The Peripheral (25 page)

BLACK BEAUTY

T
heir lawyers were from Klein Cruz Vermette, in Miami. One of the three who’d met them in the snack bar at Hefty was a Vermette, Brent, but not the one in the name. Son of the one in the name, not yet a full partner.

It had been Macon’s idea to sign the papers there. Otherwise they’d have been doing it in Fab, or the space next door, or in Tommy’s police car, Tommy having driven them over from the football field, where the helicopter they’d chartered in Clanton had landed. They’d flown in their own jet, from Miami to Clanton, and they were nice. So nice, she figured, that Coldiron must be paying them fuckloads of money not to show how weird they must think this all was, that she and Burton and Macon were being set up as a corporation that was buying a strip mall. But it did make it easier, the niceness. Brent, who had an even more expensive-looking tan than Pickett’s, had put away a plate of pork nubbins, while the other two had Hefty lattes.

She’d only seen Tommy when he’d walked them in from the parking lot, hadn’t had a chance to speak with him. She guessed driving and being security was part of his job now, or part of the part about Jackman’s deal with Pickett. He’d given her a nod, when he went back to the car. She’d smiled at him.

She’d have thought having Tommy drive the lawyers to a meeting in Hefty Mart was too obvious, but now she figured his relationship with the town had always been funny. Plenty of people must know about Jackman and Pickett, and more than she wanted to imagine must be making money off building, though maybe not that directly.
So if you saw Tommy drive some people in business clothes to Hefty, then sit there in the parking lot while they had a meeting inside, maybe you’d ignore it. Or maybe you’d go over and say hello, and Tommy would give you something from the Coffee Jones machine, but you wouldn’t ask him what he was doing.

Now it was just her and Macon there, Burton having gone with Tommy to take them back to their helicopter. She’d gotten herself a half-order of chicken nubbins, which she sometimes liked more than she’d admit.

“We could all have had two heads,” Macon said, “and they wouldn’t have mentioned it.” He had his Viz in, and she guessed he was literally keeping an eye on news and the market.

“They were nice, though.”

“You wouldn’t want to be on their bad side.”

“You’re Chief Technical Officer, huh?” she asked him.

“Yep.”

“Shaylene’s not on the board? That Burton’s idea?”

“I don’t think it was his call. My guess is they’re looking at who’s essential to whatever makes this worthwhile to them. You’re essential, Burton is, evidently I am, and Conner.”

“Conner?”

“Not on the board either, but it looks like he’s essential.”

“Why does it?”

“He’s already swallowed one of these.” He took a small plastic box from the front pocket of his new blue shirt and put it on the table between them. Clear, flat, square. Inside, white foam with a single cutout, fitting a glossy black pill. “You’ll want some water.”

“What is it?” She looked at him.

“Tracker. That’s not it. Gel cap around it, makes it less easy to lose, easier to swallow. Barely big enough to see, on its own. Ash ordered them from Belgium. Bonds to your stomach lining, good for six months, then it disassembles itself and nature takes its course.
Company makes it has its own string of low-altitude satellites. Have to keep putting ’em up, but they make that a feature, not a bug, ’cause they get to keep changing their hardwired encryption.”

“To keep track of where I’m at?”

“Pretty well anywhere, unless somebody sticks you in a Faraday cage, or way down in a mine. A little more robust than Badger”—he smiled—“and you could lose your phone. Want some water?”

She opened the box, shook the thing out. Didn’t feel any different than any other pill. Tiny little reflections of the snack bar lights in the deep glossy black. “Don’t bother,” she said, putting it on her tongue and washing it down with half a short cup of black coffee Burton had left on the table. “Wish it meant somebody in Belgium could tell me where the fuck I am,” she said. “In terms of all the rest of it, I mean.”

“Know what ‘collateral damage’ means?”

“People get hurt because they happen to be near something that somebody needs to happen?”

“Think that’s us,” he said. “None of this is happening because any of us are who we are, what we are. Accident, or it started with one, and now we’ve got people who might as well be able to suspend basic laws of physics, or anyway finance, doing whatever it is they’re doing, whatever reason they’re doing it for. So we could get rich, or killed, and it would all still just be collateral.”

“Sounds about right. What do you say we do, with that?”

“Try not to get damaged. Let it go where it’s going, otherwise, because we can’t stop it anyway. And because it’s interesting. And I’m glad you swallowed that. You get lost, it’ll tell us where to find you.”

“But what if I wanted to get lost?”

“They aren’t the ones trying to kill you, are they?” He took his Viz off, looked her in the eye. “You’ve met them. Think they’d be trying to kill you, if you stood to get them in some kind of very deep shit, or lose them a bunch of money?”

