Virtual Light

29. Dead mall

But he sort of had this feeling.

He got up and felt his way to the front. A little bit of light there, coming from under the door. He found the handle. Eased it open a crack.

“Hey there.” Gold at the edges of a smile. Square little automatic pointing at Rydell’s eye. He’d swung the passenger-side bucket around and tilted it back. Had his boots up on the middle seat. Had the dome-light turned down low.

“Where’s Mrs. Elliott?”

“Mrs. Elliott is gone.”

Rydell opened the door the rest of the way. “She work for you?”

“No” the man said. “She’s IntenSecure.”

“They put her on that plane to keep track of me?”

The man shrugged. Rydell noticed that the gun didn’t move at all when he did that. He was wearing surgical gloves, and that same long coat he’d had on when he’d gotten out of the Russians’ car, like an Australian duster made out of black micropore.

“How’d she know to pick us up by that tattoo parlor?”

“Warbaby had to be good for something. He had a couple of people on you for backup.”

“Didn’t see anybody” Rydell said.

“Weren’t supposed to.”

“Tell me something” Rydell said. “You the one did that Blix guy, up in the hotel?”

The man looked at him over the barrel of the gun. That small a bore, ordinarily, wouldn’t mean much damage, so Rydell figured the ammunition would be doctored some way. “I don’t see what it’s got to do with you” he said.

Rydell thought about it. “I saw a picture of it. You just don’t look that crazy.”

“It’s my job” he said.

Uh-huh, Rydell thought, just like running a french-fry computer. There was a fridge and sink on the right side of the door, so he knew he couldn’t move that way. If he went left, he figured the guy’d just stitch through the bulkhead, probably get the girl, too.

“Don’t even think about it.”

“About what?”

“The hero thing. The cop shit.” He took his feet off the center bucket. “Just do this. Slowly. Very. Get into the driver’s seat and put your hands on the wheel. Nine o’clock and two o’clock. Keep them there. If you don’t keep them there, I’ll shoot you behind your right ear. But you won’t hear it.” He had this kind of slow, even tone, reminded Rydell of a vet talking to a horse.

Rydell did like he was told. He couldn’t see anything outside. Just dark, and the reflections from the dome light. “Where are we?” he asked.

“You like malls, Rydell? You got malls back in Knoxville?” Rydell looked at him sideways.

“Eyes front, please.”

“Yeah, we got malls.”

“This one didn’t do so well.”

Rydell squeezed the foam padding on the wheel.

“Relax.”

Rydell heard him give the bulkhead a kick with the heel of one boot. “Miss Washington! Rise and shine, Miss Washington! Do us the favor of your presence.”

Rydell heard the double thump as she startled from sleep, tried to jump up, hit her head, fell off the bed. Then he saw her white face reflected in the windshield, there in the doorway. Saw her see the man, the gun.

Not the screaming kind. “You shot Sammy Sal” she said.

“You tried to electrocute me” the man said, like he could afford to see the humor in it now. “Come out here, turn around, and straddle the central console. Very slowly. That’s right. Now lean forward and brace your hands on the seat.”

She wound up next to Rydell, her legs on either side of the instrument console, facing backward. Like she was riding some cafe-racer.

Gave him about a two-inch difference of arc between shooting either one of them in the head.

“I want you to take your jacket off” he said to her, “so you’ll have to take your hands off the seat to do that. See if you can manage to keep at least one hand on the seat at all times. Take plenty of time.”

When she’d gotten it to where she could shrug it off her left shoulder, it fell over against the man’s legs.

“Are there any hypodermic needles in here” he said, “any blades, dangerous objects of any kind?”

“No” she said.

“How about electrical charges? You don’t have a great record for that.”

“Just the asshole’s glasses and a phone.”

“See, Rydell” he said, “the asshole. How he’ll be remembered. Nameless. Another nameless asshole…” He was going through the jacket’s pockets with his free hand. Came up with the case and the phone and put them on the RV’s deep, padded dash-panel. Rydell had his head turned now and was watching him, even though he’d been told not to. He watched the gloved hand open the case by feel, take out the black glasses. That was the only time those eyes left him, to check those glasses, and that took about a second.

“That’s them” Rydell said. “You got ’em now.”

The hand put them back in their case, closed it. “Yes.”

“Now what?”

The smile went away. When it did, it looked like he didn’t have any lips. Then it came back, wider and steeper.

“You think you could get me a Coke out of the fridge? All the windows, the door back there, are sealed.”

“You want a Coke?” Like she didn’t believe him. “You’re gonna shoot me. When I get up.”

“No” he said, “not necessarily. Because I want a Coke. My throat’s a little dry.”

