Vast and sheer, the glass facades of downtown’s canyons, reflecting the blue of the evening, enclosing him like a trap.
Kern cringes as drones whip by overhead. Glimpses of men in suits seen through windows, a doorman standing before a gilded multistory mural of the hills. He has the sense that life is flowing out of the city, leaving it to its essential dull hardness. His reflection in the glass wall of a darkened lobby is a stranger staring back at him. “Relax,” says the ghost. “You look like you’re waiting to be arrested.”
The bank doesn’t even have a sign—there’s just a hand scanner by an armored white door in an otherwise blank concrete wall.
“Are you sure this is it?” he asks.
“This is it. It’s a branch of Crédit Nuage Cantonale de Genève. Very discreet, Nuage. There’s never any signage.”
“Are you a client?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, I’m sure not.”
“That’s less of a problem than you’d think. For one thing, your new look is consistent with family money—you look like you could be slumming it to piss off your dad. For another, the point of Nuage is it’s a numbered-account bank—if you’ve got the account number and the passcode, which I’ll give you, they don’t care who you are. So if they don’t think you’re a rich brat they’ll think you’re running errands for someone important. Put your hand on the scanner and let’s go on in.”
“Won’t that make me findable?”
“Elsewhere, maybe. Here, no. And there’s no other option, unless you want to do hits for pocket change until they catch you, which I’m guessing would take about a day.”
The surface of the scanner is cool under his palm. A woman’s voice, the accent maybe German, asks for the first eight digits of his account number, which the ghost whispers in his ear.
“I don’t see any security,” he murmurs, stepping into a wall of cold air, the odor of leather from the glossy black couches, a faint floral perfume. “It’s hidden,” the ghost says as the door locks behind him, sealing off the evening and its melancholy.
He clenches his fists in his jacket pockets, wonders if the bank people have gone home, or if they made him and he should run for it, but then a tall woman in a pale suit emerges from a corridor and from the way she looks past him it seems she must have other business but she says, “This way please, sir”—sir?—in the same voice as the scanner and leads him into a tiny high-ceilinged room with cinder-block walls and not much light and the air conditioner’s roaring is so loud that it’s hard to hear her as she leans across the table and with absolute seriousness says, “This room is secure. Do you wish to make a withdrawal?”