That kind of plonking summation was typical of Gauss. He had killed the conversation. “I think Heinrich has hit it on the head,” Cullen said at last. “But we can’t do any of that convincing by remote control. We need to send people in who can press the flesh and get right on the Grenadians, hand to hand. Show them what we’re made of, how we operate.”
“All right,” David said sharply. Laura was surprised. She’d felt the pressure building, but she’d assumed he would let her pick the moment. “It’s obvious,” he said. “Laura and I are the ones you need. Grenada knows us already, they’ve got dossiers on us a foot thick. And we were there when Stubbs was killed. If you don’t send us—the eyewitnesses—they’re bound to wonder why not.”
The Committee members were silent a moment—either wondering at his tone, or maybe appreciating the sacrifice. “David and I feel responsible,” Laura added. “Our luck’s been bad so far, but we’re willing to see the project through. And we have no other assignments, since Galveston shut our Lodge down.”
Cullen looked unhappy. Not with them—with the situation. “David, Laura, I appreciate that correct attitude. It’s very courageous. I know you’re aware of the danger. Better than we are, since you’ve seen it personally.”
David shrugged it off. He never reacted well to praise. “Frankly, I’m less afraid of the Grenadians than the people who shot them.”
“An excellent point. I also note that the terrorists shot them in America,” Gauss said. “Not in Grenada, where the security is much stronger.”
“I should go,” Saito objected. “Not because I would be better at it.” A polite lie. “But I am an old man. I have little to lose.”
“And I’ll go with him,” said Debra Emerson, speaking for the first time. “If there’s any blame in this security debacle, it’s certainly not the Websters’. It’s my own. I was also at the Lodge. I can testify as well as Laura can.”
“We can’t go into this expecting that our people will be shot!” de Valera said passionately. “We must arrange things so they never even think we might be prey. Either that, or not go in at all. Because if that confidence fails, it’s gonna be war, and we’ll have to become gangland soldiers. Not economic democrats.”
“No guns,” Cullen agreed. “But we do have armor, at least. We can give our diplomats the armor of the Net. Whoever goes will be online twenty-four hours. We’ll know exactly where they are, exactly what they’re doing. Everything they see and hear will be taped and distributed. All of Rizome will be behind them, a media ghost on their shoulder. Grenada will respect that. They’ve already agreed to those terms.”
“I think Charlie’s right,” Garcia-Meza said, unexpectedly. “They won’t harm our diplomats. What’s the point? If they want to savage Rizome, they won’t start with the Websters just because they are close at hand. They are not so naive. If they shoot us, they will shoot for the head. They will go for us—the Committee.”
“Jesus,” de Valera said.
“We are feasting with tigers here,” Garcia-Meza insisted. “This is a vital operation and we’ll have to watch each step. So I’m glad we have those Vienna glasses. We’ll need them.”
“Let me go,” Ms. Emerson begged. “They’re young and they have a baby.”
“Actually,” de Valera said, “I think that’s the Websters’ major advantage as candidates. I think the Websters should go, and I think they should take their baby with them.” He smiled at the circle, enjoying the stir he’d created. “Look, think about it. A peaceable young married couple, with a baby. It’s a perfect diplomatic image for our company, because it’s true. It’s what they are, isn’t it? It may sound cold-blooded, but it’s a perfect psychological defense.”
“Well,” said Garcia-Meza, “I don’t often agree with de Valera, but that’s clever. These pirates are macho. They would be ashamed to fight with babies.”
Kaufmann spoke heavily. “I did not want to mention this. But Debra’s background in American intelligence … that is simply not something that a Third World country like Grenada will accept. And I do not want to send a Committee member, because, frankly, such a target is too tempting.” He turned to them. “I hope you understand, David and Laura, that I mean no reflection on your own high value as associates.”
“I just don’t like it,” Cullen said. “Maybe there’s no other choice, but I don’t like risking company people.”
“We’re all in danger now,” Garcia-Meza said darkly. “No matter what choices we make.”
