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 the faint edge of anxiety. In the afternoon, she suggested they walk down the beach, toward Barre, the way they'd gone that first morning. Turner extracted the dustplug from the socket behind his ear and inserted a sliver of microsoft The structure of Span- ish settled through him like a tower of glass, invisible gates hinged on present and future, conditional, preterite perfect. Leaving her in the room, he crossed the Avenida and entered the market. He bought a straw basket, cans of cold beer, sandwiches, and fruit. On his way back, he bought a new pair of sunglasses from the vendor in the Avenida. His tan was dark and even The angular patchwork left by the Dutchman's grafts was gone, and she had taught him the unity of his body Mornings, when he met the green eyes in the bathroom mirror, they were his own, and the Dutchman no longer troubled his dreams with bad jokes and a dry cough. Sometimes, still, he dreamed fragments of India, a country he barely knew, bright splinters, Chandni Chauk, the smell of dust and fried breads The walls of the ruined hotel stood a quarter of the way down the bay's arc. The surf here was stronger, each wave a detonation. Now she tugged him toward it, something new at the corners of her eyes, a tightness. Gulls scattered as they came hand in hand up the beach to gaze into shadow beyond empty doorways. The sand had subsided, allowing the structure's fa~ade to cave in, walls gone, leaving the floors of the three levels hung like huge shingles from bent, rusted tendons of finger-thick steel, each one faced with a different color and pattern of tile HOTEL PLAYA DEL M was worked in childlike seashell capi- tals above one concrete arch. "Mar," he said, completing it, though he'd removed the microsoft. "It's over," she said, stepping beneath the arch, into shadow. "What's over?" He followed, the straw basket rubbing against his hip. The sand here was cold, dry, loose between his toes. "Over. Done with. This place. No time here, no future." He stared at her, glanced past her to where rusted bed- springs were tangled at the junction of two crumbling walls. "It smells like piss," he said. ``Let's swim. The sea took the chill away, but a distance hung between them now. They sat on a blanket from Turner's room and ate, silently. The shadow of the ruin lengthened. The wind moved her sun-streaked hair. "You make me think about horses," he said finally "Well," she said, as though she spoke from the depths of exhaustion, "they've only been extinct for thirty years." "No," he said, "their hair. The hair on their necks, when they ran." "Manes," she said, and there were tears in her eyes. "Fuck it." Her shoulders began to heave. She took a deep breath She tossed her empty Carta Blanca can down the beach. "It, me, what's it matter?" Her arms around him again. "Oh, come on, Turner Come on" And as she lay back, pulling him with her, he noticed something, a boat, reduced by distance to a white hyphen, where the water met the sky. When he sat up, pulling on his cut-off jeans, he saw the yacht It was much closer now, a graceful sweep of white riding low in the water. Deep water. The beach must fall away almost vertically, here, judging by the strength of the surf. That would be why the line of hotels ended where it did, back a long the beach, and why the ruin hadn't survived. The waves had licked away its foundation. "Give me the basket She was buttoning her blouse. He'd bought it for her in one of the tired little shops along the Avenida Electric blue Mexican cotton, badly made. The clothing they bought in the shops seldom lasted more than a day or two. "I said give me the basket." She did. He dug through the remains of their afternoon, finding his binoculars beneath a plastic bag of pineapple slices drenched in lime and dusted with cayenne. He pulled them out, a compact pair of 6 X 30 combat glasses. He snapped the integral covers from the objectives and the pad- ded eyepieces, and studied the streamlined ideograms of the Hosaka logo. A yellow inflatable rounded the stern and swung toward the beach. ``Turner, I'' "Get up." Bundling the blanket and her towel into the basket. He took a last warm can of Carta Blanca from the basket and put it beside the binoculars. He stood, pulling her quickly to her feet, and forced the basket into her hands. "Maybe I'm wrong," he said. "If I am, get out of here. Cut for that second stand of palms." He pointed. "Don't go back to the hotel. Get on a bus, Manzanillo or Vallarta. Go home~~ He could hear the purr of the outboard now He saw the tears start, but she made no sound at all as she turned and ran, up past the ruin, clutching the basket, stum- bling in a drift of sand. She didn't look back. He turned, then, and looked toward the yacht. The inflat- able was bouncing through the