Count Zero by William Gibson

through a cascade of plate glass, into the lobby of a Marrakech hotel. The scientist whooped as he pressed the button that detonated the two dozen canisters of CN taped along the flanks of the vehicle, and Oakey was there, too, offering him whiskey from a bottle, and yellow Peruvian cocaine on a round, plastic-rimmed mirror he’d last seen in Allison’s purse. He thought he saw Allison somewhere beyond the windows of the bus, choking in the clouds of gas, and he tried to tell Oakey, tried to point her out, but the glass was plastered with Mexican holograms of saints, postcards of the Virgin, and Oakey was holding up something smooth and round, a globe of pink crystal, and he saw a spider crouched at its core, a spider made of quicksilver, but Mitchell was laughing, his teeth full of blood, and extending his open palm to offer Turner the gray biosoft. Turner saw that the dossier was a brain, grayish pink and alive beneath a wet clear membrane, pulsing softlyin Mitchell’s hand, and then he tumbled over some submarine ledge of dream and settled smoothly down into a night with no stars at all.
     
    Webber woke him, her hard features framed in the square doorway, her shoulders draped in the heavy military blanket taped across the entrance. “Got your three hours. The medicals are up, if you want to talk to ’em.” She withdrew, her boots crunching gravel.
    Hosaka’s medics were waiting beside the self-contained neurosurgery. Under a desert dawn they looked as though they’d just stepped from some kind of matter transmitter in their fashionably rumpled Ginza casuals. One of the men was bundled in an oversized Mexican handknit, the sort of belted cardigan Turner had seen tourists wear in Mexico City. The other two wore expensive-looking insulated ski jackets against the desert cold. The men were a head shorter than the Korean, a slender woman with strong, archaic features and a birdlike ruff of red-tinged hair that made Turner think of raptors. Conroy had said that the two were company men, and Turner could see it easily; only the woman had the attitude, the stance that belonged to Turner’s world, and she was an outlaw, a black medic. She’d be right at home with the Dutchman, he thought.
    “I’m Turner,” he said. “I’m in charge here.”
    “You don’t need our names,” the woman said as the two Hosaka men bowed automatically. They exchanged glances, looked at Turner, then looked back to the Korean.
    “No,” Turner said, “it isn’t necessary.”
    “Why are we still denied access to the patient’s medical data?” the Korean aked.
    “Security,” Turner said, the answer very nearly an automatic response. In fact, he could see no reason to prevent them from studying Mitchell’s records.
    The woman shrugged, turned away, her face hidden by the upturned collar of her insulated jacket.
    “Would you like to inspect the surgery?” the man in the bulky cardigan asked, his face polite and alert, a perfect corporate mask.
    “No,” Turner said. “We’ll be moving you out to the lot twenty minutes prior to his arrival. We’ll take the wheels off, level you with jacks. The sewage link will be disconnected. Iwant you fully operational five minutes after we set you down.”
    “There will be no problem,” the other man said, smiling.
    “Now I want you to tell me what you’re going to be doing in there, what you’ll do to him and how it might affect him.”
    “You don’t know? ” the woman asked, sharply, turning back to face him.
    “I said that I wanted you to tell me,” Turner said.
    “We’ll conduct an immediate scan for lethal implants,” the man in the cardigan said.
    “Cortex charges, that sort of thing?”
    “I doubt,” said the other man, “that we will encounter anything so crude, but yes, we will be scanning for the full range of lethal devices. Simultaneously, we’ll run a full blood screen. We understand that his current employers deal in extremely sophisticated biochemical systems.