Upgunned (10 page)

Elias stammered some excuse so he could run off to clean his butt, which left me and the woman named Char alone for a moment in the gallery.

“Sorry if we woke you up,” I said. “Elias had some proofs for me and I couldn't get away any earlier. Have to catch a plane.” I shrugged.

“I know what that's like,” she said, hunting around for—I guessed correctly—a cigarette. I lit one of mine and passed it over. Then she lighted on a leather sofa and tucked up her legs so I would not comment on her lack of undergarments. “Shoots can be murder.”

Ho, sister, if only you knew.

“Well, I also wanted to pay him for the print,” I said, my gaze finding the two pictures on the wall I'd liked.

“Oh? Which one?
Petroglyph?
” She seemed to scrutinize it for the first time. “It's not worth
that
much money.”

She had come in and spotted the cash on the table. Counted it.

Caution.

“No, this one,” I said, getting close enough to read the title. “
Targets #5.
”

Char rolled her slightly almond-shaped eyes. “
That's
worth even less. It's sexist crap.”

“Not to me,” I said smoothly. “It's the sexlessness of it that appeals to me. Look closer and you'll see that gender identity is left largely up to the viewer. No, really, I'm not kidding. It's the perfect answer to the sexlessness of advertising—the shaved pubes, the boy bodies. Most of the billboard people don't even have heads anymore.”

“That's because all the damned fashion designers are gay men.” She frowned. “They want the six-pack and the cut butt and no head to talk back to them.”

I stayed on the photo. “This says ‘to hell with all that.' In death, everybody is equal.”

She cocked her head, tossing down a wisp of hair so that a single eye reevaluated me. “I'm not quite ready to say you might have a point there. You used to work at Inkworks? Elias said you were an old compadre.”

“Yeah, for Boss Wiley, believe it or don't,” I said, once again thanking Mal Boyd's dossier.

“Yeah, he poured toner into the Photostat machine and Boss nearly decapitated him with a paper cutter blade,” said Elias, freshly emerged from his ablutions.

“I'd rather forget that dark day, thanks,” I said. Now we were collaborators. I had to think fast to catch Elias up on the falsified story. “I was just telling Char about how I overpaid you for
Targets #5
so you would think about running me an entire series for Hofmeister's gallery.”

Which gallery, I also knew about from Mal Boyd's dossier.

Elias blinked fast several times. “Uh, right.”

“You didn't say anything about a gallery show,” Char said. “Hof's gallery? Seriously? You mean—
without
Clavius's help?”

“Yeah. It's not cast in stone yet.” Elias nervously considered how compelling his own feet were.

“Anyway,” I cut in, “since I've kept you kids up and since I'm here right now, why don't I just take it with me?”

“What?” When he looked up I could see his eyes. There must have been some very entertaining chemicals in that bathroom.

“
Targets #5,
Elias,” I said with a hint of happy. “That picture. Right there. That you sold to me. So it's mine now. Correct?”

He smacked his head. “Ah! Sorry! Right. Sure … you need it wrapped up or—?”

“No, it's under glass; it's fine.”

Elias actually handed me the framed artwork off the wall. Oddly, it made up for the extra money I'd had to waste tonight. He seemed tormented enough for one workday, and I speculated that Char's easy manner would evanesce as soon as I was out the door. These two were going to have a fight. You could feel it in the ozone.

I made a little thumb-and-forefinger gunpoint at him when I bid my farewells. “Remember,” I said.

“Copy,” he said, and I found that surprisingly apt.

*   *   *

Cognac was asleep when I arrived at the Beverly Hilton just before dawn. I left her that way and consumed a gigantic breakfast with plenty of stout and whimsically stray shots of white rum. Then I awoke Cognac just in time to inform her she could sleep in, since I was buying her for the entire following day. Some of the things we did ought not to be recorded.

I thought a lot about recorded data in the next few weeks, when I wasn't sneaking in and out of hospitals. That part came soon enough.

