SUSHI BARN
The tunnel to Sushi Barn was less a tunnel than a giant hamster run. Madison had built two seven-foot walls of shingle bags, with a walkway in between, from a hole in the wall in the back of Coldiron, across the vacant store next door, through another hole in its far wall, across the next empty store, and finally through another hole, into Hong’s kitchen.
Coming in from the alley, Flynne had seen Burton, looking pale, under one of the white crowns. Conner was under another. “Want to switch jobs?” Clovis asked Tacoma, seeing her. “Neither of these guys are home much.”
“They’re making Burton work?” Flynne asked.
“Nobody’s twisting his arm,” Clovis said. “Glad to get out of his body. Conner just comes back to be fed and sleep.”
Griff didn’t seem to have any idea what Flynne might have on her mind. She wasn’t sure what Lowbeer might have heard, or what Griff might know. She wanted to look at his hands now, but he had them in his jacket pockets.
Hong’s kitchen was humid with cooking rice. He led them out to the front room, where the seating was at secondhand picnic tables, painted red, and over to an alcove, a sheet of red-painted plywood forming one of its walls. The alcove had its own picnic table, and a framed poster of the Highbinders on the inside of the red wall, a San Francisco band she’d liked in high school. She put the Wheelie Boy down on the scuffed, red-painted concrete floor, under the seat, and sat, facing the Highbinders poster. Griff took the seat opposite. A kid she recognized as a cousin of Madison’s brought them glasses of tea.
“You need food, just let somebody know,” Hong said.
“Thanks, Hong,” she said, as he turned back to the kitchen. She looked at Griff.
He smiled, raised a tablet, consulted it, looked up from it, met her eyes. “Now that we know that a safe house elsewhere isn’t an option for your mother, we’re looked into maximizing security for your family home. With a view to keeping it as low key, as transparent really, as we possibly can. We don’t want to disturb your mother. We think a compound might be in order.”
“Pickett had a compound,” she said. “Don’t want that.”
“Exactly the opposite. Stealth architecture. Everything remains apparently the same. Any new structures will appear to always have been there. We’re speaking with specialist architects. We need it done yesterday, largely at night, silently, invisibly.” He scrolled something with a fingertip.
“Can you do that?”
“With sufficient money, absolutely. Which your firm most certainly has.”
“Not my firm.”
“Partially yours.” He smiled.
“On paper.”
“This building,” he said, “isn’t paper.”
She looked out at the front room of Sushi Barn. Noticed four members of Burton’s posse, men whose names she didn’t know, seated two-by-two at different tables, black Cordura rifle bags tucked under their seats. The rest of the customers were in KCV county outfits. “Doesn’t feel real to me,” she said. She looked back at him. “Been a lot lately that doesn’t.” She looked down at his hands.
“What doesn’t?”
“You’re her,” she said, looking up, meeting his pale eyes. Not that crazy cartoon blue. Not blue at all, but widening now. A woman laughed, tables away. His hand lowered the tablet, came to rest on the table, and for the first time since the end of the ride back from Pickett’s, she thought she might be about to cry.
He swallowed. Blinked. “Really, I’ll be someone else.”
“You don’t become her?”
“Our lives were identical, until Lev’s first communication was received here. But this is no longer their past, so she isn’t who I’ll become. We diverged, however imperceptibly at first, when that message was received. By the time she first contacted me, there were already bits of my life she was unfamiliar with.”
“She mailed you?”
“Phoned me,” he said. “I was at a reception in Washington.”
“Did she tell you she was you?”
