Veil Page 19

  Kodjo shared his discovery with the group, setting off a flurry of cross referencing and fact checking. The article cited an audio recording of a negotiation between Zia and an Argentine general in charge of political kidnappings that was timestamped during a site visit she and Daniela had made to a blight-ravaged Bolivian agricultural region. When a fake video placed Zia on the yacht of a Kazakhstani oligarch, Aafreen and Zia had actually been pitching a foundation to extend their funding beyond immediate relief to support reconstruction with more resilient infrastructure.

  Tommy had woven threads of truth through the web of lies he was spinning around Zia and Santiago in order to maximize verisimilitude. Using her humanitarian aid missions as a cover for subterfuge made it easy for outsiders like Bonnie to confirm circumstantial evidence that supported Tommy’s fiction. Zia really had been in those places at those times. She just hadn’t been meeting those people or doing those things. With the full weight of SaudExxon’s influence behind it, the sham evidence was enough to convince the FBI to issue a warrant and freeze León assets, especially when so many in power would benefit from Santiago’s downfall. But as convincing as those tidbits of truth were to people who didn’t know better, there were people who did know better.

  Nobody was more ruthless in assessing and enforcing social standing than teenagers. At boarding school, Zia and her friends had bonded precisely because classmates like Tommy had shunned them for coming from poor countries with little geopolitical sway. Those same countries were most exposed to the ravages of a changing climate from which they had profited least, a perverse catastrophe that Miranda’s death had inspired Zia to help mitigate. That was why Zia had ended up leading missions to each of her friend’s home countries, and why each of those friends was now an alibi. They had already started contacting reporters, and stories that called Bonnie’s article into question were trickling out, a trickle that with any luck might soon become a flood.

  None of their efforts would matter if SaudExxon had Zia and Santiago in custody. They would be rushed through a sham trial and executed. But Zia and Santiago weren’t waiting for Tommy’s troops to arrest them. Instead, they were flying through the rarified reaches of the stratosphere in a drone running an unprecedented experiment in what could easily prove to be a misguided effort to tweak the entire energy system of the planet it was soaring over. Stars blazed above. Waves churned below. By attempting to set the perfect trap, Tommy had given Zia the slimmest of chances.

  Vision blurring, Zia nudged Santiago.

  He looked up from the trance in which he’d been composing his press release.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Santiago.

  Dembe’s hand was on Zia’s forearm, quietly comforting.

  Zia almost laughed as she wiped away her tears. There was so much wrong it was hard to know where to start, but she was crying because something was finally starting to go right. She would do everything in her power to keep things heading in that direction.

  “Wait,” said Zia.

  “What do you mean?” asked Santiago.

  Zia turned to Dembe. “How much time do we have?” she asked. “How long do you think it will take for Tommy to track us?”

  Dembe waggled her head from side to side. “No way to know. It depends on how quickly he discovers exactly how we got out and on how well we’ve covered our tracks.”

  “But if you had to guess?”

  “I’d give us a day,” said Dembe. “Disembarking unconventionally will help throw him off.”

  A day.

  A day wasn’t nearly enough for what Zia had in mind.

  A day would have to do.

  Control the narrative.

  That was what Zia had learned working on President Kim’s campaign. That was what Galang and years of managing disaster response had taught her. That was the advice Zia had given to her father. That was exactly what Tommy had done. Scandal. Intrigue. Betrayal. He had harnessed the power of unbridled Schadenfreude at the prospect of a magnate, toppling.

  Zia had tried to enlist Galang’s help to tell this story properly, and Tommy had had him killed. She had tried to do the same with Bonnie, and Tommy had gotten to her first. But maybe the issue wasn’t finding the right person to report the story, but changing the ending of the story itself.

  Zia initiated a video call to the group chat.

  As the phone rang, she asked her father, “How much sway do you still hold at Interstice?”

  His expression darkened. “The board’s dead set on ousting me. VPs are jockeying for position. It’s a goddamn mutiny.”

  “But you’re not out yet.”

  “I’m technically still CEO of a cage full of vultures.”

