Pattern Recognition

29. PROTOCOL

Ngemi gets out stiffly, stretching his legs, jacket creaking. Reaches into the backseat for his colorful carpetbag. Cayce gets out too.

There is a silence here. No birds sing.

“If there are dogs, shouldn't we hear them?” Looking toward the low brick structures beyond the fence. The wire, she sees, is strung between tall square columns of discolored concrete. It all feels old, and somehow dead. World War II?

“I've never heard them,” Ngemi says, darkly, and starts along a footpath, skirting small puddles. His shoes are black four-eyelet DMs, the ur-Martens of the first decade of punk, long since de-recontextualized into the inexpensive everyman's footwear they'd been designed to be.

Uncut grass. Wild shrubbery with small yellow flowers. She follows Ngemi toward the nearest mirror-world trailer. It is two-tone, the upper body beige, the lower burgundy, dented and dull. It has a shallow, centrally peaked roof that reminds her of drawings of Noah's ark in books for children, and on its back a square, faded mirror-world license plate, “LOB” and four numerals. It doesn't look as though it's been anywhere in a long while, grass grown up around it, hiding any wheels it may still possess. Its windows, she sees, have been sealed over with galvanized sheet metal.

“Hobbs,” Ngemi calls, though not very loudly, “Hobbs, it is Ngemi.” He pauses, advances. The caravan's door, beige and burgundy as well, doesn't look as though it could ever fully close. “Hobbs?” He raps twice, softly.

“Piss off,” says someone, she assumes Hobbs, from within. It is a voice of utmost weariness, made peevish with pain.

“I've come for the calculators,” Ngemi says. “To complete the Japanese transaction. I have your share of the money”

“Cunt.” Baranov kicks open the door, it seems, without having to rise from where he must be seated, the opening presenting as a depth-less rectangle of darkness. “Who the fuck is she?”

“You met near Portobello, briefly,” Ngemi says. “A friend of Voytek's.” Which, Cayce supposes, is true, though after the fact.

“And why” Baranov says, leaning slightly forward, so that sunlight glints flatly on his glasses, “would you bring her here?” All weariness gone, now, the voice taut and careful, menacing in its precision.

“I'll let her explain that,” Ngemi says, glancing at Cayce, “after you and I have sorted present business.” He hefts the carpetbag in Baranov's direction, as if indicating the nature of that business. To Cayce: “Hobbs has room for only one visitor at a time. Excuse us, please.” He climbs into the caravan, which sways on its springs, alarmingly, with a sound like the rattling of empty bottles. “I doubt we'll be long.”

“Tedious cunt,” Baranov says, though whether about her, Ngemi, or life, she can't tell.

Ngemi, hunched almost double beneath the low roof, settles himself on something unseen, casts Cayce an apologetic look, and closes the door.

Alone now, though aware of their muffled voices, she looks toward the other caravans. Some are more dilapidated than Baranov's, others newer and slightly larger. She doesn't like them. To escape their lines of sight, she walks around Baranov's. Finds herself facing the wire fence and the dead-looking brick buildings. Likes this no better.

Beneath her breath, recites the duck-in-the-face mantra.

There is a black cable between the toes of her suede boots from Parco. She looks back and sees where it snakes from a vent in the side of Baranov's caravan. She walks forward, following it, and finds the point where it's been inserted through the fence, close to the ground. It leads off through tussocks of yellowing grass, toward the brick compound. Electricity? From MI5, or whatever other keepers?

“Hello!” Ngemi calls her, from the side of the caravan. “Come and have your talk with Hobbs. He won't bite you. He might actually be in a better mood, now.”

She walks back, pretending not to notice the cable.

“Go on,” says Ngemi. He glances at the old-fashioned calculator-watch on his wrist, its chrome case flashing in the wan sunlight. In his other hand, the carpetbag, looking heavier. “I don't know how long he might give you. I'd like to catch the next train, if we can.”

The caravan sways as she climbs in, blinking in the dark. A gloom that reeks of stale cigarette ash and unwashed clothing, horribly close. “Sit down,” Baranov orders. “Close the door.”

She does, discovering that what she sits on consists of chair-high stacks of books, very old ones, large jacketless volumes with dull cloth covers.

He leans forward. “Journalist?”

No.

“Name.”

“Cayce Pollard.”

“American.”

“Yes.”

As her eyes adjust to the gloom, she sees that he is partially reclining on a narrow berth that must be his bed, though it seems so steeply piled with what she takes to be wadded clothing that she doesn't see how he could sleep on it. A narrow folding table has been let down from the wall in front of him, one-legged.

He jacks a pale cigarette into the corner of his mouth and leans forward. In the flare of his plastic lighter she sees that the grimy, littered surface of the little table is Formica, printed in that boomerang pattern from the fifties. There is a mound of butts there that may conceal, in its base, an actual ashtray. And three thick sheaves of banknotes, bound with wide pink rubber bands.

The coal of his cigarette flares mightily, like a meteorite entering Earth's atmosphere, fully half the cigarette apparently consumed on that first draw. She braces herself for the exhalation, but it does not come. Instead, he stacks the sheaves of banknotes and pockets them, tucking them away into the tattered Barbour she remembers from Portobello.

