“We have cams on our non-ass,” Conner said. “You haven’t seen the feeds from those.” A square feed appeared, overlapping the vacant center of the display. Close-up of white plastic covering the floor beneath them.
They rose out of the opening in the tent.
Netherton saw the plastic recede, becoming a white square framed in blue, illuminated by the nearest streetlight.
“Close alpha,” Conner said, and the white square was pulled shut from one side. “Aperture beta.” Now the entire blue roof of the low main tent was hauled open, from the center, in either direction, revealing a wider expanse of white, on which four figures lay like gingerbread men atop brightly colored net hammocks: pink, blue, yellow, a pale fluorescent green. Their heads were black dots.
Netherton glanced from the feed to the display. Vertigo swept in. The drone was stories up now, amid buildings, still rising. “Verity,” he ventured, “hello?”
“Yeah?”
“Why are your heads black?”
“Pussy riot,” she seemed to say, inexplicably.
“When the hammocks are clear,” Conner said, “cut guylines. You four act like dummies. Everybody else, on the ground, run like motherfuckers. Good to go? Okay. Liftoff.”
On the square feed, the hammocks rose toward the camera, their passengers immobile and, he assumed, terrified. Figures below them were sprinting away from the tent, which he saw was collapsing, he assumed because its ropes had been cut. He recognized a figure in a white jumpsuit. He’d seen her inside. These were the technicians.
“How are things going?” asked Rainey, from the direction of the door, back from coffee.
Netherton muted. “Verity and a few of the others are being lifted, in hammocks, up to Stets’ penthouse.”
“Fun?”
“Looks terrifying.”
“How’s Thomas?” she asked.
“Sleeping.”
“Mia tells me she’s just taken on Dominika Zubov as a client,” Rainey said. “I’m sure she meant me to tell you, as she knows you and Lev are friends, and she didn’t ask me not to.”
Her friend Mia, he remembered, watching the hammocks rise, was also in celebrity crisis management, and had steered Rainey into it, from the less specialized realm of PR in which he and Rainey had first met. Mia’s firm, unlike Rainey’s, was London-based. “She’s breaking client confidentiality,” he said. “Is that like her?”
“Dominika’s obviously sending you a message. Mia expects you to convey it to Lev. She wants to get back together with him.”
The feed from the ass-cam slammed suddenly up at him, the drone evidently falling straight down, upright, several stories, then veering sickeningly sideways, below the ascending hammocks.
“Why did you do that?” Rainey asked.
“Do what?”
“Make that high-pitched noise and shove yourself back into the couch,” she said.
“Sorry,” Netherton said. “Conner did something with the drone. Still is . . .” The drone was darting around, too quickly now for him to follow, except that his point of view did, disconcertingly.
Netherton unmuted. “What was that?” The drone was still, hovering. In the square feed, something small grew steadily smaller, tumbling down, toward the flattened tent.
“Drone,” said Conner. “Kept getting into our no-fly.”
“How do they know there’s a no-fly?” Netherton asked, as the drone impacted tarp-covered pavement.
“They don’t. Too close is too fucking close.”
“Why are all their heads black?”
“Ski masks, pulled on over hearing protection. Don’t want anyone IDing them, and they’re supposed to be life-sized dolls anyway, for the cover story— Gotcha.” This last apparently addressed to something else below them, now falling.
“How did you do that?”
“Those four babies Eunice had made up? They kick ass. Just used one to flip something ten times its size.”
101
HAMMOCK RIDE
I won’t be able to hear you speak over the engines, so I’ll just monologue at you. Resist the urge to look around, because you’re playing a stuffed doll. Sorry you have to get up this way, but anything like a real helicopter would blow Stets’ law-breaking budget. Virgil’s got somebody retroactively faking that you guys are big stuffed dolls in a Caitlin art piece. Underestimated the draw of what little web stuff we’ve had up since this morning, cryptic as it is. SFPD showed up sooner than expected, and you don’t want to be on the ground, because Pryor and a fresh batch of contractors are there already, looking for you and Manuela.
Verity, reading this against the sky, as the hammock rose, hoped the noise protection was working. The full-throttle roar of Grim Tim’s Harley would have been mild by comparison.
Now the drone, gray quadcopters mounted low on either side, like bulbous panniers, rose vertically past her, behind white Helvetica.
If it looks like we’re pulling this evening out of our ass, it’s because mine is legion. The branch plants were still doing things for me, behind my back, when Cursion erased me. When they started recompiling me, they set this evening in motion even before Stets and Caitlin knew about it. Once I recompiled, there was just me, right? Now I’m all of the branch plants, but I’m still spoofing like there are a few, because that could be handy. But keep that to yourself.
Now the drone dropped past the hammock, like a rock, behind Eunice’s text.
Pryor’s got some dickhead shooting at us from the ground. Or make that past tense, now Conner’s on the case.
102
NOTHING BUT TURGENEV
This evening’s budget,” Ash said to Conner, Netherton listening as the drone whipped through its downward spiral, “can’t afford assault, let alone homicide.”
“We got assault already. That’s an assault fucking rifle down there, shooting at us.”
“Disarm the shooter.”
