The Boost

by Stephen Baker

  “So there we are, the three of us, trying to figure out how to make a living for ourselves in Juárez. For Sapo and Raul, it was just a question of picking sides. There were two cartels, the Juárez and the Chihuahua. They were run by these two cousins: El Greñas, or the Mop Head. He had very curly hair and was famous for playing the banjo. Or maybe it was the mandolin.… What’s that tiny guitar?”

  “The ukulele?” Ellen says.

  “Exacto. The ukulele. The other was Santiago. They called him El Mortífero, which means ‘deadly.’ They both said that since they were cousins, they’d cooperate and there would be peace. But of course everybody knew that they’d end up slaughtering each other. I said this to Raul and Sapo, but they couldn’t see any other future for themselves outside of el negocio, and they both went to work for Greñas. Within a year, they were both dead.”

  Francisco, who with minimal help has emptied more than half of the tequila, dabs at his eyes with his napkin and takes a couple of breaths.

  “So,” he says, “I have to figure out a new career for myself. Even with their market shrinking, the narcos still have most of the business in town. You absolutely want them as customers. But to stay alive, you want to work for both of them. Now, what do they need? They’re shipping into an American market that is changing, day by day. As the new chips are spreading throughout the population, it’s becoming harder to send wild people across the border. The U.S. is starting large-scale electronic surveillance. Everyone knows that, but no one knows the details. Where can the drug runners go unnoticed? That information is worth gold. Providing that information, I decide, will be my new business.

  “I was sharing a room in a boarding house just down the street from here with a guy named Silvestre. I called him Sibo. He was from Mexico City, a chilango. He called me Pancho, which is a Mexican nickname for Francisco. I hated it. It sounded to me like someone wearing a big sombrero and dressed in a blanket. So I asked him to call me Paco. That turned into Paquito, which I hate more than Pancho. But what can you do?

  “Anyway, we started printing this newsletter together. In the beginning we were just informing the local people here in Juárez about what was going on if they crossed the border. We did interviews on the street, looking for people who had just crossed, or who knew others who had. In the early days, there was a lot more traffic crossing the border. That was before Washington and Mexico City locked us out. We’d ask people, ‘What’s happening in Santa Teresa? What’s going on around Fabens?’ Then we’d write it up. It was pretty much a trade publication for the drug industry. Then we found people who had contacts in Washington, and in Chicago, and in Mexico City, and we started writing about how the whole continent was changing. Everybody wanted to know. The first weeks, we printed up only about two hundred copies. By the end of the second month, we were selling ten times that many. Then I started thinking: If we know this about the U.S., what is going on in China and in Europe and Africa? We had people here, a whole new exile community of wild people. These were very curious people, and intelligent. I mean, think about it: They moved to a faraway city in a different continent because they wanted to keep their heads working the same way. How many people would do that?” He looks around the table for an answer, but gets only shrugs.

  He continues. “Even though they didn’t have boosts, they still had contacts back home. So I set them up. There was still e-mail back then, and they could communicate with their friends back home. Pretty soon, we were publishing news that people couldn’t find anywhere else. We were sending the papers all over the world, using some of the old drug-smuggling routes to ship them. We were hiring correspondents on every continent.”

  “Wait a minute,” Ralf says. “If these people had e-mail, then they also had the Internet. Couldn’t they just read the news there?”

  “News on the Internet was drying up,” Francisco says. “Everything was going to the boost. Almost none of it was news. There was no business model for news reporting. The companies and governments that ran the boost weren’t the least bit interested in publishing the kind of news that we were running.”

  “Oh, give me a break!” Ralf says.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “There’s still news in the boost,” Ralf says. He looks for support to Simon, who’s staring blankly out the window, like someone who’s heard this same discussion more than once.

  “Okay,” Francisco says. “Tell me this. You live in Washington. There’s lots of news to cover there. Do you know any journalists?”

