'They don't, Laney said.

'Of course they do, protested Rydell, 'I was there.

'No, Laney said, 'they've got footage of me.

'What are you talking about, Laney?

'The infinite plasticity of the digital.

'But I signed for it. My name, not yours.

'On a screen, right?

'Oh. Rydell thought about it. 'Who can get into GlobEx and alter that stuff?

'Not me, said Laney. 'But I can see it's been altered.

'So who did it?

'That's academic at this point.

'What's that mean? Rydell asked.

'It means don't ask. Where are you?

'In a bed-and-breakfast on the bridge. Your cough sounds better.

'This blue stuff, Laney said. Rydell had no idea what he meant. 'Where's the projector?

'Like a thermos? Right here.

'Don't take it with you. Find a shop there called Bad Sector and tell them you need the cable.

'What kind of cable?

'They'll be expecting you, Laney said and hung up.

Rydell sat there on the end of the bed, with the sunglasses on, thoroughly pissed off at Laney. Felt like bagging the whole deal. Get a job back at that parking garage. Sit around and watch nature in downtown Detroit.

Then his work ethic caught up with him. He took off the glasses, put them in his jacket, and started putting his shoes back on.

28. FOLSOM STREET

FOOT of Folsom in the rain, all these soot-streaked RVs, spavined campers, gut-sprung vehicles of any description, provided that description included old; things that ran, if they ran at all, on gasoline.

'Look at that, Tessa said, as she edged the van past an old Hummer, ex-military, every square inch covered with epoxied micro-junk, a million tiny fragments of the manufactured world glittering in Tessa's headlights and the rain.

'Think there's a spot there, Chevette said, peering through the bad wiper wash. Tessa's van had Malibu-style wiper blades; old and hadn't been wet for quite a while. They'd had to creep this last block along the Embarcadero, when the rain had really started.

It was drumming steadily on the van's flat steel roof now, but Chevette's sense of San Francisco weather told her it wouldn't last all that long.

The black kid with the dreads had earned his fifty. They'd found him crouching there like a gargoyle on the curb, his face somehow already as old as it would ever need to be, smoking Russian cigarettes from a red-and-white pack he kept tucked into the rolled-up sleeve of an old army shirt, three sizes too big. The van still had its wheels on and the tires were intact.

'What do you think he meant, Tessa said, maneuvering between a moss-stained school bus of truly ancient vintage and a delaminating catamaran up on a trailer whose tires had almost entirely rotted away, 'when he said somebody was looking for you?

'I don't know, Chevette said. She'd asked him who, but he'd just shrugged and walked off. This after determinedly trying to hustle Tessa for God's Little Toy. 'Maybe if you'd given him the camera platform, he'd've told me.

'No fear, Tessa said, killing the engine. 'That's half my share of the Malibu house.

Chevette saw that there were lights on in the tiny cabin of the cat-boat, through little slit-like windows, and somebody moving in there. She started cranking down the window beside her, but it stuck after two turns, so she opened the door instead.

'That's Buddy's space there, said a girl, straightening up from the catamaran's hatch, her voice raised above the rain, hoarse and a little frightened. She hunched there, under some old poncho or piece of tarp, and Chevette couldn't make out her face.

'S'cuse us, Chevette said, 'but we need to stop for the night, or anyway till this rain lets up.

'Buddy parks there.

'Do you know when he'll be back?

'Why?

'We'll be out of here dawn tomorrow, Chevette said. 'We're just two women. You okay with that?

The girl raised the tarp a fraction, and Chevette caught a glimpse of her eyes. 'Just two of you?

'Let us stay, Chevette said, 'then you won't have to worry who else might come along.

'Well, the girl said. And was gone, ducking back down. Chevette heard the hatch dragged shut.

'Bugger leaks, Tessa said, examining the roof of the van with a small black flashlight.

'I don't think it'll keep up long, Chevette said.

'But we can park here?

'Unless Buddy comes back, Chevette said.

Tessa turned the light back into the rear of the van. Where rain was already pooling.

'I'll get the foam and the bags up here, Chevette said. 'Keep 'em dry till later, anyway.

She climbed back between the seats.

29. VICIOUS CYCLE

RYDELL found a map of the bridge in his sunglasses, a shopping and restaurant guide for tourists. It was in Portuguese, but you could toggle to an English version.

It took him a while; a wrong move on the rocker-pad and he'd wind up back in those Metro Rio maps, but finally he'd managed to pull it up. Not a GPS map, just drawings of both levels, set side by side, and he had no way of knowing how up-to-date it was.

His bed-and-breakfast wasn't on it, but Ghetto Chef Beef Bowl was (three and a half stars) and Bad Sector was too.

The lozenge that popped up when he clicked on Bad Sector described it as a source for 'retro hard and soft, with an idiosyncratic twentieth-century bent. He wasn't sure about that last part, but he could at least see where the place was: lower level, not far from that bar he'd gone in with Creedmore and the guitar player.

There was a cabinet to put stuff in, behind the triple-faux paneling, so he did: his duffel and the GlobEx box with the thermos thing. He put the switchblade, after some thought, under the foam slab. He considered tossing it into the bay, but he wasn't sure exactly where you could find a clear shot to do that out here. He didn't want to carry it, and anyway he could always toss it later.

It was raining when he came out beside Ghetto Chef Beef Bowl, and he'd seen it rain on the bridge before, when he'd first been here. What happened was that rain fell on the weird jumble of shanty boxes people had built up there and shortly came sluicing down through all of that in big random gouts, like someone was emptying bathtubs. There was no real drainage here, things having been built in the most random way possible, so that the upper level, while sheltered, was no way dry.

This seemed to have thinned the line for the Ghetto Chef, so that he briefly considered eating, but then he thought of how Laney had him on retainer and wanted him to get right over to this Bad Sector and get that cable. So instead he headed down to the lower level.

The rain had concentrated the action down here, because it was relatively dry. It felt like easing your way through a very long, very homemade rush-hour subway car, except over half the other people were doing that too, in either direction, and the others were standing still, blocking the way and trying hard to sell you things. Rydell eased his wallet out of his right rear pocket and into his right front.

Crowds made Rydell nervous. Well, not crowds so much as crowding. Too close, people up against you. (Someone brushed his back pocket, feeling for the wallet that wasn't there.) Someone shoving those long skinny Mexican fried-dough things at him, repeating a price in Spanish. He felt his shoulders start to bunch.

The smell down here was starting to get to him: sweat and perfume, wet clothing, fried food. He wished he was back in Ghetto Chef Beef Bowl, finding out what those three and a half stars were for.

He couldn't take much more of this, he decided, and looked over the heads of the crowd for another stairway to the upper level. He'd rather get soaked.