Count Zero, Page 23

  “Eclipse? Lord! Down the bloody tube’s more like it. Think about it: We’re crawlin’, you an’ me, through what used to be their corporate data cores. Some contractor in Pakistan bought the thing; hull’s fine, and there’s a fair bit of gold in the circuitry, but not as cheap to recover as some might like . . . It’s been hangin’ up here ever since, with only old Lud to keep it company, and it him. Till I come along, that is. Guess one day the crews’ll come up from Pakistan and get cuttin’ . . . Funny, though, how much of it still seems to work, at least part of the time. Story I heard, one got me here in the first place, said T-A’s wiped the cores dead, before they cut it loose . . .”

  “But you think they are still operative?”

  “Lord, yes. About the way Lud is, if you call that operative. What do you think your boxmaker is?”

  “What do you know about Maas Biolabs?”

  “Moss what?”

  “Maas. They make biochips . . .”

  “Oh. Them. Well, that’s all I do know about ’em . . .”

  “Ludgate speaks of them?”

  “He might. Can’t say as I listen all that close. Lud, he does speak a fair bit . . .”

  27

  STATIONS OF THE BREATH

  HE BROUGHT THEM in through avenues lined with rusting slopes of dead vehicles, with wrecker’s cranes and the black towers of smelters. He kept to the back streets as they eased into the western flank of the Sprawl, and eventually gunned the hover down a brick canyon, armored sides scraping sparks, and drove it hard into a wall of soot-blown, compacted garbage. An avalanche of refuse slid down, almost covering the vehicle, and he released the controls, watching the foam dice swing back and forth, side to side. The kerosene gauge had been riding on empty for the last twelve blocks.

  “What happened back there?” she said, her cheekbones green in the glow of the instruments.

  “I shot down a helicopter. Mostly by accident. We were lucky.”

  “No, I mean after that. I was . . . I had a dream.”

  “What did you dream?”

  “The big things, moving . . .”

  “You had some kind of seizure.”

  “Am I sick? Do you think I’m sick? Why did the company want to kill me?”

  “I don’t think you’re sick.”

  She undid her harness and scrambled back over the seat, to crouch where they had slept. “It was a bad dream . . .” She began to tremble. He climbed out of his harness and went to her, held her head against him, stroking her hair, smoothing it back against the delicate skull, stroking it back behind her ears. Her face in the green glow like something hauled from dreams and abandoned, the skin smooth and thin across the bones. The black sweatshirt half unzipped, he traced the fragile line of her collarbone with a fingertip. Her skin was cool, moist with a film of sweat. She clung to him.

  He closed his eyes and saw his body in a sun-striped bed, beneath a slow fan with blades of brown hardwood. His body pumping, jerking like an amputated limb, Allison’s head thrown back, mouth open, lips taut across her teeth.

  Angie pressed her face into the hollow of his neck.

  She groaned, stiffened, rocked back. “Hired man,” the voice said. And he was back against the driver’s seat, the Smith & Wesson’s barrel reflecting a single line of green instrument glow, the luminous head on its front sight eclipsing her left pupil.

  “No,” the voice said.

  He lowered the gun, “You’re back.”

  “No. Legba spoke to you. I am Samedi.”

  “Saturday?”

  “Baron Saturday, hired man. You met me once on a hillside. The blood lay on you like dew. I drank of your full heart that day.” Her body jerked violently. “You know this town well . . .”

  “Yes.” He watched as muscles tensed and relaxed in her face, molding her features into a new mask . . .

  “Very well. Leave the vehicle here, as you intended. But follow the stations north. To New York. Tonight. I will guide you with Legba’s horse then, and you will kill for me . . .”

  “Kill who?”

  “The one you most wish to kill, hired man.”

  Angie moaned, shuddered, and began to sob.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “We’re half way home.” It was a meaningless thing to say, he thought, helping her out of the seat; neither of them had homes at all. He found the case of cartridges in the parka and replaced the one he’d used on the Honda. He found a paint-spattered razor-knife, in the dash tool kit and sliced the ripstop lining out of the parka, a million microtubes of poly insulation whirling up as he cut. When he’d stripped it out, he put the Smith & Wesson in the holster and put the parka on. It hung around him in folds, like an oversized raincoat, and didn’t show the bulge of the big gun at all.

