The Boost

by Stephen Baker

  Espinoza simply keeps his mouth shut and tries to think. He attempts to lock in to the two brothers, and comes up half empty. “I’m not getting anything from this younger one,” he messages Smedley.

  “Tell them that government authorities are investigating stolen data from the Update Division of Health and Human Services, and that Ralf Alvare and Suzy Claiborne must report immediately to Washington.” Smedley’s message reads more like a memo, and it delivers way too much information for Espinoza.

  Ralf and Simon can see that Espinoza is receiving messages. His eyes are blank, his bushy eyebrows knitted in thought, and his lips, like those of a struggling reader, appear to mouth words. They wait.

  Espinoza attempts in his confused mind to synthesize Smedley’s information. But it’s too much. Smedley resends the message, which doesn’t help one bit.

  Finally, Espinoza blurts out: “Ralf Alvare is upstairs. He may be asleep, or even dead. He and … the Artemis have stolen data, and if they don’t go back to Washington I’m going to have to use this.” He pulls the black plastic zapper from his pocket and points it at their heads.

  Smedley’s voice rings inside Espinoza’s head: “Idiot!”

  Ralf stands speechless, his thoughts confused by the beer still sloshing in his stomach. But Simon is scrutinizing the tool in Espinoza’s hand. “What is that thing?” he asks.

  “A powerful weapon,” Espinoza says, “from China.”

  “What’s it do?”

  “Scrubs data from your boost.”

  “All of it?” Simon asks.

  Espinoza nods gravely, pleased to have the conversation focused on something he understands.

  “Did you use that on our friend this morning in South El Paso?”

  “The Artemis?”

  Simon nods, and Ralf looks on with a stricken expression.

  “Keep your trap shut!” Smedley tells Espinoza.

  “No,” Espinoza says, after a pause. “But I will not hesitate to unless—”

  “Unless what?!” Smedley shouts. “Just keep your mouth shut!” He has abandoned the niceties of messages and is yelling at Espinoza.

  “Unless Ralf Alvare and the Artemis meet me here”—Espinoza refers to the time in his boost, 3:22—“at five this afternoon.” He then turns and starts to walk away, before realizing that he was standing right next to his KIFF. He returns to the vehicle, nods good-bye to the brothers, climbs in, and rides away while the voice of George Smedley berates him. Espinoza finds himself longing for solitude, even if it comes with a splitting headache. He wonders, as the car climbs toward Trans Mountain Road, if he could exchange Smedley for the migraine. Then he comes up with a question for his boss. “If Ralf Alvare is sleeping, or dead, in the apartment,” he asks, “who is that guy we were talking to?”

  Smedley considers the question for a moment and responds in a quiet voice that Espinoza hardly recognizes. “Beats me,” he says.

  Thirteen

  3/7/72 3:58 p.m. Juárez Standard Time

  The rapping on the door wakes the grandmother from her nap, startling her. She makes her way from the easy chair to the front door and peeks through the window. Without removing the chain guard, she opens the door and speaks to a young man outside. Ellen looks at him through the living-room window. He wears a buttoned-down white shirt and khaki pants and keeps his dark hair neatly parted. He could be a Mormon missionary, Ellen thinks, except that they usually travel in pairs. Ellen picks up only words from the conversation. Peligro, seguridad, Kentucky Club, Don Paquito. Where has she heard that name before?

  The grandmother calls the children to the door, and the three of them huddle briefly with the visitor. Then Alfredo looks toward Ellen and, with the wave of his hand, asks her to join them. He explains that the visitor, Enrique, will take her to see Don Paquito. “It’s for your safety,” he says.

  “I’m not going,” she says, returning to her chair. “I just want to go back to El Paso.”

  But over the next several minutes, they convince her to go. It’s for her own safety, and theirs, too. She might get shot if she returns to El Paso, unless they’re expecting her. If she stays put, a drone could come back and pulverize the entire house. It has happened before. “They know where you are,” Alfredo says. He adds that Don Paquito is hardly a drug lord. “He’s a … businessman,” he says.

