Pattern Recognition

20. UBER-BONES

Her watch wakes her, chirping mercilessly. She sits up in the huge bed, uncertain where she is.

Six in the morning. Pamela Mainwaring has her on a flight out of Narita just after noon.

She makes sure the red light is on, on the oversized kettle-analog, wraps herself in last night's white robe, goes to the window, powers open the drapes, and dimly discovers Tokyo at the bottom of an aquarium of rainy light. Gust-driven moisture shotguns the glass. The lavish lichen of the wooded palace grounds tosses darkly.

Her cell rings. She goes back to the bed, roots through the covers, finding it.

“Hello?”

“Boone. How's your head?”

“Tired. I called Pamela…”

“I know. So did I. I'll meet you in the lobby at eight-thirty. JR reservations for both of us.”

Something about a lack of autonomy here that bothers her.

“See you,” he says.

The water reaching boil as she's rummaging through the snacks atop the minibar, looking for a shrink-wrapped filter-coffee unit.

THE hotel's fitness center, a room so large that it seems designed primarily to illustrate interior perspective, has its own Pilates reformer, a faux-classical Japanese interpretation in black-lacquered wood, upholstered with something that looks like sharkskin. She's able to get in her workout, then shower and wash her hair, pack, and make the lobby by eight-thirty.

Boone arrives minutes later, in his black horsehide coat, carrying his small leather suitcase and one of those Filson outfitter bags that look like L.L. Bean on steroids.

She picks up her own black generic Korean nylon and they walk out, past the bamboo grove and into the elevator.

SHE wakes to the offer of a hot washcloth. For an instant believes she's still on her way to Tokyo, and that it's all been a dream.

This is terrifying, and she hurts her neck, so quickly does she crane around, to find that Boone Chu is in fact in the nearest seat-nest, in full recline and apparently asleep, looking as strangely canceled as anyone does when wearing a black blindfold.

They hadn't had much to say to each other, on the train to Narita. She'd slept in the lounge, after security measures including a sort of CAT scan for their shoes and answering questions in front of an infrared device that registered minute changes in the temperature of the skin around the eyes, the theory being that lying about having packed one's own bag induced a sort of invisible and inevitable micro-blush. Though the Japanese also believe that personality is determined by blood type, or had when she was last here. Boone had been impressed, though, and had told her to expect the blush machines soon in America.

She'd told him, as they were boarding, that she'd gotten something more from Taki, via Parkaboy, but that she was too tired to explain it, that she'd show it to him when she'd had more sleep.

What is that about, she wonders, that holding back? Something to do with the newness of their working relationship, but also, she knows, something to do with something she'd felt in that apartment. She doesn't want to look at that too closely. But also she wants time to get her head around this idea of the T-bone city. And there's a way in which she simply finds him pushy.

But there's the T-bone to try to figure out, she thinks, powering her bed up into lounger mode and hauling the bag with her iBook up from the floor. She boots up, finds Parkaboy's jpeg, and opens it.

If anything, it's even more enigmatic than when she first saw it.

Taki. Is there any chance that he's just making this all up to impress Keiko? But Parkaboy and Darryl had found him on a Japanese website, where he'd already made some mention of something encrypted in a segment of the footage. They hadn't invented Keiko yet. No, she knows that Taki is for real. Taki is too sad not to be real. She imagines him going to someone, while Keiko emerged more clearly for him through her messages, and somehow, perhaps at some strange cost, obtaining this image, extracted from that white flare.

But in his shyness, his caution, he hadn't brought it to their meeting. He'd brought only the one number. Then the Photoshopped version of Judy Tsuzuki had impacted, and he'd gone home and sent this to Parkaboy, thinking he was sending it to his big-eyed, Clydesdale-ankled love.

She thinks of Ivy, in Seoul, F:F:F's founder. What would Ivy make of this?

