Count Zero Read online

  “Whoa,” said the black man, “lost you for a second. Not for long, you understand, just maybe a New York minute . . .” His hand, in the mirrors overhead, took a flat spool of blue transparent plastic from the bloody cloth beside Bobby’s ribs. Delicately, with thumb and forefinger, he drew out a length of some sort of brown, beaded plastic. Minute points of light flashed along its edges and seemed to quiver and shift. “Claw,” he said, and with his other hand thumbed some sort of integral cutter in the sealed blue spool. Now the length of beaded stuff swung free and began to writhe. “Good shit,” he said, bringing the thing into Bobby’s line of sight. “New. What they use in Chiba now.” It was brown, headless, each bead a body segment, each segment edged with pale shining legs. Then, with a conjurer’s flick of his green-gloved wrists, he lay the centipede down the length of the open wound and pinched delicately at the final segment, the one nearest Bobby’s face. As the segment came away, it withdrew a glittering black thread that had served the thing as a nervous system, and as that went, each set of claws locked shut in turn, zipping the slash tight as a new leather jacket.

  “Now, you see,” said the black man, mopping the last of the brown syrup away with a wet white pad, “that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  His entrance to Two-a-Day’s apartment wasn’t anything like the way he’d so often imagined it. To begin with, he’d never imagined being wheeled in in a wheelchair that someone had appropriated from St. Mary’s Maternity—the name and a serial number neatly laser-etched on the dull chrome of the left armrest. The woman who was wheeling him would have fitted neatly enough into one of his fantasies; her name was Jackie, one of the two Project girls he’d seen at Leon’s, and, he’d come to understand, one of his two angels. The wheelchair was silent as it glided across the scabrous gray wall-to-wall of the apartment’s narrow entranceway, but the gold bangles on Jackie’s fedora tinkled cheerfully as she pushed him along.

  And he’d never imagined that Two-a-Day’s place would be quite this large, or that it would be full of trees.

  Pye, the doctor, who’d been careful to explain that he wasn’t a doctor, just someone who “helped out sometimes,” had settled back on a torn barstool in his makeshift surgery, peeled off his bloody green gloves, lit a menthol cigarette, and solemnly advised Bobby to take it real easy for the next week or so. Minutes later, Jackie and Rhea, the other angel, had wrestled him into a pair of wrinkled black pajamas that looked like something out of a very cheap ninja kino, deposited him in the wheelchair, and set out for the central stem of elevators at the arcology’s core. Thanks to an additional three derms from Pye’s store of drugs, one of them charged with a good two thousand mikes of endorphin analog, Bobby was alert and feeling no pain.

  “Where’s my stuff,” he protested, as they rolled him out into a corridor grown perilously narrow with decades of retrofitted ducts and plumbing. “Where’s my clothes and my deck and everything?”

  “Your clothes, hon, such as they were, are taped up in a plastic bag waiting for Pye to shitcan ’em. Pye had to cut ’em off you on the slab, and they weren’t but bloody rags to begin with. If your deck was in your jacket, down the back, I’d say the boys who chopped you out got it. Damn near got you in the process. And you ruined my Sally Stanley shirt, you little shithead.” Angel Rhea didn’t seem too friendly.

  “Oh,” Bobby said, as they rounded a corner, “right. Well, did you happen to find a screwdriver in there? Or a credit chip?”

  “No chip, baby. But if the screwdriver’s the one with the two hundred and ten New ones screwed into the handle, that’s the price of my new shirt . . .”

  Two-a-Day didn’t look as though he was particularly glad to see Bobby. In fact, it almost seemed as if he didn’t see him at all. Looked straight through him to Jackie and Rhea, and showed his teeth in a smile that was all nerves and sleep-lack. They wheeled Bobby close enough that he saw how yellow Two-a-Day’s eyeballs looked, almost orange in the pinky-purple glow of the gro-light tubes that seemed to dangle at random from the ceiling. “What took you bitches?” the ’wareman asked, but there was no anger in his voice, only bone weariness and something else, something Bobby couldn’t identify at first.

  “Pye,” Jackie said, swaggering past the wheelchair to take a package of Chinese cigarettes from the enormous wooden slab that served Two-a-Day as a coffee table. “He’s a perfectionist, ol’ Pye.”

