Mona Lisa Overdrive (26 page)

“Get ’em off quick,” Colin advised, “before Dickie puts his parcels down.”

She unzipped the boot with the broken heel, then the
other, pulled off both. In place of the coarse Chinese silk she usually wore in winter,
her feet were sheathed in thin black rubber toe-socks with ridged plastic soles. She
nearly ran between Dick’s legs as she cleared the door, but instead her shoulder struck
his thigh as she squeezed past, toppling him into a display of faceted crystal decanters.

And then she was free, plunging through the press of tourists down Portobello Road.

Her feet were very cold, but the ridged plastic soles provided excellent traction—though
not on ice, she reminded herself, picking herself up from her second spill, wet grit
against her palms. Colin had directed her down this narrow passage of blackened brick.…

She grasped the unit. “Where next?”

“This way,” he said.

“I want the Rose and Crown,” she reminded him.

“You want to be careful. Dickie’ll have Swain’s men here by now, not to mention the
sort of hunt that friend of Swain’s from Special Branch could mount if he’s asked
to. And I can’t imagine why he shouldn’t be asked to.…”

She entered the Rose and Crown by a side door, Colin at her elbow, grateful for the
snug gloom and irradiating warmth that seemed central to the idea of these drinking-burrows.
She was struck by the amount of padding on the walls and seats, by the muffling curtains.
If the colors and fabrics had been less dingy, the effect would somehow have been
less warm. Pubs, she guessed, were an extreme expression of the British attitude toward
gomi
.

At Colin’s urging, she made her way through the drinkers clustered in front of the
bar, hoping to find Tick.

“What’ll it be, dear?”

She looked up into the broad blond face behind the bar, bright lipstick and rouged
cheeks. “Excuse me,” Kumiko began, “I wish to speak with Mr. Bevan—”

“Mine’s a pint, Alice,” someone said, slapping down three ten-pound coins, “lager.”
Alice worked a tall white ceramic lever, filling a mug with pale beer. She put the
mug on the scarred bar and swept the money into a rattling till behind the counter.

“Someone wanting a word, Bevan,” Alice said, as the man lifted his pint.

Kumiko looked up at a flushed, seamed face. The man’s upper lip was short; Kumiko
thought of rabbits, though Bevan was large, nearly as large as Petal. He had a rabbit’s
eyes as well: round, brown, showing very little white. “With me?” His accent reminded
her of Tick’s.

“Tell him yes,” Colin said. “He can’t think why a little Jap girl in rubber socks
has come into the drinker looking for him.”

“I wish to find Tick.”

Bevan regarded her neutrally over the rim of his raised pint. “Sorry,” he said, “can’t
say I know anyone by the name.” He drank.

“Sally told me I should find you if Tick wasn’t here. Sally Shears …”

Bevan choked on his lager, his eyes showing a fraction of white. Coughing, he set
the mug on the bar and took a handkerchief from his overcoat pocket. He blew his nose
and wiped his mouth.

“I’m on duty in five,” he said. “Best step in the back.”

Alice raised a hinged section of the bar; Bevan ushered Kumiko through with small
flapping motions of his large hands, glancing quickly over his shoulder. He guided
her down a narrow passage that opened off the area behind the bar. The walls were
brick, old and uneven, thickly coated with dirty green paint. He stopped beside a
battered steel hamper heaped with terry bar towels that reeked of beer.

“You’ll regret it if you’re on a con, girl,” he said. “Tell me why you’re looking
for this Tick.”

“Sally is in danger. I must find Tick. I must tell him.”

“Fucking hell,” the barman said. “Put yourself in my position.…”

Colin wrinkled his nose at the hamper of sodden towels.

“Yes?” Kumiko said.

“If you’re a nark, and I sent you to find this Tick fellow, assuming I did know him,
and he’s on some sort of blag, then he’d do for me, wouldn’t he? But if you’re not,
then this Sally, she’d likely do for me if I don’t, understand?”

Kumiko nodded. “ ‘Between the rock and the hard place.’ ” It was an idiom Sally had
used; Kumiko found it very poetic.

“Quite,” Bevan said, giving her an odd look.

“Help me. She is in very great danger.”

He ran his palm back across thinning ginger-colored hair.

“You
will
help me,” she heard herself say, feeling her mother’s cold mask click into place,
“Tell me where to find Tick.”