  “Scavengers are a crucial piece of any ecosystem.”

  “Are you calling me carrion?”

  “Prove me wrong,” she said. “Can you swing a covert asset sale?”

  Santiago’s gaze sharpened. “Depends,” he said cautiously. “I need board approval for transactions over a certain size.”

  “What if the buyer paid only one dollar?”

  Kodjo’s face popped up on her screen. “Hello, Zia? Is that really you? We’ve been trying to contact you for ages. Are you alright?”

  “Find out,” Zia urged her father, then raised her phone.

  More faces appeared on the screen, the digital ghosts of her closest friends channeled through Interstice’s satellites, turning the slim shard of glass in her hand into a more powerful scrying glass than any sorcerer had ever managed to muster. Fuck you and your little cabal. Tommy was right. They were a cabal. And the thing about cabals were that they were just small enough to make decisions and just big enough to make an impact. If Zia was going to attempt the impossible, there was no one else she’d rather have at her side. There was Li Jie, boba tea close at hand. Aafreen looked like she hadn’t slept in days, and somehow still seemed as radiant as ever. Vachan was chattering animatedly, not realizing his microphone was muted. Daniela was popping in earbuds. Selai was outside somewhere, wind hissing in the background. Everyone was talking at once.

  Zia held up a hand, and they fell silent.

  Her father had tried to singlehandedly save the world from itself. But true salvation could only come from the inside.

  “What if I told you all the bullshit you’re seeing on the news isn’t even half the story?”

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  “Beijing will go absolutely ape shit,” said Li Jie. “I mean, they’ve been cloud seeding for years and there’s nothing technocrats like better than the idea of Mother Nature doing the Party’s bidding. Honestly, I’m surprised this is your dad’s thing and not one of their secret military projects.”

  Zia muted herself and caught her breath. The air in the cockpit was stale and funky. They were three in a space meant for two and couldn’t keep from jostling each other. Santiago had earbuds in and was rattling off a bunch of legal jargon Zia couldn’t even attempt to decipher. Dembe was double-checking the emergency hatch release.

  “Or a CIA initiative,” added Daniela. “There aren’t many countries the Yankees haven’t fucked up with bungled intelligence operations since Langley got up and running. This seems like just the kind of thing that would appeal to the Beltway crowd.” She mimed taking a sip from a cocktail. “‘Well, we ran out of land, so we’re taking our Manifest Destiny to the stratosphere.’”

  Zia hadn’t known where to begin when she started laying out the situation for her friends, so she just walked them through everything that had happened since the reunion. She remembered pulling her dress up and over her head on the shore of the alpine lake, the shock of sudden submersion, Selai describing her frustrating attempts to decode a puzzle to which only Santiago held the key—a revelation that Zia had only just now been able to share, and that Selai had accepted not with the shock Zia might have expected, but with the prim satisfaction of someone who knew that their calculus had been correct all along, that at least one aspect of life�
��s indomitable obstinacy had an explanation after all.

  Telling the whole story out loud made it feel like a ridiculous screenplay pitch for the melodramatic biopic Galang had proposed. That he had proved its first casualty was exactly the kind of irony he’d demand the director jazz up. Zia swallowed the lump rising in her throat. We need to get the old gang back together more often. When had life become so damn complicated? What had the world come to, what had they themselves come to, if it took catastrophe to bring them together? Zia returned her attention to the faces clustered on her screen as her hand instinctively grasped the absent tennis racket. She needed to show them that this was a catastrophe only they could avert.

  Vachan was shaking his head. “If it really did throw off the monsoon… I’ve seen what it’s done to our farmers here in Sri Lanka. And Delhi’s been trying to use us as a scapegoat for whatever they can because of the domestic political pressure they’re feeling from the agricultural crisis. The second they find out about this, I— I don’t want to know what they’ll do. It’s going to get ugly, fast. They’re not going to be shy about throwing their weight around.”

