Spook Country

by William Gibson

  He climbed back up, feet against the blue wall. He undid the knot at that end and let the rope go. He walked to the other end, where it hung straight, coiling on the concrete below, and slid down. He pulled down the hot respirator, gulped cool unfiltered air, and flicked the second knot free. The rope fell into his arms and he quickly coiled it, then walked away.

  Out of sight of the old man’s container, he tossed the rope, the respirator, and the bag it had come in into a dumpster. He left his shredded gloves on the fender of a forklift. The green jacket went into an empty cement bag, and into another dumpster.

  He pulled the hood of his black sweatshirt up and put his hard hat on. Ochun was gone. Now he must get out of this place.

  He saw a diesel train-engine rumble slowly past, a hundred yards in front of him, painted with black and white diagonals. It was pulling a train of flatcars, each one carrying a container.

  He walked on.

  HE WAS ALMOST OUT, when the helicopter came, out of nowhere, sweeping the tracks with its bubble of insanely bright light. He’d just taken ten minutes, trying to find a path through brambles, after jumping off his train. He’d thought he was well clear, that he had plenty of time. Now here he was, jeans caught on wire, on top of this six-foot fence, like a child, no systema at all. He saw the helicopter swing up, then out, toward where the sea must be. Still turning. Coming back. He threw himself off the fence, feeling his jeans tear.

  “Dude,” someone said, “you gotta know they got motion detectors in there.”

  “Coming back,” another boy said, pointing.

  Tito got to his feet, prepared to run. Suddenly the narrow park leapt into shivering, seemingly shadowless incandescence, the helicopter somewhere high above the new green leaves of the trees. Tito and three others, at the core of the beam. Two of them were resting a full-sized electric piano across the back of a bench, giving the helicopter the finger with their free hands. The other, grinning, had a white, wolf-shouldered dog on a red nylon lead. “I’m Igor, man.”

  “Ramone.” As the light went out.

  “You want to help us move, man? We got a new practice space. Beer.”

  “Sure,” said Tito, knowing he needed to get off the street. “You play anything?” asked Igor. “Keyboards.”

  The white dog licked Tito’s hand. “Awesome,” said Igor.

  78. THEIR DIFFERENT DRUMMER

  My purse,” she said, as they drove back to Bobby’s. “It’s not in back.” Craning around the seat.

  “Sure you didn’t give it to our dustmen?”

  “No. It was right there, beside the tripod.” Garreth wanted to give the tripod to the friend who’d arranged the studio for them. It was a good one, he’d said, and his friend was a photographer. Everything else had been passed to his “dustmen,” who’d been waiting in the parking lot, two men in a concrete-spattered pickup, who were being paid to see that it became part of a warehouse foundation they were pouring that morning.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but we really can’t go back.”

  She thought of Bigend’s scrambler, which she didn’t mind losing at all. But then she remembered the money from Jimmy. “Shit.” But then, strangely, she found she was glad to be done with that as well. Something oppressive about it, wrong. Otherwise, aside from her phone, the scrambler, the keys to the Phaeton and the flat, her license and her single credit card, there was only some makeup, a flashlight, and some mints. Her passport, she remembered now, was back at Bigend’s.

  “They must’ve taken it by mistake,” he said. “But that was strictly a one-way transaction. Sorry.”

  She considered telling him about the GPS tracker, but decided not to. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Were your car keys in your purse?” he asked, as they turned off Clark.

  “Yes. It’s parked up the street and around the corner, here, behind a dumpster, just before you get to your…alley.” She’d just seen a tall figure in black, getting out of a small blue car parked behind the opalescent bulk of the Blue Ant Phaeton.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Heidi,” she said. As he drove past the blue car and the Phaeton, she saw Inchmale straighten up on the other side, bearded and more balding than she remembered him. “And Inchmale.”

  “Reg Inchmale? Seriously?”

  “Past the alley,” she said, “pull over here.”

  He did. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know, but I’d better get them out of here. I don’t know what you still have to do, but I’ll bet there’s something. I’ll get them to rescue me. I think that’s probably what they’re here for.”

