Level 25 - Chapter 3

Level 25

Chapter 3 - Dropping Out

As Norma entered “The Illustrious Lotus”, a small Tibetan diner in the heart of Tirane’s ramshackle industrial district, the setting sun made valiant, but generally unsuccessful efforts to poke through the grimy, acidic clouds which seemed to hover perpetually over the hundreds of decrepit factories and foundries, warehouses and sweatshops comprising the district. A few of these manufacturing concerns were shuttered and abandoned, their once-bustling loading docks and machine rooms now haunted only by rats and the invisible homeless. The owners of these companies had squeezed every last drop of energy from the beleaguered workers, produced a glut of gadgets craved by the affluent West, and then taken the money and run.
But most of the shops in Tirane still operated at full capacity—two twelve hour shifts, round-the-clock production. Labor was cheap in Albania—very cheap—cheaper in fact than the robots which had been installed years earlier by Western investors seeking to modernize Eastern Europe’s ancient industrial base. But when the N.R.O. emerged as the dominant force in the Eastern Hemisphere and made clear its intentions in Albania, the nervous investors pulled out their robots and leased them instead to NASA for use in the extra-terrestrial mining experiment. The robots were replaced, for the most part, by desperate refugees who were fleeing the onslaught of the imperialist Chinese and had become stranded in Albania’s revitalized rust belt, without proper documents and without money. They were willing to work long, dirty, dangerous hours for peanuts, until they’d saved enough to secure passage to the Free Zone in Western Europe. The typical paycheck for a 72-hour week was 20 redfrancs. (1 redfranc in 2018 was equivalent to 3 dollars in the C.S.A.) Many never made it to the Free Zone—they were either worked to death, or languished, forgotten, in the corrugated tin and particle board shanty towns which ringed the industrial district and which gave scant shelter to the miserable workers and their broken dreams.
While an air raid horn wailed relentlessly, Norma sat at a window-facing counter in the gritty lunch cart, eating tsampeh—barley bread—which she dunked in a bowl of thin potato soup. She ate slowly and listlessly, alternating her gaze between a T.V. atop a cooler stocked with fruit juice, and the scene on the street outside. On the T.V., a correspondent for the N.R.O. World News Service was reporting that the leaders of the Czech Republic had invited representatives to the C.S.S.I.P.S. to Prague to assist the Czechs in forming a new, more enlightened government, under the name “the Czech People’s Republic”, the 23rd star in the N.R.O.’s red and yellow hammer-crescent-star flag. Norma knew this was bullshit. Earlier in the day, N.R.O. gunships hovering over Prague’s administrative district had used lasers to “soften up” the Czech nationalists and then moved in with tanks and APC’s and “invited” the Czech president and his cabinet to line up against a wall in the courtyard of the Parliament Building.
Anyway, Norma thought, it didn’t really matter whether the Chinese told the truth or not—the people were resigned to their fate—in this part of the world, at least, here on the border between tyranny and poverty. She watched, through the grease-besmirched window, the day-shift workers shuffling home down the street full of pot-holes and oily, rainbow-hued puddles, with heads down and shoulders drawn in, lunch pails in one hand and heavily patched packets and frayed sweaters in the other. Many were accosted by young street urchins, orphans mainly, who roamed the alleyways, scavenging garbage cans for food during the day and at night rolling the occasional hapless drunk for the few centimes in his pocket. These children had to wait until they were twelve years old to work in the mills, but many never made it that far. Some of the homeward bound workers took pity and gave the youngsters whatever leftover crumbs their lunchboxes held. Norma watched as one extravagant machinist pulled a shiny coin from his pocket. Immediately he was surrounded by a swarm of the filthy tots; he tried swatting them away as they threatened to pig-pile on him. Finally, in desperation, he pulled out a few more coins, threw them in the air, and while the children were distracted, he made good his escape. Norma chuckled. She could identify with these kids—been there, done that—some things never change, not in the Balkans, maybe not anywhere, she thought cynically. She’d been just like these scrappers, but there wasn’t a whole lot of warmth in her heart for them—maternal instincts were completely lacking in Norma.
By the time the streets were clear again, she had finished her supper. She left her stool and walked to the back of the diner, where a young, bored-looking woman sat at the cash register, leafing through a magazine.
“Where’s Lobsang?” Norma asked the cashier.
“I dunno,” the young woman mumbled and shrugged, “probably in the kitchen or down in the cellar.” She glanced up at Norma for a millisecond. One of the more fortunate of Albania’s youth, Norma thought, staring down at this strikingly, yet demurely beautiful young woman.
She was Pemma, the 16-year old daughter of Lobsang, who owned “The Illustrious Lotus”, one of the few remaining Tibetan diners in Greater Tirane. Lobsang had immigrated to Albania 18 years earlier, fleeing the genocide inflicted by China on the Tibetans—not only on the Tibetans in Tibet, but also on those who had earlier taken refuge in Ladakh, Kashmir, Nepal, and India. It was a tragic chain of disasters which had engulfed the Tibetans, a peaceful, religious, and very isolationist race of people who had preserved their traditional Buddhist culture for hundreds of generations high in the Himalayans: The Chinese occupied their country in 1950 and for 50 years waged a campaign of oppression against the Tibetans, destroying all their monasteries, killing all the monks and nuns, selling ancient texts and tonkhas to unscrupulous Western art dealers, and doing whatever they could think of to wipe out a beautiful way of life and enslave a freedom-loving people. But as long as the spiritual and political leader of the Tibetans, the Dalai Lama, lived in exile in Dharamsala, India, the Chinese could not complete their mission.