“No. She told me that the woman I’d just been speaking with, a moment before, was a mole, a deep-cover agent, for the Russian Federation. She, the woman, was my American equivalent, in many ways. Then she, Ainsley, this stranger on the phone, told me something that proved it. Or would, when I’d used classified search engines. So it was rather a gradual revelation, over about forty-eight hours. I did guess,” he said. “During our third call. She told me, then, that she’d made a wager with herself, that I would. And won.” He smiled slightly. “But I’d seen that she had knowledge not only of the world, but of my exact and most secret situation in it. Knowledge no one else could possess, not even my superiors. And she’d continued to identify other foreign and domestic agents in my own agency, and in the American agency I liaise with. In her time, they’d gone undetected for years, one for over a decade, and at very serious strategic cost. I’m unable to act on most of them, else I attract too much attention, become suspect myself. But possession of that information has already had a very beneficial effect on my career.”
“When was this?”
“Thursday,” he said.
“It hasn’t been very long.”
“I’ve barely slept. But it was nothing professional that convinced me. It was that she knew me as no one else could. Thoughts and feelings I’ve had constantly, all my life, but had never expressed, not to anyone.” He looked away, then back, shyly.
“I can see her now,” Flynne said, “but it didn’t strike me until Wilf told me about the tray, this morning.”
“The tray?”
“Like the one at my house. Clovis has one, in London. She’s an old lady there. Has a store that sells American antiques. Lowbeer’s friend. Took Wilf there when she needed Clovis to refresh her memory about something. When he told me, I remembered your hands, hers. Saw it.”
“How utterly peculiar it all is,” he said, and looked down at his hands.
“You’re not named Lowbeer?”
“Ainsley James Gryffyd Lowbeer Holdsworth,” he said. “My mother’s maiden name. She was allergic to hyphenation.” He took a blue handkerchief from a jacket pocket. Not Homes blue but darker, almost black. Dabbed his eyes. “Pardon me,” he said. “A bit emotional.” He looked at her. “You’re the first person I’ve discussed this with, other than Ainsley.”
“It’s okay,” she said, not sure what that even meant now. “Can she hear us? Right now?”
“Not unless we’re in range of a device of some kind.”
“You’ll tell her? That I know?”
“What would you prefer?” He tilted his head then, reminding her more than ever of Lowbeer.
“I’d like to tell her myself.”
“Then you will. Ash just messaged me that they need you back, as soon as possible.”
104.
THE RED MEDICI
Netherton, just then looking at the peripheral, saw Flynne arrive. It was like seeing someone jarred out of a reverie, the peripheral suddenly informed, present. She took in the faces around the table. “Where’s Lowbeer?” she asked.
“You’ll be meeting with her,” Ash said, “but you’re here now for equipment, for tomorrow’s event.”
“What kind of equipment?”
“Two kinds,” Ash said.
Ossian opened the rosewood pistol case.
“These are weapons,” Ash said.
“Why do they look like that?” Flynne raised an eyebrow at Netherton.
“They were built into a high-security pram,” Netherton said, “as an antikidnapping measure.”
“Are they guns?”
“Best think of them as that,” Ash said. “Never point one at anyone you don’t want to kill. There’s a relationship between what happens when you depress this stud,” she indicated a point on the inner curve of the parrot-head handle, “and the position of the barrel. Though not exclusively, so not entirely like a gun in that regard. Once the system acquires a biological target, on being tr
iggered, it dispatches assemblers, which seek and find the target regardless. Pick one up.”
The peripheral leaned forward, tapped the gun nearest her with the nail of her index finger. “Like an old derringer, but made of peppermint.” She used both hands to lift it from its recess, neatly managing, Netherton noted, to not point it at any of them. It lay on her open palm.
“It’s deactivated, currently,” said Ossian, “after considerable effort. You can try the grip.”
She closed her hand around the parrot’s head, extended the thing, its festive barrel pointing at a palm-sized bald patch on Ash’s velour tent. “I’m taking these to Wilf’s ex’s party?”
“You certainly aren’t,” said Ash. “Weapons of any sort are proscribed, and you’ll be scanned thoroughly, prior to admission. In any case, these happen to be as blatantly illegal as anything in London today.”
“Then why are you showing them to me?” She returned the thing to its fitted recess, sat back.
“Under certain conditions,” Ash said, “as I understand it, one of these may be delivered to you. We’re showing them to you now so you’ll recognize them, if necessary, and know how to use them.”
