“That’s what Mother was doing?” Simon asks.
“Well, she wouldn’t call it that, but, yes,” Francisco says. “She had one of the first chips. She was the test case for her Senate committee. I had never been around a person with a chip, of course, and having one in her head was a real adjustment for her. It added to stress, for both of us. Then, using the chip she figured out some things about me, which I resented.” He pauses and shrugs. “To be fair, I suppose she did, too. In any case, we argued about these things. Sometimes it got loud. We were in a little apartment in Adams Morgan, and the neighbors would pound on the walls and say, ‘Shut up!’ Then you,” he says, pointing at Simon, “would wake up and start asking all sorts of questions, and your mother would blame me, and I’d drink a big glass of rum and get even louder. It was terrible. I ended up spending a lot of nights with my friends in a place down Columbia Road.
“Anyway, one of my points in those arguments was that the chip was just a computer. The Chinese could impress everybody by calculating big numbers in their heads at meetings, or sending messages to each other. But the real thinking came from the biological part. The brain—the wet brain—was still the crucial cognitive engine. Everybody had one. Now it’s true, the Americans needed good computers. But they didn’t necessarily need them inside their heads. They certainly didn’t need Chinese computers there. What was the rush?
“They were scared,” he says. “It was like a—” He pauses, looking for the right word. He turns to Simon. “¿Como se dice ‘una estampida’?”
“A stampede,” Simon says.
“Oh, that’s easy. It was like a stampede.” He pronounces it “estampede.” “Your mother was part of the team. I blamed her for it. I was thinking, ‘The Americans are surrendering. The country’s going to turn into a client state of a dictatorship.’ You didn’t need a boost to see that coming. In any case, my marriage was falling apart, and the Chinese and the Americans, who by now had their own chip, were heading down to South America to battle for market share. That’s where the cognitive war was going to get hot.”
Francisco takes a sip of coffee. Then he calls over the waiter and orders a pitcher of tequila. “So one day I tell Stella that I’m going down to Asunción to see my folks and do some work. What I don’t tell her is that my ticket is one-way. I’m not proud of this, but it’s the truth. I kiss her good-bye. She’s four or five months pregnant, and frankly, I think she’s happy to see me go. I kissed you good-bye,” he says to Simon. “That one hurt.” He pauses to pour four small glasses of tequila. He distributes them and then downs his with a single gulp.
“Now Paraguay,” he says, “was the test market for the American chips. We were the … Indian rabbits.”
“Guinea pigs,” Simon says, correcting him.
“Precisely, the guinea pigs. When I get down there, it’s pretty easy to see what’s going to happen. The Americans are going to roll out their chips, and the Chinese are going to do everything they can to disrupt it. Now the Chinese have been researching for decades into all sorts of cognitive weaponry. They have viruses and worms and trojans and all sorts of programs to interfere with computer systems. We all know that. So it makes perfect sense that they will try to sabotage the American chips in Paraguay. At least it’s a possibility. A successful sabotage might kill people. Perhaps thousands of them. The only way to protect the Paraguayans, the way we see it, is to keep the Americans from implanting the chips in the first place.”
“We?” Ralf asks. “You were with some group?”
“We called ourselves the Nuevos Bolivarianos. They called us revolutionaries, and said we were anti-American. But the only revolution we wanted was to maintain the cognitive status quo—the human brain without a chip. Though yes, some of us were anti-American, others were against the project mostly because we knew, or at least suspected, that the Chinese were going to sabotage them. The battle between those two countries was about to start and it was going to take place inside our heads!
“It was in September of 2044 that we made our big move. We blew up a warehouse across the Rio Paraguay from Concepción. We had intelligence that the first load of chips was there. Everything about the operation was a success. We moved in with great secrecy. The plastic explosives, which came from Venezuela, worked impeccably. They left nothing but … escombros.”
“Rubble,” Simon says.
“There was only one problem,” Francisco continues, “and it was a big one. The chips were not in that warehouse. The Chinese or the Americans—we still don’t know which—fed us false intelligence. There were three watchmen in the warehouse. They all died.
