‘You didn’t answer my question.’
‘Bear with me. There is public history, and there is secret history. I am proposing to make you privy to secret history. Not because you are a journalist, actually, but because you are, to whatever extent, a celebrity.’
‘You want to tell me your secrets because I used to be a singer in a band?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘though not because you used to be a singer in a band, specifically. Because you are, by virtue of having been a popular singer –’
‘Never that popular.’
‘You already constitute a part of the historical record, however small you might prefer to see it. I’ve just checked the number of your Google hits, and read your Wikipedia entry. By inviting you to witness what we intend to do, I will be using you, in effect, as a sort of time capsule. You will become the fireplace brick behind which I leave an account, though it will be your account, of what we do here.’
She looked at him. ‘The scary thing is, I think you’re serious.’
‘I am. But I want you to understand the price, before you agree.’
‘Who says I’m agreeing?’
‘If you’re to witness history, Hollis, you necessarily become a part of that which you witness.’
‘Am I free to write about what I might see?’
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘although by freely agreeing to accompany us, in the eyes of the law you probably become an accessory. More seriously, though, the person we are about to interfere with is powerful, and has every reason to suppress knowledge of what you’d witness. But that will be your business. If you agree to go with us.’
‘And if I don’t?’
‘We will have someone take you to another location, and keep you there until we’re gone. That will complicate things for us, as it means moving Bobby and his equipment, since you already know about this place, but that should be no concern of yours. Should you choose that option, you won’t be harmed in any way. Blindfolded, but not harmed.’
The man from the alley, she saw, had closed the long case, and had been joined, further down the second long table, by the dark-haired boy. ‘I don’t see why you have any reason to trust my end of that,’ she said. ‘Why would you trust me not to call the police, as soon as I’m free?’
‘I was trained,’ he said, ‘by the government organization of which I was a member, to assess character very quickly. My work involved making crucial personnel decisions, often literal snap judgments, under extremely difficult conditions.’ He stood up.
‘For that matter,’ she said, looking up at him, ‘why should I believe you?’
‘You won’t betray our agreement, should we reach one,’ he said, ‘because you simply aren’t the type. By the same token, you’ll trust us. Because, in fact, you already do.’
He turned then, walked over to the man from the alley, and began a quiet conversation.
She heard the scratching of a cigarette lighter as Bobby, on the floor, fired up a Marlboro.
Where would Bobby sleep, she wondered, without his gridlines? Then noticed, just in front of the old man’s chair, a thin, dusty-blue, perfectly straight line, the kind produced with carpenter’s chalk and a taut string.
Then saw another, crossing the first at right angles.
69 Magnets
Garreth took Tito to the far end of the second table, where ten disks, each no thicker than a small coin, and about three inches in diameter, were arranged on a half-sheet of fresh plywood.
Someone had sprayed these with turquoise-blue paint, then with a faint dusting of dark gray, then with a dull topcoat. Each one lay in its own blur of overspray. The three aerosol cans stood in a row at one end of the plywood. Putting on latex gloves, Garreth carefully picked one up, exposing the perfect round of unsprayed plywood beneath. He showed Tito its unpainted back, bright silver metal. ‘Rare-earth magnets,’ he said, ‘painted to match the box as closely as possible.’ He indicated two printouts, photographs of a shipping container, a dirty turquoise blue. ‘Once you place one on a flat steel surface, it’s difficult to remove, except with a knife or a thin screwdriver blade. We have ten, but you’ll have a maximum of nine holes to cover. The spare is in case you drop one, but try not to.’
‘How do I carry them?’
‘They either stick together, almost too firmly to separate, or they repel one another, depending on which way they’re facing. So you’ll use this.’ He indicated a rectangle of stiff black plastic, covered with silver tape. A length of olive paracord was looped through two holes, at one end. ‘Soft plastic envelopes under the tape, one for each disk. You carry it in down the front of your jeans, then hang it around your neck for climbing. Slip them out one at a time as you cover the nine holes. They should cover any spalling completely, as well as sealing the hole.’
‘What is "spalling"?’
‘When the bullet pierces the painted steel,’ Garreth said, ‘it bends the steel inward. The paint isn’t flexible, so it shatters. Some of it vaporizes. Result is bright, shiny steel, visible around the hole. The hole itself is no bigger than the tip of your finger. It’s the spalling that visually identifies a bullet hole, so we have to cover it. And we want as tight a seal as possible, because we don’t want to be setting off sensors.’
‘And when they have been closed?’