“I believe in this initiative!” de Valera declared. “I pushed for this from the beginning. I know the consequences. I truly believe the Grenadians will go for this—they’re not barbarians, and they know their own best interests. If our diplomats are hurt on duty, I’ll take the heat and resign my post.”
Emily was annoyed by this grab for the limelight. “Don’t be non-R, de Valera! That won’t do them much good.”
De Valera shrugged off the accusation. “David, Laura, I hope you understand my offer in the meaning I intended. We’re associates, not bosses and pawns. If you’re hurt, I won’t walk from that. Solidarity.”
“None of us will walk,” Cullen said. “We don’t have that luxury. Laura, David, you realize what’s at stake. If we fail to smooth things with Grenada, it could plunge us into disaster. We’re asking you to risk yourselves—but we’re giving you the power to risk all of us. And that kind of power is very rare in this company.”
Laura felt the weight of it. They wanted an answer. They were looking to the two of them. There was no one else for them to look to.
She and David had already talked it out, privately. They knew they could duck this assignment, without blame. But they had lost their home, and it would leave all their plans floundering. It seemed better to seize the risk, go with the flow of the crisis, and depend on their own abilities to deal with it. Better that than to sit back like victims and let terrorists trample their lives with impunity. Their minds were made up.
“We can do it,” Laura said. “If you back us.”
“It’s settled then.” And that was that. They all rose and folded up the picnic. And went back to the farmhouses.
Laura and David began training immediately with the videoglasses. They were the first the company had bought, and they were grotesquely expensive. She’d never realized it before, but each set cost as much as a small house.
They looked it, too—at close range they had the strange aura of scientific instruments. Nonconsumer items, very specialized, very clean. Heavy, too—a skin of tough black plastic, but packed tight with pricy superconductive circuitry. They had no real lenses in them—just thousands of bit-mapped light detectors. The raw output was a prismatic blur—visual software handled all the imagery, depth of focus, and so on. Little invisible beams measured the position of the user’s eyeballs. The operator, back at his screen, didn’t have to depend on the user’s gaze, though. With software he could examine anything in the entire field of vision.
You could see right through them, even though they were opaque from outside. They could even be set to adjust for astigmatism or what have you.
They made custom-fitted foam earpieces for both of them. No problem there, that was old tech.
Chattahoochee Retreat had a telecom room that made the Galveston Lodge’s look premillennial. They did a crash course in videoglass technique. Strictly hands-on, typical Rizome training. The two of them took turns wandering over the grounds, scanning things at random, refining their skills. A lot to look at: greenhouses, aquaculture ponds, peach orchards, windmills. A day-care crèche where a Retreat staffer was baby-sitting Loretta. Rizome had given the creche system a shot, years ago, but people hadn’t liked it—too kibbutzish, never caught on.
The Retreat had been a working farm once, before single-cell protein came in and kicked the props out of agriculture. It was a bit Marie Antoinette now, like a lot of modern farms. Specialty crops, greenhouse stuff. A lot of that commercial greenhouse work was in the cit
ies now, where the markets were.
Then they would go inside, and watch their tapes, and get vertigo. And then try it again, but with books balanced on their heads. And then take turns, one monitoring the screen and the other out walking and taking instruction and bitching cheerfully about how tough it was. It was good to be working at something. They felt more in control.
It was going to work, Laura decided. They were going to run a propaganda number on the Grenadians and let the Grenadians run a propaganda number on them, and that would be it. A risk, yes—but also the widest exposure they’d ever had within the company, and that meant plenty in itself. The Committee hadn’t been crass enough to talk directly about reward, but they didn’t have to; that wasn’t how things were done in Rizome. It was all understood.
Dangerous, yes. But the bastards had shot up her house. She’d given up the illusion that anyplace would be truly safe anymore. She knew it wouldn’t. Not until this was all over.
They had a two-hour layover in Havana. Laura fed the baby. David stretched out in his blue plastic seat, propping his sandaled feet one atop the other. Crude overhead speakers piped twinkling Russian pop music. No robot trolleys here—porters with handcarts, instead. Old janitors, too, who pushed brooms like they’d been born pushing them. In the next row of plastic seats, a bored Cuban kid dropped an empty soft-drink carton and stomped it. Laura watched dully as the mashed carton started to melt. “Let’s get plastered,” David said suddenly.
