Contraband

by George Foy

  This was Bokon Taylay.

  ‘Armored circuits to Fort Meade,’ Brodin spoke in a rhythm, almost a little song to the snicky plastic percussion of his keyboard. ‘—encryption. Scramble. Control. Grid, phase-in? OK, OK.’

  A web of patterns appeared on the three screens. The patterns shifted, flowed, rearranging themselves like colored glass in a kaleidoscope. The lines were green and black, as on the ECM’s scan, but much finer and denser than the ECM showed. Most of the servers were unlabeled.

  Wildnet.

  Overhead, the lights and shine of the Web bubbled like a heavy cover of altocirrus with every molecule of vapor lit from inside.

  Brodin joysticked forward, flying under, over, between the Wildnet lines, which grew bigger, flicked behind, like a chopper evading power cables.

  ‘Eighteen-point-forty-six activity,’ Brodin muttered. ‘Way below average obviously, but within the margin for error.’ He hit another series of keys and squares of text appeared on the right-hand screen. His head turned as he scanned the boxes. ‘Activity on the 77 Pell Street SAP. No traffic associated with you. But that’s the whole problem with you people, no? The indies. The little fellows. You have networks we don’t know.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ the pilot asked, ingenuously, thinking that if he could distract the two men he might just have time to reach for the shiv in his workboot.

  ‘Don’t tell him,’ the TransCom man said quickly, ‘it’s Level Four classified.’

  ‘What difference does it make?’ Brodin replied.

  ‘Si,’ the Cayman agreed. ‘Choo nail his ass anyway.’ He chuckled, looking at Brodin for approval, but Brodin said nothing, and the Cayman licked his lips and shut up.

  Ela shifted the pistol in her hands. She had both fists around the butt, FBI-style. She pointed it delicately at the pilot, without looking at his face. But he could look at hers, and wonder why it was so taut and pale, yet basically the same as always; wonder, if the sea rose in protest when the wind switched directions on it, if the air bubbled crazily when the land changed temperature, how the cyclone of human treachery could have no more outward manifestation than this.

  ‘Here—’ Brodin hit a few more keys. On the two left-hand screens, the point-of-view surged upward, following the wild lines where they straggled from secure access providers toward the jewel-filled clouds above; and then, just like an aircraft breaking cloud cover, Brodin had entered the overarching Web, moving faster by a factor of twenty, of a hundred, than the pilot had ever navigated before. Following the trail of a Wildnet data link, lights burbling around them exactly the way the phosphorescence had streaked past the pilot’s eye when he was diving in the blood-warm waters of the lagoon at Pulau Karang.

  Brodin pulled back on the joystick. Their speed slowed. Now a lozenge of dark neon flashed, on and off, in the screens’ corner. ‘CONTROL’, it read, in deep pink letters.

  The screens went dark. Suddenly, instead of the opalescent sheen of the Web, a half-dozen black sine curves bent back across all three terminals, undulating like snakes.

  ‘OK,’ Brodin continued. His voice was pleased, as if he’d just pulled a rabbit from a top hat. ‘Here is the harmonic. Music, you see, a symphony of information, made up of billions of notes.’

  ‘Why are you telling him this, Brodin?’ Ela asked him, ‘if it’s so secret? What do you mean, it doesn’t matter?’

  The fish-faced man smiled.

  ‘Because I think we owe him an explanation, after this chase. It is traditional, in English thrillers, no? But we own the subtext, so he cannot by some, ah, dexterous feat of heroism, turn the tables on us, the way they do in thrillers. The subtext is where control lies; that’s what Lacan really meant.’

  ‘The machine-pistols is where control lies,’ the bearded man growled, patting his. Brodin ignored him.

  ‘Also,’ he continued, ‘perhaps he can help us better, if he understands, when he goes to Oakdale.’

  Ela looked blank.

  ‘That is the other reason,’ Brodin explained. ‘Oakdale. The interrogation center. We need to get all the information on your father out of him, my dear. And we can’t exactly let him loose after that, now can we?’

  ‘But you’ll get the information from me!’

