Spook Country

He thought of the peculiar, phoenix-like creature on the front door, downstairs.

But then he remembered eating pizza that Brown had ordered, in the kitchen, downstairs. Pepperoni and three cheeses. And the fridge, which had contained a six-pack of very cold Pepsi and nothing else. He remembered feeling the smooth white circles of the heating elements on the range, something he’d not seen before. Brown had taken his pizza into a sort of study, along with a glass and a bottle of whiskey. Milgrim had never seen Brown drink before. Then he’d heard Brown on the phone, through the closed door, but hadn’t been able to make anything of it. And then, he guessed, he’d treated himself to another Rize.

Sometimes, he observed now, sitting on the edge of the bed in his underwear, a little too much had a way of clearing the air, the morning after. He looked up and encountered the eagle’s gun-muzzle eye. Looking quickly away, he rose, surveyed the room, and began to search it, quietly and with an efficiency born of practice.

It had obviously been decorated to be a boy’s room, and in the style of the rest of the house, though perhaps with a bit less effort. Less Ralph Lauren than some diffusion line. He hadn’t yet seen a single actual antique, aside from the Ur-eagle outside, which might even be original to the house. The furnishings were faux-old, and that rather halfhearted, more likely made in India or China than North Carolina. For that matter, he thought, noting the room’s empty inbuilt bookcase, he hadn’t seen a single book.

He carefully, quietly opened each drawer in the small bureau. All empty, aside from the bottom one, which contained a wire coat hanger clad in tissue, printed with the name and address of a dry cleaner in Bethesda, and two pins. He knelt on the carpet and peered under the bureau. Nothing.

The small, vaguely Colonial desk, finished, like the bureau, in rather robotically distressed blue paint, offered nothing more, other than a dead fly and a black ballpoint pen marked PROPERTY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT in white. Milgrim tucked the pen into the elastic waistband of his underwear, having at that point no pockets, and carefully opened what he took, correctly, to be a closet door. The hinges squeaked with disuse. Empty coat hangers rattled on a hook. The closet proved to contain nothing but more coat hangers, on one of which hung a small navy blazer with an elaborately gold-embroidered crest. Milgrim went through its pockets, finding a wadded Kleenex and a stub of chalk.

The boy’s jacket and the piece of chalk saddened him. He didn’t like thinking of this as a child’s room. Perhaps there had been other things here once, books and toys, but somehow it didn’t seem like it. The room suggested a difficult childhood, perhaps not too different from the one Milgrim himself had had. He left the closet, closing the door, and went to the blue, ladder-backed chair on which his clothes had been draped. Forgetting the U.S. Government pen, he jabbed himself with it as he was putting on his pants.

Dressed, he approached the drawn striped drapes of the room’s single window. Positioning himself so that he could move the outer edge of one drape as minimally as possible, he discovered what he took to be N Street, on what appeared to be an overcast day. But his angle down also revealed the right front fender of a parked car, black and highly polished. A large car, to judge by what he could see of its fender.

He put on the Paul Stuart coat, discovering his book in its pocket, clipped the government pen into the inside pocket, and tried the room’s door, finding it unlocked.

A paneled, carpeted hallway, illuminated now by a skylight. He looked over a banister and down, two flights, to the softly gleaming gray marble of the hallway they’d entered yesterday evening. One of those central but minimal stairwell-shafts encountered in houses of this age, very long and narrow, ru

The hallway was empty.

“I understand what you have to work with,” said a voice Milgrim had never heard before, the speaker equally close, equally invisible. “You’re using the best men available to you, and finding them lacking. We see that all too often. I’m disappointed, of course, that you weren’t able to apprehend him. In the light of your previous lack of success, I think it would have been wise to arrange to try to photograph him. Don’t you? To be prepared to photograph him in any case, in the event he escaped again.” The man had a lawyer’s cadence, Milgrim thought. He spoke slowly and clearly, and as though he took it for granted that he’d be paid attention to.

“Yes, sir,” said Brown.

“Then we might at least have a chance to learn who he is.”

“Yes.”

Eyes wide, gripping the banister rail as though it were the railing of ship in a storm, Milgrim stared down at the distant, narrow slice of marble floor, tasting his own blood. He’d bitten the inside of his cheek, when that spoon had rattled against that coffee cup. Brown’s breakfast conversation was being reflected off that marble floor, he guessed, or being sucked up this slit of Federal stairwell, or both. Had children stood here a hundred years ago, he wondered, suppressing giggles at some other conversation?

“You say the information intended for him indicates that he still has no tracking ability, hence no knowledge of whereabouts or ability to predict destination.”

“Whoever he has working on it,” Brown said, “doesn’t seem to be getting the job done.”

“And our friends,” the other said, “are they able to determine, when they go over this material, what it is, exactly, that’s being so unsuccessfully searched for?”

“The assessment’s handled by someone who has no knowledge of any of this. It’s just information, to him, and he analyzes classified data constantly.”

“Government?”

“Telco,” Brown said. “You know who handles the decryption. They never look at the product. And our analyst has every reason to pay as little attention as possible to what this might actually be about. I’ve made sure of that.”

“Good. That was my understanding.”

Cutlery rattled loudly on a plate, so seemingly close that Milgrim winced. “So,” the other man said, “are we in a position to bring things home?”

“I believe we are.”

“So the shipment finally comes to port. After all this time.”

“But not in conus,” Brown said.

Conus? Milgrim blinked, terrified for an instant that this entire conversation might all be some unprecedented aural hallucination.

“No,” agreed the other, “not yet on American soil.”

CONUS, thought Milgrim, in Fourth of July capitals. Continental United States.

“And what are the current odds of it being opened for inspection?” the man asked.

“Extremely unlikely,” Brown said. “Slightly more likely to have a gamma scan, but the contents and packing look fine, that way. We actually had it gamma’d ourselves, in a previous port of call, to see how it reads.”

“Yes,” said the other, “I saw those.”

“You agree, then?” asked Brown.

“I do,” said the other. “What steps are being taken in your absence, in New York?”

Brown took a moment to answer. “I sent a team to the IF’s room, for fingerprints and to recover the surveillance device. They found the door open and everything under a coat of fresh latex paint. Even the lightbulb. No fingerprints. And there were none on the iPod, of course. The unit was where I left it, under a coatrack, but they’d dumped that outside.”

“They didn’t find it?”

“If they did find it, they might avoid doing anything to indicate that.”

“Are you any closer to understanding who they are?”

“They’re one of the smallest organized crime families operating in the United States. Maybe literally a family. Illegal facilitators, mainly smuggling. But a kind of boutique operation, very pricey. Mara Salvatrucha look like UPS in comparison. They’re Cuban-Chinese and they’re probably all illegals.”