  Ralf thinks about it. “Not exactly. Maybe they just don’t use that word anymore. A lot of the news,” he adds, “is put together automatically, with machines finding information, focusing on certain subjects or memes, and then organizing it.”

  “Are the machines doing the reporting?” Francisco asks.

  “I’m sure they’re doing some kind of reporting,” Ralf says, “though the process is different. More efficient, I’m sure.”

  “That story about the open surveillance gate in the chip,” Francisco says. “The one that was on the front page of our paper. Did machines report on that? Can you find that news in the boost?”

  “Well, I don’t have my boost right now.…”

  “But do you think the story’s there?”

  “Probably not,” Ralf admits.

  “In time,” Francisco says, continuing his story, “e-mail disappeared. The companies that used to run it started to unplug their big old computers. Electronic communications moved entirely to the boost. That meant that we had to set up an analog information network. We started using couriers. We actually found a few telegraphs that still worked. One of them in China is functioning to this day. In some places, we used pigeons. You’d laugh. It’s technology Hernán Cortés would recognize. And some of our news is very old. But even old news has value when its only competition is no news.

  “I have this theory,” Francisco says, as he signals to the waiter for the bill. “Whenever a new technology is introduced, it kills one market and creates a new one, or maybe more than one. When I was young, people were willing to pay just about anything and even risk their lives for an hour or two away from themselves. They wanted to escape. Millions of them took drugs. This was a mammoth escape market.

  “Then came the boost. That provided a cheaper and safer way to escape. You could escape into virtual worlds or load a euphoria application without breaking the law. That basically killed drugs, at least as a mass market.

  “Now in the boost, practically everything can be fun. You don’t have to read a dry article about a war in Syria or Cameroon. You can go there in your boost, and shoot guns, and learn something about the place in the process. It’s the spread of the entertainment economy. That’s where most of the money is. But even so, a certain number of people—three hundred thousand of them, at the very least—are willing to pay a lot to learn what’s really happening. If in the past, people paid a premium for escape, now there’s a surplus of it. It’s cheap. And there’s a shortage of reality, or news. That creates a booming news market. I have it practically all to myself!”

  “So what happened to the two cousins, the drug lords?” Ellen asks. Ralf leans forward, eager to hear. Simon leans back and rolls his eyes.

  Francisco, glancing at Simon, places a handful of red chips on the restaurant bill and closes the leather cover. He smiles at Ellen and lifts his right eyebrow in the highest of arcs, and then gently lowers it. “I’ve talked enough for today,” he says, pushing back his chair and standing up. “I have to leave something for tomorrow.”

  Twenty-six

  3/9/72 12:34 p.m. Mountain Standard Time

  Oscar Espinoza stands ankle-deep in the white sand trap at the abandoned Santa Teresa Country Club. He has the trap door held open with one meaty hand and is calling to a man standing on the other side of his parked KIFF. George Smedley comes trotting in his direction. He’s wearing a tight-fitting white exercise suit, with running pants and a matching golf shirt. He’
ll freeze, Espinoza thinks. Smedley holds on to his Panama hat as he makes his way toward the sand trap. His signature peregrine falcon feather pokes out from the hat’s charcoal band. Espinoza, while far from an expert on men’s fashion, dreads guiding this person through Ciudad Juárez.

  “Just sending a couple of last-minute messages before entering the dead zone,” Smedley says. He ducks into the tunnel, and Espinoza follows him, shutting the door behind them.

  “My headache’s gone!” Smedley says. Then, looking down the tunnel, his mood darkens. He complains about the cold and adds, “You didn’t say we’d have to crawl.”

  “A little brown might help your look,” Espinoza says as he pads along on all fours. “Your knees will match your feather.”

  The plan, as Smedley outlined it at dinner the night before, is to make contact with Ralf Alvare and, if possible, with Suzy Claiborne, and to offer them both a small fortune, or maybe even a large one, to return with Smedley to Washington, where a team of the nation’s best surgeons will replace the boost in Ralf’s head—after first removing the stolen update code. That’s assuming that Ralf still has the chip, as Espinoza has led Smedley to believe.

