Spook Country (27 page)

M ilgrim sat beside Brown on one of the two benches in a very small park, under the bare branches of a row of young maples. In front of him was fifty feet of close-cropped grass, a six-foot green-painted chain-link fence, a short steep decline covered with brambles, a wide gravel roadbed stained rust-red by its four lines of track, a paved road, and a vast stack of those metal boxes he’d seen on the ship in the harbor. He watched a streamlined metallic-blue trailer-truck drive quickly past, along the road, pulling a long, rust-streaked gray box that evidently had wheels attached.

Beyond the box-pile were mountains. Beyond those, cloud. They made Milgrim uneasy, these mountains. They didn’t look as though they could be real. Too big, too close. Snowcapped. Like the logo at the start of a film.

He looked to his right, focusing instead on a vast, almost featureless rectangular berg of concrete, windowless, probably five stories tall. On its front, in huge simple sanserif letters, reversed into the concrete between massive molded columns, he read

BC ICE & COLD STO RAGE LTD

RAGE. He glanced at Brown’s busily shifting laptop screen, where satellite images of this port area zoomed in and out; were replaced, were overlaid with yellow grids.

They had been wardriving, Brown called it, ever since requisitioning Skink’s Glock. This meant driving around with Brown’s armored laptop open on Milgrim’s lap, announcing wireless networks as they passed through them. The laptop did this in a flat, breathless, peculiarly asexual voice that Milgrim found distinctly distasteful. Milgrim had had no idea that people had these networks in their houses and apartments, the sheer number of them amazing, nor that they extended so far beyond the owner’s actual property. Some people named them after themselves, others were simply called “default,” or “network,” and some were named things like “DarkHarvester” and “Doom-smith.” Milgrim’s job was to watch a window on the screen that indicated whether or not a network was protected. If a network was unprotected, and had a strong signal, Brown could park and use his computer to get on the Internet. When he did this, color satellite images of the port would appear. Brown could zoom in on these, allowing Milgrim to see the tops of individual buildings, even the rectangles of individual boxes. Initially, Milgrim had found this mildly interesting, but now, after three hours of it, he was ready for Brown to find what he was looking for and take him back to the Best Western.

This bench had been an improvement on sitting in the car, though, and Brown seemed to have a solid connection from an apartment (“CyndiNet”) in the three-story stucco complex behind them, its brown-painted steel balconies stacked with barbecues, plastic chairs, and bicycles. But now Milgrim’s butt ached. He stood and rubbed it. Brown was engrossed in whatever he was doing. Milgrim walked forward, across the rough short grass, expecting to be stopped. No order came.

When he reached the green fencing, he looked through it, to his left, and found a rectangular orange diesel train engine, its blunt nose painted with crisp diagonals in black and white. It sat, inert, on the nearest set of tracks, beside a rectangular white sign, obviously intended to be read by trainmen, that said HEATLEY. On a yellow triangle a few feet before it, REDUCE SPEED. He read the names on individual boxes in their stacks: HANJIN, COSCO, TEX, “K” LINE, MAERSK SEALAND. Beyond them, further inside the port, were tall buildings of unknown purpose, and the arms of those same orange cranes he’d seen from the black Zodiac.

He looked back at Brown, hunched over his little screen, lost to the world. “I could run away,” Milgrim said, softly, to himself. Then he touched the green-painted steel horizontal that topped the fence, turned, and walked back to the bench.

He missed his overcoat.

H ollis thought he looked a little like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who’d be invited quail shooting with the vice-president, though too careful to get himself shot. Thin steel spectacle frames. His remaining hair neatly barbered. Seriously good dark overcoat.

They sat facing one another now in worn metal chairs that might once have done duty in a church hall. His legs were crossed. He wore shoes that made her think of old French priests, bicycling. Black toe-cap oxfords, polished to a dull glow, but thickly soled with black rubber.

“Miss Henry,” he began, then paused, his voice reminding her of an American consular official she’d met in Gibraltar, when she’d been seventeen and had had her passport stolen. “Pardon me. You aren’t married?”

“No.”

“Miss Henry, we find ourselves in an awkward situation.”

