William Gibson - Spook Country

“It’s an intimate process,” the old man said. “Entirely about intimacy.” He spread his hand, held it, as if above an invisible flame. “An ordinary cigarette lighter will cause a man to tell you anything, whatever he thinks you want to hear.” He lowered his hand. “And will prevent him ever trusting you again, even slightly. And will confirm him, in his sense of self, as few things will.” He tapped the folded paper. “When I first saw what they were doing, I knew that they’d turned the SERE lessons inside out. That meant we were using techniques the Koreans had specifically developed in order to prepare prisoners for show trials.” He fell silent.

Tito heard the lapping of waves.

This was still America, they said.

The Jeep, covered with a tarp and branches, had been waiting for them near the weathered concrete runway that Garreth said had once belonged to a weather station. There were push brooms in the back of the Jeep. Someone had used them to sweep the concrete, in preparation for their landing.

A boat was coming, Garreth had said, to take them to Canada. Tito wondered how large a boat it would be. He imagined a Circle Line tour boat. Icebergs. But the sun here was warm, the breeze off the sea gentle. He felt as though he had come to the edge of the world. The edge of America, the land he had seen unrolling beneath the Cessna, almost entirely empty. The small towns of America, at night, had been like lost jewels, scattered across the floor of a vast dark room. He’d watched them pass, from the Cessna’s window, imagining people sleeping there, perhaps distantly aware of the faint drone of their engines.

Garreth offered Tito an apple, and a knife to cut it with. It was a crude knife, like something you might see in Cuba, the handle covered in chipped yellow paint. Tito opened it, discovering DOUK-DOUK printed on the blade. It was very sharp. He cut the apple into quarters, wiped both sides of the blade on the leg of his jeans, passed it back to Garreth, then offered the slices of fruit. Garreth and the old man each took one.

The old man looked at his worn gold watch, then out across the water.

S core some shit,” said Brown, sounding like he’d rehearsed the line, as he handed Milgrim a fold of colorful foreign bills. They were shiny and crisp, decked with metallic holograms and, it looked to Milgrim, printed circuitry.

Milgrim, in the passenger seat of the Taurus, looked over at Brown. “Excuse me?”

“Shit,” said Brown. “Dope.”

“Dope?”

“Find me a dealer. Not some corner guy. Somebody in the business.”

Milgrim looked out at the street they were parked on. Five-story brick Edwardian retail structures lacquered with the unhappiness of crack or heroin. The fuckedness quotient way up, down in this part of town.

“But what are you trying to buy?”

“Drugs,” said Brown.

“Drugs,” Milgrim repeated.

“You have three hundred and a wallet with no ID. If you get picked up, I don’t know you. You get picked up, you forget the passport you came in on, how you got here, me, everything. Give them your real name. I’ll get you out eventually, but if you try to screw me, you’re in there for good. And if you can get the guy to do the deal in a parking garage, that’s a major plus.”

“I’ve never been here before,” said Milgrim. “I don’t even know if this is the right street.”

“Are you kidding? Look at it.”

“I know,” Milgrim said, “but a local would know what’s going on this week. Today. Is this where the biz is, or did the police just shift it three blocks south? Like that.”

“You look,” said Brown, “like a junkie. You’ll do fine.”

“I’m not known. I might be mistaken for an informant.”

“Out,” ordered Brown.

Milgrim got out, the foreign cash folded in his palm. He looked down the street. Every shop boarded up. Plywood papered with rain-wrinkled multiples of film and concert posters.

He decided it would be best to behave as though he were shopping for his own flavor of pharmaceuticals. This would up his authenticity immediately, he thought, as he knew what to ask for, and that the units would be pills. This way, if he actually managed to buy something, it might even turn out to be worth keeping.

The day suddenly seemed brighter, this foreign but oddly familiar street more interesting. Allowing himself to forget Brown almost entirely, he strolled along with a new energy.

An hour and forty minutes later, having been offered three different shades of heroin, cocaine, crack, meth, Percodan, and marijuana buds, he found himself closing a transaction for thirty Valium tens at five each. He had no idea whether these would prove genuine, or if they even existed, but he had an expert’s conviction that he was being asked, as an obvious tourist, to pay at least twice the going rate. Having separated the hundred and fifty the seller required, he’d managed to slip the other half into the top of his left sock. He did things like this automatically, when buying drugs, and no longer recalled any particular event having led to the adaptation of a given strategy.

Skink, so called for the purpose of this transaction at least, was white, in his thirties perhaps, with vestigial skater fashion-notes and a high, intricately tattooed turtleneck Milgrim assumed disguised some early and likely unfortunate choices in iconography. A cover-up, perhaps of jail work. Visible neck or facial tattoos did serve, Milgrim thought, to suggest that one probably wasn’t a cop, but the jail look rang other, less comfortable bells. As noms of convenience went, “Skink” wasn’t particularly comforting, either. Milgrim wasn’t quite sure what one was; either reptilian or amphibian, he thought. Skink definitely wasn’t the most reliable-looking retailer Milgrim had come across, in the course of his stroll along this diversely supplied thoroughfare, but he was the only one, so far, who’d responded positively to Milgrim’s request for Valium. Though he didn’t, he said, have it on him. They so seldom do, thought Milgrim, though he nodded understandingly, indicating that he was okay with whatever Skink’s arrangements might be.

“Up the street here,” Skink said, fiddling with the ring through the outer limit of his right eyebrow.

Milgrim always found these worrying. They seemed more prone to infection than things put through other, more central, more traditional parts of the face. Milgrim was a believer in evolution, and knew that evolution strongly favors bilateral symmetry. Asymmetrical individuals tended to be less competitive, in most species. Though he had no intention of mentioning it to Skink.

“In here,” said Skink, portentously, stepping sideways into an entranceway. He opened an aluminum-framed door whose original glass had been replaced with plywood.

“It’s dark,” protested Milgrim, as Skink grabbed his shoulders, hauling him into a dense, ammoniac reek of urine. Skink shoved him, hard, and he fell back against what were all too obviously stairs, their painful impact complicated by a loud confusion of toppling bottles. “Chill,” Milgrim quickly advised an abrupt darkness, Skink having shut the door behind him. “Money’s yours. Here.”

Then Brown was through the door, in a brief burst of sunlight. Milgrim felt, rather than saw, Brown lift Skink bodily off his feet and drive him headfirst into the stairs, between Milgrim’s legs.

A few more empties toppled from the stairs.

An uncomfortably bright beam, recalled from the IF’s room off Lafayette, darted clinically across the crumpled Skink. Brown bent, ran one hand over Skink’s lower back, then, with a grunt of effort, used both hands to flip him over. Milgrim saw Brown’s spotlit hand unzipping the fly of Skink’s saggy pants. “Glock,” said Brown, thickly, plucking, like some gross-out conjuring trick, a large pistol from Skink’s open pants.