Islands in the Net (12 page)

You could see right through them, even though they were opaque from outside. They could even be set to adjust for astigmatism or what have you.

They made custom-fitted foam earpieces for both of them. No problem there, that was old tech.

Chattahoochee Retreat had a telecom room that made the Galveston Lodge's look premillennial. They did a crash course in videoglass technique. Strictly hands-on, typical Rizome training. The two of them took turns wandering over the grounds, scanning things at random, refining their skills. A lot to look at: greenhouses, aquaculture ponds, peach orchards, windmills. A day-care crèche where a Retreat staffer was baby-sitting Loretta. Rizome had given the creche system a shot, years ago, but people hadn't liked it—too kibbutzish, never caught on.

The Retreat had been a working farm once, before single-cell protein came in and kicked the props out of agriculture. It was a bit Marie Antoinette now, like a lot of modern farms. Specialty crops, greenhouse stuff. A lot of that commercial greenhouse work was in the cities now, where the markets were.

Then they would go inside, and watch their tapes, and get vertigo. And then try it again, but with books balanced on their heads. And then take turns, one monitoring the screen and the other out walking and taking instruction and bitching cheerfully about how tough it was. It was good to be working at something. They felt more in control.

It was going to work, Laura decided. They were going to run a propaganda number on the Grenadians and let the Grenadians run a propaganda number on them, and that would be it. A risk, yes—but also the widest exposure they'd ever had within the company, and that meant plenty in itself. The Committee hadn't been crass enough to talk directly about reward, but they didn't have to; that wasn't how things were done in Rizome. It was all understood.

Dangerous, yes. But the bastards had shot up her house. She'd given up the illusion that anyplace would be truly safe anymore. She knew it wouldn't. Not until this was all over.

They had a two-hour layover in Havana. Laura fed the baby. David stretched out in his blue plastic seat, propping his sandaled feet one atop the other. Crude overhead speakers piped twinkling Russian pop music. No robot trolleys here—porters with handcarts, instead. Old janitors, too, who pushed brooms like they'd been born pushing them. In the next row of plastic seats, a bored Cuban kid dropped an empty soft-drink carton and stomped it. Laura watched dully as the mashed carton started to melt. “Let's get plastered,” David said suddenly.

“What?”

David tucked his videoglasses into the pocket of his suit, careful not to smudge the lenses. “I look at it this way. We're gonna be online the whole time in Grenada. No time to relax, no time for ourselves. But we got an eight-hour flight coming up. Eight hours in a goddamn airplane, right? That's free license to puke all over ourselves if we want. The stews'll take care of us. Let's get wasted.”

Laura examined her husband. His face looked brittle. She felt the same way. These last days had been hell. “Okay,” she said. David smiled.

He picked up the baby's tote and they trudged to the nearest duty-free shop, a little cubbyhole full of cheap straw hats and goofy-looking heads carved from coconuts. David bought a liter flask of brown Cuban rum. He paid with cash. The Committee had warned them against using plastic. Too easy to trace. Data havens were all over the electric money business.

The Cuban shopgirl kept the paper money in a locked drawer. David handed her a 100-ecu bill. She handed over his paper change with a sloe-eyed smile at David—she was dressed in red, chewing gum, and listening to samba music over headphones. Little hip-swaying motions. David said something witty in Spanish and she smiled at him.

The ground wouldn't settle under Laura's shoes. The ground in airports wasn't part of the world. It had its own logic—Airport Culture. Global islands in a net of airline flight paths. A nowhere node of sweat and jet lag with the smell of luggage.

They boarded their flight at Gate Diez-y-seis. Aero Cubana. Cheapest in the Caribbean, because the Cuban government was subsidizing flights. The Cubans were still touchy about their Cold War decades of enforced isolation.

David ordered Cokes whenever the stewardess came by and topped them off with deadly layers of pungent rum. Long flight to Grenada. Distances were huge out here. The Caribbean was flecked with cloud, far-down fractal wrinkles of greenish ocean surge. The stews showed a dubbed Russian film, some hot pop-music thing from Leningrad with lots of dance sequences, all hairdos and strobe lights. David watched it on headphones, humming and bouncing Loretta on his knee. Loretta was stupefied with travel—her eyes bulged and her sweet little face was blank as a kachina doll's.