  ‘My dear girl,’ Brodin said, ‘you don’t really think your father told you everything?’

  He noticed the expression on the pilot’s face. ‘Don’t look so sick, Mr Marak,’ he added. ‘It is the historical role of women, to switch sides. Helen of Troy, and so forth. Men fight for one side or another, yes? Perhaps it doesn’t matter which. The balance is the point. It is women who keep the balance from getting too uneven.’

  He looked at Ela with eyes that were interested, and not unsympathetic.

  ‘He goes to interrogation tonight.’

  ‘After that, we get him,’ the bearded man muttered.

  ‘TransCom were extremely upset with Mr Marak,’ Brodin continued. Then, going on as if he’d never been interrupted, he said, ‘The notes to this symphony are what I call Fons. They are information broken down into the tiniest possible bits – tone, meaning, context, and so forth. English has an average of 4.7 bits of information per letter; each bit has approximately seven Fons. Then the Fons are broken down further, into Negons – Fons which have command value, as in imperatives, negations, orders – and Infons, which include all unweighted communications. Pure information, in the truest sense.

  ‘You see—’ Brodin tapped out another sequence. The sine curves split in two and multiplied, the data curves, the black snakes of information he was talking about dancing crazily, brightly on the three screens ‘—an organization that grows over a certain size always hits a singularity where the number of Negons in a given piece of communication suddenly jumps much higher than the Infons. That is because the organization, at this scale, all at once becomes much more occupied with regulating itself; it also spends less time processing information to and from its environment. Typically this threshold occurs at the level of 66.78 percent. Negons, that is.

  ‘Now this jump in Negons is like a fingerprint. If you process it according to my algorithms, it not only identifies what type of organization has generated this piece of communication, but it identifies the organization itself. That is the beauty of negative information, you see. You can define yourself as easily by what you are not, as by what you are. And you can only do this with Negons; Infons are too volatile.’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe,’ the pilot muttered, ‘where I heard this shit before.’

  ‘Shannon had an inkling,’ Brodin replied seriously, still snicking at his keyboard. ‘Zatt and Chomsky too; but they never perfected the algorithms.’

  The bits of light on the screens began to sort themselves out, clustering around seven or eight points in different corners.

  ‘Through NSA, we have access to all telephone, radio, cable, and video-broadcast communications in this hemisphere,’ Brodin continued. ‘Now, watch’ (he hit a button), ‘we ask the program to search for Negons that define a smuggling organization – Negons typical of concealment, travel, cargo, timetables, weight, foreign names, radio frequencies, chart data – and Bingo!’ He hit another key, like Horowitz, flipping his wrist high in the air, gray locks flying. ‘We get a TA, a traffic analysis, of all such organizations, by urgency, by depth, by sector.’

  The bits of light fled their congregation points. They straightened, trembling, into several dozen broad lines.

  More tapping on the keyboard.

  ‘Then we correlate this with intelligence. Known names, locations, etcetera, and – Bingo again!’

  The wrists flew.

  ‘It’s probabilities, really,’ he said. ‘Once we ID the group, and the urgency level, we fall back on human data. Like, when you ran the bodies from the Double Headed Shot Cays, that was a DeLisi contact. Once we knew that, once we sussed it would happen within two days, we staked out the Cays because they’d used them before.’

 
The lines on the screens flailed, whipped around like cobras being annoyed with a stick. Suddenly, they fused and became one long, regular sine curve with peaks and valleys very close together. Paragraphs of text appeared on one of the screens above the curve.

  ‘Here we ID one particular organization,’ Brodin said. ‘The peaks and troughs are very close, indicating there will be action soon, I think.’ He peered at a text box. ‘Aha! Forty-six percent accounting traffic.’ He pointed at the screen. ‘Spirit Knives-Organizatsni, the computer says, they always have heavy accounting. Thirty-nine percent disciplinary, they disguise it as food orders.’ He frowned. ‘Although I must admit I thought we’d broken the tai-lo’s network. In fact we almost caught you once, through his Negon—’

  ‘Drop the gun,’ Ela said.

