David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“No, no, anyway, listen…what? Oh, probably a waffle iron. Yeah.” He laughed as if at a joke.

When they were little, his sisters had a game where a certain word or phrase would negate the following word or phrase, or make it into its opposite. It was one of many coded languages they used. Leo only barely got the rules to most of the secret languages that his sisters employed. This one was simple enough, though, and when he’d played it, he’d chosen waffle iron as his code switch because he loved the machine, was allowed to operate it from a young age, had never burned himself on it. His sisters thought that was hilarious, since waffle iron was such a difficult phrase to slip into conversation. Thereby, waffle iron became the standard code switch between the siblings — it meant The following is an insincere statement; it means the opposite of what it seems to mean.

“I’m glad you’re coming to get me,” Leo said down the phone. “I’ll be here when you arrive. I’d rather just meet at my house, but of course I’m not going to do that.” He uhm-hmm ed a few times, said loveya, and hung up. He returned the phone-booth key to Nurses’ Island.

Back in his room, he saw that his clothes had been packed up for him. His trifolded trousers, neat rows of T-shirts, and rock garden of balled socks had been transferred from the veneered pressboard wardrobe into the blue duffel bag that he’d come with, which lay at the foot of his bed. Unknown hands had scooped his toothbrush and comb and organic deodorant into his Dopp kit. Creepy. Who does that? He put everything carefully on the floor beside his bed. He lay down. A breeze with jasmine on it came through his open window. Leo was tired. He decided he would rest before his escape; he wanted to say good-bye to James.

Leila had four hours before she was to meet the Ding-Dong guy and then another four hours before her flight left for LA. She was bored and ragged and underslept. She wished she hadn’t agreed to the Heathrow meeting. Over the last thirty-six hours of travel, the implausibility of Ned’s story had really become apparent to her. Part of what he told her was probably true; something shady had been perpetrated on her. But that’s pretty much all the Burmese government did — perpetrate shit.

And yet. She couldn’t throw out the little owl icon that the original Ding-Dong e-mail had deposited on her desktop. The other programs on her laptop chugged as if on thin fuel, while this one just blinked away, and twice opened itself up to reveal a message from a guy called Seymour, one saying How about coffee? and then another saying Java-Jiva? Terminal 3, 2 p.m.? They were written as if she could respond, but there was no Reply button or anything.

Maybe if her father weren’t on bail and bed rest, if her brother hadn’t been begging her to come home and deal with their mom — maybe then she would have had more time for the Mystery of the Security Men in the Forest. As it was, she was ready to forget the whole thing. She let Heathrow distract her. She killed a few hours in its chutes and atria. She strolled through handbag stores and wandered through a cigar outlet, passed a waxing joint and a place called Pretzel Junction.

There had to be better ways than this to build an economy, right? If people just spent their money on less stupid stuff, wouldn’t so many problems disappear? Yes, but whose idea of stupid, she knew was the issue. There were a few face products on which she didn’t mind dropping some serious ducats, so that probably made her a hypocrite. But she’d be willing to make adjustments for the greater good. The world reflected by the stores in this airport seemed to be going the other way. There was a place that sold water, but in rhinestone-encrusted bottles and for hundreds of dollars. There was bad candy made in China and flown to London and sold to people, some of whom were flying to China. There were cheesy lingerie shops and a vitamin outlet and there were two distinct yogurt franchises. There were newsstands, which at least still sold some product that seemed related to living. But why any shelf space at all for Abs! Superyachts Monthly, or Model Train Enthusiast ? Actually, Model Train Enthusiast was fine. She picked up an armful of newspapers and some pecans.

Leila got to Java-Jiva ten minutes early. She read the Irish Times, because she’d never read it before and because it was one of those gigantic broadsheets you need to have upper-body strength to hold upright. She had to spread the thing out over the back of another chair to read it. She remembered how briskly her dad could fold and fold a newspaper page, until he had just the columns he wanted. He used to read to them from the papers in the morning, so Leila could recall when the embassy hostages came home and when Sadat was assassinated and when President Carter was attacked by a swamp rabbit.

“Are you Leila?” said a woman to Leila. She was in her thirties. Greek-looking. Dark-haired. Business-suity. An American accent, but what kind Leila could not tell. It sounded without place.

“Yes. I’m Leila?” said Leila, as if she were meeting herself. “Are you”—she dug in her bag for her planner—“sorry. I have it here.”

“Seymour Butz? No. Seymour couldn’t make it. I came instead.”

Seymour Butz. That was the guy’s name. Damn. Leila had not said it or heard it out loud and had missed the joke, if that’s what it was.

“I’m Paige Turner,” said the woman.

“That seems unlikely,” said Leila.

“May I sit?”

“Be my guest,” said Leila, who was getting intrigued at exactly the same rate as she was getting annoyed. She just wanted to confirm that this “network” was a sort of stunt, of no use to her, so she could take the whole thing off her desk. But if it was a stunt, what kind of stunt? Was it some sort of stupid viral-marketing thing, or a cult, or someone’s MFA thesis? Even in the mire of her family- and job-related distresses, Leila was good at analyzing situations. She supposed that could be called compartmentalizing. When she heard people refer to this as a male trait and view it as generally a bad thing, she was uncomfortable.

There are people who will try to con a woman by banking on her politeness or by presuming that female restraint will trump her curiosity or her skepticism. Rich had once called her blinkered, a word choice he had quickly regretted.

But Leila hadn’t run in two days. And she was tired. The sleep she had nabbed had been the airport kind. She felt, as her father used to say, not enough sandwiches for a picnic.

As soon as the alleged Paige Turner sat down, Leila said, “Why don’t you tell me in less than ten minutes if you are part of some sort of opposition network, what you oppose, and how you think you can help me.”

“I am. Part of a network,” said Paige. “We’re called Dear Diary. We do not oppose, exactly, but are hoping to move past the nation-state thing. We can help you by asking you to join us. We think you’ll want to be a part of what we’re working on. In the near term, though, we are opposing something, which is ‘the Committee’”—the woman made air quotes with her slender fingers—“which is a thing where a sort of cabal of businessmen and some other bad guys are planning an electronic coup so that they will control the storage and transmission of all the information in the world. Those men you saw in Burma were part of that. You weren’t supposed to see them; you certainly weren’t supposed to send out e-mails about them. That’s why they screwed you.” She said all that without a bit of drama but with a sort of practiced enunciation, as if she were reciting the specials.