“You don’t have an agenda while you’re sleeping.”
“Well, I have an agenda now.” He slid his hand over her bony hip and obtained a firm, intimate grip. “I’m a hundred percent agenda. I’m going to change your life. I’m going to transform you. I’m going to empower you.”
She stirred against the sheets. “How is that weird little miracle supposed to happen?”
“Tomorrow I’m taking you to meet my dear friend, Senator Bambakias.”
__________
Yosh Pelicanos, Oscar’s majordomo, had a grocery delivery shipped to the house at eight AM. Yosh was not a man to be deterred by the mere fact that he was hundreds of miles from the scene. He had a keyboard and a list of Oscar’s requirements, so the electric hand of the net economy had dropped four boxes of expensive shrink-wraps at Oscar’s doorstep.
Oscar set up the new air filter in the breakfast nook. This finessed Greta’s allergy problem. Allergies were very common among Collaboratory workers; the laundered air was so pure that it failed to properly challenge people’s immune systems, which hence became hyperreactive.
Then Oscar tied an apron over his lounge pajamas and put the kitchen to work. Results were gratifying. Oscar and Greta tore through lox, and bagels, and waffles, with lashings of juice and coffee. When the ravenous edge was blunted, they toyed with triangled rye toast and lumpfish caviar.
Oscar gazed affectionately across the table’s massive flowered centerpiece. Things were going so well. He believed in breakfasts. Morning-after breakfasts were far more intimate and emotionally engaging than any number of romantic dinners. He’d been through a horrid gamut of breakfasts: breakfasts that were hungover, shame-ridden, full of unspoken dread or politeness stretched tighter than a banjo string; but breakfast with Greta was a signal success. Steamed clean in a white terry bathrobe and socketed in her Saarinen chair, she was a mutant swan in freshwater.
She smoothed a black mass of caviar across her toast and licked a stray dab from her fingertip. “I’m gonna miss that cytoplasm panel.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve bought you the full set of conference tapes. They’ll ship in the morning set at lunch. You can speed through all the boring parts in the media room.”
“No one goes to conferences to watch the tapes. All the action’s in the halls and the poster sessions. I need to go back there. I need to confer with my colleagues.”
“No, Greta, that’s not what you need today. You have a higher priority. You need to go to Cambridge with me, and confer with a United States Senator. Donna is arriving any minute; she’s been shopping, and she’s going to do you over.”
“Who is Donna?”
“Donna Nunez is one of my krewe. She’s an image consultant.”
“I thought you left your krewe in Texas at the lab.”
“No, I brought Donna with me. Besides, I’m in constant touch with my krewe. They haven’t been abandoned, they’re very busy back there—laying some groundwork. As for Donna, she’s been devoting a lot of thought to this project. You’ll be in very good hands.”
Greta put down her toast with a resolute look. “Well, I don’t do that sort of thing. I don’t have time for an image.”
“Rita Levi-Montalcini did.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What do you know about her?”
“You once told me that this woman was very important to you. So, I put my oppo-research people on her. Now I’m an expert on your role model, Dr. Rita. Rita was a Nobelist, and a neuroscientist, and she was a major player in her country’s research effort. But Dr. Rita understood how to handle her role. She dressed every day like a Milanese jewel.”
“You don’t do science by dressing up.”
“No, you run science by dressing up.”
“But I don’t want to! I don’t want to run a damned thing! I just want to work in my lab! Why can’t you get that through your head? Why won’t anyone let me do my work anymore? If you’d just let me do the things I’m really good at, I wouldn’t have to go through any of this!”
Oscar smiled. “I bet that felt marvelous. Can we talk like adults now?”
She snorted.
“Don’t think that I’m being frivolous. You are being frivolous. You are a national celebrity. You’re not some ragged grad student who can hide out in your nice giant test tube. Rita Levi-Montalcini wore tailored lab coats, and did her hair, and had real shoes. And so will you. Relax and eat your caviar.”
The door emitted a ring. Oscar patted his lips with a napkin, belted his dressing gown, stepped into his slippers.
