“We have to get you out of town. You’re already lucky to have lasted this long.”
He thinks of his room, his espresso machine, his two other shirts, and most of all his laptop, and it’s like she’s been following his thoughts when she says, “They’ve probably found your place by now. Whatever you had, it’s gone. You need to let it go.”
“Who are ‘they,’ and why are they after me?” he says, trying to rally, wanting to argue her into admitting that nothing has really changed. “Did I touch up someone important? So look—I’m just hired help. I could just go wait it out till this all blows over.”
“Who they are is a private hit squad, and the phone is a prototype, something special—I think it has to do with encryption. I know their boss, and he’s not going to give up. If you stay in San Francisco, you’ll die.”
It feels like he’s always been in San Francisco—Kern knows he grew up in a different country, but barely remembers it—and leaving seems unimaginable. He wonders how long till new construction seals his room off, and if he dies will his spirit return to work the heavy bag there, forever throwing combinations in the dark? He tries to accept this, but finds himself saying, “But what if I just gave them the phone? I could just leave it somewhere and they could take it and they’d never have to see me—”
“You’re not going do that,” she says. “Okay? They’d kill you just the same.” Her voice sounds flat and hard and younger now, less educated, more of the country’s burned-out core. “They don’t allow loose ends. Better that a thousand innocents should die than that a single enemy go free. Okay? Do you understand that you can’t negotiate?”
He doesn’t say anything, in fact his mind has gone blank, but then, more kindly, she says, “The phone has an earpiece with a camera—why don’t you put it on?”
He studies the phone, finds the button that detaches a whorl of more-or-less flesh-colored plastic with a tiny lens at one end. When he puts it in the ghost whispers, “Now we share a perspective,” and he feels her presence twining around him.
“Look around a little, so I can orient,” she says, so he duly peers around the street, feeling like a tourist. “I think this is the lower Mission,” she says. “God, it feels like a long time.”
“Why help me?” he blurts. “Whoever you are. I mean, why bother? Why not just let me die?”
“Would you say you’re a man of a grateful spirit?” she asks, and he thinks, Here it comes. “Because if you are, you could do me a favor, because I’m trapped here and I need help getting out.”
“Trapped where?”
“I’m locked in an empty house,” she says. “There’s a computer, but no net—all I can get is the phone you’re on. There’s a window overlooking mountains and a pool of black water, but otherwise it’s just stone. I think I’m near LA. So how about it: if I get you through this, will you help me?” Fear in her voice, though she’s trying to hide it, because this is her big pitch, and he realizes that if he were inclined to negotiate he’d have a lot of leverage, but he’s not some grasping businessman, and he owes her, and moreover it looks like he has nowhere else to go, so he just says, “It’s a deal.”
“Okay. Good,” she says. She’d seemed omniscient at first but now her evident relief makes her seem smaller. “You should wait till they’ve given up trying to find you, but we’ll find you an out-of-the-way place to lie low. So, first things first—let’s have a look you.” He focuses on his reflection in a plate-glass window, tries not to worry what she’ll think of him, but what does it matter, they’ve reached an agreement. He’d forgotten what he was wearing, but it turns out to be a sleeveless soccer jersey made of light synthetic—it dries fast and doesn’t smell after he sweats in it—and cargo pants, loose enough to kick in, once white, now soft and grey. The fresh bloodstains on the knees signify his recent, violent victory, though no one else will get it, they’ll probably think he tripped.
“Damn, boy,” she says, “work out a little? You look like you live on protein and Zen Buddhism. I guess I might have known. Anyway, you look like a favelino street fighter, which I’m guessing is more or less what you are, but that stands out here, and we have some business in the city, so we’re going to need to change your look. How much money have you got?” When he tells her, she says, “Constraint elicits creativity.”
She takes him to a street where rain patters on the awnings between the rooftops and there are too many people drinking in little bars and browsing in the stalls. A woman bumps him with her handbag and he knows exactly how he could pivot and shatter her jaw with his elbow but he does nothing and forces himself to wear a blank mask. Even so, the ghost says, “You can relax a little. Look up,” and he does, sees the SFPD drone hovering there, thirty feet overhead, its red lights shining through the rain, its props’ hum audible.
She takes him to a stall where old clothes are stacked on plastic crates. The proprietor, an elderly black man with bushy dreads, is either staring straight at him or watching TV on his sunglasses—in any case, Kern is careful to give him an unobstructed sight line as he picks through the stock. The ghost finds him a hooded leather jacket, glossy with use, worn through at the elbows, and a black T-shirt with Desolation Angels emblazoned in white letters over an out-of-focus white dove, and the words and the image have an eeriness that grips him.
“It was a band,” the ghost says. “They were big, in their niche, in the day, which wasn’t so long ago. Not your demographic, which can’t hurt.”
He’s aware of a muted ripple of interest in the crowd as he swaps shirts, and wonders if you’re not supposed to do that out here.
“Now you look a little more like you belong,” she says. “The next things are money and a passport. I’m going to guess that you haven’t got one?”
He’s heard of passports, knows you need one to travel between states now, and even to get into some cities. He thinks of Lares’ brisk trade in server intrusion, stolen credit cards, fraudulent documents. “No, but I know someone who makes them,” he says. In any case Lares owes him an explanation for the last job. “But it’s expensive.” Strange to need a passport, like suddenly needing a necktie or a pram.
She says, “Awesome. So, money first,” and though he has many questions he feels that there will be no answers, that the harder he struggles, the less he’ll finally know. This is the logic of dreams, he tells himself, not of waking life, but then he’s letting her guide him deeper into the city.
15
Future Shift