The man with the bloody mouth caught his left shoulder and he careened into a table, food and glassware flying, a woman screaming. In the instant of contact, Elleggua, mounting Tito with nauseating speed, had reached back with Tito’s right hand, slipped something from the man’s belt, and now simultaneously drew and fired the Bulgarian’s pneumatic gun with his left, from under Tito’s right armpit.
An inhuman shriek unmounted the orisha as Tito saw the illuminated exit sign and slammed through the door beneath it, past the laden carts of busboys. Kitchen staff in white flung themselves out of his way. He slipped in something wet, nearly went down, ran on. Exit sign. Slamming out, into sudden sunlight, as an alarm triggered behind him.
A large green van, neatly lettered in silver, one of its twin rear doors open. Prada man, no longer wearing his painter’s overalls, reaching down his hand.
Tito handed him the leather-cased badge Elleggua had taken from the pursuer’s belt.
He flipped it open. ‘Ice,’ he said, and pocketed it. He boosted Tito into the truck. A dark, hollow, diesel-smelling space, with odd dim lights. ‘You’ve already met.’ He jumped out of the truck and slammed and locked the door.
‘Be seated,’ said the old man, from a bench fastened lengthwise across the space with canvas strapping. ‘We wouldn’t want you injured, in case of a sudden stop.’
Tito climbed over the back of the padded bench. Discovering the two ends of a simple seat belt, he fastened them as the driver put the truck in gear, heading west, then swung north onto Park.
‘I trust they took it from you?’ the old man asked, in Russian.
‘Yes, they did,’ Tito replied, in English.
‘Very good,’ said the old man, in Russian. ‘Very good.’
43 Pong
The lobby bar was full again.
She found him seated at the long alabaster table, snacking, from a rectangular plate, on what looked like sushi wrapped in raw meat. ‘Who took the picture?’ she asked, when she was close enough to ask quietly and be heard.
‘Pamela. She’s an excellent photographer.’
‘Was she following me?’
‘No. She was watching Chombo. Watching him pack up and move out.’
‘Are you sure he moved himself out? He wasn’t arrested by the Department of Homeland Security?’
‘I doubt the DHS would let him smoke cigarettes and get in the way, while they packed up the evidence.’
‘I wouldn’t want a chance to find out, myself. Would you?’
‘Of course not. Would you like a drink?’
‘Not now, thanks. I’d like you to explain, if what you’ve told me so far is true, why you don’t seem worried about that. I would be. In fact, I’ve discovered that I am. If you’ve been sniffing around covert American programs designed to intercept smuggled weapons, I’d imagine you’re running some chance of getting yourself in trouble. If not, and what you’ve told me is true, why not?’ Which was putting it more forcefully than she’d intended, but it felt right.
‘Please,’ he said, ‘have a seat.’
The stools here were deliberately mismatched. The one next to his reminded her of those elongated figurines of Masai warriors, carved from ironwood, but without the dangerously spiky bits. His was polished aluminum, sort of Henry Moore. ‘No, thanks.’
‘I don’t know what might be in that one particular container, Hollis. Do you believe me?’
She thought about it. ‘I might. It depends.’
‘On what, exactly?’
‘On what you might be about to tell me next.’
He smiled. ‘Wherever we go with this, I’ll never be able to tell you exactly how I came to be involved. Is that acceptable?’
She thought about it. ‘Yes.’ It really didn’t sound like that negotiable a point.
‘And I’m going to require a very sincere commitment to my undertaking, now, if this conversation is to continue. I need to know that you’re with me, before I tell you more. But please, understand that I can’t tell you more without taking you further into the thing itself. This is a matter in which possession of information amounts to involvement. Do you understand?’ He took up a scarlet fleshmaki, regarded it seriously, then popped it into his mouth.
Whatever this was that Bigend was involved in, she decided, it was deep. Deep and possibly central. To something, she couldn’t yet know what. She remembered seeing the white truck rounding the corner, going away, and realized that she really did want to know where it had gone, and why. If she imagined never knowing, for some reason, she saw Alberto’s River Phoenix, prone on Viper Room concrete. Another ending.
Bigend touched his lips with a cocktail napkin, raising an interrogatory eyebrow.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But if I ever find you lying to me, even by omission, it’s over. Any obligation on my part. Over. Understood?’
‘Perfectly,’ he said, cycling the smile and flagging down their server. ‘A drink.’
‘Double scotch,’ Hollis said. ‘One rock.’
She looked down along the glowing alabaster. All the candles. Drinks. Women’s wrists. What had she just done?
