The message light blinks when I thumb it on. Dr. Simon Mobarak. Well, I'll be damned.
If it's oh-dark-thirty in the morning in Toronto, it's even earlier for a hardworking single neurologist with an on-line virtual-reality game addiction. Hell, Simon might still be camped out in his bar in the Avatar Gamespace. If he isn't, he's curled up in bed, just hitting the first sweet, refreshing flickers of REM sleep. I really shouldn't call him. I still haven't forgiven him for giving Valens the information that he needed to find me.
I have Simon's home number.
He owes me.
I call.
No visual, but a sleepy voice mumbles amid a rustle of sheets. “Jenny? It's 3 a.m.”
“My give-a-shitter is broken, Simon. You called?”
“Yeah.” There's a grunt and more rustling. I imagine him finding his contact and ear clip in the dark and fitting them in. He coughs and swims into focus. I laugh. He's turned a bedside lamp on and must have straightened his pajama top.
“Who the hell sleeps in pajamas, Simon?” Damn, it's hard to stay mad at him. He looks about ten years old.
“Dr. Hua has your message. She was apparently already interested in the case. How are you holding up? Nanite treatments still working okay?”
Not too bad with the spy talk. We could be discussing medicine. “Better every day. Do you foresee any problems?”
“Depends on the prognosis, of course, but it could get very ugly indeed.”
“Are you going to be around if I need you?”
“I'm taking ‘Das Unterwasserzug' to Europe for a conference.” His grin is as disheveled as his pj's. “I'd expect you to be all impressed if you hadn't just been up and down the beanstalk.” Das Unterwasserzug. Imagine a marble in a giant garden hose. Vacuum in front, pressure behind, and the cars themselves riding on magnetic levitation rails. Cross the Atlantic in two hours.
We can build things like that, like the space elevator, like the Montreal. But Florida is half underwater and, while the dikes are holding around Manhattan and Boston, Houston was a little too exposed to save. “You have my hip,” I remind him. “Give me a call if you learn anything interesting.”
He stifles a yawn with his hand and tugs the down comforter in its corduroy duvet up halfheartedly. Beige. He must have bought that after his wife left. “Give me a call if you just want to talk.” He raises his hand and cuts me off before I can respond, leaving me with my mouth half open and a snappy comeback drifting on the air.
Is that your way of letting me know we're still friends if I want it, Simon? Rather than thinking about it too much, I enter another code and — expecting to leave a message — am not ready for an actual answer. “Yo.”
“Face, it's Maker.”
“Whatcha got going on? I came by your hotel but there wasn't nobody there.” He's in a room I don't recognize. The image jiggles a little as he shifts position: he must have his hip resting on his knee.
“I'm looking for another place. When did you come by?”
“Last night this morning. I knocked.”
“I must have been in bed.” A little white lie never hurt anybody. “I wanted to check in. I'm at Gabe's. Meet me downstairs in twenty minutes?”
He picks me up in my truck and we head down the block to Roupen's, where we get coffee and pick at the pies. He's got that inflatable cast off, finally. I wonder if his ankle's better or if he just got sick of wearing it. Razorface, uncharacteristically, starts talking.
“I got some weird shit going on, Maker. Those folks I hooked up with — gone without a trace, and the contact number they gave me is disconnected. Little worried out here, thinking maybe I should pull a vanishing act myself. I want you to be careful, too. I know they're gunning for your prime minister.”
“When'd you lose track of them?”
“Sometime this morning. Nobody around when I got back from your place—”
“Marde.”
“What?”
“Razorface—” You don't get to be my age living the way I've lived without a healthy respect for your instincts. “What were their names?”
“Got no last names. Chick looked — Eurasian, maybe? Pretty thing, lot like Bobbi. Named—”
“Indigo.”
“Yeah. How did you know that?”
“I killed her uncle, Face. Do me a favor?”
He coughs into his hand, and I don't like the way it sounds, or the gray hollows under his eyes. He picks up his coffee. “Anything.”
“Lie low. Stay close. Things are going to get ugly in Hartford and maybe here, and I may wind up with my ass extradited. The information you got Simon is in good hands, and I expect walls to start crumbling.” The coffee in its white stoneware mug is burned. I finish it and get the night-shift cook to bring me a carafe while Razorface is still doctoring his second cup with too much cream and sugar. I stare out the window at the chrome and neon of the sign. “How willing are they to kill people, Face?”
“Real willing.” Despite all the creamer, he blows across his coffee. He doesn't have much appetite for his pie, and the scrapes on his head aren't healing well. I can still see pink raw edges, half knit. “It's going to be soon, too. I–I dunno, I had them half talked out of going after Unitek, but now they think I'm a problem — surprised there's not a bullet in my brain. Farley'd like that.”
The name clicks over in my head. “Who?”
“There were two in the cell. Girl was Indigo.”
“Indigo Xu.”
“Whatever. Man went by Farley. Big white guy with light tattoos. Another one who thinks the space program money should be spent at home.”
“Oh, shit me not.” If I had been holding onto the edge of the table, I would have left fingermarks on it. “Face, he's got a Unitek badge. I saw him there yesterday.”
Alberta Holmes hired my sister, not too long ago. Barb Casey was what Razorface might have called a stone killer; the phrase didn't do her justice. Holmes wouldn't flinch at hiring another assassin or two… and it would amuse her to use somebody in ways they wouldn't imagine, for goals they wouldn't approve. It would probably amuse her to keep dredging up bits of my past and seeing if she could make me twitch. Keep me off balance.
Seeing as how hiring Barb worked out so well.
Which makes me wonder, actually, why Alberta and Fred have so much invested in keeping me distracted. Wonder what on Earth I can possibly do to mess up their carefully laid plans?
Unless some of the fighting is over me.
I wonder, watching things click over in Razorface's head and the light go on in those deep brown eyes. I wonder if Holmes thinks she can use me to run Fred. Because if she does, she's seriously underestimating the ruthlessness of the man.
Razorface thinks for what seems like a long time before he talks. “You think they work for Holmes.”
“Either that or they have an in and they're still planning to do the job. There are too many variables to be sure.” I lean my elbows on the table and my face into my hands, the cool metal edge furrowing my stomach and my pants sticking to the washed-damp bench when I shift. The sensitive polymer over my steel hand feels strange to me still, after so many years of metal touching my skin. Razorface's spoon clinks and I try to make sense of what I know.
I just don't know enough. “Face, go to ground. Stay down. You willing to stay in this thing for a while?”
He shrugs. “What the hell else I got to do?”
I drop my hands and put the left one over his enormous one, squeezing enough to get his attention. “Stay hard.”