Count Zero

  He entered the hotel’s bar, a jungle-garden extension of the lobby, and found a seat by himself at one of the glass-topped tables. A pale man with a shock of white, bleached hair crossed the bar with a drink in each hand. The pale skin was drawn tight across angular features and a high forehead; he wore a neatly pressed military shirt over jeans, and leather sandals.

  “You’re the security for those simstim kids,” the pale man said, putting one of the drinks down on Turner’s table. “Alfredo told me.” Alfredo was one of the hotel bartenders.

  Turner looked up at the man, who was evidently sober and seemed to have all the confidence in the world. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced,” Turner said, making no move to accept the proffered drink.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Conroy said, seating himself, “we’re in the same ball game.” He seated himself.

  Turner stared. He had a bodyguard’s presence, something restless and watchful written in the lines of his body, and few strangers would so casually violate his private space.

  “You know,” the man said, the way someone might comment on a team that wasn’t doing particularly well in a given season, “those seismics you’re using really don’t make it. I’ve met people who could walk in there, eat your kids for breakfast, stack the bones in the shower, and stroll out whistling. Those seismics would say it never happened.” He took a sip of his drink. “You get A for effort, though. You know how to do a job.”

  The phrase “stack the bones in the shower” was enough. Turner decided to take the pale man out.

  “Look, Turner, here’s your leading lady.” The man smiled up at Jane Hamilton, who smiled back, her wide blue eyes clear and perfect, each iris ringed with the minute gold lettering of the Zeiss Ikon logo. Turner froze, caught in a split-second lock of indecision. The star was close, too close, and the pale man was rising—

  “Nice meeting you, Turner,” he said. “We’ll get together sooner or later. Take my advice about those seismics; back ’em up with a perimeter of screamers.” And then he turned and walked away, muscles rolling easily beneath the crisp fabric of his tan shirt.

  “That’s nice, Turner,” Hamilton said, taking the stranger’s place.

  “Yeah?” Turner watched as the man was lost in the confusion of the crowded lobby, amid pink-fleshed tourists.

  “You don’t ever seem to talk to people. You always look like you’re running a make on them, filing a report. It’s nice to see you making friends for a change.”

  Turner looked at her. She was twenty, four years his junior, and earned roughly nine times his annual salary in a given week. She was blonde, her hair cropped short for the series role, deeply tanned, and looked as if she was illuminated from within by sunlamps. The blue eyes were inhumanly perfect optical instruments, grown in vats in Japan. She was both actress and camera, her eyes worth several million New Yen, and in the hierarchy of Sense/Net stars, she barely rated.

  He sat with her, in the bar, until she’d finished two drinks, then walked her back to the suite-cluster.

  “You wouldn’t feel like coming in for another, would you, Turner?”

  “No,” he said. This was the second evening she’d made the offer, and he sensed that it would be the last. “I have to check the seismics.”

  Later that night, he phoned New York for the number of a firm in Mexico City that could supply him with screamers for the perimeter of the suite-cluster.

  But a week later, Jane and three others, half the series cast, were dead.

  “We’re ready to roll the medics,” Webber said. Turner saw that she was wearing fingerless brown leather gloves. She’d replaced her sunglasses with clear-glass shooting glasses, and there was a pistol on her hip. “Sutcliffe’s monitoring the perimeter with the remotes. We’ll need everybody else to get the fucker through the brush.”

  “Need me?”

  “Ramirez says he can’t do anything too strenuous this close to jacking in. You ask me, he’s just a lazy little L.A. shit.”

  “No,” Turner said, getting up from his seat on the ledge, “he’s right. If he sprained his wrist, we’d be screwed. Even something so minor that he couldn’t feel it could affect his speed . . .”

  Webber shrugged. “Yeah. Well, he’s back in the bunker, bathing his hands in the last of our water and humming to himself, so we should be just fine.”

  When they reached the surgery, Turner automatically counted heads. Seven. Ramirez was in the bunker; Sutcliffe was somewhere in the cinderblock maze, monitoring the sentry-remotes. Lynch had a Steiner-Optic laser slung over his right shoulder, a compact model with a folding alloy skeleton stock, integral batteries forming a fat handgrip below the gray titanium housing that served the thing as a barrel. Nathan was wearing a black jumpsuit, black paratrooper boots filmed with pale dust, and had the bulbous ant-eye goggles of an image-amplification rig dangling below his chin on a head strap. Turner removed his Mexican sunglasses, tucked them into a breast pocket in the blue work shirt, and buttoned the flap.

