The Boost

by Stephen Baker

  “Don’t bother with the details,” Simon says. “We just don’t know. But if we meet him where he’s planning for us, in my apartment, he’s in a position of strength. Out here, he’s weaker.”

  “His car isn’t dumb enough to drive off a cliff,” Ralf says.

  “We’ll see,” Simon says.

  They walk from the site of the buried chip toward the cinder block wall. “It doesn’t look so high tech,” Ralf says to Simon. “More like something King Arthur would order up.”

  “They moved to low tech as the budgets shrank,” Simon says.

  Wandering away from Simon, Ralf comes up to a pit, an old sand trap. He looks into it and is surprised to see a patch of glittering white sand. It stands out on the deserted golf course like a gold tooth on a corpse picked clean by crows. He points to it and shouts to Simon, “Who tends that sand trap?”

  “You noticed,” Simon says, smiling as he walks toward his brother. “That’s why we’re here.” He explains to Ralf that the sand covers a trap door leading to a tunnel first dug by the drug mafia early in the century, and used for the last decade or so as a secret conduit between the wild world of Juárez and its supporters, suppliers, migrants, and refugees. “This is the lifeline to the wild world,” he says.

  “And what does this lifeline have to do with you?” Ralf asks.

  He doesn’t have time to answer. They hear the sound of a vehicle above, tearing through the desert plants and bumping over rocks. “Sounds like he’s coming fast,” Simon says.

  3/7/72 5:15 p.m. Mountain Standard Time

  Oscar Espinoza is half expecting the two brothers to skip the follow-up meeting. He also knows that the Artemis—at least the one he saw—won’t be there. She is in Juárez, as he knows firsthand, and will not likely be available for a boost-scrubbing encounter with his zapper. There might be another Artemis around—the true domed one. But he doubts it. So after knocking on their door at the Palmore and waiting a few moments, Espinoza turns around and lumbers down the steps. But Smedley, still riding shotgun in his boost, orders him to climb back to the landing. “Break into the apartment!” he yells.

  “What for?”

  “To get information, for starters. Like where they might be.”

  Espinoza, weary of hosting his meddling boss in his boost, tries to collect his thoughts. He has spent the entire afternoon with Smedley, most of the time processing barked orders and finding ways to sidestep them. But this time he comes up with an idea for Smedley. “Just do a search for Ralf Alvare’s boost,” he says. “That’s what we’re looking for, right?”

  “I guess that’s right,” Smedley concedes.

  Some ten minutes later, Espinoza is in the KIFF, heading north on I-10 toward Santa Teresa. When the vehicle misses the turn at Sunland Park, Smedley starts barking orders.

  “Left here!” Smedley commands as they reach a dirt road. Seconds later, he tells Espinoza to follow a right curve up a hill. Espinoza dutifully transmits the order to the vehicle. It would be easier if Vallinger’s command center, which has the details on Ralf’s boost, could simply provide the map coordinates to the KIFF and let it hunt for itself. But Smedley keeps that information to himself and provides Espinoza only with turn-by-turn instructions.

  At one point, Espinoza asks Smedley about the nature of the mission. “Do we want the boost as it is or do we want it erased?” he asks.

  “As it is,” Smedley answers. “But zap him if you see he’s crossing into Mexico. He’s only about a hundred yards away from the border.”

  The ride up the rocky path makes Espinoza’s head hurt even more. He presses his palms to his eyes and sees the colors of the desert, the browns and yellows, swirl in a tightening vortex. He orders the KIFF to halt, and the vehicle promptly skids to a stop. “Take off the headache,” he tells Smedley.

  “Oh, I hit that by mistake,” Smedley says.

  “Don’t joke.”

  “I’m not kidding,” Smedley says. “The interface on this machine is a bad joke.” He tells Espinoza that he’ll turn it off, but struggles to find the right command. Espinoza hears him grumbling about the “stupid app” and its “god-awful interface.” He finally gives up. “I’ll do it later,” he says. “I promise.”

  Espinoza sits in the KIFF, waiting. The vehicle is halfway up a steep hill, probably the remains of a tee on the front nine. Espinoza breathes heavily as the pain throbs through his head.