  “Actually,” he said, “that’s a good idea.”

  “How do I get back in touch with you?”

  He handed her a phone. “Don’t use it to call anyone else. I’ll call you when things are bit more sorted, on our end.”

  “Okay,” she said, and was out of the car, running back along the sidewalk, to intercept a biker-jacketed Heidi Hyde, striding toward her with some sort of three-foot paper-wrapped club in her hand. She heard the van pull away, behind her.

  “What’s going on?” demanded Heidi, tapping the palm of her hand with the gift-wrapped club.

  “We’re getting out of here,” Hollis said, passing her. “How long have you been here?”

  “Just got here,” said Heidi, turning.

  “What’s that?” Indicating the club.

  “An ax-handle.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  “There she is,” Inchmale said, around the stub of a small cigar, as they reached the blue car. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Get us out of here, Reg. Now.”

  “Isn’t that your car?” Pointing at the Phaeton.

  “I’ve lost the keys.” Pulling at the rear door of the blue car. “Will you please unlock this?” It unlocked. “Take me somewhere,” she said, getting in. “Now.”

  “YOUR PURSE,” said Bigend, “is near the intersection of Main and Hastings. Heading south on Main, currently. On foot, apparently.”

  “It must have been stolen,” she said. “Or found. How fast can you get Ollie over here with a spare set of keys?” She’d told him, at the start of the conversation, that she was in this particular bar. Otherwise, she realized, she’d have had to worry.

  “Almost instantly. You’re very near the flat. I know the place. They make a very decent piso mojado.”

  “Have him bring the keys. I’m not feeling like sitting around in a bar.” She closed Inchmale’s phone and handed it back to him. “He says you should try the piso mojado,” she said.

  Inchmale raised an eyebrow. “Do you know that that means ‘wet floor’?”

  “Hush a minute, Reg. I need to think.” According to Bigend, he’d ordered Ollie away, when she’d told him to, shortly before midnight, from the live-work building on Powell Street. The GPS unit in the scrambler, Bigend had said, had remained there for about fifteen minutes, then had headed west. From its speed, obviously in a vehicle. A bus, Bigend guessed, because it had made a number of brief stops that weren’t at intersections. She imagined him watching this on that huge screen in his office. The world as video game. He’d assumed, he’d said, that this had been her, headed back to the flat, but then the GPS telltale had gone walkabout, through what Ollie told him was the poorest-per-capita postal code in the country. She had already decided, she knew, for reasons as powerfully visceral as they were mysterious, that she wanted nothing more to do with either Jimmy Carlyle’s fifty hundreds or Bigend’s bugged scrambler.

  “Phone,” she said to Inchmale. “And a Visa card.”

  He put his phone on the table in front of her and dug out his wallet. “If you’re making a purchase, I’d rather you use that Amex. That’s the one for business expenses.”

  “I need their eight-hundred number to report my card stolen,” she said. Ollie arrived while she was dealing with Visa, which kept her from having to speak with him. Inchmale was g
ood at getting rid of people like Ollie. Who left, quickly.

  “Drink up,” she said, indicating Inchmale’s Belgian beer. “Where’s Heidi?”

  “Chatting up the bartender,” he said.

  Hollis leaned out of their white vinyl booth and spotted Heidi in conversation with the blonde behind the bar. Inchmale had insisted on her leaving the ax-handle in their blue Honda rental.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked him. “I mean, I appreciate that you’ve come to make sure I’m okay, but how did you get to where you found me.”

  “The Bollards weren’t ready to go into the studio, it turned out. Two of them had flu. I called Blue Ant. A number of times. They aren’t really in the book. Then I had to get through to Bigend himself, which was like reverse-engineering every ordinary concept of corporate structure. When I got him, though, he was all over me.”

  “He was?”

  “He wants ‘Hard to Be One’ for a Chinese car commercial. To run globally, I mean. Only the car is Chinese. He hadn’t heard it for a while. Seeing you jogged his memory. Swiss director, fifteen-million-dollar budget.”

