Laney found his wallet, produced the blank card with the pencilled number. Blackwell took it. “Ta.” He stood up. “Shame to waste a good breakfast that way. Ring the hotel doctor from your room and get yourself sorted. Sleep. I’ll deal with this.” He tucked the card into the breast pocket of his aluminum jacket.
And as Blackwell left the room, Laney noticed, centered on the bodyguard’s squeegeed plate and standing upright on its broad flat head, a one-and-a-half-inch galvanized roofing-nail. 270 William Gibson U U U Laney’s ribs, an ugly patchwork of yellow, black, and blue, were sprayed with various cool liquids and tightly bound with micropore. He took the hypnotic the doctor had offered, showered at great length, climbed into bed, and was suggesting the light turn itself off when a fax was delivered.
It was addressed to C. LANEY, GUEST:
DAY MANAGER GAVE ME MY WALKING PAPERS. “FRATERNIZING.” ANYWAY, I’M SECURITY HERE AT THE LUCKY DRAGON,
MIDNITE ON, YOU CAN GET ME FAX, E-MAIL, PHONE’S BIZ
ONLY BUT THE PEOPLE ARE OKAY. HOPE YOU’RE OKAY. FEEL
RESPONSIBLE. HOPE YOU’RE ENJOYING JAPAN, WHATEVER.
RYDELL
“Good night,” Laney said, putting the fax on the bedside module, and fell instantly and very deeply asleep.
And stayed that way until Arleigh phoned from the lobby to suggest a drink. Nine in the evening, by the blue clock in the corner of the module-screen. Laney put on freshly ironed underwear and his other blue Malaysian button-down. He discovered that White Leather Tuxedo had sprung a few seams in his only jacket, but then the boss Russian, Starkov, hadn’t let the man come with them in the van, so Laney figured they were even.
Crossing the lobby, he encountered a frantic-looking Rice Daniels, so tense that he’d reverted to the black head-clamp of his Out of Control days. “Laney! Jesus! Have you seen Kathy?”
“No. I’ve been asleep.”
Daniels did a strange little jig of anxiety, rising on the toes of his brown calfskin loafers. “Look, this is too fiicking weird, but I swear- I think she’s been abducted.”
“1 lave you called the police?”
0
277 “We did, we did, but it’s all flicking Martian, all these forms they tick through on their notebooks, and what blood type was she. . . . You don’t know what blood type she is, do you, Laney?”
“Thin,” Laney said. “Sort of straw-colored.”
But Daniels didn’t seem to hear. He seized Laney’s shoulder and showed him teeth, a rictus intended somehow to indicate friendship. “I have real respect for you, man. How you don’t have any issues.”
Laney saw Arleigh wave to him from the entrance to the lounge. She was wearing something short and black.
“You take care, Rice.” Shaking the man’s cold hand. “She’ll turn up. I’m sure of it.”
And then he was walking toward Arleigh, smiling, and he saw that she was smiling back. 278 William Gibson Chia was on the bed, watching television. It made her feel more normal. It was like a drug, that way. She remembered how much television her mother had watched, after her father had left.
But this was Japanese television, where girls who could have been Mitsuko, only a little younger, wearing sailor-suit dresses, were spinning huge wooden tops at a long table. They could really spin them, too; keep them up forever. It was a contest. The console could translate, but it was even more relaxing not to know what they were saying. The most relaxing parts of all were the close-ups of the tops spinning.
She’d used the translation to check out the NHK coverage of the death hoax on the net and the candlelight vigil at the Hotel Di.
She’d seen a very satisfyingly pudgy Hiromi Ogama denying she knew who had nuked her chapter’s site and then issued the call to mourning from its ruins. It had not been a member of the club, Hiromi had stressed, either locally or internationally. Chia knew Hiromi was lying, because it had to have been Zona, but the Lo/Rez people would be telling her what to say. Arleigh had told Chia the whole thing had been launched out of a disused website that belonged to an aerospace company in Arizona. Which meant that Zona had blown her country, because now she wouldn’t be able to go back there. (Nice as Arleigh seemed to be, Chia hadn’t told her anything about Lona.)