Spook Country

Behind them was a T-intersection, a tree-lined street ru

“Visible from the street,” Brown said, the monocular like something growing out of his eye. “What are the odds against that?”

Milgrim didn’t know, and if he had, he wouldn’t necessarily have told Brown, who was obviously made very anxious and unhappy by this. But bolstered by the second Rize, he did attempt to change the subject: “The IF’s family, in New York?”

“What about them?”

“They haven’t been texting in Volapuk, have they? You haven’t needed any translation.”

“They aren’t texting in anything, that we know of. They aren’t phoning. They aren’t sending e-mails. They haven’t shown. Period.”

Milgrim thought about the signal-grabber that Brown had used, to get around the IF’s habit of constantly changing phones and numbers. He remembered his own suggestion, to Brown, to have the NSA do it, use that Echelon or something. What Brown had just said made him wonder, now, if someone might not already be doing that.

“Get in the car,” Brown said, turning back to the parked Taurus. “I don’t need you thinking, not tonight.”

71. HARD TO BE ONE

W hat do you know about money laundering, Hollis?” the old man asked, passing her a round foil dish of peas and paneer. The four of them were having an Indian meal at the far end of the second long table. They’d ordered in, which Hollis supposed was what you did if you were plotting whatever these people were plotting, and didn’t want to have to go out.

Bobby, who didn’t like Indian, and didn’t want to sit with them, was making do with a large plain cheese pizza that had required separate delivery.

“Drug dealers,” she said, using her plastic fork to shovel peas onto a white paper plate, “wind up with piles of cash. Someone told me that the big guys throw the fives and ones away, too much trouble.” Inchmale loved factoids relating to illicit behavior of all kinds. “But it’s hard to buy anything very substantial with a truckload of cash, and the banks only let you deposit a certain amount, so the guy with bags of cash has to accept a steep discount, from someone who can get it back into circulation for him.”

The old man helped himself to colorfully flecked rice and chunks of chicken in bright beige sauce. “A sufficiently large amount of cash comes to constitute a negative asset. What could you do with ten million, say, if you couldn’t account for where it had come from?”

Why was he telling her this? “How big would that be, ten million?” She thought of Jimmy’s five thousand, in her purse. “In hundreds.”

“Hundreds, always,” he said. “Smaller than you think. Two-point-four billion, in hundreds, only took up the same amount of space as seventy-four washing machines, although it was considerably heavier. A million in hundreds weighs about twenty-three pounds and fits in a small suitcase. Ten million in hundreds weighs a little over two hundred and thirty pounds.”

“Did you see that two-point-four billion yourself?” She thought it was worth asking.

“June 2004,” he said, ignoring the question, “the Federal Reserve Bank of New York opened its vault on a Sunday, to prepare that amount for shipment to Baghdad, aboard a couple of C-130 cargo planes.”

“Baghdad?”

“We sent nearly twelve billion dollars in cash to Iraq, between March 2003 and June 2004. That June shipment was intended to cover the transition of power from the Coalition Provisional Authority to the interim Iraqi government. The largest one-time cash transfer in the history of the New York Fed.”

“Whose was it?” It was the only question she could think of.

“Iraqi funds, generated mainly from oil revenues, and held in trust by the Federal Reserve, under the terms of a United Nations resolution. The Development Fund for Iraq. Under the best of circumstances, say in a country like this one, in peacetime, keeping track of the ultimate distribution of even one billion is practically impossible. Oversight of twelve billion, in a situation like the one in Iraq? It’s literally impossible, today, to say with any authority exactly where the majority of that money went.”

“But it was used to rebuild the country?”

“Does it look like it?”

“It kept the interim government afloat?”

“I suppose it did. Some of it.” He began to eat, carefully and methodically and with evident enjoyment.

She met the eye of the Englishman who’d found her in the alley. He had dark hair, cut very short, probably in an effort to get the stylistic jump on early-onset male pattern baldness. He looked bright, she thought. Bright and fit and probably fu

“Join me,” invited Mr. Bright Fit Criminal, from across the table, indicating the chair beside his. The old man gestured with his hand, mouth full, indicating that she should. She took her plate and went around the end of the table, noticing a yellow, rectangular plastic box, featureless except for three short black ante

She put her plate on the table and took the seat beside him.

“I’m Garreth,” he said.

“I didn’t think you used names, here.”

“Well,” he said, “not surnames. But that’s my actual given. One of them, anyway.”

“What did you do, Garreth, before you started doing whatever this is that you’re doing now?”

He considered. “Extreme sports. Some hospital, as a result. Fines and a little jail, likewise. Built props for films. Did stunts for them as well. And what did you do, between ‘Hard to Be One’ and what you’re doing now?” He raised his eyebrows.

“Did badly in the stock market. Invested in a friend’s music store. What do you consider ‘extreme’ sports?”

“BASE jumping, mainly.”

“‘Base’?”

“Acronym. B building, A ante

“What’s the tallest thing you ever jumped from?”

“I can’t tell you,” he said, “you’d look it up.”

“I can’t just Google ‘Garreth’ and ‘BASE jumping’?”

“I used my BASE-jumping name.” He tore a long strip from a scorched-looking round of naan, rolled it, and used it to sop up his remaining tandoori and paneer.

“Sometimes I wish I’d used my indie rock singer name.”

“Tito, there,” indicating the boy in black, “he’s seen your poster on St. Marks Place.”

“‘Tito’ is his BASE-jumping name?”

“Maybe the only name he’s got. He has a very large family, but I’m yet to hear a surname from any of them.” He wiped his mouth with a paper towel. “Are you thinking of having children?” he asked her.

“Am I what?”

“Sorry,” he said. “Are you pregnant?”

“No.”

“How would you feel about being exposed to a certain amount of radiation? Make that an uncertain amount. Not really very much. Probably. Bit dicey, actually. But likely not too bad.”

“You aren’t kidding, are you?”

“No.”

“But you don’t know how much?”

“As much as a couple of serious X-rays. That’s if things go optimally, which we expect them to. If there were a problem, though, it could go higher.”