The Bridge Trilogy Part 49

b.a.s.t.a.r.ds." 3 0.

C.

-07.

'a

"That wu it, basically," Laney said, They had their own Legal team waiting, to do that, and another team to work on the nondisclosure agreement I'd signed with Slirscan."

"And the second team had the bigger job," Blackwell said, shoving his empty gla.s.s toward the bartender, who swept it smoothly out of sight, producing a fresh replacement just as smoothly, as if from nowhere.

"That's true," Laney said. He'd had no idea, really, of what he'd be getting into when he'd found himself agreeing to the general outlines of Rice Daniels' offer. But there was something in him that didn't want to see Slitscan walk away from the sound of that one single shot from Alison Shires' kitchen. (Produced, the cops had pointed out, by a Russian-made device that was hardly more than a cartridge, a tube to contain it, and the simplest possible firing mechanism; these were designed with suicide almost exclusively in mind; there was no way to aim them at anything more than two inches away. Laney had heard of them, but had never seen one before; for some itason, they were called Wednesday Night Specials.)

And Slitscan would walk away, he knew; they'd drop the sequence on Alison's actor, if they felt

they had to, and the whole thing would settle to the sea floor, silting over almost instantly with the world's steady accretion of data.

And Alison Shires' life, as he'd known it in all that terrible, ba.n.a.l intimacy, would lie there forever, forgotten and finally unknowable.

But if he went with Out of Control, her life might retrospectively become something else, and he wasn't sure, exactly, sitting there on the hard little chair in Visitors, what that might be.

He thought of coral, of the reefs that grew around sunken aircraft carriers; perhaps she'd become something like that, the buried mystery beneath some exfoliating superstructure of supposition, or even of myth.

It seemed to him, in Visitors, that that might be a slightly less dead way of being dead. And he wished her that.

08 William Gibson 1~~.

"Get me out of here," he said to Daniels, who smiled beneath his surgical clamp, whipping the card triumphantly away from the plastic.

"Steady," said Blackwell, laying his huge hand, with its silvery-pink fretwork of scars, over Laney's wrist, "You haven't even had your drink yet."

Lane>' had met Rydell when the Out of Control team installed him in a suite at the Chateau, that ancient simulacrum of a still more ancient original, its quaint concrete eccentricities pinched between the twin brutalities of a particularly nasty pair of office buildings dating from the final year of the previous century. These reflected all the Millennial anxiety of the year of their creation, while refracting it through some other, more mysterious, weirdly muted hysteria that seemed somehow more personal and even less attractive.

Laney's suite, much larger than his apartment in Santa Monica, was like an elongated 1920s apartment following the long, shallow concrete balcony that faced Sunset, this in turn overlooking a deeper balcony on the floor below and the tiny circular lawn that was all that remained of the original gardens.

Lane>' thought it was a strange choice, considering his situation. He would have imagined they'd choose something more corporate, more fortified, more heavily wired, but Rice Daniels had explained that the Chateau had advantages all its own. It was a good choice in terms of image, because it humanized Laney; it looked like a habitation, basically, something with walls and doors and windows, in which a guest could be imagined to be living something akin to a life-not at all the case with the geometric solids that were serious business hotels. It also had deeply rooted a.s.sociations with the Hollywood star system, and with human tragedy as well. Stars had lived here, in the heyday of old Hollywood, and, later, certain stars had

died here. Out of Control planned to frame the death of Alison Shires 3

as a tragedy in a venerable Hollywood tradition, but one that had 0

C.

a

09.

t been brought on by Slitscan, a very contemporary ent.i.ty. Besides, Daniels explained, the Chateau was far more secure than it might at first look. And at this point Lane>' had been introduced to Berry Rydell, the night security man.

Daniels and Rydell, it seemed to Laney, had known one another prior to Rydell working at the Chateau, though how, exactly, remained unclear. Rydell seemed oddly at home with the workings of the infotainment industry, and at one point, when they'd found themselves alone together, he'd asked Laney who was representing him.

"How do you mean?" Lane>' had said.

"You've got an agent, don't you?"

Laney said he didn't.

"You better get one," Rydell had said. "Not that it'll necessarily come out the way you'd wanted, but, hey, it's show business, right?"

It was indeed show business, to an extent that very quickly made Laney wonder if he'd made the right decision. There had been sixteen people in his suite, for a four-hour meeting, and he'd only been out of the lock-up for six hours. When they'd finally gone, Laney had staggered the length of the place, mistakenly trying several closet doors in his search for the bedroom. Finding it, he'd crawled onto the bed and fallen asleep in the clothes they'd sent Rydell to the Beverly Center to buy for him.

Which he thought he might well do right here, now, in this Golden Street bar, thereby answering the question of what the bourbon was doing to his jet lag. But now, finishing the remainder of the shot, he felt one of those tidal reversals begin, perhaps less to do with the drink than with some in-built chemistry of fatigue and displacement.

"Was Rydell happy?" Yamazaki asked,

It seemed a strange question, to Lane>', but then he'd remembered Rydell mentioning someone j.a.panese, someone he'd known in San Francisco, and that, of course, had been Yamazaki.

70 Ahhtiapn Gibson "Well," Lariey said, "he didn't strike me as desperately unhappy, but there was something sort of down about him. You could say that. I mean, I don't really know him well at all."

"It is too bad," Yamazaki said. "Rydell is a brave man."

"How about you, Laney," Blackwell said, "you think of yourself as a brave man?" The wormlike scar that bisected his eyebrow writhed into a new degree of concentration.

"No," Laney said, "I don't."

"But you went up against Slitscan, didn't you, because of what they did to the girl? You had a job, you had food, you had a place to sleep. You got all that from Slitscan, but they did the girl, so you opted to do 'em back. Is that right?"

"Nothing's ever that simple," Laney said.

When Blackwell spoke, Laney was unexpectedly aware of another sort of intelligence, something the man must ordinarily conceal. "No," Blackwell said, almost gently, "it f.u.c.king well isn't, is it?"

One large, pinkly jigsawed hand, like some clumsy animal in its own right, began to root in the taut breast pocket of Blackwell's micropore. Producing a small, gray, metallic object that he placed on the bar.

"Now that's a nail," Blackwell said, "galvanized, one-and-a-half-inch, roofing, I've nailed men's hands to bars like this, with nails like that. And some of them were right b.a.s.t.a.r.ds." There was nothing at all of threat in Blackwell's voice. "And some of those, you nail their one hand, their other comes up with a razor, or a pair of needle-nose pliers." Blackwell's forefinger absently found an angry-looking scar beneath his right eye, as though something had entered there and been deflected along the cheekbone. "To have a go, right?"

"Pliers?"

"b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," Blackwell said. "You have to kill 'em, then, Now that's one kind of 'brave,' Laney.

What I mean is, how's that so different from what you tried to do to Slitscan?"

"I just didn't want them to let it drop. To let her ... settle to the 3 bottom. Be fotgotten. I didn't really care how badly Slitscan got

B.

71.

hurt, or even if they were damaged or not. I wasn't thinking of revenge, as much as of a way of. .

. keeping her alive?"

"There's other men, you nail their hand to a table, they'll sit there and look at you. That's your true hard man, Laney. Do you think you're one of those?"

Laney looked from Blackwell to the empty bourbon gla.s.s, back to Blackwell; the bartender moved, as if to refill it, but Laney covered it with his hand. "If you nail my hand to the bar, Blackwell,"