Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

by David Shafer

  “Read the e-mail I sent you,” she said. “Can you talk this time tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, sure. But sis?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why not just come home? I mean, if they’re going to kick you out anyway.”

  “Well. I guess I will come home. I mean soon.”

  “But how about just come home tomorrow? It sounds like they got you pretty much boxed in. Anyways, I really miss you. And Mom’s driving me bonkers. She’s always calling me a fruit vendor.”

  It helps so much to know that you are missed, thought Leila. What keeps the truly alone even attached to the earth? “Call her a housewife,” she said. Leila knew all the reasons that Dylan could never do that, but she thought he’d find the idea funny.

  “Yeah,” he said. He hadn’t found it funny. “Lately, she’s not really doing that part.”

  Leila wanted to ask what he meant, but she could hear the forced exhale that meant his cigarette was finished; his break was over. Where do you smoke at a Whole Foods? she wondered. Inside a dumpster?

  And when she’d gotten off the phone she’d thought about Dylan’s question: Why not just go home tomorrow? Or as soon as she could, anyway? She hadn’t really considered that. It just seemed to her that if they were pushing you, you should push back. You should not stand in front of a gun, obviously, but neither should you let a threat alone compel you to move. And if they really wanted to kick her out, she thought she should make them go through with it. At least that way, she’d get a ride to the airport.

  But maybe that’s not how life works at all. Maybe you’re not supposed to put up so much resistance. Maybe a lot of that is pride and ego and pointless in the end. In which case she’d been misled by all that required reading and by the Die Hard movies.

  Chapter 8

  Ned was sitting in a cracked plastic chair on his minuscule balcony drinking a whiskey and smoking a cigarette, his first in two weeks. The evening’s haze smeared the city before him, and a rich umber sunset flamed the river beyond. The sensual reward of the cigarette mixed with the moral defeat of the cigarette. His head swam.

  Ned actually came from a distinguished line of U.S. intelligence operatives. A distant but direct ancestor had spied for George Washington in New York City during the Revolutionary War, and Ned’s grandfather was an OSS legend who’d once had a fistfight with a member of the Central Politburo. If they were looking down now…Well, Ned tipped a little splish of whiskey from his glass to the cement at his feet—an offering, an apology. Because his forebears would deffo not approve of what the CSS, in the form of grade 5 Nigel Smith, was doing to Leila Majnoun.

  Ned had done a couple of hard-core things in the field, but only against truly bad characters, men who posed a threat. And in both cases, the action he’d taken had been swift. Whereas what Nigel arranged for the Majnoun girl was an escalating series of logistical punishments, like a premoral boy funneling ants into solvent. It was almost like he wanted Leila to not just shut down but feel the edge of what he could do; he wanted her to suspect but be unable to confirm a link between her having asked questions about the forest site and all the shit that was now raining down on her, on her family. If you inject that kind of confusion and doubt to a person’s life, you can really derail it.

  Ned had risen quickly in the clubby little world of espionage. He was smarter than most of the other guys, a lot of whom were alcoholics in regimental ties. After two years of training, he had begun his career in China region. There was still real spy stuff happening there: boxy cars following other boxy cars along deserted roads, agents meeting people in washrooms, that sort of thing. In China, Ned was called Chuck, a contracting officer for apparel-manufacturing concerns. People just said the craziest shit to Chuck. Ned wrote it all up; his reports were vivid and tight, his insights keen, his observations actionable. Bethesda noticed.

  But then it seemed like maybe it would be twenty years before he’d be allowed to advance a grade in China region, so Ned concentrated on his languages and his open-source analysis skills. When he was passed over for three consecutive cycles, he decided to leave field analysis and return to analysis.

  Back in Bethesda, his pay slip said he was a statistician for the Congressional Budget Office (he even had some of that work on his desk, a tradition among CSS analysts). He drove an old Saab. He read and read and read. It was like being a professor but with no students, which he understood from professor acquaintances was pretty much the way you wanted it. He had a wicker lampshade over his kitchen table; stalagmites of magazines and journals grew in his living room. He lived across the street from a doggy day-care place, and sometimes when he left his driveway in the morning, a beagle would be keening. He tried Internet dating. He worked on collation and discrete DiP software for Open Source, on the fourth floor. His parents sent him pears on his birthday.