  “Go get them,” says Smedley’s voice.

  Oscar Espinoza, wracked by pain, orders the vehicle forward. It climbs to the top of the hill, rolls forward, slows down, and stops.

  When Espinoza looks down, both he and Smedley can see that the KIFF is perched at the edge of a cliff. Below they see the two brothers, both faces pointed right toward them.

  Espinoza climbs out of the car and begins to jog down the side of the hill. He would like to yell to the brothers, telling them to wait, that he doesn’t want to hurt them, but the pain in his head is too great.

  He hurries down the hill, looking at the scene unfolding below. The brothers appear to be arguing. The older one with the hat has the younger one, Ralf, by the elbow. He is tugging him away from the advancing Espinoza, toward a pit with unusually white sand.

  As he gets closer to the border, his connection with Smedley dims. The phrases turn into simple words. “Run! Catch them!” The pain from the head and the tooth seems to ease.

  He sees the two brothers jump into the pit of white sand. The older one, looking back at him, starts digging in the sand. Then he hoists open a sheet metal door, and the two of them climb inside and disappear.

  “Catch!” Smedley orders.

  “They’re gone. Can’t you see?”

  “Go!” Espinoza, all 260 pounds of him, sprints toward the pit and hurls himself into the white sand. He locates the door, opens it, and crawls inside. He finds himself in a tunnel. It’s dark and cool. He sees the brothers ahead of him, two forms silhouetted against the light at the end. Espinoza, still panting, lies in the darkness and quietly rejoices. Smedley’s voice is gone, and the pain has vanished from his head. In this tunnel, he has found a measure of peace.

  Fifteen

  3/7/72 5:31 p.m. Juárez Standard Time

  Don Paquito does something strange with his eyes, Ellen notices. When he hears something that surprises him, or maybe something that makes him mad, he bats them heavily, as if trying to push out a dust mote, or maybe a tear, and then pauses for a second or two, before returning to the conversation. The first time he did it was when Ellen mentioned, early in their conversation, that she supposed he was in the drug business.

  He batted his eyes, gazed for two or three seconds toward the twenty people in the next room typing on prehistoric computers, and then looked back at the Artemis sitting before him. “What makes you say that?” he asked, speaking with a soft Spanish accent.

  “Well,” Ellen said, not expecting to be pressed on such a simple point, “You’re the … leader of Juárez, from what I’ve heard, and the business of Juárez is drugs. Everybody knows that.”

  That was when Don Paquito did the second strange thing with his eyes. He arced one brow impossibly high, into a peak that seemed to stretch halfway up his forehead. He just left it that way for a second or two, by way of response, before slowly lowering it to its place. There was something about the green eye under that acrobatic brow that looked familiar to her.

  “I’ll bet you can wiggle your ears,” Ellen said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I was just saying that if you can move your eyebrow like that, you can probably do tricks with your ears,” Ellen said.

  That was when she saw Don Paquito smile for the first time.

  She likes his looks. He’s small, probably not much more than five-seven, with wrinkles that dance across his face when he smiles. He has short-cropped black hair that’s turning gray on the sides. His teeth are straight and true, though a bit darker than the sparkling norm in the United States. Ellen wonder
s if he smokes cigars.

  When Ellen arrived at his offices, escorted by Alfredo and her “guide,” Enrique, she caused a stir. The three entered through a crowded waiting room, where several dozen people were gathered on wooden benches and folding chairs. There were mothers with children, adults with their elderly parents, all of them dressed as if for church. A couple of the men wore neckties, something Ellen had seen only in old movies. When they saw Ellen, the crowd rose to its feet, and it seemed that everyone offered her a seat at the same time. She looked about, confused. Standing in one corner of the room, a pastry vendor reached into his glass case, pulled out a chocolate donut, ceremoniously shooed the flies from it, and lifted it to her on a white napkin. She walked past him, flashing a confused smile.

  Enrique pulled Ellen by the elbow, leading her past the crowd and into the next room. This was the one where two dozen people typed on the old computers. Some of them talked on telephones, like the one Ellen had used at the Kentucky Club.

