Уильям Гибсон - Agency

“Hello, Verity,” Netherton said. “Who’s this?”

“Manuela,” Verity said. “She can’t hear you.”

“What’s happening?” asked the girl.

“Talking with Wilf,” Verity said to her. “On these glasses.”

The girl leaned closer. Looking at Verity’s glasses. “He’s on the roof?”

“In London,” Verity said.

“How long do we have to be here?” the girl asked, looking around.

“I don’t know,” Verity said.

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

“We’ve got that covered.” Verity leaned forward to use the top of the low wooden table for support, as she got to her feet, stepping over to the wood-and-paper screens and sliding them aside. Everything seemed identical to the cube atop Fang’s. “Flushes itself when you stand up.”

“Thanks.” The girl stood, her longish green coat bunched around her.

“Want to hang your parka?” Verity asked.

“I’m good.” The girl slid the screens shut behind her and Verity stepped back.

“She doesn’t know why she’s here,” Netherton said.

“Bet she doesn’t want to be, either.” She looked up at the glowing ceiling.

“Will you try to explain it to her?” he asked.

She closed her eyes. Opened them. “The future, all that? Maybe Rainey could—”

“Raining?” asked the girl, from behind the paper screens.

“My wife’s name,” Netherton said, “Rainey,” then remembered she couldn’t hear him.

He heard the toilet flush.

“Guess the fake piss didn’t fool ’em,” Conner said.

“Who?” Netherton asked, confused.

“Our gentleman callers. Their van’s coming back.”

Then Netherton was atop the cube, with that handily distorted circular point of view. The drone raised its right arm, pointing with a manipulator. Beyond it, in the lower, thicker half of the display, cars of the era passed on the street nearest them. The arm swung sideways, still extended, to the right, swiveling entirely backward, so that the view down it was now in the upper, narrower half, showing the alley behind them. “If I had a rifle, huh? But Ash wants this quiet, nonlethal if possible, but mainly no police presence.”

“Not the rules in Coalinga,” Verity said, surprising Netherton again.

“We weren’t in the middle of San Francisco. Your fingerprints are all over this container, if I kill somebody. Not that that means I won’t have to.”

What’s going on?” asked Manuela, eyeing the container’s door in a way that looked to Verity as though she was wondering whether or not to open it and run.

“Probably locked,” Verity said, causing Manuela to look up, “but that’s to keep people out, not us in.”

“Is this a cult?” Manuela asked. “Kidnapping people and telling them somebody’s after them?”

“Let me think about it,” Verity said.

“You’re kidnapped too? Let’s fucking escape.”

“Those men outside we’ve been talking about, they’d kidnap us. Conner, on the roof, watching out for us, thinks they would. So do I.”

“They’ll see him up there,” Manuela said. “This box isn’t that big.”

“Neither is he. About this high.” Verity held out her hand, palm down.

Manuela’s eyes narrowed.

“He’s up there telepresently,” Verity said.

“So what you’re doing is some new way to give TED talks? Like theater, with really random props and locations?”

“Those things like an iPad on a Segway, roll around at conferences with somebody’s face on the screen?”

Manuela eyed her narrowly. “They still do that?”

“And those big headless robot dogs, with backpacks, on YouTube? Marching single file through the woods?”

“Yeah?”

“Conner’s using something like the iPads on wheels, but more like one of those dogs, except it’s got arms and two legs.”

“So where is he, physically?”

“D.C. Washington.”

Manuela winced. “Please.”

“Don’t believe me?” Verity asked. “I know how you feel.”

“Conner,” Wilf said, “says they’re returning.”

“What’s he expect us to do,” Verity asked, “crouch on the floor behind the couch?”

“What are you talking about?” Manuela demanded.

“If they’re coming back,” Verity said, “it’s for us.”

“Conner’s lowering us down, on a winch,” Wilf said. “The cable comes out of a hatch on the drone.”

“Hatch on its shoulder,” Verity asked, “or back of where its head should be?”

“Chest,” Wilf said.

“Where what’s head should be?” asked Manuela.

“Talking to Wilf. They’re in the alley now. Right outside. What’s happening, Wilf?”

“Conner’s releasing drones,” he said. “Little ones. Aerial. Three. Out of another hatch. He already had one up, so four in all.”

“Like the one he zapped the guy in front of the Clift with?”

“Smaller,” he said.

Verity thought of the drones Dixon had delivered. Where were they now? In their camo’d hutch on top of the place next to Joe-Eddy’s?

Manuela was digging through the protein bars in the bag on the table. Choosing one, she straightened, tore the wrapper off, and took a bite. Chewing, she fixed Verity with an expression of unresigned impatience that made her look fourteen.

“Conner,” Verity said, “what are you doing now?”

“Lying down on the pavement,” Conner said, “legs up, arms folded, hatches closed. So what’ll it look like?”

“Heater my mom had. Electric. Oil-filled.”

“So they’ll see it, but won’t know what it is. Somebody dropped off your mom’s heater. Or they can worry it’s a claymore, whatever. They’ll know it wasn’t here before, but they’ve also got a job to do.”

“You’re just going to lie there?”

“Till I don’t,” Conner said.

“What about us?” she asked.

“Get your shoes on,” Conner said, “jackets, whatever. Ready to go.”

“Where?”

“That’s fluid,” he said.

Verity looked at Manuela, who hadn’t removed her shoes or parka. “Put some food in your pockets,” she said. “We’re going, so we might need it.” She got her own shoes from the tray, sat on the armor-plate couch, and put them on.

With the drone on its back in the alley, the squashed-circle display looked to Netherton like something Rainey might have taken him to see at the Tate, its lower half filled with nothing but the luminously featureless San Francisco night sky above it, the upper half a high-resolution night-vision close-up of the pavement beneath it, greenly glowing. “Where are those men?” he asked.

Conner replaced the drone’s feed with four others, evidently from the small aerial units he’d mentioned. The feed in the upper left quadrant was stationary, directly above the container’s square roof, straight down. Beside the container, the now seemingly limbless drone might be mistaken for an equipment case. A smaller, paler rectangle, tucked into the angle of the cube’s rear wall and the adjacent building, would be the charger. The upper right quadrant offered what he judged to be the same view from a greater altitude, the alley a relatively dark connector between parallel streets, both more brightly lit, the one nearest the container wider than the other. Both lower quadrants were livelier, each from a camera in motion, each above one of those two streets.

“Lower left,” said Conner, “white van. Just dropped two new guys on Tennessee, near the alley. Headed out of frame.” The camera turned, to keep the van in frame. “Bringing our two around to Third. Maybe more. Hope not.”

“What will you do when they get here?” Verity asked.