  If he hadn’t made such a scene about Dear Diary, he’d probably still be there; he’d probably be a grade 5 by now, and maybe he’d be able to effectively oppose people like Nigel and whoever else was putting the Service in the service of a growing web of ambiguously allied clients. These thoughts, and the whiskey, stirred the silt of Ned’s regrets and resentments.

  The Dear Diary episode had nearly cost him his career. He’d gone out on a limb, and the limb had snapped off beneath him, and he’d been left looking like a neophyte who’d wasted the skills and assets of the Service by chasing a phantom menace. The Myanmar posting was punishment for all that. They’d done more than boot him from Open Source; they’d sent him into Nigel’s toxic little corner of the field.

  “I believe outcome is being achieved, sir,” Ned had told Nigel that morning at the daily report he was now required to present on Leila Majnoun. “She has accepted the fact that she’s leaving. She’s received no useful response from the original recipients.”

  “That’s because I’m making sure she doesn’t,” Nigel said huffily, puffily.

  Ned nodded—rightyouaresir—and continued, “And she sent that e-mail to only one other person.”

  “Who?”

  “Her brother.” To underscore that the brother was unconnected, Ned added, “He works at Whole Foods.”

  “I know where he works,” Nigel snapped.

  Another little nod from Ned. “Anyway, I don’t think she’ll contest the deportation.”

  “I don’t think she’ll contest it either,” said Nigel, mocking Ned’s word choice. “I think that that nosy cunt will begin her self-deportation in about”—he grandly looked at his heavy Rolex—“five hours.”

  Ned put on his blankest face, but Nigel did not elaborate, and Ned did not inquire. Part of this game was letting Nigel enjoy the belief that he was as unreadable as the Sphinx when all Ned had to do, really, was wait him out. All morning, the man could barely contain his glee. Midday, he took a call in the microSCIF, and when he came out he was humming. Then, a few hours later, another SCIF call, and when he came out he attempted to turn on the office TV but got confused by the remotes.

  “Swain, did you alter the settings on this thing?” he barked. “The channel won’t change.”

  “Let me see if I can figure it out,” said Ned, accepting the remote like it was a partial differential equation. He made an aha face and switched the function selector from TV to CABLE. “I think that’s it,” he said.

  Ned snatched back the remote and thumbed his way up to CNN. There was an ad playing—If you’ve experienced these symptoms, talk to your doctor about Synapsiquell—but Nigel waited so eagerly that Ned stayed right beside him. Then there was another ad for a wealth-management company—a fit and shrewd-looking older man walked along a private beach with either his adult daughter or his very young wife. Whichever it was, he was proud. Offscreen, a distinguished-elder-black-man voice stressed the importance of protecting the legacy you’ve built.

  Then the show returned, and the camera swoosh-tracked to the anchor desk in that urgent way, and the handsome anchor was squaring the corners of the paper
s before him. He appeared to be especially troubled by the upcoming story.

  “We’re starting to get some more details on this very troubling story out of Tarzana, California,” said the anchor—TARZANA was highlighted on the map of LA County that appeared beside the anchor’s head—“where authorities early this morning removed computers and other electronic equipment from a middle-school principal’s office.” A wide shot of a parking lot, then a zoom in on three or four men in blue windbreakers carrying boxes to the trunks of white Fords. “This after a police tactical unit arrested a man today in a predawn raid in a neighborhood near the school. While authorities have not yet confirmed any connection between the two events, neighbors told a reporter that the man arrested was Tarzana middle-school principal Cyrus Majnoun”—the anchor paused minutely at the foreignish name.

