Bandwidth, p.5
Bandwidth, page 5
Dag authorized the final payment.
“There,” he said. “Does that clear things up?”
“You know, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that knowing a person’s true name gives you power over them.”
“And what is that supposed to mean?”
“Emily Kim,” she said, raising her hands and wiggling her fingers as if in mystical incantation. “Emily Kim, Emily Kim, Emily Kim. Emily Kim.”
Dag’s jaw muscles bunched as he stared at Diana for a long moment.
“You found her,” he said, barely able to believe it.
Diana granted him access to a secure cache of files. “Oh, she’s a sly one, your portrait model, a ghost, barely any digital presence at all. But that’s her all right. Once I get a scent . . . Well, let’s just say that I know my business.”
“Emily Kim,” he murmured to himself. Opening the sketchbook, he examined his handiwork. There she sat, nursing her cocktail at the bar. Then a close-up of her expression from the first time he looked up from the table on the balcony. He had reconstructed various angles of her face from his memories of their conversation over Casa Dragones. And, of course, flashes from the clips that snuck into his feed. He had drawn every portrait in fine art pencil, the graphite lines and textures contrasting sharply against the cream paper. Holed up in the hotel room, he’d allowed himself to get lost in the act of creation like he hadn’t in years. The curve of a stroke, the pressure on the page, the scritch-scratch of the pencil—it was an all-consuming thing, a black hole of attention.
Drawing was his refuge. Imagination was the one place he could find escape and absolution. It was where he retreated when the world became too painful, where he could get out from under the yoke of the demands placed on him at every turn, whether it was abusive, drug-addled foster parents or university exams. He had poured the confusion and insanity of the last two weeks into every shade and flourish, and Emily Kim had come alive on the page in all her strange, seductive humanity. Diana had taken the sketches, tunneled into theoretically impenetrable databases, and correlated her way through facial recognition and special-purpose search algorithms to track down and identify the woman who had been naught but a digital wraith.
“Whaddaya think? Can I grow up to be an artist?”
Diana had decorated the white space around each portrait with hearts, stars, and swirls inked in bright, sparkly nail polish. Dag ignored her quip, looking up from the page and out at the horizon. Across the bay, the deep-orange sun had just touched the top of the Golden Gate Bridge as North America rotated into night. Skyscrapers gleamed, the ruffled surface of the bay was liquid silver, and the Berkeley campus glowed with light that would make a photographer swoon. Dag smelled eucalyptus and watched a hawk circle lazily overhead. The smoke from Southern California was blowing north again, peppering the air with a faint scent of ash and turning this sunset skyscape into a riotous bouquet of color. Emily Kim was out there somewhere, and he was going to find her.
“Be careful, lover boy.” Diana gave him an odd look, unaccustomed tenderness shining through her jaded whimsy. “I’d hate to see something happen to that cute little face of yours.”
CHAPTER 10
Dag slipped on a piece of seaweed, but he took a heavy step forward and caught his fall. The gray kayak he was dragging down to the water was loaded with gear, which made hauling it awkward. The redhead at the rental shop shared a tide chart in his feed and handed him a jacket with a smile. Most tourists didn’t come in for multiday rentals. The scratch of the gravel against the hull quieted as the nose reached the shallows.
Double-checking everything, he pulled on the skirt, slid his legs into the kayak, and sealed the elastic neoprene around the cockpit. The last rays of sunlight had faded from the snowy peak of Mount Baker behind him, and it was full dusk. The ocean was shifting from slate gray to black, and the San Juan Islands were nothing but shadowy humps of darkness in the distance.
Retrieving the paddle, Dag raised his arms and scooted his hips forward. Once. Twice. On the third try, the kayak slid silently into the glassy waters of Lummi Bay. In his black hooded spray jacket, he would be as insubstantial as a ghost to any passersby gazing out at the deepening night.
