Spook Country (20 page)

T here were ghosts in the Civil War trees, past Philadelphia.

Earlier the track had passed near streets of tiny row houses, in neighborhoods where poverty seemed to have been as efficient as the neutron bomb was said to be. Streets as denuded of population as their windows were of glass. The houses themselves seemed to belong less to another time than to another country; Belfast perhaps, after some sectarian biological attack. The shells of Japanese cars in the streets, belly down on bare rims.

But past Philadelphia, and after taking another tablet, Milgrim began to catch glimpses of spectral others, angels perhaps. The late-afternoon sun dressed the passing woods with Maxfield Parrish foxfire, and perhaps it was that epileptic flicker generated by the train’s motion that called these beings forth. He found them neutral, if not actually benign. They belonged to this landscape, this hour and time of year, and not to his story.

Across the Metroliner’s aisle, Brown tapped steadily on his armored laptop. An anxiety stole into Brown’s face when he wrote, Milgrim knew, and he saw it again now. Perhaps Brown was uncertain of his writing abilities, or habitually prepared to have what he wrote rejected or criticized excessively, by whoever it was to whom he wrote. Or was it that he was simply uncomfortable with reporting a lack of success? As far as Milgrim knew, Brown had never been successful at what he had seemed to be trying to do, with the IF and the subject. Capturing the subject seemed to have been a win position for Brown, and Brown had tried, but hadn’t managed it. Seizing whatever it was the IF delivered to the subject had seemed to be another, though secondary, win position, and possibly Brown had succeeded in that, today, in Union Square. Capturing the IF had never seemed like a win position. Had they captured the IF, Milgrim assumed, both subject and the IF’s extended family would be alerted to Brown’s game. The planting of the signal-grabber in the IF’s room would have been negated. So, Milgrim, assumed, what Brown was doing now was drafting his report of what had happened in Union Square.

But he thought it unlikely that any such report would mention him, or Dennis’s black associates, and that was probably a very good thing. He was concerned that Brown had not yet mentioned to him the fact of his having been discovered no longer cuffed to the bench, but he felt prepared; the cuff itself had failed, and Milgrim, sensing trouble in the park, had taken it upon himself to return to Brown’s car, the better to facilitate their departure.

Tiring of the flicking of sun through the trees, he thought he might read his book. But putting his hand on the worn cover, in the side pocket of the Paul Stuart, was as far as he got. He fell asleep, then, with his cheek against the warm glass, and only woke as Brown was shaking him, as they pulled into Union Station in Washington.

He found he was horribly stiff now, no doubt from his uncharacteristic bout of exercise in the park, as well as from the burst of fear-driven adrenaline that had made it possible. His legs felt like stilts as he staggered upright, brushing at crumbs from the turkey sandwich he’d had before Philadelphia. “Move,” Brown ordered, pushing him ahead. Brown had his laptop and his bag slung at his hips, packhorse-style, straps crossing his chest. Milgrim suspected Brown had been taught this at some point in a course on optimally securing one’s hand luggage. He had the sense that Brown improvised relatively little, and never with much of a sense of ease; he was a man who believed there were ways to do things, and that those were the ways things should be done.

He was also, Milgrim thought, struggling to keep up with him along the platform, an authoritarian, but with what Milgrim assumed would be a fundamental need to obey orders.

The Beaux-Arts triumphalism of the station made Milgrim feel suddenly very small. His neck shrank into the collar of the Paul Stuart coat. He seemed to see himself, and Brown, from high up in those ornate arches, the two of them like beetles, far below, trundling across a vast expanse of marble. He forced himself to peer up, from between his shoulders, at inscribed stone, allegorical sculpture, gilt, all the pomp and gravitas of another young century’s American Renaissance.

Outside, the air laced with a tonality of pollution not New York’s, and faintly muggy, Brown got them quickly into a cab, driven by a Thai with yellow shooting-glasses, and out of there, into that street plan that Milgrim had never been able to grasp at all. Circles, radial avenues, Masonic complexities. But Brown had given the driver an address on N Street, and Milgrim did remember that, that other alphabet city, so different. He had spent three weeks here, once, in the salad days of the first Clinton administration, as part of a team translating Russian trade reports for a firm of lobbyists.

At some point they turned off a busy shopping street full of mall brands and into a suddenly quieter neighborhood, entirely residential, of smaller, older houses. In the Federal style, Milgrim remembered, and also that this must be Georgetown, recalled from a style seminar conducted in a townhouse. Not unlike these they were passing, but grander, with a walled rear garden in which Milgrim, having slipped out for a joint, had discovered an enormous tortoise and an even larger rabbit, the resident’s pets he’d supposed, but remembered now as in some magical moment of childhood. Milgrim’s actual childhood had been short on magical moments, he reflected, so perhaps he’d shifted this encounter back, along the subjective time line, to compensate for that. But definitely this was Georgetown, these narrow façades of mellow brick, black-painted wooden shutters, the sense that Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren would have been hard at work on interiors, together at last, sheathing inherently superior surfaces under hand-rubbed coats of golden beeswax.