  “How’s it going, Teddy?” he asked a beefy six-footer with close-cropped brown hair.

  “Jus’ fine,” Teddy said, with a toothy smile.

  Turner surveyed the other three members of the site team, nodding to each man in turn: Compton, Costa, Davis.

  “Getting down to the wire, huh?” Costa asked. He had a round, moist face and a thin, carefully trimmed beard. Like Nathan and the others, he wore black.

  “Pretty close,” Turner said. “All smooth so far.”

  Costa nodded.

  “We’re an estimated thirty minutes from arrival,” Turner said.

  “Nathan, Davis,” Webber said, “disconnect the sewage line.” She handed Turner one of the Telefunken ear-bead sets. She’d already removed it from its bubble pack. She put one on herself, peeling the plastic backing from the self-adhesive throat microphone and smoothing it into place on her sunburnt neck.

  Nathan and Davis were moving in the shadows behind the module. Turner heard Davis curse softly.

  “Shit,” Nathan said, “there’s no cap for the end of the tube.” The others laughed.

  “Leave it,” Webber said. “Get to work on the wheels. Lynch and Compton unlimber the jacks.”

  Lynch drew a pistol-shaped power driver from his belt and ducked beneath surgery. It was swaying now, the suspension creaking softly; the medics were moving inside. Turner heard a brief, high-pitched whine from some piece of internal machinery, and then the chatter of Lynch’s driver as he readied the jacks.

  He put his ear-bead in and stuck the throat mike beside his larynx. “Sutcliffe? Check?”

  “Fine,” the Australian said, a tiny voice that seemed to come from the base of his skull.

  “Ramirez?”

  “Loud and clear . . .”

  Eight minutes. They were rolling the module out on its ten fat tires. Turner and Nathan were on the front pair, steering; Nathan had his goggles on. Mitchell was coming out in the dark of the moon. The module was heavy, absurdly heavy, and very nearly impossible to steer. “Like balancing a truck on a couple of shopping carts,” Nathan said to himself. Turner’s lower back was giving him trouble. It hadn’t been quite right since New Delhi.

  “Hold it,” Webber said, from the third wheel on the left. “I’m stuck on a fucking rock . . .”

  Turner released his wheel and straightened up. The bats were out in force tonight, flickering things against the bowl of desert starlight. There were bats in Mexico, in the jungle, fruit bats that slept in the trees that overhung the suite-cluster where the Sense/Net crew slept. Turner had climbed those trees, had strung the overhanging limbs with taut lengths of molecular monofilament, meters of invisible razor waiting for an unwary intruder. But Jane and the others had died anyway, blown away on a hillside in the mountains near Acapulco. Trouble with a labor union, someone said later, but nothing was ever determined, really, other than the fact of the primitive claymore charge, its placement and the position from which it had been detonated. Turner
had climbed the hill himself, his clothes filmed with blood, and seen the nest of crushed undergrowth where the killers had waited, the knife switch and the corroded automobile battery. He found the butts of hand-rolled cigarettes and the cap from a bottle of Bohemia beer, bright and new.

  The series had to be canceled, and the crisis-management team did yeoman duty, arranging the removal of bodies and the repatriation of the surviving members of the cast and crew. Turner was on the last plane out, and after eight Scotches in the lounge of the Acapulco airport, he’d wandered blindly out into the central ticketing area and encountered a man named Buschel, an executive tech from Sense/Net’s Los Angeles complex. Buschel was pale beneath an L.A. tan, his seersucker suit limp with sweat. He was carrying a plain aluminum case, like a camera case, its sides dull with condensation. Turner stared at the man, stared at the sweating case, with its red and white warning decals and lengthy labels explaining the precautions required in the transportation of materials in cryogenic storage.

  “Christ,” Buschel said, noticing him. “Turner. I’m sorry, man. Came down this morning. Ugly fucking business.” He took a sodden handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped his face. “Ugly job. I’ve never had to do one of these, before . . .”