  Ellen is frightened. She doesn’t want to go alone with Enrique, even though he has a nice smile and looks like a missionary. “Come with me,” she says to Alfredo. He looks first to his grandmother and his sister, and then back to Ellen, and nods.

  Ten minutes later, Ellen and Alfredo walk along Avenida David Herrera with Enrique. The atmosphere is transformed. The virtual ghost town that she experienced on her first walk is now alive with sounds and smells, and above all, people. Old gas-burning cars roar by, sending plumes of black smoke into the air and honking at the children riding bikes in the street. Drivers leer at her through open windows. Ellen, still holding the bag with the blouse, feels embarrassed by the brick camouflage on her leggings. She wonders briefly if she could buy another pair of pants here. Foolish thought, she tells herself. She has no money for the wild world and anyway, she’ll be heading back to El Paso in no time.

  They come to a busy commercial thoroughfare, Avenida Juárez. Stores and restaurants line the street, and streams of pedestrians circulate on the sidewalks. Vendors have big blankets stretched out, covered with statues and trinkets. Boys pushing wheeled carts sell fruit popsicles and tamales. Ellen sees Africans and Chinese. A family with two small children in tow looks American. A group of Indian women pass by, each dressed in bright saris of red and yellow. They’re laughing and speaking a language Ellen has never heard. She records a snippet and feeds it to her boost, and learns a moment later that it’s Tamil.

  “This doesn’t feel like Mexico,” Ellen says to Alfredo.

  “People come here from everywhere,” he says.

  They walk across the street and into a dark saloon called the Kentucky Club. Six or seven people sit at stools along the parquet bar. Chandeliers hang from a ceiling lined with thick wooden beams. In the song echoing through the tavern, a man sings, “Tear drops, rolling down my face, trying to forget my … feelings of love…” The idea that groupings of wild people in this bar are all condemned to listen to the same song at the same time intrigues her. How much of their lives, she thinks, do they spend seeing and listening to things they don’t like? Or do they learn to like things, because other people do?

  Alfredo touches her elbow and points to the end of the bar. Enrique is holding the receiver of an old-fashioned telephone to his ear. He beckons with his hand, and she walks to the phone. He hands her the receiver. It’s heavy. A tinny voice comes into her ear. “Hello, is that you, Ellen?”

  It’s a man’s voice, and it sounds vaguely familiar. Ellen says nothing. She worries that even by making the simple statement that yes, it is she holding this phone to her face in this dark club in Juárez, she will certify her presence here, making it harder to wish away her detour through the fence and go home. Some sort of organization is clearly at work, folding her into this city. Enrique is a part of it. So is this telephone and, perhaps, Alfredo and the grandmother, the fearsome drones and Don Paquito. Ellen wants no part of it. As the man on the other end says, “Ellen? Ellen?” she keeps quiet.

  Alfredo appears at her elbow. “Say something,” he says. “It won’t hurt you.”

  Ellen shakes her head. She listens to the voice. She knows it, but can’t assign a face to it. She holds the mouthpiece to her eyes. It’s circular and has dozens of small round holes.

  “Speak into it,” Alfredo urges her.

  Finally, Ellen puts it to her face, covers her mouth with the other hand, and whispers: “Who are you?”

  “Chui,” he says. “It’s me, Chui, from the Cavalry Club.”

  “Why are you talking on this machine?”

  “They called me.”

  “Who?”

 
“The man you’re with, in Juárez. Your guide.”

  “My guide?”

  “You can trust him,” Chui says.

  Alfredo is on his tiptoes, leaning toward Ellen’s face, trying to hear the conversation. She shoos him away, pointing to the far end of the bar. He walks about halfway down, where Enrique is sitting on a stool, and looks back at her.

  “Chui,” she says. “They want to take me to see Don Paquito. I just want to come home.”

  “Do what they say,” he answers. “Stay away from those drones, and don’t try crossing the border.”

  Ellen nods solemnly and asks, “Where’s Ralf?”

  “Simon’s brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was in here drinking beers a while ago. He’s probably asleep now, I’d guess.”

  “Is he going to come here?”

  “Why would he do that?”

  Tears spring into Ellen’s eyes. “To … rescue me,” she manages to say.

