“We are prepared to deal with that as well,” said the other.
“Neither of you are even remotely prepared to deal with what I suspect we will encounter,” the black medic said, her voice as cold as the wind that blew out of the east now. Turner heard sand hissing across the rusted sheet of steel above them.
“You,” Turner said to her, “come with me.” Then he turned, without looking back, and walked away. It was possible that she might not obey his command, in which case he’d lose face with the other two, but it seemed the right move. When he was ten meters from the surgery pod, he halted. He heard her feet on the gravel.
“What do you know?” he asked without turning.
“Perhaps no more than you do,” she said, “perhaps more.
“More than your colleagues, obviously.”
“They are extremely talented men. They are also… servants.”
“And you are not.”
“Neither are you, mercenary. I was hired out of the finest unlicensed clinic in Chiba for this I was given a great deal of material to study in preparation for my meeting with this illustrious patient. The black clinics of Chiba are the cutting edge of medicine: not even Hosaka could know that my position in black medicine would allow me to guess what it is that your defector carries in his head. The street tries to find its own uses for things, Mr. Turner Already, several times, I’ve been hired to attempt the removal of these new implants. A certain amount of advanced Maas biocircuitry has found its way into the market. These attempts at implanting are a logical step. I suspect Maas may leak these things deliberately.”
“Then explain it to me.”
“I don’t think I could,” she said, and there was a strange hint of resignation in her voice. “I told you, I’ve seen it. I didn’t say that I understood it.” Fingertips suddenly brushed the skin beside his skull jack “This, compared with biochip implants, is like a wooden staff beside a myoelectric limb.”
“But will it be life-threatening, in his case?”
“Oh, no,” she said, withdrawing her hand, “not for him…” And then he heard her trudging back toward the surgery
Conroy sent a runner in with the software package that would allow Turner to pilot the jet that would carry Mitchell to Hosaka’s Mexico City compound. The runner was a wild-eyed, sun-blackened man Lynch called Harry, a rope-muscled apparition who came cycling in from the direction of Tucson on a sand-scoured bike with balding lug tires and bone-yellow rawhide laced around its handlebars. Lynch led Harry across the parking lot. Harry was singing to himself, a strange sound in the enforced quiet of the site, and his song, if you could call it that, was like someone randomly tuning a broken radio up and down midnight miles of dial, bringing in gospel shouts and snatches of twenty years of international pop. Harry had his bike slung across one burnt, bird-thin shoulder
“Harry’s got something for you from Tucson,” Lynch said.
“You two know each other?” Turner asked, looking at Lynch “Maybe have a friend in common?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lynch asked.
Turner held his stare. “You know his name.”
“He told me his fucking name, Turner.”
“Name’s Harry,” the burnt man said. He tossed the bicycle down on a clump of brush. He smiled vacantly, exposing badly spaced, eroded teeth. His bare chest was filmed with sweat and dust, and hung with loops of fine steel chain, rawhide, bits of animal horn and fur, brass cartridge casings, copper coins worn smooth and faceless with use, and a small pouch made of soft brown leather.
Turner looked at the assortment of things strung across the skinny chest and reached out, flipping a crooked bit of bent gristle suspended from a length of braided string. “What the hell is that, Harry?”
“That’s a coon’s pecker,” Harry said. “Coon’s got him a jointed bone in his pecker Not many as know that”
“You ever meet my friend Lynch before, Harry?”
Harry blinked.
“He had the passwords,” Lynch said. “There’s an urgency hierarchy. He knew the top. He told me his name. Do you need me here, or can I get back to work?”
“Go,” Turner said.
When Lynch was out of earshot, Harry began to work at the thongs that sealed the leather pouch. “You shouldn’t be harsh with the boy,” he said. “He’s really very good. I actually didn’t see him until he had that fletcher up against my neck.” He opened the pouch and fished delicately inside. “Tell Conroy I’ve got him pegged.”
“Sorry,” Harry said, extracting a folded sheet of yellow notebook paper from his pouch. “You’ve got who pegged?” He handed it to Turner; there was something inside.
“Lynch. He’s Conroy’s bumboy on the site. Tell him.” He unfolded the paper and removed the fat military microsoft.
There was a note in blue capitals: BREAK A LEG, ASSHOLE. SEE YOU IN THE DF
“Do you really want me to tell him that?”
“Tell him.”
“You’re the boss.”
