William Gibson - Spook Country

He handed her a phone. “Don’t use it to call anyone else. I’ll call you when things are bit more sorted, on our end.”

“Okay,” she said, and was out of the car, running back along the sidewalk, to intercept a biker-jacketed Heidi Hyde, striding toward her with some sort of three-foot paper-wrapped club in her hand. She heard the van pull away, behind her.

“What’s going on?” demanded Heidi, tapping the palm of her hand with the gift-wrapped club.

“We’re getting out of here,” Hollis said, passing her. “How long have you been here?”

“Just got here,” said Heidi, turning.

“What’s that?” Indicating the club.

“An ax-handle.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“There she is,” Inchmale said, around the stub of a small cigar, as they reached the blue car. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Get us out of here, Reg. Now.”

“Isn’t that your car?” Pointing at the Phaeton.

“I’ve lost the keys.” Pulling at the rear door of the blue car. “Will you please unlock this?” It unlocked. “Take me somewhere,” she said, getting in. “Now.”

“YOUR PURSE,” said Bigend, “is near the intersection of Main and Hastings. Heading south on Main, currently. On foot, apparently.”

“It must have been stolen,” she said. “Or found. How fast can you get Ollie over here with a spare set of keys?” She’d told him, at the start of the conversation, that she was in this particular bar. Otherwise, she realized, she’d have had to worry.

“Almost instantly. You’re very near the flat. I know the place. They make a very decent piso mojado.”

“Have him bring the keys. I’m not feeling like sitting around in a bar.” She closed Inchmale’s phone and handed it back to him. “He says you should try the piso mojado,” she said.

Inchmale raised an eyebrow. “Do you know that that means ‘wet floor’?”

“Hush a minute, Reg. I need to think.” According to Bigend, he’d ordered Ollie away, when she’d told him to, shortly before midnight, from the live-work building on Powell Street. The GPS unit in the scrambler, Bigend had said, had remained there for about fifteen minutes, then had headed west. From its speed, obviously in a vehicle. A bus, Bigend guessed, because it had made a number of brief stops that weren’t at intersections. She imagined him watching this on that huge screen in his office. The world as video game. He’d assumed, he’d said, that this had been her, headed back to the flat, but then the GPS telltale had gone walkabout, through what Ollie told him was the poorest-per-capita postal code in the country. She had already decided, she knew, for reasons as powerfully visceral as they were mysterious, that she wanted nothing more to do with either Jimmy Carlyle’s fifty hundreds or Bigend’s bugged scrambler.

“Phone,” she said to Inchmale. “And a Visa card.”

He put his phone on the table in front of her and dug out his wallet. “If you’re making a purchase, I’d rather you use that Amex. That’s the one for business expenses.”

“I need their eight-hundred number to report my card stolen,” she said. Ollie arrived while she was dealing with Visa, which kept her from having to speak with him. Inchmale was good at getting rid of people like Ollie. Who left, quickly.

“Drink up,” she said, indicating Inchmale’s Belgian beer. “Where’s Heidi?”

“Chatting up the bartender,” he said.

Hollis leaned out of their white vinyl booth and spotted Heidi in conversation with the blonde behind the bar. Inchmale had insisted on her leaving the ax-handle in their blue Honda rental.

“What are you doing here?” she asked him. “I mean, I appreciate that you’ve come to make sure I’m okay, but how did you get to where you found me.”

“The Bollards weren’t ready to go into the studio, it turned out. Two of them had flu. I called Blue Ant. A number of times. They aren’t really in the book. Then I had to get through to Bigend himself, which was like reverse-engineering every ordinary concept of corporate structure. When I got him, though, he was all over me.”

“He was?”

“He wants ‘Hard to Be One’ for a Chinese car commercial. To run globally, I mean. Only the car is Chinese. He hadn’t heard it for a while. Seeing you jogged his memory. Swiss director, fifteen-million-dollar budget.”

“For a car commercial?”

“They need to make an impression.”

“What did you say?”

“No. Of course. The foot you always start with, right? No. But then he segued into this really interestingly textured bullshit about how concerned he was about you, up here in Vancouver. James Bond shit in the company car, you weren’t checking in, why didn’t I take the Blue Ant Lear up in about fifteen minutes and check on you.”

“So you did?”

“Not immediately. I don’t like being gamed, and your man’s all game.”

Hollis nodded.

“I was having lunch with Heidi. I ran it by her. And of course she bit. Became worried about you. And I caught it, then. Even though I could see that it would be to his advantage to get us both up here, bit of harmless adventure, then he’d pitch it to the two of us.”

“Pitch what?”

“The Chinese car commercial. He wants us to rerecord ‘Hard to Be One’ with different lyrics. Chinese car lyrics. But I was getting this secondhand paranoia off our different drummer over there. So then she and I are in her car, headed for Burbank. I think it took us longer to drive to Burbank than it took the plane to get up here. I had my passport, she had her driver’s license, and we both got here with what we were standing up in.”

“And she bought an ax-handle?”

“We got to that neighborhood where you’d left the car, and she didn’t like it. I said she was misreading it completely, missing the cultural subtexts, and that it wasn’t actually dangerous, not that way. But she stopped at a lumberyard and tooled up. Didn’t offer me one.”

“It wouldn’t suit you.” She reached under her jacket and scratched her ribs, hard. “Come on. I need a shower. I was where there was ground glass, earlier. And cesium.”

“Cesium?”

She stood, picking up the two blank white cards that Ollie had left.

W here’d you say you’re from?” asked the man from Igor’s label, offering Tito an open bottle of beer.

“New Jersey,” said Tito, who hadn’t. When they’d reached the rehearsal space, he’d phoned Garreth and told him the job was done, but that he thought he should stay off the street tonight. He hadn’t mentioned the helicopter, but he’d had a feeling that Garreth knew.

He accepted the beer, pressing the cold bottle against his forehead. He’d enjoyed playing. The Guerreros had come, briefly, at the end.

“Amazing,” said the label man. “Is that where your family’s from?”

“New York,” said Tito.

“Right,” said the A&R man, and sipped his own beer. “Amazing.”

B usiness-class lounge for Air Asshole,” declared Inchmale, enthusiastically, taking in the central area of the first floor of Bigend’s flat.

“Has the bedroom to match, upstairs,” Hollis told him. “I’ll show you, after I’ve had a shower.”

Heidi put her ax-handle down, still wrapped, on the counter beside Hollis’s laptop.

“Ollis!” Odile stood at the head of the floating glass stair-slabs, in what Hollis supposed might be a very large hockey jersey. “Bobby, you have found him?”

“Sort of. It’s complicated. Come down and meet my friends.”

Odile, in bare feet, descended the slabs.

“Reg Inchmale and Heidi Hyde. Odile Richard.”