A Song Called Youth (95 page)

He punched for a facial match-up search in the videofile. On a hunch, he specified May 12. The evening of the Le Pen assassination . . . 

Watson remembered it with toothache clarity . . . 

The Palace of Versailles. The fantasy of the Sun King. The embodiment of absolutist royal power. The austere and vast chateau to the west of Paris, its fanatically symmetrical array of gardens now overgrown and pocked with shell holes; the North Wing partly caved in. The South Wing, though, mostly intact.

Le Pen had weathered criticism from the neo-Fascist ranks for making Versailles his base of operations. It was not a state building, it was just a vast, oversized museum. A monument to Louis XIV’s aloofness; his disdain for the stinking, starving masses of the great city. But Le Pen’s intent was obvious to the man on the street; the symbolism shone like fireworks in the sky: imperial power was returned. Kings had been chosen by bloodline, and genetics was the axis of power in the new state.

Le Pen began holding televised nationalist fêtes in the South Wing, and for the latest had arranged to bus a thousand white middle-class Parisians—returned to Paris at the announcement of the war’s end—to the dowdy grounds of Versailles. They waited for him lined up to either side of the formal walkway approaching the Petites Écuries; a shield stood between the crowd and the walkway where Le Pen was expected. The impenetrable transparent plastic shield had been erected in a tunnel shape from the entryway out to the podium in the gardens where Le Pen was to speak. He was always thoroughly protected. And with equal thoroughness he had directed that the carvings over the arch of the Petites Ecuries be restored for the occasion: the masterpiece by François Girardon,
Alexander Taming His Charger Bucephalus.
Alexander the Great (Alexander the unapologetic tyrant!) astride the raging horse, with two trained chargers holding the rebellious mount to the course. The damage from the war to Versailles was relatively minor: the breast of Bucephalus had been cracked, was partly fallen.

A team of workers from Paris had seamlessly replaced the horse’s chest with a clever cosmetic plaster, tinted to suggest age. The repair was complete when the president of Fascist France, Jean Le Pen, grandson of the founding father of the Front National, stepped out of the entry between the cheering crowds . . . The crowds waved and shouted on the other side of the temporary plastic shielding . . . Le Pen took one long stride toward the podium, where he was to announce the formation of the Unity Party and its alliance with SPOES, the Self-Policing Organization of European States . . . 

And the breast of Bucephalus burst open. A stream of Teflon-coated bullets ripped through Le Pen and his bodyguards and his minister of defense.

Le Pen had been killed by a small, remote-controlled machine-pistol lovingly hidden in the ornate carvings over the archway of the entry to the Petites Écuries rotunda. Hidden there by NR operatives two days before. They’d waylaid the repair crew and taken their places. The plaster over the barrel of the gun was paper-thin.

Now, Watson ran the video of the assassination, again and again, zooming in for crowd close-ups. They’d rounded up everyone in the crowd, or so they thought, debriefed them all, extracted them one by one: they found two Jews pretending to be gentiles, and sent them to the “Processing Centers.” But they found not one NR operative, not one assassin. Well, someone could easily have slipped away from the crowd in all the confusion after the shooting.

He scanned the faces, not sure what he was looking for. And then saw him. Half turned away. His hands in his pockets, perhaps activating the remote control on the weapon hidden in the sculpture . . . If you didn’t look closely at the eyes, the assassin looked vacuous, smiling vaguely, happily confused. Putting on the expression of a starved half-wit. His eyes, though, didn’t match the rest of the expression. They were focused, intent, predatory.

It was
him!
Missing most of an ear, the man in the Larousse crowd just now. The one who’d gotten away in the Metro tunnel (Gotten away? There were still soldiers in pursuit, combing the tunnels. But he’d have his escape route carefully planned, so yes: Gotten away.)

A cross-check with CIA files told Watson the subject was a man marked by the CIA for termination with extreme prejudice. A terrorist.

One Daniel Torrence. Aka “Hard-Eyes.”

“You filthy little rotter,” Watson said softly, staring at the man on the screen. “You buggering bastard. You stinking little turd Jew. You ugly little wog. You’re the target now, fancy boy. You’re it. You especially.
We’re coming after you, Danny boy!
”

• 02 •

Los Angeles, California.