  “Hey, listen,” Chui says. “You’ll be okay. Just stick to your guide. If you want to talk to me, just come back to this phone in the Kentucky Club. I’m on the other end.”

  Ellen nods. She dries her eyes with the crook of her elbow, mumbles a good-bye into the receiver, and places it in its cradle. She joins Alfredo and Enrique. The three of them step out of the dark Kentucky Club onto Avenida Juárez. They turn right and make their way through the international throng toward Avenida 16 de Septiembre and the headquarters of Don Paquito.

  Fourteen

  3/7/72 4:14 p.m. Mountain Standard Time

  Oscar Espinoza’s words echoed in Ralf’s wild mind. “Ralf Alvare is upstairs, probably sleeping or dead.” This had to mean that his boost lay somewhere in Simon’s apartment. It was the only piece of him they could trace. Ralf ran up the stairs. He rifled through his gym bag and inspected every inch of the floor by the sofa, where he had slept. He ran his finger along shelves in the bathroom, and even the toilet. On his hands and knees, he inspected the kitchen floor. Then he carefully wiped the table where Ellen’s undrunk cup of tea still sat. It was only when he went back to the green bag and unloaded it on the living-room floor that he saw a shiny speck. It was obscured by the lint at the bottom of his bag. But when he moistened a finger and lifted it to his eye, he could see a gleaming bit of ceramic the approximate size and weight of a bee’s wing.

  The chip now lies on a butter plate on the living-room coffee table. Simon has covered it with the dome of a blue ceramic coffee cup, so that a breeze from the patio or the opening of a door won’t blow it away. They’ve concluded that the chip must have fallen into his bag from the tray by his bed in the Alexandria Clinic. Or perhaps the quiet Asian man who led Ralf out to the street placed it there. In any case, some twenty-eight years of memories and videos lie under that cup, along with Ralf’s entertainment and communications complex and a couple zettaflops of processing power. That’s as powerful as supercomputers from the ’20s, and fast enough to count each grain of sand on every beach on earth in a half second, though Ralf certainly has more practical applications in mind. One of them has to do with hacking the software update, which is also on the chip.

  “The thing is,” Simon is telling him, “as soon as you get this into your head—assuming you can—they’ll know where to find you.”

  Ralf is growing impatient. It’s as if half of his brain is lying under that cup. He just wants to get it back where it always was, to be himself again—and to put an end to this wild chapter of his life. Once he’s himself again, he tells Simon, he’ll figure out a way to stay safe.

  “Imagine this,” Simon says. “We find someone to implant it, and next thing you know, that guy with the nose comes back with that black tool and zaps you. What then?”

  Ralf thinks about it. “Maybe we can use it,” he says, “to flush them out.”

  “Flush them out? We’ve already seen them! It’s the big guy in his KIFF, and he’s got someone else running shotgun in his head.”

  “But we don’t know who’s sending them.”

  “Okay,” says Simon, warming to the subject. “We flush them out. Let’s just imagine that we put the chip out in the desert someplace. We set up a trap, and his KIFF falls into a big ditch. Once we have the man there, at our mercy for food and water, is he going to be able to give us details on who hired him?” He shakes his head. “Whoever is doing this, I don’t think he gives privileged information to his goons.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I have an idea,” Simon says.

  3/7/72 5:09 p.m. Mountain Standard Time

  At the end of a dirt path, the orange car parks and the purring engine goes silent. The two brothers climb out. “Santa Teresa International Golf Club,” Simon says, extending his arms toward an expanse of scrub country, backed by a cinder block wall and bathed in the soft late-afternoon light. As they start walking toward the wall, Ralf can still make out the contours of the old golf course. The fairways, overgrown with sagebrush and creosote bushes, are bordered by cypress trees and flow down to what used to be putting greens. The weeds there, now tall enough to camouflage a white-tailed deer, still have a touch of green to them. Their ancestors, a half century ago, were tiny nubs of grass that were doused in chemicals, mowed, and coiffed. They were as foreign to this desert as orchids or daffodils, he thinks. Now they’re expressing their wild side—a bit like him.

