Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  She spoke softly. “How were they killed?”

  “Elephant guns. In my day we fought poachers with guns, not eyes and websites and satellites. They don’t even give you a gun.”

  “I know.” He had encouraged her to take his, but she had told him no. She would be fired if she were caught with a personal weapon.

  He sipped his nightcap, a mix of tea and brandy that smelled so sour it made Makena’s stomach light. “There are twice as many elephants now. Maybe more.” He smiled at her. “There is more land for them, and more of them. There is progress.”

  “I know.” She drank her water. “I still feel sad.”

  “Look up,” he told her.

  “Why?” But she did, and drank in the deepness of stars overhead, like a carpet of pinpricks in the nearly moonless night.

  “My grandmother lived in the first bush, the wild bush. She told me that when an elephant dies, a star falls. Perhaps if we watch, we will see Flower’s star.”

  Makena wrapped her arms around her knees and kept staring upward. The sky looked close enough to touch even through the mosquito nets. “What would your grandmother say if she knew the wildest elephants were ridden every day?”

  “As long as she knew you were doing it she would be pleased.”

  “You’re lying,” Makena said.

  He stood up and kissed her forehead with his cool, thin lips. “She would be proud that you are caring for the family. Are you coming to bed?”

  “Not until I see Flower’s star.”

  SAAD SMELLED OF ELEPHANTS. He lay on his bed and watched a Chinese professor with passable English stalk the stage, back and forth, using expressive hands to illustrate the economy of the commons. The class itself was in the commons and he could pay a little bit and take a test if he wanted the credit. An Oxford class. He expected to get an A even though he was only thirteen and living in resettled Africa. The commons was easier for him to understand than international trade or the physics of space elevators.

  His sister, Makena, made a living sufficient for all three of them, riding a beast that had become the apex herbivore of the most famous commons of all: the wilds. The same commons had been stolen from his people long ago, and now it was a different place. Still, he almost expected Makena to show up in Professor Jiang’s presentation.

  Maybe he should send the man a picture of his sister.

  He didn’t. He took careful notes in longhand. When the class ended, he placed the paper in his lockable drawer and put the key on a string around his neck.

  He’d learned to do classes with paper notes, to stay away from his gaming devices and just focus. For some classes, he locked his bedroom door and locked all of his extra machines on the far side of the door. That way, he’d have to take an extra step and that would make him stop and remember how much the classes mattered.

  He wasn’t allowed to ask the professor questions since he wasn’t formally enrolled, but he wrote down the questions he wanted answered.

  He retrieved his phone and opened a chat window. He called up an Angel Makena had connected him up with as a tutor, Luis Castanova. Luis had led him to these classes.

  Luis lived and breathed international data and data synthesis, and Saad had never failed to find him online. “Luis,” he typed. “Ask why the commons was so hard to sell into the middle of America.”

  Luis typed back. “Because commons had no value in a greedy, capitalistic society. How about if I ask why they’re gaining in value?”

  “Okay.” Saad stared out the window, and then typed, “If the commons are gaining value, does that mean Makena gets a raise?”

  “It means more people get hired.”

  “We lost Flower today.”

  “We all know,” Luis responded. “I’m chasing her ivories.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll show you. We’ll go together and you can be my witness.”

  Saad pushed the right buttons to slave part of his computer to Luis’s and open a verbal window as well. Luis’s image showed up on his screen. He looked as Hispanic as his name suggested, with wide lips, an easy smile, and long dark hair. Slight. Saad was pretty sure Makena had a crush on him, but his sister was too imperious to say anything when Saad asked.

  Luis stared at something so intently it looked like he might fall into his screen, but then he noticed the completed connection and smiled.

  “Take me away,” Saad said.

  “Okay. We’re going to Cotonou. I’m looking for a ship there.”

  Saad pursed his lips. “Twelve hours since Flower died. Would the ivory have gotten there so fast?”

  A map flashed up on the screen. A red X showed the place Flower had died, maybe twenty miles from Saad and Makena’s grandfather’s house. Luis’s thick Spanish accent forced Saad to turn up the volume and stay as still as possible. “The drone pilot got footage of the three jeeps, but they shot the drone down before we could tell which one they put the ivory in. We caught one, and it didn’t have the ivory. The other two went in almost opposite directions, one south and one west.”

  “Did they split the ivory up?” Saad asked.

  “The jeeps were stealthed moments after Flower died. We could see where they went as long as they made dust, but no details. They disappeared completely once they hit pavement. We couldn’t even tell how many people were in them.

  “So both jeeps ended up in towns. They stopped in a few places and could have transferred the cargo almost anywhere out of sight. Or maybe they wrapped it up in invisible cloth . . . I don’t know. No one reported any ivory and none of our Angels actually saw any.” Luis raised an eyebrow. “But we did get a clue.”

  Luis was playing with him, stringing him along, having fun. But Saad was okay with that. He learned every time Luis talked with him. He played his part of the game and asked, “What’s the clue?”

  “We know who is planning to buy the ivory.”

  “Who?”