Donna had arrived, with heaps of luggage and a set of suit bags. She had brought two winter-clad Boston high-maintenance girls in a second taxi. The three women were having an animated chat with a young Anglo man. Oscar recognized the man—he didn’t know his name, but he knew the face, the cane, and the support shoes. This stranger was a local guy, a neighborhood regular.
Oscar unsealed his door. “How good of you to come. Welcome. You can take your equipment up to the prep room. We’ll be sending your client in presently.”
Donna ushered her charges upstairs, chatting briskly in Spanglish. Oscar found himself confronting the man with the cane. “May I help you, sir?”
“Yeah. My name’s Kevin Hamilton. I manage the apartment block up the street.”
“Yes, Mr. Hamilton?”
“I wonder if we could have a word together, about all these guys who’ve been showing up trying to kill you.”
“I see. Do come in.” Oscar shut the door carefully behind his new guest. “Let’s talk this over in my office.” He paused, noting Hamilton’s cane and the clumsy orthopedic shoes. “Never mind, we can talk downstairs.”
He led the limping Hamilton into the dayroom. Greta appeared suddenly, barefoot and in her bathrobe.
“All right, where do you want me?” she said resignedly.
Oscar pointed. “Upstairs, first door on your left.”
Hamilton offered a gallant little salute with his cane.
“Hello,” Greta told him, and trudged up the stairs.
Oscar led Hamilton into the media room and unstacked an aluminum chair for him. Hamilton sat down with obvious relief.
“Good-looking babe,” he remarked.
Oscar ignored him and sat in a second chair.
“I wouldn’t have disturbed you this morning,” Hamilton said, “but we don’t see a lot of assassinations in this neighborhood, generally.”
“No.”
“Yesterday, I myself got some mail urging me to kill you.”
“Really! You don’t say.”
Hamilton scratched at his sandy hair, which had a jutting cowlick and a part like a lightning bolt. “You know, you and I have never met before, but I used to see you around here pretty often, in and out at all hours, with various girlfriends. So when this junkbot email told me you were a child pornographer, I had to figure that was totally detached from reality.”
“I think I can follow your reasoning,” Oscar said. “Please go on.”
“Well, I ran some backroute tracing, found the relay server in Finland, cracked that, traced it back to Turkey…I was downloading the Turkish activity logs when I heard some gunfire in the street. Naturally, I checked out the local street monitors, analyzed all the movement tags on the neighborhood CCTV…That was pretty late last night. But by then, I was really ticked off. So I pulled an all-nighter at the keyboard.” Hamilton sighed. “And, well, I took care of it for you.”
Oscar stared in astonishment. “You ‘took care of it’?”
“Well, I couldn’t locate the program itself, but I found its pushfeeds. It gets all its news off a service in Louisiana. So, I spoofed it. I informed the thing that I’d killed you. Then I forged a separate news release announcing your death, and I faked the headers and fed it in. It sent me a nice thank-you note. That should take care of your problem. That thing is as dumb as a brick.”
Oscar mulled this over, thoughtfully. “Could I get you a little something, Kevin
? Juice? An espresso, maybe?”
“Actually, I’m kind of bushed. I’m thinking I’ll turn in now. I just thought I’d walk down the street and give you the news first.”
“Well, that’s very good news you’ve given me. It’s excellent news. You’ve done me quite a favor here.”
“Aw, think nothing of it,” Kevin demurred. “Any good neighbor would have done the same thing. If he had any serious programming skills, that is. Which nobody much does, nowadays.”
“Forgive me for asking, but how did you come by these programming skills?”
Hamilton nudged his chin with the handle of his cane. “Learned them from my dad, to tell the truth. Dad was a big-time coder on Route 128 before the Chinese smashed the info economy.”
“Are you a professional programmer, Kevin?”
“Are you kidding? There aren’t any professional programmers. These losers who call themselves sysadmins nowadays, they’re not programmers at all! They just download point-and-click canned stuff off some pirate site, and shove it into the box.”
Oscar nodded encouragement.
