‘But?’ I tapped my way through a circumventory login, then told the organizer to use a random whereis server to find my account daemon and haul it in—and to abort if looked like it was going to take longer than thirty seconds.
‘Hap, what are you saying?’ Laura asked. I shushed her, watched the timer. With ten seconds left the organizer announced that the daemon was coming home: two seconds later the results were there on the screen.
The daemon listed the six bank accounts it administered in my name: two real, two virtual, two nothing more concrete than randomized streams through gaps in the money market. All empty. Zeros straight across the board.
Laura gawked at the column of emptiness. I killed the Net connection before the cellular source could be traced.
Stared straight ahead, seeing nothing at all.
I had nothing to my name, and there was just one man in the world who could have taken it. The same man who’d been the only person able to dial into my phone that morning, and who suddenly did business over the wire so he could put me in a certain place at a certain time. A man who I’d trusted with all of my business for over a year, who knew everything about me.
‘It’s Quat,’ I said. ‘He’s fucked me over.’
‘Your hacker? Why?’
‘The transmitter your guy used—was it a suitcase full of junk?’
Laura nodded. ‘I couldn’t believe it was going to work—but it did. Look, I’m tired of saying “Why?”, so can you just assume my participation from now is a generic question mark?’
‘Did you get Hammond’s address through the same guy? From the same hacker who set up the transfer?’
Laura nodded. ‘I put a veiled ad in adult personals for hacker services: couple hours later this guy comes through.’ Which implied Quat had been her hacker, that he’d had access to a machine all the time and he knew about Hammond’s murder. ‘Does that mean this Quat guy got killed?’
I shook my head, thoughts still whirling. ‘The guy in the Café was just an actor—method nerd going through his lines. Quat set me up, operating at one remove.’
I put it together as best I could.
Laura wants Hammond dead, for whatever reason, but doesn’t know where he’s at. She finds a hacker—Quat—or he finds her. He gets the address. Next day he reads that the guy has been whacked—then Laura wants an illicit memory dump. He had to know that it was the murder, and he arranges to send it into my head. I blow town for two days—he doesn’t know where I am, and he’s strangely difficult to get hold of. As soon as I’m back I get in touch with him: he holds off giving me a machine he already has, until he can set me up with the cops.
It held, though there were some weird coincidences in the mix which didn’t sit comfortably. And there was still a big question, which Laura returned to immediately.
‘Yeah, fine,’ she said, ‘but why would this guy want to do that to you? You stiff him over a bill or something?’
‘No. He had control over all my money. I couldn’t have stiffed him even if I’d wanted to. I trusted him with everything.’
Laura abruptly downed the rest of her drink in one swallow, looked at me bright-eyed. ‘Then we’re both screwed.’
There was a noise, from out back of the kitchen. Deck, I assumed. Then I heard the sound of someone’s feet going back down the stairs.
I stood up, pulled the gun. Walked into the other room and squinted through the kitchen windows. I couldn’t see anyone out there. Gun held out in front, I edged towards the back door, wishing it had a glass panel in it. When I got there I took the handle as quietly as possible, took a breath, and yanked it open.
Nobody there.
The night had cooled, faint condensation hanging in the air and turning yard lights into sparkles. I looked down, saw a small suitcase that looked familiar.
I ran to the end of the walkway and stuck my head out, but couldn’t see anyone heading away from the building. At a sound I whirled back round, and nearly blew Laura’s head off. She was peering into the suitcase. ‘The transmitter?’ she asked.
I nodded, swallowing compulsively. ‘What’s this?’ she added, reaching forward to pick up a small scrap of paper from inside the case.
I took it from her. She craned her neck to read it with me. On it was written just one word: HELENA.
‘Who’s Helena?’ Laura asked.
I realized who’d saved me at the Café.
‘My ex-wife,’ I said, and went back inside.
PART TWO
* * *
Missing
Nine
A boy is out walking by himself, early on a Sunday evening. He heads slowly down the hill towards the school, not going anywhere in particular, just following his feet. Behind him, half a mile back, is the place where he lives: an old condominium, one of the first built on this stretch of the coast, now mainly empty for the winter season. He doesn’t know yet that it will define his idea of living space for ever, that he will always seek out places with clean rooms and empty corridors, where you nod to strangers at a distance and know that you’ll be leaving again before you even step in the door. It’s just home, and always has been. His father is the caretaker there—air-conditioner supremo, banisher of bugs and cleaner of pools. His mother works in a bar/restaurant a mile down the beach, and has done all her life. She’s there now, ferrying burgers and frosted glasses of beer, yakking with her friend Marlene and listening to the guitarist play ‘The Great Filling Station Hold-up’ for the first, but not the last, time of the evening.
The boy left his father sitting comfortably in front of the tube, watching a tape of an old Braves game for like the eighteenth time. The Doritos and bean dip were in place on the side table, a beer in his favourite glass by his hand: he was, as he always put it, not moving for no man now. Neither parent would mind the boy going out walking by himself. He’s always done it, and nothing bad’s ever happened to him yet.