  “What’s this?” Ellen asked Enrique.

  “The newsroom,” he said.

  They moved into the next room, a hall with potted palm trees and café tables embossed with the blue and white label of Corona beer. “This room is called the playa,” Enrique said. “It means ‘beach.’”

  Ellen nodded. She drummed her fingers on the table. She looked down and was embarrassed to see the ridiculous brick pattern on her leggings. Then she wondered why she should care about her appearance for an interview with a drug lord, if that’s what Don Paquito was.

  A young woman wearing blue jeans and sandals walked up to the table and announced that Don Paquito was waiting for her. Ellen felt frightened. Alfredo patted her shoulder, and said he had to leave. “But when will I see you again?” she asked, feeling lonely and abandoned.

  He shrugged and walked backward toward the waiting room, with a wistful smile.

  “It’ll be all right,” said Enrique, all business. “We know how to find him.”

  With a lump in her throat, Ellen followed the young woman into a small dark office. On three sides stood shelves piled high with books, in English and Spanish. On the wall to her left hung a large poster featuring a somber-faced Mexican, clad in white, with a pointed moustache and penetrating eyes. Under it were the words: ¡Tierra y Libertad!

  “That’s Emiliano Zapata,” came a voice from across the room. Don Paquito was sitting at a shiny walnut desk with brass fixtures. Ellen recognized it from her art studies as a Louis XV. She looked at Don Paquito. What struck her was the eyes. They smiled more than his mouth, and she felt she knew him.

  Ellen instinctively fed Zapata’s name into the archives of her boost and learned that he was a leader of the Mexican Revolution, gunned down in a town called Chinameca in 1919.

  Don Paquito gestured toward the only other seat in the office, a metallic desk chair on wheels, and Ellen sat down. He asked her if she wanted something to drink, “Some lemonade, perhaps?” She nodded, and he called toward the door. “¡Elenita, agüita de limón para la señorita!” Moments later, the young woman came into the office carrying a tray with a tall glass of lemonade and a chocolate donut that looked suspiciously like the fly-covered specimen from the waiting room. Ellen ignored the pastry and drank down the cold, sweet lemonade, emptying the glass. “Tráele más,” Don Paquito said. The woman darted out the door and returned with a pitcher, and filled Ellen’s glass.

  Leaning back in his desk chair, the Mexican went on to grill Ellen about what she knew about Juárez. That drew her comment about the drug economy, sparking the first batting of Don Paquito’s eyes.

  “And what do you know about me?”

  “Nothing,” she said, taking a sip of lemonade. She remembered the story about the tigers in his house, and the harem, and the glass eye that he popped out from time to time. But she kept that intelligence to herself.

  “Surely you must have something about me on your chip. Your boost. Petabytes or zettabytes of data, and nothing about me?” He acted hurt.

  “There’s no network coverage here,” Ellen said. “But I do have some archives.” She promptly carried out a search and unearthed an old news report about a man named Don Paquito who had wrested political and military control of Juárez from a previous generation of drug lords who ran the Juárez cartel. “It says you’re ruthless,” she said.

  “‘Ruthless,’” he said, trying out the word in his mouth. “After the Boston Red Sox made their very foolish trade with the Yankees, they were ‘ruthless,’ too.” He laughed at his own joke, which made no sense to Ellen. She focused on his pronunciation of “Yankees,” which sounded almost like “junkies.”

  He went on to ask her about her family in Paterson, New Jersey, her education at Rutgers, where she majored in graphic design. He told her that he also did some studying in the United States. “American Studies,” he said dismissively. “Should have done econ.”

  She looked at him quizzically.

  “I could have used more mathematics, and statistics,” he said. “Everybody could.”

  Ellen nodded slowly. That was one of Ralf’s talking points, which she found tiresome.

  “You think that you can do all your math in your chip,” Don Paquito said, “and that we wild people might as well give up in those areas. But you have to know which questions to ask.” He pointed to his head. “You get the questions from the wild brain.” He lifted his eyebrow in a modified arc, as if to punctuate the point.

