention is off Thieu and focused off down the street. Berry looks across to see a newish red Toyota pickup roar up and skid to a halt, splattering gobs of red mud. Three men in crisp, new industrial clothing get down from the back of the pickup. Two of them are handling big black dogs that salivate messily and snarl at everyone. Two more men dressed in black leather jackets, denim shirts and Levis climb out of the cab. They look Vietnamese and they all sport moustaches and ugly expressions.

Berry and Mattelart are a little apart from Thieu and the factory women. The pickup-men walk towards the women and one of the cab-men starts yelling something at them in Vietnamese, waving his arms to indicate they should get back into the factory. Thieu shouts something back, and the shouting cab-man says something explosive and waves at the men holding the dogs. They unchain them.

Berry takes it in, a tableau in slo-mo: The dogs take off with the sheer pleasure of the chase, saliva flailing from heavy muzzles, paws ripping into the mud for traction. There is stunned silence, inaction from the women behind Thieu, and she stands, half turned towards the dogs, with this look of intense concentration. The pickup-men are crouched, faces lit with anticipation, moustaches bristling, hands open.

There are two soft noises and the dogs plough into the mud, bloodying it, flecks hitting Thieu's bare legs and sandalled feet. A roar erupts from the pickup-men and the two cab-men pull out pistols, but Berry nails them both in the arm before they can shoot. He turns back to check on Thieu and the factory women, and spins back in time to see Mattelart take a burst in the chest. Berry aims and fires and a man falls off the pickup, an AK74 splashing into the mud. Berry can see that Mattelart is dead, and he walks up to the man lying next to the pickup near the AK74. He has a huge red stain covering his right shoulder and some blood bubbling out past his moustache. He can see Berry out of pain creased eyes.

The two cab-men lie groaning in the mud, and the other two men cower behind the pickup. Berry puts his gun to the head of the man who killed his friend.

"No! No!" Thieu screams and runs towards Berry . "Enough! Enough! That's enough!" She grabs his shoulder and moves to pull him away. Berry glances around at men and women, puts his gun away and walks over to Mattelart's body. He picks the Frenchman up and lifts him onto his shoulder and walks through the mud to the beat up old Mitsubishi Colt they came in.

Berry and Thieu are sitting at a table made out of packing cases in a Nedlloyds shipping container. It has holes cut in it for windows and an extra door and plastic covered skylights.They are drinking locally made sake.

"You know, I've seen people living in these things on the outskirts of nearly every port in the developing world…” Berry says. “‘Tainer Towns they call 'em.”

Thieu's grandfather, mother and two sisters are sitting in the background quietly watching the exotic Euro get drunk.

"Will you come to the funeral tomorrow?" Thieu asks.

"Sure. Got to say goodbye to the old frog bastard."

"How did you know him, John?"

"Call me Berry . Mattelart? I met him in Grenoble , on a mission."

"A mission?"

"Yes, Ms Thieu, I used to work for an organisation who oversaw the world nuclear industry."

"The IAEA, you mean?"

"No, the IAEA is different. My employers operated covertly."

"Then...?"

"It's like this. After all that shit about nuclear weapons development in North Korea and Iran, and a couple of terrorist jobs involving nuclear materials that didn't make the headlines, the powers that be decided they needed a special unit to undertake sensitive operations to minimise the chances of uncontrolled nuclear weapons proliferation. I was in this unit and they sent me to France ." He swirls the sake around in his glass.

"Anyway, the French have always had this full on nuclear program, and my bosses heard there was fissile material going missing from the breeder at Grenoble . My cover was as an American union rep on exchange, and I met Mattelart. He was the local rep and we hit it off, became friends - wasn't even too pissed when he found out who I really was at the end of it all. He'd guessed on was something other than what I claimed."

"So you worked for the Americans?"

"No, not really. This agency I worked for was international, but Americans mostly ran it."

"And it was secret. Plausible deniability," she says. Berry nods his head. “And is this where you got the combat enhancements?”

