The microsoft Conroy had sent filled his head with its own universe of constantly shifting factors: airspeed, altitude, attitude, angle of attack, g-forces, headings. The planes 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 planes time of arrival and confirming the arrangement for space for a single passenger
He wondered what Mitchell was doing, feeling. The Maas 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 mesas 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 endlessly 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-ells 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 fragments 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 mans life, from Turners 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 inter-corporate 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 Turners professionally casual ability to realign his loyalties to fit a change in employers. Or, perhaps, of his unyielding commitment 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 employers clients, and he was bright, very bright. He wore clothes well. He had a way with technology.
Conroy had found him in Mexico, where Turners employer 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. Hed set up a liaison between Sense/Net and the local government, bribed the towns top police official, analyzed the hotels security system, met the local guides and drivers and had their histories double-checked, arranged for digital voice protection on the simstim teams transceivers, established a crisis-management team, and planted seismic sensors around the Sense/Net suite-cluster.
He entered the hotels 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.
Youre the security for those simstim kids, the pale man said, putting one of the drinks down on Turners table. Alfredo 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 dont think weve been introduced, Turner said, making no move to accept the proffered drink.
It doesnt matter, Conroy said, seating himself, were in the same ball game. He seated himself.
Turner stared. He had a bodyguards 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 comment on a team that wasnt doing particularly well in a given season, those seismics youre using really dont make it. Ive met people who could walk in there, eat your kids for breakfast, stack the bones in the shower, and stroll out whistling. 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, heres 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 lettering 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. Well 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.
Thats nice, Turner, Hamilton said, taking the strangers place.
Yeah? Turner watched as the man was lost in the confusion of the crowded lobby, amid pink-fleshed tourists.
You dont ever seem to talk to people. You always look like youre running a make on them, filing a report. Its 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 illuminated from within by sunlamps. The blue eyes were inhumanly 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 shed finished two drinks, then walked her back to the suite-cluster.
You wouldnt feel like coming in for another, would you, Turner?