by David Shafer
So why had he roused himself for this Bluebird thing? It looked like Nigel worked for the Bluebird client; it looked like the power was going the wrong way. Because Majnoun should not really be the Service’s problem. If some nosy civilian girl could derail your thing, you need to address the thing, not the nosy civilian girl. That was the deal, Ned thought.
Ned’s plan was working, somewhat. The rattled, worried Nigel was indeed more indiscreet about grade 5 matters than the bored, drunk Nigel had been. There definitely was something happening in the forest. Maybe a SAG (subsidiary agency of government, or “shadow-ass government,” as the joke went) was building an offline server, and Bluebird was protecting it during construction? But why would any U.S. agency—even some creepy unnamed SAG—see fit to build such a facility on the Chinese border?
Then Ned opened his workstation one morning and saw Majnoun’s e-mail, and his heart sank. He had seriously failed to anticipate that she would crowd-source a request for further investigation of the forest site. People generally quit after a few fruitless Sine searches. Not this girl. And what a list of names in the To: field. Those were some inconvenient recipients.
Because her e-mail had mentioned Bluebird specifically, there was no way Ned could keep it off Nigel’s computer. He just had to wait until Nigel opened his station that morning and saw it for himself.
“Christ. That little slit has gone and done it,” barked Nigel at 10:27 a.m. Some scalding Nescafé splashed out of his mug and into his lap; he leaped up and cursed secondarily. Ned could see him blame that on Majnoun as well.
“What’s up, boss?” Ned asked. In speech and manner, Ned never betrayed even a trace of his antagonism toward Nigel. He was always cheery and dim and acquiescent. You have to be the easiest one in the room, one of Ned’s mentors had taught him. You have to be like a cornflake in milk.
“She fucking e-mailed the coordinates of the new…of that secure site. How the fuck did she come up with coordinates? Didn’t the locals dud her devices before they let her go north?”
They had, but they had apparently forgotten about her fancy little running watch. Ned had noticed the oversight a few days after her return.
After another minute of cursing others and dabbing at his stained crotch, Nigel shut himself in the microSCIF—the phone-booth-size sensitive compartmented information facility that every covert station had been issued last year. Actually, it looked just like a phone booth, though the phone on its wall had a screen as well as a handset. Ned had caught only glimpses of the inside. It was for grade 5 use only, and there was no way around the biometrics (short of actually gouging Nigel’s eyes out of their sockets and chopping his hands off, a fantasy Ned sometimes indulged).
Nigel was in there for twenty minutes, and when he came out he looked even grayer than usual. He smoked one cigarette and then another; Ned could see gross little wheels turning in his head.
“Listen, Swain. I need you to go down to the Internet place on Eighteenth Street. You’re going to meet a guy there.”
“Who’s the guy?”
“He’s SAG. Don’t worry about that. Remember you said the NGO girl went north with that driver of hers?”
Ned nodded.
“You can pick him out? The driver?”
Ned nodded.
“I need you to meet the guy and show him which one is the driver.”
“Uh. Okay,” said Ned. He was stalling, though. Even a cornflake in milk would balk at some instructions. There are only a few reasons you identify a foreign national for a SAG asset, and none of them are happy ones. Nigel would know that Ned would know this by now.
“He’s a terrorist, Swain. He chose the wrong side.”
And what Ned saw in Nigel’s eyes just then—the hardening, the heartlessness, the sharp point of paranoia—it gave him a fright like he hadn’t known since he was a boy. Neither one of them thought the taxi driver was a terrorist. The words were just a conjurer’s spell, a Patriot Act sim sala bim. And the part about choosing sides? That was meant for Ned, and it was delicately laced with a predator’s menace.
The guy at the Internet place on Eighteenth Street did not look like a SAG asset. Generally, SAG assets looked like they were just dying to beat the shit out of someone. It would be very hard to pick one out at a hockey game, for example. But this guy was wispy and almost pretty, though once he was sitting in Ned’s car, Ned saw that he had the BMI of a shotgun shell and that his every movement came out of nowhere; he even opened the glove box in a deft and deadly way.
