Irina takes the stairs of necessity, using her phone for light.
As she runs down the first flight she uses her wireless to attack Cromwell’s phone. In the fashion of phones, it has conservative security, and immediately bricks itself. She does the same to the deaf girl’s phone, thinking, Sorry, beauty.
There’s a cluster of phones and what are probably guns on the floor beneath the Dernière and as she attacks them she wonders if they work for Cromwell and if she’d graciously declined his offer would there have been quiet footsteps behind her and then an iron hand closing on her shoulder.
She takes the stairs five at a time, letting gravity do the work.
She remembers the thick blades of the steak knives on the table. In the first second of darkness she probably could have killed Cromwell, if she’d wanted to go the full Lady Macbeth, but even now can’t see herself stabbing him in the carotid, though she wonders if she’ll come to see her passivity as a failure of will and a strategic catastrophe.
Nightmare descent past floor after floor through the near-dark, and the unexpected joy of the headlong flight. She reaches the lobby, bursts out onto the street. As though preordained a drone taxi is stopping ten feet in front of her. An overcoated man with an umbrella is reaching for the cab’s door when she body checks him—flash of his astonishment as he sprawls on the sidewalk—“Sorry!” she calls, the word cut off by the slamming door.
* * *
“Come over,” Philip says on her phone as she scans the street.
“I’m not going to put you at risk,” she says.
“For fuck’s sake, come over. It’s a secured building, and I’ll tell them to go on low alert. Can we please just take the rest of the back and forth as read, or maybe do it while you get your ass over?”
She’s going to argue, but bites it off, says, “See you soon, then.” She hangs up, gives the cab Philip’s address.
She breaks into the cab’s computer and changes its log so it thinks it picked her up near the Ferry Building, half a mile from Maison Dernière, then turns off her implant’s wireless.
The cab’s nav shows five minutes to Philip’s house. She’s agitated, wants to do more than slouch down in her seat and hope her friend knows what to do. She thinks of flying down the stairs, how much fun it was, like skiing on virgin snow in high alpine country, but actually she’s never done that—she’s been skiing all of four times, and never left the bunny slopes—the memory is Constantin’s—they turn up from time to time. It’s a misery and a desecration that whatever fragments of her friend remain are, presumably, in Cromwell’s hands, and regarded without tenderness.
On her phone she finds the website for Iliou Engineering, Constantin’s father’s company in Athens, and the website for the family office, which consists of just a stylized drawing of a dam and an email address. As the cab turns toward the hills she starts writing a message.
* * *
The cab stops on a hill with a view of the city that looks silver with the moonlight on the towers and the fog. On the uphill side of the road are expensive-looking condos behind a high wall topped with broken glass. As she reaches out to open the cab’s door her phone rings.
“Ms. Sunden?” asks someone, young, male, indistinctly foreign.
“Who’s calling?”
“This is Mr. Iliou’s secretary. Will you take a call with Mr. Iliou? I’m instructed to tell you that it’s highly urgent.”
She hesitates, but owes it to Constantin not to keep the old man waiting. “Sure,” she says.
Another male voice, older, intent, weary. “Ms. Sunden,” he says. “This is Constantin’s father. I got your note. Thank you for that. The disposition of my son’s remaining memories does in fact concern me deeply. But before we discuss that, I have the sense that you believe yourself to be in danger. Is this true?”
She thinks of Cromwell, whose guilt seems certain, who must be hunting for her. “Yes.”
“Then the first thing is to get you out of it. I’d like you to come and see me. I’m currently in Patmos, a Greek island in the Dodecanese. But forgive me—obviously, you know where Patmos is. I have a jet standing by at San Francisco airport—with a flight path allowing mostly supersonic speed, the flight should take about six hours. Without going into detail, the security situation here is sufficient to deter even a highly resourced adversary. Will you come?”
His calm is fathomless, and his sincerity evident. She remembers Cromwell mentioning Philip with casual contempt, and that he’d known where Philip lived. She thinks of him floating in the black water, how she’d wanted to save him, how he’d let himself be destroyed before backing down. “I’ll come,” she says, her fingers moving over the cab’s screen, redirecting it to the airport.