Fifteen minutes later he was in front of her building on Fountain Avenue. Looking up. Fifth floor. 502.
The nodal point.
“You don’t want to talk about it?”
Laney looked up from his empty cup, meeting Blackwell’s eyes across the table. WUhi~im (Uk “I’ve never really told this to anyone,” he said, and it was true.
“Let’s walk,” Blackwell said, and stood, his hulk seeming to li’t effirtlessly, as though he were a heliLim Parade float. l.aney wondered what time it might be, here or in L.A. Yamazaki was taking care of the bill.
He left Amos ‘n’ Andes with them, out into a falling mist that wasn’t quite rain, the sidewalk a bobbing stream of black umbrellas. Yamazaki produced a black object no larger than a business card, slightly thicker, and flexed it sharply hetween his thumbs. A black umbrella flowered. Yamazaki handed it to him. The curve of the black handle felt dry and hollow and very slightly warm.
“How do you fold it?”
“You don’t,” Yamazaki said. “It goes away.” He opened another for himself. 1-lairless Blackwell, in his micropore, was evidently immune to rain. “Please continue with your account, Mr. Laney.”
Through a gap between two distant towers, Laney glimpsed the side of another, taller building. He saw vast faces there, vaguely familiar, contorted in inexplicable drama.
The nondisclosure agreement Laney had signed was intended to cover any incidences of Slitscan using its connections with DatAmerica in ways that might be construed as violations of the law. Such incidences, in Laney’s experience, were frequent to the point of being constant, at least at certain advanced levels of research. Since DatAmerica had been Laney’s previous employer, he hadn’t found any of this particularly startling. DatAmerica was less a power than a territory; in many ways it was a law unto itself.
Laney’s protracted survey of Alison Shires had already involved any number of crjmiI~a1 violations, one of which had provided him with the codes required to open the door into her building’s foyer, activate the elevator, unlock the door of her fifth-floor apartment, and
55 cancel the private security alarm that would automatically warrant an armed response if she did these things without keying in two extra digits. This last was intended as insurance against endemic home invasion, a crime in which residents were accosted in parking garages and induced to surrender their codes. Alison Shires’ code consisted of her month, date, and year of birth, something any security service strongly advised against. Her back-up code was 23, her age the year before, when she’d moved in and become a subscriber.
Laney softly reciting these as he stood before her building, its eight-story facade feinting toward someone’s idea of Tudor Revival. Everything looking so sharply and comprehensively detailed, in these first moments of an L.A. dawn.
23.
“So,” Blackwell supposed, “you just walked in. Punched up her codes and bang, there you were.” The three of them waiting to cross at an intersection.
-Bang.
No sound at all in the mirrored foyer. A sense of vacuum. A dozen Laneys reflected there as he crossed an expanse of new carpet. Into an elevator smelling of something floral, where he used part of the code again. It took him straight to five. The door slid open. More new carpet. Beneath a fresh coat of cream enamel the corridor’s walls displayed the faint irregularities of old-fashioned plaster.
502.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Laney asked aloud, though whether to himself or to Alison Shires he did not nor would he ever know.
The brass round of an antique security fish-eye regarded him from the door, partially occluded by a cataract of pale paint.
The key-pad was set flush with the door’s steel frame, not quite 56 NiHiarn Gбb~on level with the fish-eye. I-Ic watched his finger finding its way through the sequence.
23.
But Alison Shires, naked, opened the door before the code could key, Upful (iroupvine soaring joyfully behind her as Laney grabbed her blood-slick wrists. And saw there in her eyes what he took then and forever as a look of simple recognition, not even of blame.
“This isn’t working,” she said, as though she were indicating a minor appliance, and Laney heard himself whimper, a sound he hadn’t made since childhood. He needed to see those wrists, but couldn’t, holding her. He was walking her backward, toward a wicker armchair he wasn’t even aware he’d seen.