Spook Country

by William Gibson

  “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 she asked, when the server had withdrawn.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.”

  44. EXIT STRATEGY

  Milgrim found himself heading for Brown’s parked Corolla, or rather he found his body, cramping and gasping from its unaccustomed gallop, weaving unevenly in what he supposed to be that general direction. He’d had a general out-of-body experience, between lunging up from the bench and rediscovering himself this way, and he had no idea where those black gentlemen might be. He hoped they had taken his word for it, that Brown was a DEA agent. Since one of them had spontaneously concluded that a bust was in progress, possibly they had. Dennis Birdwell was unlikely to pay anyone enough to do otherwise; it was unlikely enough that he’d hired them in the first place. Milgrim found it rather shocking. His attempts to spot them, unsteady as he was, had yielded no very large leather-wrapped figures whatever. Nor, indeed, anyone who looked like they were part of any Red Team. Nor even Brown himself.

  The Greenmarket looked suddenly deserted, aside from those he took to be produce sellers, all of whom seemed to be trying to use cell phones, and some of whom were yelling at one another in a fairly hysterical fashion.

  Now sirens were rising, ululating in the distance. Approaching. Many, it seemed.

  In spite of the agonizing stitch in his side, which made him want to bend double, he forced himself to remain approximately upright, and to move as quickly as he could.

  He was crossing Union Square West at Seventeenth, and had the Corolla in sight, when some of the sirens simultaneously arrived and ceased. He looked back, along Seventeenth, and saw a police car and an ambulance sitting at angles in the intersection at Park, their rooftop lights frenetically red and blue. Three identical black SUVs appeared, from the east, on Seventeenth, sirenless, to disgorge bulky, black-clad figures that appeared to Milgrim, at this distance, to be wearing spacesuits. These were the new post-9/11 superpolice, he guessed, though he couldn’t remember what they were supposed to be called. Samson squads? Some of them entered the building through an entrance at the corner. Now the first of what sounded to be several fire engines.

  No time to watch this, arresting as he found it. Brown’s bag was still in the car.

  But the streetscape, he now realized, with a sharp pang of dismay, seemed utterly devoid of anything he could use to break a car window. His hand closed repeatedly on the nonexistent handle of the inexpensive Korean-made claw-hammer he’d last used to access the interior of an automobile, but then someone else’s hand closed viselike on his left shoulder, while his right wrist was twisted up behind his back with near dislocating force.

  “They’re gone,” Brown was saying quietly. “They were jamming our radios and the cell frequencies. If we’re talking, they’re gone. Get out now. The others are already clear. They have him in custody? A Hercules team?” Brown sighed. “Shit,” he said, with finality.

  Hercules teams, Milgrim thought. That was it.

  “Move,” Brown ordered. “They’ll be sealing off the area.” He yanked open the Corolla’s rear door and shoved Milgrim inside, face-first. “Floor,” he commanded.

  Milgrim managed to pull his feet in just as Brown slammed the door. He smelled relatively new automobile carpet. His knees were on Brown’s black bag and laptop, but he knew that the moment, if there had ever been one, was past. He concentrated on breathing more regularly, and on preparing his excuse for having come uncuffed.

  “Stay down,” Brown said, getting in on the driver’s side and starting the engine. He pulled away from the curb. Milgrim felt him turn right on Union Square West, then slow. The front passenger door opened, as someone scrambled in. They pulled away again, the door slamming.

  “Give it to me,” Brown said.

  Milgrim heard something rustle.

  “You used gloves?” The level calm in Brown’s
voice, Milgrim knew from experience, was a bad sign. Red Team One’s day in the park must not have gone well.

  “Yes,” someone said. A man’s voice, perhaps familiar from the meeting earlier, in the New Yorker. “That part came off when he dropped it.”

  Brown said nothing.

  “What happened?” the other asked. “Were they expecting us?”

  “Maybe they’re always expecting someone. Maybe they’ve been trained to do that. Hell of a concept, isn’t it?”

  “How’s Davis?”

  “Looked like a broken neck, to me.”