“Maybe literally,” said Conner, as the drone came around for what Netherton correctly judged would be the final turn in their descent. To speed across fallen blue plastic, with a clearance of mere inches, toward the back of a man in a long dark coat, aiming a complicated-looking black rifle over his head.
The drone’s left arm scarcely seemed to brush his right shoulder, but the impact sent him flying, the rifle landing a meter beyond his reach. The drone pivoted sharply, edges of the slack tent fluttering in its downdraft, as manipulators on its hyperextended arms snatched up the rifle, and then they were ascending again.
“Thank you,” said Ash, “though I’d rather you’d left the rifle.”
“You were more fun when you had four eyes,” Conner, said, cheerfully. “I can’t just drop it, can I? Might kill somebody.”
Netherton, watching identical floors of the building pass in the upper half of the drone’s display, was surprised by the sudden arrival of an actual opening in the previously unbroken wall of glass. Within which, on a carpet of yet more of the blue plastic which had made up the launch tent, the four color-coded hammocks were now spread, their riders, flat on their backs, being freed by a number of efficient-looking strangers.
The overcomplicated muzzle of the shooter’s black rifle appeared then, close up, in the upper half of the display, Conner either managing to hold the gun vertically behind the drone or somehow to have fastened it there, as they crossed the last few meters, to land on more of the blue plastic, everyone around the hammocks covering their ears.
Lev’s thylacines pulsed, just as they touched down.
“Yes?”
“He’s gone,” Lev said. “The room where they were dining no longer exists.”
“I’m sorry—?”
“It disappeared. My father says its having so much the quality of an old wives’ tale is particularly effective. He thinks she’s telling them they mustn’t allow themselve
s to dismiss her as merely that.”
“Who’s disappeared?” Netherton asked.
“Yunevich,” said Lev.
“We aren’t supposed to say the name.”
“It no longer matters. My father opened by telling me I wouldn’t need the bots further, and should return them to Kensington Gore in a cab, where he ordinarily keeps them. I knew then.”
“What’s happened?”
“Yunevich was dining at Shchaviev’s, in the Strand. Second floor, stuffed bear in the foyer?”
“Don’t know it,” Netherton said.
“It’s very old klept. He was with three others, none of them names I recognized. Coconspirators, my father assumes. They were dining in the smallest of the private rooms. Single table for four, a fireplace, collection of nothing but Turgenev, various editions. Was, rather.”
“Was?”
“Room’s gone,” said Lev. “Assemblers. Their waiter, an old man, was wheeling a cart of coffee and desserts in, along the corridor from the main dining room. When he saw that it was as though there had never been a door, let alone a room, he became hysterical. Other guests went to his aid, Muscovites, unfamiliar with the place, hence unaware of a room having been there, so unable to understand what had happened. The restaurant’s security soon did, however.”
The drone was now the focus of a scrum of busy technicians, who were removing the quadcopter units. “The wall,” said Netherton, “where the door had been. What’s behind it now?”
“A closet for storing mops and buckets. Shchaviev’s prides itself on doing literally everything traditionally.”
“But it hadn’t been, before?”
“It had,” said Lev, “but behind the missing dining room. It’s that much larger now, though everything in it is a perfect match for the earlier, smaller iteration. Twenty years’ dust on the uppermost of the new shelves, they told my father.”
“Who did?”
“Individuals in a position to know.”
“Were the police informed?”
“No,” said Lev. “Isn’t done, in situations like this. The Muscovites, returning to their table in the main room, received brandies on the house. Eventually it all became rather jolly.”
“You don’t sound nearly as down, yourself,” Netherton said, “as you recently have.” It was true.
“Dominika’s been in touch,” Lev said.
“She has?”
“She wants to get back together.”
“That’s wonderful,” Netherton said, remembering what Lowbeer, and Rainey, had told him. Now, though, he wouldn’t have to be the one to relay Dominika’s desire for reconciliation. “I’m in a bit of a situation here, actually. Talk later?”
“Good luck with it, then,” said Lev, chipper as Netherton had heard him in quite a while. The thylacines vanished.
“Done talking?” Conner asked. “Didn’t want to interrupt you.”
“Yes, thanks.”
“We’re getting a tow,” said Conner, as someone dropped something black over the drone, blocking its front, rear, and peripheral feeds. A square feed appeared, snaking up out of this darkness, to find blue plastic and more technicians. “They’ve draped a hooded raincoat over our AR-15,” Conner said, peering about with what Netherton assumed was the black cable-cam. Now what Conner called the ass-feed appeared: blue tarp as carpeting, very close up, the drone’s legs entirely retracted. Then they were tipped backward, someone towing them through a slit in blue plastic, Conner’s cam-tentacle first finding Verity, in what appeared to be a long gray robe, then they were being wheeled away, the flexicam taking in quite a crowd. “Turgenev,” he said, thinking of Lev’s story.
“Klept?” asked Conner.
“No,” Netherton said, “evidently a writer.”
