Spook Country

“Pamela put a GPS tracking device on that truck, about an hour before you arrived.”

“Jesus,” she said, “she did? What is she, James Bond?”

“Nothing like it. Likes a bit of a game, Pamela.” He smiled.

“Where is it, the truck?”

He took a Treo from within his jacket and thumbed a sequence on the keypad. Squinted at it. “Just north of San Francisco, at the moment.”

44. EXIT STRATEGY

M ilgrim found himself heading for Brown’s parked Corolla, or rather he found his body, cramping and gasping from its unaccustomed gallop, weaving unevenly in what he supposed to be that general direction. He’d had a general out-of-body experience, between lunging up from the bench and rediscovering himself this way, and he had no idea where those black gentlemen might be. He hoped they had taken his word for it, that Brown was a DEA agent. Since one of them had spontaneously concluded that a bust was in progress, possibly they had. De

The Greenmarket looked suddenly deserted, aside from those he took to be produce sellers, all of whom seemed to be trying to use cell phones, and some of whom were yelling at one another in a fairly hysterical fashion.

Now sirens were rising, ululating in the distance. Approaching. Many, it seemed.

In spite of the agonizing stitch in his side, which made him want to bend double, he forced himself to remain approximately upright, and to move as quickly as he could.

He was crossing Union Square West at Seventeenth, and had the Corolla in sight, when some of the sirens simultaneously arrived and ceased. He looked back, along Seventeenth, and saw a police car and an ambulance sitting at angles in the intersection at Park, their rooftop lights frenetically red and blue. Three identical black SUVs appeared, from the east, on Seventeenth, sirenless, to disgorge bulky, black-clad figures that appeared to Milgrim, at this distance, to be wearing spacesuits. These were the new post-9/11 superpolice, he guessed, though he couldn’t remember what they were supposed to be called. Samson squads? Some of them entered the building through an entrance at the corner. Now the first of what sounded to be several fire engines.

No time to watch this, arresting as he found it. Brown’s bag was still in the car.

But the streetscape, he now realized, with a sharp pang of dismay, seemed utterly devoid of anything he could use to break a car window. His hand closed repeatedly on the nonexistent handle of the inexpensive Korean-made claw-hammer he’d last used to access the interior of an automobile, but then someone else’s hand closed viselike on his left shoulder, while his right wrist was twisted up behind his back with near dislocating force.

“They’re gone,” Brown was saying quietly. “They were jamming our radios and the cell frequencies. If we’re talking, they’re gone. Get out now. The others are already clear. They have him in custody? A Hercules team?” Brown sighed. “Shit,” he said, with finality.

Hercules teams, Milgrim thought. That was it.

“Move,” Brown ordered. “They’ll be sealing off the area.” He yanked open the Corolla’s rear door and shoved Milgrim inside, face-first. “Floor,” he commanded.

Milgrim managed to pull his feet in just as Brown slammed the door. He smelled relatively new automobile carpet. His knees were on Brown’s black bag and laptop, but he knew that the moment, if there had ever been one, was past. He concentrated on breathing more regularly, and on preparing his excuse for having come uncuffed.

“Stay down,” Brown said, getting in on the driver’s side and starting the engine. He pulled away from the curb. Milgrim felt him turn right on Union Square West, then slow. The front passenger door opened, as someone scrambled in. They pulled away again, the door slamming.

“Give it to me,” Brown said.

Milgrim heard something rustle.

“You used gloves?” The level calm in Brown’s voice, Milgrim knew from experience, was a bad sign. Red Team One’s day in the park must not have gone well.

“Yes,” someone said. A man’s voice, perhaps familiar from the meeting earlier, in the New Yorker. “That part came off when he dropped it.”

Brown said nothing.

“What happened?” the other asked. “Were they expecting us?”

“Maybe they’re always expecting someone. Maybe they’ve been trained to do that. Hell of a concept, isn’t it?”

“How’s Davis?”

“Looked like a broken neck, to me.”

“You didn’t say he was dangerous.”

Milgrim closed his eyes.

“Blackwater dump your ass for dumbness?” Brown asked. “Is that what I’ll find out when I ask them?”

The other said nothing.

Brown stopped the car. “Get out,” he said. “Leave town. This afternoon.”

Milgrim heard the door open, the man get out, the door close.

Brown drove on. “Get that Transit ticket off the rear window,” Brown said.

Milgrim crawled up on the rear seat and pulled the suction cups off the glass. They were about to turn onto Fourteenth. He looked back up Union Square West and saw a black Hercules team vehicle blocking an intersection. He turned around, hoping Brown wouldn’t order him back on the floor, and placed his feet, carefully, on either side of Brown’s laptop and bag. “Are we going back to the New Yorker?”

“No,” said Brown, “we are not going back to the New Yorker.”

Brown drove instead to a rental drop-off in Tribeca.

They took a cab to Pe

45. BREAKBULK

W here do you think the truck’s headed?” Hollis asked, poolside, from her cozy depression in the edge of the giant Starck futon.

“Not the Bay,” said Bigend, sunken so deeply, beside her, that she couldn’t see him. “Soon we’ll know whether or not it’s Portland. Or Seattle.”

She settled further back, watching a small plane’s lights cross the empty center of the luminous sky. “You don’t think they’d go inland?”

“No,” he said, “I think this is about a port, one with a container facility.”

She raised herself, as well as she could, on her right elbow, trying to see his face. “It’s coming?”

“Perhaps that’s what Bobby’s sudden departure means, and not simply that you scared him off.”

“But you think it’s coming?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“The Hook,” he said. “Remember it? That large Russian helicopter? A helicopter capable of flying hundreds of miles, picking up our container from one vessel and transferring it to another?”

“Yes.”

“There are some interesting possibilities for keeping track of commercial shipping, today. Of a specific vessel, I mean. But I doubt any of them would help us trace our mystery box, because I think it keeps changing vessels. At sea. We’ve heard about the use of that venerable Hook, early on, but you don’t need to go that large to shift a single forty-foot container from one vessel to another. Provided you don’t need to actually fly it too far, that is. Ours is a forty-footer, by the way. All either forty or twenty. Standardization. Containers full of merchandise. Packets full of information. No breakbulk.”

“No what?”

“Breakbulk. Noncontainerized freight. Old-fashioned shipping. Crates, bundles. What shipping used to be. I’ve thought that in terms of information, the most interesting items, for me, usually amount to breakbulk. Traditional human intelligence. Someone knowing something. As opposed to data mining and the rest of it.”