“Costa Rica?”
“That’s right.”
“Never have.”
“People know how to live, there.”
“You work for those data havens” Rydell said.
“I didn’t say that. Somebody else must’ve said that.”
“So did he” Rydell said. “He was carrying those glasses to somebody, up from Costa Rica, and she took ’em.”
“And I was glad she did. So glad. I was in the room next to his. I let myself in through the connecting door. I introduced myself. He met Loveless. First time. Last time.” The gun never wavered, but he began to scratch his head with his hand in the surgical glove. Scratch it like he had fleas or something.
“Loveless?”
“My nom. Nom de thing.” Then a long rattle of what Rydell took to be Spanish, but he only caught nombre de something. “Think she’s tight, Rydell? I like it tight, myself.”
“You American?”
His head sort of whipped sideways, a little, when Rydell said that, and his eyes unfocused for a second, but then they came back, clear as the chromed rim around the muzzle of his gun. “You know who started the havens, Rydell?”
“Cartels” Rydell said, “the Colombians.”
“That’s right. They brought the first expert systems into Central America, nineteen-eighties, to coordinate their shipping. Somebody had to go down there and install those systems. War on drugs, Rydell. Lot of Americans on either side, down there.”
“Well” Rydell said, “now we just make our own drugs up here, don’t we?”
“But they’ve got the havens, down there. They don’t even need that drug business. They’ve got what Switzerland used to have. They’ve got the one place in the world to keep what people can’t afford to keep anywhere else.”
“You look a little young to have helped put that together.”
“My father. You know your father, Rydell?”
“Sure.” Sort of, anyway.
“I never did. I had to have a lot of therapy, over that.”
Sure glad it worked, Rydell thought. “Warbaby, he work for the havens?”
A sweat had broken out on the man’s forehead. Now he wiped it with the back of the hand that held the gun, but Rydell saw the gun click back into position like it was held by a magnet.
“Turn on the headlights, Rydell. It’s okay. Left hand off the wheel.”
“Why?”
“Cause you’re dead if you don’t.”
“Well, why?”
“Just do it, okay?” Sweat running into his eyes.
Rydell took his left hand off the wheel, clicked the lights, double-clicked them to high beams. Two cones of light hit into a wall of dead shops, dead signs, dust on plastic. The one in front of the left beam said THE GAP.
“Why’d anybody ever call a store that?” Rydell said.
“Trying to fuck with my head, Rydell?”
“No” Rydell said, “it’s just a weird name. Like all those places look like gaps, now…”
“Warbaby’s just hired help, Rydell. IntenSecure brings him in when things get too sloppy. And they do, they always do.”
They were parked in a sort of plaza, in a mall, the stores all boarded or their windows whitewashed. Either underground or else it was roofed over. “So she stole the glasses out of a hotel had IntenSecure security, they brought in Warbaby?” Rydell looked at Chevette Washington. She looked like one of those chrome things on the nose of an antique car, except she was getting goosebumps down her thigh. Not exactly warm in here, which made Rydell think it might be underground after all.
“Know what, Rydell?”
“What?”
“You don’t know shit about shit. As much as I tell you, you’ll never understand the situation. It’s just too big for someone like you to understand. You don’t know how to think in those terms. IntenSecure belongs to the company that owns the information in those glasses.”
“Singapore” Rydell said. “Singapore own DatAmerica, too?”
“You can’t prove it, Rydell. Neither could Congress.”
“Look at those rats over there…”
“Fucking with my head…”
Rydell watched the last of the three rats vanish into the place that had been called The Gap. In through a loose vent or something. A gap. “Nope. Saw ’em.”
“Has it occurred to you that you wouldn’t be here right now if Lucius fucking Warbaby hadn’t taken up rollerblading last month?”
“How’s that?”
“He wrecked his knee. Warbaby wrecks his knee, can’t drive, you wind up here. Think about it. What does that tell you about late-stage capitalism?”
“Tell me about what?”
“Don’t they teach you anything in that police academy?”
“Sure” Rydell said, “lots of stuff.” Thinking: how to talk to crazy fuckers when you’re being held hostage, except he was having a hard time remembering what they’d said. Keep ’em talking and don’t argue too much, something like that. “How come the stuff in those glasses has everybody’s tail in a twist, anyway?”
“They’re going to rebuild San Francisco. From the ground up, basically. Like they’re doing to Tokyo. They’ll start by layering a grid of seventeen complexes into the existing infrastructure. Eighty-story office/residential, retail/residence in the base. Completely self-sufficient. Variable-pitch parabolic reflectors, steam-generators. New buildings, man; they’ll eat their own sewage.”
“Who’ll eat sewage?”
“The buildings. They’re going to grow them, Rydell. Like they’re doing now in Tokyo. Like the maglev tunnel.”
“Sunflower” Chevette Washington said, then looked like she regretted it.
“Somebody’s been look-ing…” Gold teeth flashing.
“Uh, hey…” Go for that talking-to-the-armed-insane mode.
“Yes?”
“So what’s the problem? They wanna do that, let ’em.”
“The problem” this Loveless said, starting to unbutton his shirt, “is that a city like San Francisco has about as much sense of where it wants to go, of where it should go, as you do. Which is to say, very little. There are people, millions of them, who would object to the fact that this sort of plan even exists. Then there’s the business of real estate…”
“Real estate?”
“Know the three most important considerations in any purchase of real estate, Rydell?” Loveless’s chest, hairless and artificially pigmented, was gleaming with sweat.
“Three?”
“Location” Loveless said, “location, and location.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You never will. But the people who know where to buy, the people who’ve seen where the footprints of the towers fall, they will, Rydell. They’ll get it all.”
Rydell thought about it. “You looked, huh?”
Loveless nodded. “In Mexico City. He left them in his room. He was never, ever supposed to do that.”
“But you weren’t supposed to look either?” It just slipped out.
Loveless’s skin was running with sweat now, in spite of the cool. It was like his whole lymbic system or whatever had just let loose. Kept blinking and wiping it back from his eyes. “I’ve done my job. Did my job. Jobs. Years. My father, too. You haven’t seen how they live, down there. The compounds. People up here have no idea what money can do, Rydell. They don’t know what real money is. They live like gods, in the compounds. Some of them are over a hundred years old, Rydell…” There were flecks of white stuff at the corners of Loveless’ smile, and Rydell was back in Turvey’s girlfriend’s apartment, looking into Turvey’s eyes, and it just clicked, what she’d done.
Dumped that whole bag of dancer into the Coke she’d brought him. She hadn’t been able to pour it all in, so she’d sloshed the Coke out onto the top of the can to wash it down, mix it around.
He had his shirt undone all the way now, the dark fabric darker with sweat, and his face was turning red.
“Loveless—” Rydell started, no idea what he was about to say, but Loveless screamed then, a high thin inhuman sound like a rabbit with its leg caught in a wire, and started pounding the butt of his pistol into the tight crotch of his jeans like there was something terrible fastened on him there, something he had to kill. Each time the gun came down, it fired, blowing holes in the carpeted floorboard the size of five-dollar pieces.