Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (36 page)

“Okay. Okay,” said Roxana. Leila’s burst of anger had worked. “I’m sorry I said that about your job. I actually think that what you do is admirable,” Roxana conceded, shrugging her pear-like shoulders. “But you’re wrong about how we have it set up now. All those poor people are welcome up here, with us. I love this country, Leila. And I think anyone talking about its overthrow is misguided. And I think that so-called radicals are dangerous, because they move too quickly, like children. And, like children, they fall off walls. They usually end up bringing about something other than what they intended.”

“I’m not trying to
overthrow
America. Have you considered that it’s the
other
guys who are doing that, that
they’re
the ones subverting and co-opting and rigging things? We’ve got to push back before it’s too late to push back. We’ve got to at least be ready.”

“But you said it’s a
postnationalist
organization,” said Roxana. “That sounds to me like a bunch of affluent anarchists. Turtleneck types with tiny glasses of red wine.”

“Okay.
You’re
affluent now,” said Leila, moving in. “You know that, right? Like, more affluent than I am; more than Mom and Dad are. Any idea or politics you have is, by definition,
affluent
.”

“I’m just saying. Either your new friends have pull or they don’t. They can help us or they can’t.”

“They definitely have pull, Roxana. I saw things.”

“Mysterious much?” prompted Roxana.

“Just, you know, the way they switched my papers in Heathrow, the way they kept me safe in Dublin. They have a robust network. But I can’t access it since I got back here. They gave me this weird phone, Roxana.” Leila reached into the white deli bag and pulled the little Nokia from the extra mayonnaise sachets and napkins and sugar packets (for bulk) and creamer pucks (for the signal confusion said to be caused by the reflective racket of the foil lids).

“You aren’t supposed to have that in here,” said Roxana. This pleased Leila because it laid bare for a moment the brown-nosey quality in Roxana, which the magazine profilers never mentioned since they were generally there for the overcame-adversity angle. “It won’t work, anyway. The whole building’s shielded.”

“Fine. But just look at it. When you called me when I was in Portland, your call rang through to this one. I also used it to exchange text messages with the woman from Dublin. But it hasn’t made a peep since I left Portland. Now when you call me, your call comes to my BlackBerry, the BlackBerry I left at the front desk. This one, the Nokia, the Dear Diary—its little green light stays on always. The clock knows the time zone. It’s not a smartphone. Like, there are no apps. I can compose a message, but when I try to send it the screen just reads, 
No secure path available
.
”

“When I said you aren’t supposed to have that in here,” said Roxana, “I meant you aren’t supposed
to be able
to get transmitting electronics—any type or kind of transmitting electronic device—past the sally port in the lobby. This is a hardened, unwired facility.”

“Well, they didn’t look between the chicken salad sandwiches, okay?” said Leila, waggling the phone.

“Let me see that.”

Leila handed the phone to Roxana. Usually—all their lives—this had meant that the object would pass from Leila’s hands to Roxana’s feet. But since she was wearing the tester prosthetic, Roxana put out her graspy-whisk-on-a-desk-lamp thing. Leila, who had never once expressed discomfort with Roxana’s armlessness, shuddered a little as she handed the phone into her sister’s bionic prosthetic.

“Yeah, I know, it looks weird,” said Roxana. “The final product will be covered in fake skin or whatever. This is the mechanics.”

Leila was embarrassed to have been caught shuddering, and she saw now that the whisk thing was more like an ingenious paddle, with nesting, Teflon-coated wires forming a sort of cupped paw. Roxana could hold the little phone securely and even manipulate it more precisely than a human hand might.

But after a minute of close scrutiny, Roxana dropped the phone from her bionic paw and caught it with her feet. She felt the phone with her naked feet, the way you might feel a piece of fruit before eating it.

“I think I see how this phone got in the building,” she said. “It’s not electronic. There’s no signature. You sure this isn’t just, like, a gum dispenser?”

Despite the crack, Leila could see that Roxana was intrigued by the Nokia, and she kept it before her on her tall desk as she started back in on her screens.

“Okay, all I’m seeing is a strange deficit in the frequency that the words
Dear Diary
appear in Speechwave.”

“What’s speech wave?”

