Zero History (28 page)

He sat down at the desk and logged into his Twitter account.

“Get n touch,” Winnie had posted, an hour earlier.

“Camden Town Holiday Inn,” he typed, then added his room number and the telephone number of the hotel. He updated. Refreshed. Nothing.

The phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Welcome back,” said Winnie. “I’m coming over there.”

“I’m just going out,” said Milgrim. “It’s work. I don’t know how long it’s going to take.”

“How’s your evening look?”

“Nothing scheduled yet.”

“Keep it open for me.”

“I’ll try.”

“I’m not that far away. Heading for the general vicinity now.”

“Goodbye,” Milgrim said to the phone, though she was already gone. He sighed.

He’d forgotten to return Hollis’s red dongle, but he didn’t need it here. He’d give it back to her the next time he saw her.

He closed the laptop and put it in his bag, which he’d unpacked on arrival. Bigend had wanted the memory card with the pictures of Foley, and he didn’t have another, so he wouldn’t bother taking the camera.

Walking from his room to the elevator, he wondered why they had decided to build a Holiday Inn here, beside this canal.

In the lobby, he waited at the concierge desk while two young American men received directions to the Victoria and Albert. He looked at them the way he imagined Blue Ant’s young French fashion analyst might. Everything they were wearing, he decided, qualified as what she’d call “iconic,” but had originally become that way through its ability to gracefully patinate. She was big on patination. That was how quality wore in, she said, as opposed to out. Distressing, on the other hand, was the faking of patination, and was actually a way of concealing a lack of quality. Until he’d found himself in Bigend’s apparel-design push, he hadn’t known that anyone thought about clothing that way. He didn’t imagine that anything these two wore was liable to acquire any patina, except under different and later ownership.

When they’d moved on, he asked for directions to Voytek’s Biro Shack, explaining where he’d been told it was.

“I don’t see it listed, sir,” said the concierge, clicking his mouse, “but you aren’t far, if it’s where they told you it would be.” He ballpointed a map in a colored brochure and handed it to Milgrim.

“Thanks.”

Outside, the air smelled differently of exhaust. More diesel? The neighborhood felt theme-parky but downscale, a little like a state fairground before the evening crowds arrive. He passed two Japanese girls eating what seemed to be corn dogs, which heightened the effect.

He was keeping an eye out for Winnie, but if she’d arrived he didn’t see her.

Following the ballpoint line on the concierge’s map, he found himself in a brick-arched under-mall, some Victorian retrofit, stocked mostly with merchandise that reminded him of St. Mark’s Place, though with an odd, semi-Japanese feel, perhaps an appeal to foreign youth-tourism. Further back in this, glassed behind half a brick archway, floridly Victorian gilt lettering announced
BIROSHAK &
SON
. A surname, then. As he entered, a bell tinked, bouncing on a long Art Nouveau lily stem of brass, attached to the door.

The shop was densely but tidily packed with small, largely featureless boxes, like old-fashioned TV-top cable units, arrayed on glass shelves. A tall, balding man, about Milgrim’s age, turned and nodded. “You are Milgrim,” he said. “I am Voytek.” There was a battered plastic pennant behind the counter:
AMSTRAD
, both the name and the logo unfamiliar.

Voytek wore a wool cardigan pieced together from perhaps half a dozen donors, one sleeve plain camel, the other plaid. Under it a silky ecru T-shirt with too many pearl buttons. He blinked behind harsh-looking steel-framed glasses.

Milgrim put his bag on the counter. “Will it take long?” he asked.

“Assuming I find nothing, ten minutes. Leave it.”

“I’d rather stay.”

Voytek frowned, then shrugged. “You think I will put something in it.”

“Do you do that?”

“Some people do,” said Voytek. “PC?”

“Mac,” said Milgrim, unzipping his bag and bringing it out.

