Virtual Light

“I hope so” Rydell said, and broke the co

He gave the parking-attendant Karen’s apartment number. After this, it really wasn’t going to matter much. He had the flashlight stuck down in the back of his jeans, under the denim jacket Buddy had loaned him. It was probably Buddy’s father’s. He’d told Buddy he’d help him find a place when he got to L.A. He sort of hoped Buddy never did try that, because he imagined kids like Buddy made it about a block from the bus station before some really fast urban predator got them, just a blur of wheels and teeth and no more Buddy to speak of. But then again you had to think about what it would be like to be him, Buddy, back there in his three-by six-foot bedroom in that trailer, with those posters of Fallon and Jesus, sneaking that VR when his daddy wasn’t looking. If you didn’t at least try to get out, what would you wind up feeling like? And that was why you had to give it to Sublett, because he’d gotten out of that, allergies and all.

But he was worried about Sublett. Pretty crazy to be worried about anybody, in a situation like this, but Sublett acted like he was already dead or something. Just moving from one thing to the next, like it didn’t matter. The only thing that got any kind of rise out of him was his allergies.

And Chevette, too, Chevette Washington, except what worried him there was the white skin of her back, just above the waist of those black bike-pants, when she was curled on the bed beside him. How he kept wanting to touch it. And how her tits stuck out against her t-shirt when she’d sit up in the morning, and those little dark twists of hair under her arms. And right now, walking up to this terracotta coffee-module near the base of the escalator, the rectangular head of Wally’s pepper-spray flashlight digging into his spine, he knew he might never get another chance. He could be dead, in half an hour, or on his way to prison.

He ordered a latte with a double shot, paid for it with just about the last of his money, and looked at his Timex. Ten ’til three. When he’d called Warbaby’s personal portable from the motel, the night before, he’d told him three.

God-eater had gotten him that number. God-eater could get you any number at all.

Warbaby had sounded really sad to hear from him.

Disappointed, like. “We never expected this of you, Rydell.”

“Sorry, Mr. Warbaby. Those fucking Russians. And that cowboy fucker, that Loveless. Got on my case.”

“There’s no need for obscenity. Who gave you this number?”

“I had it from Hernandez, before.” Silence.

“I got the glasses, Mr. Warbaby.”

“Where are you?”

Chevette Washington watching him, from the bed. “In Los Angeles. I figured I’d better get as far away from those Russians as I could.”

A pause. Maybe Warbaby had put his hand over the phone. Then, “Well, I suppose I can understand your behavior, although I can’t say I approve…”

“Can you come down here and get them, Mr. Warbaby? And just sort of call it even?”

A longer pause. “Well, Rydell” sadly, “I wouldn’t want you to forget how disappointed I am in you, but, yes, I could do that.”

“But just you and Freddie, right? Nobody else.”

“Of course” Warbaby had said. Rydell imagined him looking at Freddie, who’d be tap-tapping away on some new laptop, getting the call traced. To a cell-node in Oakland, and then to a tumbled number.

“You be down here tomorrow, Mr. Warbaby. I’ll call you at your same number, tell you where to come. Three o’clock. Sharp.”

“I think you’ve made the right decision, Rydell” Warbaby had said.

“I hope so” Rydell had said, then clicked off.

Now he looked at his Timex. l’ook a sip of coffee. Three o’clock. Sharp. He put the coffee down on the counter and got the phone out. Started punching in Warbaby’s number.

It took them twenty minutes to get there. They came in two cars, from opposite directions; Warbaby and Freddie in a black Lincoln with a white satellite-dish on top, Freddie driving it, then Svobodov and Orlovsky in a metallic-gray Lada sedan that Rydell took for a rental.

He watched them meet up, the four of them, then walk in, onto the plaza under the Blob, past those kinetic sculptures, heading for the nearest elevator, Warbaby looking sad as ever and leaning on that cane. Warbaby had his same olive coat on, his Stetson, Freddie was wearing a big shirt with a lot of pink in it, had a laptop under his arm, and the Russians from Homicide had these gray suits on, about the color and texture of the Lada they were driving.

He gave it a while to see if Loveless was going to turn up, then started keying in that number in Utah.

“Please, Jesus” he said, counting the rings.

“Your latte okay?” The Central Asian kid in the coffee-module, looking at him.

“It’s fine” Rydell said, as God-eater picked up.

“Yes?”

“Paradise.”

“This Richard?”

“Nixon. They’re here. Four but not Smiley.”

“Your two Russians, Warbaby, and his jockey?”

“Got ’em.”

“But not the other one?”

“Don’t see him…”

“His description’s in the package anyway. Okay, Rydell. Let’s do it.” Click.

Rydell stuck the phone in his jacket pocket, turned, and headed, walking fast, for the escalator. The boy in the coffeemodule probably thought there was something wrong with that lane.

God-eater and his friends, if they weren’t just one person, say some demented old lady up in the Oakland hills with a couple of million dollars’ worth of equipment and a terminally bad attitude, had struck Rydell as being almost uniquely full of shit. There was nothing, if you believed them, they couldn’t do. But if they were all that powerful, how come they had to hide that way, and make money doing crimes?

Rydell had gotten a couple of lectures on computer crime at the Academy, but it had been pretty dry. The history of it, how hackers used to be just these smart-ass kids dicking with the phone companies. Basically, the visiting Fed had said, any crime that was what once had been called white-collar was going to be computer crime anyway, now, because people in offices did everything with computers. But there were other crimes you could still call computer crimes in the old sense, because they usually involved professional criminals, and these criminals still thought of themselves as hackers. The public, the Fed had told them, still tended to think of hackers as some kind of romantic bullshit thing, sort of like kids moving the outhouse. Merry pranksters. In the old days, he said, lots of people still didn’t know there was an outhouse there to be moved, not until they wound up in the shit. Rydell’s class laughed dutifully. But not today, the Fed said; your modern hacker was about as romantic as a hit man from some ice posse or an enforcer with a dancer combine. And a lot harder to catch, although if you could get one and lean on him, you could usually count on landing a few more. But they were set up mostly in these cells, the cells building up larger groups, so that the most you could ever pop, usually, were the members of a single cell; they just didn’t know who the members of the other cells were, and they made a point of not finding out.

God-eater and his friends, however many of them there were or weren’t, must’ve been a cell like that, one of however many units in what they called the Republic of Desire. And if they were really going to go ahead and do the thing for him, he figured there were three reasons: they hated the idea of San Francisco getting rebuilt hecause they liked an infrastructure with a lot of holes in it, they were charging him good money—money he didn’t have—and they’d figured out a way to do something that nobody had ever done before. And it was that last one that had really seemed to get them going, once they’d decided to help him out.

And now, climbing the escalator, up through all these kinds of people who lived or worked up here, forcing himself not to break into a run, Rydell found it hard to believe that God-eater and them were doing what they’d said they could do. And if they weren’t, well, he was just fucked.