Finally, though, in 1999, half a million Red Army soldiers made the arduous trek across the Himalayans into Nepal, capturing Kathmandu after a brief skirmish, then stormed into northern India like a huge swarm of angry killer bees. Tibetan refugee camps were targeted, but these camps had been expecting an invasion for months and were prepared. Young Tibetans, once committed to non-violence, had formed militias, led by militant Khampas, descendants of the famed warriors of the eastern province of Kham in Tibet. But they were no match in numbers or weaponry for the Chinese. And they were totally abandoned by their Indian hosts, who had grown weary of their presence. They were decimated. Meanwhile, Chinese special agents hunted down the Dalai Lama in Sri Lanka, where he was being guarded by Tamil separatists, and ruthlessly assassinated him, along with his entourage. China offered as justification to an outraged world the unsubstantiated claim that the Dalai Lama had encouraged his people to take up arms against the Chinese.
Lobsang was one of the Khampas who had tried, in vain, to rally the Tibetans against the Chinese, and one of the few to survive the last ethnic cleansing of the twentieth century. At 21 years of age he was able to make a new life for himself in Tirane. He found work as a packer in a walkie talkie factory. He met his Albanian wife there and after a year they said to hell with it, quit their jobs, and opened “The Illustrious Lotus”. A year later Pemma was born and shortly thereafter Lobsang lost his wife to a typhus epidemic which ravaged Tirane.
Norma entered the kitchen. Lobsang wasn’t there. A table in the middle of the room was covered with mixing bowls, spoons, a rolling pin, can opener, and several other items. On a shelf on one wall were a variety of pots and pans, spatulas. Whips, and measuring cups; on another shelf were plates and bowls and flatware for serving meals. In an n alcove at one end of the kitchen were cans and boxes of dry goods; a stove and oven occupied the other end of the kitchen; two refrigerators and a freezer also took up residence there. It was a minimalist kitchen. The truth was: “The illustrious Lotus” had few customers—it was a front. Lobsang ran a lucrative sideline.
Soon after his wife had died, Lobsang changed. He no longer dreamed of the day when the Tibetans reclaimed their homeland. He didn’t think it would ever happen—not in his lifetime, anyway—so why bust his hump, day in and day out? He found an easier way to make money—collaborating with the enemy, the Chinese, who, he realized, would one day rule the world. With his contacts in Switzerland—the descendants of Tibetans who took refuge there in the 1960s and ‘70s—Lobsang served as a conduit for the Chinese government functionaries who needed to stash huge sums of money, swag from imperialist incursions, into numbered accounts in Swiss banks. In addition, he served as an intermediary in Albania for the Chinese intelligence bureaus and the freelance agents, such as Norma, they employed.
Norma walked through the kitchen, down a short hallway past the restroom—‘out of order’, a common state of affairs for basic services in Eastern Europe—and down creaky, unlit stairs into the musty cellar where Lobsang had his cramped office. He was seated behind a small metal desk. In his hand he held a palm-top computer which he was talking to—it was linked to a fiber optic viewphone line. On the screen was an aged Asian face. It was saying,”…under no conditions are agents to neglect their I-15 reports. It won’t be tolerated. Understood?”
“Yes, Feng-Li, you can count on it. Over and out,” Lobsang replied.
“Over and out,” the voice from the palm-top repeated, and then the face disappeared, replaced by an icon representing a disconnected communications link. Lobsang snapped shut the palm-top, not very much larger than a woman’s make-up compact, and set it down on the desk. He looked up at Norma and smiled.
“Right on time, sweet’ums,” he said playfully.
“You know me, ace,” she bantered back as she sat in a folding chair in the corner by a water cooler, whose noisy refrigerator unit kicked on and off at irregular intervals. Overhead, a 45-watt bulb under an imitation Tiffany shade offered a pleasant ambience—“Gemütlichkeit” was the word that came to Norma’s mind. The low light put everything into a soft focus, including Norma’s mood—a pleasant change form the jarring street scene upstairs. The medicinal Tibetan incense which sent up snakes of smoke from the desktop completed the perfect setting. “Oh my aching dogs,” she muttered as she stretched out her long legs. Rainy, dreary days like this one seemed to remind her of her approaching middle age.
“You’re not too concerned with security these days,” Norma said, pointing to the wide open door.
“Oh, Pemma warns me of any unwelcome company,” Lobsang countered, pointing to the ceiling, “there’s a button on the side of the cash register she can press.”
“She seems dead to the world up there.”
“Ohhh, she’s very hip to the scene, as you say, she is a good outlook…uh, I mean lookout.”
