The pilot of the white boat, saying nothing, took it out fast, in a direction other than the one he’d come.
Tito listened to a dog barking. A man came to the railing of the high wharf and waved to them. Garreth waved back. The stranger turned away, was gone.
The old man looked at his watch, then at the sky.
Tito had heard the seaplane before he’d seen it, coming in only a few feet above the water. ‘Don’t say anything,’ Garreth told him, as the plane’s propeller stopped and it floated the last few yards to the pier.
‘How are you gentlemen?’ asked the pilot, a man with a mustache, climbing down onto the nearest pontoon as Garreth held the plane’s wing.
‘Very well,’ said the old man, ‘but I’m afraid we’re overweight.’ He indicated the Pelican. ‘Mineral samples.’
‘Geologist?’ the pilot asked.
‘Retired,’ said the old man, smiling, ‘but it seems I’m still hauling rocks.’
‘Shouldn’t be a problem.’ The pilot opened a hatch in the side of the plane, which looked nothing like the Cessna. It had only one propeller, and looked built for work. Tito watched as Garreth and the pilot wrestled the Pelican case off the dock and up into the hatch.
He saw the old man blow air between his pursed lips, relieved, as they got it into the plane without dropping it.
‘How long will we be?’ the old man asked the pilot.
‘All of twenty minutes,’ said the pilot. ‘Shall I call you a cab?’
‘No, thank you,’ the old man said, climbing up into the plane. ‘We have our own transportation.’
They landed on a river, near a very large airport, where Tito, still amazed at the mountains he’d seen in the distance, helped Garreth push the Pelican case and their other few pieces of luggage, on a cart, up a long ramp of steel mesh.
Tito sat on the edge of the cart, looking toward the river, where another seaplane was taxiing for takeoff in late-afternoon sunlight. Gravel crunched as Garreth and the old man drove up in a white van. Tito helped Garreth load the case and their other bags into it.
There were only two seats in the van, no side windows in the back. Tito settled himself, squatting, on the Pelican case. The old man looked back. ‘Don’t sit on that,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t be good for your descendants.’ Tito moved away from the case, and used his own bag as a cushion instead.
After that, as they’d driven through a city, he’d seen almost nothing. Fragments of buildings, through the windshield and the rear windows. Until they’d arrived here, Garreth opening the rear doors onto an only partially paved alley, strange green ferns growing between broken asphalt and the peeling walls on either side. He’d helped Garreth with the Pelican case, up two flights of decrepit wooden stairs, and into this long, cluttered room.
Where this strange man, the one they called Bobby, had been waiting for them. Tito’s mother’s illness, which had begun in Sunset Park, where they had gone to stay with Antulio, after the attacks on the towers, had made him very anxious around people who behaved in certain ways.
He paced, this Bobby, and smoked, and spoke almost constantly. Garreth and the old man listened, listened and looked at one another.
Bobby said that it wasn’t good for him, doing this from home. It wasn’t good for him to be here, in his hometown, doing this, but it particularly wasn’t good for him to be here, in his own place, doing this, with the box a few blocks away. Tito looked at the Pelican case. Was this what Bobby meant by a box?
‘But you knew that,’ the old man said, quietly. ‘You knew that if it came here, it would be there.’
‘They’ve pinged it three times already,’ Bobby said. ‘Not part of the pattern. I think they’re here, and I think they’re pinging it from here, and I think they’re pinging it as they drive around, trying for a visual. I think they’re that close. Too close.’ He dropped his cigarette, ground it under his shoe, and wiped the palms of his hands on his dirty white jeans.
What did ‘pinged’ mean, Tito wondered.
‘But, Bobby,’ the old man said, softly, ‘you haven’t told us where it is, exactly. Where is it? Has it been off-loaded? We do need to know that.’
Bobby was lighting another cigarette. ‘It’s where you wanted it. Exactly where you wanted it. I’ll show you.’ He crossed to the long tables, the old man and Garreth following. Bobby tapped anxiously on a keyboard. ‘Right here.’
‘Which means they don’t have anyone on the inside, otherwise they’d shuffle it deeper into the deck.’
‘But you do, right?’ Bobby squinted through smoke.
‘That doesn’t concern you, Bobby,’ said the old man, more gently still. ‘You’ve done a long and very demanding job, but it’s coming to an end now. Garreth has your last installment here, as we agreed.’ Tito watched the old man’s hands, for some reason remembering him using the cane in Union Square.
Garreth took a pager from his belt, looked at it. ‘Delivery. I’ll be five minutes.’ He looked at the old man. ‘You’re okay?’
‘Of course.’
Bobby moaned.
