Zero History (50 page)

The camera-map, on Garreth’s laptop, was grayscale, the cones of camera-vision red, each one fading to pink as it spread from its apex. Occasionally, one of them would move as an actual given camera motored on its axis. She had no idea where this particular display was being darknetted from, and she was glad that she didn’t.

The screen that offered Milgrim’s video feed, she thought, seemed entirely out of step with the operation, and perhaps for that reason she found herself going back to it, though it wasn’t very interesting. With Gracie still unaccounted for, she felt Garreth’s nerves. He could have used someone who knew what they were doing, she guessed, on another drone like Fiona’s.

Whatever Milgrim was flying, it seemed leisurely, almost comical, though capable of invigorating bursts of sustained forward motion. Having been instructed, via Fiona, to make a circuit of the area, looking for Gracie, he had, though Garreth had complained that he was too high. Now he was cruising, she saw, above vegetation scrubby enough to warrant the name, Garreth apparently having forgotten about him. But nothing had been expected of Milgrim and his drone, she knew. He’d been given the job to keep him out of Bigend’s hands.

The sound of a very long zipper being stealthily undone. She glanced to the right and saw Heidi touch her upraised forefinger to her lips.

“Our two,” Garreth said to the headset, “are starting for point now. Put it down about twenty meters west of point. We’ll have to run with the batteries you have.” That would be Fiona.

As he spoke, Heidi slipped through the fly and slowly lowered the zipper, closing it behind her.

Point, Hollis knew, would be the GPS coordinates that Gracie had specified as the site of the exchange.

On Fiona’s screen, the perspective suddenly dropped to knee-height, then raced forward over darkly blurred grass, as if from the viewpoint of a hyperkinetic child.

Milgrim, she saw, had reached the end of the scrub, and was turning slowly around for more.

I hope she just had to pee, thought Hollis, glancing back at the long plastic zipper.

L
ook,” said Fiona, “it’s you.”

Garreth had ordered her aloft again. Now she showed Milgrim her iPhone, the camo tarp rustling around them.

“That’s Ajay?” Two figures on the little screen, from a high angle, steel-engraved in washed-out green. One of them shuffling, dejected, head down, shoulders too wide for Milgrim’s jacket. The other man was short, broad, something round and flat on his head. Ajay’s hands were together, crossed, just above crotch-level, in what looked like a gesture of modesty. Handcuffed.

Fiona swung down, hovered, catching them as they passed, into and out of frame. Milgrim thought Ajay was doing a good job of conveying abject surrender, but otherwise he didn’t see the resemblance. Chandra seemed to have done a better job with the spray-on hair this time.

The other man, Milgrim thought, looked as if someone had subjected the Dalai Lama to the gravity of a planet with greater mass than Earth’s. Short, extremely sturdy, age-indeterminate, he wore a sort of beret, level across his forehead, with a pom-pom on top.

As the subjects left her frame, Fiona’s thumbs moved, whirling the point of view back up, reminding Milgrim to check his own iPhone, where he found his penguin looking at grass and low bushes.

When he glanced back, Fiona had found three more figures, approaching on the Scrubs.

One was Chombo, still furled in his tissue-thin coat, and looking much more convincingly unhappy than Ajay’s Milgrim. To Chombo’s left came Foley, limping visibly, wearing darker pants than the ones that had elicited his nickname. He still had his cap, though, and the short dark jacket he’d worn in Paris. On Chombo’s right, Milgrim saw, to his horror, was the man from Edge City Family Restaurant, Winnie’s other Mike, the one with the mullet and the knife in his Toters.

“He wants you over here,” Fiona said, meaning where her drone was, “looking for the one I lost. Move.”

Milgrim sank his concentration into the bright little rectangle, penguin-space, his thumbs tapping. He rolled, corrected for it, swam higher in the air.

Fiona’s drone’s night vision was so much better than the penguin’s. The penguin’s suffered from a kind of infrared myopia; the darker it was, the closer he had to get, and the brighter he had to make the penguin’s infrared LEDs. Which were none too bright to begin with, according to Fiona. The grass below presented in a sort of cheesy pointillism, monochrome, faintly green, stripped of detail. Though if anyone were there, he thought, he’d see them.

