“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.