W ith a click that he felt, rather than heard, the tiny ratchet at the heart of the cable-tie moved aside for Milgrim’s modified ballpoint clip. He sighed, enjoying a moment of unaccustomed triumph. Then he loosened the tie, without removing it from the bench’s armrest, and slid his wrist free. Keeping his wrist on the rest, he looked around the park as casually as possible. Brown was nowhere to be seen, but there was the matter of the other three he’d glimpsed in Brown’s room at the New Yorker, plus whoever else comprised Brown’s Red Team.
Why, he wondered, were such teams always red? Of tooth and claw, the teams of men like Brown. Seldom even blue. Never green, never black.
Past him moved a sunny afternoon’s pedestrian traffic, across the width of the park. There were people here, he knew, who were playing at being here. Playing games. Brown’s game, the game of the IF and those who worked with him. There were no police in evidence, he noted, and that struck him as odd, though in truth he hadn’t passed this way for so long that he had no idea what sort of presence they currently chose to maintain.
“It must have been defective,” he said aloud, of the cable-tie, rehearsing a line in the event of Brown’s return before he could compose himself sufficiently to move away from this bench. “So I waited for you.”
Very large hands found Milgrim’s shoulders, pressed down. “Thank you for waiting,” said a deep, measured voice, “but we aren’t detectives.” Milgrim looked over at the hand on his left shoulder. It was enormous, a black man’s hand, with pink, glossily polished nails. Milgrim rolled his eyes, craning his neck gingerly, and saw, atop a vast bluff of button-studded black horsehide, a mighty black chin, perfectly shaven.
“We aren’t detectives, Mr. Milgrim.” The second black man, rounding the far end of the bench, had unbuttoned his heavy, cuirass-like coat, exposing a double-breasted black-on-black brocade vest and an elaborately collared satin shirt the color of arterial blood. “We aren’t police at all.”
Milgrim craned around a little further, to better see the one whose hands rested on his shoulders like two-pound bags of flour. They were both wearing the tight woolen skullcaps he remembered now from the laundry on Lafayette. “That’s good,” he said, wanting to say something, anything.
Horsehide creaked as the second man settled himself on the bench, his enormous leather-clad shoulder touching Milgrim’s. “In your case, Mr. Milgrim, I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”
“No,” said Milgrim.
“We’ve been looking for you,” said the one with his hands on Milgrim’s shoulders. “Not very actively, we’d be first to admit. But once you’d borrowed that young lady’s telephone to contact your friend Fish, he had that number on call-display. Fish, being a friend of Mr. Birdwell, phoned him immediately. Mr. Birdwell phoned that number. He social engineered the lady, who anyway suspected you of having tried to steal her phone, you understand? Are you following me so far, Mr. Milgrim?”
“Yes,” said Milgrim, feeling an irrational but very powerful urge to put the cable-tie back on, as though that would magically reverse the flow of events, taking him back to the uneventful park of a few moments before, seeming now a very paradise of security and light.
“We happened to be nearby,” said the one beside him, “and drove to Lafayette, where we found you. Since then, as a favor to Mr. Birdwell, we have been observing your movements, Mr. Milgrim, awaiting an opportunity to speak with you in private.”
The hands on his shoulders grew abruptly heavier. “Where is that cop-looking motherfucker you always with, Mr. Milgrim? Drove you over here.”
“He’s not a cop,” Milgrim said.
“He didn’t ask you that,” said the one beside him.
“Whoa,” exclaimed the one behind, “old white man just deck that boy out the cuts!”
“Thief!” shouted a man, from the direction of the Greenmarket. “Thieves!” Milgrim saw movement there.
“This place supposed to be gentrified,” said the man beside Milgrim, as if offended by the disturbance. “Two million a unit, here.”
“Shit,” said the one behind, letting go of Milgrim’s shoulders, “it’s a bust.”
“He’s DEA!” shrieked Milgrim, lunging forward, his worn leather soles slipping nightmarishly, like feet in some ancient animation, one in which the gate of the projector is jumping. Or a very, very bad dream. And part of that dream, as he ran, was that he was still holding, before him, as if some tiny sword, his painfully honed Houdini key.
