Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

by David Shafer

  There had to be better ways than this to build an economy, right? If people just spent their money on less stupid stuff, wouldn’t so many problems disappear? Yes, but whose idea of stupid, she knew was the issue. There were a few face products on which she didn’t mind dropping some serious ducats, so that probably made her a hypocrite. But she’d be willing to make adjustments for the greater good. The world reflected by the stores in this airport seemed to be going the other way. There was a place that sold water, but in rhinestone-encrusted bottles and for hundreds of dollars. There was bad candy made in China and flown to London and sold to people, some of whom were flying to China. There were cheesy lingerie shops and a vitamin outlet and there were two distinct yogurt franchises. There were newsstands, which at least still sold some product that seemed related to living. But why any shelf space at all for Abs!, Superyachts Monthly, or Model Train Enthusiast? Actually, Model Train Enthusiast was fine. She picked up an armful of newspapers and some pecans.

  Leila got to Java-Jiva ten minutes early. She read the Irish Times, because she’d never read it before and because it was one of those gigantic broadsheets you need to have upper-body strength to hold upright. She had to spread the thing out over the back of another chair to read it. She remembered how briskly her dad could fold and fold a newspaper page, until he had just the columns he wanted. He used to read to them from the papers in the morning, so Leila could recall when the embassy hostages came home and when Sadat was assassinated and when President Carter was attacked by a swamp rabbit.

  “Are you Leila?” said a woman to Leila. She was in her thirties. Greek-looking. Dark-haired. Business-suity. An American accent, but what kind Leila could not tell. It sounded without place.

  “Yes. I’m Leila?” said Leila, as if she were meeting herself. “Are you”—she dug in her bag for her planner—“sorry. I have it here.”

  “Seymour Butz? No. Seymour couldn’t make it. I came instead.”

  Seymour Butz. That was the guy’s name. Damn. Leila had not said it or heard it out loud and had missed the joke, if that’s what it was.

  “I’m Paige Turner,” said the woman.

  “That seems unlikely,” said Leila.

  “May I sit?”

  “Be my guest,” said Leila, who was getting intrigued at exactly the same rate as she was getting annoyed. She just wanted to confirm that this “network” was a sort of stunt, of no use to her, so she could take the whole thing off her desk. But if it was a stunt, what kind of stunt? Was it some sort of stupid viral-marketing thing, or a cult, or someone’s MFA thesis? Even in the mire of her family- and job-related distresses, Leila was good at analyzing situations. She supposed that could be called compartmentalizing. When she heard people refer to this as a male trait and view it as generally a bad thing, she was uncomfortable.

  There are people who will try to con a woman by banking on her politeness or by presuming that female restraint will trump her curiosity or her skepticism. Rich had once called her blinkered, a word choice he had quickly regretted.

  But Leila hadn’t run in two days. And she was tired. The sleep she had nabbed had been the airport kind. She felt, as her father used to say, not enough sandwiches for a picnic.

  As soon as the alleged Paige Turner sat down, Leila said, “Why don’t you tell me in less than ten minutes if you are part of some sort of opposition network, what you oppose, and how you think you can help me.”

  “I am. Part of a network,” said Paige. “We’re called Dear Diary. We do not oppose, exactly, but are hoping to move past the nation-state thing. We can help you by asking you to join us. We think you’ll want to be a part of what we’re working on. In the near term, though, we are opposing something, which is ‘the Committee’”—the woman made air quotes with her slender fingers—“which is a thing where a sort of cabal of businessmen and some other bad guys are planning an electronic coup so that they will control the storage and transmission of all the information in the world. Those men you saw in Burma were part of that. You weren’t supposed to see them; you certainly weren’t supposed to send out e-mails about them. That’s why they screwed you.” She said all that without a bit of drama but with a sort of practiced enunciation, as if she were reciting the specials.

  “Get the fuck outta here,” said Leila. “So what are you? If ‘the Committee’”—Leila made air quotes like the woman had—“is a cabal, what are you guys?”

