by Eliot Peper
“Who are they after?”
Dembe raised her eyebrows. “You,” she said.
Zia imagined teams of agents scouring the forest for her phone. She tried to catch her breath. “Me? Why would they want to arrest me?”
“The situation is evolving,” said Dembe. “For now, my only priority is getting you outside of US jurisdiction.”
The elevator slowed and Zia’s stomach rose into her throat. Had Washington discovered Santiago’s scheme? Did they assume she was party to it? Knowing that she’d attend Galang’s funeral, had they planned to snatch her up and charge her with crimes for which there was no precedent? Could the CIA have been behind the botched kidnapping attempt in Chhattisgarh? When Zia had been preparing for her ambassadorial post, she’d learned more than she necessarily wanted to know about the tense relationship between diplomatic and intelligence services, and the sordid history of clandestine operations gone wrong.
The elevator doors opened onto a small but well-appointed waiting area. One of the officers who Dembe had sent ahead was standing across the room at the exit, sidearm at his side.
“Clear,” he said.
Dembe nodded and they jogged past him and out onto the roof. Zia blinked in the sunlight. A helicopter perched on a raised landing pad in front of them, rotors spinning. Zia leaned into the blast of downwash as she ran up the stairs and across the platform. Dembe hopped up into the open cabin, then reached back to pull Zia in after her. The second they were both inside, the engine howled and the chopper leapt off the roof like a scalded cat. Zia stumbled and fell to her knees, grasping for purchase, but Dembe maneuvered across the bucking floor like a bull rider, slamming the door closed, hoisting Zia into a jump seat, getting her buckled in, and then sitting down across from her.
The chopper banked and Central Park spread out below them, a swath of green hemmed in on all sides by steel and concrete. Zia craned her neck to see if she could pick out the FBI agents, but while she managed to spot the line of parked SUVs, the people swarming around them were the size of ants and indistinguishable from one another. Then the nose of the aircraft dipped and they roared off across the hungry, grasping New York City skyline.
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28
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Zia read the exposé in stunned disbelief, trying to ignore her father screaming into his phone out on the deck. Zia was sitting at the counter where she’d sliced the oranges, and surreality crept into her mind like the crimson juice that had leaked across the cutting board, a sense that the world was not what it seemed, that there was no underlying truth, just illusions stacked one atop the other forever.
Bonnie had written the story herself and as Zia read, it was as if Bonnie were reading the article aloud in her precise, clipped tone—glasses glinting in the afternoon sunlight, scarf arranged just so.
Only instead of journalism, she was narrating a fairytale.
It started out true enough, profiling Zia and her parents, describing the tragedy of her mother’s passing and how Zia had embarked on a career in humanitarian aid while Santiago had forged ahead with Interstice. That was where things went off the rails. The drive the Maldivian detectives had found on Galang’s body had been decrypted. It contained reams of evidence from an ongoing investigation: financial records, video clips, interview transcripts, message archives, photographs, and on and on and on.
The evidence painted a disturbing picture. Using Zia’s disaster response work as a cover, she and Santiago had sold Interstice data to terrorist groups and rogue regimes the world over, violating seventeen different international laws and secreting billions into anonymous Swiss bank accounts. There was video footage of Zia in meetings she had never attended, messages she had never written, audio recordings of words she had never uttered, receipts for purchases she had never made, GPS breadcrumbs leading to locations she’d never been, corroborating confessions from people she’d never met.
This fantastical patchwork was woven together with threads of truth. Zia had been in the general areas detailed in the articles during those times. She had been responding to hurricanes, fires, earthquakes, floods, epidemics, and famines. She just hadn’t snuck away for excursions to sell sensitive data on the black market. They even had an annotated transcript of her meeting with Galang in Chhattisgarh, supposedly gleaned from a secret recording device he’d brought along. But instead of recollections, friendly needling, and career woes, the transcript had Galang pressing Zia for information about her clandestine activities to which she responded with defensive misdirection, counteraccusations, and veiled threats. Even though she could sense the impending conclusion, it still blindsided her.
Zia and her father had called a hit on Galang to stop his investigation. The only reason the truth was coming out at all was because the assassin had been sloppy and missed the drive in his rush to escape the scene. Maldivian analysts had cracked it and immediately shared the contents through international counterterrorism channels, and with Bonnie’s newsroom. Zia had confirmed her guilt in the public eye by fleeing arrest in New York. Bonnie even quoted from Zia’s eulogy at the funeral, painting a disturbing picture of a deranged, supremely confident sociopath determined to bask in the aftermath of her misdeeds.
By the time she reached the end, Zia was clinging to the counter for support, as if the smooth, cool granite was a life raft that might buoy her away from this whirlpool of disinformation that threatened to suck her down into schizophrenia. The story was so disturbing, so detailed, so utterly convincing. Did Zia not even know herself? Did she harbor a split personality in some dark corner of her mind that seized control and ferried Interstice data for blood money? Had she slipped into one of the parallel realities she’d glimpsed in the elevator, a universe in which she was, in fact, a hardened criminal?
