COUNT ZERO

“So,” Webber said, “he’s coming in by air.” She spat brown juice on a yellowed cactus. Her cheek was packed with Copenhagen snuff “You got it,” Turner said. He sat beside her on a ledge of buff shale. They were watching Lynch and Nathan clear the strip he and Sutcliffe had laid out with the orange tape The tape marked out a rectangle four meters wide and twenty long Lynch carried a length of rusted I-beam to the tape and heaved it over. Something scurried away through the brush as the beam rang on concrete.

“They can see that tape, if they want to,” Webber said, wiping her lips with the back of her hand. “Read the head-lines on your morning fax, if they want to.”

“I know,” Turner said, “but if they don’t know we’re here already, I don’t think they’re going to. And you couldn’t see it from the highway.” He adjusted the black nylon cap Ramirez had given him, pulling the long bill down until it touched his sunglasses. “Anyway, we’re just moving the heavy stuff, the things that could tear a leg off. It isn’t going to look like anything, not from orbit.”

“No,” Webber agreed, her seamed face impassive beneath her sunglasses He could smell her sweat from where she sat, sharp and animal.

“What the hell do you do, Webber, when you aren’t doing this?” He looked at her.

‘Probably a hell of a lot more than you do,” she said. “Part of the time I breed dogs.” She took a knife from her boot and began to strop it patiently on her sole, flipping it smoothly with each stroke, like a Mexican barber sharpening a razor. “And I fish. Trout.”

“You have people, in New Mexico?”

“Probably more than you’ve got,” she said flatly. “I figure the ones like you and Sutcliffe, you aren’t from any place at all. This is where you live, isn’t it, Turner? On the site, today, the day your boy comes out. Right?” She tested the blade against the ball of her thumb, then slid it back into its sheath.

“But you have people? You got a man to go back to?”

“A woman, you want to know,” she said. “Know anything about breeding dogs?”

“No,” he said

“I didn’t think so.” She squinted at him. “We got a kid, too. Ours. She carried it.”

“DNA splice?”

She nodded.

“That’s expensive,” he said.

“You know it; wouldn’t be here if we didn’t need to pay it off. But she’s beautiful.”

“Your woman?”

“Our kid.”

12 CAFÉ BLANC

AS SHE WALKED FROM the Louvre, she seemed to sense some articulated structure shifting to accommodate her course through the city. The waiter would be merely a part of the thing, one limb, a delicate probe or palp. The whole would be larger, much larger. How could she have imagined that it would be possible to live, to move, in the u

Eventually she found herself on the pavement below the terrace of the Blanc. It seemed as good a place as any. A month before, she would have avoided it; she’d spent too many evenings with Alain there. Now, feeling that she had been freed, she decided to begin the process of rediscovering her own Paris by choosing a table at the Blanc She took one near a side screen. She asked a waiter for a cognac, and shivered, watching the Paris traffic flow past, perpetual river of steel and glass, while all around her, at other tables, strangers ate and smiled, drank and argued, said bitter good-byes or swore private fealties to an afternoon’s feeling.

But – she smiled – she was a part of it all. Something in her was waking from a long and stifled sleep, brought back into the light in the instant she’d fully opened her eyes to Alain’s viciousness and her own desperate need to continue loving him. But that need was fading, even as she sat here. The shabbiness of his lies, somehow, had broken the chains of her depression. She could see no logic to it, because she had known, in some part of herself, and long before the business with Gnass, exactly what it was that Alain did in the world, and that had made no difference to her love. In the face of this new feeling, however, she would forgo logic. It was enough, to be here, alive, at a table in the Blanc, and to imagine all around her the intricate machine that she now knew Virek had deployed.

Ironies, she thought, seeing the young waiter from Napoleon Court step up onto the terrace. He wore the dark trousers he had worked in, but the apron had been replaced with a blue windbreaker. Dark hair fell across his forehead in a smooth wing. He came toward her, smiling, confident, know-ing that she wouldn’t run. There was something in her then that wanted very badly to run, but she knew that she wouldn’t. Irony, she told herself: As I luxuriate in the discovery that I am no special sponge for sorrow, but merely another fallible animal in this stone maze of a city, I come simultaneously to see that I am the focus of some vast device fueled by an obscure desire.

“My name is Paco,” he said, pulling out the white-painted iron chair opposite her own.

“You were the child, the boy, in the park...”

“A long time ago, yes.” He sat. “Señor has preserved the image of my childhood.”

“I have been thinking, about your Señor.” She didn’t look at him, but at the passing cars, cooling her eyes in the flow of traffic, the colors of polycarbon and painted steel. “A man like Virek is incapable of divesting himself of his wealth. His money has a life of its own. Perhaps a will of its own. He implied as much when we met.”

“You are a philosopher.”

“I’m a tool, Paco. I’m the most recent tip for a very old machine in the hands of a very old man, who wishes to penetrate something and has so far failed to do so. Your employer fumbles through a thousand tools and somehow chooses me.

“You are a poet as well!”

She laughed, taking her eyes from the traffic; he was gri

“And you are an egotist as well?”

“Am I?”

“Perhaps not. Certainly, you are observed. We watch, and it is well that we do. Your friend in the brasserie, we watch him as well. Unfortunately, we’ve been unable to determine where he obtained the hologram he showed you. Very likely, he already had it when he began to phone your friend’s number Someone got to him, do you understand? Someone has put him in your way. Don’t you think that this is most intriguing? Doesn’t it pique the philosopher in you?”

“Yes, I suppose it does I took the advice you gave me, in the brasserie, and agreed to his price.

“Then he will double it.” Paco smiled.

“Which is of no importance to me, as you pointed out. He has agreed to contact me tomorrow. I assume that you can arrange the delivery of the money. He asked for cash.”

“Cash” – he rolled his eyes – “how risqué! But, yes, I can. And I know the details as well. We were monitoring the conversation. Not difficult, as he was helpful enough to broadcast it himself, from a bead microphone. We were anxious to learn who that broadcast was intended for, but we doubt he knows that himself.”

“It was unlike him,” she said, frowning, “to excuse him-self, to break off that way, before he had made his demands. He fancies he has a flair for the dramatic moment...”

“He had no choice,” Paco said “We engineered what he took to be a failure of the bead’s power source It required a trip to the hommes, then. He said very nasty things about you, alone in the cubicle.”