There was a remarkable tension-release flow to the sort of work I do. Sometimes the setup involved weeks, months of prep, playing roles and living in assumed skins; other times the action was fast and fatal. There was no artificial high quite like this sensation, and once the mission was closed, release flooded every nerve ending. This required the discipline of learning to eat stress the way ordinary people crave love. It was almost a regressive state, taking me and people similar to me back to jungle law, to sleep when tired, eat when hungry or instead of being eaten—raw Darwinism with a dash of Nietzsche. It put me beyond the clock of regular citizens and out of reach of their law enforcement. Planning stages were so comprehensive that police interference was always accounted for and factored in, so officers of the normal-world law represented mild deterrent potential at best. Hell, half the time I worked for some shadow-ops government agency that guaranteed my immunity as a deal point—I could always escape custody with a single phone call. A fifty-two card deck of alternate identities didn't hurt, either. Nor did secure drops, safe houses or the finest modern weaponry military and black market subcontractors could provide. Tax free.

I had just pulled off the subterranean equivalent of winning the lottery. A sealed and delivered deal had taken the worst turn imaginable, and instead of folding, my team and I rebounded with solid improvisation. Money was always more fun when you feel you have actually earned it. For “money,” substitute “all the things you desire” if you're not a complete capitalist.

About ten o'clock that evening I got a secure cell message that three tailored suits were ready for my pick up. Bad timing; I did not know whether Cognac would elect to stay past midnight.

When I arrived at Mal Boyd's aerie, I found him ashen. Not eating.

“We're severely compromised, dear boy,” he said. “Your face and crimes are all over the Internet.”

 

PART THREE

ELIAS

Char left me without even a contact number. If I had been paying closer attention, I would have seen she had been moving her stuff out for weeks, piecemeal, in increments too small to be remarked.

Yes, you could say I had been distracted.

Gun Guy had labeled me a pornographer. That was conditionally true. Most of my catch for the past year had come from shooting fashion spreads instead of nurturing my own tentative idea of art. There's a reason they're called “spreads” and they're generally more obscene than anything featuring split beaver or pink-think or the anal avenging found in the newsstand sections you always pretend to avoid.

We've all become street whores for the fashion industry. It barks trends and we lie back and spread our billfolds, queuing up in a desperate grab for this season's insane idea of faux class. Wander over into that
other
section of the magazine racks, you know the one I mean. Where the bedsheet-sized glossies beckon with empty promises of style and cool. Where they'll teasingly tell you about this season's ten essential must-have accessories, or how howlingly ridiculous parkas are the in thing, why
all
the hoi polloi are wearing them this week.

It makes celebrities of people who have never accomplished anything apart from being celebrities, and offers them to you for worship. You already know the brand names and labels and their snakepit pecking order, because you still believe you can buy pedigree for the cost of a stupid magazine.

It's not your fault you're such a sucker for this garbage; hell, we've
all
been conditioned … or I never would have let Nasja delve my crotch after that last shoot. There are some kinds of candy that don't permit the word
no.

Insiders would attempt to dazzle you with a fireworks display of dropped names, feeding your mad lust for dirt, the real scoop, the hot gossip. Or they'd blind you with the glare of trivia; the chewy argot and insider jargon of the mavens of high style.

Your lust object has butt implants, a face full of botulism, a vaginal tuck, a penile implant, fake pecs, surgically mutilated eyes, a decalcifying skeleton, two or three serious drug monkeys, a coyote's sense of entitlement, a head full of bees, and is so utterly devoid of human emotion he or she might as well be from another galaxy.

But now, used, scared, and abandoned, having filled my pants like a toddler and quaked like a sissy, minus a picture on my wall that I really liked and was compelled to give away to avoid being handily murdered, you may forgive my abrupt and uncharacteristic introspection.

Listen to me: It's not the Year of Gloss. Buzz can eat you alive. You don't care about the A-list party animals or Fashion's Best Catfights, or which supermodels are courting which labels. The Foot is not the New Face; trust me. It doesn't matter what look is the talk of the runways, or how some daring doyenne turned a gallery opening into an all-night bacchanal.

