Zero History

79. DUNGEON MASTER
Hollis stood behind him, trying to pretend she was watching someone play a game,
something tedious and self-importantly arcane, on multiple screens. Something that didn’t
matter, was of no great importance, on which nothing depended.
A game with undergraduate production values. No music, no sound effects. Garreth the
dungeon master, defining the quests, setting tasks, issuing gold and sigils of invisibility.
Better to look at it that way, but she couldn’t make it stick. She leaned back, against
aubergine-coated automotive steel, the coolness of it, and watched the video feed from
Fiona’s drone.
Whatever Fiona was flying felt hummingbird-swift, capable of brilliantly sudden pause
and sustained hover, but also of elevator-like ascents and descents. All in the pale green
monochrome of night vision. Her cameras were better than Milgrim’s, expensively
optimized. Hollis, with no idea what it might look like, imagined it a huge dragonfly, its
body the size of a baguette, the pulsing wings iridescent.
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.