  That led to more discussion about language and art. Ellen contributed a few tidbits, but it was mostly Don Paquito who did the talking. He mentioned Montaigne and Emerson and José Ortega y Gasset, paintings by Caravaggio and José Siqueiros. Ellen, suddenly weary, stopped paying attention. Looking down, she traced her finger along the orange pattern of the bricks on her leggings. Either he was trying to impress her, she figured, or Don Paquito was a lonely man.

  Then he stopped talking. The room was silent, until other noises began to intrude. Ellen could hear a fly batting against the screen in the window. She could hear the voices in the newsroom next door. She could hear Don Paquito’s rhythmic breathing. They sat.

  Now Ellen, no longer frightened of this drug lord—if he is one—is thinking about what she can get from him. He appears to be reading a document on his desk.

  “So,” she says, breaking the silence, “can you help me get back to El Paso this afternoon?”

  Don Paquito looks up. “I thought you’d never ask,” he says. “But I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

  “Why?”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “Well, I … I got into a bit of a jam, and—”

  “Someone was chasing you, wasn’t he?”

  How does he know? She wonders how much to tell him. “Well,” she says, “sort of.”

  “He won’t chase you over here.”

  She takes a moment to digest that thought. From the logic of it, she should stay in Juárez forever, or at least for a long time. That, she says to herself, is not going to happen.

  “Why did you come down to El Paso?” Don Paquito goes on. “From your home in Adams Morgan?”

  “Mount Pleasant,” she says.

  “Mount Pleasant then.”

  “My boyfriend has family down here.”

  “Ralf,” he says, “has Simon.” He pronounces the second name in Spanish.

  “You know about Ralf, and Simon?”

  “I know about a lot of things,” Don Paquito says. He gestures toward the newsroom. “I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m in the information business.”

  “I just want to get back to Ralf,” Ellen says.

  “From what I’m hearing,” Don Paquito says, “you’ll be seeing him over here.”

  Sixteen

  3/7/72 7:35 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

  “Let me get this straight,” says John Vallinger. “I give you instructions to stop Ralf Alvare and his chip from crossing into Mexico. So first you chase his girlfriend over there. T
hen, just minutes ago, you chase Alvare and his brother, and they both wind up in Juárez. The man you’ve hired to apprehend them follows them and is now off the grid. Do I have that right?”

  They’re sitting around a gleaming mahogany table in Vallinger’s K Street office. Outside the thick soundproof windows, each dressed with a cats-eye shade, Washington, two swallows chase each other, dipping and soaring in the evening sky. A Renaissance oil portrait of a prince, barely one-foot square, surveys the proceedings from its perch on an olive green wall. The prince has a bowl cut, with black bangs nearly down to his eyes, and he wears a leather beret tilted to the right, almost in the fashion of China’s original “capped” workers.

  George Smedley sits across from Vallinger. He struggles to maintain eye contact with his boss. Wearing a three-piece suit with his emblematic feather in his lapel, he slouches slightly in his chair.

  “Do I have the story straight?” Vallinger asks.

  Smedley nods his head ever so slightly.

  “That’s a yes?” Vallinger asks.

  “Yes, essentially,” Smedley says in a low voice.

  Sitting with them is Tyler Dahl, often mentioned as a possible successor to the aged Vallinger. Smedley cannot abide him. Dahl studied humanities at Williams but fancies himself a tech specialist. Smedley is aware that the younger man views him as an enemy and spreads poisonous rumors about him. Smedley’s lucky, he knows, that they come from such a self-interested source. Vallinger tends to discount the rumors—even though a number of them are true.

  Sitting next to Dahl are a sprightly legislative assistant Smedley once tried to date, and three other people he has never seen. Two of them wear military uniforms.

  “Essentially?” Vallinger asks. “Am I missing something?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You said I had the story essentially straight.”

  “Right,” Smedley says. He coughs to give himself time and then weighs his words carefully. “First, there’s no indication that our man, Espinoza, is in Juárez. He went into the tunnel. He may be back. Then you make it sound like we drove these people into Juárez. That wasn’t our intent. They escaped into Juárez, and there’s every indication that that was their design from the beginning.”