“Now I have to close the door!” Amelia cried, and she jumped through the doorway still holding the bags of helium and lofted down the hallway like a parachutist, kind of, until she thumped down next to the doorway to the bears’ quarters, just narrowly avoiding a drop right through the open door that would have had her joining the bears, not good, but by spread-eagling she did avoid it, and quickly she closed and locked the enclosure door.
“Frans, right the ship!” she said triumphantly, and then killed the cameras and crawled up to the bathroom to pee. “Yay!”
People born and bred to life within earshot and eye glance of a score of neighbors have learned to preserve their own private worlds by uniformly ignoring each other, except on direct invitation.
e) Inspector Gen
Inspector Gen walked the skyways to work. Breezy fall day. Autumn in New York, the great song of the city. Wave tank patterns diamonding the canals below, lit from the south by the low morning sun. Her favorite time of year. Have to get out the heavier jacket.
In the station it was the usual scurrying about. The blunt edge of pandemonium. How could there be crime on a day so beautiful? So many different kinds of hunger. Desperate eyes in a blank face, hands manacled, chain around waist. Ah the waste. Hold the line.
She went into her office and sat down behind her desk. She kept the desktop clear, the only way to keep it from being inundated. She picked up the single note on the battered blotter and saw that her chief assistant, Lieutenant Claire Clooney, wanted a meeting with her and Sergeant Olmstead. She was about to call Claire when a ruckus erupted outside her door. She took a look and there was that same blank face, now pulled back into a rictus of despair and rage, teeth exposed, foaming at the mouth. Striking out wildly, three big street cops trying to subdue the person, Gen wasn’t sure about gender here. Cuffing behind the back was always safer, even with wrists shackled to waist. It was a lesson that somehow did not become policy, she didn’t know why.
“What’s the problem?” she asked the demented prisoner.
Gargled gasp, hissing, more foam from mouth. Drug reaction, it seemed. Gen winced as the cuffed hands together swung into the ribs of one of the cops. Would leave a bruise, but the cop hooked an arm through the arms of the afflicted person and simply lifted the person bodily off feet; struggle availed nothing, and a wickedly fast attempt to bite only bit a thrust hat, stunning the prisoner. The others pressed in and a Taser shot arched the prisoner back and into a wrap held out by another cop. The wrap was like an armless straitjacket. Off they carried the person.
“To the hospital,” Gen said, but of course they were already headed that way, and only nodded before disappearing down the hall. Bellevue was conveniently nearby.
“Does anyone know what that was about?” Gen called to those down the hall, minding other business.
“Bad shit in Kips Bay,” Sergeant Fripp said. “This is the third one today.”
“Ah hell.”
Bad drugs were always the bane of the city, right back to the demon rum. She never saw the point. To her anything beyond a beer was illness, if not hell. Here it was 8 a.m. on a fine breezy morning, poor person foaming at the mouth. People were strange.
“Do we know where they got it?”
“Looks like the Park Thirty-three area. Someone said Mezzrow’s.”
“Really?”
“That’s what she said.”
“That’s not like them.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Gen thought it over. “I guess I should go and have a word with them, see what’s up. It isn’t like them.”
“Do you want any of us along?”
“I’ll take Claire and Ezra.”
As if called, Claire showed up, Olmstead in hand. When they were seated Gen regarded her whiteboard unenthusiastically. The big screen on the other wall, filled with a live GIS map of the city marked by various kinds of tags, was just as uninspiring.
When they got to it, near the end of a long list of outstanding problems, Claire reported there were still no pings from the two men who had gone missing out of the old Met tower. Quite possibly they were dead. On the other hand, among bodies found recently, none had been them.
Possibly they had slipped away and were hiding for some reason. Possibly someone had kidnapped them. Either would be odd, but odd things definitely happened. People were well documented these days, not in any single system, but in the stack of all systems, the accidental megasystem. It was hard to stay hidden. But it wasn’t a total system in the end, so it could happen.
Olmstead brought her up to date on what he had found in the datasphere, and Gen drew things on the whiteboard, just to help her see: initials, Xs and Os, arrows here and there, lines solid or dotted.
The two men’s contract work for Henry Vinson’s hedge fund, Alban Albany, had ended just three months earlier. Alban Albany, like most hedge funds, kept its financial activities proprietarial, but Sean had found signs that it was involved in high-frequency trading in the dark pools run out of the Cloister cluster. Vinson’s earlier work for Adirondack Investing, when he had worked with Larry Jackman, had done that kind of trading, and Rosen and Muttchopf had worked for Adirondack too. Adirondack had been one of the investment firms the Senate Finance Committee was looking at when Rosen had recused himself. Rosen and Muttchopf’s recent work for Alban Albany had gotten them paid forty thousand dollars apiece. Then they had left and started moving around.
Vinson’s business security and his personal security were both handled by a security firm called Pinscher Pinkerton. An international firm, based in Grand Cayman if anywhere. Very opaque, Olmstead said gloomily, even though its name was out there, as one of the free-floating armies for hire that were now roaming at large in the world. An octopus, as subsidiary-stacked corporations were called. Or more probably an arm of a bigger octopus.
On the night Rosen and Muttchopf had disappeared, Sean said, there had been a strange event in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. A bite across everything in the exchange, after which everything went back to normal. Along with the bite, there had been a bolus of information sent to the SEC that the SEC wasn’t talking about. No obvious connection to the two men, except that it had happened that night.
“It would be good to get the SEC to tell us what they got that night.”
“I’m trying,” Olmstead said. “They’re slow.”
That was all they had that was new on that case. Olmstead had also, at Gen’s behest, been looking into the bid on the Met tower that had so troubled Charlotte. So far he had only managed to confirm that it was being laundered through the big brokerage Morningside Realty, headquartered uptown but doing business all over the tri-state region.
Gen marked up her whiteboard. Findings about the two men were in red. The Met tower was a blue box, with Charlotte Armstrong on one side of it and Vlade Marovich on the other.