Veil Read online

  But she knew. Of course she knew. Santiago had grown up in a rural village outside of Limón, Costa Rica. He’d worked in a pizzeria and spent every minute of his free time devouring computer science papers and discussing their implications on obscure forums. Unable to afford a high-bandwidth connection, he’d hacked together an illegal tap to the nearest fiber optic line, then expanded the tap to connect his neighbors. In a few short years, the ramshackle pirate network became a legitimate wireless internet service provider which displaced domestic and then international competitors and grew like wildfire until Interstice satellites strung the globe in a brilliant necklace, gems hurtling through their orbits and coating the planet in an invisible membrane that transformed every square meter of Earth into a threshold to the digital. Sometimes Zia suspected that Interstice was more of a child to Santiago than she was. There wasn’t a chance in hell that he’d sell, no matter how exorbitant the price.

  “Come on, now,” said Tommy. “The minute our bankers whisper anything about this, it’ll turn into a thing. I know how mercurial Santiago can be and so I’m here as a friend trying to float something, hoping for your advice on whether it might stick.”

  “When people preface something with ‘as a friend,’ they really aren’t,” said Zia.

  “Fine,” said Tommy, and something subtle shifted in his voice. “But when things get ugly, remember that I asked nicely first.”

  Zia looked up at him, more astonished than scared. “Are you threatening me?”

  “Naw,” said Tommy with a lopsided grin. “I’m just reporting the facts, like Galang.”

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  Zia strolled through Central Park, trying to digest what had happened at the funeral yesterday.

  The cloudless sky was baby blue. The sun shone. The air was crisp. It was one of those magical autumn days that made New York irresistible, as if the city glowed from within. Office workers sat out on the grass eating lunch. Tourists rode in horse drawn carriages and toddlers clambered around on the play structures. The whole scene was so idyllic that Zia could almost forget that Dembe and her team were shadowing her at a respectful distance, guardian angels throwing furtive glances back and forth instead of frisbees.

  I’m just reporting the facts, like Galang. Had Tommy meant that like Galang had done for many years, he was reporting facts? Or that one of the facts that he was reporting was Galang’s demise? Knowing Tommy, it was probably both, the delivery intentionally enigmatic. If so, was it possible that Tommy himself had ordered the hit? He had led the construction of New Malé, so it was entirely possible he held enough sway in the Maldives to pull something like that off. Maybe he’d bribed some of the officials in the black-market ring in order to win the project for SaudExxon and didn’t want that coming to light if Galang exposed them.

  But then why would he have attended the funeral? Why would he have hinted at it to Zia, even enigmatically? No. She was missing something.

  She knelt down and picked up a fallen trident maple leaf. Veins branched into smaller and smaller capillaries and the edges were uneven, serrated. It was deep red, almost brown, the color of rust, of drying blood. She’d helped Li Jie back to his hotel room after he got too drunk at the funeral and started weeping inconsolably. It had reminded her how her own tears had refused to come at her mother’s funeral—a fact that still left Zia feeling confused and vaguely guilty. The leaf crackled when Zia crushed it in her fist.

  What if Tommy knew? What if SaudExxon was behind the increase in ambient corporate espionage Santiago had reported? What if Tommy’s “rumors” weren’t a fishing expedition, but coded communication alluding to the geoengineering program? For a brief paranoid moment, Zia had asked herself whether Santiago might have ordered Galang’s killing in order to keep his secret safe. She had immediately dismissed the notion, but maybe Santiago wasn’t the only one who wanted his program to stay under the radar.

  Intelligence services from half a dozen countries might already know. They might be using it as leverage for other intel or it might have gotten stuck halfway through their bureaucratic intestines, never reaching political leadership because the scheme was too complex, too technical, too abstract. They might be starting up clandestine geoengineering programs of their own and didn’t want to attract public scrutiny to the stratosphere.

  Her phone buzzed. Forensics decrypted the drive they found on Galang, texted Aafreen, but they won’t tell my people anything about it. I’m pressing, but so far I’ve come up dry.

