Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits (35 page)

“Then it's decided,” Zoey said. “Armando will put a gun to Molech's head and then we'll have leverage. Echo, turn Armando into Superman. And somebody turn off the head, it's freaking me out.”

Echo tapped at her tablet then said, “I'm … actually not sure how.”

“Then just throw a towel over it or something.”

Thirty minutes left. Echo was watching software stream into Armando's implants—Zoey thought she'd have to plug a cable into his head or something, but it was all done wirelessly.

Will said, “Molech demanded you meet his people in the lobby of Livingston Tower, with the gold in hand, and that you come alone. But I see no reason you can't bring your phone, so the plan stays the same—I do all the talking. Stalling is the name of the game. It doesn't matter where the conversation goes as long as it
goes.
Don't be alarmed by whatever I say. Ultimately the goal is to stall, to give Armando time to work.”

While he spoke, Zoey was chewing on her thumbnail and watching the feed of her mother. The car had parked somewhere in the woods, and Zoey's mother and her abductor were drinking beers and laughing, digging sandwiches out of fast-food bags. The guy had probably found her at the bar and offered a trunk full of free beer if she'd leave with him. It usually didn't take more than that to get on Melinda Ashe's good side. Zoey couldn't stop crying.

Will said, “Listen to me, Zoey. This here—this is what we did for your father. We identified and nullified threats, by whatever means necessary. We're old hats at this. There's a process, that's all. Any good plan is just a series of branching pathways, like a flowchart. We can't predict what Molech is going to do, but his options aren't infinite and we have to have a procedure in place regardless of which choice he makes. So no matter what I say, no matter what happens, we're winning as long as we keep him talking.
No matter what.
And if he thinks he's winning, so much the better. Understand?”

Zoey nodded.

Budd pointed at the feed and said, “I know who that is with Zoey's momma. See the cigarette pack on the dash? Guy's name is Kools Duncan. Real name is Charlie. Low-level rent-a-turd, got rough with one of Arthur's girls a few years back.”

Andre looked dubious. “He's the only guy in the world who smokes Kools?”

“See how he's dippin' his fries in his milkshake? Playin' Nina Simone on the stereo. Yeah, that's Kools. Gave himself that nickname. He's white, by the way.”

Andre squinted at the screen. “You think he went alone?”

“No way to know for sure, but I reckon so. Kools never did get along with partners. He once stabbed a fella over whose turn it was to drive. Kools says I want to drive and the other fella says sure and Kools stabbed him in the face.”

Will said to Zoey, “All right, we should get going. Just wear what you're wearing.
Don't
brush the cat hair off your shirt. And don't wash your face.”

“
Why?
”

“It's clear you've been crying, your makeup is a mess. Leave it like that, that's what we want. I'd have you bring the cat, too, but he's too difficult to control.”

“I'm going to have to ask you to elaborate.”

“This will be the opposite of how we did it at the memorial service—we want Molech to perceive a shift in power. We can't look like we have a plan here, the more vulnerable you look, the more receptive the other person is to what you have to say. They'll take any offer as genuine as long as they think it's coming from a place of weakness. And props are everything. For instance, if hypothetically you had grown mistrustful of Andre and he was trying to get back in your good graces, he might show up here looking hungover, eating some kind of ridiculous food. It would instantly endear you to him. Remember, the most powerful impression a person can make is that they don't care if they make an impression. And whoever we're meeting with needs to take one look at you and realize you're the weak link, that you can be pushed into accepting whatever they want.”

“Wow. All right.”

“Now, once we meet his people in the lobby, they'll presumably try to transport you to another location, though probably not back to the Fire Palace. We'll tail you wherever you go and, quite frankly, the farther away, the better—the time they spend driving you to wherever they want to meet is time for Armando to do his thing. Understand?”

“Just barely.”

To Armando he said, “How much time do you need?”

“The problem is Molech can't know I'm there until I'm in his face—the moment he knows I'm coming, he might panic and tell his man in Fort Drayton to … do something unpleasant.”

