Spook Country

by William Gibson

  And was stunned to discover the brilliantly floodlit vastness of the port, right there, past twelve feet of chain-link and some railroad tracks. The lights were like the lights on a playing field, but taller. A grimly artificial daylight. Towering rows of concrete cylinders, smoothly conjoined, like abstract sculptures. Grain storage, she guessed. Some other, much more high-tech sculptor, had employed huge, strangely ephemeral-looking black tanks, one of which was steaming, cauldron-like, in the cool air. Beyond these, and far taller, were the titanic Constructivist cranes she’d glimpsed on her drive over. Between the tracks and these large-scale sculptures were windowless geometrics in corrugated metal, and a great many shipping containers, stacked like the blocks of some unusually orderly child. She imagined Bobby’s wireframe container suspended above it all, invisible, like Alberto’s fallen River on the sidewalk below the Viper Room.

  It generated white noise, this place, she guessed, on some confusingly vast scale. Iron ambients, perceived in the bone. A day here and you’d stop noticing it.

  She turned, looking up at the building he’d parked behind, and was again startled by scale. Eight tall stories, its footprint broad and deep enough to allow its mass to be read as a cube. The scale of an older Chicago industrial building, alien here.

  “Live-work space,” he said, opening the van’s rear doors. “Studio rental.” He took out the bungee-wrapped dolly, unhooking them, unfolding and extending it. Then the long gray case, which he lay carefully on the pavement beside the dolly. He wasn’t moving too quickly, she thought, but he was moving just as quickly as he could without actually moving too quickly. “Would you mind carrying this tripod, and the bag?” He got a solid grip on the black case, grunting softly as he turned with it and lowered it onto the dolly. He put the gray case on top of it, angled against the extended handle, and began snapping it all together with bungees.

  “What’s in it?” she asked, meaning the canvas bag, as she pulled the folded tripod out and put it under her arm.

  “A spotting scope. And an apron.”

  She picked it up by its canvas handles. “Heavy apron.”

  He closed and locked the van’s rear doors, bent to grasp the dolly’s handle.

  She looked back at the container stacks, thinking of Bigend’s pirate story. Some of them were close enough to read the names of companies. YANG MING.

  CONTSHIP.

  He hauled the loaded dolly up an incline, to a double door that reminded her of Bobby’s factory. She followed him, the heavy canvas bag bumping against her knee, as he used one of a ring of several keys to open one of the doors.

  It swung shut behind her, locking, as she entered. Brown ceramic tile floor, crisp white walls, good light fixtures. He was turning another key, this one in a steel elevator panel. He pushed a button, which lit. Wide enameled doors jolted open, revealing a room-sized elevator walled with splintery, unpainted plywood. “Serious freight,” he said, approvingly, wheeling the dolly in, the gray and the black cases bound with black bungees. She put the canvas bag down on the paint-spotted floor of the elevator, beside it. He pushed a button. The doors closed and they began to rise.

  “I loved the Curfew, when I was in college,” he said. “Still do, I mean, but you know what I mean.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Why did you break up?”

  “Bands are like marriages. Or maybe only good ones are. Who knows why a good one works, let alone why it stops working.”

  The elevator stopped, its doors opening to reveal more of the brown tile. She followed him along a white corridor.

  “Have you been here before?” she asked.

  “No.” He parked the dolly beside a door and got out his keys. “I sent a friend to negotiate an evening’s rental. She’s in film production here, knows what to say. They think we’re scouting it for a night shoot, checking angles.” He turned the key. “But we really are checking angles, so keep your fingers crossed.” He opened the door and pulled the dolly inside. She followed. He found a light switch.

  A tall, partially lofted white space, lit by halogen fixtures strung like stainless-steel clothespins along taut high cables. Someone worked here in glass, she saw. Massive fist-thick slabs of green-edged glass, some of them the size of doors, were racked like CDs in raggedly padded constructions of dull galvanized pipe. There were corrugated foil ducts, HEPA filters, exhaust fans. Live-work didn’t strike her as so attractive, if the work involved ground glass. She put the heavy bag down on a workbench, propped the tripod beside it, and scratched her ribs, under her jacket, thinking of ground glass.

