Brown didn’t like theNew York Times . Brown actually didn’t like news media of any kind, Milgrim had come to understand, because the news conveyed did not issue from any reliable, that was to say, governmental, source. Nor could it, really, under present conditions of war, as any genuine news, news of any strategic import whatever, was by definition precious, and not to be wasted on the nation’s mere citizenry.
Milgrim certainly wasn’t going to argue with any of that. If Brown had declared the Queen of England to be a shape-shifting alien reptile, craving the warm flesh of human infants, Milgrim would not have argued.
But midway through a third-page piece on the NSA and data mining, something occurred to Milgrim. “Say,” he said to Brown, who’d just ended a call and was looking at his phone as if he wished he knew a way to torture it, “this NSA data-mining thing…”
It hung there, between them, somewhere above the table. He wasn’t in the habit of initiating conversations with Brown, and for good reason. Brown looked from the phone to Milgrim, his expression unchanged.
“I was thinking,” Milgrim heard himself say, “about your IF. About the Volapuk. If the NSA can do what it says they can, here, then it should be pretty easy to fold a logarithm into the mix that would grab your Volapuk and nothing else. You wouldn’t even need much of a sample of their family dialect. You could just find half a dozen dialectal examples of the form and shoot for a kind of average. Anything that went through the phone system, after that, that had that tag, bingo. You wouldn’t need to be changing any more batteries on the IF’s coatrack.”
Milgrim was genuinely pleased with having thought of this. But Brown, he saw, was not happy with Milgrim for having thought of it. “That’s only good for overseas calls,” Brown said, and seemed to be considering whether or not to hit him.
“Ah,” Milgrim said. He put his head down and pretended to read, until Brown got back on the phone, quietly chewing someone else out for losing the IF and the other male.
Milgrim couldn’t get back into his article, but continued to pretend to read the paper. Something was working its way up, inside him, from some new and peculiarly discomfiting angle. So far he’d taken it for granted that Brown, and by extension his people, were government agents of some kind, presumably federal. And yet, if the NSA had been doing what thisTimes article said they had been doing, and he, Milgrim, was reading about it, why should he suppose that what Brown had said was true? The reason Americans weren’t freaking out over this NSA thing, Milgrim assumed, was that they’d already been taking it for granted, since at least the 1960s, that the CIA was tapping everybody’s phone. It was the stuff of bad episodic television. It was something little kids knew to be true.
But if there were Volapuk being texted in Manhattan, and the real government really needed it as badly as Brown seemed to need it, wouldn’t they get it? Milgrim folded his paper.
But what if, asked the upwardly burrowing voice, Brown was not really a government agent? There had until now been some part of Milgrim willing to suppose that being held captive by federal agents was in a sense the same as being under their protection. While the majority of him had suspected this was a dubious formulation, it had taken something, perhaps the new calm and perspective afforded by his change of medication, to bring him to this moment of unified awareness: What if Brown was just an asshole with a gun?
It was something to think about, and to his surprise he found that he could. “I need to use the washroom,” he said.
Brown muted his phone. “There’s a back door,” he said, “out the kitchen. Someone’s out there, in case you think you’re leaving. If they thought you might get away, they’d shoot you.”
Milgrim nodded. Got up. He wasn’t going to run, but for the first time, he thought Brown might be bluffing.
In the washroom he ran cool water over his wrists, then looked at his hands. They were still his. He wiggled his fingers. Amazing, really.
17. PIRATES AND TEAMS
The front of her Mondrian haircut had started to remind her of Bobby Chombo’s elephantiasis-of-the-forelock, the result of an ongoing interaction of product with particulates. Whatever the stylist had applied had by now sucked in every molecule of the brew that was the air of the L.A. basin, plus however many cigarettes Bobby Chombo had recently smoked in her immediate vicinity.
