Spook Country (24 page)

C ommercial airliners were like buses, Milgrim decided, staring at the textured ceiling in his room in this Best Western. But a Gulfstream was like a taxi. Or like having a car. He wasn’t ordinarily impressed by wealth, but his Gulfstream experience, Vegas decor aside, had left him struggling with issues of scale. Most people, he assumed, would never set foot on one. It was the sort of thing you knew existed, that you took for granted, however theoretically, as something some people owned. But most people, he now suspected, would never have to get their heads around the reality of the thing.

And he didn’t know what going through ordinary Canadian customs was like, but everything had gone exactly as Brown had said it would, in the Gulfstream version. They’d landed at a large airport, then taxied to a dark place with nothing much at all outside. An SUV with lights on top had driven up, and two uniformed men had gotten out of it. When they’d come aboard, one in a jacket with gold buttons and the other in a tight, ribbed pullover with cloth patches over the shoulders and elbows, they’d accepted the three passports the pilot had handed them, opened each one, compared it to a printout, said thanks, and left. The one with the commando sweater was East Indian, and looked like he lifted weights. That was it. The pilot had pocketed his passport and gone back into the cockpit. Milgrim had never even heard him speak. He and Brown got their bags and left, walking down a long stairway that someone must have rolled up to the plane.

It had been cold, the air damp and full of the sound of planes. Brown had led them to a parked car, had felt under the front bumper, and come up with keys. He opened it and they got in. Brown had driven slowly away as Milgrim, beside him, had looked back at the lights of a tanker truck, rolling toward the Gulfstream.

They’d driven past an odd, pyramidal building and stopped at a chain-link gate. Brown had gotten out and punched numbers into a keypad. The gate had started rattling aside as Brown got back into the car.

The city had been very quiet, as they drove in. Deserted. Scarcely a pedestrian. Strangely clean, lacking in texture, like video games before they’d learned to dirty up the corners. Police cars that looked as though they had nowhere in particular to go.

“What about the plane?” Milgrim had asked, as Brown drove fast across a long multilaned concrete bridge over what he took to be the second of two rivers.

“What about it?”

“Does it wait?”

“It goes back to Washington.”

“That’s quite a plane,” Milgrim had said.

“That’s what money will buy you, in America,” Brown had said, firmly. “People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?”

“Why?” asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown’s part.

“Because they have better stuff,” Brown had replied. “No other reason.”

Milgrim thought about that now as he lay looking up at the ceiling. It was textured with those crumbs of rigid foam, the size of the last few pieces left in an empty bag of popcorn. They were stuff, those texturizing bits, and so was a Gulfstream. But almost anybody got those bits, during the course of an ordinary life. He supposed you needed money just to get away from some kinds of stuff. A Gulfstream, though, was another kind of stuff. It bothered him, in some unaccustomed way, that Brown had access to such things. Brown belonged to the New Yorker, Milgrim felt, or to this Best Western. Low-pixel laminate. The Gulfstream, the Georgetown townhouse with the housekeeper who cut hair, that felt wrong, somehow.

But then he wondered if Brown might not actually have the DEA connections he’d imagined he might have. Maybe he borrowed the plane from the people he got the Rize from? They seized things from serious dealers, didn’t they? Boats. Planes. You read about that.

That would explain the shag carpeting, too.

T he pilot followed highways.

Tito could see this now, sitting up in the front with him, the fear having somehow absented itself with the takeoff from Illinois and the pilot’s offer of the seat beside his.

Like a stranger beside you on a bus, he thought now, fear, then unexpectedly getting up, getting off. Keep your mother and the flight from Cuba in its own separate drawer. This was much better.

Gratitude to Ellegua; may the ways be opened.

The flat country through which they followed the thin straight lines of highway was called Nebraska, the pilot had told him, pressing a button on his headset that allowed Tito to hear him with his own headset.

Tito ate one of the turkey sandwiches the man with the cowboy hat and refueling truck had given them in Illinois, careful with the crumbs, while he watched Nebraska unroll beneath them. When he finished the sandwich, he folded the brown paper bag it had come in, propped his elbow against the padded ledge at the top of the door, where the window started, rested his head on his cupped hand. His headset made a clicking sound. “Information Exploitation Office,” he heard the old man say.

“It’s a DARPA program, though,” Garreth said.

“DARPA R and D, but always intended for IXO.”

“And he’s gotten into a beta version?”