  “Excuse me,” he said, picking up the tripod, “while I play director of photography.” He crossed to a wide, steel-mullioned window and quickly set up the tripod. “Could you open the bag, please, and bring the scope?” She did, finding a sort of thickly truncated gray telescope atop smooth thick folds of pale blue plastic. She brought it to him, watched as he mounted it on the tripod, removed the black lens caps, and peered through it, making adjustments. He whistled. “Oh. Dear. Fuck.” He whistled. “Pardon me.”

  “What?”

  “Very nearly buggered. By that roof peak there. Look.”

  She squinted through the scope.

  The turquoise container seemed to float, just above the slanted metal roof of a windowless building. She assumed it must be stacked atop others, the way they did that.

  “Shit out of luck, if that roof were a foot taller,” he said. “We’d no idea.” He was bending over the dolly, unhooking the bungees now. He carried the long case to the workbench and carefully put it down, beside the canvas bag. He returned to the dolly, which lay on the floor now, the black case on top of it. He knelt and took something iPod-sized and yellow from his jacket pocket. He held it near the case, pressed something, then brought it closer, reading a screen.

  “What’s that?”

  “Dosimeter. Russian. Surplus. Excellent value.”

  “What did you just do?”

  “Radiation count. All good.” He smiled at her, from where he knelt on the floor.

  She was suddenly self-conscious, watching him. She glanced around, noting a zippered white tarp taped so that it sealed off the section under the loft. Pretending interest in this, she walked over and partially undid the white nylon zipper, a six-foot fly that curved to one side, near the bottom. She stuck her head through.

  Into someone’s life. A woman’s. The contents of a small apartment had been shoehorned into this space. Bed, dresser, suitcases, bookcases, clothes sagging on a spring-loaded rod. Someone’s childhood staring out from a shelf, in stuffed acrylic fur. A lidded paper Starbucks cup forgotten on the corner of the Ikea dresser. The light, through the white tarp, was diffuse and milky. She felt suddenly guilty. Withdrew her head, zipped up.

  He’d opened the long gray case.

  It contained a rifle. Or some Surrealist’s take on one. Its wooden stock, in deliriously grained tropical hardwood, was biomorphic, counterintuitive somehow, like something from a Max Ernst landscape. The barrel, which she assumed must be blue steel, like the other metal parts, was encased in a long tube of lustrous gray alloy that reminded her of expensive European kitchenware. Like a rolling pin by Cuisinart. But still, somehow, quite undeniably a rifle, one with a scope, and something else slung beneath its Cuisinart muzzle.

  He was unfolding a small black cloth bag that seemed to have its own internal plastic framework.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Catches the shells, as they’re ejected,” he said.

  “No,” she said, “that,” indicating the gun.

  “Thirty-caliber. Ten-twist, four-groove barrel.”

  “He told me you weren’t going to kill anybody.” Behind him, through the window, she saw the glassy black tanks, so weirdly fragile-looking, with their ragged plumes of steam. What would happen if he shot them?

  Her cell rang.

  Backing away from him, she fumbled in her purse for it, pulling it out with the scramb
ler dangling from its stub of cable. “Hollis Henry.”

  “Ollie’s outside,” said Bigend.

  Garreth was staring at her, still holding the black cartridge bag, like some esoteric piece of Victorian mourning equipment.

  She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

  “We lost you shortly after you left the car,” Bigend said. “It’s still where you left it. Then you came back on, headed north on Clark. Are you safe?”

  Garreth tilted his head, raised his eyebrows.

  She looked at the dangling scrambler, realizing that it must have another of Pamela’s GPS units in it. Bastard.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Ollie, though, is definitely not a plus.”

  “Shall I send him home?”

  “Make sure you do. If you don’t, it’s a deal-breaker.”

  “Done,” he said, and was gone.

  She closed her phone. “Work,” she said.

