Spook Country (blue Ant, #2)

William Gibson's Spook Country weaves together three storylines against a backdrop of post-9/11 surveillance culture and the Iraq War.

Hollis Henry, a former singer of the indie rock band the Curfew, is freelancing for Node, a not-yet-launched European technology magazine. Her editor, Philip Rausch, sends her to Los Angeles to write about locative art, a medium in which artists use GPS coordinates to anchor virtual installations to real-world locations. Accompanied by Odile Richard, a French curator, Hollis meets Alberto Corrales, a young artist who shows her a virtual rendering of actor River Phoenix lying face-down on the sidewalk outside the Viper Room, visible only through a VR headset.

In New York, Tito, a young Cuban-Chinese man, follows elaborate family tradecraft to make covert deliveries of iPods to a mysterious old man in Washington Square Park. Tito's family operates as illegal facilitators whose services enable other criminals' operations. His grandfather helped found Cuba's intelligence service under KGB guidance, and the family practices Santería, a faith blending West African deities called orishas with Catholic saints. Tito's cousin Alejandro warns him the deliveries may be dangerous: Uncle Carlito speaks of a cold civil war in America, and the old man is a former intelligence officer who knew their grandfather in Havana. Tito's aunt Juana, the family's master forger, tells him the old man brought the family to America after Tito's father's death, and the family owes him a debt.

The third storyline follows Milgrim, a translator with a drug dependency, held captive by a man called Brown. Brown forces Milgrim to translate Volapuk, a system by which Russian-speakers approximate the Cyrillic alphabet using Roman characters and numerals. Brown has planted a surveillance device in Tito's room to intercept text messages, tracking Tito's deliveries. He controls Milgrim by supplying him with benzodiazepines, anti-anxiety medication on which Milgrim is physically dependent.

Rausch instructs Hollis to find Bobby Chombo, a reclusive GPS specialist, and to watch for anything Bobby might reveal about shipping patterns or iPods used for data transfer. Through her former bandmate Reg Inchmale, now living in Buenos Aires, Hollis learns that Node is a project of Hubertus Bigend, a Belgian advertising magnate who runs an agency called Blue Ant. Alberto takes Hollis to Bobby's rented factory, where the agoraphobic technician has marked the floor with a GPS grid in white powder and refuses to sleep in the same square twice. When Hollis accidentally activates a piece on a VR helmet, she sees a translucent wireframe of a full-scale shipping container. Bobby yanks the helmet off her head in panic.

Bigend meets Hollis and reveals his true interest. He tells her about a covert CIA maritime program in which teams disguised as pirates boarded merchant vessels to search for weapons of mass destruction. In August 2003, one such team opened a container on a freighter bound from Iran to Macau but was ordered by radio to leave it immediately. Bigend suspects Bobby periodically knows where the container is through his GPS expertise and wants Hollis to get closer to Bobby.

The old man arranges a final delivery with different rules: Brown's operatives are meant to seize the iPod while both Tito and the old man escape. At the Union Square farmers' market, Brown's team converges as Tito approaches the old man. The old man strikes the nearest operative with a loaded cane. Tito drops the iPod for Brown's people to seize, uses a pneumatic salt gun on a pursuer, and escapes through the W Hotel's kitchen. Garreth, an associate of the old man, picks Tito up in a van.

Brown has cable-tied Milgrim to a park bench during the confrontation. Using a broken pen clip, Milgrim picks the tie's ratchet and frees himself, but Brown recaptures him. Brown takes Milgrim to Washington, D.C., where Milgrim overhears Brown's conversation with an unseen superior who asks about the container and says it is time to conclude the operation. Brown switches Milgrim's medication to Rize, a Japanese benzodiazepine that gives Milgrim unexpected clarity. Milgrim begins questioning whether Brown is truly a government agent.

Bobby vanishes from Los Angeles, his factory emptied overnight. Bigend's assistant places a GPS tracker on the truck carrying Bobby's equipment, which heads toward Vancouver. Bigend reveals Bobby is Canadian, his real name Robert Ferguson. Bigend also explains the iPod deliveries: Bobby compiles fake logs claiming he has not located the container, encrypts them in music files on iPods, and ships them to Costa Rica. From there, the iPods are forwarded to a New York importer, where Tito collects them for delivery to the old man. Hollis flies north with Odile and, through Bobby's sister, locates his studio near the port.

Behind Bobby's building, Garreth discovers Hollis and brings her upstairs, where she finds the old man, Tito, and a terrified Bobby monitoring the container's signal. The old man offers Hollis a choice: She can witness what they are about to do and become a repository for secret history, or she can be blindfolded and held until they leave. She agrees to stay.

Brown and Milgrim also arrive in Vancouver. They observe the container ship entering port, and Brown spots the turquoise container atop a stack. When Milgrim later spots Tito near the Princeton Hotel, Brown impulsively swerves the car at him. Tito flips over the vehicle, which crashes into a lamppost. Milgrim pockets Brown's supply of Rize and walks away, finally free.

At midnight, Garreth fires nine specially modified .30-caliber rounds into the container from the eighth floor of a nearby building. Each cartridge contains a brachytherapy capsule of cesium-137, a radioactive isotope used in cancer treatment. The capsules atomize on impact and irradiate the container's contents. Tito climbs the container stack and places turquoise-painted magnets over each bullet hole, concealing the damage.

The next morning at a café near the port, the old man reveals what the container holds: one hundred million dollars in U.S. cash, originally shipped from the Federal Reserve to Baghdad as part of nearly twelve billion dollars sent to Iraq between 2003 and 2004. Mid-level profiteers diverted the money, intending to launder it abroad, but the old man and his network of retired intelligence contacts spent years blocking them. The cesium has rendered the cash permanently impossible to handle without triggering radiation detectors. The container is being driven south toward the Idaho border, where the old man will alert authorities. They watch it roll past the café window on a flatbed truck, with Brown behind the wheel.

Milgrim settles into a bed-and-breakfast under his own name, beginning an independent life. Hollis tells Bigend a cover story, claiming she was held captive and knows nothing. Inchmale flies to Vancouver with the Curfew's former drummer, Heidi Hyde, to check on Hollis and brokers a deal with Bobby to direct a music video, forcing Bobby to restore the abandoned art installations in Los Angeles. Tito settles in Vancouver, where his family arranges an apartment. In the final scene, Hollis dons her VR helmet and looks up at Bigend's building, where Alberto has installed a giant virtual Mongolian Death Worm, a scarlet, eyeless creature Hollis has adopted as an emblem of unnameable anxiety, its tail wound through the penthouse windows.