Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (11 page)

“What about Majnoun?” asked Ned in the manner he used when he wanted to sound capable of violence. He imagined that there was something really gross in his mouth; the effect was to make his voice flat and his eyes dull.

The asset looked at Ned; sized him up. Then he just shrugged.

“There’s the driver, I think,” said Ned, still with the imaginary gross thing in his mouth, and he indicated a knot of men beneath a weeping tree. The SAG asset lasered his gaze through the windshield. The traffic moved again and they were able to approach the target, at which point both Ned and the asset could see it wasn’t Majnoun’s taximan. The asset relaxed, if that was the word. Ned started taking them on a loop around.

After half a block, he tried again. “Probably can’t take Majnoun now, right? I mean, the day after she sends that shit out?”

This time the guy liked it: the lack of subject, the deference, the lame use of
shit
.

“Yeah, that’s what they’re saying. She just raced right to the top of their pile, though,” he said. “Anyway, the girl’s got protection right now. Two dudes from that Gettwin Nikaya monastery on her all the time.” It took Ned a minute to understand, because the asset had mangled the Burmese.

When he got it, all he did was raise one eyebrow. He wanted to appear to be thinking,
What, and you’re afraid of a couple of monks?,
when he was in fact thinking,
Monks from the Cathubhummika Mahasatipatthana Hnegttwin are protecting Leila? What the fuck?
Ned had thought those two minders were Zeya’s men. The Hnegttwin were pretty hard-line theologically—they worshipped the spirit, not the image, of Buddha—but they were no Shaolin Avengers.

“No one’s scared of a couple of monks,” said the asset, on cue. “But, you know, with these type of people, the monks are very important. They have a lot of power.”

Ned sat up for this lesson in the South Asian psyche.

“Like in Afghanistan. With their warlords and shit,” said the asset. “You might have a guy totally in your sights and then it turns out he’s Abdul Whatever’s lieutenant’s fuck boy. So you can’t go near him.”

They were parked now, with the taxi rank fifty yards off Ned’s right flank. The asset crooked his forearm in his open window, a pen in his grasp pointed toward the rank. One by one, he pointed the pen at the drivers, twisting the tip of the pen delicately, as if waiting for the last word of a stanza to come to him. Ned could see now that the asset was examining each man’s image as it resolved on the screen inside his not-at-all-cheap glasses.

“We shouldn’t let her go,” said Ned, bringing it back to Leila, though the asset seemed to have finished with her. “The girl’s a bad combination. Clueless and connected, you know?” He had to be very careful here not to out-Herod Herod; the asset must know he was a grade 4. But Whatever was going to happen to Leila, Ned wanted to be in on it.

The asset stiffened. “I got him,” he said, twisting his pen tip and squinting at his tiny screen. Then in one of his too-swift motions he had his shades off and was handing them to Ned. “Confirm,” he said.

The asset had frozen the image on the screen. Ned squinched his mouth up, like he couldn’t be sure. “Here, lemme have the lens.”

Ned saw the tang of resistance, and then its evaporation. The asset gave him the pen.
You don’t have to fight them,
his mentor had taught.
With some men, you can establish dominance by making them give up a small, closely held thing
.

Ned refreshed the screen; aimed and zoomed the pen.

Yeah. Shit. That was Aung-Hla. Thirty-nine, father of three, kept his Tercel sparkling.

“You’re really gonna let her walk?” Ned asked, aiming the pen at each of the other men in turn.

“Don’t worry about it, bro. Your boss is in on it. Dude can cook up some nasty shit. He’s using that new outfit, you know? The Ruiners?”

He’d heard about them. But Ned thought the Ruiners sounded too bad to be true: a cadre of grade 5s sitting in Aeron chairs on the thirteenth floor of a twelve-story building in northern Virginia. It was said they had full access, through every lens, tap, screen, or pipe. It was said they could reach into your life as a child reaches into the world of her toys. Not just pull, but push. They could rewrite your life; play with you, punish you, or crumple you like paper.

“It’s not him. It’s not the driver,” said Ned.