“What?”
David tucked his videoglasses into the pocket of his suit, careful not to smudge the lenses. “I look at it this way. We’re gonna be online the whole time in Grenada. No time to relax, no time for ourselves. But we got an eight-hour flight coming up. Eight hours in a goddamn airplane, right? That’s free license to puke all over ourselves if we want. The stews’ll take care of us. Let’s get wasted.”
Laura examined her husband. His face looked brittle. She felt the same way. These last days had been hell. “Okay,” she said. David smiled.
He picked up the baby’s tote and they trudged to the nearest duty-free shop, a little cubbyhole full of cheap straw hats and goofy-looking heads carved from coconuts. David bought a liter flask of brown Cuban rum. He paid with cash. The Committee had warned them against using plastic. Too easy to trace. Data havens were all over the electric money business.
The Cuban shopgirl kept the paper money in a locked drawer. David handed her a 100-ecu bill. She handed over his paper change with a sloe-eyed smile at David—she was dressed in red, chewing gum, and listening to samba music over headphones. Little hip-swaying motions. David said something witty in Spanish and she smiled at him.
The ground wouldn’t settle under Laura’s shoes. The ground in airports wasn’t part of the world. It had its own logic—Airport Culture. Global islands in a net of airline flight paths. A nowhere node of sweat and jet lag with the smell of luggage.
They boarded their flight at Gate Diez-y-seis. Aero Cubana. Cheapest in the Caribbean, because the Cuban government was subsidizing flights. The Cubans were still touchy about their Cold War decades of enforced isolation.
David ordered Cokes whenever the stewardess came by and topped them off with deadly layers of pungent rum. Long flight to Grenada. Distances were huge out here. The Caribbean was flecked with cloud, far-down fractal wrinkles of greenish ocean surge. The stews showed a dubbed Russian film, some hot pop-music thing from Leningrad with lots of dance sequences, all hairdos and strobe lights. David watched it on headphones, humming and bouncing Loretta on his knee. Loretta was stupefied with travel—her eyes bulged and her sweet little face was blank as a kachina doll’s.
The rum hit Laura like warm narcotic tar. The world became exotic. Businessmen in the aisles ahead had plugged their decks into the dataports overhead, next to the air vents. Cruising forty thousand feet over Caribbean nowhere, but still plugged into the Net. Fiber-optics dangled like intravenous drips.
Laura leaned her seat back and adjusted the blower to puff her face. Airsickness lurked down there somewhere below the alcoholic numbness. She sank into a stunned doze. She dreamed.… She was wearing one of those Aero Cubana stewardess outfits, nifty blue numbers, kind of paramilitary 1940s with chunky shoulders and a pleated skirt, hauling her trolley down the aisle. Giving everyone little plastic tumblers full of something … milk.… They were all reaching out demanding this milk with looks of parched desperation and pathetic gratitude. They were so glad she was there and really wanted her help—they knew she could make things better.… They all looked frightened, rubbing their sweating chests like something hurt there.…
A lurch woke her up. Night had fallen. David sat in a pool of light from the overhead, staring at his keyboard screen. For a moment Laura was totally disoriented, legs cramped, back aching, her cheek sticky with spit.… Someone, David probably, had put a blanket over her. “My Optimal Persona,” she muttered. The plane jumped three or four times.
“You awake?” David said, plucking out his Rizome earplug. “Hitting a little rough weather.”
“Yeah?”
“September in the Caribbean.” Hurricane season, she thought—he didn’t have to say it. He checked his new, elaborate watchphone. “We’re still an hour out.” On the screen, a Rizome associate in a cowboy hat gestured eloquently at the camera, a mountain range looming behind him. David froze the image with a keytouch.
“You’re answering mail?”
