Spook Country (32 page)

W here’d you say you’re from?” asked the man from Igor’s label, offering Tito an open bottle of beer.

“New Jersey,” said Tito, who hadn’t. When they’d reached the rehearsal space, he’d phoned Garreth and told him the job was done, but that he thought he should stay off the street tonight. He hadn’t mentioned the helicopter, but he’d had a feeling that Garreth knew.

He accepted the beer, pressing the cold bottle against his forehead. He’d enjoyed playing. The Guerreros had come, briefly, at the end.

“Amazing,” said the label man. “Is that where your family’s from?”

“New York,” said Tito.

“Right,” said the A&R man, and sipped his own beer. “Amazing.”

B usiness-class lounge for Air Asshole,” declared Inchmale, enthusiastically, taking in the central area of the first floor of Bigend’s flat.

“Has the bedroom to match, upstairs,” Hollis told him. “I’ll show you, after I’ve had a shower.”

Heidi put her ax-handle down, still wrapped, on the counter beside Hollis’s laptop.

“Ollis!” Odile stood at the head of the floating glass stair-slabs, in what Hollis supposed might be a very large hockey jersey. “Bobby, you have found him?”

“Sort of. It’s complicated. Come down and meet my friends.”

Odile, in bare feet, descended the slabs.

“Reg Inchmale and Heidi Hyde. Odile Richard.”

“Ça va? What is that?” Noticing the ax-handle.

“A gift,” said Hollis. “She hasn’t found anyone to give it to, yet. I have to shower.”

She went upstairs.

The Blue Ant figurine was where she’d left it, on the ledge, still poised for action.

She undressed, checked herself for the rash that fortunately didn’t seem to be there, and took a long, very thorough shower.

What would Garreth and the old man be up to now, she wondered. Where had Tito gone, after they’d dropped him off? Why was her purse, or Bigend’s scrambler at least, afoot on the street? What constituted the Mongolian Death Worm, in her current situation? She didn’t know.

Had she just seen a hundred million dollars irradiated, with. 30-caliber pellets of medical cesium? She had, if Garreth had been telling the truth. Why would you do that? She was soaping herself down, for the third time, when it came to her.

To make it impossible to launder. The cesium. It wouldn’t come out in the wash.

She hadn’t even thought to ask him, as he’d packed up to leave the studio. She hadn’t asked him anything, really. She’d understood that he needed, absolutely, to be doing what he was doing, doing it rather than talking about it. He’d been so utterly focused, checking things with the dosimeter, making sure nothing was left behind.

She was certain she hadn’t left her purse up there. Someone must have taken it from the van, when she’d carried the duffel over to give it to the dustmen.

She toweled off, dressed, checked to see that her passport was where she’d left it, then dried her hair.

When she came back down, Inchmale was seated at one end of a twenty-foot couch, its leather very nearly the color of the seats in Bigend’s Maybach, reading messages on his phone. Heidi and Odile were what felt like half a block of polished concrete away, taking in the view, darkness and lights, like figures inserted into an architectural drawing to illustrate scale.

“Your Bigend,” he said, looking up from the phone.

“He’s not my Bigend. He’ll be your Bigend, though, if you sell him the rights to ‘Hard to Be One’ for a car commercial.”

“I can’t do that, of course.”

“For reasons of artistic integrity?”

“Because the three of us would have to agree. You, me, Heidi. We own the rights jointly, remember?”

“I say it’s up to you.” Sitting beside him on the couch.

“And why is that?”

“Because you’re still in the business. Still have a stake.”

“He wants you to write it.”

“Write what?”

“The changes to the lyrics.”

“To turn it into a car jingle?”

“A theme. An anthem. Of postmodern branding.”

“‘Hard to Be One’? Seriously?”

“He’s texting me every half-hour. Wants to pin it down. He’s the sort of man I could get sick to the back teeth of. Actually.”

She looked at him. “Where’s the Mongolian Death Worm?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to be most afraid of, now. Do you? You used to tell me about the Death Worm when we were touring. How it was so deadly that there were scarcely any descriptions of it.”

“Yes,” he said. “It might spit venom, or bolts of electricity.” He smiled. “Or ichor,” he said.

“And it hid in the dunes. Of Mongolia.”

“Yes.”

“So I adopted it. Made it a sort of mascot for my anxiety. I imagined it as being bright red…”

“They are bright red,” said Inchmale. “Scarlet. Eyeless. Thick as a child’s thigh.”

