Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

by David Shafer

Quivering Pines

  Leo,” said James. “Leo.”

  Leo woke. The jasmine was still in the air. He had fallen asleep with his shoes on, which made him feel dangerous.

  “Your sister’s here.”

  “What? No.”

  “Yes. At the smoking station.”

  Leo clawed at the light in the room. He’d been asleep for less than an hour, he was certain. Unless he had been asleep for twenty-four hours. “That’s not possible. I mean it’s highly unlikely.”

  “Ah. Okay. Someone pretending to be your sister is here, then,” said James.

  Leo got upright and started moving out of the room and down the hall, still napped-out and confused. James was right behind him and they moved briskly. A woman at the men’s smoking station would be a level-one breach of Quivering Pines’ gender-segregation policy and would probably set in motion some sort of regime response. They were racing the clock.

  “I left her out there, but I couldn’t keep Clive from talking to her,” said James. “He thinks he just won the lottery. Hurry. He’ll bore her sideways.”

  The small knot of men in the lounge were also aware of Leo’s alleged sister outside. But they had gone into prison-yard mode, and no one wanted to be called a snitch. Leo realized that they liked him, that they didn’t want him booted from their midst. He passed through the lounge and stepped out to the patio, and as he did, one man posted himself along the corridor to keep a lookout for counselors, and another clutch of men arranged themselves in front of the patio doors and busily scribbled in raggedy notebooks to distract from and obscure the transgression taking place outside.

  Leo saw a girl there and in the bright sun was a little dazzled. Clive was talking to her. She was dark like Leo. No, darker. Very pretty. But too small to be a Crane. Cranes leaned back on the air behind them; this girl leaned in. He stopped at the edge of the patio. James stopped beside him.

  “Yeah. That’s not my sister,” he said.

  “Really?” said James. “You sure about that? This is important.”

  “I’m serious. That’s not my sister. Look at her.”

  The woman turned around just then and looked at Leo.

  “Shit. I guess you’re right,” said James. “Well, she said she was your sister. I’d better come out there with you.”

  They walked to the smoking station. “Clive,” said James when he and Leo had reached the smoking station, “come back in with me. I want to talk to you about something.”

  “In a minute,” said Clive.

  “No, Clive. This can’t wait,” said James.

  Clive copped on. He quickly dug a business card from the breast pocket of his fleece top and handed it to the woman. James gave Leo two of his menthol cigarettes and then escorted Clive back to the facility.

  Leo gave the girl one of James’s cigarettes. “Here,” he said, “look like you’re smoking this.” He demonstrated by taking a fake drag. “So you’re my sister,” he said.

  “Yeah. No,” said Leila.

  “You’re not my sister?” It came out like a question.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “I know. I know you’re not. Why’d you tell James you were?”

  “The lady at the front desk kind of supplied me with that one. It seems that your sister was expected. I needed to see you.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “No.”

  This was a relief. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m here because of your broadside. I’m with the people resisting the thing you warned about, and we want to know what you have on Deveraux.” She held her cigarette like she’d seen them held in the movies, but she took a passable fake drag, and then did a good fake exhale.

  “You read my broadside?”

  “I did.”

  Leo noticed that the eye of the stanchioned cigarette lighter was glowing orange. Behind the girl was the medical building; a slender telescoping satellite antenna had sprouted from its roof.

  “Did you drive here?” he asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you in the lot?”

  “Yes. It’s a little black Toyota. Two doors. Beneath the basketball hoop.”

  “How about I meet you there in four minutes?”

  “Copy that,” said Leila.

  Leo turned and walked quickly back to the patio. The summer buzzed in his ears. He was elated. More. New. Information. James fell in with him when he strode into the lounge. The onion-shaped counselor had come down the corridor and was sniffing at the frisson in the room. He looked perturbed. Leo motored back to the dorm room, James right behind.

  “What’s up?” said James when the door was closed.

  “Couldn’t rightly say,” said Leo.

  “You packed?” said James.

