Sy said, “Your mate, Chopper, prefers to travel alone.”
Farley then recognized the four as Chopper’s entourage. For an instant he wondered if they had taken Chopper outside of camp, killed him, and returned. Then a smile carved itself between his mustache and beard.
Chopper. How he loved Chopper. He said, “Yeah, you got it right, Sy; my buddy Chopper does like to travel alone.”
“Well, then,” Sy said, “I shouldn’t expect to see him alive again—between the jihadists, thugs, and lions, I rather think he has little chance.”
“Actually,” Farley said, “the jihadists and criminals are the ones in trouble—but he won’t hurt the lions.”
Gloria moved into a cheap Santa Monica motel so she could remodel what had been a souvenir shop into a VirtExReality Arcade.
Accessible from three freeway off-ramps, one block from the beach, and visible from the Santa Monica pier, the arcade shared a strip mall with a dozen boutiques and restaurants and a cinema multiplex—ideal SoCal turf. The Beautiful People populated the sidewalk, some of them fighting the battle against time with large surgical budgets. There were surfers, skaters, and occasionally a movie star.
She got e-mail from Farley less than once a week now, and it made her realize how much she missed him and worried about him. It bothered her that she worried more about Farley than about her father. To get them home, she had to get the documentary out. Someday she’d have her own contacts, but right now she needed help. She sighed and, trying not to think of her father and Farley as kidnapped and the documentary as their ransom, took her phone from her purse and made the call.
“Hollywood!” Bupin said. “You must make me VR of Hollywood lifestyle after you pay ransom for your executives and father.”
“Plan A is on track; the software for Plan B, the superhero apps, is written and mostly debugged; and I’ve got the details for Plan C if we need them. I’ve done everything you’ve asked.”
“Yes, you have rubbed my lamp and I am ready to grant you one wish.”
“This documentary has to be good. Really good. Earth-shatteringly good.”
“Because you have no room for error,” Bupin said. “Somali pirates have excellent reputation for this one thing. You pay ransom, they release hostages.”
“Bupin, they aren’t that kind of pirate, okay?”
“Think what you will. Documentary must generate hive-worth of buzz. Leverage.”
“Can you please help me get the best possible documentary producer and editor? Farley has recorded dozens of nature videos, but—”
“I will call my friend George Lucas, and then my admin will talk to his admin and they will connect you to finest documentary people on earth. Expect a call. Like planets in gourmet horoscope, things must align.”
Then, in smooth, unclipped English, with no twisted clichés, Bupin said, “Do you understand the danger that those three men face?”
“They aren’t pirates. Farley and—”
“Break out of your fantasy. You need to have contingency plans. Since you haven’t asked, let me just tell you: if you do ask, I will pay the ransom to liberate your people. Do you understand?”
“Farley insists on paying this stupid debt!” Gloria realized that she’d stood. Her hands shook. She wanted Bupin to return to his role as a VC clown.
And he did: “Very good, then, we will hold your house of cards together.”
She had to focus.
The key was timing. The grand opening date would determine the promotion schedule. It would take more than a month for even a genius to produce a documentary from raw footage. The longer it took, the longer Farley and Tahir had to stay in Somalia. She began planning how to make the documentary go viral so it would provide a ton of free publicity.
She set the date for the VirtExReality Arcade Grand Opening: fifteen weeks from that day. She sent e-mail to Farley that gave him a deadline for returning footage.
Bupin’s metaphor of a house of cards seemed accurate. Business ventures like this one usually are, but this time the stakes were greater than profit and loss.
Ringo was on a debugging rampage. The virtual reality software library was huge, not even counting the experiential database inputs. The whiteboard in the family room was covered with the most brilliant flowchart he’d ever created.
With his first cup of morning caffeinate in hand, Ringo walked from the kitchen to the family room and glanced out the picture window. The sun was just about to peek over the hills and illuminate the foggy coast. At first he didn’t think anything of it when he saw a familiar figure sitting out on the bluff smoking a cigarette. Then he spilled his coffee.
