Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (34 page)

“Did the forensics guy have any idea what it was?”

“Well, first he says, ‘Oh, this is useless, it’s just a bunch of corrupt scraps.’ He said it was like someone had emptied the shredder bins at IBM and then glued everything together to look like a document. But twenty minutes later, he actually stood up from his chair and sort of started hopping around. I have never seen a tech guy so excited. He’s saying, ‘It’s written on the back, it’s written on the back.’” Dylan took another drag of his cigarette, squinted through an exhale. “And it turns out that if you turn the code over, there are legible files on the other side. See, Mystery Dude gave us both the encrypted file and the decrypted file. The tech guy said that the code he thought was junk is actually the first nontheoretical use of quantum encryption he’s ever seen. He said it was like someone had just FedExed us the Rosetta stone.”

Leila stretched her calves against the little concrete wall that enclosed the tiny garden. Her dad had another olive tree failing to thrive in a terra-cotta pot. She felt the taut line up the back of her.

“It’s a work order, Leila. Or an invoice. It’s an internal document, anyway. From a company called TMI Data Solutions, in Roanoke, Virginia. It details the work this outfit did on Dad’s hard drive. The file is called C. Majnoun Minor Porn. The work is broken down, itemized: Flick-Burst Transmission, and Evidence Custody Chain Repair—they did twelve units of that—and then there’s one line item that just says Collage Fabrication. And there are these things that I guess are chat windows within the working document. Like, where people scribble notes, you know, on a document that has to go through an office. And beside Collage Fabrication, some professional framer has written to another professional framer, like at shift change or something,
Pull images of the blonde with the bangs in the folder JV Volleyball ’06. That’s the one I’d want to fuck if I was this guy
.”

The run had gotten her mind ticking right. Leila sucked down the news. What Dear Diary said about the Committee’s reach was true.

“And it’s enough?” she asked Dylan. “It’s enough to make the prosecutor back down?”

“Well, so, by last night, our forensic guy had spoken with their forensic guy. And when we show up to the RITSerF, you could tell that the prosecutor was pretty shaken, actually. Kramer thinks that the man had no idea. They built that facility a year ago and it cost a billion dollars and it’s supposed to be the safest place in the world, and we’ve just given him proof that the evidence in a high-profile case is being written like a storybook by some black-helicopter-contractor outfit in Virginia with apparently free access to his shop. Dude went white.”

“And he said he’s going to drop the charges?”

Dylan made a little grimace. “All but one. He wants us to plead to one count possession of unauthorized material. It wouldn’t be a felony conviction. The sentence would be that Dad would have to sign a legal instrument saying he would never speak or write about the events.”

“Dad’s not going to do that. And if the prosecutor concedes that the evidence is fabricated, where’s the unauthorized material?”

“When the FBI interrogated him, Dad admitted to having installed on his personal laptop a copy of, I think it was, Adobe Creative Suite. That was software licensed for use by the school only.”

“You’re fucking joking with me, right? They can do that? They can ream a guy like they reamed Dad and then turn around and compel his silence?”

Dylan, who took care when speaking and who saw no reason to add to the scope of the trouble they were facing, said, “Let’s not worry about the
them
here, Leila. Or not at this moment, anyway. Let’s just worry about Dad, and what’s happening right now. Shouldn’t we take this offer? Plead to the bullshit count, and Dad walks away?”

A car went by. Jim Brenton and his severely autistic son from three houses down. Leila waved, and Jim gave her two honks, like you do when you’re supporting picketers. Dylan had told her that some neighbors were already keeping their distance and that an unknown man had yelled vile things at the house soon after the arrest. So the two honks made Leila want to weep with gratitude. Behind Jim Brenton’s car came one of those cute USPS mail jeeps with the right-hand drive. The mailman inside was better-looking than your average mailman. Leila waited until both vehicles were well past.

“You think he should take it, I know,” she said. “But, Dylan, he can’t walk back into that school without it being perfectly clear to everyone that he was completely exonerated, cleared of all charges. The gag-order part of this would kill him.”

“Maybe, Leila.” They were standing close to each other now, like conspirators, like siblings. “But the risk of the other course is we fight this and lose. Or it could be months or years, and then we have to take the same deal, or a worse one. So maybe Dad won’t be able to walk back into that school. I just want him walking.”

Leila began to object.

