Kowalski and the Suits stood in a circle around the table in the Mold Room looking at a severed head. This was the position Zoey had caught them in that first night, and she realized that she was now officially a member of their cult. Arthur’s chair at the end of the table still sat empty, and Zoey had actually considered making a big show of sitting in it, but the chair looked old, cracked, and farted-on. Instead, Zoey paced around the room, squeezing Stench Machine and trying not to look at the head, which had belonged to the man who had called himself The Hyena, among other things, but whose real name had been Lawrence Shandy.
Echo was hunched over a virtual keyboard that was projected onto the coffee cup–stained conference table, typing and pausing occasionally to swipe through menus from the coin’s embedded memory.
“There’s a mountain of data on here. It’s not just the gold hardware drivers, it’s everything. I’m seeing schematics for devices, implants, prototypes … it goes on and on. He saved it all.”
Zoey turned her attention to the wall monitor displaying the map of the city and its scatter of red dots. They had been joined by a single, moving green dot—Kevin’s Camaro, hopefully on its way to impress his idol with a fifteen-dollar souvenir Arthur had bought at a gift shop in the Incheon International Airport. Zoey had expected the green dot to steadily make a beeline toward Molech’s location, then felt like screaming when she saw the car stop, then lurch forward slowly, then stop again. She hadn’t anticipated traffic and intersections.
Zoey glanced back at Echo and said, “So you were Arthur’s computer genius?”
“Ah, no. I knew absolutely nothing about computers when Arthur brought me on. He hired me for a position that had no job description, I just taught myself on the fly because he kept calling me every time something broke.”
“Really? Your Blink highlight reel referred to you as a Chinese computer hacker. And sexy seductress.”
“Well, I’m Filipino, but whatever.”
Without turning away from the feed, Andre said, “Yeah and I’m the sexy seductress.”
“And your nickname is Black Mountain? Does everybody call you that?”
“No, and that’s kind of insulting in two distinct ways. Still kind of like it.”
“So are you saying Will’s nickname isn’t The Magician?”
Will said, “One time, I get caught on camera doing the one coin trick I know…”
Kowalski said, “They call me Supercock.”
Kowalski had been a vice squad detective with Tabula Ra$a police right up until the whole organization fell apart and all vices were effectively legalized. He was technically still TRPD, but hadn’t been paid in four months. Most of the rest of the cops had rented themselves out as private security to pay the bills, but Kowalski continued to show up to the precinct every day, taking money under the table to do favors for Livingston Enterprises. Meanwhile, he continued to work cases for free because, well, he liked it.
Zoey asked, “So … did the coroner have some reason for taking the guy’s head off, or…”
Kowalski said, “Nope. But they got a saw in there. Slices right through tendon and bone, I just lopped it off and walked out with it in a grocery bag. I wasn’t gonna drag this bastard’s whole corpse into my back seat.”
“And … that’s not going to cause any problems? It’s not, I don’t know, messing with evidence or something?”
“Evidence of what? Nobody is disputing the shooting, the guy’s own Blink got it all. And sure as hell nobody is debating whether this prolapse had it coming. The only ones who’d have a legitimate beef would be his family, if they wanted to throw him a funeral.” He shrugged. “If they call, we’ll duct tape it back on. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m gonna leave before you ask me to do something morally questionable.”
After he was out of earshot, Zoey asked Will, “How much do you trust that guy?”
“Enough.” He was watching an avalanche of indecipherable code cascade down the coin’s holographic display, “What are we looking at here?”
Echo muttered, “The work of a madman. This is software written in a computer language that Resnov invented from scratch, intended to manage hardware that he invented, all of it patched by Singh, who was learning it as he went. Some of the menus are in broken English, some are in some alien language that might be code, I don’t know.”
“If you had enough time with it, could you figure it out?”
“I don’t think God could figure out how it actually works. I’m just trying to figure out the commands to install it to the Raiden hardware. This menu had a picture of a stick figure man with an arrow pointing at it, so I hit it, and … it started uploading data. Now I guess we turn on this guy’s jaw implants and see if it … fails.”
“You mean explodes?” finished Zoey. “Do you mind if I wait outside?”
Will said, “He’s turning down Fairfax.”
Zoey looked up at the monitor, and soon the green dot slowed, then stopped, turning off the street into what must have been an alley or parking lot. Not far down the street were two dots, side by side.
Will said, “Is that the Fire and Ice?”
Echo glanced up from her work and said, “Yep.”
Andre muttered, “Son of a bitch.”
Zoey asked, “Where’s that?”
Budd said, “It’s a pair of buildings downtown, been closed for a couple years. It was called the Fire and Ice Casino. Twin towers, the Ice Palace and the Fire Palace, on opposite sides of Fairfax Avenue. Former covered in ice, latter done up to look like it was a volcano or somethin’. They both had rooftop pools, connected by a swim bridge that spanned the street, guests could drift back and forth. It closed down after the Fire Palace was gutted by a fire.”
Zoey said, “That’s ironic.”
Budd said, “It’s not irony when a poorly designed building covered in hundreds of decorative open flames ends up a towering inferno. And yeah, he’s walking toward the Fi—”
The severed head twitched, and everybody in the room jumped back at once. Its jaw opened, then closed, metal teeth clinking together loudly—a huge amount of force in the mechanism. Then the jaw clanked together again, and again, its slack lips opening and closing like some kind of macabre puppet.
Echo said, “Let’s, uh, take that out to the yard.”