“Put it on the counter. I lock up.” He came from behind the counter, wearing those gray felt clogs that reminded Milgrim of the feet of toy animals. He went to the door, slid a bolt into place, and returned. “I hate these Air,” he said, amiably enough, turning the laptop over and producing the first of a number of tiny, very expensive-looking screwdrivers. “They are very bitch, to open.”

“What are all these boxes?” Milgrim asked, indicating the shelves.

“They are computers. Real ones. From the dawn.” He removed the bottom of the Air, with no evident difficulty at all.

“Are they valuable?”

“Valuable? What is true worth?” He put on an elaborate pair of magnifying glasses, with clear colorless frames.

“That’s what I asked you.”

“True worth.” LEDs in the clear temples illuminated the elegantly compacted guts of the Air. “You put a price on romance?”

“Romance?”

“These true computers are the root code. The Eden.”

Milgrim saw that there were still older machines, some actually housed in wood, locked in a large, really quite seriously expensive-looking glass case, rising a good six feet from the floor. The wood-cased typewriter-y device nearest him bore an eye-shaped silk-screened
ENIGMA
logo. “What are those, then?”

“
Before
the Eden. Enigma encryption. As called forth by Alan Turing. To birth the Eden. Also on offer, U.S. Army M-209B cipher machine with original canvas field case, Soviet M-125-3MN Fialka cipher machine, Soviet clandestine pocket-sized nonelectronic burst encoder and keyer. You are interested?”

“What’s a burst encoder?”

“Enter message, encrypt, send with inhuman speed as Morse code. Spring-winder. Twelve hundred pounds. Discount for Blue Ant employee, one thousand.”

Someone rapped on the door. A young man with a massive diagonal forelock, wrapped in what appeared to be a bathrobe. He was grimacing with impatience. Voytek sighed, put down the Air, on a battered foam pad that bore the Amstrad logo, and went to open the door, still wearing the illuminated magnifying glasses. The bathrobed boy—Milgrim saw that it was a very thin, very wrinkled sort of overcoat, perhaps cashmere—swept past Voytek without eye contact, to the rear of the shop, and through a door Milgrim hadn’t previously noticed. “Cunt,” said Voytek, neutrally, relocking the door and returning to the Air and the task at hand.

“Your son?” asked Milgrim.

“Son?” He frowned. “It is Shombo.”

“Is what?”

“Is arse-pain. Nightmare. Bigend.” He’d picked up the Air now and was peering savagely into it from a few inches away.

“Bigend is?” Milgrim was not unfamiliar with the opinion, if the man meant Bigend.

“Shombo. I must keep him here, take him home. I lose track of the months.” He tapped the little Mac with a screwdriver. “Nothing has been added here.” He began to smoothly reassemble it, his efficiency fueled, Milgrim sensed, with resentment. Of gray-robed Shombo, Milgrim hoped.

“Is that all you need to do?”

“All? My family is living with this person.”

“To my computer.”

“Now software analysis.” He produced a battered black Dell from beneath the counter and cabled it to the Air. “Is password?”

“Locative,” Milgrim said, and spelled it. “Lowercase. Dot. One.” He went to the showcase to look more closely at the Enigma machine. “Does patination make them more valuable?”

“What?” LEDs flashed in his direction from the plastic glasses.

“If they’re worn. Evidence of use.”

“Most valuable,” said Voytek, staring at him over the tops of the glasses, “is mint.”

“What are these things?” Black, shark-toothed gears, the size of the bottom of a beer bottle. Each one stamped with a multidigit number, into which white paint had been rubbed.

“For you, same as burst encoder: one thousand pounds.”

“I mean what are they for?”

“They set encryption. Receiving machine must have day’s identical rotor.”

A single rap on the door, tinkling the lily bells. It was the other driver, the one who’d driven Milgrim in from Heathrow.

“Shit-persons,” said Voytek in resignation, and went to unlock the door again.

“Urine specimen,” the driver said, producing a fresh brown paper bag.

“The fuck,” said Voytek.

“I’ll need to use your bathroom,” Milgrim said.

“Bath? I have no bath.”

“Toilet. Loo.”

