David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

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.

Ned 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.