Spook Country (25 page)

H ollis woke on Bigend’s maglev bed, feeling as though it was the altar atop some Aztec pyramid. Platform of sacrifice. And there actually was a pyramid of sorts above it, she saw, a glass-sided construct she suspected of being the pinnacle of this particular tower. She had to admit she’d slept well, however much magnetism she’d absorbed in the process. Perhaps it eased the joints, like those mail-order bracelets. Or perhaps it was actually the pyramid that did it, subtle energies sharpening her prana.

“Hello,” called Ollie Sleight, from a level below. “Are you up?”

“Be right with you.”

She slid off the Aztec altar, which moved slightly, and in a very strange way, and got into jeans and a top, blinking, as she did so, at the expensive emptiness of this bedroom, or sleeping-pinnacle. Like the lair of some design-conscious flying monster.

Ignore sea, she told herself, mountains. Don’t look. Too much view. She found a bathroom, where nothing much resembled conventional amenities, figured out how to work the taps, and washed her face and brushed her teeth. Barefooted, she went down to meet Ollie, possibly to confront him.

“Odile’s gone for a walk,” he said, seated at a long glass table with an open FedEx carton and various bits of black plastic in front of him. “What kind of phone do you have?”

“Motorola.”

“Straight two-point-five-millimeter jack,” he said, selecting one from an assortment. “Hubertus sent this.” Indicating the largest of the black bits. “It’s a scrambler.”

“What does it do?”

“You plug it into the headset jack on your phone. It uses a digital encryption algorithm. You program in a sixteen-digit code and the algorithm rolls the scrambling code up to about sixty thousand times. Gives you seventeen hours’ scramble before the pattern repeats. Hubertus has already charged and programmed this one. He wants you to use it when the two of you talk.”

“That’s nice,” she said.

“May I have your phone?”

She took it from her jeans pocket and handed it to him.

“Thanks.” He connected it to the black rectangle, which reminded her of those snap-off automotive CD-player fronts. “It has its own charger, which won’t work for your phone.” He used the edge of his palm to sweep extra black bits and packaging back into the FedEx box. “I brought fruit and pastry. There’s coffee on.”

“Thank you.”

He put a set of car keys on the table. She saw a blue-and-silver VW emblem. “These are for the extra Phaeton downstairs. Have you driven one?”

“No.”

“You need to watch the width. It looks so much like a Passat that it’s easy to forget how much wider it is. Look down at the painted lines, when you get in; that’ll remind you.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m off, then,” he said, getting up and tucking the carton under his arm. He was in a T-shirt and jeans this morning, both of which seemed to have been gone over with a Dremel tool for about as many hours as Bigend’s gadget could roll its codes. He looked tired, she thought, but that might just be the beard.

When he was gone, she looked for the kitchen and coffee. It turned out to be across this very space, and disguised as a bar, but the coffeemaker and an Italian toaster gave it away. She took her cup back to the table. Her cell rang, various LED effects dancing excitedly on the black face of the scrambler.

“Hello?”

“Hubertus. Oliver told me you were up.”

“I am. Are we ‘scrambled’?”

“We are.”

“You have one too?”

“That’s how it works.”

“It’s too big to fit in a pocket.”

“I know,” he said, “but I’m increasingly concerned with privacy. All of which is relative, of course.”

“This isn’t really private?”

“It’s more private than…not. Ollie has a box with a Linux machine in it that can sniff three hundred wireless networks at the same time.”

“Why would he want to do that?”

He took a moment to think about it. “Because he can, I suppose.”

“I want to talk to you about Ollie.”

“Yes?”

“He came in the restaurant at the Standard while I was meeting with Odile and Alberto. Bought a pack of cigarettes.”

“Yes?”

“Was he checking me out? For you?”

“Of course. What else do you think he would have been doing?”

“Just checking,” she said. “I mean, I am. Just making sure.”

“We needed a sense of how you were getting along with them. We were still making up our minds, at that point.”

The Blue Ant “we,” she thought. “More centrally, then, where’s Bobby?”

“Up there,” he said. “Somewhere.”

“I thought you could keep track of him.”

“Of the truck. The truck’s in the yard of a leasing firm, in a satellite city called Burnaby. Bobby and his equipment were off-loaded beside a warehouse, just north of the border, early this morning. I’ve had Oliver up all night, on that. He went down to the GPS coordinates where they stopped.”

“And?”

“Nothing, of course. We assume they switched trucks. How are things with Odile?”

“She’s gone out for a walk. When she gets back, I’ll try to work out what potential connections she might have here, to Bobby. I stayed away from that, on the flight up. Seemed too soon.”

“Good,” he said. “If you need me, use the ring-back for this call.”

She watched the scrambler do its little LED-dance as the encrypted connection was broken.

T hey took the black plastic Pelican case on in Montana. It wasn’t another fueling stop, though Tito imagined they were due for one of those soon. The pilot landed on a deserted stretch of rural highway, at dawn. Tito saw a battered old station wagon pulling up beside them, two men standing on its roof, but then Garreth told him to stay away from the windows. “They don’t want to see anyone they don’t know.”