“In back. With Shombo.”

“He’ll have to watch,” Milgrim said, indicating the driver.

“I don’t want to know,” said Voytek. He rapped on the door through which Shombo had vanished. “Shombo! Men need loo!”

“Fuck off,” said Shombo, muffled by the door.

Milgrim, closely followed by the driver, approached it, tried the knob. It opened.

“Fuck off,” said Shombo again, but abstractedly, from a multiscreened rat’s-nest quite far back in a larger, darker space than Milgrim had expected. The screens were covered with dense columns of what Milgrim took to be figures, rather than written language.

With the driver behind him, Milgrim headed for the plywood-walled toilet cubicle, illuminated by a single bare bulb. There wouldn’t have been room for the driver, who simply loomed in the doorway, passing Milgrim the paper bag. Milgrim opened it, removed the sandwich bag, opened that, removed the blue-topped bottle. He broke the paper seal, removed the lid, and unzipped his fly.

“Piss off,” muttered Shombo, without a trace of irony.

Milgrim sighed, filled the bottle, capped it, finished in the grimy toilet, flushed by pulling a chain, then put the bottle in the sandwich bag, the sandwich bag in the paper bag, handed the paper bag to the driver, then washed his hands in cold water. There didn’t seem to be any soap.

As they left the room, Milgrim saw the reflection of the bright screens in Shombo’s eyes.

He closed the door carefully behind him.

The driver handed Milgrim a crisp manila envelope of a pattern suggesting deeply traditional banking practices. Within it, Milgrim felt the sealed bubble-pack containing his medication.

“Thanks,” said Milgrim.

The driver, without a word, took his leave, Voytek bustling irritably to lock the door behind him.

H
e’ll be right down,” said Jacob, smiling and luxuriantly bearded as ever, when he met her at Blue Ant’s entrance. “How was Paris? Would you like coffee?”

“Fine, thanks. No coffee.” She felt ragged, and assumed she looked it, but also better, since Heidi had forced her to make the call. Looking up at the lobby’s used-eyeglasses chandelier, she welcomed whatever distraction or annoyance Bigend might be able to provide.

And here he suddenly came, the optically challenging blue suit muted, if that could be the word for it, by a black polo shirt. Behind him, silent and alert, his two umbrella-bearing minders. Leaving Jacob behind, he took Hollis’s arm and steered her back out the door, followed by the minders. “Not
good
, Jacob,” he said to her, quietly. “Sleight’s.”

“Really?”

“Not entirely positive yet,” he said, leading her left, then left again at the corner. “But it looks likely.”

“Where are we going?”

“Not far. I’m no longer conducting important conversations on Blue Ant premises.”

“What’s happening?”

“I should have the whole phenomenon modeled. Have some good CG visualizations done. It’s not clockwork, of course, but it’s familiar. I’d guess it takes a good five or six years to cycle through.”

“Milgrim made it sound like a palace coup, some kind of takeover.”

“Overly dramatic. A few of my brightest employees are quitting. Those who haven’t gotten where they’d hoped to, with Blue Ant. So few do, really. Someone like Sleight tries to quit with optimal benefits, of course. Builds his own golden parachute. Robs me blind, if he can. Information flows out, before these parties depart, to the highest bidders. Always more than one golden parachutist.” He took her arm again and crossed the narrow street, in the wake of a passing Mercedes. “Too many moving parts for a solo operator. Sleight, probably Jacob, two or three more.”

“You don’t seem that alarmed.”

“I expect it. It’s always interesting. It can shake other things out. Reveal things. When you want to know how things really work, study them when they’re coming apart.”

“What does that mean?”

“Increased risk. Increased opportunity. This one comes at an inopportune time, but then they do seem to. Here we are.” He’d stopped in front of a narrow Soho shopfront, one whose austerely minimalist signage announced
TANKY
&
TOJO
in brushed aluminum capitals. She looked in the window. An antique tailor’s dummy, kitted out in waxed cotton, tweed, corduroy, harness leather.