Spook Country

69. MAGNETS

G arreth took Tito to the far end of the second table, where ten disks, each no thicker than a small coin, and about three inches in diameter, were arranged on a half-sheet of fresh plywood.

Someone had sprayed these with turquoise-blue paint, then with a faint dusting of dark gray, then with a dull topcoat. Each one lay in its own blur of overspray. The three aerosol cans stood in a row at one end of the plywood. Putting on latex gloves, Garreth carefully picked one up, exposing the perfect round of unsprayed plywood beneath. He showed Tito its unpainted back, bright silver metal. “Rare-earth magnets,” he said, “painted to match the box as closely as possible.” He indicated two printouts, photographs of a shipping container, a dirty turquoise blue. “Once you place one on a flat steel surface, it’s difficult to remove, except with a knife or a thin screwdriver blade. We have ten, but you’ll have a maximum of nine holes to cover. The spare is in case you drop one, but try not to.”

“How do I carry them?”

“They either stick together, almost too firmly to separate, or they repel one another, depending on which way they’re facing. So you’ll use this.” He indicated a rectangle of stiff black plastic, covered with silver tape. A length of olive paracord was looped through two holes, at one end. “Soft plastic envelopes under the tape, one for each disk. You carry it in down the front of your jeans, then hang it around your neck for climbing. Slip them out one at a time as you cover the nine holes. They should cover any spalling completely, as well as sealing the hole.”

“What is ‘spalling’?”

“When the bullet pierces the painted steel,” Garreth said, “it bends the steel inward. The paint isn’t flexible, so it shatters. Some of it vaporizes. Result is bright, shiny steel, visible around the hole. The hole itself is no bigger than the tip of your finger. It’s the spalling that visually identifies a bullet hole, so we have to cover it. And we want as tight a seal as possible, because we don’t want to be setting off sensors.”

“And when they have been closed?”

“You have to find your own way out. The man who’ll take you in can’t help us with that. We’ll go over the maps and the satellite images one more time. Don’t climb until the midnight buzzer stops. When you’ve sealed it, get out. When you’re out, call us. We’ll pick you up. Otherwise, the phone’s only for an emergency.”

Tito nodded. “Do you know that woman?” he asked.

“I hadn’t met her before,” said Garreth, after a pause.

“I have seen posters of her, in shops on St. Marks Place. Why is she here?”

“She knows Bobby,” Garreth said.

“He is unhappy to see her?”

“He’s having a bit of a meltdown generally, isn’t he? But you and I, we have to keep this central to mission, right?”

“Yes.”

“Good. When you go up to the box, you’ll be wearing this.” He indicated a black filter-mask in a large Ziploc bag. “We don’t want you inhaling anything. When you get down from the stack, stick it somewhere it won’t be found for a while. And no prints, of course.”

“Cameras?”

“Everywhere. But our box is in the top tier of a stack, and if everything’s gone right, it’s in a blind spot. The rest of the time, you hood up and we hope for the best.”

“The woman,” Tito asked, concerned by what seemed a serious breach of protocol, “if she isn’t one of you, and you’ve never seen her before, how do you know she isn’t wearing a wire?”

Garreth indicated the three black ante

70. PHO

B rown took Milgrim to a dim, steamy Vietnamese restaurant, one with no English signage whatever. It felt like the anteroom of a sauna, which Milgrim found agreeable, but smelled of disinfectant, which he could have done without. It had the look of having been something else, long ago, but Milgrim found it impossible to say what that might have been. Perhaps a Scottish tearoom. Forties plywood with halfhearted Deco accents, long submerged under many coats of chipped white enamel. They ate pho, watching thin slices of pink beef graying in the shallow pool of hot, almost colorless broth, over sprouts and noodles. Milgrim had never seen Brown use chopsticks before. Brown definitely knew how to put away a bowl of pho, and tidily. When he was done, he opened his computer on their black Formica tabletop. Milgrim couldn’t see what he was doing. He supposed there might be wifi here, leaking down from the single story above, or that Brown might be looking at files he’d downloaded earlier. The old lady brought them fresh plastic tumblers of tea that might have passed for hot water, except for a peculiarly acetic aftertaste. Seven in the evening and they were the only customers.

Milgrim was feeling better. He’d asked Brown for a Rize, in the little park, and Brown, engrossed in whatever he was doing on the laptop, had unzipped a pocket on its bag and handed Milgrim an entire unopened four-pack. Now, behind Brown’s upright screen, Milgrim popped a second Rize from its bubble and washed it down with the tea-water. He’d brought his book in from the car, thinking Brown would probably work on the laptop. Now he opened it.

He found a favorite chapter: “An Elite of Amoral Supermen (2).”

“What’s that you keep reading?” asked Brown, unexpectedly, from the other side of the screen.

“‘An elite of amoral supermen,’” Milgrim replied, surprised to hear his own voice repeat the chapter title he’d just read.

“That’s what you all think,” said Brown, his attention elsewhere. “Liberals.”

Milgrim waited, but Brown said no more. Milgrim began again to read of the Beghards and the Beguines. He was well into the Quintinists, when Brown spoke again.

“Yes sir. I am.”

Milgrim froze, then realized that Brown was using his cell.

“Yes sir, I am,” Brown repeated. A pause. “It is.” Another silence. “Tomorrow.” Silence. “Yes sir.”

Milgrim heard Brown close his phone. Heard the rattle of china up the narrow stairwell of the house on N Street. The same sir? The man with the black car?

Brown called for the bill.

Milgrim closed his book.

MOISTURE IN THE air threatened to fall but didn’t. Larger drops fell from trees and wires. This had arrived while they were in the pho sauna, a different kind of moisture. The mountains had gone behind indeterminate scrims of cloud, shrinking the bowl of sky in a way Milgrim found comforting.

“Do you see it?” Brown asked. “Turquoise. Top one of three?”

Milgrim squinted through the Austrian monocular Brown had used in the surveillance van in SoHo. Superior optics, but he couldn’t find the point of focus. Fog, lights, steel boxes stacked like bricks. Angular puzzle-pieces of pipe, gantries of vast derricks, all of it jiggling, overlapping, like junk at the end of a kaleidoscope. And then it came together for him, one turquoise rectangle, topmost on its pile. “I see it,” he said.

“What are the odds,” Brown said, roughly taking the monocular, “of them stacking it where we can see it?”

Milgrim decided that the question was best treated as rhetorical, and kept silent.

“It’s off the ground,” Brown said, pressing the padded eyepiece into the orbit of his eye. “Up high. Less likelihood of tampering.” Even with that bit of apparently better news, it seemed, Brown was still rattled by the sight.

They stood facing a length of new gray twelve-foot chain-link, beside a long, plain-looking tavern, beige brick, out of which grew, surprisingly, a small, brown, four-story Edwardian hotel, called the Princeton. Milgrim had noticed how bars here seemed to possess these vestigial hotels. This one also had a large satellite dish, one of so archaic a pattern that he could imagine a younger person thinking it original to the building.