“What the hell is going on with you?” Dee said.
“Look at the guy over there smoking a cigarette by that light pole.”
Dee turned, looked, turned back. “What about him?”
“Do you know him?”
“Know him?” She looked again. “Never seen him before.”
“He’s not from the ranch?”
Dee shook her head. “You’re being paranoid.”
“Probably.” Olivia pulled her seat belt down and buckled in. “Let’s go for a drive. Are you okay with that?”
“If it makes you happy.” Dee buckled up.
Olivia rolled out of the parking lot, constantly scanning for other cars moving on them. None did. She got on the perimeter road and relaxed a little.
Dee said, “The González effect tormented Jacob until the day he died.”
“Dee, listen to me. The probability machine can’t be used anymore. It’s too dangerous. Even when it’s used correctly, to avert a crisis, it does it by creating other crises. And that doesn’t take into account the deliberate misuse of the power for personal gain—to enrich the Society, for instance.”
“You talk like there’s an alternative.”
Olivia pulled over and put the car in park. “There is.”
Dee looked puzzled—and then shocked. “No.”
Olivia looked intently at Dee. “The probability machine is like a magic credit card. We’ve been using it for a long time to bail us out of bad situations, and now it’s become a bad situation itself. It’s time to cut up the card . . . to turn the machine off.”
The blood rushed out of Dee’s face. She appeared shaken, then angry. “That’s insane. Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I need your help. Yours and Alvaro’s.”
“Alvaro?”
“He knows where to find the probability machine.”
Dee’s face looked like a closed door. “He wouldn’t tell you where it is. He wouldn’t even tell me.”
“I’m a Shepherd. Doesn’t he have to tell me?”
“I don’t know. None of this is the way it’s supposed to be.”
If Olivia were more like Brian, this would be the time to touch Dee’s shoulder, to make a small physical connection. She tried. With an unreadable expression, Dee looked at her hand, and Olivia withdrew it. “Alvaro will listen to you, Dee. I know he will.”
“He listens to me, but it doesn’t matter. Alvaro is missing.”
“Missing where?”
Dee sighed. “He never came back from Aleppo. Jacob’s body is still there, too—and nobody knows where the link is. The Society is frantic. Emilio is over there right now, looking for Alvaro. Everyone thinks he must have the link. Wonder what they’d think if they knew it was right here, just a few miles from the ranch, and that a woman had it.”
Suddenly Olivia was on full alert. “Are you going to tell them?”
Dee took a long minute before she answered. “No.”
“Why not?”
Dee looked out the windshield. A couple of cars whooshed by. “Damn it. Because I know you’re right. If Andrew knew you had the link, he’d sacrifice you in a heartbeat to see power migrate to Emilio. And Emilio having the link is nothing but bad news.”
“Then come with me to Syria and help me find Alvaro.”
“Come to . . . me?”
“Either we get to him first, or Emilio does.”
Dee shook her head. “I hate all of this.”
“I need your help.”
“I’ll think about it. This is hard to get my head around. I need to go back now. I’ve been gone too long.”
“While you’re thinking about it, think about this. The existence of the probability machine proves the future exists. You people always believed that meant you had to use the machine. Alvaro said it was deterministic. But how do you know I’m not part of that determinism? I showed up at the right time and place because I’m the one who’s supposed to turn the thing off now that it’s time to turn it off. No one in the Society would even consider doing that. You’re all too invested.”
Dee looked thoughtful and extremely uncomfortable. “I have to go.”
Olivia put the Ford in gear and drove them back to the parking lot. Dee opened the door and started to climb out. Hot air rushed in, displacing the cool.
“Take my number,” Olivia said.
“Tell me. Don’t write it down.”
Olivia recited her phone number.
Standing by the open door, Dee said, “You know what? When I read your message, when you said a woman can link—it made me think you knew something about Alvaro. That’s why I met you.” She slammed the door and walked back to her car.