“You sure?” said the asset. Like:
You’re really gonna take a stand here?

“Yeah. It’s not him,” said Ned, and shrugged. There was a sort of aikido in the effective use of condescension. It was a question of careful dosing, and placement. “I see why you thought so, though. All those guys look alike.”

L
eila hated the Monday-morning conference call. The New Yorkers as usual forgot that for most people on the call, Monday morning had come and gone. In Mandalay, it was 9:30 p.m. and Leila was wondering whether she would eat chicken soup at the blue place or noodles with green shoots at the place with the tattered awning. And whether either would still be open when this call ended. The New Yorkers were all take-charge and macchiatoed and
Great to have you with us, Pat
.

When Leila dialed in, her connection was terrible, whirs and clicks. She cut the line and dialed in again. The same whirs and clicks. Though maybe not as loud this time, and easier to listen to than fifteen coworkers jostling for position. So she didn’t cut the line again. She pressed
SPEAKERPHONE,
returned the handset to its base, and listened absently to all the good intentions and machinations as she wrote in her notebook about who else she might send that e-mail to, whether the Zeya henchman who’d mentioned the bird people could have meant Bluebird, and what she was going to get her dad for his birthday, which was in a month. When it was her turn to report, she kept it to a minimum.

Leila had already decided that this call was not the venue to bring up the freeze-out she was taking from the Burmese. It had gotten worse just in the past few days. Professional relationships that she had spent months cultivating were snapping shut one by one. Heckle and Jeckle were still there—she caught glimpses of them—but they’d receded and been augmented by a rotating cast of plainclothes men who stood on the corner outside her office smoking cigarettes and speaking nonfurtively into walkie-talkies the size of cowboy boots. These guys did
not
wave back. She hadn’t seen Aung-Hla in days, and when she asked the other taximen about him, they shrugged dumbly. The only one who would speak straight with her said,
You don’t need to know everything
.

And then this morning a young man from the Ministry of Immigration had arrived by moped and served her with notice that in a week her visa would be rescinded and her presence in the country would become illegal. So she would need to loop New York in soon. But she had never figured out whom to trust in Helping Hand and she suspected that the organization would dump her and her projects just as soon as it learned she was politically toxic. Leila needed a few more days to work out an exit strategy. She was trying to find a way that she could get Dah Alice to take over the Helping Hand projects. She didn’t know whether she could pull that off or whether it would even be a net gain for Dah Alice’s organization. But there was money waiting for those nursing students; there was the ransomed medical shipment; there was the small, well-outfitted office. Maybe that should be Leila’s model for global improvement—collect privilege and office supplies from the first world and then cast them off in the third.

“Leila, can we expect to see the paperwork on those scholarship candidates soon?” asked a guy called Tim or Tom Timmiken over the bad line.

What up with that guy? From what she understood of the Helping Hand chain of command, he had no business sticking his nose in this. The problem appeared to be that back in New York, during her three-day Goal Definement and Orientation training, he had hit on her, poorly. She had clearly signaled zero interest. But he kept flinging doors practically off their hinges to open them for her. She saw him check the jut of his jaw in nearby mirrors. She’d read from a binder during the taxi ride they shared while he’d displayed to her both his forearms and his world-informedness by leaning forward and talking geopolitics with the Pakistani driver, who clearly couldn’t give a shit.

“Yeah, I’ll send that through just as soon as I can, Tahhhm.” She tried to elide
Tim
and
Tom.
Hopefully, a
whir
or
click
obscured her obscuring.

She was thinking maybe she could find her dad a complete encyclopedia, like a
Britannica
eleventh edition, or maybe a vintage
Hoyle
’s Rules of Games
or the kind of
OED
that comes with a magnifying glass when she realized the others had signed off the call and that she was the only one left on the line. Broadcast by the speakerphone and without any competing sound, the whirs and clicks were very loud.

An hour later, she was in the lobby of the Excellents Hotel calling her brother, Dylan, on an avocado-colored phone that sat on a doily at one end of the bar, its handset as heavy as a hammer. The Excellents had been Leila’s home for a few weeks when she first arrived in Mandalay. The staff there knew her and appeared to like her; when she came in and nodded at the phone, the desk man nodded back with a smile.

