Ash had placed the call, speaking with the polt first. No attempt to present herself as anything other than an elective freak with four pupils. Demanding to know what he’d seen on his most recent shift. The polt had been evasive, and Ash, after a nod from Lev, had put Lev on. Lev, without introducing himself, had gotten right to it. The polt was about to be terminated, no pay for his two previous shifts, unless he could explain himself. The polt, then, had promptly admitted to having hired his sister, who he described as “qualified and reliable,” to substitute for him, his cousin Luke having been critically injured in a fight. “I had to get up there. They didn’t think he was going to make it.”
“What does he do, your cousin?” Lev had asked.
“He’s religious,” the polt had said. Netherton had thought he’d heard a laugh, just then, and the polt had quickly taken one of his hands off the wheel.
The polt had said that he was on his way home now, from visiting his injured cousin, and hadn’t spoken with his sister. Lev had advised him not to, until he could speak with her in person. And then he’d told the polt about the ad.
At which point Netherton had decided that Lev, whatever small degree of klepty cultural essence he might possess, was out of his depth here. The polt hadn’t needed to know that. It would have been less wise to tell the polt that they were phoning from a future that wasn’t his, one in which he was part of a wealthy obsessive’s hobby set, but hardly more unnecessary. Netherton had been about to type Lev a note, his phone’s keyboard appearing unevenly on the table’s carved top, but then he’d considered the dynamics of his own relationship with Lev. Better to sit and listen, watching as the polt carved himself a new and potentially more lucrative position. The polt had tactical skills, Netherton saw, ones that Lev, bright as he was and in spite of familial predisposition, had never had cause to fully develop.
The polt had told Lev that he was not, as it happened, a particularly easy target for a hired assassin. That he had resources to draw on, in a situation of that sort, but that his sister being potentially a target was “unacceptable.” The word had fallen on the air in Ash’s narrow tent with a surprising weight. And what, the polt had asked, did Lev intend to do about that?
“We’ll give you money,” Lev had said. “You’ll be able to hire protection.”
Netherton had been aware of Ash trying to catch his eye. He’d known that she got it, that the polt was on top now, Lev outmaneuvered. He’d met her eye, but neutrally, without giving her what she wanted.
Lev had told the polt that he needed to speak with the polt’s sister, but the polt had wanted to hear a figure, a specific sum of money. Lev had offered ten million, a bit more than the fee for the supposed murder contract. The polt had said that that was too much for his cousin to receive by something called Hefty Pal.
Lev had explained that they could arrange for the cousin to win that amount in their state’s next lottery. The payment would be entirely legitimate. At that, Netherton had been unable to resist looking at Ash again.
“You don’t think that that lottery business casts the whole thing as a Faustian bargain?” Netherton had asked, when the call was done.
“Faustian?” Lev looked blank.
“As if you have powers one would associate with Lucifer,” said Ash.
“Oh. Well, yes, I see what you mean. But it’s something a friend stumbled across, in his stub. I have detailed instructions for it. I’d been meaning to bring it up with you.”
“It’s close in here,” Netherton had said, standing, distressed velour heavy against his shoulder. “If we’re going to chat, let’s do it in the Mercedes. It’s more comfortable.”
And that had been that, really, except that now he was sitting here, waiting for the polt’s sister to call.
21.
GRIFTER
They never caught up with Leon. Maybe he actually did some pedaling, or more likely did some and used the hub at the same time. Her bike was propped against the oak in the front yard, Leon nowhere in sight, but a buddy of Burton’s, Reece, was sitting in the wooden lawn chair there, with a mandolin across his lap. As she and Burton got closer, after they left the car by the gate, she saw it wasn’t a mandolin but an Army rifle that looked like it had been telescoped back into itself, squashed front to back. A bullpup, they called that. Reece had a ball cap pulled down level with his eyebrows, the kind that continually altered its pattern. Reece had been something in the Army, special something but less special than HaptRec, and admired Burton in a way that she found unhealthy, though whether for Reece or Burton she wasn’t sure.
“Hey, Reece,” Burton said.
“Burton,” Reece said, touching the bill of his ball cap, close to a salute, but staying put in the chair. He had a Viz in his left socket, and now she was close enough to see moving light from it, reflected in his eye.
“Who else is here?” Burton asked, looking up at the dark house, white clapboard starting to lighten with the dawn.
“Duval’s up the hill,” Reece said, as Flynne watched a pixelated blob of tan migrate a little closer to where the button would have been on a regular ball cap. They didn’t have a button, Marine caps, because if someone hit you on top of your head, they could drive the button into your skull. “Carter’s around the back, Carlos down by the trailer. Got a net up, twenty units, twenty in reserve.” Twenty drones over the property, she understood, flying synchronously in repeating pattern, each of the three men monitoring a third of it. That was a lot of drones.
“We’re going to the trailer,” Burton said. “Tell Carlos.”
The bill of the ball cap bobbed. “Luke after you? Duval said he heard.”
