Zero History

  “Mental cunt,” observed Benny, taking another case and walking away.

  Voytek scooted across the carpeted cargo area on his B.U.M. EQUIPMENT signage and climbed out, taking the two remaining cases and walking away.

  Milgrim got out, his knees stiff, and glanced around. There was nobody in sight. “Seems quieter,” he said.

  “Tea time,” said Fiona. She looked at him. “That’s from the shop.”

  “Yes,” said Milgrim.

  “It’s not bad on you,” she said approvingly, if surprised. “You cut most of the douche baggage.”

  “I do?”

  “You wouldn’t wear one of those little leashes on your wallet,” she said. “And you wouldn’t wear one of his hats.”

  “The douche baggage?”

  “The fuckery,” said Fiona, closing the van’s rear door. “We need your stuff,” she said, walking around and opening the side door. She handed Milgrim his bag, and a Tanky & Tojo bag containing the clothes he’d been wearing before (minus the Sonny jacket) and the restuffed Mont-Bell sausage. She pulled out the retaped sleeping foam and a black garbage bag. “These are your things from the Holiday Inn.”

  He followed her into the littered garage.

  As they were nearing the entrance to Bigend’s Vegas cube, Benny emerged. Fiona handed him the keys to the van. “Carbs on the bike are sound,” she told him. “Thank Saad.”

  “Ta,” said Benny, pocketing the keys without pausing.

  Milgrim followed her in. Two of Voytek’s cases were on the table, open. The other two, still closed, were on the floor. He wore a pair of large black-and-silver headphones and was assembling something that looked to Milgrim like a black unstrung squash racket.

  “Leave me,” said Voytek flatly, not bothering to make eye contact. “I sweep.”

  “Let’s go,” Fiona said to Milgrim, putting down the foam and the black bag containing Milgrim’s things from the hotel. “He can do it faster alone.” Milgrim dropped the sausage beside the foam, but kept his bag. As he left the room, Milgrim saw Voytek step forward, toward one wall, raising the racket two-handed, with a sort of ecclesiastic deliberation.

  “What’s he doing?” he asked Fiona, who was looking down at a motorcycle whose engine lay in pieces on the littered floor.

  “Sweeping for bugs.”

  “Has he found them before?”

  “Not here. But this place is still a secret, as far as I know. They turn up at Blue Ant weekly. Bigend has a toffee box full of them. Keeps saying he’ll make me a necklace.”

  “Who puts them there?”

  “Strategic business intelligence types, I suppose. The kind of people he generally refuses to hire.”

  “Are they able to learn things, doing that?”

  “Once,” she said, and touched the broken edge of the bike’s cowling with a fingertip, in a way he envied, “he sent me across town with a Taser.”

  “That shocks people?”

  “Yes.”

  “He sent you to shock someone?”

  “There was a LAN cable bodged into it. I pretended to be there for a job interview. When I had the chance, I plugged it, unobserved, into the first available LAN socket. Any one would do. The Taser was in my purse. Gave it a click. Just the one.”

  “What happened?”

  “It punched out their entire system. All of it. Erased everything. Even the parts in other buildings. Then I wiped it for prints, binned it, and left.”

  “That was because they’d taken something?”

  She shrugged. “He called it a lobotomy.”

  “Clean,” announced Voytek glumly, carrying out two of his cases. They weren’t heavy at all, Milgrim now knew, because he’d seen that they mainly contained black foam padding. Voytek set them down and returned for the other two.

  “When is he coming?” asked Milgrim.

  “Not expecting him,” she said. “He just wants you in a safe place.”

  “He’s not coming?”

  “We’re just killing time,” she said, and smiled. She wasn’t someone who smiled often, but when she did, he found, it seemed as though it meant something. “I’ll teach you how to work the balloons. I’m getting really good.”

  59. THE ART OF THE THING

  After a mutual exchange of various telephone numbers, both written down and entered in phones, Bigend left.

  Garreth had also insisted on establishing codes, by which either could indicate that he was speaking under duress, or that he believed the conversation was being somehow surveilled. Hollis, discovering that she was actually very hungry, took advantage of this to catch up on her breakfast. Garreth began to write in his notebook, in what was either shorthand or his impossible handwriting, she’d never been sure.

