Zero day code, p.6
Zero Day Code, page 6
part #1 of End of Days Series
The long walk gave him a chance to gather his thoughts for the day. He had a crop of bokchoi planted at the moment. The first shoots had come through last week. Lu Huang did not much like the look of them. They had none of the lively green vigour you hoped for in a young plant. The shoots appeared frail to him, and speckled brown here and there. He glowered at the lights of the factory as he shuffled past. It made plastic cases for cell phones. Colourfully stupid things they were, made to look like cartoon cats. Thick clouds of foul-smelling fumes poured from the chimney stacks night and day. Pipes, which were already rusted through, vomited wastewater of the most alarming colours directly into the river at all hours. If he was being honest, Lu Huang would admit that the once lush soil of the valley had thinned out and gone bitter long before the cartoon cat phone-case factory arrived, but he was certain his own crops had taken a decided turn for the worst as soon as those devils had turned on their machines.
The owners of the factory, who had never set foot in the valley, had paid an artist to paint giant pictures of their ugly phone cats on the side of the factory. Walking past his giant feline tormentors always put the old man in a foul mood, and he shuffled past this morning with his brows even more deeply furrowed than normal. Lu Huang was very worried about this crop. If it did not come good, he would have trouble paying his bills. The man from the fertiliser factory called every day, until Lu Huang’s old phone was cut off because he could not pay that bill either.
Soon the man from the fertiliser factory would be at his door, probably with police officers.
That was how Xi Peng and Hua Fong had lost their farms to the diabolical cat phone people.
These dark thoughts stayed with Lu Huang until he reached the gate of his small holding. The sun was rising and it looked like another day without clouds or the promise of rain. The cast iron gate creaked on its hinges as he pushed through. The outlines of scarecrows slumped and forlorn against the lightening sky. No birds had yet tried to steal his crop.
Lu Huang’s frail and aged heart beat a little more slowly as he neared the first rows of bokchoi.
No birds would be foolish enough to make a meal of these plants.
There was enough light now for him to see that the dark spots which had speckled the first shoots of his crop were gone. The entire crop was gone. It had turned black and withered away to ruin while he slept.
Lu Huang slowly fell to his knees and wept for all that he had lost.
Severino Munoz pushed the small wooden rowboat away from the wharf. The boy jumped in at the last minute, holding the rope that had secured them to the rotting timbers of the dock. The boy was still young, with the spindly thinness of an early teen. His eyes twinkled with the adventure of it all and he moved about the small wooden boat with the surefooted grace of one born to the water.
Severino smiled at him, but it was an effort. They would row for two hours, even with the tide in their favour, to reach the nets off Punta La Madre and he feared it would all be for nought. The nets caught nothing but plastic bags and bottles these days. The anchovies which once teemed in these waters, which had sustained the families of La Madre and Playa Blanca and Puerto Valero, they were all gone, it seemed.
The boy did not care. Not yet.
He was just happy to be out on the water with his uncle, even if it meant many hours of hauling an oar, roasting in the sun and dragging himself home with nothing to show for the effort. The boy’s father, brother to Severino’s wife, had drowned out here under these very waves not three years ago and it had fallen to Severino to raise his nephew to manhood.
Manhood could wait, thought the fisherman, as he pulled at the oars and watched the boy from under the brim of his old hat.
Manhood was just debt, fear and the struggle not to give up at the end of every godforsaken day. Why did the boy need to rush towards such a future? Severino had more than enough of these sorrows to suffice.
“Uncle, where do the fish go?” the boy asked.
Severino grunted unintelligibly. Often that was enough. The boy just needed to know he was listening. With an audience he would babble on for hours about this and that, none of it especially interesting or important. Severino did not mind. It passed the time out here, and increasingly it felt as though time was all he had.
But today the boy wanted answers.
“The man on the radio said it is El Nino again. He said El Nino chases away the fish.”
“Sometimes this is so,” Severino agreed, and kept rowing. They had passed out through the heads of the tiny bay in which their village nestled between low, scrubby hills. The sun still reflected fiercely off the white render of their homes and places of business, but soon all that would fall below the horizon.
“But mama says no,” the boy protested. “Mama says there is no El Nino to chase away the fish, and if there was there would still be no fish to chase away.”
Severino did not care for this line of talk.
His sister was too smart for her own good sometimes. The boy did not need to bother himself with these things at his age. Why should he be given to worry over such matters? The coming and going of El Nino had shaped the lives of fishermen for as long anybody remembered. Years, decades, before the gringo scientists had arrived to study the waters off Punta La Madre, the men of the district had known that there were times when the ocean grew warmer than usual and the anchovies disappeared. Usually it happened just before Christmas. Prayers to the Christ child were always more fervent in those years. But this had been so for centuries, and for centuries the fish had always come back.
Not this year, though.
His sister Madelena was correct in that much at least. The gringo scientists, the government men in Santiago, the yammering fools on the radio, they all agreed that El Nino had gone away last year.
The fish should be back.
“Did the fish always come back when you were a boy?” Severino’s nephew asked.
“Of course. I would not be here otherwise,” the man said, regretting his foolishness as soon as the words left his mouth.
