William Gibson - Pattern Recognition

He's gone, when she returns to the table, two crumpled pieces of paper money beside the empty beer bottle, her half-empty glass, the ashtray, and the torn envelope. She looks over at the barman, who scarcely seems to register her presence at all.

On the red television, insectoid superheroes on streamlined motorcycles buzz through a cartoon cityscape.

“He took a duck in the face,” she says to the barman, shrugging into the Rickson's and slipping the Luggage Label over her head.

The barman, glumly, nods.

Outside, there is no sign of Taki, though she hasn't really expected any. She looks both ways, wondering where she might more easily hail a cab back to the Hyatt.

“Do you know this bar?”

Looking up into a smooth, tanned, evidently European face that she somehow doesn't like at all. She takes in the rest of him. A Prada clone: black leather and shiny nylon, shoes with those toes she hates.

Hands grab her, from behind, hard, just above the elbows, pinning her arms at her sides.

There's something that's supposed to happen now, she thinks. Something that's supposed to happen —

When she'd first moved to New York her father had insisted that she take lessons in self-defense from a small, fastidious, slightly portly Scotsman called Bunny. Cayce had argued that New York was no longer as dangerous as Win remembered it, which was true, but it had been easier to visit Bunny six times than to argue with Win.

Bunny, her father had told her, had been an SAS man, but when she'd asked Bunny about this he'd said that he had always been too fat for the SAS, and had in fact been a medic. Bunny favored cardigans and tattersall shirts, was very nearly her father's age, and told her that he would teach her how “hard men” fought in pubs. She'd nodded gravely, thinking that if she were ever set upon by literary types in the White Horse she would at least be able to hold her own. So, while some of her friends explored Thai kickboxing, she'd been schooled in no more than half a dozen moves most often practiced in the maximum-security wings of British prisons.

Bunny's preferred term for this was “making mayhem,” which he always pronounced with a certain satisfaction, raising his pale sandy eyebrows. And, in the way of things, Cayce had never, that she knew of, come even remotely close to requiring Bunny's mayhem in Manhattan.

With the Prada clone's fingers scrabbling to undo the Velcro fastening between her breasts, trying to free her bag, it comes to her that what's supposed to happen now, in the Bunny plan of things, is this: She shoves her arms suddenly forward, just far enough to grab the glove-thin leather of both his lapels. And as the second assailant inadvertently cooperates, yanking her arms back, her hands buried in Prada's lapels, she pulls with all her might and smashes her forehead as hard as she can into Prada's nose.

Never having actually followed through on this move before, Bunny not having had a nose to spare, she's unprepared both for the pain it causes her and the extraordinarily intimate sound of cartilage being crushed against her forehead.

His dead weight, as he abruptly collapses, pulls his lapels from her hands, reminding her to step back, off-balancing whoever is behind her, look down between her legs (a mart's shoe, black, with that same horrible squared-off toe), and stamp as hard as she can, with her heel, on the revealed instep, producing a remarkably shrill scream from very close behind her left ear.

Pull loose and run.

“And run” was invariably the footnote to any Bunny lesson. She tries to, the laptop banging painfully against her hip as she bolts for the end of this alley and the lights of a brighter Roppongi.

Which is instantly blocked, with a squeal of brakes, by a silver scooter and its silver-helmeted rider. Who flips up his mirrored visor. It's Boone Chu.

She seems to inhabit some fluid, crystalline medium. Pure adrenal dream.

Boone Chu's mouth is open, moving, but she can't hear him. Hitching up her skirt, all in the logic of dream, she straddles the scooter behind him and sees his hand do something that throws them forward, yanking the two black-clad men suddenly out of frame and leaving her with a sculpturally confused image of the one trying to hop, one-legged, as he tries to pull the other, the one she's head-butted, to his feet.

In front of her the RAF roundel on the back of Boone Chu's parka as she grabs him around the waist to keep from being thrown off, realizing simultaneously that it had been him she'd seen from the Starbucks clone earlier, and him in Kabukicho the night before, and now very fast, between two lines of cars waiting at the intersection, their polished doors gleaming like jellyfish in a neon sea.

Out into the crossing before the lights can change. A left that reminds her she has to lean with him when he turns, and that she's never liked motorcycles, and then he's bombing down a more upscale alley, past, she sees, something called Sugarheel Bondage Bar.

He passes her back a metallic blue helmet with flaming eyes painted on it. She manages to fumble this on, but can't fasten the strap, one-handed. It smells of cigarettes.

Her forehead throbs.

Slowing slightly, he turns left into another alley, this one too narrow to admit cars. It's one of those Tokyo residential corridors, lined with what she assumes are tiny houses, and punctuated with glowing clusters of vending machines. Billy Prion's paralyzed grin on one, proffering a bottle of Bikkle.

She's never seen a scooter driven this fast, down one of these, and wonders if it's illegal.

He stops where the alley intersects a wider, car-capable one, slams down the kickstand and swings off, removing his helmet. A pair of tough-eyed Japanese kids throw down cigarettes as he hands one of them his helmet and unzips his parka.

“What are you doing here?” Cayce asks him, sounding as if nothing very remarkable has happened, as she dismounts and tugs her skirt down. Boone removes her helmet and hands it to the second kid.

“Give him your jacket.”

Cayce looks down at the Rickson's, sees the tape peeling where Dorotea burned it. She pulls the Rickson's off and hands it to the boy now fastening the strap of the blue helmet. Noticing a missing finger joint there against a flaming-eye decal. The boy puts the Rickson's on, zips it up, and hops on the scooter behind his partner, who's wearing Boone's helmet and parka. This one snaps the mirrored visor down, returns Boone's thumbs-up, and then they are gone.

“You've got blood on your forehead,” Boone tells her.

“It's not mine,” she says, touching it, feeling stickiness smear beneath her fingertips. Then: “I think I'm concussed. I might throw up. Or faint.”

“It's okay. I'm here.”

“Where did they go, with the bike?” The metal column of a traffic light, across the alley, furred with weird municipal techno-kipple, twins itself, dances, then comes together again.

“Back to see where those two are.”

“They look like us.”

“That's the idea.”

“What if those men catch them?”

“The idea was that they might wish they hadn't. But after what you did to them, they might not be up to much.”

“Boone?”

“Yes?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Watching them watch you.”

“Who are they?”

“I don't know yet. I think they're Italian. Did you get the number? Is it in the laptop?”

She doesn't answer.

She holds a chilled can of vending-machine tonic water against the bump. Most of a pack of Kleenex-analog, splashed with tonic, has been used to sponge her forehead.

The cab negotiates a narrow lane. The back of a concrete apartment building, bristling unevenly with dozens of air conditioners. Motorcycles shrouded under gray fabric.