William Gibson - Spook Country

“Chef used to work on the Queen Elizabeth,” said the old man. “The first one.”

In the back of the room, a very old man, either Chinese or Malaysian, was bent almost double beside a white-painted cast-iron range that must have been older than he was. The only thing in Beenie’s that wasn’t old seemed to be the steel fire hood suspended above the large square stove.

There was a pleasant smell of bacon.

A very quiet woman, behind the counter, without being asked, brought her a cup of coffee. “Poached eggs medium, please.” The walls were hung with oddly framed bits of generic Orientalia. Hollis guessed the place would have been here when she was born, and would have looked pretty much the same, though without the massive stainless hood above the stove.

“Delighted you can be here this morning,” said the old man. “It’s been a long night, but it appears to have gone in our favor.”

“Thank you,” said Hollis, “but I still have only a very vague idea of what you’re up to, in spite of what I saw Garreth do last night.”

“Tell me your idea of what we’re doing, then,” he said.

Hollis added milk to her coffee, from a very cold stainless creamer. “Garreth told me that the”—she glanced at the woman, who was standing beside the ancient cook—“the box, contained a, a large sum?”

“Yes?”

“Garreth, were you exaggerating?”

“No,” said Garreth. “One hundred.”

“Million,” said the old man, flatly.

“What Garreth did…You spoke of laundering. He…contaminated? Am I right?”

“Indeed,” said the old man, “he did. As thoroughly as could be arranged, under the circumstances. The projectiles would be effectively atomized, as they entered. Of course they then encounter virtually solid blocks of extremely high-quality paper, edge-on. But our intent wasn’t to destroy that paper, but rather to make it difficult to handle safely. And also to tag it, if you will, for certain kinds of detection. Though there hasn’t been a remarkable lot of progress, in the past five years, with that sort of sensing. Another neglected area.” He sipped black coffee.

“You’ve made laundering it difficult.”

“Impossible, I would hope,” he said. “But you must understand that for the people who first arranged to have that hundred put in that box, the fact that it’s back here at all already borders on disaster. They did not originally intend for it to return to North America, or indeed to any part of the First World. Too unwieldy an amount. There are economies, however, in which that sort of money can be traded for one thing or another, without too punishing a discount, and it was to one or another of those economies that they intended it to go.”

“What happened?” Hollis asked, thinking how very strange it was that she had at least a general idea of what the answer would be.

“It was discovered, in transit, by a team of American intelligence operators, assigned to look for a very different sort of cargo. They were ordered off the case immediately, but in a way that created a snag in the fabric of things, bureaucratically, and for that reason, and others, it eventually came to my attention.”

Hollis nodded. Pirates.

“In terms of profiteering from the war, Miss Henry, this is a piddling amount. I found the sheer gall of it fascinating, though, or perhaps the sheer lack of imagination. Out the door of the New York Fed, onto the back of a truck in Baghdad, one thing and another, then sail it away.”

She had been about to mention the Hook, she realized, the giant Russian helicopter, and bit her lip.

“In the course of determining who the parties involved were, I learned that this particular container had been equipped with a unit that monitored its whereabouts, and to an extent its integrity, and covertly broadcast the information to the parties involved. They had known, for instance, when it had been opened by the American intelligence team. And that put the wind up them.”

“Pardon me?”

“They lost their nerve. They began looking for different venues, easier markets, steeper discounts perhaps but less risk. The box went on its own very peculiar journey, then, and nothing ever quite worked out for them, none of those various potential launderings.” He looked at her.

As various friends of his saw to that, she guessed.

“And I imagine they were afraid, by then. It became a sort of permanent resident in the system, never quite arriving. Until it got here, of course.”

“But why did it, finally?”

He sighed. “Things are winding down, for these people. So I sincerely hope. There’s less to be made, and the wind begins to blow from a potentially cleaner direction. An amount of this sort, even quite stiffly discounted, begins to seem worthwhile. At least for the smaller fish. And make no mistake, these are the smaller fish. No faces you’ve seen on television. Functionaries. Bureaucrats. I knew their like once, in Moscow and Leningrad.”

“So there’s something here, in Canada, that they can do with it?”

“This country certainly isn’t without resources of that kind, but no. Not here. It’s headed south, across the border. Into Idaho, we think. Most likely a crossing called Porthill. Just south of Creston, British Columbia.”

“But won’t it be that much more difficult to launder, there? You told me last night that that much illicit cash constitutes a negative asset.”

“I believe they’ve made themselves a deal.”

“With whom?”

“A church,” he said.

“A church?”

“The kind with its own television station. The kind with an adjacent gated attraction. In this case, with an adjacent gated community.”

“Jesus,” she said.

“I wouldn’t go that far, myself,” he said, and coughed. “Hundred-dollar bills in the collection plate are the norm, however, I’m told.”

Now the woman appeared behind the counter, from the stove, and placed one plate of eggs and bacon in front of Hollis, a second in front of the old man.

“Look at that,” he said. “Exquisite. If you were in the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, and ordered poached eggs and bacon and toast, what you would be served would in no way differ from this. The presentation.”

And he was right, she saw. The bacon was perfectly flat, rigid, weightless, grease-free, crisp. Pressed, somehow. The eggs poached with a whisk, equally perfect, on a small bed of potato. Two slices of tomato and a sprig of parsley. Arranged with a casual, accomplished elegance. The woman returned with smaller plates of buttered toast for each of them.

“You two eat,” Garreth said. “I’ll explain.”

She broke the first of her eggs with her fork. Soft yellow yolk.

“Tito was in the container facility last night, at midnight, when the buzzer sounded.”

She nodded, mouth full of bacon.

“I punched our nine holes through the box. Leaving nine small but painfully obvious bullet holes. When the box was craned down from that stack, today, and put on a flatbed trailer, those nine holes would have been glaringly obvious. Aside from which, with them open, there was the possibility that a sensor in the facility would register the cesium. Except that Tito climbed up and stuck custom-made magnetic plasters over each hole, both sealing and, we hope, concealing them.”

She looked down the counter to where Tito was being served his plate of eggs. His eyes met hers, briefly, and then he began to eat.

“You said they put it on a truck today,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And they’re taking it into the United States, through Idaho?”

“We think Idaho. The unit inside is still functioning, though, and Bobby is keeping track of that for us. We should be able to anticipate where they’re going to cross.”