  “Do you really think he’d honor that agreement, if you were able to do whatever it is you intend to do?” she asked as he capped his pen.

  “Initially. I imagine he’d then manage to start to see that he’d really made a different agreement, and that any subsequent misunderstanding is ours alone. But then it would become a matter of reminding him, and at the same time reminding him exactly how his little difficulty had been tidied. Quite a lot of this, and why it needs to be very good indeed, is the need to impress Bigend with the idea that he wouldn’t want anything like it to ever happen to him. Without ever uttering anything like a threat, mind you, for which reason I would hope that you’d put your man at the Guardian back in the box. If he’s the one I think you mean, he makes me want to believe that global warming isn’t androgenic, just to spite him.”

  “Where’s your eccentric mentor in this?”

  “He’ll be in the background, if he’s to be involved at all, and I’m glad of it. He was happier during the previous administration in the United States. Easier to be around.”

  “He was?”

  “Less free-floating ambiguity then. I’ll need his permission to use the material we prepared for that other exploit. But Gracie seems a perfect match for his targeting mechanism, as he has a peculiar detestation for war profiteers. Who are certainly no less abundant now than they used to be, though generally a bit less flagrant. I’ll also need him to hook me up with Charlie. Sweet old boy in Birmingham. Gurkha.”

  “Gurkha?”

  “Perfect dear. Love him to bits.”

  “Fuck me, it’s the prodigal skydiver.”

  Hollis swung around at Heidi’s voice, and found her there, in the gap between the screens, Ajay peering around her shoulder.

  “What’s this?” Heidi pushed at the mahogany frame of one of the screens, causing the whole thing to wobble alarmingly. “Planning on having it off right here?”

  Garreth smiled. “Hello, Heidi.”

  “Heard you were well and truly fucked,” said Heidi. She was wearing gray sweats, under her majorette jacket. “Look about the same, to me.”

  “What did Milgrim do last night?” Hollis asked. “Bigend says he hurt someone.”

  “Milgrim? Couldn’t hurt himself, if he had to. Fucker from that car was behind us. I’d known it for blocks.” She raised her hand and made a concise little dart-throwing gesture. “Rhenium. Screamed like a bitch.”

  “A great honor,” said Ajay, from behind Heidi, his eyes wide with excitement. Heidi put her arm around him, shoved him forward.

  “Ajay,” said Heidi. “Fastest sparring partner I’ve ever had. We went over to Hackney this morning and beat the living shit out of each other.”

  “Hello, Ajay,” said Garreth, offering his hand.

  “Can’t believe this, really,” said Ajay, pumping Garreth’s hand. “Blinding, to see you’re not as badly off as we’d heard. Download all your videos. Fantastic.” Hollis half expected him to ask for an autograph, his waterfall bobbing with excited delight.

  “What flavor, the sparring?” asked Garreth.

  “Bit of everything, really,” said Ajay, modestly.

  “Really,” said Garreth. “We should talk. As it happens, I need someone fast, in just that
way.”

  “Well, then,” said Ajay, running his hand through his waterfall. “Well, then.” Like a child who’d just been told, in July, that it was actually, now, officially, absolutely, Christmas morning.

  >>>

  “You aren’t sorry you didn’t quit before the shit hit?” Heidi asked. They were back in her room, where Hollis saw that the Breast Chaser had been partially painted, though wasn’t yet under construction. There was a faint smell of aerosol enamel.

  Hollis shook her head.

  Ajay was pacing excitedly by the window.

  “Calm the fuck down,” Heidi snapped at him. “Elvis isn’t leaving the building. Get used to it.” Garreth had asked to be taken to Number Four, in order to make some calls and use his laptop. To get him there, in the chair, they’d had to go along a hallway, to the rear of the building, and take a service elevator that Hollis had never seen before. Utterly devoid of Tesla charm, being German, nearly silent, and highly efficient, it got them to their floor quickly, but then Hollis became confused about the route to the room. The hallways were mazelike. Garreth, however, had remembered the way exactly.

  “So who are these people, supposed to be fucking with us?” asked Heidi. “The dipshit with the bandage. How scary is that?”