  They were eating in a Mexican restaurant on Kansas Street, G&R’s, as Smedley laid out the plan. Espinoza was working his way through a mountain of chiles rellenos, half of them stuffed with cheese, the others with hamburger. Espinoza wadded his mouthful into one cheek to talk. “I told you that the Artemis over there isn’t the domed one you’re looking for.”

  “I know what you said,” Smedley snapped. “You were close enough to see the roots of her hair, but not close enough to catch her. Just humor me on this one.”

  “What do we do if Alvare says no?” Espinoza asked.

  “Offer him more money.”

  “Whose money is it?”

  “We’ll give the bill to Vallinger. He can decide whether he wants to pay it.” Smedley winced from the unrelenting pain in his head. He had pushed for Espinoza to rush straight from the airport to the Santa Teresa tunnel. But Espinoza urged patience. “It’s dangerous there at night,” he said. “I don’t want to leave my KIFF all night at that golf course.”

  For Espinoza, it was a strange and novel experience to spend time in El Paso with Smedley. No longer in their usual roles—supervisor and lackey—they were now closer to suffering colleagues, both of them answering to a higher power, John Vallinger and his top aide, Tyler Dahl. Smedley had the headache, and this time Espinoza had been spared. Probably an oversight, he thought.

  At certain moments over dinner, it seemed to Espinoza, it almost felt like they were friends. Smedley told him about a handful of media properties he owned, including some popular virtual worlds. “You never know. There might be a place for you there,” he said to Espinoza as they finished up dinner. “Some of the sites are pretty kinky.”

  Crawling through the tunnel the next day, Espinoza is still wondering about that comment. Did it have something to do with his nose? He shifts his thinking to the current assignment and details for Smedley some of the dangers they’ll likely face in Juárez. He tells him about the revolutionaries who briefly arrested the Alvare brothers. “They want Juárez to stay wild. They’re kind of fanatical, but not really that strong. Kind of weak, actually.”

  When Smedley asks him how the Alvare brothers freed themselves, Espinoza realizes that he’s talking too much. “Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe they’re still prisoners there.”

  “But you said they were at Don Paquito’s headquarters.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I think Don Paquito’s people freed them. But I’m not sure. When people talk in Spanish, I don’t always catch everything.”

  When they step out into Juárez, a group of boys wrapped in old quilted coats is waiting for them. They try to sell plastic coins to the Americans, but Smedley and Espinoza push past them. “Those look like tiddlywinks,” Smedley says.

  “They can buy some good stuff,” Espinoza says. He retraces his steps from the two days before, winding his way along the dirt roads, past the chicken coops and the pigsties.

  Smedley tags along behind, gripping his bare arms in the cold. “Do they have any buildings with heat over here?” he asks.

  “Move faster and you’ll warm up,” Espinoza says.

  Then he hears a familiar rumbling noise. “Come on,” he says, breaking into a jog. “Run.” The noise grows louder, and he sees the Revolutionary Brigade truck turning around a corner and coming their way. The truck skids to a stop in front of them, and the same three young men climb out. One of them wears a bandage across his nose. The two others carry baseball bats.

  The gangly one says something, but his words are drowned out by another roaring engine much louder than their truck. The men turn around and see a drone hurtling toward them. It’s as big as an elephant and it moves forward on hexagonal wheels that behave more like feet. The revolutionaries race to one side of the street. Espinoza grabs Smedley and hurls him to the other side. He dives in the same direction just as the drone fires a screaming missile. It slams into the truck and destroys it, sending scraps of metal and plastic high into the air. Espinoza and Smedley, both lying on the ground, cover their heads as the debris rains down. “That was the call I made,” Smedley says, smiling.

  “You called for a drone escort?”

