Zero History by William Gibson Read Free Book Online Page B

large square photograph of himself, very low in resolution, on a hideous chartreuse lanyard minus any branding. As always, he suspected that this was at least partially intended to serve as a high-visibility target, should the need arise. He put it on. “Coffee,” he said.
    “No,” said Rausch, “they’re waiting,” but Milgrim was already on his way to the lobby’s cappuccino station, the source of that fine aroma.
    “Piccolo, please,” said Milgrim to the blond barista, her hair only slightly longer than Rausch’s.
    “He’s waiting,” said Rausch, beside him, tensely stressing the first syllable of “waiting.”
    “He’ll expect me to be able to talk,” said Milgrim, watching the girl expertly draw the shot. She foamed milk, then poured an elaborate Valentine’s heart into the waiting shot in Milgrim’s white cup. “Thank you,” he said.
    Rausch fumed silently in the elevator to the fourth floor, while Milgrim was mainly concerned with keeping his cup and saucer level and undisturbed.
    The doors slid aside, revealing Pamela Mainwaring. Looking, Milgrim thought, like some very tasteful pornographer’s idea of “mature,” her blond hair magnificently banged.
    “Welcome back,” she said, ignoring Rausch. “How was South Carolina?”
    “Fine,” said Milgrim, who held the red cardboard tube in his right hand, the piccolo in his left. He raised the tube slightly. “Got it.”
    “Very good,” she said. “Come in.”
    Milgrim followed her into a longish room with a long central table. Bigend was seated at the table’s far end, a window behind him. He looked like something that had gone wrong on a computer screen, but then Milgrim realized that that was the suit he was wearing, in a weirdly electric cobalt blue.
    “If you don’t mind,” Pamela said, taking the red cardboard tube and handing it on to Milgrim’s favorite in Bigend’s clothing design team, a French girl, today in a plaid kilt and cashmere pullover. “And the photographs?”
    “In my bag,” Milgrim said.
    While his bag was placed on the table and opened, motorized shades tracked silently shut across the window behind Bigend. Overhead, fixtures came on, illuminating the table, where Milgrim’s tracings were being carefully unfurled. He’d remembered to leave his camera atop his clothes, and now it was being passed from hand to hand, up the table.
    “Your medication,” said Pamela, handing him a fresh bubble-pack.
    “Now, then,” said Bigend, rising, “be seated.”
    Milgrim took the chair to the right of Pamela’s. They were extremely fine workstation chairs, either Swiss or Italian, and he had to restrain himself from fiddling with the various knobs and levers projecting from beneath the seat.
    “I see the Bundeswehr NATO pattern,” someone said. “The legs are pure 501.”
    “But not the box,” said the girl in kilt and cashmere. The box, he had learned, was everything, in a pair of jeans, above the top of the leg. “The two small pleats are absent, the rise lower.”
    “The photographs,” said Bigend, from behind her chair. A plasma screen, above the window he’d been sitting in front of, flared turquoise, around coppery coyote brown, the Formica counter in Edge City Family Restaurant making itself known in this darkened room in central London.
    “Knee pads,” said a young man, American. “Absent. No pockets for them.”
    “We hear they have a new pad-retention system,” said the French girl, with a surgeon’s seriousness. “But I don’t see that here.”
    They watched, then, silently, while Milgrim’s photographs cycled.
    “How tactical are they?” asked Bigend as the first photograph reappeared. “Are we looking at a prototype for a Department of Defense contract?”
    A silence. Then: “Streetwear.” The French girl, much more confident than the others. “If these are for the military, it isn’t the American military.”
    “He said they needed gussets,” said Milgrim.
    “What?” asked