Mona Lisa Overdrive

30 - The Rip

The airport sucked a groggy Danielle Stark away down a pastel corridor lined with reporters, cameras, augmented eyes, while Porphyre and three Net security men swept Angie through the closing ring of journalists, a choreographed piece of ritual that had more to do with providing dramatic visuals than protection. Anyone present had already been cleared by security and the PR department.

Then she was alone with Porphyre in an express elevator, on their way to the heliport the Net maintained on the terminal's roof.

As the doors opened, into gusts of wet wind across brilliantly lit concrete, where a new trio of security men waited in giant fluorescent-orange parkas, Angie remembered her first glimpse of the Sprawl, when she'd ridden the train up from Washington with Turner.

One of the orange parkas ushered them across an expanse of spotless concrete to the waiting helicopter, a large twin-prop Fokker finished in black chrome. Porphyre led the way up the spidery, matte-black stairway. She followed without looking back.

She had something now, a new determination. She'd decided to contact Hans Becker through his agent in Paris. Continuity had the number. It was time, time to make something happen. And she'd make something happen with Robin as well; he'd be waiting now, she knew, at the hotel.

The helicopter told them to fasten their seatbelts.

As they lifted off, there was virtual silence in the soundproofed cabin, only a throbbing in the bones, and for a strange second she seemed able to hold the whole of her life in mind and know it, see it for what it had been. And it was this, she thought, that the dust had drifted over and concealed, and that had been freedom from pain.

And the site of the soul 's departure, said an iron voice, out of candleglow and the roar of the hive ...

"Missy?" Porphyre from the seat beside her, leaning close ...

"I'm dreaming ... "

Something had been waiting for her, years ago, in the Net. Nothing like the loa, like Legba or the others, though Legba, she knew, was Lord of the Crossroads; he was synthesis, the cardinal point of magic, communication ...

"Porphyre," she asked, "why did Bobby leave?" She looked out at the Sprawl's tangled grid of light, at the domes picked out in red beacons, seeing instead the datascape that had drawn him, always, back to what he'd believed was the only game worth playing.

"If you don't know, missy," Porphyre said, "who does?"

"But you hear things. Everything. All the rumors. You always have ... "

"Why ask me now?"

"It's time ... "

"I remember talk, understand? How people who aren't famous talk about those who are. Maybe someone who claimed they knew Bobby talked to someone else, and it came around ... Bobby was worth talking about because he was with you, understand? That's a good place to start, missy, because he wouldn't have found that so very gratifying, would he? Story was, he'd set out hustling on his own, but he'd found you instead, and you rolled higher and faster than anything he could've dreamed of. Took him up there, understand? Where the kind of money he'd never even dreamed of, back in Barrytown, was just change ... "

Angie nodded, looking out over the Sprawl.

"Talk was he had his own ambitions, missy. Something driving him. Drove him off, finally ... "

"I didn't think he'd leave me," she said. "When I first came to the Sprawl, it was like being born. A new life. And he was there, right there, the very first night. Later, when Legba -- when I was with the Net ... "

"When you were becoming Angie."

"Yes. And as much of me as that took, I knew he'd be there. And also that he'd never buy it, entirely, and I needed that, how it was still just a scam, to him, the whole business ... "

"The Net?"

"Angie Mitchell. He knew the difference between it and me."

"Did he?"

"Maybe he was the difference." So high above the lines of light ...

The old New Suzuki Envoy had been Angie's favorite Sprawl hotel since her earliest days with the Net.

It maintained its street wall for eleven stories, then narrowed jaggedly, at the first of nine setbacks, into a mountainside assembled from bedrock excavated from its Madison Square building site. Original plans had called for this steep landscape to be planted with flora native to the Hudson Valley region, and populated with suitable fauna, but subsequent construction of the first Manhattan Dome had made it necessary to hire a Paris-based eco-design team. The French ecologists, accustomed to the "pure" design problems posed by orbital systems, had despaired of the Sprawl's particulate-laden atmosphere, opting for heavily engineered strains of vegetation and robotic fauna of the sort encountered in children's theme parks, but Angie's continued patronage had eventually lent the place a cachet it would otherwise have lacked. The Net leased the five topmost floors, where her permanent suite had been installed, and the Envoy had come to enjoy a certain belated reputation with artists and entertainers.

Now she smiled as the helicopter rose past a disinterested robot bighorn pretending to munch lichen beside the illuminated waterfall. The absurdity of the place always delighted her; even Bobby had enjoyed it.

She glanced out at the Envoy's heliport, where the Sense/Net logo had been freshly repainted on heated, floodlit concrete. A lone figure, hooded in a bright orange parka, waited beside a sculpted outcropping of rock.

"Robin will be here, won't he, Porphyre?"

"Mistah Lanier," he said sourly.

She sighed.

The black chrome Fokker brought them smoothly down, glasses tinkling gently in the drinks' cabinet as the landing gear met the roof of the Envoy. The muted throb of the engines died.

"Where Robin is concerned, Porphyre, I'll have to make the first move. I'm going to speak with him tonight. Alone. In the meantime, I want you to stay out of his way."

"Porphyre's pleasure, missy," the hairdresser said, as the cabin door opened behind them. And then he was twisting, clawing at the buckle of his seatbelt, and Angie turned in time to see the bright orange parka in the hatchway, the upraised arm, the mirrored glasses. The gun made no more sound than a cigarette lighter, but Porphyre convulsed, one long black hand slapping at his throat as the security man swung the hatch shut behind him and sprang at Angie.

Something was clapped hard against her stomach as Porphyre lolled back bonelessly in his seat, the sharp pink tip of his tongue protruding. She looked down, in pure reflex, and saw the black chrome buckle of her seatbelt through a sticky-looking lozenge of greenish plastic.

She looked up into a white oval face framed by a tightly drawn orange nylon hood. Saw her own face blank with shock, doubled in the silver lenses. "He drink, tonight?"

"What?"

"Him." A thumb jerked in Porphyre's direction. "He drink any alcohol?"

"Yes ... Earlier."

"Shit." A woman's voice, as she turned to the unconscious hairdresser. "Now I've sedated him. Don't wanna suppress his breathing reflex, y'know?" Angie watched as the woman checked Porphyre's pulse. "Guess he's okay ... " Did she shrug, inside the orange parka?

"Security?"

"What?" The glasses flashed.

"Are you Net security?"

"Fuck no, I'm abducting you."

"You are?"

"You bet."

"Why?"

"Not for any of the usual reasons. Somebody's got it in for you. Got it in for me too. I was supposed to set it up to grab you next week. Fuck 'em. Had to talk to you, anyway." "You did? Talk to me?"

"Know anybody name of 3Jane?"

"No. I mean, yes, but -- "

"Save it. Our asses outa here, fast."

"Porphyre -- "

"He's gonna wake up soon. Look of him, I don't wanna be around when he does ... "