Take No Names, page 19
Then we’re back in DF, rolling down backstreets toward the poorer eastern neighborhoods.
The city is eerie, the streets strangely quiet. People seem more glued to their screens than usual. We pass a few storefronts and lobbies with crowds gathered around TVs. I feel Mark and Sun notice it, too, an alertness to the difference in the air. The knowledge that we must have caused it.
But we don’t stop. Too risky. We don’t find out why DF is on lockdown until we arrive at Art’s cousin’s restaurant. Pozolería Urbana, on Vicente Guerrero, in Iztapalapa.
29
It seems that every restaurant in Mexico City has a flat-screen TV prominently mounted on the wall facing the door, showing not the Pumas game but a slideshow of the food on the menu. Just in case you’re a passerby with a weakness for low-res temptation. Or you horfed your enchiladas so fast that you forgot what they looked like.
Pozolería Urbana is no exception. At the moment—around four in the afternoon, five hours after our incursion into the Baoli—the restaurant is closed, the lights are off, and all of the windows are shuttered against prying eyes and the broiling sun. Jules, Art, Sun, Mark, and I sit dispersed around the dining area, isolated by the grudges that divide us. We’re all watching the TV above the service counter, which is mirroring Jules’s phone over the Wi-Fi. She’s tapping through livestreams from every major news station on the continent.
They’re all showing the same thing.
“For centuries, we have tolerated a world order in which the richest countries exploit those who have less. All in the patronizing guise of Enlightenment.”
Lai Yixun stands at a white podium, the bright sun casting lens flare off his diamond tie clip. His epic backdrop is the multicolored facade of Terminal One. When I glimpsed the live video of this speech on the Baoli Jumbotron this morning, I assumed he was speaking Mandarin. But apparently English remains the lingua franca between China and Mexico.
“The powerful countries say, ‘We grew wealthy by burning fossil fuels, but you must not do so because they pollute too much. We achieved hegemony using nuclear weapons, but you must not develop them because they are too dangerous.’ These powerful countries consider themselves to be ‘exceptional.’”
He does air quotes with his fingers, a wry smile on his face.
“Today, China demonstrates a different model of global leadership. Instead of withholding our technologies, we share them with—” Lai pauses mid-sentence as a man in a black suit rushes up to him, wraps his hand around the foam tip of the microphone, and whispers in Lai’s ear.
Each time I see it, I think about where I was at that exact moment. Perhaps in the atrium of the Baoli, falling on my face after failing to hurdle the barrier around the turnstiles. Or still down in the corridor, sliding on my belly through a puddle of Pine-Sol.
Lai’s face screws up, his aplomb replaced first by disbelief, then rage. He storms away from the podium. Murmurs spread through the crowd as a third man takes his place and says something about technical difficulties, postponement of the ceremony, please cease all recordings—but nobody’s listening. The cameramen aren’t even filming him anymore.
They’ve refocused on the maglev train, a sleek rocket now sliding into view behind him. Racing across the desert at 280 miles per hour. Brisk and smooth as mercury.
Not slowing down.
The screams begin before the crash, but it all happens so fast that I don’t notice that sympathetic detail until CNN replays the footage in slow motion. First: lots of screaming voices, rendered low and bloaty by the stretching of the sound waves. Next: the silver train folding upon itself like an inchworm as it smashes into the station. The shock wave generated by the impact shatters the glass walls of the terminal in a spectacular diagonal progression. The middle of the train, arching upward, obliterates the grand facade of multicolored panels. And then gravity catches up to the train’s tortured joints, and it tips toward the camera, snaps in half, and crashes onto its side, a final row of glass fountains erupting from its windows.
Mark is squeezing his eyes shut, cupping his hands over his ears.
“Must we, Mother?” he moans.
“Shut up,” Jules says. “They’re about to show a statement from the Chinese Foreign Ministry.”
