Chia nodded. Eddie was driving, talking in Japanese on a speakerphone. They’d found Maryalice at a tiny little bar, just off the arrivals area. It was the third one they’d looked in, Chia got the feeling that Eddie wasn’t very happy to see Maryalice, but Maryalice hadn’t seemed to care.

It was Maryalice’s idea that they give Chia a ride into Tokyo. She said the train was too crowded and it cost a lot anyway. She said she wanted to do Chia a favor, because Chia had carried her bag for her. (Chia had noticed that Eddie had put one bag in the Graceland’s trunk, but kept the one with the Nissan County sticker up front, next to him, beside the driver’s seat.)

Chia wasn’t really listening to Maryalice now; it was some time at night and the jet lag was too weird and they were on this big bridge that seemed to be made out of neon, with however many lanes of traffic around them, the little cars like strings of bright beads, all of them shiny and new. There were screens that kept blurring past, tall and narrow, with Japanese writing jumping around on some of them, and people on others, faces, smiling as they sold something.

And then a woman’s face: Rei Toei, the idoru Rez wanted to marry. And gone.

9. Out of Control

Rice Daniels, Mr. Laney. Out of control.” Pressing a card of some kind to the opposite side of the scratched plastic that walled the room called Visitors away from those who gave it its name. Laney had tried to read it, but the attempt at focusing had driven an atrocious spike of pain between his eyes. He’d looked at Rice Daniels instead, through tears of pain: close-cropped dark hair, close-fitting sunglasses with small oval lenses, the black frames gripping the man’s head like some kind of surgical clamp.

Nothing at all about Rice Daniels appeared to be out of control.

“The series,” he said. “ ‘Out of Control.’ As in: aren’t the media? Out of Control: the cutting edge of counter-investigative journalism.”

Laney had gingerly tried touching the tape across the bridge of his nose: a mistake. “Counter-investigative?”

“You’re a quant, Mr. Laney.” A quantitative analyst. He wasn’t, really, but that was technically his job description, “For Slitscan.”

Laney didn’t respond.

“The girl was the focus of intensive surveillance. Slitscan was all over her. You know why. We believe a case can be made here for Slitscan’s culpability in the death of Alison Shires.”

Laney looked down at his running shoes, their laces removed by the Deputies. “She killed herself,” he said.

“But we know why.”

“No,” Laney said, meeting the black ovals again, “I don’t, Not exactly.” The nodal point. Protocols of some other realm entirely.

“You’re going to need help, Laney. You might be looking at a manslaughter charge. Abetting a suicide. They’ll want to know why you were up there.”

“I’ll tell them why.”

“Our producers managed to get me in here first, Laney. It wasn’t easy. There’s a spin-control team from Slitscan out there now, waiting to talk with you. If you let them, they’ll turn it all around. They’ll get you off, because they have to, in order to cover the show. They can do it, with enough money and the right lawyers. But ask yourself this: do you want to let them do it?”

Daniels still had his business card thumbed up against the plastic. Trying to focus on it again, Laney saw that someone had scratched something in from the other side, in small, uneven mirror-letters, so that he could read it left to right:

I NO U DIDIT

“I’ve never heard of Out of Control.”

“Our hour-long pilot is in production as we speak, Mr. Laney.” A measured pause. “We’re all very excited.”

“Why?”

“Out of Control isn’t just a series. We think of it as an entirely new paradigm. A new way to do television. Your story—Alison Shires’ story—is precisely what we intend to get out there. Our producers are people who want to give something back to the audience. They’ve done well, they’re established, they’ve proven themselves; now they want to give something back—to restore a degree of honesty, a new opportunity for perspective.” The black ovals drew slightly closer to the scratched plastic. “Our producers are the producers of ‘Cops in Trouble’ and ‘A Calm and Deliberate Fashion’.”

“A what?”

“Factual accounts of premeditated violence in the global fashion industry.”

“ ‘Counter-investigative’?” Yamazaki’s pen hovered over the notebook.

“It was a show aboutshows like Slitscan,” Laney explained. “Supposed abuses.” There were no stools at the bar, which might have been ten feet long. You stood. Aside from the bartender, in some kind of Kabuki drag, they had the place to themselves. By virtue of filling it, basically. It was probably the smallest freestanding commercial structure Laney had ever seen, and it seemed to have been there forever, like a survival from ancient Edo, a city of shadows and minute dark lanes. The walls were shingled with faded postcards, gone a uniform sepia under a glaze of accumulated nicotine and cooking smoke.

“Ah,” Yamazaki said at last, “a ‘meta-tabloid’.”

The bartender was broiling two sardines on a doll’s hotplate. He flipped them with a pair of steel chopsticks, transferred them to a tiny plate, garnished them with some kind of colorless, translucent pickle, and presented them to Laney.

“Thanks,” Laney said. The bartender ducked his shaven eyebrows.

In spite of the modest decor, there were dozens of bottles of expensive-looking whiskey arranged behind the bar, each one with a hand-written brown paper sticker: the owner’s name in Japanese. Yamazaki had explained that you bought one and they kept it there for you. Blackwell was on his second tumbler of the local vodka-analog, on the rocks, Yamazaki was sticking to Coke Lite. Laney had an untouched shot of surrealistically expensive Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey in front of him, and wondered vaguely what it would do to his jet lag if he were actually to drink it.

“So,” Blackwell said, draining the tumbler, ice clinking against his prosthetic, “they get you out so they can have a go at these other bastards.”

“That was it, basically,” Laney said, “They had their own legal team waiting, to do that, and another team to work on the nondisclosure agreement I’d signed with Slitscan.”

“And the second team had the bigger job,” Blackwell said, shoving his empty glass toward the bartender, who swept it smoothly out of sight, producing a fresh replacement just as smoothly, as if from nowhere.

“That’s true,” Laney said. He’d had no idea, really, of what he’d be getting into when he’d found himself agreeing to the general outlines of Rice Daniels’ offer. But there was something in him that didn’t want to see Slitscan walk away from the sound of that one single shot from Alison Shires’ kitchen. (Produced, the cops had pointed out, by a Russian-made device that was hardly more than a cartridge, a tube to contain it, and the simplest possible firing mechanism; these were designed with suicide almost exclusively in mind; there was no way to aim them at anything more than two inches away. Laney had heard of them, but had never seen one before; for some reason, they were called Wednesday Night Specials.)

And Slitscan would walk away, he knew; they’d drop the sequence on Alison’s actor, if they felt they had to, and the whole thing would settle to the sea floor, silting over almost instantly with the world’s steady accretion of data.

And Alison Shires’ life, as he’d known it in all that terrible, banal intimacy, would lie there forever, forgotten and finally unknowable.

But if he went with Out of Control, her life might retrospectively become something else, and he wasn’t sure, exactly, sitting there on the hard little chair in Visitors, what that might be.