Tito winced, remembering his mother.
‘I’m not ready for this,’ Bobby said.
‘Bobby’ said the old man, ‘you don’t have anything you have to be ready for. You really have nothing else to do, other than monitor the box for us. There’s no need for you to leave here, tonight. Or for the next three months, for that matter. We’ll be leaving soon, about our business, and you’ll be staying here. With your final payment. In advance. As agreed. You’re extremely talented, you’ve done an amazing job, and soon you’ll realize that you can relax.’
‘I don’t know who they are,’ Bobby said, ‘and I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know what they’ve got in that box.’
‘You don’t. You don’t know either.’
‘I’m afraid,’ Bobby said, and Tito heard his mother, after the attacks.
‘They have no idea who you are,’ said the old man. ‘They have no idea who we are. I intend to keep it that way.’
Tito heard Garreth, and someone else, coming back up the stairs. A woman appeared at the top of the stairs, Garreth behind her. In jeans and a dark jacket.
‘What’s she doing here?’ Bobby shook his hair back from terrified eyes. ‘What is this?’
‘Yes,’ said the old man, flatly. ‘Garreth, what is this?’
‘I’m Hollis Henry,’ the woman said. ‘I met Bobby in Los Angeles.’
‘She was in the alley,’ Garreth said, and now Tito saw that he held a long gray rectangular case with a single handle.
‘She’s not supposed to be here,’ said Bobby, sounding as though he was about to cry.
‘But you do know her, Bobby?’ the old man asked. ‘From Los Angeles?’
‘The strange thing,’ Garreth said, ‘is that I know her too. Not that we’ve met before. She’s Hollis Henry, from the Curfew.’
The old man raised his eyebrows. ‘The curfew?’
‘Favorites of mine in college. A band.’ He shrugged apologetically, the weight of the long case keeping one shoulder down.
‘And you found her, just now, in the alley?’
‘Yes,’ said Garreth, and suddenly smiled.
‘Am I missing something, Garreth?’ the old man asked.
‘At least it’s not Morrissey,’ Garreth said.
The old man frowned, then peered at the woman over his glasses. ‘And you’re here to visit Bobby?’
‘I’m a journalist now,’ she said. ‘I write for Node.’
The old man sighed. ‘I’m not familiar with it, I’m afraid.’
‘It’s Belgian. But I can see I’ve upset Bobby. I’m sorry, Bobby. I’ll go now.’
‘I don’t think that would be a good idea at all,’ the old man said.
67 Wardriving
Milgrim sat beside Brown on one of the two benches in a very small park, under the bare branches of a row of young maples. In front of him was fifty feet of close-cropped grass, a six-foot green-painted chain-link fence, a short steep decline covered with brambles, a wide gravel roadbed stained rust-red by its four lines of track, a paved road, and a vast stack of those metal boxes he’d seen on the ship in the harbor. He watched a streamlined metallic-blue trailer-truck drive quickly past, along the road, pulling a long, rust-streaked gray box that evidently had wheels attached.
Beyond the box-pile were mountains. Beyond those, clouds. They made Milgrim uneasy, these mountains. They didn’t look as though they could be real. Too big, too close. Snowcapped. Like the logo at the start of a film.
He looked to his right, focusing instead on a vast, almost featureless rectangular berg of concrete, windowless, probably five stories tall. On its front, in huge simple sanserif letters, reversed into the concrete between massive molded columns, he read
BC ICE & COLD STO RAGE LTD
RAGE. He glanced at Brown’s busily shifting laptop screen, where satellite images of this port area zoomed in and out; were replaced, were overlaid with yellow grids.
They had been wardriving, Brown called it, ever since requisitioning Skink’s Glock. This meant driving around with Brown’s armored laptop open on Milgrim’s lap, announcing wireless networks as they passed through them. The laptop did this in a flat, breathless, peculiarly asexual voice that Milgrim found distinctly distasteful. Milgrim had had no idea that people had these networks in their houses and apartments, the sheer number of them amazing, nor that they extended so far beyond the owner’s actual property. Some people named them after themselves, others were simply called ‘default,’ or ‘network,’ and some were named things like ‘DarkHarvester’ and ‘Doom-smith.’ Milgrim’s job was to watch a window on the screen that indicated whether or not a network was protected. If a network was unprotected, and had a strong signal, Brown could park and use his computer to get on the Internet. When he did this, color satellite images of the port would appear. Brown could zoom in on these, allowing Milgrim to see the tops of individual buildings, even the rectangles of individual boxes. Initially, Milgrim had found this mildly interesting, but now, after three hours of it, he was ready for Brown to find what he was looking for and take him back to the Best Western.
