The Sensory Deception (42 page)

On the seventh day, Farley awoke in the Niagara tunnel. A few scattered rays of sunlight indicated morning. The darkness encouraged the belief that this was part of the dream. He pulled his right leg gently and remembered that the irons had been removed. This small boon and his responsibility to the team were enough to build his spirits and set the optimistic example they needed to survive.

He could smell the bowls of boiled vegetables and fish guts floating in salty water that were lined up inside the gate. Some of the captives stretched, others groaned, someone cried—morning in Sayyid Hassan’s prison.

Farley lingered in the shadows at the gate. Three men stood guard, AK-47s hanging from their shoulders. Two of them were Sy’s men, but neither spoke English. Escape looked quite difficult, so difficult that Farley had to consciously push the word
impossible
out of his mind.

Farley heard his name called in that posh English accent.

Sy stood at the gate, peering into the cave through cupped hands. He looked older than he had when they had first met, some five months ago. His clothes were clean; life went on in camp.

Sy said, “I can hardly request forgiveness, but I require that you listen.” He paused as though expecting a response, then continued when he didn’t get one. “I was offered a choice. They would destroy all of us—you, me, my people, and yours—and sink the
Cetacean Avenger
, or I could cooperate and no one would be harmed.” He paused again.

“Not buying it, Sy. Don’t pretend to be a victim,” Farley said. “They killed two innocent people who were trying to help you.”

“Perhaps, but my village is safe.”

Sy stepped to one of the guards, one wearing the dirt-brown uniform. He whispered in the guard’s ear and then returned to the gate. Sy’s guard maneuvered himself between Sy and the other two guards and engaged them in conversation. Sy motioned for Farley to approach.

“Smell is frightful,” Sy said.

Farley leaned closer to Sy but didn’t say anything.

Sy glanced back at the guards and exhaled as his gaze passed over the village.

Farley spit on the ground. When they met, Sy had called himself a king. “Sy, you’re no better than any of them.”

Sy said, “You’ve been reported dead, massacred by a terrorist organization. Once your plight has been forgotten, you’ll be
ransomed by Al-Shabaab in what has become the perception of common practice.”

“No, you listen,” Farley spoke loud enough that one of the guards turned. He continued at the same volume. “I paid you back in full. I’ve spent over five months solving your problems. A week ago the whole world was on your side, and you sold us out.”

“There was little I could do.”

Farley waved to the guards. “You can get your pawn away from me.” One of the two who wore the shiny black boots made eye contact.
Okay
, Farley thought,
so you speak English
.

Sy said, “Are there any simple comforts that I can provide?”

“I’ll form a committee,” Farley said. “Send someone this afternoon; we’ll have a list. Now please leave.”

Tahir was some fifty miles north in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. It was a capital in name only. Warlords occupied neighborhoods whose borders were in constant dispute. In their conspicuous white helmets, UN soldiers stayed in a central part of the city. Tahir had seen this situation many times from Kuwait to Baghdad. UN soldiers operated under strict rules of engagement that, in Tahir’s experience, rendered them easy targets with little ability to defend themselves. They had to stay in the green zone.

After watching the
Cetacean Avenger
steam out to sea under a pirate escort, Tahir had gauged the overall hopelessness of the situation and began working his way north. He’d set out hoping to contact authorities who could help free Farley. His expectations were appropriately low, and now he found himself in self-preservation mode. With every block of every street subject to territorial dispute, his anonymity was a disadvantage. His options
were limited. However, being unarmed with no money in hostile territory felt nostalgic to Tahir. Somehow he was more comfortable than if he’d been driving a cab down Lombard Street.

One thing about disputed territory is that there is always work for mercenaries. He hoped he could join a petty militia whose political and religious dispositions didn’t completely contradict his own—it would be the ultimate cover. He kept his hopes low.

Once armed with a rifle and some money, he’d have options. He’d have better luck in Nairobi, though heading north to the Islamic world, Eritrea or Yemen, held an ironic appeal. As he scouted the area, he took every chance to catch sight of a television but didn’t see any news from the Somali coast.

He set up in a ruined building between neighboring warlords. At first, soldiers on both sides of this particular battle assumed he was the enemy, but every time they saw him and he failed to return fire, their suspicion decayed. He’d become all but invisible, able to bide his time.

A
t the airport, Chopper checked in the pile of luggage. The documentation had all the right stamps and signatures for transport of high-tech equipment, camping gear, and a rifle. He watched the two four-foot duffel bags and full pack disappear on the conveyer belt. One duffel held sensors, a DAQ laptop, transmission equipment, and the standard tools of a biochemist, some titration glassware, testing strips, a few stock chemicals, and plenty of tubing. Having learned from Farley’s trouble recharging equipment in Somalia, Chopper also brought a flexible solar panel that was rolled up in a poster tube. A 7mm bolt-action hunting rifle and several hundred rounds were in the other duffel bag.

He guided Gloria through airports as if she were mentally challenged, and right now, she was. She focused on every stimulus, every flash of light, scent, and sound. It gave her the appearance of a bobble-head doll. At the Los Angeles airport, people looked at her for the instant it took to realize she was challenged, and then they looked away. In Rio, not as many people noticed, and those who did, stared.

When they finally arrived, just three people occupied the boxy, whitewashed building at the Uarini airstrip. It looked more like a concession stand than an airport terminal. None of them
gave Gloria a second glance. Chopper set the bags and backpack on a bench and then sat Gloria next to them.

