Veil Read online

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  VEIL

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  © 2020 Eliot Peper

  All Rights Reserved.

  Book design by Kevin Barrett Kane

  Typeset in 10.5/15 Mercury Text G1

  Also by Eliot Peper

  Breach

  Borderless

  Bandwidth

  True Blue

  Neon Fever Dream

  Cumulus

  Exit Strategy

  Power Play

  Version 1.0

  To all who have lost a loved one,

  or are lost themselves.

  You may be shattered,

  but you are alive.

  You can pick up the pieces.

  You can make something beautiful.

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  PROLOGUE

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  Sweat stung Miranda León’s eyes. Breath came in shallow gasps. Mud squelched under her boots. Just after dawn and it was already forty degrees Celsius with ninety-nine percent humidity. Insects swarmed. The hot spot on her left heel chafed. She wasn’t as young as she once was. And yet, there was nowhere else she’d rather be.

  Swiping a dirty hand across her forehead, she peered up at the receding back of her guide. The bright yellow soccer jersey hung loose across Gilberto’s narrow shoulders. He was nimbler in his plastic flip flops than she could hope to be with the best gear modernity could offer.

  “Not much farther, Doña León,” he called back over his shoulder. “It’s just over the next ridge.”

  Doña. She really was getting old.

  Snagging the water from her pack, she stopped to take a sip. Jungle encroached on all sides, ten thousand shades of green bending, branching, reaching ever farther in an endless quest for light and water and nutrients—the basic ingredients from which life manufactured itself. How many undiscovered species called a single square kilometer of this tropical rainforest home? How many miraculous medicines might be derived from the biochemical exhalations of one of its undocumented leaves? How long did this rotting, teeming, fecund forest have before succumbing to the slash and burn of progress?

  Stashing the water bottle, Miranda pressed on up the steep track. Her clothes were soaked with sweat. Her calves ached. Her spirit gorged on the lush fractals of gigantic ferns that had been gobbling dappled sunlight and releasing spores since dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Sixty-six million years after an asteroid drove them to fiery extinction SaudExxon was consolidating global concessions and squeezing every last drop of liquified dinosaur from their graves to power the churning, commodified madness people called civilization. Humans were their own meteorite.

  Damn. That was definitely a blister. There was moleskin in her pack but if she sat down to take off her boot right now, she might not get up again. She’d deal with it when they got back to the village.

  She stumbled around a sharp bend and there was Gilberto, grinning at her like the teenager he’d recently been.

  “Hijueputa,” she managed between panting breaths. “Is it always this hot?”

  “Look,” he said.

  She did.

  They had reached the crest of a hill and through a gap in the foliage the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains stretched away to the horizon. Birds darted through the canopy. Mist daubed valleys like sculpted meringue. Unidentifiable animal calls formed a soundscape as rich and tangled as the ecosystem of this unique Colombian coastal range rearing up almost six thousand meters from recently submerged Caribbean beaches, little sister of the Andes and mother of thirty-six rivers.

  “Hijueputa,” she said again, reverently this time.

  Gilberto nodded, still smiling.

  The epic view called to mind the epigraph of her work in progress—the description of a fictional astronaut’s view of the Earth from space, gleaned from a 1983 short story by Don DeLillo. Reading that story had reignited Miranda’s childlike curiosity, taking her back to the first time she’d gazed up at the stars through a telescope as a young girl, noticing their uniquely nuanced hues amidst the buttery glow of their respective galaxies, imagining the planets that danced around them and whatever beings might be gazing up into their own firmaments at the distant star around which Earth spun in all its verdant, multifaceted glory. At the end of the day, literature was nothing but a reminder that life was too big for language to contain.

  Gilberto led onward. She had thought it would be easier going downhill but the rising temperature counterbalanced whatever respite descent had promised, and Miranda had to fight back dizziness as she focused on not tripping over rocks or slipping on roots.