Reviewing the wind, current, and swell data, he dipped the paddle into the brine and glided out to sea. Once on course, he dialed down feed opacity and stared out into the darkness. Diana’s cache hadn’t contained everything he needed, but it had given him enough evidence to continue the chase on his own. He had peeled away shell companies like layers of an onion, unraveled the cat’s cradle of offshore accounts, back-channeled information requests through inside contacts, and finally traced Emily Kim to a private island off the northern coast of Washington State that supposedly held a foundation and boarding school under her direction.
The salty air was chilly and sharp, smelling of fish, marine diesel, and rotting seaweed. Dag placed the paddle into the water at an angle that minimized noise and spray. Once the blade was submerged, he pulled strongly, leveraging his hips and back to maximize force. After half an hour, he fell into a rhythm, one stroke after another in a constant, timeless gait. There was a lot of water to cover.
When Dag was seven years old, he’d been placed in his third foster home, this one in East County San Diego. It turned out to be a foster farm, the parents harboring as many kids as they could squeeze into their squalid bungalow to collect and skim the government support payments. Now he saw them for who they were: pathetic, petty fraudsters taking advantage of a flawed system. But at the time, they had been the despots of his universe, using their flock to mass-produce handmade wooden rosaries that they sold at a hefty artisan markup via feed.
Dag still remembered the first day. Despite the experience of his previous two foster homes, he had harbored the unlikely hope that this one would be different. When the social worker dropped him off, his new guardians had said all the right things, smiled in the right places, wrapped him in sweaty but affectionate hugs.
But as soon as the checklist was complete and the bureaucrat holding it had disappeared in a cloud of parched dust, the pretense had dropped. Dag poured his desperate need for love into a trembling smile, and they had handed him a crate of unpolished wooden beads and a bottle of spray varnish. The only thing worse than his foster parents were his foster siblings. Childhood was rendered innocent only in the rose-tinted memories of adults. Something started building inside Dag like steam filling a kettle.
One day, after he finished tidying up the master bedroom, he slipped through the back door and wandered through the neighborhood until he found a bus stop. The bus ferried him through neighborhoods baking in summer heat and eventually deposited him in the beatific beach holdout of La Jolla. Even then, the rising ocean was making incursions. But the sea lions hadn’t yet abandoned the rocky point, and Dag spent hours staring out at them, face pressed up between the bars of the railing bordering the sidewalk. Tourists and joggers bustled by, but he paid them no mind. His consideration was only for the sea lions. There they lay, shiny and fat as sausages, snoring and cavorting on the warm rocks like they had not a care in the world. The tang of gull guano tickled his nostrils. And then, on whatever whims flutter through the minds of pinnipeds, they would plunge off the rocks and into the surf, where the bulk and flippers that made them so awkward on land turned them into instruments of grace beneath the waves.
That had been the first thing he’d drawn, a sea lion kingdom hidden in a deep ocean trench safe from the predations of adults. Adults were the end of all good things. The lifeguard had proved that right, to Dag’s dismay but not surprise. He was quite precocious when it came to fatalism. The lifeguard smiled and offered him a candy bar and promised to help. But in the end, he turned Dag over to a police officer, who delivered him back to his foster home, where retribution was exacted to rein in his wanderlust. Despite it all, Dag never forgot that beautiful things could exist in a world of hurt, or that there were beings on this earth who could nap on rocks and do underwater somersaults whenever they pleased.
A foghorn blew in the distance, and he returned to the reality of churning muscles and sea spray. What the hell was he doing out here alone in an expedition-grade ocean kayak packed with firearms and tactical gear? Why in seven hells hadn’t he told Sean—whose respect he’d dedicated years to earning—what he’d found in Room 412? Dag had finally cultivated a streak of good luck. Thanks in no small part to his mentor’s tutelage, he was a rising star at a prestigious firm that pulled geopolitical strings from behind closed doors.
Yet here he was, paddling into a dark and dangerous unknown.
He had never checked up on that particular set of foster parents or siblings, but he could safely assume they were dead or deadbeats. They wouldn’t even recognize him now, and if they did, it might push them into the cardiac arrest they so deserved. He didn’t pretend to care that San Diego was now nothing but a charcoal pit. So why had he gamely dodged out a side door after flying home from Mexico City? It wasn’t like he hadn’t lived through various and sundry disaster scenarios before.
