William Gibson - Count Zero

And that was all.

Later, as she was helping him hunt for Wigan Ludgate in the maze of corridors at the far end of the cores, he paused, gripping a welded handhold, and said, “You know, the queer thing about those boxes?”

“Yes?”

“Is that Wig got a damn good price on them, somewhere in New York. Money, I mean. But sometimes other things as well, things that came back up…”

“What sort of things?”

“Software, I guess it was. He’s a secretive old fuck when it comes to what he thinks his voices are telling him to do Once, it was something he swore was biosoft, that new stuff…”

“What did he do with it?”

“He’d download it all into the cores.” Jones shrugged “Did he keep it, then?”

“No,” Jones said, “he’d just toss it into whatever pile of stuff we’d managed to scrounge for our next shipment out Just jacked it into the cores and then resold it for whatever he could get.”

“Do you know why? What it was about?”

“No,” Jones said, losing interest in his story, “he’d just say that the Lord moved in strange ways…” He shrugged “He said God likes to talk to Himself…

HE HELPED BEAUVOIR carry Jackie out to the stage, where they lay her down in front of a cherry-red acoustic drum kit and covered her with an old black topcoat they found in the checkroom, with a velvet collar and years of dust on the shoulders, it had been hanging there so long. “ Map fé jubile mnan ,” Beauvoir said, touching the dead girl’s forehead with his thumb. He looked up at Turner. “It is a self-sacrifice,” he translated, and then drew the black coat gently up, covering her face.

“It was fast,” Turner said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Beauvoir took a pack of menthol cigarettes from a pocket in his gray robe and lit one with a gold Dunhill. He offered Turner the pack, but Turner shook his head. “There’s a saying in Creole,” Beauvoir said.

“What’s that?”

‘Evil exists.’

“Hey,” said Bobby Newmark, dully, from where he crouched by the glass doors, eye to the edge of the curtain. “Musta worked, one way or another… The Gothicks are starting to leave, looks like most of the Kasuals are already gone…”

“That’s good,” Beauvoir said, gently. “That’s down to you. Count. You did good. Earned your handle.”

Turner looked at the boy. He was still moving through the fog of Jackie’s death, he decided. He’d come out from under the trodes screaming, and Beauvoir had slapped him three times, hard, across the face, to stop it. But all he’d said to them, about his run, the run that had cost Jackie her life, was that he’d given Turner’s message to Jaylene Slide. Turner watched as Bobby got up stiffly and walked to the bar; he saw the care the boy took not to look at the stage. Had the two been lovers? Partners? Neither seemed likely.

He got up from where he sat, on the edge of the stage, and went back into Jammer’s office, pausing to check on the sleeping Angie, who was curled into his gutted parka on the carpet, beneath a table. Jammer was asleep, too, in his chair, his burned hand still on his lap, loosely enveloped in the striped towel. Tough old mother, Turner thought, an old jockey. The man had plugged his phone back in as soon as Bobby had come off his run, but Conroy had never called back. He wouldn’t now, and Turner knew that that meant that Jammer had been right about the speed with which Jaylene would strike, to revenge Ramirez, and that Conroy was almost certainly dead. And now his hired army of suburban bighairs was decamping, according to Bobby.

Turner went to the phone and punched up the news recap, and settled into a chair to watch. A hydrofoil ferry had collided with a miniature submarine in Macau; the hydrofoil’s life jackets had proven to be substandard, and at least fifteen people were assumed drowned, while the sub, a pleasure craft registered in Dublin, had not yet been located… Someone had apparently used a recoilless rifle to pump a barrage of incendiary shells into two floors of a Park Avenue co-op building, and Fire and Tactical teams were still on the scene; the names of the occupants had not yet been released, and so far no one had taken credit for the act… (Turner punched this item up a second time…) Fission Authority research teams at the site of the alleged nuclear explosion in Arizona were insisting that minor levels of radioactivity detected there were far too low to be the result of any known form of tactical warhead… In Stockholm, the death of Josef Virek, the enormously wealthy art patron had been announced, the announcement surfacing amid a flurry of bizarre rumors that Virek had been ill for decades and that his death was the result of some cataclysmic failure in the life-support systems in a heavily guarded private clinic in a Stockholm suburb… (Turner punched this item past again, and then a third time, frowned, and then shrugged.) For the morning’s human interest note, police in a New Jersey suburb said that-

“Turner…”

He shut the recap off and turned to find Angie in the doorway.

“How you doing, Angie?”

“Okay. I didn’t dream.” She hugged the black sweatshirt around her, peered up at him from beneath limp brown bangs. “Bobby showed me where there’s a shower. Sort of a dressing room I’m going back there soon. My hair’s horrible.”

He went over to her and put his hands on her shoulders. “You’ve handled this all pretty well. You’ll be out of here, soon.”

She shrugged out of his touch. “Out of here? Where to? Japan?”

“Well, maybe not Japan Maybe not Hosaka…”

“She’ll go with us,” Beauvoir said, behind her.

“Why would I want to?”

“Because,” Beauvoir said, “we know who you are. Those dreams of yours are real. You met Bobby in one, and saved his life, cut him loose from black ice. You said, ‘Why are they doing that to you?’…”

Angie’s eyes widened, darted to Turner and back to Beauvoir.

“It’s a whole long story,” Beauvoir said, “and it’s open to interpretation. But if you come with me, come back to the Projects, our people can teach you things We can teach you things we don’t understand, but maybe you can…”

“Why?”

“Because of what’s in your head” Beauvoir nodded solemnly, then shoved the plastic eyeglass frames back up his nose. “You don’t have to stay with us, if you don’t want to. In fact, we’re only there to serve you…”

“Serve me?”

“Like I said, it’s a long story… How about it, Mr. Turner?”

Turner shrugged. He couldn’t think where else she might go, and Maas would certainly pay to either have her back or dead, and Hosaka as well. “That might be the best way,” he said.

“I want to stay with you,” she said to Turner. “I like Jackie, but then she…”

“Never mind,” Turner said. “I know.” I don’t know anything, he screamed silently. “I’ll keep in touch…” I’ll never see you again. “But there’s something I’d better tell you, now. Your father’s dead.” He killed himself. “The Maas security people killed him; he held them off while you got the ultralight off the mesa.”

“Is that true? That he held them off? I mean, I could feel it, that he was dead, but…”

“Yes,” Turner said He took Conroy’s black wallet from his pocket, hung the loop around her neck. “There’s a biosoft dossier in there For when you’re older It doesn’t tell the whole story. Remember that Nothing ever does…”

Bobby was standing by the bar when the big guy walked out of Jammer’s office. The big guy crossed to where the girl had been sleeping and picked up his grungy army coat, put it on, then walked to the edge of the stage, where Jackie lay — looking so small — beneath the black coat. The man reached into his own coat and drew out the gun, the huge Smith Wesson Tactical. He opened the cylinder and extracted the shells, put the shells into hrs coat pocket, then lay the gun down beside Jackie’s body, quiet, so it didn’t make a sound at all.