“It’s not going to work,” she says again.
From where he lies on the floor, Derek says, “It’s going to work. Take a leap of faith.”
The thumb drive is hot in her hand. Hemingway licks her knuckles as if encouraging her.
“Believe,” Derek says, choking on his own blood. “Just believe.”
She guides the thumb drive toward the USB port and closes her eyes and takes a steadying breath and clicks it into place.
❖
Juniper has fifty pounds on Cloven, but he shrinks before him like a child who fears his father’s fist. He isn’t sure how many rounds remain in his pistols, and he never gets the chance to find out. When he raises his arms, Cloven strikes them down with enough force to send the guns clattering away. A fist bruises Juniper’s stomach. An elbow jars his throat. A knee batters his face. Fingers twist his hair. Teeth gnash his ear. He is too big to be thrown, but his body is somehow soaring through the air, striking the pavement, rolling several yards until he comes to a stop.
He keeps trying to fight back, and Cloven keeps striking him down. He has to hope Lela and Derek stand some chance inside the data center, but right now they feel far away. Portland feels far away. The life he has built there feels far away. The only thing that feels near is water. It puddles around his feet, splashes past his knees, his waist, his chest, siphoning into his open mouth and gurgling his screams. He tries to kick his way up, but two bony hands hold him down. Above the rippling surface of the water, a face stares down at him. Grinning. Red-eyed. Bubbles escape Juniper’s mouth until there is no air left in him. And the water comes flooding in to fill every chamber of him with thick green algae-stinking water. A fish pecks at his eye and a water beetle claws its way into his nose and a frog slides down his throat. He was supposed to die. He is going to die. He is dying.
And then somehow he is not. He is curled in a fetal position in the middle of the street. Gulping air. Shuddering with a chill. As though the city walling him in is a reservoir suddenly emptied.
He hears a screaming that seems to come from many men, but its only source is Cloven. His ponytail has come undone. Strands of long inky hair fall across his face. He staggers back, clawing at the virtual reality goggles. Instead of red, they now glow white. The illumination soon seeps from his nose and mouth and ears, the tips of his fingers, cracking through his skin, consuming him, making his body, and then the street, and then the city indistinguishable from light itself.
Epilogue
THE LINE ISN’T LONG at Customs. No one wants to come to this country. Especially now. It isn’t safe. Always on the news for another kidnapping, another beheading, another suicide bombing. She flew from New York to Berlin to Dubai to here, and on the last leg wore a hijab that has soured with her breath.
The floor is made of broken tiles and the walls are dirt-colored. A light fuzzes on and off. Four soldiers with assault rifles stand nearby, watching the line with stony expressions. A stand-up fan with a rusty blade blows nearby, but makes no difference, the air hot and dry, baking her throat. When it is her turn, the agent waves her forward. He has a thick black mustache and wears a blue collared shirt with a black tie. Sweat rolls down his forehead, and he dabs at it with a handkerchief. When he sees her passport, he says, “Let me guess. Aid worker? Or reporter?”
“I’m a journalist,” she says, and shares the authenticating letter from her editor at Harper’s.
He takes it, gives it a cursory read, and then begins to fold it into smaller and smaller squares. “You’re here to tell the world all about our troubles.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“We are not entertainment.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“Yet you’re here to write your little stories.”
“Maybe my little stories can make a difference,” she says. “Maybe I can help.”
And now he has folded the letter so many times that it can be bent no further, a tight white square pinched between his fingers. His tosses it to her and she pockets it quickly.
“What about the dog?”
She looks down at Hemingway, who wears a blue vest with a fluorescent yellow border. “He’s a service animal. I have epilepsy.” She pulls out another paper, but he waves it away and stamps her passport and makes a note on her Customs card. His eyes are already on the next person in line when he says, “I would take care when you’re here, Ms. Falcon.”
And then the man behind her—a big man with a jutting forehead, dressed in preacher blacks—steps forward. And the Customs agent says, “Let me guess: a missionary? Here to save the heathens of this backward country? How wonderful.”
Lela doesn’t turn to look, but she listens to his familiar baritone and smiles beneath her hijab when Juniper says, “I’m just here to shine a little light on the dark.”
❖
The magazine set her up with a trusted fixer—a man named Abed who wears a prayer cap and an overlong shirt embroidered at the breast. He meets her in baggage claim. He takes her suitcase and smiles at her dog. As they walk outside—into the furnace-blasted air—he tells her how much he admired her work in The New Yorker, Mother Jones, the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, especially “The Red Zone,” the Ellie Award–winning, 10,000-word feature she wrote about what happened in Portland. “You are fearless,” he says, and she says, “Hardly.”
“And yet here you are.” He holds out his arms as if to acknowledge the airport, the city, the country as a whole. A few men with wiry beards pause to look at them.