* * *
Back in Seattle, in the middle of the night, Olivia startled awake in Brian’s bed. For several moments she didn’t know where she was, and she was frightened. A chat alert spun in the dark like a mystic coin, each twirl in sync with the trill of the alert. She reached out and finger-flicked the projection. It stopped spinning and plumped into a bubble containing a blurry face. No, it wasn’t the face that was blurry. With the heels of her hands, Olivia tried to grind the sleep out of her eyes.
“When do we leave?” the face in the bubble said.
“What?” Olivia blinked, and Dee’s features resolved. “Dee.”
“Yeah.”
A vivid bruise discolored Dee’s jaw.
Olivia winced. “What happened to you?”
“The guy I put on the gate while I went to meet you, he was around yesterday when that boy delivered your message. He got suspicious when I drove away in the middle of the afternoon, so he ratted me out to Andrew. They got rough with me.” She touched her bruised jaw. “I didn’t tell them about you. The fucking coup was on this whole time, and I didn’t even know it.”
Thirty-One
Olivia almost started crying when Helen Fischer’s unscarred face appeared in the chat bubble projected from Olivia’s IsnGlas tablet. The last time she had talked to her London-based editor at The Beat, Helen had been sick, already in the aggressive early stages of variola infection. In the last images of Helen, preserved in a recorded message, the older woman’s face had presented a hideous battleground of smallpox lesions. By the time Olivia had read that message, Helen had probably been dead two days. Now she was back, restored to life, her blue eyes behind glasses as sharp and inquiring as ever, her ugly death a lost shade known only to Olivia.
“Livvie,” Helen said. “This is a surprise.”
Olivia wiped her eyes. “Hi, Helen. I need to go back to Syria.”
Helen pursed her lips. “You just left Syria.”
“I know.”
“What’s going on?”
“A story. And I need to do this fast.”
Helen removed her glasses and leaned forward, peering closely at Olivia’s image projected on the other side of the world.
“Are you all right?” Helen said.
“I’m fine.”
“May I be honest? You don’t look fine.”
Good old Helen. Abrupt, to the point. No different than she’d been every other time Olivia talked to her. Absurdly, Olivia had to hold back tears again. Once the barricades were down they were really down. She had to get it together and keep it that way.
“I’m okay, really.”
Helen put her glasses back on. “What do you need?”
“Border crossing and a safe, fast route into Aleppo. I know you have people in-country.”
“And you want me to arrange this.”
“Yes.”
“The civil war is over. You can arrange public transport, if nothing else. What am I missing?”
“I won’t be alone. And the person coming with me might not have a visa.”
Helen sat back in her office chair. “You want me to help you smuggle someone over the border? Livvie, what the hell is going on? Why can’t this unnamed person obtain a visa?”
“It would take weeks, with no guarantee sh
e’d get it, and we don’t have weeks. There are rumors of a bioweapon and a plan to smuggle it out of Aleppo. I told you about it before—before I decided to come home.”
Helen looked skeptical. Olivia knew from past experience that that was a bad sign.
“You said yourself while you were still in-country that you didn’t have anything to work on. You were pretty out of it when we talked.”
Olivia had called after Brian died, compelled to connect with someone. She knew people in Aleppo, of course. But Helen was conveniently far away and a kind of mother figure.
“A lead on the bioweapon has come up since I got home.”
“Okay. What do you have exactly?”
“I can’t tell you, not yet.”
“Then I’m going to say no,” Helen said.
“What? Come on.”
“There’s something off about this,” Helen said. “I don’t believe you’re all right. Livvie, that was a hard blow you took, your friend dying. When you called and told me you were finished with Syria, I believed you. That was, what, four days ago? Now this.”
Olivia took a moment, then: “I need to work. That’s what’s off, and that’s all that’s off. I’ve got a lead on the bioweapon story, and I need this woman because of who she knows in Aleppo. But if we have to wait for the endless processing of her visa, that lead might disappear. And trust me, none of us wants it to disappear. Helen, help me do my job. Please. Trust me.”