  “We’re just a network. We stay in touch and keep each other up to date, share ideas.”

  “You mean like Friendster?” said Leila.

  “If you like. Look, I’d be skeptical too, okay? But listen. The Committee has founded a secret, sovereign corporate state to achieve its ends. We want to stop them. But we can’t just call the police or whatever, because they operate way above that level.”

  “What do you mean, way above that level?”

  “They control seventy percent of the bandwidth in Asia, all the newspapers in contentious geopolitical zones, and the major pharmaceuticals. They control Sine, Skype, Facebook, all of that. They own forests and water basins and silica mines and railroads and airports. They have shareholders in the security services of most of the nations in the world. They have a very capable, committed executive tier. They recruit by convincing, co-opting, or blackmailing. They have extraction teams and attorneys and a kind of HR department. And they’re planning to put it all into play. Soon, we think.”

  A waitress approached their table. “Can I get you anything?” she asked. Leila hadn’t realized it was a table-service place; she had just chosen a chair on the periphery and camped.

  “I’ll have a mint tea,” said Paige Turner.

  “Nothing for me,” said Leila.

  The waitress went to clear a cup from their table, which was covered with Leila’s papers and magazines.

  “Oh. Sorry. Here,” said Leila. She collected her stuff and shoved it into the open maw of her big bag, then put it all on the floor beneath her feet. The waitress acknowledged Leila’s help, and then knelt down to push Leila’s bag farther under the table. She made a watch-out signal to Leila by tapping at the corner of one eye and then indicating the rivulet of passersby in the concourse.

  “Yes. Thank you,” said Leila, and smiled back at the woman.

  After the waitress left, Paige Turner went on. “They’re simply going to start a protection racket. Like, it’s going to be sold as a service, but they’re going to sell you what had been free before. Some of them are Malthusians who believe that the Earth won’t continue to carry us beyond about ten billion, so they want to secure their access to resources: water, genetic material, the electronic transmission of data. But then a lot of them are probably just profiteers.

  “To stop them we’ve hacked together a broadcast platform which we think we can stand up and defend for, maybe, seventy-two hours. We’re going to use it to disseminate to everyone in the world the truth of what’s been going on. We’d also use that platform to offer everyone in the world a third way?” She did the rising-intonation thing, as if unsure of herself or awaiting some reassurance from Leila.

  Wasn’t the third way a Clinton thing? “Go on,” said Leila.

  “Right now, if you’re born in certain places, you’re just fucked, right?”

  “Yes. Definitely.”

  “While we have the world’s attention, we’re going to send back to them all the information that’s been collected on them. Then destroy that data and offer everyone the chance to sign up with us.”

  “What do you give them?”

  “A number.”

  “Say again?”

  “We give them a number. Well, we each discover our own number, really.”

  “Why does anyone want a number?”

  “Because it’s the beginning of a new way of organizing the world.”

  “Yeah, it’s also the beginning of a way of subjugating the world.”

  “That’s why we want to have a really good launch. But once everyone
sees the scale of the data-mining the Committee’s been doing and the fascist reach of their operation, they’ll know we’re the good guys.”

  “That’s terrible logic,” Leila couldn’t help saying. “If I’m sitting at my desk or whatever and I get your big announcement, I’m going to want to evaluate your claims independently…”

  “And how would you do that?” Paige asked.

  “I guess I’d start by searching for committee, cabal, electronic coup.”

  The waitress came back with Paige’s mint tea and a little handheld payment device.

  “Thank you,” said Paige. She fed the payment device her credit card and keyed a PIN code into it. The device chittered out a little receipt, but when Paige tore it off, the bit of curled paper fluttered to the floor. “Sorry,” said Paige to the waitress, who had knelt to pick it up.

  “I told you,” Paige went on, “they control all those search engines. We’re working on getting paper about all of this. But the Committee is basically paperless. Maybe that’s to save trees.”