‘You have to find your own way out. The man who’ll take you in can’t help us with that. We’ll go over the maps and the satellite images one more time. Don’t climb until the midnight buzzer stops. When you’ve sealed it, get out. When you’re out, call us. We’ll pick you up. Otherwise, the phone’s only for an emergency.’
Tito nodded. ‘Do you know that woman?’ he asked.
‘I hadn’t met her before,’ said Garreth, after a pause.
‘I have seen posters of her, in shops on St. Marks Place. Why is she here?’
‘She knows Bobby,’ Garreth said.
‘He is unhappy to see her?’
‘He’s having a bit of a meltdown generally, isn’t he? But you and I, we have to keep this central to mission, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. When you go up to the box, you’ll be wearing this.’ He indicated a black filter-mask in a large Ziploc bag. ‘We don’t want you inhaling anything. When you get down from the stack, stick it somewhere it won’t be found for a while. And no prints, of course.’
‘Cameras?’
‘Everywhere. But our box is in the top tier of a stack, and if everything’s gone right, it’s in a blind spot. The rest of the time, you hood up and we hope for the best.’
‘The woman,’ Tito asked, concerned by what seemed a serious breach of protocol, ‘if she isn’t one of you, and you’ve never seen her before, how do you know she isn’t wearing a wire?’
Garreth indicated the three black antennas of the yellow-cased jammer Tito had seen him use in Union Square, further down the table. ‘Nothing here broadcasting,’ he said, softly, ‘is there?’
70 Pho
Brown took Milgrim to a dim, steamy Vietnamese restaurant, one with no English signage whatever. It felt like the anteroom of a sauna, which Milgrim found agreeable, but smelled of disinfectant, which he could have done without. It had the look of having been something else, long ago, but Milgrim found it impossible to say what that might have been. Perhaps a Scottish tearoom. Forties plywood with halfhearted Deco accents, long submerged under many coats of chipped white enamel. They ate pho, watching thin slices of pink beef graying in the shallow pool of hot, almost colorless broth, over sprouts and noodles. Milgrim had never seen Brown use chopsticks before. Brown definitely knew how to put away a bowl of pho, and tidily. When he was done, he opened his computer on their black Formica tabletop. Milgrim couldn’t see what he was doing. He supposed there might be wifi here, leaking down from the single story above, or that Brown might be looking at files he’d downloaded earlier. The old lady brought them fresh plastic tumblers of tea that might have passed for hot water, except for a peculiarly acetic aftertaste. Seven in the evening and they were the only customers.
Milgrim was feeling better. He’d asked Brown for a Rize, in the little park, and Brown, engrossed in whatever he was doing on the laptop, had unzipped a pocket on its bag and handed Milgrim an entire unopened four-pack. Now, behind Brown’s upright screen, Milgrim popped a second Rize from its bubble and washed it down with the tea-water. He’d brought his book in from the car, thinking Brown would probably work on the laptop. Now he opened it.
He found a favorite chapter: ‘An Elite of Amoral Supermen (2).’
‘What’s that you keep reading?’ asked Brown, unexpectedly, from the other side of the screen.
"‘An elite of amoral supermen,’" Milgrim replied, surprised to hear his own voice repeat the chapter title he’d just read.
‘That’s what you all think,’ said Brown, his attention elsewhere. ‘Liberals.’
Milgrim waited, but Brown said no more. Milgrim began again to read of the Beghards and the Beguines. He was well into the Quintinists, when Brown spoke again.
‘Yes sir, I am.’
Milgrim froze, then realized that Brown was using his cell.
‘Yes sir, I am,’ Brown repeated. A pause. ‘It is.’ Another silence. ‘Tomorrow.’ Silence. ‘Yes sir.’
Milgrim heard Brown close his phone. Heard the rattle of china up the narrow stairwell of the house on N Street. The same sir? The man with the black car?
Brown called for the bill.
Milgrim closed his book.
Moisture in the air threatened to fall but didn’t. Larger drops fell from trees and wires. This had arrived while they were in the pho sauna, a different kind of moisture. The mountains had gone behind indeterminate scrims of cloud, shrinking the bowl of sky in a way Milgrim found comforting.
‘Do you see it?’ Brown asked. ‘Turquoise. Top one of three?’
Milgrim squinted through the Austrian monocular Brown had used in the surveillance van in SoHo. Superior optics, but he couldn’t find the point of focus. Fog, lights, steel boxes stacked like bricks. Angular puzzle-pieces of pipe, gantries of vast derricks, all of it jiggling, overlapping, like junk at the end of a kaleidoscope. And then it came together for him, one turquoise rectangle, topmost on its pile. ‘I see it,’ he said.
