The Bridge Trilogy Part 34

'Well,' Rydell said, 'it's real good for the environment.'

'It's bad for your country,' Wally said. 'Image thing. An American should drive some car to feel proud of. Bavarian car. At least j.a.panese.'

'I'll get this back to you, Wally.' Holding up the big black flashlight.

'And something else. You said.'

'Don't worry about it.'

'When you pay rent on Mar Vista?'

'Kevin'll take care of it.' Getting into the tiny Montxo and starting up the flywheel. It sat there, rocking slightly on its shocks, while the wheel got up to speed.

Wally waved, shrugged, then backed into his house and closed the door. Rydell hadn't ever seen him not wear that Tyrolean hat before.

Rydell looked at the flashlight, figuring out where the safety was. It wasn't much, but he felt like he had to have something. And it was nonlethal. Guns weren't that hard to buy, on the street, but he didn't really want to have to have one around today. You did a different kind of time, if there was a gun involved.

Then he'd driven back toward the Blob, taking it real easy at intersections and trying to keep to the streets that had designated lanes for electric vehicles. He got Chevette's phone out and hit redial for the node-number in Utah, the one G.o.deater had given him, back in Paradise. G.o.d-eater was the one who looked like the mountain, or so he said. Rydell had asked him what kind of a name that was. He'd said he was a full-blood Blood Indian. Rydell sort of doubted it.

279.

None of their voices were real, even; it was all digital stuff. G.o.d-eater could just as well be a woman, or three different people, or all three of the ones he'd seen there might've been just one person. He thought about the woman in the wheelchair in Cognitive Dissidents. It could be her. It could be anybody. That was the spooky thing about these hackers. He heard the node-number ringing,

in Utah. G.o.d-eater always picked up on five, in mid-ring.

'Yes?'

'Paradise,' Rydell said.

'Richard?'

'Nixon.'

'We have your goods in place, Richard. One little whoops and a push.'

'You get me a price yet?' The light changed. Somebody was honking, p.i.s.sed-off at the Montxo's inability to do anything like accelerate.

'Fifty,' G.o.d-eater said.

Fifty thousand dollars. Rydell winced. 'Okay,' he said, 'fair enough.'

'Better be,' G.o.d-eater said. 'We can make you pretty miserable in prison, even. In fact, we can make you really miserable in prison. The baseline starts lower, in there.'

I'll bet you got lots of friends there, too, Rydell thought. 'How long you estimate the response- time, from when I call?'

G.o.d-eater burped, long and deliberate. 'Quick. Ten, fifteen max. We've got it slotted the way we talked about. Your friends're gonna s.h.i.+t themselves. But really, you don't wanna be in the way.

This'll be like something you never saw before. This new unit they just got set up.'

'I hope so,' Rydell said, and broke the connection.

He gave the parking-attendant Karen's apartment number. After this, it really wasn't going to matter much. He had the flashlight stuck down in the back of his jeans, under the z8o denim jacket Buddy had loaned him. It was probably Buddy's father's. He'd told Buddy he'd help him find a place when he got to L.A. He sort of hoped Buddy never did try that, because he imagined kids like Buddy made it about a block from the bus station before some really fast urban predator got them, just a blur of wheels and teeth and no more Buddy to speak of. But then again you had to think about what it would be like to be him, Buddy, back there in his three-by six-foot bedroom in that trailer, with those posters of Fallon and Jesus, sneaking that VR when his daddy wasn't looking. If you didn't at least try to get out, what would you wind up feeling like? And that was why you had to give it to Sublett, because he'd gotten out of that, allergies and all.

But he was worried about Sublett. Pretty crazy to be worried about anybody, in a situation like this, but Sublett acted like he was already dead or something. Just moving from one thing to the next, like it didn't matter. The only thing that got any kind of rise out of him was his allergies.

And Chevette, too, Chevette Was.h.i.+ngton, except what worried him there was the white skin of her back, just above the waist of those black bike-pants, when she was curled on the bed beside him.

