Zero History Part 51

"No idea. Phoned a friend in Washington? But then, I never cease to be amazed at how the oddest things float about."

"And they arrested Gracie and the others?"

He sat up, doubled the yellow bungee in front of his chest, and slowly pulled his fists apart. "A special kind of detention."

"Nothing in the news."

"Nothing," he agreed, still stretching.

"Pep put something in their car. Then locked it up again."

"Yes." The bungee at full extension now, quivering.

"The other party favor."

He relaxed, the yellow elastic drawing his fists together. "Yes."

"What was in it?"

"Molecules. The sort you don't want a bomb-sniffer to find. They were sampled from a particular batch of Semtex that the IRA were heavily invested in. Plastic explosive. Distinctive chemical signature. Still a few tons of it out there, as far as anyone knows. And the card from a digital camera. Photographs of mosques, all over Britain. The dates on the images were a few months old, but not over sell-by, as suggestive evidence goes."

"And when you said you were using something 'off the shelf,' that was it?"

"Yes."

"Who was it originally for?"

"Not important now. No need to know. When I jumped off the Burj, silly t.i.t, I blew the window of opportunity on that one. But then I had a girlfriend in trouble. Vinegar and brown paper."

"Vinegar?"

"Improvised fix. Whatever's handiest."

"I'm not complaining. But what about Gracie? Won't he tell them about us?"

"The beauty of that," he said, putting his hand on her hip, "is that he doesn't know about us. Well, you a bit, possibly, through Sleight, but Sleight's without a governor now, with Gracie a secret guest of Her Majesty. Sleight's busy getting himself well away from all of it, I'd imagine. And it's looking better than that, actually, according to the old man."

"How better?"

"American government seems not to like Gracie. They're turning up all sorts of things on their end. He's getting major interagency attention, so the old boy hears. I imagine ours will eventually decide he's been the victim of a practical joke, but then he'll have genuine problems back home. Huge ones, I hope. I'm more worried about your Big End in the long run, myself."

"Why?"

"Something's happening there. Too big to get a handle on. But the old man says that that's it exactly: Big End, somehow, is now too big to get a handle on. Which may be what they mean when they say something's too big to fail."

"He's found Meredith's last season of shoes. Tacoma. Bought them, given them to her. Via some weird new ent.i.ty of his that targets and a.s.sists creatives."

"I'd watch the 'targets,' myself."

"And he's paid me. My accountant phoned this morning. I'm worried about that."

"Why?"

"Hubertus paid me exactly the amount I received for my share of licensing a Curfew song to a Chinese car company. That's a lot of money."

"Not a problem."

"Easy for you to say. I don't want to be in his debt."

"You aren't. If it hadn't been for you, he might not have gotten Chombo back, because I wouldn't have turned up. And if he had gotten him back, swapping Milgrim, he'd have eventually had to deal with Sleight and Gracie, down the road. I wasn't just putting the wind up him with that. He knows that. You're being rewarded for your crucial role in getting him wherever he's now gotten."

"On his way to Iceland, that would be."

"Let him go. How are you at kitchens?"

"Cooking? Minimal skills."

"Designing them. I have a flat in Berlin. East side, new building, old was entirely asbestos so they knocked it down. One very big room and a bathroom. No kitchen, just the stumps of pipes and ganglia sticking up from the floor, more or less in the middle. We'd need to fill that in, if we were going to live there."

"You want to live in Berlin?"

"Provisionally, yes. But only if you do."

She looked at him. "When I was leaving Cabinet," she said, "following you out to the Slow Foods van, Robert congratulated me. I didn't ask him what for, just said thanks. He'd been odd since you turned up. Do you know what that was about?"

"Ah. Yes. When I first struck up a conversation with him, when I was waiting for you, I told him that I was there to ask you to marry me."

She stared at him. "And you were lying."

"Not at all. Moment never presented itself. I a.s.sume he thinks we're engaged."

"Do you?"

"Your call, traditionally," he said, putting down the bungee.

86. DOILIES

Fiona was getting her hair cut.

