The next morning, she tossed clothes in a suitcase like coins into a fountain. He tried to comfort her, but she pulled away. He felt helpless, like he had broken another thing in Rebecca. The Scale of Sages had been cruel. He said softly, “My being there won’t bring Sandy back.”
“No,” Rebecca said. “But it might have saved something else.”
She spent hours on the phone, and in the late afternoon, he brought her luggage downstairs. She strapped on her shoes. “I don’t know if Laila told you, but Peter got a job at the university.”
Surprised, he asked if Peter was returning to UCLA.
“No, the university here. He’s going to teach English.”
So it had come to that. He felt sorry for Peter. “We’re going to be late if we don’t leave soon,” Daniel said.
He hadn’t driven a car since they had come back from the trip. He felt his heart rate rise and his palms grow clammy as he thought about being at the wheel. In his head, he could hear the engine purring deceptively. He reached for his shoes by the entryway.
“Don’t bother,” Rebecca said. “I have a ride.”
There was a knock before he could reply. Peter stood alone at the door, Laila’s empty Volkswagen pulsing in the street.
Daniel pulled his wife aside. “What’s going on? I’ll take you to the airport.”
“You’re too busy,” she said gently. She gave him a passionless kiss, then walked past Peter and waited in the car.
“How is she?” Peter asked Daniel.
“She’s obviously been better.”
Peter launched into a winding explanation of why he was here. Rebecca had called to ask for a ride. Laila was at the clinic and couldn’t come. He was still talking when Daniel shut the door. He spent the rest of the evening in his study, poring over documents both authentic and false. He worked late into the night, trying not to think about poor Sandy dying in a no-name place with no friends, or about how much he wanted to be with Rebecca’s family. Instead, he thought about Greenwood. Even the most transparent man could become opaque when his livelihood depended on it. What a swindle Greenwood had pulled, checking out girls every chance he got. Maybe he’d hoped the seed inside him would simply die. But it had sprouted and bloomed, no poison strong enough to destroy what was inside him. Daniel wished an Agent Ruby existed for men with twisted desires.
Daniel went upstairs and retrieved the photograph, which he had unimaginatively hidden under the mattress. He locked the envelope inside the safe in his study, spinning the lock again and again. The boy in the picture might have been Greenwood’s first, but Daniel suspected he wasn’t. He thought about the awful whorehouse he’d wandered into. Some youths were living under even worse conditions, used in back alleys and streets.
At first, Dannaco-Hastings balked at Greenwood’s insistence that the Reform be changed. It would cost too much to reconfigure the pipes for the Gulzar field and re-dig the channel. Once he’d convinced them it would be worthwhile, they requested samples from the Gulzar poppies’ resin.
“That’s already been done,” Daniel told Greenwood. The consultant tried to protest, but Daniel pushed the file across the desk. “It’s all there. Everything was tested less than a year ago. If we test again, we’ll be wasting resources, and you know both our employers hate that.”
Seth, standing outside Daniel’s office, let out a laugh of disbelief.
Eventually, Dannaco-Hastings accepted the report, taking Greenwood at his word. And so began the reshuffling of priorities in Smythe’s office and elsewhere, committees signing off on the firm’s request to destroy the Gulzar field. Daniel’s made-up file circulated among senators and congressmen with limited interest in Afghan poppies. Smythe’s office argued at first, but the information was undeniable, or so Greenwood told them. Dannaco changed its mind, and so did Smythe. Sherzai quietly went along but stopped taking part in meetings and calls, sending an assistant in his stead. Everyone moved fast. The smell of dark tea and Nescafé filled USADE night and day, and Seth and Iggy seemed to never leave at all. Neither spoke to Daniel. Iggy was too busy, Seth too angry.
If the office was too chaotic, the house was too quiet without Rebecca. There seemed to be no middle ground left in Daniel’s life. Peter and Laila called and showed up at his door once, but he made excuses not to see them. Ian came by and asked for help on an old car. There was no time, Daniel said, when in truth, he no longer enjoyed working on cars. He couldn’t avoid his friend much longer, though. Ian would be at the Gulzar field the day of its destruction. In Washington, a committee had decided that the Peace Corps should be on hand to “help farmers and their families adjust,” whatever that meant.
The following Tuesday, Daniel received a message from Philip Kauffman, who now worked at a research desk in the Department of Agriculture on fruit orchards in the Midwest. He told a cautionary tale. During his time at USADE, he had exhaustively studied the Gulzar land, as he’d studied every field in Fever Valley. There was no payout there, he explained, reminding Daniel that the directorship was an easy post to lose when poor decisions were made.