  Brodin switched to the joystick. The patterns shifted left, neatly. Gray hair fringed his half-sucker. His mouth pulled downward at the interruption.

  The pilot swiveled away from the screens to face Ela – but Ela was leaning forward in the direction of the TransCom goon and she held Brodin’s pistol in both hands and the pistol was aimed at the bearded man’s head and its barrel trembled only a tiny bit.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ the TransCom man said. His grip on the machine-pistol tightened, but the silencer was pointed away from Ela and clearly he was unsure whether he could line it up in time.

  ‘Chingon,’ the Cayman whispered. He looked less uncomfortable. Things suddenly had been reduced to a level he could understand, of threats, and potential mayhem, and how they balanced each other out.

  ‘I’m counting to three,’ Ela said. Her voice was tighter even than her grip on the pistol. Brodin looked around, finally, flipping the half-sucker up as he did so. His eyes moved back and forth, fast, efficient.

  ‘You idiot,’ he hissed at the TransCom man.

  ‘You can do nothing,’ he told Ela. ‘I have people stationed at the entrances.’

  ‘One,’ Ela whispered.

  ‘Stop this foolishness. Now, Mrs Taylor!’

  ‘Two.’

  The small ventilation fans inside the data-processing units were the loudest sound in the room.

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Do as she says,’ Brodin ordered the bearded man.

  The pilot spun left, his right arm hooking around the Cayman’s elbow while his left pulled, from Fawcett’s boot, a long thin knife with a handle made of jaguar bone.

  ‘Maricon,’ the Cayman hissed.

  ‘Bad place to hide a shiv,’ the pilot told him, stepping back but holding the knife ready for use, his thumb pressed against the flat of the blade.

  ‘Slow, real slow,’ Ela hissed in a tone she’d learned from VR serials. The TransCom man looked at the whiteness of the woman’s knuckles, and laid his gun carefully on the wall-to-wall.

  ‘What do we do now, Joe?’ Ela whispered.

  The pilot said nothing. His chest was exploding with new hope. Only part of the hope had to do with avoiding BON’s interrogation and whatever TransCom was going to do with him. The rest – most of it – had to do with Ela, and the rescue of vital contact with her.

  In one swift happy movement he slipped the jaguar-bone knife in his pocket, scooped up the machine-pistol, flicked off the safety and discharged half the magazine at the workbench with all its telephones, half-sucker interfaces, relays, satellite tuners, modems and scanners and video displays.

  The silenced bullets made little cracking noises as they busted the sound barrier before plunging into the equipment. Silicon exploded into powder. The phosphor tubes disintegrated. Blue-green sparks arced in tiny fireworks. A fine green rain of chopped glass fell throughout the office. Chips of plastic, gold wire, and overworked metal ricocheted off the walls. The warm-broccoli stink of organic semiconductors suffused their taste buds.

  ‘Tchiot!’ Brodin screamed from the floor where he had dived for cover, and held out his hands at the broken machinery, as if in pain.

  A Russian, the pilot thought. He felt an abstract sympathy; the man was in love with his machines.

  ‘Fuck,’ Ela muttered, astonished by the violence of the bullets.

  ‘Come on,’ the pilot said, ‘let’s get outta here,’ and gestured at the door.

  *

  He held the machine-pistol on Brodin and the Cayman while Ela struggled to give the TransCom man a leg up into the air-conditioning ducts. As soon as he got into the duct the bearded man tried to scamper his escape, crawling fast for help, you could hear the metallic whanging of his knees. The pilot, sensing things about to veer fatally out of control, braced to jump after him – but just then the thudding stopped.

  ‘Aaaah.’ A voice came hollow and eerie from the grate opening. ‘A scared little rabbit. I wondered what you guys were up to.’

  ‘Rocketman,’ Ela whispered. Her eyes warmed as she listened.

  They shepherded the three men down the airco ducts. This was not easy; the Cayman’s bulk barely fit through the tighter passages, and he complained without cease, his dank breath and sweat-smell overpowering in the confined areas. Finally they reached the backup freight elevator landing. Both Brodin and the TransCom man seemed convinced that the building was impossible to escape from. Their eyes were calm. At any rate, neither of them argued with the muzzle of Ela’s pistol.

