“Harwood front,” the Rooster says, “run through a shell corporation in Antigua-”
“Shut up,” and the Rooster does. “Between Nanofax AG of Geneva and the Lucky Dragon Corporation of Singapore. Lucky Dragon is a Harwood Levine client of course.
“Nanofax?”
“Everything the name implies,” says Klaus, “and considerably less.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nanofax AG offers a technology that digitally reproduces objects, physically, at a distance. Within certain rather large limitations, of course. A child’s doll, placed in a Lucky Dragon Nanofax unit in London, will be reproduced in the Lucky Dragon Nanofax unit in New York-”
“How?”
‘With assemblers, out of whatever’s available. But the system’s been placed under severe legal constraints. It can’t, for instance, reproduce functional hardware. And of course it can’t, most particularly can’t, reproduce functional nanoassemblers.”
“I thought that they’d proven that didn’t work anyway,” Laney says.
“Oh no,” says the Rooster, “they just don’t want it to.”
“They who?”
“Nation-states,” says the Rooster. “Remember them?” 196 RYDELL watched this man move ahead, in front of him, and felt something complicated, something he couldn’t get a handle on, but something that came through anyway, through the ache in his side, the pain that grated there if he stepped wrong. He’d always dreamed of a special kind of grace, Rydell: of just moving, moving right, without thinking of it. Alert, relaxed, there. And somehow he knew that that was what he was seeing now, what he was following: this guy who was maybe fifty, and who moved, though without seeming to think about it, in a way that kept him in every bit of available shadow. Upright in his long wool coat, hands in pockets, he just moved, and Rydell followed, in his pain and the clumsiness that induced, but also in the pain somehow of his adolescent heart, the boy in him having wanted all these years to be something like this man, whoever and whatever he was.
A killer, Rydell reminded himself, thinking of the weight lifter they’d left behind; Rydell knew that killing was not the explosive handshake exchange of movies, but a terrible dark marriage unto and perhaps (though he hoped not) even beyond the grave, as still his own dreams were sometimes visited by the shade of Kenneth Turvey, the only man he’d ever had to kill. Though he’d never doubted the need of killing Turvey, because Turvey had been demonstrating his seriousness with random shots through the door of a closet in which he’d locked his girlfriend’s children. Killing anyone was a terrible and permanent thing to enter into, Rydell believed, and he also knew that violent criminals, in real life, were about as romantic as a lapful of guts. Yet here he was, doing the best he could to keep up with this gray-haired man, who’d just killed someone in a manner Rydell would’ve been unable to specify, but silently and without raising a sweat; who’d just killed someone the way another man might change his shirt or open a bottle of beer. And something in Rydell yearned so to be that, that, feeling it now, he blushed.
The man stopped, in shadow, looking back. “How are you?” 196 48. IN THE MOMENT “Fine,” Rydell said, which was almost always what he said if any- one asked him that.
“You are not ‘fine.’You are injured. You may be bleeding internally.”
Rydell halted in front of him, hand pressed to his burning side. “What did you do to that guy?”
You couldn’t have said that the man smiled, but the creases in his cheeks seemed to deepen slightly. “I completed the movement he began when he struck you.”
“You stabbed him with something,” Rydell said.
“Yes. That was the most elegant conclusion, under the circumstances. His unusual center of gravity made it possible to sever the spinal cord without contacting the vertebrae themselves.” This in a tone that someone might use to describe the discovery of a new but convenient bus route.
“Show me.”
The man’s head moved, just a fraction. Some birdlike acuity. Light winked, reflected, in the round, gold-framed glasses. He reached into the open front of his long coat and produced, with a very peculiar and offhand grace, a blade curved, upswept, chisel-tipped. What they called a tanto, Rydell knew: the short version of one of those Japanese swords. The same light that had caught in the round lenses now snagged for an instant in a hair-fine line of rainbow along the curved edge and the angled tip, and then the man reversed the movement that had produced the knife. It vanished within the coat as though a segment of tape had been run backward.