Spook Country

Skink, so called for the purpose of this transaction at least, was white, in his thirties perhaps, with vestigial skater fashion-notes and a high, intricately tattooed turtleneck Milgrim assumed disguised some early and likely unfortunate choices in iconography. A cover-up, perhaps of jail work. Visible neck or facial tattoos did serve, Milgrim thought, to suggest that one probably wasn’t a cop, but the jail look rang other, less comfortable bells. As noms of convenience went, “Skink” wasn’t particularly comforting, either. Milgrim wasn’t quite sure what one was; either reptilian or amphibian, he thought. Skink definitely wasn’t the most reliable-looking retailer Milgrim had come across, in the course of his stroll along this diversely supplied thoroughfare, but he was the only one, so far, who’d responded positively to Milgrim’s request for Valium. Though he didn’t, he said, have it on him. They so seldom do, thought Milgrim, though he nodded understandingly, indicating that he was okay with whatever Skink’s arrangements might be.

“Up the street here,” Skink said, fiddling with the ring through the outer limit of his right eyebrow.

Milgrim always found these worrying. They seemed more prone to infection than things put through other, more central, more traditional parts of the face. Milgrim was a believer in evolution, and knew that evolution strongly favors bilateral symmetry. Asymmetrical individuals tended to be less competitive, in most species. Though he had no intention of mentioning it to Skink.

“In here,” said Skink, portentously, stepping sideways into an entranceway. He opened an aluminum-framed door whose original glass had been replaced with plywood.

“It’s dark,” protested Milgrim, as Skink grabbed his shoulders, hauling him into a dense, ammoniac reek of urine. Skink shoved him, hard, and he fell back against what were all too obviously stairs, their painful impact complicated by a loud confusion of toppling bottles. “Chill,” Milgrim quickly advised an abrupt darkness, Skink having shut the door behind him. “Money’s yours. Here.”

Then Brown was through the door, in a brief burst of sunlight. Milgrim felt, rather than saw, Brown lift Skink bodily off his feet and drive him headfirst into the stairs, between Milgrim’s legs.

A few more empties toppled from the stairs.

An uncomfortably bright beam, recalled from the IF’s room off Lafayette, darted clinically across the crumpled Skink. Brown bent, ran one hand over Skink’s lower back, then, with a grunt of effort, used both hands to flip him over. Milgrim saw Brown’s spotlit hand unzipping the fly of Skink’s saggy pants. “Glock,” said Brown, thickly, plucking, like some gross-out conjuring trick, a large pistol from Skink’s open pants.

Then they were back on the street, the sunlight surreal now. Getting back into the Taurus.

“Glock,” Brown said again, pleased.

Milgrim remembered then, and to his relief, that this was a make of gun.

65. EAST VAN HALEN

S he opened her PowerBook on the counter of Bigend’s crypto-kitchen, taking wifi for granted. None of her trusted networks were available, she was advised, but did she want to join BAntVanc1?

The phrase “trusted networks” briefly made her feel like crying. She wasn’t feeling as though she had any.

Bigend, she saw, pulling herself together, hadn’t activated his WEP. No password required. But then he had Ollie, she supposed, who could eavesdrop on hundreds of other people’s wifi at once, so maybe it all balanced out.

She joined BAntVanc1 and checked her e-mail. Nothing. No spam, even.

Her phone rang, in her purse. It was still attached to the scrambler. How would that work if it were anyone other than Bigend? She answered. “Hello?”

“Just checking,” said Bigend, and suddenly she didn’t want to tell him about Sarah.

A reaction to her sudden sense of his ubiquity, if not yet actual then potential. Once he was established in your life, he’d be there, in some way no ordinary person, no ordinary boss, even, could be. Once she accepted him, past a certain point, there was always going to be the possibility of him ringing her up, to say “Just checking,” before she could even ask who was calling. Did she want that? Could she afford not to?

“Nothing yet,” she said, wondering if Ollie might not already have somehow transmitted their lunch conversation to Los Angeles. “I’m nosing around Odile’s art circles here. She has a lot of them, though, and it can’t be done too obviously. No telling who might let him know I’m here looking.”

“I think he’s there,” said Bigend, “and I think you and Odile are currently our best chance of finding him.”

She nodded silently. “This is a big country,” she said. “Why wouldn’t he head somewhere he’d be less likely to be found?”

“Vancouver is a port,” said Bigend. “A foreign container port. Our pirates’ chest. He’s there to monitor the off-loading, though not for the shippers.” There was an utterly silent digitized pause. “I want to set you up on a darknet we’re having built for us.”

“What’s that?”

“In effect, a private Internet. Invisible to nonmembers. Scrambled phones, at this point, just serve as strings around our fingers to remind us of a fundamental lack of privacy. Ollie’s working on it.”

“Someone’s here,” she said. “Have to run.” She hung up.

Leaving her PowerBook open on the counter, its sticker-encrusted lid the most colorful thing in sight, aside from the view, she went upstairs, undressed, and had a long shower. Odile had opted for a post-lunch nap.

She dried her hair and dressed, got back into jeans, sneakers. Finding the Blue Ant figurine in her clothes, she looked around for a perch for it. Selected a head-high ledge of talcum-smooth concrete and stood the ant on it, icon-style. It made the ledge look slightly ridiculous. Perfect.

She chanced on her passport, as she was folding things, and tossed it into the Barneys bag.

She put on a dark cotton jacket, took her purse, and went down to the crypto-kitchen, where she shut her PowerBook and wrote Odile a note on the back of a Visa charge slip, which she left on the counter: “Back later. Hollis.”

She found the Phaeton where she’d left it, followed Ollie’s advice to remind herself how wide it was, did some work with the map from the glove compartment, avoided activating the GPS screen (it spoke, if you let it), and drove out into late afternoon sunlight, feeling reasonably confident she could find Bobby’s place, and not confident at all that she’d know what to do when she did.

He didn’t live that far from here, to judge by the map.

Rush hour. After a few moves designed to get her headed east, crosstown, she got with the flow, such as it was. Edging more or less steadily eastward, amid what she assumed to be commuters headed for eastern satellites, she saw that Bobby’s place probably wasn’t all that close, at least not psychogeographically. Bigend’s strata-title, atop one tower in a variegated hedge of greenglass, along what her map said was False Creek, was high-end twenty-first-century. Here, she was driving into what remained of a light-industrial zone. The way they’d built on railway land, when land had been surplus. Not unlike the feel around Bobby’s rental on Romaine, though studded now, here and there, with large pieces of brand-new metropolitan infrastructure, most of these apparently still under construction.

When she finally turned left, onto a wide, north-south street called Clark, she was past the fancy infra-bits and into a more low-down, more careworn architecture, a lot of it clapboard. Nonfranchise auto-repair shops. Small manufacturers of restaurant furniture. Chrome chairs recovered. At what she guessed was the foot of this wide street, suspended against distant mountains, some truly kick-ass Soviet Constructivist project appeared to have been erected, perhaps in belated honor of a designer who’d earned himself a one-way to the Gulag. Vast crazy arms of orange-painted steel, canted in every direction, at every angle.