She turned her head to look at Rydell, eyes big with fear.

“Get him his Coke” Rydell said.

She got off the console and edged through, into the back, there, but just by the door, where the fridge was.

“Look out the front” he reminded Rydell. Rydell saw the fridge-light come on, reflected there, caught a glimpse of her squatting down.

“D-diet or regular?” she said.

“Diet” he said, “please.”

“Classic or decaf?”

“Classic.” He made a little sound that Rydell thought might be a laugh.

“There’s no glasses.”

He made the sound again. “Can.”

“K-kinda messy” she said, “m-my hand’s shakin’—” Rydell looked sideways, saw him take the red can, some brown cola dripping off the side. “Thank you. You can take your pants off now.”

“What?”

“Those black ones you’re wearing. Just peel them down, slow. But I like the socks. Say we’ll keep the socks.”

Rydell caught the expression on her face, reflected in the black windshield, then saw how it went sort of blank. She bent, working the tight pants down.

“Now get back on the console. That’s right. Just like you were. Let me look at you. You want to look too, Rydell?”

Rydell turned, saw her squatting there, her bare legs smooth and muscular, dead white in the glow of the dome-light. The man took a long swallow of Coke, watching Rydell around the rim. He put the can down on the dash-panel and wiped his mouth with the back of his gloved hand. “Not bad, huh, Rydell?” with a nod toward Chevette Washington. “Some potential there, I’d say.”

Rydell looked at him.

“Is this bothering you, Rydell?”

Rydell didn’t answer.

The man made the sound that might’ve been a laugh. Drank some Coke. “You think I enjoyed having to mess that shitbag up the way I did, Rydell?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you think I did. I know you think I enjoyed it. And I did, I did enjoy it. But you know what the difference is?”

“The difference?”

“I didn’t have a hard on when I did it. That’s the difference.”

“Did you know him?”

“What?”

“I mean like was it personal, why you did that?”

“Oh, I guess you could say I knew him. I knew him. I knew him like you shouldn’t have to know anyone, Rydell. I knew everything he did. I’d go to sleep, nights, listening to the sound of him breathing. It got so I could judge how many he’d had, just by his breathing.”

“He’d had?”

“He drank. Serbian. You were a policeman, weren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Ever have to watch anybody, Rydell?”

“I never got that far.”

“It’s a funny thing, watching someone. Traveling with them. They don’t know you. They don’t know you’re there. Oh, they guess. They assume you’re there. But they don’t know who you are. Sometimes you catch them looking at someone, in the lobby of the hotel, say, and you know they think it’s you, the one who’s watching. But it never is. And as you watch them, Rydell, over a period of months, you start to love them.”

Rydell saw a shiver go through Chevette Washington’s tensed white thigh.

“But then, after a few more months, twenty flights, two dozen hotels, well, it starts to turn itself around..

“You don’t love them?”

“No. You don’t. You start to wait for them to fuck up, Rydell. You start to wait for them to betray the trust. Because a courier’s trust is a terrible thing. A terrible thing.”

“Courier?”

“Look at her, Rydell. She knows. Even if she’s just riding confidential papers around San Francisco, she’s a courier. She’s entrusted, Rydell. The data becomes a physical thing. She carries it. Don’t you carry it, baby?”

She was still as some sphinx, white fingers deep in the gray fabric of the center bucket.

“That’s what I do, Rydell. I watch them carry it. I watch them. Sometimes people try to take it from them.” He finished the Coke. “I kill those people. Actually that’s the best part of the job. Ever been to San Jose, Rydell?”

“Costa Rica?”

“That’s right.”

“Never have.”

“People know how to live, there.”

“You work for those data havens” Rydell said.

“I didn’t say that. Somebody else must’ve said that.”

“So did he” Rydell said. “He was carrying those glasses to somebody, up from Costa Rica, and she took ’em.”

“And I was glad she did. So glad. I was in the room next to his. I let myself in through the connecting door. I introduced myself. He met Loveless. First time. Last time.” The gun never wavered, but he began to scratch his head with his hand in the surgical glove. Scratch it like he had fleas or something.

“Loveless?”

“My nom. Nom de thing.” Then a long rattle of what Rydell took to be Spanish, but he only caught nombre de something. “Think she’s tight, Rydell? I like it tight, myself.”

“You American?”

His head sort of whipped sideways, a little, when Rydell said that, and his eyes unfocused for a second, but then they came back, clear as the chromed rim around the muzzle of his gun. “You know who started the havens, Rydell?”

“Cartels” Rydell said, “the Colombians.”

“That’s right. They brought the first expert systems into Central America, nineteen-eighties, to coordinate their shipping. Somebody had to go down there and install those systems. War on drugs, Rydell. Lot of Americans on either side, down there.”

