Leila Manjoun has a problem. She’s bringing several tons of medical supplies into Myanmar, part of her work for an NGO called Helping Hands. They’re held up in customs, either because Helping Hands refuses to bribe officials or something more sinister. Then she realizes she’s being followed. By a series of accidents she becomes witness to an off-limits facility on the Chinese border. “When she tried to plot the location … on a map, she couldn’t find the road… . It wasn’t on maps.” And it “couldn’t be found using the expensive, proprietary satellite-mapping service she had access to.” Leila emails a few acquaintances about it and suddenly not only is she thrown out of the country, but her father, a middle school principal in Tarzana, Calif., has been framed for possession of child pornography.
That’s the beginning of David Shafer’s comic thriller “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.” If you need the name deciphered, be aware that it’s military lingo for “W…T…F”, the abbreviation for a common expletive.
“WTF” just gets wilder and wilder, as Leila finds that she’s run afoul of a conspiracy, known only as “the Committee,” to get control of all the personal information in the world (not just your social security and credit card numbers, but your emails, your phone conversations, your personal preferences and the words that trigger your gut reactions). The committee’s plan is, first, to crash everybody’s computers and sell all their data back to them, and, second, to use the data to decide which 5 percent of the world’s population is worth leaving alive.
For the reader, there’s a little bit of WTF about the three characters. The second we’re introduced to, Leo Crane, has a problem, too. At first, his problem seems to be that he’s somewhat paranoid and definitely nonconformist.
He delights the parents at the daycare where he works by writing honest summaries of their kids’ days on the report forms: “TODAY WE PLAYED WITH ___. Blocks. Who woulda thunk?” Or, “TODAY WE ATE___, …Fish sticks flaccid, but juice boxes especially cold.” His attitude gets him fired, and then, because of his paranoid tendencies, he publishes a broadside about something that sounds a lot like the Committee.
That lands him in a psychiatric facility that is nominally open door, but actually has features like high fences and speed bumps that turn into tire traps.
Luckily for Leo and Leila, the conspiracy has its opponents. Although most of the U.S. intelligence agencies have already been corrupted, the Postal Inspection Service, founded by Ben Franklin, is still honest, and one of its agents steers Leila to a countercultural network called Dear Diary, which has created an alternate Internet using bioengineered plant-based computers that can’t be detected when they go through airport screening. (As I’ve said, it just keeps getting wilder and wilder.)
Dear Diary has a plan. The plan involves Mark Devereux, formerly Leo’s best friend, who has become a key advisor to one of the Committee’s top people, all because of his smarmy ghost-written book that essentially tells its readers they can have as much as they want. Mark isn’t really one of the bad guys; he’s just misguided and a bit greedy. He may be persuaded to smuggle a computer virus into the committee’s secure facility.
If “WTF” had been written a couple of years ago, before Edward Snowden’s revelations about National Security Association spying, the scale of the Committee’s plan might seem ludicrously over the top. As it is, it only seems a bit beyond this year’s headlines.
The virtue of the book, besides being a great read, is that it points out that government spying is only one threat to our privacy these days — and probably not even the biggest. Almost everybody seems to accept without worry that private corporations can collect any kind of data about us they want; in fact (as happens in the book), people are generally happy to jump into networks that encourage them to give up the most intimate details of their lives. Presumably, they assume all that will happen with this data is they’ll get targeted ads.
Of course, Shafer is none too serious about this. And if the corporate conspirators almost seem within the range of credibility, Dear Diary is a bit far out. Plant-based computers? Fake identities with names like “Sarah Tonin” and “Paige Turner”? An “eye test” that gives you a subliminal connection to everyone in the organization, as well as a unique 15-digit number that captures your essence? As Leo and Leila fall in love, they discover that Leo’s eye test number is the square root of Leila’s: They were fated for each other! WTF? Shafer is having a lot of fun here, and the reader will, too.
Be forewarned: This is clearly only the first of a series (the Dear Diary trilogy?). The end of the book is a cliffhanger. The only thing you can know for sure is that defeating the bad guys isn’t going to be as easy as Leila and Leo think.
Book Review - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot by David Shafer