  Interagency rivalry or something else? asked Zia.

  Not sure yet, but it’s pissing me off, texted Aafreen.

  Go get ‘em, tiger. And let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.

  You bet. This particular tiger will eat their careers for breakfast. Any luck on your end?

  Zia thought for a moment before responding. Maybe, she texted, too early to say.

  Pocketing her phone, Zia looked up to find herself at a wooden gate opening onto a narrow dirt path that led up a forested hill. The second she crossed the threshold, she seemed to have stepped from a crowded public park into a tiny pocket of wilderness. Dembe appeared beside Zia and sent one of her henchmen up ahead, then retreated with the other to shadow from behind.

  Zia climbed through thick foliage. The path switched back up the hill, and once she’d turned the first corner, she was alone, having left all sights and sounds of the joggers and strollers and dog walkers and tourists behind. It was a relief to escape the pressure of all those eyes, all those other lives, but despite her guardian angels hovering just out of earshot, Zia couldn’t help but wonder whether camouflaged attackers lurked in the shadows behind that rotting stump or in that tangle of brambles or behind that hulking boulder. Her pulse leapt when she heard a squirrel scrambling across the boughs above.

  She had pressed her father to consider who would have the most to gain from outing the program. Would India, citing the devastation of the failed monsoons, descend on his islands with swarms of fighter jets to shut him down and get their rain back? Would environmental activists launch massive campaigns to stop him meddling with the climate? Would Ghana celebrate him as a hero for saving them from further destruction that global warming would have brought without the program? Or maybe an Interstice competitor would use it to discredit the company, or a short seller would make billions by betting against the stock, or an intrepid young journalist would make a name for themselves by breaking the story.

  But maybe the real question was who had the most to gain from keeping the program secret. Zia herself had pointed out to Santiago that his program undermined public climate science by feeding labs fraudulent stratospheric data that couldn’t explain the stabilization of global temperature. SaudExxon had been spending billions on propaganda campaigns designed to sow doubt and misinformation about climate change since well before the corporoyal consolidation. Santiago might be trying to offset the biggest threats of global warming, but in doing so he was inadvertently advancing the cause of its progenitors. The longer the program stayed secret, the more it would corrode the credibility of climatology. Moreover, the direct effect of limiting the worst impacts of warming could be used to justify unabated burning of fossil fuels. If climate change wasn’t that bad after all, why bother reforming the global economy’s energy infrastructure? If you pumped more carbon into the atmosphere, you could just spray more aerosols into the stratosphere.

  It was a perfect short term salve that would create a much larger disaster over the long run as carbon and aerosol buildup escalated until the termination shock became an existential threat for humanity—any break in the program over the subsequent centuries leading to climate catastrophe. That’s why Santiago saw the program as simply a way to buy time, not a solution in its own right.

  But the value of SaudExxon’s oil reserves depended on maintaining the status quo. The faster the world transitioned off of fossil fuels, the faster SaudExxon descended into obsolescence. From a
certain perspective, Santiago’s program was a stay of execution for SaudExxon. It sabotaged their scientific adversaries in public debate and slapped a bandage over the worst side effects of their operations. It meant they could keep up business as usual for decades to come.

  Zia’s foot slipped on a root and she put her hand out to catch herself on a tree. She looked at her hand splayed against the trunk, brown-red skin against the variegated grays and greens of moss and lichen growing over the dark ridges of the oak’s bark. The textures were dense and lavish and the soft, diffuse light rendered every shade more itself. For a fleeting moment, Zia could feel the ghostly presence of her mother, as if some fragment of Miranda’s soul had migrated into the living wood of this ancient oak. Her mother had always been so quick to see how human systems interlocked to create perverse side effects. Where others glimpsed only gears and cogs, her view took in the whole machine, and her prose rendered it legible to everyone, a literary cutaway diagram. The annotated manuscript Zia and Galang had posthumously published held a special appeal in part because its very roughness revealed Miranda’s creative process in a new way—a cutaway diagram of a cutaway diagram.