The Excellents was a colonial building, crumbling in a heartbreaking sort of way. Like a wouldn’t-make-it-ten-more-years kind of way. The stairways sagged like swag; the doorways skewed parallelogramatically. Wherever a foot had scuffed, a million feet had scuffed before, so there were wear patterns in the wooden thresholds and even in the stone stairs. She climbed onto a stool and dialed her brother, using a phone card she’d bought in the street. The barman brought her a glass of terrible white wine.

Dylan wasn’t sure the whirs and clicks meant anything. That’s probably why she’d called him—he was skeptical and slow to worry and hard to impress.

“Can’t they just kick you out?” Dylan asked her. “Why would they bug your phone? It’s not like you have any nonprofit trade secrets.”

“They did.”

“They did what?”

“Kick me out.”

“Hold up,” said Dylan. “They kicked you out?”

“Well, I mean, I got a letter today saying they’re going to. In seven days my visa gets yanked.”

“Plus those guys following you.” He seemed to reconsider the whirs and clicks. “Leila, whom did you piss off?”

She liked her brother’s care with grammar. Six years younger than Leila, he was the only Majnoun kid born in the United States, the only one who had absorbed no Farsi. As a boy, he’d played the sheriff, the space sheriff, and the policeman; he whipped out his bus pass as if it were a badge. He’d once applied to the FBI, but at an early interview he had miscalculated the candor required and overshared about his collegiate use of psychotropics.

“I don’t know,” said Leila. “This prick of a general, certainly. But maybe other people too. Did you read that e-mail I sent you?”

“When?”

“Like an hour ago.”

“No, I’m at the store. I’m on break.” Dylan had washed out of law school and then slipped into something pretty bleak. There was a brief hospital stay, and then a long year and some heavy meds while living in his old room at home. These days, he seemed mostly back together, but he was on a much gentler career trajectory than the one he’d abandoned; he worked at Whole Foods, in produce.

Cyrus and Mariam Majnoun had been hit hard by their son’s slide off the striving-immigrant-professional-vindication track, and Leila thought that their undisguised disappointment in him had probably prolonged and intensified Dylan’s episode. Plus, it was annoying, because they had two totally successful daughters, women who would have been happy to take some of the burden of achieving off their brother. But it was a son thing, apparently.

“Read the e-mail I sent you,” she said. “Can you talk this time tomorrow?”

“Yeah, sure. But sis?”

“Yeah?”

“Why not just come home? I mean, if they’re going to kick you out anyway.”

“Well. I guess I will come home. I mean soon.”

“But how about just come home tomorrow? It sounds like they got you pretty much boxed in. Anyways, I really miss you. And Mom’s driving me bonkers. She’s always calling me a fruit vendor.”

It helps so much to know that you are missed,
thought Leila. What keeps the truly alone even attached to the earth? “Call her a housewife,” she said. Leila knew all the reasons that Dylan could never do that, but she thought he’d find the idea funny.

“Yeah,” he said. He hadn’t found it funny. “Lately, she’s not really doing that part.”

Leila wanted to ask what he meant, but she could hear the forced exhale that meant his cigarette was finished; his break was over. Where do you smoke at a Whole Foods? she wondered. Inside a dumpster?

And when she’d gotten off the phone she’d thought about Dylan’s question: Why not just go home tomorrow? Or as soon as she could, anyway? She hadn’t really considered that. It just seemed to her that if they were pushing you, you should push back. You should not stand in front of a gun, obviously, but neither should you let a threat alone compel you to move. And if they really wanted to kick her out, she thought she should make them go through with it. At least that way, she’d get a ride to the airport.

But maybe that’s not how life works at all. Maybe you’re not supposed to put up so much resistance. Maybe a lot of that is pride and ego and pointless in the end. In which case she’d been misled by all that required reading and by the Die Hard movies.

