Step out of the elevator when it reaches the twenty-third floor.
“Room 2307?” you’ll say. “It’s along here?”
The maid will turn from her cleaning cart and smile brightly. “Fifth door to your right, thanks for asking.”
Anything over that will also be acceptable.
Your name will appear on the TV screen in your room, incorporated into a message of greeting. You ignore it. You remember a blind operative you once knew who stayed at Holiday Inns all the time because the rooms were always laid out in exactly the same way. It made finding his way around a lot easier.
You will incapacitate your first attacker by crushing his windpipe. The second you will see reflected in the white tiles of the bathroom. That will give you enough time to turn and shoot him in the chest. Twice.
He will fall toward you, fingers trailing blood across the walls and floor.
You will call down to room service to have someone come and clean out the human grease.
“This better not show up on my bill,” you’ll say on your way out.
“I’ll be sure to note that,” the girl at the reception desk will reply and smile brightly. “Thanks for asking.”
Things dazzle here, but they don’t shine. Everything has a hard reflective surface to it. The dominant color is a stormy green. You walk to the end of the block. There must be people in these buildings, but the interiors seem empty and devoid of life, despite the glass and the open structures. The sight of clouds in a vast blue sky moving across the straight edge of a building will give you a slow sense of falling.
You pause for a moment. Motorway. Distant sirens beyond the towers, the strange silence of cars passing, cold ragged wind generated by the close proximity of tall structures to each other, planes passing overhead.
Some of the buildings have names. HSBC, Citigroup, Bank of America.
Have your pass ready for inspection.
You feel like you’re in transit.
A woman appears around the windswept corner of an office building. Long black hair, a swing to her hips. She must be an office worker: trim black skirt, black sweater, black patent-leather high heels. You wonder how she can walk in shoes like those. She carries a file of documents. The stiff breeze disturbs the hem of her skirt as she walks.
She will stop and nod toward the ambulance pulled up at the back entrance to your hotel. Two bodies strapped to gurneys are being wheeled out, their faces covered.
“What happened over there?” she will ask.
“Got in the way,” you’ll reply.
She watches the paramedics load up the ambulance, her file of documents held up to shade the side of her face.
“Wrong place at the wrong time?” she will ask.
“Not really,” you will reply, then after a long pause: “Some people don’t know it’s over till they see the inside of a mortuary drawer.”
“You sound like a trailer for a movie no one wants to see,” she will say.
“I’m told I have that effect.”
“And would it kill you to smile?”
“Why don’t we find out?”
The faintest of smiles will appear on her face instead. “Okay,” she’ll say.
2
Once you get outside the neat arrangement of precincts around Canada Square, things come apart very quickly. You can see how thin, how artificial and transparent, this shining cluster of buildings really is. You sit at a café table and think about ordering something. Someone has written Public Enemy No One on a nearby wall in spray paint. Beyond that is the river: rusting cranes, empty sheds, and disused landings. Worn concrete, green with age.
You will look across at her long black hair and wonder why she came with you so readily. Even so, you made it look like she didn’t have any choice. CCTV cameras are everywhere, turning the entire area into a series of flickering electromagnetic shadows.
“They never tell me who I have to kill,” you’ll remark. “Usually I’m left to figure it out for myself.”
“Is that what you meant by those people getting in the way?” she’ll ask.
You slide a blurred black-and-white photograph across the table: a snapshot of a man with graying hair, smiling enigmatically, eyes black and closely focused.
“Look at the picture,” you’ll say. “He had a different name then.”
A waitress in a green coverall will then come over. She’ll be wearing a white plastic badge with her name on it and the message, I’m going to help you, printed underneath. She will look more like the kind of woman who’d have her first name spelled out in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs on a gold charm around her neck. You order coffee.
“How do you take it?” the waitress will ask.
“Straight out the jug,” you’ll reply. “Like my mother’s milk.”
A silent pause accompanied by a blank stare. Last time you saw a face like that, the word before was printed below it.
“Black, no sugar,” you’ll reply. “Thanks for asking.”
She will later hand you a cardboard cup covered with a plastic lid. You stare at it. A newspaper lies on the next table. You notice the headlines out the corner of your eye. Mars Robot Goes Insane. Weapons of Mass Destruction Found in New York.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” she’ll observe as the waitress walks slowly away.
“Is anybody?”
The blurred black-and-white photograph still lies on the table between you.
“It’s not what you’ve done that poses the biggest threat these days,” you’ll say. “It’s what you owe. We want to extract our money before war breaks out in the ghost galaxies.”
“And for that you have to find this guy, this...?” She’ll pause, waiting for a name.
“John Frederson.”
She’ll frown.
“I don’t think I know him,” she’ll say. “Where’s he from?”
“Standard Oil New York,” you reply. “The Ryberg Electronics Corporation of Los Angeles, Phoenix-Durango, Islam Incorporated, the Russian petroleum industry...”
“He gets around.”
“Beijing, Moscow, Tokyo, London... It’s amazing how much damage the system can take while still sending out signals.”
“So it’s up to you to track him down and...”
“Make him see reason.”
“All you’re missing is a raincoat and a gun,” she’ll say, a smile playing on her lips. Then she’ll take another look at you.
“Well, maybe just the raincoat,” she’ll add.
“Is that a problem?” you ask before peeling the tight-fitting plastic lid off your cardboard cup and taking a sip.
“I don’t like guns,” she’ll reply. “Guns kill people.”
“Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do?” you’ll say, pulling a face. The coffee tastes like weed-killer. “Come on,” you’ll say. “Let’s get out of here.”
Total Information Awareness and the Policy Analysis Market focus upon high-level aggregate behavior in order to predict political assassinations or possible terrorist attacks.
“Where are we going now?” she’ll ask, taking a pack of cigarettes from her black patent-leather purse.
“Do you have to?” you’ll ask. “Cigarettes kill people.”
Another scratchy subtitle appears before your eyes: Ordinary men are unworthy of the position they occupy in this world. An analysis of their past draws you automatically to this conclusion. Therefore they must be destroyed, which is to say, transformed.