‘Coincidentally,’ he said, watching the server’s trim bottom recede with exactly the expression she’d seen when he’d considered his maki, ‘I learned something this morning. Something regarding Bobby.’
‘I wouldn’t think that "coincidentally" was ever a safe concept, around material like this.’ She decided to risk the Masai stool, finding it surprisingly comfortable.
‘Even the clinically paranoid can have enemies, they say.’
‘What is it, then?’
‘Bobby, I’ve known for some time, is charged with at least two tasks by his employers.’
‘Who are?’
‘Don’t know. The tasks of Bobby Chombo, though: One, as I’ve told you, consists of listening for the Flying Dutchman of shipping containers. When he took this job, he was given a set of parameters of some kind, and this task of fishing one particular signal out of a great many others. He did it. Does it still. The container sends a signal periodically, announcing its location, and probably that it hasn’t been tampered with. It’s an intermittent signal, encrypted, and it shifts frequencies, but if you’re Bobby, evidently, you’ll know when and where to listen for it.’
‘What’s in it for whoever pays him?’
‘Don’t know. But I generally assume that it’s not their container, not their signal. After all, they had to pay Bobby to find it for them. Probably after paying someone else for the information they gave him to help him find it. Quite roundabout, if it’s theirs in the first place, though I don’t rule it entirely out.’
‘Why not?’
‘Never a good idea. I’m agnostic, basically. About everything.’
‘What’s Bobby Chombo task two, then?’
‘That’s what I’ve just learned. When we were at Blue Ant, I told you that he ships iPods to Costa Rica.’
‘Right. Music, you said.’
‘What do you know about steganography?’
‘I don’t even know how to pronounce it.’
‘Bobby’s other task consists of compiling elaborate logs of fictitious searches for the container’s signal. These fictions of his, mathematical, enormous, recount his ongoing search for and utter failure to find the key he already has, but which he pretends not to have.’ He cocked his head. ‘Did you follow that?’
‘He fakes evidence that he still hasn’t found the signal?’
‘Exactly. He’s compiled three such epics, so far. He encrypts them steganographically on the drives of iPods –’ Interrupted by the arrival of her drink.
‘What was that word again?’ she asked, when the server had withdrawn.
‘"Steganographically." He spreads his fictitious activity log very thinly, through a lot of music. If he’s given you the key, or if you have sufficiently, hugely powerful decryption capacities, you can pull it out of the music.’
‘And the iPod’s less likely to be checked than a laptop?’
He shrugged. ‘Depends who’s doing the checking.’
‘And how did you learn this?’
‘I can’t tell you. Sorry, but it has a direct bearing on how I got involved, and we’ve agreed I can’t discuss that.’
‘Fine.’ It wasn’t, really, because she could imagine him using it whenever he found it convenient. But she’d deal with that as they went along.
‘But I’ve told you that I know he sends them to a poste restante situation in Costa Rica.’
‘Right.’
‘Where so far I’ve lost track of them, but not before getting a whiff of retired U.S. intelligence officers. Which is a fairly distinctive pong. Never anything like a name attached, of course. But now I’m hearing that Bobby’s iPods get reshipped, from San José.’
‘Where to?’
‘New York. Unless I’m being played. But it looks as if the person Bobby sends them to, in San José, is lazy. Or nervous. The actual addressee never picks them up. But they employ the same functionary to ship them back out. By DHL. To an address on Canal Street. Chinese importer.’
‘Bobby keeps track of the wandering container,’ she said. ‘He generates false evidence that he hasn’t found it yet. He sends that evidence to someone in Costa Rica, who then ships it back to New York…’
‘You missed a step. He sends it to someone in Costa Rica whose job, apparently, according to Bobby’s employers’ wishes, is to sign for it, then hand it over to someone else, the intended recipient. The person Bobby ships to is just your average quasi-criminal postbox. But the intended recipient has never turned up for his end of things. Instead, he’s cut a deal with the postbox, to simply turn it around. It’s a gap, you see, a flaw in someone’s architecture.’
‘Whose?’
‘No idea.’
‘Can you tell me how you found this out, that they go to New York?’
‘I sent someone down there with an armload of cash. Made the postbox a surprise offer. It’s that kind of town.’
‘And that’s all you got for your money?’
‘That and the sense that Mr. Postbox finds the resident ex-CIA gerontocracy oppressive, and desires to retire further south, away from them.’
She went over it again, in her head, swirling the lone ice cube in her scotch. ‘So what do you think?’
‘Someone’s being scammed. Someone’s being led to believe that someone else is aware of the container, but is unable to locate it. Why, do you think, would anyone do that?’
