And then the sensation of something plucking at his sleeve.
Not his sleeve, exactly, but part of his mind, something -
“Señor,” the child said, “we are experiencing anomalous phenomena in the matrix, possibly as a result of our own current overextension. We strongly suggest that you allow us to sever your links with the construct until we are able to determine the nature of the anomaly.”
The sensation was stronger now. A scratching, at the back of his mind…
“What?” Virek said. “And return to the tanks? It hardly seems to warrant that…”
“There is the possibility of real danger,” the boy said, and now there was an edge in his voice. He moved the barrel of the Browning slightly. “You,” he said to Bobby, “lie down upon the cobbles and spread your arms and legs.”
But Bobby was looking past him, to a bed of flowers, watching as they withered and died, the grass going gray and powdery as he watched, the air above the bed writhing and twisting. The sense of the thing scratching in his head was stronger still, more urgent.
Virek had turned to stare at the dying flowers. “What is -”
Bobby closed his eyes and thought of Jackie. There was a sound, and he knew that he was making it. He reached down into himself, the sound still coming, and touched Jammer’s deck. Come! He screamed, inside himself, neither knowing nor caring what it was that he addressed Come now! He felt something give, a barrier of some kind, and the scratching sensation was gone.
When he opened his eyes, there was something in the bed of dead flowers. He blinked. It seemed to be a cross of plain, white-painted wood; someone had fitted the sleeves of an ancient naval tunic over the horizontal arms, a kind of mold-spotted tailcoat with heavy, fringed epaulets of tarnished gold braid, rusting buttons, more braid at the cuffs… A rusted cutlass was propped, hilt up, against the white upright, and beside it was a bottle half filled with clear fluid.
The child spun, the little pistol blurring… And crumpled, folded into himself like a deflating balloon, a balloon sucked away into nothing at all, the Browning clattering to the stone path like a forgotten toy.
“My name,” a voice said, and Bobby wanted to scream when he realized that it came from his own mouth, “is Samedi, and you have slain my cousin’s horse…”
And Virek was running, the big coat flapping out behind him, down the curving path with its serpentine benches, and Bobby saw that another of the white crosses waited there, just where the path curved to vanish. Then Virek must have seen it, too; he screamed, and Baron Samedi. Lord of Graveyards, the ba whose kingdom was death, leaned in across Barcelona like a cold dark rain.
“What the hell do you want? Who are you?” The voice was familiar, a woman’s. Not Jackie’s
“Bobby,” he said, waves of darkness pulsing through him. “Bobby…”
“How did you get here?”
“Jammer. He knew. His deck pegged you when you iced me before. He’d just seen something, something huge He couldn’t remember…” Turner sent me. Conroy. He said tell you Conroy did it. You want Conroy…” Hearing his own voice as though it were someone else’s. He’d been somewhere, and returned, and now he was here, in Jaylene Slide’s skeletal neon sketch. On the way back, he’d seen the big thing, the thing that had sucked them up, start to alter and shift, gargantuan blocks of its rotating, merging, taking on new alignments, the entire outline changing ‘Conroy,” she said. The sexy scrawl leaned by the video window, something in its line expressing a kind of exhaustion, even boredom. “I thought so.” The video image whited out, formed again as a shot of some ancient stone building.
Park Avenue. He’s up there with all those Euros, clicking away at some new scam.” She sighed. “Thinks he’s safe, see? Wiped Ramirez like a fly, lied to my face, flew off to New York and his new job, and now he thinks he’s safe -”
The figure moved, and the image changed again. Now the face of the white-haired man, the man Bobby had seen talking to the big guy, on Jammer’s phone, filled the screen.
She’s tapped into his line, Bobby thought.
“Or not,” Conroy said, the audio cutting in. “Either way, we’ve got her. No problem.” The man looked tired, Bobby thought, but on top of it. Tough. Like Turner.
“I’ve been watching you, Conroy,” Slide said softly. “My good friend Bunny, he’s been watching you for me. You ain’t the only one awake on Park Avenue tonight…”
“No,” Conroy was saying, “we can have her in Stockholm for you tomorrow Absolutely.” He smiled into the camera.
“Kill him, Bunny,” she said. “Kill ‘em all. Punch out the whole goddamn floor and the one under it. Now.”
“That’s right,” Conroy said, and then something happened, something that shook the camera, blurring his image. “What is that?” he asked, in a very different voice, and then the screen was blank.
“Burn, motherfucker,’ she said.
And Bobby was yanked back into the dark.
