S he opened her PowerBook on the counter of Bigend’s crypto-kitchen, taking wifi for granted. None of her trusted networks were available, she was advised, but did she want to join BAntVanc1?
The phrase “trusted networks” briefly made her feel like crying. She wasn’t feeling as though she had any.
Bigend, she saw, pulling herself together, hadn’t activated his WEP. No password required. But then he had Ollie, she supposed, who could eavesdrop on hundreds of other people’s wifi at once, so maybe it all balanced out.
She joined BAntVanc1 and checked her e-mail. Nothing. No spam, even.
Her phone rang, in her purse. It was still attached to the scrambler. How would that work if it were anyone other than Bigend? She answered. “Hello?”
“Just checking,” said Bigend, and suddenly she didn’t want to tell him about Sarah.
A reaction to her sudden sense of his ubiquity, if not yet actual then potential. Once he was established in your life, he’d be there, in some way no ordinary person, no ordinary boss, even, could be. Once she accepted him, past a certain point, there was always going to be the possibility of him ringing her up, to say “Just checking,” before she could even ask who was calling. Did she want that? Could she afford not to?
“Nothing yet,” she said, wondering if Ollie might not already have somehow transmitted their lunch conversation to Los Angeles. “I’m nosing around Odile’s art circles here. She has a lot of them, though, and it can’t be done too obviously. No telling who might let him know I’m here looking.”
“I think he’s there,” said Bigend, “and I think you and Odile are currently our best chance of finding him.”
She nodded silently. “This is a big country,” she said. “Why wouldn’t he head somewhere he’d be less likely to be found?”
“Vancouver is a port,” said Bigend. “A foreign container port. Our pirates’ chest. He’s there to monitor the off-loading, though not for the shippers.” There was an utterly silent digitized pause. “I want to set you up on a darknet we’re having built for us.”
“What’s that?”
“In effect, a private Internet. Invisible to nonmembers. Scrambled phones, at this point, just serve as strings around our fingers to remind us of a fundamental lack of privacy. Ollie’s working on it.”
“Someone’s here,” she said. “Have to run.” She hung up.
Leaving her PowerBook open on the counter, its sticker-encrusted lid the most colorful thing in sight, aside from the view, she went upstairs, undressed, and had a long shower. Odile had opted for a post-lunch nap.
She dried her hair and dressed, got back into jeans, sneakers. Finding the Blue Ant figurine in her clothes, she looked around for a perch for it. Selected a head-high ledge of talcum-smooth concrete and stood the ant on it, icon-style. It made the ledge look slightly ridiculous. Perfect.
She chanced on her passport, as she was folding things, and tossed it into the Barneys bag.
She put on a dark cotton jacket, took her purse, and went down to the crypto-kitchen, where she shut her PowerBook and wrote Odile a note on the back of a Visa charge slip, which she left on the counter: “Back later. Hollis.”
She found the Phaeton where she’d left it, followed Ollie’s advice to remind herself how wide it was, did some work with the map from the glove compartment, avoided activating the GPS screen (it spoke, if you let it), and drove out into late afternoon sunlight, feeling reasonably confident she could find Bobby’s place, and not confident at all that she’d know what to do when she did.
He didn’t live that far from here, to judge by the map.
Rush hour. After a few moves designed to get her headed east, crosstown, she got with the flow, such as it was. Edging more or less steadily eastward, amid what she assumed to be commuters headed for eastern satellites, she saw that Bobby’s place probably wasn’t all that close, at least not psychogeographically. Bigend’s strata-title, atop one tower in a variegated hedge of greenglass, along what her map said was False Creek, was high-end twenty-first-century. Here, she was driving into what remained of a light-industrial zone. The way they’d built on railway land, when land had been surplus. Not unlike the feel around Bobby’s rental on Romaine, though studded now, here and there, with large pieces of brand-new metropolitan infrastructure, most of these apparently still under construction.
When she finally turned left, onto a wide, north-south street called Clark, she was past the fancy infra-bits and into a more low-down, more careworn architecture, a lot of it clapboard. Nonfranchise auto-repair shops. Small manufacturers of restaurant furniture. Chrome chairs recovered. At what she guessed was the foot of this wide street, suspended against distant mountains, some truly kick-ass Soviet Constructivist project appeared to have been erected, perhaps in belated honor of a designer who’d earned himself a one-way to the Gulag. Vast crazy arms of orange-painted steel, canted in every direction, at every angle.
What the hell was it, though?
Bigend’s port, she guessed. And Bobby so close by.
She turned right when she spotted Bobby’s street.
She’d lied to Bigend, she admitted to herself now, and it was bothering her. She’d told him she’d work with him as long he didn’t hold back information, or lie to her, and now she’d done exactly that, to him. She wasn’t comfortable with that. The symmetry was a little too obvious. She sighed.
She drove to the end of the block, turned right again, and pulled over, behind a rust-streaked dumpster with EAST VAN HALEN painted across its back in runny black spray-bomb.
She got her phone and Bigend’s scrambler out of her purse, sighed, and rang him back.
He answered immediately. “Yes?”
“Odile’s found his sister.”
“Very good. Excellent. And?”
“I’m near a place he has here. His sister told us where it is. She thinks this is where he’ll be.” She didn’t see any need to tell him she’d known this when she’d last spoken with him. She’d squared things.
“Is that why you’re a block east of Clark Drive?” he asked.
“Shit,” she said.
“This display only names the main streets,” he said, apologetically.
“This car’s telling you exactly where I am!”
“It’s a factory option,” he said. “A lot of Phaetons go to corporate fleets in the Middle East. Standard security feature, there. Why did she tell you, by the way? Do you know?”
“Because she’s fed up with him, basically. Not an easy sibling. I just saw your port, a minute ago. It’s down at the foot of the street.”
“Yes,” he said, “handy. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Look around a little.”
“Would you like me to send Ollie?”
“No. I doubt I’ll be long.”
“If I don’t see the car go back to the flat this evening, and I haven’t heard from you, I’ll send Ollie.”
“Fair enough.” She hung up.
She sat there, looking at East Van Halen’s dumpster. Beyond it, a few car lengths, was the opening into an alley. An alley that might lead, she supposed, to some rear entrance in whichever of these buildings was Bobby’s.
She got out, activating the Phaeton’s alarm system. “You take care of your crypto-luxurious ass,” she told it. “I’ll be back.”