Garreth opened the cabin door and a black case was handed in. It seemed to be very heavy. Garreth didn’t try to lift it. He strained, dragging it in, while someone Tito couldn’t see, outside, pushed. It looked to Tito like a Pelican case, plastic and waterproof, the kind Alejandro had sometimes used to bury documents and supplies. Then the door was closed, he heard the station wagon’s engine, and the pilot began to taxi. As they took off, Tito imagined he could feel the additional weight.

When they’d leveled out, the old man held a yellow plastic instrument close to the black box, then showed Garreth the readout on its screen.

They landed again within an hour, at a rural strip where another avgas truck was waiting.

They drank paper cups of coffee from a thermos the avgas man had brought, while he and the pilot fueled the plane.

“That’s really the ultimate handload he’s put together, isn’t it?” said Garreth to the old man.

“He told me he used JB Weld to seal the tips,” said the old man.

“Is that all?” Garreth asked.

“When I was a boy, we fixed holes in engine blocks with JB Weld.”

“They probably weren’t quite so radioactive,” said Garreth.

T his is Sarah,” said Odile, when Hollis found her, on the crowded café patio of a municipal gallery. The Phaeton had a GPS-based guidance system, but it also had a map. She could have walked over here, she guessed, in the time it had taken her to get the car, find the place, and find parking. And Ollie had been right about it being wide. All of this in response to Odile having phoned and asked her to lunch with someone interesting.

“Hello,” said Hollis, taking the girl’s hand, “I’m Hollis Henry.”

“Sarah Ferguson.”

Hollis was pulling up a wrought-iron chair, wondering whether she’d missed her chance to have Odile put visiting the local locative artists on hold, when the French curator said, “Fer-gus-son.”

“Oh,” said Hollis.

“Sarah is Bobby’s sister.” Odile was wearing a narrow pair of black-framed sunglasses.

“Yes,” said Sarah, with what Hollis took to be a possible lack of enthusiasm. “Odile tells me you met Bobby in Los Angeles.”

“I did,” said Hollis. “I’m doing a piece on locative art for Node, and your brother seems to be a key player.”

“Node?”

“It’s new,” said Hollis. Could Bigend, or Rausch, have known that Odile knew Bobby’s sister? “I didn’t know he had a sister.” She looked at Odile. “Are you an artist, Sarah?”

“No,” said Sarah, “I work for a gallery. Not this one.”

Hollis looked up at this retrofitted bank or government building. Saw public art, the statue of a ship, mounted where a roof started.

“We must go inside, for the food,” said Odile.

Inside, an upscale cafeteria line that for some reason made Hollis feel they were in Copenhagen. The people ahead of them looked as though they could each identify a dozen classic modern chairs by the designer’s name. They chose sandwiches, salads, and drinks; Hollis used her credit card, telling Sarah lunch was on Node. When she put her wallet back in her purse, she saw the envelope with Jimmy’s five thousand dollars. She’d almost left it in the electronic safe in the room at the Mondrian.

Sarah resembled Bobby, Hollis thought, as they settled at their table, but it looked better on a girl. She had darker hair, nicely cut, and was dressed for work in a gallery that sold art to people who expected a certain seriousness of demeanor. Mixed grays and black, good shoes.

“I had no idea you knew Bobby’s sister,” Hollis said to Odile, picking up her sandwich.

“We’ve only just met,” said Sarah, picking up her fork. “We have an ex in common, it turns out.” She smiled.

“Claude,” said Odile, “in Paris. I told you, Ollis, he knew Bobby.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I phone him,” said Odile. “He gives me Sarah’s number.”

“Not the first call from a stranger I’ve had about Bobby, in the past twenty-four hours,” said Sarah, “but at least there’s the connection through Claude. And you weren’t angry.”

“Have the others been angry?” Hollis asked.

“Some of them, yes. Others simply impatient.”

“Why? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Because he’s a fuckup,” said Sarah.

“Artists in L.A.,” said Odile. “They try to find Bobby. His geohacks are down. Their art is gone. E-mail bounces.”

“I’ve had half a dozen calls. Someone down there must’ve known he has a sister here, and I’m in the book.”

“I know one of the artists who works with him,” Hollis said. “He was quite upset.”

“Who?”

“Alberto Corrales.”

“Did he cry?”

“No.”

“He cried on the phone,” said Sarah, spearing a slice of avocado. “Kept saying he’d lost his river.”

“But you don’t know where your brother is?”

“He’s here,” said Sarah. “My friend Alice saw him on Commercial Drive, this morning. She’s known him since high school. She called me. As a matter of fact, she called me about twenty minutes before you did,” she said to Odile. “She said hello. He couldn’t dodge her; he knew she knew it was him. Of course she had no idea people in L.A. are looking for him. He told her he was in town to talk with a label, about releasing a CD. Of course that was the first I knew of him being here.”

“Are you close?”

“Does it sound like it?”

“Sorry,” said Hollis.

