Lindsay looked around. A bunch of new guards had come around the corner to the right. They were in heavy gray TAC-team gear, like puffy gnomoids. They weren’t rushing at us, though, they were just standing there wondering if there was really a problem.
“Listen, Lindseed,” I whispered, “call them off now. Seriously.”
“This is Lindsay Warren, stay there!” he yelled at them. “FLOOR GUARDS, STAND FAST!” They paused. “I’ll page you in a second,” he said.
We turned our back on them and went in. The door sealed itself behind us. Lindsay led us into the box, past the Great Glass Elevator and the windows looking down on the interior of the Hyperbowl. A stage with a proprietary Sleeker-friendly surface stage had rolled out over the ball pit and they were doing some kind of elaborate rite, or what they would call a halftime show or awards ceremony. The recipient of whatever it was-some of the signage said it was the Oskars, but since they spelled it that way I figured they had had trouble with the actual Oscars, which might still be going on somewhere-was standing on a scaffold in a tiara, giving a speech about how lucky and well-meaning she was. The VVIP SkyBox was empty, with signs of recent recreational use.
“Let’s talk in the Blue Bin, or whatever you call it.”
Lindsay punched a code into a panel on the far wall. The door slid to the side with a little sizzle. It was probably just a sound effect they’d put in to make the whole thing seem more cool. I made sure I’d remembered the code and then made the three of them go in first.
Lindsay’s Blue Room-which was really known as the Safe Room, or the Sealing Room-was steel-lined on all four sides and had no windows. It had only been slightly face-lifted since Jed 1 had been here, so it was still about two rope-lengths square, with a one-rope-length ceiling and only two doors, one directly opposite the door we’d come through. There was a square black-granite conference table in the center of the room, off-angle so that you could sit at it and see all four walls, and in the center of the table, about an arm square, a DHI holo-block layout of the Game, with the center bin taken up by a small model of the temple district and stadium complex of Neo-Teo. It was turned off, with only a single green light marking our position in the stadium, but I could still see that it had been vastly improved. The only other solid things in the room were twelve black chairs. The ceiling was white and emanated a cheap-feeling ethereal glow, and the walls looked like blue silk. Each had what looked like a big oil painting in a wide black frame. Directly across from us, that is, on the western wall, there was a scene of Lehi arriving in the Promised Land in an odd sort of boat like a wooden submarine. On our right there was a bigger canvas of Christ in America. It showed Jesus upstage left, his hands outstretched showing his wounds, and behind him the Pyramid of the Castillo at Chichen Itza. A group of rather Anglo-looking ancient Maya surrounded Christ, regarding him with varied attitudes of gratitude and awe. One of the women was wearing a huipil that was almost authentic, but the men sported anachronistic gold neck-plates and quetzal-plumed pickelhaubes like nineteenth- century Prussian officers. On our left another mural showed Nephi Making Gold Plates. Behind him, Teotihuacan burned, except, judging from the fall foliage around him, Teotihuacan seemed to be somewhere in Upstate New York. The last painting, above the door we’d come through, showed the Angel Moroni appearing to Joseph Smith, pointing out the buried Plates of Nephi with his radiant finger.
“Have a sit,” I said to Lindsay, pointing to the center chair on the table’s southeast side. “Keep your fingers off the tabletop.” Be more careful, I thought. I fingered the detonator buttons on my phone. “Put your hands through the arms of the chair and on your thighs. Please.”
He did. As he raised his arms his jacket pulled a bit on the Bom and he winced a little.
