Count Zero
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Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 Next page "But now." he was saying. "you can see that things have worked out for the best. It's often like that, isn't it?" Again, the smile, but this time it was boyish, slightly wistful, and somehow, horribly, more intimate "We've lost the gallery, but you've found employment, Marly. You have a job to do, an interesting one, and I have the connections you'll need, Marly. I know the people you'll need to meet, in order to find your artist "My artist?" Covering her abrupt confusion with a sip of Vichy. He opened his scarred attache and removed something flat, a simple reflection hologram. She took it, grateful to have something to do with her hands, and saw that it was a casual shot of the box she'd seen in Virek's construct of Barcelona. Someone was holding it forward A man's hands, not Alains, and on one of them, a signet ring of some dark metal. The background was lost. Only the box, and the hands "Alain," she said, "where did you get this?" Looking up to meet brown eyes filled with a temble childlike triumph It s going to cost someone a very great deal to find out He ground out his cigarette and stood. "Excuse me." He walked away, headed in the direction of the restrooms. As he vanished, behind mirrors and black steel beams, she dropped the hologram, reached across the table, and flipped back the lid of his attache. There was nothing there, only a blue elastic band and some crumbs of tobacco "May I bring you something else? More Vichy, perhaps?" The waiter stood beside her. She looked up at him, struck suddenly by a sense of familiarity. The lean dark face "He's wearing a broadcast unit," the waiter said. "He's armed as well. I was the bellman in Brussels. Give him what he wants. Remember that the money means nothing to you." He took her glass and placed it carefully on his tray. "And, very likely, it will destroy him." When Alain returned, he was smiling. "Now, darling," he said reaching for his cigarettes, "we can do business." Marly smiled back and nodded HE ALLOWED HIMSELF three hours of sleep, finally, in the windowless bunker where the point tekm had established the command post. He'd met the rest of the site team Ramirez was slight, nervous, perpetually wired on his own skill as a console jockey; they were depending on him, along with Jaylene Slide on the offshore rig, to monitor cyberspace around the grid sector that held the heavily iced banks of Maas Biolabs, if Maas became aware of them, at the last moment, he might be able to provide some warning. He was also charged with relaying the medical data from the surgery to the offshore rig, a complex procedure if they were to keep it from Maas. The line out ran to a phone booth in the middle of nowhere Once past that booth, he and Jaylene were on their own in the matrix. If they blew it, Maas could backtrack and pinpoint the site. And then there was Nathan. the repair- man, whose real job consisted of watching over the gear in the bunker. If some part of their system went down, there was at least a chance he could fix it. Nathan belonged to the species that had produced Oakey and a thousand others Turner had worked with over the years, maverick techs who liked earning danger money and had proven they could keep their mouths shut The othersCompton, Teddy, Costa, and Davis were Just expensive muscle, mercs, the sort of men you hired for a job like this. For their benefit, he'd taken particular care in questioning Sutcliffe about the arrangements for clear-out. He'd explained where the copters would come in, the order of pickup, and precisely how and when they would be paid. Then he'd told them to leave him alone in the bunker, and ordered Webber to wake him in three hours. The place had been either a pump house or some sort of nexus for electrical wiring. The stumps of plastic tubing that protruded from the walls might have been conduit or sewage line, the room provided no evidence that any of them had ever been connected to anything. The ceiling, a single slab of poured concrete, was too low to allow him to stand, and there was a dry, dusty smell that wasn't entirely unpleasant The team had swept the place before they brought in the tables and the equipment, but there were still a few yellow flakes of newsprint on the floor, that crumbled when he touched them. He made out letters, sometimes an entire word. Each of the folding metal camp tables had been set up along a wall, forming an L, each arm supporting an array of extraordinarily sophisticated communications gear. The best, he thought, that Hosaka had been able to obtain He hunched his way carefully along the length of each table, tapping each console, each black box, lightly as he went There was a heavily modified military side-band trans- ceiver rigged for squirt transmission. This would be their link in case Ramirez and Jaylene flubbed the data transfer. The squirts were prerecorded, elaborate technical fictions encoded by Hosaka's cryptographers. The content of a given squirt was meaningless, but the sequence in which they were broad- cast would convey simple messages. Sequence B/C/A would inform Hosaka of Mitchell's ariival; F/D would indicate his departure from the site, while F/G would signal his death and the concurrent closure of the operation. Turner tapped the side-band rig again, frowning He wasn't pleased with Sutcliffe's arrangements there. If the extraction was blown, it wasn't likely they'd get out, let alone get out clean, and Webber had quietly informed him that, in the event of trou- ble, she'd