“It became the shape I’d give to any major fear I couldn’t quite get a handle on. In L.A., a day or two ago, the idea of Bigend and his magazine that doesn’t quite exist, this level of weirdness he’s nosed himself into, and taken me with him, that I can’t even tell you about, that all felt like the Death Worm. Out there in the dunes.”

He looked at her. “It’s good to see you.”

“Good to see you, Reg. But I’m still confused.”

“If you weren’t, these days,” he said, “you’d probably be psychotic. The worst really are full of passionate intensity now, aren’t they? But what strikes me is that you don’t seem actually frightened now. Confused, but I don’t feel the fear.”

“I’ve just seen someone, some people,” she told him, “tonight, do the single strangest thing I imagine I’ll ever see.”

“Really?” He was suddenly grave. “I envy you.”

“I thought it was going to be terrorism, or crime in some more traditional sense, but it wasn’t. I think that it was actually…”

“What?”

“A prank. A prank you’d have to be crazy to be able to afford.”

“You know I’d love to know what that was,” he said.

“I know. But I’ve given my word once too often in this thing. I gave it to Bigend, then gave it again to someone else. I’d tell you that I’ll tell you eventually, but I can’t. Except that I might be able to. Eventually. It depends. Understand?”

“Is that young Frenchwoman a lesbian?” asked Inchmale.

“Why?”

“She seems physically attracted to Heidi.”

“I wouldn’t say that that’s any indication of lesbianism, particularly.”

“No?”

“Heidi constitutes a sort of a gender preference unto herself. For some people. And lots of them are male.”

He smiled. “That’s true. I’d forgotten.”

A chord sounded.

“The mothership,” said Inchmale.

Hollis watched as Ollie Sleight wheeled a tinkling, cloth-covered cart in. He was back in his expensive chimney-sweep outfit, she saw, but now was clean-shaven. “We weren’t sure you’d have eaten,” he said. And then, to Hollis, “Hubertus would like you to call him.”

“I’m still processing,” she told him. “Tomorrow.”

“You’re serving breakfast,” said Inchmale, hand coming down on Ollie’s shoulder, cutting off any response to Hollis. “If you’re going to make a go of this, and move up from being a Civil War reenactor”—he flipped the lapel of the chimney-sweep suit—“you’re going to have to learn to stay on task.”

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “I have to sleep now. I’ll call him tomorrow, Ollie.”

She went upstairs. Dawn was well under way, lots of it, and there was nothing in sight that resembled a blind or drape. She got out of her jeans, climbed up on Bigend’s maglev bed, pulled the covers over her head, and fell asleep.

Y ou can’t give me a number? E-mail?” The man from Igor’s label looked desperate.

“I’m moving,” Tito said, watching for Garreth’s van from the second-floor window of the rehearsal space. “I’m in between everything.” He saw the white van.

“You have my card,” the man said, as Tito ran for the door.

“Ramone!” whooped Igor, in farewell, crashing a chord on his guitar. The others cheered.

Downstairs and out the door, he ran across the wet sidewalk and opened the van’s passenger door, climbing in.

“Party?” Garreth asked, pulling away from the curb.

“A band. Rehearsing.”

“You’re in a band already?”

“Sitting in.”

“What do you play?”

“Keyboards. The man from Union Square, he tried to kill me. With a car.”

“I know. We had to call in a local favor to make sure he got out of custody.”

“Out?”

“They only had him for an hour or so. He won’t be charged.” They stopped for a light. Garreth turned to look at him. “His car’s steering failed. An accident. Lucky nobody was hurt.”

“There was another man, a passenger,” Tito said, as the light changed.

“Did you recognize him?”

“No. I saw him walking away.”

“The man who tried to run you over, the one who came after the iPod in the park, was in charge of trying to find us in New York.”

“He put the bug in my room?”

Garreth glanced over at him. “Didn’t know you knew about that.”

“My cousin told me.”

“You have a lot of cousins, don’t you?” Garreth smiled.

“He wanted to kill me,” Tito said.

“Not the steadiest tool in the drawer, our man. We imagine he got so frustrated, in New York, trying to grab you, or us, that when he saw you here, he lost it. Worked up about the box arriving, too. We’ve seen him lose it a few times, over the past year or so, and someone always gets hurt. Tonight it was him. The police report says not so badly, though. A few stitches. Big bruise on his ankle. He can drive.”

“A helicopter came,” Tito said. “I rode a train to where I could see streetlights, an apartment building, beyond a fence. I may have set off motion detectors.”

“Your man called that helicopter in, we think. Some kind of general alert. He’d have done it as soon as he got out of custody. Had them raise security on the port. Because he’d seen you.”

“My protocol was poor,” said Tito.