“No. Couldn’t tell you exactly why. But they could still completely screw up the world, just by dicking around with it. Couldn’t they?”

His fingers closed around the tangled, rigid, silvery filaments. She looked down and saw the lights of the projectors, moving in there. She looked up at him.

He nodded.

ANTIBODY

N
etherton, eyes screwed shut, viscerally dreading the gray light of the patchers’ island, became aware of a honeyed scent, warm yet faintly metallic.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Netherton,” Lowbeer said, from nearby. “I suppose that was very unpleasant for you. Not to mention unnecessary.”

“I’m not opening my eyes,” he said, “until I’m sure we’re no longer there.” He opened his right, fractionally. She was seated opposite where he lay.

“We’re in the cupola of the land-yacht,” she said. “Not peripherally.”

Opening both eyes, he saw that she’d lit her candle. “Were you here, before?”

“I was in Ash’s tent,” she said. “Had I come in earlier, you’d have asked where we were going. And refused, possibly.”

“Revolting place,” he said, meaning the island, though equally true of Ash’s tent. He sat up, the cushion that had supported his head lowering itself as he did.

“Ash,” said Lowbeer, fingers extended around the candle as if for warmth, “imagines you a conservative.”

“Does she?”

“Or a romantic, perhaps. She sees your distaste for the present rooted in the sense of a fall from grace. That some prior order, or perhaps the lack of one, afforded a more authentic existence.”

The autonomic cutout slid down Netherton’s forehead, over his eyes. He plucked it off, resisted the urge to snap it in half, put it aside.
“She’s the one mourning mass extinctions. I simply imagine things were less tedious generally.”

“I personally recall that world, which you can only imagine was preferable to this one,” she said. “Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.”

“I’ve no idea how anything could be otherwise,” he said. “I simply don’t like the way things are. Neither does Ash, apparently.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s in your dossier.”

“What is?”

“That you’re a chronic malcontent, albeit quite a purposeless one. Otherwise we might have met earlier.” Periwinkles quite sharp, just then.

“And why, exactly, do you think al-Habib is here?” Netherton asked, a change of topic seeming suddenly welcome.

“That was a peripheral, that you saw her stick her thumb into,” she said. “He’d been peripherally there for years, though not with the peri you and Rainey saw. Very expensively bespoke, the one you saw die. It had only been there for a few days. Complete genome, full complement of organs, fingerprints. The formal forensic signatures of a legal death, waiting to be ticked off. The island’s history assigned to an imaginary figure. His previous peripheral, most likely, was weighted and dropped into the water column, to be consumed by their assemblers. None of his immediate cohort would have been privy to that, nor to his real identity, and now, conveniently, courtesy of the Americans, they’re all dead. But we saw the survivors, didn’t we? Mortaring him into the fabric of the place. Memorializing what he’d pretended to be.”

“He hadn’t actually been there, before?”

“Present at the start, certainly, for their initial flotilla and whatnot. Perhaps for the cannibalism as well. He isn’t at all nice, Hamed. Good at pretending, though.”

“What did he pretend to be?” he asked.

“A prophet. A shaman. Motivated extraordinarily, thus extraordinarily motivating. Taking the same drugs they took, which he himself provided. Though of course he didn’t actually take them. If you fancy resenting the tedious, I recommend intentional communities, particularly those led by charismatics.”

“You believe he was here, while he was doing that?”

“No, not here. Geneva.”

“Geneva?”

“As a place to await an opportunity to optimally monetize the island, as good as any. And, of course, his mother is Swiss.”

“With two penises and the head of a frog?”

“All easily reversible,” said Lowbeer, pinching out the candle’s flame. “He’s made a mistake, though, in not staying there. London’s his mistake. Premature.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s come to my attention again,” she said, her expression just then making Netherton wish for another change of topic.

“What is it,” Netherton asked, “since you’re encouraging my curiosity, that you’ve offered Lev?”

“Assistance with his hobby.”

“Would you lie to me?”

“If the need were sufficiently pressing,” she said, “yes.”

“You’re telling me you’re helping him manage his stub?”

“I’ve an overview of its history, after all. I’ve information which isn’t generally available, here. Nor there either, or I should say, then. Where certain bodies are buried, you see. The nature of actual as opposed to ostensible policy, for any number of state and nonstate players. Fed the right bits of that, on a need-to-know basis, Ash and Ossian become considerably empowered. I’m surprised at just how engrossing I’ve started to find it.”

“Who else is in there, trying to kill Flynne and her brother? Do you know that?”

