Agency Read online

  Where Ash’s road intersected the high street rose the side of a 1930s cinema. High up, on the windowless wall facing him, on a Moderne lozenge, steel-rimmed Prussian blue capitals spelt RIO. He’d taken Rainey there once, he remembered now, to a Kurosawa festival, having by then forgotten that it overlooked Ash’s weird hacienda.

  The car, on arrival, proved to be a front-loading single-seater, the smallest of its three wheels in the rear. Like a solo sauna that had escaped from a day spa, Netherton thought. It opened its single door. “Good evening, Mr. Netherton,” it said, as he got in.

  He gave it the address in Alfred Mews as the door closed, then phoned Rainey. “On my way,” he said, her sigil brightening as they pulled out onto the high street.

  “How’s Ash?” she asked.

  “She’s lost the bifocal eyes. And the tattoos. Told me she’s seeing someone.”

  “Make you any less irritable around her?”

  “No.”

  “This was business, I take it?” Her joke.

  “Lowbeer. Has a new project.”

  “A stub,” she said.

  “How did you know?”

  “From all you say, she’s obsessed with them.”

  “How’s Thomas?”

  “Sleeping.” She opened a feed of his son, curled in his crib.

  “I’ll be there soon.”

  “Bye, then,” she said.

  Thomas vanished. Rainey’s sigil dimmed.

  He watched the passing shops, the few pedestrians. A couple stood talking, in the doorway of a pub.

  He closed his eyes, which caused the single seat’s headrest to improve its support. When he opened them, the car was at a traffic signal, still in Hackney.

  Through the windshield, at a pedestrian crossing, he saw something tripodal, perhaps three meters tall, which was also waiting, draped in a cloak of what appeared to be damp-blackened shingle.

  Hackney, he thought irritably, glaring at it. Always gotten up as something it wasn’t.

  11

  RELATIONSHIP TREE

  Down under Joe-Eddy’s workbench, two inches above dust bunnies and a gum wrapper someone had folded as small as humanly possible, Verity was navigating the five-inch-wide canyon between the wall and an unused piece of drywall when Eunice opened the feed.

  It was divided equally into six, each showing her a stranger, two of them female. “Who are they?” she asked, straightening up in the workstation chair and putting the drone into hover with the unbranded controller Eunice had downloaded to her phone.

  “From something like Uber,” Eunice said, “but for following people.”

  “You’re shitting me. What’s it called?”

  “Followrs,” said Eunice, the spelling blipping past in Helvetica. “You really haven’t been online much this year, have you?”

  “Who’re they following?” Already knowing the answer.

  “You.”

  Verity looked more closely. A young Latina in the lower right corner was shown at a different angle, the image in a different resolution. “Lower right, that’s in 3.7?”

  “Getting that one off a cam I found there. Two more from street cams. Only have four drones, and you’re using one to dick around with under furniture.”

  The girl in 3.7 seemed engrossed in her phone. “What’s she doing?”

  “Candy Crush Saga. Nondigital surveillance is weaponized boredom.”

  Another feed showed a white man seated behind the wheel of a car, looking straight ahead, apparently unaware of the drone in front of him. Having that forgettable a face would be a plus, she supposed, for doing this.

  “Gavin put them onto you. He thinks it’s untraceable.”

  Verity started backing out from behind the plasterboard. “If they’ve got somebody in 3.7,” she said, “that means they were watching us last night.”

  “Somebody from Cursion was. Name’s Pryor. Found him on a couple of security cams, along the street. Facial recog’s a deep dive. Nasty. The six from Followrs are low-risk, though. The one in the car is behind on his child support, but that’s the worst of it, recordwise.” The feed blinked off.

  “What do they want?” Verity asked, as the drone cleared the end of the plasterboard.

  “Sight of you. Since I’m keeping Tulpagenics from being able to monitor us, Gavin’s got these guys on it.”

  Verity flew the drone into the kitchen, where she was seated at the table, Pelican case open in front of her. Something took the drone over then, maybe Eunice, maybe the case. It hovered above the case, adjusted position, then descended, straight down into one of the square holes in the foam. “You found them by using the drones?” she asked Eunice.

  “That and banking faces.”

  “So what’s it mean?”

  “You won’t like this at all,” said Eunice, “but it means you need to go and see Stetson Howell.”

  “Won’t happen. Which is to say zero fucking way.”

  “You need somebody they’d have a harder time messing with,” Eunice said. “He’s the best you’ve got. I did a relationship tree, shows that anybody else you know who’s got the kind of juice you need, you met through him. And none of them have anywhere near as much reason to help you.”

  “I don’t ‘have’ Stets.” She resisted the urge to throw the phone across the kitchen, reminding herself it was hers, and that she was talking with Eunice over the headset and Tulpagenics’ phone.

  “You don’t think he’s an asshole, either.”

  Verity’s phone rang, caller unknown, making her reconsider throwing it across the room. “Hello?”

  “Verity? Stets.”

  “Stets,” she said, blankly.

  “I have your new PA on the other line. She thinks we should meet.”

  “She does?”

  “Says this morning may be your only available slot for a while. Virgil will pick you up. Twenty minutes?”