been ordered to use a hand-held antitank rocket on the medicals in their miniature surgery. They know," she said. "You can bet they're getting paid for it, too." The rest of them were depending on the helicopters, which were based near Tucson. Turner assumed that Maas, if alerted, would easily take them out as they came in. When he'd objected to Sutcliffe, the Australian had only shrugged: "It isn't the way I'd set it up under the best circumstances, mate. but we're all in here on short notice, aren't we?" Beside the transceiver was an elaborate Sony biomonitor, linked directly with the surgical pod and charged with the medical history recorded in Mitchell's biosoft dossier. The medicals, when the time came, would access the defector's history; simultaneously, the procedures they carried out in the pod would be fed back to the Sony and collated, ready for Ramirez to ice them and shift them out into cyberspace, where Jaylene Slide would be riding shotgun from her seat in the oil rig. If it all went smoothly, the medical update would be waiting in Hosaka's Mexico City compound when Turner brought him in in the jet. Turner had never seen anything quite like the Sony, but he supposed the Dutchman would have had something very similar in his Singapore clinic The thought brought his hand to his bare chest, where he uncon- sciously traced the vanished line of a graft scar. The second table supported the cyberspace gear. The deck was identical with the one he'd seen on the oil rig, a Maas- Neotek prototype. The deck configuration was standard, but Conroy had said that it was built up from the new biochips. There was a fist-sized lump of pale pink plastique squashed on top of the console; someone, perhaps Ramirez, had thumbed in twin depressions for eyes and a crude curve of idiot grin. Two wires, one blue, the other yellow, ran from the thing's pink forehead to one of the black, gaping tubes that protruded from the wall behind the console. Another of Webber's chores. if there seemed any danger of the site being overrun. Turner eyed the wires, frowning; a charge that size, in that small, enclosed space. guaranteed death for anyone in the bunker. His shoulders aching, the back of his head brushing the rough concrete of the ceiling, he continued his inspection The rest of the table was taken up with the deck's peripherals, a series of black boxes positioned with obsessive precision. He suspected that each unit was a certain specific distance from its neighbor, and they were perfectly aligned. Ramirez himself would have set them out, and Turner was certain that if he touched one, moved it the least fraction, the jockey would know. He'd seen that same neurotic touch before, in other console men, and it told him nothing about Ramirez. He'd watched other jockeys who reversed the trait, deliber- ately tangling their gear in a rat's nest of leads and cables, who were temfied of tidiness and plastered their consoles with decals of dice and screaming skulls There was no way to tell, he thought; either Ramirez was good, or else they all might be dead soon. At the far end of the table were five Telefunken ear-bead transceivers with adhesive throat mikes, still sealed in individ- ual bubble packs. During the crucial phase of the defection, which Turner took to be the twenty minutes on either side of Mitchell's amval, he, Ramirez, Sutcliffe, Webber, and Lynch would be linked, although the use of the transceivers was to be kept to an absolute minimum Behind the Telefunkens was an unmarked plastic carton that contained twenty Swedish catalytic handwarmers, smooth flat oblongs of stainless steel, each in its own drawstring bag of Christmas-red flannelette. `You're a clever bastard," he said to the carton. "I might have thought that one up my- self He slept on a corrugated foam hiker's pad on the floor of the command post, using the parka as a blanket. Conroy had been nght about the desert night, but the concrete seemed to hold the day's heat He left his fatigues and shoes on; Webber had advised him to shake his shoes and clothing out whenever he dressed. "Scorpions," she'd say, "they like sweat, any kind of moisture " He removed the Smith & Wesson from the nylon holster before he lay down, carefully positioning it beside the foam pad. He left the two battery lanterns on, and closed his eyes. And slid into a shallow sea of dream, images tossing past, fragments of Mitchell's dossier melding with bits of his own life. He and Mitchell drove a bus through a cascade of plate glass, into the lobby of a Marrakech hotel. The scientist whooped as he pressed the button that detonated the two dozen canisters of CN taped along the flanks of the vehicle, and Oakey was there, too, offenng him whiskey from a bottle, and yellow Peruvian cocaine on a round, plastic- rimmed mirror he'd last seen in Allison's purse. He thought he saw Allison somewhere beyond the windows of the bus, choking in the clouds of gas, and he tried to tell Oakey, tried to point her out, but the glass was plastered with Mexican holograms of saints, postcards of the Virgin, and Oakey was holding up something smooth and round, a globe of pink crystal, and he saw a spider crouched at its core, a spider made of quicksilver, but Mitchell was laughing, his teeth full of blood, and extending his open palm to offer Turner the gray biosoft. Turner saw that the dossier was a brain, grayish pink and alive beneath a wet clear membrane, pulsing softly in Mitchell's hand, and then he tumbled over some submarine ledge of dream and settled smoothly down into a night with |
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