  “A madame in Charleston caters to Chinese clients. They will pay well. She also has a deal to sell some ivory to a priest in Chicago.”

  “How did you find that out?”

  “The priest’s secretary likes elephants more than ivory rosaries.”

  “We are lucky.”

  Luis laughed. “Yes, Saad, we are very lucky. She told us about this six months ago, and about where the money is. She said to watch the money. It moved fifteen minutes after Flower died.”

  Wow. “Okay, so her tusks are being shipped to the United States. But there are a lot of ports in the United States,” Saad said. Even a kid from Africa knew that.

  “So how do you think I figured it out?” Luis asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think about it. You tell me that, and I’ll tell you the rest of the story.”

  Saad pursed his lips. Luis had never done this before, tested him this way. Maybe if he succeeded, he could get a job as an Angel investigator like Luis. If he worked for Luis, he would miss the elephants. Still, this might be a chance. A good chance. “Let me work it out for a minute.”

  “Okay, I’ll go check on our question.” His screen darkened.

  Surely there wouldn’t be an answer that fast. Maybe Luis would stop and call a girl. The thought of that made Saad shiver, but then he forced his mind away from girls and back to the problem at hand.

  Twenty minutes later, he sent a text giving fair warning and reconnected to Luis. “I think I have the answer.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I used globenet to track every ship going to America from Africa by port. I used a time window that allowed the ivory to be driven to possible ports. That narrowed it down to thirty-seven ships.”

  Luis was smiling.

  Feeling more confident, Saad continued. “Twenty are the wrong kind of ships—cruise ships or tankers. The tusks are probably in a container. So that left five ships. One of those was from South Africa. It goes to Miami. I think it’s the best bet.”

  Luis was grinning from ear to ear a
nd laughing. “Not right. But you are thinking really well. What if I told you ivory can be detected in containers now?”

  “Then I would say it must be on one of the tankers.” He imagined Flower’s tusks tied down to the flat top of a supertanker and covered with blue tarps that blew in the wind.

  Luis still shook his head. “Most regulated ships in the world.”

  “Then what?”

  “What’s left?”

  “A cruise ship? Isn’t that really busy?”

  Luis had stopped laughing. “Did you notice the Ruby Sea?”

  Saad drew his brows together. “No. I just set all the cruise ships aside.”

  “You were right to set aside commercial cruise ships. It’s possible, but it would take more than one crewman acting together to hide something so big. I think the ivory is on the Ruby. She’s private—only a few hundred cabins, and all of them bigger than your house. The cost of ten days on her would buy your house. There’s stealthed stuff everywhere aboard her, from money to the daughters of sheiks.”

  “Where does she get in?”

  “It doesn’t matter. We’re going to get the ivory before it leaves Africa.”

  “You’ll come here?”

  “No. But we have rangers we trust. I’ll tell you about it after it happens.”

  “I hope you find the ivory.”

  “We will.”

  “Someone from here is going to be your mule?”

  “You need to be older.”

  “That’s not fair! You’re barely older than Makena, and Makena is barely older than me.”

  Luis laughed. “There’s two times two years in there.”

  “I can do math.” But then he didn’t want Luis to think he whined. “Did you get an answer?”

  “The commons are getting more expensive because they are getting more beautiful as they become more protected. Even strips in cities.”

  “I want to do what you do,” Saad reminded Luis.

  “Graduate.”

  “One more year.”

  “Well, you have to be at least sixteen, too.”

  “Maybe I’ll have my master’s degree by then.”

  “Maybe you will.”

  “You said I could follow you to the port.”

  Luis grinned and then shut off his camera. “I’ll slave the right window.”

  This wasn’t as good as going with Luis in a drone. He’d have no view he could control.

  “Watch,” Luis said.

  They were on a small dock. The Ruby Sea filled a berth. Brightly painted gangplanks spilled out over the sides. Music played from a band on the deck.

  Swarthy men and veiled and covered women boarded, and occasionally he spotted a more Nordic face on a man or woman or a couple.

  Security guards waited at the foot of every entrance, checking IDs casually, chatting, and here and there holding the hands of people boarding or kissing them on the cheek.

  Saad loved the clothes. Men and women both wore flowing robes and colorful belts and scarves.

  His and Luis’s twinned point of view wandered through three different people. Saad kept trying to guess who they were, but they were professionals, and whenever he looked at where he thought he had just been standing virtually, the place was empty. He didn’t dare talk since he had no idea if the sound would come out on the scene.

  He could hear the band and the conversations, mostly in languages he didn’t speak. His guess was that the people were Arab and Egyptian and perhaps American.

  After an hour, everyone had boarded the ship.

  “Did you learn anything?” Saad asked.

  “I think it’s there,” Luis said. “I’m almost a hundred percent sure. But there was no sign.”

  “So now what?”

  “I watch it sail, I watch it while it sails, and I watch it land.”

  “Thanks for taking me along.”

  “Anytime.”

  Saad dropped his connection and wandered out to see his sister. “How was class?” she asked.

  “Great. We studied African literature.” He struggled to remember that class, which he had actually passed months ago. “We studied Chinua Achebe.”

  “I didn’t like his work.”