The asset was in the passenger seat, Ned driving. When the asset looked right, Ned stole a glance and saw that the guy had a picture of the taxi driver strapped to his forearm, under the long sleeve of his pirate-type shirt.
“Picture’s crap. That’s why you’re here,” said the asset without looking at Ned.
Ned drove slowly. He needed to think. You never knew when these things were going to come up. Knowing what you should do was seldom of any use. Saying to the man “I’m sorry, sir, but I joined the Service to keep my country safe, not to chauffeur assassins. Please exit the vehicle” wasn’t an option; Ned had blown past that point a while back. They passed the faded movie house, the flower market, the rubble-strewn park with the diesel-powered merry-go-round.
He thought of Leila. He’d been listening to her all week, though he’d made contact with her only twice, months ago. Once when she first arrived, and then once when he’d found her in the university cafeteria and talked to her about aspirated consonants. While it was part of his job to bore people into never suspecting him of anything, he couldn’t help being a bit hurt that he had been so successful in her case. She was very pretty: compact and Persian and poised. It would have been nice to get a nod from her. He thought of one of these guys prowling around Leila.
“If he’s working today, he should be up here,” said Ned. They were coming up on the pagoda beside which some of the taximen queued. But the traffic had grown thick around one of the circles. Back home, on traffic reports, this is called stop-and-go traffic, thought Ned. The asset wasn’t saying anything, just mowing down locals from behind his cheap-looking shades.
“What about Majnoun?” asked Ned in the manner he used when he wanted to sound capable of violence. He imagined that there was something really gross in his mouth; the effect was to make his voice flat and his eyes dull.
The asset looked at Ned; sized him up. Then he just shrugged.
“There’s the driver, I think,” said Ned, still with the imaginary gross thing in his mouth, and he indicated a knot of men beneath a weeping tree. The SAG asset lasered his gaze through the windshield. The traffic moved again and they were able to approach the target, at which point both Ned and the asset could see it wasn’t Majnoun’s taximan. The asset relaxed, if that was the word. Ned started taking them on a loop around.
After half a block, he tried again. “Probably can’t take Majnoun now, right? I mean, the day after she sends that shit out?”
This time the guy liked it: the lack of subject, the deference, the lame use of shit.
“Yeah, that’s what they’re saying. She just raced right to the top of their pile, though,” he said. “Anyway, the girl’s got protection right now. Two dudes from that Gettwin Nikaya monastery on her all the time.” It took Ned a minute to understand, because the asset had mangled the Burmese.
When he got it, all he did was raise one eyebrow. He wanted to appear to be thinking, What, and you’re afraid of a couple of monks?, when he was in fact thinking, Monks from the Cathubhummika Mahasatipatthana Hnegttwin are protecting Leila? What the fuck? Ned had thought those two minders were Zeya’s men. The Hnegttwin were pretty hard-line theologically—they worshipped the spirit, not the image, of Buddha—but they were no Shaolin Avengers.
“No one’s scared of a couple of monks,” said the asset, on cue. “But, you know, with these type of people, the monks are very important. They have a lot of power.”
Ned sat up for this lesson in the So
uth Asian psyche.
“Like in Afghanistan. With their warlords and shit,” said the asset. “You might have a guy totally in your sights and then it turns out he’s Abdul Whatever’s lieutenant’s fuck boy. So you can’t go near him.”
They were parked now, with the taxi rank fifty yards off Ned’s right flank. The asset crooked his forearm in his open window, a pen in his grasp pointed toward the rank. One by one, he pointed the pen at the drivers, twisting the tip of the pen delicately, as if waiting for the last word of a stanza to come to him. Ned could see now that the asset was examining each man’s image as it resolved on the screen inside his not-at-all-cheap glasses.
“We shouldn’t let her go,” said Ned, bringing it back to Leila, though the asset seemed to have finished with her. “The girl’s a bad combination. Clueless and connected, you know?” He had to be very careful here not to out-Herod Herod; the asset must know he was a grade 4. But Whatever was going to happen to Leila, Ned wanted to be in on it.
