David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“The thing he had was Super-Eight film of Deveraux beating off, back in college.”

“Eww,” said Sarah.

Leila felt the need to defend Leo. “I don’t think it was like that. It was supposed to be funny. Deveraux was a sperm donor. It was some joke about that. I think he was making fun of himself.”

“Well, anyway, you can forget about Deveraux. After you met him in that airport lounge, he went aboard Sine Wave . That’s Straw’s yacht. He’s probably wearing their contacts by now, and out of our reach. He was a good lead, though.”

“But Sarah?”

“Yeah?”

“I was right, right? I mean, we wouldn’t engage in that kind of blackmail?”

There was a longish pause. “I think you made the right call under the circumstances. That’s not really the kind of incriminating we were looking for. But, I suppose, if it were important enough…Leave that aside though, Lola,” said Sarah. “I’m calling about Rusty Trombones.”

“Who?”

“Rusty Trombones. Our man who passed you the stuff with your dad’s hard drive—”

“Yeah, thank you so much, Sarah,” interrupted Leila.

“No. That was mishandled. Rusty was supposed to get that to the prosecutor; it was supposed to look like it came from a whistle-blower, not from someone associated with your dad’s case. That it came through your brother complicates things. It gives the Committee reason to believe that you’ve had contact with us. We kept you clean from Heathrow to Dublin to Portland to LA. But when Dylan walked into the RITSerF with that drive, there was a line drawn connecting you to us.”

“Well, fuck ’em. I don’t care that they know that. The hard drive worked. They’re going to drop the charges against my dad. Most of them, anyway.”

“You do care. Trust me. You don’t want to be a known Diarist right now. Not in a large American city. And they’re not dropping the charges against your dad.”

“No. They are.” She said it too loud. “I spoke to our attorney this morning. He said the prosecutor signed off on it.”

“Yeah, well, today a stove exploded in that prosecutor’s face. There’s a new prosecutor. And the SCIF in Kramer’s office was seized, and Rusty Trombones has vanished. He’s probably in a six-by-six at Fort Meade.”

Leila went cold.

“Look, Lola,” said Sarah. “Don’t worry. If things really go pear-shaped, we have a contingency for all the Majnouns. Sit tight. The Committee still may not have realized you’re connected to us. Until they do, there’s no reason to believe they’ll make things any worse for you.”

Until? Any worse? “How long? How long do I sit tight? ”

“Give it a week. Things will probably be going one way or another within a week.”

“What’s the contingency plan?”

“We can probably get you all out of here. An emergency exfiltration.”

“I don’t like this plan, Sarah. Just wait around? I want a better assignment.”

“Well, actually, there is something else we need from you.”

“Yeah?”

“We need to talk to your sister.”

When Leila called her sister back in and handed her the phone, Roxana made a thing of asking Leila to step out into the hallway. Minutes ticked by. Leila walked up and down the bland corridor, but it was spookily blank: nine other office doors, each identical to Roxana’s, the elevator bank, fire stairs at the end, a water fountain.

She was trying to super-compartmentalize, to take the problem apart. The stove that exploded in the prosecutor’s face. A line between herself and Dear Diary. Could they really un drop the charges against her father? What had happened to the free country the Majnouns had fled to?

She sat down on the floor outside her sister’s door, anger, panic, and despair thumping through her heart. She got up and paced the hallway again, tried the door to the fire stairs, just to see that it opened.

She did this for twenty minutes: sit down — anger, panic, despair; stand up and pace — rack your brain for some new angle on the thing.

Leila heard a strange sound from behind her sister’s four-inch-thick door. She stood, pushed the door open, and stepped back into Roxana’s small office. Her big sister was weeping. This was the third time in Leila’s life that she had seen her sister weep; Roxana’s disability had hardened her. And when the armless weep, it is worse than when the rest of us do. Roxana was wiping her nose and eyes with a wadded napkin held in her left foot.

“What is it, Rox?” Leila said at once, and moved to her quickly.

A sob rose through Roxana and convulsed her, and Leila hugged her sister for the first time since she’d been home. It’s gonna be okay, she whispered in Farsi. And when Roxana could speak again, she whispered to her sister:

“ They did this.”

“I know, Rox,” said Leila.

Sniffle. “No. This, ” said Roxana, and she touched Leila with her clavicle.

Leila didn’t understand. Then Roxana spun on her chair and nodded Leila toward the largest of the many screens on, above, and around her desk. Onscreen were displayed two documents: an interoffice e-mail thing and what seemed to Leila to be a high-res photo of a paper document.

The interoffice e-mail thing was sent from one twenty-five-character alphanumeric code to another twenty-five-character alphanumeric code. The subject line read: A two-fer!

Dude. You know the drama that the Ruiners dropped on the principal in Cal because of that hot, nosy NGO girl? shit is double useful. My sleuths got old-fashioned on the background, went into the archives. Attached find doc from trial of a drug Prodigium. 1970! It was supposed to make geniuses. Made lots dead babies instead. The few geniuses it did make are mostly in full-time care by now. (wouldn’t that suck? being a genius vegetable) But check it out. One of the Prodigium betas that didn’t die now working at the LA facility. Roxana Majnoun. Hot name, but she has no arms (If she wore a hijab, she’d look like an anorexic ghost lol). Shes not commissioned. Shes there under pretense. Shes working on the gaze sink stuff. They were hoping to bring her in nice — the political department rated her amenable. But shes not playing ball. She won’t take the project to the next level. So legal should keep all options open on the principal, because they want traction on the armless sister too. Since we have the father, may as well use him.

did you see the prosecutor job? nice, right? First exploding stove I ever ordered.

Leila leaned close to the screen to examine the high-res photo of the paper document. Damn, it was in Farsi. Leila’s reading comprehension of Farsi had been deteriorating in her adulthood. This was troubling. Plus, Roxana wrote beautiful Nasta’liq script with her feet, so Leila didn’t want to admit that she was losing what was, technically, their mother tongue.

But when she began reading the document, Leila found that her Farsi comprehension had come back; it was better than it had been in years. She was reading a formal letter of understanding between Baxter-Snider Pharmaceuticals and the Iranian Ministry of Health. It had clearly been drafted in English and then translated into Farsi, and that plus the mix of Western legal obliquity and Eastern pomposity made it sound stilted.

Permission had been granted by the ministry for public-health research, and researches into—

“What does that word mean, Rox?” asked Leila, pointing at the screen.

Roxana sniffled and tilted her head. “Mind science,” she said.

— mind science that would bring glory to the nation and make Iran once again the seat of medicine and learning. Baxter-Snider was free to conduct any and all discreet population-based longitudinal chemical trials of promising compounds. The ministry gave Baxter-Snider full but unnamed partnership with itself. The ministry agreed to provide Baxter-Snider unlimited access to all its current and future epidemiological research, monitoring, and outreach operations, and would temporarily cede full management and control of the nation’s prenatal and maternal programs, medical and social.