  “For a car commercial?”

  “They need to make an impression.”

  “What did you say?”

  “No. Of course. The foot you always start with, right? No. But then he segued into this really interestingly textured bullshit about how concerned he was about you, up here in Vancouver. James Bond shit in the company car, you weren’t checking in, why didn’t I take the Blue Ant Lear up in about fifteen minutes and check on you.”

  “So you did?”

  “Not immediately. I don’t like being gamed, and your man’s all game.”

  Hollis nodded.

  “I was having lunch with Heidi. I ran it by her. And of course she bit. Became worried about you. And I caught it, then. Even though I could see that it would be to his advantage to get us both up here, bit of harmless adventure, then he’d pitch it to the two of us.”

  “Pitch what?”

  “The Chinese car commercial. He wants us to rerecord ‘Hard to Be One’ with different lyrics. Chinese car lyrics. But I was getting this secondhand paranoia off our different drummer over there. So then she and I are in her car, headed for Burbank. I think it took us longer to drive to Burbank than it took the plane to get up here. I had my passport, she had her driver’s license, and we both got here with what we were standing up in.”

  “And she bought an ax-handle?”

  “We got to that neighborhood where you’d left the car, and she didn’t like it. I said she was misreading it completely, missing the cultural subtexts, and that it wasn’t actually dangerous, not that way. But she stopped at a lumberyard and tooled up. Didn’t offer me one.”

  “It wouldn’t suit you.” She reached under her jacket and scratched her ribs, hard. “Come on. I need a shower. I was where there was ground glass, earlier. And cesium.”

  “Cesium?”

  She stood, picking up the two blank white cards that Ollie had left.

  79. ARTIST AND REPERTOIRE

  Where’d you say you’re from?” asked the man from Igor’s label, offering Tito an open bottle of beer.

  “New Jersey,” said Tito, who hadn’t. When they’d reached the rehearsal space, he’d phoned Garreth and told him the job was done, but that he thought he should stay off the street tonight. He hadn’t mentioned the helicopter, but he’d had a feeling that Garreth knew.

  He accepted the beer, pressing the cold bottle against his forehead. He’d enjoyed playing. The Guerreros had come, briefly, at the end.

  “Amazing,” said the label man. “Is that where your family’s from?”

  “New York,” said Tito.

  “Right,” said the A&R man, and sipped his own beer. “Amazing.”

  80. MONGOLIAN DEATH WORM

  Business-class lounge for Air Asshole,” declared Inchmale, enthusiastically, taking in the central area of the first floor of Bigend’s flat.

  “Has the bedroom to match, upstairs,” Hollis told him. “I’ll show you, after I’ve had a shower.”

  Heidi put her ax-handle down, still wrapped, on the counter beside Hollis’s laptop.

  “Ollis!” Odile stood at the head of the floating glass stair-slabs, in what Hollis supposed might be a very large hockey jersey. “Bobby, you have found him?”

  “Sort of. It’s complicated. Come down and meet my friends.”

  Odile, in bare feet, descended the slabs.

  “Reg Inchmale and Heidi Hyde. Odile Richard.”

  “Ça va? What is that?” Noticing the ax-handle.

  “A gift,” said Hollis. “She hasn’t found anyone to give it to, yet. I have to shower.”

  She went upstairs.

  The Blue Ant figurine was where she’d left it, on the ledge, still poised for action.

  She undressed, checked herself for the rash that fortunately didn’t seem to be there, and took a long, very thorough shower.

  What would Garreth and the old man be up to now, she wondered. Where had Tito gone, after they’d dropped him off? Why was her purse, or Bigend’s scrambler at least, afoot on the street? What constituted the Mongolian Death Worm, in her current situation? She didn’t know.

  Had she just seen a hundred million dollars irradiated, with. 30-caliber pellets of medical cesium? She had, if Garreth had been telling the truth. Why would you do that? She was soaping herself down, for the third time, when it came to her.