“So suddenly, we were murderers. The army launched a massive counterattack against us. They had informants in our group—the same ones who gave us the wrong warehouse. They led the soldiers right to our doors. Within a week of that attack, almost all of my friends were in jail or killed.”
“How did you survive?” Ralf asks.
Francisco downs another shot of tequila and slowly scratches the side of his nose. “I was an informant for the Americans,” he says quietly. “Now I did not tell them about our attack, and I didn’t rat on my compañeros. But I told them about members of our group who seemed to be pro-Chinese. I felt that by working against the deployment I was helping the United States. That was the side I chose.” He stares down at the white tablecloth.
No one speaks. Simon rolls back his head and looks up through the dome at the wintry sky. This is one piece of information he didn’t know. Ralf takes a spoonful of flan, swallows it, and follows it with a sip of tequila.
“I don’t get it,” Ellen says. “Did the Chinese plant spies in your group?”
“Of course,” Francisco says. “They wanted to know what we were up to. They wanted us to fail, so that the Americans could roll out the chips and they could sabotage them. That’s what I always believed, and I believe it to this day. That’s what happened. We failed. We were dismantled. The Americans went ahead with the chips.”
“What did you do?” Ellen asks.
“I left Paraguay the next day. I was lucky that the Americans did not kill me right away. They knew that I knew about the warehouse bombing. They had to know that. They knew that I didn’t tell them. So I was aware that my days were numbered. The survivors in our group—and there weren’t many—were likely to be suspicious of anyone who didn’t get killed. Of course, people were suspicious of them, too. Everyone was suspicious of everyone else, and the way to settle things, all of a sudden, was to kill people. So it didn’t make sense for me to stick around. I found a truck driver who was going to Santa Cruz, in Bolivia, carrying a refrigerated load of Argentine beef. I went along. When we crossed the border into Bolivia, I hid among carcasses of cows. I almost froze.
“So I get to Santa Cruz. I have no money, and only the clothes on my back—which stink of beef. My only asset is my education, and my English. Santa Cruz, at that point, is the capital of Bolivia’s coca industry. I start out as a laborer, a peón, working like a mule and living in a little shack with eight bunk beds. Sixteen of us in this little space! It smelled worse than the meat truck. Eventually they see that I’m not a peón, that I speak English and know about economics. So I work my way up in the business. Pretty soon, I’m flying around and making deals. I’m going down to Lima, to the port of Callao, up to Santa Marta in Colombia, to Belem and Recife in Brazil. I make a couple of trips to Mexico, one to Culiacán, another one right here to Juárez. At this point, the chip wars are exploding all over the continent. But that’s not my fight anymore.”
“So what happened in Paraguay?” Ellen asks.
“Just what I feared. The Americans rolled it out. The chips worked wonderfully—una maravilla. Really,” he adds, “despite everything people said, the Americans were ahead of the Chinese in this technology. Much smoother software interface. But within a week or two, a virus started spreading in the chip. I wasn’t there, of course, but friends who were told me about it. People started going cr
azy. They got horrible headaches and went suicidal. People were jumping off bridges. One guy set himself on fire in the Plaza Uruguaya, right across from the train station. I think my whole family died, though I never got official word. In the end, the government and the Americans had to take the chips out. It was over in Paraguay.
“Before long, the two countries moved on to different markets, to Chile, to Argentina, finally the big one in Brazil. There was violence and all kinds of intrigue. But as far as I was concerned, the die was cast in Paraguay. The rest of the chip wars were an aftermath. The Chinese won. As I say, that was no longer my war. I was into a different business.
“That new business was also in crisis—because of the chips. The drug business could not thrive in a surveillance state, and that’s what was coming in every country. As the chips rolled out in Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, the governments finally had a way to monitor their populations. They could watch the narcos, step by step. If the narcos tried to stay wild, as they did here in Juárez, they could arrest them. It was illegal not to have a chip. If the narcos made deals with police or army officers, as they always had, the government could see that, too. Everything was visible.