She readjusts her hijab and lowers her voice. “That doesn’t mean I’m not afraid.”
Sometimes it all feels like a dream, but that’s true of everything in life. Every moment—stored in the unreliable hard-wiring of your mind—is suspect, a foggy replication, a prejudiced illusion. She rereads her article every now and then just to prove to herself it happened. She trusts in the writing. That it won’t shape-shift on her like everything else in this impermanent, virtual world. And that she might make some incendiary difference with it.
Juniper walks by then, but she doesn’t acknowledge him except with a stare. He carries a heavy duffel to a taxi waiting in the roundabout. It’s an old Subaru with white doors and a yellow hood and trunk, the paint peeled off in long scratches. When he tells the driver the name of his hotel and settles his body into the rear seat, the shocks give a squeak and the taxi lowers noticeably with his weight.
She watches the taxi pull into the dusty stream of traffic before telling Abed, “Let’s go.”
❖
She’s staying a few blocks away from the U.S. Embassy—in a safe house with seven other reporters and three aid workers. One of them—an Irish writer working for the Guardian—pours hot water over tea leaves in the kitchen. The others she can hear snoring or typing or listening to music in their rooms. “What story are you here for?” the Irish reporter asks, and she says, “You’ll hear about it soon enough.”
“Ah, come on. Just tell me.” He’s smiling but she can sense the twitchy eagerness behind it. Journalists aren’t colleagues but starved dogs chasing the same bone.
“I’d tell you,” she says, “but then I’d have to kill you.”
He laughs, not knowing she means it.
Abed will pick her up tomorrow for the first of her interviews. In the meantime she needs to prep and get some sleep and reset her clock.
Her room is the size of a closet. The desk and the single mattress take up so much of the floor that she can’t lay her suitcase down. Hemingway whines before entering and then turns three circles on the bed before settling into the nest of blankets. She’s going to join him soon, but first she plugs the sim card into her phone and powers it up.
While she waits for the screen to brighten, she hears the call to prayer as it purls and echoes through the city. It’s a sound she feels inside and outside her, like a waterfall’s shushing boom or a wolf’s plaintive howl. She goes to the window and pulls aside the blackout curtain
to look out at the city, at the streets crammed with motorcycles and bicycles and cars, at the stacks of mud-colored buildings. Across the way, she watches a man lay down his Kalashnikov rifle and unroll a prayer mat. He is guarding a French restaurant whose windows are barricaded with piles of sandbags.
Her phone startles her with a chime. She lets the curtain fall back into place and ignores the text messages and voicemails and inbox alerts. Instead she brings the phone to her mouth and says, “I missed you, Hannah.”
“Don’t get all gross and sentimental,” the voice says. “I’m right here.”
❖
The next morning Abed takes her around the city. She and Hemingway sit in the backseat of his Nissan. The windshield is so dust-stained and wind-scoured that she can barely see out of it. This makes her feel safer, shielded. They pass an open-topped Jeep filled with men whose arms bristle with rifles, and then they get stopped at a checkpoint by soldiers who stare at her while talking to Abed in their rough, musical voices.
She has three interviews set up that day. The first is at a women’s shelter. A table is pulled aside and a rug lifted off the floor and a trapdoor hoisted to allow her down the stairs, into a hidden basement full of women who have been raped, women who have run away from their marriages, all of them with husbands or brothers or even fathers who have threatened to kill them for their offenses. The women—some only teenagers—coo over Hemingway, who falls onto his back and lolls his tongue and presents his belly for them to rub. Abed translates for her as she scratches notes in her Moleskine and holds out her phone to capture their voices. “I don’t think you hit record,” Abed says, and she says, “It’s fine. Don’t worry.”
Their next stop is a house owned by a white-bearded man in a brown vest who arranges safe passage from the country for these women. He offers Lela a steaming cup of chai and a cold chickpea salad. While they sit in the living room—with the television on but muted—the man falls asleep twice while talking to her. Each time he spills his tea, which rouses him and he begins speaking again as though without interruption. He refuses a photo, but she can feel the slight shudder of the phone as it secures several images of him and the room—not to publish but merely for recollection and editorial verification.
And then it is time for her third and final interview of the day. This takes place at the edge of the city, past the checkpoints, in a walled-in compound with a square-shaped two-story concrete building inside it. A guard with a beard running halfway down his chest stands at the gate. They climb out of the Nissan to speak with him.
The sun is sinking and the air has taken on a hazy, purplish tincture. While Abed and the guard speak, she surveys the surrounding area. Half a block away there is a market with a few tables out front. Juniper sits there, drinking a chai and pretending to read a newspaper.
Abed says, “Lela? They want to know why you have the dog.”
She returns her attention to them. “Just say I have diabetes.”
He does and the guard spits and says to her directly in broken English, “What does dog and diabetes mean? Not sense.”