“The Sixth Fleet has been using something called Fast-C2AP,” the old man said. “Makes locating some ships as easy as checking an online stock price. But it’s not PANDA, not by a long shot. Predictive analysis for naval deployment activities. If it doesn’t get dumbed down, PANDA will comprehend behavioral patterns of commercial vessels, local to global; their routes, routine detours for fuel or paperwork. If a ship that always travels between Malaysia and Japan turns up in the Indian Ocean, PANDA notices. It’s a remarkable system, not least because it actually would contribute to making the country safer. But, yes, he does seem to have accessed some sort of beta version, and cross-referenced a vessel on it with the box’s most recent signal.”

“Earning his wage in that case,” said Garreth.

“But I ask myself,” the old man said, “who is it we’re dealing with, here? Is he a genius of some kind or, really, at the end of the day, just a talented and audacious burglar?”

“And the difference would be?” asked Garreth, after a pause.

“Predictability. Are we inadvertently creating a monster, assigning him these things, facilitating him?”

Tito looked over at the pilot, deciding he seemed most unlikely to be listening to this conversation. He was steering the plane with his knees, and filling in blanks on a white paper form, on a battered, boxlike aluminum clipboard, with a hinged lid. Tito wondered if there would be a telltale of some kind, a light perhaps, that could indicate to Garreth and the old man that his headset was on.

“Seems an abstract concern, to me,” said Garreth.

“Not to me,” said the old man, “although it certainly isn’t that immediate. One immediate concern today is whether our positioning arrangement is reliable. If our box gets put down in the wrong spot, things will get complicated. Very complicated.”

“I know,” said Garreth, “but they’re Teamsters, those two. Old hands. At one time they would’ve been ‘losing’ boxes like this. Driving them straight out of there. Now, with an upgraded security regime, they’re not even thinking about that sort of thing. But good money for putting one down where we most need it, that’s something else.”

“For that matter,” said the old man, “if that box isn’t wearing the same owner code, product code, six-digit registration number, and check digit it was wearing when last seen, our Teamsters won’t find it for us, will they?”

“It is,” Garreth said. “The same ISO markings are encrypted in every transmission.”

“Not necessarily. That piece of equipment was programmed when the box had those markings. We can’t be certain that it still does. I just don’t want you to forget that we have other options.”

“I don’t.”

Tito removed the headset.

Without touching any of its buttons, he hung it from its hook above the door, put his head back, and pretended to be asleep.

Alphabet talk. He didn’t like it.

B rown rented a remarkably ugly and uncomfortable black boat called a Zodiac. A pair of huge inflated black rubber tubes, joined at the front in a crude point, a hard black floor down between these, four high-backed bucket seats mounted on posts, and the largest outboard motor, black, that Milgrim had ever seen. The rental operation, in the marina where the thing was docked, provided each of them with a semirigid flotation jacket, a red nylon garment apparently lined with sheets of only barely flexible foam. Milgrim’s smelled of fish, and chaffed his neck.

Milgrim couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a boat, and he certainly hadn’t expected to find himself in one today, very nearly the first thing in the morning.

Brown had come in through the door that connected their rooms, that now familiar arrangement, and shaken him awake, though not very forcefully. The gray boxes weren’t on the doors, here, and Milgrim had to assume that Brown had left them in Washington, along with the gun, the large folding knife, and perhaps the flashlight and handcuffs as well. But Brown was wearing his black nylon jacket, today, over a black T-shirt, and Milgrim thought he looked much more at home in it than he did in his suit.

After a silent breakfast of coffee and eggs in the hotel’s restaurant, they’d gone to the underground garage and retrieved the car, a Ford Taurus with a Budget sticker beside the rear license plate. Milgrim had come to prefer a Corolla.

Cities, in Milgrim’s experience, had a way of revealing themselves in the faces of their inhabitants, and particularly on their way to work in the morning. There was a sort of basic fuckedness index to be read, then, in faces that hadn’t yet encountered the reality of whatever they were on their way to do. By this standard, Milgrim thought, scanning faces and body language as Brown drove, this place had an oddly low fuckedness index. Closer to Costa Mesa than San Bernardino, say, at least in this part of town. It did remind him more of California than he would have expected it to, though maybe that was this sunshine, more San Francisco than Los Angeles.

Then he became aware of Brown whistling, under his breath, as he drove. Tunelessly, he thought, but with something akin to cheerfulness, or at any rate a degree of positive excitement. Was he picking up the vibe from this sunny but mildly overcast morning’s crowds? Milgrim doubted that, but it was weird nonetheless.