“Point and click,” Ossian said. “Has absolutely no effect on inorganic material. Soft tissue only.” He lowered the lid.
“Second order of business,” said Ash, opening her hand, palm up, to reveal what Netherton assumed was a Medici, but red. “This will install a cognitive bundle that will enable you to sound something like a neoprimitivist curator. If not to another neoprimitivist curator, though I’d imagine that’s debatable.”
“It will?” Flynne asked, eyeing the thing. “How?”
“Think of it as a disguise. You no more need to operate it than you need to operate a mask. Certain specific sorts of query will trigger it.”
“And?”
“You’ll spout a reasonably high grade of facile nonsense.”
“Will I know what it means?”
“It won’t mean anything,” said Ash. “Were you to keep it up, you’d shortly repeat yourself.”
“Bullshit baffles brains?”
“One hopes. I’ll need to install it in your peripheral now.”
“Where did you get it?” Flynne asked.
“Lowbeer,” said Ossian.
“The back of your hand, please,” said Ash.
Flynne placed the peripheral’s hand palm down on the table, beside the corroded base of Ash’s display, spread its fingers. Ash pressed the red Medici gently against the back of the peripheral’s hand, where it remained, seeming to do nothing at all.
“Well?” Flynne asked, looking up at Ash.
“It’s loading,” Ash said.
Flynne looked at Netherton. “What have you been doing?” she asked.
“Waiting for you. Admiring your guns. Yourself?”
“Talking with Griff.” He couldn’t read her expression. “They’re talking about defenses for our house. Stuff that’s supposed to not bother my mother.”
“The mystery man,” said Ossian. “So you’ve actually met him.”
Flynne looked at him. “Sure.”
“Any idea how she recruited him?” Ossian asked.
“No,” Flynne said, “but wouldn’t it figure that she’d be good at that?”
“No doubt,” said Ossian. “But we seem to be increasingly following his orders, with next to no idea of who he might be.”
“No idea who she is, either,” Flynne said. “Maybe he’s like that.”
Ash leaned forward to remove the Medici, then tucked it into her reticule. “We’ll just test it,” she said to Flynne. “Tell us, please, why you think Daedra West’s art is important today.”
Flynne looked at her. “West’s oeuvre obliquely propels the viewer through an elaborately finite set of iterations, skeins of carnal memory manifesting an exquisite tenderness, but delimited by our mythologies of the real, of body. It isn’t about who we are now, but about who we would be, the other.” She blinked. “Fucking hell.” The peripheral’s eyes were wide.
“I’d hoped for something in a more colloquial register,” said Ash, “but I suppose that’s a contradiction in terms. Try not to let it run on. The thinness will show.”
“I can interpret, for Daedra,” Netherton suggested.
“Quite,” said Ash.
105.
STATIC IN YOUR BONES
In the elevator, she tried thinking about what Wilf had told her about Daedra’s art, wondering if she might hear that bullshit voice in her head, but she didn’t. “What is that thing that talks?” she asked him.
“Cognitive bundle,” he said, as the doors opened. She smelled Lev’s cooking from the kitchen. “It constructs essentially meaningless statements out of a given jargon, around whatever chosen topic. I won’t walk you up. You’ve been there before.” He’d stopped at the foot of the stairs.
“I said it,” she said, “but I didn’t think it.”
“Exactly. But that isn’t evident to anyone else. And it wasn’t bad, for a collage from rote.”
“Creeps me out.”
“I think it’s actually a good idea, in our situation. Best you get upstairs.”
“Try the Wheelie, when I get back.”
“Where is it?”
“On a chair in the back of Coldiron. By the beds.”
“Good luck,” he said.
She turned and climbed the stairs, with their runner of patterned carpet, to turn at the landing, up again. At the top, furniture gleamed softly, glass sparkled. She wished she could’ve stopped to look at the things, but here was Lowbeer, at the double doors, only one of them partially open, her hand on the knob. “Hello,” she said. “Please come in.” Into that green again, gilt trim. A single lamp, incandescent element behind glass cut like diamonds. “Griff is sorting out protection for your mother, I understand.”