He tapped the wall feed and a photo popped into view. It was the Fire and Ice Casino, as the twin towers had looked when they were open. Zoe thought the Ice Palace was beautiful—it really did look like a fifty-story building carved out of ice, like something out of a fantasy novel. At the top was its rooftop pool, complete with water slides and faux icebergs, the crystal blue of the glass swim bridge snaking from its roof to the Fire Palace across the street. That building had been made up to look like a charred volcano in mid-eruption, with twisting paths of roaring flames undulating down from the roof to suggest oozing lava, its rooftop pool lit from the bottom with orange lights, so swimmers could pretend they were paddling around in magma. Armando tossed up a second photo next to it, an “after” pic of the buildings as they existed today—dormant, dark, each covered from the neck down in black tarps, like they were wearing frumpy mourning dresses. The swim bridge was an empty half-pipe of filthy glass, collecting rainwater and bird crap.

Armando said, “I think the Fire Palace is essentially impossible to infiltrate unnoticed. It has three times as many guards on the exterior, and there are vehicles entering and exiting every few minutes. The Ice Palace is our way in—the entrance is guarded, but the interior is nearly deserted. I'll go up through the Ice Palace, across the swim bridge, then down to the Fire Palace basement. If all goes well, I could make the whole trip in … twenty minutes.”

Wu said, “And where will I be?”

Zoey answered, “You'll be here, watching, and if I die you're to pack up my cat and get him to safety. And so help me god, if you laugh at me right now I will claw your eyes out.”

Wu did not laugh.

Echo said to Armando, “Your implants are online. I think. The progress bar stopped. There's a message here that looks like it's in Elvish but it's not blinking red or anything.”

Armando stood, and put on his jacket. Wu strode up behind him and held out a katana, handle-first.

“A gift, but only if you apologize for your previous mockery.”

Armando replied, “I would, but this blade looks exactly like the one we ruined last night. The one you said was an ancient one-of-a-kind relic. This makes me think that you have a barrel full of them that you buy in bulk from Costco.”

“No, this is my last one.
Maybe
I have one more somewhere.”

“All right,” said Will. “Let's start the game.”

 

THIRTY-EIGHT

Five minutes until Molech's deadline.

The obscenity that was Livingston Tower loomed over the sedan, having turned from flat black to beet red since Zoey had seen it last (apparently the memorial service marked the end of the mourning period). It was frosted by the artificial snow, making the whole thing look like a cherry Popsicle that had just come out of the freezer. Will and Zoey were alone in the car two blocks away, close enough to see yellow caution tape had been stretched across the main entrance.

Will said, “We had them close the building under the guise of a bomb threat. Since it's Sunday, our offices would have been closed anyway but there are five restaurants and three brothels up there, and that's their busiest day. We can't have people coming in and out, every random bystander adds another variable we can't control. Molech could take a hostage, or even worse, someone could decide to play hero.”

Zoey brought up a video feed on her phone, coming directly from Armando's glasses. At the moment he was on foot, a block away from his target. Through his eyes Zoey could see the derelict tower that had once been the Ice Palace hotel and casino, behind its faded black shroud. The view panned across the busy street, to the identical Fire Palace, the glass bridge undulating high overhead. Somewhere behind those walls, Zoey thought, was Molech. Hopefully.

The camera panned back to the Ice Palace and zoomed in toward the main entrance, which was being guarded by five shirtless men who were just barely pretending to be construction workers. And this, they had said, was the
least
guarded of the two towers.

Armando held out his hand, palm-up. Perched there was a black object that looked like a large insect—about the width of a half dollar. It whirred softly and levitated out of his hand, and buzzed off toward the derelict building.

Immediately the feed switched to the point of view of the tiny drone, bobbing through the air about ten feet above street level. It passed over the elaborate hats of three passing women in church clothes, then arrived at the Ice Palace and paused, hovering over the group of guards who were smoking and conversing in front of the entrance. Graphics flashed across the screen as it scanned the faces of the guards. Then one of the men turned to go inside and when he opened the door, the drone quickly ducked in.

