Now, Simon thinks, baby brother comes onto the scene, with Ellen. Simon can see his father light up when Ralf enters the room—and even more when he sees Ellen. Francisco lavishes attention on the two. He plies them with food and tequila and teaches them Spanish words. He tells them his tired old stories, with all of the nastiness carefully clipped out. Yesterday he called them into his office, saying, “Vengan para aca, mis joyas,” or “Come in here, my jewels.” Simon felt like gagging. He can almost sense Francisco’s relief to be united with a son who loves women, and might produce his grandchildren. It doesn’t hurt that Ralf brought along a woman who might have stepped out of a Botticelli canvas. These new elements of his family make Francisco giddy with pride and feed his hormones. Simon can imagine him, after a few tequilas, hugging Ralf, telling him with teary eyes how much he loves him, and then slipping around the corner to seduce Ellen. It could happen.
In Ralf, the father seems to believe he has found a soul mate. He respects Ralf’s mathematical genius. He is unperturbed by Ralf’s shyness. It doesn’t even seem to bother Francisco that Ralf has not yet figured out what to call him, simply addressing him as “you.”
What thrills Francisco about Ralf—and deepens the wedge between himself and Simon—is Ralf’s new status as wild. Simon, by contrast, is the son with the boost. Francisco doesn’t dwell on the irony that Simon is clumsy with his boost, and often wishes he didn’t have to trouble with it, while Ralf practically lived in his. What matters to Francisco is now. Ralf is as wild and free in his head as a cave-painting Cro-Magnon—the Juárez ideal. Simon not only has a boost, but he uses it to carry on a virtual sex life with avatars that, as far as Francisco is concerned, are of the wrong gender. He and his father would never discuss such things. But Simon can sense contempt. It has been on the rise since Ralf and Ellen arrived.
The bus doesn’t come. It’s chilly out, though not as cold as yesterday, and Simon, to keep warm, walks along a trail of shanties toward the downtown. He’s still stewing about his father. It bothers him that Francisco remains so proud of his outlaw status. He keeps the big poster of Emiliano Zapata on his office wall and has a smaller framed photo of Che Guevara on his desk. Both those men, Simon has learned, were gunned down by the governments they fought. The Mexican army ambushed Zapata. The CIA hunted down Che. Yet Francisco works for the very government he claims to oppose. The United States quietly uses Francisco, and has benefited from his help since his service in Paraguay during the chip wars. Francisco has always been careful to keep the relationship in its place. He was probably working for the gringos even while running drugs out of Bolivia.
Francisco never told Simon about his rise to power in Juárez. “Let sleeping dogs snore,” he laughed one time when Simon brought it up. But in his three years working for his father, Simon has put together pieces of the narrative.
In his early years in Juárez, as Francisco said at lunch, two drug lords, Greñas and Mortífero, ran the declining narcotics business in Juárez. Francisco, an outsider with a South American accent and a pronounced limp, was careful to make himself useful to both ringleaders. Using his growing network of reporters, he dug up intelligence that he provided for free. Each lord got his share. With time, each one began to suspect that the other was getting the more valuable tips. This suspicion cast a shadow over Francisco’s business. He was convinced that one of the two would mount a takeover. It would be just a matter of abducting Francisco—who couldn’t even run away on his bum leg—and threatening to kill him if he didn’t work exclusively for one side or the other. Sometime in 2045 or ’46, old-timers decades later told Simon, Francisco was getting word through his intelligence network that both sides were targeting him. The abduction might come in a matter of days. So one morning he secretly delivered himself and his business to the more brutal of the two, Greñas. In return, he asked only for protection from Mortífero. Then he told Greñas his plan.
A couple days later, one of Francisco’s couriers delivered an intelligence packet to Mortífero, whose headquarters were on the east side of Juárez, a neighborhood of modest houses where people parked their cars on their tiny lawns. It was near the Bridge of the Americas, the main trucking route to the U.S. The packet told of a warehouse in Fabens, just fifteen miles down the river, that was full of meds and pleasure drugs—anti-depressants, muscle relaxers, sleeping pills, heroin tabs, and the so-called buzz-rushers that were the rage when Francisco and Stella were in college. An entire container had been abandoned, and it would be sitting there, with only one guard defending it, until the Long Beach cartel—one of the last drug mafias in the U.S.—could free up a truck from San Antonio. It was an enormous supply, and free. But there was so much that Mortífero would have to send dozens of mounted traffickers across a narrow river crossing to pick it up.
That very night, Mortífero dispatched eighteen men on horseback to Fabens. Just as they reached the warehouse, they were ambushed by U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency forces, and fourteen of them were killed. The survivors were forced to escort a disguised SWAT team back to headquarters. They entered the building with a hail of flash grenades and then shot the dazed drug runners, including Mortífero, before racing back across the Bridge of the Americas to El Paso.
That night at the Greñas headquarters, not far from The Tribune offices, the celebration lasted till dawn. It seemed all of professional Juárez was there—narcos, merchants, even journalists from The Tribune and, of course, an entire brothel. Toward the end of the party, a drunk Greñas embraced a cold sober Francisco and whispered slurred promises to build an empire together.