“Then how will I row the boat when you are gone and the fish with you?” the boy asked.
His tone was not plaintive, or scared.
He just wanted to know how his uncle was going to make everything right.
Severino had made everything right after the boy’s father drowned. Severino had even made everything right when Chile had fallen out of the World Cup.
Severino would surely make this right too. He would bring back the fish. He would win the World Cup. He would protect the boy and raise him well, until the boy was a man, and it was his turn to take out the boat and make everything well.
Severino said nothing.
He pulled on the oars as the sun beat down on them, two small specks of life dragging themselves across the vast wasteland of a dead sea.
The nets were still hours away.
Perhaps today would be different.
Timothy Santo marvelled at his cup of coffee. Not because it was unusually good or bad, but because his secretary told him it had cost nearly eight hundred vatu. Seven US dollars, more or less. The Foreign Minister of Vanuatu had an MBA from the University of California, and his family exported cocoa to the US, a business which made him sensitive to fluctuations in currency and commodity prices. This morning he was feeling particularly sensitive, and not just about his very expensive cup of rather ordinary coffee.
Vanuatu was in crisis.
You couldn’t tell that, looking out of Santo’s office window over downtown Port Vila. It was still early in the day. Most shops and businesses were closed and only a few tourists had ventured forth to seek out a cheaper and more adventurous breakfast than the fare on offer at their hotel buffet. It looked so tranquil, he thought. Palm trees swaying gently in the early morning breeze. The rising sun dappling the blue waters of the Pacific. Boats swaying at anchor in the marina across the street from his office. A paradise, in fact.
But a paradise which could no longer feed itself or pay to import food from anywhere else.
Santo had all the briefings on his desk, but he did not need them. His wife had rung him late the previous day to confirm that the bank was calling in the loan they had taken out two years earlier, to expand operations at the main family plantation. The drought had not broken with the change in the Southern Oscillation Index, the measurement of sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific that was bound up so closely with weather patterns from South America to India. The drought had not broken. Two crops had failed.
And now Timothy Santo was bankrupt. But that was the least of his problems.
He would have to tender his resignation to the President later today, but first he had one last duty to perform for the island republic. The drought which destroyed his family business, and with it his political career, had also collapsed the island’s kava and coconut industries and, unsurprisingly, the businesses of his competitors in the cocoa trade. Vanuatu was as broke as its Foreign Minister.
Worse than that though, it would soon go hungry if the government could not work a solution.
Fish stocks had declined precipitously around the archipelago, a dire development for a society where ninety-nine percent of the population still fished by rod and hand line for sustenance an average of three times a week. The small village farms which had once grown foodstuffs like taro, yams and bananas had largely given way to commercial crop plantations.
Just like the one his family owned.
Sorry.
Had owned.
Maybe once upon a time everybody could have been given seeds and a shovel and told to fend for themselves. But not now.
Keen-eyed observers might have noticed that some shelves in the capital’s supermarkets were not being restocked as quickly as usual. The loss of foreign currency earnings had finally flowed through to the local economy, out on the street. It was probably days from seizing up completely.
Santo’s heart quickened when he thought about it. He could not bear to read the reports on his desk. The language was dry. The figures were impersonal. But the warning was stark.
Unemployment. Hyper-inflation. Financial collapse.
All of it, coming for them.
The minister jumped so violently at the knock on his door that he spilled half of his very expensive coffee down his shirt, staining it beyond all hope of just dabbing out a few spots.
His secretary, Mary, stood in the doorway, eyes wide, staring at the brown patch on his white shirt.
“The… ambassador is here,” she said.
“Damn,” Santo, cursed. The drink was hot, and it had scalded him a little. More importantly he was not fit to receive his visitor and he had no time to change into the clean shirt he kept in his office closet. His suit jacket was draped over the back of his office chair and Mary gestured at it in desperation.
“Great idea”, he mouthed silently, given her a thumbs-up.
Putting down the rest of the coffee, he quickly pulled on the coat and did up the buttons. It seemed to hide the stain and he was resolved to ignore the discomfort. The small puddle on his desk he hid by moving an in-tray. The liquid spilled on the carpet behind his desk was not visible to anybody but him.
“Please, Mary,” Timothy Santo said with commendable false cheer. “Do show the ambassador in.”
A moment later a tall, well-dressed Chinese man appeared in the doorway, smiling.
Ambassador Yu Wenhao.
“I do hope this is convenient,” he said.
“Of course, of course, come in,” Santo said, suddenly mortified by the fear that he made have splashed coffee on his pants too.
The Ambassador did not seem to notice anything awry, not even with the awkward way Santo moved to shake his hand while holding his suit jacket closed.
“Please, Mr. Ambassador, do sit down.”
Yu Wenhao took the armchair in front of Santo’s desk. Vanuatu’s Foreign Minister dropped into his own seat with something like blessed relief.
“I am very grateful you could make time to see me at this difficult juncture,” Yu said.
Santo’s smile faltered just little bit.
“Difficult?”
The Chinese official nodded but said nothing.