Their cab came to a sudden halt, the driver’s acrid yellow glasses turning to Brown. “You here?” he asked.

Probably, Milgrim replied silently, as Brown passed the man a few folded bills and ordered Milgrim out.

Milgrim’s shoes slipped on bricks worn cornerless with years. He followed Brown up three high granite steps cupped by centuries of feet. The black-painted door, beneath a simple fanlight, was decorated with a Federal eagle in recently polished brass, so old that it resembled no eagle Milgrim had ever seen, but some creature out of more ancient mythology, perhaps a phoenix. Cast, Milgrim guessed, by artisans who’d never seen an eagle, only some engraving of one. Brown’s attention was entirely taken up, now, with a keypad of brushed stainless, set into the jamb, on which he was entering a code he copied from a slip of blue paper. Milgrim looked up the street and saw expensively old-fashioned streetlights wink on. Somewhere up the block a very large dog was barking.

As Brown completed his sequence, the door made a startling concise mechanical sound as it unlocked itself.

“In,” Brown ordered.

Milgrim grasped the curved brass handle, depressed the thumbpiece, and pushed. The door swung silently open. He stepped in, knowing immediately that the house was empty. He saw a long brass plate set with reproduction antique light switches. He pressed the one nearest the door, his finger covering the round dot of mother-of-pearl. A bowl of creamy glass lit, above them, its rim held in flowered bronze. He looked down. Polished gray marble.

He heard Brown close the door behind him, its lock making that sound again.

Brown pressed more of the buttons on the brass plate, illuminating further reaches. He hadn’t been too far off about Martha and Ralph, Milgrim saw, though the furniture wasn’t real. It was like the furniture in the lobby of a more traditionally minded Four Seasons.

“Nice,” Milgrim heard himself say.

Brown turned on the ball of one foot, staring.

“Sorry,” Milgrim said.

T ito sat, eyes resolutely closed, within his music.

Aside from vibration and the noise of the engine, there was nothing to suggest forward motion. He had no idea of their direction.

He stayed within the music, with Ochun, who held him above his fear. He saw her, eventually, as the waters of a stream, crossing pebbles, descending a hillside, through thick growth. He became aware of a bird overhead, above the stream, beyond treetops.

He felt the machine turning. The Prada man, seated beside him, touched his wrist. Tito opened his eyes. The man was pointing, saying something. Tito removed the Nano’s earphones, but still he couldn’t hear, only the sound of the engine. Through a curved plastic window he saw the sea below, low waves rolling in to a rocky beach. In a wide grassy clearing, shaven into low brown woods, white buildings were arranged around a squared loop of beige road.

The old man, in the seat in front of Tito, beside the pilot, had a large blue headset clamped over his ears. Tito had scarcely noticed the pilot, having closed his eyes as soon as he’d managed to fasten his seat belt. Now he saw the man’s gloved hand on a bent steel stick, his thumb pressing buttons on a grip like the one on an arcade game.

The rounded, slightly irregular square of road, and the white buildings, grew steadily larger. The largest of the buildings, clearly a house, with lower wings extending from either side, stood beyond the loop, facing the sea, broad windows staring emptily. The other buildings, clustered as far away as possible on the loop, behind the house, seemed to be smaller houses and a wide garage. There were no trees or bushes, once the brown woods ended. There was a scoured quality to the buildings, which he now could see were made of white-painted wood. In this northern climate, he knew, wooden houses might stand for a very long time, as there seemed to be nothing to eat them. In Cuba, only the hardest woods from the Zapata swamp forests could withstand insects for so long.

He saw a long black car, stationary on one side of the beige loop, midway between the big house and the smaller ones.

They swung in over the beach, sand rushing past beneath them, low over the slanting gray roof of the big house. The machine halted, impossibly, in midair, then settled toward grass.

The old man removed his headset. The Prada man reached across, unfastening Tito’s seat belt. He passed Tito the bag containing his APC jacket. Tito’s stomach clenched, as the helicopter met solid ground. The tone of its roaring changed. The Prada man had opened a door, was gesturing Tito out.

Tito climbed out, and was almost knocked to the ground by the wind from the rotors. Crouching low, the wind tearing at his eyes, he grabbed the cap to keep it from being blown off. Prada man scrambled under the fuselage and helped the old man down from a door on the opposite side. Obeying the man’s gestures, still crouching, he scrambled after the two, in the direction of the black car. The pitch of the roaring changed.

Tito turned to see the helicopter lifting, like some clumsy magic trick. It swung suddenly toward the sea, out over the big house, then rose higher, receding, against the cloudless sky.

In the sudden quiet, he heard the old man’s voice, and simultaneously felt the stiff breeze, in off the sea: “Sorry about the uniform. We thought it would be better for you to make a specific impression at the heliport.”

