“Okay,” she said. By the time she’d gotten herself together, Grim Tim was at the register, paying for his gas with cash, his helmet still on. When he’d finished, she followed him out to the pumps, restraining the urge to say something to Conner now that she could see the drone.
Evening had arrived, Napa-Sonoma still providing extra pulpy orangeness. She settled her mask and put the helmet on. “Where’s Dixon now?” she asked, assuming Conner could hear her, but not certain he’d have an answer.
“Near Coalinga’s airport,” he said.
“What for?”
“Helping Lowbeer conduct a personality test.”
“How?”
“By letting us see just how nasty somebody’s willing to be.”
“Nasty?”
“Makes a difference how you want to deal with them.”
“Whose personality?”
“Pryor.”
Grim Tim handed her a pair of rubber-coated black knit gloves, still on shiny cardboard from the station’s rack. Something she’d meant to ask for as they’d pulled in, but had then forgotten. Her hands had been getting colder, since the crossroads, plus bug-impact on bare skin. “Thanks,” she said, partially pulling her mask down.
Something piercing his upper cheek moved a fraction, a minimalist alternative smile. He put his own gloves on, and straddled the bike. Pulling her own off their cardboard and putting them on, she got on behind him.
And then they were on the highway again, accelerating.
84
Looking Quite Chipper
As Netherton surfaced in Hanway Street, a plain white Michikoid trotted past, pulling an equally white carbon-fiber rickshaw. In it sat two heavily modded neoprimitives, their faces as masklike as those of the Michikoids. Patchers, he knew, inhabitants of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which he’d visited himself, telepresently, on the job that had resulted in Lev introducing him to Lowbeer. These two would be envoys, neither tourism nor private business being a possibility. What skin of theirs was visible was a rough gray, bioengineered to protect them from excessive sunlight. Under the winter morning, it reminded him of frost.
Then they were gone, having reached and turned the corner. Lowbeer’s sigil, the coronet, began to pulse. “Yes?” he responded.
“The car’s in Tottenham Court Road,” said Lowbeer. “You’ll see it.”
He walked on, thinking that Lowbeer’s real work consisted of learning things, often things this fundamentally dull, through processes largely automated for her by the aunties and other systems. Eventually, having made her decisions, some action might be implemented, usually covertly, resulting in something dramatic happening. This, he supposed, was the nature of security work, where by definition one attempts to preserve aspects of the status quo. What she did with the stubs might be seen as that as well, he decided, if you thought of it in terms of a much longer status quo.
On Tottenham Court Road now, he spotted movement in a wide shop window. Drawing closer, he saw a miniaturized scale model of this part of London, tiny vehicles and pedestrians driving and strolling. A crisp yellow circular cursor surrounded a single magnified figure, its back to him, in front of a shop window. He raised his arm, the figure’s arm following suit. Thomas would love this.
He walked on, eventually coming to Lowbeer’s car, or what could be seen of it, as its step descended from nowhere. It was parked, for once appropriately, in curbside space reserved for Metropolitan Police and emergency vehicles.
Up and into it, then, to find Lowbeer seated in the chair pit, fingers steepled, elbows on the tray-sized mahogany table, on which were two white china mugs, cream, sugar, and a cylindrical black carafe. The car’s windows, or rather the cam systems that emulated them, showed vehicular traffic to one side, pedestrian to the other. “Good morning,” she said, as he heard the door close behind him. “Coffee?”
“Yes, thanks,” he said, the Denisovan Embassy’s café au lait having produced no noticeable effect.
“Have a seat,” she said. She wore a gray tweed suit, gray broadcloth shirt, and a pointillist camouflage necktie, olive and buff shot through with martial red. Looking quite chipper. “Lev’s dancing girls are extremely effective. We made a serious effort to listen in on your conversation, no success whatever. Aunties assume the encryption’s Chinese, nothing old-boy klept at all. We’ll look into that later, as it’s unexpected, though not unprecedented. Well?”
Netherton was settling himself in the built-in green armchair opposite hers. “He says it’s Yunevich. He also says, and I quote, that Yunevich isn’t his sort of klept. Seems to be a deep-burrowing, low-profile Square Miler with pretensions to Soviet bureaucratic DNA.”
Lowbeer was pouring from the carafe. “An old boy,” she said. “Endlessly predictable. Tedious, really.”
Her expression, as she said this, though superficially mild, made Netherton grateful not to be this Yunevich, whoever he was.
85
Multitasking
The feed from the very different bipedal drone Conner was piloting, through this rocky scrubland adjacent to CLG, New Coalinga Municipal Airport, meshed strangely with the motion of the bike.
There was no audio, so the roar of Grim Tim’s engine and the occasional whomps of displaced air, when vehicles passed them in either direction, became a soundtrack for the thing’s roadrunner trot through brush and rocks. It looked, she assumed, like the other three running with it, controlled, Conner said, by a swarming program. Like elongated tortoiseshells, mounted atop the hindquarters of miniature robot greyhounds, about a yard tall, assuming they could stand upright, something she hadn’t yet seen one do. They ran canted forward, which they’d done constantly since Conner had opened the feed, and were armless, their legs blurring when not confronted with an obstacle. “Where are they going?” she asked Conner.
“To the personality test,” he said. “Dixon dropped them off nearer the airport.”
“Where is he?”
“In the parking lot there.”
“And where are we going, on the bike?”
“The hell away from Coalinga.”
The feed’s perspective rushed up a low ridge and froze. Which was confusing, given the momentum of the bike beneath her. To this drone’s right, she could see another like it, equally immobile. “Why’d they stop?”
“Look where it’s looking.”
Between the drone and the lights of the airport, she made out a vehicle, neutrally colored. The feed zoomed in on it. Some species of bad-boy pickup, its cabin extended, the bed enclosed. “Who’s that?”
“Pryor. I gassed him this morning, leaving the hotel.”
“Why’s he out here?”
“Man pads,” said Conner. “May have one in the truck.”
“Huh?”
“Acronym. Man-Portable Air-Defense System. Shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile. MANPADS. Singular, never plural.”
Something particularly large passed them, on the highway, headed in the opposite direction, she assumed a big truck. “To shoot down a plane?”
“Howell’s Honda just took off from SFO, flight plan filed for CLG. They’ll barely reach cruising altitude before they start descending.”
“The guy from in front of the Clift is going to shoot down Stets’ plane?”
“Not if I see him looking like he means to. If he did, though, your ex has it equipped with Israeli infrared countermeasures.”