Zero History Part 22

"Hollis is unaware of any of this."

"Am I?"

There was a silence. "Interesting question," said Bigend, finally. "What do you think?"

"I don't like Sleight. Don't like the man he had following me."

"You're doing well. More proactive than I asked for, but that's interesting."

"I saw a penguin. Penguin-shaped. Something. I may need to go back to the clinic."

"That's our Festo air penguin," Bigend said, after a pause. "We're experimenting with it as an urban video surveillance platform."

"Festive?"

"Festo. They're German."

"What's going on? Please?"

"Something that happens periodically. It has to do with the kind of talent Blue Ant requires. If they're any good at what I hire them for, they tend to have an innate tendency to go rogue. That or sell out to someone who already has. I expect this to happen. It can actually be quite productive. Fiona was on the train with you, this morning. She'll be on the train back, tomorrow. Put Hollis in a cab to Cabinet."

"What's that?"

"Where she's staying. Then wait near the cab rank. Fiona will bring you to me. Give her a rundown of your day now, then get some sleep."

"Okay," Milgrim said, then realized Bigend was gone. He handed the phone back to Fiona, noticing that she wore something on her left wrist, about six inches long, that looked like a doll's computer keyboard. "What's that?"

"Controls the penguin," she said. "But we're switching over to iPhones for that."

33. BURJ

She got the iPhone out of her purse in the little bronze elevator, hit Heidi's cell number as she stepped out. It was ringing as she walked along the hallway, doors to her right, weird twisted brown medieval timbers to her left. Heidi picked up as she was fiddling the key into the lock.

"f.u.c.k-" Against a wash of what sounded to Hollis like exclusively male pub ruckus.

"Tell me what's happened to Garreth. Now." She opened the door. Saw white towels where she'd left them on the bed, the Blue Ant figurine on the built-in bedside table, big crazy gold fake Chinese scribbles on the blood-red walls. It was like stepping into a life-size Barbie's Shanghai Brothel kit.

"Hold on. Get the f.u.c.k over! Not you. Had to get out of that bench thing."

"I thought you weren't drinking."

"Red Bull. Cutting it with ginger ale."

"Tell me. Now."

"Don't look on YouTube."

"At what, on YouTube?"

"Burj Khalifa world-champions.h.i.+p base jump."

"That hotel? Looks like an Arabian Nights sailboat? What happened?"

"That's Burj Al Arab. Burj Khalifa's the world's tallest building-"

"s.h.i.+t-"

"The jump on YouTube, that wasn't him. That was earlier. That guy high-pulled, they say here. That's when-"

"What happened to Garreth?"

"The guy on YouTube holds the world's record now for jumping out of a building. Your boy figured a way to get in and go off it higher up. They still hadn't finished closing all the windows at the top. There was this crane-"

"Oh G.o.d-"

"And the security had of course gotten lots tighter, since YouTube guy did his, but your boy's an expert at-"

"Tell me!"

"He was on the way up, however he was managing that, and they got onto him. He got up to the point where the windows weren't installed, and went off from there. Actually a little lower than YouTube guy- "Heidi!"

"Did the bat-suit thing. Took it really far out, really low, probably p.i.s.sed that he'd jumped from below the record point. Trying for points on style."

Hollis was crying now.

"Had to come down on a freeway. Four in the morning, there was a vintage Lotus Elan-"

Hollis started sobbing. She was sitting on the bed now, but didn't know how she'd gotten there.

"He's okay! Well, he's alive, okay? My boy says he must've been super well connected, because the ambulance that picked him up put him straight on an air ambulance, a jet, into a high-end trauma center in Singapore. Where you go, there, if you need s.h.i.+t-hot medical attention."

"He's alive? Alive?"

"f.u.c.k yes. I told you already. Leg's messed up. I know he was in Singapore, six weeks, then it gets fuzzy. Some people say he went to the States from there, to get stuff done they couldn't do in Singapore. Military doctors. You said he wasn't military."

"Connected. The old man ..."

"Story is, that air ambulance had some kind of local royal crest."

"Where is he?"

"These boys at my gym, they're ex-military. Maybe ex-. Fuzzy. Doesn't matter how much they drink, the story just trails off, at a certain point. Runs up against some prime directive. They know who he is, but from the jumping. They're big fans of that. Also because he's English. Tribal thing. That secret-life s.h.i.+t you told me about, I don't think they'd get that. Or maybe they would. They're all bats.h.i.+t in their own way."

Hollis was wiping her face, mechanically, with a towel smeared with makeup. "He's alive. Say he's alive."

"They think he went into some funny arrangement, Stateside, where they work on messed-up Delta Force guys, like that. That impresses them deeply. Then they order another round, talk football, and I fall asleep."

"That's all you've been able to find out?"

"All? I've done everything short of trying to f.u.c.k it out of them, and I wouldn't say they'd made it exceptionally easy not to do that either. You were the one told me to leave the civilians alone, weren't you?"

"Sorry, Heidi."

"It's okay. They never ran into anybody thought they were civilians before. Kind of worth it. You know how to get in touch with him?"

"Maybe."

"Now you've got an excuse. Gotta go. They want me to throw darts. They bet. Take care of yourself. You back tomorrow? We'll have dinner."

"You're sure he's alive?"

"I think these guys would know, if he wasn't. He's like a football player to them. They'd hear. Where are you?"

"At the hotel."

"Get some sleep. Tomorrow."

"Bye, Heidi."

