“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.
69
When 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.
70
The kitchen was fragrant with the blini Lev was making. “She’s helping you with the stub,” Netherton said. “She told me.” Rain was falling in the garden, on the artificial-looking leaves of the hostas. Did thylacines dislike rain? Neither Gordon nor Tyenna was in sight.
Lev looked up from the segmented iron pan. “I don’t expect you to understand.”
“Understand what?”
“The appeal of continua. Or of collaborating with her. She’s already gotten us into the White House.”
“That would be what, then, the first Gonzales administration?”
“No direct contact. Yet. But we’re close. No one I know of has ever penetrated a stub this efficiently. She knows where the pivots are, the moving parts. How it works.”
“Is that what she offered you, after that first meeting?”
“It’s reciprocal,” Lev said, removing the pan from the element. “She assists me, we protect Burton and his sister, you help her with the Aelita business, Daedra, whatever that is.” Using a spatula, he began to transfer the blini to two waiting plates. “Salmon, or caviar?”
“Is the caviar real?”
“You’d want my grandfather, for caviar from a sturgeon.”
“I wouldn’t, actually.”
“I’ve had it,” Lev said. “I couldn’t tell the difference. This is entirely its equal.”
“I will, thank you.”
Lev tidily burdened each blintze with sour cream and caviar.
“Ossian’s taken delivery of a Bentley,” Netherton said. “Drove itself in from Richmond Hill. Like a silver-gray steam iron, windowless, six wheels. Hideous. Parked by Ash’s tepee. What’s that about?”
“Executive transport,” Lev said. “Early jackpot. They need to disassemble something, so they’ll do it inside. Assemblers might be released.”
“The buggy?”
Lev looked up from the blini. “Who told you about that?”
“Ossian pointed it out to me, when we were waiting for your brother’s peripheral. He didn’t mention disassembling it. But later I saw him pushing it through the garage, and Lowbeer told me she wants its weapons.”