Spook Country

  Tito in back, sitting as far from the black plastic case as he could. White iPod plugs in his ears, nodding to some rhythm only he could hear. Looking tranced. Like a kid in a chill-out room. Why had they wrapped him in that black rope? It must be uncomfortable, but he didn’t look uncomfortable. She’d watched him practice a trick with it, before Garreth and the old man had wrapped him in it. Tying one end of it quickly around a vertical pipe, pulling it tight, then standing back and flicking it. The knot tight and solid when he pulled on it, but letting go instantly when he flicked it. He did it three times. She couldn’t follow his hands, when he knotted it. He was pretty enough, at rest, almost feminine, but when he moved with purpose, he became beautiful. Whatever it was, she knew she didn’t have it herself. That had been her weakness, onstage. Inchmale had once sent her to a French movement teacher, in Hackney, in an effort to change that. The man had said he’d teach her to walk like a man, that that would make her very powerful onstage. She’d satisfied him, finally, but had never even considered trying it onstage. The one time she’d demonstrated it for Inchmale, though, after a few drinks, he said he’d paid good money to have her taught to walk like Heidi.

  Garreth took a right onto a main street, heading east. One-story retail, car leasing, restaurant furniture. A few blocks later, he took a left. They headed downhill, into what once would have been a neighborhood of modest frame houses. A few were still there, but unlit, each one painted a single dark color, no trim. Placeholders in a real estate game, next to small factories, auto-body shops, a plastics fabricator. Patches of weedy grass that had once been lawns, gnarled ancient fruit trees. No pedestrians here, almost no traffic. He looked at his watch, pulled over, put out the lights, and shut off the engine.

  “How did you get into this?” she asked, without looking at him.

  “I heard that someone was looking for a really odd skill set,” he said. “I had a friend who’d been in the SAS, another BASE enthusiast. We’d jumped together, in Hong Kong. He was approached first, actually, and didn’t want it. He said he was too military, not unconventional enough. He recommended me, and I came down to London and he took me along to my meeting. I couldn’t believe it, but he was wearing a tie. Bastard. Amazing. Turned out it was his club tie, the only one he owned. Special Forces Club. That’s where we went. I’d no idea there was one.”

  “What did it look like? His tie.”

  “Black and gray, thin diagonal stripes.” She felt him glance at her. “And himself waiting in an alcove off a sitting room.”

  She knew he meant the old man. She looked out the window, not really seeing anything.

  “He introduced us and left me there. Pot of nasty coffee. Old-school British coffee. I had a list of questions I’d prepared, but I never asked them. Just answered his. It was like some weird inversion of a Kipling script. This old man, this American, in a Savile Row suit he’d probably bought in the sixties, asking me these questions. Pouring nasty coffee. Utterly at home in this club. Wee decoration on the lapel of his suit, the ribbon for some medal, no bigger than a windowpane of acid.” He shook his head. “Hooked. I was hooked.” Smiling.

  “There must be things I shouldn’t ask you,” she said.

  “Not really. Just things I mustn’t answer.”

  “Why’s he doing this, whatever it is?”

  “He used to be in national security, American government. Career man. Retired a few years before 9/11. I think he went a bit feral, frankly, after the attacks. Frothing, really. Not a good idea to get him on the topic. He’d been hugely well connected, it seemed. Friends everywhere. And the lot of them pissed as well, at least to hear him tell it. Old spooks. Most retired, some not quite, some soon forced out because they wouldn’t toe a party line.”

  “There’s more than one of him, you mean?”

  “Not really, no. I find it easiest to think of him as slightly off, really. I imagine they do too, though it doesn’t stop them giving him help, and funding. Amazing what you can do with a little money, when you’re given a free hand. He’s as sharp as anyone I’ve met, sharper, but he has obsessions, topics he’s queer about. One of them, a big one, is people profiting from the war in Iraq. He gets onto things, things he learns certain people have done. Through his various connections, he hears things, puts bits together.”

  “What for?”

  “So that he can fuck with them, frankly. Fuck them up. Over. Sideways, if he can manage it. Loves it. Lives for it.”

