Veil Read online

  The family didn’t give her a second glance as she rounded the corner of the pool and headed over to where the swimmer was finishing a post-workout stretch. He looked up as she approached and she donned an embarrassed grimace. Time to channel Daniela, who had once charmed her way into Beyoncé’s greenroom at an arena show.

  “Sorry to bug you,” she said.

  “No problem,” he waved off the apology. “What’s up?”

  “It’s just—” She bit her lower lip. “Oh my god, this is embarrassing.” She shook her head and let color rise in her cheeks. “I forgot which locker I put my stuff in. I’ve checked a few and now I think I’m going crazy. Is there any chance I might be able to borrow your phone so I can call mine and figure out where I stashed it? I promise it won’t take more than a couple minutes.”

  He grinned. “Sure,” he said. “Let me just grab it for you.”

  “Thank you so much, I just feel so silly.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “I don’t want to admit how many times I lose my keys.”

  She laughed, and saw a guard walking up the path past the pool. She turned slightly so her back was to the guard and hoped that the swimmer wouldn’t be able to hear her pounding heart.

  “So, what program do you work on?” he asked as he collected his things from a chaise lounge.

  “Oh, that’s classified,” she said, injecting enough flirtatiousness into her tone that she might or might not be joking.

  He glanced at her over his shoulder and she winked.

  He laughed. “Aren’t they all?”

  That gave her cover to treat his question as rhetorical. “I really appreciate you helping me out,” she said. “I’m just having one of those days.”

  He stood, unlocked his phone, and offered it to her.

  “I swear I’ve seen you around,” he said, cocking his head to the side.

  “Maybe,” she said, hoping against hope that her captors hadn’t sent out some kind of APB. Dissemble. Context was everything. “Small world, right? I’m Joanna.”

  “I’m Logan,” he said. “Hey, it’s not too often you meet new people around here. After you find your phone, any chance you’d be interested in grabbing a drink? Donny just got in a shipment of good scotch.”

  Zia cocked her head to the side and looked him up and down. “You know what?” she said, with a sly smile. “I’d like that.”

  She turned and walked back to the locker room, letting her hips sway in the way her mother had taught her to dance salsa. She hadn’t even had to stab him in the eye with her needle. And then she was back in the locker room with a phone and could hardly believe her luck. Finally she had caught a break. Maybe she’d make it out of here after all.

  She stared down at the screen and drew a blank. Her momentary glee collapsed into indecision. Who exactly was she supposed to call? She’d been so focused on getting her hands on a phone that she hadn’t thought about what she would actually do with it. She couldn’t very well call 911. She didn’t even know where in the world she was, let alone what, if any, authorities existed out here. The guards chasing her might well be the highest authorities on this damn island.

  Her location, at least, was a question that Zia could solve. She opened a map and zoomed out from her GPS pin for context. She reeled. Nowhere near India. A tiny island in the Indonesian archipelago, not too far from Borneo. Who could possibly want to hold her here? How long had she been unconscious?

  She could call Himmat, but what could he possibly do from India except alert Jason? Galang might know what to do, but Galang might very well have been abducted himself. Zia’s finger twitched. She wanted so desperately to sign onto their group chat and declare her emergency. She had friends in moderately high places, maybe they could do something. But they were also scattered all over the world, and what could she possibly say?

  Zia was the rock. She was the person other people could rely on. She didn’t need help and wouldn’t be controlled. Her stomach tightened. She was down a set, ad-out, and tossing the ball to serve. She was basking in post-coital bliss when Tommy doused the afterglow by asking why she wasted her time with people like Galang and Kodjo. She was telling the president-elect that she would not serve as her new ambassador to Sri Lanka. She was savoring a mouthwatering croissant when she received the call about her mother and the world turned upside down. Her hand found the needle in her pocket, caressed its slender, menacing line. If only life were so simple, people purpose-built for whatever the world demanded from them.

