Skinner (15 page)

The man has both phones up now, both shooting video, but he’s started moving toward the Scandic hotel at the edge of the square.

“Okay, let’s go, fucking shit, let’s go, okay, move, move!”

Skinner grabs Jae’s upper arm, pulls her a few feet, gets ahead of the man and in front of him.

“I need your room number and I need to see your room key, please. We’re only admitting registered guests.”

The protester that went down in the fire is up, running, flames streaming from the back of her head. Two more protesters run alongside and behind her, one trying to pull off her burning jacket, another trying to empty a liter bottle of Evian on her head, an officer has dropped his baton and shield, pulled off his coat, carrying it spread before him like a net, trying to tackle the girl and bring her to the ground so he can smother the flames. He leaves his feet, throws his body onto hers, and they go down, he blankets her with the coat, slapping it with flat palms, hugging her. A protester with a bench slat runs from behind and smashes it over the cop’s helmet, knocking him off the girl.

The man flinches.

“Holy shit.”

He puts both phones in one hand and digs in the deep outer pockets of his Armani.

“Key card, yeah, five-nineteen, shit.”

The attack on the police line has disintegrated under the clubs, driven back, but several retreating protesters have stopped and formed a ring around the fallen officer, kicking him. The burning girl he extinguished is lost to view.

The man pulls a key card from his pocket.

“Key. So can we get the fuck inside now?”

Skinner knees him in the crotch twice, easing him down to the ground as he folds forward, curled on his side, mouth open wide but unable to draw enough air to make any noise. His hands have clenched and Skinner has to pry the key card and both phones from his grip, dropping the phones, one each in his jacket pockets, key in hand, rising and taking Jae by the wrist.

“Let’s go.”

She drags her feet, looking at the man on the ground.

“Is he safe there?”

Skinner is still moving, pulling her toward the Scandic.

“No.”

A new siren rises and fills the square, bouncing off the faces of the tall buildings. A warning that something large and powerful is coming. At the far end of the square the police line splits open and a towering blue and high-viz truck, unholy product of a mating between a doubledecker bus and a fully armored Humvee, rolls through, two water cannons above a high cab, windows covered by steel screens, a broad cow catcher mounted up front.

Skinner draws Jae close, his arm over her shoulder.

“Passport.”

She watches Skinner take his own from inside his jacket, holding it and the key in the same hand, holding them up in clear view, as they walk briskly toward the Scandic. She unzips her jacket, unzips one of the interior pockets, pulls out her own passport, and presents it in the same manner.

Skinner is waving his passport and key at the security guards behind the locked doors, pulling Jae closer.

“We’re staying in the hotel.”

Skinner slaps the key card and his passport against the glass.

“Room five-nineteen.”

The doors are unlocked, guards pulling them open, holding out their arms to draw Skinner and Jae inside as if pulling them from the ocean after a shipwreck. Behind them, the water cannons open fire on the square, white noise drowning the world’s voice.

Someone drapes a blanket over Jae’s shoulders, a man pats Skinner’s back as if for a job well done. The thunder of the water cannon and continuing howl of the siren force everyone to raise their voices, Skinner can see people who have come down from the restaurant for a different perspective on events, cocktails in hand.

A man, British accent, north-something, places himself in front of Skinner and Jae.

“How is it out there? The police need to contract their lines, yes?”

Gravitas in the words.

Skinner leads Jae around him toward a bank of elevators.

A concierge crosses the carpet, meets them at the elevators, pushing the button. Her English is impeccable.

“My apologies for the situation. We, of course, have no control over something like this, but we will make every effort to see that it doesn’t make your stay any less enjoyable.”

By the time they descend in the elevator to the subfloor basement, ask a laundress with poor English for directions, lose themselves, find themselves, find the loading dock, wave off the questions of a security guard, smiles, head shakes,
sorry, we don’t understand a word
,
and emerge into brisk sunlight on the peaceful street of Drottninggatan, eight minutes have passed since the protesters started their flash riot a block away.

Seventeen minutes of traffic later, a taxi deposits them at the south end of Helgeandsholmen and they cross a bridge, wandering into the narrow cobbled alleys of old world charm that define the tiny island of Gamla Stan.

Postcards, cafés, historical preservationists at work. They slow down, the buildings built tall and narrow and pressed together, dense, no sound reaching them from the riot now. Sunshine on the exterior walls of the upper stories. Wooden shutters folded open. Flower boxes.

