Irina, at the insistence of her insurer, had attended a two-day class on kidnap prevention. Her teacher, a retired army sergeant, had prosthetic legs and, as he’d told her with a kind of schoolboy relish, a lower intestine that came out of a tissue printer. She remembers the chaw on his breath as he explained how most kidnapers tracked their victims with drones in order to find “the random moment of purest vulnerability,” a phrase that had struck her as having a certain poetry, and even as she thinks this she’s started running.
Faces whip by, eyeblink flashes of dismay, indifference, surprise, and she weaves around bystanders to occlude the lines of sight and fire, and she’s grateful once again for never really having aged. Keep moving, the sergeant had said. Don’t be predictable, find a strong point to retreat to, all of it obvious, none of it useful, and now here she is completely on her own.
As she runs she tells herself there’s still time to act, doesn’t let herself panic, and obliges herself to think of the city, and what it has that she can use. She could try ducking into a bank or a good hotel, but their doors will be locked and it might be seconds before they buzz her in, and the Marine with whom she had her moment is now too far away. There are drones overhead—she could turn on her wireless, seize a few and use them to run interference or, if they’re armed, shoot down her pursuers, though she’d thought her days of intrusions were done.
She corners hard, slipping a little, and sprints down the block, aware of the fear in her wake, how the brighter and more careful people are scattering, and then she sees hard-hatted workmen supervising a segmented drone the size of a van, dodecapodal and safety yellow, its nimble forward appendages pulling fiber-optic cables up through the incisions in the asphalt of the street, all under the eye of a trio of cops. One of them, leaning against a parked car in his green slicker, registers her speed and starts to raise his gun as he scans the street behind her.
Maybe she should find cover but she needs to know what’s going to happen so she turns, sees the damp pedestrians, the headlights of the cars going by at a rush-hour crawl—no camera drones, no van, no obvious pursuers. The cop is glaring down his rifle-sights now, aiming back the way she came, panning left to right, right to left, but, finding no targets, he lowers his rifle as he turns to her with a look of inquiry. It looks like no one’s coming, and in decency she should talk to him and explain but instead she ducks into a cafe.
Inside, she peers out through the raindrops on the windows at the blurred passersby. The cop across the street stares after her, then loses interest—worse things happen all the time.
Her mouth is dry so she orders a sparkling water though she finds it’s difficult to look away from the windows. The barista is friendly but his hair is sculpted into planes and spines that suggest nothing so much as a lionfish, and she feels old because instead of implying some extraordinarily specific cultural fealty his hair just reads as an elaborate waste of time.
She tells herself it was nothing, just another false alarm. Vans are legal, and camera drones are nothing special, especially this close to the favelas—they’re probably searching for illegal construction. She’s often seen jackbooted cops hassling refugees with their cheap little construction drones, and pitied them, though she’s also seen the claustrophobic Piranesi webwork that Jakarta has become, favela clotting all its parks and alleyways and public spaces—she remembers the masses of concrete filling the rail yards, the shadows and confinement of the narrow tunnels over the tracks, grey dust raining down as the trains roared through.
Find a strong point, the sergeant said. On her phone she searches for hotels with five-star security—the nearest is the Doric, seven blocks away. Finalizing her booking, she wonders how she’ll get there—it seems far away, and traffic is almost at a standstill, and she doesn’t want to walk on the street.
She startles when her phone rings; the hipster programmer at the next table looks like he’s going to ask if she’s all right but he sees her face and turns back to his computer.
When she picks up Maya says, “I hope you feel like making money tonight, because Herr Cromwell wants to see you.”
“Does he.”
“Hey, are you all right? You sound like your puppy died.”
“No. Yes. I’m fine,” she says, unable to bring her voice to life.
“Why don’t you tell Auntie Maya what’s wrong.”
“The afternoon has gotten strange.” She wonders if the line is secure, then wonders about the physics of parabolic microphones, if they work through glass. “It’s probably nothing.”
“What kind of nothing? Whatever it is, I can probably help. The agency has lawyers, coders, contractors, what have you. I think there’s even a masseur now.”
“In this context, contractor means mercenary, right? Like a hired soldier?”
“Shit, really? You in bad trouble, hon?” Her voice is almost squeaky, like a pubescent boy’s. “Do you need some help right away?”
“I might.” She feels like crying but she’d lose her self-respect.