  Her previous books had cataloged humanity’s self-inflicted wounds. The failing crops and rising seas. The water wars and megastorms. The stateless refugees and smoldering wildfires. An endless stream of canny politicians, frustrated scientists, slick lobbyists, outraged activists, cynical industrialists, and everyone else just trying to do their best in a world that always seemed to lie just beyond the edge of comprehension.

  If she didn’t have Santiago, Miranda knew she would be insufferable. The future belongs to the optimists, he would say. What future? she would reply. He kept her hopeful despite everything. She kept him grounded despite himself. They drove each other crazy and from their craziness had sprung one daughter, four-going-on-five books, and a trillion-dollar company.

  This book, though… This book would be different.

  “Da da da da,” sang Gilberto, spreading his skinny arms wide.

  Huffing, Miranda stumbled up beside him. The sight took away whatever breath she still had. These weren’t trees. They were giants, monarchs, the ancient gods of this single, vast, variegated organism that humans called a forest. This stand of old growth monsters dwarfed the surrounding trees, forming a local mesa in the topology of the canopy that was so dense with other plants, animals, and symbionts that it made Singapore’s famous arcologies appear to be little more than abandoned warehouses in comparison.

  Yes, this. This.

  Miranda reached out and touched the knobby, cream colored bark of the rubber tree. The trunk shot forty meters up before exploding into a luxurious crown that permitted only fractional glimpses of the blue sky above. She inhaled deeply and the hot, wet, pollen-laden air was the greatest gift she’d ever received.

  This book was her way of paying that gift forward. She was tired of playing Cassandra, of being the sailor pointing out leak after leak to a crew that barely pretended to listen. So instead of highlighting the mass delusion that doomed future generations, maybe she could seduce humanity into sanity via that most slippery and profound of emotions—wonder. Could she capture natural splendor in narrative and, in doing so, provide everyone a taste of the overview effect experienced by DeLillo’s astronaut? Could she craft a story that would burrow into readers’ minds and inoculate them against the manic consumption that was the endpoint of so many commercial, social, and political vectors? Could she make them see this tree for what it was, instead of only the latex it produced?

  This was the most ambitious project she had ever attempted. It was why she was here in a remote corner of a Colombian jungle with nothing more than a local guide and an open heart. It was way beyond what she was capable of. But she could hear Santiago: The only way to find your limits is to assume you haven’t got any. She had poked him and told him he should hand over Interstice to a successor and start a self-help seminar. But she had started reading up on that initial intimation of an idea all the same, and the reading turned into notes, which turned into research, which turned into an outline, which turned into a proposal, which turned into her, here, now. If Miranda could accomplish even a vanishingly small percentage of her goal with this book, maybe Zia could leverage her soon-to-be-announced appointment as the youngest Costa Rican ambassador in history, recruit her friends from that elite
Swiss boarding school, and force some common sense into the next round of UN climate negotiations.

  See? Hope. Santiago would be proud.

  “Ready?” asked Gilberto. “It’ll take us three hours to get back to the village and we need to get moving before it really gets hot.”

  “It isn’t already?” Miranda shook her head. “Okay, just give me a few minutes.”

  She explored the grove, savoring the mesmerizing intricacy of tessellated life. This moment. No, this one. This one. Each was a seed she would plant in prose, in the all-too-likely-vain hope that they might sprout and produce fruit of their own, pollinated by readers. She would walk a razor’s edge. People were born. People had a succession of sensory experiences. People died. All the highs and lows and angst of life was nothing but an extended effort of wrangling meaning from step two. That’s why art was dangerous. It was beautiful, it felt true. But the universe didn’t conform to what humans found convenient to feel to be true. The universe was the universe. In trying to divine its secrets, humans projected themselves onto systems that transcended them. When DeLillo’s astronaut gazed back at Earth, he saw himself reflected in it. How to inspire people to look beyond themselves and their petty squabbles, to see the beauty in the vascular patterns of this leaf, hear the music in the pitter patter of rain, imagine the dazzling scale of the cosmos and the quantum extending infinitely in more directions than there were words for?

