Spook Country

The elevator stopped, its doors opening to reveal more of the brown tile. She followed him along a white corridor.

“Have you been here before?” she asked.

“No.” He parked the dolly beside a door and got out his keys. “I sent a friend to negotiate an evening’s rental. She’s in film production here, knows what to say. They think we’re scouting it for a night shoot, checking angles.” He turned the key. “But we really are checking angles, so keep your fingers crossed.” He opened the door and pulled the dolly inside. She followed. He found a light switch.

A tall, partially lofted white space, lit by halogen fixtures strung like stainless-steel clothespins along taut high cables. Someone worked here in glass, she saw. Massive fist-thick slabs of green-edged glass, some of them the size of doors, were racked like CDs in raggedly padded constructions of dull galvanized pipe. There were corrugated foil ducts, HEPA filters, exhaust fans. Live-work didn’t strike her as so attractive, if the work involved ground glass. She put the heavy bag down on a workbench, propped the tripod beside it, and scratched her ribs, under her jacket, thinking of ground glass.

“Excuse me,” he said, picking up the tripod, “while I play director of photography.” He crossed to a wide, steel-mullioned window and quickly set up the tripod. “Could you open the bag, please, and bring the scope?” She did, finding a sort of thickly truncated gray telescope atop smooth thick folds of pale blue plastic. She brought it to him, watched as he mounted it on the tripod, removed the black lens caps, and peered through it, making adjustments. He whistled. “Oh. Dear. Fuck.” He whistled. “Pardon me.”

“What?”

“Very nearly buggered. By that roof peak there. Look.”

She squinted through the scope.

The turquoise container seemed to float, just above the slanted metal roof of a windowless building. She assumed it must be stacked atop others, the way they did that.

“Shit out of luck, if that roof were a foot taller,” he said. “We’d no idea.” He was bending over the dolly, unhooking the bungees now. He carried the long case to the workbench and carefully put it down, beside the canvas bag. He returned to the dolly, which lay on the floor now, the black case on top of it. He knelt and took something iPod-sized and yellow from his jacket pocket. He held it near the case, pressed something, then brought it closer, reading a screen.

“What’s that?”

“Dosimeter. Russian. Surplus. Excellent value.”

“What did you just do?”

“Radiation count. All good.” He smiled at her, from where he knelt on the floor.

She was suddenly self-conscious, watching him. She glanced around, noting a zippered white tarp taped so that it sealed off the section under the loft. Pretending interest in this, she walked over and partially undid the white nylon zipper, a six-foot fly that curved to one side, near the bottom. She stuck her head through.

Into someone’s life. A woman’s. The contents of a small apartment had been shoehorned into this space. Bed, dresser, suitcases, bookcases, clothes sagging on a spring-loaded rod. Someone’s childhood staring out from a shelf, in stuffed acrylic fur. A lidded paper Starbucks cup forgotten on the corner of the Ikea dresser. The light, through the white tarp, was diffuse and milky. She felt suddenly guilty. Withdrew her head, zipped up.

He’d opened the long gray case.

It contained a rifle. Or some Surrealist’s take on one. Its wooden stock, in deliriously grained tropical hardwood, was biomorphic, counterintuitive somehow, like something from a Max Ernst landscape. The barrel, which she assumed must be blue steel, like the other metal parts, was encased in a long tube of lustrous gray alloy that reminded her of expensive European kitchenware. Like a rolling pin by Cuisinart. But still, somehow, quite undeniably a rifle, one with a scope, and something else slung beneath its Cuisinart muzzle.

He was unfolding a small black cloth bag that seemed to have its own internal plastic framework.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Catches the shells, as they’re ejected,” he said.

“No,” she said, “that,” indicating the gun.

“Thirty-caliber. Ten-twist, four-groove barrel.”

“He told me you weren’t going to kill anybody.” Behind him, through the window, she saw the glassy black tanks, so weirdly fragile-looking, with their ragged plumes of steam. What would happen if he shot them?

Her cell rang.

Backing away from him, she fumbled in her purse for it, pulling it out with the scrambler dangling from its stub of cable. “Hollis Henry.”

“Ollie’s outside,” said Bigend.

Garreth was staring at her, still holding the black cartridge bag, like some esoteric piece of Victorian mourning equipment.

She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

“We lost you shortly after you left the car,” Bigend said. “It’s still where you left it. Then you came back on, headed north on Clark. Are you safe?”

Garreth tilted his head, raised his eyebrows.

She looked at the dangling scrambler, realizing that it must have another of Pamela’s GPS units in it. Bastard.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Ollie, though, is definitely not a plus.”

“Shall I send him home?”

“Make sure you do. If you don’t, it’s a deal-breaker.”

“Done,” he said, and was gone.

She closed her phone. “Work,” she said.

“They couldn’t’ve reached you, before,” he said. “I turned on a jammer, when I took you upstairs. You might’ve been wearing a wire. Left it on, until you were aboard. Should’ve told you earlier, but I’ve a one-track mind.” Indicating the rifle, in its bed of gray foam.

“What are you pla

He picked it up. It seemed to flow around his hands, his thumb actually appearing through one fluidly carved hole. “Nine shots,” he said. “Bolt action. One minute. Evenly spaced along forty feet of Cor-ten steel. A foot above the bottom of the container. That foot clears an interior frame, which we couldn’t penetrate.” He looked at his watch. “But look,” he said, “you can watch me do it. I can’t prepare and explain it to you at the same time, not in any detail. He told you the truth, you know. We aren’t going to injure anyone.” He was attaching the black bag to the rifle. He lay it back on its gray foam. “Time we get you into your apron,” he said, reaching into the canvas bag and bringing out thick folds of pale blue plastic. It slid out to its full length.

“What’s that?”

“Radiologist’s apron,” he said, putting a blue padded loop over her head and coming behind her, where she heard him unfasten, then fasten Velcro. She looked down at the blue and breastless tube her body had become, and understood why the bag had been so heavy.

“Aren’t you going to wear one?”

“I,” he said, taking something much smaller from the bag, “am making do with this butterfly.” He fastened the thing behind his neck, the bulk of it beneath his chin. “Thyroid protection. By the way, would you mind turning the ring off, on your phone?”

She got it out and did so.

He was fitting a foot-long black nylon jacket around the rifle’s fat tube. She looked at it more closely and saw loops of nylon webbing. He looked at his watch. Checked the dosimeter again, this time standing in the middle of the studio space. Went to the iron-framed window. It was divided into five sets of mullions, she saw, but only the ones on either end opened. He opened the one nearest the room’s corner. She felt a cool breeze, laced with something that smelled like electricity. “Three minutes,” he said. “Go.”

He knelt beside the black plastic case and opened it. Removed a three-inch slab of dull gray lead and set this on the floor. There were nine holes drilled in the block of lead that filled the case. A row of five, another of four. Twists of something like Saran Wrap protruded from each hole. One after another, using his left hand, he plucked them out, nine film-wrapped, bottlenecked cartridges, placing each one on the palm of his right hand. He got up, cradling them carefully, and moved quickly to the workbench, where he put them down, with a muffled clink of brass, on the gray foam. He unwrapped them, placing each one in its black nylon loop, the way Mexican bandits wore bullets across their chests in cartoons. He looked at his watch. “Minute. To midnight.” He picked up the rifle and pointed it at the wall. His thumb moved. An intense point of red light appeared on the wall, vanished.