Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (20 page)

“I’m glad you’re coming to get me,” Leo said down the phone. “I’ll be here when you arrive. I’d rather just meet at my house, but of course I’m not going to do that.” He
uhm-hmm
ed a few times, said
loveya,
and hung up. He returned the phone-booth key to Nurses’ Island.

Back in his room, he saw that his clothes had been packed up for him. His trifolded trousers, neat rows of T-shirts, and rock garden of balled socks had been transferred from the veneered pressboard wardrobe into the blue duffel bag that he’d come with, which lay at the foot of his bed. Unknown hands had scooped his toothbrush and comb and organic deodorant into his Dopp kit. Creepy. Who does that? He put everything carefully on the floor beside his bed. He lay down. A breeze with jasmine on it came through his open window. Leo was tired. He decided he would rest before his escape; he wanted to say good-bye to James.

L
eila had four hours before she was to meet the Ding-Dong guy and then another four hours before her flight left for LA. She was bored and ragged and underslept. She wished she hadn’t agreed to the Heathrow meeting. Over the last thirty-six hours of travel, the implausibility of Ned’s story had really become apparent to her. Part of what he told her was probably true; something shady had been perpetrated on her. But that’s pretty much all the Burmese government did—perpetrate shit.

And yet. She couldn’t throw out the little owl icon that the original Ding-Dong e-mail had deposited on her desktop. The other programs on her laptop chugged as if on thin fuel, while this one just blinked away, and twice opened itself up to reveal a message from a guy called Seymour, one saying
How about coffee?
and then another saying
Java-Jiva? Terminal 3, 2 p.m.?
They were written as if she could respond, but there was no Reply button or anything.

Maybe if her father weren’t on bail and bed rest, if her brother hadn’t been begging her to come home and deal with their mom—maybe then she would have had more time for the Mystery of the Security Men in the Forest. As it was, she was ready to forget the whole thing. She let Heathrow distract her. She killed a few hours in its chutes and atria. She strolled through handbag stores and wandered through a cigar outlet, passed a waxing joint and a place called Pretzel Junction.

There had to be better ways than this to build an economy, right? If people just spent their money on less stupid stuff, wouldn’t so many problems disappear? Yes, but
whose
idea of stupid, she knew was the issue. There were a few face products on which she didn’t mind dropping some serious ducats, so that probably made her a hypocrite. But she’d be willing to make adjustments for the greater good. The world reflected by the stores in this airport seemed to be going the other way. There was a place that sold water, but in rhinestone-encrusted bottles and for hundreds of dollars. There was bad candy made in China and flown to London and sold to people, some of whom were flying to China. There were cheesy lingerie shops and a vitamin outlet and there were two distinct yogurt franchises. There were newsstands, which at least still sold some product that seemed related to living. But why any shelf space at all for
Abs!,
Superyachts Monthly,
or
Model Train Enthusiast
? Actually,
Model Train Enthusiast
was fine. She picked up an armful of newspapers and some pecans.

Leila got to Java-Jiva ten minutes early. She read the
Irish Times,
because she’d never read it before and because it was one of those gigantic broadsheets you need to have upper-body strength to hold upright. She had to spread the thing out over the back of another chair to read it. She remembered how briskly her dad could fold and fold a newspaper page, until he had just the columns he wanted. He used to read to them from the papers in the morning, so Leila could recall when the embassy hostages came home and when Sadat was assassinated and when President Carter was attacked by a swamp rabbit.

“Are you Leila?” said a woman to Leila. She was in her thirties. Greek-looking. Dark-haired. Business-suity. An American accent, but what kind Leila could not tell. It sounded without place.

“Yes. I’m Leila?” said Leila, as if she were meeting herself. “Are you”—she dug in her bag for her planner—“sorry. I have it here.”

“Seymour Butz? No. Seymour couldn’t make it. I came instead.”

Seymour Butz.
That
was
the guy’s name. Damn. Leila had not said it or heard it out loud and had missed the joke, if that’s what it was.

“I’m Paige Turner,” said the woman.

“That seems unlikely,” said Leila.

“May I sit?”

