As he"s walking across it, he looks up to one of the higher decks, where a couple of the crew members are hanging out in their dark windbreakers. One of them is leaning against a railing, watching the firefight through binoculars. Another one, an older one, approaches him, leans over to examine his back, slaps him a couple of times between the shoulder blades.
The guy drops his binoculars to see who"s pounding him on the back. His eyes are not Chinese. The older guy says something to him, gestures at his throat. He"s not Chinese, either.
The binocular guy nods, reaches up with one hand and presses a lapel switch. The next time he turns around, a word is written across his back in neon green electropigment: MAFIA.
The older guy turns away; his windbreaker says the same thing.
Hiro turns around in the middle of the gangplank. There are twenty crew members in plain sight all around him. Suddenly, their black windbreakers all say, MAFIA. Suddenly, they are all armed.
"I was planning to get in touch with Mr. Lee"s Greater Hong Kong and file a complaint about their proconsul here in Port Sherman," Hiro jokes. "He was very uncooperative this morning when I insisted on renting this boat out from under you."
Hiro is sitting in the first-cla.s.s dining room of the Kowloon. On the other side of the white linen tablecloth is the man Hiro had previously pegged as the Industry creep on vacation. He"s impeccably dressed in a black suit, and he has a gla.s.s eye. He has not bothered to introduce himself, as though he"s expecting Hiro to know who he is already.
The man does not seem amused by Hiro"s story. He seems, rather, nonplussed.
"So?"
"Don"t see any reason to file a complaint now," Hiro says.
"Why not?"
"Well, because now I understand his reluctance not to displace you guys."
"How come? You got money, don"t you?"
"Yeah, but-"
"Oh!" the man with the gla.s.s eye says, and allows himself sort of a forced smile. "Because we"re the Mafia, you"re saying."
"Yeah," Hiro says, feeling his face get hot. Nothing like making a total d.i.c.khead out of yourself. Nothing in the world like it, nosireebob.
Outside, the gun battle is just a dim roar. This dining room is insulated from noise, water, wind, and hot flying lead by a double layer of remarkably thick gla.s.s, and the s.p.a.ce between the panes is full of something cool and gelatinous. The roar does not seem as steady as it used to be.
"f.u.c.king machine guns," the man says. "I hate "em. Maybe one out of a thousand rounds actually hits something worth hitting. And they kill my ears. You want some coffee or something?"
"That"d be great."
"We got a big buffet coming up soon. Bacon, eggs, fresh fruit you wouldn"t believe."
The guy that Hiro saw earlier, up on the deck, pounding Binocular Man on the back, sticks his head into the room.
"Excuse me, boss, but we"re moving into, like, the third phase of our plan. Just thought you"d wanna know."
"Thank you, Livio. Let me know when the Ivans make it to the pier." The guy sips his coffee, notices Hiro looking confused. "See, we got a plan, and the plan is divided up into different phases."
"Yeah, I got that."
"The first phase was immobilization. Taking out their chopper. Then we had Phase Two, which was making them think we were trying to kill them in the hotel. I think that this phase succeeded wonderfully."
"Me, too."
"Thank you. Another important part of this phase was getting your a.s.s in here, which is also done."
"I"m part of this plan?"
The man with the gla.s.s eye smiles crisply. "If you were not part of this plan, you would be dead."
"So you knew I was coming to Port Sherman?"
"You know that chick Y.T.? The girl you have been using to spy on us?"
"Yeah." No point in denying it.
"Well, we have been using her to spy on you."
"Why? Why the h.e.l.l do you care about me?"
"That would be a tangent from our main conversation, which is about all the phases of the plan."
"Okay. We just finished Phase Two."
"Now, in Phase Three, which is ongoing, we allow them to think that they are making an incredible, heroic escape, running down the street toward the pier."
"Phase Four!" shouts Livio, the lieutenant.
"Scusi," the man with the gla.s.s eye says, scooting his chair back, folding his napkin back onto the table. He gets up and walks out of the dining room. Hiro follows him above deck.
A couple of dozen Russians are all trying to force their way through the gate onto the pier. Only a few of them can get through at once, and so they end up strung out over a couple of hundred feet, all running toward the safety of the Kodiak Queen.
But a dozen or so manage to stay together in a clump: a group of soldiers, forming a human shield around a smaller cl.u.s.ter of men in the center.
"Bigwigs," the man with the gla.s.s eye says, shaking his head philosophically.
They all run crablike down the pier, bent down as far as they can go, firing the occasional covering burst of machine-gun fire back into Port Sherman.
The man with the gla.s.s eye is squinting against a cool, sudden breeze. He turns to Hiro with a hint of a grin. "Check this out," he says, and presses a b.u.t.ton on a little black box in his hand.
The explosion is like a single drumbeat, coming from everywhere at once. Hiro can feel it coming up out of the water, shaking his feet. There"s no big flame or cloud of smoke, but there is a sort of twin geyser effect that shoots out from underneath the Kodiak Queen, sending jets of white, steamy water upward like unfolding wings. The wings collapse in a sudden downpour, and then the Kodiak Queen seems shockingly low in the water. Low and getting lower. All the men who are running down the pier suddenly stop in their tracks.
"Now," Binocular Man mumbles into his lapel.
There are some smaller explosions down on the pier. The entire pier buckles and writhes like a snake in the water. One segment in particular, the segment with the bigwigs on it, is rocking and seesawing violently, smoke rising from both ends. It has been blown loose from the rest of the pier.
