“Yes. Sleight was telling him where I was.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why not?”
“I left the Neo with someone else. He followed them.” He needed to clean his teeth. There was pear galette between his upper rear molars. It still tasted good.
“It’s been a long day,” said Hollis as they reached what he took to be their hotel. “I spoke with Hubertus. He wants you to call him. Sleight thinks you’ve run away.”
“I feel like I have.” He held the door for her.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Monsieur Milgrim?” A man, behind a vaguely pulpit-like counter.
“Mister Milgrim’s room is on my card,” said Hollis.
“Yes,” said the clerk, “but he must still register.” He produced a printed white card and a pen. “Your passport, please.”
Milgrim brought out his Faraday pouch, then his passport.
“I’ll call you in the morning, in time for breakfast here, then the train,” said Hollis. “Good night.” And she was gone, around a corner.
“I will photocopy this,” said the clerk, “and return it to you when you are finished in the lobby.” He gestured with his head, to Milgrim’s right.
“The lobby?”
“Where the young lady is waiting.”
“Young lady?”
But the clerk had vanished, through a narrow doorway behind the counter.
The lights were out in the small lobby. Folding wooden panels partially screened it from the reception area. Streetlight reflected on china, set out for breakfast service. And on the yellow curve of the helmet, from the low oval of a glass coffee table. A small figure rose smoothly to its feet, in a complex rustle of waterproof membranes and cycle-armor. “I’m Fiona,” she said sternly, her jawline delicate above the stiff buckled collar. She stuck out her hand. Milgrim shook it automatically. It was small, warm, strong, and callused.
“Milgrim.”
“I know that.” She didn’t sound British.
“Are you American?”
“Technically. You too. We both work for Bigend.”
“He told Hollis he wasn’t sending anybody.”
“Blue Ant didn’t send anybody. I work for him. So do you.”
“How do I know you really work for Bigend?”
She tapped the face of a phone like Hollis’s, listened, handed it to him.
“Hello?” said Bigend. “Milgrim?”
“Yes?”
“How are you?”
Milgrim considered. “It’s been a long day.”
“Run it past Fiona after we’ve spoken. She’ll relay it to me.”
“Did you have Sleight tracking me with the Neo?”
“It’s part of what he does. He called from Toronto, said you’d left Paris.”
“I slipped someone the phone.”
“Sleight’s wrong,” Bigend said.
“Not about the phone leaving Paris.”
“That’s not what I mean. He’s wrong.”
“Okay,” said Milgrim. “Who’s right?”
“Pamela,” said Bigend. “Fiona, whom you’ve just met. We’ll be keeping it at that until the situation sorts itself out.”
“Is Hollis?”
“Hollis is unaware of any of this.”
“Am I?”
There was a silence. “Interesting question,” said Bigend, finally. “What do you think?”
“I don’t like Sleight. Don’t like the man he had following me.”
“You’re doing well. More proactive than I asked for, but that’s interesting.”
“I saw a penguin. Penguin-shaped. Something. I may need to go back to the clinic.”
“That’s our Festo air penguin,” Bigend said, after a pause. “We’re experimenting with it as an urban video surveillance platform.”
“Festive?”
“Festo. They’re German.”
“What’s going on? Please?”
“Something that happens periodically. It has to do with the kind of talent Blue Ant requires. If they’re any good at what I hire them for, they tend to have an innate tendency to go rogue. That or sell out to someone who already has. I expect this to happen. It can actually be quite productive. Fiona was on the train with you, this morning. She’ll be on the train back, tomorrow. Put Hollis in a cab to Cabinet.”
“What’s that?”
“Where she’s staying. Then wait near the cab rank. Fiona will bring you to me. Give her a rundown of your day now, then get some sleep.”
“Okay,” Milgrim said, then realized Bigend was gone. He handed the phone back to Fiona, noticing that she wore something on her left wrist, about six inches long, that looked like a doll’s computer keyboard. “What’s that?”
“Controls the penguin,” she said. “But we’re switching over to iPhones for that.”
33. BURJ
She got the iPhone out of her purse in the little bronze elevator, hit Heidi’s cell number as she stepped out. It was ringing as she walked along the hallway, doors to her right, weird twisted brown medieval timbers to her left. Heidi picked up as she was fiddling the key into the lock.
“Fuck-” Against a wash of what sounded to Hollis like exclusively male pub ruckus.
“Tell me what’s happened to Garreth. Now.” She opened the door. Saw white towels where she’d left them on the bed, the Blue Ant figurine on the built-in bedside table, big crazy gold fake Chinese scribbles on the blood-red walls. It was like stepping into a life-size Barbie’s Shanghai Brothel kit.
“Hold on. Get the fuck over! Not you. Had to get out of that bench thing.”
“I thought you weren’t drinking.”
“Red Bull. Cutting it with ginger ale.”
“Tell me. Now.”
“Don’t look on YouTube.”
“At what, on YouTube?”
“Burj Khalifa world-championship base jump.”
“That hotel? Looks like an Arabian Nights sailboat? What happened?”
“That’s Burj Al Arab. Burj Khalifa’s the world’s tallest building-”
“Shit-”
“The jump on YouTube, that wasn’t him. That was earlier. That guy high-pulled, they say here. That’s when-”
“What happened to Garreth?”
“The guy on YouTube holds the world’s record now for jumping out of a building. Your boy figured a way to get in and go off it higher up. They still hadn’t finished closing all the windows at the top. There was this crane-”
“Oh God-”
“And the security had of course gotten lots tighter, since YouTube guy did his, but your boy’s an expert at-”
“Tell me!”
“He was on the way up, however he was managing that, and they got onto him. He got up to the point where the windows weren’t installed, and went off from there. Actually a little lower than YouTube guy-
“Heidi!”
“Did the bat-suit thing. Took it really far out, really low, probably pissed that he’d jumped from below the record point. Trying for points on style.”
Hollis was crying now.
“Had to come down on a freeway. Four in the morning, there was a vintage Lotus Elan-”
Hollis started sobbing. She was sitting on the bed now, but didn’t know how she’d gotten there.
“He’s okay! Well, he’s alive, okay? My boy says he must’ve been super well connected, because the ambulance that picked him up put him straight on an air ambulance, a jet, into a high-end trauma center in Singapore. Where you go, there, if you need shit-hot medical attention.”
“He’s alive? Alive?”
“Fuck yes. I told you already. Leg’s messed up. I know he was in Singapore, six weeks, then it gets fuzzy. Some people say he went to the States from there, to get stuff done they couldn’t do in Singapore. Military doctors. You said he wasn’t military.”
“Connected. The old man…”
“Story is, that air ambulance had some kind of local royal crest.”
“Where is he?”
“These boys at my gym, they’re ex-military. Maybe ex-. Fuzzy. Doesn’t matter how much they drink, the story just trails off, at a certain point. Runs up against some prime directive. They know who he is, but from the jumping. They’re big fans of that. Also because he’s English. Tribal thing. That secret-life shit you told me about, I don’t think they’d get that. Or maybe they would. They’re all batshit in their own way.”