“Be my guest,” said Leila, who was getting intrigued at exactly the same rate as she was getting annoyed. She just wanted to confirm that this “network” was a sort of stunt, of no use to her, so she could take the whole thing off her desk. But if it was a stunt, what kind of stunt? Was it some sort of stupid viral-marketing thing, or a cult, or someone’s MFA thesis? Even in the mire of her family- and job-related distresses, Leila was good at analyzing situations. She supposed that could be called compartmentalizing. When she heard people refer to this as a male trait and view it as generally a bad thing, she was uncomfortable.

There are people who will try to con a woman by banking on her politeness or by presuming that female restraint will trump her curiosity or her skepticism. Rich had once called her
blinkered,
a word choice he had quickly regretted.

But Leila hadn’t run in two days. And she was tired. The sleep she had nabbed had been the airport kind. She felt, as her father used to say, not enough sandwiches for a picnic.

As soon as the alleged Paige Turner sat down, Leila said, “Why don’t you tell me in less than ten minutes if you are part of some sort of opposition network, what you oppose, and how you think you can help me.”

“I am. Part of a network,” said Paige. “We’re called Dear Diary. We do not
oppose,
exactly, but are hoping to move
past
the nation-state thing. We can help you by asking you to join us. We think you’ll want to be a part of what we’re working on. In the near term, though, we
are
opposing something, which is ‘the Committee’”—the woman made air quotes with her slender fingers—“which is a thing where a sort of cabal of businessmen and some other bad guys are planning an electronic coup so that they will control the storage and transmission of all the information in the world. Those men you saw in Burma were part of that. You weren’t supposed to see them; you certainly weren’t supposed to send out e-mails about them. That’s why they screwed you.” She said all that without a bit of drama but with a sort of practiced enunciation, as if she were reciting the specials.

“Get the fuck outta here,” said Leila. “So what are you? If ‘the Committee’”—Leila made air quotes like the woman had—“is a cabal, what are you guys?”

“We’re just a network. We stay in touch and keep each other up to date, share ideas.”

“You mean like Friendster?” said Leila.

“If you like. Look, I’d be skeptical too, okay? But listen. The Committee has founded a secret, sovereign corporate state to achieve its ends. We want to stop them. But we can’t just call the police or whatever, because they operate way above that level.”

“What do you mean, way above that level?”

“They control seventy percent of the bandwidth in Asia, all the newspapers in contentious geopolitical zones, and the major pharmaceuticals. They control Sine, Skype, Facebook, all of that. They own forests and water basins and silica mines and railroads and airports. They have shareholders in the security services of most of the nations in the world. They have a very capable, committed executive tier. They recruit by convincing, co-opting, or blackmailing. They have extraction teams and attorneys and a kind of HR department. And they’re planning to put it all into play. Soon, we think.”

A waitress approached their table. “Can I get you anything?” she asked. Leila hadn’t realized it was a table-service place; she had just chosen a chair on the periphery and camped.

“I’ll have a mint tea,” said Paige Turner.

“Nothing for me,” said Leila.

The waitress went to clear a cup from their table, which was covered with Leila’s papers and magazines.

“Oh. Sorry. Here,” said Leila. She collected her stuff and shoved it into the open maw of her big bag, then put it all on the floor beneath her feet. The waitress acknowledged Leila’s help, and then knelt down to push Leila’s bag farther under the table. She made a watch-out signal to Leila by tapping at the corner of one eye and then indicating the rivulet of passersby in the concourse.

“Yes. Thank you,” said Leila, and smiled back at the woman.

After the waitress left, Paige Turner went on. “They’re simply going to start a protection racket. Like, it’s going to be sold as a service, but they’re going to sell you what had been free before. Some of them are Malthusians who believe that the Earth won’t continue to carry us beyond about ten billion, so they want to secure their access to resources: water, genetic material, the electronic transmission of data. But then a lot of them are probably just profiteers.

“To stop them we’ve hacked together a broadcast platform which we think we can stand up and defend for, maybe, seventy-two hours. We’re going to use it to disseminate to everyone in the world the truth of what’s been going on. We’d also use that platform to offer everyone in the world a third way?” She did the rising-intonation thing, as if unsure of herself or awaiting some reassurance from Leila.

Wasn’t the third way a Clinton thing? “Go on,” said Leila.

“Right now, if you’re born in certain places, you’re just fucked, right?”

“Yes. Definitely.”

“While we have the world’s attention, we’re going to send back to them all the information that’s been collected on them. Then destroy that data and offer everyone the chance to sign up with us.”

