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 at the site, balancing clusters of small problems against sin- gle, larger ones. So far there were a lot of little ones, but no real ballbreakers. Lynch and Webber were starting to get in each other's hair, so he arranged to keep them apart. His conviction that Lynch was Conroy's plant, instinctive from the beginning, was stronger now. Instincts sharpened, on the edge; things got witchy. Nathan was having trouble with the lowtech Swedish hand warmers; anything short of an elec- tronic circuit baffled him. Turner put Lynch to work on the hand warmers, fueling and priming them, and let Nathan carry them out, two at a time, and bury them shallowly, at meter intervals, along the two long lines of orange tape. The microsoft Conroy had sent filled his head with its own universe of constantly shifting factors: airspeed, altitude, at- titude, angle of attack, g-forces, headings. The plane's weapon delivery information was a constant subliminal litany of target designators, bomb fall lines, search circles, range and release cues, weapons counts. Conroy had tagged the microsoft with a simple message outlining the plane's time of arrival and confirming the arrangement for space for a single passenger He wondered what Mitchell was doing, feeling. The Mans Biolabs North America facility was carved into the heart of a sheer mesa, a table of rock thrusting from the desert floor. The biosoft dossier had shown Turner the mesa's face, cut with bright evening windows; it rode about the uplifted arms of a sea of saguaros like the wheelhouse of a giant ship. To Mitchell, it had been prison and fortress, his home for nine years. Somewhere near its core he had perfected the hybridoma techniques that had eluded other researchers for almost a century; working with human cancer cells and a neglected, nearly forgotten model of DNA synthesis, he had produced the immortal hybrid cells that were the basic production tools of the new technology, minute biochemical factories end- lessly reproducing the engineered molecules that were linked and built up into biochips. Somewhere in the Maas arcology, Mitchell would be moving through his last hours as their star researcher. Turner tried to imagine Mitchell leading a very different sort of life following his defection to Hosaka, but found it difficult. Was a research arcology in Arizona very different from one on Honshu? There had been times, during that long day, when Mitch- ell's coded memories had risen in him, filling him with a strange dread that seemed to have nothing to do with the operation at hand. It was the intimacy of the thing that still disturbed him, and perhaps the feeling of fear sprang from that. Certain frag- ments seemed to have an emotional power entirely out of proportion to their content. Why should a memory of a plain hallway in some dingy Cambridge graduate dormitory fill him with a sense of guilt and self-loathing? Other images, which logically should have carried a degree of feeling, were strangely lacking in affect: Mitchell playing with his baby daughter on an expanse of pale woolen broadloom in a rented house in Geneva, the child laughing, tugging at his hand. Nothing. The man's life, from Turner's vantage, seemed marked out by a certain inevitability; he was brilliant, a brilliance that had been detected early on, highly motivated, gifted at the kind of blandly ruthless in-company manipulation required by some- one who aspired to become a top research scientist. If anyone was destined to rise through laboratory-corporate hierarchies, Turner decided, it would be Mitchell. Turner himself was incapable of meshing with the intensely tribal world of the zaibatsumen, the lifers. He was a perpetual outsider, a rogue factor adrift on the secret seas of intercorpo- rate politics. No company man would have been capable of taking the initiatives Turner was required to take in the course of an extraction. No company man was capable of Turner's professionally casual ability to realign his loyalties to fit a change in employers. Or, perhaps, of his unyielding commit- ment once a contract had been agreed upon. He had drifted into security work in his late teens, `when the grim doldrums of the postwar economy were giving way to the impetus of new technologies. He had done well in security, considering his general lack of ambition. He had a ropy, muscular poise that impressed his employer's clients, and he was bright, very bright. He wore clothes well. He had a way with technology. Conroy had found him in Mexico, where Turner's em- ployer had contracted to provide security for a Sense/Net simstim team who were recording a series of thirty-minute segments in an ongoing jungle adventure series When Conroy arrived, Turner was finishing his arrangements. He'd set up a liaison between Sense/Net and the local government, bribed the town's top police official, analyzed the hotel's security system, met the local guides and drivers and had their histo- ries doublechecked. arranged for digital voice protection on the simstim team's transceivers, established a crisis-management team, and planted seismic sensors around the Sense/Net suite-cluster. He entered the hotel's bar, a jungle-garden extension of the lobby, and found a seat by himself at one of the glass-topped tables. A pale man with a