Virgil accepted them, pulling them on. “You’re policing our perimeter, right?” he asked the drone.
“Shit no,” said Conner. “Just admiring cows.” The drone’s nonhands were no longer on its hips, but on the ground, its arms having extended again, lending it a quality of simian alertness, like a headless Cubist orangutan surveying its savannah.
Sevrin, having gotten out on the driver’s side in the meantime, leaving his door open, came around to the open passenger door. “Your bag,” he said to Verity, “and charger. I get them.”
“And the hoodie,” she said. “You good with all this?” Meaning Dixon, the Fiat, the roof box.
Sevrin nodded, turned to the van.
Now Virgil, taller than Dixon, was lifting a black bundle from the box. It was rectangular, larger than the Pelican case but not by much, wrapped in shiny, thick-looking, flexible black plastic. It was sealed with transparent tape, and obviously heavy. He passed it to Dixon.
“Easy does it,” said Dixon, taking it and putting it carefully on the ground.
She remembered her dream. Eunice’s last will and testament. Looked up at the sound of a jet, but couldn’t find it. When she lowered her eyes, Sevrin was already in the van, on his knees, doing something between the passenger seats. Dixon walked toward it, looking as though he was being careful where he placed his feet, the first of the black bundles in his gloved hands, over which white Helvetica appeared: j-e, getting feed from ur glasses.
“Where are you?” Verity asked.
Home alone with lawyers. U?
“Route 25. Near Coalinga.”
U arent going there.
“Why not?”
Ur beard guy?
“Dixon.”
He’s driving something there. Ur going somewhere else.
“Who with?”
Cant say.
This last text over the backdrop of her view of Route 25, as a U-Haul headed toward Coalinga passed a silver Range Rover going in the other direction.
“Here’s your ride,” Conner said, the drone pointing, long arm extended. She hadn’t heard the engine of the black touring bike until then, and now it was pulling over, front shocks bumping over the rough shoulder as it rolled toward them.
She ran, up to the closed gate. Reaching it, she took hold of the length of tubing topping it and lifted. She began walking backward with it, so the bike had room to be ridden in and then down, toward the van. “I’ll get this,” Virgil said, beside her, taking the white pipe, lifting, beginning to close it.
She turned as the bike came to a halt, facing the immobile drone.
“Why’s he here?”
To take you back.
She started down the slope. Grim Tim and the drone, figures in a landscape. Then she saw Sevrin, crawling out backward, on hands and knees, from between the van’s two rows of passenger seats, pulling her Muji bag after him.
80
THE SQUARE MILE
Arriving at the bottom of the Denisovan Embassy’s annoyingly melted staircase, the place’s décor definitely having a cumulative effect on him, Netherton immediately spotted one of Lev’s redheads, though not yet draped in security sequins. This one was dressed, it struck him, as though it might be a publicist, but in fact was exactly the opposite: a counter-publicist. A cousin of Bertie’s, the fallen coachman, but where Bertie’s every movement had been remotely inspired, be that doing whatever coachmen did or homicidally attacking you with a bung starter, the redhead’s primary boast was zero connectivity. In a society in which most objects of any complexity whatever could recall anything they’d ever encountered, this one remained in a permanent state of tabula rasa.
“Good morning, Mr. Netherton,” it said, evidently remembering his name. How was that possible, if it had no memory? He made a note to ask Lev, once privacy had been established. “This way, please.”
The place was busier now than he’d seen it, perhaps the result of this being a traditional hour for breakfast. Following the bot-girl toward the catacombs beneath Hanway Place, he glimpsed Bevan Westmarch, a former associate from his own days as a publicist, seated at a crowded table. Wetmark, Rainey called him, having also worked with him. Now he clearly saw Netherton. Pretending not to have noticed him, Netherton continued after the bot-girl.
