Void Star
Page 33
“I have privacy concerns,” she tells him.
He regards her with acute, birdlike attention.
“And concerns about safety,” she admits, reluctant to self-dramatize.
“Very good, madame,” he says. “Perhaps our secured floors would be suitable?”
“How secured?”
“Highly secured. The most security-conscious parties have found them acceptable. The president of North Korea, at this very desk, said he felt peace of mind here.”
“Well, with a recommendation like that. Let’s do it.”
“There are, of course, no electronic records of our guests on the secured floors,” the clerk says, and opens a lockbox to retrieve a massive paper ledger.
* * *
Absolute silence in her room. At first it’s unsettling. She listens in vain for air-conditioning, footsteps, the hum of machines.
She’s never spent so much on a hotel room. She’ll think of it as a bunker high in the sky from which she can look down on the lights of Tokyo, its snowstorms.
Her phone rings—the number is Swiss—the bank, as expected. “Ms. Sunden?” asks a German voice, and when she assents says, “This is Klaus Dietrich, vice president of security at Crédit Nuage Cantonale. I’m calling in response to your email. First of all, I’d like to say that I’m extremely sorry that your account has been compromised. This is our first significant breach, and we take it very seriously. According to the letter of the law, it’s your job to keep your account information safe, but I’m happy to say the board has made an exception—we are refunding the stolen monies, and I’ve annotated your account so that facial recognition will be required for all future withdrawals. Moreover, I will, if you like, send you such information as we have about the thief.”
Heartening that it doesn’t always have to be war, that there are still functional—even rigorous—institutions, so much so she briefly wants to cry. “Please do,” she says. “And thank you.”
When she rings off there’s already an email from the bank with an attached security-camera video of a boy stepping into a bland foyer with the leather couches that looks like the foyer of every Nuage branch in the world. The boy looks uncomfortable, like the room’s moderate elegance oppresses him; she notices the dark stains on the knees of his pants, and his earpiece, and then she recognizes him—it’s Kern, who stole the phone that Cromwell desires so intensely. She wonders how he got her account number and passcode, and even though she was deep in Cromwell’s counsel it strikes her that she’s still missing something, that there’s someone else who has her information.
* * *
She wakes to a knocking at her door. It’s day. Just whiteness out the window.
The security screen by the door shows Philip standing dazed in the hall, roll-aboard behind him. She remembers telling the desk to let him up.
When she opens the door he says, “I’ve stayed here a dozen times and didn’t know this wing existed.”
She hugs him, though for years they’ve barely touched.
She sees him look at the minibar, then look away, and remembers Iliou’s plane. “Drink,” she says. “Compared to the room, the booze is free.”
He sits on the bed, seems to fold himself around his whisky, forcing himself to stay awake as she tells her story.
“Cloudbreaker,” he says, when she gets to that part. “It’s interesting, but the worst people use that. The worst people. I wish you’d left it alone.”
“I think I do too,” she says, and almost tells him what Cloudbreaker did to her but decides to keep it to herself.
He becomes very solemn when she gets to the attack on the villa and though it seems like that happened a long time ago she realizes there’s not much left to tell.
“So what are we going to do?” he asks, blinking to keep his eyes open as he lies back on the bed.
“Take the initiative.” She explains her plan to go to the node in Tokyo, break in, feign to offer Cromwell Magda’s life. “In the best case, it works and Parthenon gets to him,” she says. “In the worst case, we learn something about whoever he’s bargaining with, or maybe just offend them, and hopefully fuck up his life.”
“I can think of worse cases,” Philip says as his eyes close. “This is fucked. I applaud your initiative but this is much too … opaque. I can’t tell what’s in play, but it’s evident that you’re not safe, and that nothing is under control. You have a new passport. A diplomatic one, for Christ’s sake. You could bail, go live quietly until it blows over. There’s little to like in Cromwell, but I will say he’s rational. He’ll forget about you when it’s in his interest to do so. This will pass.”
The suggestion is both reasonable and practical and she could in fact go live somewhere off the grid and, say, read all the classics of every culture in the original and take up some harmless, donnish hobby—the cultivation of rare orchids, say—to keep her occupied while her life winds down, for she’ll have no money for the Mayo, and after the first year there’ll be no going back, and every night she’ll go to bed wondering if this is the night she wakes to find assassins smirking down at her—she remembers Corporal Boyd’s gauntleted hand fumbling for a hypodermic and Cloudbreaker’s predatory joy as it tore through her history and says, “No.”
“All right,” Philip says into his pillow. “I said my piece. This is fucked, but all right.”
The couch seems far away. It’s easier just to lie down beside him.
She waits until his breathing changes and she’s certain he’s asleep before she says, “Thank you for coming with me.”
* * *
When she wakes it’s night and she must have been moving in her sleep because the security screen by the door is illuminated; in its faint blue glow she sees Philip asleep on his back, arms folded over his chest like the marble effigy of a medieval knight, and as beautiful, like the boy he was.
He’s inches away. She’s aware of his heat.
