Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash

Trying to keep her knees steady, she puts the dog tags on. They dangle down onto her coverall.

"Better put them inside," Uncle Enzo says.

She drops them down into the secret place between her breasts. They are still warm from Uncle Enzo.

"Thanks."

"It's just for fun," he says, "but if you ever get into trouble, and you show those dog tags to whoever it is that's giving you a bad time, then things will probably change very quickly."

"Thanks, Uncle Enzo."

"Take care of yourself. Be good to your mother. She loves you."

As she steps out of the Nova Sicilia franchulate, a guy is waiting for her. He smiles, not without irony, and makes just a hint of a bow, sort of to get her attention. It's pretty ridiculous, but after being with Uncle Enzo for a while, she's definitely into it. So she doesn't laugh in his face or anything, just looks the other way and blows him off.

"Y.T. Got a job for ya," he says.

"I'm busy," she says, "got other deliveries to make."

"You lie like a mattress," he says appreciatively. "Y'know that gargoyle in there? He's patched in to the RadiKS computer even as we speak. So we all know for a fact you don't got no jobs to do."

"Well, I can't take jobs from a customer," Y.T. says. "We're centrally dispatched. You have to go through the 1-800 number."

"Jeez, what kind of a fucking dickhead do you think I am?" the guy says.

Y.T. stops walking, turns, finally looks at the guy. He's tall, lean. Black suit, black hair. And he's got a gnarly-looking glass eye.

"What happened to your eye?" she says.

"Ice pick, Bayonne, 1985," he says. "Any other questions?"

"Sorry, man, I was just asking."

"Now back to business. Because I don't have my head totally up my asshole, like you seem to assume, I am aware that all Kouriers are centrally dispatched through the 1-800 number. Now, we don't like 1-800 numbers and central dispatching. It's just a thing with us. We like to go person-to-person, the old-fashioned way. Like, on my momma's birthday, I don't pick up the phone and dial 1-800-CALL-MOM. I go there in person and give her a kiss on the cheek, okay? Now in this case, we want you in particular."

"How come?"

"Because we just love to deal with difficult little chicks who ask too many fucking questions. So our gargoyle has already patched himself in to the computer that RadiKS uses to dispatch Kouriers."

The man with the glass eye turns, rotating his head way, way around like an owl, and nods in the direction of the gargoyle. A second later, Y.T.'s personal phone rings.

"Fucking pick it up," he says.

"What?" she says into the phone.

A computer voice tells her that she is supposed to make a pickup in Griffith Park and deliver it to a Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates franchise in Van Nuys.

"If you want something delivered from point A to point B, why don't you just drive it down there yourselves?" Y.T. asks. "Put it in one of those black Lincoln Town Cars and just get it done."

"Because in this case, the something doesn't exactly belong to us, and the people at point A and point B, well, we aren't necessarily on the best of terms, mutually speaking."

"You want me to steal something," Y.T. says.

The man with the glass eye is pained, wounded. "No, no, no. Kid, listen. We're the fucking Mafia. We want to steal something, we already know how to do that, okay? We don't need a fifteen-year-old girl's help to get something stolen. What we are doing here is more of a covert operation."

"A spy thing." Intel.

"Yeah. A spy thing," the man says, his tone of voice suggesting that he is trying to humor someone. "And the only way to get this operation to work is if we have a Kourier who can cooperate with us a little bit."

"So all that stuff with Uncle Enzo was fake," Y.T. says. "You're just trying to get all friendly with a Kourier."

"Oh, ho, listen to this," says the man with the glass eye, genuinely amused. "Yeah, like we have to go all the way to the top to impress a fifteen-year-old. Look, kid, there's a million Kouriers out there we could bribe to do this. We're going with you, again, because you have a personal relationship with our outfit."

"Well, what do you want me to do?"

"Exactly what you would normally do at this juncture," the man says. "Go to Griffith Park and make the pickup."

"That's it?"

"Yeah. Then make the delivery. But do us a favor and take I-5, okay?"

"That's not the best way to do it - "

"Do it anyway."

"Okay."

"Now come on, we'll give you an escort out of this hellhole."

Sometimes, if the wind is going the right way, and you get into the pocket of air behind a speeding eighteen-wheeler, you don't even have to poon it. The vacuum, like a mighty hoover, sucks you in. You can stay there all day. But if you screw up, you suddenly find yourself alone and powerless in the left lane of a highway with a convoy of semis right behind you. Just as bad, if you give in to its power, it will suck you right into its mudflaps, you will become axle dressing, and no one will ever know. This is called the Magic Hoover Poon. It reminds Y.T. of the way her life has been since the fateful night of the Hiro Protagonist pizza adventure.

Her poon cannot miss as she slingshots her way up the San Diego Freeway. She can get a solid yank off even the lightest, trashiest plastic-and-aluminum Chinese econobox. People don't fuck with her. She has established her space on the pavement.

She is going to get so much business now. She will have to sub a lot of work out to Roadkill. And sometimes, just to make important business arrangements, they will have to check into a motel somewhere - which is exactly what real business people do. Lately, Y.T. has been trying to teach Roadkill how to give her a massage. But Roadkill can never get past her shoulder blades before he loses it and starts being Mr. Macho. Which anyway is kind of sweet. And anyway, you take what you can get.

This is not the most direct route to Griffith Park by a longshot, but this is what the Mafia wants her to do: Take 405 all the way up into the Valley, and then approach from that direction, which is the direction she'd normally come from. They're so paranoid. So professional.

LAX goes by on her left. On her right, she gets a glimpse of the U-Stor-It where that dweeb, her partner, is probably goggled into his computer. She weaves through complex traffic flows around Hughes Airport, which is now a private outpost of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong. Continues past the Santa Monica Airport, which just got bought out by Admiral Bob's Global Security. Cuts through the middle of Fedland, where her mother goes to work every day.

Fedland used to be the VA Hospital and a bunch of other Federal buildings; now it has condensed into a kidney-shaped lozenge that wraps around 405. It has a barrier around it, a perimeter fence put up by stringing chain link fabric, concertina wire, heaps of rubble, and Jersey barriers from one building to the next. All of the buildings in Fedland are big and ugly. Human beings mill around their plinths, wearing wool clothing the color of damp granite. They are scrawny and dark underneath the white majesty of the buildings.

On the far side of the Fedland barrier, off to the right, she can see UCLA, which is now being jointly run by the Japanese and Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong and a few big American corporations.

People say that over there to the left, in Pacific Palisades, is a big building above the ocean where the Central Intelligence Corporation has its West Coast headquarters. Soon - like maybe tomorrow - she'll go up there, find that building, maybe just cruise past it and wave. She has great stuff to tell Hiro now. Great intel on Uncle Enzo. People would pay millions for it.

But in her heart, she's already feeling the pangs of conscience. She knows that she cannot kiss and tell on the Mafia. Not because she's afraid of them. Because they trust her. They were nice to her. And who knows , it might turn into something. A better career than she could get with CIC.