We’ve been sitting here for two hours now, squabbling like ill-tempered cats, absorbing each new development like a punch to the kidneys. I’m back in my own clothes, which Jules transported here, along with the rest of our stuff, from Hotel el Paraíso. There’s an improvised sling around my right arm and an unfinished bowl of tofu pozole on the table in front of me. My appetite made an appearance as the morphine wore off. But I lost it again when Al Jazeera broke the news of the Chinese aircraft carrier disembarking from the naval base in Venezuela, cruising toward the Gulf of Mexico.
Mark’s sitting alone at a table in the far corner of the restaurant. He’s finished his pozole as well as two thirty-two-ounce bottles of Pacífico, and he’s working on a third. Jules and Art share a table on the opposite side, and Sun’s sitting cross-legged on the linoleum, leaning against the wall, his palms rested on his knees.
Art’s dad, Rafa, is faceup on the kitchen floor, snoring gently. The family resemblance is striking, except that Rafa is several inches shorter, and his long hair is blown out and streaked with bleach. When he lay down half an hour ago, I expressed some surprise that he was capable of knocking off for forty winks in the middle of an international crisis.
Art shrugged his giant shoulders and said, “Siestas reduce stress.”
Ken’s sport bike is blocking the locked door. His suppressor pistol sits on the table in front of Art, along with Mark’s balisong and a long-barreled revolver. When we staggered in two hours ago, coated in layers of dried blood and dust, Art pointed this revolver at our heads while Rafa emptied our pockets. Jules stood behind them, her arms crossed over her chest.
Then Jules sat us down in the dining room, showed us the shocking footage of the train crash, and explained that she’d be calling the shots from now on. I hadn’t given her my real crypto account number when I called her from the pool house, but I had done so four nights earlier, when I called her from the hotel. She transferred the entire balance to a crypto wallet of her own on Wednesday after reaching Art on the phone.
He’d quoted her the modest sum of three hundred thousand pesos to provide a hideout for three hired guns on short notice. Instead of agreeing, she gave him my share of the APEX money—at current rates about ten times what he’d asked.
“She said that your recent behavior had been extremely annoying, and that she’d feel better if I had that money instead of you,” he told me, smiling smugly and turning his palms up like, Who am I to argue with that?
I stared from him to Jules with my jaw hanging open. He placed the tofu pozole in front of me, as well as a cloth napkin and a wooden spoon. Then Jules explained that she’d transferred him Sun’s share of the crypto, too, when Longdai released our surveillance photos an hour ago. The stakes had gone up, she explained, now that we were the most wanted fugitives in the country. As for Mark’s share, she said she’d decide what to do with it later.
Mark took it poorly. First he bit the side of his thumb so hard I could see it turn white. Then he struck a conversational tone.
“It seems we’ve gotten blurry on the boundaries here,” he said. “You aren’t my sister, or my banker, or my hot ticket to citizenship. And frankly, all this nuanced family beefing is causing me a migraine. So how about you hand me back my knife and transfer me my goddamn cyber peanuts, and I bid you a permanent adieu?”
Jules shook her head. “You know where we’re hiding. If you take off and get caught, how do I know you won’t give up our location?”
“Who said anything about me getting caught? I was in and out of the Baoli in fifteen minutes, wearing a hat and sunglasses! I wasn’t down in the tunnel, playing shotgun hot potato like these buffoons.”
Instead of answering, Jules pulled out her phone and queued up the surveillance photos on the restaurant’s TV.
Intruders A, B, and C. Longdai’s smart surveillance algorithms had reconstituted thousands of images from the Baoli’s security cameras into mug shots. Intruder A—that’s me—in Lijia’s jumpsuit, straight on, brightly lit, on a plain white background. Sun is Intruder B, looking extra severe in his navy blue suit.
Intruder C is Mark in his tourist garb. The software that amalgamated the images had managed to digitally remove his sunglasses. His eyes in the photo are a void gray instead of green. But the pizza-slice scar on his cheek is plain as day.
Mark stared at the photos for a long minute. Then he shot a death glare at Jules, marched behind the bar, and helped himself to his first Pacífico.
He downed about a third of it as we watched the crash a second time. I saw him cringe as shards of glass rained out of the desert sky.