  “Who are those people?”

  “I don’t know, myself. He says it’s better that way. He also says that, so far, none of them have been anyone I’d ever ordinarily have heard of.”

  “He was telling me about money laundering, about huge shipments of cash, to Iraq.”

  “Yes indeed,” he said, looking at his watch. He turned the key, starting the ignition. “We’ve been driving them wild, with this one. He plays this game of cat and mouse with them.” He smiled. “Makes them think they’re the cat.”

  “You enjoy it yourself, it seems to me.”

  “I do. I do indeed. I’ve a very diverse and peculiar skill set, and ordinarily no place to use the half of it. Soon enough, I’ll be too old for most of it. Truth to tell, I probably already am. Main reason we’ve got our man Tito in the back here. Snake on ice, our Tito.” He took a right, another left, and they were waiting at a light, turning left on a street with more traffic, more lights. He reached back and thumped the back of his seat. “Tito! Ready up!”

  “Yes?” asked Tito, removing his iPod plugs.

  “Hotel’s in sight. Coming up. Climb over the lady, here, get out that side. He’ll be parked just past the hotel, waiting for you.”

  “Okay,” said Tito, as the van slowed, tucking his white plugs back into the hood of his sweatshirt.

  He looked, just then, she thought, like a very serious fifteen-year-old.

  74. AS DIRECTED

  Milgrim had been thinking about offering Brown a Rize, when he spotted the IF walking along the sidewalk. They were headed east on the street where the Princeton Hotel was, coming up on it again, but bound, Milgrim guessed, for another wifi session, courtesy of CyndiNet.

  They backed directly on the tracks, these places. Milgrim supposed you could see the floodlit stacks of boxes, from their rear windows. From some of them, even, the one particular turquoise box that had Brown so visibly stressed.

  He knew that he wasn’t really going to suggest that Brown try a Rize, but he did believe that, just now, it would probably be a good thing. Brown had been muttering, periodically, and when he wasn’t doing that, Milgrim could see the muscle in his jaw working. Milgrim had sometimes, though rarely, given tranquilizers to civilians, people who weren’t habituated. Though only if they seemed to him to be in serious need, and if he himself was sufficiently well supplied. He always explained that he had a prescription (he often had several) and that these drugs were perfectly safe, if used as directed. He just didn’t get into the matter of who or what might be doing the directing.

  He had never seen Brown this tense, before.

  Brown had come into his life a week before Christmas, on Madison, a solid figure zipped into the same black jacket he wore tonight. A hand around Milgrim’s upper arm. Flashing something in a black badge case. “You’re coming with me.” And that had been it. Into a car that might as well have been this one, driven by an unsmiling younger man wearing a tie decorated with Goofy in a Santa Claus outfit.

  Two weeks later, he’d been sitting with Brown at a table near the window of that magazine place on Broadway, eating sandwiches, when the IF had walked past in a black leather porkpie.

  Now here he came again, the IF, but in a short, bright green jacket, with a construction worker’s yellow helmet tucked under his arm. Sort of like a younger Johnny Depp, but ethnic, off to some nightshift job. It struck Milgrim as wonderful, somehow. A taste of home. “There’s the IF,” he said, pointing.

  “What? Where?”

  “There. Green jack
et. That’s him, right?”

  Brown braked, peering, spun the wheel, and gunned the Taurus hard, left, into the path of oncoming traffic, aiming for the IF.

  Milgrim had time to see that the furiously screaming girl in the passenger seat of the car braking violently in front of them was actually giving them the finger.

  He had time to see the IF’s face register the Taurus, the boy’s eyes widening in amazement.

  He had time to note the dullness of the beige brick of the Princeton Hotel.

  He had time to see the IF do something patently impossible: shoot straight into the air, knees tucked, flipping over, the Taurus and Milgrim passing directly through the space he’d occupied an instant before. Then the Taurus clipped something that wasn’t the IF, and a pale hard thing like a very large nursery toy, full of concrete, manifested from nowhere at all, somehow, between Milgrim and the dashboard.

  The Taurus’s alarm was sounding.

  They weren’t moving.