  “You didn’t say he was dangerous.”

  Milgrim closed his eyes.

  “Blackwater dump your ass for dumbness?” Brown asked. “Is that what I’ll find out when I ask them?”

  The other said nothing.

  Brown stopped the car. “Get out,” he said. “Leave town. This afternoon.”

  Milgrim heard the door open, the man get out, the door close.

  Brown drove on. “Get that Transit ticket off the rear window,” Brown said.

  Milgrim crawled up on the rear seat and pulled the suction cups off the glass. They were about to turn onto Fourteenth. He looked back up Union Square West and saw a black Hercules team vehicle blocking an intersection. He turned around, hoping Brown wouldn’t order him back on the floor, and placed his feet, carefully, on either side of Brown’s laptop and bag. “Are we going back to the New Yorker?”

  “No,” said Brown, “we are not going back to the New Yorker.”

  Brown drove instead to a rental drop-off in Tribeca.

  They took a cab to Penn Station, where Brown bought two one-way tickets to Washington on the Metroliner.

  45. BREAKBULK

  Where do you think the truck’s headed?” Hollis asked, poolside, from her cozy depression in the edge of the giant Starck futon.

  “Not the Bay,” said Bigend, sunken so deeply, beside her, that she couldn’t see him. “Soon we’ll know whether or not it’s Portland. Or Seattle.”

  She settled further back, watching a small plane’s lights cross the empty center of the luminous sky. “You don’t think they’d go inland?”

  “No,” he said, “I think this is about a port, one with a container facility.”

  She raised herself, as well as she could, on her right elbow, trying to see his face. “It’s coming?”

  “Perhaps that’s what Bobby’s sudden departure means, and not simply that you scared him off.”

  “But you think it’s coming?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “The Hook,” he said. “Remember it? That large Russian helicopter? A helicopter capable of flying hundreds of miles, picking up our container from one vessel and transferring it to another?”

  “Yes.”

  “There are some interesting possibilities for keeping track of commercial shipping, today. Of a specific vessel, I mean. But I doubt any of them would help us trace our mystery box, because I think it keeps changing vessels. At sea. We’ve heard about the use of that venerable Hook, early on, but you don’t need to go that large to shift a single forty-foot container from one vessel to another. Provided you don’t need to actually fly it too far, that is. Ours is a forty-footer, by the way. All either forty or twenty. Standardization. Containers full of merchandise. Packets full of information. No breakbulk.”

  “No what?”

  “Breakbulk. Noncontainerized freight. Old-fashioned shipping. Crates, bundles. What shipping used to be. I’ve thought that in terms of information, the most interesting items, for me, usually amount to breakbulk. Traditional human intelligence. Someone knowing something. As opposed to data mining and the rest of it.”

  “I don’t know anything about data mining,” she said, “or the rest of it.”

  “We’ve been buying into data mining at Blue Ant.”

  “Shares in a company?”

  “No. I suppose you could say we’re subscribing. Or hoping to. No simple matter.”

  “To what?”

  “The Swiss have a system known as Onyx, based on Echelon, the system originally developed by the British and the Americans. Onyx, like Echelon, uses software to filter the contents of satellite communication for specific search terms. There are Onyx listening posts at Zimmerwald and Heimenschwand, in Canton Bern, and at Leuk in Canton Valais. I spent a week in Heimenschwand, when I was thirteen. Dada.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Dada. My mother was researching a minor Dadaist.”

  “The Swiss? The Swiss have that kind of system?”

  “Last month,” he said, “the Sunday edition ofBlick published a classified Swiss government report based on Onyx intercepts. It described a fax sent from the Egyptian government to their embassy in London, referencing covert CIA detention facilities in Eastern Europe. The Swiss government refused to confirm the existence of the report. They did, however, immediately initiate judiciary procedures against the publishers, for having leaked a secret document.”

  “You can ‘subscribe’ to something like that?”

  “Bankers,” said Bigend, “require good information.”

  “And?”

  “Blue Ant requires good bankers. And they happen to be Swiss. But we don’t quite have the work-around in place. New search terms have to be approved by an independent commission.”

