Spook Country Read online

  spook country

  ALSO BY WILLIAM GIBSON

  Neuromancer

  Count Zero

  Burning Chrome

  Mona Lisa Overdrive

  Virtual Light

  Idoru

  All Tomorrow’s Parties

  Pattern Recognition

  WILLIAM GIBSON

  spook country

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS, NEW YORK

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2007 by William Gibson Ent. Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gibson, William, date.

  Spook country / William Gibson.

  p. c.m.

  ISBN: 1-101-14728-8

  1. Intelligence officers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.I2264S66 2007 2007003138

  813'.54—dc22

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  For Deborah

  CONTENTS

  FEBRUARY 2006

  1. WHITE LEGO

  2. ANTS IN THE WATER

  3. VOLAPUK

  4. INTO THE LOCATIVE

  5. TWO KINDS OF EMPTY

  6. RIZE

  7. BUENOS AIRES

  8. CREEPING HER OUT

  9. A COLD CIVIL WAR

  10. NEW DEVONIAN

  11. BOBBYLAND

  12. THE SOURCE

  13. BOXES

  14. JUANA

  15. SPIV

  16. KNOWN EXITS

  17. PIRATES AND TEAMS

  18. ELEGGUA’S WINDOW

  19. FISH

  20. TULPA

  21. SALT OF SOFIA

  22. DRUM AND BASS

  23. TWO MOORS

  24. POPPIES

  25. SUNSET PARK

  26. GRAY’S PAPAYA

  27. THE INTERNATIONAL CURRENCY OF BAD SHIT

  28. BROTHERMAN

  29. INSULATION

  30. FOOTPRINT

  31. PURO

  32. MR. SIPPEE

  33. COUNTERPANE

  34. SPOOK COUNTRY

  35. GUERREROS

  36. SPECTACLES, TESTICLES, WALLET, AND WATCH

  37. FREERUNNERS

  38. TUBAL

  39. TOOLMAKER

  40. DANCING

  41. HOUDINI

  42. GOING AWAY

  43. PONG

  44. EXIT STRATEGY

  45. BREAKBULK

  46. VIP

  47. N STREET

  48. MONTAUK

  49. ROTCH

  50. WHISPERING GALLERY

  51. CESSNA

  52. SCHOOL CLOTHES

  53. TO GIVE THEM THE PLEASURE

  54. ICE

  55. PHANTOM GUN SYNDROME

  56. HENRY AND RICHARD

  57. POPCORN

  58. ALPHABET TALK

  59. BLACK ZODIAC

  60. ROLLING THE CODES

  61. THE PELICAN CASE

  62. SISTER

  63. SURVIVAL, EVASION, RESISTANCE, AND ESCAPE

  64. GLOCKING

  65. EAST VAN HALEN

  66. PING

  67. WARDRIVING

  68. SNAP

  69. MAGNETS

  70. PHO

  71. HARD TO BE ONE

  72. EVENT HORIZON

  73. SPECIAL FORCES

  74. AS DIRECTED

  75. HEY, BUDDY

  76. LOCATION SHOOT

  77. SLACK ROPE

  78. THEIR DIFFERENT DRUMMER

  79. ARTIST AND REPERTOIRE

  80. MONGOLIAN DEATH WORM

  81. IN BETWEEN EVERYTHING

  82. BEENIE’S

  83. STRATHCONA

  84. THE MAN WHO SHOT WALT DISNEY

  February 2006

  1. WHITE LEGO

  Rausch,” said the voice in Hollis Henry’s cell.“Node,” it said.

  She turned on the bedside lamp, illuminating the previous evening’s empty can of Asahi Draft, from the Pink Dot, and her sticker-encrusted PowerBook, closed and sleeping. She envied it.

  “Hello, Philip.”Node was her present employer, to the extent that she had one, and Philip Rausch her editor. They’d had one previous conversation, the one which had resulted in her flying to L.A. and checking into the Mondrian, but that had had much more to do with her financial situation than with any powers of persuasion on his part. Something in his intonation of the magazine’s name, just now, those audible italics, suggested something she knew she’d quickly tire of.

  She heard Odile Richard’s robot bump lightly against something, from the direction of the bathroom.

  “It’s three there,” he said. “Did I wake you?”

  “No,” she lied.

  Odile’s robot was made of Lego, white Lego exclusively, with some odd number of black-tired white plastic wheels underneath, and what she assumed were solar power cells screwed across its back. She could hear it moving patiently, however randomly, across the carpet of her room. Could you buy white-only Lego? It looked right at home here, where lots of things were white. Nice contrast with the Aegean-blue table legs.

