Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

Nahm bit her lip. Dorian could practically see the tug-of-war on her creased forehead, a chance at instant wealth battling the cardinal rule of confidentiality.

“I want sixty percent,” Nahm said. “I lose my best ever client. I maybe get big fucking trouble. You are safe with your phone somewhere, no risk.”

Dorian grinned. “You’re sharper than you let on. Why the dizzy bitch act? Do clients really like it that much?”

“Sixty percent,” Nahm repeated, but with a hint of her own grin.

“Fine.” Dorian spat out his ice and stuck out his hand. “Sixty.”

Alexis Carrow had rented a suite at the Emerald Palace, a name Dorian thought a bit generous for an eight-story quickcrete façade topped by a broken-down eternity pool collecting algae. But if she was after privacy, it wasn’t a bad choice. It was far enough from the main drag to be relatively quiet, and small enough to be inconspicuous.

Of course, gaining access was as easy as waltzing past reception wearing a drunken grin and clutching an expired keycard fished from the wastebasket outside. Dorian affected a slight stagger on his way to the lift. Once the shiny doors slid shut, he took out his tablet and called Nahm.

“How’s the timing?” he asked, as she appeared on the screen putting up her hair with a static clip.

“She’s on her way,” Nahm said, unsticking a floating tendril of dark hair from her eyelash. “Get me from Bali Hai in five minute, then take ten, twelve minute back to hotel. Over.”

“Alright.” Dorian punched the backlit eight with his knuckle. “So I’m going to put it in the back of the toilet.”

“So, how they did in The Godfather. Over.” Nahm was now applying a gloss to her lips that shimmered like broken glass and was not paying as close attention as Dorian would have liked.

“Sure,” he said. “As soon as you get in, go to the bathroom. Get some water going so she can’t hear you take the lid off. Then open the ziplock, take the eyecam out first. You ever wear contacts?”

“Yes.”

“It’s like that,” Dorian said. “Once you have the eyecam in, take the sticky out of the ziplock and hide it in your hand.”

“And put it to the blur without her knowing it,” Nahm continued, then, in a surprisingly credible imitation of Dorian’s accent: “Base of the projector if possible, over.”

“Yeah, then business as usual,” Dorian said, as the lift jittered to a halt. “She won’t notice when the projection goes down, so long as you’re being your usual distracting self and you don’t start complimenting her eyes or anything batshit like that.” The lift made to open and he jammed it shut again. “Do what you normally do,” he went on. “Let the eyecam do the work. After she pays you, come find me across the street and we’ll get the POV uploaded to a private cloud. At which point, champagne and a blowjob.”

“Who give the champagne, who give the blowjob?” Nahm asked, checking her thumbnail offscreen. “Over.”

“Both on me if you do this right,” Dorian said, knuckling the Open Door button. “Message me when you get to the hotel.” He paused, and then, because she was growing on him a bit: “Over.”

Nahm’s face lit up for the split second before he ended the call, then Dorian set off down the stucco-walled hallway. He made a quick check around the corner, then doubled back to door 811 and made short work of the electronic lock. The suite had obviously been prepped for her arrival. Freshly-laundered sheets on the bed, a sea of fluffy white towels at the foot of it. Condom sprays and lubricants arrayed brazenly on the nightstand. Minibar stocked with Tanqueray gin and Lunar vodka.

Dorian plucked a cube out of the full ice bucket and popped it in his mouth, making his way to the bathroom. He lifted the featherweight top off the back of the Western-style toilet, then reached inside his pocket where the tiny eyecam and the even smaller sticky had been lovingly double-bagged in ziplock. Neither had been cheap, and he had a feeling he wasn’t going to get the sticky back.

Setting the bag adrift in chemical-smelling water, Dorian replaced the top of the toilet and re-entered the room. He walked in a slow circle around the bed, picturing angles, trying not to get distracted imagining Nahm and a celebrity CEO fucking on it. In the end, he decided to plant his insurance cam in the far corner. It would be an uncreative wide angle shot, but with a near-zero chance of Alexis Carrow’s deblurred face failing to make an appearance.

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Nahm to manage the eyecam, but back-ups were his cardinal rule where information storage was concerned. A healthy fear of technical difficulties went hand-in-hand with hacking for a living.

Once satisfied with the cam’s placement in a shadowy whorl of stucco, Dorian put his ear to the door to listen for footsteps. Hearing nothing, he exited the room, heart pumping with the old break-and-enter exhilaration from his teenage years.

His hand was still on the doorknob when a black-shirted employee rounded the corner in his peripheral. Dorian didn’t look up. He pretended to struggle with the door, then looked down at his keycard and made a slurred sound of realization.

“This no your room, sir. Can I help you?”

Dorian tried not to jump. The man had slunk up and stopped directly behind him, quiet as a cat, a feat made more impressive by the sheer size of him. Tall for a Thai, broad-chested and broad-shouldered, with a shaved scalp glistening in the florescent lighting and a tattoo of a cheerful cartoon snake wriggling up and down one sinewy forearm. Dorian could have sworn he’d been kicked out of a couple bars by the very same. Bouncers and hotel security tended to overlap.

“Wrong floor,” Dorian said, waving his keycard. “Hit the wrong button in the lift. One too many Changs.” He shook an imaginary beer bottle.

“Okay, sir,” the guard said, not smiling.

“Nice tattoo,” Dorian added. “Friendly-looking little bugger.”

He gave the man a bleary grin, then made for the lift as quickly as he could without looking suspicious.

Now that the rest of it was in Nahm’s hands, Dorian had nothing to do but wait. He camped out in an automated tourist bar across the way, slumping into a plastic molded seat with his tablet. Once Nahm messaged him to say they were at the hotel, he bought a gargantuan Heineken bottle and drank it slowly on ice.

Time ticked by on his tablet screen. He passed it imagining the whole thing going off flawlessly, and then by imagining himself on a small sleek yacht knifing through the blue-green waters off Ko Fangan. Maybe even with Nahm draped on his shoulder for a week or two, wearing a pair of aviators and a skanky swimsuit. Between that and the tingly insulation of a half-liter of Heineken, he barely rattled when a hand slammed down on the table in front of him.

Dorian blinked hard. Nahm was standing in front of him, shoulders trembling, clutching herself. The static clip was still in place, moving her hair in graceful black ripples around her face, but the effect wasn’t the same with her lip gloss smeared halfway across her cheek and a growing brown bruise under her bloodshot left eye. And hulking behind her, red-faced and furious, was the hotel security guard.

“Shit,” Dorian said. The buzz from the beer slipped away all at once.

“I fuck up,” Nahm said shakily. “I left the bathroom open. The blur go off, but when we switch around on the bed she see herself in the mirror.”

The security guard barked something fast and angry, from which Dorian could only extricate falang and police. He reached across the table and hauled Dorian up by the armpit, jerking his head toward the door.