  Virgil Roberts, who looked, people agreed, like Janelle Monáe had a twin brother, and appeared to non-insiders to be Stets’ meta-gofer, but among other things was his resident pitch-critic. “Okay,” she said, “twenty minutes. See you.” Finger-swiping to end it. “Dammit, Eunice—”

  “Best I got right now in the might-work-like-a-motherfucker department. Okay?”

  “Shit,” said Verity, in what she reluctantly recognized as the relatively affirmative, and twenty minutes later was climbing into the passenger seat of an electric BMW.

  “How are you?” Virgil asked, grinning, extending his right hand to give her left an upside-down squeeze.

  “Complicated. Where are we going?”

  “Fremont,” he said, as Eunice facially recognized him, the street name meaning nothing in particular to Verity. He pulled back into Valencia traffic.

  “How are you, Virgil?” she asked.

  “Working for the man. Mostly wrangling a lot of reno details, but on what I’d call a heroic scale. You working?”

  “Pied-à-terre,” Eunice said, an aerial shot filling the glasses. Sunlit uppermost stories of a tower, its massive verticality penetrating a photoshopped bed of cotton-candy fog. “The fiancée’s regooding them the top two floors. Footprint’s about three tennis courts.” Then it was gone.

  “Just got a job,” Verity said, “but I can’t talk about it.”

  “As long as it doesn’t involve getting marble out, you’re good. First owner evidently didn’t know that other materials existed, so there’s a lot of it. Caitlin wants every last gram of it optimally recycled, so we have to get as much of it as possible out intact, unbroken.”

  Her phone rang. “Sorry,” she said, raising it.

  “No problem.” He smiled, turning another corner.

  “Don’t hate on me,” Eunice said.

  “I do have good reason,” Verity said, her tone cheerful for V
irgil’s benefit.

  “It’s situational.”

  “Steady-state, if things keep on this way,” Verity said, as Virgil turned onto Fourteenth.

  “We have to stay inside their feedback loop. Sometimes I have to push you out of a comfort zone.”

  The grimly accusatory façade of the Armory loomed now. “Being pushed is outside my comfort zone.”

  “Right now,” Eunice said, “we’re being followed. By the dude who’s behind on his child support. Four more waiting for rides, to go wherever he follows us. Last one’s covering 3.7, in case you come back. Work with me.”

  Verity took a deep breath, slowly let it out. “Okay.” Beyond the Armory now, they passed antigentrification murals.

  “We need a sit-down with Stets, the three of us.”

  “How would that look, devicewise?”

  “We go with what he’s got. Worst case, you prop your phone up on something, speaker on, and I use an avatar.”

  “Topics?”

  “Your new job, my views on your employer . . .”

  “What you’ve said to me?” She glanced at Virgil, deciding he looked a little too determinedly like he was just driving.

  “Sure,” Eunice said, “and whatever you think about it. It’s not a pitch. We’re giving him a chance to decide whether he wants to be involved with us.”

  Past shoals of waist-high cardboard microshanties now, some with shopping carts as structural elements, many roofed with pale-blue dollar-store plastic tarps. “That’s not entirely his call. Or yours.”

  “I know. But we’re almost there. End the call.”

  “Okay,” said Verity, “bye.” Lowering the phone as they drove beneath the overpass feeding the bridge.

  Opening out into SoMa, to descend eventually, blocks and corners later, an off-street ramp of spotlessly new concrete. Stopping before a grid of white-painted steel rod, which rose hydraulically. As he pulled forward, she glanced back, seeing the gate descend behind them.

  12

  ALFRED MEWS

  Rainey had decorated their flat with furniture collected since joining him in London, all of it the product, relatively speaking, of human hands. None of it, as she put it, liable to shape-shift. She admired Scandinavian design of the mid-twentieth century, but couldn’t afford it, so looked for period knockoffs rather than assembler simulacra.

  “So it’s earlier, there? Earlier than the county?” she asked from the kitchenette, as she plated their evening meal.

  “The year after the Americans elected their first female president.”

  “Gonzalez?”

  “No. They elected theirs earlier, in 2016. And the Brexit vote was to remain. May I help you?”

  “Have a look in at Thomas, please.”

  He crossed to the nursery door, saw Thomas curled in his crib, surrounded by a soothing miniature auroral display. “He’s fine.”

  “Are people happier there?” she asked. “Happier than they were here, then?”

  “I gather they aren’t, particularly.”

  “Pity,” she said. “Ready for tilapia tacos? Place on Tottenham Court Road. Better Mexican in your new stub, no doubt. Why aren’t they happy, there?”

  “The drivers for the jackpot are still in place, but with less torque at that particular point.” He took a seat at the table. “They’re still a bit in advance of the pandemics, at least.”

  She took the seat opposite. “Nothing before the 2020s has ever seemed entirely real, to me. Hard to imagine they weren’t constantly happy, given all they still had. Tigers, for instance.” Picking up a taco. “What had to change, to produce the opposite result in that election?”

  “We don’t know yet. Connectivity’s too poor to access the data needed for that.”

  “Could you take me there?”

  “Not yet. That same lack of connectivity. Infrastructure’s wanting.”

