The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [47]
★★His casino?★★
★★Yeah. Didn’t you know? He owns this place.★★
★★Oh. So—★★
★★He’s downstairs right now.★★ I flinch, and discover the hard way that it is indeed possible to cut yourself on an electric razor if you try hard enough. I finish off hurriedly and open the door. Ramona thrusts a bulky carrier bag at me. “Put this on.”
“Where did you get this?” I pull out a tuxedo jacket, neatly folded; there’s more stuff below it.
“It was waiting for you at the front desk.” She smiles tightly. “You have to look the part if we’re going to carry this off.”
“Shit.” I duck back into the bathroom and try to figure out what goes where. The trousers have odd fasteners in strange places and I’ve got no idea what to do with the red silk scarf-like thing; but at least they cheated on the bow tie. When I open the door Ramona is sitting in the chair by the bed, carefully reloading cartridges into the magazine of an extremely compact automatic pistol. She looks at me and frowns. “That’s supposed to go around your waist,” she says.
“I’ve never worn one of these before.”
“It shows. Let me.” She makes the gun vanish then comes over and adjusts my appearance. After a minute she steps back and looks at me critically. “Okay, that’ll do for now. In a dim light, after a couple of cocktails. Try not to hunch up like that, it makes you look like you need to sue your orthopedic surgeon.”
“Sorry, it’s the shoes. That, and you managed to land a critical hit on my geek purity score. Are you sure I can’t just wear a tee shirt and jeans?”
“No, you can’t.” She grins at me unexpectedly. “Monkey-boy isn’t comfortable in a monkey suit? Consider yourself lucky you don’t have to deal with underwire bras.”
“If you say so.” I yawn, then before my hindbrain can start issuing shutdown commands again I go over to my briefcase and start gathering up the necessaries Boris issued to me: a Tag Heuer wristwatch with all sorts of strange dials (at least one of which measures thaumic entropy levels—I’m not sure what the buttons do), a set of car keys with a fob concealing a teensy GPS tracker, a bulky old-fashioned cell phone . . . “Hey, there’s something fishy about this phone! Isn’t it—” I pick it up “—a bit heavy?”
I suddenly realize that Ramona is standing behind me. “Switch it off!” she hisses. “The power switch is the safety catch.”
“Okay already! I’m switching it off!” I put it in my inside pocket and she relaxes. “Boris didn’t say anything about—what does it do?” Then the penny drops. “Holy fuck.”
“That’s what you’d get if you switched it on, pointed it at the pope, and dialed 1-4-7-star,” she agrees. “It takes nine millimeter ammunition. Are you okay with that?” She raises one perfectly sketched eyebrow at me.
“No!” I’m not used to firearms, they make me nervous; I’m much happier with a PDA loaded with Laundry CAT-A countermeasure invocations and a fully charged Hand of Glory. Still, nothing wakes me up quite like nearly shooting someone by accident. I fidget with the new tablet PC that Brains provisioned for me, plugging it in and setting it for counter-intrusion duty. “Shall we go drop in on Billington?”
I’M NOT MUCH OF A BEACH BUNNY. I’M NOT A culture vulture or a clothes horse either. Opera leaves me cold, clubbing is something bad guys do to baby seals, and I’m no more inclined to work the slots than I am to stand in the middle of a railway station ripping up twenty-pound notes. Nevertheless, there’s a certain vicarious amusement to be had in stepping out at night with a beautiful blonde on my arm and a brown manila envelope in my inside pocket labeled HOSPITALITY EXPENSES—even if I’m going to have to account for any cash I pull out of it, in triplicate, on a form F.219/B that doesn’t list “gambling losses” as an acceptable excuse.
It’s dark, and the air temperature has dropped to about gas mark five, leaving me feeling like a Sunday roast in a tinfoil jacket. There’s an onshore breeze that