William Gibson - Spook Country

“What did it look like? His tie.”

“Black and gray, thin diagonal stripes.” She felt him glance at her. “And himself waiting in an alcove off a sitting room.”

She knew he meant the old man. She looked out the window, not really seeing anything.

“He introduced us and left me there. Pot of nasty coffee. Old-school British coffee. I had a list of questions I’d prepared, but I never asked them. Just answered his. It was like some weird inversion of a Kipling script. This old man, this American, in a Savile Row suit he’d probably bought in the sixties, asking me these questions. Pouring nasty coffee. Utterly at home in this club. Wee decoration on the lapel of his suit, the ribbon for some medal, no bigger than a windowpane of acid.” He shook his head. “Hooked. I was hooked.” Smiling.

“There must be things I shouldn’t ask you,” she said.

“Not really. Just things I mustn’t answer.”

“Why’s he doing this, whatever it is?”

“He used to be in national security, American government. Career man. Retired a few years before 9/11. I think he went a bit feral, frankly, after the attacks. Frothing, really. Not a good idea to get him on the topic. He’d been hugely well connected, it seemed. Friends everywhere. And the lot of them pissed as well, at least to hear him tell it. Old spooks. Most retired, some not quite, some soon forced out because they wouldn’t toe a party line.”

“There’s more than one of him, you mean?”

“Not really, no. I find it easiest to think of him as slightly off, really. I imagine they do too, though it doesn’t stop them giving him help, and funding. Amazing what you can do with a little money, when you’re given a free hand. He’s as sharp as anyone I’ve met, sharper, but he has obsessions, topics he’s queer about. One of them, a big one, is people profiting from the war in Iraq. He gets onto things, things he learns certain people have done. Through his various connections, he hears things, puts bits together.”

“What for?”

“So that he can fuck with them, frankly. Fuck them up. Over. Sideways, if he can manage it. Loves it. Lives for it.”

“Who are those people?”

“I don’t know, myself. He says it’s better that way. He also says that, so far, none of them have been anyone I’d ever ordinarily have heard of.”

“He was telling me about money laundering, about huge shipments of cash, to Iraq.”

“Yes indeed,” he said, looking at his watch. He turned the key, starting the ignition. “We’ve been driving them wild, with this one. He plays this game of cat and mouse with them.” He smiled. “Makes them think they’re the cat.”

“You enjoy it yourself, it seems to me.”

“I do. I do indeed. I’ve a very diverse and peculiar skill set, and ordinarily no place to use the half of it. Soon enough, I’ll be too old for most of it. Truth to tell, I probably already am. Main reason we’ve got our man Tito in the back here. Snake on ice, our Tito.” He took a right, another left, and they were waiting at a light, turning left on a street with more traffic, more lights. He reached back and thumped the back of his seat. “Tito! Ready up!”

“Yes?” asked Tito, removing his iPod plugs.

“Hotel’s in sight. Coming up. Climb over the lady, here, get out that side. He’ll be parked just past the hotel, waiting for you.”

“Okay,” said Tito, as the van slowed, tucking his white plugs back into the hood of his sweatshirt.

He looked, just then, she thought, like a very serious fifteen-year-old.

M ilgrim had been thinking about offering Brown a Rize, when he spotted the IF walking along the sidewalk. They were headed east on the street where the Princeton Hotel was, coming up on it again, but bound, Milgrim guessed, for another wifi session, courtesy of CyndiNet.

They backed directly on the tracks, these places. Milgrim supposed you could see the floodlit stacks of boxes, from their rear windows. From some of them, even, the one particular turquoise box that had Brown so visibly stressed.

He knew that he wasn’t really going to suggest that Brown try a Rize, but he did believe that, just now, it would probably be a good thing. Brown had been muttering, periodically, and when he wasn’t doing that, Milgrim could see the muscle in his jaw working. Milgrim had sometimes, though rarely, given tranquilizers to civilians, people who weren’t habituated. Though only if they seemed to him to be in serious need, and if he himself was sufficiently well supplied. He always explained that he had a prescription (he often had several) and that these drugs were perfectly safe, if used as directed. He just didn’t get into the matter of who or what might be doing the directing.

He had never seen Brown this tense, before.

Brown had come into his life a week before Christmas, on Madison, a solid figure zipped into the same black jacket he wore tonight. A hand around Milgrim’s upper arm. Flashing something in a black badge case. “You’re coming with me.” And that had been it. Into a car that might as well have been this one, driven by an unsmiling younger man wearing a tie decorated with Goofy in a Santa Claus outfit.

Two weeks later, he’d been sitting with Brown at a table near the window of that magazine place on Broadway, eating sandwiches, when the IF had walked past in a black leather porkpie.

Now here he came again, the IF, but in a short, bright green jacket, with a construction worker’s yellow helmet tucked under his arm. Sort of like a younger Johnny Depp, but ethnic, off to some nightshift job. It struck Milgrim as wonderful, somehow. A taste of home. “There’s the IF,” he said, pointing.

“What? Where?”

“There. Green jacket. That’s him, right?”

Brown braked, peering, spun the wheel, and gunned the Taurus hard, left, into the path of oncoming traffic, aiming for the IF.

Milgrim had time to see that the furiously screaming girl in the passenger seat of the car braking violently in front of them was actually giving them the finger.

He had time to see the IF’s face register the Taurus, the boy’s eyes widening in amazement.

He had time to note the dullness of the beige brick of the Princeton Hotel.

He had time to see the IF do something patently impossible: shoot straight into the air, knees tucked, flipping over, the Taurus and Milgrim passing directly through the space he’d occupied an instant before. Then the Taurus clipped something that wasn’t the IF, and a pale hard thing like a very large nursery toy, full of concrete, manifested from nowhere at all, somehow, between Milgrim and the dashboard.

The Taurus’s alarm was sounding.

They weren’t moving.

He looked down and saw something on his lap.

He picked it up. A rearview mirror.

The horrible, hard, pale thing that had hurt his face was deflating. He prodded it with the mirror. “Airbag,” he said.

He looked to the left as he heard Brown’s door open. Brown’s airbag, undeflated, crowned the steering column like some nameless, ominous device in the window of an orthopedic supply house. Brown swatted it out of his way, feebly but viciously. Stood swaying, supporting himself on the open door.

Milgrim heard a siren.

He looked down at Brown’s laptop, in its black nylon bag between the seats. He watched his hand unzip the side pocket, enter, and emerge with a number of bubble-packs. He looked out, over his detumescent airbag, and watched Brown, who seemed to have hurt his leg, hop awkwardly to a hooded trash receptacle, slip Skink’s Glock from his jacket, and slide it quickly under the spring-loaded black flap. He hopped back to the car, more slowly now and taking greater care, and leaned against the mysteriously wrinkled hood. His eyes met Milgrim’s. He gestured, urgently. Out.