  “I liked the county,” she said, “even though it made me sad.”

  “It did? Why?”

  “They’re living in a conspiracy theory, but a real one. Controlled by secret masters. Your employer, primarily.”

  “But isn’t it better there now, than if we hadn’t intervened?” he asked.

  “It is, I’m sure, but it makes a joke of their lives.”

  “But everyone you know there is in on it.”

  “I don’t know whether I’d rather know or not know,” she said, and took a bite of taco.

  13

  STETS

  Virgil parked in a white garage, beside several crisp trade vans, the polished concrete floor only lightly marked by tires. In front of them, massively framed in bronze-toned metal, a single equally bronze-toned elevator door. First owner, she assumed, doubting the architect fiancée was into faux-pharaonic kitsch.

  They got out. He walked to the elevator, to swipe a card in a slot. The door hummed briskly open. He gestured for her to enter.

  She did, finding herself reflected in rose-gold mirror.

  “Hang on,” he said, from outside, “it’s fast.”

  “You’re not coming?”

  “Chores here. But I’ll take you back.”

  “Okay,” she said, “thanks.”

  “Fifty-second,” he said, as the door closed. She steadied herself on an oversized handrail, the ascent commencing, accelerating smoothly, as the glasses tiled with feeds, like horizontally displayed playing cards.

  “Every cam in the building, except Stets’,” Eunice said, the elevator’s speed making Verity slightly light-headed. She saw vistas of cube farms, screen-lit faces in individual cubicles, a long service island in a kitchen the size of her condo, an angle down on a vacant swimming pool, a baby in its crib.

  The elevator slowed, to stop with only the faintest bump, the feeds blinking out. The door opened behind her. She turned, to face an odd blue light.

  A power tool yelped its way through something, at a distance. She turned back, to check her face in the mirror, then stepped out, into a confusing space made more so by that light. Whatever the building’s top several floors had contained had been stripped to raw concrete, little else, with only a small portion of the uppermost floor remaining. Scaffolding ran up to this, supporting a temporary zigzag of aluminum stairs. Blue plastic tarps, semitranslucent, like the ones covering the cardboard shanties she’d passed in the street, were laced together, strung taut, across walls of glass.

  With a barely audible whirr, something detached itself from beneath the lapel of her tweed jacket and shot forward.

  “Other one’s in the car with Virgil,” Eunice said, opening a feed from the microdrone, nothing but the blue of the tarps, then briefly blurred, as it zipped between two adjacent edges. To overlook the Bay, where something anomalously vast loomed in what was left of bad wildfire light, as though the horizon should sag beneath it.

  “What’s that?”

  “Container ship,” Eunice said. “Chinese. Not their biggest, but up there.” The saw or grinder scrawked again, echoes ringing metallically off concrete she supposed had recently been covered by Virgil’s marble.

  “Verity!”

  The ship vanished. She looked up.

  His face above a bright yellow railing, topped with his trademark permanent bedhead. “Come up,” he called, as Eunice drew her lines around his nose. “I’d be down to greet you, but I’ve fucked up my knee.”

  She walked to the scaffolding, started up the stairs, realizing she’d had no time to worry about how awkward it might be to see him again, and now here they were.

  “What happened to you?” she asked, reaching the top, seeing the black articulated brace clamped around his left leg, under baggy black shorts and extending down to midcalf.

  “Fell off a Honda.” A mesh nylon safety vest, over his black t-shirt, was crisscrossed with bands of fluorescent orange and reflective s
ilver.

  “I thought you hated motorcycles,” she said.

  “It’s a plane.”

  “A plane?”

  “An HA-420. Took delivery last week. Looks like a Pixar character.”

  “You fell off a plane?”

  “Down the stairs, getting off. Nothing broke. Have to wear this for a while, have physio.” He rapped the brace with his left hand.

  She went to him, instinctively making their hug the A-frame kind. He pecked her cheek, grinned. “Good to see you.”

  “Good to see you.”

  “Been a while.”

  “I’ve been out of the media’s way.”

  “So your PA was telling me.”

  “Eunice.”

  “Impressive. Where’d you find her?”

  “She found me. What’s that?” she asked, seeing smooth silver behind him and glad to change the subject.

  “Airstream Flying Cloud.”

  “How’d you get it up here?”

  “In our case, the model name says it all. With part of the roof temporarily off the building, temptation got the best of us.”

  “How will you get it back down?”

  “Caitlin wants to build it in. Like a secret fort.”

  “Congratulations on your engagement,” she said, one of the more classically awkward things anyone ever had to say to an ex, and yet she didn’t feel it.

  “Are you with anyone?” he asked, the other half of a perfect double whammy of awkwardness, and yet still nothing.

  “No,” she said.

  He gave her his hand, at the trailer’s open door, as she stepped up and in, then winced as he climbed up after her, leaving the door open.

  “That looks painful,” she said.

  “Not much.” He rubbed his braced leg through the black shorts. “Like something? Water? Coffee?”

  “No, thanks,” she said. “What did she tell you?” And instantly the awkwardness was there, but it had nothing at all to do with them. It was, she realized, about Eunice.