“How high up were you?” Cerise asked.
“High,” Trouble answered. “At least two stories, maybe three or four—the nearest building was a little away, you’d be looking down on it.”
Cerise nodded, looked at Mabry. “Run it, see what it comes up with.”
Mabry did as he was told. The model vanished, to be replaced by a swirling paisley pattern.
“Come on,” Cerise murmured, staring at the screen “Come on.”
Trouble leaned over Mabry’s other shoulder and willed the holding pattern to clear. After what seemed an interminable time, the paisley swirls vanished, and a message appeared: NO EXACT MATCH AVAILABLE. “Oh, shit,” Trouble said, and turned away.
“See if there’s a possible location,” Cerise said calmly to Mabry, and the big man touched keys, frowning slightly. The holding pattern reappeared, but only for a moment, then was replaced by a section of the city model—four, maybe five blocks of nondescript houses, on the far side of the Harbormouth bridge, where the solid land fell away into the Slough A message appeared with it: SIMILAR VIEWS EXIST IN THIS APPROXIMATE AREA.
“Now, that’s more like it,” Cerise said, and Trouble turned back to the screen.
“That’s where I’d expect to find him,” she agreed.
Cerise nodded, studying the image. “A view of the Ferris wheel, you said, and a bunch of housetops.”
“Yeah.”
“What about there?” Mabry asked, and slid the cursor across the screen to circle a tall rectangle colored the pale green of a rooming house.
“Why not?” Cerise said.
Mabry touched keys, and images flickered across the screen as he moved the cursor from floor to floor of the rooming house. All were views from the windows that faced the Parcade; all showed housetops and the Ferris wheel above them in the distance. “Well?”
Trouble shook her head. “Definitely not there.” She studied the screen, trying to imagine what it would take to transform the images she had just seen to the one she remembered. “What about that one?”
Mabry touched keys again, calling up the views attached to the house she had selected. Trouble watched them through, but shook her head again. “It’s close, though. Try next door.”
Mabry worked his way down the street, selecting two more houses, shook his head as the images from the third popped onto the screen. “This of course assumes that he’ll stay put long enough for us to catch him. Even if we find the place, he’ll be long gone.”
Cerise looked at Trouble, who said nothing, her eyes fixed on the screen. Cerise said, carefully, “I’m not so sure about that, Mabry. There’s no real reason for him to run—he doesn’t know what, if anything, Trouble saw, and he doesn’t know we know Seahaven. He’s been invisible for a long time, and he’s got hardware there—it must be substantial, to run Seahaven. I think he’ll stay.”
“It would be stupid,” Mabry said, but he sounded slightly more optimistic than he had. “Where next?”
Trouble pointed, touching a house across the street from the one they had viewed before. “That one.”
Mabry selected it, ran the images, moving up from the ground floor. Trouble held her breath as the pointer reached the top two floors, relaxed with a sigh.
“That’s it.”
“You’re sure?” Mabry asked, but he was already calling up the address.
“Of course I’m sure,” Trouble answered. “That’s the view I saw, anyway.”
“That’s near where Blake used to live,” Cerise said, and shook the thought away as irrelevant.
Mabry shoved himself away from the media center, not bothering to shut down the program. “Your phone? I need to call— ”
“We’re coming with you,” Trouble said, and pointed to the handset resting on the coffee table.
Mabry picked it up, began punching numbers. “Do you think that’s wise? I thought you had a reputation to uphold.”
Cerise grinned at that, reached across the keyboard to close down the system. “Oh, we have reputations, all right—”
“—and I fully intend to keep mine,” Trouble finished. “Nobody crosses me, Mabry. Nobody.”
“Suit yourself,” Mabry answered, and turned away to speak softly into the handset.
Cerise looked at Trouble, lowered her voice cautiously. “You sure you’re sure?”
Trouble nodded again, knowing the question she was being asked. After all this, Cerise was saying, after being dragged back into the shadows and finding out again that she had a taste for it, did she really want to throw herself irrevocably into the bright lights, turn herself into nothing more than a syscop? “I’m sure,” she said, and Mabry tossed the handset onto the couch.
“Let’s go,” he said, and swept out of the room without looking back.
Trouble followed, said over her shoulder, so softly Cerise wasn’t for a second sure she had heard correctly, “I want to be in at the kill. If I’ve gone over to the enemy, I want to do it right.”
Cerise hesitated, shook her head, uncertain of her feelings, or at best sure only of one thing, that she would see this through to the end. She followed both of them down the emergency stairs and out into the lobby.
Mabry had commandeered a car from the local cops, unmarked but with police equipment, sophisticated net monitors and local tie-ins. prominent on its control boards. There was a driver as well, a skinny, nondescript young man with pale brown hair and a recruit’s flashes below The Willows’ insignia on his shoulder. He looked momentarily as though he might protest, seeing the two women, but Mabry said, “You have the address?”
The young man swallowed whatever he had been going to say. “Yes, sir.”
“Then let’s go.” Mabry climbed into the front seat beside the driver, and Trouble and Cerise scrambled into the narrow passenger compartment. “You notified Treasury as well?”
The driver put the car into gear, edged forward out of the driveway in front of Eastman House. “Yes, sir. They’re on their way.”
“Good,” Mabry said, and leaned back against his seat. Trouble looked at Cerise, saw the other woman’s pale face intent on the road. Then Cerise looked at her, dark eyes wary, and they both heard the sound of sirens, distant now, but coming quickly closer.
“What the hell?” Trouble said, softly, and Mabry leaned forward to query one of the systems plugged into the main board.
“—hostage situation—” The voice blared from a speaker, and Mabry reached hastily for a datacord and plugged it in, cutting oft the voice.
“Who the hell can he be holding hostage?” Cerise asked. “Not Silk, surely.”
“Who’d care?” Trouble agreed, her eyes on Mabry.
The big man glanced back at her, his expression unreadable. “He’s tied into the city computers. Threatens to erase system software if he’s attacked. Can he do it?”
Trouble nodded slowly, remembering the sheer scale of virtual Seahaven, of the power, hardware and software, that the Mayor needed to maintain the illusion. Turn that power on a city system, and no IC(E) would be sufficient; at that scale, brute force alone would be enough to shatter the city’s coding, leave all the files, all the city systems, open and vulnerable.
“Does The Willows care?” Cerise asked, with a smile that did not touch her eyes.
Mabry’s eyes flicked toward her, and then away again. “The Willows is tied in to city services—drainage, the pump system, sewers, traffic control, all that. If Novross crashes those, The Willows doesn’t have sufficient backup power to keep things running.” He turned back to the control board, running one hand along a sensor strip. “Besides, the city systems contain the tax records.”
“Ah.” Cerise’s smile widened into open contempt.
The sirens were louder now as they crossed the Harbormouth bridge, and the local cops had set up a hasty roadblock halfway down Ashworth Avenue. Other cops were fanning out from the roadblock, moving along the storefronts to shut down the businesses and force the citizens indoors. Out of harm’s way, or, more likely, just out of their way, Cerise thought. Mabry extended his credentials to the waiting cop, a man in full armor under his coveralls, with a stunstick at his belt and a pellet gun slung across his shoulder.
“Where’s Starling?”
