COUNT ZERO

Bobby thought of the bodies upstairs. They’d been there all day.

“Hey,” the Fi

“You said he was close to... Legba? And Legba’s the one you and Beauvoir said gave me luck when I hit that black ice?”

Beyond the honeycomb edge of the geodesics, the sky was lightening.

“Yes,” Lucas said. He seemed lost in thought.

“But he doesn’t seem to trust that stuff at all.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Lucas said as the Rolls came into view. “He’s always been close to the spirit of the thing.”

17 THE SQUIRREL WOOD

THE PLANE HAD GONE to ground near the sound of ru

He came awake like a machine, eyes opening, vision plugged in, empty, remembering the red flash of Lynch’s death out beyond the fixed sights of the Smith & Wesson. The arc of the canopy above him was laced with mimetic approximations of leaves and branches Pale dawn and the sound of ru

“Where are we?”

“We are fifteen meters south-southeast of the landing coordinates you provided,” the plane said. “You were unconscious again. I opted for concealment.”

He reached back and removed the interface plug from his socket, breaking his link with the plane. He gazed dully around the cockpit until he found the manual controls for the canopy. It sighed up on servos, the lacework of polycarbon leaves shifting as it moved. He got his leg over the side, looked down at his hand flat against the fuselage at the edge of the cockpit. Polycarbon reproduced the gray tones of a nearby boulder; as he watched, it began to paint a hand-sized patch the color of his palm He pulled his other leg over, the gun forgotten on the seat, and slid down into earth and long sweet grass. Then he slept again, his forehead against the grass and dreamed of ru

When he woke, he was crawling forward on his hands and knees, through low branches heavy with dew. Finally he reached a cleaning and pitched forward, rolling over, his arms spread in what felt like surrender. High above him, something small and gray launched itself from one branch, caught an-other, swung there for an instant, then scrambled away, out of his sight.

Lie still, he heard a voice telling him, years away. Just lay out and relax and pretty soon they’ll forget you, forget you in the gray and the dawn and the dew. They’re out to feed, feed and play, and their brains can’t hold two messages, not for long. He lay there on his back, beside his brother, the nylon-stocked Winchester across his chest, breathing the smell of new brass and gun oil, the smell of their campfire still in his hair. And his brother was always right, about the squirrels. They came. They forgot the clear glyph of death spelled out below them in patched denim and blue steel; they came, racing along limbs, pausing to sniff the morning, and Turner’s .22 cracked, a limp gray body tumbling down. The others scattered, vanishing, and Turner passed the gun to his brother. Again, they waited, waited for the squirrels to forget them.

“You’re like me,” Turner said to the squirrels, bobbing up out of his dream. One of them sat up suddenly on a fat limb and looked directly at him. “I always come back.” The squirrel hopped away. “I was coming back when I ran from the Dutchman. I was coming back when I flew to Mexico. I was coming back when I killed Lynch.”

He lay there for a long time, watching the squirrels, while the woods woke and the morning warmed around him. A crow swept in, banking, braking with feathers it spread like black mechanical fingers. Checking to see if he were dead.

Turner gri

Not yet.

He crawled back in, under the overhanging branches, and found her sitting up in the cockpit. She wore a baggy white T-shirt slashed diagonally with the MAAS-NEOTEK logo. There were lozenges of fresh red blood across the front of the shirt. Her nose was bleeding again. Bright blue eyes, dazed and disoriented, in sockets bruised yellow-black, like exotic makeup.

Young, he saw, very young.

“You’re Mitchell’s daughter,” he said, dragging the name up from the biosoft dossier. “Angela.”

“Angie,” she said, automatically “Who’ re you? I’m bleeding. She held out a bloody carnation of wadded tissue.

“Turner. I was expecting your father.” Remembering the gun now, her other hand out of sight, below the edge of the cockpit. “Do you know where he is?”

“In the mesa. He thought he could talk with them, explain it Because they need him.”

“With who?” He took a step forward.

“Maas. The Board. They can’t afford to hurt him. Can they?”

“Why would they?” Another step

She dabbed at her nose with the red tissue. “Because he sent me out. Because he knew they were going to hurt me, kill me maybe. Because of the dreams.”

“The dreams?”

“Do you think they’ll hurt him?”

“No, no, they wouldn’t do that. I’m going to climb up there now. Okay?”

She nodded. He had to run his hands over the side of the fuselage to find the shallow, recessed handholds; the mimetic coating showed him leaf and lichen, twigs... And then he was up, beside her, and he saw the gun beside her sneakered foot. “But wasn’t he coming himself? I was expecting him, your father.”

“No. We never pla

“Enough,” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder, “he told us enough. It’ll be all right...” He swung his legs over, bent, moved the Smith & Wesson away from her foot, and found the interface cable. His hand still on her, he raised it, snapped it into place behind his ear.

‘Give me the procedures for erasing anything you stored in the past forty-eight hours,” he said. “I want to dump that course for Mexico City, your flight from the coast, anything...”

“There was no plan logged for Mexico City,” the voice said, direct neural input on audio.

Turner stared at the girl, rubbed his jaw.

“Where were we going?”

“Bogotá,” and the jet reeled out coordinates for the landing they hadn’t made.

She blinked at him, her lids bruised dark as the surrounding skin. “Who are you talking to?”

“The plane. Did Mitchell tell you where he thought you’d be going”“

“Japan...”

Know anyone in Bogotá? Where’s your mother?”

“No. Berlin, I think. I don’t really know her.”