  “Learned that in vet school,” Rhea added, for Bobby’s benefit, “ ’cept usually he’s too wasted, nobody’d let him work on a dog . . .”

  “So,” Two-a-Day said, and finally let his eyes rest on Bobby, “you gonna make it.” And his eyes were so cold, so tired and clinical, so far removed from the hustling manic bullshitter’s act that Bobby had taken for the man’s personality, that Bobby could only lower his own eyes, face burning, and lock his gaze on the table.

  Nearly three meters long and slightly over a meter wide, it was strapped together from timbers thicker than Bobby’s thigh. It must have been in the water once, he thought; sections still retained the bleached silvery patina of driftwood, like the log he remembered playing beside a long time ago in Atlantic City. But it hadn’t seen water for a long time, and the top was a dense mosaic of candle drippings, wine stains, oddly shaped overspray marks in matte black enamel, and the dark burns left by hundreds of cigarettes. It was so crowded with food, garbage, and gadgets that it looked as though some street vendor had set up to unload hardware, then decided to have dinner. There were half-eaten pizzas—krill balls in red sauce, and Bobby’s stomach began to churn—beside cascading stacks of software, smudged glasses with cigarettes crushed out in purple wine dregs, a pink styrene tray with neat rows of stale-looking canapés, open and unopened cans of beer, an antique Gerber combat dagger that lay unsheathed on a flat block of polished marble, at least three pistols, and perhaps two dozen pieces of cryptic-looking console gear, the kind of cowboy equipment that ordinarily would have made Bobby’s mouth water.

  Now his mouth was watering for a slice of cold krill pizza, but his hunger was nothing in the face of his abrupt humiliation at seeing that Two-a-Day just didn’t care. Not that Bobby had thought of him as a friend, exactly, but he’d definitely had something invested in the idea that Two-a-Day saw him as someone, somebody with talent and initiative and a chance of getting out of Barrytown. But Two-a-Day’s eyes told him he was nobody in particular, and a wilson at that . . .

  “Look here, my man,” someone said, not Two-a-Day, and Bobby looked up. Two other men flanked Two-a-Day on the fat chrome and leather couch, both of them black. The one who’d spoken wore a gray robe of some kind and antique plastic-framed glasses. The frames were square and oversized and seemed to lack lenses. The other man’s shoulders were twice as wide as Two-a-Day’s, but he wore the kind of plain black two-piece suit you saw on Japanese businessmen in kinos. His spotless white French cuffs were closed with bright rectangles of gold microcircuitry. “It’s a shame we can’t let you have some downtime to heal up,” the first man said, “but we have a bad problem here.” He paused, removed his glasses, and massaged the bridge of his nose. “We require your help.”

  “Shit,” Two-a-Day said. He leaned forward, took a Chinese cigarette from the pack on the table, lit it with a dull pewter skull the size of a large lemon, then reached for a glass of wine. The man with the glasses extended a lean brown forefinger and touched Two-a-Day’s wrist. Two-a-Day released the glass and sat back, his face carefully blank. The man smiled at Bobby. “Count Zero,” he said, “they tell us that’s your handle.”

  “That’s right,” Bobby managed, though it came out as a kind of croak.

  “We need to know about the Virgin, Count.” The man waited.

  Bobby blinked at him.

  “Vyèj Mirak”—and the glasses went back on— “Our Lady, Virgin of Miracles. We know her”—and he made a sign with his left hand—“as Ezili Freda.”

  Bobby became aware of the fact that his mouth was open, so he closed it. The three dark
faces waited. Jackie and Rhea were gone, but he hadn’t seen them leave. A kind of panic took him then, and he glanced frantically around at the strange forest of stunted trees that surrounded them. The gro-light tubes slanted at every angle, in any direction, pink-purple jackstraws suspended in a green space of leaves. No walls. You couldn’t see a wall at all. The couch and the battered table sat in a sort of clearing, with a floor of raw concrete.

  “We know she came to you,” the big man said, crossing his legs carefully. He adjusted a perfect trouser-crease, and a gold cufflink winked at Bobby. “We know, you understand?”

  “Two-a-Day tells me it was your first run,” the other man said. “That the truth?”

  Bobby nodded.