‘What are the odds,’ Brown said, roughly taking the monocular, ‘of them stacking it where we can see it?’
Milgrim decided that the question was best treated as rhetorical, and kept silent.
‘It’s off the ground,’ Brown said, pressing the padded eyepiece into the orbit of his eye. ‘Up high. Less likelihood of tampering.’ Even with that bit of apparently better news, it seemed, Brown was still rattled by the sight.
They stood facing a length of new gray twelve-foot chain-link, beside a long, plain-looking tavern, beige brick, out of which grew, surprisingly, a small, brown, four-story Edwardian hotel, called the Princeton. Milgrim had noticed how bars here seemed to possess these vestigial hotels. This one also had a large satellite dish, one of so archaic a pattern that he could imagine a younger person thinking it original to the building.
Behind them was a T-intersection, a tree-lined street running down into the street the Princeton stood on. The port, Milgrim thought, was like the long but oddly narrow train layout that had hugged a friend’s grandfather’s rec-room walls. The Princeton’s street bordered it, not far from CyndiNet’s little park.
‘Visible from the street,’ Brown said, the monocular like something growing out of his eye. ‘What are the odds against that?’
Milgrim didn’t know, and if he had, he wouldn’t necessarily have told Brown, who was obviously made very anxious and unhappy by this. But bolstered by the second Rize, he did attempt to change the subject: ‘The IF’s family, in New York?’
‘What about them?’
‘They haven’t been texting in Volapuk, have they? You haven’t needed any translation.’
‘They aren’t texting in anything, that we know of. They aren’t phoning. They aren’t sending e-mails. They haven’t shown. Period.’
Milgrim thought about the signal-grabber that Brown had used, to get around the IF’s habit of constantly changing phones and numbers. He remembered his own suggestion, to Brown, to have the NSA do it, use that Echelon or something. What Brown had just said made him wonder, now, if someone might not already be doing that.
‘Get in the car,’ Brown said, turning back to the parked Taurus. ‘I don’t need you thinking, not tonight.’
71 Hard to be one
‘What do you know about money laundering, Hollis?’ the old man asked, passing her a round foil dish of peas and paneer. The four of them were having an Indian meal at the far end of the second long table. They’d ordered in, which Hollis supposed was what you did if you were plotting whatever these people were plotting, and didn’t want to have to go out.
Bobby, who didn’t like Indian, and didn’t want to sit with them, was making do with a large plain cheese pizza that had required separate delivery.
‘Drug dealers,’ she said, using her plastic fork to shovel peas onto a white paper plate, ‘wind up with piles of cash. Someone told me that the big guys throw the fives and ones away, too much trouble.’ Inchmale loved factoids relating to illicit behavior of all kinds. ‘But it’s hard to buy anything very substantial with a truckload of cash, and the banks only let you deposit a certain amount, so the guy with bags of cash has to accept a steep discount, from someone who can get it back into circulation for him.’
The old man helped himself to colorfully flecked rice and chunks of chicken in bright beige sauce. ‘A sufficiently large amount of cash comes to constitute a negative asset. What could you do with ten million, say, if you couldn’t account for where it had come from?’
Why was he telling her this? ‘How big would that be, ten million?’ She thought of Jimmy’s five thousand, in her purse. ‘In hundreds.’
‘Hundreds, always,’ he said. ‘Smaller than you think. Two-point-four billion, in hundreds, only took up the same amount of space as seventy-four washing machines, although it was considerably heavier. A million in hundreds weighs about twenty-three pounds and fits in a small suitcase. Ten million in hundreds weighs a little over two hundred and thirty pounds.’
‘Did you see that two-point-four billion yourself?’ She thought it was worth asking.
‘June 2004,’ he said, ignoring the question, ‘the Federal Reserve Bank of New York opened its vault on a Sunday, to prepare that amount for shipment to Baghdad, aboard a couple of C-130 cargo planes.’
‘Baghdad?’
‘We sent nearly twelve billion dollars in cash to Iraq, between March 2003 and June 2004. That June shipment was intended to cover the transition of power from the Coalition Provisional Authority to the interim Iraqi government. The largest one-time cash transfer in the history of the New York Fed.’
‘Whose was it?’ It was the only question she could think of.
‘Iraqi funds, generated mainly from oil revenues, and held in trust by the Federal Reserve, under the terms of a United Nations resolution. The Development Fund for Iraq. Under the best of circumstances, say in a country like this one, in peacetime, keeping track of the ultimate distribution of even one billion is practically impossible. Oversight of twelve billion, in a situation like the one in Iraq? It’s literally impossible, today, to say with any authority exactly where the majority of that money went.’