  “No. They packed for me,” said Leo. He dropped the Dopp kit into the duffel and slung the whole thing over his shoulder, like a sailor. He stepped up on the windowsill. “James, I’m going to leap out of this window now,” he said.

  He leaped, and landed twenty-four inches below the window in the loamy softness of the Quivering Pines bark-mulch moat. A ceanothus scratched at his legs. “I’ll see you on the outside,” he said to James, through the window.

  “Go with God,” said James Dean.

  Leo made his way across the landscaped zona that surrounded the residential wing. He bobbed and weaved a bit between the bark-mulch inner ring and the hedgerow before the parking lot. He saw the girl in a Toyota where she said she’d be. He dashed over to it and tried to get in on the passenger side. But the handle lifted, clickless and impotent. He rapped on the window. She looked at him. He saw that she was beautiful, eyes full of intent.

  A clunk came from the door. But Leo was impatient and tried the handle again before it had finished and the door had fully unlocked. He saw the onion-shaped counselor come out of the front door of the main building and look his way. Leo dropped to a crouch on the ground. The girl opened the door from the inside, and it bonked into his head.

  “Ow,” said Leo.

  “What?” she said. “Where are you?”

  Leo slithered around the car door and slunk into the passenger seat. He sat spinelessly and below window level, like an adolescent not wanting to be seen in a car with his mom.

  “What are you doing?” she asked him.

  “Is there a man coming toward us from the main building?” he asked her.

  “What man?”

  “Guy looks like an onion.”

  “Um, yeah, actually.”

  “Okay, we gotta go.”

  “Who is that guy?” the girl asked.

  “No, I mean, right now.”

  “Are you allowed to leave?”

  “It’s not a locked facility. Go-go-go.”

  So she did. She reversed zippily from the spot and then saw the man from the building quicken his stride. Briefly, she choked and forgot she was in neutral, and the engine roared unengaged. The onion man broke into a trot. “Shit,” she said. Then she found her gear and the little car leaped, and they flew down the leafy drive and walloped over a speed bump. Leo unslumped himself and tried to catch mirror glimpses of Quivering Pines receding.

  “Okay, what’s that up ahead?” asked the girl, alarmed suddenly.

  Leo looked. Something was happening to the next speed bump. It was rising from the surface of the drive, like a mechanical maw. The girl braked hard and skidded a bit and ended up stopped a yard from its solid jaw.

  “You said this wasn’t a locked facility.”

  “That was my understanding,” said Leo. In the rearview, he saw the Onion crest a hillock on a speeding Segway.

  The girl reversed rapidly down the drive, looking for a break in the deep gutters that lined the sides of the road. Finding one, she shifted, and they left the road sharply. She was trying to go around the embassy-anti-car-bomb pie wedge. But once off the road, Leo saw that the potted cacti beside the drive were positioned in a pattern that prevented a direct path through the field
beside the road. The girl had to slalom around the cacti at low speed. When they passed very close to one of them, Leo could see the large planters for what they were: steel and concrete vehicle blockers. The Segway was getting closer.

  The girl managed to drive them between the planters. She got the Toyota back on the road beyond the raised pie wedge. Then she sped down the rest of the driveway and over the little railroad crossing that marked the boundary of Quivering Pines.

  They came into the city on I-5, from the south, up over the long upper-deck stretch of the Marquam Bridge and down its poorly cambered and vertiginous far side. Mount Hood was clear in the distance, sharp and faceted, like the mountains on beer labels. The girl’s car smelled hotly of new and petroleum-based upholstery. He rolled down his window. A tumult of summer air whooshed through the car and buffeted his head, cooling the prickle of sweat that had broken on his brow.

  He was visited by a sharp memory from childhood: Coming down the Henry Hudson Parkway in the backseat of a Volvo on a summer Sunday night. His dad steered a sirocco beside sheer walls of Manhattan schist, beneath the massive arched feet of the George Washington Bridge. The hot city air met the cooled layer of the river over the green verge of Riverside Park, smelling of Dominican barbecues and backed by an elm-ish funk.

