NEAL STEPHENSON

patched himself in to the computer that RadiKS uses to dispatch Kouriers.”

The man with the glass eye turns, rotating his head way, way around like an owl, and nods in the direction of the gargoyle. A second later, Y.T.’s personal phone rings.

“Fucking pick it up,” he says.

“What?” she says into the phone.

A computer voice tells her that she is supposed to make a pickup in Griffith Park and deliver it to a Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates franchise in Van Nuys.

“If you want something delivered from point A to point B, why don’t you just drive it down there yourselves?” Y.T. asks. “Put it in one of those black Lincoln Town Cars and just get it done.”

“Because in this case, the something doesn’t exactly belong to us, and the people at point A and point B, well, we aren’t necessarily on the best of terms, mutually speaking.”

“You want me to steal something,” Y.T. says.

The man with the glass eye is pained, wounded. “No, no, no. Kid, listen. We’re the fucking Mafia. We want to steal something, we already know how to do that, okay? We don’t need a fifteen. year-old girl’s help to get something stolen. What we are doing here is more of a covert operation.”

“A spy thing.” Intel.

“Yeah. A spy thing,” the man says, his tone of voice suggesting that he is trying to humor someone. “And the only way to get this operation to work is if we have a Kourier who can cooperate with us a little bit.”

“So all that stuff with Uncle Enzo was fake,” Y.T. says. “You’re just trying to get all friendly with a Kourier.”

“Oh, ho, listen to this,” says the man with the glass eye, genuinely amused. “Yeah, like we have to go all the way to the top to impress a fifteen-year-old. Look, kid, there’s a million Kouriers out there we could bribe to do this. We’re going with you, again, because you have a personal relationship with our ouffit.”

“Well, what do you want me to do?”

“Exactly what you would normally do at this juncture,” the man says. “Go to Griffith Park and make the pickup.”

“That’s it?”