“I’m going to come get you. I’m coming right now. Don’t go anywhere. Is anyone with you?”
“I’m fine, no one’s with me. Are you at the hotel? I can just come back.”
“Baby, is it really you?”
Annoyed by her sentimentality, he’s on the verge of saying something cutting but the call drops. He tries to call again but just gets network errors.
He stares out at the wisps of fog, remembers reading that the aesthetes of feudal Japan would spend hours watching the steam rising from bowls of hot tea, and then, in the stray light from the windows, he sees someone’s silhouette on the mountain.
He ducks down out of the window’s lines of sight, and he realizes the house, which was never meant for defense, has become a trap. No weapons here, just books. This is an ossuary, he remembers, built to hold the family bones. He imagines a sniper with his sights trained on the door, smoking cigarette after cigarette, as blasé as if he were hunting a deer; he imagines soldiers out in the night, poised to fire a grenade through the window but waiting till one of them, grinning and exhilarated, finishes telling a dirty story. Finally it occurs to him to turn off the light.
He runs his hands over the rough concrete in the dark, wonders irrelevantly if it’s drone-built, but no, it’s too old—when his mother was young builder drones were a strictly military thing, used mostly for raising bunkers in the North Americans’ interminable desert wars.
Uselessly, he tries to intuit his hunters’ thoughts, guess their lapses in attention. He curses his worthless phone, then realizes that he can use it. Before he can think, and therefore hesitate, he scrambles to the door, presses a button to light up his phone, and as he flings the door open throws his phone as far as he can, hoping it will draw their eyes and perhaps their fire. Running for the car, he hears the phone bounce on the rocks.
The car’s door recognizes his fingerprints, unlocks. He slams it shut behind him. “Maximum offensive footing,” he says, as the crash seat envelops him. “Take us home.”
Insulated from the night, he relaxes a little. He wonders if they’ll find his phone on the talus, maybe keep it as a trophy or search it for usable intelligence—he hopes it will be as useless to them as it was to him. He wonders if there was really an enemy or if it was just one of the vagrants who haunts the wastes beyond cities.
And then as the car turns there’s a girl in the headlights, looking right into his eyes, and in the high beams she looks overexposed, her face a mask of light. Clouds of dust rise glowing around her. Time seems to slow. At first he thinks its the madwoman from the hotel but, no, she’s younger, maybe Asian. The car is accelerating toward her, its forward guns whirring as they spin up. He’s going to tell it to stand down, though he knows it’s too late, but before he can speak or the car can fire she’s gone, must have leapt out of the way, the car passing through the space where she was standing.
31
Refuge
Irina takes the stairs of necessity, using her phone for light.
As she runs down the first flight she uses her wireless to attack Cromwell’s phone. In the fashion of phones, it has conservative security, and immediately bricks itself. She does the same to the deaf girl’s phone, thinking, Sorry, beauty.
There’s a cluster of phones and what are probably guns on the floor beneath the Dernière and as she attacks them she wonders if they work for Cromwell and if she’d graciously declined his offer would there have been quiet footsteps behind her and then an iron hand closing on her shoulder.
She takes the stairs five at a time, letting gravity do the work.
She remembers the thick blades of the steak knives on the table. In the first second of darkness she probably could have killed Cromwell, if she’d wanted to go the full Lady Macbeth, but even now can’t see herself stabbing him in the carotid, though she wonders if she’ll come to see her passivity as a failure of will and a strategic catastrophe.
Nightmare descent past floor after floor through the near-dark, and the unexpected joy of the headlong flight. She reaches the lobby, bursts out onto the street. As though preordained a drone taxi is stopping ten feet in front of her. An overcoated man with an umbrella is reaching for the cab’s door when she body checks him—flash of his astonishment as he sprawls on the sidewalk—“Sorry!” she calls, the word cut off by the slamming door.
*
“Come over,” Philip says on her phone as she scans the street.
“I’m not going to put you at risk,” she says.
“For fuck’s sake, come over. It’s a secured building, and I’ll tell them to go on low alert. Can we please just take the rest of the back and forth as read, or maybe do it while you get your ass over?”
She’s going to argue, but bites it off, says, “See you soon, then.” She hangs up, gives the cab Philip’s address.
She breaks into the cab’s computer and changes its log so it thinks it picked her up near the Ferry Building, half a mile from Maison Dernière, then turns off her implant’s wireless.
The cab’s nav shows five minutes to Philip’s house. She’s agitated, wants to do more than slouch down in her seat and hope her friend knows what to do. She thinks of flying down the stairs, how much fun it was, like skiing on virgin snow in high alpine country, but actually she’s never done that—she’s been skiing all of four times, and never left the bunny slopes—the memory is Constantin’s—they turn up from time to time. It’s a misery and a desecration that whatever fragments of her friend remain are, presumably, in Cromwell’s hands, and regarded without tenderness.
On her phone she finds the website for Iliou Engineering, Constantin’s father’s company in Athens, and the website for the family office, which consists of just a stylized drawing of a dam and an email address. As the cab turns toward the hills she starts writing a message.
*
The cab stops on a hill with a view of the city that looks silver with the moonlight on the towers and the fog. On the uphill side of the road are expensive-looking condos behind a high wall topped with broken glass. As she reaches out to open the cab’s door her phone rings.
“Ms. Sunden?” asks someone, young, male, indistinctly foreign.
“Who’s calling?”
“This is Mr. Iliou’s secretary. Will you take a call with Mr. Iliou? I’m instructed to tell you that it’s highly urgent.”
She hesitates, but owes it to Constantin not to keep the old man waiting. “Sure,” she says.
Another male voice, older, intent, weary. “Ms. Sunden,” he says. “This is Constantin’s father. I got your note. Thank you for that. The disposition of my son’s remaining memories does in fact concern me deeply. But before we discuss that, I have the sense that you believe yourself to be in danger. Is this true?”