That was when Francisco delivered the line he’d been honing for weeks. “Sixteen of the men in your army,” he said, “work for the DEA. They have chips in their heads and are in constant communication—and with me. If you attempt to kill them, or me, you’ll be dead within minutes.” This was an especially bold lie, since any DEA agents in the dead zone of Juárez would be unable to message with each other. Also, Francisco himself was every bit as wild as Greñas. But he wore a beret that night that evoked the image of the original capped workers in Shanghai. The Paraguayan publisher seemed to wield powers and alliances that Greñas only vaguely understood. He seemed formidable, all the more so for having dispatched Mortífero and his army in a single day.
Francisco told the morose drug lord that he had arranged a safe exit for him. A plane waiting at an airstrip just a mile away would carry him to Costa Rica, where he would be fitted with a boost and employed at a casino hotel.
Greñas left that morning, without even packing a bag, and was never heard from again. He probably didn’t even make it to the airport. Francisco assigned his partner, Sibo, to the job of shutting down the dying drug business. He accomplished this within months, but died in one of its last battles. That left Francisco alone at the top. In the week following Greñas’s departure, Francisco had hired dozens of the narco’s troops. Some formed a new police department, which answered to the leader now known as Don Paquito. Others were using their trafficking skills to build a distribution for Ciudad Juárez’s new and fast-growing export: newspapers.
Simon wonders if his father has had anyone killed since those early days. He walks along the dirt road near the river, lost in his thoughts, when he feels a familiar spark in his head. His boost has found a network connection, a rare hot spot in Juárez. Simon watches hundreds of messages pour in. He promptly sends a message to Chui, asking about news. He hears back almost instantly that Vallinger is looking for Smedley. “Anything else?” He hears the minibus bumping along behind him. According to Chui’s source, he learns, the lobbyist is “steaming mad about today’s story.”
Simon is thrilled to hear that. Proud again to be working for the paper, he signs off from Chui and climbs in to the crowded bus. It’s not until he’s seated that he begins to sift through his trove of messages. Among hundreds of come-ons for sex sites, he sees one message from his mother, dated Thursday. “Cover’s blown. John Vallinger is after us. Leavi
ng Montclair and heading with Suzy to El Paso.”
Stella’s coming to El Paso? Simon immediately tries to respond, before even thinking about what to tell her. But the network connection, alive for an instant, is dead. He wonders who Suzy is and why his mother is coming down. Why would John Vallinger be chasing her? Simon knew she was involved in opposition politics, but was she important enough to anger John Vallinger? Does she know that Don Paquito, the reputed drug lord, is actually Francisco, and is running the newspaper here? Simon has no idea. But he cannot imagine any other reason that would lead his mother to come down.
Thirty-eight
3/11/72 10:51 a.m. Juárez Standard Time
After breakfast, Francisco directs Ralf and Ellen down a spiral metal staircase into the print shop. He follows them, leading with his right foot, step by step, and dragging his left leg behind. He shows them the hulking stainless steel machinery, a throwback to the twentieth century. The paper, stretched like connecting tissue from one module to the next, carries the same front-page story about the Respect function in the coming cognitive update. Francisco explains how photography, more than a century ago, replaced the original system of typesetting, where men specially trained to write backward and upside down would arrange the metal letters one by one. This, he says, was a direct descendant of Gutenberg’s original movable type.
Ralf has little time for the history lesson. He wants to know how he can get his boost to the chip reader in El Paso. He has to see if the code on his chip includes the Respect function, and if he can eliminate it, or rewrite it, and then hack his revisions into the national system in Washington. It’s a daunting job, and the update is only five days away. He has no interest in hearing about Johannes Gutenberg. That type of information he can look up—if he ever gets a boost back in his head.
Ellen, though, encourages Francisco with more questions. She asks him why the American government permits the circulation of The Tribune in the U.S. “There’s no way they don’t know about it,” she says.
“Know about it?” Francisco laughs. “They’re my biggest subscribers!” He explains how the government sends a truck from Fort Bliss every morning to pick up bundles of the latest edition at Simon’s tavern, the Cavalry Club. They fly them out to offices on both coasts, and to Chicago, Dallas, and Atlanta. Another van passes by daily and picks up a bundle for the bank offices on Wall Street. “We could shut down our entire distribution network and make plenty of money just selling to the U.S. government and Wall Street alone,” he says, adding that the Chinese also airship several hundred copies per day.
“If a subscription costs so much,” Ellen asks, “why don’t people just send images of the pages back and forth in their boosts? No offense. But that’s what I’d probably do.”
“The government helps us there, too,” Francisco says. The last thing the Americans want is for The Tribune’s news to reach 430 million people. “There might be an uprising,” he says. So an official in the Department of Homeland Security actually came down to El Paso, to Simon’s tavern, to deliver “watermarking” technology. With this, The Tribune embeds background patterns on every sheet. Francisco picks up a copy of the paper and holds it up to the light. “See there, that gray circle with the line through it?” he says, tracing his finger around the page.
Ralf squints at the paper and shakes his head.
Ellen backs up, to get a fuller look at the page. “Oh, I think I see it,” she says.