The rum hit Laura like warm narcotic tar. The world became exotic. Businessmen in the aisles ahead had plugged their decks into the dataports overhead, next to the air vents. Cruising forty thousand feet over Caribbean nowhere, but still plugged into the Net. Fiber-optics dangled like intravenous drips.

Laura leaned her seat back and adjusted the blower to puff her face. Airsickness lurked down there somewhere below the alcoholic numbness. She sank into a stunned doze. She dreamed.… She was wearing one of those Aero Cubana stewardess outfits, nifty blue numbers, kind of paramilitary 1940s with chunky shoulders and a pleated skirt, hauling her trolley down the aisle. Giving everyone little plastic tumblers full of something … milk.… They were all reaching out demanding this milk with looks of parched desperation and pathetic gratitude. They were so glad she was there and really wanted her help—they knew she could make things better.… They all looked frightened, rubbing their sweating chests like something hurt there.…

A lurch woke her up. Night had fallen. David sat in a pool of light from the overhead, staring at his keyboard screen. For a moment Laura was totally disoriented, legs cramped, back aching, her cheek sticky with spit.… Someone, David probably, had put a blanket over her. “My Optimal Persona,” she muttered. The plane jumped three or four times.

“You awake?” David said, plucking out his Rizome earplug. “Hitting a little rough weather.”

“Yeah?”

“September in the Caribbean.” Hurricane season, she thought—he didn't have to say it. He checked his new, elaborate watchphone. “We're still an hour out.” On the screen, a Rizome associate in a cowboy hat gestured eloquently at the camera, a mountain range looming behind him. David froze the image with a keytouch.

“You're answering mail?”

“No, too drunk,” David said. “Just looking at it. This guy Anderson in Wyoming—he's a drip.” David winked the screen's image off. “There's all kinds of bullshit—oh, sorry, I mean
democratic input
—pilin' up for us in Atlanta. Just thought I'd get it down on disk before we leave the plane.”

Laura sat up scrunchily. “I'm glad you're here with me, David.”

He looked amused and touched. “Where else would I be?” He squeezed her hand.

The baby was asleep in the seat between them, in a collapsible bassinet of chromed wire and padded yellow synthetic. It looked like something a high-tech Alpine climber would haul oxygen in. Laura touched the baby's cheek. “She all right?”

“Sure. I fed her some rum, she'll be sleeping for hours.”

Laura stopped in mid-yawn. “You fed her—” He was kidding. “So you've come to that,” Laura said. “Doping our innocent child.” His joke had forced her awake. “Is there no limit? To your depravity?”

“All kinds of limits—while I'm online,” David said. “As we're about to be, for God knows how many days. Gonna cramp our style, babe.”

“Mmmm.” Laura touched her face, reminded. No video makeup. She hauled her cosmetics kit from the depths of her shoulder bag and stood up. “Gotta get our vid stuff on before we land.”

“Wanna try a quickie in the bathroom, standing up?”

“Probably bugged in there,” Laura said, half stumbling past him into the aisle.

He whispered up at her, holding her wrist. “They say Grenada has scuba diving, maybe we can mess around under water. Where no one can tape us.”

She stared down at his tousled head. “Did you drink all that rum?”

“No use wasting it,” he said.

“Oh, boy,” she said. She used the bathroom, dabbed on makeup before the harsh steel mirror. By the time she returned to her seat they were starting their descent.

4

A stewardess thanked them as they stepped over the threshold. Down the scruffy carpeted runway into Point Salines Airport. “Who's online?” Laura murmured.

[“Emily,”] came the voice in her earplug. [“Right with you.”] David stopped struggling with the baby's tote and reached up to adjust his volume. His eyes, like hers, hidden behind the gold-fretted videoshades. Laura felt nervously for her passport card, wondering what customs would be like. Airport hallway hung with dusty posters of white Grenadian beaches, ingratiating grinning locals in fashion colors ten years old, splashy holiday captions in Cyrillic and Japanese katakana.

A young, dark-skinned soldier leaned out from against the wall as they approached. “Webster party?”

“Yes?” Laura framed him with her videoglasses, then scanned him up and down. He wore a khaki shirt and trousers, a webbing belt with holstered gun, a starred beret, sunglasses after dark. Rolled-up sleeves revealed gleaming ebony biceps.

He fell into stride ahead of them, legs swinging in black lace-up combat boots. “This way.” They paced rapidly across the clearing area, heads down, ignored by a sprinkling of fatigue-glazed travelers. At customs their escort flashed an ID card and they breezed through without stopping.