“You fucking know it,” Turner said, crumpling the paper and thrusting it into Harry’s left armpit. Harry smiled, sweetly and vacantly, and the intelligence that had risen in him settled again, like some aquatic beast sinking effortlessly down into a smooth sea of sun-addled vapidity. Turner stared into his eyes. Cracked yellow opal, and saw nothing there but sun and the broken highway. A hand with missing joints came up to scratch absently at a week’s growth of beard. “Now,” Turner said. Harry turned, pulled his bike up from the tangle of brush, shouldered it with a grunt, and began to make his way back across the ruined parking lot. His oversized, tattered khaki shorts flapped as he went, and his collection of chains rattled softly.
Sutcliffe whistled from a rise twenty meters away, held up a roll of orange surveyor’s tape. It was time to start laying out Mitchell’s landing strip. They’d have to work quickly, before the sun was too high, and still it was going to be hot.
“So,” Webber said, “he’s coming in by air.” She spat brown juice on a yellowed cactus. Her cheek was packed with Copenhagen snuff “You got it,” Turner said. He sat beside her on a ledge of buff shale. They were watching Lynch and Nathan clear the strip he and Sutcliffe had laid out with the orange tape The tape marked out a rectangle four meters wide and twenty long Lynch carried a length of rusted I-beam to the tape and heaved it over. Something scurried away through the brush as the beam rang on concrete.
“They can see that tape, if they want to,” Webber said, wiping her lips with the back of her hand. “Read the head-lines on your morning fax, if they want to.”
“I know,” Turner said, “but if they don’t know we’re here already, I don’t think they’re going to. And you couldn’t see it from the highway.” He adjusted the black nylon cap Ramirez had given him, pulling the long bill down until it touched his sunglasses. “Anyway, we’re just moving the heavy stuff, the things that could tear a leg off. It isn’t going to look like anything, not from orbit.”
“No,” Webber agreed, her seamed face impassive beneath her sunglasses He could smell her sweat from where she sat, sharp and animal.
“What the hell do you do, Webber, when you aren’t doing this?” He looked at her.
‘Probably a hell of a lot more than you do,” she said. “Part of the time I breed dogs.” She took a knife from her boot and began to strop it patiently on her sole, flipping it smoothly with each stroke, like a Mexican barber sharpening a razor. “And I fish. Trout.”
“You have people, in New Mexico?”
“Probably more than you’ve got,” she said flatly. “I figure the ones like you and Sutcliffe, you aren’t from any place at all. This is where you live, isn’t it, Turner? On the site, today, the day your boy comes out. Right?” She tested the blade against the ball of her thumb, then slid it back into its sheath.
“But you have people? You got a man to go back to?”
“A woman, you want to know,” she said. “Know anything about breeding dogs?”
“No,” he said
“I didn’t think so.” She squinted at him. “We got a kid, too. Ours. She carried it.”
“DNA splice?”
She nodded.
“That’s expensive,” he said.
“You know it; wouldn’t be here if we didn’t need to pay it off. But she’s beautiful.”
“Your woman?”
“Our kid.”
12 - Café Blanc
AS SHE WALKED FROM the Louvre, she seemed to sense some articulated structure shifting to accommodate her course through the city. The waiter would be merely a part of the thing, one limb, a delicate probe or palp. The whole would be larger, much larger. How could she have imagined that it would be possible to live, to move, in the unnatural field of Virek’s wealth without suffering distortion? Virek had taken her up. in all her misery, and had rotated her through the monstrous, invisible stresses of his money, and she had been changed. Of course, she thought, of course: It moves around me constantly, watchful and invisible, the vast and subtle mechanism of Herr Virek’s surveillance.
Eventually she found herself on the pavement below the terrace of the Blanc. It seemed as good a place as any. A month before, she would have avoided it; she’d spent too many evenings with Alain there. Now, feeling that she had been freed, she decided to begin the process of rediscovering her own Paris by choosing a table at the Blanc She took one near a side screen. She asked a waiter for a cognac, and shivered, watching the Paris traffic flow past, perpetual river of steel and glass, while all around her, at other tables, strangers ate and smiled, drank and argued, said bitter good-byes or swore private fealties to an afternoon’s feeling.
But - she smiled - she was a part of it all. Something in her was waking from a long and stifled sleep, brought back into the light in the instant she’d fully opened her eyes to Alain’s viciousness and her own desperate need to continue loving him. But that need was fading, even as she sat here. The shabbiness of his lies, somehow, had broken the chains of her depression. She could see no logic to it, because she had known, in some part of herself, and long before the business with Gnass, exactly what it was that Alain did in the world, and that had made no difference to her love. In the face of this new feeling, however, she would forgo logic. It was enough, to be here, alive, at a table in the Blanc, and to imagine all around her the intricate machine that she now knew Virek had deployed.