He started for the door but thought better of it. Chopper didn’t like to be interrupted. Ringo stared for a while, amazed. How could anyone be that cool?
He took his phone out of his pocket and called Gloria. “He’s sitting on the bluff smoking a barch.”
She said, “Ask him what happened.”
“No way. I can be just as cool as Chopper.”
“No, you can’t,” Gloria said. She sighed. “Okay, Ringo, have him call me once he’s settled in.”
Ringo hung up and waited. When Chopper stood and started walking up to the house, Ringo took a seat on the couch, grabbed a comic, and tried to act nonchalant. Then he laughed at himself. He’d never felt so chalant in his life.
Chopper finished his trek around the planet where it had started, staring at the ocean with the sun rising behind him and the smoke of a Marlboro in his lungs. It was good to be home. The shoulder ached and he was tired of having it immobilized, but he had been through enough injuries in his life to know that a little pain couldn’t hurt him.
With the sun working its way through the morning fog, Chopper went inside. The routine feeling of climbing the bluff, opening the sliding glass door, and walking into that dimly lit family room soothed the rough edges of a fading migraine.
Ringo was sitting on the couch drinking coffee and reading a comic book. Chopper said, “Hey,” and passed through to the stairs in search of a warm shower.
“Chopper!” Ringo said.
Chopper stopped and said, “How’s the data look?”
“What the—” Ringo said. “Tell me what happened. How did you get here? Last I heard you were…”
“How does the data look?”
Ringo fired off another flurry of questions, ending with: “Chopper, is Farley okay?”
That question jarred a chunk of empathy loose in Chopper. He looked in Ringo’s eyes and imagined how hollow the world would be without that special bond he felt with Farley. Ringo didn’t have anyone like that.
“Ringo, get this straight. Farley is fine. And if you have to know, after the doctor set my shoulder, four men were assigned to guide me to a hospital in Kenya. You know that I travel alone. The land between Somalia and Nairobi is desertlike, far more forgiving than the Mojave, and populated with majestic animals and rotten humans. It made for a wonderful trip. After Farley and I equipped that magnificent leviathan, a long, silent walk was like dessert after a fine meal.”
“But how did you get here?”
Chopper’s patience was running thin. He preferred people who exercised more silence and less stupidity. “I carry an American Express Card. They have offices that you call on the telephone. They ask special questions that only you can answer. Having identified you, they check a database. They extended my credit limit. Then they provided a number. That magic number enabled me to obtain a thing called an airplane ticket. An airplane ticket allows one to travel great distances in short periods of—”
“What about your shoulder?”
“I’m getting it fixed tomorrow.”
“Surgery?”
“Yes, surgery is how doctors fix things—in this case, orthopedic surgery.”
Ringo shook his head. Chopper looked away, out the window over the sea.
“Wow. Chopper. Dude.”
“Seriously, Ringo, it wasn’t a big deal—much l
ike most of the trips I take to get away, to get some sleep. It was wonderful.”
“Even with the shoulder?”
“Can we please get to work? How does the data look? What have you got?”
Ringo set his mug on the coffee table with a thud, took a breath, and said, “Actually, it looks really good. Check it out—I’ve outdone myself!”
“How much have you processed?”
“Everything we’ve received—it’s pretty much automatic.”
Ringo described his sonar-processing software. Obviously, he’d been dying to tell someone. He wouldn’t shut up.
Then Chopper told Ringo the story of how he and Farley had equipped the greatest animal on earth. He concluded with “How close are you to finishing the Moby-Dick app?”
“Moby just left the pod. He’s made a few dives but hasn’t done anything interesting. The data’s okay, but hopefully he’ll make a deep dive soon. Even if it’s not genuine colossal squid data, I still need the terrain. Come on, I’ll show you my Daredevil software.”
