Spook Country

There seemed, however, to be no cabs at all. After ten minutes, though, she did spot one, yellow, and a Prius. It stopped for her, its driver an impeccably courteous Sikh.

Why, she wondered, as he followed a route she guessed was a more practiced and efficient version of the one she’d taken before, was Bigend’s scrambler, and perhaps her purse, in a mailbox? Someone had put it there, she supposed, either the person who’d taken it, or someone who’d found it later.

Without the rush-hour traffic, it was a quick trip. They were heading down Clark already, and there, through the Prius’s windshield, were the orange Constructivist arms of the port, differently arranged now, and, after last night, quite differently resonant.

They passed the corner leading to Bobby’s. Was he still in there, she wondered. How was he? She felt a pang of sympathy for Alberto. She didn’t like to see him lose his River.

They crossed a major intersection. Clark, opposite, split on either side of a fully elevated roadway topped with illuminated signs demanding picture ID. This must be the entrance to the port.

Her driver pulled over, in front of a strangely displaced-looking little white concrete-block diner. BEENIE’S CAFÉ BREAKFAST ALL DAY COFFEE, painted very simply, long ago, on lengths of peeling, white-painted plywood. It had a screen door with a red wooden frame, something that made it look vaguely foreign here.

She paid and tipped her driver, walked over, and looked through the single plate-glass window. It was very small, two tables and a counter with stools. Garreth waved from his stool at the counter, nearest the window.

She went in.

Garreth, the old man, and Tito were seated at the counter. There were four stools, and the one between Garreth and the old man was empty. She took it.

“Hello,” she said.

“Good morning, Miss Henry,” said the old man, nodding in her direction.

Past him, Tito leaned forward, smiling shyly.

“Hello, Tito,” she said.

“You’ll want the poached,” said Garreth. “Unless you don’t like poached.”

“Poached is fine.”

“And the bacon,” said the old man. “Incredible.”

“Really?” Beenie’s was as basic an eating establishment as she’d been in in a while. Unless you counted Mr. Sippee. But Beenie’s was indoor sit-down, she reminded herself.

“Chef used to work on the Queen Elizabeth,” said the old man. “The first one.”

In the back of the room, a very old man, either Chinese or Malaysian, was bent almost double beside a white-painted cast-iron range that must have been older than he was. The only thing in Beenie’s that wasn’t old seemed to be the steel fire hood suspended above the large square stove.

There was a pleasant smell of bacon.

A very quiet woman, behind the counter, without being asked, brought her a cup of coffee. “Poached eggs medium, please.” The walls were hung with oddly framed bits of generic Orientalia. Hollis guessed the place would have been here when she was born, and would have looked pretty much the same, though without the massive stainless hood above the stove.

“Delighted you can be here this morning,” said the old man. “It’s been a long night, but it appears to have gone in our favor.”

“Thank you,” said Hollis, “but I still have only a very vague idea of what you’re up to, in spite of what I saw Garreth do last night.”

“Tell me your idea of what we’re doing, then,” he said.

Hollis added milk to her coffee, from a very cold stainless creamer. “Garreth told me that the”—she glanced at the woman, who was standing beside the ancient cook—“the box, contained a, a large sum?”

“Yes?”

“Garreth, were you exaggerating?”

“No,” said Garreth. “One hundred.”

“Million,” said the old man, flatly.

“What Garreth did…You spoke of laundering. He…contaminated? Am I right?”

“Indeed,” said the old man, “he did. As thoroughly as could be arranged, under the circumstances. The projectiles would be effectively atomized, as they entered. Of course they then encounter virtually solid blocks of extremely high-quality paper, edge-on. But our intent wasn’t to destroy that paper, but rather to make it difficult to handle safely. And also to tag it, if you will, for certain kinds of detection. Though there hasn’t been a remarkable lot of progress, in the past five years, with that sort of sensing. Another neglected area.” He sipped black coffee.

“You’ve made laundering it difficult.”

“Impossible, I would hope,” he said. “But you must understand that for the people who first arranged to have that hundred put in that box, the fact that it’s back here at all already borders on disaster. They did not originally intend for it to return to North America, or indeed to any part of the First World. Too unwieldy an amount. There are economies, however, in which that sort of money can be traded for one thing or another, without too punishing a discount, and it was to one or another of those economies that they intended it to go.”

“What happened?” Hollis asked, thinking how very strange it was that she had at least a general idea of what the answer would be.

“It was discovered, in transit, by a team of American intelligence operators, assigned to look for a very different sort of cargo. They were ordered off the case immediately, but in a way that created a snag in the fabric of things, bureaucratically, and for that reason, and others, it eventually came to my attention.”

Hollis nodded. Pirates.

“In terms of profiteering from the war, Miss Henry, this is a piddling amount. I found the sheer gall of it fascinating, though, or perhaps the sheer lack of imagination. Out the door of the New York Fed, onto the back of a truck in Baghdad, one thing and another, then sail it away.”

She had been about to mention the Hook, she realized, the giant Russian helicopter, and bit her lip.

“In the course of determining who the parties involved were, I learned that this particular container had been equipped with a unit that monitored its whereabouts, and to an extent its integrity, and covertly broadcast the information to the parties involved. They had known, for instance, when it had been opened by the American intelligence team. And that put the wind up them.”

“Pardon me?”

“They lost their nerve. They began looking for different venues, easier markets, steeper discounts perhaps but less risk. The box went on its own very peculiar journey, then, and nothing ever quite worked out for them, none of those various potential launderings.” He looked at her.

As various friends of his saw to that, she guessed.

“And I imagine they were afraid, by then. It became a sort of permanent resident in the system, never quite arriving. Until it got here, of course.”

“But why did it, finally?”

He sighed. “Things are winding down, for these people. So I sincerely hope. There’s less to be made, and the wind begins to blow from a potentially cleaner direction. An amount of this sort, even quite stiffly discounted, begins to seem worthwhile. At least for the smaller fish. And make no mistake, these are the smaller fish. No faces you’ve seen on television. Functionaries. Bureaucrats. I knew their like once, in Moscow and Leningrad.”

“So there’s something here, in Canada, that they can do with it?”

“This country certainly isn’t without resources of that kind, but no. Not here. It’s headed south, across the border. Into Idaho, we think. Most likely a crossing called Porthill. Just south of Creston, British Columbia.”

“But won’t it be that much more difficult to launder, there? You told me last night that that much illicit cash constitutes a negative asset.”

“I believe they’ve made themselves a deal.”

“With whom?”

“A church,” he said.

“A church?”

“The kind with its own television station. The kind with an adjacent gated attraction. In this case, with an adjacent gated community.”