  “What’s in the case, Buschel?” He was much closer now, although he didn’t remember stepping forward. He could see the pores in Buschel’s tanned face.

  “You okay, man?” Buschel taking a step back. “You look bad.”

  “What’s in the case, Buschel?” Seersucker bunched in his fist, knuckles white and shaking.

  “Damn it, Turner,” the man jerking free, the handle of the case clutched in both hands now. “They weren’t damaged. Only some minor abrasion on one of the corneas. They belong to the Net. It was in her contract, Turner.”

  And he’d turned away, his guts knotted tight around eight glasses of straight Scotch, and fought the nausea. And he’d continued to fight it, held it off for nine years, until, in his flight from the Dutchman, all the memory of it had come down on him, had fallen on him in London, in Heathrow, and he’d leaned forward, without pausing in his progress down yet another corridor, and vomited into a blue plastic waste canister.

  “Come on, Turner,” Webber said, “put some back in it. Show us how it’s done.” The module began to strain forward again, through the tarry smell of the desert plants.

  “Ready here,” Ramirez said, his voice remote and calm.

  Turner touched the throat mike: “I’m sending you some company.” He removed his finger from the mike. “Nathan, it’s time. You and Davis, back to the bunker.”

  Davis was in charge of the squirt gear, their sole nonmatrix link with Hosaka. Nathan was Mr. Fix-it. Lynch was rolling the last of the bicycle wheels away into the brush beyond the parking lot. Webber and Compton were kneeling beside the module, attaching the line that linked the Hosaka surgeons with the Sony biomonitor in the command post. With the wheels removed, lowered and leveled on four jacks, the portable neurosurgery reminded Turner once again of the French vacation module. That had been a much later trip, four years after Conroy had recruited him in Los Angeles.

  “How’s it going?” Sutcliffe asked, over the link.

  “Fine,” Turner said, touching the mike.

  “Lonely out here,” Sutcliffe said.

  “Compton,” Turner said, “Sutcliffe needs you to help him cover the perimeter. You, too, Lynch.”

  “Too bad,” Lynch said, from the dark. “I was hoping I’d get to see the action.”

  Turner’s hand was on the grip of the holstered Smith & Wesson, under the open flap of the parka. “Now, Lynch.” If Lynch was Connie’s plant, he’d want to be here. Or in the bunker.

  “Fuck it,” Lynch said. “There’s nobody out there and you know it. You don’t want me here, I’ll go in there and watch Ramirez . . .”

  “Right,” Turner said, and drew the gun, depressing the stud that activated the xenon projector. The first tight-beam flash of noon-bright xenon light found a twisted saguaro, its needles like tufts of gray fur in the pitiless illumination. The second lit up the spiked skull on Lynch’s belt, framed it in a sharp-edged circle. The sound of the shot and the sound of the bullet detonating on impact were indistinguishable, waves of concussion rolling out in invisible, ever-widening rings, out into the flat dark land like thunder.

  In the first few seconds after, there was no sound at all, even the bats and bugs silenced, waiting. Webber had thrown herself flat in the scrub, and somehow he sensed her there, now, knew that her gun would be out, held dead steady in those brown, capable hands. He had no idea where Compton was. Then Sutcliffe’s voice, over the ear-bead, scratching at him from his brainpan: “Turner. What was that?”

  There was enough starlight now to make out Webber. She was sitting up, gun in her hands, ready, her elbows braced on her knees.

  “He was Conroy’s plant,” Turner said, lowering the Smith & Wesson.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said. “I’m Conroy’s plant.”

  “He had a line out. I’ve seen it before.”

  She had to say it twice.

  Sutcliffe’s voice in his head, and then Ramirez: “We got your transportation. Eighty klicks and closing. . . . Everything else looks clear. There’s a blimp twenty klicks south-southwest, Jaylene says, unmanned cargo and it’s right on schedule. Nothing else. What the fuck’s Sut yelling about? Nathan says he heard a shot.” Ramirez was jacked in, most of his sensorium taken up with the input from the Maas-Neotek deck. “Nathan’s ready with the first squirt . . .”