33 - Wrack and Whirl
MARLY PASSED THE hour adrift in the slow storm, watching the boxmaker’s dance. Paco’s threat didn’t frighten her, although she had no doubt of his willingness to carry it out. He would carry it out, she was certain. She had no idea what would happen if the lock were breached. They would die. She would die, and Jones, and Wigan Ludgate. Perhaps the contents of the dome would spill out into space, a blossoming cloud of lace and tarnished sterling, marbles and bits of string, brown leaves of old books, to orbit the cores forever. That had the right tone, somehow; the artist who had set the boxmaker in motion would be pleased.
The new box gyrated through a round of foam-tipped claws. Discarded rectangular fragments of wood and glass tumbled from the focus of creation, to join the thousand things, and she was lost in it, enchanted, when Jones, wild-eyed, his face filmed with sweat and dirt, heaved up into the dome, trailing the red suit on a lanyard. “I can’t get the Wig into a place I can seal,” he said, “so this is for you The suit spun up below him and he grabbed for it, frantic. “I don’t want it,” she said, watching the dance. “Get into it! Now! No time!” His mouth worked, but no sound came. He tried to take her arm.
“No,” she said, evading his hand. “What about you?” “Put the goddamn suit on!” he roared, waking the deeper range of echo.
“No.”
Behind his head, she saw the screen strobe itself into life, fill with Paco’s features.
“Señor is dead,” Paco said, his smooth face expression-less, “and his various interests are undergoing reorganization. In the interim, I am required in Stockholm. I am authorized to inform Marly Krushkhova that she is no longer in the employ of the late Josef Virek, nor is she an employee of his estate. Her salary in full is available at any branch of the Bank of France, upon submission of valid identification. The proper tax declarations are on file with the revenue authorities of France and Belgium. Lines of working credit have been invalidated. The former corporate cores of Tessier-Ashpool SA are the property of one of the late Herr Virek’s subsidiary entities, and anyone on the premises will be charged with trespass.”
Jones was frozen there, his arm cocked, his hand tensed open to harden the striking edge of his palm.
Paco vanished.
“Are you going to hit me?” she asked.
He relaxed his arm. “I was about to. Cold-cock you and stuff you into this bleeding suit…” He started to laugh. “But I’m glad I don’t have to now. Here, look, it’s done a new one.”
The new box came tumbling out of the shifting flitter of arms. She caught it easily.
The interior, behind the rectangle of glass, was smoothly lined with the sections of leather cut from her jacket. Seven numbered tabs of holofiche stood up from the box’s black leather floor like miniature tombstones. The crumpled wrapper from a packet of Gauloise was mounted against black leather at the back, and beside it a black-striped gray matchbook from a brasserie in Napoleon Court.
And that was all.
Later, as she was helping him hunt for Wigan Ludgate in the maze of corridors at the far end of the cores, he paused, gripping a welded handhold, and said, “You know, the queer thing about those boxes?”
“Yes?”
“Is that Wig got a damn good price on them, somewhere in New York. Money, I mean. But sometimes other things as well, things that came back up…”
“What sort of things?”
“Software, I guess it was. He’s a secretive old fuck when it comes to what he thinks his voices are telling him to do Once, it was something he swore was biosoft, that new stuff…”
“What did he do with it?”
“He’d download it all into the cores.” Jones shrugged “Did he keep it, then?”
“No,” Jones said, “he’d just toss it into whatever pile of stuff we’d managed to scrounge for our next shipment out Just jacked it into the cores and then resold it for whatever he could get.”
“Do you know why? What it was about?”
“No,” Jones said, losing interest in his story, “he’d just say that the Lord moved in strange ways…” He shrugged “He said God likes to talk to Himself…
34 - A Chain ‘Bout Nine Miles
Long
HE HELPED BEAUVOIR carry Jackie out to the stage, where they lay her down in front of a cherry-red acoustic drum kit and covered her with an old black topcoat they found in the checkroom, with a velvet collar and years of dust on the shoulders, it had been hanging there so long. “Map fé jubile mnan,” Beauvoir said, touching the dead girl’s forehead with his thumb. He looked up at Turner. “It is a self-sacrifice,” he translated, and then drew the black coat gently up, covering her face.
“It was fast,” Turner said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Beauvoir took a pack of menthol cigarettes from a pocket in his gray robe and lit one with a gold Dunhill. He offered Turner the pack, but Turner shook his head. “There’s a saying in Creole,” Beauvoir said.
“What’s that?”
‘Evil exists.’
