Virtual Light

38. Miracle mile

You live in America” he’d said, his gray hair plastered neatly back from his pitted forehead. “Why you drive that?” His BMW, immaculate, reposed in the driveway; he’d had to spend five minutes disarming it to get the flashlight out for Rydell. Rydell had remembered the time in Knoxville, Christmas day, when the Narcotics team’s new walkie-talkies had triggered every car-alarm in a ten-mile radius.

“Well” Rydell said, “it’s real good for the environment.”

“It’s bad for your country” Wally said. “Image thing. An American should drive some car to feel proud of. Bavarian car. At least Japanese.”

“I’ll get this back to you, Wally.” Holding up the big black flashlight.

“And something else. You said.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“When you pay rent on Mar Vista?”

“Kevin’ll take care of it.” Getting into the tiny Montxo and starting up the flywheel. It sat there, rocking slightly on its shocks, while the wheel got up to speed.

Wally waved, shrugged, then backed into his house and closed the door. Rydell hadn’t ever seen him not wear that Tyrolean hat before.

Rydell looked at the flashlight, figuring out where the safety was. It wasn’t much, but he felt like he had to have something. And it was nonlethal. Guns weren’t that hard to buy, on the street, but he didn’t really want to have to have one around today. You did a different kind of time, if there was a gun involved.

Then he’d driven back toward the Blob, taking it real easy at intersections and trying to keep to the streets that had designated lanes for electric vehicles. He got Chevette’s phone out and hit redial for the node-number in Utah, the one Godeater had given him, back in Paradise. God-eater was the one who looked like the mountain, or so he said. Rydell had asked him what kind of a name that was. He’d said he was a full-blood Blood Indian. Rydell sort of doubted it.

None of their voices were real, even; it was all digital stuff. God-eater could just as well be a woman, or three different people, or all three of the ones he’d seen there might’ve been just one person. He thought about the woman in the wheelchair in Cognitive Dissidents. It could be her. It could be anybody. That was the spooky thing about these hackers. He heard the node-number ringing, in Utah. God-eater always picked up on five, in mid-ring.

“Yes?”

“Paradise” Rydell said.

“Richard?”

“Nixon.”

“We have your goods in place, Richard. One little whoops and a push.”

“You get me a price yet?” The light changed. Somebody was honking, pissed-off at the Montxo’s inability to do anything like accelerate.

“Fifty” God-eater said.

Fifty thousand dollars. Rydell winced. “Okay” he said, “fair enough.”

“Better be” God-eater said. “We can make you pretty miserable in prison, even. In fact, we can make you really miserable in prison. The baseline starts lower, in there.”

I’ll bet you got lots of friends there, too, Rydell thought. “How long you estimate the response-time, from when I call?”

God-eater burped, long and deliberate. “Quick. Ten, fifteen max. We’ve got it slotted the way we talked about. Your friends’re gonna shit themselves. But really, you don’t wanna be in the way. This’ll be like something you never saw before. This new unit they just got set up.”

“I hope so” Rydell said, and broke the connection.

He gave the parking-attendant Karen’s apartment number. After this, it really wasn’t going to matter much. He had the flashlight stuck down in the back of his jeans, under the denim jacket Buddy had loaned him. It was probably Buddy’s father’s. He’d told Buddy he’d help him find a place when he got to L.A. He sort of hoped Buddy never did try that, because he imagined kids like Buddy made it about a block from the bus station before some really fast urban predator got them, just a blur of wheels and teeth and no more Buddy to speak of. But then again you had to think about what it would be like to be him, Buddy, back there in his three-by six-foot bedroom in that trailer, with those posters of Fallon and Jesus, sneaking that VR when his daddy wasn’t looking. If you didn’t at least try to get out, what would you wind up feeling like? And that was why you had to give it to Sublett, because he’d gotten out of that, allergies and all.

But he was worried about Sublett. Pretty crazy to be worried about anybody, in a situation like this, but Sublett acted like he was already dead or something. Just moving from one thing to the next, like it didn’t matter. The only thing that got any kind of rise out of him was his allergies.