  “He’s a clothing designer,” said Hollis.

  “If they aren’t all pussies,” said Heidi, “who is?”

  “It’s the man he works for,” Hollis said. “A retired Special Forces major named Gracie.”

  “Gracie? What about fucking Mabel? You’re totally making this shit up, aren’t you?”

  “It’s his last name. And Garreth’s last name, while I remember, is now ‘Wilson.’ That was what he told Bigend it was at breakfast. Gracie’s an arms dealer. Bigend was spying on some business of his, in South Carolina. Well, Milgrim was, on his orders. In the process of that, Oliver Sleight, who you met in Vancouver but probably don’t remember, Bigend’s IT security specialist, defected to Gracie—”

  “But you’re in love, right?” Heidi interrupted.

  “Yes,” said Hollis, surprising herself.

  “Well,” said Heidi, “I’m glad that’s sorted. The rest of this shit’s just shit, right? Ajay gonna get to violate his ASBO, or what?”

  There was a rap at the door.

  “Who the fuck?” inquired Heidi, loudly.

  “Garreth, luv.”

  “He likes you,” said Ajay, delighted.

  “He likes you too,” said Heidi, “so try to keep your fucking pants on.”

  She opened the door, held it as Garreth powered the scooter in, then closed, locked, and chained it.

  “All good,” said Garreth, to Hollis. “Old chap’s signed off, he’s calling the solicitor about the bank, calling Charlie.” He turned the chair toward Ajay. “Know this Milgrim, then?”

  “No,” said Ajay.

  “Are Milgrim and Ajay of a similar height?”

  Heidi raised her eyebrows, considered. “Close enough.”

  “Build?”

  “Milgrim’s a fucking weed.”

  “Bigend guessed ten stone. But Ajay’s not that broad, really,” said Garreth, considering him. “Wiry. Core strength. No excess muscle-mass. Wiry can do weed. Done any acting, Ajay?”

  “At school,” said Ajay, pleased. “Islington Youth Theater.”

  “I haven’t met Milgrim either. We’ll both have to. Can you do a rupert for me, then? How does a rupert walk inspection?”

  Ajay straightened, thumbs aligned with the seams of his sweatpants, assumed a supercilious expression, and strolled past Heidi, taking her in with a quick and disapproving glance.

  “Good,” said Garreth, nodding.

  “Milgrim,” said Heidi to Garreth, “is your basic pasty-faced Caucasian fuck. You couldn’t find a whiter guy.”

  “Ah,” said Garreth, “but that’s the art of the thing, isn’t it?”

  60. RAY

  Milgrim, in his stocking feet and shirtsleeves, lay on the white foam, pleasantly lost in a new and deliciously seamless experience. Above him, near the room’s high ceiling, illuminated by the large Italian floor lamp with its silver umbrella, the matte-black manta ray was turning slow forward somersaults, almost silently, the only sound the soft crinkling of its helium-filled foil membrane. He wasn’t watching it. Instead, he was focused on the screen of the iPhone, watching the feed from the ray’s camera as it rolled. He saw himself, repeatedly, stretched on the white rectangle, and Fiona, seated at the table, working on whatever she was assembling from the contents of the cartons Benny had brought in. Then, as the ray rolled, white wall, the brilliantly illuminated ceiling, then over again. It was hypnotic, and all the more so because he was causing the roll, maintaining it, executing it each time, with the same sequence of thumb movements on the phone’s horizontal screen.

  It swam in air, the ray. Modeled on a creature that swam in water, it propelled itself, with a slow, eerie grace, through the air.

  “It must be wonderful outside,” he said.

  “More fun,” she said, “but we aren’t allowed. Once anyone knows we have them, they’re useless. And they cost a fortune, even before the modifications. When we were first shopping for drones, I said go for something like this,” meaning the rectangular thing she was assembling on the table. “It’s faster, more maneuverable. But he said he thought we should recapitulate the history of flight, start with balloons.”

  “There weren’t balloons with wings, were there?” Maintaining concentration on his thumb work.

  “No, but people did imagine them. And this thing can only stay up for a while. Batteries.”