And then he found Chombo, and Foley, and the man from Edge City Family Restaurant, still walking.

He had the penguin on auto-swim. He took over, stilled the wings, and let momentum carry him out in the gentle arc provided by his adjustment of the tail, something he was already better at.

Over something in the grass.

A hole? A large rock? He tried to slow himself, using the wings in reverse, but this caused him to roll, catching a blank screen of light-pollution. He righted himself. Nothing below. He began to swim down, using the wings on manual.

A man sat on the grass, cross-legged, something rectangular on his lap. A dark coat, short pale hair. Then gone, the penguin, in spite of Milgrim’s best efforts, having overshot, glided on.

Fiona had told him, twice, how lucky they were to have no breeze tonight, all calm in the Thames Valley, yet he couldn’t steer the penguin well enough to see a man somewhere immediately below him. He took a deep breath, lifted his thumbs from the screen. Let things settle. Let the penguin become a simple balloon, up in the windless air. Then start again.

“Twenty feet off site,” he heard Fiona say, very quietly, “and closing.”

I
saw him,” Hollis said, not quite believing it herself. “I think Milgrim saw him too, but then he was gone.”

“I know,” said Garreth, “but we’re go now.”

Fiona’s drone hovered as Ajay and the man called Charlie reached the other three, who now stood waiting. Charlie put his hand on Ajay’s arm, stopping him. Ajay stood with his head lowered.

Now Foley led Chombo forward. Chombo squirmed, looking in every direction, and Hollis saw the black O of his mouth. Foley jabbed his hand into Chombo’s ribs.

Garreth touched the switchbox. “Hit him,” he said.

She saw Ajay blur, or teleport, across the space separating him from Foley. Whatever befell Foley, on Ajay’s arrival, was equally, invisibly fast, with Ajay seeming to have spun and grabbed Chombo before Foley had hit the grass.

Now Charlie, the short, fridge-shaped man with the plaid tam, was between those two and the man with the mullet.

She never saw the man’s knife, only the way he held his hand, as he closed with Charlie, and then she saw him fall, though Charlie seemed only to have stepped back. The man rolled, sprang up, almost as quickly as Ajay had pounced on Foley, lunged again, fell.

“Charlie tried to teach me that, once,” said Garreth, “but I couldn’t bring myself to be sufficiently superstitious.”

By now the man was on the ground again, without Charlie ever having seemed to touch him.

“Why does he keep falling?”

“Some kind of Ghurka feedback loop. But your Foley’s not getting up. Hope Ajay didn’t overdo it.”

Hollis glanced up, saw Milgrim’s screen. The gray-haired man. A rifle— “
He has a gun
—”

“Fiona,” he said, “shooter. Under the penguin. Now.”

T
humbing the wings to rotate, slowly, just briefly enough, in opposite directions, had brought the penguin around, but had presented Milgrim with the iconic silhouette of a
Ruchnoy Pulemyot Kalashnikova
, for which he’d instantly lost all English.

It lay across Gracie’s legs, metal shoulder-stock unfolded, as Gracie attached the curved magazine, a humble unit about which Milgrim, in his period of government employment, had known an absurd amount. The Russian for terminologies for every piece of machinery used to produce them: stampers and spot-welders and so many more. He’d noticed them ever since, on television screens, those magazines: ubiquitous objects in the world’s harsher places, never auguring good.

“Fuck,” from Fiona, beside him, just the least little plosive. Then: “On it.”

Gracie pulled something back, on the side of the rifle, released it, sat up and forward, bringing his knees up, settling the orthopedic-looking stock against his shoulder.

The penguin paddling down, it seemed, of its own accord, as Gracie leaned his cheek in. Barrel moving, slightly—

Jerking, as something dark and rectangular shot beneath it. Fiona’s drone.