And Chevette, too, Chevette Washington, except what worried him there was the white skin of her back, just above the waist of those black bike-pants, when she was curled on the bed beside him. How he kept wanting to touch it. And how her tits stuck out against her t-shirt when she’d sit up in the morning, and those little dark twists of hair under her arms. And right now, walking up to this terracotta coffee-module near the base of the escalator, the rectangular head of Wally’s pepper-spray flashlight digging into his spine, he knew he might never get another chance. He could be dead, in half an hour, or on his way to prison.

He ordered a latte with a double shot, paid for it with just about the last of his money, and looked at his Timex. Ten ’til three. When he’d called Warbaby’s personal portable from the motel, the night before, he’d told him three.

God-eater had gotten him that number. God-eater could get you any number at all.

Warbaby had sounded really sad to hear from him.

Disappointed, like. “We never expected this of you, Rydell.”

“Sorry, Mr. Warbaby. Those fucking Russians. And that cowboy fucker, that Loveless. Got on my case.”

“There’s no need for obscenity. Who gave you this number?”

“I had it from Hernandez, before.” Silence.

“I got the glasses, Mr. Warbaby.”

“Where are you?”

Chevette Washington watching him, from the bed. “In Los Angeles. I figured I’d better get as far away from those Russians as I could.”

A pause. Maybe Warbaby had put his hand over the phone. Then, “Well, I suppose I can understand your behavior, although I can’t say I approve…”

“Can you come down here and get them, Mr. Warbaby? And just sort of call it even?”

A longer pause. “Well, Rydell” sadly, “I wouldn’t want you to forget how disappointed I am in you, but, yes, I could do that.”

“But just you and Freddie, right? Nobody else.”

“Of course” Warbaby had said. Rydell imagined him looking at Freddie, who’d be tap-tapping away on some new laptop, getting the call traced. To a cell-node in Oakland, and then to a tumbled number.

“You be down here tomorrow, Mr. Warbaby. I’ll call you at your same number, tell you where to come. Three o’clock. Sharp.”

“I think you’ve made the right decision, Rydell” Warbaby had said.

“I hope so” Rydell had said, then clicked off.

Now he looked at his Timex. l’ook a sip of coffee. Three o’clock. Sharp. He put the coffee down on the counter and got the phone out. Started punching in Warbaby’s number.

It took them twenty minutes to get there. They came in two cars, from opposite directions; Warbaby and Freddie in a black Lincoln with a white satellite-dish on top, Freddie driving it, then Svobodov and Orlovsky in a metallic-gray Lada sedan that Rydell took for a rental.

He watched them meet up, the four of them, then walk in, onto the plaza under the Blob, past those kinetic sculptures, heading for the nearest elevator, Warbaby looking sad as ever and leaning on that cane. Warbaby had his same olive coat on, his Stetson, Freddie was wearing a big shirt with a lot of pink in it, had a laptop under his arm, and the Russians from Homicide had these gray suits on, about the color and texture of the Lada they were driving.

He gave it a while to see if Loveless was going to turn up, then started keying in that number in Utah.

“Please, Jesus” he said, counting the rings.

“Your latte okay?” The Central Asian kid in the coffee-module, looking at him.

“It’s fine” Rydell said, as God-eater picked up.

“Yes?”

“Paradise.”

“This Richard?”

“Nixon. They’re here. Four but not Smiley.”

“Your two Russians, Warbaby, and his jockey?”

“Got ’em.”

“But not the other one?”

“Don’t see him…”

“His description’s in the package anyway. Okay, Rydell. Let’s do it.” Click.

Rydell stuck the phone in his jacket pocket, turned, and headed, walking fast, for the escalator. The boy in the coffeemodule probably thought there was something wrong with that lane.

God-eater and his friends, if they weren’t just one person, say some demented old lady up in the Oakland hills with a couple of million dollars’ worth of equipment and a terminally bad attitude, had struck Rydell as being almost uniquely full of shit. There was nothing, if you believed them, they couldn’t do. But if they were all that powerful, how come they had to hide that way, and make money doing crimes?