How he keptwanting to touch it. And how her t.i.ts stuck out against her t-s.h.i.+rt when she'd sit up in the morning, and those little dark twists of hair under her arms. And right now, walking up to this terracotta coffee-module near the base of the escalator, the rectangular head of Wally's pepper-spray flashlight digging into his spine, he knew he might never get another chance. He could be dead, in half an hour, or on his way to prison.

He ordered a latte with a double shot, paid for it with just about the last of his money, and looked at his Timex. Ten 'iii three. When he'd called Warbaby's personal portable from the motel, the night before, he'd told him three.

G.o.d-eater had gotten him that number. Cod-eater could get you any number ~t all.

Warbaby had sounded really sad to hear from him.

281.

Disappointed, like. 'We never expected this of you, Rydell.'

'Sorry, Mr. Warbaby. Those f.u.c.king Russians. And that cowboy f.u.c.ker, that Loveless. Got on my case.'

'There's no need for obscenity. Who gave you this number?'

'I had it from Hernandez, before.' Silence.

'I got the gla.s.ses, Mr. Warbaby.'

'Where are you?'

Chevette Was.h.i.+ngton watching him, from the bed. 'In Los Angeles. I figured I'd better get as far away from those Russians as I could.'

A pause. Maybe Warbaby had put his hand over the phone. Then, 'Well, I suppose I can understand your behavior, although I can't say I approve...'

'Can you come down here and get them, Mr. Warbaby? And just sort of call it even?'

A longer pause. 'Well, Rydell,' sadly, 'I wouldn't want you to forget how disappointed I am in you, but, yes, I could do that.'

'But just you and Freddie, right? n.o.body else.'

'Of course,' Warbaby had said. Rydell imagined him looking at Freddie, who'd be tap-tapping away on some new laptop, getting the call traced. To a cell-node in Oakland, and then to a tumbled number.

'You be down here tomorrow, Mr. Warbaby. I'll call you at your same number, tell you where to come. Three o'clock. Sharp.'

'I think you've made the right decision, Rydell,' Warbaby had said.

'I hope so,' Rydell had said, then clicked off.

Now he looked at his Timex. l'ook a sip of coffee. Three o'clock. Sharp. He put the coffee down on the counter and got the phone out. Started punching in Warbaby's number.

It took them twenty minutes to get there. They came in two 282.

cars, from opposite directions; Warbaby and Freddie in a black Lincoln with a white satellite-dish on top, Freddie driving it, then Svobodov and Orlovsky in a metallic-gray Lada sedan that Rydell took for a rental.

He watched them meet up, the four of them, then walk in, onto the plaza under the Blob, past those kinetic sculptures, heading for the nearest elevator, Warbaby looking sad as ever and leaning on that cane. Warbaby had his same olive coat on, his Stetson, Freddie was wearing a big s.h.i.+rt with a lot of pink in it, had a laptop under his arm, and the Russians from Homicide had these gray suits on, about the color and texture of the Lada they were driving.

He gave it a while to see if Loveless was going to turn up, then started keying in that number in Utah.

'Please, Jesus,' he said, counting the rings.

'Your latte okay?' The Central Asian kid in the coffee-module, looking at him.

'It's fine,' Rydell said, as G.o.d-eater picked up.

'Yes?'

'Paradise.'

'This Richard?'

'Nixon. They're here. Four but not Smiley.'

'Your two Russians, Warbaby, and his jockey?'

'Got 'em.'

'But not the other one?'

'Don't see him . . .'

'His description's in the package anyway. Okay, Rydell. Let's do it.' Click.

Rydell stuck the phone in his jacket pocket, turned, and headed, walking fast, for the escalator.

The boy in the coffeemodule probably thought there was something wrong with that lane.

G.o.d-eater and his friends, if they weren't just one person, say some demented old lady up in the Oakland hills with a couple 283.

of million dollars' worth of equipment and a terminally bad att.i.tude, had struck Rydell as being almost uniquely full of s.h.i.+t. There was nothing, if you believed them, they couldn't do. But if they were all that powerful, how come they had to hide that way, and make money doing crimes?