“It could be a coincidence,” he said. “It was the first time they ran the train, right? Or maybe we were sent to make a scene at the Baoli, create a diversion while someone else—”
“Uploaded a virus?” I interrupted him. “One that messed up the operating system of the magnetic track? You think someone else did that?”
He shot me an irritated glance, then quickly looked away. Pearce is after something else, he’d said as we stood above Ken’s dying body.
I was still digesting the fact that he’d gone along with the plan anyway, and never breathed a word about his suspicions to me.
I glowered from him to Sun. His face was impassive, as usual, and he was pressing the pads of his thumbs into the wiry muscles at the base of his neck. One train crashed, one throat slashed, one country pushed to the brink of invasion, and Sun Jianshui was massaging his pressure points. And as Jules changed the channel and the maglev train reappeared, whole again, racing toward Terminal One again, I saw Ken dropping to his knees in the road, blood gushing from the thick scarlet line across his throat, his face frozen in a mask of shock.
The image has replayed over and over in my head for the past two hours, as the world waits for China’s response, as the mayor of Mexico City declared a lockdown until “los fugitivos que perpetraron esta atrocidad puedan ser encontrados”—the fugitives who perpetrated this atrocity can be found.
So much for keeping my head down and surviving in the shadows. Nobody in Mexico City will mistake me for qīngtíng diǎnshuǐ—the dragonfly that skims the water’s surface.
Now I’m the cannonball that obliterated the pond.
“Look, if you wanna be in charge? You need to make a plan,” Mark is saying to Jules. “We can’t just sit here until the SWAT team smokes us out. We have a very distinctive combination of complexions, okay? Someone probably IDed us when we rolled up!”
“Iztapalapans don’t like talking to cops,” Art says. “Anyway, most of the people around here hate the airport.”
“Oh, great.” Mark kicks over a chair. “So we’re safe as long as we never, ever leave our cozy pozole prison.”
“Will you please shut the fuck up?” Jules’s eyes are fixed on the screen. “We need to hear this.”
“Shit,” I’m saying at the same time. “Shit!”
The spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry is speaking over a photograph of Lijia Nu’erhachi, looking haggard.
“—a Longdai engineer who was apprehended while attempting to board a flight to Spain. Mr. Lijia confessed to accepting payments from foreign agents in exchange for access to restricted areas of the Baoli Tower. It is now understood that these foreign agents introduced a software virus that caused the crash of the maglev train.”
The coverage cuts back to the spokesman, who is reading from a script at a drab podium flanked by massive Chinese flags. As he speaks in Mandarin, CNN pipes in simultaneous interpretation into English. “Mr. Lijia confirmed that he received payments from the three intruders whose attack on the Baoli Tower was captured by surveillance cameras earlier today. We are now releasing the surveillance footage in its entirety. According to Mr. Lijia, these foreign agents were operatives of the United States of America.”
After a weighty pause, the spokesman continues, reading from his notes in a monotone that the interpreter matches. “This cowardly attack is a flagrant insult to the people of both Mexico and China. Unfortunately, we can observe that these actions are consistent with decades of arrogant American interference in the affairs of sovereign nations. Our joint investigation is ongoing, and we will leverage all necessary resources to commensurately respond to this nefarious atrocity.”
The Foreign Ministry spokesperson squares his papers against the podium and hits the camera with a withering look.
“The People’s Republic of China is not intimidated by the aggressions of a clumsy empire,” he concludes. “Fire will be fought with fire.”
Then the feed goes dead, replaced by CNN’s Crisis Coverage team: three star anchors sitting around a curved desk, pale-faced and stunned.
“¡Diosito lindo!” Arturo exclaims. “This is some shit right here.”
“You should get out of here,” I say to Jules. “You don’t have to be part of this.”
“That was true on Tuesday, too, Victor. I didn’t have to come down here, did I?”
“The stakes have gone up, like you said. We are walking dead, Jules! None of us will ever escape this. But you can go home right now.”
