William Gibson - Spook Country

Brown came in and did his trick with the two little boxes, one on the door, one on the doorframe. They were that same shade of gray, like the gun and the flashlight and the monocular. He’d do the same with his own door, and all of this, as far as Milgrim knew, so that he, Milgrim, wouldn’t decide to leave while Brown was sleeping. Milgrim had no idea what the boxes did, but Brown had said not to touch the doors when they were up. Milgrim hadn’t.

Brown tossed what Milgrim took to be a four-pack bubble-card of Ativan down on Milgrim’s flowered bedspread and returned to his own room. Milgrim heard Brown’s television come on. He knew that music, now: Fox News.

He glanced toward the bubble-pack. It wasn’t the boxes on the doors that would keep him here.

He picked it up. “RIZE,” it said, there, and “5MG,” and what looked like, yes, Japanese writing. Or the way Japanese looks when they dress it up for packaging.

“Hello?” The connecting door was still open, between their rooms. The sound of Brown’s fingers, on his armored laptop, stopped.

“What?”

“What is this stuff?”

“Your medication,” said Brown.

“It says ‘Rize,’ and there’s Japanese writing on it. It’s not Ativan.”

“It’s the same fucking thing,” Brown said, his delivery slowing threateningly. “Same DEA Schedule fucking Four narcotic.”

Milgrim looked at the bubble-card.

“Now shut the fuck up.”

He heard Brown begin to type again.

He sat back down on the bed. Rize? His first impulse was to phone his man in the East Village. He looked at the phone, knowing that that wasn’t on. His second was to ask Brown if he could borrow his laptop, so that he could Google this stuff. The DEA had a page with all the Schedule Four products, foreign brands too. But then, he thought, if Brown was really a fed, he might even be getting this stuff from the DEA. And borrowing Brown’s laptop, he knew, was no more on than using the phone to call Dennis Birdwell.

And he owed Birdwell money, under awkward circumstances. There was that.

He put the bubble-pack on the corner of the nearest bedside table, aligning its sides with the edges, both of which had black arcs where previous guests had let cigarettes burn down. The shape of the burns reminded him of McDonald’s arches. He wondered if Brown was going to order sandwiches soon.

Rize.

H ollis dreamed she was in London with Philip Rausch, walking fast down Monmouth Street, toward the needle of Seven Dials. She’d never met Rausch, but now, in the way of dreams, he was also Reg Inchmale. It was daytime, but deep in winter, the sky a directionless gray, and suddenly she was cringing beneath a lurid carnival glow, as above them descended all the vast Wurlitzer bulk of the mothership from Close Encounters—a film released when she was seven, and a great favorite of her mother’s—but here now, hugely and somehow able to fit down into the narrowness of Monmouth Street, like some electric element meant to warm reptiles in their cages, as she and Inchmale cowered, mouths agape.

But then this Rausch-Inchmale said, brusquely releasing her hand, that it was after all only a Christmas ornament, however grand, suspended there between hotel to their right and coffee shop to their left. And yes, now she plainly saw the wires supporting it, but a phone was ringing, through the window of a shop nearby, and she saw that this was some sort of field telephone from the Great War, its canvas case smeared with pale clay, as were the rough wool cuffs of Rausch-Inchmale’s trousers—

“Hello?”

“Rausch.”

Rausch yourself, she thought, her open cell to her ear. Los Angeles sunlight gnawed at the edges of the Mondrian’s layering of drapes. “I was sleeping.”

“I need to speak with you. The researchers have turned up someone you need to meet. We doubt Odile knows him yet, but Corrales certainly does.”

“Who is it, that Alberto knows?”

“Bobby Chombo.”

“Chombo?”

“He’s their king of tech-assist, these locative artists. Their geohacker. GPS signals can’t penetrate buildings. He does work-arounds. Triangulates off cellular towers, other systems. Very clever.”

“You want me to meet him?”

“If you can’t arrange it through Corrales, phone me. We’ll work something from this end.”

He wasn’t asking. She raised her eyebrows in the dark, nodded silently: Yes, boss. “Will do.”

There was a pause. “Hollis?”

She sat up in the dark, assuming a loosely defensive lotus position. “Yes?”

“When you’re with him, be specially alert to anything that might reference shipping.”

“Shipping?”

“Patterns of global shipping. Particularly in light of the sort of geospatial tagging Odile and Corrales are about.” Another pause. “Or iPods.”

“iPods?”

“As a means of data transfer.”

“How some people use them as drives?”

“Exactly.”

There was something about this, suddenly, that she really didn’t like, and in some entirely new way. She imagined the bed a desert of white sand. Something circling, hidden, beneath its surface. Perhaps the Mongolian Death Worm that had been one of Inchmale’s imaginary pets.

There are times when saying the least you can is the best thing to do, she decided. “I’ll ask Alberto.”

“Good.”

“Have you taken care of the billing here, yet?”

“Of course.”

“Hold on,” she told him, “I’m phoning the desk on the other line.”

“Give it ten minutes. I’ll just double-check.”

“Thanks.”

“We’ve been talking about you, Hollis.” That vaguest of managerial “we’s.”

“Yes?”

“We’re very happy with you. How would you feel about a salaried position?”

She sensed the Mongolian Death Worm draw closer, amid the cotton dunes. “That’s a big one, Philip. I’ll need to think about it.”

“Do.”

She closed her phone.

Exactly ten minutes later, she used the room phone to call the desk, receiving confirmation that her bill, all incidentals included, was now on an Amex card in the name of Philip M. Rausch. She had herself switched to the hotel’s salon, found there was an opening within the hour, and booked an appointment for a cut.

It was just after two, which made it just after five in New York, with Buenos Aires two hours later. She pulled up Inchmale’s number on the screen of her cell, but dialed on the room phone. He answered immediately. “Reg? Hollis. I’m in Los Angeles. Are you in the middle of dinner?”

“Angelina’s feeding Willy. How are you?” Their one-year-old. Angelina was Reg Inchmale’s Argentinian wife, whose maiden name had been Ryan, and whose grandfather had been a ship’s pilot on the Río Paraná. She’d met Inchmale while employed by either Dazed & Confused or another magazine. Hollis had never been able to keep them straight. Angelina knew as much about magazine publishing in London as anyone Hollis could think of.

“Complicated,” she admitted. “How are you?”

“Steadily less so. On good days, anyway. I think fatherhood agrees with me. And it’s so, I don’t know, deeply old-school here. They haven’t sandblasted anything yet. It looks the way London used to look. Black with grime. Or New York, come to think.”

“Can you ask Angelina something for me?”

“Would you like to speak to her yourself?”

“No, she’s feeding Willy. Just ask her what, if anything, she knows about a magazine start-up called Node.”

“Node?”

“It wants to be like Wired, but they aren’t supposed to say that. I think the money’s Belgian.”

“They want to interview you?”

“They’ve offered me a job. I’m on assignment for them, freelancing. I wondered if Angelina would have heard anything.”