None of this looks very good, she thought, meaning not so much the generally poor appearance she felt she was able to muster, to meet her new employer, but the overall arc and apparent direction of her life so far. Everything, right that minute, down to Chombo and his gridded floor. Chombo afraid to sleep in the same grid square twice…
But still. Lip gloss. Earrings. Top and skirt and hose from the worse-for-wear Barneys bag she was using to separate dress-up from workaday.
For a purse, she chose one of her black makeup bags, dumped it, refilled it minimally. The shoes from the dress-up bag were mutant black ballet slippers, by a Catalan designer long since gone into some other field.
“Out of here,” she told the woman in the mirror.
Once again ignoring the video art in the elevator.
The door opened on the buzz and tinkle of Starck’s lobby in late-evening bar mode. A brown-haired bellman, in trademark pale suit, stood centered in the projected faux-Islamic squiggles of the carpet-of-light device, smiling mightily in her direction.
This functionary’s teeth, illuminated by the accidental fall of a single sunny squiggle, were presented with billboard clarity. As she approached him, scanning for her Belgian advertising magnate, the smile increased in both width and magnitude, till, as she was about to pass, the luxurious tones last heard on her cell emerged, startling her: “Miss Henry? Hubertus Bigend.”
Instead of screaming, she took his hand, finding it firm, dry, and of a neutral temperature. He squeezed hers lightly in return, his smile expanding still further.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Bigend.”
“Hubertus,” he insisted, “please. Are you finding the hotel satisfactory?”
“Yes, thanks.” What she’d taken for a Mondrian doorman’s suit was crisp beige wool. His sky-blue shirt was open at the collar.
“Shall we try Skybar?” he asked, consulting a watch the size of a small ashtray. “Unless you’d prefer something here.” He indicated the high, narrow, surrealistically long alabaster table, atop some number of tall, biomorphic Starck legs, that was the lobby bar.
There’s safety in numbers, said an inner voice that wanted to stay right here, have the required drink and the absolute polite minimum of talk.
“Skybar,” she opted, not certain why, but recalling that it might well be impossible to get in, let alone get a table. As he led her toward the pool and the shed-sized flowerpots, each with its ficus tree, she recalled fragments from the last few times she’d been here, at the end of and just after the Curfew’s official cessation. People who didn’t know the music industry, Inchmale said, believed that the movie business was the ne plus ultra of vicious, asshole-chewing, hyena-like behavior.
They passed a Brobdingnagian futon, in whose squishy depths a covey of vicious, asshole-chewing, hyena-like, and exceptionally pretty young people reclined with their drinks. But you don’t know that about them, she reminded herself; it was just that they looked like A&R people. But then almost everyone here did.
He led her past the bouncer as though the bouncer weren’t there. Indeed, the Bluetoothed bouncer was hard-pressed to get out of Bigend’s way in time, so thoroughly did it seem that Bigend was unaccustomed to anyone being in his way.
The bar was packed, as she remembered it having always been, but he had no trouble getting them a table. Looking broad, bright-eyed, and, she supposed, Belgian, he held her heavy, library-style oak chair for her. “I was quite a fan of the Curfew,” he said to her ear.
And a huge Goth altogether, I’ll bet, she resisted replying. The idea of a baby Belgian advertising magnate raising his Bic in some darkened Curfew concert was best left unexamine
d. These days, according to Inchmale, they raised their cell phones, and the screens gave out quite a startling amount of light. “Thank you,” she said, leaving it ambiguous as to whether she was thanking him for having told her he’d liked the Curfew, or for having held her chair.
Seated opposite her now, beige elbows on the table, manicured fingers steepled in front of him, he was managing a good approximation of the look she was given by male Hollis Henry aficionados who were actually seeing some private inner version of Anton Corbijn’s portrait of her, the one in the deconstructed tweed miniskirt.
“My mother,” he began on an unexpected note, “enjoyed the Curfew immensely. She was a sculptor. Phaedra Seynhaev. When I visited her Paris studio for the last time, she was playing you. Loudly.” He smiled.