Hamilton waved his cane. “The art of computing hasn’t advanced in ten years! It can’t move anymore, ’cause there’s no commercial potential left to push it. The Euros have settled all the net protocols nice and neat, and the Chinese always pirate anything you publish…So the only guys who write serious code nowadays are ditzy computer scientists. And nomads—they’ve always got time on their hands. And, you know, various white-guy hacker crooks.” Hamilton yawned. “But I have a lot of trouble with my feet, see. So coding helps me pass the time. Once you understand how to code, it’s really kind of interesting work.”
“Are you sure there’s nothing I can do for you? I feel very much in your debt.”
“Well, yeah, there is one thing. I’m chairman of the local neighborhood watch, so they’re probably gonna bother me a lot about this shooting incident. It would be good if you could come over later and help me reassure my tenants.”
“I’d be delighted to help you.”
“Good deal, then.” Hamilton stood up with a stoical wince.
“Let me see you out, sir.”
After Hamilton’s shuffling departure, Oscar swiftly transferred the contents of his laptop into the house system and set to immediate work. He sent notes to Audrey Avizienis and Bob Argow in Texas, urging them to run immediate oppo scans on his neighbor. It was not that he distrusted Kevin Hamilton—Oscar prided himself on his open-minded attitude toward Anglos—but news so wonderful seemed very hard put to be true.
__________
At 11:15, Oscar and Greta took a cab to Bambakias’s office in Cambridge. “You know something?” she told him. “This suit isn’t as stiff as it looks. It’s really very cozy.”
“Donna’s a true professional.”
“And it fits me perfectly. How could it fit so well?”
“Oh, any smart surveillance scanner can derive body measurements. That was a military-intelligence app at first—it just took a while to work its way up to haute couture.”
They sped across the Longfellow Bridge, over the Charles River basin. Yesterday’s snow was already half gone to slush on the slopes of the Greenhouse dikes. Greta gazed out the taxi window at the distant pilings of the Science Park. Donna’s hired girls had done the eyebrows. Sleek, arched eyebrows gave Greta’s narrow face a cast of terrifying intellectual potency. The hair had real shape to it now, and some not-to-be-trifled-with gloss. Greta radiated expertise. She really looked like she counted.
“Things are so different here in Boston,” she said. “Why?”
“Politics,” he said. “The ultra-rich run Boston. And Boston’s rich people mean well—that’s the difference. They have civic pride. They’re patricians.”
“Do you want the whole country to be like this? Clean streets and total surveillance?”
“I just want my country to function. I want a system that works. That’s all.”
“Even if it’s very elitist and shrink-wrapped?”
“You’re not the one to criticize there. You live in the ultimate gated community. It’s even airtight.”
The office of Alcott Bambakias was in a five-story building near Inman Square. The place had once been a candy factory, then a Portuguese social club; nowadays it belonged to Bambakias’s international design and construction firm.
They left the cab and entered the building. Oscar hung his hat and overcoat on a Duchampian bottle-rack tree. They waited for clearance in the first-floor reception area, which boasted six scale models of elegant Chinese skyscrapers. The Chinese were the last nation still fully alive to the rampant possibilities of skyscrapers, and Bambakias was one of the very few American architects who could design skyscrapers in a Chinese idiom. Bambakias had done extremely well for himself in the Chinese market. His reputation in Europe was similarly stellar, long preceding his rather grudging fame at home in America. He’d done swooping Italian sports arenas, stolid German dike complexes, a paranoid Swiss eco-survivalist compound…He had even done a few Dutch commissions, before the Cold War had made that impossible.
Leon Sosik arrived to escort them. Sosik was a portly man in his sixties with prizefighter’s shoulders, red suspenders, a silk tie. Sosik rarely wore a hat, since he proudly sported a fine head of hair—successfully treated male pattern baldness. He looked Oscar up and down. “How are tricks, Oscar?”
“Tricks are lovely. May I introduce Dr. Greta Penninger. Dr. Penninger, this is Leon Sosik, the Senator’s chief of staff.”
“We’ve heard so much about you, Doctor,” said Sosik, gently gripping Greta’s newly manicured fingertips. “I wish we were meeting under better circumstances.”
“How is the Senator?” Oscar said.
“Al has been better,” Sosik said. “Al is taking this hard. Al is taking this very hard.”
“Well, he’s eating, isn’t he?”