“No, too drunk,” David said. “Just looking at it. This guy Anderson in Wyoming—he’s a drip.” David winked the screen’s image off. “There’s all kinds of bullshit—oh, sorry, I mean democratic input—pilin’ up for us in Atlanta. Just thought I’d get it down on disk before we leave the plane.”
Laura sat up scrunchily. “I’m glad you’re here with me, David.”
He looked amused and touched. “Where else would I be?” He squeezed her hand.
The baby was asleep in the seat between them, in a collapsible bassinet of chromed wire and padded yellow synthetic. It looked like something a high-tech Alpine climber would haul oxygen in. Laura touched the baby’s cheek. “She all right?”
“Sure. I fed her some rum, she’ll be sleeping for hours.”
Laura stopped in mid-yawn. “You fed her—” He was kidding. “So you’ve come to that,” Laura said. “Doping our innocent child.” His joke had forced her awake. “Is there no limit? To your depravity?”
“All kinds of limits—while I’m online,” David said. “As we’re about to be, for God knows how many days. Gonna cramp our style, babe.”
“Mmmm.” Laura touched her face, reminded. No video makeup. She hauled her cosmetics kit from the depths of her shoulder bag and stood up. “Gotta get our vid stuff on before we land.”
“Wanna try a quickie in the bathroom, standing up?”
“Probably bugged in there,” Laura said, half stumbling past him into the aisle.
He whispered up at her, holding her wrist. “They say Grenada has scuba diving, maybe we can mess around under water. Where no one can tape us.”
She stared down at his tousled head. “Did you drink all that rum?”
“No use wasting it,” he said.
“Oh, boy,” she said. She used the bathroom, dabbed on makeup before the harsh steel mirror. By the time she returned to her seat they were starting their descent.
4
A stewardess thanked them as they stepped over the threshold. Down the scruffy carpeted runway into Point Salines Airport. “Who’s online?” Laura murmured.
[“Emily,”] came the voice in her earplug. [“Right with you.”] David stopped struggling with the baby’s tote and reached up to adjust his volume. His eyes, like hers, hidden behind the gold-fretted videoshades. Laura felt nervously for her passport card, wondering what customs would be like. Airport hallway hung with dusty posters of white Grenadian beaches, ingratiating grinning locals in fashion colors ten years old, splashy holiday captions in Cyrillic and Japanese katakana.
A young, dark-skinned soldier leaned out from against the wall as they approached. “Webster party?”
“Yes?” Laura framed him with her videoglasses, then scanned him up and down. He wore a khaki shirt and trousers, a webbing belt with holstered gun, a starred beret, sunglasses after dark. Rolled-up sleeves revealed gleaming ebony biceps.
He fell into stride ahead of them, legs swinging in black lace-up combat boots. “This way.” They paced rapidly across the clearing area, heads down, ignored by a sprinkling of fatigue-glazed travelers. At customs their escort flashed an ID card and they breezed through without stopping.
“They be bringin’ you luggage later,” the escort muttered. “Got a car waiting.” They ducked out a fire exit and down a flight of rusting stairs. For a brief blessed moment they touched actual soil, breathed actual air. Damp and dark; it had rained. The car was a white Hyundai Luxury Saloon with one-way mirrored windows. Its doors popped open as they approached.
Their escort slid into the front seat; Laura and David hustled in back with the baby. The doors thunked shut like armored tank hatches and the car slid into motion. Its suspension whirled them with oily ease across the pitted and weedy tarmac. Laura glanced back at the airport as they left—pools of light over a dozen pedicabs and rust-riddled manual taxis.
The saloon’s frigid AC wrapped them in antiseptic chill. “Online, can you hear us in here?” Laura said.
[“A little image static, but audio’s fine,”] Emily whispered. [“Nice car, eh?”]
“Yeah,” David said. Outside the airport grounds, they turned north onto a palm-bordered highway. David leaned forward toward their escort in the front seat. “Where we going, amigo?”
“Takin’ you to a safehouse,” said their escort. He turned in his seat, throwing one elbow over the back. “Maybe ten mile. Sit back, relax, seen? Twiddle you big Yankee thumbs, try and look harmless.” He took off his dark glasses.
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