Agency

17 MiG

What did you just do?” Virgil asked, at the foot of the stairs to Caitlin’s tree-fort trailer. “Our team’s gone into crisis mode, but Stets just wants me to get you out of here. Haven’t been briefed yet on what’s happened.” He was holding what appeared to be a large hooded onesie, dingily white.

“Something about Singapore,” Verity said, “but it doesn’t have that much to do with getting me out.”

He stared at her. “Singapore.” Not a question.

“What’s this?” she asked, looking at the grubby white garment.

“Silicosis suit,” he said. He was wearing a safety vest and a fluorescent pink construction helmet. The suit he held seemed made of some cousin of Tyvek, with elasticized bootees of the same material. “Keeps the dust out. Put it on. I’ll help you.”

“Dust?”

“Marble dust. Truck’s in the garage. We use it to haul the stuff to a salvage yard in San Jose. Media know the truck, know the yard. So they’ll expect it to go there. Instead, we pull into a brake and muffler near here, on Eleventh, like we’ve got a problem. Back partially into one of the bays. Guys check under our front end while I let you out the back, out of sight. Get you out of the suit, and this,” handing her a goggled mask, muzzled with twin filtration units. “In the next bay, your PA has a vehicle waiting. You leave, immediately, and someone else drives to San Jose.”

The name PACO had been written across the mask’s forehead, with a silver paint pen, in faux-runic caps.

“Do I have to wear this?”

“Dust hazard’s real, but it also reduces the chance of you being recognized. Any hint you’re still involved with Stets would be Christmas for the tabloids. Want help with it?”

She managed by herself. It smelled, inside, of something synthetically fruity. He pulled up the suit’s white hood, cinching its edges down around the mask.

And then into the elevator, Eunice offering no thumbnails. “Butt-ugly,” Verity said, noticing the fleshy pink marble floor for the first time.

“We’ll replace it,” he said, behind her, “when the rest is out. The place was all like this.”

“Who owned it?” The door closed behind him and they began to descend.

“Stets bought it from a numbered corporation in the Bahamas. I thought he’d made a mistake, first time I walked in, but then they gave me a VR fly-through of Caitlin’s rebuild.”

A single thumbnail opened. Him again, the one she’d seen in the Fiat on Valencia, who’d then brought the pillow full of hundreds to Joe-Eddy’s. “Sevrin,” Eunice said. “Severin but minus the second e.” Seen now in what might be a passport photo, clinically unsmiling. Head almost shaven, with a tight little goatee she didn’t remember him having. “He’s in the muffler shop, to pick you up.” The elevator was slowing. The thumbnail blinked out.

“You’ll see the truck,” Virgil said. “Only vehicle there. Left rear door’s open, step up on the milk crate, step in, close it behind you. I’ll be with the crew who’re there, giving them something else to think about, then I’ll check that the rear door’s shut, drive us out.”

Drone I left with him is on top of the van. Other one’s back under your lapel.

She looked down, but with the suit on couldn’t see her lapels. The door slid open. She saw the rear of a tall white truck, one of its twin doors open. She stepped out, heading for it, Virgil to her right. Farther to her right, ahead, three men in vests and helmets were peering into a brightly lit opening in the white wall, within it what she first took to be the enlargement of a congested urban satellite view, then recognized as cable, conduit, components.

There was a red plastic box on the floor, below the truck’s open rear door. She stepped up on it, feeling elephantine in the white bootees, and closed the door behind her.

Darkness, instantly replaced by a weird green half-light.

“I’m processing us a shitty excuse for night vision,” Eunice said. “Sit on that pallet,” the cursor indicating where, “on the folded tarp.”

“Kid who had the money’s Latino? I couldn’t tell.”

“Moldovan. Goes on the street by Mig, for Miguel. His Spanish is so good they think he’s Colombian. Joke is, it’s”—*MiG*—“an illegal, pretending to be a less exotic flavor of illegal. Get on the pallet. Virgil’s ready to go.”

She heard the driver-side door thump shut, up beyond the windowless bulkhead, then the ignition. She stepped onto the wooden pallet and squatted, propping herself up, gloved hands behind her.

“This won’t shift around,” Eunice said, the cursor indicating strapped sheets of marble, sloping up and out on either side.

Virgil reversed, turning, then started up the ramp. Stopped. Sound of the white gate opening. Then up again, to Fremont.

“Check this,” Eunice said, opening a feed straight up, evidently from the microdrone on the roof.

Verity, remembering the view from the top of the park, Eunice tagging drones above the Financial District, thought she saw one now, above them. “Drone?”

“National Enquirer,” Eunice said. “Here’s their feed.”

A white rectangle, in SoMa traffic. The top of this truck, Verity guessed. “Nobody’s thought you might be you yet, but one of the hardhats flagged you as possible scandal material, going in. And they know Caitlin’s been in New York.”

“Hate ’em,” Verity said. Eunice replaced the _Enquirer_’s feed of the truck’s roof with their drone again, barely visible against cloud. Then the feed closed, leaving her in blurry green undarkness. “That guy, the Moldovan…”

“Sevrin,” Eunice said.

“You got him working for you between my turning you on, yesterday afternoon, and us going up in the park?”

“Yeah.”

“How’s that even possible?”

“Analyzed a shitload of darknet chat, about shifting amounts of cash in the Bay Area. Boy stood out. I got in touch, struck a deal, put him on retainer.”

“For part of the money?”

“That was just what we needed for one cash-only transaction. By the time I was in touch with him, I’d figured how to access serious money.”

“He’s a criminal?”

“Financial services,” Eunice said, “but on the street side.”

The truck stopped and reversed, turning. Virgil killed the engine. She heard men’s voices. Spanish.

“Get up,” Eunice said.

Verity did, clumsy in the silicosis suit. She heard Virgil open the driver-side door, then he was at the back, opening that, just as Eunice showed her a feed of three men in tan jumpsuits, from above, clustered around the van’s left front fender. A fourth brought a flat gray rectangle, lay down on it, then scooted under the front chassis.

“How are you?” Virgil asked.

“Okay.” She saw upright red toolboxes with drawers, behind him. Swung herself down.

He loosened the drawstring at the edge of the suit’s hood, drew the hood back. “Hold your breath,” he said, then unfastened the mask’s straps and removed it. “Okay to breathe.” She did, finding the odor of petroleum distillates surprisingly welcome. He unzipped the front of the suit, stepped behind her, and held the fabric at the shoulders, allowing her to shrug her way out. “I’m standing on the edges of the bootees,” he said. “Step forward and your shoes will come out.” She did.

“So. The Singapore deal fell through,” he said, behind her.

“Eunice’s advice.”

“Know why?”

“She had documents. All I know.”

The beige Fiat she’d seen on Valencia gleamed in the other bay, looking like it had just been washed and polished.

Virgil stepped from behind her, the suit draped over his left arm, mask in his right hand. “Good seeing you again.”

“You too, Virgil.”

“Take care of yourself.” He turned and walked toward the sunlight, the voices speaking Spanish.

Eunice’s Moldovan, Modigliani-thin, stepped from behind the Fiat. He did have the goatee, she saw, but it was so short as to barely be there. “Sevrin.”

“Verity,” he said. He opened the front passenger door for her, she got in, he closed it. “Head on knees, because they always have cameras. I fasten seatbelt behind you, silence alarm.”

She did, hearing the buckle click behind her.