Zero History

  “Special Agent Whitaker,” she said to Fiona, when she reached them.

  “Right,” said Fiona.

  The driver emerged from the car. An older man, he wore what Milgrim supposed might be called a fedora, a raincoat roughly the color of Winnie’s, dark slacks, large brown shoes. He closed the car door and stood, looking back at them.

  “Milgrim and I will talk in the car,” Winnie said. “He’ll be behind the wheel. My driver will wait at a distance, where you can see him. Fair enough?”

  Fiona nodded.

  “Come on, then,” Winnie said to Milgrim.

  He got off the bike, feeling clumsy in the armored nylon oversuit, put the hairspray helmet on the seat. She walked him to the car. Past the cans, which Milgrim saw had contained some sort of boldly labeled cider, the London couriers apparently being health-minded in spite of smoking. “Your friend doesn’t have any trouble making her terms known,” Winnie said.

  “I heard. But she has orders not to let me out of her sight. And she did agree to bring me here, on very short notice.”

  She opened the driver’s-side door for him.

  Milgrim, who hadn’t driven a car for a decade or more, got in behind the wheel. The car smelled of air-freshener, and had a large St. Christopher medal affixed to the dash. Winnie walked quickly around the back, opened the door, got into the passenger seat, closed the door.

  “Nice suit,” Milgrim said as she crossed her legs.

  “It’s perverse of me.”

  “It is?”

  “Navy or charcoal being the norm. Fed shows up wearing a wedding dress, it’ll be described as a black suit. A black suit and she shoved her badge in your face. She was wearing charcoal gray from Brooks Brothers, the credentials were presented slowly, respectfully, at midtorso level. But then it’s a black suit, and she shoved the badge in their face. Know what’s weird about that?”

  “No,” said Milgrim.

  “You don’t present the credentials, you don’t get that. That’s why cards are so much better. The badge is like something out of a role-playing game, some seal of elder doom. When your job’s building relationships and establishing rapport, the credentials are murder.”

  Milgrim considered her. “That’s your job?”

  “You’re here, aren’t you?”

  He thought about it. “I see what you mean. Who’s that man?” he asked, to change the subject.

  “I’m renting his spare bedroom. Really, the suit’s for him. If he’s going to drive me around, I figure I can look like his idea of a professional.”

  The man had strolled a little farther, stopped, and now stood with hands in raincoat pockets, staring out in what Milgrim thought might be the direction of the City. Milgrim twisted in his seat, saw Fiona watching them, astride the Yamaha, her helmet-hair a tousled dandelion.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Gracie and Foley have kidnapped someone who works for Bigend—”

  “ ‘Kidnapped’? That has a very specific meaning, for me. That’s a crime. Kidnapped who?”

  “Shombo. Chombo, I mean. He works for Bigend. They went to the home of the man Chombo was staying with, hit the man, threatened him, his wife and child as well, and took Chombo away.”

  “You didn’t tell me?”

  “I haven’t had time,” said Milgrim, which in a way was true. “And I’ve had to infer a lot of it.”

  “What’s Chombo?”

  “He seems to be some kind of researcher, on a project of Bigend’s. Bigend wants him back.”

  “Ransom demand?”

  “Me.”

  “You what?”

  “I’m the ransom. Fiona told me. She figured it out when Garreth was tasking her.”

  “Go on.”

  “They’re giving them someone else instead. Ajay. They’re making him look as much like me as they can. I think he was a soldier. Or something.”

  Winnie whistled. She shook her head. “Shit,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “What does Garreth want Fiona to do? Do you know that?”

  “Fly a video drone. When they do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “I don’t know. Get Chombo back.”

  Winnie frowned at him, drummed the fingers of one hand on a pant-suited knee, looked away, then quickly back. “Thank God for leave en route.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”

  “Garreth,” she said.

  “Garreth?”

  “You’re arranging for me to speak with him. Soonest. Tonight.”

  Milgrim looked at the St. Christopher. “I can try. But …”

  “But what?”

  “Don’t bring him.” Indicating the retired Scotland Yard detective, but keeping his hands below the level of the dashboard.

  “By phone. And not my phone, either. He’ll have a number that’s a throwaway. Get me that.”

  “Why do you want to talk with him? He’ll ask me.”

  “He’s building something. He’s building it for Gracie. I don’t want to know what it is. At all. The kidnapping angle puts things in a different light.”

  “Why?”

  “Makes me think Gracie is indulging himself, over here. Kind of midlife adventure. Kidnapping. Sort of like a red convertible, for a certain kind of guy. Businessman, in his position, can’t afford it. At all. But they don’t actually teach you business, in the schools. He doesn’t know that, though.”

  “What should I tell Garreth?”

  “Tell him it won’t take long. He won’t have to tell me anything, admit to anything, provide any information. It won’t be recorded. He can use voice-distortion software, which he will anyway, unless he really is an amateur, in which case you’re all liable to wind up with Mike all over you, real soon now, and there’s nothing I’ll be able to do about it. Tell him I have an Easter egg for him. And what I’ll give him isn’t mine, in any way. Nothing to do with me.”

  “Why should he believe you?”