“I know that, okay? But I wouldn’t want to miss your theatrical debut.” She turns back to the TV screen, which is showing newly released surveillance footage from the Baoli. I’m walking down the stairs from the mezzanine, wearing Lijia’s blue jumpsuit, haloed by a yellow circle labeled INTRUDER A.
“Jules, this isn’t a joke! You need to go while you can,” I say. “I never should’ve involved you in the first place.”
Now she turns away from the screen to scowl at me. “Wow, Victor, that is so patronizing! You’re excused from deciding anything for me!”
She stands up now, crosses the room, and sits down at my table to berate me some more. “You know something, Victor? You spend a lot of time stewing in the past, but you’re not the only one with regrets! I could’ve gone with you to that house in Pasadena. I could’ve said, ‘Hey, maybe let’s call the cops instead of shooting each other in the leg.’ But instead I threw you my car keys and said I wanted out. Well, now I want in. You and Sun are the only family I’ve got. I’m not going to run away like you always do. I’m not going to abandon you just because you have less common sense than a lemming.”
I open my mouth, but for a moment, nothing comes out. Then I say, “You married the guy who killed our father, and I’m the one lacking common sense?”
Jules sets her jaw and presses her lips together hard. Her nostrils flare as she takes a deep breath, and I see her choosing her words.
“I chose to forgive Sun, and now I have a friend I can always count on. What can you say for yourself about the choices you’ve made? Look where they’ve gotten you!”
I’m fumbling for another retort when Mark cuts in.
“I hate to interrupt Hanukkah,” he says, “but this may be important.”
We turn to the TV, which is now showing a split-screen interview. In one panel, there’s the same poised journalist who so recently spoke with Lai Yixun in a conference room at the Baoli Tower.
In the other panel is Niles Pearce.
30
This brazen accusation from the Chinese Foreign Ministry is an insult to the American people,” Pearce is saying. “Frankly, Ally, I’m astounded.”
I’m on my feet now, stepping closer to the screen. Niles looks a lot like his younger brother, but his blond hair is longer, and his eyes are blue, not gray. The chyron at the bottom of the frame reads: SENATOR NILES PEARCE III (R-MO).
“The United States government has not authorized any operations in Mexico City related to Longdai and their extravagant airport. As chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I would know!”
“Senator, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has released surveillance footage of three men staging a dramatic attack on the Baoli Tower. A Longdai engineer has confessed to taking bribes from American operatives. If the United States isn’t behind today’s attack, who is?”
Niles Pearce clasps his hands in front of his chest. “This train crash only took place a few hours ago. Before jumping to conclusions, let’s take a look at what we know and what we don’t know. A visual spectacle—with zero casualties, let’s not forget. Then, almost immediately, a confession from one of Longdai’s own engineers. And the footage of these ‘intruders,’ the so-called ‘American operatives’—” Now it’s his turn to do air quotes. “Do those men look like SEAL Team Six to you?”
The journalist blinks rapidly. “I’m not sure I follow, Senator.”
“Ally, this train crash has all the hallmarks of a false flag attack. We know that Lai Yixun is a student of history. The Mukden Incident: a pretext for the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. The Gleiwitz Incident: that’s how Hitler took Poland! Now, consider the net result of this train crash. A Chinese carrier steaming toward the Cantarell oil field. If you’re a Chinese expansionist, I’d say this outcome looks a lot like Christmas.”
Niles Pearce shrugs his shoulders and opens his hands on either side of his face. He has the same boyish smile as his brother, the same slight drawl that has him pronouncing the h in his “whats.” He seems to be enjoying the opportunity to perform on camera.
The journalist doesn’t share his upbeat tone. “That’s quite a statement, Senator. Is it fair to say that you categorically deny American involvement in the maglev crash?”
Pearce nods solemnly. “I assure you, the United States government had no role in this incident.”
“One last question, Senator. What can you tell us about the reports of increased activity at naval bases in Louisiana and Texas? Is the United States preparing a military response to the Chinese carrier group headed to the Gulf of Mexico?”