The sidewalk down to the school is very familiar. It is the site of a raging torrent every time it rains hard, and the marching path of a procession of ants a couple months ago. The boy spent an hour squatted down by the column of little creatures as they flowed silently past, wondering where they were going, and why. In school that week Miss Bannerham had told them a story about butterflies, how some particular brand began the year hanging in South America, and then—all at once, and all together—flew up the world as far as Canada or somewhere. Someplace north, anyhow. It was a long journey, and along the way they mated, and laid eggs, and died: the butterflies which made the return leg later in the year, back to the exact same trees the journey had started in, weren’t the same bugs who’d begun the trip. Some were born to fly north, others didn’t know any direction but south: between them they followed a cycle that went on and on, year after year, filled with apparent purpose and yet with no aim that he could see.
Miss Bannerham said it was something to do with a particular plant they needed, or temperatures, or something, but the boy didn’t believe it. If the plant was so important, why didn’t they all just set up camp right next to one, and put their feet up for the whole year? If you liked the sea, you lived on the coast: it made sense. You didn’t go live in Utah or somewhere.
The ants were the same. They were up to something, he knew, but they weren’t letting on what it was.
That particular evening the sidewalk was still, and dry, and frankly not much to look at. The boy carried on down the hill, hands in his pockets, peering at the houses he passed. Deep yards, trimmed grass, mostly one-storey houses. The light had faded enough that lights shone in many of the living rooms: he caught brief glimpses of people sitting, moving, watching TV. A torso and an arm would move smoothly across the window, then disappear; someone would stand, sit down again; an occasional murmur of sound rose and fell, no more intelligible than the beat of distant wings. Maybe it was all supposed to be easier to understand than the ants and the butterflies, but the boy didn’t see how. It was other people stuff, parts of lives he’d
never comprehend.
The hill began to level out, and the school yard became visible over on the right. This was a large, square compound, taking up a whole block. At the far end were the classrooms; near side a big playground lined with grass and trees and with black metal railings all around. The boy stopped when he was opposite, and looked across. He didn’t have any particular feelings about the place, other than it was where he spent most days. Inside, on a school day, would be lots of children, some he knew and didn’t mind, others he didn’t know or mildly disliked. A big container of people who were different from him, who had different parents and different lives. The only particularly interesting occupant was Miss Bannerham, who the boy was just old enough to have a crush on.
He didn’t think of it in those terms, just knew that he minded her class less than the others, and that if Mom hadn’t been his mom, he wouldn’t have minded it being Miss Bannerham. At home, in a safe place, he had a badge she had given him. Some people had come to the school two weeks ago, to mark the teachers. The boy had been somewhat surprised to find that even teachers had to do tests, but Miss Bannerham didn’t seem to mind. She gathered the children at the front of the class, on the floor, and told them about some stuff. The grown-ups had stood at the back, and they listened too. The boy had asked questions, and answered questions: it had been an interesting class, and it was fun to know things. At the end of the day, when he was gathering his books and there weren’t many kids left in the classroom, Miss Bannerham came up to him, took him to one side, and gave him the badge. It was narrow and silver and had the word ‘Merit’ on it, and she said that he could keep it for a month. He kept quiet about it at school, sensing vaguely that was the best policy, but he showed it to his parents and they seemed pleased.
The boy had spent the day on the grey beach, battling the wind and looking for sand dollars. His family had a policy, devised and administered by his father, that anyone who found an intact sand dollar was entitled to a—as he put it—‘beverage of their choice’, the next time the family went into town for dinner. The boy’s beverage of choice was always a coke, which he would have got regardless, but he understood that wasn’t the point.
All he’d found that day were fragments, and a small dead squishy thing that he hadn’t liked the look of, but that didn’t matter. He felt pleasantly tired, and decided to just walk round the school and then go home.
He peered in through the railings as he passed the playground, looking at the trees on the far side. They had been demonstrated, to everyone’s satisfaction, to be the best place in the whole area for finding Knights. These were large beetles which most of the boys coveted and kept in jars with holes punched in the lid, and though their real name probably wasn’t Knights that was what they were called. Many happy hours were spent conducting battles between these insects: the contests actually rather peaceable affairs in which their characteristics—length, width, coolness of wings—were compared. In general the bugs were green, but every now and then someone would find a black one, and these always won the contests hands down. Black Knights always did. The boy’s best friend Earl already had one, and it was the boy’s view that it was about time he did too.
Sending out a vague hope that he might make such a find the following day, the boy continued along the path as it went by the school buildings. There wasn’t much to see along that stretch, or after he’d turned the first corner: just dark windows in a darker building. He whiled away the time considering something he’d heard a TV preacher say earlier in the day—that the Lord would have mercy upon people who’d done bad things, and cast their sins into the sea. This didn’t seem to tally with his mother’s view, which was that people who dumped things in the sea were themselves bad, especially if they damaged seagulls’ wings. The boy had nervously asked his dad where specifically the sins were cast, because he didn’t want to swim through them by accident and come out bad. His father had laughed uproariously and stopped shouting at the TV for a while.
