The Peripheral (26 page)

ASSET

T
he kitchen was fragrant with the blini Lev was making. “She’s helping you with the stub,” Netherton said. “She told me.” Rain was falling in the garden, on the artificial-looking leaves of the hostas. Did thylacines dislike rain? Neither Gordon nor Tyenna was in sight.

Lev looked up from the segmented iron pan. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

“Understand what?”

“The appeal of continua. Or of collaborating with her. She’s already gotten us into the White House.”

“That would be what, then, the first Gonzales administration?”

“No direct contact. Yet. But we’re close. No one I know of has ever penetrated a stub this efficiently. She knows where the pivots are, the moving parts. How it works.”

“Is that what she offered you, after that first meeting?”

“It’s reciprocal,” Lev said, removing the pan from the element. “She assists me, we protect Burton and his sister, you help her with the Aelita business, Daedra, whatever that is.” Using a spatula, he began to transfer the blini to two waiting plates. “Salmon, or caviar?”

“Is the caviar real?”

“You’d want my grandfather, for caviar from a sturgeon.”

“I wouldn’t, actually.”

“I’ve had it,” Lev said. “I couldn’t tell the difference. This is entirely its equal.”

“I will, thank you.”

Lev tidily burdened each blintze with sour cream and caviar.

“Ossian’s taken delivery of a Bentley,” Netherton said. “Drove itself in from Richmond Hill. Like a silver-gray steam iron, windowless, six wheels. Hideous. Parked by Ash’s tepee. What’s that about?”

“Executive transport,” Lev said. “Early jackpot. They need to disassemble something, so they’ll do it inside. Assemblers might be released.”

“The buggy?”

Lev looked up from the blini. “Who told you about that?”

“Ossian pointed it out to me, when we were waiting for your brother’s peripheral. He didn’t mention disassembling it. But later I saw him pushing it through the garage, and Lowbeer told me she wants its weapons.”

“He didn’t know, when you first saw it. She only asked for it when you’d returned from that club. Immediately after. Well, not for it, exactly. She asked if I had any weapons. I don’t keep weapons. But then I remembered.”

“Assemblers?”

“Short-acting,” Lev said. “Decommission themselves. If there were an accident, the vehicle should be able to contain them.”

“Dominika didn’t want it, Ossian said.”

“Neither did I. Grandfather means well, but he’s of another generation. You haven’t visited the Federation, have you?”

“No,” said Netherton.

“I’ve somehow managed to avoid it myself.”

“Dominika was born here?”

“Literally, in Notting Hill,” said Lev.

Lev was one of those people whom marriage seemed basically to suit in some fundamental way, a state Netherton found unimaginable. The world seemed to consist increasingly of such states. “Why does Lowbeer want the buggy’s weapons?” he asked, as Lev passed him a warm plate.

“She hasn’t said. Given the quality of advice she’s providing Ash and Ossian, I’m disinclined to second-guess her.”

“You’ve no idea who else is in your stub?”

“No. But their quants are easily as good as Ash’s.” They were seated at the pine table now, Lev with his fork poised above his blini. He frowned. “Yes?” he said. “When? Do they know who?” He looked at Netherton, or rather through him. “Let me know, then.” He put down his fork.

“What is it?”

“The signatures of Flynne’s phone have vanished, about two miles from her home.”

“You don’t know where she is?”

“We do,” said Lev. “She has a tracker in her stomach. The service alerts us if she leaves our specified perimeter, as it now has. Both her tracker and her phone drove together to the nearest town, which she does frequently, then both turned north. As they did, her phone was lost. Either she turned it off, which she never does, or someone blocked its signal. Shortly after that, she left the perimeter. The vehicle has since been exceeding speed limits, on very rough roads.”

“She’s in it now, this vehicle?”

“Yes, but nearing the base of operations of the drug synthesist who controls her county.”

“She’s been abducted?” asked Netherton.

“Lowbeer’s cross, Ash says.”

“What are you doing about it?”

“Lowbeer has her own asset, or assets, in the stub,” Lev said. “Ash says they’re on this too. As are her brother and Macon, of course.”

