William Gibson - Spook Country

He saw another store detective, white, in a beige coat and black shirt and tie. They must be provided with allowances for clothing, he thought, as he rounded a white modular wall of cosmetics and arrived at the men’s shoes.

The Guerreros recognized the stranger standing there, a three-eyelet black alligator oxford in his hand. The strength of their recognition startled.

Blunt and broad shouldered, dark hair cut very short, the other, perhaps thirty, turned. Replaced the shoe on its shelf. “Sixteen hundred,” he said, his English warmly accented in some unfamiliar way. “Not today.” He smiled, teeth white but crowded. “Know Union Square?”

“Yes.”

“At the north end of the park, Seventeenth Street, the Greenmarket. One sharp, don’t show before then. If you did, he wouldn’t be there. If you get within ten paces, and nothing’s happened, break and run. They’ll think you’ve seen them. Some of them will try to take him. Others will try to take you. Get away, but lose this in the process.” He dropped the white rectangle of the iPod, in its Ziploc bag, into Tito’s jacket’s side pocket. “Run for the W, the hotel on the corner of Park and Seventeenth. Know it?”

Tito nodded, remembering having wondered about the name as he’d passed the place.

“Main entrance on Park, up from the corner. Not the revolving door nearest the corner; that’s the hotel’s restaurant. But that’s where you’re actually headed, the restaurant. In past the doorman, but then right. Not up the steps to the lobby. Not into the lobby, understand?”

“Yes.”

“Through the door, right, you’ve made a U-turn. You’re headed south. When you get to the revolving door, at the corner of the building, left. Into the restaurant, straight through it, into the kitchen, exit onto Eighteenth. Green step-van with silver lettering, south side of Eighteenth. I’ll be there.” He turned his head, as if scanning the display of shoes, most of which, today, Tito found very ugly. “They have radios, the men who’ll try to take you, and phones, but all of that will be jammed, as soon as you move.”

Tito, pretending to look at a zip-sided black calf boot, touched its toe with his finger, nodding noncommittally, turning to go.

Oshosi knew that the white detective in the beige jacket had been watching them.

The door of the frosted-glass elevator slid aside. Brotherman emerged, tall hair streaked with copper, eyes glazed, gait unsteady. The white detective instantly forgot Tito, who crossed to the elevator, entered, and pushed the button for the twenty-foot ride to the ground floor. As the door closed, Tito saw the one the Guerreros had recognized, grinning at the detective’s approach to Brotherman, who was about to become abruptly sober, dignified, and firmly but courteously disinclined to be interfered with by a store detective.

B y the time Milgrim had finished shaving and gotten dressed, Brown was holding a meeting in the adjoining room. Milgrim had never known Brown to have a visitor before, and now he was having three, three males. They had arrived within minutes of Brown having made his call, and Milgrim had gotten brief glimpses of them as they’d filed into Brown’s room. From what little he’d managed to see, he knew that they were white and conventionally dressed, and that was it. He wondered if they too had been staying here, particularly as two of them were in shirtsleeves and carried no coats or jackets.

He could hear them talking now, conversing quickly, but couldn’t make anything out. Brown was making various decisive sounds, yeas or nays, and periodically interrupting to reel off what Milgrim took to be revised strategic requirements.

Milgrim decided to treat this as opportunity to pack, and having considered the circumstances, to re-Rize. Packing consisted of putting his book in the pocket of his overcoat, and seeing to toiletries. He rinsed and dried the blades of his blue plastic razor. He used a piece of toilet paper to tidy up the threads and cap of his small tube of Crest toothpaste; replacing the cap, he carefully furled the tube to its shortest possible length, watching it plump out satisfyingly as he did so. He washed and rinsed his white toothbrush, dried its bristles with one piece of toilet paper, and then wrapped them loosely in another. He considered taking the small bar of New Yorker soap, which lathered up nicely, but then he wondered why it was that he assumed they wouldn’t be coming back.

Something was up. Afoot. He remembered reading Sherlock Holmes, centuries before. Leaving the bar of wet soap on the edge of the soap-and-whisker-speckled sink, he tucked the rest of his possessions away in the various pockets of the overcoat. He assumed that Brown would still have the wallet and identification he’d confiscated on first picking Milgrim up (he’d pretended to be a cop, and Milgrim wouldn’t have doubted it, not on that first meeting), but otherwise these grooming aids, and his book, plus the clothes he was wearing and the overcoat, comprised the whole of Milgrim’s worldly possessions. Plus two 5 mg tablets of Rize. He thumbed the pack’s penultimate dose into his palm and considered it. Was this a worldly possession, he wondered. Unworldly, he decided, swallowing it.

Hearing Brown’s meeting conclude with what sounded like a determined slapping of palms, he walked to the window. No need to see them, really, or they him. If indeed they weren’t already quite familiar with him. But still.

“Move it,” said Brown, from the door.

“I’m all packed.”

“You’re what?”

“‘Game is afoot.’”

“You want a broken rib?”

But Brown’s heart wasn’t in it, Milgrim saw. He was distracted, focused utterly on his impending operation, on whatever needed to be done now with regard to IF and Subject. He had his cased laptop in his hand, and his other black nylon bag slung across his shoulder. Milgrim watched him pat himself down with his free hand, locating pistol, handcuffs, flashlight, knife, whatever other empowerments he didn’t leave home without. Spectacles, Milgrim recited to himself, testicles, wallet, watch. “Ready when you are,” he said, and walked past Brown into the hallway.

As his benzo-boost kicked in, in the elevator, Milgrim became aware of a not unpleasurable excitement. Something really was afoot, and as long as it didn’t mean another four hours in the laundry on Lafayette, it promised to be interesting.

Brown marched them across the lobby, to the main entrance, and out into surprisingly bright sunlight. A bellman was holding open the driver’s door of a recently washed silver Corolla and proffering the key, which Brown took, handing the man two dollars. Milgrim rounded the back of the Corolla and got in. Brown was placing his laptop and other bag on the floor behind the passenger seat. When they rode together in a car like this, Milgrim knew, he rode shotgun, probably because that made him easier to shoot. Was that why they called it that? He heard Brown power-lock the doors.

Brown headed east on Thirty-fourth. The weather was fine, bespeaking some genuine onset of spring, and Milgrim imagined himself a pedestrian, strolling pleasantly. No, he thought, a pedestrian strolling with a mere 5 mg of Rize on hand. He reframed the image, hanging Brown’s black bag over his shoulder. Wherein, he assumed, was kept the brown paper bag with the Rize supply.

“Red Team One,” Brown said, firmly, as they took a right on Broadway, “south on Broadway, for Seventeenth.” He listened to some distant voice.

Milgrim looked over and saw the gray plug in Brown’s ear, the gray wire vanishing into the collar of his jacket.

“I’m going to leave you in the car,” Brown said, touching something at his collar, a mute control. “I’ve got Transit Authority tags that’ll keep the traffic cops off it, but I’m thinking I’ll cuff you.”