“Luke’s not the problem,” Burton said. “Need to be expecting scarier company than that.” He put his hand on Reece’s shoulder for a second, then started down the hill.
“Night, Flynne,” said Reece.
“Morning,” she said, then caught up with Burton. “What did they look like,” she asked him, “the people who phoned you?”
“Remember the Sacrificial Anodes?”
She barely did. From Omaha or something. “Before my time.”
“She looked like the singer in the Anodes, Cat Blackstock, but with Halloween contact lenses. Other one was maybe my age, big boy, sloppy, some beard, antique eyeglasses. Used to people agreeing with him.”
“Were they Colombian? Latino?”
“English. From England.”
Remembering the city, the curve in the river. “Why did you believe them?”
He stopped, and she almost bumped into him. “I never said I believed them. Believe in the money they’ve been paying me, I can spend that. They put ten million in Leon’s Hefty Pal, I’ll believe in that too.”
“You believe somebody’s been hired to kill you?”
“I think Coldiron might believe it.”
“Enough to get Reece and them over here, with guns?”
“Can’t hurt. They like an excuse. Leon wins the lottery, he can spread a little around.”
“The lottery’s rigged?”
“Surprise you if it was?”
“You think they’re the government, Coldiron?”
“It’s money. Anybody offer you any, lately, aside from me?” He turned, starting down the path again. Birds were beginning to sing.
“What if it’s some kind of Homeland sting?”
Over his shoulder: “Told them you’d talk to them. Need you to do that, Flynne.”
“But you don’t know who they are. Why don’t they have video of everything? They were paying us to fly cameras.”
He stopped again, turned back. “There’s a reason there’s a website to sign up to kill people you never heard of. Same reason nobody in this county’s making a decent living, unless they’re building drugs.” He looked at her.
“Okay,” she said. “Not like I said I wouldn’t. It just feels crazy.”
“Homeland Security officer was telling me I should apply to get on with them. Guys working unde
r him were rolling their eyes, behind his back. Hard times.”
They were almost to the unlit trailer now, its soft-looking paleness starting to show in the dark between the trees. It felt like she hadn’t been there for a long time.
A figure turned, barely visible past the trailer, beside the trail. Carlos, she guessed. He gave them a thumbs-up sign.
“Where’s the log-in?” he asked.
“Under the table. In your tomahawk case.”
“Axe,” he corrected, opening the door and climbing in. The lights came on. He looked down at her. “I know you think this is crazy, but this just might be a way out of our basic financial situation. Ways are thin on the ground, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“I’ll talk to them.”
The Chinese chair got larger, for Burton. She got the slip of Fab paper out of the case, read Burton the log-in as he typed.
He was about to flick GO, when they had it entered, but she put her hand over his. “I’ll do it, but I can’t if you’re here. If anybody’s here. You want to listen from outside, that’s okay.”
He flipped his hand over, squeezed hers. Got up. The chair tried to find him. “Sit down before it has a breakdown,” he said, picking up the tomahawk, and then he was out the door, closing it behind him.
She sat down, the chair audibly contracting, a series of sighs and clicks. She felt the way she had at Coffee Jones, every time she’d had to go in the office in back and get shit from Byron Burchardt, the night manager.
She took her phone off, straightened it, used it as a mirror. Hair wasn’t doing so good, but she had lip gloss that Janice had brought a case of home from Hefty Mart when she’d worked there. Most of the writing was worn off the tube, just a nub left inside, but she got it out of her jeans and used it. Whoever she was going to talk to now, it wouldn’t be poor Byron, whose car had been run over by an autopiloted eighteen-wheeler on Valentine’s Day, about three months after he’d fired her.
She flicked go.
“Miss Fisher?” Just like that. Guy maybe her age, short brown hair, brushed back, expression neutral. He was in a room with a lot of very light-colored wood, or maybe plastic that looked like wood, shiny as nail polish.
“Flynne,” she told him, reminding herself to be polite.
“Flynne,” he said, then just looked at her, from behind an old-fashioned monitor. He was wearing a high black turtleneck, something she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen in real life before, and now she saw the desk was made of marble-look stuff, shot through with big veins of fake gold. Like the loan office in a grifter bank ad. Maybe that was Colombian. He didn’t look Latino to her, but neither did he have a beard or glasses, like the one Burton had described.
“How about you?” she said, sounding more testy than intended.
“Me?” He sounded startled, like he’d been lost, thinking.
“I just told you my name.”
The way he was looking at her now made her want to check over her shoulder. “Netherton,” he said, and coughed, “Wilf Netherton.” He sounded surprised.
“Burton says you want to talk to me.”
“Yes. I do.”
Like the ones Burton said he’d talked to, he sounded English.
“Why?”
“We understand that you were substituting for your brother, on his last two shifts—”
“Is it a game?” Hadn’t known what she was going to say. It just came out.
He started to open his mouth.
“Tell me if it’s a fucking game.” Whatever this was talking, she knew, was what she’d had going on since she’d quit playing Operation Northwind. Sometimes it felt like she’d caught Burton’s PTSD, sitting there on Madison and Janice’s couch.