"Yep. I am in my first year of a PhD in nuclear engineering at Caltech and hating it. These suits contact me and say `Do you remember the Six Million Dollar Man?' and I say `No' and they say `Anyway, there's this guy see...' and they pack this S of A neuroelectronic gear into me and train me up and I join this group of nuclear secret policemen."

"I've never heard of these people."

"No, top secret, like I said. If there's some problem, we move in, blow something up, kill someone important, slow down the project, plug the leak. It was really dangerous - nuclear programs are absolutely top shelf and only the best resources go into them - but I thought it was worth doing. At the start at least."

"What happened?"

"Well, I came to realise that the whole business was corrupt from start to finish, and everyone was in on it - governments, corporations, judges, the whole kit and caboodle. The nuclear power industry only really began as a way to legitimise military programs and it is inherently unsafe. But there's this whole economy built around it, and despite Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and North Korea and Pakistan , and with the new push from concerns about Greenhouse, its an industrial juggernaut.

"Anyway, they sent me on this mission to Geneva . They knew they needed a better control system to keep track of all the material - yellowcake, fuel rods, waste, the lot - and this Fujitsu-IBM research team came up with something new, an AI."

"AI, as in artificial intelligence?"

"Yeah. It was an idea that had been around for a while but never really took off. Anyway, someone came up with the idea that it was the basic programming process that was the problem, that the machinery worked well enough, we just couldn't tell it want we wanted it to do. This team came up with a computer that took instructions in a completely new way - by conversation. What you did was you put on a VR skinsuit, and you walked inside the computer, which was really a network of computers anyway. And you carried on a conversation with the computer.

"So they got this monster up and running and plugged into the net so it could control reactors and ships and trucks and anything else dealing with nuclear materials, but it didn't work properly. There were accidents and more trouble than ever, and I was sent to Geneva to find out what was what." He drains his glass. Thieu reaches across and refills it.

“Merci beaucoup. Well, it turned out that one of the research team had become born again and decided this computer was God's way of hurrying up the apocalypse, so he'd been telling the computer all kinds of weird shit. Nobody really understood this thing, this AI, but decided it had to be terminated. It used to develop its own logic patterns, and if it came up with one hostile to human life, it could be embarrassing - given that it was in control of the most lethal substances known to humankind."

He grins drunkenly at Thieu. "But the thing had a big brain all right, and I got it to do one last thing before I threw the switch. I got it to write me some software and inject it into the net. Then I went to my superiors and told them I wanted out and they said no and I said I was leaving anyway and that if they did anything to harm me certain information concerning the way the nuclear industry really operates and who gets what would be released at multiple sites throughout the net. You see, the software that AI wrote for me keeps a look out for my retinal scan and fingerprints and if they stop appearing on the net, like they should when I buy something or pass an ID check, out comes the news.

"So they figured, my bosses, what the hell, he's not going to bother us until he dies, and they let me go."

Thieu watches him for a few seconds as he moves his glass around on the rough wood. "Bloody Mattelart, he used to say you had to know when to get out, otherwise you became one of them. He could have had a cushy job in Paris , but he came here instead. Crazy frog."

The security around Menshikov's old French colonial house is cludgy Russian stuff. They just can't come to terms with miniaturisation, goes against the grain, Berry is thinking as he's through it like a knife and into the house which he has scoped is empty; must be the servants night off or something. Padding past the furniture and bric a brac, Berry is reminded how much Russian culture is influenced by the east - the bright colours, lush textures, involved design. He finds the safe behind a watercolour showing a samovar and some fruit.

Russians can make safes, their sort of thing, but Berry has a cracking device built in a CIA black lab. He kept it after he quit the nuclear cops and had it posted to him in Saigon from his home in San Francisco . It is the size of a mouse. He opens the heavy door and finds a couple of shelves of papers and about half a million in US dollars and the same again in yen. He shuffles the paper for what he wants, finds it, memorises the numbers written on it, puts it back and closes the safe door.