“Your protocol, Tito,” said Garreth, pulling over in the middle of a featureless block, behind a black car, “is fucking genius.” He pointed at the black car. “Cousin for you.”

“Here?”

“Nowhere else,” said Garreth. “I’ll collect you tomorrow. There’s something himself wants you to see.”

Tito nodded. He got out of the van and walked forward, finding Alejandro behind the wheel of the black Mercedes.

“Cousin,” said Alejandro, as Tito got in.

“I wasn’t expecting you,” said Tito.

“Carlito wants to make certain you’re settled,” said Alejandro, starting the Mercedes and pulling away. “So do I.”

“Settled?”

“Here,” said Alejandro. “Unless you prefer Mexico City.”

“No.”

“It isn’t because they think you’d be so hot in Manhattan,” said Alejandro.

“Protocol,” said Tito.

“Yes, but also real estate.”

“How is that?”

“Carlito bought several apartments here, when it was less expensive. He wants you to live in one, while he explores possibilities here.”

“Possibilities?”

“China,” said Alejandro. “Carlito is interested in China. China, here, is very close.”

“Close?”

“You’ll see,” said Alejandro, turning at an intersection.

“Where are we going?”

“The apartment. We’ll need to furnish it. Something a little less basic than your last place.”

“Okay,” said Tito.

“Your things are there,” said Alejandro. “Computer, television, that piano.”

Tito looked over at him, smiled. “Gracias.”

“De nada,” said Alejandro.

T he unfamiliar ring tone of Garreth’s cell woke her. She lay on Bigend’s maglev bed, wondering what was ringing. “Damn,” she said, realizing what it must be. She scrambled off the strangeness, hearing one of the black cables thrum as it was depressed, then released. She found the phone in a front pocket of yesterday’s jeans.

“Hello?”

“Good morning,” said Garreth. “How are you?”

“Well,” she said, surprised to note that it seemed literally true. “And you?”

“Very well, though I hope you’ve had more sleep. How do you feel about a traditional Canadian workingman’s breakfast? You’d need to be here in an hour. There’s something we’d like you see, assuming everything’s gone as planned.”

“Has it?”

“A complication or two. We’ll know soon enough. But signs are good, generally.”

What would that mean, she wondered. Would the turquoise box be emitting money-colored clouds of radioactivity? But he didn’t sound like a worried man. “Where is it? I’ll get a cab. I don’t know whether my car’s been returned yet, and I don’t feel like driving.”

“It’s called Beenie’s,” he said. “Three e’s. Got a pen?”

She wrote down the address.

Downstairs, after she’d dressed, she found a Blue Ant envelope on top of her laptop. Across it, in a very beautiful cursive, in fountain pen, was written: “Your purse, or in any case the unit, are currently inside a Canada Post box at the corner of Gore and Keefer streets. Enclosed to cover incidentals in the meantime. Best, OS.” It contained two hundred dollars, Canadian, in fives, tens, and twenties, fastened with a very nice paper clip.

Pocketing this, she went spelunking for Odile’s room. When she found it, it was twice the size of her semi-suite at the Mondrian, though lacking in Aztec-temple pretensions. Odile, however, was snoring so loudly that she hadn’t the heart to wake her. As she was leaving, she noticed the ax-handle, still wrapped, on the floor beside the bed.

The street, when she’d found her way outside, was still very quiet. She looked up at Bigend’s building, but it was too tall to show her anything of his flat. Its footprint was smaller than its full perimeter, its lower floors tapering outward as they rose. In one of these were the slanted greenish glass windows of a gym, where residents in trim outfits were exercising on uniformly white machines. Like a detail in a Hugh Ferris drawing of some idealized urban future, she thought, but one that Ferris might never have come up with. Gain the glass-walled gymnasia and the benign white ghosts of factory machinery, but lose the high curvilinear glass bridges connecting adjacent towers.

There seemed, however, to be no cabs at all. After ten minutes, though, she did spot one, yellow, and a Prius. It stopped for her, its driver an impeccably courteous Sikh.

Why, she wondered, as he followed a route she guessed was a more practiced and efficient version of the one she’d taken before, was Bigend’s scrambler, and perhaps her purse, in a mailbox? Someone had put it there, she supposed, either the person who’d taken it, or someone who’d found it later.

Without the rush-hour traffic, it was a quick trip. They were heading down Clark already, and there, through the Prius’s windshield, were the orange Constructivist arms of the port, differently arranged now, and, after last night, quite differently resonant.

They passed the corner leading to Bobby’s. Was he still in there, she wondered. How was he? She felt a pang of sympathy for Alberto. She didn’t like to see him lose his River.

