David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

But that was all years ago. Nigel was well past his expiration date. No one in the Service wanted to risk the capital that would be required to oust him. So he could pretty much do what he wanted until some major part of him broke. And what he wanted to do was drink in the hotel bar. To Ned, it seemed he hadn’t ever given a shit about anything that happened in Myanmar.

So why had he roused himself for this Bluebird thing? It looked like Nigel worked for the Bluebird client; it looked like the power was going the wrong way. Because Majnoun should not really be the Service’s problem. If some nosy civilian girl could derail your thing, you need to address the thing, not the nosy civilian girl. That was the deal, Ned thought.

Ned’s plan was working, somewhat. The rattled, worried Nigel was indeed more indiscreet about grade 5 matters than the bored, drunk Nigel had been. There definitely was something happening in the forest. Maybe a SAG (subsidiary agency of government, or “shadow-ass government,” as the joke went) was building an offline server, and Bluebird was protecting it during construction? But why would any U.S. agency — even some creepy unnamed SAG — see fit to build such a facility on the Chinese border?

Then Ned opened his workstation one morning and saw Majnoun’s e-mail, and his heart sank. He had seriously failed to anticipate that she would crowd-source a request for further investigation of the forest site. People generally quit after a few fruitless Sine searches. Not this girl. And what a list of names in the To: field. Those were some inconvenient recipients.

Because her e-mail had mentioned Bluebird specifically, there was no way Ned could keep it off Nigel’s computer. He just had to wait until Nigel opened his station that morning and saw it for himself.

“Christ. That little slit has gone and done it,” barked Nigel at 10:27 a.m. Some scalding Nescafé splashed out of his mug and into his lap; he leaped up and cursed secondarily. Ned could see him blame that on Majnoun as well.

“What’s up, boss?” Ned asked. In speech and manner, Ned never betrayed even a trace of his antagonism toward Nigel. He was always cheery and dim and acquiescent. You have to be the easiest one in the room, one of Ned’s mentors had taught him. You have to be like a cornflake in milk .

“She fucking e-mailed the coordinates of the new…of that secure site. How the fuck did she come up with coordinates? Didn’t the locals dud her devices before they let her go north?”

They had, but they had apparently forgotten about her fancy little running watch. Ned had noticed the oversight a few days after her return.

After another minute of cursing others and dabbing at his stained crotch, Nigel shut himself in the microSCIF — the phone-booth-size sensitive compartmented information facility that every covert station had been issued last year. Actually, it looked just like a phone booth, though the phone on its wall had a screen as well as a handset. Ned had caught only glimpses of the inside. It was for grade 5 use only, and there was no way around the biometrics (short of actually gouging Nigel’s eyes out of their sockets and chopping his hands off, a fantasy Ned sometimes indulged).

Nigel was in there for twenty minutes, and when he came out he looked even grayer than usual. He smoked one cigarette and then another; Ned could see gross little wheels turning in his head.

“Listen, Swain. I need you to go down to the Internet place on Eighteenth Street. You’re going to meet a guy there.”

“Who’s the guy?”

“He’s SAG. Don’t worry about that. Remember you said the NGO girl went north with that driver of hers?”

Ned nodded.

“You can pick him out? The driver?”

Ned nodded.

“I need you to meet the guy and show him which one is the driver.”

“Uh. Okay,” said Ned. He was stalling, though. Even a cornflake in milk would balk at some instructions. There are only a few reasons you identify a foreign national for a SAG asset, and none of them are happy ones. Nigel would know that Ned would know this by now.

“He’s a terrorist, Swain. He chose the wrong side.”

And what Ned saw in Nigel’s eyes just then — the hardening, the heartlessness, the sharp point of paranoia — it gave him a fright like he hadn’t known since he was a boy. Neither one of them thought the taxi driver was a terrorist. The words were just a conjurer’s spell, a Patriot Act sim sala bim . And the part about choosing sides? That was meant for Ned, and it was delicately laced with a predator’s menace.

The guy at the Internet place on Eighteenth Street did not look like a SAG asset. Generally, SAG assets looked like they were just dying to beat the shit out of someone. It would be very hard to pick one out at a hockey game, for example. But this guy was wispy and almost pretty, though once he was sitting in Ned’s car, Ned saw that he had the BMI of a shotgun shell and that his every movement came out of nowhere; he even opened the glove box in a deft and deadly way.

The asset was in the passenger seat, Ned driving. When the asset looked right, Ned stole a glance and saw that the guy had a picture of the taxi driver strapped to his forearm, under the long sleeve of his pirate-type shirt.

“Picture’s crap. That’s why you’re here,” said the asset without looking at Ned.

Ned drove slowly. He needed to think. You never knew when these things were going to come up. Knowing what you should do was seldom of any use. Saying to the man “I’m sorry, sir, but I joined the Service to keep my country safe, not to chauffeur assassins. Please exit the vehicle” wasn’t an option; Ned had blown past that point a while back. They passed the faded movie house, the flower market, the rubble-strewn park with the diesel-powered merry-go-round.

He thought of Leila. He’d been listening to her all week, though he’d made contact with her only twice, months ago. Once when she first arrived, and then once when he’d found her in the university cafeteria and talked to her about aspirated consonants. While it was part of his job to bore people into never suspecting him of anything, he couldn’t help being a bit hurt that he had been so successful in her case. She was very pretty: compact and Persian and poised. It would have been nice to get a nod from her. He thought of one of these guys prowling around Leila.

“If he’s working today, he should be up here,” said Ned. They were coming up on the pagoda beside which some of the taximen queued. But the traffic had grown thick around one of the circles. Back home, on traffic reports, this is called stop-and-go traffic, thought Ned. The asset wasn’t saying anything, just mowing down locals from behind his cheap-looking shades.

“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 .