  Cut to a man in a bathrobe outside his house, speaking to camera: “It was nuts. It was guys in body armor. They knocked the door down. I even thought, you know, You got the wrong house. That’s the principal’s house. But then they came out of there with Madge-noon. I never saw anything like it before. It was nuts.”

  Then back to the anchor. “Authorities aren’t commenting on the arrest or the seizures at this time. But viewers may recall that a school district in nearby Orange County was rocked last year by a scandal involving a high-school principal and Internet child pornography. We’ll bring you more on this story as it develops.”

  Nigel clicked off the set, looking like he’d just taken a pie out of the oven. “Ha!” he crowed. “See, Swain? That’s how you put a stop to all this Nancy Drew bullshit. Let’s see how curious she is now.”

  And for a split second, Ned may have let the mask slip, because Nigel felt the need to say: “You should be proud of the work we did here, Swain.” He put no extra emphasis on the we. He didn’t need to. Was there any doubt that if something like this collapsed, it would collapse not just on Nigel but on everyone around him?

  Thus the cigarettes, which Ned bought on the way home. And then the pre-dinner turn to whiskey. How had it come to this? thought Ned, and he meant all of it: the avoidance drinking, the loneliness, the being stuck under the thumb of a man he despised and implicated in an immoral conspiracy almost certainly unrelated to national security. Ned knew all about the greater good, and something about Patriot Act back channels, and he was annoyed by liberals who walked around all un-blown-up claiming that they liked their civil liberties more than their security. But he’d thought there were some controls in place, that there was still a grown-up in the room.

  Ned was smoking as if to make up for two weeks of not smoking. What was the recipe for Camels? They were fucking delicious. What was this “Turkish and American blend”? It was chemicals sprayed out of nozzles, wasn’t it?

  Leave aside for a moment the morality of what Nigel was doing to Leila, Ned thought. Leave that aside and it was still very wrong just in terms of resource allocation, wasn’t it? Unless Leila Majnoun was a future Hitler come back in a time machine, Ned couldn’t really see how such a vicious and elaborate operation could be justified. Nigel’s interest in her was unprofessionally vengeful. And what he was doing was probably illegal. The word still meant something, or was supposed to, anyway. Extralegal was fine; illegal was not. Plus, it was just terrible espionage—there must be a huge number of people involved in something like what he had just witnessed. Oh yeah—he was one of them.

  And that’s when Ned had a thought that was one of those across-the-line thoughts. What if he told Majnoun what had been done to her? What would she do with the information?

  The line crossed was treason, actually. Because there was no ombudsman at the CSS; there was no mediator who was going to take his complaint up the chain of command. The papers he’d signed at his commission to the Service made it very clear: If he did what he had just considered doing, he was on the outside; if he was on the outside, he was a risk; if he was a risk, he was a threat; if he was a threat, he was a target.

  He couldn’t just tell her straight out. If he told her that 85 percent of electronic correspondence (worldwide) and 100 percent of electronic correspondence (English-language) was run through a threat-sieve network commissioned by the U.S. government but increasingly outsourced to a consortium of private companies, she would not believe him. But if he gave her just enough so that she could go looking for the rest? She was smart, and apparently determined. Give her something to run with—one of the Dear Diary portals he’d identified but had never been allowed into—and she’d probably chase it down. And with her Farsi and Burmese, her monk minders and her Rolodex, she was just the kind of asset that Dear Diary might hook and land.

  And if Dear Diary did open a door for Leila, Ned could follow her in. After the e-mail, Nigel had bumped her to level-8 surveillance. At that level she could have a low-altitude UAV snooping her every step; her financials would be flagged; her scent would be waved before the computers. If it came to it, she could be extraordinarily renditioned from, like, a women’s toilet. So keeping an eye on her should be cinchy. But he’d have to get clear of Nigel for a few weeks. Taking time off work when you work for the world’s most elite clandestine agency is not a cinch. You can’t just cash in sick days and forward your voice mail. If you say it’s a vacation, there’d better be sand in your shoes when you come back, and if you say it’s a family illness, they’ll be wanting to see those biopsy reports.

