COUNT ZERO by William Gibson

Behind his head, she saw the screen strobe itself into life, fill with Paco’s features. “Sefior is dead,” Paco said, his smooth face expression- less, “and his various interests are undergoing reorganization. In the interim, I am required in Stockholm. I am authorized to inform Marly Krushkhova that she is no longer in the employ of the late Josef Virek, nor is she an employee of his estate. Her salary in full is available at any branch of the Bank of France, upon submission of valid identification. The proper tax declarations are on file with the revenue authorities of France and Belgium. Lines of working credit have been invalidated. The former corporate cores of Tessier-Ashpool SA are the property of one of the late Herr Virek’s subsidiary entities, and anyone on the premises will be charged with trespass.” Jones was frozen there, his arm cocked, his hand tensed open to harden the striking edge of his palm. Paco vanished. “Are you going to hit me?” she asked. He relaxed his arm. “I was about to. Cold-cock you and stuff you into this bleeding suit . .” He started to laugh. “But I’m glad I don’t have to now . Here, look, it’s done a new one. The new box came tumbling out of the shifting flitter of arms. She caught it easily. The interior, behind the rectangle of glass, was smoothly lined with the sections of leather cut from her jacket. Seven numbered tabs of holofiche stood up from the box’s black leather floor like miniature tombstones. The crumpled wrap- per from a packet of Gauloise was mounted against black leather at the back, and beside it a black-striped gray match- book from a brasserie in Napoleon Court And that was all.

Later, as she was helping him hunt for Wigan Ludgate in the maze of corridors at the far end of the cores, he paused, gripping a welded handhold, and said, “You know, the queer thing about those boxes “Yes?” “Is that Wig got a damn good price on them, somewhere in New York. Money, I mean. But sometimes other things as well, things that came back up . . “What sort of things?” “Software, I guess it was. He’s a secretive old fuck when it comes to what he thinks his voices are telling him to do Once, it was something he swore was biosoft, that new

“What did he do with it?” “He’d download it all into the cores.” Jones shrugged “Did he keep it, then?” “No,” Jones said, “he’d just toss it into whatever pile of stuff we’d managed to scrounge for our next shipment out Just jacked it into the cores and then resold it for whatever he could get.” Do you know why? What it was about?” “No,” Jones said, losing interest in his story, “he’d just say that the Lord moved in strange ways ..” He shrugged “He said God likes to talk to Himself . .

HE HELPED BEAUvOIR carry Jackie out to the stage, where they lay her down in front of a cherry-red acoustic drum kit and covered her with an old black topcoat they found in the checkroom, with a velvet collar and years of dust on the shoulders, it had been hanging there so long. “Map f~ jubile mnan,” Beauvoir said, touching the dead girl’s forehead with his thumb. He looked up at Turner. “It is a self-sacrifice,” he translated, and then drew the black coat gently up, cover- ing her face. “It was fast,” Turner said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. Beauvoir took a pack of menthol cigarettes from a pocket in his gray robe and lit one with a gold Dunhill. He offered Turner the pack, but Turner shook his head. “There’s a saying in creole,” Beauvoir said “What’s that?” `Evil exists.’ “Hey,” said Bobby Newmark, dully, from where he crouched by the glass doors, eye to the edge of the curtain. “Musta worked, one way or another . . The Gothicks are starting to leave, looks like most of the Kasuals are already gone “That~s good,~~ Beauvoir said, gently. “That’s down to you. Count. You did good. Earned your handle.” Turner looked at the boy. He was still moving through the fog of Jackie’s death, he decided. He’d come out from under the trodes screaming, and Beauvoir had slapped him three times, hard, across the face, to stop it. But all he’d said to them, about his run, the run that had cost Jackie her life, was that he’d given Turner’s message to Jaylene Slide. Turner watched as Bobby got up stiffly and walked to the bar; he saw the care the boy took not to look at the stage. Had the two been lovers? Partners? Neither seemed likely. He got up from where he sat, on the edge of the stage, and went back into Jammer’s office, pausing to check on the sleeping Angie, who was curled into his gutted parka on the carpet, beneath a table. Jammer was asleep, too, in his chair, his burned hand still on his lap, loosely enveloped in the striped towel. Tough old mother, Turner thought, an old jockey. The man had plugged his phone back in as soon as Bobby had come off his run, but Conroy had never called back. He wouldnt now, and Turner knew that that meant that Jammer had been right about the speed with which Jaylene would strike, to revenge Ramirez, and that Conroy was al- most certainly dead. And now his hired army of suburban bighairs was decamping, according to Bobby Turner went to the phone and punched up the news recap, and settled into a chair to watch. A hydrofoil ferry had collided with a miniature submarine in Macau; the hydrofoil’s life jackets had proven to be substandard, and at least fifteen people were assumed drowned, while the sub, a pleasure craft registered in Dublin, had not yet been located. . . . Someone had apparently used a recoilless rifle to pump a barrage of incendiary shells into two floors of a Park Avenue co-op building, and Fire and Tactical teams were still on the scene; the names of the occupants had not yet been released, and so far no one had taken credit for the act. . . . (Turner punched this item up a second time . . ) Fission Authority research teams at the site of the alleged nuclear explosion in Arizona were insisting that minor levels of radioactivity detected there were far too low to be the result of any known form of tactical warhead. . . . In Stockholm, the death of Josef Virek, the enormously wealthy art patron had been announced, the announcement surfacing amid a flurry of bizarre rumors that Virek had been ill for decades and that his death was the result of some cataclysmic failure in the life-support systems in a heavily guarded private clinic in a Stockholm suburb. . . (`rurner punched this item past again, and then a third time, frowned, and then shrugged.) For the morning’s human inter- est note, police in a New Jersey suburb said that

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