The Bridge Trilogy Part 122

Rydell moved the tool a fraction of an inch, and the kid's eyes widened. "Not okay," Ryclell said.

"I don't know1 Know we had to have it a.s.sembled to spec, in Fresno. I just work here. n.o.body tells me who pays for what." He took a deep, shuddering breath. "If they did, somebody like you'd come in and make me tell, right?"

"Yeah," Rydell said, "and that means people are liable to come in and torture your a.s.s into telling them things you don't even know..

"Look in my shirt pocket," the kid said carefully. "There's an address. Get on there, talk to whoever, maybe they'll tell you."

Rydell gently patted the front of the pocket, making sure there wouldn't be any used needles or other surprises. The ma.s.sive pad of

muscle behind the pocket gave him pause. He slid two fingers in and came up with a slip of cardboard torn from something larger. Rydell saw the address of a website. "The cable people?"

"Don't know. But I don't know why else I'd be supposed to give it to you."

"And that's all you know?"

"Yes."

"Don't move," said Rydell. He removed the tool from the kid's nostril. "Cables under the counter?"

"Yes."

"I don't think I want you to reach under there."

"Wait," said the kid, raising his hands. "I gotta tell you: there's a 'bot under there. It's got your cables. It just wants to give 'em to you, but I didn't want you to get the wrong idea."

"A 'bot?"

"It's okay!"

Rydell watched as a small, highly polished steel claw appeared, looking a lot like a pair of articulated sugar tongs his mother had owned. It grasped the edge of the counter. Then the thing chinned itself, onehanded, and Rydell saw the head. It got a leg up and mounted the

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counter, pulling a couple of heat-sealed plastic envelopes behind it. Its head was disproportionately small, with a sort of wing-like projection or antenna sticking up on one side.

It was in that traditional j.a.panese style, the one that looked as though a skinny little shiny robot was dressed in oversized white armor, its forearms and ankles wider than its upper arms and thighs. It carried the transparent envelopes, each one containing a carefully wound cable, across the counter, put them down, and backed up. Rydell picked them up, shoved them into the pocket of his khakis, and did a pretty good imitation of the robot, backing up.

As the kid's Ray-Bans came into his peripheral vision, he saw that they hadn't broken,

When he was in the doorway, he tossed the black driver to the kid, who missed catching it. It hit the Heavy Gear II poster and dropped out of sight behind the counter.

RYDELL found a laundromat-cafe combination, called Vicious Cycle, that had one hotdesk at the back, behind a black plastic curtain. The curtain suggested to him that people used this to access p.o.r.n sites, but why you'd want to do that in a laundromat was beyond him.

He was glad of the curtain anyway, because he hated the idea of people watching him talk to people who weren't there, so he generally avoided accessing websites in public places. He didn't know why using the phone, audio, wasn't embarra.s.sing that way. It just wasn't. When you were using the phone you didn't actually look like you were talking to people who weren't there, even though you

were. You were talking to the phone. Although, now that he thought about it, using the phone in the earpiece of the Brazilian gla.s.ses would look that way too.

So he pulled the curtain shut and stood there in the background rumble of the dryers, a sound he'd always found sort of comforting. The gla.s.ses were already cabled to the hotdesk. He put them on and worked the rocker-pad, inputting the address.

There was a brief and probably entirely symbolic pa.s.sage through some kind of neon rain, heavy on the pinks and greens, and then he was there.

Looking into that same empty s.p.a.ce that he'd glimpsed in Tong's 124.

corridor: some kind of dust-blown, sepulchral courtyard, lit from above by a weird, attenuated light.

This time though, he could look up. He did. He seemed to be standing on the floor of a vast empty air shaft that rose up, canyon-like, between walls of peculiarly textured darkness.

High above, a skylight he guessed to be the size of a large swimming pool pa.s.sed grimy sunlight through decades of soot and what he took, at this distance, to be drifts of something more solid.

Black iron mu!lions divided long rectangles, some of them holed, as by gunfire, through what he guessed was archaic wire-cored safety gla.s.s.

When he lowered his head, they were there, the two of them, seated in strange, Chinese-looking chairs that hadn't been there before.

One of them was a thin, pale man in a dark suit from no particular era, his lips pursed primly. He wore gla.s.ses with heavy, rectangular frames of black plastic and a snap-brim hat of a kind that RydelI knew only from old films. The hat was positioned dead level on his head, perhaps an inch above the black frames. His legs were crossed, and Rydell saw that he wore black wingtip oxfords.

His hands were folded in his lap.

The other presented in far more abstract form: an only vaguely human figure, the s.p.a.ce where its head should have been was coronaed in a cyclical and on-going explosion of blood and matter, as though a sniper's victim, in the instant of impact, had been recorded and looped. The halo of blood and brains flickered, never quite attaining a

steady state. Beneath it, an open mouth, white teeth exposed in a permanent, silent scream. The rest, except for the hands, clawed as in agony around the gleaming arms of the chair, seemed constantly to be dissolving in some terrible fiery wind. Rydell thought of black-and-white footage, ground zero, sb-mo atomic hurricane.

"Mr. Rydell," said the one with the hat, "thank you for coming. You may call me Klaus. This," and he gestured with a pale, papery-looking hand, which immediately returned to his lap, "is the Rooster."

The one called the Rooster didn't move at all when it spoke, but the open mouth flickered in and out of focus. Its voice was either the soundcollage from Tong's or another like it. "Listen to me, Rydell. You are now

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responsible for something of the utmost importance, the greatest possible value. Where is it?"

"I don't know who you are," Rydell said. "I'm not telling you anything."

Neither responded, and then Klaus coughed dryly. "The only proper answer. You would be wise to maintain that position. Indeed, you have no idea who we are, and if we were to reappear to you at some later time, you would have no way of knowing that we were, in fact, us."

"Then why should I listen to you?"

"In your situation," said the Rooster, and its voice, just then, seemed composed primarily of the sound of breaking gla.s.s, modulated into the semblance of human speech, "you might be advised to listen to anyone who cares to address you."

"But whether or not you choose to believe what you are told is another matter," said Klaus, fussily adjusting his shirt cuffs and refolding his hands.

"You're hackers," Rydell said.

"Actually," said Klaus, "we might better be described as envoys. We represent," he paused, "another country."

"Though not, of course," said the perpetually disintegrating Rooster, "in any obsolete sense of the merely geopolitical-"

"'Hacker,'" interrupted Klaus, "has certain criminal connotations-"

"Which we do not accept," the Rooster cut in, "having long since established an autonomous reality in which-"

"Quiet," said Klaus, and Rydell had no doubt where the greater authority lay. "Mr. Rydell, your employer, Mr. Laney, has become, for want of a better term, an ally of ours. He has brought a certain situation to our attention, and it is clearly to our advantage to come to his aid."

''Alhat situation is that?"