Count Zero (25 page)

M
ARLY 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, wildeyed, 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 expressionless, “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 . . .”

H
E HELPED
B
EAUVOIR
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 fè 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 . . .”

“Yes,” Turner said. He took Conroy’s black wallet from his pocket, hung the loop around her neck. “There’s a biosoft dossier in there. For when you’re older. It doesn’t tell the whole story. Remember that. Nothing ever does . . .”

Bobby was standing by the bar when the big guy walked out of Jammer’s office. The big guy crossed to where the girl had been sleeping and picked up his grungy army coat, put it on, then walked to the edge of the stage, where Jackie lay—looking so small—beneath the black coat. The man reached into his own coat and drew out the gun, the huge Smith & Wesson Tactical. He opened the cylinder and extracted the shells, put the shells into his coat pocket, then lay the gun down beside Jackie’s body, quiet, so it didn’t make a sound at all.

“You did good, Count,” he said, turning to face Bobby, his hands deep in the pockets of his coat.

“Thanks, man.” Bobby felt a surge of pride through his numbness.

“So long, Bobby.” The man crossed to the door and began to try the various locks.

“You want out?” He hurried to the door. “Here. Jammer showed me. You goin’, dude? Where you gonna go?” And then the door was open and Turner was walking away through the deserted stalls.

“I don’t know,” he called back to Bobby. “I’ve got to buy eighty liters of kerosene first, then I’ll think about it . . .”

Bobby watched until he was gone, down the dead escalator it looked like, then closed the door and relocked it. Looking away from the stage, he crossed Jammer’s to the office door and looked in. Angie was crying, her face pressed into Beauvoir’s shoulder, and Bobby felt a stab of jealousy that startled him. The phone was cycling, behind Beauvoir, and Bobby saw that it was the news recap.

“Bobby,” Beauvoir said, “Angela’s coming to live with us, up in the Projects, for a while. You want to come, too?”

Behind Beauvoir, on the phone screen, the face of Marsha Newmark appeared, Marsha-momma, his mother. “—ning’s
human interest note, police in a New Jersey suburb said that a local woman whose condo was the target of a recent bombing was startled when she returned last night and disco—”

“Yeah,” Bobby said, quickly, “sure, man.”

“S
HE’S GOOD
,”
THE
unit director said, two years later, dabbing a crust of brown village bread into the pool of oil at the bottom of his salad bowl. “Really, she’s very good. A quick study. You have to give her that, don’t you?”

The star laughed and picked up her glass of chilled retsina. “You hate her, don’t you, Roberts? She’s too lucky for you, isn’t she? Hasn’t made a wrong move yet . . .” They were leaning on the rough stone balcony, watching the evening boat set out for Athens. Two rooftops below, toward the harbor, the girl lay sprawled on a sun-warmed waterbed, naked, her arms spread out, as though she were embracing whatever was left of the sun.

He popped the oil-soaked crust into his mouth and licked his thin lips. “Not at all,” he said. “I don’t hate her. Don’t think it for a minute.”

“Her boyfriend,” Tally said, as a second figure, male, appeared on the rooftop below. The boy had dark hair and wore loose, casually expensive French sports clothes. As they watched, he crossed to the waterbed and crouched beside the girl, reaching out to touch her. “She’s beautiful, Roberts, isn’t she?”

“Well,” the unit director said, “I’ve seen her ‘befores.’ It’s surgery.” He shrugged, his eyes still on the boy.

“If you’ve seen my ‘befores,’ ” she said, “someone will hang for it. But she does have something. Good bones . . .” She sipped her wine. “Is she the one? ‘The new Tally Isham?’ ”

He shrugged again. “Look at that little prick,” he said. “Do you know he’s drawing a salary nearly the size of mine, now? And what exactly does he do to earn it? A bodyguard . . .” His mouth set, thin and sour.

“He keeps her happy.” Tally smiled. “We got them as a package. It’s a rider in her contract. You know that.”

“I loathe that little bastard. He’s right off the street and he knows it and he doesn’t care. He’s trash. Do you know what he carries around in his luggage? A cyberspace deck! We were held up for three hours yesterday, Turkish customs, when they found the damned thing . . .” He shook his head.

The boy stood now, turned, and walked to the edge of the roof. The girl sat up, watching him, brushing her hair back from her eyes. He stood there a long time, staring after the wake of the Athens boats, neither Tally Isham nor the unit director nor Angie knowing that he was seeing a gray sweep of Barrytown condos cresting up into the dark towers of the Projects.

The girl stood, crossed the roof to join him, taking his hand.

“What do we have tomorrow?” Tally asked finally.

“Paris,” he said, taking up his Hermes clipboard from the stone balustrade and flipping automatically through a thin sheaf of yellow printouts. “The Krushkhova woman.”

“Do I know her?”

“No,” he said. “It’s an art spot. She runs one of their two most fashionable galleries. Not much of a backgrounder, though we do have an interesting hint of scandal, earlier in her career.”

Tally Isham nodded, ignoring him, and watched her understudy put her arm around the boy with the dark hair.