Mona Lisa Overdrive

26 - Kuromaku

And Sally was silent, on the street and in the cab, all the long cold way back to their hotel.

Sally and Swain were being blackmailed by Sally's enemy "up the well." Sally was being forced to kidnap Angie Mitchell. The thought of someone's abducting the Sense/Net star struck Kumiko as singularly unreal, as if someone were plotting to assassinate a figure out of myth.

The Finn had implied that Angie herself was already involved, in some mysterious way, but he had used words and idioms Kumiko hadn't understood. Something in cyberspace; people forming pacts with a thing or things there. The Finn had known a boy who became Angie's lover; but wasn't Robin Lanier her lover? Kumiko's mother had allowed her to run several of the Angie and Robin stims. The boy had been a cowboy, a data thief, like Tick in London ...

And what of the enemy, the blackmailer? She was mad, Finn said, and her madness had brought about the decline of her family's fortunes. She lived alone, in her ancestral home, the house called Straylight. What had Sally done to earn her enmity? Had she really killed this woman's father? And who were the others, the others ...

And had Sally learned what she'd wanted to learn, in visiting the Finn? Kumiko had waited, finally, for some pronouncement from the armored shrine, but the exchange had wound down to nothing, to a gaijin ritual of joking good-byes.

In the hotel lobby, Petal was waiting in a blue velour armchair. Dressed for travel, his bulk encased in three-piece gray wool, he rose from the chair like some strange balloon as they entered, eyes mild as ever behind steel-rimmed glasses.

"Hello," he said, and coughed. "Swain's sent me after you. Only to mind the girl, you see."

"Take her back," Sally said. "Now. Tonight."

"Sally! No!" But Sally's hand was already locked firmly around Kumiko's upper arm, pulling her toward the entrance to the darkened lounge off the lobby.

"Wait there," Sally snapped at Petal. "Listen to me," she said, tugging Kumiko around a corner, into shadow. "You're going back. I can't keep you here now."

"But I don't like it there. I don't like Swain, or his house ... I ... "

"Petal's okay," Sally said, leaning close and speaking quickly. "In a pinch, I'd say trust him. Swain, well, you know what Swain is, but he's your father's. Whatever comes down, I think they'll keep you out of the way. But if it gets bad, really bad, go to the pub where we met Tick. The Rose and Crown. Remember?"

Kumiko nodded, her eyes filling with tears.

"If Tick's not there, find a barman named Bevan and mention my name."

"Sally, I ... "

"You're okay," Sally said, and kissed her abruptly, one of her lenses brushing for an instant against Kumiko's cheekbone, startlingly cold and unyielding. "Me, baby, I'm gone."

And she was, into the muted tinkle of the lounge, and Petal cleared his throat in the entranceway.

The flight back to London was like a very long subway ride. Petal passed the time inscribing words, a letter at a time, in some idiotic puzzle in an English fax, grunting softly to himself. Eventually she slept, and dreamed of her mother ...

"Heater's working," Petal said, driving back to Swain's from Heathrow. It was uncomfortably warm in the Jaguar, a dry heat that smelled of leather and made her sinuses ache. She ignored him, staring out at the wan morning light, at roofs shining black through melting snow, rows of chimneypots ...

"He's not angry with you, you know," Petal said. "He feels a special responsibility ... "

"Giri."

"Er ... yes. Responsible, you see. Sally's never been what you'd call predictable, really, but we didn't expect -- "

"I don't wish to talk, thank you."

His small worried eyes in the mirror.

The crescent was lined with parked cars, long silver-gray cars with tinted windows.

"Seeing a lot of visitors this week," Petal said, parking opposite number 17. He got out, opened the door for her. She followed him numbly across the street and up the gray steps, where the black door was opened by a squat, red-faced man in a tight dark suit, Petal brushing past him as though he weren't there.

"Hold on," red-face said. "Swain'll see her now ... "

The man's words brought Petal up short; with a grunt, he spun around with disconcerting speed and caught the man by his lapel.

"In future show some fucking respect," Petal said, and though he hadn't raised his voice, somehow all of its weary gentleness was gone. Kumiko heard stitches pop.

"Sorry, guv." The red face was carefully blank. "He told me to tell you."

"Come along then," Petal said to her, releasing his grip on the dark worsted lapel. "He'll just want to say hello."

They found Swain seated at a three-meter oak refectory table in the room where she'd first seen him, the dragons of rank buttoned away behind white broadcloth and a striped silk tie. His eyes met hers as she entered, his long-boned face shadowed by a green-shaded brass reading lamp that stood beside a small console and a thick sheaf of fax on the table. "Good," he said, "and how was the Sprawl?"

"I'm very tired, Mr. Swain. I wish to go to my room."

"We're glad to have you back, Kumiko. The Sprawl's a dangerous place. Sally's friends there probably aren't the sort of people your father would want you to associate with."

"May I go to my room now?"