  He looked down and saw something on his lap.

  He picked it up. A rearview mirror.

  The horrible, hard, pale thing that had hurt his face was deflating. He prodded it with the mirror. “Airbag,” he said.

  He looked to the left as he heard Brown’s door open. Brown’s airbag, undeflated, crowned the steering column like some nameless, ominous device in the window of an orthopedic supply house. Brown swatted it out of his way, feebly but viciously. Stood swaying, supporting himself on the open door.

  Milgrim heard a siren.

  He looked down at Brown’s laptop, in its black nylon bag between the seats. He watched his hand unzip the side pocket, enter, and emerge with a number of bubble-packs. He looked out, over his detumescent airbag, and watched Brown, who seemed to have hurt his leg, hop awkwardly to a hooded trash receptacle, slip Skink’s Glock from his jacket, and slide it quickly under the spring-loaded black flap. He hopped back to the car, more slowly now and taking greater care, and leaned against the mysteriously wrinkled hood. His eyes met Milgrim’s. He gestured, urgently. Out.

  Milgrim reminded his hand, bold but absentminded, to pocket the bubble-packs.

  The door was stuck, but then it popped open, almost spilling him on the sidewalk. A crowd had emerged from the Princeton. Baseball caps and waterproof outerwear. Hair like a Dead concert.

  “Get over here,” Brown ordered, palms flat on the hood, trying to keep his weight off his injured leg.

  Milgrim saw flashing lights approaching, homing fast, downhill, from the east. “No,” he said, “sorry,” and turned, walking west as quickly as he could. Expecting the hand, any hand, on his shoulder or upper arm.

  He heard the siren shut off in mid-yelp. Saw the whirl of red lights from behind him, thrown across sidewalk, animating his shadow.

  His hand, in the pocket of the Jos. A. Banks jacket, decided to pop a Rize out of its bubble. He didn’t entirely approve, but then had to dry-swallow it, as he didn’t like loose tablets. He saw the painted lines of a pedestrian crossing, just as the light changed, and crossed with his gaze fixed on the jaunty little illuminated pictoglyph on the far side.

  He walked uphill, then, into relative darkness, the hooting of the wounded Taurus fading behind him.

  “Sorry,” he said, walking, to tall dark houses looming amid low forties commercial, while his busy, clever hand patted down his own pockets as if he were some ambulatory drunk it had just encountered. Taking stock. The Rize. New wallet, empty. Toothbrush. Toothpaste. Plastic razor in a fold of toilet paper. He stopped, turned, looking back down the incline to the street where Brown had tried to kill the IF. He wished he were back in the Best Western, looking at the textured ceiling. Some old movie on the television, sound down low, just that little bit of movement out of the corner of your eye. Sort of like having a pet.

  He walked on, feeling the dead fisheyes of the old houses. Oppressed by this darkness, silence, the specter of some long-vanished domesticity.

  But then the upper stories of another street appeared, as if from nowhere, another, better world, with all the lurid gravity of major hallucination. As if glowing from within, the ornate gold-leaf sign of a tobacconist; beside it, a general store; more. The neighborhood of grim dark houses reconstituting itself in its innocence, before him, in this most secret moment.

  Then he saw a camera dip and smoothly turn, at the end of a craning metal arm, scooping up the bright vision, and knew that this was a set, constructed, he now understood, within the black and invisible ruin of some gutted foundry. “Sorry,” he said, and walked on, past caterers’ trucks and walkie-talkied girls, his ankle starting to itch.

  He bent to scratch it, finding a hundred and fifty Canadian dollars tucked into the top of his sock, left over from the Glocking expedition.

  But better still, in his other, his nonclever hand, he discovered his book.

  Straightening, he pressed it against his cheek, swept with gratitude for still having it. Within it, beyond the worn paper cover, lived landscapes, figures. Bearded heresiarchs in brilliantly jeweled gowns, sewn from peasant rags. Trees like giant dead twigs.

  He turned, and looked back at the precise, unearthly glow of the film set.

