Greg Bear - Darwin's Radio

The aching sound of sirens echoed through the garage. Mitch pushed through a door to the elevator cubicle just as three uniformed security guards came thumping down the stairs. They rounded the corner, guns drawn, and glared at him.

Mitch held up his hands and hoped he looked innocent. They swore and locked the double glass doors. “Get up there!” one shouted at him.

He climbed the stairs with the guards close behind.

From the lobby, looking out upon West Harbor Drive, he saw small riot trucks skirt the crowd, pushing slowly and steadily into the women. The women cried out in chorus, compressed and angry voices like a crashing wave. Water cannons twisted on top of a truck like antennae on a bug’s head.

The lobby’s glass doors opened and closed as guests waggled keys at staff and were allowed in. Mitch walked to the middle of the lobby, standing in an atrium, feeling the air from outside brush past. A sharp tang caught his attention: odors of fear and rage and something else, acrid, like dog piss on a hot sidewalk.

It made his hair stand on end.

The smell of the mob.

Dicken met Kaye on the penthouse floor. A man in a dark blue suit held open the door to the penthouse level and checked their badges. Tiny voices chattered in his earplug.

“They’re already in the lobby downstairs,” Dicken told her. “They’re going nuts out there.”

“Why? “ Kaye asked, baffled.

“Mexico City,” Dicken said.

“But why riot?”

“Where’s Kaye Lang?” a man shouted.

“Here!” Kaye held up her hand.

They pushed through a line of confused and chattering men and women. Kaye saw a woman in a swimsuit laughing, shaking her head, clutching a large white terry cloth towel. A man in a hotel bathrobe sat in a chair with his legs drawn up, eyes wild. Behind them, the guard yelled, “Is she the last one?”

“Check,” another answered. Kaye had never known there were so many of Marge’s security people in the hotel — she guessed twenty. Some wore sidearms.

Then she heard Cross’s high-pitched bellow.

“For Christ’s sake, it’s just a bunch of women! Just a bunch of frightened women!”

Dicken took Kaye’s arm. Cross’s personal secretary, Bob Cavanaugh, a slender man of thirty-five or forty with thinning blond hair, grabbed both of them and ushered them through the last cordon into Cross’s bedroom. She was sprawled across a king-size bed, still in her silk pajamas, watching closed circuit television. Cavanaugh draped a fringed cotton wrap over her shoulders. The view on the screen swayed back and forth. Kaye guessed the camera was on the third or fourth floor.

Riot control vehicles sprayed selective shots from water cannons and forced the mass of women farther down the street, away from the convention center entrance. “They’re mowing ‘em down!” Cross shouted angrily.

“They trashed the convention floor,” the secretary said.

“We never expected this kind of reaction,” Stan Thorne said, thick arms folded across a substantial belly.

“No,” Cross said, her voice like a low flute. “And why in hell not? I always said it was a gut issue. Well, here’s the gut response! It’s a goddamned disaster!”

“They didn’t even present their demands,” said a slender woman in a green suit.

“What in hell do they hope to accomplish?” someone else said, not visible to Kaye.

“Dropping a big fat message on our doorstep,” Cross grumbled. “Something’s kicked the body politic in the groin. They want fast, fast relief, and screw the process.”

“This could be just what we needed,” said a small, thin man whom Kaye recognized: Lewis Jansen, the marketing director for Americol’s pharmaceutical division.

“The hell you say.” Cross cried out, “Kaye Lang, I want you!”

“Here,” Kaye said, stepping forward.

“Good! Frank, Sandra, get Kaye on the tube as soon as they clear the streets. Who’s the talent here?”

An older woman in a bathrobe, carrying an aluminum briefcase, named from memory the local television commentators and affiliates.

“Lewis, have your folks work up some talking points.”

“My folks are at another hotel.”

“Then call them! Tell the people we’re working as fast as we can, don’t want to move too fast on a vaccine or we’ll harm folks — shit, tell them all the stuff we were saying down on the convention floor. When in hell will people ever learn to sit back and listen? Are the phones out of order?”

Kaye wondered whether Mitch had been caught in the riot, if he was okay.

Mark Augustine entered the bedroom. It was getting crowded. The air was thick and hot. Augustine nodded to Dicken, smiled genially at Kaye. He seemed cool and collected, but there was something about his eyes that betrayed this camouflage.

“Good!” Cross roared. “The gang’s all here. Mark, what’s up?”

“Richard Bragg was shot to death in Berkeley two hours ago,” Augustine said. “He was out walking his dog.” Augustine tilted his head to one side and drew his lips together into a wry expression for Kaye’s benefit.

“Bragg?” someone asked.

“The patent asshole,” another answered.

Cross stood up from the bed. “Related to the news about the baby?” she asked Augustine.

“You might think so,” Augustine said. “Somebody at the hospital in Mexico City leaked the news. La Prensa reported the baby was severely malformed. It was on every channel by six A.M.”

Kaye turned to Dicken. “Born dead,” he said.

Augustine pointed to the window. “That might explain the mob. This was supposed to be a peaceful demonstration.”

“Let’s get to it, then,” Cross said, subdued. “We have work to do.”

Dicken looked downcast as they walked to the elevator. He spoke in an undertone to Kaye. “Let’s forget the zoo,” he said.

“The discussion?”

“It was premature,” he said. “Now is no time to stick our necks out.”

Mitch walked along the littered street, boots crunching through shards of glass. Police barricades marked by yellow ribbon closed off the convention center and the front entrances of three hotels. Overturned cars were wrapped in yellow ribbon like presents. Signs and banners littered the asphalt and sidewalks. The air still smelled of tear gas and smoke. Police in skintight dark green pants and khaki shirts and National Guard troops in camouflage stood with folded arms along the street while city officials disembarked from vans and were led off to tour the damage. The police watched the few unofficial bystanders through dark glasses, silently challenging.

Mitch had tried to get back to his hotel room at the Holiday Inn and had been turned away by unhappy clerks working with the police. His luggage — one bag — was still in his room, but he had the satchel with him, and that was all he really cared about. He had left messages for Kaye and Dicken, but there was no fixed place for them to return his calls.

The convention appeared to be finished. Cars were being released from hotel garages by the dozens, and long lines of taxis waited a few blocks south for passengers dragging wheeled suitcases.

Mitch could not pin down how he felt about all this. Anger, jerks of adrenaline, a bitter surge of animal exultation at the damage — typical residues of being so near mob violence. Shame, the single thin coating of social veneer; after hearing about the dead baby, guilt at perhaps being so wrong. In the middle of these flashing emotions, Mitch felt most acutely a wretched sense of displacement. Loneliness.

After this morning and afternoon, what he regretted most was missing his breakfast with Kaye Lang.

She had smelled so good to him in the night air. No perfume, hair freshly washed, richness of skin, breath smelling of wine, but flowery and hardly offensive. Her eyes a little drowsy, her parting warm and tired.