“Cool new software we got with foundation money. It samples daily human speech from all over the world, in real time.”

In real time?
“Samples it from whom, Rox?”

“Everybody. You and me, probably. Whenever we pass through a collection point.”

Leila’s mouth must have dropped open a bit, because Roxana continued, “Oh, no. It’s not like that, Leila. There’s no risk to privacy. It’s deeply blinded; the data is completely severed from its source.”

Wow, and you’re supposed to be the genius in this family?
thought Leila. But she said only, “So what’s so strange about the deficit?”

“It’s just strange. Statistically significant. Why are those and related words being used less frequently in the last five days? There’s also been less crying and more laughing. That’s correlated with anticipation.”

Wait. Since when are astronomy facilities in hardened, unwired buildings?
thought Leila, suddenly looking around Roxana’s office. The door was four inches thick.

Then Roxana was consulting another screen. “Let me ask you this, sis,” she said. “Did these Dear Diary people
do
anything to you? Like, did they administer a test, or a substance? Were you disoriented at any point?”

“What are you working on here, Roxana?” asked Leila, partly to dodge the question, but also because it suddenly seemed germane. “I mean, in the LA County Large Array Facility? I thought you were working on something about content-free static grammars. You’re not an astronomer now, are you?”

“No. But I don’t think there’s even a telescope left in this building. Most of it’s leased to New Solutions. That’s who has the money for these nice computers. I get to use the computers to work on my thing, and I’m just expected to put in a few hours a week on one of their projects.”

“What’s that project?”

“Sorry. I’m not supposed to tell you.”

Leila made a
really?
face.

“I’m not. I signed papers about this.”

“What’s New Solutions?”

“They’re a pretty big IT contractor. I think they used to be called Blu Solutions/Logistics.”

“That’s a
defense
contractor, Roxana.” Leila was scolding her sister and had grounds to do so. Roxana had always kept on the other side of that line. She had turned down lots of money before. She wouldn’t work for the hackers either, though. She used to say it had to be real research; it had to be public. Everything she did, she wanted to go right in the public library.

“Okay, maybe,” conceded Roxana, suddenly defensive. “There is a lot of that around here. And you’re right—it’s not my scene. I don’t like not being able to talk about what I do. But it’s not like anyone ever understood me before. Of course I liked SNARC better. I’ll probably go back there. I was at SNARC, not PARC, by the way. PARC is in Palo Alto, not Pasadena. And my thing, the thing I’m working on like forty hours a week, is context-free
stochastic
grammars. You never pay attention to my career either.”

Fair point,
thought Leila. SNARC, the
I am Jim’s sandwich
place.

Roxana was doing more justifying and rationalizing: “This is a one-year fellowship. The money is…good. I can pull more data here than I can anywhere else. Anyway, the thing they want me to help them with is totally good.”

“The thing you can’t talk about?”

“Well, the software is classified. But the application, Leila…”

Leila waited. She just knew her sister was going to blab.

“It’s a gaze-capture device,” said Roxana proudly. “A screen you work with your eyes.”

“You’ve been typing on one of those for years.”

“Yeah.
Typing
. Big whoop. This thing helps thoughts
come out
.”

Leila looked blankly at her sister.

“Leila, I may be like this”—she straightened up in her chair, to display her disability—“but I feel lucky when I think of the people locked in. Cord injury, Parkinson’s, the myelin-sheath disorders. This machine could give those people a new way out.”

“There are other things that machine could do, Roxana,” said Leila. “How far along are you guys?”

“We’re there, pretty much. We’ve built one. But it draws a ridiculous amount of energy. I think maybe that’s why the fifty-tesla magnet on the third floor, actually. But the people working on that part say they may have found a way. They have a device they’ve been trying to reverse-engineer for months. They want my help with that too, but they’re super-cloak-and-dagger about it—like, I would have to sign still more papers. I told them to find someone else.”

Then both women jumped in their chairs, because the Dear Diary phone rang, loudly, with one of those skeuomorphic old-timey rings, and vibrated too, and scattled across the broad laminate surface of Roxana’s desk. Roxana picked up the phone with her foot.

“Who is it?” asked Leila.

Roxana brought the phone to her face, squinted at the little screen. “Sarah Tonin?” she said.

