Apparently people were beginning to wonder why she wasn’t broadcasting. Nicole told her that daily. People were aware she was flying but not broadcasting. Rumors had it that she was traumatized by the death of the polar bears. Well, so what? It was true. Something like true. She couldn’t characterize how she felt. It was new, it was unpleasant. Maybe it was trauma, sure. She didn’t know. Maybe feeling stunned was part of being traumatized. But she had always felt a little stunned, she realized. A little distant, a little removed. She had hated aspects of her childhood so much that she had gone off to be alone whenever she could, and as that seemed to help, inside herself she was always a bit removed. A few seconds behind whatever happened to her, or happened in front of her. Had she always been traumatized? And if so, by what?
She didn’t know. Her mother was an obvious candidate, but then again her mother hadn’t been that bad. Just your ordinary stage mom, in fact, so why had she reacted so badly to all that? What was wrong with her that made her want so badly to get away from everyone? Was it just that the world was fucked, that people saw that and didn’t change, that they didn’t give a shit? Or was it something in her, something wrong with her?
Now again she was a bit behind what she was actually seeing, because one of the skyvillages below her was tilted sideways and spinning slowly down toward the Earth. “Frans, what’s with that skyvillage down there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Its balloons! It looks like they’ve popped?”
“Where are you looking, please?”
Amelia took the controls and headed down after the distressed aircraft. “Go as fast as you can!” she cried.
“Going.”
Amelia piloted, and Frans took over propulsion and ballast, and also established contact with the skyvillage, which was now putting out a mayday. Half of its balloons had popped all at once, and in the abrupt tilt everything aboard it had been thrown into chaos. They were dropping fast, not refrigerator fast, but with considerable negative buoyancy. They were just now pulling themselves off the tilted walls of their buildings and trying to get a grip on the situation, but had not achieved that, obviously. In fact they sounded desperate.
After her recent adventure putting the Assisted Migration on the vertical to deal with the bears, Amelia could well imagine the chaos. “Get down there,” she told Frans. “Spill more helium now. Come on, go. Go!”
“At our current speed we will intersect them while they are still approximately a thousand feet above the ground.”
“Good. How can we hook onto the side of them that’s lost its balloons?”
“Our grappling hook might serve that purpose.”
“Good. Do it. Go faster.”
“Must be able to reestablish buoyancy when we connect to them.”
“Don’t we have helium reserves in those tanks?”
“Yes—”
“Go faster then! Come on!”
She called down to them and explained her plan. They were happy to hear she had one.
The Assisted Migration dropped toward the sinking skyvillage, much more slowly than Amelia would have liked, even in what seemed to her some kind of slow motion, but in fact they were dropping fast, Frans said. As fast as possible.
“Never forget to film your adventures,” Frans added at one point.
“Fuck that!” she cried. “I hate that! Don’t you dare say things that my production team has programmed you to say!”
“Not sure what I can say then.”
“Then just be quiet! Really, Frans. You’re just reminding me that you’re a program. It’s very disappointing. I say fuck that shit, I hate that shit. You’re just like everyone else.”
Silence from Frans.
When they reached an altitude just above the falling skyvillage and had lowered Amelia’s swing rope with a grappling hook on its end, people on the skyvillage ventured out onto their sharply canted platform, all of them roped and harnessed like climbers, to collect the Assisted Migration’s grapple and hook it to the edge of the village floor, midway around the arc of busted balloons. It was so amazing to see the villagers out there in their harnesses, maneuvering like mountain climbers, that Amelia started to film it.
“Hey people,” she said to the cloud, “this is Amelia, I’m back. Check out what these folks are doing to save their skyvillage. It’s amazing! I hope they are solidly belayed, because they are just hanging there. Now there, look—there they have it. Okay, they’re going to hook our line to their floor, and we’re going to pull them up as much as we can. Frans, get us back to the strongest buoyancy we’ve got.”
“Releasing reserve helium now.”
“And quit sulking. People, Frans is annoyed with me right now, but it’s not my fault. Our producers are manipulative creeps. That includes you, Nicole. But for now let’s concentrate on the heroism of our people in trouble down there. Looks like we’ve got enough loft to pull up the side of the village that lost its balloons. I heard one of them say they thought a meteorite shot through that arc of their balloon circle. Anyway, they’re almost back to level. We’ll let them down at—at where, Frans? Where’s a good big airfield we can help them down onto?”
“Calgary.”
“We’re descending on Calgary, folks. Look how they’re having to play with the balloons they still have, to get themselves level. Yikes! I bet their homes are all messed up inside. I know we were here when we went vertical. None of us likes it when that happens. Which reminds me—all of you should join the Householders’ Union, like today. Check it out, look into it, and join. Because we need to organize, people. We are like that poor skyvillage down there. We are badly out of whack. We are tilted and falling. Headed for a crash. So we need to do some synchronized lifting of each other, to get through the emergency we’re in. Pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Put that message on a repeater, Nicole, and maybe I’ll forgive you. Okay, now everyone just watch while we nail this landing. Frans, nail this landing. Then I’ll forgive you too.”