  “I like it that he was smart.” Like me, he thought. You don’t see it yet, but my light will be very bright one day. He never said this out loud, but it was his way of reminding himself he would surpass Makena in many things when he grew up. He had to bide his time, but someday he would please her by becoming greater than she could imagine, just like he was helping her to buy him an education far greater than any of them had imagined. “I talked to Luis. He may know where the ivory is.”

  “I heard.” A slight blush touched her cheeks. She had showered. Even though she smelled more of slick shampoo now than of beast, he could feel Delba looking over her shoulder at him.

  LUIS SAT ON A bench and sipped black coffee as the Ruby Sea approached Charleston Harbor. The open water between him and the dock she’d pull alongside reflected a nearly cloudless dawn sky and the wheeling forms of seabirds.

  He’d been in Charleston for three days reporting what he knew to every agency that might care.

  He wore dockhand work blues: jeans and a short-sleeved shirt with a light coat he’d buttoned against the cool and then unbuttoned over and over. Even this early in the winter, the air felt sticky. Thankfully, it wasn’t hot—just thick and damp and full of the promise of heat.

  Whatever he saw streamed back through his glasses to his watchers in five points of the world. “The boat’s here,” he told them.

  He picked out Saad’s voice. “Lucky day.”

  Makena chimed in from the top of Delba. “Get them. Delba knows something’s happening. She’s got her trunk up in the air and she’s waving at you.”

  Luis fed a sat shot of the beautiful and brilliant Makena into the left window of his glasses and left it there so he could watch her. Delba’s trunk was in fact up, and she trotted slowly around, the closest thing an elephant could manage to prancing. “For you,” he whispered, talking to the elephant and her rider.

  Makena sat like a queen of the savanna upon her massive gray throne. Her beauty always made his throat swell up and his groin tighten. He had never met her in person, and probably never would. But still, she had become his icon for the whole project. She and her brother, who was perhaps even more brilliant than Makena.

  “I want these men,” a new voice piped up. “For my grandmother.”

  “Hi, Araceli.” Luis checked on the Ruby Sea’s progress. She hadn’t touched the dock yet, but now she loomed close. “How’s your grandmother doing?”

  “She still has nightmares. She saw them cut out the tusks. She’s taken two more shifts, and nothing happened on those. They haven’t cleared her yet, though. The dumb Angel monitors think she might not hold together under stress, and they want me to babysit her through two more trips.”

  “That’s two more times you both get paid,” he reminded her.

  “Just get these guys.”

  “I either did or I didn’t,” he said. “The work’s already done.” Still, he fingered a handgun in his pocket. He did know how to use it—he’d spent a few years on the drug-soaked and bloody border between the United States and Mexico when he was in his early teens. A friend here had loaned it to him.

  Hopefully he wouldn’t need it.

  He had a knife with him, too. In his boot, the hilt scratched at his calf.

  Both seemed like bad ideas.

  “Quiet now,” he said to all of his lurkers. In addition to the three, he was being ridden by two senior Elephant Angels and a lawyer. It made him feel heavy for no logical reason.

  As the Ruby Sea turned to present her broad side to the dock, her engines turned deep and throaty. Dockhands caught silver snakes of ropes and started the dance of tying her up, calling to each other.

  Seabirds dipped above the Ruby’s decks, calling mournfully and looking for scraps of food.

 
The cruise ship dock was a city-block-sized square of walkways. He stood onshore. Two sides of the dock went straight out to meet a thick white immensity of concrete with cleats as big as Luis’s arms. The Ruby Sea had tied up just in front of an even bigger boat. Temporary fences served as security, each manned by armed, uniformed men in formal poses.

  A few passengers and crew stared out over the rails on the second and third decks. This would be a port of call only, but it was also the first few hours the passengers had onshore since the Ruby left Africa.

  Doors opened and bright orange gangways started to roll out.

  “Can you get closer?” Saad asked.

  “I’ll kick you out if you’re not quiet.”

  “Beast,” Makena teased in a hushed whisper. She had the last word—his watchers all shut up and watched like they were supposed to.

  A group of ten mixed Coast Guard and uniformed Port Authority police marched out onto the dock. Luis recognized some of the faces from agencies he’d been asking for help. He smiled.

  They left a human barrier five people wide on the far side of the fence. The other five walked through the gate and past the watcher and up to one of the pursers. A policeman showed the purser a set of papers.

  The purser shook his head.

  Words were exchanged. Luis couldn’t make them out, but they sounded determined.

  The purser called two others over. Apparently he wanted them to watch the police, since the purser then disappeared into the bowels of the Ruby Sea.

  The scene looked tense.

  The gangways were all out now, bobbing from almost flat to slightly canted as the Ruby Sea reacted to slight and periodic jerks of her engines.

  People started down the closest gangway. The guards by the fence let them through with no questions, but the five on the dock stopped them. Hushed but heated voices talked over one another in multiple languages.

  Newsbots started arriving, many no bigger than his hand, a few even smaller. A mix of drones and UAVs jostled for position. One knocked another out of the air and it fell into the sea and floated.