“I know. I know. I know. It’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham,” said Dylan. “But imagine. The case would be us saying, No, it’s not that a pedophile principal was making sicko collages out of the volleyball-trip pictures; it’s that a shadow-government frame shop is persecuting innocent Americans. It would be a tough sell, sis. The drive that Mystery Dude gave us is enough to beat this. I say let’s thank our stars and go home, because I don’t know that it’s enough to convince twelve content civilians that they’re living under a tyranny. Maybe that’s for another day, you know? Who knows, maybe that prosecutor will do the right thing and ferret this out.”

“You’re saying we should eat this? Let them get away with it?” She was checking his math, though, and saw that he was right, just in risk-to-Dad terms.

Dylan shrugged his shoulders, exhaled a thin stream of smoke. “Unless…” And he did this cool little rapping of the air, with his smoking knuckle.

“Unless what?” she said.

“Unless you can get your Dear Diary friends to hook us up with some more of the good shit.”

L
eo slept soundly, and ludicrously late, happy to be in his own bed again, certain in his dreaming head that the world had sent him word. A girl in a Toyota. So when he finally roused himself—ten fifteen!—and raced downstairs and found Lola’s note and her absence, his world spun again. What utter bullshit. Leo was a
light
sleeper.
The universe sends you a Lola Montes, and you let her creep out of your house while you snooze like a fool?

He sat very still in his kitchen, wondering what to do. For an hour. Then he made some coffee and thought about getting stoned. He pushed that thought away and thought some more about Lola, about why she had come, why she had left. And when a car he did not recognize pulled up to his house, Leo didn’t know whether to run toward it or away from it. But the footfall on his porch was no threat, nor was the knock at his door. It was Daisy.

“You wanna tell me what the fuck?” she said to him.

The next morning. Daisy woke him very early, barging into his room and saying, “Let’s go to that diner I saw by the freeway. We can write your contract there.” She shook him hard. His sisters had always been physical and executive with Leo. He didn’t mind. Big brothers hold your head underwater and drive their knees into your solar plexus and throw your turtle out the window; big sisters just dress you up and order you around a lot.

They walked to the Overlook Diner and sat at a vinyl-and-Formica four-top by the window.
The freeway. That’s what it overlooks,
Leo thought. He had wondered for years about the eponymous claim.

Daisy waited until they had coffees before them, and then she turned over her paper placemat and slid it across to him. She pushed over a pen and said, “Here. I’ll dictate it to you.”

Leo gave her a
seriously?
look. But his sister stone-faced him, so he took up the pen.

“‘I, Leo Crane,’” she said, “‘will not drink alcohol or smoke weed, starting now until forever, or at least until all my sisters are dead.’”

“Oh, come on, Daisy,” said Leo, lifting pen from placemat. Daisy only made a
don’t interrupt
gesture.

“‘I will attend an AA or an NA meeting every day. I will meet with Alice Waters twice a week—’”

“The chef?”

“No, not the chef, you asshole. She’s a therapist and an LCSW and she’s good people and she’s smart. Keep writing. ‘And I will see Larry Davis, prescribing psychiatrist, once a week. My sister Daisy is old friends with Alice and Larry both, from PA school, and she will totally check up on me, and with them, whether or not that’s ethical or whatever. I will speak by phone or Skype to at least one of my sisters every day, and I will accept every single call I receive from them.’”

“What if I’m in the shower or something?”

“‘Unless I am in the shower or something, in which case I will return the call promptly. I will not sit in my house by myself. I can journal but I cannot blog. I will keep away from conspiracists.’ That one’s important, Leo. Also this one: ‘I will find a job—’”

“Can you give me a few weeks on that?”

“‘—within three weeks, maybe with that nice friend of mine the carpenter who fired me six months ago.’”

“Gabriel? I don’t know. He was pretty pissed.”

“I talked to him. He said he’s willing to do it.”

Leo nodded okay. “What’s in this contract for me?” he asked.

“‘In return, my sisters will not make me go back to Quivering Pines or any other inpatient rehab facility—’”

“Or nuthouse of any kind.”

“‘—or nuthouse of any kind. Though, of course, if I go crazy again or can’t stay off the weed or the booze, my sister Daisy will be unable to plead my case anymore, and without Daisy advocating for me, I will be screwed.’ Because Rosemary totally thinks we should have brought you straight to a serious psych facility back east.”

“Wait. Is this part of the contract?” he asked.