  “The minute they start to, Beijing will trip them up and then kick them once they’re down,” Li Jie grimaced. “You should see the kind of nasty stuff they pull to undermine us here in Taiwan. My parents would kill me if I mentioned specifics, but they stop at nothing. And all those infrastructure projects in Nepal, the direct investment into Pakistan, the bilateral trade deals with Sri Lanka—no offense, Vachan—”

  “None taken,” he waved him off.

  “…it’s all just maneuvering to contain and constrain India, give them no room to move, no room to grow. This will be a perfect opportunity to press the advantage, to paint Delhi a bad actor. If the prime minister blames the drought on this program and demands a ban, Beijing will play thoughtful and call for additional research while drumming up the risk of termination shock via their media apparatus. The farther Delhi goes, the harder Beijing will push, starting up their own program from scratch if necessary. And that’s just the public stuff.”

  “There’s no way the US sits back and watches this one pass without getting its hands dirty,” said Daniela.

  “Don’t forget Moscow,” said Aafreen. “This could turn into a Great Power bar fight in no time. Most of my job consists of not pissing off the wrong group of assholes, and let me tell you, it’s harder than it sounds. This kind of thing… This kind of thing could really blow up.”

  Zia had to suppress a nostalgic smile. The conversation didn’t just echo the arguments she’d made to Santiago, but also all the final exams she’d studied for with this tight-knit group, munching on potato chips as they spun out case studies late into the night in the chateau library. A bunch of kids playing at the intrigue their parents accomplished in earnest.

  “I can’t believe it’s fucking Tommy,” said Kodjo. “Having Zia kidnapped, calling a hit on Galang, framing Zia and Santiago, all to hijack this program and keep it under wraps.”

  “Oh, I can,” said Aafreen, her expression calcifying. “You should have seen what SaudExxon got up to during the construction of New Malé. When Tommy got wind that Zia was meeting up with Galang, he must have assumed she might be about to leak Project Svalinn, which would have ruined his plan. So he attempted to kidnap Zia for leverage with Santiago, and when that failed, he had Galang assassinated, giving him the opportunity to frame them both. Then he could just move in and snatch Interstice without anybody finding out that he was really after the geoengineering program. The whole thing is only marginally more baroque than the visa scheme his colleagues were running with my second cousin.”

  “I knew that fucker was a snake,” snarled Daniela. “Even back in high school.”

  Back on the beach, Tommy’s blue eyes might have twinkled, but it had been the glitter of winter sun off polished chrome. His grin hadn’t been easy. They weren’t kids anymore. And this game had consequences.

  “The program has to stop,” said Vachan. “Ramp it down to zero as quickly and safely as possible. Otherwise people are going to start shooting sooner or later. You can’t even prove attribution? This is way too much uncertainty for heads of state to handle. That’s the thing about weather, it’s always been an ‘act of God,’ even the insurance companies say so. The minute people start messing with it, other people have a target to pin all their problems on. It’s pouring gasoline on the dumpster fire that is geopolitics.”

  “It’s climate, not weather,” said Kodjo. “And anyone who thinks climate change is an act of God is ignorant or kidding themselves.”

  “Yeah, but Zia’s dad is doing it intentionally,” said Daniela.

  “At least if it’s on purpose we can see what works and try to improve it,” said Kodjo. “I’d rather have that than the status quo of pretending that something that threatens the biosphere is an externality. It’s ludicrous.”

  “If Santiago hadn’t been doing this, I wonder how many more centimeters sea levels would have risen,” Selai murmured. “I wonder how many more Heat Waves we’d have had, how many other islands we’d have had to evacuate.”

  “Judging from our experience with storm surges in the Maldives, a lot,” said Aafreen. “New Malé probably wouldn’t even be viable anymore.”

  “So, what then?” asked Vachan, cheeks flushing. “The whole subcontinent goes hungry so that you can save some beaches? On a per capita basis, we’ve got a hell of a lot more people suffering because of this.”

  “So you think West Africa should take one for the team so you can have the monsoon back?” asked Kodjo.

  “I’m just saying Delhi will shoot every drone out of the air before acquiescing.”

  “And I’m just saying that Accra will build its own drones and defend them if it means keeping farmers happy,” said Kodjo. “The agricultural lobby will make sure of that.”