  He’d find a way. Maybe he could work from Sydney station. The more he thought about it, and the more he drank, the more likely it seemed to him that Leila Majnoun was his ticket into Dear Diary. The obsession had nearly derailed him, and he was still looking for a way back to it.

  Okay, so he had an ulterior motive. But his anterior motive—to see that she had at least the chance to fight back against Nigel’s plan—that was sincere.

  He marveled again at her choice of phone. Ned had ghosted every single one of her devices, and he had real-time access to 80 percent of the phone lines in Myanmar. If she’d been on any one of those, he could have been listening to her now. But the phones at the Excellents were trunked from one of the last predigital exchanges in the city; they used twenty-pulse-per-second crossbar switches and crossbar tandems. Of course, he could get the feed from the other direction, but to do that he would need to involve Bethesda, and the feed would be copied to Nigel’s station per protocol. Ned didn’t want to risk giving Nigel anything else on Leila or drawing any more heat on her than she was already taking, so he had to settle for recording and subsequent collection. The device he had installed in the handset of the Excellents’ lobby phone was the size of a grain of basmati rice. It was unpowered and nontransmitting. He would collect it in the morning.

  But he was worried about the morning, worried that by the time it came, he would have lost heart or come to his senses. He needed to do something tonight; he needed to commit.

  Ned bicycled swiftly through the hot dark streets to Leila’s little apartment above the tailor shop. He passed by twice, looking for her plainclothes detail and/or minder monks, but he saw no surveillance. What tails she had would be outside the Excellents right now, where she was. He stashed his bike and slipped up to her building along its darkest flank. His heart was beating as it hadn’t in twenty years of espionage. His heart was beating as it hadn’t since he and a girl from a million years ago used to climb over eight feet of chain-link on a Saturday night to sneak into the marina and onto her parents’ cabin cruiser.

  He reached her front door and slipped the note beneath it.

  I think your father was framed, it said. Meet me at the Excellents tomorrow. 8p.

  The next day, Ned stayed away from the office. The hangover was not terrible and not unwelcome—it kept reminding him of what he’d done last night. He didn’t regret it exactly, but in the cold light of day, his plan looked rickety and tenuous. He would never have pulled the trigger if he had waited until morning.

  First thing, he collected the device from the phone at the Excell
ents, replaced it with another. Then he brought it home and listened to it while he drank coffee and ate cheese.

  It was worse than he thought. The dad’s arrest sounded brutal. The SWAT team had scared the shit out of the mother; the brother had been injured during the arrest, presumably trying to defend his father from what must surely have seemed to him a nightmare. Cyrus Majnoun was charged with the possession and distribution of child pornography, aggravated by his being a school principal. After hours of interrogation, he’d suffered a mild heart attack. He was hospitalized and stable now.

  Leila was definitely angrier than she was hurt or scared. Her voice seethed out of Ned’s laptop. She had really burned up that Excellents’ phone last night. She’d spoken to her brother and her sister and then an attorney in California and then three more attorneys in New York, and then with her brother and sister again on two extensions of her parents’ home phone. Ned could hear the glasses rattle in the Majnoun kitchen when the little brother closed the fridge door.

  If any of the Majnoun children doubted their father’s innocence, not one betrayed a hint of it. Leila was the most galvanized. At one point, Dylan referred to “clearing” their dad’s name, and Leila responded, “Clear him, D? We’re going to see him reinstated, apologized to, and recompensed. Like, recompensed in a way that will make the FBI wish they’d never heard the name Majnoun.”

  Roxana said she had begun to organize parents and faculty at the middle school.

  “Will they support him?” Leila asked her sister.

  “Hard to say right now,” she answered. “I think most of them know it must be a setup or a mistake. But we need to figure out why he was set up, and by whom. There are a few people saying terrible things already, and those voices will only get stronger. We need something to say back to them, some alternative theory. It helps that there are no victims. If he were a predator pornographer principal, he would have hurt a child by now; some victim would have come forward.”