It had hovered, watching four men emerge from a black sedan. A Mercedes hire-car, Garreth had said, having somehow checked plate numbers.
Two of the men were tall, broad-shouldered, and efficient-looking. Another, shorter, almost certainly Foley, limped. The fourth, whose posture she now recalled from Los Angeles and Vancouver, a perpetual petulant slump, was Bobby Chombo, Bigend’s pet mathematician. That same annoying haircut, half of his thin face lost behind an unwashed diagonal curtain. There he’d been, below Fiona’s dragonfly, as if in a pale green steel engraving, wrapped in what looked like a robe or dressing gown. Neurasthenic, she remembered Inchmale delighting in calling him. He’d said that neurasthenia was coming back, and that Bobby was ahead of the curve, an early adapter.
Garreth took it for granted that one of the taller men, the one in the dark raincoat, carrying a rectangular package, was Gracie. This based, Hollis gathered, on the other’s having some kind of archaic rocker hair, hair that reminded her of one of Jimmy’s junkie friends, a drummer from Detroit.
When the four of them, Foley seeming to be leading Chombo, had moved on, away from the car, Garreth had had Fiona dip down to read the car’s plate number, and peek through the window, in case they’d left someone to watch it, a complication that Hollis gathered would have required some other and more unpleasant skill on Pep’s part. The car had been empty, and Fiona, aloft again, had found them easily, still moving, but the one Garreth thought was Gracie was gone, missing, and still was, his package with him. Fiona had been unable to look for him then, because Garreth had needed her back at the car, so that he could vet Pep’s arrival and subsequent burglary, which had taken all of forty-six seconds, passenger-side door, complete with lockup.
Pep, following instructions, hadn’t been wearing the messenger bag, and Hollis assumed he’d deposited the other party favor, whatever it might be, in the car, that being evidently the plan. And then he was gone, his dual-engined electric bicycle, utterly silent, capable of an easy sixty miles per hour, never having intersected with the focal cones of any of the cameras showing on the screen of Garreth’s laptop. Had it, Garreth said, the resulting image of a riderless bicycle might have negated the whole exercise.
The camera-map, on Garreth’s laptop, was grayscale, the cones of camera-vision red, each one fading to pink as it spread from its apex. Occasionally, one of them would move as an actual given camera motored on its axis. She had no idea where this particular display was being darknetted from, and she was glad that she didn’t.
The screen that offered Milgrim’s video feed, she thought, seemed entirely out of step with the operation, and perhaps for that reason she found herself going back to it, though it wasn’t very interesting. With Gracie still unaccounted for, she felt Garreth’s nerves. He could have used someone who knew what they were doing, she guessed, on another drone like Fiona’s.
Whatever Milgrim was flying, it seemed leisurely, almost comical, though capable of invigorating bursts of sustained forward motion. Having been instructed, via Fiona, to make a circuit of the area, looking for Gracie, he had, though Garreth had complained that he was too high. Now he was cruising, she saw, above vegetation scrubby enough to warrant the name, Garreth apparently having forgotten about him. But nothing had been expected of Milgrim and his drone, she knew. He’d been given the job to keep him out of Bigend’s hands.
The sound of a very long zipper being stealthily undone. She glanced to the right and saw Heidi touch her upraised forefinger to her lips.
“Our two,” Garreth said to the headset, “are starting for point now. Put it down about twenty meters west of point. We’ll have to run with the batteries you have.” That would be Fiona.
As he spoke, Heidi slipped through the fly and slowly lowered the zipper, closing it behind her.
Point, Hollis knew, would be the GPS coordinates that Gracie had specified as the site of the exchange.
On Fiona’s screen, the perspective suddenly dropped to knee-height, then raced forward over darkly blurred grass, as if from the viewpoint of a hyperkinetic child.
Milgrim, she saw, had reached the end of the scrub, and was turning slowly around for more.
I hope she just had to pee, thought Hollis, glancing back at the long plastic zipper.
80. FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE
Look,” said Fiona, “it’s you.”
Garreth had ordered her aloft again. Now she showed Milgrim her iPhone, the camo tarp rustling around them.
“That’s Ajay?” Two figures on the little screen, from a high angle, steel-engraved in washed-out green. One of them shuffling, dejected, head down, shoulders too wide for Milgrim’s jacket. The other man was short, broad, something round and flat on his head. Ajay’s hands were together, crossed, just above crotch-level, in what looked like a gesture of modesty. Handcuffed.
Fiona swung down, hovered, catching them as they passed, into and out of frame. Milgrim thought Ajay was doing a good job of conveying abject surrender, but otherwise he didn’t see the resemblance. Chandra seemed to have done a better job with the spray-on hair this time.
The other man, Milgrim thought, looked as if someone had subjected the Dalai Lama to the gravity of a planet with greater mass than Earth’s. Short, extremely sturdy, age-indeterminate, he wore a sort of beret, level across his forehead, with a pom-pom on top.
As the subjects left her frame, Fiona’s thumbs moved, whirling the point of view back up, reminding Milgrim to check his own iPhone, where he found his penguin looking at grass and low bushes.
When he glanced back, Fiona had found three more figures, approaching on the Scrubs.
One was Chombo, still furled in his tissue-thin coat, and looking much more convincingly unhappy than Ajay’s Milgrim. To Chombo’s left came Foley, limping visibly, wearing darker pants than the ones that had elicited his nickname. He still had his cap, though, and the short dark jacket he’d worn in Paris. On Chombo’s right, Milgrim saw, to his horror, was the man from Edge City Family Restaurant, Winnie’s other Mike, the one with the mullet and the knife in his Toters.
“He wants you over here,” Fiona said, meaning where her drone was, “looking for the one I lost. Move.”
Milgrim sank his concentration into the bright little rectangle, penguin-space, his thumbs tapping. He rolled, corrected for it, swam higher in the air.
Fiona’s drone’s night vision was so much better than the penguin’s. The penguin’s suffered from a kind of infrared myopia; the darker it was, the closer he had to get, and the brighter he had to make the penguin’s infrared LEDs. Which were none too bright to begin with, according to Fiona. The grass below presented in a sort of cheesy pointillism, monochrome, faintly green, stripped of detail. Though if anyone were there, he thought, he’d see them.
And then he found Chombo, and Foley, and the man from Edge City Family Restaurant, still walking.
He had the penguin on auto-swim. He took over, stilled the wings, and let momentum carry him out in the gentle arc provided by his adjustment of the tail, something he was already better at.
Over something in the grass.
A hole? A large rock? He tried to slow himself, using the wings in reverse, but this caused him to roll, catching a blank screen of light-pollution. He righted himself. Nothing below. He began to swim down, using the wings on manual.
A man sat on the grass, cross-legged, something rectangular on his lap. A dark coat, short pale hair. Then gone, the penguin, in spite of Milgrim’s best efforts, having overshot, glided on.
Fiona had told him, twice, how lucky they were to have no breeze tonight, all calm in the Thames Valley, yet he couldn’t steer the penguin well enough to see a man somewhere immediately below him. He took a deep breath, lifted his thumbs from the screen. Let things settle. Let the penguin become a simple balloon, up in the windless air. Then start again.