Spook Country

“Containers.”

“Yes. Pirates and teams provided one another with mutual backup. The teams would have amply bribed any local authorities, and of course the U.S. Navy would stay well away when one of these operations was under way. The ships’ crews were never the wiser, whether contraband was discovered or not. If something were found, the interdiction came later, nothing to do with our pirates.” He gestured to a waiter for another piso. “Another drink?”

“Mineral water,” she said. “Joseph Conrad. Kipling. Or a movie.”

“The pirates who proved best at this were out of Aceh, in northern Sumatra. Prime Conrad territory, I believe.”

“Were they finding much, the faux pirates?”

The diamond factor’s nod again.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“In August 2003, one of these joint CIA-pirate operations boarded a freighter with Panamanian registry, bound from Iran to Macau. The team’s interest centered on one particular container. They’d broken its seals, opened it, when orders came by radio to leave it.”

“Leave it?”

“Leave the container. Leave the vessel. Those orders were followed, of course.”

“Who told you that story?”

“Someone who claims to have been a member of the boarding team.”

“And you think that Chombo, somehow, has something to do with that?”

“I suspect,” Bigend said, leaning closer and lowering his voice, “that Bobby periodically knows where that container is.”

“Periodically?”

“Apparently it’s still out there, somewhere,” Bigend said. “Like the Flying Dutchman.” His second piso arrived, along with her water. “To your next story,” he toasted, touching the rims of their fresh plastic glasses.

“The pirates.”

“Yes?”

“Did they see what was in it?”

“No.”

“MOST PEOPLE don’t self-drive these,” Bigend said, pulling out onto Sunset, headed east.

“Most people don’t drive them at all,” Hollis corrected, from the passenger seat beside him. She craned her neck for a glimpse back into what she supposed could be called the passenger cabin. There seemed to be a sort of frosted skylight, as opposed to any mere moonroof. And a lot of very glossy wood, the rest in carbon-colored lambskin.

“A Brabus Maybach,” he said, as she turned her head in time to see him give the wheel a little pat. “The firm of Brabus extensively tweaks the product of Maybach, to produce one of these.”

“‘Darth my ride’?”

“If you were riding in back, you could watch for locative art on the monitors in each front seatback. There’s MWAN and a fourplex GPRS router.”

“No thanks.” The seats back there, upholstered in that gunmetal lamb, obviously reclined, becoming beds, or possibly chairs for high-end elective surgery. Through the smoked glass at her side, she saw pedestrians at the intersection, staring at the Maybach. The light changed and Bigend pulled away. The vehicle’s interior was still as a museum at midnight. “Do you always drive this?” she asked.

“The agency has Phaetons,” he said. “Good stealth cars. Mistake them for Jettas, at a distance.”

“I’m not a car person.” She ran her thumb along a lambskin seat seam. Like touching the butt of a supermodel, probably.

“Why have you decided to interest yourself in journalism, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Looking for a way to make a living. Curfew royalties don’t amount to much. I haven’t been that talented an investor.”

“Few people are,” he said. “If they’re successful at it, of course, then they imagine they are. Talented. But they’re all doing the same things, really.”

“I wish someone had told me what they’re doing, in that case.”

“If you need to earn money, there are more lucrative fields than journalism.”

“Are you discouraging me?”

“Not at all. I’m simply encouraging you in a broader way. I’m interested in what motivates you, and how you understand the world.” He glanced sideways at her. “Rausch tells me you’ve written about music.”

“Sixties garage bands. I started writing about them when I was still in the Curfew.”

“Were they an inspiration?”

She was watching a fourteen-inch display on the Maybach’s dash, the red cursor that was the car proceeding along the green line that was Sunset. She looked up at him. “Not in any linear way, musically. They were my favorite bands. Are,” she corrected herself.

He nodded.

She glanced back down at the dash display and found the street map gone, replaced by wireframe diagrams of a helicopter, its bulbous profile unfamiliar. Now it appeared above the wireframe profile of a ship. Either a small ship or quite a large helicopter. Cut to video of the actual aircraft in flight. “What’s this?”

“The Hook, so-called. It’s an older, Soviet-made helicopter, one with tremendous lifting capacity. Syria owns at least one of them.”

The Hook, or another just like it, was lifting a Soviet tank now, as if in demonstration. “Drive,” she ordered. “Don’t be watching your own Power-Point.”

Cut to a colorful, simplified animation, illustrating how a helicopter (not looking very Hook-like) could shuffle cargo containers on the deck and in the holds of a freighter. “The container in your story,” she began.

“Yes?”

“Did they say whether it was very heavy?”

“It’s not, that we know of,” said Bigend, “but it’s sometimes at the center of a stack of much heavier containers. That’s a very secure position, as there’s ordinarily no way at all, at sea, to access a container in that position. The Hook, though, would allow you to do that. Plus you could have arrived from somewhere else, another ship say, with your container Hooked. Decent cruising range, reasonably fast.”

He got on the 101 Freeway, southbound. The Maybach’s suspension turned the pockmarked pavement into something silken, smooth as warm fudge. She could sense the car’s power now, held effortlessly in check. On the dash display, lines symbolizing signals were being emitted by a shipping container. They rose at a sharp angle, to be intercepted by a satellite, which bounced them back down, past the curve of the earth. “Where are we going, Mr. Bigend?”

“Hubertus. To the agency. It’s a better place to discuss things.”

“Agency?”

“Blue Ant.”

And here on the display, now, unmoving and crisply hieroglyphic, was that insect itself. Blue. She looked back up at him.

His profile vaguely reminded her of someone.

18. ELEGGUA’S WINDOW

T ia Juana sent him walking, crosstown along 110th, to Amsterdam and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the better to consult Eleggua. The owner, she said, of the roads and doors in this world. Lord of the crossroads, intersection of the human and the divine. For this reason, Juana maintained, there had secretly been raised a window to him and a place of devotion, in this great church in Morningside Heights.

“Nothing can be done in either world,” she said, “without his permission.”

It had begun to snow, as he walked uphill, past chicken wire and poster-crusted plywood, where the retaining wall of the cathedral’s grounds had been brought down, long ago, by rain. He turned up his collar, settled his hat, and walked on, no stranger now to snow. Though he was grateful, finally, to reach Amsterdam. He saw the unlit neon of V&T Pizza, like something pointing to the avenue’s ordinary human past, and then he was passing the priest’s house, and the garden that surrounded the perpetually dry fountain, with its delirious sculpture, where the decapitated head of Satan dangled from the great bronze claw of the Holy Crab of God. It was this sculpture that had most interested him, when Juana first brought him here, that and the cathedral’s four peacocks, one of them albino and, Juana said, sacred to Orunmila.

There were no guards at the cathedral’s doors, but he found them within, waiting, with their suggestion of five dollars’ donation. Juana had shown him how to remove his hat, and cross himself, and, ignoring them, pretending he spoke no English, to light a candle and pretend to pray.