“Mr….?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I can’t give you my name. My friend tells me that you’re a musician. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“And you tell me that you are also a journalist, on assignment from a British magazine.” A gray eyebrow rose, above an arc of polished steel.

“Node. Based in London.”

“And you’d approached Bobby in Los Angeles, regarding your article?”

“I did. Though I can’t say he was pleased with my having done that.” She glanced at Bobby, hunched on the dirty floor, gripping his knees, eyes hidden by his forelock. From another of these chairs, a dark-haired boy of interestingly indeterminate race watched Bobby with what she took to be a combination of fascination and unease.

The other man, the one who’d discovered her in the alley, and so politely but firmly invited her up here, had now opened the long gray case he’d been given by the man she’d surreptitiously watched him meet in the alley. Not quite surreptitiously enough. This lay with its lid up, now, on one of the long tables, but seated here she couldn’t see what it contained.

“I’m sorry for coming here,” she said. “He’s in terrible shape.”

“Bobby’s under stress,” the old man said. “His work.”

“Locative art?”

“Bobby’s been working for me, assisting with a project of mine. It’s nearing closure. The stress Bobby is experiencing has to do with that. You’ve arrived at a most inopportune time, Miss Henry.”

“Hollis.”

“We can’t let you go, Hollis, until we’ve completed what we’ve come here for.”

She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it.

“We aren’t criminals, Hollis.”

“Excuse me, but if you aren’t criminals, or the police, I don’t see why I can’t leave when I want to.”

“Exactly right. The fact is, we are intent, here, on committing a number of criminal offenses, under both Canadian and American law.”

“Then how aren’t you criminals, exactly?”

“Not in your ordinary sense,” he said. “Our motivation is decidedly nonstandard, and what we intend to do, as far as I know, has never been attempted before. I can assure you, though, that we do not anticipate killing anyone, and we hope to harm no one physically.”

“‘Anticipate,’ in that context, isn’t so reassuring. And I don’t suppose you want to tell me what it is you’re up to.”

“We intend to damage a specific piece of property, and its contents. If we’re entirely successful”—and here he smiled briefly—“the damage will go unnoticed. Initially.”

“Do you have some optimal reason you’d prefer for me to suppose you’re telling me this? Maybe we could just cut to that. Save time. Otherwise, I see no reason for you to be telling me anything at all.”

He frowned. Uncrossed his legs. With the black priest shoes flat on the floor, he rocked back an inch or so on the chair’s rear legs. “If my associate weren’t so absolutely convinced of your identity, Miss Henry, things would be very different.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Bear with me. There is public history, and there is secret history. I am proposing to make you privy to secret history. Not because you are a journalist, actually, but because you are, to whatever extent, a celebrity.”

“You want to tell me your secrets because I used to be a singer in a band?”

“Yes,” he said, “though not because you used to be a singer in a band, specifically. Because you are, by virtue of having been a popular singer—”

“Never that popular.”

“You already constitute a part of the historical record, however small you might prefer to see it. I’ve just checked the number of your Google hits, and read your Wikipedia entry. By inviting you to witness what we intend to do, I will be using you, in effect, as a sort of time capsule. You will become the fireplace brick behind which I leave an account, though it will be your account, of what we do here.”

She looked at him. “The scary thing is, I think you’re serious.”

“I am. But I want you to understand the price, before you agree.”

“Who says I’m agreeing?”

“If you’re to witness history, Hollis, you necessarily become a part of that which you witness.”

“Am I free to write about what I might see?”

“Of course,” he said, “although by freely agreeing to accompany us, in the eyes of the law you probably become an accessory. More seriously, though, the person we are about to interfere with is powerful, and has every reason to suppress knowledge of what you’d witness. But that will be your business. If you agree to go with us.”

“And if I don’t?”

“We will have someone take you to another location, and keep you there until we’re gone. That will complicate things for us, as it means moving Bobby and his equipment, since you already know about this place, but that should be no concern of yours. Should you choose that option, you won’t be harmed in any way. Blindfolded, but not harmed.”

The man from the alley, she saw, had closed the long case, and had been joined, further down the second long table, by the dark-haired boy. “I don’t see why you have any reason to trust my end of that,” she said. “Why would you trust me not to call the police, as soon as I’m free?”