“Once you see it, it’s hard to ignore,” Francisco says. “Anyway, Homeland Security monitors the traffic between the chips. When they see people exchanging images carrying that watermark, they automatically delete it. People get back a message warning them that they’ve been violating international copyrights, and that if they persist they face big fines, or even limits on their boosts. It’s as if the American government works for me.”
“I thought you were on the most-wanted list,” Ralf says.
Francisco laughs. “That’s just for show. If they wanted to arrest me, they could drop a SWAT team in here and have me, dead or alive, in about six minutes.”
“What about the drones,” Ellen asks, “and all the defenses you have up around here?”
“Those drones are part of the same show, so that Americans will think their government is at war with the narco traffickers who are supposedly running Juárez,” Francisco says. “It’s all lies. If the drones are targeted at anyone, it’s at people like you. They don’t want you going back and telling people that life over here is … well, I wouldn’t call it ‘normal,’ but—it isn’t anything like the hell they describe. The last thing they want is for you to go back with a copy of The Tribune. That could be destabilizing. The way they see it, The Tribune is classified intelligence, only to be read by the political and business elite.”
He hushes as footsteps come down the metal stairs. Simon appears, just back from his meeting with George Smedley. His cheeks are pink from the cold, and his hair, usually tied back in the ponytail, falls across his forehead. “You telling them about the watermark?” he asks.
Francisco nods.
“Yeah, it’s as if the Americans work for us,” Simon mocks. “Thank God for that watermark. Wouldn’t want the wrong people to be reading the news.”
Francisco avoids the confrontation with Simon by taking a step to the machine and scrutinizing one of its long steel arms. He says nothing.
“So,” Simon continues, “I got word from El Paso this morning that John Vallinger read this story”—he points to the paper in the machine—“and he’s steaming mad.” He turns to Ralf and Ellen. “You know all about John Vallinger, right?”
They both nod.
“He’s one of our subscribers,” Simon says. “He actually pays a premium to get snippets of the news delivered through the boost. These are just summaries of the stories, you see. So he doesn’t have issues with the watermark. Other people do. But not John Vallinger.”
Francisco lowers his head closer to the steel arm, as if studying each of the rivets attaching it to the body of the machine.
Ellen, trying to ignore the tension between Simon and his father, focuses on the key issue: spreading word about the Respect function. She asks Simon if it would be possible to publish a copy of the paper without the watermark, so that people can learn details about the update, and start protesting. “Otherwise, this might turn into a dictatorship.”
“I’m betting that most of our subscribers are pretty thrilled with the Respect function,” Simon says. “These are powerful people, and having a more obedient population sounds ideal to them.”
“It’s not ideal for me,” Ellen says.
“Well, you’re not supposed to know about this,” Simon says. “You only know because … well, because of all the events that led you to cross into Juárez. You’re not the target reader of The Tribune. People like you, you live your life, spend a lot of time in virtual worlds, you might not even notice that one day it just feels better to buy the leading brands of one thing or another, and to support the America First! party. Nothing’s really changed that much. Are you really worse off for not knowing the details about the software in the boost?”
“You don’t need to insult me!” Ellen says, fighting to hold back tears. She runs to the staircase, hops up the stairs two at a time, enters the deserted newsroom, and slams the door behind her.
“Nice job,” Ralf says to his brother.
“She needed to hear it. You needed to hear it,” Simon says.
They both look at Francisco, who has dropped the guise of inspecting machinery and is now simply staring at the floor.
“So,” Ralf says to his father. “How about getting this story onto the boost?”
Francisco bats his eyes and looks up the staircase. Then he responds meekly. “It would destroy my business model.”
“That’s what this is about?” Ralf says, spreading his arms toward the massive machinery. “A business model?”
“We employ lots of people,” Franci
sco says, looking up at Ralf. “We’re the economic engine of an entire city, a city that’s under embargo. We need this to survive.”
“Papá,” Simon says. “We have Chui over there in El Paso. He just placed a few billion Renminbi into a Singapore fixed-asset fund, and he’s looking into a hedge fund out of Montevideo that returns 23% a year. This business model you talk about is making you rich. But let’s not pretend you’re investing it all into Juárez.”
Thirty-nine
SATURDAY, MARCH 12, 2072:
FOUR DAYS BEFORE THE NATIONAL COGNITIVE UPDATE
3/12/72 9:13 a.m. Eastern Standard Time
“When he was little, I wondered if Ralf had some form of autism,” Stella says. “He was spending all of his time—I mean all of it—on his chip. So I’m a thirty-year-old widow, I’ve lost my job, I’ve got one kid in open rebellion and the other simply won’t talk to me. He barely comes into my world.”
“He does get quiet,” Suzy says, looking out the window at the New Jersey Turnpike. “I think he’s a genius, though. At least that’s what everyone at the office always says.”
“Yes, we heard those things,” Stella answers.
They’re driving a southern route to El Paso, heading down toward Washington before turning west into the Shenandoah mountains of Virginia and beyond. Suzy begged for this longer route, saying that she couldn’t stand another drive through Pennsylvania. “It goes on forever.”
The Boost Page 22