After almost a minute, Helen said, “I’m still going to say no. And I’m sorry, Livvie. I think you should stay home for now and recover until you can make a more rational decision.”
“I am rational.”
“Then I wish you’d tell me the truth. Because you’re not doing that. And that troubles me very much. It isn’t like you.”
“Thanks for the advice, but I’m going in.”
“I’m sorry. And I wish you wouldn’t.”
“I’m sorry, too.”
Olivia broke the connection. It wasn’t going to be easy. But she knew she could find another way.
She knew it because she had to.
* * *
The Karkamiş refugee camp, on the Turkish side of the border with Syria, looked like a carnival of nightmares. Hundreds of dingy white tents intermingled with shanty-like structures thrown together out of scrap wood and sheet metal. In the twilight, a constellation of cook fires burned red, like scattershot perforations between Earth and the Underworld. Barking dogs and the cries of children reached Olivia and Dee on the low hill overlooking the camp. So did an ugly smell, a ripe effluvium of rotting garbage, sewage, and burning meat.
“Welcome to the Disaster,” Olivia said.
“God,” Dee said.
“This camp isn’t even official,” Olivia said. “When the war ended, a lot of people returned to Syria, and they shut down the worst of the camps. Like this one. The remaining, official camps, like the one in Kilis, are a lot bigger and almost tolerable, with electricity, security, container dwellings, all kinds of amenities.”
“What’re container dwellings?”
“Shipping containers turned into apartments. They aren’t as bad as they sound.” Olivia removed her soft cap and mopped the sweat off her forehead. Before leaving the States she’d cut her hair boyishly short. Some kind of stupid leaving-the-past-behind gesture. Now she felt self-conscious about it.
“So what are all these people doing here?” Dee looked a little overwhelmed.
“The war stopped, but it’s not safe in Syria. Not by any stretch. The homes and businesses these people left during the bombing, a lot of them don’t exist anymore. It’s going to take years to rebuild a humanitarian infrastructure that can bring everyone home. In the meantime, believe it or not, a place like this is a better option. For some people. At least, that’s what they think.” She gestured at the camp, at the visible piece of the world Disaster. Olivia’s stomach was in knots. Had she always felt this way in the Disaster? She couldn’t remember.
Getting to Turkey had not been a problem. Olivia, of course, had come here many times, and her credentials were in order. Dee possessed a passport, and the e-visa was approved in a single day.
Syria was another matter.
The international coalition occupying the country was not strictly defined as an occupying force. Assad’s ruling party never fell during the long civil war. The Americans wanted Assad out—they had always wanted him out—yet he was still there, sick and wheelchair-bound but still the head of his government. Visas had to be obtained through the regime, and those wheels did not turn swiftly, and sometimes not at all.
But there was another way.
“Come on. We have to find a guy.” Olivia hitched up her backpack and hooked her thumbs under the straps. They walked down into the camp.
During his employment with the NGO Oregon Helps, Brian had spent a lot of time in refugee camps, some worse than this one. Olivia had seen worse, too. But she had maintained a semipermeable barrier between herself and the human suffering. She had gone to those camps to get a story, tap an interview subject, follow a trail, research background. She had stood outside the Disaster even as she navigated through it.
Until Brian.
People ignored Olivia and Dee, or merely glanced up as they passed: haggard faces, old and young, in firelight. But a dog started following at their heels as soon as they stepped between the first row of tents. The mongrel looked like it had missed a few meals, but it wasn’t the skinniest dog Olivia had ever seen. In Aleppo, she had once observed a dog—no more than a skeleton with a thin layer of mangy fur stretched over its bones—prowl through rubble, tracking the scent of crushed and buried human corpses. By comparison, this pooch was more like Buster and his piece of yellow rope back in Portland.
“Go home,” Olivia said. The dog ignored her.
“How do we find this guy?” Dee kept her voice low, as if it mattered.
“My contact said someone would find us, once we reached the camp.”
