‘Yes,’ someone said. A man’s voice, perhaps familiar from the meeting earlier, in the New Yorker. ‘That part came off when he dropped it.’
Brown said nothing.
‘What happened?’ the other asked. ‘Were they expecting us?’
‘Maybe they’re always expecting someone. Maybe they’ve been trained to do that. Hell of a concept, isn’t it?’
‘How’s Davis?’
‘Looked like a broken neck, to me.’
‘You didn’t say he was dangerous.’
Milgrim closed his eyes.
‘Blackwater dump your ass for dumbness?’ Brown asked. ‘Is that what I’ll find out when I ask them?’
The other said nothing.
Brown stopped the car. ‘Get out,’ he said. ‘Leave town. This afternoon.’
Milgrim heard the door open, the man get out, the door close.
Brown drove on. ‘Get that Transit ticket off the rear window,’ Brown said.
Milgrim crawled up on the rear seat and pulled the suction cups off the glass. They were about to turn onto Fourteenth. He looked back up Union Square West and saw a black Hercules team vehicle blocking an intersection. He turned around, hoping Brown wouldn’t order him back on the floor, and placed his feet, carefully, on either side of Brown’s laptop and bag. ‘Are we going back to the New Yorker?’
‘No,’ said Brown, ‘we are not going back to the New Yorker.’
Brown drove instead to a rental drop-off in Tribeca.
They took a cab to Penn Station, where Brown bought two one-way tickets to Washington on the Metroliner.
45 Breakbulk
‘Where do you think the truck’s headed?’ Hollis asked, poolside, from her cozy depression in the edge of the giant Starck futon.
‘Not the Bay,’ said Bigend, sunken so deeply, beside her, that she couldn’t see him. ‘Soon we’ll know whether or not it’s Portland. Or Seattle.’
She settled further back, watching a small plane’s lights cross the empty center of the luminous sky. ‘You don’t think they’d go inland?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I think this is about a port, one with a container facility.’
She raised herself, as well as she could, on her right elbow, trying to see his face. ‘It’s coming?’
‘Perhaps that’s what Bobby’s sudden departure means, and not simply that you scared him off.’
‘But you think it’s coming?’
‘It’s a possibility.’
‘Do you know where it is?’
‘The Hook,’ he said. ‘Remember it? That large Russian helicopter? A helicopter capable of flying hundreds of miles, picking up our container from one vessel and transferring it to another?’
‘Yes.’
‘There are some interesting possibilities for keeping track of commercial shipping, today. Of a specific vessel, I mean. But I doubt any of them would help us trace our mystery box, because I think it keeps changing vessels. At sea. We’ve heard about the use of that venerable Hook, early on, but you don’t need to go that large to shift a single forty-foot container from one vessel to another. Provided you don’t need to actually fly it too far, that is. Ours is a forty-footer, by the way. All either forty or twenty. Standardization. Containers full of merchandise. Packets full of information. No breakbulk.’
‘No what?’
‘Breakbulk. Noncontainerized freight. Old-fashioned shipping. Crates, bundles. What shipping used to be. I’ve thought that in terms of information, the most interesting items, for me, usually amount to breakbulk. Traditional human intelligence. Someone knowing something. As opposed to data mining and the rest of it.’
‘I don’t know anything about data mining,’ she said, ‘or the rest of it.’
‘We’ve been buying into data mining at Blue Ant.’
‘Shares in a company?’
‘No. I suppose you could say we’re subscribing. Or hoping to. No simple matter.’
‘To what?’
‘The Swiss have a system known as Onyx, based on Echelon, the system originally developed by the British and the Americans. Onyx, like Echelon, uses software to filter the contents of satellite communication for specific search terms. There are Onyx listening posts at Zimmerwald and Heimenschwand, in Canton Bern, and at Leuk in Canton Valais. I spent a week in Heimenschwand, when I was thirteen. Dada.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Dada. My mother was researching a minor Dadaist.’
‘The Swiss? The Swiss have that kind of system?’
‘Last month,’ he said, ‘the Sunday edition of Blick published a classified Swiss government report based on Onyx intercepts. It described a fax sent from the Egyptian government to their embassy in London, referencing covert CIA detention facilities in Eastern Europe. The Swiss government refused to confirm the existence of the report. They did, however, immediately initiate judiciary procedures against the publishers, for having leaked a secret document.’
‘You can "subscribe" to something like that?’
‘Bankers,’ said Bigend, ‘require good information.’
‘And?’
‘Blue Ant requires good bankers. And they happen to be Swiss. But we don’t quite have the work-around in place. New search terms have to be approved by an independent commission.’
