Spook Country

“But you do, right?” Bobby squinted through smoke.

“That doesn’t concern you, Bobby,” said the old man, more gently still. “You’ve done a long and very demanding job, but it’s coming to an end now. Garreth has your last installment here, as we agreed.” Tito watched the old man’s hands, for some reason remembering him using the cane in Union Square.

Garreth took a pager from his belt, looked at it. “Delivery. I’ll be five minutes.” He looked at the old man. “You’re okay?”

“Of course.”

Bobby moaned.

Tito winced, remembering his mother.

“I’m not ready for this,” Bobby said.

“Bobby,” said the old man, “you don’t have anything you have to be ready for. You really have nothing else to do, other than monitor the box for us. There’s no need for you to leave here, tonight. Or for the next three months, for that matter. We’ll be leaving soon, about our business, and you’ll be staying here. With your final payment. In advance. As agreed. You’re extremely talented, you’ve done an amazing job, and soon you’ll realize that you can relax.”

“I don’t know who they are,” Bobby said, “and I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know what they’ve got in that box.”

“You don’t. You don’t know either.”

“I’m afraid,” Bobby said, and Tito heard his mother, after the attacks.

“They have no idea who you are,” said the old man. “They have no idea who we are. I intend to keep it that way.”

Tito heard Garreth, and someone else, coming back up the stairs. A woman appeared at the top of the stairs, Garreth behind her. In jeans and a dark jacket.

“What’s she doing here?” Bobby shook his hair back from terrified eyes. “What is this?”

“Yes,” said the old man, flatly. “Garreth, what is this?”

“I’m Hollis Henry,” the woman said. “I met Bobby in Los Angeles.”

“She was in the alley,” Garreth said, and now Tito saw that he held a long gray rectangular case with a single handle.

“She’s not supposed to be here,” said Bobby, sounding as though he was about to cry.

“But you do know her, Bobby?” the old man asked. “From Los Angeles?”

“The strange thing,” Garreth said, “is that I know her too. Not that we’ve met before. She’s Hollis Henry, from the Curfew.”

The old man raised his eyebrows. “The curfew?”

“Favorites of mine in college. A band.” He shrugged apologetically, the weight of the long case keeping one shoulder down.

“And you found her, just now, in the alley?”

“Yes,” said Garreth, and suddenly smiled.

“Am I missing something, Garreth?” the old man asked.

“At least it’s not Morrissey,” Garreth said.

The old man frowned, then peered at the woman over his glasses. “And you’re here to visit Bobby?”

“I’m a journalist now,” she said. “I write for Node.”

The old man sighed. “I’m not familiar with it, I’m afraid.”

“It’s Belgian. But I can see I’ve upset Bobby. I’m sorry, Bobby. I’ll go now.”

“I don’t think that would be a good idea at all,” the old man said.

67. WARDRIVING

M ilgrim sat beside Brown on one of the two benches in a very small park, under the bare branches of a row of young maples. In front of him was fifty feet of close-cropped grass, a six-foot green-painted chain-link fence, a short steep decline covered with brambles, a wide gravel roadbed stained rust-red by its four lines of track, a paved road, and a vast stack of those metal boxes he’d seen on the ship in the harbor. He watched a streamlined metallic-blue trailer-truck drive quickly past, along the road, pulling a long, rust-streaked gray box that evidently had wheels attached.

Beyond the box-pile were mountains. Beyond those, cloud. They made Milgrim uneasy, these mountains. They didn’t look as though they could be real. Too big, too close. Snowcapped. Like the logo at the start of a film.

He looked to his right, focusing instead on a vast, almost featureless rectangular berg of concrete, windowless, probably five stories tall. On its front, in huge simple sanserif letters, reversed into the concrete between massive molded columns, he read

BC ICE & COLD STO RAGE LTD

RAGE. He glanced at Brown’s busily shifting laptop screen, where satellite images of this port area zoomed in and out; were replaced, were overlaid with yellow grids.

They had been wardriving, Brown called it, ever since requisitioning Skink’s Glock. This meant driving around with Brown’s armored laptop open on Milgrim’s lap, a

This bench had been an improvement on sitting in the car, though, and Brown seemed to have a solid co

When he reached the green fencing, he looked through it, to his left, and found a rectangular orange diesel train engine, its blunt nose painted with crisp diagonals in black and white. It sat, inert, on the nearest set of tracks, beside a rectangular white sign, obviously intended to be read by trainmen, that said HEATLEY. On a yellow triangle a few feet before it, REDUCE SPEED. He read the names on individual boxes in their stacks: HANJIN, COSCO, TEX, “K” LINE, MAERSK SEALAND. Beyond them, further inside the port, were tall buildings of unknown purpose, and the arms of those same orange cranes he’d seen from the black Zodiac.

He looked back at Brown, hunched over his little screen, lost to the world. “I could run away,” Milgrim said, softly, to himself. Then he touched the green-painted steel horizontal that topped the fence, turned, and walked back to the bench.

He missed his overcoat.