Rydell had gotten a couple of lectures on computer crime at the Academy, but it had been pretty dry. The history of it, how hackers used to be just these smart-ass kids dicking with the phone companies. Basically, the visiting Fed had said, any crime that was what once had been called white-collar was going to be computer crime anyway, now, because people in offices did everything with computers. But there were other crimes you could still call computer crimes in the old sense, because they usually involved professional criminals, and these criminals still thought of themselves as hackers. The public, the Fed had told them, still tended to think of hackers as some kind of romantic bullshit thing, sort of like kids moving the outhouse. Merry pranksters. In the old days, he said, lots of people still didn’t know there was an outhouse there to be moved, not until they wound up in the shit. Rydell’s class laughed dutifully. But not today, the Fed said; your modern hacker was about as romantic as a hit man from some ice posse or an enforcer with a dancer combine. And a lot harder to catch, although if you could get one and lean on him, you could usually count on landing a few more. But they were set up mostly in these cells, the cells building up larger groups, so that the most you could ever pop, usually, were the members of a single cell; they just didn’t know who the members of the other cells were, and they made a point of not finding out.

God-eater and his friends, however many of them there were or weren’t, must’ve been a cell like that, one of however many units in what they called the Republic of Desire. And if they were really going to go ahead and do the thing for him, he figured there were three reasons: they hated the idea of San Francisco getting rebuilt hecause they liked an infrastructure with a lot of holes in it, they were charging him good money—money he didn’t have—and they’d figured out a way to do something that nobody had ever done before. And it was that last one that had really seemed to get them going, once they’d decided to help him out.

And now, climbing the escalator, up through all these kinds of people who lived or worked up here, forcing himself not to break into a run, Rydell found it hard to believe that God-eater and them were doing what they’d said they could do. And if they weren’t, well, he was just fucked.

No, he told himself, they were. They had to be. Somewhere in Utah a dish was turning, targeted out toward the coast, toward the California sky. And out of it, fed in from wherever God-eater and his friends were, were coming these packages, no, packets, of signals. Packets, God-eater called them.

And somewhere, high above the Blob, up over the whole L.A. Basin, was the Death Star.

Rydell dodged past a silver-haired man in tennis whites and ran up the escalator. Came out under the copper tit. People going in and out of that little mall there. A fountain with water sliding down big ragged sheets of green glass. And there went the Russians, their wide gray backs heading toward the white walls of the complex where Karen’s apartment was. He couldn’t see Warbaby or Freddie.

“Shit” he said, knowing it hadn’t worked, that God-eater had fucked him, that he’d doomed Chevette Washington and Sublett and even Karen Mendelsohn and it was one more time he’d just gone for it, been wrong, and the last fucking time at that.

And then these things came through a long gap in the glass, just south of where the handball-courts were, and he hadn’t ever seen anything like them. There were a bunch of them, maybe ten or a dozen, and they were black. They hardly made any sound at all, and they were sort of floating. Just skimming along. The players on the courts stopped to watch them.

They were helicopters, but too small to carry anybody. Smaller than the smallest micro-light. Kind of dish-shaped. French Aerospatiale gun-platforms, the kind you saw on the news from Mexico City, and he guessed they were under the control of ECCCS, the Emergency Command Control Communications System, who ran the Death Star. One of them swung by, about twenty feet over his head, and he saw the clustered tubes of some kind of gun or rocket-launcher.

“Damn” Rydell said, looking up at the future of armed response.

“POLICE EMERGENCY. REMAIN CALM.”

A woman started screaming, from somewhere over by the mall, over and over, like something mechanical.

“REMAIN CALM.”

And mostly they did, all those faces; faces of the residents of this high country, their jawlines firm, their soft clothes fluttering in the dancing downdrafts.

Rydell started running.

He ran past Svobodov and Orlovsky, who were looking at the three helicopters that were much lower now, and so clearly edging in on them. The Russians’ mouths were open and Orlovsky’s half-frame glasses looked like they were about to fall off.

“ON YOUR FACES. NOW. OR WE FIRE.”

But the residents, slender and mainly blond, stood unmoved, watching, with racquets in their hands, or dark glossy paper bags from the mall. Watching the helicopters. Watching Rydell as he ran past them, their eyes mildly curious and curiously hard.

