Zero History Part 32

He shrugged.

"Who is the designer?"

"I'm sending you to find that out," said Bigend.

"Milgrim," said Hollis, "has something he needs to tell you." It was the only thing she could think of that might change the subject, give her time to think.

"Do you, Milgrim?" Bigend asked.

Milgrim made a brief, strange, high-pitched sound, like something burning out. Closed his eyes. Opened them. "The cop," he said, "in Seven Dials. The one who took my picture. The one from Myrtle Beach."

Bigend nodded.

"She's an agent. From," and he closed his eyes again, "the Defense Criminal Investigative Service." Milgrim opened his eyes, tentatively discovering himself not dead.

"Who are, I confess," said Bigend, after a pause, "entirely new to me. American, I take it?"

"It was the pants," said Milgrim. "She was watching the pants. Then we showed up, and she thought we might be involved with Foley, and Gracie."

"Which we are, of course, courtesy of Oliver."

Hollis hadn't heard Bigend use Sleight's first name for a while.

"She wants me to tell you about Gracie," said Milgrim.

"I'd like you to do that," said Bigend, "but perhaps things would be simplified by my speaking with her myself. I'm not entirely unaccustomed to dealing with Americans."

"She has to go back," said Milgrim. "She isn't going to learn what she needs to learn here. You aren't what she thought you were. You're just compet.i.tion for Foley and Gracie. But she wants you to know about Gracie. That Gracie won't like it that you're competing."

"He already didn't," said Bigend. "He turned Sleight, probably at that Marine Corps trade fair in Carolina. Unless Sleight volunteered, which I regard as a possibility. And did she give you a reason for her wanting me to know all this, your unnamed, perhaps nameless federal agent?"

"Winnie Tung Whitaker," said Milgrim.

Bigend stared at him. "Hyphenated?"

"No," said Milgrim.

"Did she? Suggest why she might want me to know about this person?"

"She said that you're rich and have lawyers. That if she can roll you in front of him, she might as well. I don't think she's been getting any closer to popping him. Sounded frustrated."

"One does," agreed Bigend, leaning forward in his trench coat. "And when did you discuss all this with her?"

"She was at the hotel," Milgrim said, "after I met with you. And I had dinner with her, tonight. Vietnamese."

"And who is employing 'Foley,' then?"

"Michael Preston Gracie." Hollis saw Milgrim check to see that he'd gotten the name right. "Major, retired, U.S. Army, Special Forces. He trains police for foreign countries, arranges for them to buy equipment from friends of his. Sometimes it isn't equipment they should be able to buy. But he's moving into contracting the way you want to. Designing things, manufacturing. She said it was the legitimization stage."

"Ah," said Bigend, with a nod. "He's gotten big enough to acquire real lawyers."

"That's what she said."

"That's often problematic. A watershed. Not everyone makes it. By the time you're big enough to have lawyers willing to sufficiently make the case for legitimization, you're quite big, and highly illegitimate."

"I knew a drug dealer who bought a Saab dealers.h.i.+p," offered Milgrim.

"Exactly," said Bigend, with a look for Hollis.

"I think she wanted you to understand that Gracie's dangerous," Milgrim said, "and that he regards compet.i.tors as enemies."

" 'Listen to your enemies,' " Bigend said, " 'for G.o.d is speaking.' "

"What does that mean?" Milgrim asked.

"A Yiddish proverb," Bigend said. "It rewards contemplation."

Something moved, three feet above Bigend's head. The manta, a sinuous matte-black blot, as wide, from wingtip to wingtip, as a small boy's outstretched arms.

"f.u.c.k, this is cool," called Heidi, from across the floor of the atrium, "I heard everything you said!"

"Be a dear," Bigend called to her, not bothering to look up. "Swim it away. Try the penguin now."

The thing's wingtips silently flexed, catching the air, for all the world like a real ray, as it swam slowly up, wheeling gracefully, barely missing the hanging stairway. "Utterly addictive," Bigend said to Hollis. "Your locative art will morph again, with cheap aerial video drones."

"That doesn't look cheap to me."

"No," said Bigend, "not at all, but cheaper platforms will be in the High Street by Christmas. But the Festos are genius. We opted for their sheer strangeness, the organic movement, modeled from nature. They aren't very fast, but if people see them, their first thought is that they're hallucinating."

Milgrim nodded. "He's coming," he said. "Gracie."

"To London?"