Milgrim stayed in the cabin, finishing Hollis's book, then digging deeper into the archival subbas.e.m.e.nt of Cabinet's website, where he might learn, for instance, that the watercolors in the hallways leading to Hollis's room were early twentieth-century, by the expatriate American eccentric Doran Lumley. Cabinet owned thirty of these, and rotated them regularly.

He looked up at the decor of the cabin, remembering Hollis's room at Cabinet, how much he'd liked it. Designers from Hermes had based these cabins on ones in transatlantic prewar German airships, though n.o.body was making much of a point of that. Frosted aluminum, laminated bamboo, moss-green suede, and ostrich in one very peculiar shade of orange. The three windows were round, portholes really, and through them, if he looked, an empty sea, gone bronze with the setting sun.

The ekranoplan reminded Milgrim of the Spruce Goose Spruce Goose, which he'd toured in Long Beach as a high school student, but with its wings largely amputated. Weird Soviet hybrids, the ekranoplans; they flew, at tremendous speeds, about fifteen feet above the water, incapable of greater alt.i.tude. They had been designed to haul a hundred tons of troops or cargo, very quickly, over the Black or Baltic Sea. This one, an A-90 Orlyonok, had, like all the others, been built in the Volga Shipyard, at Nizhni Novgorod. Milgrim already knew more about them than he cared to, as he was supposed to be translating a four-inch stack of technical and historical doc.u.ments for Bigend. With Fiona here, he hadn't made much progress.

He'd tried working in the smallest of the four lounges, on the top deck, directly behind the flight deck (if that was the term, in something that arguably voyaged, rather than flew). There was scarcely anyone there, usually, and he could take the papers and his laptop. But the wifi was excellent onboard, and he'd found himself Googling things there, eating croissants, drinking coffee. That was where he'd discovered Cabinet's site.

"That's Cabinet, isn't it?" the Italian girl had asked, topping up his coffee. "Have you stayed there?"

"No," Milgrim had said, "but I've been there."

"I used to work there," she'd said, smiling, and walked back toward the galley, looking very smart in her Jun Marukawa tunic and skirt. Fiona said that Bigend, with the Hermes ekranoplan, had gone totally Bond villain, and that the crew uniforms were the icing on the cake. Still, Milgrim had thought, no denying the girl looked good in her Marukawa.

But when he'd finally settled down to translate what was really quite dreadful prose, Bigend had emerged from the flight deck, the Klein Blue suit freshly pressed.

He'd taken a seat opposite Milgrim, at the small round table, the suit contrasting painfully with the orange leather upholstery. He'd proceeded, with no preface whatever, as was his way, to tell Milgrim a great deal about the history of the rifle Gracie had left on Little Wormwood Scrubs. It had, Milgrim had already known, been found, just after dawn, by a dog walker, who'd promptly phoned the police. Stranger things, Milgrim now knew, had been found on the Scrubs, including unexploded munitions, and not that long ago.

He'd learned then that the police who'd responded to the dog walker had been ordinary police, so that the rifle's serial numbers had been, however briefly, in ordinary police computers. Shortly to evaporate, under the attention of spookier ent.i.ties, but long enough for Bigend, however he might have done it, to acquire them. He now knew, somehow, that the rifle, Chinese-made, had been captured in Afghanistan two years before, and dutifully logged. After that, a blank, until Gracie had turned up with it, folded, in a cardboard carton. It bothered Bigend, the rifle. It was his theory (or "narrative," Milgrim's therapist in Basel might have said) that Gracie had gotten the gun from some opposite number in the British military, after it had been secretly deleted from stores and smuggled back to England. But Bigend's concern now was just how opposite a number this theoretical person might have been. Might Gracie have had a British partner, someone with similar inclinations? Someone who hadn't been rolled up by whatever supercops Garreth had called down?

Milgrim hadn't thought so. "I think it was about the gun," he'd said.

"How do you mean, 'about the gun'?"

"Things happen around guns. This happened because a gun was there. You've told me that you can't understand why Gracie brought the gun. That it doesn't fit with your sense of who he is. That it was stupid. Over-the-top. Gratuitous. Bad business."

"Exactly."

