Alif the Unseen (8 page)

Dina looked uneasy.

“It’s public,” Alif reassured her. “At least technically. It’s a shop, but only for people who know people. I won’t make you break any rules. We’ll
leave a door open or something.”

“Okay.”

Alif led her on a circuitous path through Baqara District, doubling back every few blocks. Each time he saw a man in a
thobe
his stomach churned. When they reached the door of Radio
Sheikh the sun was setting, and what birds remained in the City made restless sounds as they jockeyed for position in the stunted trees. Alif knocked on the door more forcefully than he meant
to.

“Yes?” It opened a crack and Alif saw Abdullah’s eyes flashing back at him in the rosy light.

“ We need to come in,” said Alif. “Now, immediately.”

“We?”

Alif pushed the door open over Abdullah’s startled protest and ushered Dina inside. Abdullah shrank away from her, glaring at Alif over her head.

“This is Dina,” said Alif. “Find your manners.”

“
As-salaamu alaykum,
miss,” muttered Abdullah, shifting his gaze to the concrete floor.

“
W’alaykum salaam,
” said Dina. Abdullah’s expression changed.

“Is this—is she the—” He stopped midsentence, blushing. It took Alif a moment to realize what he meant.

“No! This isn’t her. This is the neighbor’s daughter.”

“Oh. Okay.” Abdullah took a deep breath. “Tea, anyone? Dina?”

Alif threw his backpack on the welding bench without answering. “Listen,
bhai,
” he said, “I’m in serious going-to-jail-to-be-raped-by-thugs trouble. It’s
real this time. I’ve screwed up in the most profound way imaginable and I am fucked, fucked.”

Dina began backing toward the door.

“The Hand again? Has something happened?”

“State security is watching my house. Our house. Dina’s family lives in the same duplex. He was very nasty with her when she tried to get inside.”

Abdullah fumbled his way toward the bench and sat down. “Go on,” he said, feigning composure.

“The girl—Intisar—when the Hand broke into my computer I was connected to her machine. I thought that since she’s an aristocrat they wouldn’t bother with her, so I
wasn’t worried, but then Faris—” He swallowed. “It’s her fiancé, Abdullah. Abbas Al Shehab—that’s her fiancé’s name. Imagine his surprise
when he found his future wife’s computer hooked up to a hacker’s. All our e-mails, all our chats—it will be a scandal to end scandals.”

“Wait a minute.” Abdullah steepled his fingers. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Slow down and tell me again, because it sounds like you’re
saying you’ve been screwing the Hand’s bride-to-be.”

Alif slumped to the floor and covered his face.

“Alif,” said Abdullah in a soft voice, “were you running the pattern recognition program? The one you’ve been working on?”

“Yes. It was installed on her machine. Functioning perfectly, too.”

“So you’ve delivered into the Hand of the enemy a tool they could use to hunt us down no matter which computer or login we use?”

“Yes.” The single syllable crescendoed in a squeak. “Yes.”

“And you’ve given the Hand a reason to cut off your dick as well as your head.”

“Yes.”

“Then I agree.” Abdullah stood. “You are one fucked man, and you’ve fucked us all along with you.”

“Please stop cursing,” said Dina.

“What are you going to do?” asked Abdullah, beginning to pace the floor. “You can’t stay here. I mean you can, for now, but you’ll have to keep moving.”

“Thanks. Even one night would be a huge—”

“Don’t thank me. This isn’t a favor for a friend. I’m so angry I could bash your half-Arab nose right in. But what happens to you now will affect everyone you know.
I’d like to keep my own ass out of prison, if it comes to that.”

“What about Dina?”

“What
about
Dina?” said the girl herself. “Dina is going home this very moment. I’ve heard enough.”

Alif looked up at her anxiously. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Not with the State watching the house. They could get angry and decide arresting you is the best way to
drive me insane. You live next door to a terrorist. People have been executed for less.”

“What am I supposed to do? Are you saying I can’t go back to my own house?”

“Please keep your voices down,” said Abdullah, twisting his hands.

“My mother,” moaned Alif. “My poor mother.”

“You should have thought of your poor mother before you started screwing someone else’s prize filly.”

“Stop it!”

