Barrabas felt a chill, looking at them. Like they were in a trance. Some kind of chip augmentation, maybe.
“Mickin,” Bettina said.
“Cover,” Jerome said.
“Hub?” said Jo Ann.
Smoke explained. “They’re talking in a sort of aug-chip shorthand. She said that there was a microwave oven in use creating some interference; Jerome said he’d give her some transmission cover so she could get through.”
“Oh.”
“You wouldn’t mind our using an extractor, Jo Ann?” Smoke asked. Politely but without any real concern for her dislikes.
“An extractor?” Jo Ann asked nervously. “Can you get the stuff out with… well, I guess you can.”
Smoke nodded. “And we can record it. Find out what it is. Way you describe it, it sounds as if it would be of interest to us.”
To us. It was then that Barrabas was sure. About who he’d fallen in with.
He was with the New Resistance.
He was hiding out with his own enemies.
They thanked Dahlia and sent her home. The rest of them cabbed directly from the restaurant to the London Institute of Neurobiology, where a sympathizer had access to an extractor. Getting into the cab, Barrabas was uncomfortably aware that the big black woman was standing very close to him; was, in fact, watching him. As was Jerome. They began keeping an eye on him directly Jo Ann told them about his involvement with the SA. He began to wonder if he would be separated from Jo Ann at some point, taken somewhere for interrogation. Afterward, his body dumped in the Thames…
They weren’t going to just let him go, that was certain. He toyed with the idea of disappearing on his own. He was afraid to return to the SA, but he might hide out with relatives upcountry—or somewhere, anyway, on his own.
He couldn’t bring himself to break away completely from Jo Ann, though. When he looked at her, a strange gestalt organized her face into someplace exquisitely restful.
Suppose he suppressed those feelings. Suppose he asked them to let him out of the cab, right here…
They’d never let him go. They didn’t dare trust him. He could hardly blame them for that, really. There’d be an argument at least, quite possibly a fight.
No. He’d have to take his chances with them, at least for now.
By the time he’d decided, it was fair dark out and they’d arrived at the hospital.
They drove around the back. A nearly midget-size Paki doctor in a blue tunic was waiting for them, his arms clasped anxiously over his chest. He nodded briskly to Smoke, frowned at the others, but said nothing. The doctor led them into the clinical brightness and medicinal tang of the corridor, their footsteps echoing off the white tile walls. He took them hastily into a lab, through the lab to a little room filled with equipment Barrabas didn’t recognize. In the midst of all the cryptic gear was a padded examination table. “Lie down, please,” the doctor said.
Barrabas realized, with a chill, that the doctor wasn’t talking to Jo Ann. He was talking to him. To Patrick Barrabas.
“I’ll go first,” Jo Ann said, seeing the look on his face.
“First?” Barrabas said.
“Lord, motherfucker can talk! I thought he was deef!” Bettina said.
“Keep your voices down, please,” the little doctor said, almost squeaking it, looking through a window in the door. “We’re not supposed to be in here, you know.”
Smoke nodded and said softly to Barrabas, “We have to debrief you, find out how much we can trust you, how you stand on things, what you might know that can help us.”
“For all I know, you might erase part of me,” Barrabas said. “To protect yourselves. Or brainwash me.”
Smoke shook his head. “Not going to erase anything from your head. Or plant anything. Just going to read it. We won’t force you. But…”
But. Barrabas nodded. It wasn’t a threat exactly. That wasn’t the tone the man was using. More a mixture of regret and warning—that they might have to kill him.
Barrabas took a deep breath and said, “You are forcing me, in a way. But sod it.” He turned to Jo Ann. “I’m going to do this for you.” Maybe it was melodramatic; he didn’t care.
He felt trapped. But, strangely, at the same time he felt set free.
He lay down on the table, and she held his hand.
Dawn was breaking steel blue and aluminum gray across the Dover Straits. It was a windy morning, and the sea lashed against the pilings of the dock, making the big hover ferry rock at its moorings. Barrabas and Jo Ann and Smoke and Jerome stood on the dock at the back of the crowd, waiting for the all-clear to go aboard the hover ferry. Bettina was conspicuously absent.
To their right, drivers with permits to take cars to France were queued up, mostly in the cheap Brazilian methanol compacts.
Barrabas huddled into his coat and moved a little closer to Jo Ann. The sky was dull with clouds, and whitecaps tipped the jade peaks of the sea. “Fuckin’ cold,” Jerome-X muttered.
“That’s England for you,” Jo Ann said. “Supposed to be summer.”
“It’ll warm up,” Barrabas said. “It’s early days.” He was looking around, trying to spot SA. “Wish we’d done a plane flight, though.”
Smoke said, in just over a whisper, “The SA’ll be on the airport for sure. They might not’ve come this far looking for us.”
Barrabas said, “I don’t know. I’m surprised they’re not here. They want Jo Ann, and they mean to find her. I know ’em.”
“Maybe they’ll just have the cops arrest us,” Jerome said. Looking over his shoulder; searching the street behind them for someone.
“They’ve got a relationship with the police—but they don’t want them involved in this, I’m sure,” Barrabas said.
Jerome looked small and sorrowful, almost lost in the oversize gray trenchcoat he’d borrowed from Dahlia.
Smoke glanced at him. “You sure about this, Jerome? Going with us?”
“Yeah.” But Jerome looked over his shoulder again.
“You think she’s going to come and talk you out of it?” Smoke said.
Jerome-X shot him a hard look. “Fuck you.”
“Jerome—we’ve got Bones in Paris now. He’s our connection to the Plateau there.”
“I don’t want to be a chip chippie. I want to fight.”
“Your career is beginning to move in the States. If you were a celebrity, you could help us there.”
“I don’t fucking want a career. I want to fight.” Pouting, he huddled deeper into his coat.
Smoke said gently, “Jerome…”
“What?”
“There’s more than one way to fight.”
“Look—I saw something once. When I was linked. When we got out of jail. Saw myself. Like—a kinda personality animation thingie. It was sick, man. Need attention all the time. No belief in myself. Trying to be a performer because I want to get into the media. Like, I’m not a valid person unless I’m making records and on TV and stuff. That’s bullshit, Smoke.”
“This is what you were up all night arguing with Bettina over?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s got good instincts, Jerome.”
“You trying to tell me to stick to what I know how to do? I can learn. I don’t have to spend my life trying to be a fucking spectacle. It’s childish. I got to get away from that.”
“Yes. Rickenharp felt something like that. But it didn’t change him. Everybody’s got drives to be one way or another. You have a drive to be a spectacle—so what? Maybe there’s a reason. You saw only the subjective gestalt. There might be some other reason you’re a performer—if it’s neurosis, well, maybe there’s a higher reason for the neurosis. You only see a small thread on the tapestry.”