by David Shafer
Ned was impressed by her detachment, her analysis. This was the eldest child, the armless genius.
Dylan was to going to assist the attorney and start pushing back against the FBI and the prosecutor. “That lawyer you found, Leila, he says we need to get our hands on the seized computers as soon as we can. It looks like their entire case is digital. But the guys we’re going to need, the forensics guys, they’re very expensive. Like four-fifty-an-hour expensive.”
Leila had told them she’d be home in three days. To Ned that meant that his only chance to talk to her would be tonight—if she even showed up.
Roxana quit the line before Dylan, and Ned heard Dylan ask Leila, “Sis, there’s no way, you think, any of this could have anything to do with, you know, the trouble you’ve been having in Burma? Or that e-mail you sent me?”
Ned leaned in to his laptop.
“No. No. The Burmese already kicked me out. And whatever I saw in the forest—and even if it was something that I wasn’t supposed to see—I wasn’t able to do anything with it.”
But she had considered it. She had paused between the two nos. And that was before she had received his note.
Chapter 9
Ned decided he would treat the meeting as a potential romantic opening, because that’s what his Burma-region persona would do—Ned the tone-deaf postdoc interested in diglossia and the ninth-century pagan empire of the Irrawaddy River Valley. Leila would be wondering why he was trying to help her, and a crush was the most plausible motivation. A girl like Leila would have run into that plenty. So he spent an hour primping for their date. He held various shirts against himself in front of a mirror. That made him worry again that he would never be called handsome because he had a slightly too-large head, and that this was what had kept him from any great love in his adulthood. He splashed on cologne.
He was at the bar of the Excellents Hotel an hour early, ordered a drink, and sipped it slowly. He wondered if she’d show up and what he would do if she didn’t. The bar was really just a corner of the lobby with a driftwood sign whereon Bar was written in cursive, with rope. There was a nautical theme to the hotel that presumably had once been more thoroughly carried out but now was limited to a few things like the ropy signage and a clutch of naval-battle prints curling in their frames. Maybe some dusty rear admiral, ex of the East India Company, had built the place to make it more likely that steamer-trunked friends would visit him in this too-hot outpost of the Empire.
At 8:05, Leila walked in. She looked around as if scanning for a trap. She saw him. He waved.
She approached and recognized him. “You’re Fred. From the university.”
“Ned.”
“Did you write this?” She held up his note. She didn’t sit.
“I did,” he said. “You want a drink?”
She ignored that. But she sat down. “Tell me what you meant by it.”
She looked rough, like she hadn’t slept. “Okay. You know how you were writing to people about the security contractors in the forest?”
“Do I know that? How do you know that?”
It all hinged on this. “I do some work for a guy who I think is, like, a spy. Like, a CIA guy or something.”
“You’re a spy?” said Leila.
Ned laughed. “No, I’m a linguist. But I do some translation work for this guy. And he has crappy security on his computer. And I snuck a look. You saw something you weren’t supposed to see. They want you gone.” One truth and several lies.
“What did I see? What are the contractors doing up there?”
“I don’t know.” Sadly, this was also true. But it didn’t matter for his purposes here. He gave her a mashed-up version of a possible explanation. “It’s some huge corporation. I think it’s like a Chinese company that wants to test some totally gnarly genetic pesticides on live forests. They want to do stuff you can’t do even in China. So they’re doing it here and pretending it’s China. Is your dad okay?”
“What’s the company called?”
“New Solutions?” He said it with a rising terminal intonation. “I Sined it. I think it’s just a name. Like, it’s owned by something bigger.”
He needed Leila to think he was less intelligent than he was. It was the most basic requirement of field analysis, but it was actually quite rare: the ability and willingness to appear dumber than you were. That’s why he’d started out in field analysis: the acting part came naturally to him. He could slacken his mouth a little bit when necessary. He could even deaden his eyes.
Yeah, look at my slightly too-large head, he used to think. Pay no attention to what I’m doing.
“So who’s your spy friend?” asked Leila.
“He’s not my friend,” said Ned. “You know that skinny old dude who runs the Paradise Hotel?” More intentionally dull speech. Ned could have offered much more artful descriptives for Nigel: Decrepit. Glossy. Ghoulish.
“The Canadian?”
“Is he Canadian? I didn’t know that.”
“He sounds Canadian. You say he’s a spy?”
“Yeah. I do translating for him, for the hotel. I think he works for the CIA or something.”
Leila looked blankly at Ned. “So, what, you rifled through his desk on my behalf?”
“No. No. He had me fixing his computer. He’s useless. He couldn’t open his e-mail. But he left me alone in his office, and…well, I saw the name of the outfit you work for, and I thought, Why would he care about that? And then, behind a really dinky firewall, I saw those e-mails you wrote, about the site in the forest.” Ned leaned forward. “Dude can read your e-mails.” He sounded incredulous at the idea. “And I saw that he had written to someone and said that you would be removed from the equation. That’s what he wrote, removed from the equation. And there was some stuff about the project you saw, but I couldn’t really understand it, other than what I’ve already told you. I only had about an hour.”