  It was obvious who she needed to call, so glaringly obvious that she had been trying not to see it, trying, despite everything, to avoid a conversation she’d spent nearly a decade not having. She was a fugitive holding a shard of beveled glass connected to the digital infinite via an invisible lattice as dense as the jungle that had concealed her, and she could no longer afford the indulgence of lying to herself. The needle bent in her grip. He had billions of dollars, a global satellite network, and would do whatever was necessary to find her. There was nothing she wanted less than his help. There was nothing she needed more.

  Maybe she should just return the phone and surrender to the guards, end this stupid little game. Better to face torture than the shadows that were gathering inside her. Pandora should have left her box closed.

  Tears splattered onto the screen as Zia typed in the number.

  He picked up on the first ring.

  “Papi?”

  “Zia? Oh, thank god, thank god. Where are you, sweetie? I stepped out to take a call and when I got back to your room, you had disappeared. We’ve been trying to find you all afternoon.”

  +

  13

  +

  Her father’s villa was smaller than the one Zia had woken up in. It was nestled all by itself up on the mountainside, surrounded by impenetrable rainforest. Instead of the beach, it looked out over the airfield where another of those colossal planes was taking off.

  Santiago León met his daughter on the wide deck. He had always been thin, but the intervening years had eroded whatever fat had once softened the lines of his face, leaving him gaunt. Large rectangular glasses framed intense dark eyes, and his silver hair was combed back from his forehead. He wore his signature plain white t-shirt, blue jeans, and leather jackboots. The only time Zia had ever seen him wear anything else was on the last day they’d seen each other in person, the day of her mother’s funeral.

  He pulled Zia into a hug, voice cracking as he whispered “mi hija” into her ear over and over again. She hugged him back, feeling his protruding ribs, his beating heart, his ragged breath. The familiar musk of smoke, cinnamon, and sweat dredged up memories of staying up past her bedtime writing code together, going on family backpacking trips into remote alpine country, squeezing his hand as tight as she could as a real-life rocket rode an incandescent pillar of fire into the heavens. Relief, pain, confusion, joy, resentment, admiration, longing, nostalgia, comfort, regret, exhaustion, pride, and a dozen subtle and ineffable emotions washed over Zia in a violent cataract. Ten years. It had been ten years.

  They disengaged, looking each other up and down.

  “I’m just glad you’re okay,” he said, shaking his head. “I was so, so worried.”

  Anger coalesced within Zia like an image coming into crystal clear focus.

  “What the hell is going on?” she asked, remembering the chirping crickets, shadows glimpsed through the tresses of a pepper tree. “You had me kidnapped? You could have called, you know.”

  “What?” A shadow flitted across his face. “No! Of course not.”

  “Okay,” said Zia. “Then what happened?”

  “We rescued you,” he said, suddenly unsure whether he was supposed to be backpedaling or reassuring. “There were a number of red flags. People attempting to hack you. Sophisticated people. Attribution was impossible. Then my people on the ground spotted a surveillance team following you. At first they just ran counter surveillance but when the bogeys moved in, they had no choice
but to take action. Just in time, too. If they hadn’t…” He shivered. “Who knows where you might be? My worst nightmare come true… Anyway, they managed to get you out and bring you here to safety. I was sitting with you waiting for you to wake up and stepped out to take a call but when I got back you were gone and… Oh honey,” he ran a hand through his hair. “I’m just so relieved that you’re safe. Gracias a Dios.”

  “And why were you monitoring my accounts?” she asked as certainty settled over her like a winter chill.

  “Wait, what?” he shook his head in confusion.

  “How did you notice these ‘red flags’ if you weren’t monitoring me remotely? Did these ‘sophisticated people’ message you with a heads up? Or maybe they sent you a pretty postcard saying, ‘we’re trying to hack Zia’?”

  “We— I— It’s just that—”

  “And your ‘team on the ground’? The ones who so conveniently stepped in to ‘save’ me? Who are they exactly, pray tell? You have people stalking me?”