Flynne looked at the long table, its dark top perfectly smooth but not too glossy. It no longer felt to her like Santa’s Headquarters here. She wished it did. A very business-y room, almost an office. She looked at Lowbeer, who was wearing another one of her suits. Saw Griff there, more strongly than she’d expected. “He’s you,” she said. “He’s you when you were younger.”
Lowbeer’s head tilted. “Did you guess, or did he confide in you?”
“You have the same hands. Netherton saw the tray on our mantel. Said he’d seen one in Clovis’s store here. That she’s an old woman. I guess once I thought of her being there, and here, at the same time . . .” She stopped. “But it isn’t the same time. I guessed you might be there too.”
“Exactly,” said Lowbeer, closing the door.
“Am I here, that way?” Flynne asked.
“Not that we’ve been able to determine. Your birth record survives. No death record. But things became messy, as I understand Netherton’s explained to you. Records, during the deeper jackpot, are incomplete to nonexistent, and more so in the United States. There was a military government there, briefly, that erased huge swathes of data, seemingly at random, no one seems to know why. If you were alive today, you’d be about my age, and that would mean either that you were wealthy or very well connected, which tend to be the same thing, here. Which should mean that I’d be able to have found you.”
“You don’t mind, that I know?”
“Not at all. Why would you think I might?”
“Because it’s a secret?”
“Not from you. Come, sit here.” She went to the tall, mossy-green armchairs, at the head of the table. She waited until Flynne was settled in one, then sat in the other. “I understand that Netherton is pleased with the cognitive bundle.”
“Glad somebody is.”
“And you’ve been shown the guns.”
“Why do I need them?”
“Only one,” she said. “The other’s either for Conner or your brother, depending. I hope none of you need them, but there’s a crudeness of mind behind this business. Best we have our own options for crude
ness.”
The tall windows were hidden behind green curtains. Flynne imagined a maze behind them, more green curtains, like the blue tarps in Coldiron. “What about President Gonzales? Griff says they killed her.”
“They did. It set the tone.”
“You’re going to change that?”
“That depends. It’s less like a conspiracy than a climate, at this point.”
“What does it depend on?”
“Daedra’s party, it seems.”
“How?”
“Coldiron and Matryoshka, as your people are calling it, are racing for ownership of your world. Competing tides of subsecond financial events. We are not winning. We are not losing, by that much, but we are not winning. Lev is employing a brilliant but makeshift apparatus on Coldiron’s behalf. Matryoshka, which exists in order to kill you, and for no other reason, appears to be employing some more powerful state financial apparatus, here. I need to stop that, in order to enable Coldiron’s dominance, which may then enable the prevention of Gonzales’s assassination. But the politics here are such that I’m unable to do that without first having proof, or some reasonable facsimile thereof, of who murdered Aelita. I can’t begin to explain how power works, here, but someone powerful must have an interest in Matryoshka. Invariably, they will have stepped on someone else’s toes, or stand to. I can leverage that, offer that other party a fulcrum with which to crush them. But in order for any of that to happen, you and Netherton must succeed at Daedra’s event.”
Flynne looked at the cut glass and silver on the sideboard. She looked at Lowbeer. “It all hangs on me identifying the asshole on that balcony?”
“Yes.”
“That’s fucked.”
“It is that, yes. But here we are. Should you recognize him, you’ll alert me, and things will be set in motion.”
“What if I don’t? Can’t?”
“Best not dwell on that. But if you do succeed, we face another level of difficulty, in that Daedra’s gathering operates under a protocol that strictly bans the use of personal communication devices. As peripherals, telepresent devices, you and Mr. Penske become exceptions of a sort, but you’ll be very tightly monitored. So it then becomes a question of how, should you identify our murderer, you will then communicate that to me.”