Alif and Abdullah went silent and stared at Dina. She was breathing heavily, fists clenched at her sides.

“Stop saying such ugly things! You’re a couple of boys trying to talk like men—you’re not fooling anyone!” She took a few deeper, shaking breaths and relaxed her
hands. “We have to think calmly and decide what must be done.”

Alif studied Dina over the ridge of his updrawn knees, impressed. A damp flush had appeared on the skin beneath her eyes, but her gaze was steady. She sat down on the welder’s bench and
smoothed her robe before addressing them again.

“Brother Abdullah, I think we’ll take that tea now.”

* * *

For an hour they discussed and discarded Alif’s options. Could he flee the country? No: by now his name had certainly been added to a blacklist at every port and border.
Could he bribe some Bedouin to take him through the desert, where he could cross into Oman or Saudi Arabia unnoticed? Dina dismissed this as fanciful. Was there no relative or friend with political
connections to whom he could appeal for protection? Alif thought of his father’s other family: his first wife had a cousin or two in some modest level of government. But she would never help
him.

After the evening call to prayer Abdullah left for a quarter of an hour, returning with hot shawarma sandwiches. By this time Alif’s anxiety had changed shape: he considered what might
happen—or worse, had already happened—to Intisar. Everything hinged on whether her fiancé decided to reveal the scandal to her father or not. The Hand did not yet have formal
control over Intisar; her father, on the other hand, was within his rights to beat her to the verge of death. For a brief, fluttering minute Alif let himself imagine the Hand had released her from
her engagement and hushed the whole thing up to avoid embarrassment.

“When you saw her,” Alif asked Dina as they ate, “Intisar, I mean, did she look like she’d been hurt? Did you see any bruises or marks? Was she limping?”

“No,” Dina said curtly. “She wasn’t limping. She just seemed upset.”

“Maybe it’s all right then,” said Alif, thinking again of the possibility that Intisar was both free and socially damaged enough to make him look like a suitable match. He
could give up his work, take a job at a respectable company, make microchips for morons. They could be happy.

“All right,” snorted Abdullah. “You’re going to need a bodyguard for the rest of your life. If you even make it to the rest of your life.”

“I don’t care if I do,” said Alif. “All that matters is that Intisar is safe. She shouldn’t be punished for what I’ve done—she’s never said a word
against the emir or the government in her life. If they hurt her I’ll kill myself.” He ground the palms of his heels against his eyes.

“Don’t be a baby,” Dina muttered.

Abdullah crumpled the wax paper wrapping of his sandwich and dragged one hand across his mouth. “Look,” he said, “here’s my idea. You both stay here tonight. I’ll
curtain off a corner for Dina and my sister can lend her some night things. Then in the morning you both go to the old part of the souk and look for help. You need protection.”

“Look for help? From who?”

“Vikram the Vampire.”

Alif burst into an exasperated laugh. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Vikram the Vampire? Are we ten years old?”

“I used to play that game with my cousins,” said Dina. “We’d turn off all the lights and say his name three times and then spit. He never showed up. Of course when I got
older I repented.”

“He’s not
really
a vampire,” Abdullah said crossly. “That’s just what they call him. After the legend, you know. He’s a black market thug. He worked
over my friend Nargis, who imports those Chinese hacktops, when he was short on cash one month. Nargis came in here with a broken jaw and two missing teeth, scared to death. Said the guy has yellow
eyes.”

“So why would we go to him?” Alif asked. “I don’t want a broken jaw.”

“You pay him, idiot. You pay him to protect you.”

“One guy is no match for the Hand, even if he does have yellow eyes.”

“Would you just listen? Of course he’ll have ideas we haven’t thought of. Smugglers, dock workers—who knows what kind of connections those thugs have. They’re
almost as crooked as the government. And Vikram is the worst of the lot.”

“Can’t we talk to someone normal?”

“No,” said Abdullah, “you’re divorced from normal. The further off the grid you go the better.”

Alif let out a sharp breath. “Fine, okay. Let’s say I find Vikram the Vampire. There’s still the matter of the book.”

“What book?”

Catching Alif’s eye, Dina gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head.

“Nothing,” Alif stuttered. “Just thinking out loud. Some research I have to do.”