“Nailing landing,” Frans promised.
“And make a garden wilder than the wild,” Amelia sang, the last line of her show’s theme song, from the great poem by Frederick Turner.
Okay: say the work wasn’t done. Obviously true. Say they had to change their one big rule, if there was to be any chance to make it all work: also true. Fine. She would change the big rule. She would change everything. If she had to fight, she would fight. She was still going to rescue that baby bird and put it back in the air.
Samuel Beckett was taken to Shea Stadium for his first baseball game, a doubleheader, all explained to him by his friend Dick Seaver. Halfway through the second game Seaver asked Beckett if he would like to leave.
Beckett: Is the game over then?
Seaver: Not yet.
Beckett: We don’t want to go then before it’s finished.
h) Inspector Gen
Inspector Gen and Sergeant Olmstead went to talk to the Lower Manhattan Mutual Aid Society’s data analysis team, a group of quanty detectives who were always striving to mine the stacks and the cloud in ways cleverer than the official city and federal teams. Their offices were a kind of shabby decrepit office located at 454 West Thirty-fourth, just north of the intertidal, in an old brownstone among brownstones, most of which had been hollowed out and turned into fronts for towers ten times higher than they were. This preserved the street look while also rendering the neighborhood quite bizarre, a place where alien metal claws seemed to have unsheathed themselves out of the old brick flesh.
In this mélange of old and new, the brownstone called the Wolf Den was easy to miss but nevertheless one of the great nodes of the metropolis, housing as it did most of the Lame Ass’s data miners. Gen followed Olmstead through their security with the gloomy sensation she always had when entering this bastion of big data. To her data analysis was the ugly love child of science and Kafka, always either proving the sky was blue or demonstrating the truth of something deeply wrong or, to be more precise, rad
ically counterintuitive to Gen Octaviasdottir. And Gen was all about intuition. So this was a tool that cut her as much as the material she was working on. Nevertheless it was often useful, or at least useful to Olmstead. And Olmstead was useful to her.
They conferred with some of Sean’s frequent partners. River surface temperature data, available to everyone, showed that the area above the Cypress Avenue subway station had warmed in the days immediately before the two coders from the Met had been kidnapped. Okay, so far so good: the sky was blue.
The container itself had been harder to track, but here was where the Wolves shone; they had a huge cache of Chinese data, basically everything the Chinese government had kept from their own people through the twenty-first century, stolen all at once in a hilarious countercoup that formed the plot for Chang’s great opera Monkey Bites Dragon. In this Chinese archive the Lame Ass team had been able to locate the very container in which Mutt and Jeff had been imprisoned. It had been built in China, like almost all the containers on the planet, some 120 years before. This one’s travels had been the usual oceanic zigzag until the late 2090s, when containerclippers had finished superseding diesel-powered ships. By then smaller composite containers had taken over as the standard unit of shipping and land transport, and the old steel containers had been retired and turned into housing and land storage. This particular container had then dropped out of the tracking systems. It hadn’t been possible to find out where it had been for the last half century; most likely it had rested right in one of the drowned parking lots of the south Bronx, very near the Cypress subway station.
The FBI’s surveillance systems, also somehow available to these guys, showed that in the two weeks prior to the kidnapping, Henry Vinson had met several times with two people associated with Pinscher Pinkerton, out on a dock and inside a mobile Faraday cage, so that they had not been recorded. Here, as the analysts put it, they were entering the octopus’s garden. When Vinson and the Pinscher people had met, the FBI surveillance had spotted someone else also surveilling their meeting, and those other surveillors looked like they had gotten a recorder inside the Faraday cage on that dock, thus probably successfully recording them. But who the other surveillors had been, the FBI had not been able to determine.
Pinscher Pinkerton appeared to have no physical offices anywhere. Its finances were based in Grand Cayman, and its name only appeared in the cloud from time to time, mostly in messages where its encryption had failed. The Lame Ass cryptographers had pickpocketed some of its encryption the year before, but Pinscher had detected the pick and moved on. What the analysts had recovered before that move showed nothing at all concerning the kidnapping of Rosen and Muttchopf, but they had found evidence of contacts with another sucker on that leg of the octopus, a group implicated in three corporate assassinations. This was what had earned that whole octopus leg an F from the FBI and put them on the Ten Worst list. Murder for hire, as simple as that. Rosen and Muttchopf’s names could be in some of these data, but if they had been given code names that hadn’t been figured out, that might explain why they hadn’t appeared on any of these lists. As it stood, the evidence the analysts had was not enough to convince the city to go after a World Trade Organization warrant to search Pinscher’s files in the cloud.
“Damn,” Gen said. “But I want to go after them.”
Vinson’s offices, however, the FBI had cracked quite easily. Here there was a record of the hiring of Rosen and Muttchopf, also of a contact with Pinscher for personal security consultations. These were public filings, in effect. The Lame Ass analysts had also snatched some dark pool diving algorithms out of the dark pools themselves; these had been tagged by Jeff Rosen as being his work, and they stuck to other algorithms he had spotted in the dark pools. He had indeed inserted a covert channel into a pool connected to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Taken together these findings might constitute enough probable cause to get a warrant issued from the SEC to search further in Vinson’s files.