She seemed interested. Very suspicious, but interested. “So how do you know my dad was framed?”
“Well. I guess I don’t. Know that, I mean. But here’s a situation where someone who works either for the CIA or for, like, a bad corporation, someone who can read your e-mail, that person wants you to leave Burma. I saw the news about your dad…”
“How did you know he’s my father?”
“Majnoun. I’d never heard the name before. And I saw a picture of your brother. You two look alike. Anyway, if they can read your e-mail, I doubt they’d have any trouble putting porn on someone’s computer.”
She was evaluating. Her brain practically whirred.
“You want that drink?” he asked.
She shook her head no.
“Are you going home?” he asked.
“Yeah.” It was the first time that her voice had softened with him. “My dad had a heart attack. He’s in the hospital.”
“Shit. I’m sorry. Listen, I may be able to help you.”
“Really?” She arched an eyebrow. “How?”
“I think I know about some people who are good at getting to the bottom of things like this.”
“You mean like the police?”
“No, not at all like the police. It’s a sort of a network for, like, people who think corporations are bad and do bad stuff.”
“Are you part of this network?”
“No.”
“So how do you know about it?”
“They helped out a friend of mine once,” he lied.
“And how will they help me?” asked Leila.
“I don’t know exactly. But if you get screwed by a government or, like, a corporation, they help you get back at those people.”
“That’s it? That’s all you got for me?”
Ned looked hurt. “Yeah. I guess so. But it’s something.”
With a nod, she allowed that it might be. “Okay. How do I get in touch with this network?”
Ned wrote the address of a website on a piece of paper and pushed it across the table to her. “It’s
a house-swapping site. But ignore that. Just write, like, a paragraph in one of the windows about what happened to you. Then they’re supposed to get in touch with you.”
“But if the CIA can read my e-mail, they’re going to know I’m doing this, right? I mean, what you’re saying is very, very weird. You must know that.”
“I know that. Look, I may be totally wrong about this. But I’ve just heard that these people can help. I mean, when you’re in a jam.”
“Like the A-Team.”
“Pardon?”
“Forget it.”
Leila picked up the scrap with the website address. She stood up. “Okay. Well, thanks,” she said, giving little. Then she sandaled out of there, briskly, into the hot night.
Chapter 10
Leila left the Excellents and headed back to her office. Sixteen hours until she had to leave the country. She had a lot of work to do before then.
That Ned guy didn’t seem like the sharpest tool in the shed, actually. Maybe sort of spectrum-y. And the waves of cologne off him had been overpowering. Was that Drakkar Noir? What he’d told her was almost certainly nonsense. For one thing, why would a CIA agent have some dude fix his computer?
He seemed well intentioned, though. He had said sorry about Leila’s dad. Hearing the word, she had almost cracked and started crying.
Dylan had asked her last night did she think their dad’s arrest could have anything to do with her e-mail. She reviewed again the reasons she’d told him no. Yeah, they were valid. Back in her office, she tossed into the trash the piece of paper with the website address Ned had given her.
She began to pack up the office. She didn’t know what kind of a packing job was required. The office was rented for a year, and Helping Hand had paid up-front. It seemed unlikely that she’d be returning, but someone might. New York was being squirrely about whether they would even want her back. During an hours-long call earlier that day, the region director kept referring to the Mandalay office as a “partner program,” which was troubling. It seemed like maybe they would dump the whole thing. Leila thought of all the young women whom she had encouraged to dream of a first-world medical education; she thought of their hopes withering like, well, like raisins in the sun.
You should always look behind yourself to see if you have accidentally hurt someone. Her father had said that to her once. He did not say you had to fix everything you screw up; he did not say you must never hurt anyone. None of those unfollowable directions. Just that: You should always look behind yourself. She was old enough now to read the secret meaning embedded in all real advice: that the giver has fallen short of it himself, and that falling-short still rings in him and shapes his soul. When had her father not looked behind himself? It must have been when they left Iran.
She packed like a dervish. Pens and cords and cables went into zip-lock bags. Reports and binders were puzzled and staggered to fit in boxes. Maps rolled into cardboard tubes. What about the office computer? She transferred all the program files from the desktop to her laptop and trashed everything on the desktop. That didn’t seem like enough, considering the weird shit that was going down. What if they were getting rid of her just so they could punish the women she’d interviewed? So she did her best to scrub the hard drive. How do you do that? She found a menu item called Overwrite Deleted Files, and the computer did its spinny pizza thing for a few minutes. Was that enough? She considered taking a brick to the tower, or tearing out its innards. But she didn’t know which was the hard drive and which the logic board or whatever. Besides, that would make her look guilty or afraid of something, whereas what she wanted to do was stare down her antagonists, be they Burmese corruptocrats or—as that guy Ned would have her believe—the CIA.
Why didn’t she know more about computers? That knowledge suddenly seemed more important than feminist theory or eighties’ song lyrics, both of which she was well acquainted with. Computers had risen around her all her life, like a lake sneakily subsuming more and more arable land, but she’d never learned to write code or poke behind the icons or anything like that. She was like a medieval peasant confounded by books and easily impressed by stained glass.
