60. ROLLING THE CODES

H ollis woke on Bigend’s maglev bed, feeling as though it was the altar atop some Aztec pyramid. Platform of sacrifice. And there actually was a pyramid of sorts above it, she saw, a glass-sided construct she suspected of being the pinnacle of this particular tower. She had to admit she’d slept well, however much magnetism she’d absorbed in the process. Perhaps it eased the joints, like those mail-order bracelets. Or perhaps it was actually the pyramid that did it, subtle energies sharpening her prana.

“Hello,” called Ollie Sleight, from a level below. “Are you up?”

“Be right with you.”

She slid off the Aztec altar, which moved slightly, and in a very strange way, and got into jeans and a top, blinking, as she did so, at the expensive emptiness of this bedroom, or sleeping-pinnacle. Like the lair of some design-conscious flying monster.

Ignore sea, she told herself, mountains. Don’t look. Too much view. She found a bathroom, where nothing much resembled conventional amenities, figured out how to work the taps, and washed her face and brushed her teeth. Barefooted, she went down to meet Ollie, possibly to confront him.

“Odile’s gone for a walk,” he said, seated at a long glass table with an open FedEx carton and various bits of black plastic in front of him. “What kind of phone do you have?”

“Motorola.”

“Straight two-point-five-millimeter jack,” he said, selecting one from an assortment. “Hubertus sent this.” Indicating the largest of the black bits. “It’s a scrambler.”

“What does it do?”

“You plug it into the headset jack on your phone. It uses a digital encryption algorithm. You program in a sixteen-digit code and the algorithm rolls the scrambling code up to about sixty thousand times. Gives you seventeen hours’ scramble before the pattern repeats. Hubertus has already charged and programmed this one. He wants you to use it when the two of you talk.”

“That’s nice,” she said.

“May I have your phone?”

She took it from her jeans pocket and handed it to him.

“Thanks.” He connected it to the black rectangle, which reminded her of those snap-off automotive CD-player fronts. “It has its own charger, which won’t work for your phone.” He used the edge of his palm to sweep extra black bits and packaging back into the FedEx box. “I brought fruit and pastry. There’s coffee on.”

“Thank you.”

He put a set of car keys on the table. She saw a blue-and-silver VW emblem. “These are for the extra Phaeton downstairs. Have you driven one?”

“No.”

“You need to watch the width. It looks so much like a Passat that it’s easy to forget how much wider it is. Look down at the painted lines, when you get in; that’ll remind you.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m off, then,” he said, getting up and tucking the carton under his arm. He was in a T-shirt and jeans this morning, both of which seemed to have been gone over with a Dremel tool for about as many hours as Bigend’s gadget could roll its codes. He looked tired, she thought, but that might just be the beard.

When he was gone, she looked for the kitchen and coffee. It turned out to be across this very space, and disguised as a bar, but the coffeemaker and an Italian toaster gave it away. She took her cup back to the table. Her cell rang, various LED effects dancing excitedly on the black face of the scrambler.

“Hello?”

“Hubertus. Oliver told me you were up.”

“I am. Are we ‘scrambled’?”

“We are.”

“You have one too?”

“That’s how it works.”

“It’s too big to fit in a pocket.”

“I know,” he said, “but I’m increasingly concerned with privacy. All of which is relative, of course.”

“This isn’t really private?”

“It’s more private than…not. Ollie has a box with a Linux machine in it that can sniff three hundred wireless networks at the same time.”

“Why would he want to do that?”

He took a moment to think about it. “Because he can, I suppose.”

“I want to talk to you about Ollie.”

“Yes?”

“He came in the restaurant at the Standard while I was meeting with Odile and Alberto. Bought a pack of cigarettes.”

“Yes?”

“Was he checking me out? For you?”

“Of course. What else do you think he would have been doing?”

“Just checking,” she said. “I mean, I am. Just making sure.”

“We needed a sense of how you were getting along with them. We were still making up our minds, at that point.”

The Blue Ant “we,” she thought. “More centrally, then, where’s Bobby?”

“Up there,” he said. “Somewhere.”

“I thought you could keep track of him.”

“Of the truck. The truck’s in the yard of a leasing firm, in a satellite city called Burnaby. Bobby and his equipment were off-loaded beside a warehouse, just north of the border, early this morning. I’ve had Oliver up all night, on that. He went down to the GPS coordinates where they stopped.”

“And?”

“Nothing, of course. We assume they switched trucks. How are things with Odile?”

“She’s gone out for a walk. When she gets back, I’ll try to work out what potential connections she might have here, to Bobby. I stayed away from that, on the flight up. Seemed too soon.”

“Good,” he said. “If you need me, use the ring-back for this call.”

She watched the scrambler do its little LED-dance as the encrypted connection was broken.

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