N
ed was sitting in a cracked plastic chair on his minuscule balcony drinking a whiskey and smoking a cigarette, his first in two weeks. The evening’s haze smeared the city before him, and a rich umber sunset flamed the river beyond. The sensual reward of the cigarette mixed with the moral defeat of the cigarette. His head swam.

Ned actually came from a distinguished line of U.S. intelligence operatives. A distant but direct ancestor had spied for George Washington in New York City during the Revolutionary War, and Ned’s grandfather was an OSS legend who’d once had a fistfight with a member of the Central Politburo. If they were looking down now…Well, Ned tipped a little
splish
of whiskey from his glass to the cement at his feet—an offering, an apology. Because his forebears would deffo not approve of what the CSS, in the form of grade 5 Nigel Smith, was doing to Leila Majnoun.

Ned had done a couple of hard-core things in the field, but only against truly bad characters, men who posed a threat. And in both cases, the action he’d taken had been swift. Whereas what Nigel arranged for the Majnoun girl was an escalating series of logistical punishments, like a premoral boy funneling ants into solvent. It was almost like he wanted Leila to not just shut down but feel the edge of what he could do; he wanted her to suspect but be unable to confirm a link between her having asked questions about the forest site and all the shit that was now raining down on her, on her family. If you inject that kind of confusion and doubt to a person’s life, you can really derail it.

Ned had risen quickly in the clubby little world of espionage. He was smarter than most of the other guys, a lot of whom were alcoholics in regimental ties. After two years of training, he had begun his career in China region. There was still real spy stuff happening there: boxy cars following other boxy cars along deserted roads, agents meeting people in washrooms, that sort of thing. In China, Ned was called Chuck, a contracting officer for apparel-manufacturing concerns. People just said the craziest shit to Chuck. Ned wrote it all up; his reports were vivid and tight, his insights keen, his observations actionable. Bethesda noticed.

But then it seemed like maybe it would be twenty years before he’d be allowed to advance a grade in China region, so Ned concentrated on his languages and his open-source analysis skills. When he was passed over for three consecutive cycles, he decided to leave field analysis and return to analysis.

Back in Bethesda, his pay slip said he was a statistician for the Congressional Budget Office (he even had some of that work on his desk, a tradition among CSS analysts). He drove an old Saab. He read and read and read. It was like being a professor but with no students, which he understood from professor acquaintances was pretty much the way you wanted it. He had a wicker lampshade over his kitchen table; stalagmites of magazines and journals grew in his living room. He lived across the street from a doggy day-care place, and sometimes when he left his driveway in the morning, a beagle would be keening. He tried Internet dating. He worked on collation and discrete DiP software for Open Source, on the fourth floor. His parents sent him pears on his birthday.

If he hadn’t made such a scene about Dear Diary, he’d probably still be there; he’d probably be a grade 5 by now, and maybe he’d be able to effectively oppose people like Nigel and whoever else was putting the Service in the service of a growing web of ambiguously allied clients. These thoughts, and the whiskey, stirred the silt of Ned’s regrets and resentments.

The Dear Diary episode had nearly cost him his career. He’d gone out on a limb, and the limb had snapped off beneath him, and he’d been left looking like a neophyte who’d wasted the skills and assets of the Service by chasing a phantom menace. The Myanmar posting was punishment for all that. They’d done more than boot him from Open Source; they’d sent him into Nigel’s toxic little corner of the field.

“I believe outcome is being achieved, sir,” Ned had told Nigel that morning at the daily report he was now required to present on Leila Majnoun. “She has accepted the fact that she’s leaving. She’s received no useful response from the original recipients.”

“That’s because I’m making sure she doesn’t,” Nigel said huffily, puffily.

Ned nodded—
rightyouaresir
—and continued, “And she sent that e-mail to only one other person.”

“Who?”

“Her brother.” To underscore that the brother was unconnected, Ned added, “He works at Whole Foods.”

“I know where he works,” Nigel snapped.

Another little nod from Ned. “Anyway, I don’t think she’ll contest the deportation.”