“In Northern California we usually work with Parthenon Associates. They’re mostly British ex–special forces,” Maya says, and Irina is aware that she’s trying not to show how much she wants to ask exactly what the trouble is. “They’re very good. Pulled any number of client asses out of fires, and they’re extremely discreet. Would that help?”
“Yes.”
Sound of typing as Maya says, “Soooo … You now have an account with Parthenon, and as of two seconds ago they’ve dispatched a contractor to your current location. Any charges go on your tab with us but as of now you’re officially their client, so their obligation is to you, and the agency is out of the loop. I just pushed their contact info to your phone. I might add that they have strong ties of reciprocity, as they say, with the state and city powers-that-be, so they’re in a position to clean up their own messes, or for that matter most any mess at all.”
“Thanks,” Irina says, feeling a little better, though part of her questions the wisdom of bringing in shooters when it’s not at all yet clear who, if anyone, needs to be shot.
“So anyway. The reason I called. Cromwell wants to have dinner with you tonight at this restaurant, Maison Dernière. Apparently he has an offer for you and wants to make it in person. And since it’s short notice and you’ll actually be doing something for Water and Power, even if it’s just eating breadsticks and listening to him talk about his many achievements, they’re offering quadruple time.”
The hourly seems high, almost desperately so, but she’s not going to blow off one of her few friends of long standing, so she says, “I have plans tonight.”
“Philip, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell him I said I love him to death but if he wants his company to grow he has to stop being such a little priss about using me and my people, and accept the reality of TMP’s market power. Actually, maybe you could phrase that in a nicer way? And tell him I said I love his tie, because I think he wears them now. Anyhow: Cromwell’s people thought you might be busy, but they say it’s urgent, and that he really wants to talk tonight, so he’s available when you are, and after dinner is fine. I kind of suspect he doesn’t sleep much—hell, I don’t sleep much and I’m less than half his age. I know you must be tired, and there’s whatever else is going on, but money-money-money, you know? So are you down?”
“Sure,” says Irina, though the night seems far away.
“Great. And are you absolutely sure you don’t want to tell me what’s up?”
“I’m fine,” she lies, sounding annoyed.
“Okay. Well, great, then. Call me if something comes up. Bye, sweetie. Good luck. You’ve got my number.”
At the table beside her is a boy with a bowl haircut, ethnically Korean, wearing a glossy black sweatsuit, rapt in his laptop, and surreptitiously looking over his shoulder she sees he’s playing a first-person shooter, though no guns or adversaries are in evidence, and he seems only to be wandering through a dark mansion, going up and down stairs and stopping before locked doors and passing in and out of shadows, and she wonders what the point is, if whatever nameless evil implied by the endless eerie corridors will reveal itself in the end or if finally the game is about boredom and dread and long, fruitless searching.
She stopped playing video games years ago—they’re too easy a way to annul her emotions, and there’s no getting away from computers—but now she envies his absorption.
A tall rangy boy in a black hoodie comes into the cafe, head down and hands in pockets. He doesn’t look posh enough for the neighborhood, but maybe he has a job here, and she’s wondering what’s keeping Parthenon when the boy stops in front of her, and her momentary terror dissolves when he lifts his eyes and she sees that he’s a man—she’d been fooled by the clothes and the body language—blue-eyed, windburned, smiling down at her.
“Parthenon?” she asks, and feels foolish.
“Yes, ma’am,” he says, his voice Scottish, sounding at the same time like he’s making a joke and reporting for duty.
“Good. So. Thanks for coming out. I won’t need you to come very far with me today.”
Out on the street on the way to the Doric he seems not to mind the rain and she isn’t sure if they’re supposed to make conversation. You know you’re truly rich, she thinks, if you’re used to dealing with private soldiers.
Finally she says, “So is one of you enough to deal with … whatever arises?”
“Probably,” he says. “I’m wearing armor, so I’m more durable than I look, and in addition to my sidearm I’ve got a collapsible long gun under the hoodie, which is more firepower than nonmilitary personnel are really supposed to have. And if I fire a shot, or shots are fired near me, then reinforcements come at a run—armed drones arrive in under one minute, and a squad in five, and if at that point there’s still a problem, then, well, the escalation is ridiculous, but Parthenon isn’t in the business of losing fights.” He’s both grave and cheerful, and she wonders how he manages such sangfroid in the face of the violence of his profession.
“You don’t present as I expected.”