  “Protection.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to make us a lot of friends over here,” Espinoza says, as the three revolutionaries scamper away.

  “Who gives a shit?”

  Espinoza climbs to his feet. “Come on,” he says. “There are some people around here who make good goat, if they can find a stove to cook it on.”

  They take off walking toward the city with the drone following a block behind.

  Twenty-seven

  3/9/72 4:30 p.m. Juárez Standard Time

  Simon tells the bartender at the Kentucky Club that his brother, Ralf, has never had a margarita in his life. “Make him a good one,” he tells him in Spanish, with Herradura. He orders club sodas for himself and Ellen. Then he walks down to the end of the bar and picks up the old-fashioned phone.

  “That’s like the one he has over at his tavern,” Ralf says to Ellen.

  “That’s where he’s calling. He’s talking to Chui.” She tells him about her visit to the same bar, two days earlier, with Enrique, her “guide,” and Alfredo, the boy whose family she met. As the bartender pours Ralf’s margarita into a large glass with a salted rim, Ellen describes the lunch she had that first day, and how she thought she’d be able to cross back to El Paso that same afternoon. It was just a couple hundred yards away, she says. It still is, but it now seems so distant, almost unapproachable. “When are we ever going to go back?” she asks.

  “As soon as I get my boost,” Ralf says, trying to cheer her up. “I know where the tunnel is. Our car’s waiting for us on the other side of it.” He casually takes a gulp of the margarita and promptly coughs it out, spraying the polished mahogany bar. “Wow,” he says, wiping the bar with a napkin. “I think that drink’s made for smaller sips.”

  Ellen takes a tiny sip herself, and winces. “The margarita app is a lot smoother,” she says.

  Simon joins them. As he settles on a bar stool he pats his brother on the back.

  “Business call?” Ralf says.

  “Sort of.”

  “Now that we’ve heard all about Francisco’s history, how about you tell us what your business is over there at the tavern,” Ralf says.

  “All right,” Simon says with a sigh. “I knew I’d have to sooner or later.” He tells his brother about the handwritten message he got from Don Paquito three years ago, when Simon was working at a brokerage in St. Louis. “I didn’t have any idea who he was,” Simon says. “He offered me a lot of money.” They met at the deserted Santa Teresa Golf Club. Simon recognized his father immediately. It was just a grayer version of the face that appeared over his bed when he was a child, waking him up to kiss him good night, talk
ing to him in Spanish and smelling of rum. “Same guy,” he says, taking a sip of his club soda. “He even did the same trick with his eyebrow. Have you noticed that?”

  Ralf nods.

  Francisco convinced him, Simon continues, that he wasn’t the monster he was made out to be, that he didn’t have a harem and tigers and a full stable of killers on call. “He gave me the same talk he gave you about journalism and truth in the boost. He told me he had a problem. He had a business that was growing too fast for him to handle. He had to figure out how to deal with all the revenue pouring in.”

  “It couldn’t be that much,” Ralf says. “Three hundred thousand people times, what?” He quickly gives up pushing any arithmetic through his wild brain, already addled by tequila. He takes another sip of the margarita.

  “You have no idea,” Simon says. “How much are you making in your job in Washington?”

  “Four million a year,” Ralf says, shrugging. “Government work.” He takes another sip of the drink.

  “Well, if you wanted to subscribe to The Tribune, five days a week, fifty weeks a year, it would cost you three months’ wages, before taxes.”

  “Get off it!”

  “A million a year,” Simon says, nodding. “He has about a hundred journalists on payroll and sizable distribution costs. But compared to the revenue, it’s nothing. Of course he spends almost nothing on technology. About ninety percent of the money that comes in is pure profit.”

  Simon goes on to describe in great detail how he and Chui run what amounts to a brokerage out of the tavern, and how they juggle Francisco’s billions in accounts all over the world. He mentions exotic financial instruments and associates he works with in Shanghai, Montevideo, and Zurich.