Gloria had emerged from the Moby-Dick experience a different person. She didn’t process information so much as absorb it. Chopper administered five doses every twelve hours. He was well aware of the dosage that permanently altered synapse chemistry and expected that after a month of this treatment, the effect would become permanent. In this state, Gloria would not betray Farley. She would not betray anyone. She needed to be closer to her senses, closer to the state of genuine reality, to overcome the egotism of her species.

A man emerged from the building wearing an Indiana Jones hat and greeted Chopper in English. Chopper said he needed transportation to the village of Mariano Tuxauas. The man smiled the grin of a salesman closing a deal. He pointed across the gravel airstrip at a red amphibious plane floating on pontoons where a bend in one of the infinite tributaries that make up the Amazon formed a tiny harbor.

Chopper pulled out a VirtExArts credit card and the man introduced himself: Van O’Reilly, an American expat. O’Reilly led them to a table outside a cantina across a road from the airstrip. He spread a map on the table as Chopper positioned Gloria. Chopper then described how to get to the village by land. O’Reilly described landmarks, and Chopper recognized enough of them to isolate the village’s location on the map. He proposed a simple flight path. Chopper waved it off and asked about the terrain along the deforestation boundary. O’Reilly sprinkled salt from a shaker to mark the pristine from the spoiled, and Chopper dictated his desired flight path. O’Reilly didn’t ask what business they had in the forest, and Chopper didn’t volunteer it.

As the two men planned, Gloria sat at the table, her eyes darting back and forth, tracking anything that moved.

They spent the night at a small inn. All the buildings were constructed of thick bricks the same color as the soil and had far-reaching awnings. The whole town looked sun-beaten.

The next morning, Chopper loaded the big duffel bags and backpack on the plane. It seated four: pilot, copilot, and two behind them on a plywood bench. The plane rose over the forested Amazon drainage basin. A million tributaries fed and drained these forests of broad-leaved trees. From the sky, the canopy spread across the horizon and steamy mist rose and dissipated in the open sky.

Except for the cancer.

Chopper sat on the bench behind the pilot and held Gloria. She stared out the window and he spoke gently, his mouth inches from her ear. “Remember Los Angeles? The slime mold of concrete? Remember that alley? Now look at the forest. See how the leaves reach for the sky? The creeks, the rivers, each one is a limb of the Sea. Watch him caress Earth. Do you feel the affection? Los Angeles was once green and brown, a rocky, sterling place ruled on the high ground by mountain goats and rams, and on low ground by bear and deer—and now it’s a putrid mess of concrete scum. Humanity lives in its own shit. Do you want to teach them?” With each question, her chin dipped slightly in recognition. Her other features were relaxed, her forehead unruffled, her eyes open wide, but Chopper could feel emotion coursing through her as he added paint to the picture.

He turned to the pilot and said, “Head over to those clouds.”

“You want me to fly around that baby thunderhead at three o’clock?”

“Can you?”

“Yee. Haw.”

Chopper whispered in Gloria’s ear, “Look, Sea is raining on Earth, loving Her. See how She responds? The trees reach out to
Him and guide His affection to the ground, to Her body, and She blooms at His touch.”

O’Reilly gave the thunderhead a wide berth but approached close enough that the plane bounced along a path of atmospheric potholes. It was the sort of small thunderhead that passes over plains on lazy summer days, towering into the sky from a base of cotton fluff, fluorescing white against a royal blue canvas. They worked their way around it. The sun cast shadows that defined the roiling cloud structures, swollen with moisture.

“Hold on tight,” O’Reilly said. He looked back with the kind of smile you see on skiers and sailors and drag racers when they’re about to test their skill.

The plane dove for the base of the thunderhead. Every window rattled, the wings shook, and the bench where Gloria and Chopper sat came loose. Chopper wrapped one arm around Gloria’s waist and pressed his other hand against the ceiling, bracing the two of them as well as he could. He had to yell above the racket even with his mouth against her ear: “The thunderstorm is passion.”

They passed into the gray base, and mist covered the windows until they couldn’t see the tips of the wings. A few seconds later they broke through into a rainstorm. Now windy gusts shoved them this way and that. Chopper held strong, gritting his teeth behind a wide grin. Then, as if riding a wooden roller coaster, when they bottomed out it felt like the plane was falling apart, but it started another climb back into the cloud and, a minute later, emerged into clear blue sky.

O’Reilly leveled out, flicked a few switches, leaned forward to see landmarks, and accelerated back to cruising altitude. Chopper and Gloria settled onto the bench.

A few minutes later the rising mist gave way to tendrils of smoke that didn’t dissipate so much as clump over the treetops.

“There it is,” Chopper said, gently rotating Gloria’s head. “Do you see the cancer?”

The smoke grew thicker. Not as thick as the fog inside the thunderhead, but thick enough to convert the sun from a radiant, yellow-white star to a brownish-orange blob. Directly below, flames turned healthy greens and browns to black and gray.

Chopper massaged Gloria’s neck. “Cancer looks the same in flesh, a spreading black mass of death invading and destroying healthy tissue. Yes, Gloria, it is cancer. They do it for money. Even though the wealth within the forest is far greater than what they will grow, it’s easier for them. Humanity is the same as any disease: invade, destroy, and consume everything.” He shook his head, laughing without humor. “And like a disease, we’ve given our host a fever. She is warming, and She’ll get as hot as it takes to kill the virus before She cools.”