  Returning to the present, Leo tried to steady his mind. He had to rule out the possibility that this girl was a figment. If she was, then he had met the requirement for suicide; that was the deal he’d made with himself.

  And yet—still. Here again was the world he had imagined; here was life. There was evil afoot and he was being asked to oppose it. Why had he been chosen for this counterintervention? Would Quivering Pines give chase?

  They slipped along the concrete channels of the freeway like they were riding a log flume at a water park and exited onto a street of car dealerships—tubular wind-sock men and Mylar glitter bunting dazzling drivers-by. They passed the hospital and the derelict Wonder Bread factory, slated for demolition, backhoes and breakers waiting dinosaurishly in its fenced-off yard.

  “I never introduced myself,” said the girl at a red light, the first they’d come to. “My name is Lola Montes.”

  That was odd, he thought, she didn’t look Latin, and she’d paused between the first and last names.

  “Leo Crane. Would you get in the left lane here?” he said. What would a sane person do now? “Bring me home and I’ll make us some coffee and we can talk.”

  But when they rolled up to his house, he saw someone standing on his porch, so he didn’t tell Lola to stop there. When they’d gone a block, he asked her to pull over. Then he adjusted his side mirror until it reflected his porch.

  “Something wrong?” asked Lola.

  “That was my house back there. But the letter carrier’s lingering.”

  Lola adjusted her rearview, and they both surveilled.

  “Is that not your regular mailman?”

  “I got a few. I must be on a crappy route. Sometimes it’s this very fit, too-tan lady. Sometimes it’s a Sikh dude who wears the whole outfit, you know? The cape and what I think may be a postal-issue turban. Sometimes it’s a slacker in, like, a Slayer T-shirt. But I don’t think I’ve seen this guy before.”

  They both discreetly observed him as he left Leo’s porch and walked across the street to a little USPS minivan. He popped the lift gate at its back. It looked to Leo like he was sorting large envelopes back there and scanning bar codes, as mailmen sometimes did midroute. Then the guy got in the driver’s seat, but he didn’t start the van. He unwrapped a sandwich and started to eat it.

  Sure. Could be lunch, Leo thought. “Would you tell me more about your people,” he asked Lola, “the ones you said are resisting the thing?”

  Lola seemed to collect her thoughts. “We’re called Dear Diary. Though I think that’s supposed to be ironic or something. I’m very new. Anyway, that’s just a sort of a placeholder, you know, as a name. We’re in a state of flux.”

  “And there are lots of you?”

  “There are tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands.”

  “And the other side? The ones you’re resisting?”

  “They’re called the Committee, and they’re building an extralegal, nation-replacing, wealth-protecting, fee-based data-rights system.”

  “A system?”

  “Yeah, like, ‘Hey, sign up now, richest point-zero-zero-zero-five percent of the world, for our data-protection plan. That way, when we cripple the electronic infrastructure, your shit is safe and everyone else is a fucking peasant.’”

  “So is it as I described?”

  “You embellished. The Scientologists aren’t involved. And it has nothing to do with your illustrious ancestors.”

  Yes. He had bragged about his illustrious ancestors, written that he was descended from the American intellectual elite. How mortifying.

  “But you were right about SineCo,” she said encouragingly, as if sensing his embarrassment. “Straw is using that search-and-storage empire of his for something very bad indeed.”

  The search-and-storage empire. Yup, that’s what had first aroused Leo’s suspicions. “We’ll Keep It Safe” was the tagline for SineCo’s new, unwired socialverse. And Lola was telling him that SineCo was only the part you could see.

  “It’s like a network or a club. The Committee owns some companies outright. Not just SineCo, but Bluebird—the private-army people—and General Systems, that company that makes thermostats and breakfast cereal and airplanes. And then there are hundreds of other assets that they just control—the word they use is claim. Dams and mines and airports and pharmaceutical companies and TV networks and hospital corporations and a couple of the big NGOs.”