At last he lets his breath out, and the caravan fills with smoke, though less of it than she would have expected. Sunlight, through a few small holes in the metal skin, shafts dramatically in, giving the space the look of a Ridley Scott set scaled for dolls. “You know that bloody Pole.”

“Yes.”

“Reason enough to avoid you. You're wasting my time, darling.” The meteorite enters the atmosphere again, putting paid to the second half of the cigarette. He stubs it out, or partially out, atop the mound.

It occurs to her that she hasn't seen his left hand. Everything so far, the cigarette, the lighter, the banknotes, has been done with his right. “I can't see your left hand.”

In answer, the gun appears, perfectly captured in one of the subminiature Ridley Scott floodlights. “I can't see either of yours.” She has never looked down the barrel of a gun before, and this one seems to have very little left to look down. A huge old top-opening revolver, its barrel and the front of the trigger guard sawed roughly away, the rusted metal showing the tooth marks of hasty filing. Baranov's hand, slender and filthy, is too small for the massive wooden grip. A lanyard ring swings from the pistol's butt, suggesting tall white helmets and the Raj.

She lifts her hands; a gesture familiar, long ago, from a children's game.

“Who sent you?”

“I sent myself.”

“What do you want?”

“Ngemi and Voytek say you can get information.”

“Do they?”

“I want to trade something for one specific piece of information.”

“You're lying.”

“No. I know exactly what I need. And I can give you something you want, in exchange for it.”

“Too late, darling. I've no need for whores.” And then the rough metal of the muzzle, impossibly cold and distinct, is pressed against the center of her forehead.

“Lucian Greenaway.” She feels the ring of cold move, a fraction, in reaction. “The dealer. Bond Street. The calculator. I can buy it for you.” The cold ring, pressing.

“I can't give you money,” she says then, knowing that this is the one lie she needs to tell now, and tell well, “but I can use someone else's credit card to buy the calculator for you.”

“Ngemi's gob needs stopping.”

And then it comes to her, why she mustn't offer money, though surely Bigend would provide: Once paid, Baranov would then feel that he was giving his own money to the dealer he hates.

“If I could offer you money, I would, but all I can offer is to buy the calculator. To give it to you. In exchange for what I need.” Done, she closes her eyes. The circle of cold steel becomes the very horizon.

“Greenaway.” Horizon withdrawn. “Do you know what he's asking?”

“No.” Eyes tight shut.

“Four thousand five. Pounds.”

She opens her eyes. Sees the pistol pointed not so directly at her. “If we're going to talk, would you mind not pointing that at me?”

Baranov seems to remember the gun in his hand. “Here,” he says, letting it drop, everything on the Formica rattling under the impact, “you point it at me.”

She looks from it to him.

“Bought it at a boot sale. Boy dug it up in the woods here. Two quid. The inside's rust and earth. Cylinder won't turn.” He smiles at her.

She looks back at the gun on the table, imagining picking it up, smiling back at him, raising it, and bringing it down, as hard as she can, on his forehead. She lowers her hands. Then she looks up at him again. “My offer.”

“You've someone's credit line, good for four five?”

“Visa.”

“Tell me what you're after. That isn't to say I'll do it.”

“I'm going to get something out of this bag. A printout.”

“Go ahead.”

He pushes the revolver and a chipped white cup aside, so that she can place the glossy of the T-city on the table. He moves to touch something, to his right, and a halogen beam falls on the table. She thinks of the cable, snaking through the wire fence. He looks at the image, saying nothing.

“Each of these numbers is a code,” Cayce says, “identifying a particular sequence in a piece of information. Each sequence has one of these numbers encrypted, for purposes of identification, and to enable it to be tracked.”

“Stego,” says Baranov, putting a slender, brown-stained forefinger down on the printout. “This one. Why's it circled?”

“The encryption is done by a firm in America called Sigil. I want to learn who they do it for, but the specific piece of information I'm asking you for is the e-mail address to which they sent this particular piece, when it had been encrypted.”

“Sigil?”

“In Ohio.”

He sucks his teeth, making an odd, small, birdlike sound.

“Can you do that?”

“Protocol,” he says. “Assuming I could, what then?”

“If you tell me you can, I'll go to your dealer and buy the calculator.”

“And then?”

“You'll give me the e-mail address.”

“And then?”

“I'll give Ngemi the calculator. But if you don't give me the address…”

“Yes?”

“It goes into the canal, at Camden Lock.”

He leans forward, eyes narrowing behind round lenses, lost in an intricacy of wrinkles. “You'd do that, would you?”

“Yes. And I'll do it if I think you're cheating me.”

He peers at her. “I believe you would,” he says, at last, with something close to approval.

“Good. Then call Ngemi, when you have something. He knows how to reach me.”

He says nothing.

“Thank you for considering my offer.” She rises, crouching beneath the low ceiling, elbowing open the door, and climbs out, into bright pallor and rich, extraordinarily fresh air. “Goodbye.” She closes the door behind her.

Ngemi creaks, beside her. “Was he in a better mood, then?” he asks.

“He showed me his gun.”

“This is England, girl,” Ngemi says. “People don't have guns.”