“Well I don’t know that I would characterise things as difficult,” Santo said, recovering as best he could. Nobody outside the Cabinet had yet been briefed on the true scope of the looming crisis. Yu had been invited here under the ever-so-slightly false pretence that they were to discuss routine revisions to the structure of the loans - credit that Beijing had advanced the tiny island nation for a host of infrastructure programs that none of the usual western aid donors would consider.
“Oh,” said Yu. “I see. That is good to hear, Minister. I am advised that your country is three days from defaulting on a number of loans, and that the government itself will run out of money by Friday.”
The words were spoken as though they did not imply the end of the world as Santo knew it. Yu managed to sound both relieved and disbelieving at the same time.
Santo, meanwhile was reeling.
The room actually seemed to spin around him for a few seconds.
“How could you know…” he started to say before stopping himself.
He had not meant to speak aloud, but in the chaos of his tumbling thoughts and trip hammering heart, Timothy Santo momentarily lost control of himself.
“The Chinese side always does its due diligence, Minister,” Yu said, occasioning another lurch of Santo’s heart.
Whenever these people started talking about ‘the Chinese side’ you knew you were in trouble.
“The Chinese side is well aware of the fiscal difficulties in which the Republic of Vanuatu finds itself,” the ambassador went on. “But the Chinese side requires that, compliant with the terms of the loans advanced to the Republic, all payments are to be made on schedule, or failing that, the entirety of the outstanding balance be paid by the close of business in Beijing tomorrow.”
Santo opened his mouth to reply, but nothing came out.
Ambassador Yu stared at him, saying nothing.
“But… but…” the Foreign Minister said, before running out of words.
Yu smiled.
“But perhaps we might come to an arrangement, he said.
7
The Oakland Shoot
Jody Sarjanen hated these handovers. She especially hated the need to do them on neutral ground, because it forced her to wait for Chad in places like this, the McDonald’s off Junipero Serra Boulevard, about a mile southwest of the little Oceanview bungalow she shared with Ellie and her son, Max.
“The worst house in the best street,” Ellie would say, setting up one of their favourite jokes.
“If you’re a crack dealer looking for a starter home,” Jody would reply with a lopsided smile and stagey eye roll.
She wasn’t smiling this morning. Chad was late, as usual, and she had to sit inside Micky D’s because it was a hundred and six outside and she couldn’t afford to run the AC in the car. The gas tank was super low and later today she had to drive to Oakland for a photoshoot, before picking Ellie up from work in Temescal and looping back across the bridge to get home. Maybe there’d be enough gas in the tank… hopefully there would be.
Anybody sneaking a look at the striking young woman in the booth by the window—and a couple of customers both male and female did do just that—would have seen a tall, composed and distantly elegant woman nursing a large, professional looking camera bag. They might have imagined her a model, waiting on a photographer. Her straight, shoulder length hair, pulled back into a severe ponytail was almost shockingly blonde, a natural icy colour that evoked the glaciers and frozen lakes of her Finnish ancestry. If you were bold enough to stare openly at such an exotic beauty, you might have noticed the slight twitching at the corner of one eye; but only if you stared closely. Otherwise, there was no obvious sign of the wild emotional currents that roared within her.
One long leg jigged under the table as she stared vacantly through the dark tangle of electricity poles and wires sagging in the heat. A few storefronts, half of them empty, a gas station, and a Korean corner market seemed to dance in the heat shimmer. A No. 54 bus rumbled past, belching thick oily fumes, adding to the unkempt, defeated appearance of the streetscape.
McDonalds was a comparative haven of clean lines and cool air, but there was no escaping the smell of fried meat and hot grease, forcing Jody to breathe through her mouth while trying not to gag. Whenever she attended to the smell of burning flesh, her throat would close up. So she fixed her attention outside, beyond the plate glass window that was hot to the touch, despite the air conditioning. There just weren’t that many places in Oceanview where she could take custody of her son in a safe and public place. She would have preferred the library on Randolph Street, but Chad was banned from there. He was very loud; no more so than when he was yelling at the ‘fatties’ and the ‘book chodes’ that they should get off their lazy butts and burn some ‘ass cheddar’ at the gym.
With him.
Chad.
Chief executive asskicker of Body By Chad, premium provider of personal training in the Oceanview metropolitan area.
So the library was out.
As was the new playground across from Sheridan Elementary, Max’s K-5 school. It had been claimed by a gang. Not the Vietnamese 5T or the O.G. wannabes in the sad little white homie crew that haunted the failing mall on Sagamore. No. Jody was scared of running into the mothers’ group which had turned on her when she bailed on Chad and hooked up with Ellie. They loved to hang out and brunch under the shade trees in the park. Not that she thought they’d be there today. Their boob jobs would melt in this heat.
She just wanted to get her kid and be gone.
Dinostar Records had commissioned the Oakland shoot, and they were pretty good at paying their invoices on time. But ‘on time’ meant that their three hundred bucks still wouldn’t drop into her PayPal for another week. And Ellie wouldn’t get paid until Friday night. El could bring food home from the restaurant, which was great, but you couldn’t run a car on leftover tabbouleh.