This bench had been an improvement on sitting in the car, though, and Brown seemed to have a solid connection from an apartment (‘CyndiNet’) in the three-story stucco complex behind them, its brown-painted steel balconies stacked with barbecues, plastic chairs, and bicycles. But now Milgrim’s butt ached. He stood and rubbed it. Brown was engrossed in whatever he was doing. Milgrim walked forward, across the rough short grass, expecting to be stopped. No order came.
When he reached the green fencing, he looked through it, to his left, and found a rectangular orange diesel train engine, its blunt nose painted with crisp diagonals in black and white. It sat, inert, on the nearest set of tracks, beside a rectangular white sign, obviously intended to be read by trainmen, that said HEATLEY. On a yellow triangle a few feet before it, REDUCE SPEED. He read the names on individual boxes in their stacks: HANJIN, COSCO, TEX, ‘K’ LINE, MAERSK SEALAND. Beyond them, further inside the port, were tall buildings of unknown purpose, and the arms of those same orange cranes he’d seen from the black Zodiac.
He looked back at Brown, hunched over his little screen, lost to the world. ‘I could run away,’ Milgrim said, softly, to himself. Then he touched the green-painted steel horizontal that topped the fence, turned, and walked back to the bench.
He missed his overcoat.
68 Snap
Hollis thought he looked a little like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who’d be invited quail shooting with the vice-president, though too careful to get himself shot. Thin steel spectacle frames. His remaining hair neatly barbered. Seriously good dark overcoat.
They sat facing one another now in worn metal chairs that might once have done duty in a church hall. His legs were crossed. He wore shoes that made her think of old French priests, bicycling. Black toe-cap oxfords, polished to a dull glow, but thickly soled with black rubber.
‘Miss Henry,’ he began, then paused, his voice reminding her of an American consular official she’d met in Gibraltar, when she’d been seventeen and had had her passport stolen. ‘Pardon me. You aren’t married?’
‘No.’
‘Miss Henry, we find ourselves in an awkward situation.’
‘Mr.…?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I can’t give you my name. My friend tells me that you’re a musician. Is that correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you tell me that you are also a journalist, on assignment from a British magazine.’ A gray eyebrow rose, above an arc of polished steel.
‘Node. Based in London.’
‘And you’d approached Bobby in Los Angeles, regarding your article?’
‘I did. Though I can’t say he was pleased with my having done that.’ She glanced at Bobby, hunched on the dirty floor, gripping his knees, eyes hidden by his forelock. From another of these chairs, a dark-haired boy of interestingly indeterminate race watched Bobby with what she took to be a combination of fascination and unease.
The other man, the one who’d discovered her in the alley, and so politely but firmly invited her up here, had now opened the long gray case he’d been given by the man she’d surreptitiously watched him meet in the alley. Not quite surreptitiously enough. This lay with its lid up, now, on one of the long tables, but seated here she couldn’t see what it contained.
‘I’m sorry for coming here,’ she said. ‘He’s in terrible shape.’
‘Bobby’s under stress,’ the old man said. ‘His work.’
‘Locative art?’
‘Bobby’s been working for me, assisting with a project of mine. It’s nearing closure. The stress Bobby is experiencing has to do with that. You’ve arrived at a most inopportune time, Miss Henry.’
‘Hollis.’
‘We can’t let you go, Hollis, until we’ve completed what we’ve come here for.’
She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it.
‘We aren’t criminals, Hollis.’
‘Excuse me, but if you aren’t criminals, or the police, I don’t see why I can’t leave when I want to.’
‘Exactly right. The fact is, we are intent, here, on committing a number of criminal offenses, under both Canadian and American law.’
‘Then how aren’t you criminals, exactly?’
‘Not in your ordinary sense,’ he said. ‘Our motivation is decidedly nonstandard, and what we intend to do, as far as I know, has never been attempted before. I can assure you, though, that we do not anticipate killing anyone, and we hope to harm no one physically.’
‘ "Anticipate," in that context, isn’t so reassuring. And I don’t suppose you want to tell me what it is you’re up to.’
‘We intend to damage a specific piece of property, and its contents. If we’re entirely successful’ – and here he smiled briefly – ‘the damage will go unnoticed. Initially.’
‘Do you have some optimal reason you’d prefer for me to suppose you’re telling me this? Maybe we could just cut to that. Save time. Otherwise, I see no reason for you to be telling me anything at all.’
He frowned. Uncrossed his legs. With the black priest shoes flat on the floor, he rocked back an inch or so on the chair’s rear legs. ‘If my associate weren’t so absolutely convinced of your identity, Miss Henry, things would be very different.’