“Uh, seems we have a parade,” Dee said.
“What?”
Dee nodded over her right shoulder. Olivia turned. Now, besides the dog, six children followed them, a couple of girls and four boys. They hung back a respectable distance, except for a girl in a red shirt and rubber-tire sandals. She was almost as close as the dog. Surprisingly, she reached out and grabbed the dog’s tail.
“Bibi, la-a.”
“What’d she say?” Dee asked.
“She said ‘No.’ The dog’s name is Bibi, I guess. Bibi, no.”
Bibi stopped following the women, and the child let go. The dog chased around to nip at its own tail. Olivia bent forward, left hand propped on her thigh, and waved for the girl, who looked about nine years old, to come closer. She did, her fingers clutching Bibi’s neck fur, holding the dog against her hip.
“What’s your name?” Olivia asked in Arabic.
The girl stared at her.
“We’re looking for someone,” Olivia said. “Can you help?”
The girl shrugged.
“A man named Jameel Antar. Can you show me where he is?”
In Arabic, the girl said, “Yes. Follow me.”
Olivia stood up straight. “Really?”
Dee nudged her. “What’d the girl say?”
“She wants us to follow her.”
“Should we?”
“I don’t know. Yes.”
Dee looked around the camp like she was in an iffy inner-city neighborhood. “Where’s this kid’s parents?”
“She might not have any,” Olivia said.
“God, this place. You’re right, it’s a disaster.”
The child spoke up in a mixture of English and Arabic. “La, mach disaster. Baytayy.”
Olivia felt a stab of embarrassment. “I’m sorry,” she said to the girl.
“What’s going on?” Dee said. “What’d she say?”
“She said this is not a disaster, it’s her home.”
“Jesus. I’m
an idiot.”
The child walked past them with her dog. When Olivia and Dee didn’t move, the girl called back, “Attabie fatatan.”
Follow a girl.
They looked at each other and followed the girl.
She led them to a bearded man wearing jeans, a long-faded Lady Gaga tour shirt, and Adidas sneakers. He sat on a pillow under a makeshift lean-to made of tent fabric and wooden poles. A black cigarette jutted from the corner of his mouth. His eyes looked heavy, but when Olivia and Dee approached with the child, he stood with alacrity and greeted them.
“I am Jameel. Not my true name, of course.”
“Of course,” Olivia said. “We’re—”
Jameel held up his hand. “I know who you are. Did you bring the payment?”
“Yes.” Olivia started to reach for a zippered pocket on her pants.
Jameel waved his hand. “No, no. Not here. Sit down and have a drink.”
“When do we cross?” Olivia asked, unshouldering her backpack.
“One hour. You are later than you said you would be.”
Olivia and Dee sat on pillows under the lean-to. The tent fabric caught the pungent smoke rising from Jameel’s cigarette and hovered it over them in a thin, noxious cloud.
The little girl and her dog stood facing them, waiting.
“She requires payment,” Jameel said.
“How much?”
Jameel named a modest sum. Olivia produced a pair of coins and handed them to the child, who closed her grubby fist around them and ran away, the dog at her heels.
Jameel removed the cigarette from his lips and blew smoke. “I told the kids to watch for you.”
“And whoever found us got paid,” Dee said.
“They are all paid, but Akilah brought you to me, so she is paid a little more. Do you want smoke?” He held out a pack of Turkish cigarettes. On the front was the obligatory photo of the country’s president, a hard-looking man wearing sunglasses. Turkey’s version of Joe Camel.
Olivia shook her head. “No, thanks.” She looked across to a dilapidated shack made of scavenged plywood and plastic sheeting. A man and a woman stood talking in voices too soft to hear. The woman wore a yellow hijab. A little boy poked his head out of the shack, and the man playfully gave him a tap on his crown. “Boop!” the man said. The boy pulled his head back into the shelter, and the woman laughed, covering her lips with a pair of fingers, as if she couldn’t decide whether to stop laughing or blow a kiss.
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