S ystema avoids pursuit whenever possible, the uncles taught. Systema prefers not to flee; rather, it goes away. The distinction was difficult to express, but easily demonstrated through something as simple as the attempted grappling of wrists across a table. The wrist trained in systema went away.
But Tito, having been directed to a particular place, the mysteriously named W, could no longer fully practice going away, the art of which is dependent on a genuine lack of direction. To be pursued, as Oshosi assured him he now was, was to accept a certain disadvantage. But there was systema for this as well, and he chose to demonstrate it now, taking the back of a bench at speed, dropping, rolling, coming up with his momentum intact but headed in the direction opposite. A simple enough business, spending momentum in the roll, but he heard a child cheer to see it.
The nearest of his three pursuers was just rounding the bench as Tito vaulted back over it, past him, and hit the path, running east now. He looked back. The other two, untrained slaves to their own momentum, were carried past the first and very nearly ran into the bench. These were the ones he’d seen Marcos trip. One of them had a bloodied mouth.
With Oshosi at his shoulder, Tito ran toward Union Square East and Sixteenth Street. The orisha wanted him out of the park and its calculable geometries of pursuit. A cab slid in front of him as he reached the traffic on Union Square East; he went over its hood, meeting the eyes of its driver as he slid past the windshield, friction burning his thigh through his jeans. The driver slammed his horn and held it, and other horns woke reflexively, a sudden uneven blaring that mounted to crescendo as his three pursuers reached the stream of traffic. Tito looked back and saw the one with the bloody mouth maneuvering between crowded bumpers, holding something aloft like a token. A badge, Tito guessed.
Tito ran north, bent low, deliberately slowing, weaving through the crowd, some of whom were pausing to see what the horns were about. Faces peered from the windows of a restaurant. He looked back and saw the bloody-mouthed man spill a woman out of his way as he ran after Tito.
Tito sped up, Oshosi noting that his pursuer was still gaining. He ran across Seventeenth without slowing. Saw the entrance to the resturant, a revolving door. He ran on, to the hotel’s entrance, an airy lip of glass protruding to shelter it. Under the startled doorman’s black-shirted arm, past a woman just emerging. He saw Brotherman descending two broad marble steps, divided by a central railing. Brotherman wore a Federal Express uniform and cradled a flat red-white-and-blue carton upright in his arms. He’d never seen Brotherman in shorts before. As Tito threw right, his new shoes grabbing the white marble, he heard the bloody-mouthed man slam through the doors behind him.
He glimpsed a sinuous overhang of stairway, deeper in the lobby, and registered the distinctive sound of Brotherman, releasing, on his exit, thirty pounds of twelve-millimeter steel ball bearings, through the trick bottom of his FedEx carton and onto the white marble.
Tito sprinted south, Oshosi indicating that his pursuer, who must have missed the bearings, was only a few steps behind.
Into the restaurant, darting past the row of tables by the south-facing windows; past the unbelieving faces of diners, who an instant before had been lingering over desserts and coffees.
The man with the bloody mouth caught his left shoulder and he careened into a table, food and glassware flying, a woman screaming. In the instant of contact, Eleggua, mounting Tito with nauseating speed, had reached back with Tito’s right hand, slipped something from the man’s belt, and now simultaneously drew and fired the Bulgarian’s pneumatic gun with his left, from under Tito’s right armpit.
An inhuman shriek unmounted the orisha as Tito saw the illuminated exit sign and slammed through the door beneath it, past the laden carts of busboys. Kitchen staff in white flung themselves out of his way. He slipped in something wet, nearly went down, ran on. Exit sign. Slamming out, into sudden sunlight, as an alarm triggered behind him.
A large green van, neatly lettered in silver, one of its twin rear doors open. Prada man, no longer wearing his painter’s overalls, reaching down his hand.
Tito handed him the leather-cased badge Eleggua had taken from the pursuer’s belt.
He flipped it open. “Ice,” he said, and pocketed it. He boosted Tito into the truck. A dark, hollow, diesel-smelling space, with odd dim lights. “You’ve already met.” He jumped out of the truck and slammed and locked the door.
“Be seated,” said the old man, from a bench fastened lengthwise across the space with canvas strapping. “We wouldn’t want you injured, in case of a sudden stop.”
Tito climbed over the back of the padded bench. Discovering the two ends of a simple seat belt, he fastened them as the driver put the truck in gear, heading west, then swung north onto Park.
