The Sensory Deception (45 page)

The man shuffled through a deck of yellow cards and set one on the counter. Sure enough, the stars and stripes were mingled among the flags of other faraway countries, including the red sun of Japan. As Tahir had anticipated, his odd request generated a
conversation. He explained that his son was in the employ of an Indian transport company aboard a ship due to land in Okinawa. The man dug into a shelf behind him and pulled out an atlas. The two studied Japan and the man talked about places he’d like to go.

An hour later, Tahir emerged from the store. People walked with purpose along cracked sidewalks. Mopeds, bicycles, buses, and a few old European cars mixed with armed transports—mostly beat-up pickup trucks mounted with machine guns and rocket launchers—clogged the streets.

He walked until he saw the antennas of an undamaged cell-phone base station. Half a block farther, he went into a café. The men wore traditional Muslim gear: light-colored, loose-fitting tunics, called
thobes
, and pants,
sirwals
. Some were in turbans, others in low-profile, cylindrical headwear,
tagiyah
, or scarflike
ghutra
, which were held to the head with rope coils. They sipped strong black coffee, played dominoes, and smoked tobacco from hookahs. Tahir walked to the counter. He bought a Turkish coffee and a big piece of pita bread draped in tahini. He asked about business, and made the same dumb wisecracks at the expense of the local military that he’d made in Baghdad and before that in Tehran. They brought the same result, too: even the soldiers laughed.

He sipped his coffee, ate the bread, and read an old Lebanese newspaper. An hour later, he got another cup of coffee. This time, as the man poured, Tahir pulled the scratched-up cell phone from his pocket. He flipped it open, held down the button, looked at it with disgust, and, when the man passed the coffee across the counter, said, “This phone is the devil. When the battery is alive there is no signal. There must be a perfect signal right here, for the battery is dead.”

The man across the counter shook his head in commiseration and said, “
Inshallah
, a signal will come.” He then pulled a
phone from under the counter. A newer phone, the kind with a large screen and no buttons. The man said, “Aah, you are right, we have a signal today. If you would be so kind sir, as to give me a few
shilin
, you may use my phone.” He handed Tahir the phone and, with a smile, added, “Maybe a signal, my friend, but don’t expect clarity.”

Tahir took the phone and stared at it. He laughed and asked, “How does one use this fancy phone?” The man showed him how to make a call. Of course, the phone was useless to him at that moment. He could hardly stand in a café in Mogadishu and have a conversation in English without raising suspicion. But he had discovered the location of an operable phone and, equally important, had learned how to use it. He pretended to make a call and then handed the phone back. “You have fancy new phone and barely a signal?”

The man accepted the phone, zipped his fingers across the screen, and suddenly it was a tiny television. Tahir shook his head. The man said, “A smartphone! When I call my son, I can barely hear him, but he sends me movies of my granddaughter. It is upside down.”

A few minutes later Tahir crossed the street and entered a building. He went up a flight of stairs and moseyed down a hall holding the newspaper as though reading it, but actually taking in every sound of the building to determine its baseline. He repeated this up the next three floors. From the roof, he watched the entrance of the café, familiarizing himself with the rhythm of the block so he could behave in a way that the locals would think of as normal and therefore invisible.

He went back to the café that evening. The hookahs were out and dominoes covered every table. He joined a game, played well enough not to draw attention, spoke rarely enough to conceal his accent, and when the proprietor was engrossed in a game, took it
upon himself to reach across the counter for a bowl of honey. He brought the honey to the proprietor’s table and parceled out tiny spoonfuls to each man according to his desire, then returned the honey to its spot.

As he set the earthenware bowl behind the counter, he felt along the shelf, passed over some keys, a leather pouch, and then felt the man’s cell phone.

He finished the game of dominoes, stood, yawned, and walked out. Fifteen minutes later, he sat down on the roof across the street from the café. He took out the yellow card and deciphered the number to call for a US connection. To his left, a few buildings down the block, he could see the cell phone base station. He prayed for good coverage.

As a crescent moon set over Mogadishu, Tahir made his call.

Ringo’s world was built around abstract realities. He simulated things; he didn’t live them. As Gloria sprinted through the burning jungle, he watched until he had to act.

It took an hour to get Bupin on the phone. Bupin asked a laundry list of questions aimed at determining the level of danger. Ultimately he brushed the whole thing aside. All Ringo had seen were the data necessary for reproducing the experience of paradise being transformed into a nightmare. It was
supposed
to look like that.

Ringo skimmed through the data as it accumulated, hoping for evidence that Bupin was correct. He wasn’t. The video showed Gloria running, and when she looked back, it showed Chopper chasing her with a rifle. All evidence indicated that he was herding Gloria, the child, and as many villagers as he could into the conflagration.

Ringo set the helmet aside and turned off the video. He stared at the monitor in front of him, a software editor and debugger covered in C code. He would call Bupin again, right after he figured out exactly where Ringo and Gloria were. He cursed himself for designing a DAQ system without a GPS chip. It had been a battery-lifetime decision. The fewer the processors, the longer the battery life. Instead he’d written software that calculated the position of the sensors based on the length of time it took the data to travel from to the satellites and the DAQ systems. With the position of the satellites and Chopper’s DAQ PC, he could calculate the position of the transmitter to within a few miles. Sufficient accuracy to isolate Moby-Dick swimming from the Indian Ocean to the Antarctic, but not good enough to find Gloria. He knew he could do better; he’d just never had the time or reason to improve the original software.