Gen pondered her options now by running various scenarios past Sean Olmstead, who served as her whiteboard in the absence of a real one. If they got a warrant and used it, they might find evidence of Vinson hiring Pinscher to stash away the troublesome cousin and his partner. If Jeff had been seeing only the tip of the iceberg, in terms of illegal market manipulation, sequestering him and his partner could have saved Vinson from years in prison, or at least an inconvenient slap on the wrist.
“Why wouldn’t he have them killed?” Olmstead asked.
“But, you know, if he wanted to stop short of that. Family or whatnot.”
Olmstead nodded uncertainly. “You don’t have any of these connections established very well.”
“But with a warrant we could find what they were doing.”
“You think?”
“Maybe not. But we might scare them into doing something stupid.”
“You like to try that,” Olmstead noted, tapping nervously on the table as he thought it over. Jazzy fingernail riffs, indicating uncertainty. “You always think you can scare them, flush them from cover.”
“Exactly. They’re almost always doing some bad stuff. They think they’re great business minds, running rings around the SEC, but a visit from a police inspector with a warrant can freak them out.”
“They consider their exposures and try to reduce them.”
“Exactly. The guilty flee where woman pursueth. And sometimes we then build a case built entirely on them doing something new and stupid.”
“Substituting for what you suspect but can’t prove.”
“Exactly!”
“But, you know, when they recognize the trick and hold fast, then you’ve just tipped your hand. That’s happened a lot. The trick is kind of an old trick by now. A hokey old cliché, if I may be so bold.”
Gen sighed. “Please, youth. I still want to try it. Because I like to make people mad. Because logic flies out the window when you’re mad.”
“Are you talking about them or about you? Okay, sorry. Might as well see if we can get a warrant. I can tell you want to.”
“You’re a mind reader.”
They got the warrant from the SEC’s cloud control panel. Olmstead called Lieutenant Claire to ask for a ride, and she soon arrived at Pier 76 off the Javits Center in a small speedboat, accompanied by a clutch of New York’s finest, fraud division, wearing civvies. They proceeded north to the Cloisters dock, tied off, and took the broad promenade stairs up to the cluster’s giant plaza.
Space itself was different up here: bigger, higher, more spacious. People eyed them as they passed—three officers in uniform, a gaggle of followers in civvies—raid! Vice squad! All the old instincts kicked in as this posh neighborhood was revealed by the spooked looks in people’s eyes to be only the latest in a long line of fashionable scam zones. It made Gen happy to stroll purposefully along, as if marshaling a tiny parade.
Then into the massive base of the fattest tower, flashing badges at their security.
“We’re here to speak to Henry Vinson, at Alban Albany,” Gen said to the building security people.
“Do you have an appointment?” they asked.
“We have a warrant.”
Gen chewed vigorously to pop her ears on the way up to the fiftieth floor, which was fairly low in the tower, where the floors were largest. She and Olmstead and Claire and the fraud forensics team emerged from the elevator and headed to the Alban Albany reception desk, where a little clot of people awaited.
“I want to speak to Henry Vinson,” Gen said, showing them the warrant.
One of the receptionists gestured at her phone and Gen said, “Yes, go ahead,” and she pinged Vinson and said that there was a policewoman to see him.
“Send her in,” came the reply.
“Come on in,” said Henry Vinson from the middle of a vast open floor, window-walled on all sides. Five six, Anglo, balding blond, looked younger than his age, which she knew was fifty-three. Tight small mouth, thin skinned, very well groomed an
d tailored. Like an actor playing a chief executive officer, but this, Gen found, was almost always true of CEOs. “How can I help you?” he said.
“I’m here to ask you about your cousin Jeff Rosen,” Gen said. “He and another man were taken and held against their will recently. City systems are showing us that you had several consultations with your company’s security contractor, Pinscher Pinkerton, at the time of their kidnapping. And Rosen and his partner worked for you twice in the last ten years. So we’re wondering if you can tell us when you last saw them.”
“I’m surprised to hear about this,” Vinson said, looking affronted. “I know nothing about it. We’re an investment firm in good standing with the SEC and the city. We would never engage in illegal practices.”
“No,” Inspector Gen agreed. “That’s what makes this pattern so disturbing. Possibly there may be rogue elements in Pinscher, doing things you don’t know about that they think you might approve of.”
“I doubt that.”
“When did you last see your cousin, Jeff Rosen?”
Vinson looked annoyed. “I’m not in touch with him.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“I don’t know. Several years ago.”
“When was the last time you were in contact with him?”
“The same. As I said, we haven’t been in touch. His mother and my father have both been dead for years. When we were young we never associated except at holidays. So I know who you mean, but beyond that, there’s no connection to speak of.”
“But he worked for your company.”
“Did he?”