  “They couldn’t’ve reached you, before,” he said. “I turned on a jammer, when I took you upstairs. You might’ve been wearing a wire. Left it on, until you were aboard. Should’ve told you earlier, but I’ve a one-track mind.” Indicating the rifle, in its bed of gray foam.

  “What are you planning on doing with that, Garreth? I think it’s time you told me.”

  He picked it up. It seemed to flow around his hands, his thumb actually appearing through one fluidly carved hole. “Nine shots,” he said. “Bolt action. One minute. Evenly spaced along forty feet of Cor-ten steel. A foot above the bottom of the container. That foot clears an interior frame, which we couldn’t penetrate.” He looked at his watch. “But look,” he said, “you can watch me do it. I can’t prepare and explain it to you at the same time, not in any detail. He told you the truth, you know. We aren’t going to injure anyone.” He was attaching the black bag to the rifle. He lay it back on its gray foam. “Time we get you into your apron,” he said, reaching into the canvas bag and bringing out thick folds of pale blue plastic. It slid out to its full length.

  “What’s that?”

  “Radiologist’s apron,” he said, putting a blue padded loop over her head and coming behind her, where she heard him unfasten, then fasten Velcro. She looked down at the blue and breastless tube her body had become, and understood why the bag had been so heavy.

  “Aren’t you going to wear one?”

  “I,” he said, taking something much smaller from the bag, “am making do with this butterfly.” He fastened the thing behind his neck, the bulk of it beneath his chin. “Thyroid protection. By the way, would you mind turning the ring off, on your phone?”

  She got it out and did so.

  He was fitting a foot-long black nylon jacket around the rifle’s fat tube. She looked at it more closely and saw loops of nylon webbing. He looked at his watch. Checked the dosimeter again, this time standing in the middle of the studio space. Went to the iron-framed window. It was divided into five sets of mullions, she saw, but only the ones on either end opened. He opened the one nearest the room’s corner. She felt a cool breeze, laced with something that smelled like electricity. “Three minutes,” he said. “Go.”

  He knelt beside the black plastic case and opened it. Removed a three-inch slab of dull gray lead and set this on the floor. There were nine holes drilled in the block of lead that filled the case. A row of five, another of four. Twists of something like Saran Wrap protruded from each hole. One after another, using his left hand, he plucked them out, nine film-wrapped, bottlenecked cartridges, placing each one on the palm of his right hand. He got up, cradling them carefully, and moved quickly to the workbench, where he put them down, with a muffled clink of brass, on the gray foam. He unwrapped them, placing each one in its black nylon loop, the way Mexican bandits wore bullets across their chests in cartoons. He looked at his watch. “Minute. To midnight.” He picked up the rifle and pointed it at the wall. His thumb moved. An intense point of red light appeared on the wall, vanished.

  “You’re going to shoot the container.”

  An affirmative grunt.

  “What’s in it?”

  He walked to the window, the rifle cradled at his waist. He looked back at her, the blue thyroid shield like a bad turtleneck. “One hundred million dollars. In a set of fake pallets, along the floor. About fourteen inches deep. Little over a ton of U.S. hundreds.”

  “But why,” she said, “why are you shooting it?”

  “Remington Silvertips. Hollowed out.” He opened the breech, extracted a cartridge from its nylon loop, and chambered it. “Inside each one, a brachy-therapy capsule. Cancer therapy, localizes the effect on malignant tissue, spares the healthy.” He looked at his watch. “They preplant tubes, insert the capsules. Highly radioactive isotopes.” He raised the rifle to his shoulder, its barrel out the window now, his back to her. “Cesium, in these,” she heard him say.

  Then a buzzer or electric bell began to sound, from the port, and he was firing, ejecting, reloading, firing again, with a smooth machine-like rhythm, until the black loops were empty, and the buzzer, as if by some sympathetic magic, had ceased.

  77. SLACK ROPE

  The Guerreros were not waiting for him, when he left the dark bed of the truck, blinking under artificial sunlight. Instead he discovered Ochun, calm and supple amid this noise and iron, hundreds of engines, the shifting of great weights.

