Part 18 (1/2)

Konstantin made a disgusted noise. ”How did you figure that out?”

”I'd like to tell you I calculated it all from watching his vital signs over a long period of time but the truth is, I've got an old buddy who works on the island, and she pointed me at a service employee who was open to financial encouragement to talk.”

Konstantin made an even more disgusted noise. ”I think I know her. She wouldn't do that for me.”

”She wouldn't have done it for me, either, if I'd asked her in the capacity of a law enforcement officer looking for information on Hastings Dervish.”

”Did she show you that squirt-gun?”

”I'm the one she took it from. Anyway, Dervish doesn't bother trying to tinker with his own online time data. He just stays plugged in and because it's Key West, he can go to h.e.l.l in his own way. Which, of course, he would.”

Konstantin took a long, thoughtful breath. ”What if he isn't actually conscious?”

”You mean a fugue state or a trance?”

”Or he's been brainwashed himself. What if he's just a front for a mob operation?”

Goku looked as nauseated as she felt.

”Think about it. How else could he get away with it? He's not some rich family's pampered golden boy, he's a placeholder. Who would allow a placeholder to indulge himself like that? Maybe he got the position because he was willing to wire up twenty-four/seven. And they told him he could have some fun with his ex on the side.” Konstantin stared at the fetus on the screen. ”Brainwas.h.i.+ng a cop, that would be a good experiment. And if it went wrong, there'd just be Hastings Dervish, the lone gunman. For all we know, he might really believe he is a lone gunman.” She paused. ”Just how was he going to brainwash me anyway?”

”They started the process after you went into room 909. All those falling intervals in between periods of relatively normal activity. About half a day of that and most people would be a quiveringmess.”

”Well, it wouldn't have worked,” Konstantin said. ”I was getting used to it. If I ever had even a mild fear of falling, it's gone now. When this is over, I'll probably take up skydiving just to relax.”

”After that would have come the jamming, while the boost was still in your bloodstream. How well do you think you'd have come out of that?”

Before she could answer, he stood up and aimed the remote at a screen in the center of the wall, which turned into a small window.

”Grace period's over. Dervish found us. Time for the next step.”

”Which is?”

He picked her up easily and flipped her over so that she was stretched out over his arms face down, as if he were going to teach her how to swim. ”You dive through the center s.p.a.ce.”

”And then?” Konstantin asked.

But he had already hurled her forward and she discovered that the window in the center was not actually small but very far away.

Konstantin had been prepared for another long flying fall once she finally reached the window.

Instead, she found herself back in the secret pa.s.sage she had first discovered wearing the child persona from You (Not You), staring into a darkness interrupted by pinp.r.i.c.ks of light from the many peepholes along the wall. Had Goku meant to put her here specifically, or had she just fallen through the nearest back door?

The back door, she realized. The back door for all of the casino, and possibly a good part of lowdown Hong Kong as well. If you were going to make what was essentially a virtual theme park, it made sense to utilize a.n.a.log versions of certain theme park maintenance methods. Maybe it was clumsier and slower in some ways, but it was probably a lot easier than stripping everything down to code whenever you needed to-- Her heart gave a sudden irregular flutter in her chest as she realized she wasn't alone.

Come on, she told herself. You might have had a minor fear of falling, but you've never been that spooked by the dark.

Something moved, briefly blocking out the light from a number of peepholes; a person, she realized, and closer than she had thought.

It's not the dark -- it's what's in the dark. That's not fear, that's being a cop. Remember?

You were a cop once, before someone got the bright idea to turn you into a cartoon character.

She felt a sudden intense surge of loss and regret. h.e.l.l with it. When she was done with this case, she'd let Celestine and DiPietro handle technocrime and loan herself to Auto Theft. She needed something real.

Something slightly more substantial than moving air touched her face, sending chills up the back of her neck into her scalp. She held perfectly still, waiting for whatever might come next. The waiting stretched from a few moments into half a minute. Konstantin felt her apprehension turn to annoyance.

G.o.d d.a.m.n it, she thought, why is everything dragged out until you sweat blood, what is this suspense fetish?

Something about the darkness changed and she knew that whatever had been there with her was now gone. She sighed. It was probably nothing more than the venality of billable time at work. Drag everything to the last possible moment so the mark finds it impossible not to stay in AR to see what happens next.

Never chalk up to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity or greed or both. Who had said that? In AR, it was doubly true, she thought and started to move along the pa.s.sageway. Being adult-sized now, she had a much wider choice of peepholes this time. Would there be a much wider choice of sights as well, or just a greater number of kinky rooms? More spiky hair, more slit skirts, moreexecutioners and willing victims. Why on earth would you go into AR simply to stand in line for your own execution? Even if someone could tell her, she doubted that she'd have understood.

I'm in the dark and I don't understand much of what's going on. Almost like being in love.

The thought gave her pause and then she kept moving, wondering what she could find here that would be useful in proving her case against Dervish. Probably an exit-- Probably? This was the back door. From here, she could find Dervish's main node, she realized.

She wouldn't be able to interfere with the connection between the node and Key West, but she could log his use of the jamming program from the node and prove it that way.

All she had to do was figure out what his node would look like and then figure out how to activate a logging program. Or, as her ex used to say, If we had some eggs, we could have some ham and eggs if we had some ham. Yeah, that was almost like being in love, too.

No, everything was there. She just had to identify it. And this time, she reminded herself, she was on a faster level, with access to more information. Things wouldn't necessarily look the way they had when she'd been here in her kid outfit. She put her eye to the nearest peephole.

And then again, she thought as she looked at the woman in the slit skirt lying on the bed, she could be wrong about that.

No kid with hair spikes, though; she looked around the room as well as she could, but the woman was the only one there, and she seemed to be asleep. Or comatose. Or, Konstantin thought, after watching to see if her torso would move even a little, non-dead. No breathing, none at all.

Cutting corners? Just a case of just having so many different things to control that certain details got left off? Dervish was digital and digits didn't breathe?

She put a hand on her chest, feeling her own respiration. You've got to turbo-charge the boost, Goku had said. But how -- by hyperventilating?

No... by being quick enough to act between one breath and another.

The image of the fractal clouds Goku had blown around them came to her almost like a cloud itself. Breathing techniques, meditation -- not the nap-on-a-pallet-under-the-desk stuff but the mystical control of yogis and fakirs. She knew nothing about any of that.

Then it looks like you'll be getting on-the-job training.

Oh, sure thing -- she could simply take up, on the fly, practices it took a lifetime to master, a.s.suming you could even learn them at all, just because she was in AR. h.e.l.l, she didn't even know if she was right about-- You're right. You know you're right because it's easy for Dervish and practically impossible for you, and that's how these things usually work. You're right because you have to be faster than you ever have been and that's as fast as you can be. And even if you're wrong, it's more right than standing in the dark doing nothing.

She drew back from the peephole, her hand still pressed against her chest. So how did you even start? Did you first slow down your breathing while you tried to figure out what it meant to exist fast?

Pray, and fast.

She'd thought it was a joke, a bad pun, and it was... but that wasn't all it was. Pray: concentrate.

Fast: abstain. But abstain from what?

Deep inside her mind, she felt a sensation like diving through very deep water, deeper than was usually safe without some kind of protection against the pressure. It was an odd sensation but at the same time there was something familiar about it, as if she were discovering some talent she'd been aware of only on a subconscious level, something she'd been born with but had never used until now. A sense-memory for something she had no conscious memory of?

Come on, boost yourself up out of that elevator. You're the one who said Tarzan was a girl.