“Well” Rydell said, “now we just make our own drugs up here, don’t we?”

“But they’ve got the havens, down there. They don’t even need that drug business. They’ve got what Switzerland used to have. They’ve got the one place in the world to keep what people can’t afford to keep anywhere else.”

“You look a little young to have helped put that together.”

“My father. You know your father, Rydell?”

“Sure.” Sort of, anyway.

“I never did. I had to have a lot of therapy, over that.”

Sure glad it worked, Rydell thought. “Warbaby, he work for the havens?”

A sweat had broken out on the man’s forehead. Now he wiped it with the back of the hand that held the gun, but Rydell saw the gun click back into position like it was held by a magnet.

“Turn on the headlights, Rydell. It’s okay. Left hand off the wheel.”

“Why?”

“Cause you’re dead if you don’t.”

“Well, why?”

“Just do it, okay?” Sweat running into his eyes.

Rydell took his left hand off the wheel, clicked the lights, double-clicked them to high beams. Two cones of light hit into a wall of dead shops, dead signs, dust on plastic. The one in front of the left beam said THE GAP.

“Why’d anybody ever call a store that?” Rydell said.

“Trying to fuck with my head, Rydell?”

“No” Rydell said, “it’s just a weird name. Like all those places look like gaps, now…”

“Warbaby’s just hired help, Rydell. IntenSecure brings him in when things get too sloppy. And they do, they always do.”

They were parked in a sort of plaza, in a mall, the stores all boarded or their windows whitewashed. Either underground or else it was roofed over. “So she stole the glasses out of a hotel had IntenSecure security, they brought in Warbaby?” Rydell looked at Chevette Washington. She looked like one of those chrome things on the nose of an antique car, except she was getting goosebumps down her thigh. Not exactly warm in here, which made Rydell think it might be underground after all.

“Know what, Rydell?”

“What?”

“You don’t know shit about shit. As much as I tell you, you’ll never understand the situation. It’s just too big for someone like you to understand. You don’t know how to think in those terms. IntenSecure belongs to the company that owns the information in those glasses.”

“Singapore” Rydell said. “Singapore own DatAmerica, too?”

“You can’t prove it, Rydell. Neither could Congress.”

“Look at those rats over there…”

“Fucking with my head…”

Rydell watched the last of the three rats vanish into the place that had been called The Gap. In through a loose vent or something. A gap. “Nope. Saw ’em.”

“Has it occurred to you that you wouldn’t be here right now if Lucius fucking Warbaby hadn’t taken up rollerblading last month?”

“How’s that?”

“He wrecked his knee. Warbaby wrecks his knee, can’t drive, you wind up here. Think about it. What does that tell you about late-stage capitalism?”

“Tell me about what?”

“Don’t they teach you anything in that police academy?”

“Sure” Rydell said, “lots of stuff.” Thinking: how to talk to crazy fuckers when you’re being held hostage, except he was having a hard time remembering what they’d said. Keep ’em talking and don’t argue too much, something like that. “How come the stuff in those glasses has everybody’s tail in a twist, anyway?”

“They’re going to rebuild San Francisco. From the ground up, basically. Like they’re doing to Tokyo. They’ll start by layering a grid of seventeen complexes into the existing infrastructure. Eighty-story office/residential, retail/residence in the base. Completely self-sufficient. Variable-pitch parabolic reflectors, steam-generators. New buildings, man; they’ll eat their own sewage.”

“Who’ll eat sewage?”

“The buildings. They’re going to grow them, Rydell. Like they’re doing now in Tokyo. Like the maglev tunnel.”

“Sunflower” Chevette Washington said, then looked like she regretted it.

“Somebody’s been look-ing…” Gold teeth flashing.

“Uh, hey…” Go for that talking-to-the-armed-insane mode.

“Yes?”

“So what’s the problem? They wanna do that, let ’em.”

“The problem” this Loveless said, starting to unbutton his shirt, “is that a city like San Francisco has about as much sense of where it wants to go, of where it should go, as you do. Which is to say, very little. There are people, millions of them, who would object to the fact that this sort of plan even exists. Then there’s the business of real estate…”

“Real estate?”

“Know the three most important considerations in any purchase of real estate, Rydell?” Loveless’s chest, hairless and artificially pigmented, was gleaming with sweat.

“Three?”

“Location” Loveless said, “location, and location.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You never will. But the people who know where to buy, the people who’ve seen where the footprints of the towers fall, they will, Rydell. They’ll get it all.”

Rydell thought about it. “You looked, huh?”

Loveless nodded. “In Mexico City. He left them in his room. He was never, ever supposed to do that.”