He ran past Freddie, who was flat down on the granite pavers, doing what the helicopters said, his hands above his head and his laptop between them.

“REMAIN CALM.”

Then he saw Warbaby, slouched back on a cast-iron bench like he’d been sitting there forever, just watching life go by. Warbaby saw him, too.

“POLICE EMERGENCY.”

His cane was beside him, propped on the bench. He picked it up, lazy and deliberate, and Rydell was sure he was about to get blown away.

“REMAIN CALM.”

But Warbaby, looking sad as ever, just brought the cane up to the brim of his Stetson, like some kind of salute.

“DROP THAT CANE.”

The amplified voice of a SWAT cop, bunkered down in the hardened sublevels of City Hall East, working his little Aerospatiale through a telepresence rig. Warbaby shrugged, slowly, and tossed the cane away.

Rydell kept running, right through the open gates and up to Karen Mendelsohn’s door. Which was half-open, Karen and Chevette Washington both there, their eyes about to pop out of their heads.

“Inside!” he yelled.

They just gaped at him.

“Get inside!”

There were a bunch of big plants beside the door, in a terracotta pot about as high as his waist. He saw Loveless step around it, raising his little gun; Loveless had on a silvery sportscoat and his left arm was in a sling; his face was studded with micropore dressings that weren’t quite the right shade, so he looked like he had leprosy or something. He was smiling that smile.

“No!” Chevette Washington screamed, “you murdering little fuck!”

Loveless brought the gun around, about a foot from her head, and Rydell saw the smile vanish. Without it, he noticed, Loveless sort of looked like he didn’t have any lips.

“REMAIN CALM” the helicopters reminded them all, as Rydell brought up Wally’s flashlight.

Loveless never even managed to pull the trigger, which you had to admit was kind of impressive. What that capsicum did, it was kind of like when Sublett got an allergic reaction, but a lot worse, and a lot quicker.

“You crazy, crazy motherfucker” Karen Mendelsohn kept saying, her eyes swollen up like she’d walked through a swarm of hornets. She and Chevette had both caught the edges of that pepper-spray, and Sublett was so worried about the residue that he’d gone into a closet in Karen’s bedroom and wouldn’t come out. “You crazy, outrageous motherfucker. Do you know what you’ve done?”

Rydell just sat there, in one of her white Retro Aggressive armchairs, listening to those helicopters yelling outside. Later on, when it all came out, they’d find out that the Republic of Desire had set Warbaby and them up as these bomb-building mercenaries working for the Sonoran Separatist Front, with enough high explosives stored in Karen’s place to blow that nipple off the tit and clear to Malibu. And they’d also worked in this hostage-taking scenario, to guarantee the SWAT guys made a soft entry, if they had to. But when the real live Counterterrorism Squad got in there, it would’ve been pretty hairy, at least if Karen hadn’t been a lawyer for Cops in Trouble. Those were some angry cops, and getting angrier, at first, but then Pursley’s people seemed to have their ways to calm them down.

But the funny thing was, they, the LAPD, never would, ever, admit to it that anybody had hacked the Death Star. They kept saying it had been phoned in. And they stuck to that, too; it was so important to them, evidently, that they were willing, finally, to let a lot of the rest of it just go.

But when he was sitting there, listening to Karen, and gradually getting the idea that, yeah, he was the kind of crazy motherfucker she liked, he kept thinking about Nightmare Folk Art, and whatever that woman’s name was, over there, and hoping she was coping okay, because God-eater had needed an L.A. number to stick into his fake data-packet, a number where the tip-off was supposed to have come from. And Rydell hadn’t wanted to give them Kevin’s number, and then he’d found the Nightmare number in his wallet, on part of a People cover, so he’d given God-eater that.

And then Chevette came over, with her face all swollen from the capsicum, and asked him if it was working or were they totally fucked? And he said it was, and they weren’t, and then the cops came in and it wasn’t okay, but then Aaron Pursley turned up with about as many other lawyers as there were cops, and then Wellington Ma, in a navy blazer with gold buttons.

So Rydell finally got to meet him.

“Always a pleasure to meet a client in person” Wellington Ma said, shaking his hand.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Ma” Rydell said.

