Spook Country

The salt wind of their passage stung Milgrim’s eyes.

He looked back and saw an island or peninsula, nothing there but trees, out of which emerged a tall suspension bridge, like the Oakland Bay.

He zipped the floater coat higher, pulling his neck in. He wished that he could pull his arms and legs in. For that matter he wished there were a room in there, large enough for a cot, and that he could stretch out while Brown drove this boat. Like a tent, with semirigid red nylon walls. He could live with the fish smell, just to lie down, out of this wind.

Milgrim looked back at the city, a seaplane lifting out of the water. Ahead, he saw several large ships at varying distances, their hulls bisected with black and red paint, and beyond them what he guessed was a port, where giant orange arms craned in the distance, above a shoreline seemingly solid with the visual complexity of industry.

To their left, on some opposite, more distant shore, stood rows of dark tanks or silos, more cranes, more freighters.

People paid to have experiences like this, he thought, but it didn’t cheer him. This wasn’t the Staten Island Ferry. He was bouncing along at some insane speed on something that reminded him of a creepy folding rubber bathtub that he’d once seen Vladimir Nabokov proudly posing with in an old photograph. Nature, for Milgrim, had always had a way of being too big for comfort. Just too much of it. That whole vista thing. Particularly if there was relatively little within it, within sight, that was man-made.

They were gaining, he saw, on what he at first took to be some kind of floating Cubist sculpture in muted Kandinsky tones. But as they drew closer he saw that it was a ship, but one so burdened, pressed so far down in the water, that the red of its lower hull was submerged, only the black showing. Its black stern, though, stuck up shiplike enough, below the absurdist bulk of boxes, revealing it for what it was. The boxes were the colors of railroad freight cars, a dull brownish red predominating, though others were white, yellow, pale blue. He was almost close enough, now, to read the writing on this ship’s stern, when he was distracted by his discovery of a smaller ship, draped with black tires as if for some eccentric designer’s runway moment, pressing ardently against the tall black stern and churning out a huge V of foamy white water. Brown swung the Zodiac’s wheel suddenly, sending them bouncing double-time across the white water. Milgrim saw the tug’s name, Lion Sun, then looked up at the much taller letters on the back of the ship, their white paint streaked with rust. M/V Jamaica Star, and under that, in slightly smaller white capitals, PANAMA CITY.

Brown killed the engine. They bobbed there, in the sudden absence of the outboard’s roar. Milgrim heard a bell ringing, far off, and what sounded like a train whistle.

Brown removed a fancily printed metal tube from his floater jacket, unscrewed the end, and drew out a cigar. He tossed the tube over the side, nipped the end of the cigar with a shiny little gadget, put the nipped end in his mouth, and lit it with one of those six-inch fake Bics, the kind Korean delis used to sell for lighting crack. He took a long ritual pull on the cigar, then blew out a great cloud of rich blue smoke. “Son of a bitch,” he said, with what Milgrim, amazed at all of this, took to be immense and inexplicable satisfaction. “Look at that son of a bitch.” Looking after the square, floating box-pile that was the freighter Jamaica Star, where Milgrim couldn’t quite make out trademarks on the boxes, though he could see they were there. Slowly receding as the tug patiently shoved it on its way.

Milgrim, definitely not wanting to disturb this special moment, whatever it might be about, sat there, listening to little waves lap against the slick and swollen flank of the black Zodiac.

“Son of a bitch,” said Brown, again, softly, and puffed on his cigar.

60. ROLLING THE CODES

H ollis woke on Bigend’s maglev bed, feeling as though it was the altar atop some Aztec pyramid. Platform of sacrifice. And there actually was a pyramid of sorts above it, she saw, a glass-sided construct she suspected of being the pi

“Hello,” called Ollie Sleight, from a level below. “Are you up?”

“Be right with you.”

She slid off the Aztec altar, which moved slightly, and in a very strange way, and got into jeans and a top, blinking, as she did so, at the expensive emptiness of this bedroom, or sleeping-pi

Ignore sea, she told herself, mountains. Don’t look. Too much view. She found a bathroom, where nothing much resembled conventional amenities, figured out how to work the taps, and washed her face and brushed her teeth. Barefooted, she went down to meet Ollie, possibly to confront him.

“Odile’s gone for a walk,” he said, seated at a long glass table with an open FedEx carton and various bits of black plastic in front of him. “What kind of phone do you have?”

“Motorola.”

“Straight two-point-five-millimeter jack,” he said, selecting one from an assortment. “Hubertus sent this.” Indicating the largest of the black bits. “It’s a scrambler.”

“What does it do?”

“You plug it into the headset jack on your phone. It uses a digital encryption algorithm. You program in a sixteen-digit code and the algorithm rolls the scrambling code up to about sixty thousand times. Gives you seventeen hours’ scramble before the pattern repeats. Hubertus has already charged and programmed this one. He wants you to use it when the two of you talk.”

“That’s nice,” she said.

“May I have your phone?”

She took it from her jeans pocket and handed it to him.

“Thanks.” He co

“Thank you.”

He put a set of car keys on the table. She saw a blue-and-silver VW emblem. “These are for the extra Phaeton downstairs. Have you driven one?”

“No.”

“You need to watch the width. It looks so much like a Passat that it’s easy to forget how much wider it is. Look down at the painted lines, when you get in; that’ll remind you.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m off, then,” he said, getting up and tucking the carton under his arm. He was in a T-shirt and jeans this morning, both of which seemed to have been gone over with a Dremel tool for about as many hours as Bigend’s gadget could roll its codes. He looked tired, she thought, but that might just be the beard.

When he was gone, she looked for the kitchen and coffee. It turned out to be across this very space, and disguised as a bar, but the coffeemaker and an Italian toaster gave it away. She took her cup back to the table. Her cell rang, various LED effects dancing excitedly on the black face of the scrambler.

“Hello?”

“Hubertus. Oliver told me you were up.”

“I am. Are we ‘scrambled’?”

“We are.”

“You have one too?”

“That’s how it works.”

“It’s too big to fit in a pocket.”

“I know,” he said, “but I’m increasingly concerned with privacy. All of which is relative, of course.”

“This isn’t really private?”

“It’s more private than…not. Ollie has a box with a Linux machine in it that can sniff three hundred wireless networks at the same time.”