“Well, I could dress like a proper bodyguard, but that would just tell the world you’re someone worth robbing. Better if I look like no one in particular. They send us to classes to learn how to do that—the costume helps, but, if you’ll forgive my boasting, I can look like a nobody even in an excellent suit.” He sighs. “You sign up to be a soldier and end up doing amateur theatricals. It’s the story of my life.”
Silence, for a while, as he slouches along beside her, for all the world like a sullen teenager, until, peering down at her from under his hood, he says, “I don’t mean to pry, but the précis was light on detail. May I ask if we’re expecting some particular kind of trouble?”
“Kidnap,” she says. “I think there may have been an attempt,” and tells him what happened, disguising her fear.
“That’s probably manageable,” he says. “And it might make you feel a little better to know that, while I’m here, I’ll fight to the last for you. There’s no true security in this world, but I’ll do everything in my power for you, and if things go bad and we’re going to die, then I’ll stand in front of you and die first.” He says this casually, like he’s explaining company policy, but his tacit conviction is more of a comfort than she’d have expected and in fact there are tears in her eyes.
The silence is benign now, and she realizes that the tension was in her alone, that he’s comfortable being quiet with his principal. “How did you come by this level of commitment?” she asks.
“Parthenon is very selective,” he says. “I’m under contract not to reveal the specifics, but early on in the selection process they test your dedication in the most revealing ways. And then, it’s a way of dealing with fear. We all have to die sometime, and I’ve chosen to put aside fear in the name of service. It seems like the only way to live with equanimity.”
“You sound like a samurai.”
“The job does require dedication, and a level of comfort with the nearness of death, but actually being a samurai? My god. With all the repression and the social rules and the obsession with caste it sounds even worse than being English.”
Blocks later she has the feeling there’s something he’s wanted to say for a while and then he says, “Do you know who made the kidnap attempt, or do you think it was just speculators?”
“I have no idea,” she says, then thinks of Cromwell, the strangeness around that gig, his latest attentions.
“I don’t mean to speak out of turn, but it seems like you might have someone in mind,” he says. He seems to look for words, then says, “It’s evident that you’re a decent person, and you might not believe the viciousness you can find in the world. Even the gentlest people are sometimes obliged to take aggressive steps. I note that we will never have any interest in, or awareness of, your private business, beyond the minimum required to do the job, and that after the job’s done we forget everything, forever. I also note that we deal in definitive solutions, the details of which needn’t concern you.”
It takes her a moment to realize that he’s offering to find her persecutors and kill them. “Wouldn’t that put you at risk?” she asks.
“It’s a dangerous business. But if you mean legal risk, well, that can be finessed, especially if one is careful to respect the structure of things. But we’re certainly not going to let a client’s interests suffer because of a narrow-minded adherence to the letter of the law.” She’s surprised to find herself already inclining toward the view that the illegality of killing for hire is a burdensome technicality.
“I honestly don’t know what’s happening. Even if anything’s happening. Actually, it doesn’t matter—the only person I have in mind is rich, like private-army rich. He’s out of my weight class in every way.”
“This very rich person. Does he know you suspect him?”
Thinks of the information seized from the reflections in his glasses. “I’d imagine not.”
“Well, it would be expensive, taking care of that for you, but in these matters initiative is everything. You’d just get the one shot, but that’s often enough. Like I said, there’s no such thing as true security.”
It’s heady—discreditably so—to think she has only to give the word and her enemy will be annihilated. (But of course Cromwell might not be her enemy, might in fact just be an exceptionally generous and possibly somewhat smitten client—all she knows for certain is that the coordinates from his laptop led her to the glyphs on the wall of the tunnel underground, and that there might possibly have been a kidnap attempt, though it might have been nothing, and if it was something might not have been him.) She says, “Let me get back to you on that.”
Outside the Doric the doorman is dressed like some kind of Renaissance courtier, a monocle in one eye, and he regards them blankly for a moment until, presumably, the monocle’s facial recognition software identifies her as a guest, at which the massive glass doors swing open and the doorman ushers her in.
The soldier pushes back his hood; his hair is copper in the foyer’s light. He’s rolled up his sleeves and she sees a list of names tattooed on his left forearm, some Anglo, some Indian. It occurs to her to ask him up for, as they say, a drink, and twenty years ago she’d have done it, but now it seems too socially complex and like it might strain his sense of correctness and it’s probably a cliché for a girl (a girl?) to have a crush on her bodyguard and in any case she wants to have a nap and be alone and maybe read before her dinner at Fantôme.
“I never got your name,” she says.
He smiles with his eyes, kisses her hand, walks away.