  Her eyes were playing tricks on her. Vast translucent things seemed to be squirming, in the depth of the luminous sky. Tentacles the length of nebulae. She blinked and they were gone. “And?”

  “Only two members of that commission, so far, would have reason to be favorably disposed to our bankers’ suggestions. But we’ll see.” She felt him sit up. “Another drink?”

  “Not for me.”

  “But you see,” he said, “the sheer complication of that sort of intelligence, and of course the innate limitations. Not to mention that we’d have no idea who else might be keeping track of search terms. You, however, with your potential to get closer to Bobby Chombo…” He stood, stretched, adjusted his jacket, and turned, bending to offer her his hand. She took it, letting him help her to her feet. “You’re breakbulk, Hollis.” The smile flashed. “Do you see?”

  “I keep trying to tell you. He didn’t like it at all, that Alejandro brought me there. It was an obvious deal-breaker, for Bobby. You may think he’s blown town because his ship’s coming in, but I know how little he liked it that I turned up.”

  “First impressions,” he said. “Those can change.”

  “I hope you’re not expecting me to just walk in on him again?”

  “Leave all that to me. First I have to see where he’s going. In the meantime, work with Philip. See what else Odile and her friends have to show you. It’s no accident that Bobby Chombo overlaps two such apparently different spheres. The important thing is that we’ve had our conversation, reached our agreement. I’m delighted to know we’ll be working together.”

  “Thank you,” she said, automatically, then realized that that really was all she could say. “Good night,” she said, then, before the pause had too much of a chance to lengthen.

  She left him there, beside the ficus trees in their giant flowerpots.

  46. VIP

  You aren’t carrying identification,” the old man said, in English, turning off the small camera on which he’d been repeatedly observing a piece of video.

  “No,” said Tito. There were two cheap, battery-operated plastic dome lights stuck to the truck’s ceiling, dimly illuminating the two of them on their uncomfortable bench. Tito had been counting the truck’s turns, trying to keep track of their direction. He guessed they were northwest of Union Square now, heading west, but was growing less certain.

  The old man took an envelope from his pocket and passed it to Tito. Tito tore it open and removed a New Jersey driver’s license with his picture on it. Ramone Alcin. Tito examined the picture more closely. It seemed to be him, though he’d never posed f
or it, nor had he ever worn the shirt Ramone Alcin wore. He looked at the signature. He would first have to practice drawing it upside down, as Alejandro had taught him. It made him uncomfortable, having identification for which he hadn’t yet learned the signature. Though for that matter, he reminded himself, he didn’t know how to drive.

  The old man took the envelope back, replacing it in his pocket. Tito took his wallet from within his jacket and slid the license behind the transparent window, noting as he did how someone had meticulously scratched the license’s laminated surface by repeatedly removing it from and replacing it in another wallet. He thought of Alejandro.

  “What else do you have?” The old man asked.

  “One of the Bulgarian’s guns,” Tito said, forgetting that a stranger might not know them.

  “Lechkov. Give it to me.”

  Tito produced the gun, in its handkerchief. A dusting of fine white salt spotted his black jeans as he passed it to the old man.

  “It’s been fired.”

  “I used it in the restaurant of the hotel,” Tito said. “I was about to be taken. One of the men who came after me was a runner.”

  “Salt?” The old man sniffed delicately.

  “Sea salt. Very fine.”

  “Lechkov liked to suggest that he made the umbrella used to assassinate Georgi Markov. He didn’t. Like these, his work seemed to belong to an earlier era. Likely he began as a village bicycle mechanic.” He tucked handkerchief and gun inside his coat. “You had to use it, did you?”

  However familiar this man might be with his family’s history, Tito thought, he would not know about the orishas. Explaining that it had been Eleggua’s choice to use the Bulgarian’s gun would not help. “Not in his face,” Tito said. “Low. The cloud stung his eyes, but they would not have been cut.” This was probably the truth, as Tito remembered, but the choice, if one had been made, had been Eleggua’s. “Water would relieve the blindness.”