  “If Delhi shoots anything down outside its own airspace, Beijing will pounce,” said Li Jie. “And there’s no way they’ll let Ghana do anything that might have regional impacts in East Asia.”

  “Ditto for Washington and the Americas,” said Daniela.

  “There’s always the UN,” said Selai with a shrug.

  Aafreen snorted. “Take it from a minister of foreign affairs,” she said. “Don’t look for answers there. There have never been so many cooks in a single kitchen.”

  The debate was starting to pick up momentum, and Zia knew it wouldn’t lead anywhere good. This was precisely the argument that would devolve into the kind of violence they were describing. Too much noise, too little signal. When tempers started to flare even among a tight knit group of friends, it didn’t bode well for the public discussion to come. If this was the preview, Zia didn’t want to see the movie.

  It was time to make her play. Letting the snowball turn into an avalanche would do nothing but waste time they didn’t have. Zia suddenly felt the stab of Galang’s absence. His face belonged alongside the others. His snarky comments should be spicing up this conversation. If he were here, he’d know how to engineer a graceful transition. Without him, Zia just had to cut to the chase.

  She unmuted herself—and wondered whether the real problem was that some part of her had been on mute ever since she lost her mom. When Zia was eleven, she wrote a book report on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Wizard of Earthsea. The teacher returned it covered in redline edits. Devastated, Zia showed the essay to Miranda, hoping for outraged sympathy at the teacher’s mishandling of Zia’s brilliant work. But instead of placating her daughter, Miranda had sat down with Zia and reviewed everything line by line, using each of the teacher’s individual edits and comments to ask questions that challenged Zia to articulate her point of view with more precision, to hone thought’s blade. Clarity is not short sentences, she’d said. Or long sentences. Or sentences of any particular flavor. Clarity is forging your imagination into a pebble that, when tossed, will ripple through other minds. Zia needed all Miranda’s quiet strength now, all her poise, all
her forceful eloquence.

  “Look,” said Zia. “You’re all right, and you’re all wrong. That’s the problem. There’s no elegant solution to this mess. But we don’t need to find an answer right here, right now.” They were all looking at her, even Santiago and Dembe. “The only way to sabotage Tommy is to make this public, and the sooner we do it, the sooner he’ll stop hunting us—or at least the sooner he’ll have bigger problems to deal with. We’ve got less than a day. That’s not enough time to figure out what to do about Project Svalinn, what’s fair, or even who should decide. But there’s something we can do to avert the worst case scenario, that this sparks a—what did you call it, Aafreen?—a Great Power bar fight.”

  She took a breath and gathered her thoughts. This was it. If they agreed, the world might have half a chance, and if they didn’t, they would have no choice but to roll the dice anyway. But the proposal was so patently ridiculous that they’d be right to just laugh in her face. “Selai,” she said. “You understand the implications better than any of us and your uncles constitute a third of the Fijian cabinet. Li Jie, you grew up with President Wu’s daughters. Kodjo, everyone and their mother in Accra owes you a favor. Vachan, your family exports more Ceylon tea than all the other estates put together. Daniela, you publish a pseudonymous singer songwriter who happens to be a justice on the Salvadoran supreme court. Aafreen, you’ve got the president on speed dial. I can call in a favor with President Kim and my dad knows the chief Indonesian economic minister because of all the approvals he needed for his island base. If we work hard and get lucky, we can get half a dozen heads of state on the line.”

  Vachan arched an eyebrow. “Uh huh, and what exactly are we supposed to tell them?”

  Miranda had always said that the writer wasn’t the author of an idea, but its vehicle—that her craft consisted of simply noticing things and cultivating them until they grew into book-shaped stories. Once an idea took root, it would spread like a weed through the garden of her mind, demanding to be shared with an overwhelming force that found release only through articulation. Just such a weed was germinating inside Zia, sending shoots in all directions, opening technicolor flowers, filling her head with drifting clouds of pollen, and releasing seeds to the wind. Only this idea demanded not articulation, but realization.