  There it was. The inevitable friction that built up between them as their reactions to each other escalated. Knowing that it was happening made it worse, accelerated the perverse cycle. Her mother had been able to diffuse it with a single chuckle or channel it into something productive with a simple question, releasing the relentless pressure that they brought to bear on each other. Mis alborotaditos, she’d say with a rueful smile. Simmer down, y’all.

  “They’re protecting you, sweetheart,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for them—”

  “You hire spooks to follow me around and don’t even mention it to me?”

  Santiago’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.

  “Typical,” she muttered. “I should have known.”

  “If I had told you, you would have refused.”

  “You’re damn right I would have refused!”

  “Exactly! You’re my daughter. I’m not going to let—”

  “I’m my own person, for fuck’s sake. I can handle myself just fine, thank you very much.”

  They glared at each other so hard the air seemed to crackle and spit.

  “They had you drugged in the back of a van,” he said softly. “That’s a tough spot to get out of all by yourself. You needed help. Isn’t that why you called?”

  Zia’s eyes narrowed. “And why did these mysterious attackers try to kidnap me in the first place? Who are they?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, frustrated. “The dead guys we were able to ID were contractors hired behind a maze of fronts. It’s like they hired Kafka to write the articles of incorporation for a cornucopia of shell companies.”

  “But you must have had a reason to assign goons to me.”

  “The red flags on your accounts.”

  Evasion, evasion, evasion. Santiago had built a commercial empire on his ability to anticipate and act on questions other people hadn’t even thought to ask yet. That he was beating around the bush meant he was hiding something. Zia had learned to read his tells and challenged him on the unlikely provenance of the tooth fairy when she was still in kindergarten. The only other person he couldn’t fool had been her mom—which was why he’d come to rely on their judgement.

  “And why were you monitoring them in the first place after I specifically asked you not to?” she asked.

  Santiago shifted uncomfortably. “We’ve been having… Infosec issues,” he said. “The usual stuff. Phishing attacks. Engineers getting asked to lunch by gorgeous consultants of ambiguous origin. Blackmail of senior execs. That sort of thing.”

  “If it’s the usual stuff, then why would that change anything?”

  “It’s been… The pressure’s been growing. More leaks. More problems. So I had our security teams bump up their alert level across the board. And I didn’t want you to get caught up in anything, so—”

  “Why?”

  “Just a precaution. As I said, the pressure’s been growing.”

  “No, what I mean is, why is the pressure growing? What are you doing that intelligence services want to know about? What would be worth kidnapping me for?”

  “I don’t know,” he shrugged. “We work on so many programs at Interstice. It could be anything.”

  Zia leveled her gaze at him.

  Santiago looked like he wished the Earth would open up beneath him.

  “You must have some idea,” she said. “You’re hardly the kind of person to throw up your hands.”

  Santiago stared up into the clouds, as if seeking forgiveness. He sucked in a deep breath and let it hiss out through his teeth. Lowering his head, he looked straight at Zia and there was an unfamiliar irresolution behind his eyes, as if he were struggling to escape a thorny paradox.

  When he finally spoke, the quality of his voice had shifted in a way she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  “There’s something I need to show you,” he said.

  +

  14

  +

  The surface of the Earth curved away in all directions. At twenty-five kilometers up, the planet’s shape was clearly visible and distance yielded truths that proximity occluded. Zia became viscerally aware of the essential strangeness of the solar system, that life for all its wonders was confined to a hunk of rock hurtling through spacetime along trajectories that could be traced all the way back to the Big Bang. The sun blazed in all its naked glory, that most intimate of stars edging ever closer to the horizon’s sickle edge. Clouds stretched out far below in a ruffled carpet of impossibly rich texture, ten thousand spires and hillocks furling and unfurling, ragged tufts transfigured by shafts of light into resplendent mythological fauna. Zia had a flash of an elementary school science class, the bow-tied teacher twirling a basketball on his finger, saying that if it were the Earth, its atmosphere would be no thicker than a single layer of plastic wrap.