“Who are they, these assets?”

“She isn’t saying. Ash and Ossian don’t like that. It would be whoever has access to the Gonzales White House, I imagine, not that she’s ever suggested as much.” He picked up his fork. “Eat these while they’re still warm. Then we’ll go down and see Ash.”

M
C
MANSION

P
ickett’s place, as much as she’d ever see of it, wasn’t what she’d imagined at all.

Reece had driven her past a white gatehouse with window slits, but hadn’t turned in. Further along, past a long stretch of white plastic fence, fabbed to look like somebody’s idea of Old Plantation, he’d turned in to a less-important-looking gate, already open, where two men in cammies and helmets were waiting, beside a golf cart. They both had rifles. Reece got out and talked to one of them, while the other one spoke to somebody else on his headset, none of them looking at her.

She’d given up trying to talk to Reece a few miles back. She’d seen it made his driving worse, and there was no point getting killed, out on some back-ass county road in the dark, even in a situation like this. They’d kept passing old wrecks, left there because the state, let alone the county, couldn’t afford to do anything about them. She’d wondered if people in those had been talking to somebody like Reece when the crash happened. Then she’d remembered swallowing the black pill in the Hefty snack bar, and wondered if it was doing what it was supposed to do. Reece didn’t know about that, but he’d put her phone in a Faraday pouch.

Then Reece came back to the Jeep, opened the door on her side, took a pair of wire clippers out of his side pocket, snipped through the zip tie that fastened her to the seat, and told her to get out.

He put his hand on her head when she did, the way you saw cops do in shows, and it made her think how he’d never touched her
before, that she could remember, not even shaken hands, and she’d known him to speak to for about three years.

“You see Burton,” he said, “tell him wasn’t anything I could do.”

“I know there wasn’t,” she said, and it hurt her that it was true. That a man like Pickett, just by being what he was, could give Reece a choice of doing this or waiting for them to come and kill him.

He closed the Jeep’s door, handed the pouch with her phone in it to the man standing nearest, walked around the back, got in on the driver’s side, closed his door, pulled back out on the road, and drove away.

The man with her phone in the Faraday pouch snapped what she guessed was a dog’s training leash onto the zip tie that held the ones around her wrists together. The other man was watching the gate close itself. Then they brought her over to the golf cart, which said
CORBELL PICKETT TESLA
on the side. The man who held the leash sat beside her, in the back, and the other man drove, and neither one of them said a word, as they drove her to Pickett’s house, some back way, on single-lane gravel that hadn’t been properly graded.

The house had floodlights trained on it, bright as day and ugly as shit, though this was just the back of it. They’d painted everything white, she guessed to tie it together, but it didn’t. Looked like somebody had patched a factory, or maybe a car dealership, onto a McMansion, then stuck an Interstate chain restaurant and a couple of swimming pools on top of that. There were sheds scattered, beside the gravel and further back, and machinery too, under big tarps, and she wondered if he actually built drugs here. She’d figured he wouldn’t, but maybe he didn’t have to give a shit. But then maybe he didn’t actually live here.

The cart rolled up to a corrugated white door in the factory-looking part, stopped, and the man beside her gave the leash a little tug, so she got off. He watched her, but didn’t make eye contact. The other man touched something on his belt and the door clanked up. They led her into a big, mostly dark space, and then between rows of white plastic tanks taller than she was, like the ones for holding rainwater.

Came to a wall she guessed was the foundation of the original house, rough-cast concrete, with a door in it. Regular door from Hefty, but with an old-fashioned hasp bolted on it, a big rusty bolt stuck down through the U-shaped part. More tree fort than builder baron, but then she guessed he didn’t have to give a shit about that either. She waited, like she saw you did if somebody had you on a leash, while the other one pulled out the bolt, opened the door, and turned on too many lights all at once, hanging low from a rough concrete ceiling that was already none too high. They led her over to a table in the middle, the only furniture in the room aside from two chairs, one on either long side of it, like the ones in the Hefty snack bar. The table, bolted to the floor with galvanized L-brackets, had a stainless-steel top that had seen a lot of wear, like in a cafeteria kitchen. Some dents and dings there that she didn’t want to imagine how they’d been made, and someone had drilled a hole exactly in the center, put in a big screw eye, the kind you’d use to hang a porch swing. The man with the leash walked her around to the chair behind the table facing the door, pointed at it, and she sat down. Then he tugged her wrists over to the eye bolt, fastened Reece’s white zip ties to it with a much more serious-looking zip tie, this one in that official Homes blue, unclipped the leash, and they both just turned and walked out, leaving the lights on and closing the door behind them. She heard them drop the bolt into place.

