Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(10)
She half expected Vallejo to message her with some blackmail or at least some snide comment about how Daniel’s rotting human corpse was a down payment, but so far, she’d gotten only silence from Texas. Even the drone raids along the Red River had ceased in the last few days.
If this was a game—and Angela had no illusions it wasn’t—was the next move hers? Would denying Daniel’s death be enough of a play? If he wasn’t in league with Mari, did Vallejo have some other way of knowing that the mech-clone survived and the man had died instead?
She’d need more than a single interview with Rafa to drive the message home. She needed a multipronged media spike. She tapped the counter again and roused her team.
A person didn’t rise to her position without help, and her inner circle was slick as black ice. Half a dozen close confidantes insulated her from unnecessary human contact. They spoke for her, made arrangements for her, greased her passage through the halls of power. About the only thing they didn’t do was wipe her ass when she shat, but that was a logistical impossibility since they all lived in different time zones and logged their advisories in remotely.
The day immediately following Daniel’s death, she deployed that inner circle to confiscate records, plant alternative timelines, edit images. Basically, to systematically dismantle reality and rebuild it as she so chose. Managing this sort of project was what she was trained to do, and it came as naturally and inevitably as mud to white shoes.
Angela told herself she didn’t have time for navel-gazing or self-indulgence. Certainly didn’t have time to recall every syllable drawled in Kellen’s velvet Texas twang.
She had shit to do, and promises to keep.
? ? ?
Two days after Daniel’s murder, one of those promises was to attend, in person, the Global Change Initiative Awards Gala. Most events like this were attended virtually by remote telepresence because of safety, but hostess Ofelia Ortega y Mars de la Madrid was old and one of the seven global trillionaires. She had habits and the resources to turn them into demands. She had proclaimed this gala a meat-meet, end of story.
A person with Angela’s ambitions did not decline such an invitation. Also, the president had specifically asked her to attend. She had not argued. Coming here with mech-Daniel at her side worked into her own plans seamlessly.
Even if having to show up physically terrified the shit out of her.
Her team of stylists and brand managers had done comprehensive research, girded her for battle: she wore a square-necked couture gown glued to her skin and shimmering in low-contrast poppy pink and fuchsia stripes, avoiding both blue and green, so nobody could accuse her of choosing sides in the current UNAN flag-design brouhaha. The ruby choker at her throat could have traded for a small island nation, pre–climate change, and her elbow-length gloves were not just smartfabric and bio-deterrent, they also contained fingertip sensors that interfaced with her choker com and enabled her to message through mech-Daniel. Just in case the president wanted to check up on her. He didn’t get out much anymore but liked to listen in to her play-by-play of events like these.
She wore a sleek turban with a real-hair fringe over her implanted psych-emitter net. She was going to live-emote this evening, but unlike the almost-disastrous interview with Rafa two days ago, she would not be surprised. Not by anything. Angela was in control of the narrative now.
“May I say you look ravishing tonight?” Resplendent in almost-matching magenta with waterfall-lace cuffs, mech-Daniel reached across the space between their wide bench seats and brushed her bare knee. Just long enough to scan her bios. Then he retreated respectfully to his end of the autocar.
“I’d better,” she replied, careful not to lick the iridescent polish off her lips. “One final check on my hook?”
Mech-Daniel ticked his head to the side and fixed his gaze up and to the left, accessing his networks.
She had told herself not to think of Kellen, not to contact him until she needed to call in her favor. Which would be never. But in a moment of weakness, she’d done it anyhow. She’d loosed a message on the darknet, a Wordsworth quote from a poem she and her classmates had been forced to memorize in classics/brain training: “The thought of our past years in me doth breed perpetual benediction.”
He wouldn’t respond. Hell, this was Kellen; he probably didn’t even know the darknet existed, and he had never particularly liked Wordsworth. He’d probably been totally confused by her stupid smartglove message, or else he had gotten angry or disgusted and pretended that it meant nothing. What had she been thinking? That they were thirteen years old and making up spy stories in the libraries of Mustaqbal?
Grow up. He won’t reply. But she still looked expectantly at her robot.
The machine’s eyes refocused just as the heavy car rolled to a stop. “Nothing yet, Mistress. I am sorry.”
Of course not. Stupid. Angela viciously tamped her disappointment, centered herself, and tapped her molars together, engaging the psych-emitter. The door opened, and a valet gestured for her to leave the car. The net burned behind her ear, clamping her head in heat and baring her, inside and out, but she was ready for it. Vid light tracers lit her up. Professional gossips bleated questions from both sides of the scarlet line leading to the hotel entrance.
She flashed a practiced smile. She was on.
The Expo Guadalajara had undergone extensive retrofitting just a couple of years before and was now linked to the underground pods system. The real power players would be arriving at a transit point inside the building. Only persons of middling importance, like Angela, would be walking the carpet into the big glass doors at street level. Since so many public figures eschewed actual physical interaction with their fawning hordes, the professional gossips didn’t do these red-carpet moshes as often as they used to.