Spook Country

She felt a sudden intense desire to get out of the Maybach, and acted on it.

The door opened like some disturbing hybrid of bank vault and Armani evening purse, perfectly balanced bombproof solidity meeting sheer cosmetic slickness. The gritty concrete floor, blotched with crumbs of gypsum, felt comforting in contrast. The guard gestured with a remote. She heard segmented steel start to rattle down behind them.

“This way, please,” said Bigend, over the clatter of the closing door. He stepped away from the Maybach without bothering to close his door, so she left hers open as well and followed him. She looked back, just as she was catching up with him, and saw it sitting open, its interior a soft, mouthlike cavern of gray lambskin under the high-resolution brilliance of the garage’s lighting.

“We’re losing the better part of the neighborhood’s edge, as the reclamation continues,” he said, guiding her around a ten-foot stack of drywall.

“‘Better part’?”

“Majority of. I’ll miss it, myself. It unsettles visitors. Unsettled is good. Last week we opened a new suite of offices in Beijing. I’m not satisfied, not at all. Three floors in a new building, really nothing we could do with them. But it’s Beijing.” He shrugged. “What choice do we have?”

She didn’t know, so said nothing. He led her up a wide flight of stairs and into what was obviously in the process of becoming a foyer. Another guard, studying CCTV windows on a panel display, ignored them.

They stepped into an elevator, its every surface taped over with white-dusted layers of corrugated cardboard. Bigend lifted a flap of the stuff and touched the controls. They rose two floors and the door opened. He gestured for her to go ahead.

She stepped out onto a scuffed runway of more of the same cardboard, taped across a floor of some smooth gray product. The cardboard ran to a conference table, six chairs on a side. Above this, on the wall beyond, hung Anton Corbijn’s portrait of her, in perfect resolution on a screen perhaps thirty feet on the diagonal.

“A wonderful image,” he said, as she looked from it back to him.

“I’ve never been entirely comfortable with it.”

“Because the celebrity self is a sort of tulpa,” he said.

“A what?”

“A projected thought-form. A term from Tibetan mysticism. The celebrity self has a life of its own. It can, under the right circumstances, indefinitely survive the death of its subject. That’s what every Elvis sighting is about, literally.”

All of which reminded her very much of how Inchmale looked at these things, though really she believed it too.

“What happens,” she asked him, “if the celebrity self dies first?”

“Very little,” he said. “That’s usually the problem. But images of this caliber serve as a hedge against that. And music is the most purely atemporal of media.”

“‘The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past,’” quoting Inchmale quoting Faulkner. “Would you mind changing cha

He gestured toward the screen. The Hook appeared in her place, the Soviet cargo helicopter, photographed from below. “What do you make of all this?” The smile flashed like a lighthouse. There were no apparent windows in this room, and at the moment this screen was the sole source of light.

“You like unsettled?”

“Yes?”

“Then you like me.”

“I do like you. And something would be very wrong if you weren’t. Unsettled.”

She went to the conference table and ran a finger along its black surface, leaving a faint trace in gypsum dust. “Is there really a magazine?”

“Everything,” said Bigend, “is potential.”

“Everything,” she said, “is potential bullshit.”

“Think of me as a patron. Please.”

“I don’t like the sound of that, thanks.”

“In the early 1920s,” Bigend said, “there were still some people in this country who hadn’t yet heard recorded music. Not many, but a few. That’s less than a hundred years ago. Your career as a ‘recording artist’”—making the quotes with his hands—“took place toward the end of a technological window that lasted less than a hundred years, a window during which consumers of recorded music lacked the means of producing that which they consumed. They could buy recordings, but they couldn’t reproduce them. The Curfew came in as that monopoly on the means of production was starting to erode. Prior to that monopoly, musicians were paid for performing, published and sold sheet music, or had patrons. The pop star, as we knew her”—and here he bowed slightly, in her direction—“was actually an artifact of preubiquitous media.”

“Of—?”

“Of a state in which ‘mass’ media existed, if you will, within the world.”

“As opposed to?”

“Comprising it.”

The light in the room changed, as he said this. She raised her eyes to the screen, where a metallic blue ant-glyph had taken over the screen.

“What’s in Chombo’s container?” she asked.

“It’s not Chombo’s container.”

“Your container.”

“It’s not our container.”

“‘Our’ being you and who?”

“You.”

“It’s not my container.”

“Just as I said,” said Bigend. And smiled.

“Whose is it, then?”

“I don’t know. But I believe you might be able to find out.”

“What’s in it?”

“We don’t know that either.”

“What does Chombo have to do with it?”

“Chombo, evidently, has found a way to know where it is, at least periodically.”

“Why don’t you just ask him?”

“Because it’s a secret. He’s being paid handsomely to keep it a secret, and his personality is such, as you’ve noted, that he likes having a secret.”

“Who’s paying him, then?”

“That seems to be even more of a secret.”

“Do you think it might be the container’s owner?”

“Or its ultimate addressee, should it ever acquire one? I don’t know. But you, Hollis, are the person I’ve found whom Bobby is most likely to talk to.”

“You weren’t there. He wasn’t that glad to have Alberto bring me around. There were no suggestions of further invitations.”

“That’s where I’m convinced you’re wrong,” he said. “When he’s gotten used to the idea that you’re available for more face time, you may well hear from him.”

“What have iPods got to do with it?”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Rausch told me to look for iPods being used for data storage. Do people still do that?”

“Chombo periodically loads an iPod with data and sends it out of the United States.”

“What kind of data?”

“Music, ostensibly. We’ve had no way of finding out.”

“Do you know where he sends them?”

“San José, Costa Rica, so far. We have no idea where else it might go, from there.”

“Who receives it?”

“Someone whose job is to run an expensive post office box, essentially. There’s a lot of that, evidently, in San José. We’re working on it. Have you been there?”

“No.”

“There’s quite a community of retired CIA people there. DEA as well. We have someone there now, trying to have a quiet look into things, though so far it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.”

“Why are you so interested in the contents of Chombo’s container?”

Bigend removed a pale-blue microfiber dust cloth from his jacket pocket, pulled a chair out on its casters, and gave it a good dusting. “Seat?” He offered her the chair.

“No thanks. Go ahead.”

He seated himself. He looked up at her. “I’ve learned to value anomalous phenomena. Very peculiar things that people do, often secretly, have come to interest me in a certain way. I spend a lot of money, often, trying to understand those things. From them, sometimes, emerge Blue Ant’s most successful efforts. Trope Slope, for instance, our viral pitchman platform, was based on pieces of anonymous footage being posted on the Net.”

“You did that? Put that thing in the background of all those old movies? That’s fucking horrible. Pardon my French.”

“It sells shoes.” He smiled.