  “Why did you do that?” she asked, running the back of her hand across her mouth.

  “Because it’s hot out there and I need to cover the gun.” He stuffed the ziploc full of used New Yen into a pocket. “Come on,” he said, “we got subways to catch . . .”

  Condensation dripped steadily from the old Georgetown dome, built forty years after the ailing Federals decamped for the lower reaches of McLean. Washington was a Southern city, always had been, and you felt the tone of the Sprawl shift here if you rode the trains down the stations from Boston. The trees in the District were lush and green, and their leaves shaled the arc lights as Turner and Angela Mitchell made their way along the broken sidewalks to Dupont Circle and the station. There were drums in the circle, and someone had lit a trash fire in the giant’s marble goblet at the center. Silent figures sat beside spread blankets as they passed, the blankets arrayed with surreal assortments of merchandise: the damp-swollen cardboard covers of black plastic audio disks beside battered prosthetic limbs trailing crude nerve-jacks, a dusty glass fishbowl filled with oblong steel dog tags, rubber-banded stacks of faded postcards, cheap Indo trodes still sealed in wholesaler’s plastic, mismatched ceramic salt-and-pepper sets, a golf club with a peeling leather grip, Swiss army knives with missing blades, a dented tin wastebasket lithographed with the face of a president whose name Turner could almost remember (Carter? Grosvenor?), fuzzy holograms of the Monument . . .

  In the shadows near the station’s entrance, Turner haggled quietly with a Chinese boy in white jeans, exchanging the smallest of Rudy’s bills for nine alloy tokens stamped with the ornate BAMA Transit logo.

  Two of the tokens admitted them to the station. Three of them went into vending machines for bad coffee and stale pastries. The remaining four carried them north, the train rushing silently along on its magnetic cushion. He sat back with his arms around her, and pretended to close his eyes; he watched their reflections in the opposite window. A tall man, gaunt now and unshaven, hunched back in defeat with a hollow-eyed girl curled beside him. She hadn’t spoken since they’d left the alley where he’d abandoned the hover.

  For the second time in an hour he considered phoning his agent. If you had to trust someone, the rule ran, then trust your agent. But Conroy had said he’d hired Oakey and the others through Turner’s agent, and the connection made Turner dubious. Where was Conroy tonight? Turner was fairly certain that it would have been Conroy who ordered Oakey after them with the laser. Would Hosaka have arranged the railgun, in Arizona, to erase evidence of a botched defection attempt? But if they had, why order Webber to destroy the medics, their neurosurgery, and the Maas-Neotek deck? And there was Maas again. . . . Had Maas killed Mitchell? Was there any reason to believe that Mitchell was really dead? Yes, he thought, as the girl stirred beside him in uneasy sleep, there was: Angie. Mitchell had feared they’d kill her; he’d arranged the defection in order to get her out, get her to Hosaka, with no plan for his own escape. Or that was Angie’s version, anyway.

  He closed his eyes, shut out the reflections. Something stirred, deep in the silt of Mitchell’s recorded memories. Shame. He couldn’t quite reach it. . . . He opened his eyes suddenly. What had she said, at Rudy’s? That her father had put the
thing into her head because she wasn’t smart enough? Careful not to disturb her, he worked his arm from behind her neck and slid two fingers into the waist pocket of his pants, came up with Conroy’s little black nylon envelope on its neck cord. He undid the Velcro and shook the swollen, asymmetrical gray biosoft out onto his open palm. Machine dreams. Roller coaster. Too fast, too alien to grasp. But if you wanted something, something specific, you should be able to pull it out . . .

  He dug his thumbnail under the socket’s dustcover, pried it out, and put it down on the plastic seat beside him. The train was nearly empty, and none of the other passengers seemed to be paying any attention to him. He took a deep breath, set his teeth, and inserted the biosoft . . .

  Twenty seconds later, he had it, the thing he’d gone for. The strangeness hadn’t touched him, this time, and he decided that that was because he’d gone after this one specific thing, this fact, exactly the sort of data you’d expect to find in the dossier of a top research man: his daughter’s IQ, as reflected by annual batteries of tests.