The pale gold bulls.h.i.+t ideograms still swimming in tears.

34. THE ORDER FLOW

Milgrim woke as some large vehicle groaned past in the street, or perhaps in dream, chains rattling. He'd slept with the windows open.

He sat up and looked at the blank screen of Hollis's laptop, on the cus.h.i.+oned ledge beneath the windows. The battery needed a charge, but she hadn't given him the charger. He guessed he had enough power left to check for Winnie's reply to his message of the night before. He'd intended to send Pamela the photos of Foley as well, and had bought the cable he'd need to do that, but after his conversation with Bigend he wasn't sure about Blue Ant's e-mail system. He imagined Sleight had been in charge of all of that. How complicated could that ultimately become, for Bigend?

With no Neo, and the laptop off, he had no way of knowing the time. The television suspended from the ceiling could tell him, he supposed, but he decided to shower instead. If it was time to go, Hollis would call him.

The shower was one of those telephone-handle arrangements, the stall largely conceptual. He brushed his teeth with one hand while rinsing his torso with the other, his battery-powered toothbrush loud in the small s.p.a.ce. Toweling off, he thought of how Bigend seemed to regard what was going on in Blue Ant as a sort of expected burn-off, like some brushfire on the Nature Channel, brought on by an otherwise essential excess of intelligence and ambition.

He put on his new socks and underwear from Galeries Lafayette, and an unworn but creased s.h.i.+rt from Hackett. He remembered the Russians in the elevator. Foley. Winced. He tucked the memory card, with his pictures of Foley on it, down into the top of his left sock.

He edged around the bed, stood looking down at Parisians pa.s.sing on the sidewalk opposite. A graying, leonine man in a long dark coat. Then a tall girl in very nice boots. He looked for Fiona, half expecting to see her astride her motorcycle, keeping watch. He looked up then, but didn't see the penguin either.

A tiny garret window popped open, on a building opposite, and a girl with short dark hair thrust her head and shoulders through, into the morning, a cigarette between her lips. Milgrim nodded. Addictions were being serviced. He sat down on the padded bench and checked his Twitter. No Winnie. It was five after seven, he saw, earlier than he'd thought.

He packed his bag, putting the laptop in last. What would he do, once he'd returned it? How would he keep in touch with Winnie? The fact of Winnie made his knowledge of Blue Ant's internal brushfire feel awkward. Otherwise, he imagined, without her, it would mainly have been interesting, as Bigend didn't seem particularly worried. Though he'd never seen Bigend worried about anything. Where most people got worried, Bigend seemed to become interested, and Milgrim knew that that could be strangely contagious. Imagining explaining that to Winnie made him uneasy.

He made a last pa.s.s for misplaced property, discovering one of his socks under the edge of the bed. He put it in his bag, put the strap over his shoulder, and left the room, leaving the door unlocked. Maids were afoot but he didn't see them, only their metal carts stacked with towels and tiny plastic bottles of shampoo. He saw the building's original stairway, winding down, beyond big twisted brown-stained timbers that couldn't possibly have been as old, in America, as they no doubt were, here.

He descended, pa.s.sing windows, on each floor, overlooking a courtyard the morning hadn't reached yet. Scooters and bicycles were parked there, at the bottom of a well of shadow.

On the ground floor he found his brief way around to the lobby, where china was rattling. No Hollis. He took a seat at a table for two, beside the windows, and asked for coffee and a croissant. The Tunisian waitress went away. Someone else brought the coffee immediately, with a small pitcher of hot milk. He was stirring his coffee when Hollis arrived, looking red-eyed and exhausted, the Hounds jacket draped across her shoulders like a short cape.

She sat down, a crumpled tissue in one hand.

"Is something wrong?" asked Milgrim, seized by some substrate of his own childhood fear, sorrow, the cup halfway to his mouth.

"I haven't slept," she said. "Found out a friend's been in an accident. Not in very good shape. Sorry."

"Your friend? Not in good shape?" He'd set the cup in its saucer. The waitress arrived with his croissant, b.u.t.ter, a miniature jar of jam.

"Coffee, please," she said to the waitress. "Not a recent accident. I only heard last night."

"How is she?" Milgrim was having one of those experiences of feeling, as he'd explained to his therapist, that he was emulating a kind of social being that he fundamentally wasn't. Not that he was unconcerned with the pain he saw in Hollis's eyes, or with the fate of her friend, but that there was some language required here that he'd never learned.

"He," corrected Hollis as her coffee arrived.

"What happened?"

"He jumped off the tallest building in the world." Her eyes widened, as if at the absurdity of what she'd just said, then closed, tightly.

"In Chicago?" asked Milgrim.

"It hasn't been Chicago for years," she said, opening her eyes, "has it? Dubai." She poured milk into her coffee, her movements determinedly businesslike now, precise.

"How is he?"

"I don't know," she said. "Flown to a hospital in Singapore. His leg. A car hit him. I don't know where he is."

"You said he jumped off a building," said Milgrim, sounding accusing, though he hadn't intended to.

"He glided down, then opened a chute. Came down in traffic."

"Why?" Milgrim s.h.i.+fted uneasily in his seat, knowing he was somehow off-script now.

"He'd need somewhere clear, flat, no wires."

"I mean, why did he jump?"

She frowned. Sipped some coffee. "He says it's like walking through walls. n.o.body can, but if you could, he says, it would feel like that. He says the wall is inside, though, and you do have to walk through it."