  To make it impossible to launder. The cesium. It wouldn’t come out in the wash.

  She hadn’t even thought to ask him, as he’d packed up to leave the studio. She hadn’t asked him anything, really. She’d understood that he needed, absolutely, to be doing what he was doing, doing it rather than talking about it. He’d been so utterly focused, checking things with the dosimeter, making sure nothing was left behind.

  She was certain she hadn’t left her purse up there. Someone must have taken it from the van, when she’d carried the duffel over to give it to the dustmen.

  She toweled off, dressed, checked to see that her passport was where she’d left it, then dried her hair.

  When she came back down, Inchmale was seated at one end of a twenty-foot couch, its leather very nearly the color of the seats in Bigend’s Maybach, reading messages on his phone. Heidi and Odile were what felt like half a block of polished concrete away, taking in the view, darkness and lights, like figures inserted into an architectural drawing to illustrate scale.

  “Your Bigend,” he said, looking up from the phone.

  “He’s not my Bigend. He’ll be your Bigend, though, if you sell him the rights to ‘Hard to Be One’ for a car commercial.”

  “I can’t do that, of course.”

  “For reasons of artistic integrity?”

  “Because the three of us would have to agree. You, me, Heidi. We own the rights jointly, remember?”

  “I say it’s up to you.” Sitting beside him on the couch.

  “And why is that?”

  “Because you’re still in the business. Still have a stake.”

  “He wants you to write it.”

  “Write what?”

  “The changes to the lyrics.”

  “To turn it into a car jingle?”

  “A theme. An anthem. Of postmodern branding.”

  “‘Hard to Be One’? Seriously?”

  “He’s texting me every half-hour. Wants to pin it down. He’s the sort of man I could get sick to the back teeth of. Actually.”

  She looked at him. “Where’s the Mongolian Death Worm?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be most afraid of, now. Do you? You used to tell me about the Death Worm when we were touring. How it was so deadly that there were scarcely any descriptions of it.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It might spit venom, or bolts of electricity.” He smiled. “Or ichor,” he said.

  “And it hid in the dunes. Of Mongolia.”

 
“Yes.”

  “So I adopted it. Made it a sort of mascot for my anxiety. I imagined it as being bright red…”

  “They are bright red,” said Inchmale. “Scarlet. Eyeless. Thick as a child’s thigh.”

  “It became the shape I’d give to any major fear I couldn’t quite get a handle on. In L.A., a day or two ago, the idea of Bigend and his magazine that doesn’t quite exist, this level of weirdness he’s nosed himself into, and taken me with him, that I can’t even tell you about, that all felt like the Death Worm. Out there in the dunes.”

  He looked at her. “It’s good to see you.”

  “Good to see you, Reg. But I’m still confused.”

  “If you weren’t, these days,” he said, “you’d probably be psychotic. The worst really are full of passionate intensity now, aren’t they? But what strikes me is that you don’t seem actually frightened now. Confused, but I don’t feel the fear.”

  “I’ve just seen someone, some people,” she told him, “tonight, do the single strangest thing I imagine I’ll ever see.”

  “Really?” He was suddenly grave. “I envy you.”

  “I thought it was going to be terrorism, or crime in some more traditional sense, but it wasn’t. I think that it was actually…”

  “What?”

  “A prank. A prank you’d have to be crazy to be able to afford.”

  “You know I’d love to know what that was,” he said.

  “I know. But I’ve given my word once too often in this thing. I gave it to Bigend, then gave it again to someone else. I’d tell you that I’ll tell you eventually, but I can’t. Except that I might be able to. Eventually. It depends. Understand?”

  “Is that young Frenchwoman a lesbian?” asked Inchmale.

  “Why?”

  “She seems physically attracted to Heidi.”

  “I wouldn’t say that that’s any indication of lesbianism, particularly.”

  “No?”

  “Heidi constitutes a sort of a gender preference unto herself. For some people. And lots of them are male.”

  He smiled. “That’s true. I’d forgotten.”