  “Context. If he’s any good, he’ll be able to find out who I am, and see where I’m coming from. But what he won’t get, from that, is that I’ve got a hard-on for Gracie. That’s up to you. You’ve got to convey that. That it’s just personal that way.” She smiled, in a way that Milgrim didn’t like. “Maybe it’s my midlife adventure.”

  “Okay,” said Milgrim, not feeling in any way that it was.

  “Tell me something, though.”

  “What?”

  “If you’re what they want in exchange for Bigend’s guy, why are you being driven around by a girl, on the back of a bike? Why aren’t you locked down, watched over, massively surveilled?”

  “Because Bigend has almost nobody he can trust right now.”

  “Shit’s deep,” she said, with what he took to be a kind of satisfaction. “Out now. You’ve got your orders. Go.”

  Milgrim got out. Seeing the man in the raincoat approaching, he left the door open. He turned and walked back, past the two cider cans, lonely sentinels of Smithfield, as Fiona started her engine.

  73. THE PATCHWORK BOYFRIEND

  In the dark, Garreth asleep beside her, the round and looming bottom of the birdcage barely visible in the faint glow of the power telltales on his laptop and various phones; tiny bright points in red and green, a constellation of potential trouble.

  She’d finally and truly met Frank, which had taken less getting used to than she would have imagined, though at first she’d cried a little.

  Frank had been stabilized in Singapore, then variously reconstructed, in a surgical odyssey funded by the old man. Frank had seen arcane facilities in the United States, ghost wings of otherwise workaday military hospitals. In one of these, shattered bone had been replaced with custom segments of calcified rattan, fastened in place with ceramic screws whose main ingredient was the primary constituent of natural bone. The result, so far, was Frank, a patchwork thing, more stitches than skin. A taut and shining mosaic, reminding her of expensivel
y mended china.

  He’d initially voted to have it off, he’d told her, knowing quite a bit about the current state of prosthetics, a field being rapidly driven by America’s wars, with their massive improvements in rates of wound survival. But the surgeons the old man had gotten him to were chancers, he said, and he’d found himself infected by their eagerness to see what they could do, out at the very edge of the possible. This had caused her to weep again, and he’d held her, and made jokes, until it passed. And he’d been curious, too, about the officially nonexistent levels of expertise and technology he’d correctly assumed to be involved. Something demanding the temporary severing of certain nerves had been the least pleasant part of it, he’d said, and the recent procedures in Germany had been to reconnect those, so that he could now feel, increasingly, what Frank was feeling. Which, while not pleasant by any means, was far superior to previous disconnection, and absolutely essential in terms of getting back to walking.

  He made the dressings progressively smaller, each time he changed them. The rest of Frank was that aerial Kansas patchwork of found-object dermis, reassuringly leg-shaped if a bit withered from the nonuse.

  Most animals, he’d told her, apparently seriously, preferred bilaterally symmetrical mates, to the extent that it formed a sort of biota-wide bottom line, and that he’d understand if she felt that way. She’d told him that the bottom line as far as she was concerned was men who didn’t sound like utter fucking idiots, and had kissed him. After which, more kissing, much else, laughter, some tears, more laughter.

  Now she lay in the minute glow of LEDs, and willed silence, absence of messaging, an empty in-box, this peace, here in the Piblokto Madness bed, which now no longer seemed that, to her, the arch of the right whale’s jawbone even bespeaking something matrimonial, if she thought about it, which she was still unwilling generally to do.

  But okay right now. Okay so far. His breathing beside her.

  Beneath her pillow, the iPhone began to vibrate. She slid her hand under, cupped it, considered the option of skipping the call. But these were not times for skipped calls.

  “Hello?” she whispered.

  “What’s wrong?” It was Milgrim.

  “Garreth’s sleeping.”

  “Sorry,” whispered Milgrim.

  “What is it?’

  “It’s complicated. Someone needs to speak with Garreth.”

  “Who?”

  “Please don’t get the wrong idea,” whispered Milgrim, “but she’s a U.S. federal agent.”

  “That’s as wrong an idea as I’ve heard in a while,” said Hollis, forgetting to whisper.

  “What is?” asked Garreth.

  “It’s Milgrim.”

  “Give him to me.”

  She covered the phone, realizing she had no idea where its microphone might be, or if covering it would help. “He wants you talk to a U.S. agent.”

  “Ah,” he said, “the odd bits emerge now. The localized high-pressure zone of weird begins to manifest. Always does. Give me the phone.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Makes perfect sense.” He reached over, squeezed her arm reassuringly. “Phone, please.”

  She handed him the phone.

  “Milgrim,” he said. “Been networking, have we? Slow down. Does she have a name?”

  And she heard a pen on paper as he wrote in the dark, something he was very good at.

  “Does she? Really? She put it that way herself?” She felt him prop himself on the pillows. When he opened the laptop, its light was light of some weird and other moon. A lucky one, she hoped. She heard him begin to type, with one hand, while he asked Milgrim questions, brief ones, and listened to longer answers.

