William Gibson - Spook Country

She turned to say something, and in doing so saw him asking the girl at the counter, in the Standard’s restaurant, for American Spirit cigarettes. Same yellow pack. Same beard. Like moss around a drain.

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.”