  “Doña León?” Gilberto’s tentative voice intruded on her reverie, and she followed it back to the present as Theseus did his string out of the Minotaur’s lair.

  “Yes, of course. Let’s go.”

  Climbing back up the ridge was a slog. By the time they reached the lookout, even Gilberto was sweating. Miranda was so taxed she felt like she might not be able to go on. Fantasies of being trapped in this sweltering forest invaded her thoughts. Insects crawling up her sleeves. Jaguars stalking in the shadows. A frog the size of a dime with enough neurotoxin to blow even Timothy Leary’s mind. It was fucking hot—a sauna draped in vines.

  “When we get back? AC baby!”

  Gilberto was trying to cheer her up, and she was tanked enough to need it. He mimed drinking and Miranda took another deep pull from her water bottle. She was losing water, that was for sure. The heat and humidity and exercise were wringing her dry.

  Then, onward.

  Onward over hills, across streams, down gullies, and through thickets that Gilberto had to hack apart with his machete. Her joints ached. Her muscles bathed in acid. The blister grew and burst. Her vision narrowed and swam. Pain. The pain of creation. Zia would not exist but for the insufferable pain of Miranda’s thirty-seven hours of labor. Miranda still remembered her astonishment when the doctor handed her the screaming, bloody infant. Another human. Another life. Santiago’s hand on her shoulder promised that he felt it too, that their dreams, their desires, their fears, had suddenly found a center of gravity outside themselves, had transferred into this strange and wondrous being that was the farthest thing from cute.

  Miranda belatedly realized that she was lying facedown in the mud. She pushed herself up and replayed the last few seconds. Her boot had snagged an exposed root. The world spun when she stood up and she pressed her eyes shut until it subsided. Gilberto was coming back up the trail, fear painted across his genial face. She waved him off, looking down at herself.

  Bloody palms. Wobbly knees. Mud everywhere. Nothing serious.

  “I’m fine,” she assured him. “I’m fine.”

  Onward.

  Up, down. Up, down. Up, down.

  How much farther to the village? Miranda had lost all sense of direction. Trees leered at her. Spider webs laced her face in sticky strands. A waterfall roared and she looked around for it wildly before realizing that the sound was the rush of blood in her ears. The heat was a physical thing, a blanket that wrapped itself around her and squeezed, stronger than the four-meter boa constrictors that slithered through these woods. The air was thick and viscous. The leaves whispered to each other and Miranda could almost understand them, as if they were speaking a language with the same root as her mother tongue. She caught herself giggling and pressed her hand over her mouth before Gilberto could hear.

  And then they stumbled out into brutal sunlight and there was the village with its huts and its bundles of electrical wires and its stray dogs and its abject poverty and Miranda looked up at the infinite, murderous blue and wondered if any of her husband’s satellites were overhead right now and then she was the satellite looking down at herself from above and only then did she realize that Gilberto was the only thing holding her up, that he’d been half-carrying her for kilometers, that she was wasted and angry and dying and missed her family more than anything and that she wasn’t the only one, there were people huddled in whatever shade they could find, there were men screaming at each other but no one was on the streets under the enormous cascading fusion explosion that dominated the sky, that nearest and dearest of stars whose thermal embrace was sucking the life out of her and—

  “I’m freezing.”

  She was lying in the corner of an earthen floored room, mercifully dark, shivering violently.

  “I’m freezing,” she repeated. “Turn down the AC.”

  “No AC,” said Gilberto.

  He mopped her brow with a wet rag. There was terror in his wide brown eyes.

  “No electricity, no AC.”

  Miranda tried to prop herself up, irate. “But I’m telling you I’m freezing.”