Her eyes were playing tricks on her. Vast translucent things seemed to be squirming, in the depth of the luminous sky. Tentacles the length of nebulae. She blinked and they were gone. And?’
‘Only two members of that commission, so far, would have reason to be favorably disposed to our bankers’ suggestions. But we’ll see.’ She felt him sit up. ‘Another drink?’
‘Not for me.’
‘But you see,’ he said, ‘the sheer complication of that sort of intelligence, and of course the innate limitations. Not to mention that we’d have no idea who else might be keeping track of search terms. You, however, with your potential to get closer to Bobby Chombo…’ He stood, stretched, adjusted his jacket, and turned, bending to offer her his hand. She took it, letting him help her to her feet. ‘You’re breakbulk, Hollis.’ The smile flashed. ‘Do you see?’
‘I keep trying to tell you. He didn’t like it at all, that Alberto brought me there. It was an obvious deal-breaker, for Bobby. You may think he’s blown town because his ship’s coming in, but I know how little he liked it that I turned up.’
‘First impressions,’ he said. ‘Those can change.’
‘I hope you’re not expecting me to just walk in on him again?’
‘Leave all that to me. First I have to see where he’s going. In the meantime, work with Philip. See what else Odile and her friends have to show you. It’s no accident that Bobby Chombo overlaps two such apparently different spheres. The important thing is that we’ve had our conversation, reached our agreement. I’m delighted to know we’ll be working together.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, automatically, then realized that that really was all she could say. ‘Good night,’ she said, then, before the pause had too much of a chance to lengthen.
She left him there, beside the ficus trees in their giant flowerpots.
46 VIP
‘You aren’t carrying identification,’ the old man said, in English, turning off the small camera on which he’d been repeatedly observing a piece of video.
‘No,’ said Tito. There were two cheap, battery-operated plastic dome lights stuck to the truck’s ceiling, dimly illuminating the two of them on their uncomfortable bench. Tito had been counting the truck’s turns, trying to keep track of their direction. He guessed they were northwest of Union Square now, heading west, but was growing less certain.
The old man took an envelope from his pocket and passed it to Tito. Tito tore it open and removed a New Jersey driver’s license with his picture on it. Ramone Alcin. Tito examined the picture more closely. It seemed to be him, though he’d never posed for it, nor had he ever worn the shirt Ramone Alcin wore. He looked at the signature. He would first have to practice drawing it upside down, as Alejandro had taught him. It made him uncomfortable, having identification for which he hadn’t yet learned the signature. Though for that matter, he reminded himself, he didn’t know how to drive.
The old man took the envelope back, replacing it in his pocket. Tito took his wallet from within his jacket and slid the license behind the transparent window, noting as he did how someone had meticulously scratched the license’s laminated surface by repeatedly removing it from and replacing it in another wallet. He thought of Alejandro.
‘What else do you have?’ the old man asked.
‘One of the Bulgarian’s guns,’ Tito said, forgetting that a stranger might not know them.
‘Lechkov. Give it to me.’
Tito produced the gun, in its handkerchief. A dusting of fine white salt spotted his black jeans as he passed it to the old man.
‘It’s been fired.’
‘I used it in the restaurant of the hotel,’ Tito said. ‘I was about to be taken. One of the men who came after me was a runner.’
‘Salt?’ The old man sniffed delicately.
‘Sea salt. Very fine.’
‘Lechkov liked to suggest that he made the umbrella used to assassinate Georgi Markov. He didn’t. Like these, his work seemed to belong to an earlier era. Likely he began as a village bicycle mechanic.’ He tucked handkerchief and gun inside his coat. ‘You had to use it, did you?’
However familiar this man might be with his family’s history, Tito thought, he would not know about the orishas. Explaining that it had been Elleggua’s choice to use the Bulgarian’s gun would not help. ‘Not in his face,’ Tito said. ‘Low. The cloud stung his eyes, but they would not have been cut.’ This was probably the truth, as Tito remembered, but the choice, if one had been made, had been Elleggua’s. ‘Water would relieve the blindness.’
‘White powder,’ said the old man, Tito deciding that the extra lines in his hatchet cheeks constituted a smile. ‘Not so long ago, that would’ve become very complicated. Now, I doubt it. In any case, you won’t be carrying this through the metal detectors before boarding.’
‘Boarding,’ said Tito, his throat suddenly dry and fear churning in the pit of his stomach.
‘We’ll leave it,’ said the old man, as if he sensed Tito’s panic, and wished to reassure him. ‘Any other metal?’