Dag leaned back. It was a clear night, and stars wheeled above the Salish Sea like pilgrims around the Kaaba. He was nothing. A short-lived speck on a meaningless rock orbiting an insignificant star in a forgotten galaxy in a universe bound by the unflinching laws of thermodynamics to descend into ultimate heat death. For a moment, the veneer of paranoia that laced this excursion fell away to reveal the unadulterated curiosity beneath. Whatever was at the center of this uncanny labyrinth, he wanted to press his face to the railing and stare.
CHAPTER 11
As Dag hauled the kayak up underneath the trees, dawn broke over the eastern horizon, setting wisps of morning mist aflame. He had beached in a secluded cove on an undeveloped corner of the island, far from the main dock. The temperate rainforest was thick with brambles and the rich smell of loam. Pines, oaks, and madrones formed a gray-green canopy overhead, and the ground beneath his feet was soft and spongy.
Dag stripped off the spray jacket, perspiration evaporating off his shoulders. No mistakes this time. He tried to remember the grizzled infiltration instructor from his month of special operations training in Namibia seven years ago. Sean had called it commando camp, arranging for Dag to attend once he proved himself capable of falling into dangerous situations. Lobbyists rarely needed such expertise, but on the singular occasions when they did, it paid to have someone who could fieldstrip a gun in addition to tying a tie. Dag was reluctant, and didn’t like the “ninja” nickname it earned him around the stuffy K Street office. The biggest lesson he’d taken away from Namibia was how hopelessly useless a month of training was against professionals who’d spent their lives in the shadows. On the other hand, that’s where he’d met Diana, who was already working freelance and ran the cyber component of the course. Ever since, Dag had tapped her when Apex needed covert help.
Time to polish those rusty skills.
Dag kneeled and methodically unpacked the kayak, cataloging each piece of gear against his feed checklist. Once everything was laid out on the forest floor, he removed the rest of his clothing. His nipples hardened and penis shrank in the chill as he stood naked under the whispering leaves. Then he pulled on a tight-fitting base layer and a camouflaged jumpsuit, matching backpack, gloves, and soft-soled boots. He strapped a holster to his right thigh, checked the handgun, and slid it into place. He did the same to the submachine gun slung on a strap across his shoulder, magnetically held in place for snug convenience and quick retrieval.
Be careful, lover boy, I’d hate to see something happen to that cute little face of yours. Diana needn’t worry. There was no private security team protecting his person on this mission, but he had come prepared. He’d had enough surprises lately. This wasn’t another diplomatic cocktail party. His muscles felt like jelly when he stretched, but aside from the firearms, the outfit was as weightless and flexible as a second skin.
Kneeling, he stuffed an energy bar into his mouth and washed it down with electrolyte-fortified water. Packing the discarded clothes and backup provisions into the cargo hatch, he pushed the kayak deep underneath an enormous blackberry thicket. Stepping back, he circled the bush until he was satisfied that no adventurous hiker would stumble across the boat.
Inhaling deeply, he savored the scent of pine, sea breeze, and damp earth. Ferns sprang up in prehistoric curls, and moss turned the occasional boulders into brooding green life-forms all their own. Sunlight slipped through gaps in the canopy to dapple the forest floor like a leopard’s coat. Calling up a topographical overlay in his feed, Dag confirmed his position, marked the location of the kayak, and set off along the route he had mapped out yesterday.
This side of the island was a natural reserve filled with old-growth forest and polka-dotted by the occasional meadow. To get to the other side, he circumnavigated the large hill that dominated the island’s geography and whose trails offered unparalleled views of Mount Baker and the San Juans. But Dag kept off the trails, skirting meadows, dropping into ravines, and traversing ridgelines through woodland that had remained largely unchanged for thousands of years.