Ironies, she thought, seeing the young waiter from Napoleon Court step up onto the terrace. He wore the dark trousers he had worked in, but the apron had been replaced with a blue windbreaker. Dark hair fell across his forehead in a smooth wing. He came toward her, smiling, confident, know-ing that she wouldn’t run. There was something in her then that wanted very badly to run, but she knew that she wouldn’t. Irony, she told herself: As I luxuriate in the discovery that I am no special sponge for sorrow, but merely another fallible animal in this stone maze of a city, I come simultaneously to see that I am the focus of some vast device fueled by an obscure desire.
“My name is Paco,” he said, pulling out the white-painted iron chair opposite her own.
“You were the child, the boy, in the park…”
“A long time ago, yes.” He sat. “Señor has preserved the image of my childhood.”
“I have been thinking, about your Señor.” She didn’t look at him, but at the passing cars, cooling her eyes in the flow of traffic, the colors of polycarbon and painted steel. “A man like Virek is incapable of divesting himself of his wealth. His money has a life of its own. Perhaps a will of its own. He implied as much when we met.”
“You are a philosopher.”
“I’m a tool, Paco. I’m the most recent tip for a very old machine in the hands of a very old man, who wishes to penetrate something and has so far failed to do so. Your employer fumbles through a thousand tools and somehow chooses me.
“You are a poet as well!”
She laughed, taking her eyes from the traffic; he was grinning, his mouth bracketed in deep vertical grooves. “While I walked here, I imagined a structure, a machine so large that I am incapable of seeing it. A machine that surrounds me, anticipating my every step.”
“And you are an egotist as well?”
“Am I?”
“Perhaps not. Certainly, you are observed. We watch, and it is well that we do. Your friend in the brasserie, we watch him as well. Unfortunately, we’ve been unable to determine where he obtained the hologram he showed you. Very likely, he already had it when he began to phone your friend’s number Someone got to him, do you understand? Someone has put him in your way. Don’t you think that this is most intriguing? Doesn’t it pique the philosopher in you?”
“Yes, I suppose it does I took the advice you gave me, in the brasserie, and agreed to his price.
“Then he will double it.” Paco smiled.
“Which is of no importance to me, as you pointed out. He has agreed to contact me tomorrow. I assume that you can arrange the delivery of the money. He asked for cash.”
“Cash” - he rolled his eyes - “how risqué! But, yes, I can. And I know the details as well. We were monitoring the conversation. Not difficult, as he was helpful enough to broadcast it himself, from a bead microphone. We were anxious to learn who that broadcast was intended for, but we doubt he knows that himself.”
“It was unlike him,” she said, frowning, “to excuse him-self, to break off that way, before he had made his demands. He fancies he has a flair for the dramatic moment…”
“He had no choice,” Paco said “We engineered what he took to be a failure of the bead’s power source It required a trip to the hommes, then. He said very nasty things about you, alone in the cubicle.”
She gestured to her empty glass as a waiter passed. “I still find it difficult to see my part in this, my value. To Virek, I mean.”
“Don’t ask me. You are the philosopher, here. I merely execute Señor’s orders, to the best of my ability.”
“Would you like a brandy, Paco? Or perhaps some coffee?”
“The French,” he said, with great conviction, “know nothing about coffee.”
13 - With Both Hands
“MAYBE YOU CAN RUN that one by me again,” Bobby said, around a mouthful of rice and eggs “I thought you already said it’s not a religion.”
Beauvoir removed his eyeglass frames and sighted down one of the earpieces. “That wasn’t what I said. I said you didn’t have to worry about it, is all, whether it’s a religion or not It’s Just a structure. Lets you an’ me discuss some things that are happening, otherwise we might not have words for it, concepts”
“But you talk like these, whatchacallem, lows, are”
“Loa,” Beauvoir corrected, tossing his glasses down on the table He sighed, dug one of the Chinese cigarettes from Two-a-Day’s pack, and lit it with the pewter skull. “Plural’s same as the singular.” He inhaled deeply, blew out twin streams of smoke through arched nostrils. “You think religion, what are you thinking about, exactly?”
“Well, my mother’s sister, she’s a Scientologist, real orthodox, you know? And there’s this woman across the hall, she’s Catholic. My old lady” - he paused, the food gone tasteless in his mouth -” ‘she’d put these holograms up in my room sometimes, Jesus or Hubbard or some shit. I guess I think about that.”