  Waves tumbling up the beach at her childhood home in Guanacaste, the one the bulldozers had demolished to build yet another cookie cutter resort. Santiago ending every argument with a ridiculously detailed plan for identifying and fixing the precise problem that had sparked the fight. Zia at sixteen, home on break from school in Switzerland, admitting to her horrified-but-trying-so-hard-to-hide-it mother, complete with air quotes, that yes, she was “sexually active.” The curiously empty feeling inside Miranda whenever she completed the rough draft of a new book, a hollowness that was at once satisfying and tragic. The taste of trigonometry. The smell of pink. The color of jazz. The coruscating sheen of the amorphous shapes that were right here all the time but separated from us by the thinnest of membranes, that liminal, invisible something that was everything and nothing, impermanent and eternal.

  By the time the medevac team arrived, it was already too late.

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  1

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  The Border Security Force officer exhaled a lungful of smoke at the perfect angle for the wall-mounted air-conditioner to blow it straight into Zia León’s face. This was the man she was missing the reunion for. She wanted to cough. She wanted to snatch away the cigar and extinguish it on his forehead. Instead, she smiled.

  “TCI informs me that you’re refusing to release our containers,” said Zia, careful to keep her tone neutral. “Is there some kind of problem?”

  “Mrs. Lion,” he deliberately used the wrong title and mispronounced her name, “there’s no need to be concerned. We aren’t refusing to release anything. This is standard procedure, nothing more.”

  “Standard procedure? Bilaspur Junction doesn’t have any borders nearby. This is heartland.”

  “When it comes to protecting India, there is no such thing as too thorough,” he said with an expansive smile.

  Himmat shifted in the seat beside Zia. “The shipment has a verified chain of custody and already passed BSF inspection at the Port of Kolkata,” he said. “You have all the paperwork and authorizations. Give us what we came for.”

  The officer drummed pudgy fingers on the pitted Formica desk. “Random inspections can happen at any time. That’s why they’re called ‘random inspections.’” He took a puff. “I mean, she’s a foreigner”—shrugging derisively at Zia—“but I would expect you to know how these things work.”

  Himmat leaned forward angrily but Zia put a hand out to restrain him. He was a good kid. He could even grow to become a good lead
er. No point in him making enemies until he absolutely had to, especially when he’d have to deal with the repercussions for years to come.

  “This is the fourth consecutive year without a monsoon,” she said. “People are starving. Farmers are bankrupt. Topsoil is blowing away in the wind.” She touched her collarbone. “You may not like me, but India needs those seeds.”

  “India doesn’t need you telling us what we do and do not need,” said the officer.

  There it was—the thing that drove her mad: that wrapped in a desiccated husk of ignorance and petty viciousness was a kernel of truth.

  “This strain was bred by Dr. Chou’s team at UC Davis,” said Himmat. “Drought resistant. High yield. No fertilizer needed. We do need this. Badly. If they aren’t planted in time, we’ll miss another harvest.”

  “Farmers can plant what they’ve always planted.” Puff. “The monsoon will come when it comes.”

  “If they do, and it doesn’t, next year will be even worse,” said Zia.

  The officer tapped ash off the end of his cigar into a ceramic tray scarred by a network of thin cracks. “Funny,” he said. “Nobody else seems to be able to predict the climate anymore, yet you seem so very sure of yourself. Coming all the way out here to appease your guilt and tell your rich friends back home that you’re saving the world. Well, it’s time to go back to America. Go home. Go.”

  “She’s from Costa Rica, you imbecile,” snapped Himmat.

  “And you,”—the officer smacked his palm on the desk and the ashtray jumped— “cozying up to her like some kind of toy poodle, sucking the foreign aid teat. You are a disgrace. You should go with her, but the way things stand she probably won’t even be able to get you a visa. If I had my way, I’d rescind hers preemptively.”

  Zia touched Himmat’s arm to make sure he didn’t say something he’d regret. A bead of residual sweat trickled down her spine, raising goosebumps in the air-conditioned chill. Her mother would have been able to make this scene read as profound. She would have teased out the irony and shown it to be a microcosm of the human condition, a reflection of the beautiful, fucked-up universe. Zia’s father on the other hand—he would have noticed opportunities to exploit, sought clues that might suggest higher levels of abstraction, bigger pictures that only he could see.