  Zia remembered the breeze ruffling Tommy’s hair, his kooky lopsided grin, the steel beneath his teasing tone. He had attended that funeral for a reason that certainly wasn’t mourning. He had sought out Zia to deliver a message, however enigmatic. What had been a runaway thought experiment collapsed into certainty.

  Pulling back her hand, Zia hurried up the path but couldn’t escape the dark silhouette coalescing behind her thoughts. In boarding school, Tommy had treated every relationship as a chip in a vast game. The black hole of his raw ambition pressed him to scramble to the top of the social hierarchy at any cost, lest the howling void of self-awareness rip away the thin veneer of an identity pegged to what other people thought of him. Zia tried to put herself in his shoes, returning to Riyadh after years spent studying abroad, tossed around by warring factions, desperate to make a mark, unable to ignore the circling hyenas that were his peers and cousins, trusting no one, knowing that the only way to control his own destiny was to bring the entire corporoyal court under his sway, that his fragile, conflicted ego depended on it. Alone and afraid, his first big gambit had been to orchestrate the construction of New Malé. What if this was his next move, the kind of risky, ambitious play that might catapult him to the very top?

  She remembered his string of buts. But the old timers still hold the reins decades past their prime. But the idiots trying to seize power have no vision for what to do with it. But SaudExxon is a ship navigating treacherous waters with an obsolete chart. He had claimed that his offer to buy Interstice represented a pivot from oil to the internet, but maybe it was more than that, maybe he could have his cake and eat it too. He could pretend to be after Interstice’s satellite network when what he was really after was Santiago’s fleet of drones. Then it wouldn’t be a pivot at all, but a self-reinforcing engine that would expand SaudExxon’s reach even as it consolidated their power base. It had a tragic elegance Miranda would have intuitively grasped, an intuition Tommy shared for precisely opposite reasons: one to lament, the other to harness.

  Zia’s breath came in shallow gasps, the incline and the knot in her chest conspiring to steal the air from her lungs. She was back in the chateau, locked in a room alone for an entire weekend as punishment for curfew violation. She was drinking cheap beer with Daniela in Guatemala, both of them trying to drown their frustration at international aid organizations who spent millions delivering emergency rations in the wake of the earthquake but wouldn’t spend a dime improving building codes to make the next one less deadly. She was tearing apart her hotel room, smashing glass on tile and ripping linens from the bed before collapsing onto the bare mattress to curl up in fetal position and try to come to terms with the fact that she would never see her mother again. What was it about humans that made them rain misery down on each other? When death was certain to rob you of everything, what possible prize was worth causing others to suffer?

  As Zia crested the hill, she glimpsed skyscrapers through the canopy, geometric steel and glass edifices overlaid by gnarled branches, hanging moss, and a panoply of leaves. She paused, calves burning, chest heaving. Like when abrupt silence reveals that music had indeed been playing, Zia was suddenly aware of being thrust between two imperfectly aligned worlds, standing at the center of a hastily sketched cosmographic Venn diagram.

  “Ma’am?”

  Zia startled. She hadn’t heard Dembe come up behind her.

  “Sorry to bother you, ma’am, but I need your phone,” said Dembe.

  “What?”

  “Your phone, ma’am.”

  Confused, Zia dug out her phone and placed it in Dembe’s outstretched hand.

  Without even a moment of hesitation, Dembe hurled the device off into the undergrowth like a pitcher throwing a fast ball.

  “Hey,” said Zia, more confused than angry.

  Dembe turned back to face Zia.

  “We need to go,” she said in a calm, commanding voice. She rocked on the balls of her feet and her amber eyes glowed like embers in the dappled light. “Right now.”

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  27

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  They didn’t stay on the meandering path but blazed a trail straight through the forest down the other side of the hill. Fallen leaves crunched underfoot. Spiderwebs clung to their faces. Zia hopped over a fallen log and batted away a low hanging branch. She accelerated, trying to keep Dembe in view. Mud sucked at her shoes and she almost slipped on a section of glacially polished stone, desperately pumping her legs to keep up with gravity as she sprinted down the striated mass of exposed rock.