Crowded in the darkness of the tiny plane, curled against warm metal, clutching his mother’s legs, her hand in his hair, the engine straining against their weight. Moonless night. Barely clearing the trees. ‘No,’ Tito managed.
The truck stopped. He became aware of a roaring, a drumming, deep and terrible. Suddenly louder as one rear door opened, sunlight slicing in. The one from Prada’s shoe department hauled himself quickly in. The old man undid his seat belt and swung himself back over the bench. Tito did the same, blank, terrified. ‘Union Square’s locked down,’ the one from Prada said.
‘Get rid of this,’ said the old man, passing the other the Bulgarian gun, in its handkerchief. He took his camera from his coat pocket and removed the coat, the Prada man helping him on with a pale raincoat. ‘Take your jacket off,’ the old man ordered Tito.
Tito obeyed. Prada man handed him a short green cloth jacket with something embroidered in yellow on the back. Tito pulled it on. He was handed a green cap with a yellow bill, JOHNSON BROS. TURF AND LAWN in yellow across the front. He put it on. ‘Sunglasses,’ said Prada man, handing Tito a pair. He bundled Tito’s jacket into a small black nylon bag, zipped it shut, and handed it to him. ‘Glasses,’ he reminded Tito. Tito put them on.
They climbed out into the sunlight, into the terrible roaring. Tito saw the sign on the chain-link, a few feet from the truck.
AIR PEGASUS VIP HELIPORT
Beyond the chain-link, the roaring helicopters.
Then Vianca was there, on her motorcycle, face hidden by her mirrored visor. He saw the Prada man pass her the Bulgarian’s gun, folded in its handkerchief. She shoved it into the front of her jacket, threw Tito a quick wave goodbye, and was gone, the whine of her engine lost beneath the thunder of helicopters.
Tito, his stomach full of cold heavy fear, followed the others into this VIP.
And when they had gone through the metal detector, and shown their identification, and had crouched, scuttling, under the whirling blades, and were belted in, and the roaring sharpened, until something seemed to pick the helicopter up as if on a cable, and bore it away, rising, out across the Hudson, Tito could only close his eyes. So that he did not see the city, as they rose, nor see it recede behind him.
Eventually, still without opening his eyes, he was able to pull his Nano from the front of his shirt, extract the earphones from the left front pocket of his jeans, and find the hymn he’d played on his Casio, to the goddess Ochun.
47 N Street
There were ghosts in the Civil War trees, past Philadelphia.
Earlier the track had passed near streets of tiny row houses, in neighborhoods where poverty seemed to have been as efficient as the neutron bomb was said to be. Streets as denuded of population as their windows were of glass. The houses themselves seemed to belong less to another time than to another country; Belfast perhaps, after some sectarian biological attack. The shells of Japanese cars in the streets, belly down on bare rims.
But past Philadelphia, and after taking another tablet, Milgrim began to catch glimpses of spectral others, angels perhaps. The late-afternoon sun dressed the passing woods with Maxfield Parrish foxfire, and perhaps it was that epileptic flicker generated by the train’s motion that called these beings forth. He found them neutral, if not actually benign. They belonged to this landscape, this hour and time of year, and not to his story.
Across the Metroliner’s aisle, Brown tapped steadily on his armored laptop. An anxiety stole into Brown’s face when he wrote, Milgrim knew, and he saw it again now. Perhaps Brown was uncertain of his writing abilities, or habitually prepared to have what he wrote rejected or criticized excessively, by whoever it was to whom he wrote. Or was it that he was simply uncomfortable with reporting a lack of success? As far as Milgrim knew, Brown had never been successful at what he had seemed to be trying to do, with the IF and the subject. Capturing the subject seemed to have been a win position for Brown, and Brown had tried, but hadn’t managed it. Seizing whatever it was the IF delivered to the subject had seemed to be another, though secondary, win position, and possibly Brown had succeeded in that, today, in Union Square. Capturing the IF had never seemed like a win position. Had they captured the IF, Milgrim assumed, both subject and the IF’s extended family would be alerted to Brown’s game. The planting of the signal-grabber in the IF’s room would have been negated. So, Milgrim assumed, what Brown was doing now was drafting his report of what had happened in Union Square.
But he thought it unlikely that any such report would mention him, or Dennis’s black associates, and that was probably a very good thing. He was concerned that Brown had not yet mentioned to him the fact of his having been discovered no longer cuffed to the bench, but he felt prepared; the cuff itself had failed, and Milgrim, sensing trouble in the park, had taken it upon himself to return to Brown’s car, the better to facilitate their departure.