“Not so you’d notice.”
Oscar was alarmed. “Look, you announced he was eating. The hunger strike is over now. The guy should be wolfing raw horsemeat. Why the hell isn’t he eating?”
“He says his stomach aches. He says…well, he says a lot of things. I gotta warn you, you can’t take everything Al says as gospel right now.” Sosik sighed heavily. “Maybe you can talk some sense into him. His wife says you’re great at that.” Sosik reached absently into his trouser pocket. “Dr. Penninger, do you mind if I debug you? Normally we’d have our new security guy doing this, but he’s still in Washington.”
“That’s quite all right,” Greta said.
Sosik swept the air around her body like a weary bishop sprinkling holy water. His device registered nothing in particular.
“Debug me too,” Oscar said. “I insist.”
“It’s a hell of a thing,” Sosik said, pursuing the ritual. “We’ve had Al bugged top to bottom for weeks. His nervous system’s bugged, his bloodstream’s bugged, his stomach is bugged, his colon is bugged. He did public MRI scans, he did PET-scans, he drank tagged apple juice—the inside of his carcass was a goddamn public circus. And when we finally got him off all the monitors, that’s when he goes haywire.”
“The hunger strike got great coverage, Leon. I’m giving you that.”
Sosik put the scanner away. “Sure, but what is it with that crazy scumbag in Louisiana? How the hell did that ever get on the agenda? Al is an architect! We could have stuck with public-works issues, and done just fine.”
“You let him talk you into the idea,” Oscar said.
“I knew it was a goofy idea! It’s just…Well, for Al it made sense. Al’s the kind of guy who can get away with that kind of thing.”
Sosik led them up a glass-and-plastic elevator. Bambakias had caused the former fifth floor to cease to exist, leaving a cavernous contemporary hangar with exposed water pipes, airducts, and elevator cabling, all tastefully done-over in tangerine, turquoise, peach, and Prussian blue.
Thirty-five people lived within the offices, Bamba
kias’s professional krewe. It was both a communal residence and a design center. Sosik led them past ergonomic office chairs, platelike kevlar display tables, and twitching heaps of cybernetic Archiblocks. It was cold outside, so squishy little rivulets of tame steam warmed the bubbled membranes underfoot.
A corner office had been outfitted as a combination media room and medical center. The health monitors were inert now, and lined against a wall, but the screens were alive and silent, flicking methodically over their feeds.
The Senator was lying naked and facedown on a massage table, with a towel across his rump. A krewe masseur was working at his neck and shoulders.
Oscar was shocked. He’d known that the near-total hunger strike had cost Bambakias a lot of weight, but he hadn’t realized what that meant to human flesh. Bambakias seemed to have aged ten years. He was wearing his skin like a jumpsuit.
“Good to see you, Oscar,” Bambakias said.
“May I introduce Dr. Penninger,” Oscar said.
“Not another doctor,” the Senator groaned.
“Dr. Penninger is a federal science researcher.”
“Oh, of course.” Bambakias sat up in bed, vaguely adjusting his towel. His hand was like a damp clump of sticks. “That’s enough, Jackson…Bring my friends a couple of…what have we got? Bring ’em some apple juice.”
“We could use a good lunch,” Oscar said. “I’ve promised Dr. Penninger some of your Boston chowder.”
Bambakias blinked, his eyes sunken and rimmed with discolor. “My chefs a little out of practice lately.”
“Out of practice on the special chowder?” Oscar chided. “How can that be? Is he dead?”
Bambakias sighed. “Jackson, see to it that my fat campaign manager gets some goddamn chowder.” Bambakias glanced down at his shrunken hands, studied their trembling with deep disinterest. “What were we talking about?”
“Dr. Penninger and I are here to discuss science policy.”
“Of course. Then I’ll get dressed.” Bambakias tottered to his bony feet and fled the room, exiting through a sliding shoji screen. They heard him call out feebly for his image consultant.
A fluted curtain shriveled upward like an eyelid, revealing a lucid gush of winter sunlight through the glass blocks. The corner office was a minor miracle of air and light; even half-empty, the space somehow felt complete and full.
Distraction Page 21
