David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

But she had considered it. She had paused between the two no s. And that was before she had received his note.

Ned decided he would treat the meeting as a potential romantic opening, because that’s what his Burma-region persona would do — Ned the tone-deaf postdoc interested in diglossia and the ninth-century pagan empire of the Irrawaddy River Valley. Leila would be wondering why he was trying to help her, and a crush was the most plausible motivation. A girl like Leila would have run into that plenty. So he spent an hour primping for their date. He held various shirts against himself in front of a mirror. That made him worry again that he would never be called handsome because he had a slightly too-large head, and that this was what had kept him from any great love in his adulthood. He splashed on cologne.

He was at the bar of the Excellents Hotel an hour early, ordered a drink, and sipped it slowly. He wondered if she’d show up and what he would do if she didn’t. The bar was really just a corner of the lobby with a driftwood sign whereon Bar was written in cursive, with rope. There was a nautical theme to the hotel that presumably had once been more thoroughly carried out but now was limited to a few things like the ropy signage and a clutch of naval-battle prints curling in their frames. Maybe some dusty rear admiral, ex of the East India Company, had built the place to make it more likely that steamer-trunked friends would visit him in this too-hot outpost of the Empire.

At 8:05, Leila walked in. She looked around as if scanning for a trap. She saw him. He waved.

She approached and recognized him. “You’re Fred. From the university.”

“Ned.”

“Did you write this?” She held up his note. She didn’t sit.

“I did,” he said. “You want a drink?”

She ignored that. But she sat down. “Tell me what you meant by it.”

She looked rough, like she hadn’t slept. “Okay. You know how you were writing to people about the security contractors in the forest?”

“Do I know that? How do you know that?”

It all hinged on this. “I do some work for a guy who I think is, like, a spy. Like, a CIA guy or something.”

“You’re a spy?” said Leila.

Ned laughed. “No, I’m a linguist. But I do some translation work for this guy. And he has crappy security on his computer. And I snuck a look. You saw something you weren’t supposed to see. They want you gone.” One truth and several lies.

“What did I see? What are the contractors doing up there?”

“I don’t know.” Sadly, this was also true. But it didn’t matter for his purposes here. He gave her a mashed-up version of a possible explanation. “It’s some huge corporation. I think it’s like a Chinese company that wants to test some totally gnarly genetic pesticides on live forests. They want to do stuff you can’t do even in China. So they’re doing it here and pretending it’s China. Is your dad okay?”

“What’s the company called?”

“New Solutions?” He said it with a rising terminal intonation. “I Sined it. I think it’s just a name. Like, it’s owned by something bigger.”

He needed Leila to think he was less intelligent than he was. It was the most basic requirement of field analysis, but it was actually quite rare: the ability and willingness to appear dumber than you were. That’s why he’d started out in field analysis: the acting part came naturally to him. He could slacken his mouth a little bit when necessary. He could even deaden his eyes.

Yeah, look at my slightly too-large head, he used to think. Pay no attention to what I’m doing .

“So who’s your spy friend?” asked Leila.

“He’s not my friend,” said Ned. “You know that skinny old dude who runs the Paradise Hotel?” More intentionally dull speech. Ned could have offered much more artful descriptives for Nigel: Decrepit. Glossy. Ghoulish.

“The Canadian?”

“Is he Canadian? I didn’t know that.”

“He sounds Canadian. You say he’s a spy?”

“Yeah. I do translating for him, for the hotel. I think he works for the CIA or something.”

Leila looked blankly at Ned. “So, what, you rifled through his desk on my behalf?”

“No. No. He had me fixing his computer. He’s useless. He couldn’t open his e-mail. But he left me alone in his office, and…well, I saw the name of the outfit you work for, and I thought, Why would he care about that? And then, behind a really dinky firewall, I saw those e-mails you wrote, about the site in the forest.” Ned leaned forward. “Dude can read your e-mails.” He sounded incredulous at the idea. “And I saw that he had written to someone and said that you would be removed from the equation. That’s what he wrote, removed from the equation . And there was some stuff about the project you saw, but I couldn’t really understand it, other than what I’ve already told you. I only had about an hour.”

She seemed interested. Very suspicious, but interested. “So how do you know my dad was framed?”

“Well. I guess I don’t. Know that, I mean. But here’s a situation where someone who works either for the CIA or for, like, a bad corporation, someone who can read your e-mail, that person wants you to leave Burma. I saw the news about your dad…”

“How did you know he’s my father?”

“Majnoun. I’d never heard the name before. And I saw a picture of your brother. You two look alike. Anyway, if they can read your e-mail, I doubt they’d have any trouble putting porn on someone’s computer.”

She was evaluating. Her brain practically whirred.

“You want that drink?” he asked.

She shook her head no.

“Are you going home?” he asked.

“Yeah.” It was the first time that her voice had softened with him. “My dad had a heart attack. He’s in the hospital.”

“Shit. I’m sorry. Listen, I may be able to help you.”

“Really?” She arched an eyebrow. “How?”

“I think I know about some people who are good at getting to the bottom of things like this.”

“You mean like the police?”

“No, not at all like the police. It’s a sort of a network for, like, people who think corporations are bad and do bad stuff.”

“Are you part of this network?”

“No.”

“So how do you know about it?”

“They helped out a friend of mine once,” he lied.

“And how will they help me?” asked Leila.

“I don’t know exactly. But if you get screwed by a government or, like, a corporation, they help you get back at those people.”

“That’s it? That’s all you got for me?”

Ned looked hurt. “Yeah. I guess so. But it’s something.”

With a nod, she allowed that it might be. “Okay. How do I get in touch with this network?”

Ned wrote the address of a website on a piece of paper and pushed it across the table to her. “It’s a house-swapping site. But ignore that. Just write, like, a paragraph in one of the windows about what happened to you. Then they’re supposed to get in touch with you.”

“But if the CIA can read my e-mail, they’re going to know I’m doing this, right? I mean, what you’re saying is very, very weird. You must know that.”

“I know that. Look, I may be totally wrong about this. But I’ve just heard that these people can help. I mean, when you’re in a jam.”

“Like the A-Team.”

“Pardon?”

“Forget it.”

Leila picked up the scrap with the website address. She stood up. “Okay. Well, thanks,” she said, giving little. Then she sandaled out of there, briskly, into the hot night.