  In the third basement there was a battery room for emergency power, and the pilot locked the prisoners inside. The Cayman and the TransCom agent argued now in Spanish. Brodin said nothing. The risks and possibilities of Oakdale and the massed threats of BON and TransCom were beginning to seriously raise voltage in the brain and sweat in the palms of the pilot and he did not spare a second glance or thought for the man he’d been trying to identify in one way or another since the Rio Chingado.

  As they came out of the tunnel into the 28th Street station a gaggle of Safe People, late-night partygoers in Donna Karan black, moved nervously back against the wall. The three of them swung out of the dark entrance and loped quickly by, weapons clutched in filthy hands, eyes sharp with escape, faces and clothes smeared with soot from the ducts. The Safe People said and did nothing; the safest policy, then and always, in a subway station at night.

  Plain gray vans were parked down the street from the station entrance. Thin-faced men with armpit bulges stood in polyester jackets under the sculpted electric ‘T’ logo at the TransCom doors.

  The three of them ditched their weapons down a storm drain and took a cab downtown. Judging this to be far enough away from TransCom, they paid it off at 14th and Second.

  Sirens howled in the distance. Smoke rose in gray dribbles from an oil-barrel stove warming the inhabitants of a Japanese compact in the bottom of a huge pothole on 14th Street. Ozone clouds teetered softly overhead. A quick sleet drew soot streaks down their features. The lights from shops and streetlights spilled long ribbons of yellow, green, red, blue on the wet tar. They stood around, not looking at each other.

  ‘He found me three months ago,’ Ela said finally. ‘Brodin.’

  ‘It don’t matter,’ the pilot told her. ‘Not anymore.’

  ‘I hated my father so much,’ she said. ‘I would have done anything to get back at him.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘They wanted to find him so bad.’ She was working her hands again, twisting the fingers around each other. ‘They couldn’t figure out, like, why his groups didn’t get caught. They think he has a secret way of communicating with them.’

  He reached out and grabbed her hands, to stop the finger-Houdini.

  ‘But when I saw my dad,’ she said, ‘it all went. The hate, and everything. He’s just a funny man. He’s not too happy. He’s getting old. Really old.’ She shook her head. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I still don’t believe in what he does. But.’

  ‘Ela,’ he said, ‘it’s OK.’

  ‘I feel much better now,’ she said.

  ‘What you gonna do?’ Rocketman asked.

  ‘I’m not sure. I can’t stay here. They’ll be lo
okin’ for me, now. I’m an outlaw too, I guess.’ She looked up at Rocketman and smiled. ‘Just like you.’

  Rocketman moved off the corner, checking up and down Second.

  ‘I thought maybe I’d go back to Chitral,’ she said. ‘Work in that hospital awhile, with PC.’

  ‘You’ll never get there,’ the pilot said, ‘with the snow. Not till spring.’

  ‘There’s always a way.’

  ‘They’ll be looking for you, like you said.’

  ‘But I learned,’ she told him. ‘I learned from you. How to get across borders.’ She pulled out her fake UCC-card. ‘I’ll need a new one of these, for starters.’

  ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Ela.’

  Her face seemed to shine in his eyes. Now it had reacquired all the radiance, the light it had gained during their trip; all the fizz it had lost when they came back to New York. It made sense, at last, that the fizz should have evaporated so quickly.

  ‘I couldn’t go through with it, Joe,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t only because of my father. I couldn’t do it to you.’

  For some reason he fixated on the little bump on her nose. It had become the focus of what he felt for her, the knot that connected all the little strings and gears and balances that were Ela, and the thought of that bump on her nose going out of his life seemed the saddest event that could happen to anyone.

  An AGATE Apache thudded overhead, searchlights poking widely at the night. Above the chopper, a jet laid a bright contrail across the city’s shine. The pilot felt a familiar lust for that jet; for taking off with no flight plan and heading toward a horizon that never ended.