Designated Targets

looked as if she’d had all her carpet and linoleum removed and left bare wooden boards and concrete in their place.

“It’s polished concrete,” she said enthusiastically when he asked. “Fucking cool, isn’t it? And it’s well within the very limited abilities of your local builders, thank God.”

“It’s, uh . . . I’ve never . . .”

“I know. You’ve never seen anything like it. You wouldn’t have. I had a hell of a time finding a designer who could understand what I wanted,” she said, beginning to pace around and whip herself into a frenzy. It made Dan wonder if she’d found a new supply of combat drugs. She spoke faster and faster, but with an enthusiasm he’d never seen her display for anything before.

It was actually kind of cute. She was like a teenager, for a change.

“I had a couple of copies of Monument and Wallpaper,” she said, picking up a magazine from what was probably a coffee table and passing it to him. “I bought them at the airport in Bangkok, back in my time, before I flew down to Darwin to join the Clinton. And that was all I had to work with. But I read about this totally outrageous gay guy in The New Yorker, you know, your New Yorker, and this graphic designer—he was just about to pack his bags and head out your way, to the Zone—but I grabbed him before I flew out last time, showed him the magazines and he, like, totally got it. He agreed to manage the renovation. We were using these Italian builders who got run out of Florence by the fascists. And anyway, I’m stoked. It’s just like being home.”

She threw her arms around him, and Dan could tell she was as happy as he’d ever known her to be. She was almost jumping with pleasure.

“It’s a great-looking pad, Jules—Is that the right word?”

“If this was nineteen sixty-two, and I was Gidget, then yeah. But go on, keep telling me how great it is.”

Dan made a show of flicking through the Wallpaper magazine, which wasn’t about wallpaper at all, as far as he could tell. He could see where the designer had picked up some ideas and recreated them in Julia’s apartment.

“That’s like what you’ve got, right?” he said, pointing out a review of a restaurant, which seemed to have only one table, a long bench, like in a mess hall.

“Close enough,” she said, squeezing him again. “Do you like it?”

“I think so,” he said. “It looks, I dunno, like a house at the World’s Fair. The view looks good.”

“It’s got a great fucking view!” she cried, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him over to the window. They were at least nine floors up in a corner apartment, and when he looked out, ribbons of light and moving traffic stretched away beneath them. He hadn’t been paying attention in the limo, but the building had to be somewhere on the extreme eastern side of Manhattan, overlooking the river, which cut through the scenery outside like a black ribbon of negative space. He’d been to New York a couple of times before and was pretty sure he could see Brooklyn and Queens and Long Island. From the corner window, a wide sliver of Manhattan proper was visible, including a small dark wedge of Central Park, then the West Side and what he guessed was the Hudson River.

“This must have cost a mint, baby,” Dan said, and he regretted it instantly. Had he broken some weird twenty-first-century taboo, implying that she couldn’t afford to pay for her own home?

But Julia was surprisingly matter-of-fact in her answer. “Well, I sold some of my stuff. You know, silly little things like an old calculator, and a digital translator, and this ancient fucking iPod that’d been in my backpack for a decade. And I got a fucking packet for them.”

As she explained how she’d cashed in, Julia grew increasingly animated again, leaving Dan confused. He’d always thought of her as an adventurer, someone for whom ties and commitments were nothing more than dead weight.

But as she spoke, her voice became faster and her hands began to fly around like birds released from a cage. “The Times had just deposited some hazard money into an account for me,” she said, “back up in twenty-one, which I could access through the Clinton, and the office here agreed to pay that out dollar for dollar, in order to get me on staff. Which meant I got another big fucking payday right away. And then I had a lawyer do my contract negotiations for me, this chick named Maria O’Brien. Actually, she was the one helped me set up my garage sale. I would never have thought to charge anyone fifty grand local for an iPod with a flat battery. She used to be with the Eighty-second, but she finished her hitch about five days after the Transition. She’s gone into business for herself here, providing legal services for anyone wanting to do business in the Zone. I tell you, Dan, she’s going to be as rich as a fucking astronaut.”

“A what?”

“It’s an in-joke. Forget it. Anyway, she got the Times to honor my pay and bonuses, and to pay me what she called a temporally adjusted salary—which, bottom line, is a shitload more than a reporter gets here, and she squeezed a great big fucking on-signing bonus out of them, as well. It was all more than enough to pay for this, and make some strategic investments with the leftovers. I’ve got another place, even bigger than this, over in Gramercy Park. I bought it with Rosanna, and we’re going to redo it together.

“Maria’s formed a partnership with a local brokerage house, and I’m having about half of my salary invested by them. You could get in on it if you wanted, Dan. You should think about it. This war’s not going to last forever, and when it’s done, you’re looking at compressing eighty years of growth into a decade or two. It’s going to be fucking crazy. It’s already crazy.”

He didn’t know quite what to say. He’d never been on the receiving end of a spiel quite like it. The closest he could recall was opening his door to a Fuller Brush salesman once. That guy had made him feel like he’d be on the road to hell if he didn’t finish the day owning a complete set of Mr. Fuller’s brushes.

Julia made him look tame.

“Uh, well, I guess I could,” he said. “I don’t have much to do with my pay, except buy you presents.”

“Well, forget about that, buddy. Get yourself a portfolio. You’re in town for, what, three days? We’ll set up a coffee with Maria and . . . Hell, fuck that . . . Let’s go see her right now. She never sleeps.”

As so often happened around Julia, Dan Black felt himself swept along in her wake. She disappeared into her bedroom and reappeared with her flexipad.

“There’s no net here,” he said.

“I know. But Maria’s got a mil-grade unit that’ll pick up a point-to-point message within five klicks, if it’s on . . . Hah! And it is!”

Julia ran her fingers through her hair and looked into the flexipad as though it were a makeup compact.

“Hey, Maria. It’s Jules. Dan’s in town and my head’s in a different time zone. You up for a drink? Zap me.” She tossed the unit onto a cushion in the chill-out zone and took his hand. “Come on, baby. Let’s have a shower and get ready.”

As she led him through into the bathroom, which looked like something out of the later Roman Empire, he heard the pad chime behind him.

Music and the sound of a party followed them into the shower.

“Hey, Jules!” he heard a woman call out. “Great to hear from you. Bring your big boy out. I’m with the famous Slim Jim down at the Bayswater. And get this, Frank Sinatra’s here!”

16

SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE ZONE, CALIFORNIA

Having been born in 1969, Admiral Phillip Kolhammer wasn’t a true child of the digital age. He grew up with rotary telephones, cassette recorders, black-and-white TV, pinball machines, one type of Coke, and the unfortunate musical legacy of the 1980s. The most secure personal files on his flexipad were a collection of bootleg tracks by a long-forgotten country rock band called Lone Justice, and the first two seasons of Miami Vice.

He’d never really mastered text messaging by thumb, but like everyone who grew up after the rise of digital entertainment, he had learned to split his attention along multiple tracks. Given the immense flows of data that streamed in from a properly monitored battlespace, he was often required to concentrate on a surprising variety of