Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (27 page)

“Mr. Patel,” said Mark before he stepped over the raised threshold, “we’re not aboard
Sine Wave,
are we?”

And here Mr. Patel gave his first smile. “No, Mr. Deveraux,” he said. “Indeed we are not. We are aboard
Sine Wave Two.
”

A steward, unarmed, met them just inside the bulkhead. “I am Mr. Singh,” he said to Mark. “Please follow me.” A different steward came for Cole and led him off in a different direction. Patel went with Mark and the steward.

From the deck, the pilothouse had looked maritime-functional. But once inside, Mark saw that it had yacht-grade surfaces and appointments (again with the walnut paneling and the subdued lighting; Mark spotted a piano, an orchid in a vase, a painting on the wall that was maybe a Rothko), and there was a zing in the air, the kind produced when subjugated staff members move swiftly through corridors.

They arrived at the door to a cabin. Mark’s cabin, apparently. Singh said, “You are to dine with Mr. Straw in forty-five minutes. I will return just prior to that. You will please not leave your room before then.”

“Where would I go? The Lido deck?” Neither Singh nor Patel laughed. “Well. Thank you, gentlemen.” He nodded gravely at Singh. “Mr. Patel, thank you for seeing me here.”

“It was Mr. Straw’s wish,” said Patel. The man had probably been in service for decades and had learned how to deliver a brush-off so that the sting was delayed a few beats.

Right. Okay.
This guy wouldn’t extinguish me if I were on fire
. Mark’s charm was flattery-based and so only traveled up. Employees hardly ever liked him. Well, fine, whatever. He didn’t need Patel’s blessing or friendship.

Alone, Mark checked out the cabin. It was plain, close to spartan. But the expensive kind of plain: wood with twelve coats of varnish, drawers on smooth metal bearings, only a few moving objects in the whole room. There was a berth he would need to climb into; there was a porthole; there was a little writing desk with twelve blank legal pads and a fist of sharpened pencils in the pencil well. There was a tiny and ingenious bathroom, a bar of soap engraved
SW2
in the soap well. Mark looked out of the porthole at the empty sea in the last light and tried to feel like Jack London.

Dinner was crown roast—Straw liked showy food—and lots of claret, poured by a gloved table man who held a folded square of napkin at the neck of the bottle to blot any errant drops. The third person at dinner was a man whom Straw had always referred to as “my boon friend Parker.” This turned out to be Parker Pope, CEO of Bluebird, the security company that had recently changed its name to Blu Solutions/Logistics. He was twenty years younger than Straw but looked like he was made from the same stuff. Mostly, the two men carried on a contentious discussion about whether the Cape buffalo or the southern white rhinoceros was more difficult game. Straw said, “Rhinoceros. It’s megafauna.”

“It’s a small-brained ungulate is what it is,” said Pope. “Whereas with the
mbogo,
you never know what they’re going to do. They despise men.”

Mark tried to see both sides of it (“I’m not much of a hunter myself”), but in the end, he went with the rhinoceros, because of the armored hide. Pope seemed to set himself against Mark right then.

“You came in with the new head of engineering, I believe,” Straw said to Mark. “Seamus Cole?”

Mark said that he had.

“Cole says he can mend the new drift net,” said Pope to Straw although he was looking at Mark.

Mark bit. “Cole mends nets?” he asked Pope. “He’s a net mender?” Then, turning to Straw and adopting the intimate tone he used with him during their sessions, he asked: “Is that why we’re on such a huge vessel? Is that what we’re doing here, James? Fishing?”

“Of a sort,” said Pope, quick as an eel. “Cole is a fisher of men. One of the best. But they like to be called data hydrologists—”

Straw cut him off. “Mark hasn’t been belowdecks yet, Parker. And I think the phrase we went with was information architect.”

Pope raised his hands, a sarcastic
jeez Louise, sorry
. “I just assumed that since you’re offering Marcus here the, uh, position, you would have been over the outlines of the project.”

“I was going to do that tomorrow. But I may as well do it now, I guess.” Straw sounded angry, like a kid whose party had been ruined. “Mark, how would you like to be SineCo’s storyteller-in-chief?”