Prada man bent, retrieving keys from beneath the left front wheel of the black Lincoln Town Car. “Lovely spot, isn’t it?” he said, looking toward the garage, the smaller houses.

“Underbuilt, by current standards,” the old man said.

Tito took off the sunglasses, considered them, decided against keeping them, and put them in one side pocket of the lawn-care jacket. He put the cap in the other and removed the jacket. He opened the black nylon bag, took out his APC jacket, shook it out, and put it on. He put the green jacket in the bag and zipped it shut.

“It was like this in the seventies, when it sold for a little under three hundred thousand,” said the Prada man. “Now they’re asking forty million.”

“I’m sure they are,” said the old man. “Nice of them to have allowed us to land.”

“The realtor suggested a lower offer, provided the terms are sufficiently simple. The caretakers, of course, have been instructed not to disturb us.” He pressed a button on the keys in his hand, opened the driver’s side door.

“Really? How wealthy am I, in this case?”

“Very.”

“By virtue of what, exactly?”

“Internet pornography.” Getting behind the wheel.

“Are you serious?”

“Hotels. A chain of boutique hotels. In Dubai.” He started the car. “Ride up front with me, Tito.”

The old man opened the rear door. He looked back at Tito. “Come along.” He got in, closing the door.

Tito walked around the long, gleaming black hood, noting New Jersey plates, and got in.

“I’m Garreth,” the man behind the wheel said, extending his hand. Tito shook his hand.

Tito pulled the door shut. Garreth put the Lincoln in gear and they rolled forward, crushed shale crunching beneath its tires.

“Fruit and sandwiches,” Garreth said, indicating a basket between them. “Water.” He followed the loop toward the garage and the smaller houses, then swung right, taking a beige road into the brown woods.

“How long will this take?” asked the old man.

“Thirty minutes, this time of year,” Garreth said, “through Amagansett and East Hampton, on Route 27.”

“Is there a gatehouse?”

“No. A gate. But the realtor’s given us the exit code.”

The car’s tires, on the shale, were muffled by dark pads of crushed dead leaves.

“Tito,” said Garreth, “I noticed you kept your eyes closed, on the way out. Don’t like helicopters?”

“Tito,” said the old man, “hasn’t flown since he left Cuba. That may well have been his first helicopter.”

“Yes,” Tito said.

“Ah,” said Garreth, and drove on. Tito stared into the brown depths of the woods. He hadn’t been so far from a city since leaving Cuba.

Soon the one who called himself Garreth stopped the car, its hood a few feet from a low, heavy-looking gate of galvanized steel. “Give me a hand with this,” Garreth said, opening his door. “It’s motorized, but when I was here with the realtor, the chain kept slipping.”

Tito got out. There was two-lane blacktop, passing just beyond the gate. Garreth had opened a gray metal box, attached to a white wooden post, and was using the keypad mounted inside it. The smell of the forest was rich and strange. A small animal ran through branches overhead, but Tito couldn’t see it, only a branch left swaying. An electric motor whined, and a chain like a very long bicycle chain, part of the gate, began to jump and rattle.

“Help it along,” Garreth said. Tito took the gate in his hands and shoved to the right, toward the sound of the engine. The chain caught, the gate juddering sideways, following a raised track of the same metal. “In the car. There’s a beam that closes it, when we’re through.”

Tito looked back, from the front seat, as the rear of the Lincoln cleared the gate. It closed smoothly enough, but Garreth stopped, got out, went back to check that it was fully closed. “That needs looking after,” said the old man. “Gives a prospective buyer the impression the whole place is in poor repair.”

Garreth got back in. They turned, onto the blacktop, and Garreth drove, picking up speed. “No more helicopters today, Tito,” he said.

“Good,” Tito said.

“Strictly fixed-wing, this next leg.”

Tito, who had been looking at the bananas in the basket between them, thought better of it.

“Leg?” asked Tito.

“A Cessna Golden Eagle,” said the old man, “1985. One of the last they manufactured. Very comfortable. Quiet. We’ll be able to sleep.”

Tito’s body wanted to press itself further back into the seat. He saw buildings ahead. “Where are we going?”

“Right now,” said Garreth, “East Hampton Airport.”

“A private plane,” said the old man, “no security checks, no identification. We’ll be getting you something more viable than a New Jersey driver’s license, but you won’t be needing anything today.”

“Thank you,” Tito said, unable to think of anything else to say. They passed a small building with a painted sign, LUNCH, cars parked in front of it. Tito looked down at the banana. He hadn’t eaten since the night before, with Vianca and Brotherman, and the Guerreros were no longer with him. He picked up the banana and began resolutely to peel it. If I have to learn to fly, he told his stomach, I refuse to starve while doing it. His stomach seemed unconvinced, but he ate the banana anyway.

Garreth drove on, and the old man said nothing.