“You don’t have to write that bit down,” she said. “But you get my point, right, Leo? This is the last bit of slack you get.”

He did get her point. From where his sister stood, he probably appeared to be loitering at that fork in the road between eccentric wanderer and mentally ill loser. Daisy was just trying to call to him from down the road she had chosen.

That being the case, Leo knew at once that he must concede at least some of the claims he had made earlier were delusional—like that Marilyn and Brand-New Day and the people hanging warning signs by the light-rail tracks had been acting in concert and against him, because of his greatness. He knew that that was all nonsense, all bullshit; that was just bad genetic code; that was uncles.

But he also knew not to tell her the
and yet
part.
And yet
it turns out that he
had
been right about a lot of it; that there
was
 a terrible plan afoot to collect and commoditize all our information; that SineCo
was
bad and
was
in cahoots with other bad guys, including his old friend Mark Deveraux; that not all facilities and institutions were what they seemed; that many were not, in fact, what they seemed.

He wanted his sister to see that he knew that he was lucky to be relieved of the self-spangled connectivity, the elation, the certainty. He didn’t even want them back. Truly. The plain old world was strange enough, turns out. What he wanted back was that girl. But when he imagined trying to convince Daisy of Lola’s role here, he saw that she’d probably end up saying something like
I believe that you believe it, Leo
.

No, the kinder thing here was not to make his sister worry any more than she was already legitimately worrying about his sanity and grip. She had enough on her plate. Everybody did. Groaning plates, all around.

He knew that Lola was real. He remembered putting his hand on her breastbone, remembered how little space she had occupied in the driver’s seat and on the mattress. And when the blanket had fallen: chin and neck and swale of clavicle and rise of breast and fall of rib. Anyway, he had kept her note. And she left a hair elastic on the white cliffs of his sink. He was wearing it on his wrist.

So he signed the contract. Daisy booked a flight home for three days later. She said she wanted to stick around to see that Leo still had what she called a basic set of life skills.

She woke him for seven a.m. walks and light breakfasts. She made checklists for him and taped them to his fridge beside his placemat contract
. Walk. Breakfast. Meds. Meeting. Look for work. Clean big stupid house. Walk. Dinner. Sleep.

Daisy was keeping a very close eye on him, and she was bossy. But she was not unreasonable. Leo liked having her around, and he was allowed to give her a hard time in his way. “On the walks, I don’t have to carry those stupid little pink weights you carry, do I?”

And she to him. “No, you’ll probably get a workout cleaning this Richie Rich house of yours.”

Zinger. It wasn’t a Richie Rich house, though. She meant it was too big for one person. He had bought when the neighborhood was still rough.

Daisy drove him to his first session with Alice Waters, who turned out to be a totally uncreepy blue-spectacled Buddhist social worker. The next day Daisy drove him to his first session with Larry Davis, a bearded and besweatered old hippie who explained to Leo without condescension the pharmacology of and current theory on a drug called lamotrigine. He gave Leo his home and mobile numbers to use in the event of an adverse reaction.

Daisy didn’t have to drive him to his first AA meeting, because there was one a few blocks from his house, in a dingy building in a still-ungentrified patch of his neighborhood. The building announced itself as Promises—the word painted brightly across the pocked masonry of its facade. Leo had always assumed it was some sort of evangelical outlet, or maybe a bar for black people or for the kind of white people who felt able to walk into black bars. So he was embarrassed to discover, when he consulted his little meeting guide, that Promises was the opposite of a bar—it was a sober club—and that the addictions and afflictions that brought people in there were highly democratic. This was no Quivering Pines. This was folding tables with that sticker of wood grain—that, but peeling—and tubes of powdered creamer made from hooves, and all types of people. It skewed a bit rough, but it was as mixed a room as Leo had ever seen in Portland.

After his first meeting, he drank thin coffee with Len, a grizzled electrician who had appointed himself Leo’s sponsor. Len said Leo was clearly white-knuckling it and that he should Let Go and Let God.

Such meaningless advice. Not even noise, really. Leo wanted a new sponsor. Maybe he could break James out of Quivering Pines. Len said that Leo should try sharing in the meeting or talking to some people afterward; that he should try to tell the others what he was going through.

“You have to trust that there is some knowledge in the room,” said Len, pulling from a Pall Mall. “Knowledge that could benefit you. Like, you ain’t the first one been through this shit.”