"Did you meet any of Sally's friends, Kumiko?"

"No."

"Really? What did you do?"

"Nothing."

"You mustn't be angry with us, Kumiko. We're protecting you."

"Thank you. May I go to my room now?"

"Of course. You must be very tired."

Petal followed her from the room, carrying her bag, his gray suit creased and wrinkled from the flight. She was careful not to glance up as they passed beneath the blank gaze of the marble bust where the Maas-Neotek unit might still be hidden, though with Swain and Petal in the room she could think of no way to retrieve it.

There was a new sense of movement in the house, brisk and muted: voices, footsteps, the rattle of the lift, the chattering of pipes as someone drew a bath.

She sat at the foot of the huge bed, staring at the black marble tub. Residual images of New York seemed to hover at the borders of her vision; if she closed her eyes, she found herself back in the alley, squatting beside Sally. Sally, who'd sent her away. Who hadn't looked back. Sally, whose name had once been Molly, or Misty, or both. Again, her unworthiness. Sumida, her mother adrift in black water. Her father. Sally.

Moments later, driven by a curiosity that pushed aside her shame, she rose from where she lay, brushed her hair, zipped her feet into thin black rubber toe-socks with ridged plastic soles, and went very quietly out into the corridor. When the lift arrived, it stank of cigarette smoke.

Red-face was pacing the blue-carpeted foyer when she emerged from the lift, his hands in the pockets of his tight black jacket. " 'Ere," he said, raising his eyebrows, "you need something?"

"I'm hungry," she said, in Japanese. "I'm going to the kitchen."

" 'Ere," he said, removing his hands from his pockets and straightening the front of his jacket, "you speak English?"

"No," she said, and walked straight past him down the corridor and around the corner. " 'Ere," she heard him say, rather more urgently, but she was already groping behind the white bust.

She managed to slip the unit into her pocket as he rounded the corner. He surveyed the room automatically, hands held loosely at his sides, in a way that suddenly reminded her of her father's secretaries.

"I'm hungry," she said, in English.

Five minutes later, she'd returned to her room with a large and very British-looking orange; the English seemed to place no special value on the symmetry of fruit. Closing the door behind her, she put the orange on the wide flat rim of the black tub and took the Maas-Neotek unit from her pocket.

"Quickly now," Colin said, tossing his forelock as he came into focus, "open it and reset the A/B throw to A. The new regime has a technician making the rounds, scanning for bugs. Once you've changed that setting, it shouldn't read as a listening device." She did as he said, using a hairpin.

"What do you mean," she asked, mouthing the words without voicing them, "'the new regime'?"

"Haven't you noticed? There are at least a dozen staff now, not to mention numerous visitors. Well, I suppose it's less a new regime than an upgrading of procedure. Your Mr. Swain is quite a social man, in his covert way. You've one conversation there, Swain and the deputy head of Special Branch, that I imagine numerous people would kill for, not least of them the aforementioned official."

"Special Branch?"

"The secret police. Bloody odd company he keeps, Swain: Buck House types, czars from the East End rookeries, senior police officers ... "

"Buck House?"

"The Palace. Not to mention merchant bankers from the City, a simstim star, a drove or two of expensive panders and drug merchants ... "

"A simstim star?"

"Lanier, Robin Lanier."

"Robin Lanier? He was here?"

"Morning after your precipitous departure."

She looked into Colin's transparent green eyes. "Are you telling me the truth?"

"Yes."

"Do you always?"

"To the extent that I know it, yes."

"What are you?"

"A Maas-Neotek biochip personality-base programmed to aid and advise the Japanese visitor in the United Kingdom." He winked at her.

"Why did you wink?"

"Why d'you think?"

"Answer the question!" Her voice loud in the mirrored room.

The ghost touched his lips with a slim forefinger. "I'm something else as well, yes. I do display a bit too much initiative for a mere guide program. Though the model I'm based on is top of the line, extremely sophisticated. I can't tell you exactly what I am, though, because I don't know."

"You don't know?" Again subvocally, carefully.

"I know all sorts of things," he said, and went to one of the dormer windows. "I know that a serving table in Middle Temple Hall is said to be made from the timbers of the Golden Hind; that you climb one hundred and twenty-eight steps to the walkways of Tower Bridge; that in Wood Street, right of Cheapside, is a plane tree thought to have been the one in which Wordsworth's thrush sang loud ... " He spun suddenly to face her. "It isn't, though, because the current tree was cloned from the original in 1998. I know all that, you see, and more, a very great deal more. I could, for instance, teach you the rudiments of snooker. That is what I am, or rather what I was intended to be, originally. But I'm something else as well, and very likely something to do with you. I don't know what. I really don't."

"You were a gift from my father. Do you communicate with him?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"You didn't inform him of my departure?"

"You don't understand," he said. "I wasn't aware of your having been away, until you activated me a moment ago."