“It’s hard to understand now what a dramatic change this was. These countries had always been so free—much freer than the rich countries, the U.S. and Europe. You could lose yourself in the mountains or stretches of jungle bigger than some European countries. The law wasn’t a problem. It was really just a starting point for negotiations, and if you had money—as we did—you almost always got your way.
“Well, with the chips, that freedom just evaporated. Gone. Everything was visible, traceable, documented. What’s more, the chip started to eat into our market. People didn’t need expensive cocaine anymore when they could buy a cheap euphoria app.”
“So did you get a boost?” Ellen asks.
“I considered it,” Francisco says. “I like electronics. I like toys. I like the idea of having entertainment available all the time, and being able to communicate with my friends. I could see that the things we had—the money, telephones, computers, movies—they were all going to move into the head. The wild world was going to be a lonely place without much opportunity. I saw that. So, yes, I considered getting a boost.”
“You never told me this!” Simon says.
“You never asked,” Francisco says. “So anyway,” he says, turning back toward Ellen, “I considered it. But I was an illegal alien in Bolivia with a work history that was sure to raise questions. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I’d rather be a citizen in a surveillance state or an outlaw on its fringes. In the end, I chose the fringe.
“Back then we knew that Juárez was wild. Everyone knew this. So four of us got a plane, loaded it with product, and took off for San Andres Island. That’s a part of Colombia that’s up in the Caribbean. We flew all night. It was just like a normal drug run. But instead of selling the cargo and flying back, we sold half of it there and flew north. We figured we’d sell the other half in Juárez.
“There were three of us in the plane who knew each other pretty well. Me, my friend Sapo, and his cousin, Raul. The fourth was the pilot, a man named Javier. I had a funny feeling about him from the beginning. He was a big fat Argentine, and new to the trade. Why would anyone jump into a dying business at this point? I couldn’t understand that. Also, he was capped. It seemed strange to me that someone with a chip in his head would take a great risk to fly to the capital of the wild world.
“So I was suspicious of Javier. Sapo vouched for him. He said he used to date Javier’s sister in Buenos Aires. Of course that led to lots of jokes, about whether Javier’s sister looked like him. The usual stuff. I guess I forgot about my suspicions, or suppressed them, because we flew north with him. It wasn’t until we were going over the Tehuantepec isthmus of Mexico, the skinniest part, that I began to wonder. I’d been over Tehuantepec before, and the army always shot at small planes like ours with surface to air missiles. SAMs. They always missed, but SAMs were part of the normal experience around there. This time, it was silent.
“Javier was listening to the radio, constantly. That wasn’t so unusual. But when he heard the Gringo voices, he would do this thing with his little finger.” Francisco holds his tequila glass and gently beats his finger against it. “At first I thought it was just nerves, or that he was keeping beat to a song in his head. But his finger would go quiet. Then the Gringo voice came on, and the finger came back to life. We assumed that the Gringos he was listening to were the anti-drug and anti-terrorism people. He was tapping his finger against this little metal ring on the side of the control panel. I pointed it out to Sapo and Raul, and we watched it for ten or fifteen minutes, all the time our suspicions rising. We figured it had to be some sort of signal he was sending.”
“What did you think he was?” Ellen asks.
“DEA,” Francisco says. “Bringing us in to jail, and squeezing us for our sources, delivery routes, couriers, bank information, the usual stuff.
“So we’re flying north over the Pacific, and we go over land again near Culiacán, in Sinaloa. This is where guns fire pretty much nonstop. Javier knows this. He’s sending out flares left and right. Those are things you fire off to divert missiles. He’s ducking, and he’s saying, ‘Whoa, that was a close call.’ We know that no one’s shooting at us. This isn’t our first plane ride.
“This is where it would have been really convenient to have chips in our heads. We could have sent messages back and forth. But all we could do in that plane was send signals with our eyes and our fingers. It was hard to come up with a strategy. If the guy hadn’t been the pilot, it would have been easy. But you can’t take out the only person who knows how to fly when you’re at fifteen thousand feet. This is what I wanted to say to Sapo. But I couldn’t get the point across.