So yes, he’s engaged, but they go back a long way, and he came all this way to see her, and whatever his commitments he’s a man, and men are simple creatures, and all she has to do is slide her hand down the front of his pants and she’s reasonably certain he’ll be entirely in the moment, and she’s about to do this when she remembers the earnestness behind the irony with which he’d spoken of his new and more settled life, and, really, it’s little enough to give.
There should be a sword to separate them, but all that’s to hand are his empty whisky miniatures, which she lines up down the middle of the bed. Probably the first time whisky kept someone chaste.
She kicks off her pants and socks, gets under the covers, disappears into sleep.
59
Telemetry Irreconcilable
It seems like Kern has always been on the ship.
In the fleet he’s come to see a purposefulness—whatever it is that they desire, they desire it absolutely, and it has, he is sure, nothing to do with him. In this, somehow, they’re good company. He imagines them racing forever over the seas, circling the world.
He studies the sea from the shade of the missile pods, bathes in the pools in the deck’s declivities, sleeps for hours in the sun. At dusk he sits on the sloping prow, his hands just visible in the slight luminance of the bow wave, watching for the lights of other ships. Akemi never speaks, but he feels that she’s present.
He tries to find his GPS, but just gets an error message—CODE 391—TELEMETRY IRRECONCILABLE.
When the sun sets he lies on the deck, taking in its fading heat, ear pressed to the nubbled black ceramic, listening to the subtle harmonics of the hull. The sound varies, slightly, from minute to minute, like it’s the ship’s song, one of hunger, distance, hatred, mourning.
60
What They Really Wanted
Motion behind Thales on the yacht’s deck. He turns, and there’s the urbane old man from the videos—Cromwell, he thinks—perched on the transom, surrounded by candles.
A ghost, he thinks, then smiles.
&
nbsp; As the rain flattens his hair the old man says, “I consider it my duty to lay it out clearly.”
The old man and candles vanish.
In the cabin, Akemi is watching the monitor where Kern is pacing a black ship’s deck. (They’re drone subs, he somehow knows, which the AIs have been stealing and using as transports for years.) Thales wonders just what Kern hopes to get from this adventure, hopes it isn’t Akemi’s love.
“I just saw Cromwell, I think,” Thales says. “I think it was from your memories.”
Her face closes, and he wishes he hadn’t spoken, as, without wanting to, he remembers how it felt when Cromwell appraised her, his evident slight contempt, his coalescing focus, the underlying pity. She’d been extraordinarily high, but could still see he thought he had no peer, yet was deeply concerned to be a gentleman, which meant he was a patsy, or at least gave her some room. He needed to see a posh good girl, someone worth saving, so she started channeling her friend Sonia, who was essentially a loser cunt failure with a has-been for a daddy, but had charming manners; shaking his hand, she undertook the assumption she’d be valued and respected.
Her thoughts veer to the tricks she’d turned for food money, about which she’s never told a soul, how it felt to knock on strangers’ doors in good hotels, the men’s discomfited formality, how it hadn’t been so bad—she’d never been prissy, and sometimes it was interesting, because, paying for it, they’d ask for what they really wanted.
He envies her the untidiness of her humanity, regrets the slightness of his own experience and how neutrally he sees the world. Made of two weeks of memory, he is the thinnest of beings.
What does he really want?
The light is fading, the swell getting steeper.
61
Hole in the Wall
Irina wakes in bed alone, hears Philip in the shower.
There’s a silver coffee service on the table. On the salver is a handwritten note in English from the hotel’s director of security informing her that both coffee and service have been controlled from the first stages of their manufacture, and that an in-house mass-spectroscopic analysis of the coffee—attached—has found no toxicity or unexpected compounds. Her heart warms toward the hotel and its policies.
She feels exhausted, thinks of going back to bed, realizes that what she actually wants to do is hide. She downs her coffee, pours another cup.
The water goes off in the bathroom as she looks up the node on a map on the room’s TV. It’s about a mile away, in some drab industrial building. Cabs keep records; they might as well walk. She looks out the window at the falling snow.
* * *
The sidewalks are slick with ice and the two of them hold each other for balance, which makes for an uncomfortably dependent image. They follow a printed map, like tourists from the last century.
The row of high-end hotels becomes just another Tokyo street. Her breathing is faster than she’d like but she can’t slow it. Strangers flow by, and for once she takes no interest, doesn’t try to deconstruct their cues of dress and manner—the street might as well be a stage set, the people extras.
Snow is falling so thickly it’s like walking through a cloud. Drones zip by overhead, more than she remembers from her last time in Japan. Cordon or no, if one of them is Cromwell’s, and recognizes her, then, however profound Japan’s xenophobia, and however strict its ban on guns, she is, in that moment, done.
“OPEN” blinks into red neon life in English and Japanese in the window of a restaurant below the level of the street. She grabs Philip’s hand and pulls him down the stairs.
Hole in the wall, she thinks. Narrow, three tables and a counter. Smells of steam, fish, soy, tea. The counterman says something. She sits at the far end with her back to the wall.
