David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Leila left the Excellents and headed back to her office. Sixteen hours until she had to leave the country. She had a lot of work to do before then.

That Ned guy didn’t seem like the sharpest tool in the shed, actually. Maybe sort of spectrum-y. And the waves of cologne off him had been overpowering. Was that Drakkar Noir? What he’d told her was almost certainly nonsense. For one thing, why would a CIA agent have some dude fix his computer?

He seemed well intentioned, though. He had said sorry about Leila’s dad. Hearing the word, she had almost cracked and started crying.

Dylan had asked her last night did she think their dad’s arrest could have anything to do with her e-mail. She reviewed again the reasons she’d told him no. Yeah, they were valid. Back in her office, she tossed into the trash the piece of paper with the website address Ned had given her.

She began to pack up the office. She didn’t know what kind of a packing job was required. The office was rented for a year, and Helping Hand had paid up-front. It seemed unlikely that she’d be returning, but someone might. New York was being squirrely about whether they would even want her back. During an hours-long call earlier that day, the region director kept referring to the Mandalay office as a “partner program,” which was troubling. It seemed like maybe they would dump the whole thing. Leila thought of all the young women whom she had encouraged to dream of a first-world medical education; she thought of their hopes withering like, well, like raisins in the sun.

You should always look behind yourself to see if you have accidentally hurt someone. Her father had said that to her once. He did not say you had to fix everything you screw up; he did not say you must never hurt anyone. None of those unfollowable directions. Just that: You should always look behind yourself. She was old enough now to read the secret meaning embedded in all real advice: that the giver has fallen short of it himself, and that falling-short still rings in him and shapes his soul. When had her father not looked behind himself? It must have been when they left Iran.

She packed like a dervish. Pens and cords and cables went into zip-lock bags. Reports and binders were puzzled and staggered to fit in boxes. Maps rolled into cardboard tubes. What about the office computer? She transferred all the program files from the desktop to her laptop and trashed everything on the desktop. That didn’t seem like enough, considering the weird shit that was going down. What if they were getting rid of her just so they could punish the women she’d interviewed? So she did her best to scrub the hard drive. How do you do that? She found a menu item called Overwrite Deleted Files, and the computer did its spinny pizza thing for a few minutes. Was that enough? She considered taking a brick to the tower, or tearing out its innards. But she didn’t know which was the hard drive and which the logic board or whatever. Besides, that would make her look guilty or afraid of something, whereas what she wanted to do was stare down her antagonists, be they Burmese corruptocrats or — as that guy Ned would have her believe — the CIA.

Why didn’t she know more about computers? That knowledge suddenly seemed more important than feminist theory or eighties’ song lyrics, both of which she was well acquainted with. Computers had risen around her all her life, like a lake sneakily subsuming more and more arable land, but she’d never learned to write code or poke behind the icons or anything like that. She was like a medieval peasant confounded by books and easily impressed by stained glass.

She took Ned’s piece of paper out of the wastebasket, uncrumpled it: Ding-Dong.com.

Really?

On her laptop, on the floor of her empty office, leaning against a wall of stacked boxes and sitting beneath the breeze of a plastic fan, Leila sent her browser to Ding-Dong.com. It was indeed a house-swapping site, or appeared to be, anyway. A rather high-pressure vibe on the front page, actually: The #1 site! Destination: Change; click-on-able testimonials beneath pictures of happy people enjoying the decisions they’d made. In the first fill-in-able text box she came to, she wrote her e-mail address and then this:

Weird guy in bar told me to try your site. My name is you don’t need to know my name. I may have some information about a major US company doing contract security in Burma, which is violation of US law, FYI. Also maybe they know I know and have screwed with me because of my knowing. Screwed me immigration-wise and maybe more, which would seem to indicate criminal government collusion. If you can help, get in touch with me. If this makes no sense, please ignore it. If this is a joke or a trap, fuck you, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

She double-locked the office, went home, and packed up her little apartment. Her things fit in four large suitcases and a big duffel. There was more to do, but it had to be done in the morning. She lay down and caught a few hours’ sleep.

She woke to her alarm. While the kettle boiled, she checked her sites and her e-mail. No response from the house-swapping people. She was disappointed but also somehow relieved. She ate an orange and drank some tea. She stuck a thumb drive in her laptop and copied onto it all of her nursing-scholarship-related files. She tried to check in to her Mandalay — Yangon flight, but she couldn’t. She checked in to her Yangon — Doha and Doha — London flights. She got into her running clothes and tucked the thumb drive in the tiny net pocket in her shorts.

She started off at a reasonable pace along one of her usual routes. Two fat policemen in a car trailed her by half a block. No Heckle and Jeckle these guys; they lurked and lurched in plain view but were too lazy to ever debouch. She was about to take advantage of that.

She suddenly ducked left, then sprinted down an alley that led to a small dirty park that at certain times of the day harbored clutches of public alcoholics. She calmed her heart and breath to listen. In the early-morning stillness, she heard only birds. Would it be that easy?

No. She heard the policemen’s car knocket ing over the bad street above her. They’d guessed at her outlet. She turned and whipped away, ran across the park and up a flight of stairs that led to a semicovered, courtyarded one-block-square market; a bazaar, but a less exotic place than the word evoked. She bought her burner phones in this market; she knew its multiple exits. There were hundreds of tiny stalls arranged into categorical districts: Battery Allée, Hosiery Town, Simcardville. But at this hour, all the stalls were shuttered, plywood faces to narrow aisles. Leila knew, though, that many stall keepers slept with their wares, so she did not feel alone. She ran quietly through the empty aisles, locating the policemen’s car as it prowled around the perimeter of the market. When they turned one corner, she went out the other way, and quickly ran down a long set of cracked steps. After four minutes at pace, when she figured she had half a mile between her and them, she slowed.

And she was about to congratulate herself on a job well done when she spotted Heckle ahead of her.

Leila didn’t break stride. Heckle held back and then dropped in behind her, as if he’d never left. Maybe he never had. She was coming up to Dah Alice’s little compound — a plaster wall around a concrete house and ratty carport and shade tree and dappled patio. She had to make a decision quickly. She removed the thumb drive from her jogging pocket. Was there any way to pass this thumb drive to Dah Alice or her house without being observed doing so? Still running, she saw that the patio door was open; a person inside. Dah Alice, probably, making mohinga for breakfast. The compound had a wooden gate at the street. Pretend to stretch against the gate and slip drive in mailbox? No mailbox. Slip drive onto gatepost? Shit. Passing compound. Turn around, pretend to cough, hurl drive toward patio door? A Hail Mary?