The barman seemed to shiver, though it was overly warm in the passageway, a steamy
warmth, beer smell mingling with raw notes of disinfectant. “D’you know London?”

Colin winked at her. “I can find my way,” she said.

“Bevan,” Alice said, putting her head around the corner, “the filth.”

“Police,” Colin translated.

“Margate Road, SW2,” Bevan said, “dunno the number, dunno his phone.”

“Let him show you out the back now,” Colin said. “Those are no ordinary policemen.”

Kumiko would always remember her endless ride through the city’s Underground. How
Colin led her from the Rose and Crown to Holland Park, and down, explaining that her
MitsuBank chip was worse than useless now;
if she used it for a cab, or any sort of purchase, he said, some Special Branch operator
would see the transaction flare like magnesium on the grid of cyberspace. But she
had to find Tick, she told him; she had to find Margate Road. He frowned. No, he said,
wait till dark; Brixton wasn’t far, but the streets were too dangerous now, by daylight,
with the police on Swain’s side. But where could she hide? she asked. She had very
little cash; the concept of currency, of coins and paper notes, was quaint and alien.

Here, he said, as she rode a lift down into Holland Park. “For the price of a ticket.”

The bulgy silver shapes of the trains.

The soft old seats in gray and green.

And warm, beautifully warm; another burrow, here in the realm of ceaseless movement …

The airport sucked a groggy Danielle Stark away down a pastel corridor lined with
reporters, cameras, augmented eyes, while Porphyre and three Net security men swept
Angie through the closing ring of journalists, a choreographed piece of ritual that
had more to do with providing dramatic visuals than protection. Anyone present had
already been cleared by security and the PR department.

Then she was alone with Porphyre in an express elevator, on their way to the heliport
the Net maintained on the terminal’s roof.

As the doors opened, into gusts of wet wind across brilliantly lit concrete, where
a new trio of security men waited in giant fluorescent-orange parkas, Angie remembered
her first glimpse of the Sprawl, when she’d ridden the train up from Washington with
Turner.

One of the orange parkas ushered them across an expanse of spotless concrete to the
waiting helicopter, a large twin-prop Fokker finished in black chrome. Porphyre led
the way up the spidery, matte-black stairway. She followed without looking back.

She had something now, a new determination. She’d decided to contact Hans Becker through
his agent in Paris. Continuity had the number. It was time, time to make something
happen. And she’d make something happen with Robin as well; he’d be waiting now, she
knew, at the hotel.

The helicopter told them to fasten their seatbelts.

As they lifted off, there was virtual silence in the soundproofed cabin, only a throbbing
in the bones, and for a strange second she seemed able to hold the whole of her life
in mind and know it, see it for what it had been. And it was this, she thought, that
the dust had drifted over and concealed, and that had been freedom from pain.

And the site of the soul’s departure
, said an iron voice, out of candleglow and the roar of the hive.…

“Missy?” Porphyre from the seat beside her, leaning close …

“I’m dreaming.…”

Something had been waiting for her, years ago, in the Net. Nothing like the loa, like
Legba or the others, though Legba, she knew, was Lord of the Crossroads; he was synthesis,
the cardinal point of magic, communication.…

“Porphyre,” she asked, “why did Bobby leave?” She looked out at the Sprawl’s tangled
grid of light, at the domes picked out in red beacons, seeing instead the datascape
that had drawn him, always, back to what he’d believed was the only game worth playing.

“If you don’t know, missy,” Porphyre said, “who does?”

“But you hear things. Everything. All the rumors. You always have.…”

“Why ask me now?”

“It’s time.…”

“I remember
talk
, understand? How people who aren’t famous talk about those who are. Maybe someone
who claimed they knew Bobby talked to someone else, and it came around.… Bobby was
worth talking about because he was with you, understand? That’s a good place to start,
missy, because he wouldn’t have found that so very gratifying, would he? Story was,
he’d set out hustling on his own, but he’d found you instead, and you rolled higher
and faster than anything he could’ve dreamed of. Took him
up
there, understand? Where the kind of money he’d never even dreamed of, back in Barrytown,
was just change.…”

Angie nodded, looking out over the Sprawl.