The word Daredevil shot a burst of light through Chopper’s head. Ringo and his obsession with superheroes could combine with the venture capitalists’ greed and destroy everything. Chopper had to keep Ringo focused.
Ringo said, “It is amazing how something that big can move fast enough to catch a fish—but other than some whale porn, we don’t have the data set we need. He’s eaten a few cephalopods, but I need something at least a meter long for the interpolation code to simulate a colossal squid.”
“Whale porn?”
“Oh, yeah, Moby screwed every cow in that pod.”
In the lab, Ringo handed Chopper a VR helmet. Chopper put it on and his field of vision turned a light grayish green.
Then Ringo clicked the mouse and Chopper felt a vague sense of motion, diving straight down. But it wasn’t a dive into darkness. Images of fish, bits of flotsam, seaweed, and other whales far in the distance zipped by. Then he “saw” a large fish to his right. In seconds, seamlessly, his brain had correlated the Doppler color scheme to the movement of objects—red trails when something was receding, blue when it was closing in. In a pinkish splash, a fish bolted. From deep in the core of his body, the muscles of his chest and thighs, Chopper responded. Flickers of light bounced from the turbulence of the water as he turned and—bam—ate.
In that very instant, though, Chopper was blasted back into his own senses by an immediate pain in his broken shoulder.
“Whoa!” Ringo yelled. He helped Chopper remove the helmet.
As he’d attacked the fish, Chopper knocked his chair over and bumped into the desk.
“Wait,” Chopper said. “Run that on a monitor.”
Ringo sat in the chair next to him, pointed a remote at the big flat screen, and clicked the mouse a few times. The video replayed.
“Slow it down,” Chopper said. “Right there! Stop.”
Ringo did so and said, “Yeah, I see it.” He drew a boundary around the shadow of an object, clicked the mouse, and zoomed in on a pile of cylinders on the ocean floor. “This thing is half a mile away. The resolution of sperm whale sonar is insane—look how clear it is. God, I’m good.”
“Those are barrels,” Chopper said. “Can you tune it so we can see if they’re labeled?”
“No, the image is built by reconstructing echoes from the whale’s sonar transmissions. We can only distinguish distance, shape, hardness, and motion. There’s no way to visualize something like a label or photograph.”
Chopper stood. The ball peen hammer pummeled away, but he barely noticed. “Motherfuckers. It’s toxic waste. What else could it be?”
Farley opened the e-mail from Ringo just before climbing into his hammock. Ringo wrote: “He was sitting on the bluff smoking a barch with his shoulder wrapped in a red bandana.”
Fucking Chopper, badass almighty!
But the message got more interesting. The precise location of toxic waste dumped on the coast? His initial anger converted to intrigue. Video of a toxic waste site could give the documentary the punch it needed. Finally, a reason to believe it could go viral and get him out of there.
This time, after two weeks in Sy’s village, he knew enough to go through the same channels as anyone else who needed Sayyid Hassan’s help. He and Tahir stood in line for fifteen minutes. Ahead of them were two men who claimed the same wife, a boy who had been caught stealing food and the guard accused of beating him, and a farmer who wanted to propose a new crop.
Guards in sunglasses stood on each side of Sy, their AK-47s hanging from shoulder straps. One appeared to be nodding off.
Farley asked, “Did you know that drums of toxic waste have been dumped off your coast?”
Sy said, “It’s common knowledge.”
“I know exactly where it is.”
Sy leaned back in his chair and said, “That is not common knowledge.”
“We can see everything the whale sees, hear everything the whale hears.” Farley rushed his words. “There are barrels off the coast, and if we can raise a few, I can identify the waste and we can trace it back to whoever dumped it.”
“European garbage scows,” Sy said. “Did you notice the boy with whom I just spoke? Did you see the shape of his left arm? Did you notice that he had just one eye? He was born near a creek that…Ah, I understand. This is the story you will tell.”