  “They’re ready to show you his best piece,” Rausch said.

  “When?”

  “Now. She’s waiting for you at her hotel. The Standard.”

  Hollis knew the Standard. It was carpeted in royal-blue Astroturf. Whenever she went there she felt as though she were the oldest living thing in the building. There was a sort of giant terrarium, behind the registration desk, in which ethnically ambiguous bikini-girls sometimes lay as if sunning themselves, or studying large, profusely illustrated textbooks.

  “Have you taken care of the billing here, Philip? When I checked in, they still had it on my card.”

  “It’s been taken care of.”

  She didn’t believe him. “Do we have a deadline on this story yet?”

  “No.” Rausch sucked his teeth, somewhere in a London she couldn’t be bothered imagining. “The launch has been rolled back. August.”

  Hollis had yet
to meet anyone fromNode , or anyone else who was writing for them. A European version ofWired , it seemed, though of course they never put it that way. Belgian money, via Dublin, offices in London—or, if not offices, then at least this Philip. Who sounded to her as though he were seventeen. Seventeen and with his sense of humor surgically excised.

  “Plenty of time,” she said, not certain what she meant, but thinking, however obliquely, of her bank balance.

  “She’s waiting for you.”

  “Okay.” She closed her eyes and clamshelled her phone.

  Could you, she wondered, be staying in this hotel and technically still be considered homeless? It felt like you could, she decided.

  She lay there under a single white sheet, listening to the French girl’s robot bumping and clicking and reversing. It was programmed, she supposed, like one of those Japanese vacuum cleaners, to keep bumping until the job was done. Odile had said it would be collecting data with an onboard GPS unit; Hollis guessed it was.

  She sat up, a very high thread count sliding to her thighs. Outside, wind found her windows from a new angle. They thrummed scarily. Any very pronounced weather, here, worried her. It got written up, she knew, in the next day’s papers, like some lesser species of earthquake. Fifteen minutes of rain and the lower reaches of the Beverly Center pancaked; house-sized boulders coasted majestically down hillsides, into busy intersections. She’d been here for that, once.

  She got out of bed and crossed to the window, hoping she wouldn’t step on the robot. She fumbled for the cord that opened the heavy white drapes. Six floors below, she saw the palms along Sunset thrashing, like dancers miming the final throes of some sci-fi plague. Three-ten on a Wednesday morning and this wind seemed to have the Strip utterly deserted.

  Don’t think, she advised herself. Don’t check your e-mail. Get up and go into the bathroom.

  Fifteen minutes later, having done the best she could with all that had never been quite right, she descended to the lobby in a Philippe Starck elevator, determined to pay its particulars as little attention as possible. She’d once read an article about Starck that said the designer owned an oyster farm where only perfectly square oysters were grown, in specially fabricated steel frames.

  The doors slid open on an expanse of pale wood. The Platonic ideal of a small oriental carpet was projected across part of this from somewhere overhead, stylized squiggles of light recalling slightly less stylized squiggles of dyed wool. Originally intended, she remembered having been told, to avoid offending Allah. She crossed this quickly, heading for the entrance doors.

  As she opened one of these, into the weird moving warmth of the wind, a Mondrian security man was looking at her, one ear Bluetoothed beneath the shaven cliff of a military haircut. He asked her something, but it was swallowed by a sudden down-drafting gust. “No,” she said, assuming he’d asked if she wanted her car brought up, not that she had one, or if she wanted a cab. There was a cab, she saw, the driver reclining behind the wheel, possibly asleep, dreaming perhaps of the fields of Azerbaijan. She passed it, a weird exuberance rising in her as the wind, so wild and strangely random, surged along Sunset, from the direction of Tower Records, like the back-draft from something straining for takeoff.

  She thought she heard the security man call to her, but then her Adidas found actual unstyled Sunset sidewalk, a pointillist abstract in blackened chewing gum. The monster open-doors statuary of the Mondrian was behind her now, and she was zipping up her hoodie. Heading, it felt, not so much in the direction of the Standard as simply outward bound.

  The air was full of the dry and stinging detritus of the palms.

  You are, she told herself, crazy. But that seemed for the moment abundantly okay, even though she knew that this was not a salubrious stretch for any woman, particularly alone. Nor for any pedestrian, this time of the morning. Yet this weather, this moment of anomalous L.A. climate, seemed to have swept any usual sense of threat aside. The street was as empty as that moment in the film just prior to Godzilla’s first footfall. Palms straining, the very air shuddering, and Hollis, now hooded blackly, striding determinedly on. Sheets of newspaper and handouts from clubs tumbled past her ankles.