Twenty minutes later, having had some difficulty finding the place, they were in a parking lot beside a marina. Water, distant mountains, greenish glass towers looking as though they’d been built the night before, boats with white masts, seagulls doing seagull things. Brown was feeding a ticketing machine with large silver-and-gold tokens of some kind.

“What are those?” Milgrim asked.

“Two-dollar coins,” said Brown, whom Milgrim knew to avoid the use of credit cards whenever possible.

“Aren’t twos unlucky?” Milgrim asked, remembering something about racetrack money.

“Lucky they aren’t fucking threes,” said Brown.

Now, the huge outboard roaring, marina and city were both behind them. The Zodiac went pancaking along over very cold-looking gray-green water, a glassy shade not unlike that of the towers overlooking the marina. The flotation jacket, stiff and odorous as it was, was agreeably windproof. The cuffs of Milgrim’s Jos. A. Banks back-to-school trousers were flapping like pennants around his ankles. Brown drove the boat on his feet, leaning forward, only loosely strapped to his seat, the wind pressing unexpected angles into his face. Milgrim doubted Brown was still whistling, but he still seemed to be enjoying this too much. And he hadn’t actually seemed all that familiar with the business of casting off, if that was what it was called. They’d needed help from the rental guy.

The salt wind of their passage stung Milgrim’s eyes.

He looked back and saw an island or peninsula, nothing there but trees, out of which emerged a tall suspension bridge, like the Oakland Bay.

He zipped the floater coat higher, pulling his neck in. He wished that he could pull his arms and legs in. For that matter he wished there were a room in there, large enough for a cot, and that he could stretch out while Brown drove this boat. Like a tent, with semirigid red nylon walls. He could live with the fish smell, just to lie down, out of this wind.

Milgrim looked back at the city, a seaplane lifting out of the water. Ahead, he saw several large ships at varying distances, their hulls bisected with black and red paint, and beyond them what he guessed was a port, where giant orange arms craned in the distance, above a shoreline seemingly solid with the visual complexity of industry.

To their left, on some opposite, more distant shore, stood rows of dark tanks or silos, more cranes, more freighters.

People paid to have experiences like this, he thought, but it didn’t cheer him. This wasn’t the Staten Island Ferry. He was bouncing along at some insane speed on something that reminded him of a creepy folding rubber bathtub that he’d once seen Vladimir Nabokov proudly posing with in an old photograph. Nature, for Milgrim, had always had a way of being too big for comfort. Just too much of it. That whole vista thing. Particularly if there was relatively little within it, within sight, that was man-made.

They were gaining, he saw, on what he at first took to be some kind of floating Cubist sculpture in muted Kandinsky tones. But as they drew closer he saw that it was a ship, but one so burdened, pressed so far down in the water, that the red of its lower hull was submerged, only the black showing. Its black stern, though, stuck up shiplike enough, below the absurdist bulk of boxes, revealing it for what it was. The boxes were the colors of railroad freight cars, a dull brownish red predominating, though others were white, yellow, pale blue. He was almost close enough, now, to read the writing on this ship’s stern, when he was distracted by his discovery of a smaller ship, draped with black tires as if for some eccentric designer’s runway moment, pressing ardently against the tall black stern and churning out a huge V of foamy white water. Brown swung the Zodiac’s wheel suddenly, sending them bouncing double-time across the white water. Milgrim saw the tug’s name, Lion Sun, then looked up at the much taller letters on the back of the ship, their white paint streaked with rust. M/V Jamaica Star, and under that, in slightly smaller white capitals, PANAMA CITY.

Brown killed the engine. They bobbed there, in the sudden absence of the outboard’s roar. Milgrim heard a bell ringing, far off, and what sounded like a train whistle.

Brown removed a fancily printed metal tube from his floater jacket, unscrewed the end, and drew out a cigar. He tossed the tube over the side, nipped the end of the cigar with a shiny little gadget, put the nipped end in his mouth, and lit it with one of those six-inch fake Bics, the kind Korean delis used to sell for lighting crack. He took a long ritual pull on the cigar, then blew out a great cloud of rich blue smoke. “Son of a bitch,” he said, with what Milgrim, amazed at all of this, took to be immense and inexplicable satisfaction. “Look at that son of a bitch.” Looking after the square, floating box-pile that was the freighter Jamaica Star, where Milgrim couldn’t quite make out trademarks on the boxes, though he could see they were there. Slowly receding as the tug patiently shoved it on its way.

Milgrim, definitely not wanting to disturb this special moment, whatever it might be about, sat there, listening to little waves lap against the slick and swollen flank of the black Zodiac.

“Son of a bitch,” said Brown, again, softly, and puffed on his cigar.