  Leila needed a moment to see that this last part was a joke.

  “When you get handed back your file and you see how much they know about you, you’ll be mad enough to really do something,” Paige assured Leila.

  “Walgreens knows I buy Pantene? I don’t care.”

  “Okay, but how about if a shadow government is filing away everything about you: your genetic sequence, your demographics, images of you, your social schematics, your skills, your access to wealth, your patterns of movement, your pressure points, your hopes and dreams, your fears and desires? How about if they’re doing this because they have a twenty-year plan to own or control all the knowledge in the world? How about if they’re betting on a breakdown of the digital infrastructure, because in that case, they’ll be able to charge the whole world for data recovery? Only it’s not really betting, since they can cause the breakdown; they can initiate the emergency.”

  A chill rode Leila’s spine. A reflexive disinclination to believe in political conspiracy theories flows from two beliefs: that human incompetence makes such conspiracies untenably complicated, and that people do not allow terrible injustices to be perpetrated upon them.

  But Leila had just spent six months in a totalitarian state where she had been daily reminded that the second premise was not axiomatic. If it can happen to someone else, it can happen to me, she remembered. Anyway, there was something plausible here—that a syndicate would cause an emergency and then sell the rescue. That’s what all good mafias did, wasn’t it? It was probably a totally orthodox business plan. “But how’d they get the genetic information?” she asked Paige. “I never went in for my mouth swab.”

  “Monitored waste streams, biosampling postage stamps. The Node. Look, I’m not from the technical side, okay? I’m a travel agent. I’m just here to deliver your tickets and documents.”

  “Oh yeah? Where am I going?”

  “Dublin. To attend a meeting.”

  “No. Listen, just so we’re clear: I’m on my way back to California.”

  “Well, look, maybe we can help you out with what’s going on there. And we hardly ever divert people like this, but you’re apparently a potentially valuable asset”—Paige rolled her eyes a tiny bit here, maybe bitchily, even—“so this is like some big deal. You should try to enjoy it.”

  That line, to Leila, was stranger than the one about the biosampling postage stamps.

  “Enjoy it?”

  “Yeah. Like, your ticket gets you into the fanciest lounge in this airport. There are really nice showers in there.”

  Her ticket? And was that a bitchy swipe, about the shower? In fairness, she could use a shower.

  “And here’s a phone,” said Paige, sliding a phone across the table. “It works only when it has a secure path, and sometimes it only lets you text.”

  “I don’t want your phone. If you want my help, you’re going to have to make a better case.”

  “That’s what they’re going to do in Dublin.” Paige Turner had disengaged. She sipped her tea. “I told you: I’m just a travel agent. I’m not Communications. Listen, I’ve got to meet another client.” She neatened her little tea mess. “Have fun in Dublin.”

  Leila decided not to attempt a response to this. This lady was not making sense. So she only nodded politely when Paige stood to go.

  “Okay,” said Leila. “Um, I’m going to leave this phone here.” She actually hadn’t touched the mobile phone. It was a cheapo Nokia.

  Paige was unfazed; she was slinging her chunky valise over her shoulder.

  “Well, thanks for your time. I guess,” said Leila.

  Paige checked her outfit, nodded at Leila, and strode away, toward Security.

  “…you nutjob,” added Leila quietly to herself.

  It was maybe two minutes later that Leila thought of her bag. The thought came to her suddenly, and she knew before she checked that she would find something terribly amiss. She knew because her heart and lungs dropped to her belly.

  Correct: Her wallet, her planner, her phone, her laptop. They were all four gone. She straightened up and looked around herself quickly, accusingly, as if a paper airplane had just bonked her in the head. But in two minutes, alone in a moving crowd, the recoverable world slips away from you at a pace. There were no waitresses here.

