Spook Country

“Please,” he said, “have a seat.”

The stools here were deliberately mismatched. The one next to his reminded her of those elongated figurines of Masai warriors, carved from ironwood, but without the dangerously spiky bits. His was polished aluminum, sort of Henry Moore. “No, thanks.”

“I don’t know what might be in that one particular container, Hollis. Do you believe me?”

She thought about it. “I might. It depends.”

“On what, exactly?”

“On what you might be about to tell me next.”

He smiled. “Wherever we go with this, I’ll never be able to tell you exactly how I came to be involved. Is that acceptable?”

She thought about it. “Yes.” It really didn’t sound like that negotiable a point.

“And I’m going to require a very sincere commitment to my undertaking, now, if this conversation is to continue. I need to know that you’re with me, before I tell you more. But please, understand that I can’t tell you more without taking you further into the thing itself. This is a matter in which possession of information amounts to involvement. Do you understand?” He took up a scarlet flesh-maki, regarded it seriously, then popped it into his mouth.

Whatever this was that Bigend was involved in, she decided, it was deep. Deep and possibly central. To something, she couldn’t yet know what. She remembered seeing the white truck rounding the corner, going away, and realized that she really did want to know where it had gone, and why. If she imagined never knowing, for some reason, she saw Alberto’s River Phoenix, prone on Viper Room concrete. Another ending.

Bigend touched his lips with a cocktail napkin, raising an interrogatory eyebrow.

“Yes,” she said. “But if I ever find you lying to me, even by omission, it’s over. Any obligation on my part. Over. Understood?”

“Perfectly,” he said, cycling the smile and flagging down their server. “A drink.”

“Double scotch,” Hollis said. “One rock.”

She looked down along the glowing alabaster. All the candles. Drinks. Women’s wrists. What had she just done?

“Coincidentally,” he said, watching the server’s trim bottom recede with exactly the expression she’d seen when he’d considered his maki, “I learned something this morning. Something regarding Bobby.”

“I wouldn’t think that ‘coincidentally’ was ever a safe concept, around material like this.” She decided to risk the Masai stool, finding it surprisingly comfortable.

“Even the clinically paranoid can have enemies, they say.”

“What is it, then?”

“Bobby, I’ve known for some time, is charged with at least two tasks by his employers.”

“Who are?”

“Don’t know. The tasks of Bobby Chombo, though: One, as I’ve told you, consists of listening for the Flying Dutchman of shipping containers. When he took this job, he was given a set of parameters of some kind, and this task of fishing one particular signal out of a great many others. He did it. Does it still. The container sends a signal periodically, a

“What’s in it for whoever pays him?”

“Don’t know. But I generally assume that it’s not their container, not their signal. After all, they had to pay Bobby to find it for them. Probably after paying someone else for the information they gave him to help him find it. Quite roundabout, if it’s theirs in the first place, though I don’t rule it entirely out.”

“Why not?”

“Never a good idea. I’m agnostic, basically. About everything.”

“What’s Bobby Chombo task two, then?”

“That’s what I’ve just learned. When we were at Blue Ant, I told you that he ships iPods to Costa Rica.”

“Right. Music, you said.”

“What do you know about steganography?”

“I don’t even know how to pronounce it.”

“Bobby’s other task consists of compiling elaborate logs of fictitious searches for the container’s signal. These fictions of his, mathematical, enormous, recount his ongoing search for and utter failure to find the key he already has, but which he pretends not to have.” He cocked his head. “Did you follow that?”

“He fakes evidence that he still hasn’t found the signal?”

“Exactly. He’s compiled three such epics, so far. He encrypts them steganographically on the drives of iPods—” Interrupted by the arrival of her drink.

“What was that word again?” she asked, when the server had withdrawn.

“‘Steganographically.’ He spreads his fictitious activity log very thinly, through a lot of music. If he’s given you the key, or if you have sufficiently, hugely powerful decryption capacities, you can pull it out of the music.”

“And the iPod’s less likely to be checked than a laptop?”

He shrugged. “Depends who’s doing the checking.”

“And how did you learn this?”

“I can’t tell you. Sorry, but it has a direct bearing on how I got involved, and we’ve agreed I can’t discuss that.”

“Fine.” It wasn’t, really, because she could imagine him using it whenever he found it convenient. But she’d deal with that as they went along.

“But I’ve told you that I know he sends them to a poste restante situation in Costa Rica.”

“Right.”

“Where so far I’ve lost track of them, but not before getting a whiff of retired U.S. intelligence officers. Which is a fairly distinctive pong. Never anything like a name attached, of course. But now I’m hearing that Bobby’s iPods get reshipped, from San José.”

“Where to?”

“New York. Unless I’m being played. But it looks as if the person Bobby sends them to, in San José, is lazy. Or nervous. The actual addressee never picks them up. But they employ the same functionary to ship them back out. By DHL. To an address on Canal Street. Chinese importer.”

“Bobby keeps track of the wandering container,” she said. “He generates false evidence that he hasn’t found it yet. He sends that evidence to someone in Costa Rica, who then ships it back to New York…”

“You missed a step. He sends it to someone in Costa Rica whose job, apparently, according to Bobby’s employers’ wishes, is to sign for it, then hand it over to someone else, the intended recipient. The person Bobby ships to is just your average quasi-criminal postbox. But the intended recipient has never turned up for his end of things. Instead, he’s cut a deal with the postbox, to simply turn it around. It’s a gap, you see, a flaw in someone’s architecture.”

“Whose?”

“No idea.”

“Can you tell me how you found this out, that they go to New York?”

“I sent someone down there with an armload of cash. Made the postbox a surprise offer. It’s that kind of town.”

“And that’s all you got for your money?”

“That and the sense that Mr. Postbox finds the resident ex-CIA gerontocracy oppressive, and desires to retire further south, away from them.”

She went over it again, in her head, swirling the lone ice cube in her scotch. “So what do you think?”

“Someone’s being scammed. Someone’s being led to believe that someone else is aware of the container, but is unable to locate it. Why, do you think, would anyone do that?”

“To make the person who owns the container believe it’s not being tracked. When in fact it is.”

“It does look that way, doesn’t it?”

“And?”

“We have a gap to exploit. We know that someone in San José is distancing themselves a little, not following through to the letter of the plan. Whoever’s supposed to receive those iPods, and take them away for reshipping, isn’t doing that. Instead, they’re paying the postbox to simply turn the iPods around. I imagine they’re frightened.”

“Of whom?”

“Possibly of whoever owns the contents of that container. That’s very interesting. And now we have another gap, as well.”

“Which is?”