‘To make the person who owns the container believe it’s not being tracked. When in fact it is.’
‘It does look that way, doesn’t it?’
‘And?’
‘We have a gap to exploit. We know that someone in San José is distancing themselves a little, not following through to the letter of the plan. Whoever’s supposed to receive those iPods, and take them away for reshipping, isn’t doing that. Instead, they’re paying the postbox to simply turn the iPods around. I imagine they’re frightened.’
‘Of whom?’
‘Possibly of whoever owns the contents of that container. That’s very interesting. And now we have another gap, as well.’
‘Which is?’
‘Pamela put a GPS tracking device on that truck, about an hour before you arrived.’
‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘she did? What is she, James Bond?’
‘Nothing like it. Likes a bit of a game, Pamela.’ He smiled.
‘Where is it, the truck?’
He took a Treo from within his jacket and thumbed a sequence on the keypad. Squinted at it. ‘Just north of San Francisco, at the moment.’
44 Exit strategy
Milgrim found himself heading for Brown’s parked Corolla, or rather he found his body, cramping and gasping from its unaccustomed gallop, weaving unevenly in what he supposed to be that general direction. He’d had a general out-of-body experience, between lunging up from the bench and rediscovering himself this way, and he had no idea where those black gentlemen might be. He hoped they had taken his word for it, that Brown was a DEA agent. Since one of them had spontaneously concluded that a bust was in progress, possibly they had. Dennis Birdwell was unlikely to pay anyone enough to do otherwise; it was unlikely enough that he’d hired them in the first place. Milgrim found it rather shocking. His attempts to spot them, unsteady as he was, had yielded no very large leather-wrapped figures whatever. Nor, indeed, anyone who looked like they were part of any Red Team. Nor even Brown himself.
The Greenmarket looked suddenly deserted, aside from those he took to be produce sellers, all of whom seemed to be trying to use cell phones, and some of whom were yelling at one another in a fairly hysterical fashion.
Now sirens were rising, ululating in the distance. Approaching. Many, it seemed.
In spite of the agonizing stitch in his side, which made him want to bend double, he forced himself to remain approximately upright, and to move as quickly as he could.
He was crossing Union Square West at Seventeenth, and had the Corolla in sight, when some of the sirens simultaneously arrived and ceased. He looked back, along Seventeenth, and saw a police car and an ambulance sitting at angles in the intersection at Park, their rooftop lights frenetically red and blue. Three identical black SUVs appeared, from the east, on Seventeenth, sirenless, to disgorge bulky, black-clad figures that appeared to Milgrim, at this distance, to be wearing spacesuits. These were the new post-9/11 superpolice, he guessed, though he couldn’t remember what they were supposed to be called. Samson squads? Some of them entered the building through an entrance at the corner. Now the first of what sounded to be several fire engines.
No time to watch this, arresting as he found it. Brown’s bag was still in the car.
But the streetscape, he now realized, with a sharp pang of dismay, seemed utterly devoid of anything he could use to break a car window. His hand closed repeatedly on the nonexistent handle of the inexpensive Korean-made claw-hammer he’d last used to access the interior of an automobile, but then someone else’s hand closed viselike on his left shoulder, while his right wrist was twisted up behind his back with near dislocating force.
‘They’re gone,’ Brown was saying quietly. ‘They were jamming our radios and the cell frequencies. If we’re talking, they’re gone. Get out now. The others are already clear. They have him in custody? A Hercules team?’ Brown sighed. ‘Shit,’ he said, with finality.
Hercules teams, Milgrim thought. That was it.
‘Move,’ Brown ordered. ‘They’ll be sealing off the area.’ He yanked open the Corolla’s rear door and shoved Milgrim inside, face-first. ‘Floor,’ he commanded.
Milgrim managed to pull his feet in just as Brown slammed the door. He smelled relatively new automobile carpet. His knees were on Brown’s black bag and laptop, but he knew that the moment, if there had ever been one, was past. He concentrated on breathing more regularly, and on preparing his excuse for having come uncuffed.
‘Stay down,’ Brown said, getting in on the driver’s side and starting the engine. He pulled away from the curb. Milgrim felt him turn right on Union Square West, then slow. The front passenger door opened, as someone scrambled in. They pulled away again, the door slamming.
‘Give it to me,’ Brown said.
Milgrim heard something rustle.
‘You used gloves?’ The level calm in Brown’s voice, Milgrim knew from experience, was a bad sign. Red Team One’s day in the park must not have gone well.