The asset stiffened. “I got him,” he said, twisting his pen tip and squinting at his tiny screen. Then in one of his too-swift motions he had his shades off and was handing them to Ned. “Confirm,” he said.
The asset had frozen the image on the screen. Ned squinched his mouth up, like he couldn’t be sure. “Here, lemme have the lens.”
Ned saw the tang of resistance, and then its evaporation. The asset gave him the pen. You don’t have to fight them, his mentor had taught. With some men, you can establish dominance by making them give up a small, closely held thing.
Ned refreshed the screen; aimed and zoomed the pen.
Yeah. Shit. That was Aung-Hla. Thirty-nine, father of three, kept his Tercel sparkling.
“You’re really gonna let her walk?” Ned asked, aiming the pen at each of the other men in turn.
“Don’t worry about it, bro. Your boss is in on it. Dude can cook up some nasty shit. He’s using that new outfit, you know? The Ruiners?”
He’d heard about them. But Ned thought the Ruiners sounded too bad to be true: a cadre of grade 5s sitting in Aeron chairs on the thirteenth floor of a twelve-story building in northern Virginia. It was said they had full access, through every lens, tap, screen, or pipe. It was said they could reach into your life as a child reaches into the world of her toys. Not just pull, but push. They could rewrite your life; play with you, punish you, or crumple you like paper.
“It’s not him. It’s not the driver,” said Ned.
“You sure?” said the asset. Like: You’re really gonna take a stand here?
“Yeah. It’s not him,” said Ned, and shrugged. There was a sort of aikido in the effective use of condescension. It was a question of careful dosing, and placement. “I see why you thought so, though. All those guys look alike.”
Chapter 7
Leila hated the Monday-morning conference call. The New Yorkers as usual forgot that for most people on the call, Monday morning had come and gone. In Mandalay, it was 9:30 p.m. and Leila was wondering whether she would eat chicken soup at the blue place or noodles with green shoots at the place with the tattered awning. And whether either would still be open when this call ended. The New Yorkers were all take-charge and macchiatoed and Great to have you with us, Pat.
When Leila dialed in, her connection was terrible, whirs and clicks. She cut the line and dialed in again. The same whirs and clicks. Though maybe not as loud this time, and easier to listen to than fifteen coworkers jostling for position. So she didn’t cut the line again. She pressed SPEAKERPHONE, returned the handset to its base, and listened absently to all the good intentions and machinations as she wrote in her notebook about who else she might send that e-mail to, whether the Zeya henchman who’d mentioned the bird people could have meant Bluebird, and what she was going to get her dad for his birthday, which was in a month. When it was her turn to report, she kept it to a minimum.
Leila had already decided that this call was not the venue to bring up the freeze-out she was taking from the Burmese. It had gotten worse just in the past few days. Professional relationships that she had spent months cultivating were snapping shut one by one. Heckle and Jeckle were still there—she caught glimpses of them—but they’d receded and been augmented by a rotating cast of plainclothes men who stood on the corner outside her office smoking cigarettes and speaking nonfurtively into walkie-talkies the size of cowboy boots. These guys did not wave back. She hadn’t seen Aung-Hla in days, and when she asked the other taximen about him, they shrugged dumbly. The only one who would speak straight with her said, You don’t need to know everything.
And then this morning a young man from the Ministry of Immigration had arrived by moped and served her with notice that in a week her visa would be rescinded and her presence in the country would become illegal. So she would need to loop New York in soon. But she had never figured out whom to trust in Helping Hand and she suspected that the organization would dump her and her projects just as soon as it learned she was politically toxic. Leila needed a few more days to work out an exit strategy. She was trying to find a way that she could get Dah Alice to take over the Helping Hand projects. She didn’t know whether she could pull that off or whether it would even be a net gain for Dah Alice’s organization. But there was money waiting for those nursing students; there was the ransomed medical shipment; there was the small, well-outfitted office. Maybe that should be Leila’s model for global improvement—collect privilege and office supplies from the first world and then cast them off in the third.