There are other things going on besides the political peccadilloes, breathless soap opera, and empty calories fed us all by a world where advertising has gone berserk. Remember that the next time you find yourself tempted by a logo.

Right now I knew what I wanted more than anything was to kick that whole steroidal designer monster in its warty asshole as far as my boot would sink. Or at least give it a good poke in the eye. It had made me a slave. It took Char from me. It showed me what a naked coward I truly was.

There was a whole other universe out there where Gun Guy operated, invisible in plain sight. That was the fulcrum of genuine power.

And I wasn't a part of it until that night.

Thanks to the speed from my medicine cabinet, I couldn't slip into bed on the far side of the no man's land across from Char. So I dumped more tequila down my neck and replayed Nasja's “erased” spycam tape.

At about the fifty-minute mark, it showed me and Gun Guy entering the loft. The audio was crisp:

Is that the bitch from before
?

No.

Then hop-to, and let's try not to wake her up. You don't want her to wind up in a can of cat food like your buddy Dominic Sharps … do you
?

I've never swooned before and don't know how it feels. Probably something like what was jacking my metabolism now, punching my heart, husking my breath, making the room swim as dust motes in the air ballooned to the size of asteroids.

Then I remembered I had purposefully used the Clavius paper to run the prints for Gun Guy, in my own covert attempt at rebellion.

The Clavius paper is thick archival bond with a hidden watermark asserting copyright, about which Clavius has always been dictatorial. If you were to digitally scan the photo—say, for illicit reproduction—a huge diagonal bar appears across the image face advising you not to do that. Neue Helvetica type across the bottom edge of the bar provides a Web site address where Clavius blogs about twice a year. Its main function is to employ a platoon of nitpicky workers who keep constant watch for violations of intellectual property rights as detailed in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Plagiarisms. Unauthorized usages or postings. Anything actionable.

He won a whale-choking settlement from Google just last year as the distribution apparatus for “free first looks” at items that were not free. Clavius had enough of a war chest to paper
them
out, and the details of the accord were sealed under a strict gag order. It was a very large numeral, following a dollar sign.

As a result, Clavius found himself in the unelected position of a popular media figure with a boner for creative rights, which is a rarity on the order of finding a still-breathing Tasmanian wolf raiding your larder's stash of sorbet. Daily hits skyrocketed. His Web site was much-followed and often-commented upon.

So I uploaded the video to it, without fanfare, in the M
EMBERS
section.

The only reason I had thought of this was because Gun Guy had kicked such a stink about the photos not being digital manipulations. What he was really talking about—although he didn't know it—was presenting pictures that could stand up to forensics on the fractal level.

The Clavius watermark on the paper would autoreference any Internet upload on prohibited material, including the photos I had shot. To this red flag system I added a footnote, which could be done using an access code and a phone, as long as the message was fewer than 140 characters. I sheltered it using a “dead pixel” protocol so that it would not appear unless those specific photos were uploaded. This was possible because every single piece of Clavius paper has its own registry number; you just entered the appropriate numbers.

SHARPS SEX PHOTOS A COMPLETE FRAUD

BY BLACKMAILERS RED FLAG REPS

FOR DETAILS AND EVIDENCE

If the machinations stayed underground, no worries. But if they came anywhere near the Internet … fireworks. And my ass was covered. Without the photos, the video would mean nothing to the average Web surfer.

This kind of control was made possible by the world-girding monoliths that really control the airflow of digital information, like a slipknot around your throat and mine. It is an ongoing global contraction of ultimate domain. The more devices you have connected to satellites, the more freedom you've already lost, not to mention privacy. Sign up, log in, don't forget your password, and they've got you by the guts. And most people don't mind at all. Why should a budget be wasted on intelligence when the subjects willingly spy on themselves? Convenience is king, and if you're not willing to live a full-disclosure life 24/7, then you must be hiding something.