They crossed a major intersection. Clark, opposite, split on either side of a fully elevated roadway topped with illuminated signs demanding picture ID. This must be the entrance to the port.

Her driver pulled over, in front of a strangely displaced-looking little white concrete-block diner. BEENIE’S CAFÉ BREAKFAST ALL DAY COFFEE, painted very simply, long ago, on lengths of peeling, white-painted plywood. It had a screen door with a red wooden frame, something that made it look vaguely foreign here.

She paid and tipped her driver, walked over, and looked through the single plate-glass window. It was very small, two tables and a counter with stools. Garreth waved from his stool at the counter, nearest the window.

She went in.

Garreth, the old man, and Tito were seated at the counter. There were four stools, and the one between Garreth and the old man was empty. She took it.

“Hello,” she said.

“Good morning, Miss Henry,” said the old man, nodding in her direction.

Past him, Tito leaned forward, smiling shyly.

“Hello, Tito,” she said.

“You’ll want the poached,” said Garreth. “Unless you don’t like poached.”

“Poached is fine.”

“And the bacon,” said the old man. “Incredible.”

“Really?” Beenie’s was as basic an eating establishment as she’d been in in a while. Unless you counted Mr. Sippee. But Beenie’s was indoor sit-down, she reminded herself.

“Chef used to work on the Queen Elizabeth,” said the old man. “The first one.”

In the back of the room, a very old man, either Chinese or Malaysian, was bent almost double beside a white-painted cast-iron range that must have been older than he was. The only thing in Beenie’s that wasn’t old seemed to be the steel fire hood suspended above the large square stove.

There was a pleasant smell of bacon.

A very quiet woman, behind the counter, without being asked, brought her a cup of coffee. “Poached eggs medium, please.” The walls were hung with oddly framed bits of generic Orientalia. Hollis guessed the place would have been here when she was born, and would have looked pretty much the same, though without the massive stainless hood above the stove.

“Delighted you can be here this morning,” said the old man. “It’s been a long night, but it appears to have gone in our favor.”

“Thank you,” said Hollis, “but I still have only a very vague idea of what you’re up to, in spite of what I saw Garreth do last night.”

“Tell me your idea of what we’re doing, then,” he said.

Hollis added milk to her coffee, from a very cold stainless creamer. “Garreth told me that the”—she glanced at the woman, who was standing beside the ancient cook—“the box, contained a, a large sum?”

“Yes?”

“Garreth, were you exaggerating?”

“No,” said Garreth. “One hundred.”

“Million,” said the old man, flatly.

“What Garreth did…You spoke of laundering. He…contaminated? Am I right?”

“Indeed,” said the old man, “he did. As thoroughly as could be arranged, under the circumstances. The projectiles would be effectively atomized, as they entered. Of course they then encounter virtually solid blocks of extremely high-quality paper, edge-on. But our intent wasn’t to destroy that paper, but rather to make it difficult to handle safely. And also to tag it, if you will, for certain kinds of detection. Though there hasn’t been a remarkable lot of progress, in the past five years, with that sort of sensing. Another neglected area.” He sipped black coffee.

“You’ve made laundering it difficult.”

“Impossible, I would hope,” he said. “But you must understand that for the people who first arranged to have that hundred put in that box, the fact that it’s back here at all already borders on disaster. They did not originally intend for it to return to North America, or indeed to any part of the First World. Too unwieldy an amount. There are economies, however, in which that sort of money can be traded for one thing or another, without too punishing a discount, and it was to one or another of those economies that they intended it to go.”

“What happened?” Hollis asked, thinking how very strange it was that she had at least a general idea of what the answer would be.

“It was discovered, in transit, by a team of American intelligence operators, assigned to look for a very different sort of cargo. They were ordered off the case immediately, but in a way that created a snag in the fabric of things, bureaucratically, and for that reason, and others, it eventually came to my attention.”

Hollis nodded. Pirates.

“In terms of profiteering from the war, Miss Henry, this is a piddling amount. I found the sheer gall of it fascinating, though, or perhaps the sheer lack of imagination. Out the door of the New York Fed, onto the back of a truck in Baghdad, one thing and another, then sail it away.”

She had been about to mention the Hook, she realized, the giant Russian helicopter, and bit her lip.

“In the course of determining who the parties involved were, I learned that this particular container had been equipped with a unit that monitored its whereabouts, and to an extent its integrity, and covertly broadcast the information to the parties involved. They had known, for instance, when it had been opened by the American intelligence team. And that put the wind up them.”