“What do you give them?”

“A number.”

“Say again?”

“We give them a number. Well, we each discover our own number, really.”

“Why does anyone want a number?”

“Because it’s the beginning of a new way of organizing the world.”

“Yeah, it’s also the beginning of a way of subjugating the world.”

“That’s why we want to have a really good launch. But once everyone sees the scale of the data-mining the Committee’s been doing and the fascist reach of their operation, they’ll know we’re the good guys.”

“That’s terrible logic,” Leila couldn’t help saying. “If I’m sitting at my desk or whatever and I get your big announcement, I’m going to want to evaluate your claims independently…”

“And how would you do that?” Paige asked.

“I guess I’d start by searching for
committee, cabal, electronic coup
.”

The waitress came back with Paige’s mint tea and a little handheld payment device.

“Thank you,” said Paige. She fed the payment device her credit card and keyed a PIN code into it. The device chittered out a little receipt, but when Paige tore it off, the bit of curled paper fluttered to the floor. “Sorry,” said Paige to the waitress, who had knelt to pick it up.

“I told you,” Paige went on, “they control all those search engines. We’re working on getting paper about all of this. But the Committee is basically paperless. Maybe that’s to save trees.”

Leila needed a moment to see that this last part was a joke.

“When you get handed back your file and you see how much they know about you, you’ll be mad enough to really do something,” Paige assured Leila.

“Walgreens knows I buy Pantene? I don’t care.”

“Okay, but how about if a shadow government is filing away everything about you: your genetic sequence, your demographics, images of you, your social schematics, your skills, your access to wealth, your patterns of movement, your pressure points, your hopes and dreams, your fears and desires? How about if they’re doing this because they have a twenty-year plan to own or control all the knowledge in the world? How about if they’re betting on a breakdown of the digital infrastructure, because in that case, they’ll be able to charge the whole world for data recovery? Only it’s not really betting, since they can cause the breakdown; they can initiate the emergency.”

A chill rode Leila’s spine. A reflexive disinclination to believe in political conspiracy theories flows from two beliefs: that human incompetence makes such conspiracies untenably complicated, and that people do not allow terrible injustices to be perpetrated upon them.

But Leila had just spent six months in a totalitarian state where she had been daily reminded that the second premise was not axiomatic.
If it can happen to someone else, it can happen to me,
she remembered. Anyway, there was something plausible here—that a syndicate would cause an emergency and then sell the rescue. That’s what all good mafias did, wasn’t it? It was probably a totally orthodox business plan. “But how’d they get the genetic information?” she asked Paige. “I never went in for my mouth swab.”

“Monitored waste streams, biosampling postage stamps. The Node. Look, I’m not from the technical side, okay? I’m a travel agent. I’m just here to deliver your tickets and documents.”

“Oh yeah? Where am I going?”

“Dublin. To attend a meeting.”

“No. Listen, just so we’re clear: I’m on my way back to California.”

“Well, look, maybe we can help you out with what’s going on there. And we hardly ever divert people like this, but you’re apparently a potentially valuable asset”—Paige rolled her eyes a tiny bit here, maybe bitchily, even—“so this is like some big deal. You should try to enjoy it.”

That line, to Leila, was stranger than the one about the biosampling postage stamps.

“Enjoy it?”

“Yeah. Like, your ticket gets you into the fanciest lounge in this airport. There are really nice showers in there.”

Her ticket? And was that a bitchy swipe, about the shower? In fairness, she could use a shower.

“And here’s a phone,” said Paige, sliding a phone across the table. “It works only when it has a secure path, and sometimes it only lets you text.”

“I don’t want your phone. If you want my help, you’re going to have to make a better case.”

“That’s what they’re going to do in Dublin.” Paige Turner had disengaged. She sipped her tea. “I told you: I’m just a travel agent. I’m not Communications. Listen, I’ve got to meet another client.” She neatened her little tea mess. “Have fun in Dublin.”

Leila decided not to attempt a response to this. This lady was not making sense. So she only nodded politely when Paige stood to go.

“Okay,” said Leila. “Um, I’m going to leave this phone here.” She actually hadn’t touched the mobile phone. It was a cheapo Nokia.

Paige was unfazed; she was slinging her chunky valise over her shoulder.

“Well, thanks for your time. I guess,” said Leila.