Killing someone isn’t all that hard to do. The human body is a fragile thing, a delicate balance easily upset. A heart beats and lungs breathe and blood flows and nerves pulse and you interrupt any of them — even for a few minutes — and what was once a walking, talking, eating, excreting, taxpaying person — an honest-to-God human being — is now just a loose collection of meat and bone, piled in a heap on the floor. A blow to the right place, a cut at the right angle, and someone — someone’s child, parent, spouse; someone that somebody, somewhere loves — is dead.

Killing someone isn’t all that hard to do. Getting it right, though, that’s a bit trickier.

Any buffoon with a knife can commit a murder: You steel yourself with a couple of gasper hits, walk up to the person that’s being inconvenient and stick the blade in their gut. That’s all there is to it. Oh, sure, the victim will stagger around, bleeding, screaming, flailing, maybe tripping on their own intestines if they pulled away from you sideways instead of straight back. But they’ll die. A slice to the throat, a couple to the chest, one thrust into a kidney and most of the blood will drain out of them before modern medicine even gets a seat at the table.

But you, unfortunately, will also get caught. You were ruled by your passion, your anger, you let it get a hold of you. You acted without a plan and you are stupid and you will be convicted and executed.

If you put a little thought into it before hand, though, the odds improve. You might fake a robbery, or pull a drive-by, or lure your target to someplace out of the way and witness-free — some place where you won’t be seen standing next to the body with a bloody shiv in your hand. So far, so good.

But what about the victim? Do you know how he’s going to react? How badly he wants to live? How likely he is to shrug off whatever wound you manage to inflict and come after you? The instinct for survival is a powerful thing — for most people anyway — and coming away from your first hit with anything less than an instantly fatal wound leaves the possibility that you might be facing someone who isn’t exactly human anymore. People devolve, become feral, savage. They will kill you with their bare hands, their teeth, anything they can get into you. They will beat you to death with their own heads if they have to.

And if you do manage to kill someone, there’s revenge. Even if no one saw you pull the trigger, break the neck, spike the meal, there will still be talk, suspicion, a search for a motive and an opportunity, and not only by the cops. The L.A.P.D. will put in a cursory job, but unless your victim was somebody rich or important, they’ve other things to worry about. But family, friends, lovers — depending on who the target was, there are upwards of a couple of dozen people who are now looking for you, driven by rage or greed or, in the odd case, justice. People bind together for a reason, and when you kill someone, you shatter whatever little world they had created and were a part of. The survivors will hunt you and find you and kill you, just to try to undo what you did. It makes no sense, has no logic, and that’s what makes it relentless.

To kill someone and get away with it, to end a life and disappear without repercussion or consequence, requires research. It requires surveillance and planning and input. You study and you plot and you don’t move one fucking finger against the target until you have identified every variable you can, their values and have at least some vague idea of what you’ll do for every possible outcome. What if the vic is wearing body armor? What if the vic is a double? What if you dated her in school? How many bystanders are you willing to kill? What are your escape routes? What if the first three are blocked? What if you’re ID’d? What if someone is expecting you? What if it’s a trap? What if the poison fails, the knife breaks, the gun misfires? What if you drop the bonegun because it’s covered in blood? What if they have a backup heart? Self-sealing lungs? Ruggedized skin? What if they’ve got some magic military-grade voodoo that you haven’t even heard rumors of, much less seen?

You can have answers to all those questions and hundreds, thousands more, and it still won’t be enough. More research, more watching, more waiting, more thinking, sometimes the kind that doesn’t involve booze and porn. Any amateur can get lucky once or twice or a dozen times, but it never lasts. Eventually, the stupid or the reckless are culled and the ranks thin and if you’re any good, you’re left standing, alone, on a pile of corpses that keeps growing and growing and growing.

You need to reconcile yourself to the fact that one day you’re going to screw up, too. You need to know that you can’t control all the variables all the time. You need to recognize that at some point — tomorrow, later today — a coin toss is going to go the wrong way and you’re going to get caught and you might get tortured and you’re going to get killed, and killed messily.

You need to hate yourself. And you need to know that you’re going to get what you deserve.

If someone cares enough to have you killed, it’s a good bet that you’ve led a pretty interesting life. You’ve got at least one criminal, financial or sexual quirk that’s far enough off the mean to make someone — usually someone you know — go to the risk and expense of making you go away. Boring people, as a rule, don’t get assassinated. It just works out that way. Boring people are safe.

Except Roland Danning. Koizumi was right: nobody could possibly care one tiny little bit about this guy. He was — and I’m just guessing here, but I’d be willing to put money on it — the single most uninteresting person alive. I had spent the past three weeks digging into his sad little life to confirm that fact.