  A police car whizzed past, headed in the direction of Tower. Its driver, slumped resolutely behind the wheel, paid her no attention. To serve, she remembered, and protect. The wind reversed giddily, whipping her hood back and performing an instant redo on her hair. Which was in need of one anyway, she reminded herself.

  She found Odile Richard waiting under the Standard’s white porte cochere and the hotel’s sign—displayed, for reasons known only to its designers, upside down. Odile was still on Paris time, but Hollis had offered to accommodate her with this small-hours meeting. Also, evidently, it was optimal for viewing this kind of art.

  Beside her stood a broad young Latino with shaven head and retro-ethnic burgundy Pendleton, sleeves scissored away above the elbows. The shirt’s untucked tails reached nearly to the knees of his baggy chinos. “Vote for Santa,” he said, beaming, as she walked up to them, raising a silver can of Tecate. There was something tattooed in very bold and ultra-elaborated Olde English lettering down the length of his forearm.

  “Excuse me?”

  “À votre santé,” corrected Odile, dabbing at her nose with a frayed wad of tissue. Odile was the least chic Frenchwoman Hollis could recall having met, though in a kind of haute-nerd Euro way that only made her more annoyingly adorable. She wore a black XXXL sweatshirt from some long-dead start-up, men’s brown ribbed-nylon socks of a peculiarly nasty sheen, and see-through plastic sandals the color of cherry cough syrup.

  “Alberto Corrales,” he said.

  “Alberto,” she said, allowing her hand to be engulfed in his other, empty hand, dry as wood. “Hollis Henry.”

  “The Curfew,” Alberto said, his smile widening.

  The fan thing, she thought, amazed as ever, and just as suddenly ill at ease.

  “This dirt, in the air,” Odile protested, “it is disgusting. Please let us go now, to view the piece.”

  “Right,” said Hollis, grateful for the distraction.

  “This way,” Alberto said, neatly lobbing his empty can into a white Standard waste container with Milanese pretensions. The wind, she noticed, had died as if on cue.

  She glanced into the lobby. The reception desk was deserted, the bikini-girl terrarium empty and unlit. Then she followed Alberto and the irritably snuffling Odile to Alberto’s car, a classic Volks Beetle gleaming under multiple coats of low-rider lacquer. She saw a volcano flowing with incandescent lava, big-busted Latinas in mini-loincloths and feathered Aztec headdresses, the polychrome coils of a winged serpent. Alberto was into some kind of ethnic culture jamming, she decided, unless VWs had entered the pantheon since she’d last looked at this stuff.

  He opened the passenger-side door and held the seat up while Odile slid into the back. Where there seemed already to be equipment of some kind. Then he gestured for Hollis to take the passenger seat, almost a bow.

  She blinked at the sublimely matter-of-fact semiotics of the old VW’s dashboard. The car smelled of some ethnic air-freshener. That too was part of a language, she guessed, like the paintjob, but someone like Alberto might deliberately be using exactly the wrong freshener.

  He pulled out onto Sunset and executed a tidy U-turn. They headed back in the direction of the Mondrian, over asphalt thinly littered with the desiccated biomass of palms.

  “I’ve been a fan for years,” Alberto said.

  “Alberto is concerned with history as internalized space,” contributed Odile, from a little too close behind Hollis’s head. “He sees this internalized space emerge from trauma. Always, from trauma.”

  “Trauma,” Hollis repeated involuntarily, as they passed the Pink Dot. “Stop at the Dot, please, Alberto. I need cigarettes.”

  “Ollis,” said Odile, accusingly, “you tell me you are not smoke.”

  “I just started,” Hollis said.

 
; “But we are here,” said Alberto, taking a left at Larrabee and parking.

  “Where’s here?” Hollis asked, cracking the door and preparing, perhaps, to run.

  Alberto looked grave, but not particularly crazy. “I’ll get my equipment. I’d like you to experience the piece, first. Then, if you like, we can discuss it.”

  He got out. Hollis did too. Larrabee sloped steeply down, toward the illuminated flats of the city, so steeply that she found it uncomfortable to stand. Alberto helped Odile from the backseat. She propped herself against the Volks and screwed her hands into the front of her sweatshirt. “I am cold,” she complained.

  And it was cooler now, Hollis noticed, without the warm blast of the wind. She looked up at a graceless pink hotel that loomed over them, while Alberto, draped in his Pendleton, rummaged in the back of the car. He came up with a battered aluminum camera case, crisscrossed with black gaffer tape.

  A long silver car glided silently past on Sunset, as they followed Alberto up the steep sidewalk.