Mona Lisa Overdrive (28 page)

Nothing happened.

Then the other three were racing frantically for the stairs at the far end of the
tunnel, their high-laced black boots slipping in melted snow, their long coats flapping
like wings. A woman screamed.

And still they were frozen there, Kumiko and the
Dracula, the muzzle of the pistol pressed against his left cheekbone. Kumiko’s arms
began to tremble.

She was looking into the Dracula’s eyes, brown eyes gone wide with an ancient simple
terror; the Dracula was seeing her mother’s mask. Something struck the concrete at
her feet: Colin’s unit.

“Run,” she said. The Dracula convulsed, opened his mouth, made a strangled, sobbing
sound, and twisted away from the gun.

Kumiko looked down and saw the Maas-Neotek unit in a puddle of gray slush. Beside
it lay the clean silver rectangle of a single-edged industrial razorblade. When she
picked up the unit, she saw that its case was cracked. She shook moisture from the
crack and squeezed it hard in her hand. The tunnel was deserted now. Colin wasn’t
there. Swain’s Walther air pistol was huge and heavy in her other hand.

She stepped to a rectangular receptacle fastened to the tile wall and tucked the gun
down between a grease-flecked foam food container and a neatly folded sheaf of newsfax.
Turned away, then turned back for the fax.

Up the stairs.

Someone pointed at her, on the platform, but the train roared in with its antique
clatter and then the doors slid shut behind her.

She did as Colin had instructed, White City and Shepherd’s Bush, Holland Park, raising
the fax as the train slowed for Notting Hill—the King, who was very old, was dying—and
keeping it there through Bond Street. The station at Oxford Circus was very busy and
she was grateful for the sheltering crowd.

Colin had said that it was possible to leave the station without paying. After some
consideration, she decided that this was true, though it required speed and timing.
Really, there was no other way; her purse, with the
MitsuBank chip and her few English coins, had gone with the Jack Draculas. She spent
ten minutes watching passengers surrender their yellow plastic tickets to the automated
turnstyles, took a deep breath, and ran. Up, over, behind her a shout and a loud laugh,
and then she was running again.

When she reached the doors at the top of the stairs, she saw Brixton Road waiting
like a tatty Shinjuku, jammed with steaming foodstalls.

She was waiting in a car and she didn’t like it. She didn’t like waiting anyway, but
the wiz she’d done made it really hard. She had to keep reminding herself not to grit
her teeth, because whatever Gerald had done to them, they were still sore. She was
sore all over, now that she thought about it. Probably the wiz hadn’t been such a
great idea.

The car belonged to the woman, the one Gerald called Molly. Some kind of regular gray
Japanese car like a suit would have, nice enough but nothing you’d notice. It had
that new smell inside and it was fast when they got out of Baltimore. It had a computer
but the woman drove it herself, all the way back to the Sprawl, and now it was parked
on the roof of a twenty-level lot that must be close to the hotel where Prior had
taken her, because she could see that crazy building, the one with the waterfall,
fixed up like a mountain.

There weren’t many other cars up here, and the ones that were were humped over with
snow, like they hadn’t moved in a long time. Except for the two guys in the booth
where you drove in, there didn’t seem to be anybody
around at all. Here she was, in the middle of all those people, the biggest city in
the world, and she was alone in the backseat of a car. Told to wait.

The woman hadn’t said much when they’d come from Baltimore, just asked a question
now and then, but the wiz had made it hard for Mona not to talk. She’d talked about
Cleveland and Florida and Eddy and Prior.

Then they’d driven up here and parked.

So this Molly’d been gone at least an hour now, maybe longer. She’d taken a suitcase
with her. The only thing Mona’d been able to get out of her was that she’d known Gerald
a long time, and Prior hadn’t known that.

It was getting cold in the car again, so Mona climbed into the front seat and turned
on the heater. She couldn’t just leave it on low, because it might run the battery
down, and Molly’d said if that happened, they were really in the shit. “ ’Cause when
I come back, we leave in a hurry.” Then she’d shown Mona where there was a sleeping
bag under the driver’s seat.