She frowns, seeing for the first time how working for Bigend, with Boone Chu, has skewed her relationship to F:F:F and the footagehead community. Even Parkaboy, who's been instrumental in all of this, doesn't know what she's up to, who she's working for.

“What is it?” Boone, looming beside her in the twilit aisle, his black T-shirt and the blindfold slung beneath his chin offering the odd suggestion of a priest's collar. A single one-inch square of white paper and he'd have a costume: the young priest, eyes somewhat swollen with sleep.

She elevates to chair and he joins her, crouching on the little visitor seat at the unit's foot. She passes him her iBook. “Taki really liked the photograph. He couldn't wait to get home. Had to keep stopping in cafés to e-mail her. When he did get home, he sent her this.”

“Are there a hundred and thirty-five of these?” Indicating the numbers.

“I haven't counted them myself, but yes. The one that matches the number Taki gave me is near the bottom of the T.”

“It looks as though each location corresponds to a segment of footage. Not the way you'd map a virtual world, though. Not if mapping virtual worlds was ordinarily your business.”

“What if it weren't?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if you were just making something up as you went along? Why should we assume that the maker knows what he's doing?”

“Or we could assume that he does, but he's just doing it his own way. The people who designed all the early Nintendo games drew them on long rolls of paper. There was no better way to do it, and you could unroll the whole thing and see exactly how it would move. The geography of the game was two-D, scrolling past on the screen …” He falls silent, frowning.

“What?”

He shakes his head. “I need more sleep.” He stands up, passing her the iBook, and returns to his seat.

She stares blankly at the jpeg, the iBook slightly warm atop her thighs, and wonders exactly what she should do when they get to Heathrow. She has the new keys to Damien's place in her Stasi envelope, in the Luggage Label bag. That's where she feels like going, really, though the residual ache in her forehead is causing her some doubt.

Would someone have been able to fiddle the locks in the meantime? She has only a very fuzzy idea of who might live in the other two flats, but whoever they are, they seem to go out to work on a regular basis. A burglar might be able to get in, then, during the day, and do whatever it took to open the apartment.

But her only other option is a London hotel, and, even with Blue Ant footing the bill, she's feeling hoteled out. She'll go to Camden, then. Heathrow Express to Paddington, then a cab. Decision out of the way, she closes Taki's jpeg, puts the iBook away, and returns to bed-mode.

WHEN they exit immigration, Bigend is waiting, the only smiling face in a scrum of glum chauffeurs holding hand-lettered sheets of cardboard. Bigend's says “POLLARD & CHU” in coarse-tipped red felt pen.

He really does seem to have too many teeth. His Stetson is set too squarely on his head and he's wearing the raincoat she'd last seen him in.

“Right this way, please.” He makes a point of taking over the luggage trolley from Boone, and they follow him out, throwing glances at each other, past the cab queue and the recent arrivals coughing gratefully over first cigarettes. She sees his Hummer parked where she's certain no one at all is allowed to park, ever, and watches as he and Boone open the square doors at the rear and load the bags.

Bigend holds the passenger-side door for her as she climbs in. Boone gets the seat behind her.

She watches Bigend fold his enormous plastic parking permission.

“You didn't need to pick us up, Hubertus,” she says, because she feels the need to say something, and because it seems so abundantly the truth.

“Not at all,” says Bigend, ambiguously, pulling away from the curb. “I want to hear all about it.”

Which he does, mainly via Boone, but, Cayce gradually notes, with two serious omissions. Boone never mentions the head-butting or Taki's jpeg. He tells Bigend that they went to Tokyo to follow up a lead suggesting that at least one segment of the footage has an encrypted watermark.

“And does it?” Bigend asks, driving.

“It may,” Boone says. “We have a twelve-digit code that may have been extracted from a specific segment of footage.”

“And?”

“Cayce was followed, in Tokyo.”

“By whom?”

“Two men, possibly Italian.”

“Possibly?”

“I overheard them speaking Italian.”

“Who were they?”

“We don't know.”

