Zero History

with a vial cooling in his overcoat pocket.
Aldous had told Milgrim all about the Toyota Hilux, about the Jankel armor and the
bulletproof glass and the run-flats. “Cartel grade,” Aldous had assured him, and unusual
for London, at least as far as a silver-gray pickup truck went. Milgrim hadn’t asked why
these particular features had been deemed necessary, but he suspected that that might be a
sensitive area.
Eventually, now, after a much less entertaining stretch of the journey, it became Euston
Road, and the beginnings of his idea of actual London.
Like entering a game, a layout, something flat and mazed, arbitrarily but fractally
constructed from beautifully detailed but somehow unreal buildings, its order perhaps
shuffled since the last time he’d been here. The pixels that comprised it were familiar, but
it remained only provisionally mapped, a protean territory, a box of tricks, some possibly
even benign.
The run-flats were nasty on mixed pavement, worse on cobbles. He sat back and held
on to the red cardboard tube as the driver began taking an endless series of corners,
keeping roughly parallel, Milgrim guessed, to Tottenham Court Road. Headed for the
heart of town, and Soho.
>>>
Rausch, his translucently short black hair looking like something sprayed from a nozzle,
was waiting for them in front of Blue Ant, the driver having phoned ahead as they’d crept
along through the traffic on Beak Street. Rausch held a magazine above his head, to ward
off the drizzle. He looked characteristically disheveled, but in his own peculiar way.
Everything about his personal presentation was intended to convey an effortless
concision, but nothing quite did. His tight black suit was wrinkled, bagged at the knees,
and in extending his arm above his head to hold the magazine, he’d untucked one side of
his white shirt. His glasses, whose frames came equipped with their own squint, would be
in need of cleaning.
“Thanks,” Milgrim said when the driver pushed a button, unlocking the passenger-side
door. The driver said nothing. They were behind a black cab, not quite there yet.
When Milgrim opened the door, it swung out with an alarming, weight-driven velocity,
to be stopped by a short pair of heavy nylon straps that prevented it from tearing itself off
its hinges. He climbed down, with the red tube and his bag, briefly glimpsing the red tank
of fire-extinguishing foam beneath the passenger seat, and tried to bump the door shut
with his shoulder. “Ouch,” he said. He put the bag down, tucked the tube under his arm,
and used the other hand to heave the armored door shut.
Rausch was bending to pick up his bag.
“He’s got the pee,” Milgrim said, indicating the truck.
Rausch straightened, grimacing fastidiously. “Yes. He takes it to the lab.”