Glasshouse - Charles Stross [148]
The designated rendezvous is the public bathhouse on the Street of Orange Leaves. It’s a narrow, cobbled, mountainside road, running from near the main drag with the silversmith’s district down toward the harbor. It’s a fine spring afternoon, and the air is heavy with the smell of honeysuckle. A gang of kids are playing throw-stick loudly outside the drunkenly leaning apartment buildings, and the usual light foot traffic is laboriously winding its way up and down the middle of the road, porters yelling insults at rickshaw drivers and both groups venting their spleen on the shepherd who’s trying to drive a small flock of spidergoats uphill.
I’ve been here long enough to know what I’m doing, more or less. I spot a boy who’s hanging back on the sidelines and snap my fingers. He comes over, not so much walking as slithering so that his friends don’t see him. Grubby, half-starved, his clothes faded and patched: perfect. A coin appears between two of my fingers. “Want another?” I ask.
He nods. “I don’t do thex,” he lisps. I look closer and realize he’s got a cleft palate.
“Not asking you to.” I make another coin appear, this time out of reach. “The teahouse. I want you to look round the back alley and see if there are any men waiting there. If there are, come and tell me. If not, go in and find Mistress Sanni. Tell her that the Tank says hello, then come and tell me.”
“Two coin.” He holds up a couple of fingers.
“Okay, two coin.” I glare at him, and he does the disappearing trick again. The kid’s got talent, I realize, he does that like a pro. Sharp doubts intrude: Maybe he is a pro? We rounded up the easy targets a long time ago—the ones who’re still running ahead of us tend to be a lot harder to nail.
I don’t have long to wait. A cent or so passes, then lisp-boy is back. “Mithreth Thanni thay, the honeypot ith overflowing. I take you to her.”
The honeypot is overflowing: doesn’t sound good. I pass him the two coins. “Okay, which way?”
He does a quick fade in front of me, but not too fast for me to follow. We’re round the back of a dubious alleyway, then into a maze of anonymous backyards in a matter of seconds. Then he goes over a rickety wooden fence and along another alley—this one full of compost, the stink unbelievable—and up to an anonymous-looking back door. “The’th here.”
My hand goes to my sword hilt. “Really?” I stare at the kid, then at the two dead thugs leaning against each other beside the back step. The kid flashes a lightning grin at me.
“You did thay to check the back alley for muggerth, Robin.”
“Sanni?”
He sketches a bow, urchin-cool. I raise an eyebrow. The muggers look as if they’re sleeping, if you ignore the blood leaking from their noses. Very good work, for an intel type who isn’t a wet ops specialist. “We don’t have long. Authenticate me.”
We do the routine, something shared, something do, something secret, something you—all the stuff the Republic of Is used to do for us. “Okay, boss, why did you call me?” Sanni isn’t my boss these days, but old habits die hard.
“The honeypot is leaking.” He drops the lisp and stands tall, Sanni’s natural presence shining through the bottleneck of his three-hundred-meg body. “We—Vera Six, that is—got word about twenty megs ago that a bunch of familiar spooks were haunting the Invisible Republic. It all snowballed really fast. Looks like several of the memory laundries have been infiltrated and the glasshouse has been taken over.”
I lean against the wall. “The glasshouse?”
Sanni nods. “Someone’s going to have to go in and polish the mirrors. Someone else. I forked an instance five megs ago, and she hasn’t reported back yet. It’s going to be deep cover, I’m afraid.”
“Shit and pig-fucking shit.” I glare at the dead muggers as if it’s their fault.
The glasshouse is a rehab center for prisoners of war. The setup is designed to encourage resocialization, to help integrate them back into something vaguely resembling postwar society; it’s a former MASucker