  74. MAP, TERRITORY

  The heels of Milgrim’s Tanky & Tojo brogues, as he sat astride the high, raked pillion of Benny’s Yamaha, didn’t quite touch the cobbles of this tiny square. Something about the angle of his feet recalled some childhood line-drawing from Don Quixote, though whether those feet had been the knight’s or Sancho Panza’s, he didn’t know. Fiona sat, saddled lower, in front of him, boots firm on the pavement, holding them upright. He held her iPhone behind her back, seeing exactly where they were now, on the bright little window, via the application she’d shown him earlier: amid these narrow lanes, his eye backtracking to Farringdon, the straight run to the bridge, river, Southwark, Vegas cube. Comprehending the route for the first time.

  He’d phoned Winnie from this courtyard, reading off the number Garreth had given him. He’d written it on the back of her card, which was becoming a softer object, its sharp corners blunted. She’d repeated it back to him, made him check it. “Good work,” she’d said. “Stand by in case I can’t reach him.”

  But that had been eight minutes ago, so he assumed she was on the phone with Garreth.

  Fiona’s yellow helmet turned. “Finished?” she asked, muffled by the visor.

  He looked down at the screen, the glowing map. Saw it as a window into the city’s underlying fabric, as though he held something from which a rectangular chip of London’s surface had been pried, revealing a substrate of bright code. But really, wasn’t the opposite true, the city the code that underlay the map? There was an expression about that, but he’d never understood it, and now couldn’t remember how it went. The territory wasn’t the map?

  “Done,” he said passing her the bright chip. She turned it off, pocketed it, while he put on Mrs. Benny’s helmet and fastened the chinstrap, scarcely noticing the hairspray.

  He put his feet on the pegs as she rolled forward, and curled in closer to her armored back, watching day-bright vignettes of headlit wall-texture as she wheeled them around, the Yahama’s engine sounding as though it were anxious for the bridge.

  What would Winnie and Garreth be talking about? he wondered as Fiona drove out of the courtyard and down the lane to Farringdon Road.

  75. DOWN THE DARKNETS

  Watching Garreth as he listened to his headset, she wondered what the American agent was saying.

  She’d watched him free a phone she hadn’t seen before, from a vacuum-sealed plastic bag, then install a card selected from a black nylon wallet containing a few dozen more, like the duplicates folder in a very dull stamp collection. He’d connected the new phone to a power unit, and then, with another cable, to something black, and smaller. When the new phone rang, the tone was a variant on Old Phone, her own most frequent choice.

  Now he listened, occasionally nodding slightly, eyes on the screen of his laptop, forefinger poking, as if of its own accord, at keys and mouse-patch. He was down his darknets again, she knew, communicating with the old man, or unspecified third parties. There seemed to be no advertising on Garreth’s darknets, and relatively little color, though she supposed that was because he tended mainly to read documents.

  Now a color photograph of a woman appeared, Chinese, thirtyish, her hair center-parted, expressionless, in the style of a biometric passport photograph. Garreth leaned forward slightly, as if for a better look, and wrote something in his notebook. “That wouldn’t actually be of much help,” he said. “I have better numbers than that myself.” He fell silent again, listening, opening screens on his desktop, making notes. “No. I have that. I don’t think you can really do much for me. Which is a pity, considering your willingness. What I could really use would be something heavier. Massive, really. And the goods will be there. Worth massive’s time, amply. Massive’ll come along, I imagine. But massive immediately would be the business.” He listened again. “Yes. Certainly. Do. Good night.” He touched the keyboard, the photograph vanishing. He looked at Hollis. “That was well queer.”

  “That was her, the photograph?”

  “Probably.”

  “What did she want?”

  “She was offering something. Didn’t really have what I’d most like, but may be able to get it.”

  “You won’t tell me?”

  “Only because you’d be less safe knowing at this point.” He stroked her hair
back from her face, on one side. “Do you know what you’d take with you, if you were going away forever? No more than you can carry at a brisk run.”

  “Forever?”

  “Probably not. But best to assume you wouldn’t come back here.”

  “Not the author’s copies,” indicating the boxes.

  “No. But seriously. Pack.”

  “I’m not going anywhere without you.”

  “That’s the plan. But pack now, please.”

  “Is this too big?” indicating her roll-aboard.

  “Perfect, but keep it light.”

  “Is it about something she told you?”

  “No,” he said, “it’s because I doubt we have much more time. Pack.”

  She set the empty roll-aboard on the nearest armchair, unzipped it, and began to select things from the drawers in the wardrobe. She added the Hounds designer’s jersey tube. Went into the bathroom, gathering things from the counter.

  “How’s Frank?” she asked, emerging.

  “Complaining, but he has to get used to it.”

  She noticed the Blue Ant figurine on the bedside table. Picked it up. You’re in, she thought, surprising herself, and carried it, with bottles and tubes of product, to the roll-aboard. “Won’t you need some sort of follow-up for neural surgery?”

  “Woman in Harley Street,” he said, “as soon as I can.”

  “How soon is that?”

  “When this is over.” A phone began to ring. Yet another variant on Old Phone. Not hers. He took a phone from his pocket, looked at it. After the third ring he answered. “Yes? From now? Venue? No? Crucial.” He thumbed a key.