“They be bringin' you luggage later,” the escort muttered. “Got a car waiting.” They ducked out a fire exit and down a flight of rusting stairs. For a brief blessed moment they touched actual soil, breathed actual air. Damp and dark; it had rained. The car was a white Hyundai Luxury Saloon with one-way mirrored windows. Its doors popped open as they approached.

Their escort slid into the front seat; Laura and David hustled in back with the baby. The doors thunked shut like armored tank hatches and the car slid into motion. Its suspension whirled them with oily ease across the pitted and weedy tarmac. Laura glanced back at the airport as they left—pools of light over a dozen pedicabs and rust-riddled manual taxis.

The saloon's frigid AC wrapped them in antiseptic chill. “Online, can you hear us in here?” Laura said.

[“A little image static, but audio's fine,”] Emily whispered. [“Nice car, eh?”]

“Yeah,” David said. Outside the airport grounds, they turned north onto a palm-bordered highway. David leaned forward toward their escort in the front seat. “Where we going,
amigo?
”

“Takin' you to a safehouse,” said their escort. He turned in his seat, throwing one elbow over the back. “Maybe ten mile. Sit back, relax, seen? Twiddle you big Yankee thumbs, try and look harmless.” He took off his dark glasses.

“Hey!” David said. “It's Sticky!”

Sticky smirked. “‘Captain Thompson' to you, Bwana.”

Sticky's skin was now much darker than it had been in Galveston. Some kind of skin dye, Laura thought. Disguise, maybe. It seemed best to say nothing about it. “I'm glad to see you safe,” she said. Sticky grunted.

“We never had a chance to tell you,” Laura said. “How sorry we are about Mr. Stubbs.”

“I was busy,” Sticky said. “Trackin' those boys from Singapore.” He stared into the lenses of Laura's glasses, visibly gathering himself up, talking through her to the Rizome videotapes spooling in Atlanta. “This, while our Rizome security still dancin' like a chicken with its head lick off, mind. The Singapore gang ran off first thing after the killing. So I track 'em in darkness. They run maybe half a mile south down the coast, then wade out to a smart yacht, waitin', so cozy, right offshore. A good-size ketch; two other men aboard. I get the registry number.” He snorted. “Rented by Mr. Lao Binh Huynh, a so-call ‘prominent Viet-American businessman,' live in Houston. Rich man this Huynh—run half a dozen groceries, a hotel, a truckin' business.”

[“Tell him we'll get right on that,”] Emily's whisper urged.

“We'll get right on that,” David said.

“You a little late, Bwana Dave. Mr. Huynh vanish some days back. Somebody snatch him out of his car.”

“Jesus,” David said.

Sticky stared moodily out the window. Rambling white-walled houses emerged from darkness in the Hyundai's headlights, the walls gleaming like shellac. A lone drunk scurried off the road when the car honked once, sharply. A deserted marketplace; tin roofs, bare flagpole, a colonial statue, bits of trampled straw basket. Four tethered goats—their eyes shone red in the headlights like something out of a nightmare. “None of that proves anything against the Singapore Bank,” Laura said.

Sticky was annoyed; his accent faltered. “What proof? You think we're planning to
sue
them? We're talking
war
!” He paused. “Too funny, Yankees asking for proof, these days! Somebody blow up your battleship
Maine
, seen—two months later wicked Uncle Sam invade Cuba. No proof at all.”

“Well, that goes to show you how we've learned our lesson,” David said mildly. “The invasion of Cuba, it failed really badly. Bay of Pork—Bay of Pigs, I mean. A big humiliation for imperial Yankeedom.”

Sticky looked at him with amazed contempt. “I'm talking eighteen ninety-eight, mon!”

David looked startled. “Eighteen ninety-eight? But that was the Stone Age.”

“We don't forget.” Sticky gazed out the window. “You in the capital now. Saint George.”

Multistory tenements, again with that strange plastic-looking whitewash sheen. Dim greenish bursts of foliage clustered the rising hillside, shaggy jagged-edged palms like dreadlocked Rasta heads. Satellite dishes and skeletal TV antennas ridged the tenement rooftops. Old dead dishes stood face-up on the trampled lawns—bird-baths? Laura wondered. “These are the government yards,” Sticky said. “Public housing.” He pointed away from the harbor, up the rising hillside. “That's Fort George on the hill—the prime minister live up there.”