Leo tried to take that on board. But as beautiful and strange as the stories here were, as real as the suffering was, these people’s predicaments were deeply unlike his own. This objection is said to be a form of denial called
terminal uniqueness
. The phrase was supposed to mean it was a false position. But a secret global network had sent a beautiful girl to involve him in a worldwide counterconspiracy. And then she’d asked him to blackmail an old friend, and when he’d said no, she’d left in the night and broke his heart.
You
tell that to the room.

He thought it could work—the meetings and the sit-ups and the attempts at prayer. The checklists and the granola and the lamotrigine.

But oh, how he wanted her back. The way she had made him feel; the way she had asked him straight, and told him straight; the way she had walked up the stairs.

He should forget about her, her wild claims of a secret world, her half nakedness, her having asked for his help. Yeah,
right
,
he should forget about her, her wild claims of a secret world, her half nakedness, her having asked for his help.

Leo liked his sister’s regimen. Her lots-of-leafy-greens diet; her bed-before-eleven, rise-at-seven policy. And he had to agree that the morning walk was a good idea. It gave his brain a baseline for the day. Or maybe that was the lamotrigine. So the day after Daisy left, he called his friend Louis, the guy whose wife was a public defender, early in the morning and asked would he like to take a walk in the woods.

Louis picked him up in his ratty Mazda truck, his old dog Cola on the bench seat beside him. Leo squashed in beside the musty brown dog and the trio drove to Forest Park, across the river, up over the arched back of the Fremont Bridge.

“Hey, do me a favor,” said Leo, as they debouched at the trailhead. There were only a few other cars parked on the verge. “Leave your phone here, will you?”

“This more of your Gene Hackman conspiracy thing?” Louis asked him.

“Sure. We can call it that.”

Louis was a city government reporter at the best alt-weekly in Portland. Leo knew that his job required being discreet and dogged at the same time. He thought Louis might be a good resource for how a non-schizophrenic person would go about confirming the existence of a secret cyberplot and the online underground opposing it.

Louis let the dog off leash and she shed five years, dashed away into the green brush beside the trail. The two men walked behind her.

While Leo talked, Louis kept his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the trail ahead. He asked only a few questions. He was pushing the pace. Leo was breathing hard as he spoke. Cola coursed around them, a house dog returned to her element.

After a mile, Louis said, “I thought you decided all that stuff was delusional.”

Leo stopped there, where the trail offered a particularly nice view of distant industry. A heavily used bank of the Willamette was far below them, far enough below to look like it was from a storybook: train cars and brightly colored tanks and stacks, their grimy, carbon-economy purpose obscured by the distance, the view softened and Fenimore-Coopered by the trailside conifers in the foreground.

“Some of it was, some of it wasn’t,” said Leo.

“That’s convenient.”

“No, Louis, it’s very
in
convenient, actually.”

Louis regarded the view, and then his friend. “Well, I can look into what you said about SineCo, I guess. I know a guy who does that kind of reporting.”

Y
es. Someone to help him with this
.

“You lost a dog?” called a man from the bank ten yards above them.

Louis turned quickly. “She’s not lost,” he said. “I’m right here.” He whistled for his dog. Cola sprang to go to him, but the man had her tight by the scruff of her neck and he yanked her back in midair. Cola yelped in pain and surprise.

“She’s got no collar,” said the man evenly. “Could be a stray.”

Louis moved toward his dog, and the man clamped down harder on her neck, pushing her into the ground. Louis stopped moving forward. He held up one hand to display leash and collar. “Easy now,” he said.

“That’s okay,” said the man brightly. “They got microchips, now, in these dogs.” He took what looked like a Node from the pocket of his too-heavy coat and held it scanner-style against Cola’s shaking shoulder blades.

“Yeah. Here it is. You Louis Hanson? Live on Northeast Twenty-Fifth Street? Two little girls in day care at Sunflower’s, on Killingsworth?”

Louis said nothing. Leo said nothing. The man gripped the dog.

Then Louis said carefully, “Yeah, that’s me.” The man let go of Cola. She raced to Louis, who slipped her collar on her and began walking quickly downhill. Leo stood rooted to the trail, looking at the man.

“Let’s go,” Leo heard Louis say, his voice weird with fear and urgency.

The man on the hill nodded at him, knowing, dismissive. “Yeah. Best be on your way, Crane.”