by David Shafer
It had been done for her, she saw—the entrapment of her pursuer. These people were somehow on her side. So she kept on, through the long square, past old women in multiple skirts and young men in spotless tracksuits and a little girl swinging a broken bottle at her tormentors, who ducked and darted and laughed. Leila was invisible, ignored. But if she stopped moving, someone—one person in a small task- or drink-engaged group—would catch her eye and give her a distinct tsst or a nod and then return to ignoring her. And at the far end of the square, the vibe was less intense—there were tourists snapping pictures and vendors selling things sweet and greasy; a spiffy streetcar clanged by. She was back in the real world.
And there, in a taxi rank by the streetcar, was Dermot, her taximan from the morning, which seemed like a week ago now. She beelined toward him and he saw her coming and opened the rear door and she slid into the black vinyl of the backseat as if it were home.
“What the fuck was that?” she asked him.
He laughed as he quickly started the taxi. “That was the Horse Market.”
“They were speaking…that wasn’t even Irish, was it?”
“No. That would be the Cant.”
“The what?”
“The Cant. Gammon. Shelta.” The words meant nothing to her. Dermot saw her confusion. “The Traveler language,” he said.
Dimly, Leila recalled a movie that Rich had loved in which Brad Pitt played a bare-knuckled fighter who spoke unintelligibly. Leila had heard about Travelers once but assumed the whole thing—a nomadic white clan people, unassimilated by their small modern European host state?—was too bizarre to really exist. Because she had spent fifteen years helping the downtrodden, Leila sometimes forgot that she didn’t know everything about downtroddenness.
Dermot steered the little taxi down a hill and across a river that was channeled into a sort of unsightly trough with two lanes of traffic down both sides, like vinyl piping. Then up a hill and past about ten churches and into a smaller web of streets dotted with butchers and newsagents, phone stores and charity shops and bakeries.
“Where are we now?” Leila asked Dermot, leaning forward in her seat.
“The Liberties,” said Dermot.
They stopped outside a building with its name carved upon it: Widows House of the Parish of St. Nicholas Without & St. Luke. A man inside opened the front door. He was in his fifties, wearing a leather jacket.
“You’re Lola Montes,” he said to Leila by way of greeting.
“No, I’m not,” said Leila. “What’s your name?”
“Nicotine Lozenge,” said the man, proud and mischievous.
Leila sighed, without rancor.
Neither was this place, apparently, their final destination; it was just another safe house. But the so-called Nicotine Lozenge offered her newspapers and a seat at his kitchen table and tea, which he served in a pot, and he did that slightly dainty thing where he held the lid of the teapot with one finger when he poured. Her dad did it that way.
“You’ve been very reasonable, Lola,” said Nicotine. “We appreciate that.”
“You’ve left me no choice but to be. And you people also keep implying that you’re going to be able to help me somehow. Anyway, you’re really burning through the amount of time and attention I have for you and your cause.”
“All right, so,” he said. “Milk?”
“What?”
“For your tea.”
“Yes, please.”
“How much?”
“Milk?”
“Time.”
He was using on her some of the one-step-ahead stuff she used on people when she wanted them to feel like she was in charge.
“Three, four hours,” she said.
It was a bluff, they both knew. If Leila walked and tried to get back into the ticketed world herself, she would, as Ricky Ricardo used to say ominously, Have some ’splainin’ to do. Still, she wanted to let this man know she was not someone to be pushed around and that Dear Diary better make its pitch soon.
He took a sip of his tea and said: “For the last ten years, Lola, what have you been working for?”
“You mean, what’s my employment history?”
He gave a small look-down that meant Don’t be obtuse. But he said only, “No. More broadly.”
She took a sip of her tea. So delicious, that tiny bit of nuttiness. On a plate on the table there were biscuits spilling from a torn-open packet. “I don’t like it that a baby girl can get born into a place where it sucks to be a girl. Or, for that matter, where she’ll be from the wrong tribe or sect, or just be dirt poor. Obviously, that’s not fair, so, yeah, I’ve been trying to do something about that.” She took a biscuit from the plate, snapped it in half. “I haven’t exactly made massive headway, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“No one has,” said Nicotine. “The problems are rather systemic, are they not?”
“Listen, Mr. Lozenge, I don’t want to discuss development politics with you. I’d rather know who was trying to follow me through a horse market, how you guys think you can help me, and when is this meeting you dragged me here for.”
“The man we kept from following you was one of the Committee’s men. They’ve started to move on us in a way that we weren’t expecting, and everyone around here is pretty scared. They decapitated London and New York and Berlin last week. We can’t even find some of our key people. That’s why we got you out of London directly. And I wouldn’t say we dragged you, exactly. So there’s that. As far as helping you, we might be able to clear your father. There’s a man who works for the Committee’s frame shop. We know a man who knows that man.”
“You really just call them the Committee?”
“When they started—when they still called themselves anything—they were the Committee for Cloud Acquisition.”
“But why’d they screw with me in the first place? What did I see in the forest?”
“One of their computers.”
“What do you mean, one of their computers?”