The boy turned the second corner and walked up as far as where the playground began again; then stopped and looked at the trees, now just the other side of the railings. It was quite dark by then, with only a streetlamp at each corner of the block, and the trees looked big and old. He could probably have made it over the fence and into the grounds, thus stealing a march on the next day’s bug-hunters, but he didn’t really fancy it. In the dark the trees looked a little, well, frightening. He knew they weren’t really so, because he’d climbed into their lower branches often enough during the day when they were huge and green and friendly, but things always looked different at night. He wondered which was true, the way things looked during the day, or during the night, and concluded it probably depends.
Anyway, the bugs would almost certainly be asleep.
Thinking that if he headed back now there might still be some Doritos left, he turned the final corner into the last straight, back towards where he’d turn left to go back up the hill. By now he was in a state of near-hypnotic abstraction, and at first didn’t notice the footsteps behind him.
When he did he turned round, expecting someone out walking their dog. He was surprised to see that the sidewalk was empty.
He walked on a little way, and heard the footsteps start up again. They weren’t hurrying or running, merely walking at the same pace as he was. He knew it wasn’t an echo of his own footsteps off the wall, however, because he was wearing the sneakers that made no sound at all.
Heart beating a little faster, the boy stepped up his pace. The footsteps got a little quicker too, and he began to get a little afraid. He’d been warned about vaguely dire things which could happen if you talked to the wrong people, or got in the wrong sort of car. Neither of his parents had been very specific about what these things were, or of what makes or models of car were the wrong ones, but the boy suddenly felt that this was probably one of the circumstances they’d been talking about.
He hurried along the pavement, faster and faster, but knew that he wasn’t getting further away from whatever was following him. If it was a grown-up, there was no chance of out-running them. They had longer legs.
So he stopped, took a deep breath, and turned round.
This time he did see someone.
A man stood way back at the corner, under the street light. He was wearing a smart suit. His face was in shadow, and the boy couldn’t see it clearly: the lamp seemed to shine from behind his head. He seemed too far away to be the one making the footsteps, but there was no-one else in sight. The man started walking, and the boy stayed rooted to the spot.
Later he was back at home, eating Doritos and watching the television with his mom as his father slept in his chair like a felled dinosaur. They made it to the end of some dumb film and then everyone went to bed.
I woke to find Laura sitting on the floor cross-legged, eating toast. She held out a cup of coffee to me. I croaked something unintelligible and sat upright. It took a long minute for me to place myself, and when I did I reached in my jacket pocket and pulled out the dream receiver. One look at the display told me what I already knew. I hadn’t been working. The dream was my own.
‘Deck’s in the shower,’ Laura said, still holding out the coffee. Her eyes looked puffy.
I took it, sipped. It was hot, and tasted like coffee. So far, so good. ‘When did he get back?’
‘About an hour after you crashed. Said he took a scenic route. You okay? You went out kind of fast.’ I nodded. After stowing the transmitter in one of Deck’s closets I’d watched out of the front window for a while, but saw nothing except an abandoned washing machine trudging off down the road. Laura clearly expected me to say something about how the transmitter had got there, and the person who’d brought it, but I didn’t. I found I could barely speak. I sat on the sofa and next thing I knew I’d slipped back twenty-five years, as if there was too much to deal with in the present day and my mind had run yelping for simpler times. The dividing lines seemed to be blurring. What I’d woken from w
asn’t just a dream, but also a memory—one I’d forgotten for a long while. As I sat with Laura’s eyes looking quizzically up at me, it was suddenly fresher and more real than the warmth of the cup in my hand or the sound of falling water in Deck’s bathroom.
Round the school we went.
I picked up the phone, dialled a number in the Net.
‘Hello?’
‘Yeah hi, Quat. It’s Hap.’ Laura stared at me with a ‘what the fuck are you doing?’ look on her face.
There was a pause. Then Quat said, ‘Hey—how you doing?’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Transmitter worked a dream. The guy hasn’t shown up to take it back though.’
Very smooth: ‘I’ll give him a call.’
‘You do that. Listen—something else weird’s happened: I can’t get any cash out the ATM. Can you look into it?’
‘Sure, sure,’ he said. ‘Look, Hap, where are you, exactly?’
‘Around,’ I said, holding the phone very tight. ‘One more thing: you know anything about that cop who got whacked?’
I put the phone down on silence.
‘What the hell was all that about?’ Deck asked from the doorway.
‘Just noise,’ I said. ‘He knows I’m lying, but not to what degree. And I do have the transmitter, after all. Now he doesn’t know what’s going on, or what I know.’
‘But you don’t know shit,’ he said.
‘Not yet I don’t.’ Overnight, and in my sleep, things had changed. Quat’s betrayal didn’t seem the most important thing any more, nor the reasons behind it—whatever they might be. I was very panicky about my money, and I should also have been concerned as to why Stratten hadn’t stuck to his word and sent me a night’s dreamwork, but I wasn’t. Not yet.
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