Leila grabbed the phone from her sister’s left foot, pressed
ACCEPT
.

“Sarah?” she said into it.

“Yes. Lola?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you talk?”

Annoying to be asked that when
you’ve
been trying to get in touch with
them
for days.

“Um, yes. Hold on.” She put the phone to her chest. “Roxana, do you mind?”

It took Roxana a moment to understand. “You want me to leave my own office?”

“Do you mind? Five minutes. Please.”

Roxana got up and left, huffily.

When she’d gone, Leila said, “What the fuck, Sarah? Why’d you guys go quiet on me. I have a lot of questions.”

“It’s not just
on you,
Lola. When the network can’t carry signals securely, it won’t carry them. That’s just protocol. You’re in LA. It’s pretty wired up there. Not a lot of green space. Sometimes you get only about an hour a day of secure transmission out there, usually late at night. The equipment we use…it cycles, you know? Like breezes do; like tides. What happened with Crane in Portland?”

“The thing he had was Super-Eight film of Deveraux beating off, back in college.”

“Eww,” said Sarah.

Leila felt the need to defend Leo. “I don’t think it was like that. It was supposed to be funny. Deveraux was a sperm donor. It was some joke about that. I think he was making fun of himself.”

“Well, anyway, you can forget about Deveraux. After you met him in that airport lounge, he went aboard
Sine Wave
. That’s Straw’s yacht. He’s probably wearing their contacts by now, and out of our reach. He was a good lead, though.”

“But Sarah?”

“Yeah?”

“I was right, right? I mean, we wouldn’t engage in that kind of blackmail?”

There was a longish pause. “I think you made the right call under the circumstances. That’s not really the kind of incriminating we were looking for. But, I suppose, if it were important enough…Leave that aside though, Lola,” said Sarah. “I’m calling about Rusty Trombones.”

“Who?”

“Rusty Trombones. Our man who passed you the stuff with your dad’s hard drive—”

“Yeah, thank you so much, Sarah,” interrupted Leila.

“No. That was mishandled. Rusty was supposed to get that to the prosecutor; it was supposed to look like it came from a whistle-blower, not from someone associated with your dad’s case. That it came through your brother complicates things. It gives the Committee reason to believe that you’ve had contact with us. We kept you clean from Heathrow to Dublin to Portland to LA. But when Dylan walked into the RITSerF with that drive, there was a line drawn connecting you to us.”

“Well, fuck ’em. I don’t care that they know that. The hard drive worked. They’re going to drop the charges against my dad. Most of them, anyway.”

“You do care. Trust me. You don’t want to be a known Diarist right now. Not in a large American city. And they’re not dropping the charges against your dad.”

“No. They are.” She said it too loud. “I spoke to our attorney this morning. He said the prosecutor signed off on it.”

“Yeah, well, today a stove exploded in that prosecutor’s face. There’s a new prosecutor. And the SCIF in Kramer’s office was seized, and Rusty Trombones has vanished. He’s probably in a six-by-six at Fort Meade.”

Leila went cold.

“Look, Lola,” said Sarah. “Don’t worry. If things really go pear-shaped, we have a contingency for all the Majnouns. Sit tight. The Committee still may not have realized you’re connected to us. Until they do, there’s no reason to believe they’ll make things any worse for you.”

Until? Any worse?
“How long? How long do I
sit tight?
”

“Give it a week. Things will probably be going one way or another within a week.”

“What’s the contingency plan?”

“We can probably get you all out of here. An emergency exfiltration.”

“I don’t like this plan, Sarah. Just wait around? I want a better assignment.”

“Well, actually, there is something else we need from you.”

“Yeah?”

“We need to talk to your sister.”

When Leila called her sister back in and handed her the phone, Roxana made a thing of asking Leila to step out into the hallway. Minutes ticked by. Leila walked up and down the bland corridor, but it was spookily blank: nine other office doors, each identical to Roxana’s, the elevator bank, fire stairs at the end, a water fountain.

She was trying to super-compartmentalize, to take the problem apart. The stove that exploded in the prosecutor’s face. A line between herself and Dear Diary. Could they really
un
drop the charges against her father? What had happened to the free country the Majnouns had fled to?