“Pardon me?”

“They lost their nerve. They began looking for different venues, easier markets, steeper discounts perhaps but less risk. The box went on its own very peculiar journey, then, and nothing ever quite worked out for them, none of those various potential launderings.” He looked at her.

As various friends of his saw to that, she guessed.

“And I imagine they were afraid, by then. It became a sort of permanent resident in the system, never quite arriving. Until it got here, of course.”

“But why did it, finally?”

He sighed. “Things are winding down, for these people. So I sincerely hope. There’s less to be made, and the wind begins to blow from a potentially cleaner direction. An amount of this sort, even quite stiffly discounted, begins to seem worthwhile. At least for the smaller fish. And make no mistake, these are the smaller fish. No faces you’ve seen on television. Functionaries. Bureaucrats. I knew their like once, in Moscow and Leningrad.”

“So there’s something here, in Canada, that they can do with it?”

“This country certainly isn’t without resources of that kind, but no. Not here. It’s headed south, across the border. Into Idaho, we think. Most likely a crossing called Porthill. Just south of Creston, British Columbia.”

“But won’t it be that much more difficult to launder, there? You told me last night that that much illicit cash constitutes a negative asset.”

“I believe they’ve made themselves a deal.”

“With whom?”

“A church,” he said.

“A church?”

“The kind with its own television station. The kind with an adjacent gated attraction. In this case, with an adjacent gated community.”

“Jesus,” she said.

“I wouldn’t go that far, myself,” he said, and coughed. “Hundred-dollar bills in the collection plate are the norm, however, I’m told.”

Now the woman appeared behind the counter, from the stove, and placed one plate of eggs and bacon in front of Hollis, a second in front of the old man.

“Look at that,” he said. “Exquisite. If you were in the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, and ordered poached eggs and bacon and toast, what you would be served would in no way differ from this. The presentation.”

And he was right, she saw. The bacon was perfectly flat, rigid, weightless, grease-free, crisp. Pressed, somehow. The eggs poached with a whisk, equally perfect, on a small bed of potato. Two slices of tomato and a sprig of parsley. Arranged with a casual, accomplished elegance. The woman returned with smaller plates of buttered toast for each of them.

“You two eat,” Garreth said. “I’ll explain.”

She broke the first of her eggs with her fork. Soft yellow yolk.

“Tito was in the container facility last night, at midnight, when the buzzer sounded.”

She nodded, mouth full of bacon.

“I punched our nine holes through the box. Leaving nine small but painfully obvious bullet holes. When the box was craned down from that stack, today, and put on a flatbed trailer, those nine holes would have been glaringly obvious. Aside from which, with them open, there was the possibility that a sensor in the facility would register the cesium. Except that Tito climbed up and stuck custom-made magnetic plasters over each hole, both sealing and, we hope, concealing them.”

She looked down the counter to where Tito was being served his plate of eggs. His eyes met hers, briefly, and then he began to eat.

“You said they put it on a truck today,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And they’re taking it into the United States, through Idaho?”

“We think Idaho. The unit inside is still functioning, though, and Bobby is keeping track of that for us. We should be able to anticipate where they’re going to cross.”

“If we fail to do that,” the old man said, “and they enter the country undetected, we do have other options.”

“Though we prefer the radiation be detected at the crossing,” Garreth said.

“And will it be?” she asked.

“It certainly will be if the border’s told to expect it,” said Garreth.

“The right combination of calls,” said the old man, dabbing egg from his lips with a white paper napkin, “and careful timing, will take care of any collaborators our financiers may have at the crossing point.”

The woman brought Garreth his eggs. He began to eat, smiling.

“And what will the result of that be?” Hollis asked.

“A world of trouble,” the old man said, “for someone. A lot of that may depend on the driver, in the end. We really don’t know. Although we’ll certainly”—and he smiled more widely than she’d seen him do before—“enjoy finding out.”

“Speak of the devil,” said Garreth, taking a pager from his belt and reading something off its tiny screen. “Bobby. He says look up. It’s rolling.”

“Come here,” said the old man, getting up, his napkin still in his hand. He moved closer to the window. She followed. Felt Garreth close behind her.

And then the turquoise container, on an almost invisible flatbed trailer, looking as though wheels had been glued to it, descended the ramp to the intersection, pulled by a spotless, shiny, red, white, and heavily chromed tractor-truck, its twin exhaust stacks reminding her of the Cuisinart casing around the barrel of Garreth’s rifle. At its wheel was a dark-haired, square-jawed man she thought looked like a cop, or a soldier.

“That’s him,” she heard Tito say, very softly.