"She said he'll be here soon."

"He has Sleight," Bigend said, "so he knows that having a look at his pants was simply basic strategic business intelligence. It isn't as though we've done anything to harm him. Or 'Foley' either, for that matter."

Milgrim looked from Bigend to Hollis, eyes wide.

"A friend of mine has been in a traffic accident," Hollis said. "I have to stay in town until I know how he is."

Bigend frowned. "Anyone I know?"

"No," said Hollis.

"That's not a problem. I wasn't planning on sending you immediately. Say four more days. Will you know by then whether or not your friend is out of the woods?"

"I hope so," said Hollis.

48. SHOTGUN

You're shotgun," Heidi said to Milgrim as they neared the truck. Milgrim saw the pink Mossberg-Taser collaboration in Bigend's gloved hands, in the office at Blue Ant, and almost said that he didn't have one. "Hollis and I need a talk," she said, clarifying things. He'd be in front with Aldous, his accustomed seat.

Aldous, alerted to their exit, had the motor running. Locks clunked open for them. Milgrim and Heidi hauled their respective doors open. He scrambled up while Heidi helped Hollis. He managed to close his door before Heidi had closed hers. The locks clunked solidly into place. Aldous had proudly pointed out the narrowness, the extreme evenness, of the gaps between the doors and the bodywork. These were too narrow for the insertion of any pry bar, he'd said, too narrow even for "the jaws of life," an expression Milgrim was unfamiliar with, but which he took to be Jamaican, some potent icon of existential dread.

He fastened his seat belt, a bulky, complicated thing, and sat back, taking stock. Where, exactly, was he now, vis a vis the snapping jaws of life? Bigend had seemed to have virtually no reaction at all to the news of Milgrim having a federal agent in his life, or for that matter to Winnie's alert regarding Gracie. Milgrim's panic attack, only his second in recovery, not counting his initial reaction to having been photographed by Winnie in the Caffe Nero, had been for naught. As indeed had been every other panic attack he'd ever suffered, his therapist had repeatedly pointed out. His limbic mind was grooved by irrational fear, a sort of permanent roller coaster, always ready for a ride. "Don't tell yourself that you're afraid," she'd advised him, "but that you have fear have fear. Otherwise, you believe that you are are fear." fear."

"You didn't quit," said Heidi, behind him.

"No," said Hollis. "It wasn't the right time."

"You've got to try those balloons. They f.u.c.king rock."

They were rolling now, the run-flats juddering over City tarmac, not so much old as recently resurfaced, piecemeal, in the course of much building.

Milgrim sighed reflexively and let himself settle forward, slightly, into the seat belt harness. Let go of the tension, he told himself. Be, as his therapist said, in the moment.

In the moment, a s.h.i.+ny black car, coming in the opposite direction, swerved diagonally into their path. Aldous instantly swinging right, into a much narrower street, the City equivalent of an alley, dark windowless walls of stone or concrete. Behind them, tires squealed. Milgrim glanced back, saw headlights plunging after them. "Look sharp," advised Aldous, speeding up. Threads burst in the straps across Milgrim's lap and chest, black shapes birthing instantly, a conjurer's trick, hauling him upright.

"Motherf.u.c.k," observed Heidi, from the back seat, as Aldous continued to accelerate.

And Milgrim fell, amazed and unthinking, into his mysterious joy at the Hanger Lane Gyratory, lost in the ba.s.so howl of the Hilux's supercharger.

Constrained by the inflated crash-harness, he struggled to look back. Saw headlights. The black car.

Aldous stamped on the brakes, momentum whipping Milgrim around. A second set of headlights, ahead of them, approaching.

"Well, then," said Aldous, his teeth very white in the beams of the approaching vehicle.

Milgrim looked to the side, seeing a blank and ancient wall, perhaps two feet away.

"Aldous," said Hollis.

"Moment, please, Miss Henry," said Aldous.

The car in front of them was only a few feet away now. Squinting against the glare of the other's lights, Milgrim saw, through the car's winds.h.i.+eld, two men. One, the driver, masked in a black balaclava. The other was masked in white, though weirdly and only partially. And was holding something up to the winds.h.i.+eld in front of him. For Milgrim to see.

Milgrim's Neo.