“But you weren’t supposed to look either?” It just slipped out.

Loveless’s skin was running with sweat now, in spite of the cool. It was like his whole lymbic system or whatever had just let loose. Kept blinking and wiping it back from his eyes. “I’ve done my job. Did my job. Jobs. Years. My father, too. You haven’t seen how they live, down there. The compounds. People up here have no idea what money can do, Rydell. They don’t know what real money is. They live like gods, in the compounds. Some of them are over a hundred years old, Rydell…” There were flecks of white stuff at the corners of Loveless’ smile, and Rydell was back in Turvey’s girlfriend’s apartment, looking into Turvey’s eyes, and it just clicked, what she’d done.

Dumped that whole bag of dancer into the Coke she’d brought him. She hadn’t been able to pour it all in, so she’d sloshed the Coke out onto the top of the can to wash it down, mix it around.

He had his shirt undone all the way now, the dark fabric darker with sweat, and his face was turning red.

“Loveless—” Rydell started, no idea what he was about to say, but Loveless screamed then, a high thin inhuman sound like a rabbit with its leg caught in a wire, and started pounding the butt of his pistol into the tight crotch of his jeans like there was something terrible fastened on him there, something he had to kill. Each time the gun came down, it fired, blowing holes in the carpeted floorboard the size of five-dollar pieces.

Chevette Washington came off that console like she was on rubber bands, right over the top of the center bucket and into the cabin in back.

Loveless froze, quivering, like every atom in him had locked down all at once, spinning in some tight emergency orbit. Then he smiled, like maybe he’d killed the thing that was after his crotch, screamed again, and started firing out through the windshield. All Rydell could remember was some instructor telling them that an overdose of dancer made too much PCP look like putting aspirin in a Coke. In a Coke.

And Chevette Washington, she was going just about that crazy herself, by the sound of it, trying to beat her way out the back of the RV.

“Hundred years old, those fuckers” Loveless said, and sort of sobbed, ejecting the empty magazine and snapping a fresh one in, “and they’re still getting it…”

“Out there” Rydell said. “By The Gap—”

“Who?”

“Svobodov” Rydell said, guessing that might do it.

The bullets came out of the little gun like the rubber cubes out of a chunker. By the third one, Rydell had reached over, deactivated the door-lock, and just sort of fallen out. Landed on his back on some cans and what felt like foam cups. Rolled. Kept rolling ’til he hit something.

Those little bullets blowing big holes in the whitewashed glass of the dead stores. A whole section fell away with a crash.

He could hear Chevette Washington pounding on the back door of the RV and he wished he could get her to stop.

“Hey! Loveless!”

The shooting stopped.

“Svobodov’s down, man!”

Chevette still pounding. Jesus.

“He needs an ambulance!”

On his hands and knees, up against some low tiled fountain smelled of chlorine and dust, he saw Loveless scramble down from the driver’s side, his face and chest slick and shining. The man had been trained so deeply, it occurred to Rydell, that it even cut through whatever the dancer was doing to him. Because he still moved the way they taught you to move in FATSS, the pistol out in both hands, the half-crouch, the smooth swings through potential arcs of fire.

And Chevette, she was still trying to kick her way out through the hexcel or whatever the back of the RV was made of. Then Loveless put a couple of bullets into it and she all of a sudden stopped.

At four o’clock Yamazaki descended the rungs he’d climbed with Loveless, in the dark, the night before.

Fontaine had gone, twenty minutes before the power returned, taking with him, against Skinner’s protests, an enormous bundle of washing. Skinner had spent the day sorting and re-sorting the contents of the green toolkit, the one he’d overturned in his bid for the bolt-cutters.

Yamazaki had watched the old man’s hands as they touched each tool in turn, imagining he saw some momentary strength or purpose flow into them there, or perhaps only memories of tasks undertaken, abandoned, completed. “You can always sell tools” Skinner had mused, perhaps to Yamazaki, perhaps to himself. “Somebody’ll always buy ’em. But then you always need ’em again, exactly the one you sold.” Yamazaki didn’t know the English words for most of the tools there, and many were completely unfamiliar. “T-reamer” Skinner said, holding up his fist, a rust-brown, machined spike of steel protruding menacingly between his second and third fingers. “Now that’s about as handy a thing as you can have, Scooter, but most people never seen one.”

“Its purpose, Skinner-san?”

“Makes a round hole bigger. Keeps it round, too, you use it right. Sheet-metal, mostly, but it’ll do plastic, synthetics. Anything thin, fairly rigid. Short of glass.”

“You have many tools, Skinner-san.”

“Never learned how to really use ’em, though.”