Skinner (16 page)

He points back at the bend.

“Empties onto one of the big streets that circle the island. Water. Ferry dock. Bridge to Södermalm. Options.”

Jae clicks another icon, tiny spiders arranged in rows like tiles, and the two spiders on the ground start to skitter over the cobbles. Alarmingly fast, finding and almost instantly rejecting deep crevices between the cobbles that might upset their balance, they move at first like the jumbled plastic pieces on a Tudor brand electric football game. Vibrating haphazardly, directionless, certain to either fall or collide. But the impression is relieved a moment after it is created as the spiders learn their terrain, adjust, receive commands from the software that is interpreting the information from their cameras, and begin to move with a sudden sure-footedness that sends Skinner stepping back as one of them scampers between his feet to a drainpipe, tries several different angles of approach, then straddles it and begins to climb, a vision certain to create a new phylum of nightmares for any arachnophobe who should see it. The second spider has been moving in a zigzag between the walls of the alley, mapping, and now it scales a shutter covering street-level basement windows, balancing when it reaches the top, tiny whirs as the camera darts back and forth for new angles, then skitters and lands on the support of a decorative streetlamp that juts from the side of the building at head height, settling, and looking at a glance, clamped to the black iron, like a small bit of decoration.

Jae packs the Toughbook away, zips her pack, shoulders it, and rises.

Skinner is looking at the spider frozen on the lamp.

“Those are a little freaky.”

Jae looks at her brainchild.

“Robot spiders. If there’s anything missing from that concept that will freak people out, I don’t know what it is.”

Skinner steps to the door.

“Robot spiders with guns.”

Jae tightens her shoulder straps, securing her pack for running.

“That’s what Cross would like to do with them.”

Skinner touches the door as he did before, palm flat, pushes, finds no give in the jamb, reaches in his jacket and comes out with the steak knife from KGB.

Jae steps back, looks up. The alley slopes downward toward the L bend, three-story buildings at the high end, four-story at the bend. Even the upper-story windows are shuttered.

“We’ve been here for a while. Are we being watched?”

Skinner’s left hand moves, the knife rotates, finds a new comfortable place to fit, held like a chisel.

“Yes, we’re being watched.”

He sticks the blade into the slight crack between door and jamb, point just above the knob, angled, applies force, his weight bearing down, blade edging in another half centimeter, opens and closes his right hand, walking stick slipping down, stopping, brass knob twenty centimeters above his hand, raises it, and hammers on the hilt of the knife. Loud, echoing, three blows, and the wood splits, Skinner prying, resetting the knife tip, hammering twice more before pocketing the badly bent knife and applying the brass knob directly to the weakened doorknob, three more blows, louder, and it falls off with a clatter, Skinner stoops to pick it up, forces it back onto its stem, and pushes the door open, stepping in, looking back at her.

“Come inside where they can’t see us.”

She steps into the vestibule and he closes the door; crippled, it tries to swing back open, and he yanks it, grinding the twisted latch plate into the splintered jamb.

Jae is standing before an inner door. She looks at Skinner as he steps past her.

“Is there any way to do this quietly?”

Skinner puts his hand on the knob, turns it, and pushes the door open on well-oiled hinges.

“Yes.”

Short hallway, one door to the left, floor of hexagonal tiles, several missing, black spots marring the otherwise uniformly dingy ivory, a tight wind of stairs, twisting left and up and out of sight, black painted iron banister. No bulbs in the ornate ceiling fixtures.

Skinner raises his hand,
hang on.

“Which floor?”

Jae looks at the door just inside the hallway. Black letter,
C.

“Concierge? Ours is 2B. Europe. This is ground. Then one and then two. A and B. Top floor. Yes?”

He looks at the stairs.

“Yes.”

He doesn’t move.

Jae looks at the broken door behind them.

“Are we still being watched?”

He points at the door marked
C.

“That sounds empty. Sounds empty just above. Sounds not empty up top.”

Jae listens. Quiet of an old building. A creak. Pop of a wood joint expanding. Her own breathing. And, yes, mumble of voices, footsteps. Could be next door, upstairs, basement, she can’t tell.