  The laptop had been replaced with a cookie tin the approximate size and weight of a laptop. In controlled shock, Leila opened the cookie tin and saw, along with cookies, a billfold, worn loose at its spine. As if with a purloined diary, she opened the wallet carefully. Inside, she found the documents of a person called Lola Montes who, it seemed, shared some of the general outlines of Leila’s life. Lola was a coastal North American with credit cards and a gym membership and business cards from restaurants. Lola had a U.S. passport, a California driver’s license, and a New York Public Library card. Lola looked a lot like Leila. Lola had a lot of cash: three hundred euros, one hundred pounds, two hundred and fifty dollars. Leila poked deeper into the wallet and found a napkin with numbers written on it, the corner of a postcard from Cancun, a rubber band around a little sachet of—what, ashes?—from India or somewhere. And in the wallet’s third layer, a picture of Leila’s brother, Dylan, and Scratch, her long-gone cat.

  It was only then that Leila returned to the photo IDs. Okay, Lola didn’t look like Leila. Lola was Leila. Or Leila was Lola.

  So. She was sitting in an airport holding a stack of high-grade forged documents, having been stripped of her own legitimate ones by an all-girl pickpocketing team.

  It would be very hard to explain.

  Still, they had given her something like a thousand dollars. Her own wallet had probably had about two hundred dollars in it. So this wasn’t larceny. Maybe this was exploding money or something. Or, oh yeah, maybe she was being recruited by a global counterconspiracy that was sending her to Dublin to meet its upper officers.

  A calm descended upon her, and an awareness. She could have led mountain expeditions or been a sea captain, because when things just got fubar, she generally got steely and clearheaded. When Dylan had sliced his arm open that time he fell through the coffee table, it had been the fifteen-year-old Leila who wrapped it in a towel and kept it elevated and compressed. Her dad went all ashen and unhelpful; she told him to drive. Her mom just kept wailing; Leila told her to please be quiet.

  So Leila knew at once that her best move would be to go along with this until some better option opened up. The possibility existed that she had already been played. If they could pickpocket and then put-pocket her after she went through security but before the plane, they could probably have her detained or worse, if that was their aim.

  The cheapo Nokia chirruped and buzzed on the plastic table like a fly caught in a web: 1 New Message, the screen said. She pressed View.

  Your papers will be returned to you in Dublin, after we meet. You can walk away then, if you like. DD.

  Chapter 14

  There wa
s a problem with Mark’s ticket to Rotterdam, which was where he was supposed to board Sine Wave. The problem with the ticket was that the SineCo representative at Heathrow didn’t have it. It was this man’s job to meet and see to the lounging, ground-transportation, and onward-travel needs of any of SineCo’s executives, upper-level contractors, and guests who came through Heathrow.

  “Mr. Deveraux, can I take you to the lounge? I’ll come back for you there when I get this straightened out?” Mark asked if he could use SineCo’s private Heathrow lounge, which was behind about three unmarked doors and usually satisfied even the most self-important trans-Heathrites. But that room was in use, apparently. So the rep ordered up a golf cart and he and Mark sat facing backward on the rear seat. As the cart whizzed along the polished concourses, Mark saw things recede before they had approached and was put in mind of near-death experiences he’d read about. A luggage store zipped forward from behind his head and was whisked backward into his past. A yogurt kiosk was similarly birthed and then faded and winked out. The cart beeped like a satellite. They arrived at one of the fancier first-class lounges, and the rep saw Mark in and promised to return once the Rotterdam thing was straightened out. It was ten o’clock in the morning.

  He collected three newspapers, a Superyachts Monthly, two bottles of water, and four croissants. He settled himself into a leather couch. He scoped out his fellow loungers, checking to see if anyone had recognized him. He ordered a cup of coffee from the steward and tried not to eat his croissants too quickly.

  Mark dialed Straw’s main gatekeeper, Nils. He got no answer, so he texted: Glitch in Rotterdam meeting? Waiting at Heathrow. Pls advise. He was going to stay sober today.