  “Then you are chosen of Legba,” the man said, again removing the empty frames,” to have met Vyèj Mirak.” He smiled.

  Bobby’s mouth was open again.

  “Legba,” the man said, “master of roads and pathways, the loa of communication . . .”

  Two-a-Day ground his cigarette out on the scarred wood, and Bobby saw that his hand was shaking.

  10

  ALAIN

  THEY AGREED TO MEET in the brasserie on the fifth sublevel of the Napoleon Court complex, beneath the Louvre’s glass pyramid. It was a place they both knew, although it had had no particular meaning for them. Alain had suggested it, and she suspected him of having chosen it carefully. It was neutral emotional ground; a familiar setting, yet one that was free of memories. It was decorated in a style that dated from the turn of the century: granite counters, black floor-to-ceiling beams, wall-to-wall mirror, and the sort of Italian restaurant furniture, in dark welded steel, that might have belonged to any decade of the past hundred years. The tables were covered in gray linen with a fine black stripe, a pattern picked up and repeated on the menu covers and matchbooks and the aprons of the waiters.

  She wore the leather coat she’d bought in Brussels, a red linen blouse, and new black cotton jeans. Andrea had pretended not to notice the extreme care with which she’d dressed for the meeting, and then had loaned her a simple single strand of pearls, which set off the red blouse perfectly.

  He’d come early, she saw as she entered, and already the table was littered with his things. He wore his favorite scarf, the one they’d found together at the flea market the year before, and looked, as he usually did, disheveled but perfectly at ease. The tattered leather attaché case had disgorged its contents across the little square of polished granite: spiral notebooks, an unread copy of the month’s controversial novel, Gauloise nonfilters, a box of wooden matches, the leather-bound agenda she’d bought for him at Browns.

  “I thought you might not come,” he said, smiling up at her.

  “Why would you have thought that?” she asked, a random response—pathetic, she thought—masking the terror she now felt, that she allowed herself at last to feel, which was fear of some loss of self, of will and direction, fear of the love she still felt. She took the other chair and seated herself as the young waiter arrived, a Spanish boy in a striped apron, to take her order. She asked for Vichy water.

  “Nothing else?” Alain asked. The waiter hovered.

  “No, thank you.”

  “I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks,” he said, and she knew that that was a lie, and yet, as she often had before, she wondered if he was entirely conscious of the fact that he was lying. Andrea maintained that men like Alain lied so constantly, so passionately, that some basic distinction had been lost. They were artists in their own right, Andrea said, intent on restructuring reality, and the New Jerusalem was a fine place indeed, free of overdrafts and disgruntled landlords and the need to find someone to cover the evening’s bill.

  “I didn’t notice you trying to reach me when Gnass came with the police,” she said, hoping at least that he would wince, but the boyish face was calm as ever, beneath clean brown hair he habitually combed back with his fingers.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, crushing out his Gauloise. Because she’d come to associate the smell of the dark French tobacco with him, Paris had seemed full of his scent, his ghost, his trail. “I was certain he’d never detect the—the nature of the piece. You must understand: Once I had admitted to myself how badly we needed the money, I knew that I must act. You, I knew, were far too idealistic. The gallery would have folded in any case. If things had gone as planned, with Gnass, we would be there now, and you would be happy. Happy,” he repeated, taking another cigarette from the pack.

  She could only stare at him, feeling a kind of wonder, and a sick revulsion at her desire to believe him.

  “You know,” he said, taking a match from the red and yellow box, “I’ve had difficulties with the police before. When I was a student. Politics, of course.” He struck the match, tossed the box down, and lit the cigarette.

  “Politics,” she said, and suddenly felt like laughing. “I was unaware that there was a party for people like you. I can’t imagine what it might be called.”

  “Marly,” he said, lowering his voice, as he always did when he wished to indicate intensity of feeling, “you know, you must know, that I acted for you. For us, if you will. But surely you know, you can feel, Marly, that I would never deliberately hurt you, or place you in jeopardy.” There was no room on the crowded little table for her purse, so she’d held it in her lap; now she was aware of her nails buried deep in the soft thick leather.

  “Never hurt me. . . .” The voice was her own, lost and amazed, the voice of a child, and suddenly she was free, free of need, desire, free of fear, and all that she felt for the handsome face across the table was simple revulsion, and she could only stare at him, this stranger she’d slept beside for one year, in a tiny room behind a very small gallery in the Rue Mauconseil. The waiter put her glass of Vichy down in front of her.