  “It’s a cabal,” said Leo.

  “Yeah, a cabal, I guess.”

  “A shadow government.”

  “Well, if they’re not that yet, that’s what they aim to become.”

  Whipsawed. That’s how he felt. Where was the flatline? How he longed for a quiet brain, trusty, like a pony. He would need days with this Lola Montes stuff. To let it sink in, to untangle the real from the imagined. But she was clearly in a hurry. And even bipolars receive startling emotional news, right?

  Leo tried to channel James Dean the way James had been when he helped Leo work through the plot the other night. Leo turned his attention from the passionate emotions to the reasoning faculties. Follow the plot, don’t drive it.

  “But there’s lots of law enforcement monitoring all that, and there are spies sitting in office parks in Virginia looking at screens, aren’t there? Isn’t their main job now to keep North Korea or al-Qaeda or whoever from crippling anything? Or there’s, like, investigative journalists and honest public servants. Someone would have seen this and blown the whistle on it.”

  “Well, as far as the Committee getting caught by crusading journalists or whatever, that ship has sailed,” said Lola. “And a lot of the guys sitting in office parks in Virginia are the Committee.”

  The mailman finished his sandwich, started the minivan, and pulled away.

  “And you were right about your old friend Deveraux,” said Lola. “He’s a way to Straw, to SineCo. That’s why we want to know about your incriminating evidence.

  “Leo?”

  “What? Sorry. I guess I was considering something else.”

  “What were you considering?”

  “Whether or not you’re real.”

  She turned in her seat, took his hand, put his palm on her chest, and pressed it firmly against her breastbone. There was no sex in the gesture, but it whisked them both somewhere farther along the line of their story. He could feel her heart beat and smell a mild funk from her.

  “I am real,” she said.

  And he knew that she was. No figment would have done that. She let go of his hand. “But I am also in a hurry,” she said.

  Yeah. She sure was. It was chop-fucking-chop with this girl. “And I want to help you,” he said. “Problem is…”

/>   She waited a few seconds. “What’s the problem, Leo?”

  “The incriminating thing I have on Mark Deveraux…”

  “You don’t have it? You made that part up?”

  He could tell her he’d made it up, that he didn’t have it. But those lies would only confuse a confusing situation. The world sends you a Lola Montes at a critical juncture, you do not shy away from truth-telling. You take one careful true step at a time.

  “No. I have it,” he said.

  But how was he to say this? Straight out, the way she was talking to him. “But it’s a piece of film, Lola. A silent movie. Super-Eight. From college. It’s Mark beating off while pretending to be crazy and retarded,” he said. “It’s not really a movie. It’s one shot. Three minutes long. But it is a long three minutes.”

  He could see her take this in.

  “Is that really what you people do?” he asked her. “This kind of blackmail? Isn’t that the other guys?”

  Chapter 18

  Damn, thought Leila, that wasn’t at all the kind of incriminating she had been anticipating. The look he gave her was right on: this did change the landscape. Every time the word blackmail had crossed her thoughts as she was crossing an ocean and a continent, she’d managed to brush it aside. This was a pitched battle, after all, everything at stake. Besides, Leo’s broadside had made it sound like what he had on Deveraux was incriminating because it would expose the Committee somehow, like it was evidence of a crime. This was different. This was a guy beating off twenty years ago.

  “Let’s go inside,” Leo said. “The mailman’s gone.”

  She needed to pee, and she needed to devise a next step. She’d come all the way here and boosted this strange man from a rehab facility or something worse. The incriminating film did sound unusable. But was she supposed to just leave? Or get new instructions from Dear Diary? Or get the film from Leo and take it back to Dear Diary and let them make the call? Her little Nokia hadn’t issued her any instructions since she’d landed this morning, when it had directed her to Quivering Pines. What about Leo Crane? Had their escape put him in danger? If he wouldn’t give up the film, was she supposed to just leave? Let him in on a secret and then take off?