But her only other option is a London hotel, and, even with Blue Ant footing the bill, she's feeling hoteled out. She'll go to Camden, then. Heathrow Express to Paddington, then a cab. Decision out of the way, she closes Taki's jpeg, puts the iBook away, and returns to bed-mode.
WHEN they exit immigration, Bigend is waiting, the only smiling face in a scrum of glum chauffeurs holding hand-lettered sheets of cardboard. Bigend's says "POLLARD & CHU" in coarse-tipped red felt pen.
He really does seem to have too many teeth. His Stetson is set too squarely on his head and he's wearing the raincoat she'd last seen him in.
"Right this way, please." He makes a point of taking over the luggage trolley from Boone, and they follow him out, throwing glances at each other, past the cab queue and the recent arrivals coughing gratefully over first cigarettes. She sees his Hummer parked where she's certain no one at all is allowed to park, ever, and watches as he and Boone open the square doors at the rear and load the bags.
Bigend holds the passenger-side door for her as she climbs in. Boone gets the seat behind her.
She watches Bigend fold his enormous plastic parking permission.
"You didn't need to pick us up, Hubertus," she says, because she feels the need to say something, and because it seems so abundantly the truth.
"Not at all," says Bigend, ambiguously, pulling away from the curb. ' I want to hear all about it."
Which he does, mainly via Boone, but, Cayce gradually notes, with two serious omissions. Boone never mentions the head-butting or Taki's jpeg. He tells Bigend that they went to Tokyo to follow up a lead suggesting that at least one segment of the footage has an encrypted watermark.
"And does it?" Bigend asks, driving.
"It may," Boone says. "We have a twelve-digit code that may have been extracted from a specific segment of footage."
"And?"
"Cayce was followed, in Tokyo."
"By whom?"
"Two men, possibly Italian."
"Possibly?"
"I overheard them speaking Italian."
"Who were they?"
"We don't know."
Cayce sees Bigend purse his lips. "Do you have any idea," he asks her, briefly making eye contact, "why you would be followed? Unfinished business elsewhere? Something unrelated?"
"We were hoping you might be able to answer that one, Hubertus," Boone says.
"You think I had Cayce followed, Boone?"
"I might myself, Hubertus, if I were in your position."
"You might well," says Bigend, "but you aren't me. I don't work that way, not in a partnership." They're on the evening motorway now, and raindrops suddenly strike the vertical windshield, causing Cayce to imagine that the weather has followed them from Tokyo. Bigend turns on the wipers, spatular things that swing from the top of the glass rather than the bottom. She watches as he touches a button, fractionally reduces air pressure in the tires. "However," he says, "as I'm sure you understand, partnership with me makes you more likely to be followed. This is an aspect of the downside of a high profile."
"But who would know that we're your partners?" Cayce asks.
"Blue Ant is an advertising agency, not the CIA. People talk. Even the ones who've been hired not to. Secrecy, when we're planning a campaign, for instance, can be of the utmost importance. But still things leak. I'll look at that, at exactly who would have reason to believe the two of you are working for me, but now I'm more curious about these putative Italians."
"We lost them," Boone says. "Cayce had just received the code from her contact, and I thought it was the right time to get her out of there. When I had a look for them, later, they were gone."
"And this contact?" '
"Someone I turned up through the footagehead network," Cayce says.
"Exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for."
"We doubt he has anything further to offer us," Boone says, causing Cayce to glance back at him, "but if this watermark is genuine, it may be a good start."
Cayce looks straight ahead, forcing herself to concentrate on the arcing of the wipers. Boone is lying to Bigend, or withholding information, and now she feels that she is too. She briefly considers bringing up Dorotea and Asian Sluts at this point, just to send things in a direction Boone isn't expecting, but she has no idea of his agenda in lying. He may be doing it for a reason she'd approve of. The next time they're alone together, she needs to have this out with him.
She blinks, as they abruptly leave the motorway, entering London's maze. Streetlights coming on.
After Tokyo, everything here feels so differently scaled. A different gauge of model railroad. Though if asked, she'd have to admit that the two do have something mysteriously in common. Perhaps if London had been built, until the war, primarily of wood and paper, and then had burned, the way Tokyo had burned, and then been rebuilt, the mystery she's always sensed in these streets would remain somehow, coded in steel and concrete.
To her considerable embarrassment, and confusion, they have to wake her when the Hummer pulls up outside of Damien's.