Reaching the top of a small hill, he caught his first glimpse of the compound through a break in the trees. An old barn sat off to one side, abutting a rolling pasture where cows chewed their cud, jaw muscles bunching as they masticated grass in the morning sunshine. Satellite dishes and antennae bristled from the roof of a large, rambling ranch house perched on top of a low rise, overlooking the entire property. Below it, chickens pecked in the courtyard of a large horseshoe-shaped building that had the same style of shingled, vine-covered walls as the house but looked like newer construction. Firewood was piled in long stacks beside a shed, and smoke billowed lazily into the air from what appeared to be an old-fashioned smoker. Beyond that, a dock jutted out from the rocky shore, and a catamaran, a fishing trawler, and a number of smaller craft were moored along it. A boathouse stood off to one side, and a seaplane bobbed at anchor farther offshore. Everything matched the latest satellite imagery, which Dag found vaguely disappointing.
Descending the hill, he headed west and slowly circled the property from the cover of the trees. This was a private island, and the compound was the only development. Forest blanketed the rest, interrupted only by hiking trails, deer paths, and the occasional gravel utility road.
Approaching from a new angle, Dag dropped to the ground and slithered up into a tight cluster of saplings that gave him a view of the grounds. Zooming in, he scrutinized the compound. From this vantage, he spotted a few new details. Rotors drooped from a helicopter resting on a pad that had been hidden by the main building from his previous outlook. Bees buzzed and orbited around a long row of hives. A neatly organized grid of raised beds grew enough produce to feed a small village. Pigs nuzzled for fallen apples in a small orchard nestled behind the barn.
All of a sudden, the central door of the main building burst open, and Dag’s hand twitched toward the submachine gun before he assured himself that there was no way he had been spotted. Instead of the heavily armed security officers he was expecting, at least two hundred children of various ages poured out into the courtyard, laughing, shouting, and pushing each other. A pair of younger ones—Dag estimated them at six years old—chased after the squawking chickens until an adult in a tweed jacket and horn-rimmed spectacles stuck his head out of a window and shouted them off. The crowd migrated over to the open grassy knoll that led down to the dock and split off into smaller groups, sitting on the grass, talking loudly, and chasing the occasional Frisbee.
Dag’s heart pounded in his chest. He summoned an overlay of the data he’d dug up on Ms. Kim. This was the only geolocation he’d been able to tie her to. The island was officially designated as the headquarters of her charitable foundation and attached boarding school. But after sifting through so many shell companies and offshore accounts, Dag had assumed this was just another piece of clever misdirection. Foundations and private schools were notorious covers for large-scale money laundering, and this must simply be another domino in whatever scheme Kim was running. But actually hosting two hundred laughing, mischievous children on-site was extravagant prestidigitation.
The alternative, that this establishment was legitimate, was even more unsettling. If Kim was indeed the executive director of a nonprofit and principal of an exclusive boarding school, then what had she been doing in Mexico City and why had she ambushed Dag with Room 412? It didn’t add up. The inconsistencies dividing the idyllic scene from the disturbing memories made his palms sweat.
A bell rang from the main building, which Dag now thought of as the school, and the students reluctantly started to make their way back inside. Some of the smaller kids chased each other all the way up to the courtyard, unwilling to forfeit their game of tag. The teenagers hung back, lagging behind the throng, clearly considering whether they might be able to skive off and get away with it. But within ten minutes, everyone had returned to the mother ship.
As the sun climbed to and descended from its zenith, Dag continued his remote observations of the property. The students emerged every couple of hours for a break or exercise. He counted 245 of them. A number of adults moved around the property as well. Teachers took lunch breaks and crossed the courtyard between classes. People ferried back and forth between the ranch house on the hill and the school, sometimes taking shifts tending the animals or the garden. A boat arrived with supplies, and a motley group of older students carried the crates up. A grizzled old man split firewood with an ax, a sheepdog snoozing next to him in the sun.
By the time dusk fell, Dag was struggling to keep his eyes open. He hadn’t slept in more than thirty-six hours, and when he blinked, he slipped into staccato increments of sleep. When he forced his eyelids open for too long, sparklers went off in his peripheral vision. Unzipping a pocket, he popped a gel into his mouth, letting the rush of sugar and caffeine buoy his flagging body.