103
MARLENE
Someone was freeing Verity’s left wrist, someone else the other. They then moved in unison to the strap around her waist, then to her ankles. All in utter silence, but then she remembered the noise-protection muffs. Virgil, appearing above her, was still wearing his own, though not the balaclava. He bent to help her remove both, sound instantly returning. “You couldn’t pay me enough to do that again,” he said, “but I’ll bet there are plenty of people who’d pay to do it.”
Above her now, more blue tarp. They’d erected a tent up here, she realized, its fourth wall open, where they’d removed an entire panel of glass.
“Our guests just watched us get flown in,” Virgil said. “We’re putting a dummy in your place, to be carried out of here with the others, on the hammocks, part of the performance piece we’re pretending Caitlin’s doing. The lawyers think it’ll reduce the charges. We’ll slip you and Manuela out the side, and take you up to the Airstream.”
A young woman with a black crew cut knelt beside the hammock, unzipping a very large gray duffel. From it she pulled a life-sized rag doll, wearing a black balaclava over sound-muffs, jeans, and a tweed blazer with a black hoodie bunched beneath it. Virgil handed her her purse. “Put that over your shoulder,” he said. “We’re bringing your garment bag.” She did, then someone helped her into a hooded gray terry robe.
“Girl who untied me told me Caitlin’s pregnant,” said Manuela, from beneath the hood of her own gray robe. “I feel like I’m at a royal wedding.”
Virgil, having shed the top of his running outfit, was being helped into something equally black but more formal. “We’ll be with some security people, on the way upstairs. Drone has its own disguise, to cover up Conner’s rifle. This way,” and he waved them both out, through a vertical slit in the side wall of blue tarp.
They were immediately surrounded by three men and a woman, Verity recognizing them as freelancers Stets sometimes hired for large public events.
Looking up, she saw that all of the tarps covering the glass had been removed, making the space feel even larger. Glancing back, past Virgil’s shoulder, she saw the drone’s extended handle in a stranger’s hand, the drone itself draped in black, the camera unit extending from beneath a hood. It swung toward her, but the man pulling it was already headed in a different direction.
“Eunice?” Under her breath.
No reply.
She kept her head down, aware of moving through a crowd she couldn’t see, until they reached the foot of the zigzag stairs, up to the trailer, now concealed by graceful sweeping forms in gleaming white fabric, and then they were climbing.
At the top, she raised her head, to find Grim Tim blocking the trailer’s open door, in white evening shirt and a black tie, under a chrome-studded black leather jacket. Bowing slightly, with a click of his heels and a resulting facial jingle, he handed her a dirty chai, the paper cup stamped with 3.7-sigma’s logo. VERATITTY, she read on the side, in fluorescent pink paint pen.
“Good to see you,” she said, as he stepped back to admit her, Manuela and Virgil following. Over her shoulder, she saw the security team turn and start back down the stairs. “Stets or Caitlin up here?” she asked Virgil.
“They’re down on the floor, greeting people.”
“I feel like I’ve got pieces of bug in my hair,” Verity said. “Maybe between my teeth.”
“Shower,” said Virgil.
“They’ve got one?”
“Right here. Connected to the plumbing for the space, so you’ll never run out of hot. Carol!” A woman in black t-shirt and jeans emerged from the crowd, smiling. “Shower available?” he asked.
“Certainly is,” the woman said.
“Show Verity where it is. And have the stylist find something for her.”
“Will do,” the woman said, and soon Verity was in the Airstream’s coffin-narrow matte-white shower, sluicing off bug parts and road dust, whether imagined or not. Very hot, the pressure steady through a complicated showerhead. When she’d rinsed her hair, she turned off the water, stepped out, a
nd put the gray robe back on. After toweling her hair and face, she retrieved the glasses and put them on.
A feed opened.
Panoramic, the POV speeding across a rocky khaki plain, under intensely blue sky. Whitish tire tracks stretched ahead, the image juddering with the movement of the unseen vehicle. Distant mountains, darker than the plain. Black husks she guessed were burnt tires, like big three-dimensional commas.
“Eunice?” Something exploded, silently, ahead and to the left, whiting out a windshield she hadn’t known was there. The feed closed. “What was that?”
Her. Navy Chief Marlene Miller.
“Marlene?”
Miller. I’m built on her skill set.
“You’re . . . her?”
I’m me. Her personality, near as I can tell, wasn’t that much like mine. They were trying to upload her military skill set, not her persona. She enlisted in 2000, did two Bahrain deployments, four in Iraq, three in Afghanistan. SEAL teams did shorter deployments then, a few months at a time. UNISS project got going in 2015. She volunteered for that between Iraq, which was where she saw Inception, and Afghan deployment. Her favorite movie, so that was where I got that from. It’s in the transcription of an interview she did for the project, at the Naval Postgraduate School.
“And you think that video’s the last thing she saw?”
Can’t prove it, but she died near Marjah. Afghanistan. An IED. Those mountains are near Marjah. I got a video match for them.
“How long have you known?”
Ash gave me the documentation. Read it all simultaneously, multitasking. Just now.
“Where did they get it?”
Conner’s stub.
“How do you feel?”
A pause.
Lots.
A single light rap on the door. “Verity?” It was Carol, the assistant who’d shown her the shower. “Ready to try a few things on?”
You need something to wear.
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