"He did it because someone he knew here had the gun. The gun was captured by British troops. Someone smuggled it back here. That's not arms dealing. That's an illegal souvenir. But Gracie saw saw the gun. And then he the gun. And then he had had the gun. And then things happened, because the gun was there. But whoever he the gun. And then things happened, because the gun was there. But whoever he got got the gun from wants the gun from wants nothing nothing at all to do with any of this. Ever." at all to do with any of this. Ever."

Bigend had stared at him. "Remarkable," he'd said, finally, "how you do that."

"It's thinking like a criminal," Milgrim said.

"Once again, I'm in your debt."

In Winnie's, Milgrim thought then, though Bigend didn't know it. When he'd tweeted her, after learning more from Hollis, he'd asked, "How did you do that?" Her tweet in reply, the last he'd gotten from her, though he still checked for them, periodically, had simply said, "Doilies."

"It's the order flow, isn't it?" Milgrim had had no intent to ask this at all. Hadn't been thinking of it. Yet it had emerged. His therapist had told him that ideas, in human relations, had lives of their own. Were in a sense autonomous.

"Of course."

"That's what Chombo was doing. Finding the order flow."

"He found it a week before they kidnapped him, but his work, to that point, would have been useless. Without him, I mean."

"And the market, the whole thing, it's no longer real? Because you know the future?"

"It's a very tiny tiny slice of the future. The merest paring. Minutes." slice of the future. The merest paring. Minutes."

"How many?"

Bigend had glanced around the empty lounge. "Seventeen, presently."

"Is that enough?"

"Seven would have been entirely adequate. Seven seconds seconds, in most cases."

Fiona's dress was a seamless tube, l.u.s.trous black jersey. She was wearing it with the top rolled down, forming a sort of band across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her shoulders bare. A gift from her mother, she said, who'd gotten it from an a.s.sociate editor at French Vogue Vogue. Milgrim knew almost nothing about her mother, other than that she'd once been involved with Bigend, but he'd always found the idea of girlfriends having parents intimidating.

He wore his freshly dry-cleaned tweed jacket and whipcord trousers, but with a Hackett shirt, no extraneous cuff-b.u.t.tons.

c.o.c.ktails were being served in the ballroom, so-called, which ordinarily was the main dining room. The walls were decorated with quasi-Constructivist murals of ekranoplans, looking, as Milgrim thought they somewhat actually did, like the Pan American Airways Flying Clippers of the 1940s, but with truncated wings and that strange canard that supported the jet engines. As he and Fiona descended the spiral stairway, he saw Aldous and the other driver towering elegantly above the a.s.sembled pa.s.sengers, many of whom Milgrim hadn't seen before, as he and Fiona had been spending most of their time in the cabin. There was Rausch, too, his black suit rumpled, his matte hair reminding Milgrim of the stuff Chandra had used on Ajay, though with a different style of application.

As they reached the deck, Aldous arrived at the bottom of the stairs. "h.e.l.lo," said Milgrim, not having seen Aldous since that night in the City. "Thanks for getting us out of that. Hope it wasn't too hard on you, after."

"Bigend's silk," said Aldous, with an elegant shrug, which Milgrim knew meant lawyer. "And the courier," he said to Fiona, winking.

"Hullo, Aldous." She smiled, then turned away to greet someone Milgrim didn't know.

"I've been wondering," said Milgrim, lowering his voice, glancing across the ballroom at the polished head of the other driver, "about the testing. It's been a while."

"What testing?"

"Urinalysis," said Milgrim.

"I think they discontinue that. Gone from the call sheets. But everything's changing, now."

"At Blue Ant?"

Aldous nodded. "New broom," he said, gravely, then nodded to his own earpiece, and slipped silently away.

"We found your mouthwash," said Rausch. "In New York. Sending it to your cabin." He looked unhappy with Milgrim, but then he always did.

"Aldous says that things are changing at Blue Ant. 'New broom,' he said."

Rausch's shoulders rose. "Everyone who matters," he said, "who's made the cut, is on this plane."

"It's not a plane," said Milgrim.

"Whatever it is," said Rausch, irritably.

"Do you know when we reach Iceland?"

"Tomorrow morning. A lot of this has just been cruising, breaking the thing in."

"I'm almost out of medication."

"That's all been placebos for the past three months. I suppose the vitamins and supplements were real." Rausch watched him carefully, savoring his reaction.