Green tea before her. Philip looking concerned. Her hands are shaking. The table’s cheap plastic veneer is filmed with cleaning fluid. Philip is intent on the lozenges of yellow egg behind the counter’s glass; she looks three seconds into the past, sees him start pretending not to notice her disturbance.
“I don’t…” she says, then stops.
Philip regards her, bright, friendly, purely helpful.
“Too many drones,” she says.
“Oh. I think I can take care of that.”
“How?”
“The Yakuza.”
“Really? I know you like to poke around in dark corners, but you’re so … scrupulous.”
“True, but I still have contacts in the Yakuza. Well, not in, it’s more like friends of friends. It’s not that big a deal—they’re not Cosa Nostra or the Downtown Aztec Kings. They’re … socially integrated. They have business cards, and websites without euphemism. It’s just a part of how things get done.”
“I won’t see you indebted.”
“Eh,” says Philip. “I have leverage. My company has patents on the best race-car engines in the world, and the Mitsui keiretsu wants to get into the high-end sports-car market. It therefore behooves them to keep me happy. They’re a major industrial player, so of course there are ties of reciprocity with the Yak…” He makes a gesture conveying a resigned acceptance of the inevitable entanglement of industry and organized crime, then takes out his phone and taps out a message.
“Sake?” he asks, looking up.
“Early.”
“Not in California.”
“I need to be fully present.”
And calm, she feels him not say.
“Maybe a small one,” she says.
She makes herself drink the sake slowly. Her eyes stray to the prisms of tuna behind the counter, their colors somewhere between ruby, eggplant and blood. She once saw a tuna in an aquarium, its body molten silver, its face like a totem of pelagic sleep.
She might float out of her skin.
“And, done,” Philip says, glancing back at his phone.
“At what cost?”
“No cost.”
“Oh, that must be how obligation works here.”
“It might dilute our profits by some fraction of a percent. I don’t care. It’s worth it, if only to impress you with my superpowers, for once.”
“Not so super.”
“Quite adequately super. There’s no one like you. It seems so improbable that we’re not just friends but old ones and I get to see you now and then. Anyone, literally anyone else, and I’d say they’re attempting too much, but you? You might win. Unless you feel like you’re not up for it, in which case we bail and I help you disappear.”
She can hardly quit with half a mile to go. “I’m still game,” she makes herself say. “Flatterer.”
He looks over his shoulder, says, “It looks like our window is opening.”
She looks outside. Goes to the window to get a better view. More drones than ever in the air. Most are red and black, of a single, beetle-like design, and grappling with the other drones—it looks like insects mating—and pulling them from the air.
She opens the door, admitting cold air and tinny chanting.
“This is madness,” she says.
“Well,” he says, “it’s tolerated.”
“What are they saying?”
“I believe it’s a counter-protest to the protests against Japan’s annexation of the new mainland territories. A standard vehicle of far-right expression. It was already scheduled, but they moved it up for me.”
The non-fascist drones are fleeing. She wonders if these assaults are common enough to be covered in their programming.
They walk down the street under red and black drones forming kanji that cast shadows in the fall of snow.
“It’s beautiful,” Philip says. “Probably the most reactionary propaganda, and viciously racist to boot, but even so, beautiful, no?”
The kanji pulse, dissolve, re-form. The city seems older now. No one is watching. She links arms with her friend, brushes snow from the shoulders of his overcoat. She feels a sense of impending relief, as on the last stage of a journey.
* * *
Before them is a blank facade encrusted with snow, and at first glance its featurelessness reads as sinister but actually it’s just functional, the kind of nameless structure she’s been ignoring all her life.
Philip leads her into an alley floored in dirty, fragmented ice and half-interred beer cans. The building’s side is as blank as the front except for an unmarked door. It’s like the secret entrance to a monumental tomb in industrial vernacular. She remembers the ziggurat Cromwell plans to raise in Magda’s honor. Philip does something with his phone—the door’s lock clicks.
“The locks here are easy,” Philip says. “Probably because no one really steals. Suckers.” He opens the door for her, her gentleman companion bowing her into the abyss.
She steps into a blackness absolute except for geometrically precise grids of winking green lights. It’s a server farm, she realizes, as her eyes adjust; the lights are from computers in their wall-mounted racks.
Corridor upon corridor and all alike. No windows and the only sound the humming of machines. She checks her phone’s GPS—they’re almost at the node’s latitude and longitude, but still fifty feet too high.
There’s an elevator but it’s key-card access. Philip says, “Might draw attention. Better not.”
She finds what looks like a closet door opening onto a metal spiral staircase, going down. It’s cramped, steep, barely wide enough for her shoulders, probably to make space for more servers, a function of the stratospheric prices of Tokyo real estate.
The stairs lead down to a second floor identical to the first one. More stairs, more floors, and she starts to feel she’s in a nightmare of repeated rooms and useless motion. The last staircase opens onto a concrete tunnel lined with still more racks of servers.
“Looks like a civil defense tunnel,” Philip says. The echo confirms her budding claustrophobia. “From when they thought the U.S. was going to nuke them again. A friend of mine found one under his house and turned it into a wine cellar.”