She tries to look as meek as possible. “He’s a service dog. He helps me.”
Hemingway sniffs the tire of the Nissan and raises his leg to piss on it, and the doofy look on his face seems to relieve the guard. He digs through her satchel, tossing everything onto the ground for her to gather. When he pulls out a bottle of water, he uncaps it, sniffs it, spits in it, and hands it back to her. Then he pats her down, and when he does, his hands linger in the wrong places. He says something and laughs harshly, and Abed does not translate. He only says, “Be safe. I’ll wait here.”
The guard busies himself with his phone, tapping the screen to unlatch the gate. While he is distracted, she leans in to Abed and says, “You need to leave. Okay? Right now.”
Abed has a look of panic on his face. “But—”
She hands him an envelope wadded with cash and puts a finger to her lips. “Trust me. Go.”
The guard waves for her to follow, and she notices then the insignia printed on his back. That of a red right hand.
She enters the compound, and the gate clangs into place behind her. The system beeps and the lock sleeves into place. Off in the distance, from atop a minaret, she hears—again—the muezzin singing the call to prayer. She pauses so that the guard might drop to his knees and bow toward the east. But he doesn’t. He keeps going. He’s deaf to prayer.
The courtyard is obscenely green compared to the rest of the dun-colored city. A lush lawn. A fountain. Pomegranate trees. Benches set along white gravel trails. In the middle of it all is a severed head on a pike. She spots one, two, three more guards stationed around the compound. All of them watching her. All of them carrying the mark of the red right hand. Crows circle high above them, like early slivers of night searching for a place in the sky.
The front door is also secured by an auto-lock system. The guard taps his phone and pushes open the door, and she steps into the dimly lit foyer. She smells tobacco and cooked lamb. On the first floor, she spots a kitchen and a living room packed with mismatched furniture and another room in which at least twenty men work busily at computer terminals. From the wall oozes a giant bloody rendering of the hand. The staircase is barricaded with gated doorways, one on each landing, each boxed with a keypad and wired with an alarm.
On the landing, on her way up to the second floor, she peeks through a doorway. A man sits in a dark room. A man she at first believes to be sleeping upright, his head nodded to the side. He is smiling at whatever dream possesses him. But she realizes he only appears to be smiling because he has no lips. He is tied to the chair and the skin has been flayed from his face and tossed on the floor. In between their footsteps, she can hear the flies buzzing.
On the third floor, the guard escorts her down a hallway and knocks gently on a door and waits for the voice that beckons them inside. At a desk sits a man in desert cammies. A former Marine who one day, without warning, walked away from his unit and over the past two years became the reigning warlord of the insurgency. His name used to be John Slater but now he goes by Wisam. His neck and face appear slim, but his belly bulges so hugely that the bottom three buttons of his shirt are undone, as though something gestates within him. He is balding but he keeps his hair long. The wooden desk is carved with ciphers that she distantly recognizes. The floor and walls and ceiling are busy with painted versions of the same. The room is otherwise crowded with filing cabinets atop which rest several blade servers. In the corner sits a minibar festooned with cut-glass tumblers and bottles of single malt. Beside it is a dead body, bloated with rot. Hemingway perks his ears and whines.
Wisam looks at her for a long minute. “What’s with the dog?”
“He’s a service animal.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He helps me. I have asthma.”
Wisam gives up on English to ask a question of the guard and then addresses her once more, “He said you said you have diabetes.”
She shrugs. “Translation issues.”
Again he and the guard speak—their eyes on her—and when they finish, her phone chirps to life and Hannah’s voice translates their conversation: “She is a lying whore. What part of her should I cut off first?” and “Maybe we should keep her? She might be an interesting toy as well as a tool.”
The men’s faces flatten. A fly lands on her hand and she shakes it off. The guard starts toward her with his rifle, butt raised, ready to strike—but Wisam calls him off. “Leave us,” he says with a soft chuckle.
The guard protests, but Wisam cuts him off. “You think I can’t protect myself from a girl?” He waves him away with a flap of his hand. “Go, go.” Then he motions to a chair across the desk from him.
She sits and Hemingway settles in beside her. She breathes through her mouth to avoid the smell of rot. His lamp is poled with stacked vertebrae, and his clock is a skull with a timepiece housed in an empty socket.
“Didn’t anyone tell you this was a bad idea?” Wisam says, and combs back the long strands of hair from his forehead. “Meeting with me?”
“No one believes you exist. They say you’re a myth. Like the boogeyman.”
“Yet here I am.” One of his eyes is brightly bloodshot. “You can take it off. The hijab.”
She doesn’t hesitate, pulling it off, bunching it into her satchel. With her fingers she tidies her hair, now short, cut just below her ears. She still hasn’t gotten used to the feeling of air on the back of her neck.
The Dark Net Page 27