Zero History (34 page)

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.

A
ll 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 breasts 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?”

“Downstairs,” the girl said, indicating a sign: women. “Clean. Open till two. Free.” She looked very serious.

“Thank you,” said Hollis.

“Fiona,” said the girl, over her shoulder.

“Hollis.”

“I know. Hurry, please. I’ll check my messages.” Hollis dismounted, watched as Fiona did the same. Fiona frowned. “Please,” she said, “hurry.”

“I’m sorry,” said Hollis, “my head’s not working.”

“Don’t worry,” said Fiona, who sounded neither British nor anything else in particular. “If you’re not right back up, I’ll come and find you.”

“Good,” said Hollis, and took the stairs, her knees behaving oddly, down into bright cheap light, white tile, the smell of some very modern disinfectant.

Seated in a stall, the door shut, she briefly considered screaming. She tried to remember if she’d hit her head on anything, because her brain felt too large for it, but she didn’t think she had. It wouldn’t have been possible, with what Aldous had made the seat belts do, which she recalled as having involved a sort of neck brace, as well as some biomorphically triangular cushion across her chest. If you were going to be bashing into cars, she supposed, you’d want that.

“My God,” she said, remembering, “that was Foley.” Milgrim’s Foley, from the blue-lit grotto beneath the Salon du Vintage, simultaneously looking the worse for wear and somehow like a scarily adult version of that Diane Arbus photograph of the emotionally disturbed boy, the one with the grenade. Bandaged, as from a head injury.

They had startlingly slick toilet paper here. In a club, she’d have assumed it was deliberately retro.

Upstairs, on the small concrete island that she guessed might be a tiny public square, though it wasn’t square, the girl called Fiona stood near her motorcycle, pinching at pixels on her iPhone’s screen. The half-dozen other bikes parked there were all equally large and rough-looking. A pair of couriers stood on the tarmac, smoking, past the end of the row of bikes, like knights in smudged primary colors, serrated plates of carbon fiber giving their backs a Jurassic look. Shapeless hair and beards, like extras in a Robin Hood movie. Beyond them, she recognized the mock Tudor façade of Liberty. Great Marlborough Street. Not so far from Portman Square. It felt like days since she’d left there.

“Ready,” said Fiona, behind her.

She turned as Fiona was slipping her phone into a pocket on the front of her black coat. “Where are Heidi and Milgrim?”

“My next job,” Fiona said, “after I run you to your hotel.”

“You know where they are?”

“We can find them,” Fiona said, throwing her leg over her bike. She wore knee-high black boots, side-buckled from top to bottom, their toes abraded to a pale gray. She held out the helmet.

“It’s giving me a headache,” she said.

“Sorry,” said Fiona, “it’s Mrs. Benny’s. Borrowed it.”

Hollis put it on and climbed on behind her, without waiting for further explanation.

M
ilgrim had never liked the City. It had always seemed too monolithic, though to some older scale of monolith. Too few hiding places. A lack of spaces in between. It had been turning its back on people like himself for centuries, and made him feel like a rat running along a baseboard devoid of holes. He felt that now, very strongly, though they weren’t running. Walking, but briskly, owing to Heidi’s long legs.

He was wearing a black “Sonny” jacket that Heidi had purchased off the back of an agreeable Turkish-looking office cleaner, here in Lombard Street, paying with a fold of bills. Or at least that was what it had embroidered on the left breast, in white, in an otherwise very good approximation of the Sony logo. His own jacket was stuffed into his bag, on top of his laptop. The transaction had also yielded a gray knit acrylic hat, which Heidi wore pulled very low, her black hair tucked completely out of sight. She’d turned her jacket inside out, revealing an impressive scarlet silk lining. The fringed epaulets had become padding, exaggerating her already formidable shoulders. This would be out of concern, Milgrim assumed, with being recognized, either by any remaining associates of Foley’s or by the ever-watchful cameras, which Milgrim now noticed everywhere.

Immediately he regretted thinking of Foley. That had been very bad, the business with the truck and the two cars, and he couldn’t help but believe it to have been his fault. That had definitely been a bandage on Foley’s head, under the cap, and Milgrim could only assume that it had had something to do with that young Russian mother’s bodyguard, in Paris. If Sleight had sent Foley after the Neo, as Milgrim had intended, he would in fact have sent him after that ominous-looking pram. And it had happened because he, Milgrim, had given in to some unfamiliar impulse to rebellion. He’d done it out of anger, really, resentment, and because he could.

Now Heidi produced her iPhone. Thumbed the screen once. Listened, then held the phone away, as if to ignore a message she’d heard before. When she put it to her mouth, she said: “Listen up, Garreth. Hollis Henry’s in deep shit now. Kidnap attempt, looked to me. Call her.” She tapped the phone again.

“Who was that?”

“Hollis’s ex,” said Heidi, “voice mail. I hope.”

“The one who jumps off buildings?”

“The one who doesn’t return his fucking calls,” said Heidi, putting her phone away.

“Why don’t we get a cab?” He’d seen several pass.

“Because they can’t
stop
a train.”