“I was trained,” he said, “by the government organization of which I was a member, to assess character very quickly. My work involved making crucial personnel decisions, often literal snap judgments, under extremely difficult conditions.” He stood up.

“For that matter,” she said, looking up at him, “why should I believe you?”

“You won’t betray our agreement, should we reach one,” he said, “because you simply aren’t the type. By the same token, you’ll trust us. Because, in fact, you already do.”

He turned then, walked over to the man from the alley, and began a quiet conversation.

She heard the scratching of a cigarette lighter, as Bobby, on the floor, fired up a Marlboro.

Where would Bobby sleep, she wondered, without his gridlines? Then noticed, just in front of the old man’s chair, a thin, dusty-blue, perfectly straight line, the kind produced with carpenter’s chalk and a taut string.

Then saw another, crossing the first at right angles.

G arreth took Tito to the far end of the second table, where ten disks, each no thicker than a small coin, and about three inches in diameter, were arranged on a half-sheet of fresh plywood.

Someone had sprayed these with turquoise-blue paint, then with a faint dusting of dark gray, then with a dull topcoat. Each one lay in its own blur of overspray. The three aerosol cans stood in a row at one end of the plywood. Putting on latex gloves, Garreth carefully picked one up, exposing the perfect round of unsprayed plywood beneath. He showed Tito its unpainted back, bright silver metal. “Rare-earth magnets,” he said, “painted to match the box as closely as possible.” He indicated two printouts, photographs of a shipping container, a dirty turquoise blue. “Once you place one on a flat steel surface, it’s difficult to remove, except with a knife or a thin screwdriver blade. We have ten, but you’ll have a maximum of nine holes to cover. The spare is in case you drop one, but try not to.”

“How do I carry them?”

“They either stick together, almost too firmly to separate, or they repel one another, depending on which way they’re facing. So you’ll use this.” He indicated a rectangle of stiff black plastic, covered with silver tape. A length of olive paracord was looped through two holes, at one end. “Soft plastic envelopes under the tape, one for each disk. You carry it in down the front of your jeans, then hang it around your neck for climbing. Slip them out one at a time as you cover the nine holes. They should cover any spalling completely, as well as sealing the hole.”

“What is ‘spalling’?”

“When the bullet pierces the painted steel,” Garreth said, “it bends the steel inward. The paint isn’t flexible, so it shatters. Some of it vaporizes. Result is bright, shiny steel, visible around the hole. The hole itself is no bigger than the tip of your finger. It’s the spalling that visually identifies a bullet hole, so we have to cover it. And we want as tight a seal as possible, because we don’t want to be setting off sensors.”

“And when they have been closed?”

“You have to find your own way out. The man who’ll take you in can’t help us with that. We’ll go over the maps and the satellite images one more time. Don’t climb until the midnight buzzer stops. When you’ve sealed it, get out. When you’re out, call us. We’ll pick you up. Otherwise, the phone’s only for an emergency.”

Tito nodded. “Do you know that woman?” he asked.

“I hadn’t met her before,” said Garreth, after a pause.

“I have seen posters of her, in shops on St. Marks Place. Why is she here?”

“She knows Bobby,” Garreth said.

“He is unhappy to see her?”

“He’s having a bit of a meltdown generally, isn’t he? But you and I, we have to keep this central to mission, right?”

“Yes.”

“Good. When you go up to the box, you’ll be wearing this.” He indicated a black filter-mask in a large Ziploc bag. “We don’t want you inhaling anything. When you get down from the stack, stick it somewhere it won’t be found for a while. And no prints, of course.”

“Cameras?”

“Everywhere. But our box is in the top tier of a stack, and if everything’s gone right, it’s in a blind spot. The rest of the time, you hood up and we hope for the best.”

“The woman,” Tito asked, concerned by what seemed a serious breach of protocol, “if she isn’t one of you, and you’ve never seen her before, how do you know she isn’t wearing a wire?”

Garreth indicated the three black antennas of the yellow-cased jammer Tito had seen him use in Union Square, further down the table. “Nothing here broadcasting,” he said, softly, “is there?”