  Brown, he was certain, would be gone now, explaining himself to the police. The Princeton Hotel would have a sandwich and a Coke, which would yield whatever change one needed for a bus, or even a cab. And then he would find his way west, to this city’s downtown core, and shelter, and perhaps a plan.

  “Quintin,” he said, starting back down the hill, toward the Princeton. Quintin had been a tailor. God incarnate of the Spiritual Libertines. Burned for seducing respected ladies of Tournai, in 1547.

  History was queer, thought Milgrim. Deeply so.

  Nodding, as he passed them, to the girls with their saucily holstered walkie-talkies. Beauties from a realm Quintin might have recognized.

  75. HEY, BUDDY

  Oshosi, scout and hunter, had entered Tito in mid-backtuck. He heard the gray car strike the lamppost as his black Adidas found the sidewalk, confusing cause and effect. The orisha propelled him immediately forward, then, like a child walking a doll, making a puppet of its limbs. Oshosi was huge in his head, an expanding bubble forcing him against the gray interior of his skull. He wanted to scream, but Oshosi clamped fingers of cold damp wood around his throat. “Buddy,” he heard someone say. “Hey, buddy, you okay?” Oshosi walked him past the voice, his heart hammering within his rope-wrapped rib cage like a mad bird.

  A bearlike, bearded man, in heavy dark clothing, having seen the crash, was climbing into the cab of an enormous pickup. Tito struck the flat black fiberglass cover of the pickup’s bed with the palm of his hand. It boomed hollowly.

  “What the fuck you doing?” the man shouted back at him, craning angrily back out of the open door.

  “You’re here for me,” said Oshosi, and Tito saw the man’s eyes widen above his black beard. “Open this.”

  The man ran back, his face strangely white, tearing at the fastening of the cover. It popped up, and Tito hauled himself in, dropping the hard hat as he collapsed on a large sheet of spotless brown cardboard. He heard a siren.

  Something struck his hand. Yellow plastic, with a yellow cord attached. An identification badge. The fiberglass cover came booming down, and Oshosi was gone. Tito groaned, fighting the urge to vomit.

  He heard the truck’s door slam, its engine roar, and then they were accelerating.

  The man who had followed him, in Union Square. One of the two behind him, there. That man was here, and had just tried to kill him.

  His ribs ached, within the cruelly wound rope. He worked the phone from his jeans pocket and opened it, glad of the screen’s light. He speed-dialed the first of the two numbers.

  “Yes?” The old man.

  “One of the men who were behind me, in Union Square.”

  “Here?”

  “He tried to hit me, with his car, in front of the hotel. He struck a pole. Police are coming.”

&
nbsp; “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In your friend’s truck.”

  “Are you injured?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The signal fizzed, faded. Was gone.

  Tito used the glow of the phone to look around the truck’s bed, which proved empty, aside from the hard hat and the yellow-framed identification tag. Ramone Alcin. The photograph looked like anyone. He slipped the cord over his head, closed the phone, and rolled onto his back.

  He lay there, slowing his breathing, then checked his body, methodically stretching, for sprains or other damage. How could the man from Union Square have followed him here? Terrible eyes, through the windshield of the gray car. He had seen his death coming, in another’s eyes, for the first time. His father’s death, at the hands of a madman, the old man had said.

  The truck stopped, waiting at a light, then turned left.

  Tito set the phone to vibrate. Put it back in the side pocket of his jeans.

  The truck slowed, pulled over. He heard voices.

  Then they drove on, over rattling metal grates.

  76 LOCATION SHOOT

  Having dropped Tito and driven on, not far at all along this strip of low-lying auto-body repairs and marine supplies, Garreth turned right, into the parking lot of what seemed to be a much taller building, one built on an entirely different scale. Behind it, they pulled in beside a pair of shiny new dumpsters and a row of content-specific recycling bins. The dumpsters, she saw, were covered in runny silk-screened multiples of photographic images. She smelled commercial art.

  “We’re location scouts,” he said, taking an orange cardboard PRODUCTION placard from between the seats and putting it on the dash.

  “What picture?”

  “Untitled,” he said, “but it actually doesn’t have that shabby a budget. Not even by Hollywood standards.” He got out, so she did the same.