He closed his mouth. Frowned slightly. Pursed his lips. Relaxed them. “It’s an extremely complex construct,” he said, “part of some much larger system. Milagros Coldiron provide it security. It isn’t our business to understand it.”
“So it’s a game?”
“If you like.”
“The fuck does that shit mean?” Desperate to know something but she didn’t know what. No way that that wasn’t a game.
“It’s a gamelike environment,” he said. “It isn’t real in the sense that you—”
“Are you for real?”
He tilted his head to the side.
“How would I know?” she asked. “If that was a game, how would I know you aren’t just AI?”
“Do I look like a metaphysician?”
“You look like a guy in an office. What exactly do you do there, Wilf?”
“Human resources,” he said, eyes narrowing.
If he was AI, she thought, somebody quirky had done the design. “Burton says you claim you can fix—”
“Please,” he interrupted, quickly, “this is hardly secure. We’ll find a better way to discuss that. Later.”
“What’s that blue light, on your face?”
“It’s the monitor,” he said. “Malfunctioning.” He frowned. “You took a total of two shifts for your brother?”
“Yes.”
“Will you describe them to me, please?”
“What do you want to know?”
“All you remember.”
“Why don’t you just look at the capture.”
“The capture?”
“If nobody was capturing that, what’s the point of me flying your camera?”
“That would be up to the client.” He leaned forward. “Will you help us out, here, please?” He actually looked worried.
He didn’t seem like someone she should trust, particularly, but at least he seemed like someone. “I started the first one in the back of a van or something,” she began. “Came up out of this hatch, controls on override . . .”
22.
ARCHAISM
Listening to her, Netherton found he lost himself, not unpleasantly. Her accent fascinated him, a voice out of pre-jackpot America.
There had been a Flynne Fisher in the world’s actual past. If she were alive now, she’d be much older. Though given the jackpot, and whatever odds of survival, that seemed unlikely. But since Lev had only touched her continuum for the first time a few months earlier, this Flynne would still be very like the real Flynne, the now old or dead Flynne, who’d been this young woman before the jackpot, then lived into it, or died in it as so many had. She wouldn’t yet have been changed by Lev’s intervention and whatever that would bring her.
“Those voices,” she said, having finished her account of the first shift, “before the twentieth floor. Couldn’t make them out. What were they?”
“I’m not familiar with the particulars of your brother’s assignment,” he said, “at all.” She was wearing what he took to be a rather severe black military shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, with epaulets, and something in scarlet, possibly cursive, above the left pocket. She had dark eyes, dark brown hair that might as well have been cut by a Michikoid. He wondered if she’d been in the same unit Lev had mentioned her brother having been in.
Ash was giving him the girl’s feed, and had centered it in his field of vision to facilitate eye contact. He was supposed to keep his head down, pretend to be viewing her on the dead monitor, but he kept forgetting to.
“Burton said they were paparazzi,” she said. “Little drones.”
“Do you have those?” She made him conscious of how vague his sense of her day actually was. History had its fascinations, but could be burdensome. Too much of it and you became Ash, obsessed with a catalog of vanished species, addicted to nostalgia for things you’d never known.
“You don’t have drones, in Colombia?”
“We do,” he said. Why, he wondered, did she appear to be seated in a submarine, or perhaps some kind of aircraft, its interior coated with self-illuminated honey?
“Ask her,” said Lev, “about what she witnessed.”
“You’ve described your first shift,” said Netherton. “But I understand there was an event, during your second. Can
you describe that?”
“The backpack,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Like a little kid’s knapsack, but made out of some shitty-looking gray plastic. Tentacle thing at four corners. Sort of legs.”
“And when did you first encounter this?”
“Came out of the hatch in the van, same deal, straight up. Past twenty, those voices were gone, like before. Then I spotted it, climbing.”
“Climbing?”
“Somersaulting, like backflips. Moving right along. Passed it, lost track. Thirty-seventh, it caught up with me, passed me. Lost it again. Got to fifty-six, got control of the copter, there’s no bugs. Did the perimeter, no paparazzi, no sign of the gray thing. Then the window defrosted.”
“Depolarized.”
“What I thought,” she said. “Saw the woman I saw before the party. Party’s over, different furniture, she’s in pj’s. Somebody else there, but I couldn’t see. Saw her make eye contact, laugh. Did another perimeter. They were at the window, when I got back.”
“Who?”
“The woman,” she said. “Guy beside her, early thirties maybe, dark hair, some beard. Kind of racially nonspecific. Brown bathrobe.” Her expression had changed. She was looking in his direction, or in the direction of his image on her phone, but she was seeing something else. “She couldn’t see the look on his face, because she was beside him, had his arm around her. He knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That it was about to kill her.”
“What was?”
“Backpack. I knew they’d see the copter. A door was opening, in the glass. A kind of railing was rolling up, for the balcony. They were going to step out. I had to move. I went like I was making another perimeter, but I stopped around the corner. Took it up to fifty-seven, doubled back.”
The Peripheral Page 8