In the canyon of King William now, more traffic, more cabs, the strap of his bag digging into his shoulder, the Sonny jacket scented faintly and not unpleasantly with cooking spices, perhaps from a recent meal. He was hungry now, in spite of the Vietnamese with Winnie. He remembered Hollis’s dongle, the cellular connection, in the Chunnel. He wondered if phones worked on the London subway. He didn’t think they did in New York; he’d never had one there. If they did, he could send Winnie a message, once they were on the train. Tell her about Foley and the Hilux. Had it been an attempted kidnapping? He supposed it had, if not worse, but why would anyone attempt that on the passengers of a cartel-grade Jankel-armored truck? But then it occurred to him that graduates of Parsons School of Design probably weren’t necessarily up on that sort of thing.

An entrance to Bank Station ahead, pedestrian traffic picking up around them, and that was the Central Line, they’d ride straight to Marble Arch, close to Portman Square, and walk to the hotel. Quicker than a cab, probably, and maybe he could get on Twitter.

Heidi swung suddenly around, whisking back one side of her inside-out jacket. As if to show him the large brooch he now saw she wore there, three rocketships, perhaps, nose-down, silver with crimson tails. And plucking part of this away, she flung it behind them, the entirety of her long body pivoting behind it.

Someone shrieked, as terrible a sound as Milgrim had heard, and continued to as Heidi, rough as any policeman, rushed him down the stairs and into Bank-Monument.

H
ollis lay fully dressed on the embroidered velvet spread of the Piblokto Madness bed, watching the faint oscillation of huge curved shadows thrown by the halogens in the birdcage library, dialed down until they were almost off. In some sense, she decided, she literally no longer knew where she was. In Number Four, in Cabinet, certainly, but if she’d just been one of the subjects of an abduction attempt, as Fiona seemed to believe she had, was Number Four still the same place? A matter of context. The same place, but
meaning
differently.

Fiona had insisted on bringing her up here, and then had looked in the bathroom, and in the wardrobe, where in any case there was no room to hide. If the wooden sides of the bed hadn’t gone straight down to the carpet, Hollis guessed, Fiona would have looked under it as well. Put the chain on, Fiona had ordered, leaving to find Milgrim and Heidi, something she seemed relatively certain of being able to do. As far as she knew, Fiona had said, both were okay. She’d had no more idea about what the attempted truck-trapping had been about than Hollis did, it seemed, though she too had identified Milgrim’s Foley, their shadow from Salon du Vintage. What had Bigend called him? A fantasist? How would he have expected to get inside Aldous’s super-truck? The thing was capable of being sealed hermetically, she knew, because Aldous delighted in explaining its many features. It carried tanks of compressed air, and could be driven through clouds of tear or any other gas. He’d also told her that it could drive underwater, with a snorkel extended. A bank vault on wheels, its “glass” some hush-hush Israeli nano stuff that Aldous was particularly proud of Bigend’s having been able to source. Was it possible that Foley had simply had no idea what the silver pickup was about? It looked, after all, at least to Hollis, like any other truck, of that stretched, four-door, overly masculine sort, its bed shortened by half through the extension of the cab. The bed was covered with a ribbed lid, painted to match the bodywork. Perhaps that was where they kept the air supply. And what had happened to Foley since she’d seen him in Paris? An accident? A head injury?

There was a knock at the door. Two raps, brisk, quite sharp. “Miss Henry?” A man’s voice. “It’s Robert, Miss Henry.”

It did in fact sound like Robert. She sat up, stood up, crossed to the door. “Yes?”

“Someone to see you, Miss Henry.”

This was such a singular thing for a hotel security man to say, and delivered with such an uncharacteristic cheerfulness, that she stepped back, quickly scanned the nearest shelf, and seized the same spikey ebony head that Heidi had so tidily bull’s-eyed earlier that day. Inverted, it felt comfortingly heavy, its serrated hairdo adding teeth to blunt-instrument potential.

She unlocked the door, leaving the chain in place, and peered out. Robert stood there, smiling. Garreth looked up at her from about the level of Robert’s waist. She couldn’t put that together, and didn’t, until she’d opened the door, although she never managed, subsequently, to remember closing it or undoing the chain. Nor could she ever remember what she’d said, but whatever it was, she would remember, had caused a look of relief to flash across Robert’s face, and his smile to widen.

“Sorry I couldn’t return your call,” said Garreth.

She heard the ebony fetish hit the carpet, bounce. Saw Robert’s broad back disappearing through one of the green corridor’s spring-loaded doors.

He was seated in a wheelchair.

Or not a wheelchair, she saw, as the fingers of his right hand moved on a joystick, but one of those electric mobility scooters, black with gray pneumatic tires, like the offspring of a high-end Swiss office chair and some expensive 1930s toy. As it rolled forward, across the threshold, she heard herself say “Oh God.”

“Not as bad as it looks,” he said. “Playing the disability card for your doorman.” He unclipped a black cane from the scooter’s side, pressed a button. A quadrangle of rubber-tipped supports sprang open at its tip. “A bit, anyway.” Using the cane for support, he stood carefully, wincing, putting no weight on his right leg.

And then her arms were around him, one of his around her, her face wet with tears. “I thought you were dead.”

“Who told you that?”

“Nobody. But I imagined it as I was being told you’d jumped off that hideous building. And nobody knew where you were—”

“Munich, when you called. Intimate session with five neurosurgeons, three German, two Czech, getting some feeling restored to this leg. Why I couldn’t call. Wouldn’t give me the phone.”

“Did it work?”

“It hurts,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s actually a
good
thing, in this case. Perhaps you should close the door?”

“I don’t want to let go of you.”