shock of white, bleached hair crossed the bar with a drink in each hand. The pale skin was drawn tight across angular features and a high forehead; he wore a neatly pressed military shirt over jeans, and leather sandals. "You're the security for those simstim kids," the pale man said, putting one of the drinks down on Turner's table. "Al- fredo told me." Alfredo was one of the hotel bartenders. Turner looked up at the man, who was evidently sober and seemed to have all the confidence in the world. "I don't think we've been introduced," Turner said, making no move to accept the proffered drink. "It doesn't matter," Conroy said, seating himself, "we're in the same ball game." He seated himself. Turner stared. He had a bodyguard's presence, something restless and watchful written in the lines of his body, and few strangers would so casually violate his private space. "You know," the man said, the way someone might com- ment on a team that wasn't doing particularly well in a given season, "those seismics you're using really don't make it. I've met people who could walk in there, eat your kids for breakfast, stack the bones in the shower, and stroll out whis- tling. Those seismics would say it never happened." He took a sip of his drink. "You get A for effort, though. You know how to do a job." The phrase "stack the bones in the shower" was enough. Turner decided to take the pale man out. "Look, Turner, here's your leading lady." The man smiled up at Jane Hamilton, who smiled back, her wide blue eyes clear and perfect, each iris ringed with the minute gold letter- ing of the Zeiss Ikon logo. Turner froze, caught in a split- second lock of indecision. The star was close, too close, and the pale man was rising "Nice meeting you, Turner," he said. "We'll get together sooner or later. Take my advice about those seismics; back em up with a perimeter of screamers." And then he turned and walked away, muscles rolling easily beneath the crisp fabric of his tan shirt. "That's nice, Turner," Hamilton said, taking the strang- er's place. "Yeah?" Turner watched as the man was lost in the con- fusion of the crowded lobby, amid pink-fleshed tourists. "You don't ever seem to talk to people. You always look like you're running a make on them, filing a report. It's nice to see you making friends for a change" Turner looked at her. She was twenty, four years his junior, and earned roughly nine times his annual salary in a given week She was blonde, her hair cropped short for the series role, deeply tanned, and looked as if she was illumi- nated from within by sunlamps. The blue eyes were inhu- manly perfect optical instruments, grown in vats in Japan. She was both actress and camera, her eyes worth several million New Yen, and in the hierarchy of Sense/Net stars, she barely rated. He sat with her. in the bar, until she'd finished two drinks, then walked her back to the suite-cluster. "You wouldn't feel like coming in for another, would you, Turner?" "No." he said. This was the second evening she'd made the offer, and he sensed that it would be the last. "I have to check the seismics." Later that night, he phoned New York for the number of a firm in Mexico City that could supply him with screamers for the perimeter of the suite-cluster. But a week later. Jane and three others, half the series cast, were dead. "We're ready to roll the medics," Webber said. Turner saw that she was wearing fingerless brown leather gloves She'd replaced her sunglasses with clear-glass shooting glasses, and there was a pistol on her hip. "Sutcliffe's monitoring the perimeter with the remotes. We'll need everybody else to get the fucker through the brush." "Need me?" "Ramirez says he can't do anything too strenuous this close to jacking in. You ask me, he's just a lazy little L.A. shit.'' "No," Turner said, getting up from his seat on the ledge, "he's right. If he sprained his wrist, we'd be screwed. Even something so minor that he couldn't feel it could affect his speed . . Webber shrugged. "Yeah. Well, he's back in the bunker, bathing his hands in the last of our water and humming to himself, so we should be just fine." When they reached the surgery, Turner automatically counted heads. Seven. Ramirez was in the bunker; Sutcliffe was somewhere in the cinderblock maze, monitoring the sentry- remotes. Lynch had a Steiner-Optic laser slung over his right shoulder, a compact model with a folding alloy skeleton stock, integral batteries forming a fat handgrip below the gray titanium housing that served the thing as a barrel. Nathan was wearing a black jumpsuit, black paratrooper boots filmed with pale dust, and had the bulbous ant-eye goggles of an image- amplification rig dangling below his chin on a head strap. Turner removed his Mexican sunglasses, tucked them into a breast pocket in the blue work shirt, and buttoned the flap "How's it going, Teddy?" he asked a beefy six-footer with close-cropped brown hair. "Jus' fine," Teddy said, with a toothy smile. Turner surveyed the other three members of the site team, nodding to each man in turn: Compton, Costa, Davis. "Getting down to the wire, huh?" Costa asked. He had a round, moist face and a thin, carefully trimmed beard. Like Nathan and the others, he wore black. "Pretty close," Turner said "All smooth so far." |
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