Lev had chosen a larger table than their last, Netherton saw, evidently to allow room for a full English breakfast he’d already finished, as evidenced by various side plates. For Lev, Netherton knew, a full English was stress-eating. He himself, he assumed, wasn’t expected to have breakfast, full or otherwise, though a place had been set for him opposite Lev. A girl, a real one, or in any case unfreckled, was just then putting a white bowl of café au lait at his place. “How are things in Cheyne Walk?” he asked, seating himself uncomfortably on yet another stalagmite.
Lev looked up, across the remnants of his solitary breakfast. “The divorce wasn’t a good idea,” he said.
“But it was hers, wasn’t it?”
Lev looked gloomier still. “The affair,” he said, “wasn’t a good idea either.”
“That never struck me as like you, frankly,” Netherton said. Which was true, given Lev’s attitude toward his father’s so-called house of love, in Kensington Gore.
“I was a fool,” Lev said.
Netherton, who’d known Dominika almost exclusively as an unseen yet forbidding presence in the Notting Hill house, tried to look sympathetic.
“Why are you making that face?” Lev asked.
“Sorry,” Netherton said, abandoning the effort. “These stools don’t agree with me.”
“You looked as though you were gurning,” said Lev.
“Do you think there’s anything to be done about it,” Netherton asked, “the marriage?”
“I don’t know,” said Lev. “I’m trying to consider all options.”
“I can see that it’s getting you down,” Netherton said, picking up the bowl and sipping. “I’ll be of any help I can, but now, perhaps, we should—” At which point he saw Lev looking at something behind him. He put down the bowl and turned, discovering all six bot-girls, now sequin-draped over identical outfits. “Certainly,” he said, turning back to Lev, “assuming you’re ready.”
“Begin,” Lev said, unenthusiastically, to the troupe.
Which they did, all turning, as before. With the circle formed, facing outward, their arms stretched overhead to uphold the shawls, the spiral storm of sequins rose, forming its dome above them.
“Is it working now?” Netherton asked.
“Yes,” said Lev, glumly.
“Would someone wishing an end to Lowbeer’s office be named Yunevich?” Netherton asked.
Lev instantly looked glummer still. He nodded, twice. The gabble of the breakfasters in the place’s busier end peaked, then fell, seeming to recede, then rose again.
“If I understand Lowbeer correctly,” Netherton said, “we’ve just fulfilled my sole actual purpose here. You now know whether she sees good reason for your having brought a previously unnamed individual to her attention. Am I correct?”
“Yes,” said Lev. “Do you know who he is?”
“No,” said Netherton. “I’m not required to. And I’m quite happy to have as little as possible to do with her work, as you well know. She employs me to help her with her hobbies.”
“Hobby,” corrected Lev, “there being only the one. The person we’d be discussing, if you’d allow me to, isn’t my sort of klept.”
“Klept are scarcely your sort, period,” Netherton said, “and that’s been my impression since we’ve known one another.”
“This goes beyond that. Not my father’s sort, nor my grandfather’s. Different roots entirely.”
“He’s not Russian?” Netherton asked, having assumed this to be impossible.
“Russian,” said Lev, “but descend
ed from Soviet functionaries, rather than émigré ’garchs. Klept, but something else as well.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Extremely low profile. Not given to ostentation, either as displays of wealth or demonstrations of power. Never entertains. Attends no functions outside of the Square Mile, and few enough there. Very much a creature of the City. Even there, though, he keeps to the deepest processes, those of the least transparent sort.”
The City, Netherton had heard Lowbeer say, explaining the klept to Flynne, had long been, and well prior to the jackpot, a unique species of semi-autonomous crypto-state, the single least democratic element of elected British government. It was this singular status, according to Lowbeer, that had allowed it to ride out the eventual collapse of democracy. That, and its core expertise in laundering money, had brought it into a mutually beneficial synergy with the émigré oligarch community, dominated by Russians, who had themselves first been attracted to London by the City’s meta-criminal financial arcana, plus the lavish culture of personal amenities for those requiring same. With this in mind, he picked up the bowl of coffee and regarded Lev over its rim. “He doesn’t sound like someone who gives much away.”