Rydell had gotten a couple of lectures on computer crime at the Academy, but it had been pretty dry. The history of it, how hackers used to be just these smart-a.s.s kids d.i.c.king with the phone companies. Basically, the visiting Fed had said, any crime that was what once had been called white-collar was going to be computer crime anyway, now, because people in offices did everything with computers. But there were other crimes you could still call computer crimes in the old sense, because they usually involved professional criminals, and these criminals still thought of themselves as hackers. The public, the Fed had told them, still tended to think of hackers as some kind of romantic bulls.h.i.+t thing, sort of like kids moving the outhouse. Merry pranksters. In the old days, he said, lots of people still didn't know there was an outhouse there to be moved, not until they wound up in the s.h.i.+t. Rydell's cla.s.s laughed dutifully. But not today, the Fed said; your modern hacker was about as romantic as a hit man from some ice posse or an enforcer with a dancer combine. And a lot harder to catch, although if you could get one and lean on him, you could usually count on landing a few more. But they were set up mostly in these cells, the cells building up larger groups, so that the most you could ever pop, usually, were the members of a single cell; they just didn't know who the members of the other cells were, and they made a point of not finding out.

G.o.d-eater and his friends, however many of them there were or weren't, must've been a cell like

that, one of however many units in what they called the Republic of Desire. And if they were really going to go ahead and do the thing for him, he figured there were three reasons: they hated the idea of San Francisco getting rebuilt hecause they liked an infrastructure

2.84.

with a lot of holes in it, they were charging him good money-money he didn't have-and they'd figured out a way to do something that n.o.body had ever done before. And it was that last one that had really seemed to get them going, once they'd decided to help him out.

And now, climbing the escalator, up through all these kinds of people who lived or worked up here, forcing himself not to break into a run, Rydell found it hard to believe that G.o.d-eater and them were doing what they'd said they could do. And if they weren't, well, he was just f.u.c.ked.

No, he told himself, they were. They had to be. Somewhere in Utah a dish was turning, targeted out toward the coast, toward the California sky. And out of it, fed in from wherever G.o.d-eater and his friends were, were coming these packages, no, packets, of signals. Packets, G.o.d-eater called them.

And somewhere, high above the Blob, up over the whole L.A. Basin, was the Death Star.

Rydell dodged past a silver-haired man in tennis whites and ran up the escalator. Came out under the copper t.i.t. People going in and out of that little mall there. A fountain with water sliding down big ragged sheets of green gla.s.s. And there went the Russians, their wide gray backs heading toward the white walls of the complex where Karen's apartment was. He couldn't see Warbaby or Freddie.

3:32. 's.h.i.+t,' he said, knowing it hadn't worked, that G.o.d-eater had f.u.c.ked him, that he'd doomed Chevette Was.h.i.+ngton and Sublett and even Karen Mendelsohn and it was one more time he'd just gone for it, been wrong, and the last f.u.c.king time at that.

And then these things came through a long gap in the gla.s.s, just south of where the handball- courts were, and he hadn't ever seen anything like them. There were a bunch of them, maybe ten or a dozen, and they were black. They hardly made any sound at all, and they were sort of floating.

Just skimming along. The players on the courts stopped to watch them.

285.

They were helicopters, but too small to carry anybody. Smaller than the smallest micro-light. Kind of dish-shaped. French Aerospatiale gun-platforms, the kind you saw on the news from Mexico City, and he guessed they were under the control of ECCCS, the Emergency Command Control Communications System, who ran the Death Star. One of them swung by, about twenty feet over his head, and he saw the cl.u.s.tered tubes of some kind of gun or rocket-launcher.

'd.a.m.n,' Rydell said, looking up at the future of armed response.

'POLICE EMERGENCY. REMAIN CALM.'.

A woman started screaming, from somewhere over by the mall, over and over, like something mechanical.

'REMAIN CALM.'.

And mostly they did, all those faces; faces of the residents of this high country, their jawlines firm, their soft clothes fluttering in the dancing downdrafts.

Rydell started running.

He ran past Svobodov and Orlovsky, who were looking at the three helicopters that were much lower now, and so clearly edging in on them. The Russians' mouths were open and Orlovsky's half-frame gla.s.ses looked like they were about to fall off.

'ON YOUR FACES. NOW. OR WE FIRE.'.