  Angela Mitchell was well above the norm. Had been, all along.

  He took the biosoft out of his socket and rolled it absently between thumb and forefinger. The shame. Mitchell and the shame and grad school. . . . Grades, he thought. I want the bastard’s grades. I want his transcripts.

  He jacked the dossier again.

  Nothing. He’d gotten it, but there was nothing.

  No. Again.

  Again . . .

  “Goddamn,” he said, seeing it.

  A teenager with a shaved head glanced at him from a seat across the aisle, then turned back to the stream of his friend’s monologue: “They’re gonna run the games again, up on the hill, midnight. We’re goin’, but we’re just gonna hang, we’re not gonna make it, just kick back and let ’em thump each other’s butts, and we’re gonna laugh, see who gets thumped, ’cause last week Susan got her arm busted, you there for that? An’ it was funny, ’cause Cal was tryin’ t’ takem to the hospital but he was dusted ’n’ he ran that shitty Yamaha over a speed bump . . .”

  Turner snapped the biosoft back into his socket.

  This time, when it was over, he said nothing at all. He put his arm back around Angie and smiled, seeing the smile in the window. It was a feral smile; it belonged to the edge.

  Mitchell’s academic record was good, extremely good. Excellent. But the arc wasn’t there. The arc was something Turner had learned to look for in the dossiers of research people, that certain signal curve of brilliance. He could spot the arc the way a master machinist could identify metals by observing the spark plume off a grinding wheel. And Mitchell hadn’t had it.

  The shame. The graduate dorms. Mitchell had known, known he wasn’t going to make it. And then, somehow, he had. How? It wouldn’t be in the dossier. Mitchell, somehow, had known how to edit what he gave the Maas security machine. Otherwise, they would have been on to him . . . Someone, something, had found Mitchell in his postgraduate slump and had started feeding him things. Clues, directions. And Mitchell had gone to the top, his arc hard and bright and perfect then, and it had carried him to the top . . .

  Who? What?

  He watched Angie’s sleeping face in the shudder of subway light.

  Faust.

  Mitchell had cut a deal. Turner might never know the details of the agreement, or Mitchell’s price, but he knew he understood the other side of it. What Mitchell had been required to do in return.

  Legba, Samedi, spittle curling from the girl’s contorted lips.

  And the train swept into old Union in a black blast of midnight air.

  “Cab, sir?” The man’s eyes were moving behind glasses with a polychrome tint that swirled like oil slicks. There were flat, silvery sores across the backs of his hands. Turner stepped in close and caught his upper arm, without breaking stride, forcing him back against a wall of scratched white tile, between gray ranks of luggage lookers.

  “Cash,” Turner said. “I’m paying New Yen. I want my cab. No trouble with the driver. Understand? I’m not a mark.” He tightened his grip. “Fuck up on me, I’ll come back here and kill you, or make you wish I had.”

  “Got it. Yessir. Got it. We can do that, sir, yessir. Where d’ you wanna go to, sir?” The man’s wasted features contorted in pain.

  “Hired man,” the voice came from Angie, a hoarse whisper. And then an address. Turner saw the tout’s eyes dart nervously behind the swirls of colors. “That’s Madison?” he croaked. “Yessir. Get you a good cab, real good cab . . .”

  “What is this place,” Turner asked the cabby, leaning forward to thumb the SPEAK button beside the steel speaker grid, “the address we gave you?”

  There was a crackle of static. “Hypermart. Not much open there this time of night. Looking for anything in particular?”

  “No,” Turner said. He didn’t know the place. He tried to remember that stretch of Madison. Residential, mostly. Uncounted living spaces carved out of the shells of commercial buildings that dated from a day when commerce had required clerical workers to be present physically at a central location. Some of the buildings were tall enough to penetrate a dome . . .

  “Where are we going?” Angie asked, her hand on his arm.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

  “God,” she said, leaning against his shoulder, looking up at the pink neon HYPERMART sign that slashed the granite face of the old building, “I used to dream about New York, back on the mesa. I had a graphics program that would take me through all the streets, into museums and things. I wanted to come here more than anything in the world . . .”