Nine a.m., and Jerome-X wanted a smoke. He didn’t smoke, but he wanted one in here, and he could see how people went into prison non-smokers and came out doing two packs a day. Maybe had to get their brains rewired to get off it. Which was ugly, he’d been rewired once to get ofs Sink, synthetic cocaine, and he’d felt like a processor with a glitch for a month after that.

He pictured his thoughts like a little train, zipping around the cigarette-burnt graffiti: “YOU FUCKED NOW” and “GASMAN WUZZERE” and “GASMAN IS AN IDIOT-MO.” The words were stippled on the dull pink ceiling in umber burn spots. Jerome wondered who GASMAN was and what they’d put him in prison for.

He yawned. He hadn’t slept much the night before. It took a long time to learn to sleep in prison. He wished he’d upgraded his chip so he could use it to activate his sleep endorphins. But that was a grade above what he’d been able to afford—and way above the kind of brain chips he’d been dealing. He wished he could turn off the light panel, but it was sealed in.

There was a toilet and a broken water fountain in the cell. There were also a few bunks, but he was alone in this static place of watery blue light and faint pink distances. The walls were salmon-colored garbage blocks. The words singed into the ceiling were blurred and impotent.

Almost noon, his stomach rumbling, Jerome was still lying on his back on the top bunk when the trashcan said, “Eric Wexler, re-ma-a-in on your bunk while the ne-ew prisoner ente-e-ers the cell!”

Wexler? Oh, yeah. They thought his name was Wexler. The fake ID program.

He heard the cell door slide open; he looked over, saw the trashcan ushering a stocky Chicano guy into lockup. The robot everyone called “the trashcan” was a stumpy metal cylinder with a group of camera lenses, a retractable plastic arm, and a gun muzzle that could fire a Taser charge, rubber bullets, tear-gas pellets, or .45-caliber rounds. It was supposed to use the .45 only in extreme situations, but the robot was battered, it whined when it moved, its digital voice was warped. When they got like that, Jerome had heard, you didn’t fuck with them; they’d mix up the rubber bullets with the .45-caliber, Russian Roulette style.

The door sucked itself shut, the trashcan whined away down the hall, its rubber wheels squeaking once with every revolution. Jerome heard a tinny cymbal crash as someone, maybe trying to get it to shoot at a guy in the next cell, threw a tray at it; followed by some echoey human shouting and a distorted admonishment from the trashcan. The Chicano was still standing by the plexigate, hands shoved in his pockets, staring at Jerome, looking like he was trying to place him.

“ ’Sappenin’,” Jerome said, sitting up on the bed. He was grateful for the break in the monotony.

“
Qué
pasa?
You like the top bunk, huh? Tha’s good.”

“I can read the ceiling better from up here. About ten seconds’ worth of reading matter. It’s all I got. You can have the lower bunk.”

“You fuckin’-A I can.” But there was no real aggression in his tone. Jerome thought about turning on his chip, checking the guy’s subliminals, his somatic signals, going for a model of probable-aggression index; or maybe project for deception. He could be an undercover cop: Jerome hadn’t given them his dealer, hadn’t bargained at all.

But he decided against switching the chip on. Some jails had scanners for unauthorized chip output. Better not use it unless he had to. And his gut told him this guy was only a threat if he felt threatened. His gut was right almost as often as his brain chip.

The Chicano was maybe five foot six, a good five inches shorter than Jerome but probably outweighing him by fifty pounds. His face had Indian angles and small jet eyes. He was wearing printout gray-blue prison jams, #6631; they’d let him keep his hairnet. Jerome had never understood the Chicano hairnet, never had the balls to ask about it.

Jerome was pleased. He liked to be recognized, except by people who could arrest him.

“You put your hands in the pockets of those paper pants, they’ll rip, and in LA County they don’t give you any more for three days,” Jerome advised him.

“Yeah? Shit.” The Chicano took his hands carefully out of his pockets. “I don’t want my cojones hanging out, people think I’m advertising—they some big fucking cojones, too. You not a faggot, right?”

“Nope.”

“Good. How come I know you? When I
don’t
know you.”

Jerome grinned. “From television. You saw my tag. Jerome-X. I mean—I do some music too. I had that song, ‘Six Kinds of Darkness’—”

“I don’t know that, bro—oh wait, Jerome-X. The tag—I saw that. Your face-tag. You got one of those little transers? Interrupt the transmissions with your own shit?”

“Had. They confiscated it.”

