COUNT ZERO

The child spun, the little pistol blurring... And crumpled, folded into himself like a deflating balloon, a balloon sucked away into nothing at all, the Browning clattering to the stone path like a forgotten toy.

“My name,” a voice said, and Bobby wanted to scream when he realized that it came from his own mouth, “is Samedi, and you have slain my cousin’s horse...”

And Virek was ru

“What the hell do you want? Who are you?” The voice was familiar, a woman’s. Not Jackie’s

“Bobby,” he said, waves of darkness pulsing through him. “Bobby...”

“How did you get here?”

“Jammer. He knew. His deck pegged you when you iced me before. He’d just seen something, something huge He couldn’t remember..” Turner sent me. Conroy. He said tell you Conroy did it. You want Conroy...” Hearing his own voice as though it were someone else’s. He’d been somewhere, and returned, and now he was here, in Jaylene Slide’s skeletal neon sketch. On the way back, he’d seen the big thing, the thing that had sucked them up, start to alter and shift, gargantuan blocks of its rotating, merging, taking on new alignments, the entire outline changing ‘Conroy,” she said. The sexy scrawl leaned by the video window, something in its line expressing a kind of exhaustion, even boredom. “I thought so.” The video image whited out, formed again as a shot of some ancient stone building.

Park Avenue. He’s up there with all those Euros, clicking away at some new scam.” She sighed. “Thinks he’s safe, see? Wiped Ramirez like a fly, lied to my face, flew off to New York and his new job, and now he thinks he’s safe -”

The figure moved, and the image changed again. Now the face of the white-haired man, the man Bobby had seen talking to the big guy, on Jammer’s phone, filled the screen.

She’s tapped into his line, Bobby thought.

“Or not,” Conroy said, the audio cutting in. “Either way, we’ve got her. No problem.” The man looked tired, Bobby thought, but on top of it. Tough. Like Turner.

“I’ve been watching you, Conroy,” Slide said softly. “My good friend Bu

“No,” Conroy was saying, “we can have her in Stockholm for you tomorrow Absolutely.” He smiled into the camera.

“Kill him, Bu

“That’s right,” Conroy said, and then something happened, something that shook the camera, blurring his image. “What is that?” he asked, in a very different voice, and then the screen was blank.

“Burn, motherfucker,’ she said.

And Bobby was yanked back into the dark.

33 WRACK AND WHIRL

MARLY PASSED THE hour adrift in the slow storm, watching the boxmaker’s dance. Paco’s threat didn’t frighten her, although she had no doubt of his willingness to carry it out. He would carry it out, she was certain. She had no idea what would happen if the lock were breached. They would die. She would die, and Jones, and Wigan Ludgate. Perhaps the contents of the dome would spill out into space, a blossoming cloud of lace and tarnished sterling, marbles and bits of string, brown leaves of old books, to orbit the cores forever. That had the right tone, somehow; the artist who had set the boxmaker in motion would be pleased.

The new box gyrated through a round of foam-tipped claws. Discarded rectangular fragments of wood and glass tumbled from the focus of creation, to join the thousand things, and she was lost in it, enchanted, when Jones, wild-eyed, his face filmed with sweat and dirt, heaved up into the dome, trailing the red suit on a lanyard. “I can’t get the Wig into a place I can seal,” he said, “so this is for you The suit spun up below him and he grabbed for it, frantic. “I don’t want it,” she said, watching the dance. “Get into it! Now! No time!” His mouth worked, but no sound came. He tried to take her arm.

“No,” she said, evading his hand. “What about you?” “Put the goddamn suit on!” he roared, waking the deeper range of echo.

“No.”

Behind his head, she saw the screen strobe itself into life, fill with Paco’s features.

“Señor is dead,” Paco said, his smooth face expression-less, “and his various interests are undergoing reorganization. In the interim, I am required in Stockholm. I am authorized to inform Marly Krushkhova that she is no longer in the employ of the late Josef Virek, nor is she an employee of his estate. Her salary in full is available at any branch of the Bank of France, upon submission of valid identification. The proper tax declarations are on file with the revenue authorities of France and Belgium. Lines of working credit have been invalidated. The former corporate cores of Tessier-Ashpool SA are the property of one of the late Herr Virek’s subsidiary entities, and anyone on the premises will be charged with trespass.”

Jones was frozen there, his arm cocked, his hand tensed open to harden the striking edge of his palm.

Paco vanished.

“Are you going to hit me?” she asked.

He relaxed his arm. “I was about to. Cold-cock you and stuff you into this bleeding suit...” He started to laugh. “But I’m glad I don’t have to now. Here, look, it’s done a new one.”

The new box came tumbling out of the shifting flitter of arms. She caught it easily.

The interior, behind the rectangle of glass, was smoothly lined with the sections of leather cut from her jacket. Seven numbered tabs of holofiche stood up from the box’s black leather floor like miniature tombstones. The crumpled wrapper from a packet of Gauloise was mounted against black leather at the back, and beside it a black-striped gray matchbook from a brasserie in Napoleon Court.

And that was all.

Later, as she was helping him hunt for Wigan Ludgate in the maze of corridors at the far end of the cores, he paused, gripping a welded handhold, and said, “You know, the queer thing about those boxes?”

“Yes?”

“Is that Wig got a damn good price on them, somewhere in New York. Money, I mean. But sometimes other things as well, things that came back up...”

“What sort of things?”

“Software, I guess it was. He’s a secretive old fuck when it comes to what he thinks his voices are telling him to do Once, it was something he swore was biosoft, that new stuff...”

“What did he do with it?”

“He’d download it all into the cores.” Jones shrugged “Did he keep it, then?”

“No,” Jones said, “he’d just toss it into whatever pile of stuff we’d managed to scrounge for our next shipment out Just jacked it into the cores and then resold it for whatever he could get.”

“Do you know why? What it was about?”

“No,” Jones said, losing interest in his story, “he’d just say that the Lord moved in strange ways...” He shrugged “He said God likes to talk to Himself...