Zero History

toward one wall, raising the racket two-handed, with a sort of ecclesiastic deliberation.
“What’s he doing?” he asked Fiona, who was looking down at a motorcycle whose
engine lay in pieces on the littered floor.
“Sweeping for bugs.”
“Has he found them before?”
“Not here. But this place is still a secret, as far as I know. They turn up at Blue Ant
weekly. Bigend has a toffee box full of them. Keeps saying he’ll make me a necklace.”
“Who puts them there?”
“Strategic business intelligence types, I suppose. The kind of people he generally
refuses to hire.”
“Are they able to learn things, doing that?”
“Once,” she said, and touched the broken edge of the bike’s cowling with a fingertip, in
a way he envied, “he sent me across town with a Taser.”
“That shocks people?”
“Yes.”
“He sent you to shock someone?”
“There was a LAN cable bodged into it. I pretended to be there for a job interview.
When I had the chance, I plugged it, unobserved, into the first available LAN socket. Any
one would do. The Taser was in my purse. Gave it a click. Just the one.”
“What happened?”
“It punched out their entire system. All of it. Erased everything. Even the parts in other
buildings. Then I wiped it for prints, binned it, and left.”
“That was because they’d taken something?”
She shrugged. “He called it a lobotomy.”
“Clean,” announced Voytek glumly, carrying out two of his cases. They weren’t heavy
at all, Milgrim now knew, because he’d seen that they mainly contained black foam
padding. Voytek set them down and returned for the other two.
“When is he coming?” asked Milgrim.
“Not expecting him,” she said. “He just wants you in a safe place.”
“He’s not coming?”
“We’re just killing time,” she said, and smiled. She wasn’t someone who smiled often,
but when she did, he found, it seemed as though it meant something. “I’ll teach you how
to work the balloons. I’m getting really good.”