David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Seldom is an illusionist offered an exit like this. The reveal would come in a third act. The SineCo rep hovered behind him.

“Well, look, Lola,” he said to her. “Good luck, okay?”

“Oh, yeah, thank you. Mark, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, Mark.” Off the high stool and back on terra shiny, Mark found his equilibrium. He wasn’t as drunk as he had feared, could do a convincing imitation of a weary-for-good-reason business traveler. The fact that the SineCo rep had said passage and not ticket gave Mark reason to hope that he was going to Hong Kong on one of the Sine aircraft; the excitement of this prospect momentarily overpowered the torpor of six hours’ drinking. “So maybe I’ll see you again in one of these places?”

“Unlikely,” she said. “Good luck with your meeting.” And then, sly-like, “You’ll want to work on that trick.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that,” said Mark.

Coming through the sliding glass doors of the Dublin airport with her satchel and her nom de guerre, Leila saw a man holding a piece of paper on which was written in sloppy Sharpie L. Montes. He was holding it in that who-gives-a-shit sort of way that taxi drivers use to show that they are not limo drivers. But he softened when he saw that L. Montes was a girl. He introduced himself as Dermot and was open-faced and bright-eyed and brisk; he led her past the taxi rank to a side lot and opened the door to the backseat of a clean but unfancy black car.

When she asked, “Where’re we going?” he just said, “Stoneybatter.” When she asked where that was, he just said, “Between Cabra and the quays.” Was this a real taximan or an agent working on behalf of Dear Diary? He had a meter, but it wasn’t running. He played talk radio — people complaining about a levy on sidewalks or something. Then there was a news bulletin, but it wasn’t in English. It sounded to her like the rough forest language of a stick-waving people.

“Is that Gaelic?” she asked Dermot.

He turned it down. “Irish,” he said.

“I know,” said Leila. “The language. Is it Gaelic?”

He found her eyes in the rearview. “The English word for the Irish language is Irish .” He said it kindly, but you could tell he had said it a few times before.

Leila was embarrassed. She actually knew that, or had known that once. In West Africa, she’d worked with an Irishman who sang beautifully and spoke his native tongue when he talked to his wife on the satellite phone. “We’re like Navajo windtalkers,” he had said to Leila, “until the guy across the train car turns out to be a Paddy.”

Dermot brought her to the door of a little brick house on a street of little brick houses on a hill laddered with streets of little brick houses. She was met at the door by a man who quickly ushered her inside and into a kitchen and then said his name was Feargal and would she like a cup of tea. She nodded sure and he asked had she had a nice journey. So she said, “Fine. Except for the part where you people abducted me.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” said Feargal. “We usually take things a bit slower than we have with you. We’ll make our case to you as quickly as we can. There’s a meeting tonight.”

Leila nodded, gave him zero else.

“And, sure, while you’re waiting, would you like to take our eye test and get a number?” he said.

Was he joking? Was that an Irish joke?

“No. No eye test for me. Just give me back my shit and get me to California,” said Leila, tough as tacks.

But then a girl called Sarah came in, and she was kind and took Leila to a room on the third floor of the skinny brick home that had a big window in an eave and a white mattress on an iron bed and a writing desk and a plumbed hand basin and a wooden chair with a towel on it. It looked like the bedroom that Leila had been dreaming about for years.

“You should sleep for a few hours,” said Sarah. “You’ll want to be sharp for this next part.”

“Look, Sarah, I am really here only to get my stuff back. I am not at all impressed with being shanghaied by you people, and I am not inclined to hear about your cause.”

“You weren’t shanghaied. You were Caracased.”

“What?”

“They did a dine-and-dip on you in terminal three, didn’t they? But they gave you cover and cash? Yeah, that’s a Caracas, not a Shanghai. But anyway, c’mere: I know you need your devices and your documents back and I’ll make sure they’re returned after the meeting.”

“How about the rest of my bags?”

“We pulled all those into our system. The four suitcases you had going to LA will be there tomorrow and will wait for you. We separated a fifth piece, a North Face duffel that scanned as your main traveling case. That one will be brought to wherever you spend the night.”

Leila had in fact been extensively trained about how to act in the event of abduction. But none of the information that she could recall had any bearing on this situation. That had been all about crouching behind the engine block and how to keep from crying. The course materials had not addressed soft-touch abductors who gave you a nice room to nap in and rerouted your primary traveling case so you’d have it in time for bed.

“Sleep, Lola, for a few hours. There’s a loo with a bath back there. And I’ll make sure no one disturbs you. I’ll come get you later, and I’ll tell you where we’re going then.”

It must have been midday when Sarah and Feargal and Leila left the little brick house. They got into a small panel van with Pat’s Flowers painted on its side. Sarah sat in the back with Leila. Feargal got in to drive but didn’t turn the key. He was waiting for something.

“I’m supposed to make you wear a blindfold,” said Sarah.

“Yeah, well, I’m not going to do that.”

“I didn’t think you would,” said Sarah.

“It’s just that things are getting Dicey Reilly around here,” said Feargal from the front.

“If you give me my stuff back right now, I won’t look out the window. How about that?” said Leila.

“Just go, Ferg,” said Sarah.

He shrugged disapproval but started the van.

They drove down a hill, past a prison that looked like a church, and a church that looked like a prison. One block was pub, pub, cobbler, bookie, pub, pub, church. And then new buildings— new as in “unfinished,” like, boom, here’s some glass and steel. Feargal was giving her a little patter about the city (“There’s the oldest boxing club in Dublin…There’s the chipper where the general got shot”) when Sarah, who had been looking out a tinted port in the van’s rear, interrupted him:

“Ferg, what about this little white Ford here?”

He looked in his side mirror judiciously. “Yeah, that’s no good,” he said. “Hang on.” Then he swung a very hard right into a lane. Even Leila saw the reaction from the two men in the little white Ford, watched their shoulders hunch in frustration as they drove by.

“Go to the fishmonger,” said Sarah decisively. She must outrank Feargal, Leila thought, or else they knew each other very well.

Feargal nodded and sped down the narrow lane. Then their progress was blocked by a clutch of undead drinkers in tattered coats who glared wreck-faced at the van but shambled aside when they got a tougher glare back from Feargal. A minute later, the flower van was idling outside a roll-up door, and Sarah was on her phone, waiting for someone to pick up, nerves only apparent from her foot joggling on the rubber-matted floor of the van. Then a change in her face and she said simply, “We need refuge,” while Feargal leaned close to the windshield — Leila realized he was showing his face to a camera she could not see. The door rolled up — more swiftly than those things usually did — and Feargal zipped in, the tires squeaking on the dry floor. The door rolled down behind them with a clatter.