Jae checks a map on her phone, turns it this way and that, the streets a senseless tangle, points down a twisting cobbled way that appears to have been built to follow a popular goat track from some previous century.

“This way. I think.”

Skinner follows a step behind, taking time to glance in the uncovered ground-floor windows, glimpses of storerooms behind businesses on parallel streets, kitchens, small domestic settings. It is an area for artists and eccentrics and families who have lived here for generations. An expensive and particular way of life, keeping house in a tourist district. But you never know what you might see. Grandpa’s birding shotgun over the sink. That HK 9mm taken from a field in Bosnia while on UN peacekeeping duty during service years. Or, more likely, a well-honed boning knife. Thinking about objects he can kill with, Skinner only gradually becomes aware of how slowly they are meandering, weaving steps, their shoulders bumping from time to time.

It seems quite natural, an act that requires no thought at all, for him to take Jae’s hand. And when he does, she does not take it back. Walking, hand in hand, down the streets of Gamla Stan, name like a lost province of one of the world’s popular war zones, Skinner scouting for mortal weapons, Jae using him for balance as her mind drifts through the data.

Eye of the storm, winds building around them, but careless, for the moment.

TERRENCE LIKES THE
future.

What Skinner said before the riot. Before she tucked in the ends of his scarf and touched him.

Terrence likes the future.

That he spoke so authoritatively in the present tense means less than shit. He is, she tells herself, a killer. He’s killed many people. She’s watched him do it. An experienced killer must have had ample opportunities to try to hide the fact that he’s killed someone. Changing the tense, from
Terrence liked the future
to
Terrence likes the future.
This is not something on which to hang your fucking hat when assessing whether the person you are traveling with has killed a friend.

I miss him.

What he also said.

Well, shit, she misses Terrence, too. And she can’t stop thinking about Haiti. The satellite photos she had looked at on the plane, coming in with a team of American emergency responders. There she was, the odd lady in the window seat at the back; no one knew how she’d gotten on the flight. Most of them knew one another. Indonesian tsunami, Katrina, Brazilian favela mudslide. Regular gatherings for these specialists who operated somewhere on the border between selfless altruist and risk taking adrenaline junkie. They were pumped.

Conversation from the seats in front of hers:

Saving a life is like the most intense high ever.

There were vets. Men and women who’d left the battlefield with new scales of affect. Dulled to any scenario that did not involve screaming sirens, the unbalanced sway inside a speeding vehicle, pop of small arms, deafening shudder of helicopter blades just overhead, and blood, still wet, squelching underfoot. A plane full of creatures who had stopped feeling quite human. Stopped acting like their husbands and wives and parents. Could not see themselves in their children any longer. They’d walked or been pushed through a scrim, seen what so much of the world saw daily from birth. The limitless possibility of life ending brutally and for no reason in the next instant. Those on the plane were the crest of human evolution. The next stage. The ones who experienced calamity and learned to thrive in that environment. The age of disaster, and these its natives. For now, they could choose to visit those places where misfortune rooted deepest; soon enough everyone would be living in the shit. The end of the global configuration that she could never avoid finding. Disaster World. What was waiting for them all, around the corner.

Jae was there because Terrence stuck her on the plane. He’d found her at Texas A&M, tinkering in someone else’s lab; piecework, her soldering always flawless. Assisting when municipalities would send teams of fire fighters to be accredited on new equipment in the rambling artificial catastrophe that was Disaster City. Training ground and test bed for the personnel and equipment that would try to blunt the edge of the future.

She’d stopped designing her own robots after Iraq. Stopped building them, anyway. She could never stop designing them in her head. Senseless crawling tools that could uncover lost and missing things. How could she stop? She’d blunted her own edge with Xanax and booze. The configurations were still there, but all they did was swirl around her, never resolving into anything coherent. Off the radar for Cross and Kestrel. She’d tried going back to teaching, but a room full of young people had come to look like a room full of animated corpses. Dead in waiting. Born too late. After the deluge had already begun.

So she’d walked away and found the job in Texas. And discovered that the ersatz emergencies of Disaster City dulled the constant internal hysteria that had plagued her since Iraq. Visiting fire fighters might be impressed by the war zone verisimilitude of the street called Sniper Alley, devoted to learning fire suppression while in a crosshairs, but she knew better. It was all so comfortingly harmless.

Then Haiti shook.

The lab emptied out. Academics only on the surface, they were men and women building robots to save lives. They’d been at Ground Zero for fuck sake. Their only problem was finding a plane with room for them, and getting a landing slot at demolished Toussaint Louverture International Airport. Jae stayed behind. A day later there was Terrence with a proposition.