“Hey,” said Bobby Newmark, dully, from where he crouched by the glass doors, eye to the edge of the curtain. “Musta worked, one way or another… The Gothicks are starting to leave, looks like most of the Kasuals are already gone…”
“That’s good,” Beauvoir said, gently. “That’s down to you. Count. You did good. Earned your handle.”
Turner looked at the boy. He was still moving through the fog of Jackie’s death, he decided. He’d come out from under the trodes screaming, and Beauvoir had slapped him three times, hard, across the face, to stop it. But all he’d said to them, about his run, the run that had cost Jackie her life, was that he’d given Turner’s message to Jaylene Slide. Turner watched as Bobby got up stiffly and walked to the bar; he saw the care the boy took not to look at the stage. Had the two been lovers? Partners? Neither seemed likely.
He got up from where he sat, on the edge of the stage, and went back into Jammer’s office, pausing to check on the sleeping Angie, who was curled into his gutted parka on the carpet, beneath a table. Jammer was asleep, too, in his chair, his burned hand still on his lap, loosely enveloped in the striped towel. Tough old mother, Turner thought, an old jockey. The man had plugged his phone back in as soon as Bobby had come off his run, but Conroy had never called back. He wouldn’t now, and Turner knew that that meant that Jammer had been right about the speed with which Jaylene would strike, to revenge Ramirez, and that Conroy was almost certainly dead. And now his hired army of suburban bighairs was decamping, according to Bobby.
Turner went to the phone and punched up the news recap, and settled into a chair to watch. A hydrofoil ferry had collided with a miniature submarine in Macau; the hydrofoil’s life jackets had proven to be substandard, and at least fifteen people were assumed drowned, while the sub, a pleasure craft registered in Dublin, had not yet been located… Someone had apparently used a recoilless rifle to pump a barrage of incendiary shells into two floors of a Park Avenue co-op building, and Fire and Tactical teams were still on the scene; the names of the occupants had not yet been released, and so far no one had taken credit for the act… (Turner punched this item up a second time…) Fission Authority research teams at the site of the alleged nuclear explosion in Arizona were insisting that minor levels of radioactivity detected there were far too low to be the result of any known form of tactical warhead… In Stockholm, the death of Josef Virek, the enormously wealthy art patron had been announced, the announcement surfacing amid a flurry of bizarre rumors that Virek had been ill for decades and that his death was the result of some cataclysmic failure in the life-support systems in a heavily guarded private clinic in a Stockholm suburb… (Turner punched this item past again, and then a third time, frowned, and then shrugged.) For the morning’s human interest note, police in a New Jersey suburb said that-
“Turner…”
He shut the recap off and turned to find Angie in the doorway.
“How you doing, Angie?”
“Okay. I didn’t dream.” She hugged the black sweatshirt around her, peered up at him from beneath limp brown bangs. “Bobby showed me where there’s a shower. Sort of a dressing room I’m going back there soon. My hair’s horrible.”
He went over to her and put his hands on her shoulders. “You’ve handled this all pretty well. You’ll be out of here, soon.”
She shrugged out of his touch. “Out of here? Where to? Japan?”
“Well, maybe not Japan Maybe not Hosaka…”
“She’ll go with us,” Beauvoir said, behind her.
“Why would I want to?”
“Because,” Beauvoir said, “we know who you are. Those dreams of yours are real. You met Bobby in one, and saved his life, cut him loose from black ice. You said, ‘Why are they doing that to you?’..
Angie’s eyes widened, darted to Turner and back to Beauvoir.
“It’s a whole long story,” Beauvoir said, “and it’s open to interpretation. But if you come with me, come back to the Projects, our people can teach you things We can teach you things we don’t understand, but maybe you can…”
“Why?”
“Because of what’s in your head” Beauvoir nodded solemnly, then shoved the plastic eyeglass frames back up his nose. “You don’t have to stay with us, if you don’t want to. In fact, we’re only there to serve you…”
“Serve me?”
“Like I said, it’s a long story… How about it, Mr. Turner?”
Turner shrugged. He couldn’t think where else she might go, and Maas would certainly pay to either have her back or dead, and Hosaka as well. “That might be the best way,” he said.
“I want to stay with you,” she said to Turner. “I like Jackie, but then she…”
“Never mind,” Turner said. “I know.” I don’t know anything, he screamed silently. ‘I’ll keep in touch…” I’ll never see you again. “But there’s something I’d better tell you, now. Your father’s dead.” He killed himself. “The Maas security people killed him; he held them off while you got the ultralight off the mesa.”
“Is that true? That he held them off? I mean, I could feel it, that he was dead, but…”
