“Fuck a duck,” she said, then realized she sounded five years old and was probably being recorded. She looked around for cams, didn’t see any. Probably there, though, because they didn’t cost anything, and maybe your prisoner would say or do something you’d like to know about. The lights were too bright, the kind of totally white LEDs that made your skin look really bad. She guessed she could stand up, but she might knock the chair over doing it, and then have nowhere to sit.
She heard the bolt come out of the hasp.
Corbell Pickett opened the door. He was wearing black wraparound sunglasses. Came over to the table, leaving the door open behind him. His watch looked like a clock out of an old airplane, but gold, on a leather strap.
“Well?” he asked.
“Well what?”
“Ever dislocate your jaw?”
She looked up at him.
“I could do it for you,” he said, looking her in the eye, “if you don’t tell me more about your people in bullshit Colombia.”
She nodded, just a little.
“How much more do you know than you told me at the house?”
She was about to open her mouth but he raised his hand, the one with the big gold watch. She froze.
“Your Colombians,” he said, lowering his hand, “bullshit or not, aren’t necessarily the ones in this with the most money. Could be somebody else. Could be I’ve been talking with them. About you. All the lawyers in Miami don’t mean shit to them. I’d say you’re out of your depth, but that doesn’t do it justice.”
She waited for him to hit her.
“Don’t tell me any shell story.” His suntan looked weirder, under the light, than her skin did, but more even.
“They don’t tell us much.”
“People I’m talking to want me to kill you. Right now. They see proof you’re dead, they give me more money than you can imagine. So you aren’t just some random-ass poor, much as you look to me like one. What makes you that valuable?”
“I don’t have clue one, why anybody would give a shit about me. Or why Coldiron hooked up with us. If I did, I’d be telling you.” And then that crazy thing that had first come to her in Operation Northwind chimed in: “Where’d they say they’re from, these people of yours?”
“They don’t,” he said, pissed that it was true, then pissed at himself for answering the question.
“If I’m worth more dead than alive,” said the crazy thing, “how come I’m alive?”
“Difference between a cashed check and leverage,” he said. He leaned a little closer. “Aren’t stupid, are you?”
“Wilf Netherton,” she said, the crazy thing gone as suddenly as it had come. “At Coldiron. He’d want a chance to outbid them.”
Pickett smiled, maybe, just a tiny little change at the corners of his mouth. “We use your phone from here,” he said, stepping back, “they’ll know exactly where it is, where you are. We wait another few hours, till it gets somewhere else, we’ll patch a call through, you and I, to your Mr. Coldiron. Meantime, you sit here.”
“Any chance you could turn the lights down?”
“No,” he said, and she saw the micro-smile again, and then he turned and went back out, closing the door behind him.
She heard the bolt rattle.
72
Netherton watched as Ossian transformed the decloaked baby buggy, glossy as a wet peppermint toffee, red and cream, into something surprisingly if only vaguely anthropomorphic.
The two rear pairs of wheels, now flat on the garage’s floor, had formed figure-eight feet, from which sprouted candy-striped legs. Its gleaming armor, around the actual baby seat, had flattened laterally, widening at the top, emulating a muscular dynamism. The tires at the ends of each arm suggested clenched fists. Netherton could actually imagine this having some appeal, for a child. It didn’t look as though it were armed, particularly, but cocky, certainly, belligerent.
Thumbing its cream-and-red controller, Ossian guided it to the open door of the Bentley executive-hauler, into which it climbed, wheel-paws gripping the silver-gray bodywork. It sat on a backward-facing seat, freezing as Ossian gave the controller a final tap.
Ash had insisted Netherton remain with Ossian while she and Lev dealt with Flynne’s apparent abduction. She and Ossian were in contact, but Netherton could only hear Ossian’s side of any exchange, and that in their morphing gibberish.
Netherton had watched Ossian put a pair of grotesque gloves, or rather hands, on the white exoskeleton. These had far too many fingers, black and unsettlingly limp, like oversized, anatomically incorrect rubber spiders. The second one had given Ossian some unspecified trouble, so he’d left it for the meantime, choosing instead to decloak and transform the buggy.
“When will they reach Flynne?” Netherton asked.
“As you know,” Ossian said, “I don’t know.” He dropped the controller into the wide pocket on the front of his apron, bent to adjust the yellow kneepads he wore over his black trousers, then knelt before the white exoskeleton.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“You might try buggering off,” Ossian suggested, without looking up.
“Burton’s gone to bring her back?”
“Seems likeliest.”
“I’d think him competent,” Netherton said.
“Tendency to fly violently off the handle aside.” Ossian prodded a black, penlike instrument into the recalcitrant glove’s jiggly black digits, causing a small red light to strobe briefly.
“He was disoriented,” Netherton said. “Understandably. When you came barging in, he reacted.”
“I might disorient you,” Ossian said, “if Zubov didn’t need you to lie to your girlfriend’s face. Is it true, that she periodically has herself flayed, her entire epidermis, to hang in whatever establishment might be willing to display such a thing?”
“If you want to put it that way,” said Netherton.
“Kinky, are we?”
“She’s an artist,” said Netherton. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
“My hairy arse,” said Ossian, as if naming the root precept of a long-held philosophy, then pressed the penlike tool repeatedly into the black spider, managing to briefly produce a steady green light.
“Why are you putting those on?”
“For Macon’s technical. Field manipulators, military. Anything from stone masonry to nanosurgery. Once he’s locked in, can’t have him coming up short the right size spanner.”
“Locked in?”
“There,” indicating the windowless silver vehicle. “Put them both in, seal it, depressurize it, partial vacuum. Should anything escape, it stays inside. Really, though, this is all to satisfy Zubov. Those assemblers are self-terminating. If they weren’t, nothing in this vehicle would stop them.”
Netherton looked at the exoskeleton. Ossian had bodged a domed, transparent cylinder onto the thing’s shoulders, during Burton’s visit. Within this, immobile, legs akimbo, stood the homunculus that had driven him, along with Lev, to the house of love. Though really, he knew, Ash had been the driver.
Ossian got to his feet, dropping the black tool into the pocket with the controller. “Lowbeer,” he said, “has someone in the stub. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“No,” Netherton lied. “Who?”
“If I knew, would I be asking? Whoever it is, they aren’t being paid. Not by us. Ash signs off on all monies spent, there. Lowbeer has someone at her beck and call, apparently able to get in anywhere, learn anything.”
“I’d think that would be exactly what you’d want.”
“Not if it means someone on our team who’s an entirely unknown quantity. Becomes Lowbeer’s game, then.”
“She’s an unknown quantity as it is. And it’s quite obviously been her game since she had that private talk with Lev.”
“He doesn’t see that,” said Ossian. “She’s leveled his game up for him. That’s all he sees now. He might listen to you, though. You’re halfway posh.” He blinked, then, distracted. Looked away, listening. Said something in that moment’s Esperanto. Listened again. “Closer to her, now,” he said to Netherton.