  “It doesn’t look like a helicopter. It looks like a coffee table for dolls.”

  “Eight props, that’s serious lift. And they’re protected. It can bump into something and not be instant rubbish. Give ray a rest and look at this.”

  “How do I stop?” asked Milgrim, suddenly anxious.

  “Just stop. The app will right it.”

  Milgrim held his breath, took his thumbs from the screen. Looked up. The ray rolled up, executed an odd little wing-tip flutter, then hung suspended, rocking slightly, its dorsal surface to the ceiling.

  Milgrim got up and went to the table. Nothing had ever been quite as pleasant as this afternoon with Fiona, in Bigend’s Vegas cube, though he kept surprising himself with the recognition of just how pleasant it was. There was nothing to do but play with Bigend’s expensive German toys, and talk, while the toys, and learning how they worked, provided a perfect topic for conversation. Fiona was working, technically, because she had to assemble the new drone from the parts in the two cartons, but she seemed to enjoy that. It involved a set of small screwdrivers mainly, color-coded hex wrenches, and videos on a website on his Air, via the red dongle. A company in Michigan, two brothers, twins, with matching eyeglasses and chambray shirts.

  It didn’t look like a helicopter, though it did have those eight rotors. It was built of black foam, with a bumper of some other black material around its edge, and two rows of four holes, in which the rotors were installed. It stood on four slanted wire legs now, about six inches above the table. Its four batteries, currently charging at a wall socket, slotted into each of the corners, equalizing weight. It had a slender, streamlined black plastic fuselage underneath, housing the camera and electronics.

  “No testing this indoors,” she said, putting down the screwdriver. “It’s together, though. I’m exhausted. Up all night. Feel like a nap?”

  “A nap?”

  “On your foam. It’s wide enough. You sleep last night?”

  “Not really.”

  “Let’s have a nap.”

  Milgrim looked from one blank white wall to the next, then up at the black ray and the silver penguin. “Okay,” he said.

  “Turn off your laptop.” She stood up while Milgrim shut the Air down. She walked over to the umbrella light and dialed it down low. “I can’t sleep with these pants on,” she said. “There’s Kevlar.”
r />   “Right,” said Milgrim.

  There was a ripping of Velcro, and then the sound of a zip. A big one, by the sound of it. Something, maybe Kevlar, rustled to the floor. She stepped out of the armored pants, already barefoot, and went to the white foam, which seemed to glow faintly. “Come on,” she said, “I can barely keep my eyes open.”

  “Okay,” said Milgrim.

  “You can’t sleep in Tanky & Tojo,” she said.

  “Right,” Milgrim said, and began to remove his shirt, which had far too many buttons on each sleeve. When he’d gotten it off, he hung it on the back of the chair, over his new jacket, and took off his pants.

  He could see her, dimly, pulling the MontBell out of its bag. He felt like screaming, or singing, something. He walked toward the foam, then realized he was wearing his black socks from Galeries Lafayette. That seemed wrong. He stopped and removed them, almost falling over.

  “Get under,” Fiona said, having spread the open bag as wide as it would go. “Good thing I never use a pillow.”

  “Me neither,” lied Milgrim, sitting down, tucking his socks quickly under the edge of the foam. He swung his legs under the Mont-Bell and lay down, very straight, beside her.

  “You and that Heidi,” said Fiona, “you’re not a number, are you?”

  “Me?” he said. “No!” Then lay there, eyes wide, awaiting her response, until he heard her softly snoring.

  61. FACIAL RECOGNITION

  They’d had a shower with H. G. Wells and Frank, Garreth’s bandaged leg, tucked through something that looked like an inhumanly capacious and open-ended condom. Toweling him off, she’d seen a bit more of Frank, “Frankenstein.” Much evidence of heroic surgery, so-called. As many stitches as a patchwork quilt, and indeed she suspected literally patchwork, the back of his other calf tidily scarred where they’d taken skin to graft. And within Frank, if Garreth wasn’t simply taking the piss, a good bit of newfangled rattan bone. Frank’s musculature was considerably reduced, though Garreth had hopes for that. Hopes generally, she’d been glad to see, and hard sensitive hands sliding all over her.