“Well, do it on your own time. Right now you have to think about keeping yourself—and the rest of us—out of jail.”

Alif let his head go limp and loll between his shoulders. “Vikram the Vampire. I committed a sin by waking up this morning. That is the only way this day could have gone so terribly
wrong.”

“What a bizarre thing to say,” Dina scoffed.

They cleaned up the crumbs and tea things in the gathering dark. When Abdullah and Dina left for his sister’s apartment, Alif took the opportunity to boot up his netbook. He braced himself
to find some insidious worm waiting in his e-mail, some miraculous program that would allow the Hand to descend on him out of the ether if he so much as coughed. But there was nothing. Cautiously
he enabled remote access to Hollywood; the hypervisor was still online. Alif let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Hurriedly he set up a roving IP address—a
costly, inefficient way to disguise his location, and far from foolproof, but it would buy him a little time. The Hand would see Alif using his e-mail and cloud computing accounts, but until he
could crack his algorithm, Alif would appear to be working from Portugal, Hawaii, Tibet.

Next, Alif set about dismantling his creation. He downloaded what little he could onto the netbook’s modest hard drive and dumped a little more—cryptic commands, programs unusable
without other programs—into the cloud he shared with a few other City gray hats. Enough to seed a new version of Hollywood when real life reasserted itself. The Tin Sari program files he
transferred intact and whole onto the sixteen-gig flash drive he always carried in his pocket. The drive had been blessed, at one point, by a toothless Sufi dervish from Somalia who grabbed Alif
’s wrist as he sat in a street café. Alif had yet to discover whether the blessing stuck.

When he was finished he blanked the hard drive of his home computer, leaving behind a program that would cause the CPU to overclock—and, he hoped, melt—the next time it was booted
up. He would leave the Hand’s agents with a lump of silicon too hot to pick up. They would get nothing from him.

“God, he’s
crying
!”

Dina and Abdullah had returned and stood in the doorway staring at him. Alif realized his face was wet.

“It’s gone,” he said. “I destroyed it. My whole system.”

Abdullah knelt beside him with a look of profound compassion.

“It’ll be all right,
bhai
. You’ll rebuild.”

“Not in time to help my clients. I have to write a bunch of awful e-mails.”

“The threat was always there, Alif—they’ll understand.”

Alif stroked the white plastic casing of his netbook absently. “In the four years I’ve been doing this stuff for money, I’ve had less than forty-eight hours of downtime. Did
you know that? And now I’m a ghost in the machine. By next week all the hacks and geeks and hats I call my friends will have forgotten who I am. That is the nature of this business. That is
the Internet.”

“You still have real friends,” said Dina. The two men made identical derisive noises.

“Internet friends are real friends,” said Abdullah. “Now that you pious brothers and sisters have taken over half the planet, the Internet is the only place left to have a
worthwhile conversation.”

“Even if they forget all about you in two weeks?”

“Even so.”

Abdullah had brought two thin cotton mattresses and a largish bed sheet. He and Alif strung the latter across one corner of the room, fastening it to the wall with thumbtacks. Alif cleared away
computer boxes and put the better of the two mattresses—one had a suspicious stain—in the tentlike space their makeshift curtain had created.

“Here,” he said to Dina, “we’ll leave while you get ready for bed.”

“This isn’t right,” Dina fretted. “I told my mother I’m staying at Maryam Abdel Bassit’s place. If she finds out I’m lying she’ll be
crushed.”

“Live adventurously. See you in the morning.” Abdullah left the room with a flourish, one arm slung along Alif’s shoulders.

* * *

The room was dark when Alif returned. He took off his shoes and lay down on the second mattress, feeling as though he had been through a physical ordeal. His back and legs
ached. Intisar reentered his thoughts every time he tried to forget her for a few minutes, bringing with her an unsettling combination of arousal and guilt, foreshadowing a disaster even greater
than the one that had already befallen him. Her life was at risk: that much was clear. He felt impotent in the face of the pain he had brought on her, the danger she must now face. He could not
save her with a few bracketed commands and C++ programs, but this was the only way he knew.

“I don’t like calling you Alif.”

He looked over at the veiled corner of the room.

“Why?”

“It’s not your name.”