“I trust they took it from you?” the old man asked, in Russian.
“Yes, they did,” Tito replied, in English.
“Very good,” said the old man, in Russian. “Very good.”
T he lobby bar was full again.
She found him seated at the long alabaster table, snacking, from a rectangular plate, on what looked like sushi wrapped in raw meat. “Who took the picture?” she asked, when she was close enough to ask quietly and be heard.
“Pamela. She’s an excellent photographer.”
“Was she following me?”
“No. She was watching Chombo. Watching him pack up and move out.”
“Are you sure he moved himself out? He wasn’t arrested by the Department of Homeland Security?”
“I doubt the DHS would let him smoke cigarettes and get in the way, while they packed up the evidence.”
“I wouldn’t want a chance to find out, myself. Would you?”
“Of course not. Would you like a drink?”
“Not now, thanks. I’d like you to explain, if what you’ve told me so far is true, why you don’t seem worried about that. I would be. In fact, I’ve discovered that I am. If you’ve been sniffing around covert American programs designed to intercept smuggled weapons, I’d imagine you’re running some chance of getting yourself in trouble. If not, and what you’ve told me is true, why not?” Which was putting it more forcefully than she’d intended, but it felt right.
“Please,” he said, “have a seat.”
The stools here were deliberately mismatched. The one next to his reminded her of those elongated figurines of Masai warriors, carved from ironwood, but without the dangerously spiky bits. His was polished aluminum, sort of Henry Moore. “No, thanks.”
“I don’t know what might be in that one particular container, Hollis. Do you believe me?”
She thought about it. “I might. It depends.”
“On what, exactly?”
“On what you might be about to tell me next.”
He smiled. “Wherever we go with this, I’ll never be able to tell you exactly how I came to be involved. Is that acceptable?”
She thought about it. “Yes.” It really didn’t sound like that negotiable a point.
“And I’m going to require a very sincere commitment to my undertaking, now, if this conversation is to continue. I need to know that you’re with me, before I tell you more. But please, understand that I can’t tell you more without taking you further into the thing itself. This is a matter in which possession of information amounts to involvement. Do you understand?” He took up a scarlet flesh-maki, regarded it seriously, then popped it into his mouth.
Whatever this was that Bigend was involved in, she decided, it was deep. Deep and possibly central. To something, she couldn’t yet know what. She remembered seeing the white truck rounding the corner, going away, and realized that she really did want to know where it had gone, and why. If she imagined never knowing, for some reason, she saw Alberto’s River Phoenix, prone on Viper Room concrete. Another ending.
Bigend touched his lips with a cocktail napkin, raising an interrogatory eyebrow.
“Yes,” she said. “But if I ever find you lying to me, even by omission, it’s over. Any obligation on my part. Over. Understood?”
“Perfectly,” he said, cycling the smile and flagging down their server. “A drink.”
“Double scotch,” Hollis said. “One rock.”
She looked down along the glowing alabaster. All the candles. Drinks. Women’s wrists. What had she just done?
“Coincidentally,” he said, watching the server’s trim bottom recede with exactly the expression she’d seen when he’d considered his maki, “I learned something this morning. Something regarding Bobby.”
“I wouldn’t think that ‘coincidentally’ was ever a safe concept, around material like this.” She decided to risk the Masai stool, finding it surprisingly comfortable.
“Even the clinically paranoid can have enemies, they say.”
“What is it, then?”
“Bobby, I’ve known for some time, is charged with at least two tasks by his employers.”
“Who are?”
“Don’t know. The tasks of Bobby Chombo, though: One, as I’ve told you, consists of listening for the Flying Dutchman of shipping containers. When he took this job, he was given a set of parameters of some kind, and this task of fishing one particular signal out of a great many others. He did it. Does it still. The container sends a signal periodically, announcing its location, and probably that it hasn’t been tampered with. It’s an intermittent signal, encrypted, and it shifts frequencies, but if you’re Bobby, evidently, you’ll know when and where to listen for it.”
“What’s in it for whoever pays him?”
“Don’t know. But I generally assume that it’s not their container, not their signal. After all, they had to pay Bobby to find it for them. Probably after paying someone else for the information they gave him to help him find it. Quite roundabout, if it’s theirs in the first place, though I don’t rule it entirely out.”
