The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [113]
Eileen Billington’s suit is a surreal flash of pink in the twilight as she walks towards me. “So, Mr. Howard.” Her smile’s as tight as a six-pack of BOTOX injections. “How are you enjoying our little cruise so far?”
“No complaints about the accommodation, but the view’s a bit monotonous,” I say truthfully enough. “I gather you wanted to talk to me?”
“Oh yes.” She probably means to smile sweetly but her lip gloss makes her look as if she’s just feasted on her latest victim’s throat. “Who is this woman?”
“Huh?” I stare blankly until she gestures impatiently at the big display screen next to me.
“Her. There, in the crosshairs.”
We’re standing beside a desk or console or whatever with a gigantic flat display. A black beret sitting in front of it is riding herd on a bunch of keyboards and a trackball: he’s got about seventy zillion small video windows open on different scenes. One of them is paused and zoomed to fill the middle of the screen. It’s an airport terminal and it looks vaguely familiar, if a little distorted by the funny lens. Several people are crossing the camera viewpoint but only one of them is centered—a woman in a sundress and big floppy hat, large shades concealing her eyes. She’s got a messenger bag slung carelessly over one shoulder, and she’s carrying a battered violin case.
Very carefully, I say, “I haven’t a clue.” Hopefully the noise of my heart pounding away won’t be audible over the ship’s engines. “Why do you think I ought to know her? What is this, anyway?” I force myself to look away from Mo and find I’m staring at the console instead, tier upon tier of nineteen-inch rackmount boxes stacked halfway to the ceiling. I blink and do a double take. They’ve got lockable cabinet fronts, but there’s a key stuck in the one right above the monitor. I can see LEDs blinking behind it, set in what looks suspiciously like the front panel of a PC. Suddenly the USB thumb drive in my pocket begins to itch furiously. “You’ve sure got a lot of toys here.”
Eileen isn’t distracted: “She has something to do with your employers,” she informs me. “This is the monitoring hub.” She pats the monitor. Some imp of the perverse tickles her ego, or maybe it’s the geas. “Here you see the filtered take from my intelligence queue. Most of the material that comes in is rubbish, and filtering it is a big overhead; I’ve got entire call centers in Mumbai and Bangalore trawling the inputs from the similarity grid, looking for eyes that are watching interesting things, forwarding them to the Hopper for further analysis, and finally funneling them to me here on the Mabuse. Computer screens and keyboards where the owners are entering passwords, mostly. But sometimes we get something more useful . . . the girl on the cosmetics stand in the arrivals terminal at Princess Juliana Airport, for example.”
“Yes, well.” I make a show of peering at the screen. “Are you sure she’s who you’re looking for? Could it be one of that group, there?” I point at a bunch of wiry-looking surf Nazis with curiously even haircuts.
“Nonsense.” Eileen sniffs aristocratically. “The surge in the Bronstein Bridge definitely coincided with that woman crossing the immigration desk—” She stops and stares at me with all the warmth of a cobra inspecting a warm, furry snack. “Am I monologuing? How unfortunate.” She taps the black beret on his shoulder. “You, take five.”
The black beret gets up and leaves in a hurry. “It’s very unfortunate, this geas,” she explains. “I could spill important stuff by accident, and then I’d have to send him to Human Resources for recycling.