All of its occupants fall down in the same direction as it jerks sideways and begins to move, yanked out of its place. Hiro can see the tow cable rising up out of the water as it is stretched tight, running a couple of hundred feet to a small open boat with a big motor on it, which is now pulling out of the harbor. There"s still a dozen bodyguards on the segment. One of them sizes up the situation, aims his AK-47 across the water at the boat that"s towing them, and loses his brains. There"s a sniper on the top deck of the Kowloon.
All the other bodyguards throw their guns into the water.
"Time for Phase Five," the man with the gla.s.s eye says. "A big f.u.c.king breakfast."
By the time he and Hiro have sat back down in the dining room, the Kowloon has pulled away from the pier and is headed down the fjord, following a course parallel to the smaller boat that is towing the segment. As they eat, they can look out the window, across a few hundred yards of open water, and see the segment keeping pace with them. All the bigwigs and the bodyguards are on their a.s.ses now, keeping their centers of gravity low as the segment bucks nastily.
"When we get farther away from land, the waves get bigger," the man with the gla.s.s eye says. "I hate that s.h.i.t. All I want is to hang on to the breakfast long enough to tamp it down with some lunch."
"Amen," says Livio, heaping some scrambled eggs onto his plate.
"Are you going to pick those guys up?" Hiro says. "Or just let them stay out there for a while?"
"f.u.c.k "em. Let "em freeze their a.s.ses off. Then when we bring them onto this boat, they"ll be ready for it. Won"t put up too much of a fight. Hey, maybe they"ll even talk to us."
Everyone seems pretty hungry. For a while, they just dig into breakfast. After a while, the man with the gla.s.s eye breaks the ice by announcing how great the food is, and everyone agrees. Hiro figures it"s okay to talk now.
"I was wondering why you guys were interested in me." Hiro figures that this is always a good thing to know in the case of the Mafia.
"We"re all in the same happy gang," the man with the gla.s.s eye says.
"Which gang is that?"
"Lagos"s gang."
"Huh?"
"Well, it"s not really his gang. But he"s the guy who put it together. The nucleus around which it formed."
"How and why and what are you talking about?"
"Okay." He shoves his plate away from him, folds up his napkin, puts it on the table. "Lagos had all these ideas. Ideas about all kinds of stuff"
"So I noticed."
"He had stacks all over the place, on all different topics. Stacks where he would pull together knowledge from all over the f.u.c.king map and tie it all together. He had these things stashed here and there around the Metaverse, waiting for the information to become useful."
"More than one of them?" Hiro says.
"Supposedly. Well, a few years ago, Lagos approached L. Bob Rife."
"He did?"
"Yeah. See, Rife has a million programmers working for him. He was paranoid that they were stealing his data."
"I know that he was bugging their houses and so on."
"The reason you know that is because you found it in Lagos"s stack. And the reason Lagos bothered to look it up is because he was doing market research. Looking for someone who might pay him hard cash for the stuff he dug up in the Babel/Infopocalypse stack."
"He thought," Hiro says, "that L. Bob Rife might have a use for some viruses."
"Right. See, I don"t understand all this s.h.i.t. But I guess he found an old virus or something that was aimed at the elite thinkers."
"The technological priesthood," Hiro says. "The infocrats. It wiped out the whole infocracy of Sumer."
"Whatever."
"That"s crazy," Hiro says. "That"s like if you find out your employees are stealing ballpoint pens, you take them out and kill them. He wouldn"t be able to use it without destroying all his programmers" minds."
"In its original form," the man with the gla.s.s eye says. "But the whole point is, Lagos wanted to do research on it."
"Informational warfare research."
"Bingo. He wanted to isolate this thing and modify it so it could be used to control the programmers without blowing their brains sky high."
"And did it work?"
"Who knows? Rife stole Lagos"s idea. Just took it and ran with it. And after that, Lagos had no idea what Rife did with it. But a couple of years later, he started getting worried about a lot of stuff he was seeing."
"Like the explosive growth in Reverend Wayne"s Pearly Gates."
"And these Russkies who speak in tongues. And the fact that Rife was digging up this old city-"
"Eridu."
"Yeah. And the radio astronomy thing. Lagos had a lot of stuff he was worried about. So he began to approach people. He approached us. He approached that girl you used to go out with-"
"Juanita."
"Yeah. Nice girl. And he approached Mr. Lee. So you might say that a few different people have been working on this little project."
"Where"d they go?" Hiro says.
Everyone"s already looking for the float, as though they all noticed at once that it was missing. Finally they see it, a quarter mile behind them, dead in the water. The bigwigs and the bodyguards are standing up now, all looking in the same direction.
The speedboat is circling around to retrieve it.
"They must have figured out a way to detach the tow cable," Hiro says.
"Not likely," the man with the gla.s.s eye says. "It was attached to the bottom, under the water. And it"s a steel cable, so there"s no way they could cut it."
Hiro sees another small craft bobbing on the water, about halfway between the Russians and the speedboat that was towing them. It"s not obvious, because it"s tiny, close to the water, done up in dull natural colors. It"s a one-man kayak. Carrying a longhaired man.
"s.h.i.t," Livio says. "Where the h.e.l.l did he come from?"
The kayaker looks behind himself for a few moments, reading the waves, then suddenly turns back around and begins to paddle hard, accelerating, glancing back every few strokes. A big wave is coming, and just as it swells up underneath the kayak, he"s matching its speed. The kayak stays on top of the wave and shoots forward like a missile, riding the swell, suddenly going twice as fast as anything else on the water.