“Leila, can we expect to see the paperwork on those scholarship candidates soon?” asked a guy called Tim or Tom Timmiken over the bad line.
What up with that guy? From what she understood of the Helping Hand chain of command, he had no business sticking his nose in this. The problem appeared to be that back in New York, during her three-day Goal Definement and Orientation training, he had hit on her, poorly. She had clearly signaled zero interest. But he kept flinging doors practically off their hinges to open them for her. She saw him check the jut of his jaw in nearby mirrors. She’d read from a binder during the taxi ride they shared while he’d displayed to her both his forearms and his world-informedness by leaning forward and talking geopolitics with the Pakistani driver, who clearly couldn’t give a shit.
“Yeah, I’ll send that through just as soon as I can, Tahhhm.” She tried to elide Tim and Tom. Hopefully, a whir or click obscured her obscuring.
She was thinking maybe she could find her dad a complete encyclopedia, like a Britannica eleventh edition, or maybe a vintage Hoyle’s Rules of Games or the kind of OED that comes with a magnifying glass when she realized the others had signed off the call and that she was the only one left on the line. Broadcast by the speakerphone and without any competing sound, the whirs and clicks were very loud.
An hour later, she was in the lobby of the Excellents Hotel calling her brother, Dylan, on an avocado-colored phone that sat on a doily at one end of the bar, its handset as heavy as a hammer. The Excellents had been Leila’s home for a few weeks when she first arrived in Mandalay. The staff there knew her and appeared to like her; when she came in and nodded at the phone, the desk man nodded back with a smile.
The Excellents was a colonial building, crumbling in a heartbreaking sort of way. Like a wouldn’t-make-it-ten-more-years kind of way. The stairways sagged like swag; the doorways skewed parallelogramatically. Wherever a foot had scuffed, a million feet had scuffed before, so there were wear patterns in the wooden thresholds and even in the stone stairs. She climbed onto a stool and dialed her brother, using a phone card she’d bought in the street. The barman brought her a glass of terrible white wine.
Dylan wasn’t sure the whirs and clicks meant anything. That’s probably why she’d called him—he was skeptical and slow to worry and hard to impress.
“Can’t they just kick you out?” Dylan asked her. “Why would they bug your phone? It’s not like you have any nonprofit trade secrets.”
“They did
.”
“They did what?”
“Kick me out.”
“Hold up,” said Dylan. “They kicked you out?”
“Well, I mean, I got a letter today saying they’re going to. In seven days my visa gets yanked.”
“Plus those guys following you.” He seemed to reconsider the whirs and clicks. “Leila, whom did you piss off?”
She liked her brother’s care with grammar. Six years younger than Leila, he was the only Majnoun kid born in the United States, the only one who had absorbed no Farsi. As a boy, he’d played the sheriff, the space sheriff, and the policeman; he whipped out his bus pass as if it were a badge. He’d once applied to the FBI, but at an early interview he had miscalculated the candor required and overshared about his collegiate use of psychotropics.
“I don’t know,” said Leila. “This prick of a general, certainly. But maybe other people too. Did you read that e-mail I sent you?”
“When?”
“Like an hour ago.”
“No, I’m at the store. I’m on break.” Dylan had washed out of law school and then slipped into something pretty bleak. There was a brief hospital stay, and then a long year and some heavy meds while living in his old room at home. These days, he seemed mostly back together, but he was on a much gentler career trajectory than the one he’d abandoned; he worked at Whole Foods, in produce.
Cyrus and Mariam Majnoun had been hit hard by their son’s slide off the striving-immigrant-professional-vindication track, and Leila thought that their undisguised disappointment in him had probably prolonged and intensified Dylan’s episode. Plus, it was annoying, because they had two totally successful daughters, women who would have been happy to take some of the burden of achieving off their brother. But it was a son thing, apparently.