“I won’t ask you what you did to my voice-mail” Wellington Ma said, “but I hope you won’t do it again. Your story, though, is fascinating.”

Rydell remembered God-eater and that fifty thousand, and hoped Ma and Karen and them weren’t going to be pissed about that. But he didn’t think so, because Aaron Pursley had already said, twice, how it was going to be bigger than the Pookey Bear thing, and Karen kept saying how telegenic Chevette was, and about the youth angle, and how Chrome Koran would fall all over themselves to do the music.

And Wellington Ma had signed up Chevette, and Sublett, too, but he’d had to pass the papers back into that closet because Sublett still wouldn’t come out.

Rydell could tell from what Karen said that Chevette had told her pretty much the whole story while she and Sublett had kept her there, and kept her from hitting any IntenSecure panic-buttons. And Karen, evidently, knew all about those VL glasses and how to get them to play things back, so she’d spent most of the time doing that, and now she knew all about Sunflower or whatever it was called. And she kept telling Pursley that there was a dynamite angle here because they could implicate Cody fucking Harwood, if they played their cards right, and was he ever due for it, the bastard.

Rydell hadn’t ever even had a chance to see that stuff, on the glasses.

“Mr. Pursley?” Rydell kind of edged over to him.

“Yes, Berry?”

“What happens now?”

“Well” Pursley said, tugging at the skin beneath his nose, “you and your two friends here are about to be arrested and taken into custody.”

“We are?”

Pursley looked at his big gold watch. It was set with diamonds around the dial, and had a big lump of turquoise on either side. “In about five minutes. We’re arranging to have the first press-conference around six. That suit you, or would you rather eat first? We can have the caterers bring you something in.”

“But we’re being arrested.”

“Bail, Berry. You’ve heard of bail? You’ll all be out tomorrow morning.” Pursley beamed at him.

“Are we going to be okay, Mr. Pursley?”

“Berry” Pursley said, “you’re in trouble, son. A cop. And an honest one. In trouble. In deep, spectacular, and, please, I have to say this, clearly heroic shit.” He clapped Rydell on the shoulder. “Cops in Trouble is here for you, boy, and, let me assure you, we are all of us going to make out just fine on this.”

Chevette said jail sounded just fine to her, but please could she call somebody in San Francisco named Fontaine?

“You can call anybody you want, honey” Karen said, dabbing at Chevette’s eyes with a tissue. “They’ll record it all, but we’ll get a copy, too. What was the name of your friend, the black man, the one who was shot?”

“Sammy Sal” Chevette said.

Karen looked at Pursley. “We’d better get Jackson Gale” she said. Rydell wondered what for, because Jackson Gale was this new young black guy who acted in made-for-tv movies.

Then Chevette came over and hugged him, all of her pressing up against him, and just sort of looking up at him from under that crazy-ass haircut. And he liked that, even if her eyes were all red and her nose was running.

On Saturday, the fifteenth of November, the morning after his fourth night with Skinner, Yamazaki, wearing an enormous, cape-like plaid jacket, much mended and smelling of candle-grease, descended in the yellow lift to do business with the dealers in artifacts. He brought with him a cardboard carton containing several large fragments of petrified wood, the left antler of a buck deer, fifteen compact discs, a Victorian promotional novelty in the shape of a fluted china mug, embossed with the letters ‘OXO,’ and a damp-swollen copy of The Columbia Literary History of the United States.

The sellers were laying out their goods, the morning iron-gray and clammy, and he was grateful for the borrowed jacket, its pockets silted with ancient sawdust and tiny, nameless bits of hardware. He had been curious about the correct manner in which to approach them, but they took the initiative, clustering around him, Skinner’s name on their lips.

The petrified wood brought the best price, then the mug, then eight of the compact discs. It all went, finally, except for the literary history, which was badly mildewed. He placed this, its blue boards warping in the salt air, atop a mound of trash. With the money folded in his hand, he went looking for the old woman who sold eggs. Also, they needed coffee.

He was in sight of the place that roasted and ground coffee when he saw Fontaine coming through the morning bustle, the collar of his long tweed coat turned up against the fog.

“How’s the old man doing, Scooter?”