The afternoon following Farley’s meeting with Sayyid, a dozen men assembled outside Farley’s converted classroom. Most spoke heavily accented English. The water where they would dive was a good thirty meters deep—a real challenge without diving equipment.
They practiced in the water immediately east of camp. Farley started with a course on safe diving practices and followed that with knot-tying drills. Tahir helped get him through the language barrier. He showed them how to dive to the seafloor by hanging on to a rope attached to a two-hundred-pound rock as it fell through the water. This way, they could get to the bottom, work as long as they could hold their breath, and then use their natural buoyancy to surface.
To plan the dive, Farley used a still image that Ringo had sent showing barrels stretching for a hundred meters, piled one upon the other. After ten days of practice, he decided the men were ready. Two of the younger ones turned out to be amazing swimmers who could hold their breath for almost three minutes.
They took a skiff, along with Sy and a few of his sailors, to the dump site, well north of camp and about a quarter mile offshore. Two of the sailors scanned the shoreline.
Tahir helped Farley strap on a video camera. The whole toxic waste recovery would be recorded for the documentary. Farley went in first and pulled a line down to measure the depth of the barrels. The length of the rope attached to the rock used for pulling the divers to the seafloor was adjusted so that it would stop at least a few meters above the barrels.
The divers went down in stages and worked a line around one barrel. Farley emphasized where the rope should be tied to encompass the barrel’s center of mass. Farley explained that if the barrel were to fall and crack, or if the lid were pulled off as the barrel was raised, the toxins could destroy what was left of their ocean-born food source. Farley went down himself to check, and when he was convinced the rope was secure, he had everyone get back in the boat. He stayed in the water to help guide the barrel to the surface as they pulled it up.
To prevent the barrel from colliding with the hull of the skiff, Farley wedged himself in between. With his back against the fiberglass and his hands and feet against the barrel, he examined it for signs of damage and leaks. He rotated it around. It looked solid and well sealed.
There was a label. Most of it had dissolved, but the remaining fragment had a few words written in French, Terre Mer Gestion SA, and a symbol. The symbol was a triangle encompassing a circle. The circle was separated into seven pieces: a smaller circle at its center plus six evenly spaced wedges alternating black and white: the international symbol for radioactive hazard.
To get the foota
ge necessary for a good documentary, Farley knew he had to record all aspects of Sy’s camp: panoramic geographic scenes, wide-angle views of activity in the village, and intimate portrayals of daily life. Getting the right footage required perseverance. He and Tahir spent hours every day walking around the village with video and audio sensors attached to themselves. Once they became a common sight, the villagers ignored them and they started acquiring genuine, spontaneous scenes.
They started each day by documenting the milieu, touring from inside the village out to its periphery. The village centered on the primary well. Vegetable gardens, bisected by paths, surrounded the well and extended to the old school building. The well water ran clear year-round and was sufficient to provide for the population as well as maintain the crops. The scenes of gardens, ramshackle huts, and the old school building, if well edited, could lend an effect of lush poverty.
On the coast, Sy’s dozen-boat latter-day pirate fleet was pulled up on the beach. The plains to the west consisted of dry grass and low shrubs. A fifty-meter clear zone was maintained beyond the chain-link fence that enclosed the central living area. The clear zone continued around the south edge of camp and to the coast.
To the north, a low mountain ridge formed a natural barrier and a place for guards to patrol with the other boundaries in sight. Several creeks converged below the ridge, funneling toward the ocean in a tiny delta. Covering just ten acres, this was the most fertile land for miles. Except for the few months of monsoon season, the creeks trickled just enough water to grow crops on one side and feed livestock on the other.
Sayyid Hassan was proud of his kingdom. But there was an underside to the culture Sy maintained. The fifty-meter clear zones were there for a reason. The caves in the northern ridge were off-limits to everyone but those who guarded them, also for a reason.
Tahir pointed toward the area with a quick jab of his elbow. “That is a prison.”
Farley shielded the sun with a hand, trying to make out its features.
The Sensory Deception Page 19