  The golf course lies fifteen miles west of El Paso, in the abandoned border town of Santa Teresa, New Mexico. Simon came up with the idea of coming here. Ralf resisted at first. They argued. Simon’s plan was to draw Espinoza to the border, where his boost wouldn’t work so well. For this, they would leave the package containing the chip in a deep ditch, and Espinoza would crash his KIFF while approaching it.

  “Killing him?” Ralf asked.

  “Probably not.” Simon shrugged, as though issues of life and death bored him.

  Ralf wanted to know what they accomplished by crashing their pursuer in the desert. “We buy ourselves time,” Simon answered.

  They set off an hour ago. First they packed water and protein pellets into Ralf’s green gym bag, along with a tiny ceramic snuff bottle, imported from China in the 1800s by one of their ancestors. Simon had wrapped Ralf’s chip in packing gauze and stuffed it into the blue bottle. Ralf didn’t see the sense of dwelling at such length on the container, a delicate oval decorated with hand-painted water birds. “Indulge me,” Simon said as he found a niche for the bottle in the cruddy gym bag. “One family heirloom inside another.”

  Santa Teresa, Simon explained as they rode west, was the brainchild of a border entrepreneur. “He was either a visionary or a crook, depending on whether you’d lent him money, I guess.” The development sprouted during a brief spell of euphoria in the late twentieth century as the United States and Mexico negotiated a free trade agreement. “The border was going to disappear,” he said, “at least at Santa Teresa.” The idea was that Mexican workers and American managers would live in the same industrial village straddling the land between New Mexico and Chihuahua. Companies would build factories there, where everyone—laborers and their bosses alike—could walk to work. Maybe they’d ride bikes. The golf course epitomized the Utopian vision. The front nine were in the U.S., the back nine across the border, as was the club house, the 19th Hole. It was famous for its large and elaborately constructed margaritas.

  Santa Teresa soon fell on rocky times, Simon said. By the time it opened, companies were finding cheaper laborers in China. This stretch of New Mexico became a crossing point for northbound drugs. Weapons headed in the other direction, arming the warring mafia that trafficked the drugs. Juárez turned into a battle zone. At the same time, America’s economic decline, brought on by debt, greed, and an education system that didn’t produce enough brainy types for the information economy, gave birth to growing waves of xenophobia. Mexicans were the prime target. Mexicans were taking American jobs, living on welfare, sending their children to school for free. Given
the grim horrors of Mexico’s drug war and the anti-Mexican pressure growing in Washington, the government had little choice but to bolster border security. Early in the process it erected a big wall, bristling with sensors, right through Santa Teresa’s golf course.

  The wall still stands there, Ralf sees. About ten feet high, it’s built of cinder blocks, lined by a deep ditch and topped with iron spikes. On the far side, the cratered roof of the 19th Hole bakes in the desert sun.

  He takes a step in that direction when Simon catches him by the shoulder. “Look out,” he says.

  Ralf looks down and sees that they’re standing at the edge of a cliff, about twenty feet up. “You barely see it,” Simon says to him. He explains that they’re standing at a tee for one of the holes, either nine or ten. “I think they hit from this bluff with their drivers, and the green was on the other side of the wall. There’s a little path here,” he says, leading the way, “where they’d drive their golf carts down to the fairway.”

  Ralf slowly follows him down the hill. When they get to the bottom, Simon grabs Ralf’s green bag and pulls out the Chinese snuff bottle. He walks along the desert floor, looking for something. After a few seconds, he stops and reaches down. With two hands he lifts a chunk of brown sandstone the size of a house cat. A snake underneath it darts away, within inches of Ralf’s right foot, leaving the sound of its rattle.

  “Forgot about them,” Simon says. Lowering himself to his knees, he inspects the moist dirt uncovered by the rock. Then, with his right hand, he digs a hole a couple of inches deep, lays the blue bottle into it like a miniature mummy, and covers it with the rock.

  “We just leave it there?” Ralf asks.

  “Where else?”

  “He drives off the cliff, probably kills himself. We leave him in the car, dead or dying, pick up the rock, put the bottle back into my gym bag, and drive home—knowing nothing about his organization, and who sent him here. That’s your scenario?”