Mona Lisa Overdrive

LANIER: This evening.

SWAIN: Well, then, not to worry.

LANIER: Goodbye, Swain.

PETAL: He's a right bastard, that one.

SWAIN: I don't like this, really ...

PETAL: You like the goods though, don't you?

SWAIN: Can't complain there, but why d'you think they want Sally as well?

PETAL: Christ knows. They're welcome to her ...

SWAIN: They. I don't like'theys' ...

PETAL: They mightn't be terribly happy to know she'd gone there on her own stick, with Yanaka's daughter ...

SWAIN: No. But we have Miss Yanaka back again. Tomorrow I'll tell Sally that Prior's in Baltimore, getting the girl into shape ...

PETAL: That's an ugly business, that is ...

SWAIN: Bring a pot of coffee to the study.

She lay on her back, eyes closed, Colin's recordings unspooling in her head, direct input to the auditory nerves. Swain seemed to conduct the better part of his dealings in the billiard room, which meant that she heard people arriving and departing, heads and tails of conversations. Two men, one of whom might have been the red-faced man, held an interminable discussion of dog racing and tomorrow's odds. She listened with special interest as Swain and the man from Special Branch (SB, Swain called it) settled an article of business directly beneath the marble bust, as the man was preparing to leave. She interrupted this segment half-a-dozen times to request clarification. Colin made educated guesses.

"This is a very corrupt country," she said at last, deeply shocked.

"Perhaps no more than your own," he said.

"But what is Swain paying these people with?"

"Information. I would say that our Mr. Swain has recently come into possession of a very high-grade source of intelligence and is busy converting it into power. On the basis of what we've heard, I'd hazard that this has probably been his line of work for some time. What's apparent, though, is that he's moving up, getting bigger. There's internal evidence that he's currently a much more important man than he was a week ago. Also, we have the fact of the expanded staff ... "

"I must tell ... my friend."

"Shears? Tell her what?"

"What Lanier said. That she would be taken, along with Angela Mitchell."

"Where is she, then?"

"The Sprawl. A hotel ... "

"Phone her. But not from here. D'you have money?"

"A Mitsubank chip."

"No good in our phones, sorry. Have any coin?"

She got up from the bed and sorted carefully through the odd bits of English money that had accumulated at the bottom of her purse. "Here," she said, coming up with a thick gilt coin, "ten pounds."

"Need two of those to make a local call." She tossed the brassy te

"Certainly," he said, "though I advise you not to."

"But I will."

"Very well. How do you propose to go about it?"

"I'll tell them," she said, "that I need to go shopping."

27 - Bad Lady

The woman must've gotten in sometime after midnight, she figured later, because it was after Prior came back with the crabs, the second bag of crabs. They really did have some good crabs in Baltimore, and coming off a run always gave her an appetite, so she'd talked him into going back for some more. Gerald kept coming in to change the derms on her arms; she'd give him her best goofy smile every time, squish the trank out of them when he'd gone, and then stick them back on. Finally Gerald said she should get some sleep; he put out the lights and turned down the fake window to its lowest setting, a bloodred sunset.

When she was alone again, she slid her hand between the bed and the wall, found the shockrod in its hole in the foam.

She fell asleep without meaning to, the red glow of the window like a sunset in Miami, and she must've dreamed of Eddy, or anyway of Hooky Green's, dancing with somebody up there on the thirty-third floor, because when the crash woke her, she wasn't sure where she was, but she had this very clear map of the way out of Hooky Green's, like she knew she'd better take the stairs because there must be some kind of trouble ...

She was half out of bed when Prior came through the door, like really through it, because it was still shut when he hit it. He came through it backward and it just went to splinters and honeycomb chunks of cardboard.

She saw him hit the wall, and then the floor, and then he wasn't moving anymore, and someone else was there in the doorway, backlit from the other room, and all she could see of the face were these two curves of reflected red light from that fake sunset.

Pulled her legs back into bed and sank back against the wall, her hand sliding down to ...

"Don't move, bitch." There was something real scary about that voice, because it was too fucking cheerful, like throwing Prior through that door had been kind of a treat. "I mean really don't move ... " And the woman was across the room in three strides, very close, so close that Mona felt the cold coming off the leather of the woman's jacket.

"Okay," Mona said, "okay ... "

Then hands grabbed her, fast, and she was flat on her back, shoulders pressed down hard into the foam, and something -- the shockrod -- was right in front of her face.

"Where'd you get this little thing?"

"Oh," Mona said, like it was something she might've seen once but forgotten about, "it was in my boyfriend's jacket. I borrowed his jacket ... "

Mona's heart was pounding. There was something about those glasses ...

"Did shithead know you had this little thing?"

"Who?"

"Prior," the woman said, and let go of her, turning. Then she was kicking him, kicking Prior over and over, hard. "No," she said, stopping as abruptly as she'd begun, "I don't think Prior knew."

Then Gerald was in the doorway, just like nothing had happened, except he was looking ruefully at the part of the door that was still on the frame, rubbing his thumb over an edge of splintered laminate. "Coffee, Molly?"

"Two coffees, Gerald," the woman said, examining the shockrod. "Mine's black."

Mona sipped her coffee and studied the woman's clothes and hair while they waited for Prior to wake up. At least that's what they seemed to be doing. Gerald was gone again. She wasn't much like anybody Mona'd seen before; Mona couldn't place her on the style map at all, except she must've had some money. The hair was European; Mona'd seen it like that in a magazine; she was pretty sure it wasn't this season's style anywhere, but it went okay with the glasses, which were insets, planted right in the skin. Mona'd seen a cabbie in Cleveland had those. And she wore this short jacket, very dark brown, too plain for Mona's taste but obviously new, with a big white sheepskin collar, open now over a weird green thing trussed across her breasts and stomach like armor, which was what Mona figured it probably was, and jeans cut from some kind of gray-green mossy suede, thick and soft, and Mona thought they were the best thing about her outfit, she could've gone for a pair of those herself, except the boots spoiled them, these knee-high black boots, the kind bike racers wore, with thick yellow rubber soles and big straps across the insteps, chrome buckles all up and down, horrible clunky toes. And where'd she get that nail color, that burgundy? Mona didn't think they even made that anymore.

"What the hell are you looking at?"

"Uh ... your boots."

"So?"

"They don't make it with your pants."

"Wore 'em to kick the shit out of Prior."