“Fuck a duck,” she said, then realized she sounded five years old and was probably being recorded. She looked around for cams, didn’t see any. Probably there, though, because they didn’t cost anything, and maybe your prisoner would say or do something you’d like to know about. The lights were too bright, the kind of totally white LEDs that made your skin look really bad. She guessed she could stand up, but she might knock the chair over doing it, and then have nowhere to sit.

She heard the bolt come out of the hasp.

Corbell Pickett opened the door. He was wearing black wraparound
sunglasses. Came over to the table, leaving the door open behind him. His watch looked like a clock out of an old airplane, but gold, on a leather strap.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well what?”

“Ever dislocate your jaw?”

She looked up at him.

“I could do it for you,” he said, looking her in the eye, “if you don’t tell me more about your people in bullshit Colombia.”

She nodded, just a little.

“How much more do you know than you told me at the house?”

She was about to open her mouth but he raised his hand, the one with the big gold watch. She froze.

“Your Colombians,” he said, lowering his hand, “bullshit or not, aren’t necessarily the ones in this with the most money. Could be somebody else. Could be I’ve been talking with them. About you. All the lawyers in Miami don’t mean shit to them. I’d say you’re out of your depth, but that doesn’t do it justice.”

She waited for him to hit her.

“Don’t tell me any shell story.” His suntan looked weirder, under the light, than her skin did, but more even.

“They don’t tell us much.”

“People I’m talking to want me to kill you. Right now. They see proof you’re dead, they give me more money than you can imagine. So you aren’t just some random-ass poor, much as you look to me like one. What makes you that valuable?”

“I don’t have clue one, why anybody would give a shit about me. Or why Coldiron hooked up with us. If I did, I’d be telling you.” And then that crazy thing that had first come to her in Operation Northwind chimed in: “Where’d they say they’re from, these people of yours?”

“They don’t,” he said, pissed that it was true, then pissed at himself for answering the question.

“If I’m worth more dead than alive,” said the crazy thing, “how come I’m alive?”

“Difference between a cashed check and leverage,” he said. He leaned a little closer. “Aren’t stupid, are you?”

“Wilf Netherton,” she said, the crazy thing gone as suddenly as it had come. “At Coldiron. He’d want a chance to outbid them.”

Pickett smiled, maybe, just a tiny little change at the corners of his mouth. “We use your phone from here,” he said, stepping back, “they’ll know exactly where it is, where you are. We wait another few hours, till it gets somewhere else, we’ll patch a call through, you and I, to your Mr. Coldiron. Meantime, you sit here.”

“Any chance you could turn the lights down?”

“No,” he said, and she saw the micro-smile again, and then he turned and went back out, closing the door behind him.

She heard the bolt rattle.

HALFWAY POSH

N
etherton watched as Ossian transformed the decloaked baby buggy, glossy as a wet peppermint toffee, red and cream, into something surprisingly if only vaguely anthropomorphic.

The two rear pairs of wheels, now flat on the garage’s floor, had formed figure-eight feet, from which sprouted candy-striped legs. Its gleaming armor, around the actual baby seat, had flattened laterally, widening at the top, emulating a muscular dynamism. The tires at the ends of each arm suggested clenched fists. Netherton could actually imagine this having some appeal, for a child. It didn’t look as though it were armed, particularly, but cocky, certainly, belligerent.

Thumbing its cream-and-red controller, Ossian guided it to the open door of the Bentley executive-hauler, into which it climbed, wheel-paws gripping the silver-gray bodywork. It sat on a backward-facing seat, freezing as Ossian gave the controller a final tap.