Contradictory futures spooled out before her. Going on the run and living out the rest of her days as a fugitive from a vindictive system that could see through every camera, gaze down from every satellite, listen through every microphone. Sitting on a concrete floor in solitary confinement, biting her nails to the quick as repressed memories of her misadventures flickered back to life like flames up dry wood tossed atop dying embers. Discovering some hole in Bonnie’s article that, if extended to its logical conclusion, would bring the whole mountain of accusations crashing down on itself. Tearfully admitting her guilt in front of the International Criminal Court and throwing herself on its mercy. Buying her way into organized crime as a vehicle to escape false accusations of involvement with organized crime.
The new phone they’d assigned to her rang, vibrating through her like an electrical shock.
It was Himmat. Himmat with his soft eyes, formal manner, and organized mind. Himmat whom she had abandoned in Chhattisgarh to direct operations when her life had taken an unexpected and unwelcome turn. How she wished she could be there with him right now, sipping on chai and debating dryland farming best practices.
She retreated into the back corner of the kitchen. “Yes?”
“Zia,” his voice quavered, uncertain. “A man from the government came here this morning. Military or CBI or something. He said that your visa has been revoked and you have been banned from entering the country. Then he demanded to search your room.” She remembered how morning light would slant in through the window to illuminate her sparsely decorated cell in Chhattisgarh, her heavily dog-eared signed first edition of William Goldman’s The Princess Bride sitting on the floor where a nightstand should be, the variegated purple flowers of the orchid that curved back on itself like a sickle. “I tried to stop him, but… Well, I didn’t know what to do. He bagged up your things and left. He told me—”
He paused and she swallowed, forcing herself not to interrupt.
“He told me that if I heard from you, I should report it to him personally, that”—he faltered—“that you’re wanted for terrorism.” His voice faded into a whisper and trended up at the end, only partially transforming the statement into a question.
Zi
a squeezed her eyes shut and scrunched up her face, trying to disembark from the carousel of horrors spinning inside her. That Himmat was trying to defend and warn her was a miracle in itself. Given that she had mysteriously disappeared from Chhattisgarh a few weeks ago, he had more reason than most to suspect her. Then again, maybe this call was a setup. Maybe the CBI man was hovering over Himmat’s shoulder, egging him on as they tried to tease out a confession while tracing the connection.
“He kept pressing me about a few dates back in May,” said Himmat. “Asking where you’d been. I checked back in my journal and it was the weekend we did a field visit to Patan together. I told him I was with you the whole time, that we were meeting with families and training survey teams. But he said it was impossible and when I showed him the dates in my diary and confirmed it in my message history he called me an idiot and said I must be mistaken. Then he confiscated my diary!”
“Thank you, Himmat,” said Zia thickly. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”
“There’s no need to thank me for being honest,” said Himmat indignantly. “The guy was a jerk. But Zia, I’m worried about you. Is it…”
The question was no less clear for trailing off.
“No,” said Zia with more conviction than she felt. “It’s not true.” Saying it felt like planting a flag. “I’m still trying to figure out what’s going on, whether I’m being framed or this is all some elaborate mistake, but I’m not a spy or a terrorist.”
“I know,” said Himmat. “Of course not. I just— It’s scary, right? What’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know,” said Zia, wishing more than anything that she did, that through force of will she could magic her life back into normalcy.
“Well, I’ve already filed complaints with the chief minister’s office,” said Himmat. “I doubt it’ll go anywhere, especially because Governor Rao is already crowing about it, but I know how important it is to be diligent with these things. Is there anything else I can do to help?”
“You’ve already done more than enough,” said Zia. “Please just keep your head down and don’t make a fuss. I don’t want you getting caught up in all this.”
“Making a fuss is what friends are for.”
Himmat’s indefatigable calm was a lifeline that reeled Zia back from despair into fury. Only a few weeks prior she had admitted to Galang that years of leading humanitarian aid missions had convinced her that there was no such thing as a natural disaster, only human disasters revealed by nature. And with his signature insight, Galang had pointed out that Zia had got out of politics only to realize that the real challenge of humanitarian aid was, in fact, politics. But now that some apparatchik had officially revoked her visa and her job, Zia’s ambivalence about her work vanished. There was satisfaction in helping people in need, even if your help didn’t prevent future instances of need. For all the systemic frustrations of disaster response, she’d been doing her very best to better the fortunes of the least fortunate rather than extending the fortunes of the most fortunate, which was the vast river into which society’s watershed guided the efforts of the privileged. That Zia’s desire to return to Chhattisgarh was waxing in no small part because her ability to do so had just been abrogated laced her burgeoning resentment with guilt.
“Just stay safe, okay?” she pleaded.
“Don’t you dare act as if this is goodbye.”
Zia hadn’t realized that was exactly what she was doing until Himmat pointed it out.
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29
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Santiago stormed back into the villa, eyes bloodshot, hair mussed, face livid. When Zia was a child, she had woken up one night, climbed down from her raised bed, and wandered out to get a glass of water from the kitchen. There had been a wedge of light spilling into the hall from her father’s study, and she’d tiptoed up to investigate. Peering in, she’d seen Santiago hunched over a keyboard, screen aglow, typing with so much pent up, manic energy that it could only be bled off into whatever digital missives he was sending into the night like ballistic missiles. Terrified that disturbing him would be like sticking a fork into a power outlet, Zia had fled back up the hallway, making sure to avoid the squeaky floorboard near the bathroom, and returned to bed sans water.