She set the heater on high and held her hands in front of the vent. Then she fiddled
with the little vid studs beside the dash monitor and got a news show. The King of
England was sick; he was really old. There was a new disease in Singapore; it hadn’t
killed anybody yet, but nobody knew how you got it or how to cure it. Some people
thought there was some kind of big fight going on in Japan, two different bunches
of Yakuza guys trying to kill each other, but nobody really knew; Yakuza—that was
something Eddy liked to bullshit about. Then these doors popped open and Angie came
through on the arm of this amazing black guy, and the vid voice was saying this was
live, she’d just arrived in the Sprawl after a brief vacation at her house in Malibu,
following treatment at a private drug clinic.…

Angie looked just great in this big fur, but then the segment was over.

Mona remembered what Gerald had done; she touched her face.

She shut off the vid, then the heater, and got into the backseat again. Used the corner
of the sleeping bag to clean her condensed breath off the window. She looked up at
the mountainside-building, all lit up, past the sagging chainlink at the edge of the
carlot’s roof. Like a whole country up there, maybe Colorado or something, like the
stim where Angie went to Aspen and met this boy, only Robin turned up like he almost
always did.

But what she didn’t understand was this clinic stuff, how that barman had said Angie’d
gone there because she was wired on something, and now she’d just heard the news guy
say it too, so she guessed it had to be true. But why would anybody like Angie, with
a life like that and Robin Lanier for a boyfriend, want to do drugs?

Mona shook her head, looking out at that building, glad she wasn’t hooked on anything.

She must’ve drifted off for a minute, thinking about Lanette, because when she looked
again, there was a copter, a big one, glittery black, poised above the mountain-building.
It looked good, real big-town.

She’d known some rough women in Cleveland, girls nobody messed with, but this Molly
was something else—remembering Prior coming through that door, remembering him screaming.…
She wondered what it was he’d finally admitted, because she’d heard him talking, and
Molly hadn’t hurt him anymore. They’d left him strapped in that chair and Mona had
asked Molly if she thought he’d get loose. Either that, Molly had said, or somebody
finds him, or he dehydrates.

The copter settled, vanished. Big one, the kind with the whirly thing at both ends.

So here she was, waiting, no fucking idea what else to do.

Something Lanette had taught her, sometimes you had to list your assets—assets were
what you had going for
you—and just forget the other stuff. Okay. She was out of Florida. She was in Manhattan.
She looked like Angie.… That one stopped her. Was that an asset? Okay—putting it another
way—she’d just had a fortune in free cosmetic surgery and she had
totally perfect teeth
. Anyway, look at it that way and it wasn’t so bad. Think about the flies in the squat.
Yeah. If she spent the money she had left on a haircut and some makeup, she could
come up with something that didn’t look all that much like Angie, which was probably
a good idea, because what if somebody was looking for her?

There went the copter again, lifting off.

Hey.

Maybe two blocks away and fifty stories higher, the thing’s nose swung toward her,
dipped.…
It’s the wiz
. Sort of wobbled there, then it was coming down.…
Wiz; it’s not real
. Straight down toward her. It just got bigger. Toward her.
But it’s the wiz, right?
Then it was gone, behind another building, and it was just the wiz.…

It swung around a corner, still five stories above the roof of the carlot, and it
was still coming down and it
wasn’t
the wiz, it was
on
her, a tight white beam stabbing out to find the gray car, and Mona popped the door
lock and rolled out into the snow, still in the car’s shadow, all around her the thunder
of the thing’s blades, its engines; Prior or whoever he worked for and they were after
her. Then the spotlight went out, blades changed pitch, and it came down fast, too
fast. Bounced on its landing gear. Slammed down again, engines dying, coughing blue
flame.

Mona was on her hands and knees by the car’s rear bumper. Slipped when she tried to
get to her feet.

There was a sound like a gunshot; a square section of the copter’s skin blew out and
skidded across the lot’s salt-stained concrete; a bright orange five-meter emergency
exit slide popped out, inflating like a kid’s beachtoy. Mona got up more carefully,
holding on to the gray car’s fender. A dark, bundled figure swung its legs out over
the
slide and went down, sitting up, just like a kid at a playground. Another figure followed,
this one padded in a huge hooded jacket the same color as the slide.