  Then they plunged back into forest again, roots reaching up to trip Zia and brush hemming her in on all sides. Ahead, she could hear Dembe barking orders over the radio as she danced through the landscape like a wood nymph, Zia crashing along behind. Who were they running from? What was so urgent that they couldn’t afford to follow the path back down the hill? Could this have something to do with the texts she was trading with Aafreen? Surely not even grizzled ex-special forces contractors would attempt to kidnap a principal with three professional bodyguards in the middle of Central Park. Zia knew she should be scared, but there was something exhilarating about leaving the manicured path to chase Dembe through the trees.

  They burst out onto a wide, paved walkway crowded with pedestrians who looked up in surprise at the two women emerging from the undergrowth. Zia dodged around a stroller and followed Dembe across an open lawn, onto another walkway, and over a bridge. Kids were feeding the ducks and a solo tenor was singing an aria. A carriage driver swore at them as they darted across the street, spooking the horses. They skirted a mass of European tourists and pounded up the pavement. Out of the corner of her eye, Zia could see Dembe’s two colleagues flanking them a hundred meters back, ties flapping and mud-spattered suits soaked with sweat.

  Before Zia realized what was happening, they’d reached the edge of Central Park. They leapt up a flight of stone stairs three at a time, pushed their way across the crowded sidewalk, dodged between two shawarma stands, and dashed out into traffic, Dembe smacking the hood of a car that honked at her as she cut it off. Just as they reached the far curb, sirens blared, cutting a wedge in the traffic like Moses parting the Red Sea. Zia looked up the street and saw a line of black SUVs roaring through the opening, lights flashing.

  The curb beneath her feet felt suddenly like the edge of a cliff, as if Zia might rock back and tumble off the brink, falling thousands of meters, wind roaring past and stomach doing somersaults in weightless free fall, before smashing into the very asphalt that she had just stepped off of.

  “Ma’am?”

  The two other bodyguards had arrived. Zia looked ahead. Dembe was beckoning from the top of the stairs that led to the entrance of a soaring tower that was just one of thousands in the engineered forest of Manhattan. Zia mounted the stairs, keenly aware of her a
ching muscles, her sucking, desperate breathing, the sour burn of bile in the back of her throat. If only she had the discipline to train for marathons like Vachan. Ouch. She had tweaked her left ankle somewhere along the way. Her walk in the park hadn’t been a walk in the park.

  As they hurried through the wide glass doors into a spacious atrium, Zia threw a glance back over her shoulder. The SUVs had pulled up onto the opposite sidewalk and serious men in dark suits and glasses poured out, assembled into teams, touched earpieces, and set off at a brisk jog into the park, civilians scattering out of their way like animals before a wildfire.

  Ahead, Dembe was touching her own earpiece and the building’s concierge was waving them through to the elevator bank. Zia’s shoes squeaked on the gleaming marble floor. The other denizens of the lobby shot them strange looks and steered clear. Zia imagined how they must look: red in the face, wild-eyed, and covered in mud and brambles.

  One of the bodyguards cleared the elevator bank area, the concierge placating tenants. Dembe called two elevators which arrived with a soft ding. She sent the other bodyguards up in one and pulled Zia into the other alongside her. As soon as they were in, she pressed the button that held the doors closed and counted to seven under her breath before directing it to take them to the roof access level.

  The elevator rose, acceleration pushing them down, compressing their spines, rooting them in place. The interior of the elevator was lined with mirrors and the cascading infinity of women with dilated pupils, bruised necks, and flushed cheeks who stared back at Zia felt less like herself than a string of strangers glimpsing each other through a slender tear in the delicate membrane that separated parallel realities from one another. In a bid to escape the cognitive dissonance, Zia turned to Dembe.

  “What”—inhale—“the”—exhale—“fuck?” she asked.

  Dembe, who to Zia’s chagrin wasn’t even breathing hard, quirked her lip into a humorless half-smile. “We got a tip from inside the bureau that FBI was running a sting.”