Now, her father joined her in the kitchen and poured himself a coffee. Whether his hand was trembling from that same surplus of internal vim or simple over-caffeination, Zia couldn’t tell. He stirred in cream and sugar and took a sip, then placed the mug on the counter.
“There are warrants out for our arrest in seventeen countries,” he said. “The US government has frozen my assets, our stock is crashing, and the board is calling for my resignation. You spend decades building something and the minute someone paints a bullshit target on you, everyone jumps ship. The hyenas are circling, and they smell blood. That… shit”—he gestured to her phone, indicating the article she’d been reading—“is a goddamn telenovela. I’m being taken down by vaporware.”
“You’re being taken down?” A lit fuse, hissing. “I didn’t ask for any of this.” She stabbed a finger at his chest. “You started it all with your secrets and your monumental ego. It took a kidnapping for you to even loop me the fuck in, and by then it was too late to do anything but damage control, which was the last thing in the goddamn universe I wanted to do, but how could I not?” Santiago was right about one thing: you couldn’t trust anyone but yourself. Just because it broke your heart didn’t make it any less true. “You stopped the monsoon. You undermined the entire scientific community. You’re a spider. You weave people into your plans regardless of their own.” The spark ran down the fuse toward the detonator. Closer. Closer. Ignition. “All I wanted was to get away from you. To live my own life.”
He stiffened, his back going ramrod straight. Pain flashed behind his eyes in the instant before they froze over and Zia was filled with a regret she wanted to, but couldn’t quite, deny.
“Go, then,” he growled. “Just go.”
“And where exactly am I supposed to run?” But ambivalence dulled the sarcastic edge of her question and it came out sounding like she was addressing it to herself instead of her father.
“I don’t know,” he said, his voice sounding as if it came from a great distance. “I hardly know what truth means anymore.”
They sized each other up for a moment, each searching for an answer to the question neither could bring themselves to ask the other: was there a seed of truth buried in the false allegations? Had father or daughter committed any of the crimes Bonnie described, without the other’s knowledge? Their eyes met, the mutual suspicion and guilt filling an invisible crucible that forced them to recognize the same doubts mirrored in the other, doubts that recognition quelled.
“It’s not about truth, it’s about optics,” said Zia, forcing herself to rise above the fray, consider next steps. She tried to channel Vachan’s preternatural ability to game theory his way through any crisis—a side effect of growing up under his grandmother’s tutelage. “Nobody’s going to blame anyone for jumping on a bandwagon and a lot of people have a lot to gain from your downfall.”
“And who has so much to gain that they’d concoct this farce?”
In her mind’s eye, Zia could see the skyscraper through the canopy, rustling leaves over gleaming metal. She could smell the loam of Central Park, hear birds twittering in counterpoint to the barely perceptible hum of distant traffic. Something uncoiled in her chest, tendrils spreading through her to pull pieces into place.
But just as Zia opened her mouth to answer, her phone rang again, then cut off abruptly. She looked down at the screen. Kodjo. But why had he called and then hung up? Frowning, she unlocked the phone and noticed the anomalous symbol in the top left corner of the screen.
“Papi, why is there no service?”
Santiago cocked his head to the side. “What do you mean? Of course there’s service. We have persistent global coverage.”
Zia raised her eyebrows and held
out her phone to him. He accepted it and lines creased his forehead. Then he dug out his phone and checked it.
“Hijueputa,” he said and leapt up to grab his laptop from the side table.
“Hijueputa,” he repeated, and snatched up a tablet that was charging in the corner.
Then he dashed down the corridor that led behind the kitchen and Zia hurried after him. He threw open a door to the small workshop that housed his shortwave radio set. He slid into the seat and began working the controls like a pianist on a keyboard. The chorus of “We Are the Champions” blared out in an infinite loop. No matter how many frequencies he tried, there was only Queen. He threw down the headphones and spun to face Zia, his face pale and pinched.
“We’re being jammed,” he said. “Wide frequency transmitter on ultrahigh power. No signal in or out. We’re deaf, dumb, and blind.”
A vise tightened around Zia’s chest.
Dembe ducked her head in through the open door. “We have a problem,” she snapped. “There are—”
A sonic boom shook the villa to its foundation. Pain lanced through their eardrums. Plates rattled in cupboards. The shortwave headphones skittered off the desk and fell to the floor. Zia and Santiago cringed.
They stumbled out past the kitchen and onto the deck to see a squadron of attack drones coming around for another pass, schooling like fish in a formation far too tight for any human pilot. Dembe pointed and they dropped their gazes to the matte black frigate cutting through the aquamarine sea toward the island. The angular, hulking form was hopelessly out of place in this tropical paradise, a tiger in a pet shop.
“It has some kind of stealth shielding, which is why we didn’t pick it up on radar,” Dembe had to shout to be heard above the ringing in their ears. “Definitely military, but it’s not flying a flag or displaying an insignia.”