Gracie looked up. Through the penguin, directly at Milgrim. Who must have done that awkward thing, though he could never remember it, the configuration she’d shown him in the cube.

Something smashed Gracie down, and sideways, out of his sniper’s posture, an idiot giant’s invisible hand, the penguin jerking simultaneously, image blurring. Milgrim never saw the wires at all, those fifteen feet of them, but he supposed they were very thin.

Gracie rolled on his back, convulsed as Milgrim fired the Taser again. “Galvanism,” the word recalled from high school biology. Gracie grabbed invisible strings. Milgrim tapped the screen again. Gracie jerked again, held on.

“Stop!” Fiona said. “Garreth says!”

“Why?”

“
Stop!
”

Milgrim raised both thumbs, obedient now, terrified that he’d done something irrevocable.

Gracie sat up, clawing at his neck, then gave the invisible string a vicious yank, blurring the image again.

And then the penguin was rising, slowly, away from him. Milgrim’s thumbs went to the wings. Nothing happened. He tried the tail, tried auto-swim. Nothing. Still rising. He saw Gracie stagger to his feet, sway, then run, out of frame, as the penguin, freed of its unaccustomed ballast of Taser, ascended of its own accord into the calm predawn air of the Thames Valley.

He thought he glimpsed the wheel of the London Eye, just as Fiona thrust her own iPhone in front of his.

W
hat was that?” she asked.

“Milgrim,” he said, shaking his head, “Tasered Gracie. It’s a good thing I’m retiring. Milgrim just saved our bacon.”

“
Milgrim
had the Taser?”

“On his balloon. Hello? Darling?” To the headset now. “Get us over the car, please. And hurry, you’re running on fumes.”

“Who was Gracie trying to shoot?”

“Chombo first, I imagine. Do Big End the most harm that way. Either when he saw that we weren’t dealing in good faith, or because he’d planned to all along. Initially, I thought he might just play it straight, local rules, get Milgrim, make his point. Hoping he wouldn’t go the full American on us, in London, in a public place, dead of night. Mad, really. But Milgrim’s secret agent thinks it’s a midlife crisis. If he’d fired, the area would be knee-deep in police in another minute, and entirely the wrong kind. Which would actually put him where we want him, though then they’d likely have us too.”

“He’s an arms dealer. Didn’t you think he might have a gun?”

“Arms dealers are businessmen. Mild old gents, some of them. I knew there was cowboy potential”—he shrugged—“but hadn’t much way to cover it. Just a bodged-up little exploit.” He grinned. “But Milgrim jolted him, sufficient that he left without the gun. Imagine he wants space between it and himself now.” He raised a hand, head tilting, listening. “You didn’t. You
did
.
Bugger
.”

“What?”

“Ajay’s sprained his ankle. In a sandbox. Chombo’s run away.” He drew a deep breath, blew it slowly out. “You’re not seeing my machinations at their genius best, are you?”

Something slammed against the back of the truck. “Stay the fuck still!” commanded Heidi, her voice muffled but fully audible through the steel door and two canvas scrims.

Garreth looked back at Hollis. “She’s
outside
,” he said.

“I know. I didn’t want to interrupt you. Hoped she was just going for a pee.”

The long zip went up then, and Bobby Chombo was almost simultaneously injected through the fly, his face slick with tears. He fell on the aubergine floor, sobbing. Heidi’s head appeared near the top of the fly. “He’s the one, right?”

“I’ve never told you how
very
beautiful I find you, have I, Heidi?” said Garreth.

“Pissed his pants,” said Heidi.

“In good company, believe me,” said Garreth, shaking his head.

“Where’s Ajay?” Heidi asked, frowning.

“About to get a Ghurka-ride. Piggyback. He’s been wanting to get to know Charlie better.” He turned back to his screens.

Milgrim’s, Hollis saw, was blank, or rather, dimly Turneresque, faintest pink behind steel gray, the greenish hue gone now. But Fiona’s was very busy. Figures climbing into the black car.

“Go,” said Garreth to the car on the screen, with a little chivying gesture. “
Please
go.”