“Impossible to read,” Lev said. “Another era entirely. Older than Lowbeer.”
Netherton drank, lowered the bowl, unfurled a white linen napkin, and wiped his mouth. “If there’s anything further you want me to tell her . . .”
“No,” said Lev, “that’s it. My father’s uncle understands him to be pushing the idea of removing her.”
“That’s that, then,” Netherton said. “I missed seeing you, since Thomas was born, and I’m sorry you’ve been going through all that with Dominika.”
“Thanks,” said Lev, slumped on his stalagmite. “I wish I could say that my father needing my help with this business is proving a welcome distraction, but the timing really couldn’t be worse.”
“That’s understandable,” said Netherton. Taking his leave, he assumed, would require cessation of sequinning. “If your father’s troupe here have no memory to be read,” he asked, recalling having wondered this on his way to the table, “how is it one of them knew my name?”
“It did,” said Lev, “but no longer does. I showed it an image of you, before your arrival, told it your name, and what to do when it found you. As soon as it had done so, it forgot both your name and your appearance.”
“I see. Stay in touch. Not just about this.”
“Time,” Lev said, raising his voice, and the sequins came spiraling down, the bot-girls lowering their shawls in unison.
81
BACKWARD, WEARING HEELS
It had taken Dixon less time to install the black seatback unit he’d fabbed for the bike’s rear saddle than it did for him to double-fold and lash Verity’s Muji bag to it with black nylon straps. Since the unit was bare plastic, she’d be using her clothing as a cushion. As casually as she tended to dress, she assumed that the result would require pressing. If she were headed into any sort of world where pressing was an option, which didn’t seem entirely guaranteed.
Now the drone, standing with its back to the rear tire of the bike, extended its legs farther than she’d yet seen them go, growing startlingly taller in the process. Looking as though it were in heels, it stepped backward, against Dixon’s newly attached rack. “Little to the left,” Dixon said, eyeing the joint between rack and drone.
“Good?” Conner asked.
“Hit the grippers,” Dixon said. Verity watched as a pair of small doors opened on the drone’s side, one above the other. From each of these emerged a flat rectangular hook, black. They then retracted partially, having found corresponding slots in the rack, leaving the drone fastened to it. Dixon, evidently watching the equivalent operation on the opposite side, seemed to have seen success as well. “Knees up,” he said.
Verity watched the drone’s legs shorten, lifting its feet from the ground, then retract entirely, into its body, leaving its torso facing backward, looking like a much more substantial version of the seatback.
“Not great aerodynamics,” Virgil said, beside her, “but the best option under the circumstances.”
“Where’s its charger?” Verity asked.
“Right saddlebag,” he said. “We have the neural cut-out helmet in the trunk of the Fiat. Be seeing you soon, I hope.”
“Where?” she asked.
“Back to the Bay, looks to me, but after that, who knows?”
Grim Tim had been standing to one side with his helmet off, never having removed his white N95 mask, the piercings in his forehead and nose glinting in the sun. He’d greeted her with what she now thought of as his amiable glare. Now he drew back the left sleeve of his leather jacket, revealing a large steel watch, black-dialed and complicated.
“We’re going?” she asked him.
The helmet nodded.
She’d already put on the down-lined jacket he’d brought, remembered from the ride to Oakland, over the black hoodie, with that over the tweed jacket she’d been wearing in the truck. Too warm, standing here in the sun. She walked over to Dixon. “Say hi to Kathy for me,” she said.
He nodded, jaw clenched, other things on his mind.
Grim Tim passed her a fresh mask when she returned, and then the helmet she’d worn before. “Okay,” she said to the others, before putting the mask on, “see you all later.”