Ash had insisted Netherton remain with Ossian while she and Lev dealt with Flynne’s apparent abduction. She and Ossian were in contact, but Netherton could only hear Ossian’s side of any exchange, and that in their morphing gibberish.

Netherton had watched Ossian put a pair of grotesque gloves, or rather hands, on the white exoskeleton. These had far too many fingers, black and unsettlingly limp, like oversized, anatomically incorrect rubber spiders. The second one had given Ossian some unspecified trouble, so he’d left it for the meantime, choosing instead to decloak and transform the buggy.

“When will they reach Flynne?” Netherton asked.

“As you know,” Ossian said, “I don’t know.” He dropped the controller into the wide pocket on the front of his apron, bent to adjust the yellow kneepads he wore over his black trousers, then knelt before the white exoskeleton.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“You might try buggering off,” Ossian suggested, without looking up.

“Burton’s gone to bring her back?”

“Seems likeliest.”

“I’d think him competent,” Netherton said.

“Tendency to fly violently off the handle aside.” Ossian prodded a black, penlike instrument into the recalcitrant glove’s jiggly black digits, causing a small red light to strobe briefly.

“He was disoriented,” Netherton said. “Understandably. When you came barging in, he reacted.”

“I might disorient you,” Ossian said, “if Zubov didn’t need you to lie to your girlfriend’s face. Is it true, that she periodically has herself flayed, her entire epidermis, to hang in whatever establishment might be willing to display such a thing?”

“If you want to put it that way,” said Netherton.

“Kinky, are we?”

“She’s an artist,” said Netherton. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

“My hairy arse,” said Ossian, as if naming the root precept of a long-held philosophy, then pressed the penlike tool repeatedly into the black spider, managing to briefly produce a steady green light.

“Why are you putting those on?”

“For Macon’s technical. Field manipulators, military. Anything from stone masonry to nanosurgery. Once he’s locked in, can’t have him coming up short the right size spanner.”

“Locked in?”

“There,” indicating the windowless silver vehicle. “Put them both in, seal it, depressurize it, partial vacuum. Should anything escape, it stays inside. Really, though, this is all to satisfy Zubov. Those assemblers are self-terminating. If they weren’t, nothing in this vehicle would stop them.”

Netherton looked at the exoskeleton. Ossian had bodged a domed, transparent cylinder onto the thing’s shoulders, during Burton’s visit. Within this, immobile, legs akimbo, stood the homunculus that had driven him, along with Lev, to the house of love. Though really, he knew, Ash had been the driver.

Ossian got to his feet, dropping the black tool into the pocket with the controller. “Lowbeer,” he said, “has someone in the stub. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“No,” Netherton lied. “Who?”

“If I knew, would I be asking? Whoever it is, they aren’t being paid. Not by us. Ash signs off on all monies spent, there. Lowbeer has someone at her beck and call, apparently able to get in anywhere, learn anything.”

“I’d think that would be exactly what you’d want.”

“Not if it means someone on our team who’s an entirely unknown quantity. Becomes Lowbeer’s game, then.”

“She’s an unknown quantity as it is. And it’s quite obviously been her game since she had that private talk with Lev.”

“He doesn’t see that,” said Ossian. “She’s leveled his game up for him. That’s all he sees now. He might listen to you, though. You’re halfway posh.” He blinked, then, distracted. Looked away, listening. Said something in that moment’s Esperanto. Listened again. “Closer to her, now,” he said to Netherton.

“She’s safe?”

“Alive. Tracker in her stomach’s giving them basic vitals.”

“Tracker?”

“We’d have had no way to find her, otherwise.”

The exoskeleton’s new hands, with an unexpected dry rustle,
sprang suddenly to a state of bristling attention, hyper-manipulative readiness.

“Hold your horses,” Ossian said, neither to Netherton nor, evidently, to Ash. “I’ll need to get you inside first, then depressurize.”

Netherton saw the homunculus, under the transparent dome, lower its own hands and the exo’s simultaneously, black digits drooping.