“No, I’m sorry,” said Sarah. “It’s just that he’s so annoying, so irresponsible. He’s as self-centered now as he was when he was fifteen. It isn’t easy, having a monster of giftedness for a brother.”

“Gifted how?” Hollis asked.

“Mathematically. Software. You know he named himself after a piece of software developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs? Chombo.”

“What does Chombo…do?”

“It implements finite difference methods for the solution of partial differential equations, on block-structured, adaptively refined rectangular grids.” Sarah made a brief and probably unconscious face.

“Could you explain that?”

“Not a word of it. But I work in a gallery of contemporary art. Chombo is Bobby’s favorite thing. He says nobody else really appreciates Chombo, understands Chombo, the way he does. He talks about it like it’s a dog, one he’s been able to train to do things no one’s ever thought of training a dog to do. Fetch things. Roll over.” She shrugged. “You’re looking for him too, aren’t you?”

“I am,” said Hollis, putting down her sandwich.

“Why?”

“Because I’m a journalist, and I’m writing about locative art. And he seems to be at the center of it, and certainly he’s at the center of his sudden absence, and the upset it’s caused.”

“You used to be in that band,” said Sarah. “I remember it. With that English guitarist.”

“The Curfew,” Hollis said.

“And you’re a writer, now?”

“I’m trying to be. I thought I’d be in L.A. for a few weeks, researching this. Then Alberto Corrales introduced me to Bobby. Then Bobby vanished.”

“‘Vanished’ is a little dramatic,” said Sarah, “particularly if you know Bobby. ‘Flaked off,’ my father calls it. Would Bobby want to see you, do you think?”

Hollis considered. “No,” she said. “He was unhappy with Alberto for bringing me to his place in L.A. His studio. I didn’t think he’d want to see me again.”

“He liked your records,” said Sarah.

“That was what Alberto said,” said Hollis, “but he really didn’t like visitors.”

“In that case,” said Sarah, and paused, looking from Hollis to Odile, then back, “I’ll tell you where he is.”

“You know?”

“He has a place on the east side. Space in a building that used to be an upholstery factory. Someone lives there, when he’s away, and I run into her occasionally, so I know he still has it. If he’s here, and not there, I’d be very surprised. Off Clark Drive.”

“Clark?”

“I’ll give you the address,” said Sarah.

Hollis got out her pen.

T ito watched the old man fold the copy of the New York Times he’d been reading. They were sitting in an open Jeep, its hood dotted with red rust through dull-gray paint that had been applied with a brush. Tito could see the Pacific, this new ocean. The pilot had flown them here from the mainland, and gone, having said a long, private goodbye to the old man. Tito had seen them clasp hands, the grip held hard.

He’d watched the Cessna become a dot, then vanish.

“I remember seeing proofs of a CIA interrogation manual, something we’d been sent unofficially, for comment,” the old man said. “The first chapter laid out the ways in which torture is fundamentally counterproductive to intelligence. The argument had nothing to do with ethics, everything to do with quality of product, with not squandering potential assets.” He removed his steel-rimmed glasses. “If the man who keeps returning to question you avoids behaving as if he were your enemy, you begin to lose your sense of who you are. Gradually, in the crisis of self that your captivity becomes, he guides you in your discovery of who you are becoming.”

“Did you interrogate people?” asked Garreth, the black Pelican case under his feet.

“It’s an intimate process,” the old man said. “Entirely about intimacy.” He spread his hand, held it, as if above an invisible flame. “An ordinary cigarette lighter will cause a man to tell you anything, whatever he thinks you want to hear.” He lowered his hand. “And will prevent him ever trusting you again, even slightly. And will confirm him, in his sense of self, as few things will.” He tapped the folded paper. “When I first saw what they were doing, I knew that they’d turned the SERE lessons inside out. That meant we were using techniques the Koreans had specifically developed in order to prepare prisoners for show trials.” He fell silent.

Tito heard the lapping of waves.

This was still America, they said.

The Jeep, covered with a tarp and branches, had been waiting for them near the weathered concrete runway that Garreth said had once belonged to a weather station. There were push brooms in the back of the Jeep. Someone had used them to sweep the concrete, in preparation for their landing.

A boat was coming, Garreth had said, to take them to Canada. Tito wondered how large a boat it would be. He imagined a Circle Line tour boat. Icebergs. But the sun here was warm, the breeze off the sea gentle. He felt as though he had come to the edge of the world. The edge of America, the land he had seen unrolling beneath the Cessna, almost entirely empty. The small towns of America, at night, had been like lost jewels, scattered across the floor of a vast dark room. He’d watched them pass, from the Cessna’s window, imagining people sleeping there, perhaps distantly aware of the faint drone of their engines.

Garreth offered Tito an apple, and a knife to cut it with. It was a crude knife, like something you might see in Cuba, the handle covered in chipped yellow paint. Tito opened it, discovering DOUK-DOUK printed on the blade. It was very sharp. He cut the apple into quarters, wiped both sides of the blade on the leg of his jeans, passed it back to Garreth, then offered the slices of fruit. Garreth and the old man each took one.

The old man looked at his worn gold watch, then out across the water.