Mark sat before his unfinished sherbet cup. He hated sherbet. Was that a title? What would be the compensation? If he was going to play this right, he had to quit letting Pope rattle Straw. He had to get Straw away from Pope. “I’m intrigued, James,” Mark said. “But I’m also exhausted. Let’s discuss it tomorrow, you and I together.”

Then a quick rap at the bulkhead, and a hot, butchy woman stepped into the dining room. “Excuse the interruption,” she said. “Mr. Pope, you’ll need to be on the next call. The prince is irate.”

“That fucking cum-guzzler,” Mark definitely heard Pope mutter, presumably of the irate prince. “Thank you, Tessa. I’ll be right there.” The woman stepped back but remained nearby. She was waiting for Pope in a way that made it clear to Mark that she was his first assistant. Pope pushed back his chair. “James: Until tomorrow. Marcus: Congratulations on the storyteller thing.” Then he looked straight at Mark and said evenly: “It’s the last job you’ll ever take.”

That night, Mark woke like a shot from a dream of a cigarette. His plan had been to get by with nicotine patches—he didn’t want Straw to know he smoked. But the patches made him feel thin-blooded and their effect lingered, making sleep into a briar patch. He paced the cabin. His porthole laughed at him. All he wanted were a few smoke-moderated breaths in the night air.

He decided to chance it. He found the two cigarettes he’d nicked from the Israeli grandma in the
fumoir,
and he slipped out into the hallway. He just had to find some access to a deck or gangway. But he was immediately confused by the labyrinth of the giant ship. It was like being in the gut of something. His first many steps took him
away
from the porthole in his cabin; then he made a right and then a right and then went up a flight of metal stairs. And then he could swear he was in the same place he’d been in thirty seconds ago. His heart began to beat faster. Singh the steward hadn’t exactly ordered him to stay in his room when he’d escorted Mark back there after dinner, but there was definitely a stay-in-your-room, Agatha Christie–type vibe on this ship, like dinner was the last scheduled event of the day, and then it was curfew.

So when Mark heard very intentional steps heading down the corridor intersection he was approaching, he slipped quickly through a nearby doorway. The move would have been superslick and graceful but for the fact that it landed him in a cabin that belonged to Pope’s assistant, the woman who had interrupted dinner. She was standing at a desk, leaning over a computer, wearing what he believed was called a camisole.

“You did
not
just sneak into my room,” she said.

There are times you go straight to the truth. “No. You are correct. I did not,” said Mark. “I was trying to get outside, on deck or whatever. I want to smoke this cigarette”—he held up a thin cigarette as proof—“but I got lost. This boat is nuts. And then I was kind of ducking to hide somewhere, because someone was coming, and I’m afraid of that creepy steward, and I know that’s stupid…” She wasn’t buying it; her expression said, Un
interested in the particulars.
“Look, sorry, please excuse me,” Mark said, and he stepped into the corridor, out of her space. But she did not move to shut the door behind him. He looked left and then right. Then he turned around to her again and said, “Any chance you could help me out here?”

Tessa’s room was more of a stateroom than a cabin. It was twice the size of his. But it looked like she spent a lot of time in it. There were four laptops and a dozen other assorted technological devices blinking away in corners, paperwork in legal-type binders piled on two desks, empty cups and glasses marooned on ledges, and three huge duffel bags stacked in an open wardrobe.

But the salient feature of Tessa’s room was its balcony, or whatever it was called on a ship. That’s where they sat and smoked, listening to the slap and slosh of ocean ten decks below. Tessa smoked a Lucky Strike. Mark suffered through one of the Israeli woman’s fey cigarettes.

“I guess it was pretty dumb of me to sneak around,” said Mark, his mind having been made still and clear by the nicotine. “I mean, we’re guests here, right?”

“Well, yes and no,” she said. Some light fell on them from her stateroom, but the dark sea and moonless sky beat it back; he couldn’t see her face well enough to read any information that it might have held.

“Let’s talk about the no part, shall we?” he said.

That amused her. And then: “You really don’t know what’s going on, do you?”

“Well, I guess not about this, no. But maybe there’s stuff I know that you don’t know.”

“What I don’t know is how you even got this far,” she said. But then she must have thought that too harsh, because she leaned a bit toward him and said, “I mean, you must have skills; Straw is mad about you. You want a less silly cigarette?” And she offered him one of her Luckies.

He took the cigarette. “He’s a close reader. He told me that my book inspired him to begin this big project of his, the thing he’s calling New Alexandria.”

