Purchase fidgeted, looking unsure of himself. The waitress came back with their drinks. Purchase’s was some sort of phantasmagorical daiquiri. A cartoon character flew across the waitress’s stomach (What was his name? Something the Gremlin) to be replaced instantly by a hydrogen-cell vehicle crashing head-on into another, both bursting into flames. “Cars are crashing in your stomach,” Purchase told her.
“That explains my heartburn,” she said, snicking Purchase’s Worldtalk expense account credit card through the credunit on her hip. She gave the card back and walked away, Marilyn Monroe waving at them from the small of her back. Monroe’s breasts superimposed for one delectable instant on the waitress’s buttocks.
“People are wearing the Grid now,” Steinfeld said.
“Just pray to Gridfriend they don’t make wallpaper like that. Come to think of it, they probably are making it…”
Steinfeld smiled; the smile was barely visible through his beard. He wore a cheap black-and-white flatsuit, a bit tacky here, but passable.
Purchase said, “I think… think, mind you… I can place Stisky—or Swenson, now, if you like—I think I can place Swenson in the Second Circle itself, after a short, ah, probationary period. Within a few weeks.”
Steinfeld looked sharply at Purchase. “It took us three years to get Devereaux into the Second Circle. And that was fast advancement. He was in the lower echelons, as you call it, two years and then—”
“I know all that. But…” Purchase leaned nearer. “But I’ve gotten to know Crandall’s sister. We modeled her transactional script patterns. She has an affair every two years—almost to the day! Usually something torrid. Then Rick gets rid of them or she loses interest. We believe that her next one will be somewhat more serious. And it’s due in a week—and that’s when I’ll introduce her to Swenson. She has a growing need for long-term emotional security. We studied her preference profile: Swenson would be her archetype, which is why we picked him. She meets Swenson, Swenson romances her—and we both agree he’s got the talent for that—and she will bring him with her. And of course he’s done very well in their lower echelons.”
“You’re very certain of that.”
“I’d swear to it: bet a cool million on it.”
Steinfeld nodded. “A million. Well—you’ve just invoked the deity that means the most to you. I’m impressed. All right. If it gets that far… Devereaux might…”
Purchase shook his head. “You don’t really think Devereaux is going to come through, do you? Do you know who’s the new SA Security chief? Old Sackville-West. Devereaux’s the nervous type. Old Sacks will smell that.”
“Then he may smell our Swenson.”
“I think not. Swenson has the talent. And he’ll have Ellen Mae’s support. Trust me.”
They took a moment to work on their drinks. Steinfeld looked down, through the table, and through the floor. The floor was transparent; the disco jutted from the side of a highmall rising two hundred stories over the main Freezone helicopter port; far below—and directly below—radio-controlled copters rose and landed, dragonfly bright in the ocean-burnished sunlight.
Steinfeld shivered with vertigo. He shifted his gaze to the expanse of cobalt sea. “Funny how from up here, the waves look regular, perfect and orderly. Down close they’re all chaotic.”
Purchase looked up from his drink. Without quite taking the straw from his mouth he said, “That supposed to be a parable of some kind?”
“No. But I guess it could be: from up here we’re taking too much for granted.” The waitress walked by, her dress flashing with forty TV channels at once. It made Steinfeld’s skin crawl. “How much of that programming”—he nodded toward the televisioned dress—“is Worldtalk’s doing?”
“Not a great deal in slices of time. But lots of it in small, regular pulses… Worldtalk’ll be active on the SA account this week. Naturally Crandall wants me to shepherd it. And I’ll have to do a good job of it. You know that.”
“For a while. But try not to promote them brilliantly. Okay?”
Worldtalk. The globe-straddling agency for public relations and advertising. Purchase was a Chinese-boxes man, working from the inside box out: his own man and yet Witcher’s man; Witcher’s man and yet Steinfeld’s; Steinfeld’s and yet the SA’s. The SA’s and yet Worldtalk’s. Steinfeld believed the sequence moved in that order of importance. He had to believe it, because he needed Purchase. There were too few like him.
There was Devereaux, of course. Who just might be a waste.
“You can pick up… Swenson, in an hour, at…” He took a plastic-tagged hotel keycard from his pocket and gave it to Purchase, who pocketed the key casually but quickly. “He’ll be there. Report on placing him to Ben-Simon at the Israeli Embassy. He’s still with me. And to Witcher. Let us know if he gets close to them… to her.”
“You sound as if you doubt Devereaux’s going to come through, yourself.” (The light shifting, Purchase’s face green, then blue.)
“Just thinking in contingencies.”
“If Devereaux doesn’t come through, we’ll have to roll up his backup team, fast.”
“They’ll have to cope with it themselves. I’m leaving in a few hours. They’ll do fine. They’re… basic. But good.”
He looked out over the sea, thinking, If Devereaux doesn’t come through…
There were eight people in the room, and, each in their own way, they were all killers. No: seven were killers. One was a man who had come here hoping to become a killer; to kill one of the other seven people within the hour, in this undersea conference room beneath Freezone.
Freezone’s enormous octagonal raft was pocketed with air and layers of flotation synthetics. Most of the buildings in the exclusive Freezone Central complex—walled off from the rest of Freezone to guarantee safety for its inhabitants and visitors—extended like enormous undersea stalactites beneath the “flotation support structure” for greater stability and less vulnerability to winds.
In one of those buildings, the inverted wedge of the Fuji Hilton, Richard Crandall and Ellen Mae Crandall presided over the meeting…
The room was dimmed for the briefing screen. Five men and the woman sat at the table. There were two Security men standing behind Crandall at the head of the table. All were bathed in the sickly electronic-blue light from the screen that filled the upper half of the wall to the right of the door.
On three sides, it was a standard convention meeting room, a forty-by-fifty-foot “planning center.” The walls were the usual imitation woodgrain, the table matching. The chairs were confoam swivels; soft track lighting overhead was muted now. A bank of remote controls for the screen and room service was inset at one end of the oblong table.
Behind Crandall, the fourth wall was a window of thick plate glass, looking out on the underside of the floating city. The dull blue vista was lit brokenly by flat white rectangles of light staggered along the down-juts of other buildings; the buildings looked like reflections in a pond, upside down. But look closer and you could see men in them: right-side-up men in upside-down buildings. Now and then some glossy, striped, gape-mouthed thing would swim up near the windows, attracted by the lights; jellyfish billowed up, pumping like disembodied heart valves.
Devereaux sat at the table, looking out into the undersea, carefully keeping up his mask of absentmindedness, carefully thinking only about jellyfish. Not permitting himself to think about the act he was about to perform. It was not yet time to think about it.