The dimly lit lobby came into view, a vast expanse that apparently used to be the casino floor, before all of the slot machines and card tables had been ripped out. All that remained was a vast plain of stained carpet dotted with exposed electrical outlets. The drone performed some kind of scan of the room, a vertical blue line sweeping across the screen. It paused, as if doing some calculations, and then a series of floating red cone shapes appeared in various spots around the room. As the guard walked across the floor, one of the red cones moved with him, as if emanating from his eyes. Another came from a security camera on the wall.

Will said, “The drone is tracking the field of vision of every human and camera in the vicinity, in real time. So it can feed Armando the exact path of floor across which a person can pass unnoticed. He just has to avoid the red patches.”

Zoey said, “As long as he has quiet shoes. And doesn't smell.”

There was, however, no such path through the four remaining armed men gathered around the entrance. That was an entirely separate problem.

Zoey heard Armando say, “Go.”

At that moment, a low, flat black car with tinted windows rolled past the Ice Palace entrance. Its engine growled with a primal sound from another time: the menacing rumble of a massive internal combustion powerplant, sixteen cylinders igniting gasoline in a symphony of synchronized thunder. The heads of the four males guarding the doorway turned to see a Bugatti Chiron crawl past, a legendary dream machine that, even in a city packed with gaudy automobiles, could drop jaws from a block away. It pulled up to the hotel next door and rolled to a stop. It revved its engine, and the pavement trembled in fear.

The driver's-side door opened and a pair of bare legs swung out. A show-stopping blonde unfolded herself out of the car, an obscenely sheer red dress appearing to be her only item of clothing—it was either designed to give the illusion the wearer didn't have on any undergarments, or else it wasn't an illusion. The woman was Echo, under a blond wig and sunglasses, sucking on a lollipop.

Will said, “I want to just note that this was
her
idea.”

The plan had been for her to circle around the car and then bend over and look into the trunk, but it hadn't occurred to any of them that this car didn't in fact have a trunk. So Echo improvised and kind of just awkwardly leaned over the back as if to examine the engine, trying not to accidentally get too close to the manifolds and set her wig on fire.

On Armando's feed, the red cones representing the field of vision of all four guards swung in the Bugatti's direction, and locked in place. One of the men even got out his phone to take pictures. Armando, who was dressed in paint-splattered coveralls, simply walked up behind them and quietly slipped through the door.

He made his way inside to the empty husk that had once been the Ice Palace Casino, slipping between the red vision fields of two cameras, arriving near what had been the casino's restrooms once upon a time. He pressed his back against a doorframe and waited for a guard and his red cone to walk past, then quietly slipped into a nearby stairwell.

Zoey tapped her phone and flipped over to the feed from her mother's captor. The camera was advancing forward between pine trees to the soundtrack of shoes crunching through snow—the man and Zoey's mom taking a leisurely walk through the woods. Her mother probably thought she was having a pretty nice Sunday. Sunny winter day, pristine clumps of snow dangling off pine trees, friendly new stranger with a car full of alcohol. Her captor muttered something and she laughed.

Zoey's guts were in knots. She wished there was a bathroom nearby.

Will said, “Just breathe. Slow, even breaths, in for five seconds, out for five seconds. Breathe from your belly, like you're making an air baby. Keep going over the plan in your head.”

“I've completely forgotten the plan.”

Will didn't reply to that.

She glanced down at her mother's feed again, then said, “Are your parents still … around?”

Will hesitated. “Father is. In Virginia.”

“Your mother passed away I guess?”

“She killed herself when I was sixteen.”

“Oh. I'm sorry.”

She flipped back to Armando's feed. He was softly climbing the stairs, making painfully slow progress. Zoey noticed he had taken off his shoes. Still, one creaky floorboard and that would be that.