“I don’t think she’ll
contest
it either,” said Nigel, mocking Ned’s word choice. “I think that that nosy cunt will begin her self-deportation in about”—he grandly looked at his heavy Rolex—“five hours.”

Ned put on his blankest face, but Nigel did not elaborate, and Ned did not inquire. Part of this game was letting Nigel enjoy the belief that he was as unreadable as the Sphinx when all Ned had to do, really, was wait him out. All morning, the man could barely contain his glee. Midday, he took a call in the microSCIF, and when he came out he was humming. Then, a few hours later, another SCIF call, and when he came out he attempted to turn on the office TV but got confused by the remotes.

“Swain, did you alter the settings on this thing?” he barked. “The channel won’t change.”

“Let me see if I can figure it out,” said Ned, accepting the remote like it was a partial differential equation. He made an
aha
face and switched the function selector from
TV
to
CABLE
. “I think that’s it,” he said.

Ned snatched back the remote and thumbed his way up to CNN. There was an ad playing—
If you’ve experienced these symptoms, talk to your doctor about Synapsiquell
—but Nigel waited so eagerly that Ned stayed right beside him. Then there was another ad for a wealth-management company—a fit and shrewd-looking older man walked along a private beach with either his adult daughter or his very young wife. Whichever it was, he was proud. Offscreen, a distinguished-elder-black-man voice stressed the importance of
protecting the legacy you’ve built
.

Then the show returned, and the camera swoosh-tracked to the anchor desk in that urgent way, and the handsome anchor was squaring the corners of the papers before him. He appeared to be especially troubled by the upcoming story.

“We’re starting to get some more details on this very troubling story out of Tarzana, California,” said the anchor—
TARZANA
was highlighted on the map of LA County that appeared beside the anchor’s head—“where authorities early this morning removed computers and other electronic equipment from a middle-school principal’s office.” A wide shot of a parking lot, then a zoom in on three or four men in blue windbreakers carrying boxes to the trunks of white Fords. “This after a police tactical unit arrested a man today in a predawn raid in a neighborhood near the school. While authorities have not yet confirmed any connection between the two events, neighbors told a reporter that the man arrested was Tarzana middle-school principal Cyrus Majnoun”—the anchor paused minutely at the foreignish name.

Cut to a man in a bathrobe outside his house, speaking to camera: “It was nuts. It was guys in body armor. They knocked the door down. I even thought, you know,
You got the wrong house
.
That’s the principal’s house
. But then they came out of there with
Madge-noon
. I never saw anything like it before. It was nuts.”

Then back to the anchor. “Authorities aren’t commenting on the arrest or the seizures at this time. But viewers may recall that a school district in nearby Orange County was rocked last year by a scandal involving a high-school principal and Internet child pornography. We’ll bring you more on this story as it develops.”

Nigel clicked off the set, looking like he’d just taken a pie out of the oven. “Ha!” he crowed. “See, Swain? That’s how you put a stop to all this Nancy Drew bullshit. Let’s see how curious she is now.”

And for a split second, Ned may have let the mask slip, because Nigel felt the need to say: “You should be proud of the work we did here, Swain.” He put no extra emphasis on the
we
. He didn’t need to. Was there any doubt that if something like this collapsed, it would collapse not just on Nigel but on everyone around him?

Thus the cigarettes, which Ned bought on the way home. And then the pre-dinner turn to whiskey. How had it come to this? thought Ned, and he meant all of it: the avoidance drinking, the loneliness, the being stuck under the thumb of a man he despised and implicated in an immoral conspiracy almost certainly unrelated to national security. Ned knew all about the greater good, and something about Patriot Act back channels, and he was annoyed by liberals who walked around all un-blown-up claiming that they liked their civil liberties more than their security. But he’d thought there were some controls in place, that there was still a grown-up in the room.

Ned was smoking as if to make up for two weeks of not smoking. What was the recipe for Camels? They were fucking delicious. What was this “Turkish and American blend”? It was chemicals sprayed out of nozzles, wasn’t it?