He was white, 57, balding. Judging from his build, he hadn’t done any voluntary physical activity in at least three decades. A threadbare moustache clung desperately to his upper lip, and his eyes were heavy-lidded and dull, the sort of thing you see in daily hype users or people who live in the suburbs. I didn’t know why Koizumi wanted him dead, but it looked like life had already done two-thirds of the job for me.

He lived in half a decaying, century-old house in Reseda. He had no apparent domestic or decorative skills and spent his home time attached to a cheap beer and whatever input his implant was excreting into his eyeball.

We’d need his media habits for the psyche profile and Chet was due with the kit soon. You crack the implant last, after you’ve finished all the non-invasive surveillance, to minimize the chance you’ll get caught. Tricky business, rooting around inside someone’s head, though my guess was we could use a hatchet instead of a headkit and Danning wouldn’t notice the difference.

He worked at the Van Nuys airport, doing low-level maintenance on skiffs and runabouts, the kind of stuff that a monkey could do, but didn’t, because they were too expensive. Van Nuys ran intra-atmospheric flights, just a patch of ground for suborbitals to use on afternoon trips to Sea-Tac or Mexico City. Rich joyriders, down from the Santa Monica mountains and on the wrong side of the tracks, also kept their planes there. Part of the berthing fee was on-going system administration and tune-ups, and Danning spent his days running diagnostics and poking a screwdriver in the parts of the engine he couldn’t damage. It was one step up from janitorial.

He woke at 5:30 every morning, weekends included. He showered, dressed and walked the three or four blocks to the airport. If it was raining — and it was, more often than not — he’d grab a Red Line. He bought lunch from an autopilot vendor that stopped by at 12:15, ate alone, and arrived back at his house by 7:30. His job performance was baseline acceptable, and at some point in the past, his boss had taken to just changing the date on his review and resubmitting it. His twentieth anniversary on the job was three years ago and he’d never received more than a cost-of-living raise and promotions forced by seniority.

He never went out after work. He had no visitors. He never gave any external indication that he got or gave calls on the ‘plant. No wife. No children. No human contact of any sort, save a casual wave to the guy who lived in the other half of the house, a broad-spectrum property-rights claim to chase occasional squatters out of his yard, and nods at co-workers who had trouble remembering his name.

There was no evidence that Unresponsive had contacted him or was working on his behalf. He wasn’t panicked, he wasn’t running. He wasn’t even moving.

Roland Danning barely existed. If you pushed on his chest, it might collapse, a shell of paper and ash. He was a nub, what was left of something after the important parts had been ground away. There were billions of people like that out there — the cold gray mass that oozed and seeped into corners, that functioned mainly as carbon dioxide emitters — and here, in his comfy chair and probably plugged into something popular and stupid, was their king. No one could possibly care if Roland Danning lived or died, Roland Danning included. And yet one of the richest, most powerful men in Los Angeles had it out for him. In the worst possible way.

That didn’t make sense.

Danning did have one distinction, actually, but it couldn’t possibly explain Koizumi’s part in all of this: he’d served in the military for four years, during the invasion and occupation of Colombia. He had joined to learn a trade — doing system administration and tune-ups on military skiffs — and been deployed to Caracas from the first days of the fighting.

It had been an ugly, embarrassing war. Colombia had finally stamped out the Brillante Perdido and shut down the production of the genetically engineered cocoa that had cut huge, bloody swaths through world drug markets. Colombians had tired of the carnage, the chaos and the politics that come with having something that everybody wants and plenty are willing to kill for. So — suddenly, unexpectedly — they had opted out, shut it down. In a sort of collective spasm of exhaustion, near the entire population decided that they wanted no part in it anymore, thank you, and would you just please leave us alone? It was an unprecedented act of social cohesion, and it had worked. Their economy stabilized, Phrohibista terrorism ended and the country wasn’t an open, running sore for the first time in as long as anybody could remember.

But it left the U.S. with a problem. Whole classes of narcotics had been legalized just a few years before, and the luxury tax that applied to G.E. cocaine and other high-end stimulants were funding fully a quarter of the government. There was a surplus for the first time in living memory. Budgets into the next century were based around the insatiable American desire to get very, very high.

So Philadelphia panicked, and requested that Colombia put the farmers back in business. But Colombia wasn’t interested. It was a nice, quiet, third-world country now and wanted nothing to do with the United States ever again.

So, of course, we invaded. Danning, four hundred thousand other grunts and over a million experimental mechs landed at strategically important spots across the countryside and set about de-pacifying the population. A more cooperative government was installed. The cocoa fields were replanted. The Phrohibistas went berserk, but the supply resumed, the FDA maintained quality and Congress got what it was looking for. Everybody was happy. Except the Colombians, of course, but they didn’t matter all that much.