Agency

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 themselves 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.”