“Talk was he had his own ambitions, missy. Something driving him. Drove him off, finally …”

“I didn’t think he’d leave me,” she said. “When I first came to the Sprawl, it was
like being born. A new life. And he was there, right there, the very first night.
Later, when Legba—when I was with the Net …”

“When you were becoming Angie.”

“Yes. And as much of me as that took, I knew he’d be there. And also that he’d never
buy
it, entirely, and I needed that, how it was still just a scam, to him, the whole
business.…”

“The Net?”

“Angie Mitchell. He knew the difference between it and me.”

“Did he?”

“Maybe he
was
the difference.” So high above the lines of light …

The old New Suzuki Envoy had been Angie’s favorite Sprawl hotel since her earliest
days with the Net.

It maintained its street wall for eleven stories, then narrowed jaggedly, at the first
of nine setbacks, into a mountainside assembled from bedrock excavated from its Madison
Square building site. Original plans had called for this steep landscape to be planted
with flora native to the Hudson Valley region, and populated with suitable fauna,
but subsequent construction of the first Manhattan Dome had made it necessary to hire
a Paris-based eco-design team. The French ecologists, accustomed to the
“pure” design problems posed by orbital systems, had despaired of the Sprawl’s particulate-laden
atmosphere, opting for heavily engineered strains of vegetation and robotic fauna
of the sort encountered in children’s theme parks, but Angie’s continued patronage
had eventually lent the place a cachet it would otherwise have lacked. The Net leased
the five topmost floors, where her permanent suite had been installed, and the Envoy
had come to enjoy a certain belated reputation with artists and entertainers.

Now she smiled as the helicopter rose past a disinterested robot bighorn pretending
to munch lichen beside the illuminated waterfall. The absurdity of the place always
delighted her; even Bobby had enjoyed it.

She glanced out at the Envoy’s heliport, where the Sense/Net logo had been freshly
repainted on heated, floodlit concrete. A lone figure, hooded in a bright orange parka,
waited beside a sculpted outcropping of rock.

“Robin will be here, won’t he, Porphyre?”

“
Mistah
Lanier,” he said sourly.

She sighed.

The black chrome Fokker brought them smoothly down, glasses tinkling gently in the
drinks’ cabinet as the landing gear met the roof of the Envoy. The muted throb of
the engines died.

“Where Robin is concerned, Porphyre, I’ll have to make the first move. I’m going to
speak with him tonight. Alone. In the meantime, I want you to stay out of his way.”

“Porphyre’s pleasure, missy,” the hairdresser said, as the cabin door opened behind
them. And then he was twisting, clawing at the buckle of his seatbelt, and Angie turned
in time to see the bright orange parka in the hatchway, the upraised arm, the mirrored
glasses. The gun made no more sound than a cigarette lighter, but Porphyre convulsed,
one long black hand slapping at his
throat as the security man swung the hatch shut behind him and sprang at Angie.

Something was clapped hard against her stomach as Porphyre lolled back bonelessly
in his seat, the sharp pink tip of his tongue protruding. She looked down, in pure
reflex, and saw the black chrome buckle of her seatbelt through a sticky-looking lozenge
of greenish plastic.

She looked up into a white oval face framed by a tightly drawn orange nylon hood.
Saw her own face blank with shock, doubled in the silver lenses. “He drink, tonight?”

“What?”

“Him.” A thumb jerked in Porphyre’s direction. “He drink any alcohol?”

“Yes … Earlier.”

“Shit.” A woman’s voice, as she turned to the unconscious hairdresser. “Now I’ve sedated
him. Don’t wanna suppress his breathing reflex, y’know?” Angie watched as the woman
checked Porphyre’s pulse. “Guess he’s okay …” Did she shrug, inside the orange parka?

“Security?”

“What?” The glasses flashed.

“Are you Net security?”

“Fuck no, I’m abducting you.”

“You are?”

“You bet.”

“Why?”

“Not for any of the usual reasons. Somebody’s got it in for you. Got it in for me
too. I was supposed to set it up to grab you next week. Fuck ’em. Had to talk to you,
anyway.”

“You did? Talk to me?”

“Know anybody name of 3Jane?”

“No. I mean, yes, but—”

“Save it. Our asses outa here, fast.”

“Porphyre—”

“He’s gonna wake up soon. Look of him, I don’t wanna be around when he does.…”