“So no empty-room-mail-drop.”

She resettles her pack.

“Do we go up?”

Skinner touches his earlobe, not looking at her.

“Your contract is to find things. If you need to go up to fulfill your contract, we go.”

“And what about your contract?”

He stops touching his ear.

“My contract is to protect you. I’m certain I can do a better job of that by not going up there.”

She steps into the hallway.

“Let’s go.”

Skinner’s first step is never completed, becoming instead a pivot as the street door is opened behind them, squeal of protesting brass, Jae turning at the sound, seeing a man on the step outside, looking at the ruined knob that has come off in his hand. Skinner moves fast, very, between her and the man, but not before she sees his swollen red eyes, bent nose packed with wadded newspaper, oozing gash on his forehead. Though her first glimpse is brief and he’s been beaten, the twigs in his beard make him easy to recognize even as Skinner grabs him by the front of his jacket, pulls him into the vestibule, drags him through the inner door, turning him, tangling the shaft of the walking stick into his arms behind his back, forcing him to the floor, a handful of throat, silencing him, looking at Jae and tipping his forehead at the street door.

“Close that.”

She does, comes through the vestibule door and closes that, watching as Skinner puts his mouth close to Twig-Beard’s ear, eases his grip on the man’s throat, and asks his most pressing question.

“Do you have a gun?”

He doesn’t. The continuing lack of easily obtainable firearms in Sweden seeming to irritate Skinner in the same way that another American might be put out by the unavailability of his favorite candy bar.

“Polizei!”

The room holds Jae the moment they go through the door. Holds her so completely that even though she hears what Twig-Beard yells when Skinner pushes him ahead of them as a human shield, she doesn’t panic about the possibility that the room may very well be occupied by the kind of people who could be keeping some of Skinner’s elusive guns and be looking forward to an opportunity to shoot them at supposed police officers. Guns or no, shots are not fired. A teenage boy with a mohawk and ear piercings big enough to shove a thumb through rushes them, but he’s just trying to get past them and out the door. Something Skinner prevents by putting Twig-Beard in his way and letting them both fall down. Someone else, gender neutral hair, baggy jeans, and black t-shirt, seen only from behind, darts into a bathroom and locks the door. The others stay as they are, seated or standing, three of them. The many screens and radios in the room seize Jae’s attention, flicker and crackle.

Skinner looks at the darkened windows, shutters closed and locked; he peers down a short hall that opens on a bedroom with a couple of cots, stacks of flattened cardboard boxes, and heaps of styrofoam packing-geometrics. Two more windows, also shuttered. One exit, and they are standing in front of it.

He uses the knob of the walking stick to point at the nearest window.

“You should have planned an escape route.”

A very young man, probably no more than twenty-five (twenty-three? twenty?), with rich cocoa skin and thick black curls, stands, his traditional
bleu de travail
four-pocket work jacket worn a size too small, snug on the shoulders, short at the cuffs.

“We did not plan to run.”

Good English, French accent, touch of something North African, though he’s probably never seen the country his parents emigrated from.

He looks at the boy tangled with Twig-Beard on the floor, the closed and locked bathroom door.

“Until the time comes, then you find out who is a runner.”

He spits on the floor, the phlegm landing indeterminately between Skinner and the boy who ran, hard to say which of them it is for, possibly both.

Jae steps further into the room, eyes moving between the three flatscreens carrying news coverage of the WTO conference and protests. SVT public channel, TV4 commercial, and CNN. At least one of the nine active laptops and desktop monitors has an Al Jazeera feed, another showing something that looks Swedishly comparable to American public access, handheld, blurry, lots of shots of the camera operator’s feet. Other screens display the Google Maps of the protests and police responses that Jae had been looking at earlier, two large screens are filled with nothing but Twitter streams, packed side by side, stacked top to bottom, layered. Four Motorola two-way radios plugged into charging stations, liquid crystal screens glowing, add an air of cold war–era revolution that curiously suits the neighborhood. Smartphones have a table of their own, cabled to computers or to chargers plugged into power strips. Extension cords snake into the room from the hallway and from under the bathroom door, every effort made not to trip the circuit breakers or, more likely in a building this old, not to blow the fuses. Some of the phones are ringing and chiming. Each seems to have a distinct tone. A story to tell about who is calling or texting or emailing. A special section of BlackBerrys. Their encrypted data service having been field-tested by the looters in the London riots. A must-have for roving street battles.