She took Ned’s piece of paper out of the wastebasket, uncrumpled it: Ding-Dong.com.
Really?
On her laptop, on the floor of her empty office, leaning against a wall of stacked boxes and sitting beneath the breeze of a plastic fan, Leila sent her browser to Ding-Dong.com. It was indeed a house-swapping site, or appeared to be, anyway. A rather high-pressure vibe on the front page, actually: The #1 site! Destination: Change; click-on-able testimonials beneath pictures of happy people enjoying the decisions they’d made. In the first fill-in-able text box she came to, she wrote her e-mail address and then this:
Weird guy in bar told me to try your site. My name is you don’t need to know my name. I may have some information about a major US company doing contract security in Burma, which is violation of US law, FYI. Also maybe they know I know and have screwed with me because of my knowing. Screwed me immigration-wise and maybe more, which would seem to indicate criminal government collusion. If you can help, get in touch with me. If this makes no sense, please ignore it. If this is a joke or a trap, fuck you, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
She double-locked the office, went home, and packed up her little apartment. Her things fit in four large suitcases and a big duffel. There was more to do, but it had to be done in the morning. She lay down and caught a few hours’ sleep.
She woke to her alarm. While the kettle boiled, she checked her sites and her e-mail. No response from the house-swapping people. She was disappointed but also somehow relieved. She ate an orange and drank some tea. She stuck a thumb drive in her laptop and copied onto it all of her nursing-scholarship-related files. She tried to check in to her Mandalay–Yangon flight, but she couldn’t. She checked in to her Yangon–Doha and Doha–London flights. She got into her running clothes and tucked the thumb drive in the tiny net pocket in her shorts.
She started off at a reasonable pace along one of her usual routes. Two fat policemen in a car trailed her by half a block. No Heckle and Jeckle these guys; they lurked and lurched in plain view but were too lazy to ever debouch. She was about to take advantage of that.
She suddenly ducked left, then sprinted down an alley that led to a small dirty park that at certain times of the day harbored clutches of public alcoholics. She calmed her heart and breath to listen. In the early-morning stillness, she heard only birds. Would it be that easy?
No. She heard the policemen’s car knocketing over the bad street above her. They’d guessed at her outlet. She turned and whipped away, ran across the park and up a flight of stairs that led to a semicovered, courtyarded one-block-square market; a bazaar, but a less exotic place than the word evoked. She bought her burner phones in this market; she knew its multiple exits. There were hundreds of tiny stalls arranged into categorical districts: Battery Allée, Hosiery Town, Simcardville. But at this hour, all the stalls were shuttered, plywood faces to narrow aisles. Leila knew, though, that many stall keepers slept with their wares, so she did not feel alone. She ran quietly through the empty aisles, locating the policemen’s car as it prowled around the perimeter of the market. When they turned one corner, she went out the other way, and quickly ran down a long set of cracked steps. After four minutes at pace, when she figured she had half a mile between her and them, she slowed.
And she was about to congratulate herself on a job well done when she spotted Heckle ahead of her.
Leila didn’t break stride. Heckle held back and then dropped in behind her, as if he’d never left. Maybe he never had. She was coming up to Dah Alice’s little compound—a plaster wall around a concrete house and ratty carport and shade tree and dappled patio. She had to make a decision quickly. She removed the thumb drive from her jogging pocket. Was there any way to pass this thumb drive to Dah Alice or her house without being observed doing so? Still running, she saw that the patio door wa
s open; a person inside. Dah Alice, probably, making mohinga for breakfast. The compound had a wooden gate at the street. Pretend to stretch against the gate and slip drive in mailbox? No mailbox. Slip drive onto gatepost? Shit. Passing compound. Turn around, pretend to cough, hurl drive toward patio door? A Hail Mary?
Fuckshitfuck. Now well past house, thumb drive still in sweaty fist, Heckle still on her like the clap.
Leila was fifty yards down the dusty road when she heard her name called. She turned and there was Dah Alice leaning on her gate like an Okie. Dah Alice waved, scooping the air with her tawny hand as if to paddle Leila back to her.
Leila turned and jogged to Dah Alice. She passed Heckle. It was as close as she’d ever been to him. He had a handsome, planar face but rough skin; he smiled at her and kept on running.
The two women spoke across Dah Alice’s gate.
“Alice”—Leila dropped the honorific, trying to convey the urgency—“I came to see you, but I did not stop because I thought those men seeing us together would cause you trouble.” She waved up the road to indicate Heckle and then vaguely offstage to mean Jeckle, wherever he was.
“Those men are friends, Leila,” said Dah Alice. “I asked them to watch you. There are others watching you who are not good.”
“I don’t know what is happening,” said Leila.
“So often it is like that,” said Dah Alice.
“Not like this. This is different.”
“This is how we live, Leila.”
Leila didn’t know if they were talking about the same thing. But there was no time. The policemen would still be looking for her, the ones who were not good. “I’m leaving today,” she said. “I don’t know when I will come back.”
“Are you going back to Hollywood?” asked Dah Alice. Leila had never managed to clarify for Dah Alice the difference between LA County and Hollywood.
