The needlessness and selfishness of it made my blood boil. I tried to put it out of my mind.
“Ninety percent of our job caters to Affluents,” Kel said. “That’s what we do. We make people with money excited about things they don’t know they want.”
“Yeah, right,” Henri laughed.
“Henri does not believe it works,” Margot said.
“It’s stupid!” Henri said. “You think just because we plop a gold printer in someone’s house, that means everyone will start buying gold printers? It’s preposterous.”
Preposterous, I thought, letting the word play in my head.
“Henri does not know which side of his bread the butter is on,” Margot said.
“The Agency wants to target the right people, Influents?, to make sure they have effective viral reach,” Kel said. Influent? was the preferred term for the trendsetting wealthy. It sounded like a flu vaccine to me. “They want their money’s worth,” Kel continued, holding up her Pad. “Henri may not think it works, but the algorithms show otherwise. Companies collect and compile as much data as they can. They model consumer habits and behavior.” Kel showed us the next target. “They know how many people will be reached by each Placement and can calculate with 85 percent accuracy how many sales a Placement will generate.”
“So they claim,” Henri said.
“What do you care?” Margot asked. “They pay us.”
“We don’t need to be worried about the program’s efficacy.” Kel nodded. “We need to concern ourselves with who might have an itchy temper, or insomnia, or an unhealthy abundance of curiosity. We need to focus on how we prepare, plan and execute.”
She paused and looked at me, then pulled up a map of a building near the center of the city. “Four of tonight’s Placements will be standard. Our fifth, however, will not.”
“That’s Lawyer territory,” Henri said, looking at the map. We would be only a few blocks from the Butchers & Rog Tower in the center of the city. Wealthy Lawyers had clustered around that building, as if they hoped some of Butchers & Rog’s power would rub off.
“Henri.” Margot patted him on the head, but Henri shook her off and fixed his hair, looking at me. I felt my cheeks burn a little and looked at my shoes.
“Some Influents? don’t care about Placement. They don’t care about the status of being an influencer, and they don’t like feeling they are being used,” Kel said, tapping the edge of her Pad to focus us.
“A few Influents?, like our first target, actively eschew Placement. Unfortunately, Huntley’s prefers exactly this sort of target, so Attorney Hugo Winfrield, Esquire, is our top priority.”
“Wait until you see this place,” Margot said to me, wide-eyed and grinning.
“You’ve never been there!” Henri cried.
“I’ve been near it,” Margot said, pouting her lips like her feelings had been hurt. “He owns the whole thirtieth floor.”
“We’ll have to disable Winfrield’s security and bypass footfalls,” Kel continued.
“Work on wires,” Henri said to me, knowingly.
“She doesn’t know what that means,” Margot said.
Margot was right, though I didn’t like her pointing it out. Maybe it was for the best I didn’t pretend to know more than I did.
“Winfrield doesn’t want us there,” Kel said. “If he spots us, we’re done—all of us. He won’t be bought off by the promise of oranges. His floor is pressure-sensitive and rigged with alarms. We’ll have to set up wires and work above the ground. I think you can handle it,” she said to me.
I swallowed. I was glad she had confidence in me, but how was I going to do that?
“The Huntley printers will be set up to run off a gold leaf silhouette of Winfrield when he enters the room,” Kel explained. “Speth, you’ll need to calibrate a small scanner to take a 3-D face scan, orient the resultant data into a profile, flatten it into a relief like you would see on a coin and print it out.”
These sorts of scanners were everywhere, embedded in practically every Ad screen in America?, but I’d never programmed one before. This was the same technology they used to put people in Ads. I wondered what it would feel like to come home, be scanned and have your face printed onto a gold medallion. Then I remembered it would never happen to me.
Kel handed the Pad to Margot, and Margot turned it to me.
“This is the interface,” Margot said. It took me a second longer to focus than it should have. I couldn’t help remembering Carol Amanda Harving’s data was in that Pad somewhere, and it felt like I could do something with that.
“These little icons represent the printer functions,” Margot said, unaware of my momentary lapse. “It isn’t that complicated, but the printer’s screen will be smaller than this. If we had the room’s layout, you could program it here and drop it down, but you won’t know how to orient anything until we see the room, place it and figure out his most likely approach.”
Everything was depicted in the most obvious way possible. You could preset what or who you wanted scanned and what angle you wanted to print from. There was a little icon box of templates, and I could see the one that looked like the coin. Maybe I could handle it, but the idea of doing it while hanging from a wire didn’t fill me with confidence.
“Are there any questions?” Kel asked the group.
Can I practice? How am I going to hang from the wire? What are the wires attached to? What if we get caught?
Kel watched my mind burn through all the things I could not ask.
“I’m sorry if it is terrifying,” Kel said to me. “But this job is dangerous. I can’t mollycoddle you. You learn by doing, just like everyone else. If I didn’t think you could do it, you wouldn’t be here at all. Do you understand?”
I think this was her version of a pep talk. I would have to get used to it. This would be how we would work. What I needed to think about was succeeding—not what would happen if I failed.
*
We entered through a window. It was sealed with locking pins, not magnets, but Henri had a tool for them and was pleased to demonstrate how quickly he could pop the window open.
I crouched with Margot like a cat at the corner of the ornate window ledge. Intricate scrollworks of leaves and abstracted spirals curved in on each other, making it easy to wedge myself in place. The buildings had more and more ornamentation the deeper into the city you went—until you hit the center, where Rog’s building was nothing but shiny, unadorned glass.
Margot wrestled with some kind of encryption on Kel’s Pad, trying to unscramble the code for the room’s motion sensors. She looked like she was playing a video game as her fingers danced over the Pad. It occurred to me that, even out in the open, the Pad could take input and none of it was tracked. How did that work?