“Their computers are very big—big as in they drive golf carts around them. And your e-mail was seriously inconvenient. A librarian at the CIA tried to unmask some imagery, and when he couldn’t, he asked questions of the geospatial people, questions that other people heard him ask.”
“Yeah, that would be Joel. He’s dogged,” said Leila, a bit proudly; they’d had the briefest of flings, years ago. Joel was a Jew from Maine, into vinyl and beer and palindromes.
“Well, then I’m sorry to tell you that Joel was dogged. He died two days ago.”
The biscuit went dry in her mouth. “Joel is dead?”
Nicotine nodded. Then paused in a way that was meant to convey something. “Brain aneurysm,” he said.
Her heart fell into her guts. “You’re telling me that the Committee killed Joel. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
She kept from bursting into tears only by looking very hard at Nicotine Lozenge. He had just upped the stakes. If it turned out he was fucking with her, she wanted to recall the moment exactly. “Did I get anyone else killed?”
“No. Everyone you contacted had their scrutiny numbers turned way up. But only Joel did anything with your question, so he was the only one they intervened on. And then you, of course, and your father.”
“So why didn’t they just, you know, ‘decapitate’ me? Or my father? Isn’t a frame job more expensive than killing someone?”
Nicotine did the quick, exaggerated frown that meant fair point. “Yes, it is. I don’t know why they didn’t just kill you”—he said it a bit breezily for her liking—“though, in fairness, they generally try to avoid such direct interventions—murder, frame jobs, all that. At least, they used to avoid those things. Most of their interventions are the kinds you don’t know have happened. They make you sick, they get you fired, they keep you down by numbers. But ever since Parker Pope came on board, they’ve gotten nasty. Aggressive.”
“Parker Pope, the CEO of Bluebird?”
“Indeed.”
“So they can just get a middle-school principal dragged away by the FBI?”
In answer, Nicotine snapped his fingers expertly—snap!—as if cutting the air before him.
“So tell me what evidence they left behind so I can bring it to the police and get my dad cleared of this shit.”
“It’s not that easy, Lola,” said Nicotine.
“Quit it with the code names, would you? My name is Leila.”
At that, a young dark-black man came into the kitchen. Dude must have been in the other room, not making a peep, thought Leila.
“We generally do not use our real names in this organization,” said the young man.
Leila didn’t show her surprise at his entry. “So Lola Montes is my code name? That’s a lame one.”
“You pick your own,” he said. “They needed to give you a temporary for the Caracas. But if you want a code name, you’ll have to join us, and if you want to join us, you’ll have to take the eye test.”
“No, thanks. What’s yours?”
“Kwame X. Nkrumah.”
“That’s pretty good.”
“Thank you. I like it.”
“You going to this meeting also?”
“I am.”
“What’s on the agenda?”
Kwame nodded at Nicotine. Nicotine said, “There are a few new people, like yourself. So we’ll do the eye tests there. And we’re trying to decide whether we can advance the launch.”
Leila swam in the words—advance the launch. What was going on? Where was Sarah?
Nicotine saw her swimming. “Sorry. You don’t know what the launch is. We hardly ever bring people in this fast. It’s just that we need you up to speed very quickly.”
“What for? What do you want me to do?” She could hear in her own voice the catch that meant desperation. Maybe all this nonsense intrigue was only to soften her up. But for what? And, no—they had let her nap.
“Do you know where I am from, Lola?” said Kwame.
“Ghana,” she said. Leila knew some Africans and was good with accents.
He was surprised and showed it, briefly. “Yes. Bukom. In Accra. We say it is self-evident that we have the right to move about this planet. An inalienable right. So one of the things we do is help people move around outside of the legal systems they were born into.”
She thought: That just makes you traffickers. But she held her tongue.
“After your e-mail, we analyzed you and saw that you have a very wide net. People who love and respect you are sprinkled all over.”
Okay, first of all, she thought, that last part was just some good-cop mindfuck. What was sprinkled all over were people hurt by her not loving them enough, hurt by her greener-pastures shtick.
“You analyzed me?”
“Don’t feel all special,” said Nicotine. “It takes about a minute. Anyway, we’re going to need your help getting a bunch of machines to some remote parts of the world.”
“What do I know about that?”
“A fair amount. But it’s mainly who you know. Phone calls you could make to people in certain places who have a lot of time for you.”
“What kind of machines do you need to get where?”
“Maybe you should limit the amount you’re trying to take on board right now,” said Nicotine. “At least until after the eye test.”
“It’s just the hardware we need to ship,” said Kwame. “The software we can beam out.”
“But what are you people trying to do? Your person in Heathrow said you’re going to give people back their stolen information and issue them numbers.”
“I wish Paige wouldn’t do that,” said Nicotine to Kwame. “It’s really not her remit.”
“We are a horizontal organization, no?” Kwame said to Nicotine.
“You get assigned to be a travel agent, you should be a travel agent,” said Nicotine grouchily.
