He clicked back, through points of recession, trying for a wider view, a sense of form, -but there were only walls, bulking masses of meticulously arranged information, and he remembered Alison Shires and his apprehension of het data-death.
“The lights are on,” Laney said, removing the eyephones, “but there’s nobody home.” He checked the computer’s clock: he’d spent a little over twenty minutes in there.
Blackwell regarded him dourly, settled on an injection-molded crate like a black-draped Buddha, the scars in his eyebrows knitted into new configurations of concern. The three technicians looked carefully blank, hands in the pockets of their matching jackets.
“How’s that, rheni” Blackwell asked.
“I’m not sure,” Laney said. ‘He doesn’t seem to do anything.” “He doesn’t bloody do anything but do things,” Blackwell declared, “as you’d know if you were orchestrating his bloody security!”
“Okay,” Laney said, “then where’d he have breakfast?” Blackwell looked uncomfortable. “In his suite.”
“His suite where?’
“Imperial Hotel.” Blackwell glared at the technicians. “Which empire, exactly?”
“Here. Bloody Tokyo”
“Here? He’s in Tokyo?”
“You lot,” Blackwell said, “outside,’ The brown-haired woman shrugged, inside her nylon jacket, and went kicking through the Styrofoam, head down, the other two following in her wake. When the tarp dropped behind them, Blackwell rose from his crate. “Don’t think you can try me on for size.
“l’m telling you that I don’t think this is going to work. Your man isn’t in there.”
‘~That’s his bloody life.” “How did he pay for his breakfast?”
“Signed to the suite.”
“Is the suite in his name?”
“Of course not.”
“Say he needs to buy something, during the course of the day?”
“Someone buys it for him, don’t they?”
“And pays with?”
“A card,” “But not in his name.”
“Right.”
“So if anyone were looking at the transaction data, there’d be no way to connect it directly to him, would there?”
“No.”
“Because you’re doing your job, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then he’s invisible. To me. I can’t see him. He isn’t there. I can’t do what you want to pay me to do. It’s impossible.” 118 William Gihsoo “But what about all the rest of it?”
Laney put the eyephones down on the keyboard “That isn’t a person. That’s a corporation.”
“But you’ve got it all! His bloody houses! His fiats! Where the gardeners put the bloody flowers in the rock wall! All of it!”
“But I don’t know who he is. I can’t make him out against the rest of it, He’s not leaving the traces that make the patterns I need.”
Blackwell sucked in his upper lip and kept it there. Laney heard the dislodged prosthesis click against his teeth.
“I have to get some idea of who he really is,” Laney said.
The lip re-emerged, damp and gleaming. “Christ,” Blackwell said, “that~r a poser.”
“I have to meet him.”
Blackwell wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “His music, then?” He raised his eyebrows hopefully. “Or there’s video-”
“I’ve got video, thanks. It really might help if I could meet him.”
Blackwell touched his ear-stump. “You meet him, you think you’ll be able to get his nodes, nodal, do that thing Yama’s on about?”
“I don’t know,” Laney said. “I can try.”
“Bloody hell,” Blackwell said. He plowed through the Styrofoam, swept the tarp aside with his arm, barked for the waiting technicians, then turned back to Laney. “Sometimes I’d as soon be back with my mates in Jika Jika. Get things sorted, in there, they’d bloody stay that way.” The woman with the brown bangs thrust her head in, past the edge of the tarp. “Collect this business in the van,” Blackwell told her. “Have it ready to use when we need it.”
“We don’t have a van, Keithy,” the woman said.
“Buy one,” Blackwell said. 18. The Otaku Something rectangular, yielding to the hrst touch but hard inside, as she tugged it free. Wrapped in a blue and yellow plastic bag from the SeaTac duty-free, crookedly sealed with wrinkled lengths of slick brown tape. Heavy. Compact.
“Hello.”
Chia very nearly falling backward, where she crouched above her open bag, at the voice and the sight of this boy, who in that first instant she takes to be an older girl, side-parted hair falling past her shoulders.