Skinner puts a hand on Jae’s shoulder, but she shrugs it off.

“This is very helpful. Looking at this will be very helpful.”

She wants to take out her Toughbook and cable up, get online, let it be her roving eye. She wants the remotes for the three TVs, she wants to wallow in the data and see the configuration. But all she’s seeing is her mother’s face swollen by the bee sting.

She bends at the waist, hands on hips, and pukes on the floor.

The French boy puts his hands in the hip pockets of his blue worker’s jacket.

“You are not police?”

Skinner closes the door.

“No, we’re not.”

He points at an open case of Etrusca spring water under one of the folding tables.

“Please.”

The man who plucks a bottle from the case and offers it to Skinner is tall, looks to have been large once, but his bulk has melted away with the passing of years, skin hangs from him, sags, a deflated man-balloon with an internal superstructure keeping its hide upright. He is the only one of the protesters over thirty, and he may well be double that.

“Shpion?”

Russian.

Skinner takes the bottle.

“Lyudi, obychnye lyudi.”

The old man smiles, the front four bottom teeth are gone, all the others are the brown of aged scrimshaw. He waves his hand up and down as if patting the head of a small child,
Yes, tell me another one
.
Stepping back, leaning against the door frame that opens on the hallway, arms folded, waiting. He’s seen all this before.

Skinner hands the water bottle to Jae.

“Okay?”

She takes it and twists off the cap, a big rinsing mouthful that she spits behind her, the only discretion allowed with the bathroom occupied.

“Yeah, okay. Little overloaded. But okay.”

She takes a drink from the bottle, then points it at the protesters.

“What the fuck?”

Skinner nods.

“Yes.”

He looks down at Twig-Beard and the runaway boy, Mohawk. They’ve untangled their limbs and scooted themselves away from Skinner’s feet, half under the table that supports the cell phone collection and the three radios.

Twig-Beard is working one of the newsprint plugs from his right nostril.

“They follow us from lunch.”

His English is bad, war movie Nazi.

The paper plug comes free, unspooling, red and wet, a final tug and it drops to the floor, a little drizzle of blood follows it then stops.

“Riksbank, they tell cops we are coming. I was beaten!”

Jae twists the cap back onto her water bottle, tightens it with a violence that suggests the breaking of chicken necks.

“We left the restaurant before you. The cops were waiting.”

He shakes a finger at her.

“No! They knew! Yes! Knew we were coming! You! You tell them!”

“The cops knew you were coming because you tried to storm the fucking national bank during a week of WTO protests!”

The German rises a little, bangs his shoulder on the underside of the table.

“Ficken Scheisse!”

Skinner ignores him, looks at the boy with the mohawk. He has a tattoo high on his skinny shoulder, revealed by the tank top he’s wearing. Warm in the room with sealed windows, several bodies, monitors and computers pumping out heat. Tattoo comprised of the letters SUF, a thin red circle behind them, off center, partially obscured by the F.

“Anarchist?”

He nods, touches the tattoo.

“
Syndikalistiska Ungdomsförbundet.
”

Skinner gestures at the screens around them.

“Local coordinators? Your group?”

Mohawk shrugs.

“Some. Different groups.”

Heavy accent, not nearly as much school as the hotel staff, and a different nuance. Not from Stockholm, and not trying to sound as if he is.

Skinner nods. He looks at the Russian, blinks, looks at the man in the blue jacket, doesn’t blink, and looks at the last person in the room. Older than the boy in blue by several years, but still young, balding nonetheless, light brown skin, weathered, hard and compact, red t-shirt, round wire rim glasses, looking at the floor between his feet.

Skinner tips the knob on the end of his walking stick, a slight dip in the direction of the man in glasses, and he looks up.