“I was permitted to resign,” the rental said. “But merely from the project. I’m a career bureaucrat.”
“As am I,” said Lowbeer. “At the moment, on official business. Would that be true of you?”
The green eyes considered Lowbeer. “No,” it said, “I’m here privately.”
“Are you now involved,” Lowbeer asked, “in what the former project may be becoming?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that,” the rental said.
“But here you are, meeting privately with Mr. Netherton. Expressing concerns over his safety.”
“She says,” said Netherton, surprising himself, “that the Americans are spreading a rumor that I had Aelita killed.”
“No,” said the rental. “I said that they seemed the most likely suspects, in spreading it.”
“You said you thought it might be Daedra,” said Netherton, and finished his whiskey. He looked around for the Michikoid.
“We are aware of a whispering campaign,” said Lowbeer, “while uncertain as to its origins.” She glanced out again. “Oh dear,” she said, and rose, reaching under the flap of her brown satchel. “I’m afraid we’ll have to be going now.” She drew out a business card, passing it to the Michikoid, which had just then arrived, as if summoned. It accepted the card with two hands, bowed, smartly retreated. Lowbeer reached back into her satchel, producing what at first appeared to be a fussily ornate, gold-and-ivory lipstick, or perhaps atomizer, but which promptly morphed into a short, ceremonial-looking baton, its staff of fluted ivory topped with a gilt coronet. A tipstaff, evidently. Netherton had never actually seen one before. “Come with me, please,” she said.
Rainey’s peripheral stood. Netherton looked down at his empty glass, started to stand, saw the tipstaff morph again, becoming a baroque, long-barreled gilt pistol, with fluted ivory grips, which Lowbeer lifted, aimed, and fired. There was an explosion, painfully loud, but from somewhere across the lower level, the pistol having made no sound at all. Then a ringing silence, in which could be heard an apparent rain of small objects, striking walls and flagstones. Someone began to scream.
“Bloody hell,” said Lowbeer, her tone one of concerned surprise, the pistol having become the tipstaff again. “Come along, then.”
She shooed them out of the Maenads’ Crush, as the screaming continued.
33
Leon was finishing a second breakfast, at the counter in Jimmy’s. Flynne sat beside him. He’d had to come into town to do contractually obligated promo media with a crew from the lottery, with, he said, the douchebag he’d bought the ticket from. Burton had driven them.
“If he’s a douchebag,” Flynne asked, “why’d you buy the ticket from him?”
“’Cause I knew it would burn his ass so bad, when I won,” Leon said.
“How much did you get, after taxes and the Hefty Pal fees?”
“About six million five.”
“I guess it’s proof of concept.”
“What concept?”
“Wish I knew. Nobody’s supposed to be able to do that. Some security company in Colombia?”
“All this shit’s like a movie to me,” Leon said, and belched softly.
“You put anything down on Mom’s meds?”
“Eighty grand,” letting his belt out a notch. “That latest biological she’s on does burn through it.”
“Thanks, Leon.”
“When you’re rich as me, everybody’s always after your money.”
Flynne gave him the side eye, saw him keeping a straight face. Then noticed, in the mirror behind the bar, way back in it, in the glare of the gravel lot, the cartoon bull. It winked at her. She resisted the urge to give it the finger, because it would just add that to whatever little profile it kept on her.
Being here was making her think of Conner, of the square white tent out on Porter, the drone swarm sucking up molecules of tires. She still hadn’t had the face time she needed to talk to Burton about that. Conner, she figured, his first night on the job, had killed those four men.
He’d done it with speed, intensity, and violence of action. That was the Corps’ fighting ethos, and maybe more so for Haptic Recon. As she understood it, it meant that your intel might not be great, your plan iffy, your hardware not the best, but you made up for it by just going for it, every time, that hard and that fast. In Burton, that coexisted with his idea of there being a right way of seeing, but she guessed that might at least partly come from hunting to put food on the table, something he’d always been good at. Conner, on the other hand, would be purely the other.
“What were you doing over at Fab?” asked Leon.
“Meeting with Shaylene and Macon.”
“Don’t do anything funny,” he said.
“You’re telling me that, today?”
“All I’ve done, today,” he said, “is help get people around here to pay their damn stupidity tax, next lottery.” He slid off his stool, hitched up his jeans.
“Where’s Burton now?” she asked.
“Over at Conner’s, if his to-do list went okay.”
“Rent a car and drive me over there,” she said. “I’ll hang my bike on the back.”
“Leon can rent the car, he’s got money.”
“Burton’s hoping you’ll have to get used to that.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Leon, suddenly serious. “Those people you and him talk to sound made up. That story that went viral, about the pediatrician who gave all his money to his imaginary girlfriend in Florida? Like that.”
“Know what’s worse than imaginary, Leon?”
“What?”
“Half imaginary.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Wish I knew.”
After she’d called for the car, they waited outside while it drove itself over.
34
Would you mind my lighting a scented candle?” Lowbeer asked. “I’ve an unfortunate reaction to bombings.” She looked from Netherton to the rental. “I’ve had memories muted, but certain things continue to be triggers. Pure beeswax, essential oils, low-soot wick. Nothing at all toxic.”
“This unit doesn’t seem to have a sense of smell,” said Rainey. “Not that high end.”
Ash, Netherton thought, might make a point here, about beeswax in a world devoid of bees. “Please do,” he said, unable to stop seeing the tall, exceptionally graceful man’s shaven black head explode, repeatedly, in slow motion, from all those different angles and distances. It had happened as he’d descended the stairs, in front of the Maenads’ Crush. Where he still lay, for all Netherton knew, sprawled back, entirely headless. Lowbeer had shown them feeds from a variety of cams, and he wished she hadn’t.
There were four small, bulbous, swivel-mounted leather armchairs in the seemingly windowless passenger compartment of Lowbeer’s car, arranged around a low round table. Netherton and the rental had the two rearmost, facing forward, with Lowbeer seated facing them. The upholstery was slightly worn, scuffed at the beading along its edges, oddly cozy.
“It was rented as a sparring partner, from a martial arts studio in Shoreditch,” Lowbeer said, taking a short, wax-filled glass tumbler from her purse. It lit as she placed it on the table. “Rented the moment you told your cab to take you to Covent Garden, Mr. Netherton. When I targeted it, I assumed you were about to be physically assaulted. A matter of blows, likely, with hands or feet, but easily fatal, as it was optimized for unarmed combat.”
Netherton looked from Lowbeer to the candle flame and back. They had emerged from the Maenads’ Crush to find the air thick, relatively speaking, with a variety of aerial devices. Four yellow-and-black diagonally striped Met units, each with two brightly blinking blue lights, had been hovering, unmoving, above the decapitated figure, on its back, on the stairs he and Rainey had themselves so recently descended. Many smaller units had darted, buzzing, some no bigger than houseflies.