“I’m just bringing milk for Thomas,” he said, drawing one of the bottles from the carrying bag. Sensing this, the bag crinkled, trying to origami itself into the butterfly it needed to become in order to fly back to the newsagent.
“Sorry. Best join me in the car.”
Netherton, fumbling to return the bottle to the bag, almost dropped both bottles, the bag escaping, fluttering clumsily away.
Climbing into her car, he found it configured, familiarly, as a windowless miniature submarine, austerely carpeted, with buff enamel walls. Four compact but comfortable green leather armchairs were sunken in a conversation pit, around a small oval table of brass-bound mahogany, their coziness offset by a sense of concentrated bureaucratic power. Churchill’s waistcoat pocket, Ash called it.
He took a seat, Lowbeer taking the one opposite. He placed the milk on the table between them, trusting there was no chance of condensation damaging the varnish.
“When did you last see Penske?” Lowbeer asked.
“Over a year ago.”
“He’s eager, of course, to pilot the drone he helped us equip, but isn’t immediately available.”
Netherton remembered Conner Penske attempting to assassinate the local drug lord, on the outskirts of Flynne’s small town. Repurposing, with an improvised explosive device, his own Veterans Administration bipedal prosthesis. Unsuccessfully, as it happened, in spite of the resulting body count. “Why unavailable?” he asked.
“Leon’s had presidential business in Alaska. Penske’s with him. The most extreme elements of the local secessionist movement would like to see Leon assassinated, particularly on Alaskan soil. He’s there to spread oil upon the far calmer waters of the secessionist majority. To distract Conner would endanger Leon. They’re returning soon to Washington. Ash will accompany you, Conner joining you in the drone as soon as Leon’s safely back in the White House. You’ll attempt to contact Eunice in-stub, warn her, win her trust. Should we be unsuccessful in that, and lose her to Cursion, you’ll be contacting Verity Jane instead.”
“Who?”
“The woman we induced Cursion to introduce to Eunice. In Eunice’s absence, she becomes the de facto locus of the network Eunice has been constructing. In that case, you’ll help enlist her as our agent there. She’s not at all the person I’d choose for the job, but there it is. I’m repeatedly placed in the position of choosing which innocent to sacrifice, to whatever current idea of the greater good. I’m weary of that. You’ve no idea how weary.”
How, Netherton wondered, could his wife and child be waiting for him, no more than twenty meters away, as he sat listening to this? He might as well be within the very bowels of the klept, beneath some City guildhall. But then, he supposed, he already was, simply by virtue of sitting here.
“You’ve the controller?” Lowbeer asked.
Netherton ran his hand over the bulge in his jacket’s side pocket, Ash having shown him how the thing folded. “Of course.”
“Very good.” A more accustomed tone now. “Ash will be joining you, by phone. She’s quite adroit, with the drone, from her sim training. I suggest you go up to your flat now and have something to eat. We’ve no idea what sort of evening you have ahead of you.”
Netherton stood, picking up a bottle of milk in either hand. “Thank you,” he said, reflexively, as the door opened behind him.
33
Clarion Alley
Verity always enjoyed the murals, in spite of the smell of pee, the alley’s walls doing double duty as public gallery and casual urinal, but it had been over a year since she’d last been here. Eunice had suggested it, after some surprisingly enjoyable aimless wandering, like walking with someone you didn’t know very well but found interesting. Arriving at the Valencia Street end, Eunice had seemed to be looking for something. She’d sent one of the drones ahead to find it.
And here it was, Verity assumed, midway between Valencia and Mission, on a prime two-story stretch of smooth brick: a celebration of the president’s bravery during the campaign, rendered in shiny black and white, like a giant Victorian steel engraving executed by OCD fairies. The president stood smiling, her arms outstretched to America. Her opponent loomed behind her, as he once actually had, Verity herself having watched this debate live. Seeing this now, she recalled her own sickened disbelief at his body language, the shadowing, his deliberate violation of his opponent’s personal space. “I don’t think anyone I know believes there was ever any real chance of him winning,” she said to Eunice. “I don’t know whether I did myself, but I was still scared shitless of it.” She was looking at how the artist had rendered his hands. Grabby.
“Smells like piss,” Eunice said.
“You can smell?”
“Google says. I wanted to see this one.”
“Why?”
“Branch plant thing. You want to see the rest?”
Verity noticed one of the drones now, like a displaced black pixel, yo-yoing slowly up and down, in front of the monochrome mural. Recording it, she assumed. “Not so much. Where would you like to go?”
“3.7.”
“Anybody there?”
“Your favorite barista.”
Verity started back toward Valencia, past other murals. One of Aztec pyramids, covered in monarch butterflies. She glanced up, passing a two-story, ferociously maternal Venezuelan goddess, her tits prominently out, holding aloft a human pelvis with both hands.
Eunice facially recognized a girl in a surplus parka, headed past them down the alley. “Need a rice cooker? She’s got one on Craigslist. Toshiba.”
“Don’t do that. It’s too personal.”
“Ever ridden bitch on a big bike?”
“What’s it got to do with rice cookers?”
“Nothing. On the back, getting boob-jammed if your biker brakes too hard?”
“More than once. Why?”
“Branch plant just asked me.”
“Joe-Eddy’s got a BMW, ’73 R Series. Likes to talk about it more than ride it.”
“Know how to hang on, lean into curves, keep your feet on the pegs?”
“Basically,” Verity said, turning onto Valencia sidewalk.
The walk to 3.7 was uneventful, but then, as they were stepping inside, Eunice having just remarked on the color of paint on the wood-mullioned door, a faint scything of static swept through the headset.
“Eunice?” TARDIS blue, Eunice had first called the paint, then qualified that as ’96 TARDIS blue. “Eunice?”
The barista looking directly into her eyes as the white cursor, frozen on his face, shivered and was gone.
“Eunice?” Reaching the bar, where her drink waited on the counter in front of him. He passed it to her unthreateningly, which wasn’t right either. She looked down. Pink paint, VER in neat capitals, then slashed through, incomplete.
Below that, in a quick scrawl, GO WITH HIM.
She looked up.
He gestured toward his mouth, shook his head. He raised a forefinger to point to her lips, then drew it quickly sideways, a request for silence. Lifting a hinged segment of the zinc counter, he took her wrists and pulled her through the resulting gap. He wore more piercings, some very detached part of her observed, in sudden proximity to his deeply seamed face, than she’d ever owned earrings.
Drawing her farther behind the chrome and copper of the espresso console, 3.7’s clientele hidden beyond it, the paper cup hot in her hand, he released her. Urgently tapped his palm with the forefinger of the other hand, to mime texting. Pointed at her purse.