Zero history

The run-flats were nasty on mixed pavement, worse on cobbles. He sat back and held on to the red cardboard tube as the driver began taking an endless series of corners, keeping roughly parallel, Milgrim guessed, to Tottenham Court Road. Headed for the heart of town, and Soho.

›››

Rausch, his translucently short black hair looking like something sprayed from a nozzle, was waiting for them in front of Blue Ant, the driver having phoned ahead as they’d crept along through the traffic on Beak Street. Rausch held a magazine above his head, to ward off the drizzle. He looked characteristically disheveled, but in his own peculiar way. Everything about his personal presentation was intended to convey an effortless concision, but nothing quite did. His tight black suit was wrinkled, bagged at the knees, and in extending his arm above his head to hold the magazine, he’d untucked one side of his white shirt. His glasses, whose frames came equipped with their own squint, would be in need of cleaning.

“Thanks,” Milgrim said when the driver pushed a button, unlocking the passenger-side door. The driver said nothing. They were behind a black cab, not quite there yet.

When Milgrim opened the door, it swung out with an alarming, weight-driven velocity, to be stopped by a short pair of heavy nylon straps that prevented it from tearing itself off its hinges. He climbed down, with the red tube and his bag, briefly glimpsing the red tank of fire-extinguishing foam beneath the passenger seat, and tried to bump the door shut with his shoulder. “Ouch,” he said. He put the bag down, tucked the tube under his arm, and used the other hand to heave the armored door shut.

Rausch was bending to pick up his bag.

“He’s got the pee,” Milgrim said, indicating the truck.

Rausch straightened, grimacing fastidiously. “Yes. He takes it to the lab.”

Milgrim nodded, looking around at the pedestrian traffic, which tended to interest him in Soho.

“They’re waiting,” said Rausch.

Milgrim followed him into Blue Ant, Rausch holding a security badge over a metal plate to unlock the door, a single sheet of greenish two-inch-thick glass.

The lobby here suggested some combination of extremely expensive private art school and government defense establishment, though when he thought about it, he’d never been in either. There was a massive central chandelier, constructed from thousands of pairs of discarded prescription eyeglasses, that contributed very handsomely to the art school part, but the Pentagon part (or would it be Whitehall?) was harder to pin down. Half a dozen large plasma screens constantly showed the latest house product, mostly European and Japanese automobile commercials with production budgets dwarfing those of many feature films, while beneath these moved people wearing badges like the one Rausch had used to open the door. These were worn around the neck, on lanyards in various shades, some bearing the repeated logos of various brands or projects. There was a smell of exceptionally good coffee.

Milgrim looked obediently at a large red plus sign, on the wall behind the security counter, while an automated camera moved lazily behind a small square window, like something in a very technical reptile house. He was shortly presented with a large square photograph of himself, very low in resolution, on a hideous chartreuse lanyard minus any branding. As always, he suspected that this was at least partially intended to serve as a high-visibility target, should the need arise. He put it on. “Coffee,” he said.

“No,” said Rausch, “they’re waiting,” but Milgrim was already on his way to the lobby’s cappuccino station, the source of that fine aroma.

“Piccolo, please,” said Milgrim to the blond barista, her hair only slightly longer than Rausch’s.

“He’s waiting,” said Rausch, beside him, tensely stressing the first syllable of “waiting.”

“He’ll expect me to be able to talk,” said Milgrim, watching the girl expertly draw the shot. She foamed milk, then poured an elaborate Valentine’s heart into the waiting shot in Milgrim’s white cup. “Thank you,” he said.

Rausch fumed silently in the elevator to the fourth floor, while Milgrim was mainly concerned with keeping his cup and saucer level and undisturbed.

The doors slid aside, revealing Pamela Mainwaring. Looking, Milgrim thought, like some very tasteful pornographer’s idea of “mature,” her blond hair magnificently banged.

“Welcome back,” she said, ignoring Rausch. “How was South Carolina?”

“Fine,” said Milgrim, who held the red cardboard tube in his right hand, the piccolo in his left. He raised the tube slightly. “Got it.”

“Very good,” she said. “Come in.”

Milgrim followed her into a longish room with a long central table. Bigend was seated at the table’s far end, a window behind him. He looked like something that had gone wrong on a computer screen, but then Milgrim realized that that was the suit he was wearing, in a weirdly electric cobalt blue.

“If you don’t mind,” Pamela said, taking the red cardboard tube and handing it on to Milgrim’s favorite in Bigend’s clothing design team, a French girl, today in a plaid kilt and cashmere pullover. “And the photographs?”

“In my bag,” Milgrim said.

While his bag was placed on the table and opened, motorized shades tracked silently shut across the window behind Bigend. Overhead, fixtures came on, illuminating the table, where Milgrim’s tracings were being carefully unfurled. He’d remembered to leave his camera atop his clothes, and now it was being passed from hand to hand, up the table.

“Your medication,” said Pamela, handing him a fresh bubble-pack.

“Now, then,” said Bigend, rising, “be seated.”

Milgrim took the chair to the right of Pamela’s. They were extremely fine workstation chairs, either Swiss or Italian, and he had to restrain himself from fiddling with the various knobs and levers projecting from beneath the seat.

“I see the Bundeswehr NATO pattern,” someone said. “The legs are pure 501.”

“But not the box,” said the girl in kilt and cashmere. The box, he had learned, was everything, in a pair of jeans, above the top of the leg. “The two small pleats are absent, the rise lower.”

“The photographs,” said Bigend, from behind her chair. A plasma screen, above the window he’d been sitting in front of, flared turquoise, around coppery coyote brown, the Formica counter in Edge City Family Restaurant making itself known in this darkened room in central London.

“Knee pads,” said a young man, American. “Absent. No pockets for them.”

“We hear they have a new pad-retention system,” said the French girl, with a surgeon’s seriousness. “But I don’t see that here.”

They watched, then, silently, while Milgrim’s photographs cycled.

“How tactical are they?” asked Bigend as the first photograph reappeared. “Are we looking at a prototype for a Department of Defense contract?”

A silence. Then: “Streetwear.” The French girl, much more confident than the others. “If these are for the military, it isn’t the American military.”

“He said they needed gussets,” said Milgrim.

“What?” asked Bigend, softly.

“He said they were too tight in the thighs. For rappelling.”

“Really,” said Bigend. “That’s good. That’s very good.”

Milgrim allowed himself a first careful sip of his coffee.