“I don’t,” she said, “yet, though I’ve suspicions.” Taking a crisp
white handkerchief from an inside breast pocket, she wiped her thumb and forefinger. “This business with al-Habib is fully as dull as its pretentious exoticism, Mr. Netherton. We’re on the same page, there. Real estate, recycled plastic, money. Whoever’s gained entrance to Lev’s stub is likely involved with that. A more interesting question, of course, being how they came to be admitted.”

“Is it?”

“It is, since the very mysterious server enabling all of this remains a mystery,” she said.

“May I ask you what it is that you actually do?”

“You pride yourself on not knowing who employs you. Rather behind the curve, in that. I might pride myself, were I so inclined, on not knowing what it is I do.”

“Literally?”

“If one has a sufficiently open mind about it, certainly. I was an intelligence officer, early in my career. In a sense I suppose I still am, but today I find myself enabled to undertake investigations, as I see fit. Into, should I so deem them, matters of state security. Simultaneously, I’m a law enforcement officer, or whatever that means in as frank a kleptocracy as ours. I sometimes feel like an antibody, Mr. Netherton. One protecting a disease.”

She offered him an uncharacteristically wan smile then, and he remembered her saying she’d had memories suppressed, as he and Rainey’s rented Wu had sat with her in her car. She must have more, unsuppressed, he thought, because just then he was certain that he felt their weight.

HOW IT SOUNDS

W
hen Reece tased her in the neck with what she’d thought was a flashlight, she’d just noticed how nothing on Burton’s table was squared up straight. It hurt. Then she wasn’t thinking, wasn’t there.

After her talk with Macon, she’d ridden home, taking her time, trying not to notice where the dead men’s car went into the ditch. Not looking out for drones. Pretending things were normal.

Her mother was asleep when she got there, Janice replaced by Lithonia, who said Leon had driven her out from Fab. Upstairs, she stretched out on her own bed, not meaning to sleep, and dreamed of London. From the air, every street was crowded as that Cheapside, but cars and trucks and buses instead of horses and carts. Full of people, except it wasn’t London but her town, gotten huge, rich, with a river the size of the Thames because of that. Waking, she went downstairs. Her mother still sleeping, Lithonia watching something on her Viz. Then down to the trailer, wondering if Burton was there but too lazy to check on Badger.

“Fuck, Reece,” she protested now, tugging at the zip ties around each of her wrists.

Reece, driving, didn’t say anything, just looked over, and that made the fear come. Not because he’d tased her and fastened her to this car seat with zip ties, but because, when he looked over, she saw that he was scared shitless.

She had a zip tie around each wrist, one fastening those together, all looped through with a longer one that went down under the front
of the seat. She could raise her hands high enough to rest them on her thighs, but that was it.

Didn’t know what he was driving, but it wasn’t cardboard, wasn’t electric.

“Made me,” he said. “No fucking choice.”

“Who did?”

“Pickett.”

“Slow down.”

“He’ll be after us,” he said.

“Pickett?”

“Burton.”

“Jesus . . .” Was this Gravely? She thought it was but then she didn’t. Looked out at roadside bushes, whipping past.

“Said they’d kill my family,” he said. “Would, too, ’cept I don’t have any. Just be me. Dead.”

“Why? What did you do?”

“Not a fucking thing. Kill me if I didn’t get you for them. He’s got people inside Homes. Homes can find anybody. So they’d find me, then somebody’d come and kill me.”

“Could’ve told us.”

“Sure, then they’d come and kill me. Kill me anyway, I don’t get you over there right now.”

She looked over and saw a muscle working, all on its own, at the hinge of his jaw. Like if you hooked it up to something, it could send his life story in code, all the parts of it he couldn’t tell, maybe didn’t know.

“Didn’t want to,” he said. “Not like I had a choice, to believe them or not. They’re who they are, and that’s what they do.”

She felt both front pockets of her jeans. Phone wasn’t there, wasn’t on her wrist, she wasn’t sitting on it. “Where’s my phone?”

“Copper mesh they gave me.”

She looked out the window. Then at the plastic chrome lettering on the glove compartment. “What’s this you’re driving?”

“Jeep Vindicator.”

“Like it?”

“Are you crazy?”

“Helps to make conversation,” she said.

“It’s not cardboard,” he said, “it’s American.”

“Don’t they make most of it in Mexico?”

“You just want to shit on my damn car now?”

“That you’re fucking kidnapping me in?”

“Don’t say that!”

“Why not?”

“How it sounds,” he said, between his teeth, and she knew he was just that far from crying.