Money was involved. In more than one sense. Money for her, of course, and money on the ground. Under the rubble. In a safe. Maybe. An office in a Hatian strip mall, lawyer’s office. Someone’s asset, moving cash, lots of it, toward a political party that might have a shot at the presidency in a country where very little was needed to give one a shot at the presidency. The essential value of political influence in Haiti being of debatable value to Jae’s mind but not, clearly, to someone else. Someone with an interest in coastal land leases on the southern edge of the island. An area that could serve excellently as a training ground for both open desert combat tactics and beachhead landings. Skill sets in much demand. There were also, in the safe, a hard drive and several papers that could, along with the money when you got down to it, be lost, happily, but should, most definitely, not be found by the wrong people.
The wrong people
defined as anyone not under specific contract to get the fucking things and destroy them. Terrence didn’t need to say
Cross
or
Kestrel,
she knew who she would be working for. It all sounded terrifically fucked to Jae. Dirty and horrifying. Something she’d gladly rather not know was happening, let alone participate in. But the money. Soldering, though specialty work, paid no bonus for a PhD. She was renting a room in a double-wide at a trailer park five miles from campus, riding the bus. Long past the point where she could produce credible excuses for not visiting home a single time in the last three years. Estranged wasn’t a nuanced enough word to describe the state her relationship with her father had reached.

Terrence put it in perspective for her.

The window of opportunity to save lives down there is closing. But, of course, the same could be said of the window on your own life.

He was the general contractor for several small and untidy jobs that people wanted done before anything could get especially organized in Haiti. Jae hadn’t listened to him when he’d told her not to take Cross’s contract in Iraq. Perhaps she’d listen now that he was telling her to take this one. His advice being both blunt and more than slightly surreal.

Get your robots out of storage and get your ass on the fucking plane to Haiti.

With a further guarantee that the contract would leave more than enough time for her to engage in actual rescue work. Of which there was certainly more than enough to go around.

And so the plane. And the professional disasterists. And the satellite photos.

They looked like gravel. Photos of gravel. As if, while crossing a patch of garden that had been covered in the tiny rocks, one had stopped to snap several pictures, straight down, careful to keep feet out of frame. Gravel, twigs. The impression ruined only by the presence of what could be taken for the remains of, perhaps, a few broken toys. Shattered fragments of an old train set, Matchbox cars run over by their full size brethren, crumbs of flesh-tone Play-Doh.

The safe turned out to be easily found. Large, it created a node within a rubble-filled sinkhole. They had money to pay diggers, and, natural disaster or not, money always produced cheap labor in Haiti. They’d got lucky and found the thing more or less faceup, cleared enough debris to open the door, and sent the workers back to their own searches. Families, entire lives buried. Inside the safe, plastic-wrapped bricks of hundred-dollar bills. She filled a Pelican Cube Case with them, topped it off with the hard drive and papers, sealed it, locked it, and found Terrence waiting for her at the airport when she arrived to ship it out on one of the empty relief planes heading home to reload.

Taking the case from her, loading it onto a dolly, sweating in his tweed, he’d looked at her, forty-eight hours since he saw her last, and nodded,
The world can make sense, Jae. You’ve just been looking in the wrong places.
The old man, again promising order in the universe. A future that could be saved from the configuration.

She watched him go, pushing the fortune in cash and potential blackmail, then she returned to the rubble. Her robots, the ones that still worked after their long layoff, were soon useless. Broken or clogged with dust. She left them where they failed, one by one, and picked up a shovel. Finding the living became almost immediately irrelevant. Impossible. There weren’t any. But the dead had value. One less rotting corpse to breed disease. One less relative uncertain if she had lost her entire family or her entire family but one. One less meal to feed the feral packs of dogs. One less of God’s victims abandoned and unknown.

Back home, some of the money bought a lease on workspace in a light industrial zone outside Houston. The rest of the money bought her tools and materials. Her relationships at A&M got her access to Disaster City. A year later, when the robots she needed were finished, she got her Land Rover running and started looking for Terrence’s promised future. Taking his contracts for image analysis. Data diving. Finding and seeing. Her specialties. Terrence told her that they were close to the heart of things. But it would take time. And always retreating, the desert, the mountains, away, when the configuration became overwhelming. Too much detail, the particles were like fog she was lost in.

Now here she is, holding hands with a killer, liking it, very much.