“Push your chair back an arm. Two feet. Right.” I took a crushed roll of clear packing tape out of my lapel pocket and tossed it to Marena. She did not catch it. “It is just tape,” I said. I got her to pick it up off the floor and tape Lindsay’s wrists to the arms of the Aeron. After some explanation, I got him to cross his feet behind the chair’s stalk, and Marena taped them to the base. I also had her run two loops around his chest and around the headrest. The Bom would not go off from pressure, but I did not want him weakening its hold on his flesh by slamming back and forth. I took off my live badge, slid it over to her, and had her exchange it with Lindsay’s. I had Marena sit in the central southwest and tape her own ankles. She slipped her feet out of shoes that, according to Jed’s irksome memory for trivia, were vintage albino-boa-skin Roger Viviers. I was about to tell her to put them back on and then decided against it. I did her last wrist myself, not getting too close. She was tricky. But she believed I could do what she wanted. I think.
I clipped Lindsay’s live badge to my chest and sat cross-legged in the center of the northwest.
Whew. A breather. Finally. I spat out my plastic cheek inserts and rubbed the fake fingerprints off my hands, switching my phone from one to the other. Do not let go of that, I thought.
“Okay,” Lindsay said. “Now, what kind of a deal are you looking for?”
(112)
Lindsay was certainly less surprised about all this than one might have thought. I suppose that like any businessman, he was always expecting a shakedown. And in fact, that was probably the right thing to expect from a domehead like Jed. But from me it was not, or rather from me it would not be for money. He was about to get shaken down for the main event.
“The first thing we need to do is harden this room,” I said.
I tapped the tabletop. The granite effect disappeared and a keyboard and standard interface screen-Warren proprietary, but basically like Windows-bloomed on its north quadrant. The tabletop functioned as a single large touchscreen, leading to a station that could control hundreds of Warren’s networks. I got to Lindsay’s personal desktop, to MENU, to SEALING ROOM SYSTEMS, and to ISOLATE SEALING ROOM SYSTEMS, before I had to ask for Lindsay for a password. He gave me one and it worked. When I closed the vault-style doors over the standard door behind us I could almost feel the steel dead bolts sliding shut. I did the same thing with the rest of the floor, locking down the Great Glass Elevator, the six other elevators, and even, contrary to regulations in nonprivate countries, the fire doors to the stairs. According to the room’s HELP file, they could not be opened from outside, even if there were a fire. Lindsay had probably guessed that I would make contact at some point, although he had not expected this situation. On the one hand, I could not get out of here. But on the other hand, Ana’s group couldn’t use any of the usual hostage-grabbing tactics, or even exotic ones like CCV, that is, Cognition-Compromising Vapor, or stupid-making gas. So far, Lindsay’s millennial paranoia, especially his care in constructing his refuge, was working against him. I looked at my watch. It was 3:23 P.M.
“I’m awfully busy,” Lindsay said. He sounded less worried than one might think.
“I know,” I said. “Do not worry. If everything goes well, I am not going to interfere with the invasion.”
Lindsay and Marena both reacted to this, although I had the sense that only Lindsay knew what I was talking about.
“All right,” I said. “Well, as always, the first thing is to get drugs. I understand there is a new formulation of the tsam lic.”
“That’s correct,” Lindsay said.
“There should be some in a wall safe in this room.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Let’s see,” I said.
After some back-and-forth, he told me how to open the safe. The door swung out of the blue-silk-looking wall without any booby traps. There were a few interesting-looking things inside-storage chips, wrapped cash, jewelry rolls, the Vase of the Seven Xibalban Gods that used to be in the Art Institute of Chicago-but all I took out was a pharmacy bottle labeled 41-037. It was full of white gelcaps.
“Where is the bar?” I asked.
Lindsay told me. It opened the same way. It was a whole little alcove with hot and cold running everything, so I got a glass of warm water. I opened one of the gel caps and tasted the powder. Even though it was a synthetic version, my tongue could still tell that it was the real deal, and more potent than ever. I swallowed the powder and pocketed the rest of the capsules. I drank the water.
By now the Hyperbowl took up most of our field of view. It had been refaced and enlarged and was now an impossibly huge truncated cone, stepped like a pyramid but too squat and too big, a gold-glass-sheathed tumor that supposedly seated 255,300 people. A ring of 365 vertical white lasers, bright enough to be visible in daylight,