Mona shivered as the one in orange led the other toward her across the roof, away
from the black copter. It was … But it
was
!

“Want you both in back,” Molly said, opening the door on the driver’s side.

“It’s you,” Mona managed, to the most famous face in the world.

“Yes,” Angie said, her eyes on Mona’s face, “it … seems to be.…”

“Come on,” Molly said, her hand on the star’s shoulder. “Get in. Your Martian spade’ll
be waking up already.” She glanced back at the helicopter. It looked like a big toy
sitting there, no lights, like a giant kid had put it down and forgotten it.

“He’d better be,” Angie said, climbing into the back of the car.

“You too, hon,” Molly said, pushing Mona toward the open door.

“But … I mean …”

“Move!”

Mona climbed in, smelling Angie’s perfume, wrist brushing the supernatural softness
of that big fur. “I saw you,” she heard herself say. “On the vid.”

Angie didn’t say anything.

Molly slid into the driver’s seat, yanked the door shut, and started the engine. The
orange hood was snugged up tight, her face a white mask with blank silver eyes. Then
they were rolling toward the sheltered ramp, swinging into the first curve. Down five
levels like that, in a tight spiral, and Molly swung them off into aisles of larger
vehicles under dim green diagonals of light-strip.

“Parafoils,” Molly said. “You ever see any parafoil gear, up the Envoy?”

“No,” Angie said.

“If Net security has any, they could be upstairs already.…” She swung the car in behind
a big long boxy hover, a white one with a name painted across the rear doors in square
blue letters.

“What’s it say?” Mona asked, then felt herself blush.

“Cathode Cathay,” Angie said.

Mona thought she’d heard that name before.

Molly was out there opening those big doors. Pulling down these yellow plastic ramp
things.

Then she was back in the car. Reversed, put it in drive, and they rolled right up
into the hover. She stripped back the orange hood and shook her head to free her hair.
“Mona, you think you can get out there and shove those ramps back in? They aren’t
heavy.” It didn’t sound like a question.

They weren’t heavy. She pulled herself up behind the car and helped Molly pull the
doors shut.

She could feel Angie there in the dark.

It was really Angie.

“Up front, strap in, hold on.”

Angie. She was sitting right beside Angie.

There was a whoosh as Molly filled the hover’s bags; then they were skimming down
the spiral ramp.

“Your friend,” Molly said, “he’s awake by now, but he can’t really move yet. Another
fifteen minutes.” She swung off the ramp again and this time Mona had lost track of
the levels. This one was packed with fancy cars, little ones. The hover roared along
a central aisle, swung left.

“You’ll be lucky if he isn’t waiting for us outside,” Angie said.

Molly brought them to a halt ten meters from a big metal door painted with diagonal
stripes, yellow and black.

“No,” Molly said, taking a little blue box from the dash compartment, “
he’s
lucky if he’s
not
waiting outside.” The door blew out of its frame with an orange flash and a sound
that slammed into Mona’s diaphragm like a solid
blow. It crashed into the wet street in a cloud of smoke and then they were over it,
turning, the hover accelerating.

“This is awfully crude, isn’t it?” Angie said, and actually laughed.

“I know,” Molly said, intent on her driving. “Sometimes that’s just the way to go.
Mona, tell her about Prior. Prior and your boyfriend. What you told me.”

Mona hadn’t ever felt so shy in her life.

“Please,” Angie said, “tell me. Mona.”

Just like that. Her name. Angie Mitchell had actually said
her
name. To her. Right there.

It made her want to faint.

“You seem lost,” the noodle seller said, in Japanese. Kumiko guessed that he was Korean.
Her father had associates who were Korean; they were in the construction business,
her mother had said. They tended, like this one, to be large men, very nearly as large
as Petal, with broad, serious faces. “You look very cold.”

“I’m looking for someone,” she said. “He lives in Margate Road.”

“Where is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come inside,” the noodle man said, gesturing Kumiko around the end of his counter.
His stall was made of pink corrugated plastic.