William Gibson: Zero history

“Win,” announced Garreth, his hand extended to mute all phones. “The Scrubs. The model worked. Optimal venue. Unless there’s wind.”

“What model?” Hollis asked.

“Someone at the University of Colorado ran one for us. Scrubs was best for us. Excuse me.” He took his hand off the box and began to type. The van slowed, honked, changed lanes, stopped briefly, turned.

“Scrubs, dear,” he said to someone else. “Need you in the air. Don’t run lights, don’t speed, get there.”

“What’s happening?” Heidi asked quietly.

“I think they’ve agreed on where they’ll do the exchange,” Hollis said. “I think we like it.”

“They’re getting one ugly-ass version of Bollywood boyfriend.” Heidi shrugged.

“I thought you were trying not to go there.”

“Trying,” agreed Heidi.

“Do you feel better?”

“Yeah,” said Heidi, and reached under the majorette jacket to rub her ribs, “but it’ll come back, if I can’t get out of this fucking truck.”

“Somewhere to go now,” Hollis said.

“Not yet,” Garreth said to someone, “but she’s airborne.” Then he said something in a language Hollis didn’t recognize at all, and fell silent.

“What language was that?” she asked, as the van made another turn.

“Catalan,” he said.

“Didn’t know you spoke it.”

“I can only say very rude things about his mother.” He sat up straighter. “Pardon.” He fell silent again. “Fully operative,” he said, finally. “Optimal so far.” He was quiet again. “I appreciate that, but no. You’ll have to keep them back. Well out of the area. I have a lot on the ground. Too many moving parts to have anyone of yours in the mix. Not negotiable, no.” She saw his hand come down on the switchbox. “Bugger.”

“What?”

“Bastard’s got a private ambulance on the prowl, so he says. Specialists sitting up late in Harley Street, in case Chombo should be damaged.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“I had. We’ve medical backup ourselves. Big End’s ambulance won’t just have medics in it. Snatch squad for Milgrim, that would be.”

“Does he know where it is?”

“They call him first.”

“How bad is that?”

“No telling,” he said. He took his hand off the box, and immediately smiled. “Darling,” he said. “Brilliant. Above it? Give me the fix. Four? Moving away from it? Pull back, drop. Approach about two feet off the ground, car between you. Need the number, make, model. Then make sure no one’s inside it. But no IR, in case it flares off the glass and they see it.”

“Infrared,” said Heidi.

The uppermost of the two screens mounted on black pipe came on, a washed-out oscilloscope green. He dialed the lighting down.

Hollis and Heidi edged forward on the foam, peering up at the screen. Image from a moving camera, abstract, unreadable. Then Hollis saw a big British license plate, as if recorded by some robot on the bottom of the sea.

“Good girl,” Garreth said. “Now raise it a bit and give us a look inside. Then follow them. The one with the parcel: that’s Gracie. Get on him and stay on him.” He touched the box again, turned. “We don’t like a parcel,” he said to Fiona, then back to the green screen.

Care for mineral water,” asked the driver, “or fruit? The basket’s right there.”

Milgrim, seated on the floor behind the passenger seat, noticed the small basket for the first time. He’d been watching the penguin joggle against the moonroof, and wondering what would happen if the Taser went off. “Is there a croissant?” he asked, leaning toward the basket.

“Sorry, no. Apple, banana. Prawn crackers.”

“Thank you,” said Milgrim, and pocketed a banana. He wanted to ask what the driver thought they were doing, actually, out in the night with a dazzle-painted robotic penguin, filled with helium, but he didn’t. He suspected that the driver had no idea; that he was someone who drove, who drove and rather specifically had no idea, and was pleasant, unobtrusive, an extremely good driver, someone who knew the city very well. So Milgrim opted to ask nothing at all. Wherever they were going was where Garreth wanted them, and perhaps Fiona would be there too.

The penguin rolled slightly as they executed a roundabout. Milgrim sensed the scrupulousness of the boy’s driving; he’d be doing nothing at all in violation, probably driving a steady two kilometers below the speed limit. Milgrim had seen people, sometimes quite unlikely people, drive this way on their way to drug deals. Transactional, he thought of it. Really the whole evening felt extremely transactional, though he’d never been offered mineral water or fruit, doing that.

The boy wore one of those headsets designed to look as much as possible, it seemed to Milgrim, like a pinball flipper had been pounded into his ear, the flipper part being the microphone. He periodically spoke softly to this, though mainly to answer yes or no, or to repeat the names of streets Milgrim promptly forgot. Milgrim gathered, though, that the boy now knew where they were going.

And suddenly, no prior announcement, it seemed that they were there.

“Where are we?” asked Milgrim.

“Wormwood Scrubs.”

“The prison ?”

“ Little Wormwood Scrubs,” said the driver. “You’ll cross the road, straight in from here, keep going straight, into the grass. He said to tell you she’s under a sheet of camouflage and may be difficult to see.”

“Fiona?”

“He didn’t say,” the boy said primly, as though unwilling to be further involved. He got out, closed the door, walked quickly around to the rear, and opened that door.

Milgrim kept the penguin low, away from the moonroof, as he edged crabwise back to the open rear door. There was something inherently cheerful about the buoyancy of a balloon, he thought. It must have been a wonderful day when they first discovered buoyant gases. He wondered what they’d put them in. Varnished silk, he guessed, for some reason picturing the courtyard at the Salon du Vintage.

The boy held the balloon for him as he climbed out, his shirt eerily white in the light from the nearest streetlight. Milgrim became aware of the presence of a large empty space, an utter anomaly in London. Opposite side of the road. Empty and dark.

“A park?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” said the boy. “Go straight across.” He pointed. “Keep going. You’ll find her.” He handed the balloon’s tether, the loop of nylon fishing line, to Milgrim.

“Thank you,” said Milgrim. “Thanks for the banana.”

“You’re welcome.”

Milgrim crossed the road, hearing the van start behind him, drive away. He kept walking. Through grass, across a paved walk, into more grass. Such a peculiar, slightly ragged emptiness, the grass uneven. None of the landscaping, the deep architecture, the classical bones, of this city’s parks. Waste ground. The grass was wet, though if it had been raining earlier, he hadn’t noticed. Dew, perhaps. He felt it through his socks, though Tanky amp; Tojo’s brogues were better for this than pavement, the black lugs digging in. Walking shoes. He imagined walking somewhere with Fiona, somewhere as wide as this but less spooky. He wondered if she liked that. Did motorcycle people like walking? Had he ever liked walking? He stopped and looked up at London’s luminous, faintly purple sky, all the lights of Europe’s largest city caught, held there, obscuring all but a few stars. He looked back, across the wide, well-lit road, to an ordinary, orderly jumble of housing he didn’t culturally understand, houses or flats or condos, and then back to the oddness of these Scrubs. It felt as though you could score here. He couldn’t imagine that a city this size wouldn’t conduct drug traffic in a place like this.