E zeiza,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“The airport. International Terminal B.”
She’d gotten him on his cell in Buenos Aires, after getting hers activated for international calling. No idea what it was costing.
“And you’re getting here day after tomorrow?”
“Day after that. It’s a long flight up to New York but it’s basically just flying north; odd to go that far without any time zones. I’m having lunch with a friend, dinner there with someone from the Bollards’ label. Then I’m out to your end next morning.”
“I think I’ve gotten myself into something, Reg, with this Node assignment.”
“What did we tell you? The lady wife has your boy’s number. Been getting steadily harsher about him since you brought his name up. This morning she’d gotten it up to ‘unclean.’ Or is that down?”
“I haven’t actually found him that personally repulsive, aside from his taste in cars, but I don’t like the sense of enormous amounts of money at the service of, of, well, I don’t know. He’s like a monstrously intelligent giant baby. Or something.”
“Angelina says he’s utterly amoral in the service of his own curiosity.”
“That probably covers it. But I don’t like the sort of thing he’s currently curious about, and I don’t like the way it feels to me that things are starting to happen, around that.”
“Sort of thing. Feels to you. You’re being uncharacteristically oblique.”
“I know,” she said, and paused, lowering her phone in abrupt recognition of what was bothering her. She put it back to her ear. “But we’re on the phone, aren’t we?”
There was a silence, on his end. A true, absolute, and digital silence, devoid of that random background sizzle that she’d once taken as much for granted during an international call as she took the sky overhead when she was outside. “Ah,” he said. “Well. There is always that. Increasingly more so, one imagines.”
“Imagines more rapidly, around him.”
“Ahem. I look forward to hearing more about this in person, then. But if my Spanish is at least semifunctional today, my flight’s just being called.”
“Good one, Reg.”
“Call you from New York.”
“Damn,” she said, closing her phone. She’d wanted, needed, to tell him about Bigend’s pirate story, about meeting Bobby, about seeing the white truck driving away and how that made her feel. He’d sort it out, she knew. Not make it make any more sense, necessarily, but just that his categories were so unlike hers. Unlike anyone’s, maybe. But something else had happened; some recognition of a line crossed, some ambiguous territory entered.
Bigend and his James Bond villain’s car, his half-built headquarters to match, his too much money, his big sharp curiosity and his bland willingness to go poking it wherever he wanted. That was potentially dangerous. Had to be. In some way she’d never really imagined before. If he wasn’t lying, he’d been paying people to tell him about secret government programs. The war on terror. Were they still calling it that? She’d caught some, she decided: terror. Right here in her hand, in Starbucks, afraid to trust her own phone and the net stretching out from it, strung through those creepy fake trees you saw from highways here, the cellular towers disguised with grotesque faux foliage, Cubist fronds, Art Deco conifers, a thin forest supporting an invisible grid, not unlike the one spread on Bobby’s factory floor in flour, chalk, anthrax, baby laxative, whatever it was. The trees Bobby triangulated on. The net of telephony, all digitized, and all, she had to suppose, listened to. By whoever, whatever, made the sort of things Bigend was poking at its business. Somewhere, she had to believe, such things were all too real.
Maybe now, they already were. Listening to her.
She looked up and saw the other customers. Relatively minor functionaries in film, television, music, games. None of them, in that moment, looking particularly happy. But none of them, probably, touched in quite the same way by this new bad thing, this shadow, fallen across her.