Spook Country

“You’re going to shoot the container.”

An affirmative grunt.

“What’s in it?”

He walked to the window, the rifle cradled at his waist. He looked back at her, the blue thyroid shield like a bad turtleneck. “One hundred million dollars. In a set of fake pallets, along the floor. About fourteen inches deep. Little over a ton of U.S. hundreds.”

“But why,” she said, “why are you shooting it?”

“Remington Silvertips. Hollowed out.” He opened the breech, extracted a cartridge from its nylon loop, and chambered it. “Inside each one, a brachy-therapy capsule. Cancer therapy, localizes the effect on malignant tissue, spares the healthy.” He looked at his watch. “They preplant tubes, insert the capsules. Highly radioactive isotopes.” He raised the rifle to his shoulder, its barrel out the window now, his back to her. “Cesium, in these,” she heard him say.

Then a buzzer or electric bell began to sound, from the port, and he was firing, ejecting, reloading, firing again, with a smooth machine-like rhythm, until the black loops were empty, and the buzzer, as if by some sympathetic magic, had ceased.

77. SLACK ROPE

T he Guerreros were not waiting for him, when he left the dark bed of the truck, blinking under artificial sunlight. Instead he discovered Ochun, calm and supple amid this noise and iron, hundreds of engines, the shifting of great weights.

She lent him a looseness he wouldn’t have felt, otherwise, after meeting the madman in the gray car and, too suddenly, Oshosi.

Standing to one side of a crowded passage between stacked containers, he let the black rope snake off his ribs, swaying slightly to encourage it. When it lay at his feet, he picked up an end of it and coiled it, slinging it over his shoulder. Making sure his identification tag was visible, he picked up two sealed, almost empty cans of paint from a clutter of such things and walked on, making certain he walked a little more quickly, more purposefully, than the men around him. He stepped aside for specialized vehicles, forklifts, a first-aid wagon.

When he judged that he’d gone as far as he should, he circled a stack of containers and came back, still walking as quickly, a man whose paint was needed, and who knew exactly where he was going.

As indeed he did, as he was fifteen feet from the stack topped with the old man’s container when the bells and buzzers signaling the start of the midnight shift all sounded. Looking up, he thought he saw a disturbance in the air, there, moving quickly down the length of the turquoise container. He remembered the Guerreros twisting the air in Union Square. But they were not here.

He set his paint cans aside, where they wouldn’t be tripped over, took latex gloves from his pocket, put them on, and walked to the end of the stack of three containers. They were stacked with their doors at the same end, as he’d been told they would be. He wiggled the black respirator out of his jacket pocket and removed it from its bag. Pocketing the bag, he removed his hard hat, put the respirator on, adjusted it, put his hard hat back on. Neither of these things were particularly good for slack rope, he thought, but Ochun was accepting. He stepped aside, nodding, as a forklift drove past.

The doors of the containers were locked with hinged, vertical steel rods, sealed with tags of metal and colored plastic. He drew the plastic rectangle from the front of his jeans, pulled its paracord over his hard hat, and climbed up the three door-rods, the soles of his Adidas GSG9 boots easily gripping the painted steel of the doors. He climbed, as Ochun suggested, as though he were delighted to do so, with no more purpose in mind than proving that he could.

His breath was loud, in the black respirator. He ignored it. Reaching the damp-slick top of the turquoise container, he climbed up and moved in, away from the edge.

He crouched there, suddenly aware of something he couldn’t name. The goddess, the noise of the port, the old man, the ten painted disks slung around his neck like blank sigils. Something was about to change. In the world, in his life, he didn’t know. He closed his eyes. Saw the blue vase glowing softly, where he’d hidden it, on the roof of his building.

Accept this.

I do, he told her.

Crouching, he moved to the far end of the container. At each corner, as Garreth had explained, there was a bracket, a sort of loop, with which these boxes could be fastened together. He threaded one end of his rope through the bracket on the side furthest from the ocean he could not see. He moved to the opposite end, playing out his rope, and knotted its other end. The black rope slid off the side of the container’s roof, fastened at either end. He looked down at the slack rope, where it hung against the side of the blue container. He hoped he’d judged the give of the nylon correctly. It was good rope, climbing rope.

I do, he said to Ochun, and slid down the rope, slowing himself with the sides of his Adidas.

Slowly, gloved palms against the painted steel, he stood upright on the rope, knees slightly bent. Between the toes of his black shoes, concrete. Directly in front of his face was the first of Garreth’s bullet holes. The steel around it was bare, edges bright. He pulled the first of his magnets from its plastic pocket and placed it over the hole. It bonded with the container with a sharp click, trapping a fold of his latex glove. He carefully tore his hand free, picking off the dangling bit. He moved his left foot, his left hand, his right foot, his right hand. He covered the second hole, careful this time not to catch his glove. A forklift rolled past, beneath him.

He remembered bringing the old man the first of the iPods, in Washington Square, by the chess tables. Snow. He saw now how that had changed things, had brought him here. He covered the third hole. Moved on. He remembered having soup with Alejandro. The fourth disk clicked in place. He moved. Five. Three men walked past, beneath him, their hard hats round buttons of plastic, two red, one blue. He stood with his palms flat against the cold steel. Six. He remembered ru

He climbed back up, feet against the blue wall. He undid the knot at that end and let the rope go. He walked to the other end, where it hung straight, coiling on the concrete below, and slid down. He pulled down the hot respirator, gulped cool unfiltered air, and flicked the second knot free. The rope fell into his arms and he quickly coiled it, then walked away.

Out of sight of the old man’s container, he tossed the rope, the respirator, and the bag it had come in into a dumpster. He left his shredded gloves on the fender of a forklift. The green jacket went into an empty cement bag, and into another dumpster.

He pulled the hood of his black sweatshirt up and put his hard hat on. Ochun was gone. Now he must get out of this place.

He saw a diesel train-engine rumble slowly past, a hundred yards in front of him, painted with black and white diagonals. It was pulling a train of flatcars, each one carrying a container.

He walked on.

HE WAS ALMOST OUT, when the helicopter came, out of nowhere, sweeping the tracks with its bubble of insanely bright light. He’d just taken ten minutes, trying to find a path through brambles, after jumping off his train. He’d thought he was well clear, that he had plenty of time. Now here he was, jeans caught on wire, on top of this six-foot fence, like a child, no systema at all. He saw the helicopter swing up, then out, toward where the sea must be. Still turning. Coming back. He threw himself off the fence, feeling his jeans tear.

“Dude,” someone said, “you gotta know they got motion detectors in there.”