COUNT ZERO

“Nothing else?” Alain asked. The waiter hovered “No, thank you.”

“I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks,” he said, and she knew that that was a lie, and yet, as she often had before, she wondered if he was entirely conscious of the fact that he was lying. Andrea maintained that men like Alain lied so constantly, so passionately, that some basic distinction had been lost. They were artists in their own right, Andrea said, intent on restructuring reality, and the New Jerusalem was a fine place indeed, free of overdrafts and disgruntled landlords and the need to find someone to cover the evening’s bill.

“I didn’t notice you trying to reach me when Gnass came with the police,” she said, hoping at least that he would wince, but the boyish face was calm as ever, beneath clean brown hair he habitually combed back with his fingers.

“I’m sorry,” he said, crushing out his Gauloise Because she’d come to associate the smell of the dark French tobacco with him, Paris had seemed full of his scent, his ghost, his trail. “I was certain he’d never detect the – the nature of the piece. You must understand: Once I had admitted to myself how badly we needed the money, I knew that I must act You, I knew, were far too idealistic. The gallery would have folded in any case. If things had gone as pla

Happy,” he repeated, taking another cigarette from the pack

She could only stare at him, feeling a kind of wonder, and a sick revulsion at her desire to believe him.

“You know,” he said, taking a match from the red and yellow box, “I’ve had difficulties with the police before. When I was a student. Politics, of course.” He struck the match, tossed the box down, and lit the cigarette.

“Politics,” she said, and suddenly felt like laughing “I was unaware that there was a party for people like you. I can’t imagine what it might be called.”

“Marly,” he said, lowering his voice, as he always did when he wished to indicate intensity of feeling, “you know, you must know, that I acted for you For us, if you will But surely you know, you can feel, Marly, that I would never deliberately hurt you, or place you in jeopardy.” There was no room on the crowded little table for her purse, so she’d held it in her lap; now she was aware of her nails buried deep in the soft thick leather

“Never hurt me...” The voice was her own, lost and amazed, the voice of a child, and suddenly she was free, free of need, desire, free of fear, and all that she felt for the handsome face across the table was simple revulsion, and she could only stare at him, this stranger she’d slept beside for one year, in a tiny room behind a very small gallery in the Rue Mauconseil. The waiter put her glass of Vichy down in front of her.

He must have taken her silence for the begi

How was she to get away? Stand, she told herself Turn. Walk calmly back to the entrance Step through the door. Out into the subdued glitter of Napoleon Court, where polished marble overlay the Rue du Champ Fleuri, a fourteenth-century street said to have been reserved primarily for prostitution. Anything, anything, only go, only leave, now, and be away, away from him, walking blind, to lose herself in the guidebook Paris she’d learned when she’d first come here.

“But now.” he was saying. “you can see that things have worked out for the best. It’s often like that, isn’t it?” Again, the smile, but this time it was boyish, slightly wistful, and somehow, horribly, more intimate “We’ve lost the gallery, but you’ve found employment, Marly. You have a job to do, an interesting one, and I have the co

“My artist?” Covering her abrupt confusion with a sip of Vichy.

He opened his scarred attaché and removed something flat, a simple reflection hologram. She took it, grateful to have something to do with her hands, and saw that it was a casual shot of the box she’d seen in Virek’s construct of Barcelona.

Someone was holding it forward A man’s hands, not Alain’s, and on one of them, a signet ring of some dark metal. The background was lost. Only the box, and the hands

“Alain,” she said, “where did you get this?” Looking up to meet brown eyes filled with a terrible childlike triumph.

“It s going to cost someone a very great deal to find out.” He ground out his cigarette and stood. “Excuse me.” He walked away, headed in the direction of the restrooms. As he vanished, behind mirrors and black steel beams, she dropped the hologram, reached across the table, and flipped back the lid of his attaché. There was nothing there, only a blue elastic band and some crumbs of tobacco.

“May I bring you something else? More Vichy, perhaps?” The waiter stood beside her.

She looked up at him, struck suddenly by a sense of familiarity. The lean dark face.

“He’s wearing a broadcast unit,” the waiter said. “He’s armed as well. I was the bellman in Brussels. Give him what he wants. Remember that the money means nothing to you.” He took her glass and placed it carefully on his tray. “And, very likely, it will destroy him.”

When Alain returned, he was smiling. “Now, darling,” he said reaching for his cigarettes, “we can do business.”

Marly smiled back and nodded.

11 ON SITE

HE ALLOWED HIMSELF three hours of sleep, finally, in the windowless bunker where the point team had established the command post. He’d met the rest of the site team. Ramirez was slight, nervous, perpetually wired on his own skill as a console jockey; they were depending on him, along with Jaylene Slide on the offshore rig, to monitor cyberspace around the grid sector that held the heavily iced banks of Maas Biolabs; if Maas became aware of them, at the last moment, he might be able to provide some warning. He was also charged with relaying the medical data from the surgery to the offshore rig, a complex procedure if they were to keep it from Maas. The line out ran to a phone booth in the middle of nowhere Once past that booth, he and Jaylene were on their own in the matrix. If they blew it, Maas could backtrack and pinpoint the site. And then there was Nathan. the repair-man, whose real job consisted of watching over the gear in the bunker. If some part of their system went down, there was at least a chance he could fix it. Nathan belonged to the species that had produced Oakey and a thousand others Turner had worked with over the years, maverick techs who liked earning danger money and had proven they could keep their mouths shut. The others – Compton, Teddy, Costa, and Davis – were Just expensive muscle, mercs, the sort of men you hired for a job like this. For their benefit, he’d taken particular care in questioning Sutcliffe about the arrangements for clear-out. He’d explained where the copters would come in, the order of pickup, and precisely how and when they would be paid.

Then he’d told them to leave him alone in the bunker, and ordered Webber to wake him in three hours.

The place had been either a pump house or some sort of nexus for electrical wiring. The stumps of plastic tubing that protruded from the walls might have been conduit or sewage line, the room provided no evidence that any of them had ever been co