surf. The yacht was named Tsushima, and he'd last seen her in Hiroshima Bay. He'd seen the red Shinto gate at ltsukushima from her deck. He didn't need the glasses to know that the inflatable's passenger would be Conroy, the pilot one of Hosaka's ninjas. He sat down cross-legged in the cooling sand and opened his last can of Mexican beer. He looked back at the line of white hotels, his hands inert on one of Tsushima's teak railings Behind the hotels, the little town's three holograms glowed: Banamex, Aeronaves, and the cathedral's six-meter Virgin. Conroy stood beside him. "Crash job," Conroy said. "You know how it is." Conroy's voice was flat and uninflected, as though he'd modeled it after a cheap voice chip. His face was broad and white, dead white. His eyes were dark-ringed and hooded, beneath a peroxide thatch combed back from a wide forehead. He wore a black polo shirt and black slacks. "In- side," he said, turning. Turner followed, ducking to enter the cabin door. White screens, pale flawless pineTokyo's aus- tere corporate chic. Conroy settled himself on a low, rectangular cushion of slate-gray ultrasuede. Turner stood, his hands slack at his sides. Conroy took a knurled silver inhaler from the low enamel table between them. "Choline enhancer?" "No." Conroy jammed the inhaler into one nostril and snorted. "You want some sushi?" He put the inhaler back on the table. "We caught a couple of red snapper about an hour ago" Turner stood where he was, staring at Conroy. "Christopher Mitchell," Conroy said. "Maas Biolabs. Their head hybridoma man. He's coming over to Hosaka." "Never heard of him." "Bullshit. How about a drink?" Turner shook his head. Silicon's on the way out, Turner. Mitchell's the man who made biochips work, and Maas is sitting on the major patents. You know that. He's the man for monoclonals. He wants out YOU and me, Turner, we're going to shift him." "I think I'm retired, Conroy. I was having a good time, back there." "That's what the psych team in Tokyo say. I mean, it's not exactly your first time out of the box, is it? She's a field psychologist, on retainer to Hosaka." A muscle in Turner's thigh began to jump. "They say you're ready, Turner. They were a little wor- ried, after New Delhi. so they wanted to check it out. Little therapy on the side. Never hurts, does it?" 2 MARY SHE'D WORN HER BEST for the interview, but it was raining in Brussels and she had no money for a cab. She walked from the Eurotrans station. Her hand, in the pocket of her good jacketa Sally Stanley but almost a year oldwas a white knot around the crumpled telefax. She no longer needed it, having memorized the ad- dress, but it seemed she could no more release it than break the trance that held her here now, staring into the window of an expensive shop that sold menswear, her focus phasing between sedate flannel dress shirts and the reflection of her own dark eyes. Surely the eyes alone would be enough to cost her the job. No need for the wet hair she now wished she'd let Andrea cut. The eyes displayed a pain and an inertia that anyone could read, and most certainly these things would soon be revealed to Herr Josef Virek, least likely of potential employers. When the telefax had been delivered, she'd insisted on regarding it as some cruel prank, another nuisance call. She'd had enough of those, thanks to the media, so many that Andrea had ordered a special program for the apartment's phone, one that filtered out incoming calls from any number that wasn't listed in her permanent directory. But that, An- drea had insisted, must have been the reason for the telefax. How else could anyone reach her? But Marly had shaken her head and huddled deeper into Andrea's old terry robe. Why would Virek, enormously weal- thy, collector and patron, wish to hire the disgraced former operator of a tiny Paris gallery? Then it had been Andrea's time for head-shaking, in her impatience with the new, the disgraced Marly Krushkhova, who spent entire days in the apartment now, who sometimes didn't bother to dress. The attempted sale, in Paris, of a single forgery, was hardly the novelty Marly imagined it to have been, she said. If the press hadn't been quite so anxious to show up the disgusting Gnass for the fool he most as- suredly was, she continued, the business would hardly have been news. Gnass was wealthy enough, gross enough, to make for a weekend's scandal. Andrea smiled. "If you had been less attractive, you would have gotten far less attention." Marly shook her head. "And the forgery was Alain's. You were innocent. Have you forgotten that?" Marly went into the bathroom, still huddled in the thread- bare robe, without answering. Beneath her friend's wish to comfort, to help, Marly could already sense the impatience of someone forced to share a |
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