  She lent him a looseness he wouldn’t have felt, otherwise, after meeting the madman in the gray car and, too suddenly, Oshosi.

  Standing to one side of a crowded passage between stacked containers, he let the black rope snake off his ribs, swaying slightly to encourage it. When it lay at his feet, he picked up an end of it and coiled it, slinging it over his shoulder. Making sure his identification tag was visible, he picked up two sealed, almost empty cans of paint from a clutter of such things and walked on, making certain he walked a little more quickly, more purposefully, than the men around him. He stepped aside for specialized vehicles, forklifts, a first-aid wagon.

  When he judged that he’d gone as far as he should, he circled a stack of containers and came back, still walking as quickly, a man whose paint was needed, and who knew exactly where he was going.

  As indeed he did, as he was fifteen feet from the stack topped with the old man’s container when the bells and buzzers signaling the start of the midnight shift all sounded. Looking up, he thought he saw a disturbance in the air, there, moving quickly down the length of the turquoise container. He remembered the Guerreros twisting the air in Union Square. But they were not here.

  He set his paint cans aside, where they wouldn’t be tripped over, took latex gloves from his pocket, put them on, and walked to the end of the stack of three containers. They were stacked with their doors at the same end, as he’d been told they would be. He wiggled the black respirator out of his jacket pocket and removed it from its bag. Pocketing the bag, he removed his hard hat, put the respirator on, adjusted it, put his hard hat back on. Neither of these things were particularly good for slack rope, he thought, but Ochun was accepting. He stepped aside, nodding, as a forklift drove past.

  The doors of the containers were locked with hinged, vertical steel rods, sealed with tags of metal and colored plastic. He drew the plastic rectangle from the front of his jeans, pulled its paracord over his hard hat, and climbed up the three door-rods, the soles of his Adidas GSG9 boots easily gripping the painted steel of the doors. He climbed, as Ochun suggested, as though he were delighted to do so, with no more purpose in mind than proving that he could.

  His breath was loud, in the black respirator. He ignored it. Reaching the damp-slick top of the turquoise container, he climbed up and moved in, away from the edge.

  He crouched there, suddenly aware of something he couldn’t name. The goddess, the noise of the port, the old man, the ten painted disks slung around his neck like blank sigils. Something was about to change. In the world, in his life, he didn’t know. He closed his eyes. Saw the blue vase glowing softly, where he’d
hidden it, on the roof of his building.

  Accept this.

  I do, he told her.

  Crouching, he moved to the far end of the container. At each corner, as Garreth had explained, there was a bracket, a sort of loop, with which these boxes could be fastened together. He threaded one end of his rope through the bracket on the side furthest from the ocean he could not see. He moved to the opposite end, playing out his rope, and knotted its other end. The black rope slid off the side of the container’s roof, fastened at either end. He looked down at the slack rope, where it hung against the side of the blue container. He hoped he’d judged the give of the nylon correctly. It was good rope, climbing rope.

  I do, he said to Ochun, and slid down the rope, slowing himself with the sides of his Adidas.

  Slowly, gloved palms against the painted steel, he stood upright on the rope, knees slightly bent. Between the toes of his black shoes, concrete. Directly in front of his face was the first of Garreth’s bullet holes. The steel around it was bare, edges bright. He pulled the first of his magnets from its plastic pocket and placed it over the hole. It bonded with the container with a sharp click, trapping a fold of his latex glove. He carefully tore his hand free, picking off the dangling bit. He moved his left foot, his left hand, his right foot, his right hand. He covered the second hole, careful this time not to catch his glove. A forklift rolled past, beneath him.

  He remembered bringing the old man the first of the iPods, in Washington Square, by the chess tables. Snow. He saw now how that had changed things, had brought him here. He covered the third hole. Moved on. He remembered having soup with Alejandro. The fourth disk clicked in place. He moved. Five. Three men walked past, beneath him, their hard hats round buttons of plastic, two red, one blue. He stood with his palms flat against the cold steel. Six. He remembered running with the Guerreros through Union Square. Seven and eight were within a foot of one another. Click, and click. Nine.