"But you've been recording ... "

"Yes, but not aware of it. I'm only 'here' when you activate me. Then I evaluate the current data ... One thing you can be fairly certain of, though, is that it simply isn't possible to broadcast any sort of signal from this house without Swain's snoops detecting it immediately."

"Could there be more of you, I mean another one, in the same unit?"

"Interesting idea, but no, barring some harrowing secret breakthrough in technology. I'm pushing the current envelope a bit as it is, considering the size of my hardware. I know that from my store of general background information."

She looked down at the unit in her hand. "Lanier," she said. "Tell me."

"Ten/twenty-five/sixteen: A.M.," he said. Her head filled with disembodied voices ...

PETAL: If you'll follow me please, sir ...

SWAIN: Come into the billiard room.

THIRD VOICE: You'd better have a reason for this, Swain. There are three Net men waiting in the car. Security will have your address in their database until hell freezes over.

PETAL: Lovely car that is, sir, the Daimler. Take your coat?

THIRD VOICE: What is it, Swain? Why couldn't we meet at Brown's?

SWAIN: Take your coat off, Robin. She's gone.

THIRD VOICE: Gone?

SWAIN: To the Sprawl. Early this morning.

THIRD VOICE: But it isn't time ...

SWAIN: You think I sent her there?

The man's reply was hollow, indistinct, lost behind a closing door. "That was Lanier?" Kumiko asked silently.

"Yes," Colin replied. "Petal mentioned him by name in an earlier conversation. Swain and Lanier spent twenty-five minutes together."

Sound of a latch, movement.

SWAIN: Bloody cock-up, not mine. I warned you about her, told you to warn them. Born killer, probably psychopathic ...

LANIER: And your problem, not mine. You need their product and my cooperation.

SWAIN: And what's your problem, Lanier? Why are you in this? Just to get Mitchell out of the way?

LANIER: Where's my coat?

SWAIN: Petal, Mr. Lanier's bloody coat.

PETAL: Sir.

LANIER: I have the impression they want your razorgirl as badly as they want Angie. She's definitely part of the payoff. They'll be taking her, too.

SWAIN: Good luck to them, then. She's already in position, in the Sprawl. Spoke with her on the phone an hour ago. I'll be putting her together with my man over there, the one who's been arranging for the ... girl. And you'll be going back over yourself?

LANIER: This evening.

SWAIN: Well, then, not to worry.

LANIER: Goodbye, Swain.

PETAL: He's a right bastard, that one.

SWAIN: I don't like this, really ...

PETAL: You like the goods though, don't you?

SWAIN: Can't complain there, but why d'you think they want Sally as well?

PETAL: Christ knows. They're welcome to her ...

SWAIN: They. I don't like'theys' ...

PETAL: They mightn't be terribly happy to know she'd gone there on her own stick, with Yanaka's daughter ...

SWAIN: No. But we have Miss Yanaka back again. Tomorrow I'll tell Sally that Prior's in Baltimore, getting the girl into shape ...

PETAL: That's an ugly business, that is ...

SWAIN: Bring a pot of coffee to the study.

She lay on her back, eyes closed, Colin's recordings unspooling in her head, direct input to the auditory nerves. Swain seemed to conduct the better part of his dealings in the billiard room, which meant that she heard people arriving and departing, heads and tails of conversations. Two men, one of whom might have been the red-faced man, held an interminable discussion of dog racing and tomorrow's odds. She listened with special interest as Swain and the man from Special Branch (SB, Swain called it) settled an article of business directly beneath the marble bust, as the man was preparing to leave. She interrupted this segment half-a-dozen times to request clarification. Colin made educated guesses.

"This is a very corrupt country," she said at last, deeply shocked.

"Perhaps no more than your own," he said.

"But what is Swain paying these people with?"

"Information. I would say that our Mr. Swain has recently come into possession of a very high-grade source of intelligence and is busy converting it into power. On the basis of what we've heard, I'd hazard that this has probably been his line of work for some time. What's apparent, though, is that he's moving up, getting bigger. There's internal evidence that he's currently a much more important man than he was a week ago. Also, we have the fact of the expanded staff ... "

"I must tell ... my friend."

"Shears? Tell her what?"

"What Lanier said. That she would be taken, along with Angela Mitchell."

"Where is she, then?"

"The Sprawl. A hotel ... "

"Phone her. But not from here. D'you have money?"

"A Mitsubank chip."

"No good in our phones, sorry. Have any coin?"

She got up from the bed and sorted carefully through the odd bits of English money that had accumulated at the bottom of her purse. "Here," she said, coming up with a thick gilt coin, "ten pounds."

"Need two of those to make a local call." She tossed the brassy tenner back into her purse. "No, Colin. Not the phone. I know a better way. I want to leave here. Now. Today. Will you help me?"

"Certainly," he said, "though I advise you not to."

"But I will."

"Very well. How do you propose to go about it?"

"I'll tell them," she said, "that I need to go shopping."