William Gibson - Spook Country

“No.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Carlito had a friend look at it. No mere wire. Something only the government has, illegal to possess.”

“Are they the government?”

“‘Contractors,’” he said for the sock on the right, “‘we are contractors. That is how things are done here now. We contractors, we work for the government, yes. Except,’” and the sock turned toward Tito and crumpled its mouth for emphasis, “‘when we don’t.’” Alejandro made the socks bow to one another, lowered them. “They are working for someone in the government, perhaps, but not on government business. But they don’t necessarily know that. They wouldn’t want to know that, would they? Sometimes these contractors find it most convenient to know nothing at all. Do you see?”

“No,” Tito said.

“If I were more specific, I’d be inventing a story. Most of this, I infer from things Carlito and others have said. Here are some things that are definite, though. Tomorrow, you will meet a man in the basement of Prada, the men’s shoe section. He will give you an iPod and certain instructions. You will already have received a message, here, in Volapuk, instructing you to deliver the iPod to the old man, at the farmers’ market in Union Square, at one o’clock in the afternoon. You will leave here as soon as you receive the message. Once you have the iPod, you will be nowhere in particular, moving, until one. The family, of course, will be with you.”

“The others had been left in drop boxes,” Tito said.

“But not this time. You must be able to recognize this man later. You must do as he tells you. Exactly as he tells you. He is with the old man.”

“Would these contractors attempt to take the iPod?”

“They will not try to apprehend you, on your way to the delivery. Above all, they want the old man. But they also want the iPod, and they will do whatever possible to capture you, once they have the old man in sight.”

“But you know what I’ve been instructed to do?”

“Yes.”

“Can you explain why I’m to do it?”

“It looks to me,” Alejandro said, raising one sock-hand as if to peer into its nonexistent eyes, “as if the old man, or those who send him the iPods, wish to feed someone some puro.”

Tito nodded. Puro, in his family, meant the most perfectly groundless of lies.

S he ate a dollar-fifty-nine barbecue beef rib with broasted potatoes off a paper plate on the trunk of the Passat, waiting for Alberto to turn up at Mr. Sippee, a blessed oasis of peace and mutual respect situated in a twenty-four-hour convenience store at the Arco gas station at Blaine and Eleventh.

Nobody messed with you in Mr. Sippee. She knew that from her previous stay in Los Angeles, and that was what brought her here now. Close to the tents under the freeway, Mr. Sippee catered to an eclectic clientele of the more functionally homeless, sex workers of varied gender and presentation, pimps, police officers, drug dealers, office workers, artists, musicians, the map-lost as well as the life-lost, and anyone in serious search of the perfect broasted potatoes. You ate standing up, if you had a car to put your food on. If you didn’t, you sat on the curb out front. She had often thought, while eating there, that the United Nations could do worse than investigate the pacific powers of broasted potatoes.

She felt safe here. Even if she’d been followed from Bobby Chombo’s recently vacated space in the factory on Romaine. Which she didn’t think she had, really, but it had definitely felt like she should have been. The feeling had made a knot between her shoulder blades, but now Mr. Sippee was taking that away.

The car nearest hers was an ivory-hued vehicle that aspired to mildly Maybachian proportions. The two young men who belonged to it, in capacious hoodies and elaborate sunglasses, weren’t eating. Instead, they were soberly fiddling with their digital hubcaps. One sat behind the wheel, tapping patiently on a laptop, while the other stood staring at the left front hubcap, bisected by a sullenly pulsing line of colored LEDs. Were they, she wondered, the car’s owners, or someone’s technical support staff? Meals at Mr. Sippee could involve these questions of unfamiliar roles, of foreign economies of scale. Particularly when dining here in the small hours, as the Curfew had often done after an evening in the studio. Inchmale loved the place.

Now a classic Volks bug, frosted with doe-eyed Aztec princesses and quasi-phallic volcanoes, drew in past the magic hubcaps, Alberto at the wheel. He parked a few vehicles down and approached as she finished the last bite of her potatoes.

“He’s gone,” said Alberto, plaintively. “Is my car safe?” Looking around at their fellow diners.

“I know he’s gone,” she said. “I told you. And nobody messes with your car at Mr. Sippee.”

“Are you sure?”

“Your car’s safe. Where’s Bobby?”

“Gone.”

“Did you go there?”

“Not after what you said. But his e-mail addresses are all bouncing. And his work’s gone. Not on the servers he uses.”

“The squid?”

“Everything. Two pieces of mine, in progress. Sharon Tate—”

“I don’t want to know.”

He frowned at her.

“Sorry, Alberto. I’m on edge myself. It was creepy, turning up like that and finding the place cleaned out. Speaking of which, did Bobby have cleaners?”

“Cleaners?”

“A couple? Hispanic, oriental? Middle-aged, small?”

“By Bobby’s standards, the place was clean when I took you there. He just let it pile up. He’d never trust anyone in to clean. The last place he had, he moved out because they kept asking him if he had a meth lab. He’s that private, hardly ever goes out—”

“Where’d he sleep?”

“He slept there.”

“Where?”

“On a pad, in a bag, in a fresh square of grid. Every night.”

“Did he have a big white truck?”

“I’ve never even seen him drive.”

“Did he always work alone?”

“No. He’d bring kids in, if he was in crunch mode.”

“You get to know any?”

“No.”

She studied the pattern of potato grease on her empty paper plate. If you knew enough Greek, she thought, you could assemble a word that meant divination via the pattern of grease left on a paper plate by broasted potatoes. But it would be a long word. She looked over at the LED-wheeled ivory car. “Is their display broken?”

“You can’t see an image unless the wheels are turning. The system senses the wheel’s position and fires the LEDs it needs, to invoke an image in persistence of vision.”

“I wonder if they make them for a Maybach?”

“What’s a Maybach.”

“A car. Did Bobby ever talk about shipping containers?”

“No. Why?”

“Somebody’s piece, maybe?”

“He didn’t talk about other artists’ work. The commercial stuff, like that squid for Japan, sure.”

“Do you know any reason he’d just blow, this way?”

Alberto looked at her. “Not unless something about you frightened him.”

“Am I that scary?”

“Not to me. But Bobby’s Bobby. What worries me about this, though, aside from losing my work, which is killing me, is that I can’t imagine him getting it together to move out. Not that efficiently. The last time, getting out of the place where they thought he had a meth lab, and into the space on Romaine, took him three days. He hired some tweaker with a mail van. I finally had to come in to help him, to organize it.”

“I don’t know what it is that bothers me about it,” she said, “but something sure does.” The hoodie boys were still into their hubcaps, serious as NASA technicians, prelaunch. “Aren’t you going to eat?”