Though Seth had stopped talking to Daniel, he grew louder when he spoke with others, accentuating his selective silences. It worked. In Iggy’s office, he audibly lamented the lack of good leadership, contempt for expertise, and futility of a program he compared to a “sniper with no aim.” Daniel gave up trying to persuade him, and instead resorted to admonishing him for insubordination. Within days the veteran engineer was on probation, a decision Daniel explained only to Smythe.
“Do what you have to do,” the undersecretary said.
“So you have my back on Seth?”
“Fuck Seth.”
This sounded encouraging, so Daniel pressed on. “I want to revisit the question of using Agent Ruby. I’m asking again that we reconsider.”
“Ain’t gonna happen. I thought this was settled. You got wax in your ears?”
Daniel gave up. Even Greenwood didn’t have the power to stop Dannaco from testing Agent Ruby. That was, after all, why they were here. They owned the product, and Daniel couldn’t forge a file about its effects or its nonexistent history. He could only fight one battle at a time.
After Seth’s probation was announced, the staff worked so silently it sounded like the typewriters were operating themselves. Farmers who had expected to soon be tilling food crops on Yassaman were given new guidelines. Daniel told Iggy to organize workshops and change the focus from wheat to corn, because he knew corn was easier to grow and the Gulzar soil was poor. Seed was ordered by the ton, hefty fees paid for swift delivery. Around the office, eyebrows rose and doors closed when Daniel passed. Elias called daily, insisting on an explanation for the change, which he’d learned about from the Ministry of Planning.
“I don’t know anything Planning hasn’t already told you,” was all Daniel would say, and after a while he refused Elias’s calls. The last thing the journalist said to him was a threat veiled as a quip: “Remember this, Daniel. A good journalist is like an octopus: he blinds his enemies with ink.”
Greenwood came and went, endorsing Daniel’s requests and justifying his conclusions. He clapped Iggy on the shoulder—never Daniel—and complimented secretaries on their dresses and their hair. One day he even flipped open his wallet and flashed a photo of a redhead he called his fiancée. After a while he came in with two-day stubble, a look at odds with his tidy hair. Within weeks, his class ring had loosened on his finger, and his watch no longer fit his wrist.
When the destruction of the Gulzar field was only three days away, Daniel spent the afternoon in Fever Valley with his crew. The poppy workers of Yassaman were there, picking at leaves and petals, pulling up weeds, and occasionally glancing at Daniel. One of the men smiled. By now, Taj and his workers guessed their land would be spared, since the machines had crawled away. Taj must have seen the newspapers too, including one where Elias had written about USADE’s sudden change of plan and condemned the regime for its lack of control over American agencies. The most remarkable thing was that such a publication could exist at all. The last of the free newspapers had been shut down nearly ten years ago. Through Laila, Daniel heard that Elias had launched the paper with friends, hiding in different apartments, typing with the curtains closed, and printing as many copies as they could by bribing workers at another paper, then leaving them in stacks around the city.
Daniel got into the pickup truck with his colleagues, Iggy at the wheel, and they pulled away from the Gulzar field. On the highway, they crossed a column of tanks moving as calmly as the Manticore. One of them was flying the Soviet flag, its hammer and sickle gleaming like an illusionist’s wink. It was what Daniel had seen the day Telaya died. While driving back to the camp with the nomads and Taj, he had passed a caravan of tanks, one of them flying the flag. That Russian advisers were present here was widely known, that they rolled along the highway in tanks less so. Long ago, Sayed Sajadi said: Russia is a bear that doesn’t hibernate. Never turn your back.
The convoy was barreling toward the city. It was funny, really. The Russians didn’t understand that when it came to opium and religion, Karl Marx had it backward. Religion wasn’t the opium of the masses. Opium was the religion of the masses, making new converts every day of war vets and jazz stars and teens who mistook self-destruction for self-expression. Of so many of the workers who depended on it for their livelihood. Delivered through pills, pipes, and needles that the faithful shared, opium provided epiphanies that made its supply scarce against ubiquitous demand. Daniel wondered why he was here at all. He couldn’t get rid of the poppies, not really. All he could hope for was to move them somewhere else. All over the world, governments were trying to kill the drug trade by passing tougher laws, driving it underground. But underground—didn’t they know?—was precisely where roots took hold.