Foley, his short-billed cap low over his bandaged head, fixed Milgrim with the one eye Milgrim could see, raised his other hand, and slowly shook an admonitory finger, his expression changing abruptly as Aldous floored the truck, popped the clutch, and crashed into the car, still accelerating. Foley's car began to move backward as its masked driver twisted the wheel, a few sparks popping as if off a grindstone, and still Aldous accelerated, the truck's unnatural ma.s.s and abnormal power, Milgrim now realized, being central to that cartel-readiness of which Aldous was so proud. Milgrim saw the other driver abandon the wheel, actually cover his eyes. The car struck the opposite wall, producing more sparks, and suddenly they were in the street at the far end, back in the world. Foley's car, patches of paintwork scoured to raw plastic, grille shattered, sat in the street, at a diagonal, its driver struggling, around an inflated airbag, with the wheel.

Aldous backed up slightly, then drove carefully, at an angle and at speed, into Foley's car. Then calmly and neatly reversed, backing up until the bed of the truck blocked the pa.s.sage. Milgrim heard brakes behind them, and turned to see the black car reversing, its headlights receding. He heard it sc.r.a.pe the wall.

"Fiona will take you home, Miss Henry," said Aldous, as Milgrim turned to see him rapidly thumbing the screen of his iPhone.

"Fiona," said Milgrim, hopefully.

"You must all leave now, quickly," said Aldous. "The police are coming. Please go with Mr. Milgrim, Miss Hyde." He touched something on the dash, causing their inflated harnesses to simultaneously unlatch. Milgrim looked down at the thing that lay across his chest, like a rubber bat, a goth party favor. He heard the doors unlatch.

"Let's roll," said Heidi.

"Ouch," said Hollis. "Don't hit me!"

"Move!"

Milgrim did as told, shoving the door open and jumping down, managing to bite the corner of his tongue in the process. He tasted blood, metallic and scary, then knew, in some new way, that he was simply here, alive for the moment, and that that was that. He blinked.

And saw Foley lunge around the back of his ruined car, his fists balled, headed straight for him. While simultaneously, it seemed, the narrow s.p.a.ce between them was bisected by the arrival of Fiona's duct-taped cowling, like an intrusion from another dimension, impossible but there it was. Foley seems to vanish as Fiona, in her yellow helmet, somehow slewed the big bike around in an amazingly tight circle, motor revving. Heidi stepped forward then, driving Hollis before her, then suddenly picked her up and sat her on the back of the bike, like someone putting a child on a pony. Milgrim saw Fiona toss Heidi the spare helmet, and hallucinated hairspray as Heidi popped it on Hollis's head, giving Fiona's yellow helmet a rap with her knuckles. He saw Fiona make a thumbs-up gesture without taking her hand off the throttle, and then she roared away, Hollis throwing her arms around her.

"Where's Foley?" Milgrim asked, trying to look in every direction at once.

"That way," said Heidi, pointing down the street. "His driver grabbed him. We're this way. Move." She pointed past the truck, into the pa.s.sage.

"My laptop," Milgrim said, remembering. He ran around the back of the truck, reached into the cab, hauling his bag out.

"Hang tough," said Heidi to Aldous, who was lighting a cigarette now, with an elegant silver lighter. She fist-b.u.mped his black-suited shoulder as she pa.s.sed.

And for the first time, Milgrim heard the sirens, foreign, British, and so many.

As quickly as he could, he followed Heidi's tall, straight back.

49. GREAT MARLBOROUGH

All was forward, turn, forward, turn again, and a sharp smell of hairspray.

Her body remembering to lean into the turns, hugging what she took to be a strong thin girl, definitely b.r.e.a.s.t.s in there, through layers of armored Cordura. Very little she could see, past the smudged plastic of the visor, under wing-beat strobings of streetlight. Ahead, the yellow of the rider's helmet, scratched diagonally, as by something with three large claws. To either side a blur of abstracted London texture, as free of meaning as sampled skins in a graphics program. The awning of a Pret A Manger, brick, possibly the green round of a Starbucks sign, more brick, something in that one official shade of red. And most of it, she guessed, in the service of evasion, a route no car could follow. At least there seemed to be relatively little traffic now.

And then they slowed, stopped, the rider reversing into a parking place. When the ignition was cut, London was instantly, strangely quiet. The rider was removing her yellow helmet, so Hollis released her, then reached up and removed her own, which she now saw was black.

"You might need the loo," said the girl, twenty-something, fox-faced, pale brown hair mussed by the helmet. The hairspray wouldn't have been hers.

"Loo?"