“Thank you.” She decided not to go with the dead mother. “But I’m a journalist now. No credentials to coast on, there.”
“Rausch is very pleased with you as a journalist,” he said. “He wants you on staff.” Their waiter arrived, and went away for Hollis’s gin-tonic and Bigend’s piso mojado, a new one on Hollis.
“Tell me aboutNode ,” she suggested. “It doesn’t seem to be generating much in the way of industry gossip.”
“No?”
“No.”
He lowered his finger-steeple. “Anti-buzz,” he said. “Definition by absence.”
She waited to see if he’d indicate that he was joking. He didn’t. “That’s ridiculous.”
The smile unshuttered, gleamed, shuttered, and then their drinks arrived, in disposable plastic that protected the hotel against barefoot poolside litigations. She afforded herself a quick scan of the rest of the clientele. Were a cruise missile just then to impact the corrugated roof of Skybar, she decided, there would be no great need forPeople to change its next cover. The fancy, as Inchmale had called them, seemed to have moved on. Just as well, for present purposes. “Tell me,” she said, leaning slightly forward over her gin.
“Yes?”
“Chombo. Bobby Chombo. Why did Rausch make such a point of my meeting him?”
“Rausch is the story’s editor,” he said, mildly. “Perhaps you should ask him.”
“Something else is going on,” she pressed. She felt as though she were marching out to confront the Mongolian Death Worm on its own ground; probably not that good an idea, but somehow she knew she must. “His urgency didn’t feel to me like part of the story.”
Bigend studied her. “Ah. Well. Part of another story, then. A much bigger one. Your secondNode story, we hope. And you’ve just come from meeting him—Chombo?”
“Yes.”
“And what did you think?”
“He knows he knows something nobody else does. Or thinks he does.”
“And what do you think that might be, Hollis? May I call you Hollis?”
“Please do. I don’t think Bobby’s all that keen on his position in any locative avant-garde. He likes being on top of any breaking phenomenon, I’d guess, but is basically bored with the grunt work. When he was helping to invent the context of the locative thing, to whatever extent he did, he probably wasn’t bored.”
Bigend’s smile opened again. It reminded her of the lights in another train when trains pass at night, going in opposite directions. Then it closed. It was like she’d entered a tunnel. “Go on.” He sipped his piso, which looked a lot like NyQuil.
“And it’s not DJ-ing,” she said, “or making mash-ups, or whatever else he does publicly. It’s whatever makes him mark the floor of that factory according to the GPS grid. He won’t sleep in the same square twice. Whatever makes him confident he’s important is also what’s making him crazy.”
“And that might be?”
She thought of the wireframed cargo container, how Chombo had so abruptly tried to yank the helmet off her head, almost pulling her over. She hesitated.
“Pirates,” he said.
“Pirates?”
“The Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea. Small, fast boats, preying on cargo vessels. They operate from lagoons, coves, islets. The Malay Peninsula. Java, Borneo, Sumatra…”
She looked from Bigend to the crowd around them, feeling like she’d fallen into someone else’s pitch meeting. A ghostly studio log line, left to hover near the bar’s massively timbered, corrugated ceiling, had fallen on her, the first likely victim to sit at this table. A pirate movie. “Arrrr,” she said, meeting his gaze again and downing the last of her gin-tonic, “matey.”
“Real pirates,” Hubertus Bigend said, unsmiling. “Most of them, anyway.”
“Most?”
“Some of them were part of a covert CIA maritime program.” He put his empty plastic glass down as though it were something he was considering bidding on at Sotheby’s. He framed it with his fingers, a director considering a shot. “Stopping suspect cargo vessels to search for weapons of mass destruction.” He looked up at her, unsmiling.
“Irony-free?”
He nodded, a tiny movement, very precise.
Thus perhaps did diamond factors nod in Antwerp, she thought. “This isn’t bullshit, Mr. Bigend?”