Leave aside for a moment the morality of what Nigel was doing to Leila, Ned thought. Leave that aside and it was still very wrong just in terms of resource allocation, wasn’t it? Unless Leila Majnoun was a future Hitler come back in a time machine, Ned couldn’t really see how such a vicious and elaborate operation could be justified. Nigel’s interest in her was unprofessionally vengeful. And what he was doing was probably illegal. The word still meant something, or was supposed to, anyway. Extralegal was fine; illegal was not. Plus, it was just terrible espionage—there must be a huge number of people involved in something like what he had just witnessed. Oh yeah—he was one of them.

And that’s when Ned had a thought that was one of those across-the-line thoughts. What if
he
told Majnoun what had been done to her? What would she do with the information?

The line crossed was treason, actually. Because there was no ombudsman at the CSS; there was no mediator who was going to take his complaint up the chain of command. The papers he’d signed at his commission to the Service made it very clear: If he did what he had just considered doing, he was on the outside; if he was on the outside, he was a risk; if he was a risk, he was a threat; if he was a threat, he was a target.

He couldn’t just tell her straight out. If he told her that 85 percent of electronic correspondence (worldwide) and 100 percent of electronic correspondence (English-language) was run through a threat-sieve network commissioned by the U.S. government but increasingly outsourced to a consortium of private companies, she would not believe him. But if he gave her just enough so that she could go looking for the rest? She was smart, and apparently determined. Give her something to run with—one of the Dear Diary portals he’d identified but had never been allowed into—and she’d probably chase it down. And with her Farsi and Burmese, her monk minders and her Rolodex, she was just the kind of asset that Dear Diary might hook and land.

And if Dear Diary did open a door for Leila, Ned could follow her in. After the e-mail, Nigel had bumped her to level-8 surveillance. At that level she could have a low-altitude UAV snooping her every step; her financials would be flagged; her scent would be waved before the computers. If it came to it, she could be extraordinarily renditioned from, like, a women’s toilet. So keeping an eye on her should be cinchy. But he’d have to get clear of Nigel for a few weeks. Taking time off work when you work for the world’s most elite clandestine agency is
not
a cinch. You can’t just cash in sick days and forward your voice mail. If you say it’s a vacation, there’d better be sand in your shoes when you come back, and if you say it’s a family illness, they’ll be wanting to see those biopsy reports.

He’d find a way. Maybe he could work from Sydney station. The more he thought about it, and the more he drank, the more likely it seemed to him that Leila Majnoun was his ticket into Dear Diary. The obsession had nearly derailed him, and he was still looking for a way back to it.

Okay, so he had an ulterior motive. But his anterior motive—to see that she had at least the chance to fight back against Nigel’s plan—that was sincere.

He marveled again at her choice of phone. Ned had ghosted every single one of her devices, and he had real-time access to 80 percent of the phone lines in Myanmar. If she’d been on any one of those, he could have been listening to her now. But the phones at the Excellents were trunked from one of the last predigital exchanges in the city; they used twenty-pulse-per-second crossbar switches and crossbar tandems. Of course, he could get the feed from the other direction, but to do that he would need to involve Bethesda, and the feed would be copied to Nigel’s station per protocol. Ned didn’t want to risk giving Nigel anything else on Leila or drawing any more heat on her than she was already taking, so he had to settle for recording and subsequent collection. The device he had installed in the handset of the Excellents’ lobby phone was the size of a grain of basmati rice. It was unpowered and nontransmitting. He would collect it in the morning.

But he was worried about the morning, worried that by the time it came, he would have lost heart or come to his senses. He needed to do something tonight; he needed to commit.

Ned bicycled swiftly through the hot dark streets to Leila’s little apartment above the tailor shop. He passed by twice, looking for her plainclothes detail and
/
or minder monks, but he saw no surveillance. What tails she had would be outside the Excellents right now, where she was. He stashed his bike and slipped up to her building along its darkest flank. His heart was beating as it hadn’t in twenty years of espionage. His heart was beating as it hadn’t since he and a girl from a million years ago used to climb over eight feet of chain-link on a Saturday night to sneak into the marina and onto her parents’ cabin cruiser.