  Turner could hear the jet banking now, braking for the landing on the highway. Webber was up and walking toward him, her gun in her hand. Sutcliffe was asking the same question, over and over.

  He reached up and touched the throat mike. “Lynch. He’s dead. The jet’s here. This is it.”

  And then the jet was on them, black shadow, incredibly low, coming in without lights. There was a flare of blow-back jets as the thing executed a landing that would have killed a human pilot, and then a weird creaking as it readjusted its articulated carbon-fiber airframe. Turner could make out the green reflected glow of instrumentation in the curve of the plastic canopy.

  “You fucked up,” Webber said.

  Behind her, the hatch in the side of the surgery module popped open, framing a masked figure in a green paper contamination suit. The light from inside was blue-white, brilliant; it threw a distorted shadow of the suited medic out through the thin cloud of dust that hung above the lot in the wake of the jet’s landing. “Close it!” Webber shouted. “Not yet!”

  As the door swung down, shutting out the light, they both heard the ultralight’s engine. After the roar of the jet, it seemed no more than the hum of a dragonfly, a drone that stuttered and faded as they listened. “He’s out of fuel,” Webber said. “But he’s close.”

  “He’s here,” Turner said, pressing the throat mike. “First squirt.”

  The tiny plane whispered past them, a dark delta against the stars. They could hear something flapping in the wind of its silent passage, perhaps one of Mitchell’s pants legs. You’re up there, Turner thought, all alone, in the warmest clothes you own, wearing a pair of infrared goggles you built for yourself, and you’re looking for a pair of dotted lines picked out for you in hand warmers. “You crazy fucker,” he said, his heart filling with a strange admiration, “you really wanted out bad.”

  Then the first flare went up, with a festive little pop, and the magnesium glare began its slow white parachute ride to the desert floor. Almost immediately, there were two more, and the long rattle of automatic fire from the west end of the mall. He was peripherally aware of Webber stumbling through the brush, in the direction of the bunker, but his eyes were fixed on the wheeling ultralight, on its gay orange and blue fabric wings, and the goggled figure hunched there in the open metal framework above the fragile tripod landing gear.

  Mitchell.

  The lot was bright as a football field, under the
drifting flares. The ultralight banked and turned with a lazy grace that made Turner want to scream. A line of tracers hosed out in a white arc from beyond the site perimeter. Missed.

  Get it down. Get it down. He was running, jumping clumps of brush that caught at his ankles, at the hem of his parka.

  The flares. The light. Mitchell couldn’t use the goggles now, couldn’t see the infrared glow of the hand warmers. He was bringing it in wide of the strip. The nose wheel caught in something and the ultralight cartwheeled, crumpling, torn butterfly, and then lay down in its own white cloud of dust.

  The flash of the explosion seemed to reach him an instant before the sound, throwing his shadow before him across the pale brush. The concussion picked him up and threw him down, and as he fell, he saw the broken surgery module in a ball of yellow flame and knew that Webber had used her antitank rocket. Then he was up again, moving, running, the gun in his hand.

  He reached the wreckage of Mitchell’s ultralight as the first flare died. Another one arced out of nowhere and blossomed overhead. The sound of firing was continuous now. He scrambled over a twisted sheet of rusted tin and found the sprawled figure of the pilot, head and face concealed by a makeshift helmet and a clumsy-looking goggle rig. The goggles were fastened to the helmet with dull silver strips of gaffer tape. The twisted limbs were padded in layers of dark clothing. Turner watched his hands claw at the tape, tear at the infrared goggles; his hands were distant creatures, pale undersea things that lived a life of their own far down at the bottom of some unthinkable Pacific trench, and he watched as they tore frantically at tape, goggles, helmet. Until it all came away, and the long brown hair, limp with sweat, fell across the girl’s white face, smearing the thin trickle of dark blood that ran from one nostril, and her eyes opened, revealing empty whites, and he was tugging her up, somehow, into a fireman’s carry, and reeling in what he hoped was the direction of the jet.

  He felt the second explosion through the soles of his deck shoes, and saw the idiot grin on the lump of plastique that sat on Ramirez’s cyberspace deck. There was no flash, only sound and the sting of concussion through the concrete of the lot.