“It’s as expensively quasi-factual as I can afford it to be. Material like this tends to squirm a bit, as you can well imagine. One rather deep irony, I suppose, is that this program, which had apparently been fairly effective, fell victim to blowback from your domestic political struggles here. Prior to certain revelations, though, and to the name of a cover company being made public, CIA teams, disguised as pirates, accompanied real pirates boarding merchant vessels suspected of smuggling weapons of mass destruction. Using radiation detectors, and other things, they inspected cargo holds and containers, while the real pirates took whatever more mundane cargo they chose to acquire. That was the payoff for the pirates, that they could have their pick of cargo, provided the teams were given a first look at all of the holds and containers.”
“Containers.”
“Yes. Pirates and teams provided one another with mutual backup. The teams would have amply bribed any local authorities, and of course the U.S. Navy would stay well away when one of these operations was under way. The ships’ crews were never the wiser, whether contraband was discovered or not. If something were found, the interdiction came later, nothing to do with our pirates.” He gestured to a waiter for another piso. “Another drink?”
“Mineral water,” she said. “Joseph Conrad. Kipling. Or a movie.”
“The pirates who proved best at this were out of Aceh, in northern Sumatra. Prime Conrad territory, I believe.”
“Were they finding much, the faux pirates?”
The diamond factor’s nod again.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“In August 2003, one of these joint CIA-pirate operations boarded a freighter with Panamanian registry, bound from Iran to Macau. The team’s interest centered on one particular container. They’d broken its seals, opened it, when orders came by radio to leave it.”
“Leave it?”
“Leave the container. Leave the vessel. Those orders were followed, of course.”
“Who told you that story?”
“Someone who claims to have been a member of the boarding team.”
“And you think that Chombo, somehow, has something to do with that?”
“I suspect,” Bigend said, leaning closer and lowering his voice, “that Bobby periodically knows where that container is.”
“Periodically?”
“Apparently it’s still out there, somewhere,” Bigend said. “Like the Flying Dutchman.” His second piso arrived, along with her water. “To your next story,” he toasted, touching the rims of their fresh plastic glasses.
“The pirates.”
“Yes?”
“Did they see what was in it?”
“No.”
“MOST PEOPLE don’t self-drive these,” Bigend said, pulling out onto Sunset, headed east.
“Most people don’t drive them at all,” Hollis corrected, from the pa
ssenger seat beside him. She craned her neck for a glimpse back into what she supposed could be called the passenger cabin. There seemed to be a sort of frosted skylight, as opposed to any mere moonroof. And a lot of very glossy wood, the rest in carbon-colored lambskin.
“A Brabus Maybach,” he said, as she turned her head in time to see him give the wheel a little pat. “The firm of Brabus extensively tweaks the product of Maybach, to produce one of these.”
“‘Darth my ride’?”
“If you were riding in back, you could watch for locative art on the monitors in each front seatback. There’s MWAN and a fourplex GPRS router.”
“No thanks.” The seats back there, upholstered in that gunmetal lamb, obviously reclined, becoming beds, or possibly chairs for high-end elective surgery. Through the smoked glass at her side, she saw pedestrians at the intersection, staring at the Maybach. The light changed and Bigend pulled away. The vehicle’s interior was still as a museum at midnight. “Do you always drive this?” she asked.
“The agency has Phaetons,” he said. “Good stealth cars. Mistake them for Jettas, at a distance.”
“I’m not a car person.” She ran her thumb along a lambskin seat seam. Like touching the butt of a supermodel, probably.
“Why have you decided to interest yourself in journalism, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Looking for a way to make a living. Curfew royalties don’t amount to much. I haven’t been that talented an investor.”
“Few people are,” he said. “If they’re successful at it, of course, then they imagine they are. Talented. But they’re all doing the same things, really.”
“I wish someone had told me what they’re doing, in that case.”