“Why not?”
“Never a good idea. I’m agnostic, basically. About everything.”
“What’s Bobby Chombo task two, then?”
“That’s what I’ve just learned. When we were at Blue Ant, I told you that he ships iPods to Costa Rica.”
“Right. Music, you said.”
“What do you know about steganography?”
“I don’t even know how to pronounce it.”
“Bobby’s other task consists of compiling elaborate logs of fictitious searches for the container’s signal. These fictions of his, mathematical, enormous, recount his ongoing search for and utter failure to find the key he already has, but which he pretends not to have.” He cocked his head. “Did you follow that?”
“He fakes evidence that he still hasn’t found the signal?”
“Exactly. He’s compiled three such epics, so far. He encrypts them steganographically on the drives of iPods—” Interrupted by the arrival of her drink.
“What was that word again?” she asked, when the server had withdrawn.
“‘Steganographically.’ He spreads his fictitious activity log very thinly, through a lot of music. If he’s given you the key, or if you have sufficiently, hugely powerful decryption capacities, you can pull it out of the music.”
“And the iPod’s less likely to be checked than a laptop?”
He shrugged. “Depends who’s doing the checking.”
“And how did you learn this?”
“I can’t tell you. Sorry, but it has a direct bearing on how I got involved, and we’ve agreed I can’t discuss that.”
“Fine.” It wasn’t, really, because she could imagine him using it whenever he found it convenient. But she’d deal with that as they went along.
“But I’ve told you that I know he sends them to a poste restante situation in Costa Rica.”
“Right.”
“Where so far I’ve lost track of them, but not before getting a whiff of retired U.S. intelligence officers. Which is a fairly distinctive pong. Never anything like a name attached, of course. But now I’m hearing that Bobby’s iPods get reshipped, from San José.”
“Where to?”
“New York. Unless I’m being played. But it looks as if the person Bobby sends them to, in San José, is lazy. Or nervous. The actual addressee never picks them up. But they employ the same functionary to ship them back out. By DHL. To an address on Canal Street. Chinese importer.”
“Bobby keeps track of the wandering container,” she said. “He generates false evidence that he hasn’t found it yet. He sends that evidence to someone in Costa Rica, who then ships it back to New York…”
“You missed a step. He sends it to someone in Costa Rica whose job, apparently, according to Bobby’s employers’ wishes, is to sign for it, then hand it over to someone else, the intended recipient. The person Bobby ships to is just your average quasi-criminal postbox. But the intended recipient has never turned up for his end of things. Instead, he’s cut a deal with the postbox, to simply turn it around. It’s a gap, you see, a flaw in someone’s architecture.”
“Whose?”
“No idea.”
“Can you tell me how you found this out, that they go to New York?”
“I sent someone down there with an armload of cash. Made the postbox a surprise offer. It’s that kind of town.”
“And that’s all you got for your money?”
“That and the sense that Mr. Postbox finds the resident ex-CIA gerontocracy oppressive, and desires to retire further south, away from them.”
She went over it again, in her head, swirling the lone ice cube in her scotch. “So what do you think?”
“Someone’s being scammed. Someone’s being led to believe that someone else is aware of the container, but is unable to locate it. Why, do you think, would anyone do that?”
“To make the person who owns the container believe it’s not being tracked. When in fact it is.”
“It does look that way, doesn’t it?”
“And?”
“We have a gap to exploit. We know that someone in San José is distancing themselves a little, not following through to the letter of the plan. Whoever’s supposed to receive those iPods, and take them away for reshipping, isn’t doing that. Instead, they’re paying the postbox to simply turn the iPods around. I imagine they’re frightened.”
“Of whom?”
“Possibly of whoever owns the contents of that container. That’s very interesting. And now we have another gap, as well.”
“Which is?”
“Pamela put a GPS tracking device on that truck, about an hour before you arrived.”
“Jesus,” she said, “she did? What is she, James Bond?”
“Nothing like it. Likes a bit of a game, Pamela.” He smiled.
“Where is it, the truck?”
He took a Treo from within his jacket and thumbed a sequence on the keypad. Squinted at it. “Just north of San Francisco, at the moment.”