“But you don’t know what he meant by that?”

“James and I don’t really discuss operational specifics, just goals. Abstractly, more or less.”

“Oh, you’re the kind of therapist I want,” said Tessa.

She had a point. In one of their recent sessions, when Straw had implied that New Alexandria involved data collection on an unprecedented scale, Mark had only agreed that it was a good idea to collect knowledge. When Straw veered off on a rant about how after the correction, there wouldn’t be so many damn people braying about their information rights, Mark didn’t say,
Wait. What correction are you talking about?
He just tried to steer Straw back to the stuff about how we all benefit by making our interactions more transparent.

“I guess tomorrow you’ll get more of the operational specifics,” said Tessa. “Though as our new SIC, you’ll want to go light on that part.”

“Ess-Eye what now?”

“Storyteller-in-chief.”

“Yeah, that. Listen, I haven’t actually said I’ll take the job yet. James and I are going to talk about it tomorrow.”

“Your thing with him looks pretty complicated.”

Mark thought that was very perceptive of her. Complicated it certainly was, at least for him: he had to act like a dutiful son but one who gave counsel to the father; manage Straw’s egomania; say enough to display his mind’s agility but not too much, lest he betray the sizable gaps in his knowledge.

“Have you always gone in for older men?”

Mark snapped to. “Pardon?”

“I just mean, you know, the age difference between you. I was once in a relationship like that. I found it challenging.”

“I’m James Straw’s counselor,” said Mark slowly. “I counsel him. That’s all.”

She leaned forward and into a bit of light. She looked sincerely confused. “Really?”

Mark nodded.

“Oh,” said Tessa. “Huh. You’re not his…partner?”

Shit
. Who else thought this? “I’m straight. You know that, right?”

She made a tiny big-deal sign with her eyes. “Well, I guess I do now. Do you know that I’m queer?”

“I couldn’t decide,” he said. “What, exactly, made you think
I
was gay?”

“Pope said Straw was bringing his boy into the operation. And since you’re not his son, I thought he meant the other kind of boy.”

This was terrible. People thought he was Straw’s boy. There came to his mind a fleeting image of what it would be like to service Straw, to be pressed against his skinny, limp flanks, hold his mottled hand.

“It’s strange, though, you know?” said Tessa. “Because I read your book, and I must have missed the part where you advocate for the construction of a diffuse remote network of offshore data vaults.”

Diffuse remote network of offshore data vaults?
“Well, I believe I did go on about preparedness,” said Mark. “You know, as a generality. I suppose remote whatever offshore data vaults kind of fit in with that.”

She definitely thought he was funny. He tried to get more out of her about the scope and nature of what the ship was engaged in, but she would say no more about it. A bit desperately, he tried the direct approach—“But there’s nothing illegal about New Alexandria, is there?”—and the way she immediately clamped down told him all he needed to know.

And then she said, “Listen, I actually have loads more work to do tonight. So I guess I’ll see you tomorrow. Hopefully, after you’ve taken the tour.” It seemed likely that when this woman pleaded work, she actually meant she had to work. Various of her devices had
bloop
ed repeatedly with incoming messages, and the binders on her desk were too big to be for show. She saw him to the door of her stateroom and used her long-fingered hands to scribble for him in the air a route back to his cabin.

There was a klaxon splitting the air. Mark leaped from his bunk, forgetting how elevated it was, and one ankle buckled beneath him and he yelped in pain and ran to the door of his cabin in his underwear. Opening it, he found Singh standing outside, as still as a queen’s guard.

“Good morning, Mr. Deveraux,” Singh said rather loudly, because the klaxon was as deafening in the corridor as it was in the cabin.

“Where’s the emergency?” yelled Mark, but even before he’d finished the question, the klaxon quit klaxoning, and his yelling was suddenly strange.

“There is no emergency, Mr. Deveraux,” said Singh. “That was the morning bell. It is six thirty. Breakfast will be in half an hour.”

Breakfast was smoothies and sardines on toast, served in a sort of officers’ mess, not the wood-paneled dining room of the night before. Straw was there and was very excited. Pope was there too, slathering sardines on his toast. Hovering nearby him was an attractive female assistant twenty years his junior, but it wasn’t Tessa, who Mark figured was probably above hovering.