COUNT ZERO

Conroy settled himself on a low, rectangular cushion of slate-gray ultrasuede. Turner stood, his hands slack at his sides. Conroy took a knurled silver inhaler from the low enamel table between them. “Choline enhancer?”

“No.”

Conroy jammed the inhaler into one nostril and snorted.

“You want some sushi?” He put the inhaler back on the table. “We caught a couple of red snapper about an hour ago”

Turner stood where he was, staring at Conroy.

“Christopher Mitchell,” Conroy said. “Maas Biolabs. Their head hybridoma man. He’s coming over to Hosaka.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Bullshit. How about a drink?”

Turner shook his head. Silicon’s on the way out, Turner. Mitchell’s the man who made biochips work, and Maas is sitting on the major patents. You know that. He’s the man for monoclonals. He wants out YOU and me, Turner, we’re going to shift him.”

“I think I’m retired, Conroy. I was having a good time, back there.”

“That’s what the psych team in Tokyo say. I mean, it’s not exactly your first time out of the box, is it? She’s a field psychologist, on retainer to Hosaka.”

A muscle in Turner’s thigh began to jump.

“They say you’re ready, Turner. They were a little worried, after New Delhi, so they wanted to check it out. Little therapy on the side. Never hurts, does it?”

2 MARLY

SHE’D WORN HER BEST for the interview, but it was raining in Brussels and she had no money for a cab. She walked from the Eurotrans station.

Her hand, in the pocket of her good jacket, a Sally Stanley but almost a year old, was a white knot around the crumpled telefax. She no longer needed it, having memorized the address, but it seemed she could no more release it than break the trance that held her here now, staring into the window of an expensive shop that sold menswear, her focus phasing between sedate fla

Surely the eyes alone would be enough to cost her the job. No need for the wet hair she now wished she’d let Andrea cut. The eyes displayed a pain and an inertia that anyone could read, and most certainly these things would soon be revealed to Herr Josef Virek, least likely of potential employers.

When the telefax had been delivered, she’d insisted on regarding it as some cruel prank, another nuisance call. She’d had enough of those, thanks to the media, so many that Andrea had ordered a special program for the apartment’s phone, one that filtered out incoming calls from any number that wasn’t listed in her permanent directory. But that, Andrea had insisted, must have been the reason for the telefax. How else could anyone reach her?

But Marly had shaken her head and huddled deeper into Andrea’s old terry robe. Why would Virek, enormously weal-thy, collector and patron, wish to hire the disgraced former operator of a tiny Paris gallery?

Then it had been Andrea’s time for head-shaking, in her impatience with the new, the disgraced Marly Krushkhova, who spent entire days in the apartment now, who sometimes didn’t bother to dress. The attempted sale, in Paris, of a single forgery, was hardly the novelty Marly imagined it to have been, she said. If the press hadn’t been quite so anxious to show up the disgusting Gnass for the fool he most assuredly was, she continued, the business would hardly have been news. Gnass was wealthy enough, gross enough, to make for a weekend’s scandal. Andrea smiled. “If you had been less attractive, you would have gotten far less attention.”

Marly shook her head. “And the forgery was Alain’s. You were i

Marly went into the bathroom, still huddled in the thread-bare robe, without answering.

Beneath her friend’s wish to comfort, to help, Marly could already sense the impatience of someone forced to share a very small space with an unhappy, nonpaying guest.

And Andrea had had to loan her the fare for the Eurotrans.

With a conscious, painful effort of will, she broke from the circle of her thoughts and merged with the dense but sedate flow of serious Belgian shoppers.

A girl in bright tights and a boyfriend’s oversized loden jacket brushed past, scrubbed and smiling. At the next inter-section, Marly noticed an outlet for a fashion line she’d favored in her own student days. The clothes looked impossibly young.

In her white and secret fist, the telefax.

Galerie Duperey, 14 Rue au Beurre, Bruxelles.

Josef Virek.

The receptionist in the cool gray anteroom of the Galerie Duperey might well have grown there, a lovely and likely poisonous plant, rooted behind a slab of polished marble inlaid with an enameled keyboard. She raised lustrous eyes as Marly approached. Marly imagined the click and whirr of shutters, her bedraggled image whisked away to some far corner of Josef Virek’s empire.

‘Marly Krushkhova,” she said, fighting the urge to pro-duce the compacted wad of telefax, smooth it pathetically on the cool and flawless marble. “For Herr Virek.”

“Fraulein Krushkhova,” the receptionist said, “Herr Virek is unable to be in Brussels today.”

Marly stared at the perfect lips, simultaneously aware of the pain the words caused her and the sharp pleasure she was learning to take in disappointment. “I see.”

“However, he has chosen to conduct the interview via a sensory link. If you will please enter the third door on your left.

The room was bare and white. On two walls hung un-framed sheets of what looked like rain-stained cardboard, stabbed through repeatedly with a variety of instruments. Katatonenkunst. Conservative. The sort of work one sold to committees sent round by the boards of Dutch commercial banks.

She sat down on a low bench covered in leather and finally allowed herself to release the telefax. She was alone, but assumed that she was being observed somehow.

“Fraulein Krushkhova.” A young man in a technician’s dark green smock stood in the doorway opposite the one through which she’d entered. “In a moment, please, you will cross the room and step through this door. Please grasp the knob slowly, firmly, and in a ma

She blinked at him “I beg-”

“The sensory link,” he said, and withdrew, the door closing behind him.

She rose, tried to tug some shape into the damp lapels of her jacket, touched her hair, thought better of it, took a deep breath, and crossed to the door. The receptionist’s phrase had prepared her for the only kind of link she knew, a simstim signal routed via Bell Europa. She’d assumed she’d wear a helmet studded with dermatrodes, that Virek would use a passive viewer as a human camera.

But Virek’s wealth was on another scale of magnitude entirely.

As her fingers closed around the cool brass knob, it seemed to squirm, sliding along a touch spectrum of texture and temperature in the first second of contact.

Then it became metal again, green-painted iron, sweeping out and down, along a line of perspective, an old railing she grasped now in wonder.

A few drops of rain blew into her face.

Smell of rain and wet earth.

A confusion of small details, her own memory of a drunken art school picnic warring with the perfection of Virek’s illusion.

Below her lay the unmistakable panorama of Barcelona, smoke hazing the strange spires of the Church of the Sagrada Familia. She caught the railing with her other hand as well, fighting vertigo. She knew this place. She was in the Guell Park, Antonio Gaudi’s tatty fairyland, on its barren rise behind the center of the city. To her left, a giant lizard of crazy-quilt ceramic was frozen in midslide down a ramp of rough stone. Its fountain-grin watered a bed of tired flowers.