'Wait,' Sixsmith said. 'Tell me the moment it sounds like someone is changing the music or you see movement'
Jimenez looked blankly down toward his feet and let out a long sigh. Sixsmith stared down the street, at the house. It was really grubby. Which was strange. Houses normally took on the characteristics of the people who owned them, in one way or another. The Sunnyvale apartment was neat, clean, and impersonal. This place looked like it was the home of someone who was making a statement: I am dropping out of this place, I don't care what it looks like, I don't give a shit what you think.
The earpiece crackled again. 'Phone call. Front room left.'
Jimenez smiled, didn't look at him, and took out his handgun.
'Patch the call through to me,' Sixsmith said, and ignored the low curse that Jimenez threw at the pavement. It was a French voice, nice, female, sounding pleasant. This could be someone talking to her mother or her best friend. It was all so calm, so anodyne, so everyday. This was the elusive Charlotte Pascal talking about shopping, about going out, someone at the other end of the line hardly getting in a word, just coming in with the occasional, 'Really? You don't say?'
Sixsmith listened for close to twenty seconds, cut the line, nodded to Jimenez, and said, 'Let's go, front room left.' Then watched the team work their way down the hill, Jimenez by his side. These guys were specialists. You left the initial stuff to them. And inside a minute it was done. The front door of the house was through, the front windows too. Hooded men were inside — no shooting, Sixsmith thought, that was good anyway. By the time the pair of them had walked down the hill and were standing at the front gate, the SWAT team leader was back outside, hood off, right glove off too, blood pouring from his wrist.
'Cut myself on the fucking window,' the man said, glowering at the wound. 'This isn't me. Too fucking hot to think out here. Stitches, I guess.'
'So?' Jimenez asked, cutting the sentence off as quickly as he could manage.
The man shrugged. 'The phone call was a tape. Left on repeat, cycling 'round and 'round. Like the CD player. Some clever stuff hooked into the PC. Just to make the place look occupied.'
'Shit,' Sixsmith said, and thought: This woman is so on the ball.
They walked inside. It wasn't as grubby as Sixsmith expected. In a way, it looked as if it had hardly been occupied. There was a mattress on the floor of the main room, a low coffee table with the CD player on it. Sheryl Crow was coming out of it a little less loudly now that one of the SWAT team (who was a fan) had turned it down, not completely off. In the corner was a desk with a PC and a phone connected to it. The computer was on: A geometric screensaver bounced slowly from corner to corner like a Ping-Pong ball moving through sludge.
A thin young SWAT guy with ginger hair came in, smiling, trying to be helpful, and said, 'Nothing in the mailbox except junk circulars. Not a piece of mail in the house as far as I can see. No clothes in the drawers. No pictures. Nothing personal at all.'
Jimenez sniffed the air. He could always tell which SWAT people wanted to cross into plainclothes work. They were so friendly. 'Can't even smell the fucking cat, Vernon,' he grumbled. 'And I got a sensitive nose. That cat never even lived here, if you ask me.'
Vernon Sixsmith wished Jimenez would shut up about the cat. He stared at the floor: bare boards, looking a little pale, unpolished for years. Something on a single, slightly raised nail. He bent down, picked at it. A piece of red fabric. Sixsmith stared at it closely, then pulled a plastic bag from his pocket and tucked it away for later.
'Someone had the carpet up,' Sixsmith said. 'Took it away.'
'Maybe the pussy peed on it. Maybe the fucking cat peed all over the place and that was that, they just had to move out and get things fumigated. That would explain why I can't smell nothing.'
Over in the corner the PC started whirring, coming to life.
'Shut up, Pete, for chrissake.' The Screensaver disappeared, to be replaced by a small yellow circle.
'Jesus Christ,' Jimenez said. 'What the hell is that?'
The SWAT man, still trying to be friendly, shrugged at him. 'The screensaver shit they get on these things right now, who's guessing? I bought my kid some PC for Christmas down at the Good Guys. Two weeks later he's knee-deep in beaver shots. The Good Guys? I ask you. And him ten years old.'
'Some of us started at nine. Early developers.'
'Yeah.' The SWAT man laughed, and Jimenez thought it could be real good fun to jerk this one around a little.
Sixsmith glanced at the computer. The image had changed. It was bigger now.
'Say,' Jimenez said, 'you heard the one about — '
'Shut up, Pete.'
'Okay, you're thinking. I recognize the signs.'
The cat bothered Sixsmith. 'What did that photographer tell me about the pictures he took of that cat, Pete? Remind me.'
'He told you he took 'em and delivered 'em here. Two weeks ago.'
'Yeah. And Pascal made out like she moved out of Sunnyvale three weeks before that?'
Jimenez paused, puzzled. 'Yeah…' Then looked at the computer. It had changed again. The image had grown. It was now clearly a medieval sun, with a face in the centre. Not a pleasant face.
'So,' Sixsmith said, 'she had the picture taken, went back to Sunnyvale, and put it on the shelf, even though she wasn't living there.'
'Guess that's the sum of it.'
He thought about the bare floorboards and wondered aloud, 'Now, why would she possibly want to do something like that?'
And the SWAT guy looked at the computer and said, 'Ugly or what?' The image filled the entire screen. It was the colour of gold. The face was huge and full of apocalyptic fury at its centre. Vernon Sixsmith suddenly felt hot and cold at the same time, stared down beneath his shoes, and said, 'I think we'd better get the fu — '
Then watched the earth erupt at his feet.
CHAPTER 19
Tina Blackshire
'Smile for the camera, Charley.' Tina Blackshire ran around Charley Pascal with the little Sony video camera, crouching down to the level of the big wooden couch where she sat, almost regally. Charley Pascal hadn't wanted to be filmed in the wheelchair. This wasn't a matter of conceit, she said. They had to be careful not to give anything away.
'When do we do the real thing?' Tina asked. She had a plain, blank face, almost unintelligent, Charley thought, although this was deceptive. She had been with them almost a year. She knew Unix. She knew the Web. Tina could handle low-level hacking tasks as easily as someone else might set out a spreadsheet. And she had no family, no friends. She was like everyone else inside the Children: alone, unattached. Capable, Charley thought, of putting that distance between your puny, temporary body and the greater, everlasting glory that lay beyond.
'Joe said after,' Charley replied a little sharply, not wanting questions just then. 'You have to be patient, Tina. He just wanted me to try the video out. Get some shots they could splice in if they needed them.'
Tina nodded, a broken, fragile expression, the invisible bruise of the gentle rebuke hidden somewhere in the pale, flat contours of her face.
Charley wore a plain white cotton smock. She smiled. Tina always made her smile, even when she had this infuriating childishness about her. She was twenty-five or so, had worked in database programming for Oracle in the big black buildings in Redwood City, just down from the San Francisco airport, until she threw in her job and came to join the Children full-time. She had a high-pitched, girlish Valley accent that broke into falsetto too easily when she became overexcited. She was slim, almost without breasts, and nearly six feet tall.