Vast and sheer, the glass facades of downtown’s canyons, reflecting the blue of the evening, enclosing him like a trap.
Kern cringes as drones whip by overhead. Glimpses of men in suits seen through windows, a doorman standing before a gilded multistory mural of the hills. He has the sense that life is flowing out of the city, leaving it to its essential dull hardness. His reflection in the glass wall of a darkened lobby is a stranger staring back at him. “Relax,” says the ghost. “You look like you’re waiting to be arrested.”
The bank doesn’t even have a sign—there’s just a hand scanner by an armored white door in an otherwise blank concrete wall.
“Are you sure this is it?” he asks.
“This is it. It’s a branch of Crédit Nuage Cantonale de Genève. Very discreet, Nuage. There’s never any signage.”
“Are you a client?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, I’m sure not.”
“That’s less of a problem than you’d think. For one thing, your new look is consistent with family money—you look like you could be slumming it to piss off your dad. For another, the point of Nuage is it’s a numbered-account bank—if you’ve got the account number and the passcode, which I’ll give you, they don’t care who you are. So if they don’t think you’re a rich brat they’ll think you’re running errands for someone important. Put your hand on the scanner and let’s go on in.”
“Won’t that make me findable?”
“Elsewhere, maybe. Here, no. And there’s no other option, unless you want to do hits for pocket change until they catch you, which I’m guessing would take about a day.”
The surface of the scanner is cool under his palm. A woman’s voice, the accent maybe German, asks for the first eight digits of his account number, which the ghost whispers in his ear.
“I don’t see any security,” he murmurs, stepping into a wall of cold air, the odor of leather from the glossy black couches, a faint floral perfume. “It’s hidden,” the ghost says as the door locks behind him, sealing off the evening and its melancholy.
He clenches his fists in his jacket pockets, wonders if the bank people have gone home, or if they made him and he should run for it, but then a tall woman in a pale suit emerges from a corridor and from the way she looks past him it seems she must have other business but she says, “This way please, sir”—sir?—in the same voice as the scanner and leads him into a tiny high-ceilinged room with cinder-block walls and not much light and the air conditioner’s roaring is so loud that it’s hard to hear her as she leans across the table and with absolute seriousness says, “This room is secure. Do you wish to make a withdrawal?”
19
No True Security
Irina, at the insistence of her insurer, had attended a two-day class on kidnap prevention. Her teacher, a retired army sergeant, had prosthetic legs and, as he’d told her with a kind of schoolboy relish, a lower intestine that came out of a tissue printer. She remembers the chaw on his breath as he explained how most kidnapers tracked their victims with drones in order to find “the random moment of purest vulnerability,” a phrase that had struck her as having a certain poetry, and even as she thinks this she’s started running.
Faces whip by, eyeblink flashes of dismay, indifference, surprise, and she weaves around bystanders to occlude the lines of sight and fire, and she’s grateful once again for never really having aged. Keep moving, the sergeant had said. Don’t be predictable, find a strong point to retreat to, all of it obvious, none of it useful, and now here she is completely on her own.
As she runs she tells herself there’s still time to act, doesn’t let herself panic, and obliges herself to think of the city, and what it has that she can use. She could try ducking into a bank or a good hotel, but their doors will be locked and it might be seconds before they buzz her in, and the Marine with whom she had her moment is now too far away. There are drones overhead—she could turn on her wireless, seize a few and use them to run interference or, if they’re armed, shoot down her pursuers, though she’d thought her days of intrusions were done.
She corners hard, slipping a little, and sprints down the block, aware of the fear in her wake, how the brighter and more careful people are scattering, and then she sees hard-hatted workmen supervising a segmented drone the size of a van, dodecapodal and safety yellow, its nimble forward appendages pulling fiber-optic cables up through the incisions in the asphalt of the street, all under the eye of a trio of cops. One of them, leaning against a parked car in his green slicker, registers her speed and starts to raise his gun as he scans the street behind her.
Maybe she should find cover but she needs to know what’s going to happen so she turns, sees the damp pedestrians, the headlights of the cars going by at a rush-hour crawl—no camera drones, no van, no obvious pursuers. The cop is glaring down his rifle-sights now, aiming back the way she came, panning left to right, right to left, but, finding no targets, he lowers his rifle as he turns to her with a look of inquiry. It looks like no one’s coming, and in decency she should talk to him and explain but instead she ducks into a cafe.
Inside, she peers out through the raindrops on the windows at the blurred passersby. The cop across the street stares after her, then loses interest—worse things happen all the time.
Her mouth is dry so she orders a sparkling water though she finds it’s difficult to look away from the windows. The barista is friendly but his hair is sculpted into planes and spines that suggest nothing so much as a lionfish, and she feels old because instead of implying some extraordinarily specific cultural fealty his hair just reads as an elaborate waste of time.
She tells herself it was nothing, just another false alarm. Vans are legal, and camera drones are nothing special, especially this close to the favelas—they’re probably searching for illegal construction. She’s often seen jackbooted cops hassling refugees with their cheap little construction drones, and pitied them, though she’s also seen the claustrophobic Piranesi webwork that Jakarta has become, favela clotting all its parks and alleyways and public spaces—she remembers the masses of concrete filling the rail yards, the shadows and confinement of the narrow tunnels over the tracks, grey dust raining down as the trains roared through.
Find a strong point, the sergeant said. On her phone she searches for hotels with five-star security—the nearest is the Doric, seven blocks away. Finalizing her booking, she wonders how she’ll get there—it seems far away, and traffic is almost at a standstill, and she doesn’t want to walk on the street.
She startles when her phone rings; the hipster programmer at the next table looks like he’s going to ask if she’s all right but he sees her face and turns back to his computer.