  He must have taken her silence for the beginning of acceptance, the utter blankness of her expression for openness. “What you don’t understand”—this, she remembered, was a favorite opening—“is that men like Gnass exist, in some sense, to support the arts. To support us, Marly.” He smiled then, as though he laughed at himself, a jaunty, conspiratorial smile that chilled her now. “I suppose, though, that I should have credited the man with having at least the requisite sense to hire his own Cornell expert, although my Cornell expert, I assure you, was by far the more erudite of the two . . .”

  How was she to get away? Stand, she told herself. Turn. Walk calmly back to the entrance. Step through the door. Out into the subdued glitter of Napoleon Court, where polished marble overlay the Rue du Champ Fleuri, a fourteenth-century street said to have been reserved primarily for prostitution. Anything, anything, only go, only leave, now, and be away, away from him, walking blind, to lose herself in the guidebook Paris she’d learned when she’d first come here.

  “But now,” he was saying, “you can see that things have worked out for the best. It’s often like that, isn’t it?” Again, the smile, but this time it was boyish, slightly wistful, and somehow, horribly, more intimate. “We’ve lost the gallery, but you’ve found employment, Marly. You have a job to do, an interesting one, and I have the connections you’ll need, Marly. I know the people you’ll need to meet, in order to find your artist.”

  “My artist?” Covering her abrupt confusion with a sip of Vichy.

  He opened his scarred attaché and removed something flat, a simple reflection hologram. She took it, grateful to have something to do with her hands, and saw that it was a casual shot of the box she’d seen in Virek’s construct of Barcelona. Someone was holding it forward. A man’s hands, not Alain’s, and on one of them, a signet ring of some dark metal. The background was lost. Only the box, and the hands.

  “Alain,” she said, “where did you get this?” Looking up to meet brown eyes filled with a terrible childlike triumph.

  “It’s going to cost someone a very great deal to find out.” He ground out his cigarette and stood. “Excuse me.” He walked away, headed in the direction of
the restrooms. As he vanished, behind mirrors and black steel beams, she dropped the hologram, reached across the table, and flipped back the lid of his attaché. There was nothing there, only a blue elastic band and some crumbs of tobacco.

  “May I bring you something else? More Vichy, perhaps?” The waiter stood beside her.

  She looked up at him, struck suddenly by a sense of familiarity. The lean dark face . . .

  “He’s wearing a broadcast unit,” the waiter said. “He’s armed as well. I was the bellman in Brussels. Give him what he wants. Remember that the money means nothing to you.” He took her glass and placed it carefully on his tray. “And, very likely, it will destroy him.”

  When Alain returned, he was smiling. “Now, darling,” he said reaching for his cigarettes, “we can do business.”

  Marly smiled back and nodded.

  11

  ON SITE

  HE ALLOWED HIMSELF three hours of sleep, finally, in the windowless bunker where the point team had established the command post. He’d met the rest of the site team. Ramirez was slight, nervous, perpetually wired on his own skill as a console jockey; they were depending on him, along with Jaylene Slide on the offshore rig, to monitor cyberspace around the grid sector that held the heavily iced banks of Maas Biolabs; if Maas became aware of them, at the last moment, he might be able to provide some warning. He was also charged with relaying the medical data from the surgery to the offshore rig, a complex procedure if they were to keep it from Maas. The line out ran to a phone booth in the middle of nowhere. Once past that booth, he and Jaylene were on their own in the matrix. If they blew it, Maas could backtrack and pinpoint the site. And then there was Nathan, the repairman, whose real job consisted of watching over the gear in the bunker. If some part of their system went down, there was at least a chance he could fix it. Nathan belonged to the species that had produced Oakey and a thousand others Turner had worked with over the years, maverick techs who liked earning danger money and had proven they could keep their mouths shut. The others—Compton, Teddy, Costa, and Davis— were just expensive muscle, mercs, the sort of men you hired for a job like this. For their benefit, he’d taken particular care in questioning Sutcliffe about the arrangements for clear-out. He’d explained where the copters would come in, the order of pickup, and precisely how and when they would be paid.