  “Well, you made it. You’re here.”

  She started to sob, hugged him, her face against his bare chest, shaking. “I’m scared, I’m so scared. . . .”

  “It’ll be okay,” he said, stroking her hair, his eyes on the main entrance. He had no reason to believe anything would ever be okay for either of them. She seemed to have no idea that the words that had brought them here had come from her mouth. But then, he thought, she hadn’t spoken them . . . There were bag people huddled on either side of Hypermart’s entranceway, prone hummocks of rag gone the exact shade of the sidewalk; they looked to Turner as though they were being slowly extruded from the dark concrete, to become mobile extensions of the city. “Jammer’s,” the voice said, muffled by his chest, and he felt a cold revulsion, “a club. Find Danbala’s horse.” And then she was crying again. He took her hand and walked past the sleeping transients, in under the tarnished gilt scrollwork and through the glass doors. He saw an espresso machine down an aisle of tents and shuttered stalls, a girl with a black crest of hair swabbing a counter. “Coffee,” he said. “Food. Come on. You need to eat.”

  He smiled at the girl while Angie settled herself on a stool. “How about cash?” he said. “You ever take cash?”

  She stared at him, shrugged. He took a twenty from Rudy’s ziploc and showed it to her. “What do you want?”

  “Coffees. Some food.”

  “That all you got? Nothing smaller?”

  He shook his head.

  “Sorry. Can’t make the change.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “You crazy?”

  “No, but I want coffee.”

  “That’s some tip, mister. I don’t make that in a week.”

  “It’s yours.”

  Anger crossed her face. “You’re with those shitheads upstairs. Keep your money. I’m closing.”

  “We aren’t with anybody,” he said, leaning across the counter slightly, so that the parka fell open and she could see the Smith & Wesson. “We’re looking for a club. A place called Jammer’s.”

  The girl glanced at Angie, back to Turner. “She sick? Dusted? What is this?”

  “Here’s the money,” Turner said. “Give us our coffee. You want to earn the change, tell me how to find Jammer’s place. It’s worth it to me. Understand?”

  She slid the worn bill out of sight and moved to t
he espresso machine. “I don’t think I understand anything anymore.” She rattled cups and milk-filmed glasses out of the way. “What is it with Jammer’s? You a friend of his? You know Jackie?”

  “Sure,” Turner said.

  “She came by early this morning with this little wilson from the ’burbs. I guess they went up there . . .”

  “Where?”

  “Jammer’s. Then the weirdness started.”

  “Yeah?”

  “All these creeps from Barrytown, greaseballs and white-shoes, walking in like they owned the place. And now they damn well do, the top two floors. Started buying people out of their stalls. A lot of people on the lower floors just packed and left. Too weird. . . .”

  “How many came?”

  Steam roared out of the machine. “Maybe a hundred. I been scared shit all day, but I can’t reach my boss. I close up in thirty minutes anyway. The day girl never showed, or else she came in, caught the trouble smell, and walked . . .” She took the little steaming cup and put it in front of Angie. “You okay, honey?”

  Angie nodded.

  “You have any idea what these people are up to?” Turner asked.

  The girl had returned to the machine. It roared again. “I think they’re waiting for someone,” she said quietly and brought Turner an espresso. “Either for someone to try to leave Jammer’s or for someone to try to get in . . .”

  Turner looked down at the swirls of brown foam on his coffee. “And nobody here called the police?”

  “The police? Mister, this is Hypermart. People here don’t call the police . . .”

  Angie’s cup shattered on the marble counter.

  “Short and straight, hired man,” the voice whispered. “You know the way. Walk in.”

  The countergirl’s mouth was open. “Jesus,” she said, “she’s gotta be dusted bad . . .” She looked at Turner coldly. “You give it to her?”

  “No,” Turner said, “but she’s sick. It’ll be okay.” He drank off the black bitter coffee. It seemed to him, just for a second, that he could feel the whole Sprawl breathing, and its breath was old and sick and tired, all up and down the stations from Boston to Atlanta. . . .