Terrence likes the future.

He said. As if Terrence were still alive. As far as he knows.

She coughs, pulls her hand free of his to cover her mouth.

Skinner raises the hand that had been holding hers, looks for a moment as if he’s deciding what to do with it now, then lets it go, dangling at his side, and steps to the side of the street, the open door of a gift shop, high-end, she can see reproductions of Viking swords and helmets inside, chocolate bars wrapped like jewelry, cashmere scarves, Pippi Longstocking toys made from organic cottons and merino wool.

“I’ll be right back.”

He goes in, nods at the proprietor, a middle aged woman with graying blonde hair and skin both weathered and robust. She looks ready for sculling or cross country skiing, whatever the weather allows.

There are also axes, leather wrapped handles.

Who buys a souvenir axe?

This is a lightly traveled street. The entry of an expensive hotel is several doors up, a man in greatcoat and braided epaulets at the curb. Cars have a special sticker on the window. Resident cars. And livery cars, Volvo sedans. She thinks of her car in Nevada, long term parking at McCarran.

Fuck, please don’t be buying an axe.

She can see him at the front of the store, smiling, a tourist smile, impeccably self-effacing but expecting to be helped with the language barrier when paying these prices. Several of the larger kronor bills he exchanged for at the airport currency kiosk are passed. He accepts some change, a receipt, and comes out carrying a walking stick with a heavy brass knob at the end. He holds it in such a way that it almost disappears, not hiding it, but carrying it as an extension, as if he has always used a walking stick.
No affectation, this; just what one always has in hand
. But she can’t help thinking of the way he held the X-Acto blade back in Oasis Two. Instantly weaponized by his touch.

He looks up and down the street.

“Close?”

She takes her eyes from the stick.

“This way.”

Up past the hotel, brief nod from the doorman, and stepping in at an arched tunnel that cuts through the ground floor of a slightly crooked building that has been painted the color of Silly Putty. A sign above the tunnel, Lilla Hoparegränd. An especially tight alleyway beyond, the backs of town houses, locked shutters. First glance suggests a dead end, but a spill of light across the face of the last building betrays a sharp L bend to somewhere.

They look down the short tunnel. Jae checks her phone, puts it back in her pocket.

“I’m expecting an empty room. If that. More likely a mailbox. Something someone cleans out from time to time. Paper bills are safer than online billing for these guys. Probably a whole bunch of domains billed to the same address. Could even be a service someone offers.
Bill your cyber criminal enterprise’s infrastructure to this address. No questions asked. Service fees payable in advance.
”

Skinner nods.

“Why I got a stick instead of a broadsword.”

He looks at the door, old, wood, yellow paint, a keystone above with the date it was set, chiseled, edges worn smooth.
1747.

He puts a flat palm against the door, pushes a little.

“Good door.”

He steps back from it.

“If it isn’t just a mailbox we may have to leave quickly.”

He points at her backpack.

“If so, it will be helpful to know if anyone is waiting for us outside.”

Jae swings the pack off her shoulders.

“I have something for that.”

Skinner watches as she unzips the bag, reaches into Velcroed padded pockets, and takes out two cylinders about the size of twelve-ounce beer cans, rounded at the ends, patterned in the pearlescent metallic black-and-gray checks of woven carbon fiber, a large Oakley logo on each one. Sunglass cases. The ones she took from the robot cases that were left with Maker Smith. She pushes the button on the side of one, definitive click, and it clamshells open, revealing one of her robot spiders in a custom carved nest of polyethylene closed cell foam. She gently works it loose, gives a practiced flick of her wrist, the eight carbon legs that had been folded beneath it springing out. Skinner makes a sound in his throat, and when she looks up he points to the end of the alley. She nods and continues unpacking her creations as he walks to the end of the alley, takes the L bend to the right, and disappears. Jae isn’t watching. Both spiders are unpacked. She puts the Oakley cases back in her pack.

She has her Toughbook out and powered up. Control routines for the spiders open. The iPad interface she uses for the worm and some of the other robots is more elegant, more fun, but too fragile for fieldwork unless mounted in one of her travel cases. The Toughbook’s Bluetooth has detected the spiders. She moves the cursor over an icon that looks like a web, clicks, enters a passcode, and windows open showing her the camera views from both spiders. One blurry, too-close view of her left boot, one hyper–low-perspective shot of the alley looking down toward the L bend as Skinner rounds the corner, walking toward her, a looming giant on the screen.