Thumbs-up from Dixon and Virgil. When she looked around for Sevrin, he was up by the gate, thumb raised. She put the helmet on, fastened her own chinstrap, and waited for Grim Tim to mount the bike. When he was settled, boots on the ground, she climbed on behind him, the folded and strapped Muji bag leaving her more room than she’d expected.
When he started the engine, she raised her feet to the pegs. They bumped slowly up the dry tire ruts, his legs swinging in exaggerated strides to keep the bike upright, toward the gate Sevrin had already partially opened. Turning her head for a last look at the valley oak, and then they were bumping out over the rough shoulder, to the edge of blacktop.
“We’re half a mile from the junction with 198,” Conner said, in her headset. “Dixon follows us that far in the van. Then he hangs a left for Coalinga, inland. We go right, toward San Lucas, take another right onto the 101.”
She looked back and saw Dixon driving the van up to the fully open gate, Virgil and Sevrin standing beside it.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“North on the 101. Gas and a pee break in King City.”
“What happened to the protocol?” Still looking back. Dixon was turning out onto the shoulder behind them, Virgil and Sevrin closing the gate behind him.
“You and I are using the stiffest level of encryption your Eunice left us,” Conner said. “I don’t have a destination yet, after King City. San Francisco seems likeliest, as everything else points toward this being prom night.”
“Prom night?”
“Shit’s being prepared to hit a big fan, but nobody’s told me what flavor of either.”
Then Grim Tim gunned the Harley and they were off, the van pulling out behind them. She swung to face forward, grabbing his midsection, which felt like a piece of leather-covered masonry.
But something had just happened, she’d no idea what, directly behind her head. “What was that?”
“This,” Conner said, opening a feed. Looking down on the van’s green roof, its windshield, from about thirty feet in the air. She could see the dark bill of Dixon’s cap. “Had it down the back of my collar.” The aerial drone was climbing now, the van sinking beneath it. On either side, rolling hills, hieroglyphic oaks, cows.
“You don’t have a neck.”
“Got a hatch. Lots of surprises.”
“Why’s Dixon going to Coalinga?”
“Might have a job at the airport. Depends. If it’s a go, I’ll let you in on it.”
“You’re a lot more willing to talk than the rest of them.”
“Fewer fucks to give, is what it is. I’m here because they need somebody to pilot Neckless here. I’m left over from their last stub. They need me there too, but I get bored, doing what they need, and they know I enjoy shit like this. So they give me more context than they give you, or anybody else in your stub, probably. Ask me. If I can, I’ll tell you.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“De nada.”
More cows, receding.
82
WETMARK
Wilf,” called Bevan Westmarch, “my man,” as Netherton was approaching the base of the staircase. Netherton had never been anything like Westmarch’s man, nor had they ever particularly been friends. He was drunk, Netherton decided, as he’d been quite prone to be, when Netherton had worked with him, at breakfast or otherwise. So had Netherton, of course, though this made him no more sympathetic now.
“Bevan,” said Netherton, stopping but not offering his hand. “How are you?”
“Very well,” said Westmarch. “Meeting up with our friend Zubov?”
Netherton, quite certain that they hadn’t been seated where Westmarch could have seen them, gave him a bored look.
“Saw him come in earlier,” Westmarch said, “trailing a school of freckled sex dolls. I know he and the missus have split up, but I was still surprised.”
Instantly remembering why Rainey called him that. Nasty when sodden, she said. “Must have missed him,” Netherton said, turning as if to scan the place for Lev, but actually dreading finding him. He wasn’t visible, though, nor were the troupe.
“Still working for the mythical Inspector Lowbeer?” asked Westmarch, as Netherton turned back, with just that hint of wooziness that allowed him a certain deniability in what he said. Netherton’s employment wasn’t a matter of public knowledge, though he’d assumed Westmarch might be aware of it.
“Do you know her, Bevan?” he asked, looking Westmarch in the eye.
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