Ringo was knee-deep in source code when the call came. The admin buzzed him and he didn’t answer. The door opened and the admin told him Tahir was on the line.

“Tahir? What? But he’s dead.” He grabbed the phone. “Is it really you?”

Though the line crackled with digital errors and analog noise, Tahir’s steady Middle Eastern enunciation, mixing vowels into consonants, convinced Ringo that it was him.

Ringo said, “What about Farley?” But the question got lost in the noise. He repeated himself but it was pointless. Of all the things Ringo believed he deserved, adequate technology topped the list.

Tahir spoke slowly, telling Ringo that they would exchange facts one at a time, chronologically, confirming reception of each before moving on to the next. Tahir would go first: Farley and most of the volunteer team were imprisoned. Ringo couldn’t believe it, so Tahir repeated himself, word for word. Ringo
whooped and swung his fist like a relief pitcher throwing the ninth straight strike of an inning.

Tahir said, “Now you will provide your facts; I will then provide instructions to remedy the situation.”

Ringo explained that Tahir and Farley had been reported dead and that the TV news had provided plenty of visual evidence. Tahir repeated the information, confirming their transmission through the noise. Ringo described Gloria’s reaction, waited for Tahir to confirm, and then explained that Gloria had accompanied Chopper to Brazil in order to record data for the next VR application.

Ordinarily the algorithmic order of presenting a fact, confirming that fact, and moving on to the next would comfort Ringo, but right now it tore at his patience. He told Tahir that Gloria was trapped in a forest fire. The noise on the line forced him to repeat it three times, and still Tahir didn’t confirm. Finally, speaking each word individually, Ringo said, “What phone do you have?”

“It is a fancy smartphone, like a tiny TV.”

Ringo relaxed. He could work with this. He said, “Why didn’t you just say so?” But he said it at a normal conversational tempo that was drowned in noise. He followed with one word at a time: “I am sending you video.”

“I can barely hear you, how can I receive video?”

For a second Ringo actually considered explaining that packet transmission and forward error correction made it much easier to transmit data than voice. Voice obviously requires a real-time connection, but stale video can be sent piece by piece and reassembled at the receiver, and corrupt pieces can be resent as many times as necessary. Describing it would have taken longer than reducing the resolution of the video and sending it.

He waited for Tahir to confirm that he had received a message. Then he instructed him on how to watch it. It took Tahir a few minutes of grappling with the user interface. Ringo could tell that Tahir had seen it when he heard the reaction: a moan of pain, a gasp of recognition, and a snarl of anger.

Tahir growled each individual syllable: “Where is she?”

“In Brazil, somewhere in South America.”

Ringo started to describe the software he was writing to calculate her GPS coordinates based on the time of flight to and from the transmitter and DAQ systems.

“How long will it take you to determine the exact location?”

“I’ll have the uncertainty down to a hundred feet in an hour, maybe two.”

Tahir had a decision to make. Should he try to rescue Gloria by himself or assemble a force? He had no idea how long Gloria could survive. Time was the enemy—or at least it seemed to be. He put the café proprietor’s cell phone in his pocket. The simple action helped calm him and, as his heart rate slowed, experience reminded him that while time could be a deadly, devious opponent, it never fired live ammo. He needed information, he needed power, and he needed help. His next thought was that he needed an army and a commander. He needed Farley.

Under cover of night and with little regard for the armed, mostly uniformed, partially legitimate “government” troops, Tahir sprinted back to the ruins he’d called home for the past two weeks. He’d accumulated three AK-47s but only six rounds of ammunition. Two of the guns were functional, the third hopelessly jammed. He began rolling the two working guns into a tarp, then stopped. With that much ammo, the guns were only
props anyway. He grabbed the jammed rifle and rolled it up with the others. He took a sack of adzuki beans and began the hike south to Sayyid Hassan’s kingdom.

Tahir made it from Mogadishu to the ridge over Sy’s camp in two days by balancing reckless and prudent behavior against the ticking clock. At one time in the distant past, he’d been capable of shutting out all concerns to quiet his mind. Now, every time his eyes shut, he saw Gloria calling for her father. The truth of it was that if Gloria died, he had no desire to continue living.

He stepped onto the ridge as the sun rose. He circled to the south, working his way around the camp and across the plain to the spot he’d found three weeks before, where he had an unobstructed view of the clear zone, the ridge, and the prison. The prison’s newly constructed steel gate reflected the sunlight like a well-lit billboard that said:
There’s no way in and no way out
. Tahir tended to believe the opposite of what billboards said. The gate would instill false confidence in the people who had built it. Two bored-looking guards leaned against the gate.

He switched his attention to the terrain up on the ridge. Another pair of guards paced a regular rotation along the ridge, down to the plain, in front of the prison, and then back up the ridge. The circuit took the better part of an hour. The guards’ schedule hadn’t changed in Tahir’s absence.

The tiny river irrigating the crops that fed Sy’s camp flowed southeast down the ridge and onto the plain. The land above the ridge was littered with boulders that disrupted and split the flow of the river into the series of small creeks that, over centuries, had carved a hundred paths from the ridge to the plain and provided the natural irrigation system that was the ultimate reason for the location of Sy’s camp.