Distraction - Bruce Sterling [162]
The prisoner now arrived, handcuffed, and with an escort of four Moderators. The prisoner wore a full-length hunter’s suit of gray and brown bark-and-leaf camou, including a billed cap. His lace-up boots were clogged with red mud. He had a square nose, large hairy ears, heavy brows, black shiny eyes. He was a squat and heavy man in his thirties, with hands like callused bear paws. He’d suffered a swollen scrape along his unshaven jaw and had a massive bruise on his neck.
“What happened to him? Why is he injured?” Greta said.
“He fell off his bicycle,” Burningboy offered flatly.
The prisoner was silent. It was immediately and embarrassingly obvious to all concerned that he was not going to tell them a thing. He stood solidly in the midst of their boardroom, reeking of woodsmoke and sweat, radiating complete contempt for them, everything they stood for, and everything they knew. Oscar examined the Regulator with deep professional interest. This man was astoundingly out of place. It was as if a rock-hard cypress log had been hauled from the bat-haunted depths of the swamp and dumped on the carpet before them.
“You really think you’re a tough customer, don’t you?” Kevin said shrilly.
The Regulator signally failed to notice him.
“We can make you talk,” Kevin growled. “Wait’ll I load up my anarchy philes on improvising interrogation! We’ll do hideous and gruesome things to you! With wire, and matchsticks, and like that.”
“Excuse me, sir,” Oscar said politely. “Do you speak English? Parlez-vous français?”
No response at all.
“We’re not going to torture you, sir. We are civilized people here. We just want you to tell us why you were exploring our neighborhood with all these surveillance and arson devices. We’re willing to be very reasonable about this. If you’ll tell us what you were doing and who told you to do it, we’ll let you go home.”
No answer.
“Sir, I recognize that you’re loyal to your cause, whatever it is, but you are captured, you know. You don’t have to remain entirely mute under circumstances like this. It’s considered entirely ethical to give your name, your number, and your network address. If you did that for us, we could tell your friends—your wife, your children—that you’re alive and safe.”
No answer. Oscar sighed patiently. “Okay, you’re not going to talk. I can see that I’m tiring you. So if you’ll just indicate that you’re not deaf …”
The Regulator’s heavy eyebrows twitched. He looked at Oscar, sizing him up for a bloodletting bowshot to the kidneys. Finally, he spoke. “Nice wristwatch, handsome.”
“Okay,” Oscar breathed. “Let me suggest that we take our friend here and dump him into the Spinoffs building, along with those other Huey scabs. I’m sure they all have a lot of news to catch up on.”
Gazzaniga was scandalized. “What! We can’t send this character in there to rendezvous with those people! He’s very dangerous! He’s a vicious nomad brute!”
Oscar smiled. “So what? We have hundreds of vicious nomad brutes. Forget talking to this guy. We don’t need him. We need to talk seriously to our own nomads. They know everything that he knows, and more. Plus, our friends actually want to defend us. So can we all knuckle down and get serious now? Boys, take the prisoner away.”
After this confrontation, the Emergency negotiations rapidly moved onto much firmer ground: equipment and instrumentation. Here the nomads and scientists found compelling common interests. Their mutual need to eat was especially compelling. Burningboy introduced three of his technical experts. Greta commandeered the time of her best biotech people. The talks plowed on into darkness.
Oscar left the building, changed his clothes to shed any cling-on listening devices, then went into one of the gardens for a quiet rendezvous with