“Next thing I know, Sapo has … what’s the white rope you use for clotheslines?”
“I think it’s just ‘clothesline rope,’” Ellen says.
“Well he has some clothesline rope around Javier’s neck, and he’s pulling hard. I can tell because it digs into the fat, and you can’t even see the rope. Of course, Javier can’t talk. His eyes are bugging out and his face turns bright red. He lets go of the control stick, and the airplane starts to dive.
“Raul and I are screaming for Sapo to let him go. But Sapo, since he was the one who brought Javier on board, is feeling betrayed. Or more betrayed, I should say. He’s yelling: ‘Tell us who you work for, hijo de puta!’”
Francisco’s voice is rising as he tells the story, and the only other people in the restaurant, three heavyset men who look like off-duty cops, are looking in his direction. He lowers his voice to a hoarse whisper and continues.
“Sapo’s a strong man, and I guess he pulls too hard, because Javier collapses to one side, and his head falls in a tilt, like he’s been hanged. The airplane is diving and we’re all screaming. I start to push Javier’s body from the seat. First I have to unbuckle him, which isn’t easy when you’re panicking. Then I have to shove his big heavy body off to the side. But these planes are tiny, and there’s nowhere to shove it. So I manage to pull it toward me, and I climb over it into the pilot’s seat. Now I’ve never piloted before, but I’ve been on lots of runs, and I’ve watched them. I know how the control stick works. I grab it and pull it back, and the plane levels off.”
Francisco takes another sip of his tequila and looks at his three guests, trying to gauge how much detail to pack into his story. “Two problems,” he says. “First, we think that Javier was sending some kind of code with his finger, and that as soon as that code stops, they’ll realize that something has changed and start shooting at us. We can’t do much about that. The second problem: We don’t know where we are, and we can’t ask the people on the radio for instructions, because they’ll know we’re amateurs. So we turn off the radio. Sapo has a road atlas for Mexico. We start looking at it, the various states, Sinaloa, Durango, Zacatecas, and matching what we see b
elow us to the maps. We don’t have a clue!
“Then we see these big mountains. ‘These have to be the Tarahumara,’ I say. I push down the control and we climb over them, barely. Then I see Copper Canyon, which, by the way, is spectacular. That puts us into the state of Chihuahua. Long story short, we find Chihuahua City, and then we drop down to about an altitude of fifteen feet. We’re not much higher than a truck. We can see every pebble. Flying like that, we follow Highway 45 all the way to Juárez. When we get to a landing strip near the border, I try to land the plane, not with great success. I think you call it a ‘crash landing.’ The three of us climb out before it explodes into flames. I barely noticed until later,” he adds, “that my leg was broken. I never really got it fixed.
“Still the crash turned out to be a good thing. First, if we had tried to sell our drugs in Juárez, we would probably have been killed within a day or two. Newcomers weren’t appreciated in the business around here. Second, it destroyed Javier’s body. If you kill a DEA agent, it’s best not to leave a lot of evidence. Of course,” he adds, “we never found out if he was DEA or not. For all we know, he was tapping tangos with his baby finger and the gunners in Tehuantepec and Sinaloa were taking the day off. We’ll never know.”
Francisco gestures out the window beyond a long stretch of shanties. “It was just over there that we landed,” he says. “So we’re thinking this is the promised land. Ciudad Juárez. No boosts, no surveillance, everyone’s a narco. It sounds like a dream, except for one thing. The city had way too many narcos facing a dramatically shrinking market. Now Juárez had a very long history of dealing with such problems. Early in the century, it was known as the murder capital of the world.”
“It still is,” Ralf says.
“Yes. But that’s propaganda. They also say we sell drugs here, and we haven’t done that for twenty years. Anyway,” Francisco continues, “they had a heritage of drug wars. When we arrived here it looked like a new one, even more vicious, was about to break out. Anyone who could count—and you didn’t need a chip for that—could see that we had a surplus of narcos. It was unsustainable.
The Boost Page 17