“That why you here? Video graffiti?”

“I wish. I’d be out in a couple months. No. Illegal augs.”

“Hey, man! Me too!”

“You?” Jerome couldn’t conceal his surprise. You didn’t see a lot of barrio dudes doing illegal augmentation. They generally didn’t like people tinkering in their brains.

“What, you think a guy from East LA can’t use augs?”

“No, no. I know lots of Latino guys that use it,” Jerome lied.

“Ooooh, he says
Latino,
that gotta nice sound.” Overtones of danger.

Jerome hastily changed the direction of the conversation. “You never been in the big lockups where they use these fuckin’ paper jammies?”

“No, just the city jail once. They didn’t have those motherfucking screw machines either. Hey, you’re Jerome—my name’s Jessie. Actually, it’s Jesus”—he pronounced it “heh-soos”—“but people they, you know . . . You got any smokes? No? Shit. Okay, I adjust. I get use to it. Shit. No smokes. Fuck.”

He sat on the edge of the bed, to one side of Jerome’s dangling legs, and tilted his head forward. He reached under his hairnet, and under what turned out to be a hairpiece, and pulled a chip from a jack unit set into the base of his skull.

Jerome stared. “Goddamn, their probes really are busted.”

Jessie frowned over the chip. There was a little blood on it. The jack unit was leaking. Cheap installation. “No, they ain’t busted, there’s a guy working on the probe, he’s paid off, he’s letting everyone through for a couple of days because of some Russian mob guys coming in, he don’t know which ones they are. Some of them Russian mob guys got the augments.”

“I thought sure they were going to find my unit,” Jerome said. “The strip search didn’t find it, but I thought the prison probes would and that’d be another year on my sentence. But they didn’t.”

Neither one of them thinking of throwing away the chips. It’d be like cutting out an eye.

“Same story here, bro. We both lucky.”

Jessie put the microprocessing chip in his mouth, the way people did with their contact lenses, to clean it, lubricate it. Of course, bacterially speaking, it came out dirtier than it went in.

“Does the jack hurt?” Jerome asked.

Jessie took the chip out, looked at it a moment on his fingertips. It was smaller than a contact lens, a sliver of silicon and non-osmotic gallium arsenide and transparent interface-membrane, with, probably, 800,000,000 nanotransistors of engineered protein molecules sunk into it, maybe more. “No, it don’t hurt yet. But if it’s leaking, it fuckin’
will
hurt, man.” He said something else in Spanish, shaking his head. He slipped the chip back into his jack-in unit and tapped it with the thumbnail of his right hand. So that was where the activation mouse was: under the thumbnail. Jerome’s was in a knuckle.

Jessie rocked slightly, just once, sitting up on his bunk, which meant the chip had engaged and he was getting a readout. They tended to feed back into your nervous system a little at first, make you twitch once or twice; if they weren’t properly insulated, they could make you crap your pants.

“That’s okay,” Jessie said, relaxing. “That’s better.” The chip inducing his brain to secrete vasopressin, contract the veins, simulate the effect of nicotine. It worked for a while, till you could get cigarettes. High-grade chip could do some numbing if you were hung up on Sim, synthetic morphine, and couldn’t get any. But that was Big Scary. You could turn yourself off for good that way. You better be doing some damn fine adjusting.

Jerome thought about the hypothetical chip scanners. Maybe he should object to the guy using his chip here. But what the Chicano was doing wouldn’t make for much leakage.

“What you got?” Jerome asked.

“I got an Apple NanoMind II. Big gigas. What you got?”

“You got the Mercedes, I got the Toyota. I got a Seso Picante Mark I. One of those Argentine things.” (How had this guy scored an ANM II?)

“Yeah, what you got, they kinda basic, but they do most what you need. Hey, our names, they both start with
J.
And we both here for illegal augs. What else we got in common. What’s your sign?”

“Uh—” What was it, anyway? He always forgot. “Pisces, I think.”

“No shit! I can relate to Pisces. I ran an astrology program, figured out who I should hang with. Pisces is okay. But Aquarius is—I’m a Scorpio, like—Aquarius,
qué
bueno.
”

What did he mean exactly,
hang with,
Jerome wondered. Scoping me about am
I
a faggot, maybe that was something defensive.

But he meant something else. “You know somethin’, Jerome, you got your chip, too, we could do a link and maybe get over on that trashcan.”