Pattern Recognition Read Online Free PDF

been somehow comforting.
    By the time they arrive at Notting Hill, whatever rogue aspect of personality has been driving this morning’s expedition seems to have decamped,leaving her feeling purposeless and confused. She pays the Russian, gets out on the side opposite Portobello, and descends the stairs to a pedestrian tunnel that smells of Friday-night urine. Overly tall mirror-world lager cans are crushed there like roaches.
    Corridor metaphysics. She wants coffee.
    But the Starbucks on the other side, up the stairs and around a corner, is not yet open. A boy, inside, wrestles huge plastic trays of cello-phaned pastries.
    Uncertain what she should do next, she walks on, in the direction of the Saturday market. Seven-thirty, now. She can’t remember when the antiques arcades open, but she knows the road will be jammed by nine. Why has she come here? She never buys antiques.
    She’s in a street of what she thinks are called mews houses, little places, scarily cute, still headed toward Portobello and the market, when she sees them: three men, variously jacketed, their collars up, staring gravely into the open trunk of a small and uncharacteristically old mirror-world car. Not so much a mirror-world car as an English car, as no equivalent exists, on Cayce’s side of the Atlantic, to mirror. Vauxhall Wyvern, she thinks, with her compulsive memory for brand names, though she doubts that this is one of those, whatever those might have been. As to why she notices them now, these three, she later will be unable to say.
    No one else in the street, and there is something in the gravity they bring to their study of whatever it is they are looking down at. Careful poker masks. The largest, though not the tallest, a black man with a shaven head, is zipped like a sausage into something shiny, black, and only approximately leatherlike. Beside him is a taller, gray-faced man, hunched within the greasy folds of an ancient Barbour waterproof, its waxed cotton gone the sheen and shade of day-old horse dung. The third, younger, is close-cropped and blond, in baggy black skater shortsand a frayed jean jacket. He wears something like a mailman’s pouch, slung across his chest. Shorts, she thinks, drawing abreast of this trio, are somehow always wrong in London.
    She can’t resist glancing into the trunk.
    Grenades.
    Black, compact, cylindrical. Six of them, laid out on an old gray sweater amid a jumble of brown cardboard cartons.
    “Miss?” The one in shorts.
    “Hello?” The gray-faced man, sharply, impatient.
    She tells herself to run, but can’t.
    “Yes?”
    “The Curtas.” The blond one, stepping closer.
    “It isn’t her, you idiot. She’s not bloody coming.” The gray one again, with mounting irritation.
    The blond one blinks. “You haven’t come about the Curtas?”
    “The what?”
    “The calculators.”
    She can’t resist, then, and steps closer to the car, to see. “What are they?”
    “Calculators.” The tight plastic of the black man’s jacket creaking as he bends to pick up one of the grenades. Turning to hand it to her. And then she is holding it: heavy, dense, knurled for gripping. Tabs or flanges that look as though meant to move in these slots. Small round windows showing white numbers. At the top something that looks like the crank on a pepper mill, as executed by a small-arms manufacturer.
    “I don’t understand,” she says, and imagines she’ll wake, just then, in Damien’s bed, because it’s all gone that dreamlike now. Automatically seeking a trademark, she turns the thing over. And sees that it is made in Liechtenstein.
    Liechtenstein?
    “What is it?”
    “It is a precision instrument,” the black man says, “performing calculations mechanically, employing neither electricity nor electronic components. The sensation of its operation is best likened to that of winding a fine thirty-five-millimeter camera. It is the smallest mechanical calculating machine ever constructed.” Voice deep and