Kwame turned back to Leila. “We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do with what we’ve built. Some of us wish to wait some more before announcing ourselves. But others say we must become something known so that everyone can decide if our way would be better. And okay, with all this violence from the Committee, we have been forced to move ahead. There is a chance they will destroy us before we let everyone know what is going on.”
“And tell me again what is going on?”
Nicotine leaned in. “A secret oligarchy has rigged the system past the point of its being correctable by legal political means. The world might tip the wrong way right now—toward the oligarchs. We probably have the technology to stop them—they don’t know how much we know; they don’t know what we have.”
“What do you have?”
“The eye test and something else that I can’t go into right here. Also, we’ve tapped their lines. Though we’re losing that too. A year ago we had thousands of access points, but now we’re down to…Kwame, you know the current number?”
“No, but Sarah knows. She spoke with Engineering this morning.”
“Did she get out of that fish store okay?” asked Leila.
From the next room came the sound of a door being double-locked. And then Sarah’s voice. “We had eight hundred twenty open portals yesterday,” she said, coming into the room carrying a heavy, clacketing trash bag over her shoulder. “But we’re losing them fast.”
Leila didn’t like the cavalier entrance; she had been worried. “So that’s why you’re kidnapping people before you can even explain your politics?” she asked all of them. “Because you’re afraid you’re about to lose a strategic advantage?”
“We can explain our politics,” said Kwame with confidence.
“Then why don’t I understand what’s going to be so different when you run the place?”
No one answered her.
Then Sarah: “You’re going to have to take the eye test.”
When they left, they left in a hurry, and Dermot was outside in the idling black car. They sat all squished together. Leila was pressed up against Sarah. Leila had diagnosed in herself a minicrush on Sarah, which was ridiculous and inappropriate and probably Stockholm-y.
Dermot drove swiftly through the city, like Pac-Man ahead of the ghosts. They went back down a long hill and across the river again. It was a warm summer evening in a city made of stone, and the people were out—peddlers yelled about oranges, girls in heels clacked out of taxis, and men swelled from the doors of brass-heavy pubs. Outside of one place, a crowd in powdered wigs was drinking raucously.
“Hey, Sarah?” said Leila, not whispering, but quiet. “You still promise you’ll get me my stuff back, and you’ll get me home after this meeting?”
“I do,” she said.
“How’d you guys do all this? What did Nicotine mean when he said you analyze people? And how did you swap my papers like that—the passport, the tickets? You did that in a food court.”
“We’ve tapped the Committee’s tap lines. So we can access as much data as they can. But we run different queries than they do. And we’re read-only. And the passports and tickets? They’re just basically bar codes and magnetic strips now anyway. That’s all just ones and zeros. We have very good people at the ones and zeros, and an excellent art department.”
The meeting was maybe sixty people in a long wooden library. For an hour, everyone just milled about and murmured; there were water bottles on a table, cans from a fridge. People spoke in hushed tones but looked excited, as if they were attending a surprise wake. Someone brought in long trays of empanadas and cake. Leila ate both, forklessly, from a plastic plate. She realized she was famished. At some signal, Sarah steered her into an anteroom, where she met a light-skinned black man in a sharp gray suit, gray like the breast of proud city pigeon. The man was in his forties and on the delicate end of handsome.
“You must be Lola Montes,” said the man. “I’m Roman Shades.”
Great. More suavery and pseu
donyms. When would these people come clean? “Are you in charge here?” she said.
“We don’t do it that way.”
“Well, will you please tell me what the fuck is going on?”
“We need your help, Lola,” said Roman Shades. “We’ll do what we can for your father. You have my word.”
“What do you want me to do?” she said.
“Will you look at this screen?”
Leila hesitated one more moment, then nodded a tiny assent, and Roman put before her a normal-seeming laptop, the black-plastic-binder-size kind that had gone from exotic to ubiquitous in the ten years that Leila was an adolescent in America. By now there must be piles of these—mountains of them—lying junked and dying all over the world. Leila had seen shrink-wrapped pallets of laptops like these loaded into the bellies of planes. Actually, technically, and reluctantly, she’d been responsible for some of those pallets—outdated computer equipment being “donated” by first-world transnationals back to Africa to avoid the expense of recycling and to get the tax write-off.
But when Roman unfolded this laptop, there was no booting up or opening of anything. Just a luminous blue rectangle with numbers in rows and columns, plus a few symbols Leila couldn’t identify interspersed betwixt the numbers. The rows and columns weren’t exactly staying still—they were shimmering—and the screen was rolling up; not zippily, like in The Matrix, but slowly, as if there were a monkey turning a wooden crank handle behind the computer.
“Okay, what do I do here?” Leila asked the small scrum around her.
“You just did it,” said Sarah, who was receiving a little oblong sticker chittering out of a handheld printing device. Sarah and Roman and Feargal were quickly bent over it. “Do you want to know your number?” Sarah asked Leila.
“I know my number,” said Leila. “Eight five one four six one one three two six two two five.” She said it more easily than you could recite the rhymes your parents taught you.
“Yeah. But isn’t that brilliant?” said Sarah, tearing off and then handing Leila the little sticker with the same number printed clearly upon it. “It’s a fairly good number, actually.”