Cayce sees Bigend purse his lips. “Do you have any idea,” he asks her, briefly making eye contact, “why you would be followed? Unfinished business elsewhere? Something unrelated?”

“We were hoping you might be able to answer that one, Hubertus,” Boone says.

“You think I had Cayce followed, Boone?”

“I might myself, Hubertus, if I were in your position.”

“You might well,” says Bigend, “but you aren't me. I don't work that way, not in a partnership.” They're on the evening motorway now, and raindrops suddenly strike the vertical windshield, causing Cayce to imagine that the weather has followed them from Tokyo. Bigend turns on the wipers, spatular things that swing from the top of the glass rather than the bottom. She watches as he touches a button, fractionally reduces air pressure in the tires. “However,” he says, “as I'm sure you understand, partnership with me makes you more likely to be followed. This is an aspect of the downside of a high profile.”

“But who would know that we're your partners?” Cayce asks.

“Blue Ant is an advertising agency, not the CIA. People talk. Even the ones who've been hired not to. Secrecy, when we're planning a campaign, for instance, can be of the utmost importance. But still things leak. I'll look at that, at exactly who would have reason to believe the two of you are working for me, but now I'm more curious about these putative Italians.”

“We lost them,” Boone says. “Cayce had just received the code from her contact, and I thought it was the right time to get her out of there. When I had a look for them, later, they were gone.”

“And this contact?”

“Someone I turned up through the footagehead network,” Cayce says. “Exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for.”

“We doubt he has anything further to offer us,” Boone says, causing Cayce to glance back at him, “but if this watermark is genuine, it may be a good start.”

Cayce looks straight ahead, forcing herself to concentrate on the arcing of the wipers. Boone is lying to Bigend, or withholding information, and now she feels that she is too. She briefly considers bringing up Dorotea and Asian Sluts at this point, just to send things in a direction Boone isn't expecting, but she has no idea of his agenda in lying. He may be doing it for a reason she'd approve of. The next time they're alone together, she needs to have this out with him.

She blinks, as they abruptly leave the motorway, entering London's maze. Streetlights coming on.

After Tokyo, everything here feels so differently scaled. A different gauge of model railroad. Though if asked, she'd have to admit that the two do have something mysteriously in common. Perhaps if London had been built, until the war, primarily of wood and paper, and then had burned, the way Tokyo had burned, and then been rebuilt, the mystery she's always sensed in these streets would remain somehow, coded in steel and concrete.

To her considerable embarrassment, and confusion, they have to wake her when the Hummer pulls up outside of Damien's.

Boone carries her bag to the door. “I'll go in with you.”

“It isn't necessary,” she says. “I'm tired. I'll be fine.”

“Call me.” On the plane, approaching Heathrow, he'd tapped his various cell numbers into her phone. “Let me know you're okay.”

“I will,” she says, feeling like an idiot. She unlocks the front door, manages a smile, and goes in.

On the landing, she sees that the bundles of magazines have been removed, and with them the black bin liner.

She's up the last flight and almost to Damien's door, the second German key in hand, before she realizes that light is showing, from the crack at the foot of his door.

She stands there, the key in one hand, her bag in the other, hearing voices. One is Damien's.

She knocks.

A young woman, taller than she is, opens the door. Enormous cornflower-blue eyes, tilted slightly above extraordinary cheekbones, regard her coldly. “Yes? What do you want?” the blonde asks, with what Cayce assumes is a stage accent, some aspect of a joke, but as this woman's mouth, with its perfectly outlined, extravagantly full underlip, sets itself in grim distaste, she realizes that it isn't.

Damien, stubble-headed after a recent shaving and for an instant quite unrecognizable, appears behind uber-bones and playfully squeezes her shoulders, grinning over one at Cayce.

“It's Cayce, Marina. My friend. Where on earth have you been then, Cayce?”

“Tokyo. I didn't know you were back. I'll go to a hotel.”

But Damien will have none of that.