He is dodging through shrubbery on his way to the razor-topped fence when he hears the gate opening. Crouched behind a bougainvillea bush, he sees a black Mercedes Benz limousine drive up the crushed quartz drive and stop at the front entrance. A man the size and shape of a large bear gets out of the driver's seat and walks around to open the passenger door. Menshikov, in a heavy grey coat and homburg, slowly folds his great bulk out of the car and walks with the driver up the stairs of the house. Suddenly he gives a shout and falls over backwards cracking his behatted head nastily on the steps. As his weight carries him down the stairs, followed by the scrambling driver, his blood smears the white marble. When Menshikov comes to rest near the bottom, a fat walrus on its back, he clutches at his knees and begins moaning. The driver sees the blood, pulls a pistol out of his coat pocket and peers into the grounds.

Berry is already at the fence and over. He powers up his hearing a little, hears Menshikov blubbering and the driver jabbering something back at him. Berry strides away towards the hire car he's parked down the road. Lucky break that, he thinks, that fat prick will spend the rest of his life visiting knee specialists.

Berry is sitting on the bed in his hotel room holding a Motorola Netboy in one hand and hitting the tiny keyboard with a Bic biro. He is on the net. He types in the long code and password that activates the software the AI made for him, then hits the voice stub.

"The following number is the code of an account in a bank somewhere." He types the number. "Locate the account and transfer the contents to the account numbered 3-4618-44467 in the Vietcombank." An okay sign comes up on the screen.

"Whoooee!" says Berry as he skips over to the minibar and drags a bottle of Heineken out of the fridge. "That AI. Damn glad I killed it when I think what it could have done to the banking industry," he says to the beer as he opens it. And the Saigon Garment Trades Workers Union would get a nice little surprise next time they checked their funds... It would be their fighting fund now.

There is a knock at the door. Beer in hand, Berry opens it to Mrs Ng and stares down at the laser in her small hand.

"Mrs Ng, now why did I just know I would see you again?"

"Well Berry-"

"I know, don't say it. This is Saigon, and..."

She motions him back to the bed and he sits down on it; she closes the door behind herself.

"Do you know what I just did to your boss, by the way?" Berry asks taking a sip from his beer. "Oh, I'm sorry. Like a drink."

She ignores his offer. "Boss? I don't have a boss since Menshikov paid me off."

"Then why-?"

"You killed my husband, remember?"

"But you said... Jesus, I'll never understand some people." She shrugs and raises the laser level with his forehead.

There is a sound like an explosion and something huge has burst hrough the door and slammed Mrs Ng face-first into the wall. It's Menshikov's driver, the bear, with a Makarov in his hand. The old Red Army pistol is a hefty weapon, but in the Russian's fist it looks like a toy. He eyes Berry and gives him an ugly grin with definite hints of a painful death, then he raises his gun towards Mrs Ng who is picking herself off the ground and groaning, blood streaming from a cut lip. She looks up to see the pistol and freezes.

Berry steels himself, and then moves faster than anyone should, hitting the Russian's gun arm, smashing the elbow and sending the Makarov spinning across the carpet. The huge man roars, staggers through the French window, onto the balcony and over the railing.

Berry hears the sound of something heavy crashing through foliage and impacting on concrete.

Berry can feel the ligaments and tendons in his right arm, down his right side, a few other places, snapped like over-stretched elastic. He glowers at Mrs Ng who looks astonished.

"I don't like to do that too often… it hurts…," Berry says.

Mrs Ng reaches over and retrieves the laser, calmly points it at Berry.

"Oh, come on Mrs Ng. We're about even, don't you think."

She climbs gingerly to her feet, still holding the laser on Berry. Then she glances out the smashed window to the balcony, shrugs.

"Maybe it's also time for you to leave Saigon, Mr Berry," she says, and walks past the splintered door and out.

End