  Santiago touched his fingertips to the glass. The drone flew itself and they were the only passengers in its small cabin, joeys riding in the pouch of an algorithmic kangaroo. Time had hardened her father into an amber cast of his former self. As scared and outraged as she was, Zia couldn’t help but feel a twinge of curiosity about whatever it was he had gotten himself into. He drove her crazy, batshit crazy, but he was still her nothing-will-stand-in-the-way-of-progress dad.

  “Once enough people started using the Interstice low-earth orbit satellite network to connect to the internet, we ran into a new problem,” he said.

  “Traditional ISPs fighting tooth and nail to stay in the game,” said Zia, remembering the years when his brainchild was under a constant barrage of vicious corporate espionage from ailing cable companies desperate to maintain their oligopoly at any cost.

  “Greedy laggards were certainly a bump in the road,” he said, snorting at what were once arch nemeses. “But what I’m talking about happened after they were dead and buried. With so many people on Interstice, the network would get overloaded at peak times and connections would slow down.”

  “So put up more satellites,” said Zia. Old conversations reverberated at the ghostly edges of this one, scenarios spun out over the dinner table, crises averted, puzzles solved. The León triumvirate at its ingenious, bickering best.

  “Then we’d have too much capacity at off-peak times,” he said. “We needed a way to make the network more adaptive, more resilient. So we built this fleet of high-altitude drones that provide regional signal boosts to even out the peaks and troughs.” He patted the bulkhead. “This beauty is my little secret though—I had her outfitted to carry passengers and you’re the first person besides me to ride her.” He spun a finger in the air. “The fleet is loaded with every exotic sensor we can get our hands on, and we give the data to scientific and educational groups pro bono.”

  Selai’s research depended on that data. “And sell it to governments and corporations at stupendous rates?”

  He shrugged. “They get what they pay for. Nobody else collects even one percent of what we can because nobody else has a reason to put drones all the way
up into the stratosphere every day. You’ve been to our Pacific base, and we have an Atlantic twin off the coast of Senegal. It’s the single biggest bet Interstice has made in the past decade, and it worked.”

  So this project was the cave Santiago had retreated to after the funeral, the hole in which he had buried his grief. Zia struggled to draw breath under the weight of everything that had been left unsaid. There were some gaps you just couldn’t fill.

  Zia tried to collect herself. “I’m sure the board is over the moon, but I’m failing to see how a successful R&D initiative got me kidnapped.” Last night, a doctor had come to Santiago’s villa and bandaged Zia up. She had called Himmat to reassure him that despite the rumors flying around the village, everything was going to be okay. A quick exchange of messages with Galang had confirmed he had arrived safely in the Maldives, which was a relief and a disturbing confirmation that Zia was the real target of the raid. Then fourteen hours of beautiful, blank, exhausted sleep that ended when Zia woke screaming and thrashing from a dream she couldn’t recall.

  His face tightened. “That’s because I just told you the same story I told shareholders.”

  The pregnant silence swelled. Her father was many things, but a liar wasn’t one of them. The year he started Interstice, he had published an essay mapping out his entire long-term strategy for the company. When his early investors had objected, he had responded that it wasn’t the idea that counted, it was the execution, and if they weren’t interested in coming along for the ride, he’d be happy to find alternative sources of capital. Over the subsequent years, his relentless execution had proven the essay right, and his investors had congratulated themselves on their prescience. Later, Santiago’s blunt honesty had sometimes proven to be a liability. Numerous senior employees had quit in the wake of receiving some of his “direct feedback” and Miranda had constantly coached him to soften his public statements. His patent disgust with playing politics was part of what had inspired Zia to get into diplomacy. Tired of pulling out the shrapnel of his candor, she picked up a healthy respect for nuance and cooperation. She suspected he hadn’t acquired a similar respect for her own choice of career path, and she didn’t like to admit how big of a role defiance played in why she had pushed so hard to get that ambassadorial post before the Heat Wave hit.