“I’m sure of it,” Norma said, though she didn’t sound convinced. Then she added, with a touch of uncharacteristic sincerity, “ She’s certainly a beautiful girl..”
“She takes after her mother.” After a few moments he added, with a toothy grin, “I sure hope she doesn’t emu—, emu—, uh, take after her father.” He laughed and threw up his hands, signaling his frustration with the Russian language, the only language he and Norma had in common. After ten years he still stumbled over certain idioms and vocabulary. But they could communicate well enough for their purposes—much better than ten years ago when they used a translator program to converse: Norma would type in a sentence, the computer would translate it into Tibetan and then Lobsang would take his turn—hunt and peck—he didn’t know how to type; their meetings would take forever to conclude. Gradually, a bond was formed—mutual trust and mutual advantage. But there was a limit to how close she would get, so she taught him Russian, instead of her native Serbian. Besides, Russian was the lingua franca of espionage in the Eastern Hemisphere.
“Oh, stop it!” she chided Lobsang for his self-deprecation. “So, where’s the meet? And when?”
“Tomorrow morning at 11:00 you must be at the corner of Main Street and the Avenue of the Martyrs, between the newspaper kiosk and the statue of Deng Xiao-Ping. Peel off your eyes for a man in a gray suit with a hammer-crescent-and-star lapel pin.”
Norma stifled a giggle induced by his latest idiomatic blunder.
“What’s funny?”
“Oh, nothing…say, Lobsang, there’s something I need to discuss with you…some financial matters, and…well, I can trust you, can’t I?”
“Of course, Norma. What is it? How can I be of a service for you?”
“It’s my account in Switzerland. First I want you to deposit this check.” She pulled a small credit card-sized piece of plastic out of her pocket and handed it to Lobsang. It had a bar code on one side and a magnetic strip on the other. Otherwise it bore no markings. “It’s 3000 redfrancs. Down payment on the Level 25 job. Then I want you to wait until you receive a v-mail message from a Sergei Andronikus. When that happens I want you to transfer 10,000 redfrancs to Pemma’s account and transfer the balance to this account in the Cayman Islands.” She handed Lobsang another card, similar in appearance, but this one was red where the other was green. “Then close the Swiss account, but do it using this ISPAC”—another card, this time blue, with a small microchip embedded in it—“and don’t breathe a word of any of this…capeesh?”
Lobsang gave her a puzzled look.
“Mum’s the word…don’t say anything about any of this, okay?”
Finally, understanding dawned on him. “You can count on it, sugar.” He swiveled around in his chair, moved aside a framed picture of the Potala in Lhasa to reveal a safe recessed in the wall. He held his face close to the safe and pressed a button on the door; a beam of laser light swept across his eyeball—a retinal scan—and the safe’s door swung open. He deposited the cards in the safe, closed the door, swung back the picture of his lost nation’s beloved landmark, and then turned back to Norma with another puzzled look: “I’ll do all this for you, but first, please tell me: why? Are you leaving us? Is Level 25 done and you’ve had enough? You can tell me…I am mum, no?”
Norma said nothing, just stared at Lobsang’s weather-beaten face.
“You’ve been a good friend…this is the important thing,” said Lobsang softly.

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The following morning Norma stood at the appointed spot in downtown Tirane, waiting to meet with a representative of N.R.O. intelligence. There was a chill in the air and it went right to Norma’s bones. She felt apprehensive. She had a premonition that this meeting would not end well. She glanced up at the muezzin’s tower in the square; it had been converted into a clock tower, its digital display read 11:00. As if on cue, a middle-aged Chinese man in a gray suit, sporting the imperial herald on his lapel, strode up to her.
“Come along,” he said quite simply, and lightly clasped his right hand around Norma’s left elbow. He led her around the corner and down a side street where a wheezing, sputtering 20 year old Ford Crown Victoria awaited them. (Only occasionally did one see automobiles in Albania, always chauffeuring about Chinese officials, usually older internal combustion models, sometimes newer electric ones. The N.R.O.’s MagLev network was confined to Greater Beijing.) Norma and the N.R.O. agent climbed into the Ford’s back seat and the car lurched off in the direction of the industrial district.
They rode in silence for a few minutes. The man in the gray suit sat on her left and on her right sat a much older man wearing a worker’s shirt of the sort favored by the immortalized Deng Xiao-Ping (in fact, the man resembled the late Chinese leader.) Up front, beside the driver, a young Azerbaijani, sat another elderly Chinese intelligence official who assumed an air of grave self-importance. Norma wondered, What was up with all the brass hats today?
Finally, Deng’s doppelganger spoke up: “Have you reestablished contact yet with the Yankee cur, Nick?”
Norma hesitated, then answered, “I’ve tried repeatedly, but he appears to have vanished.” Three weeks had elapsed since she met “Hubert Burns” in cyber-Casablanca. “It makes no sense, ‘cause he gave me his Web address and he seemed real interested …in meeting me again, that is.” For some reason unknown to her she blushed.
“Since when have these Western infodustrial pigs ever made any sense?” the elderly agent in the front seat asked rhetorically.
Norma put forth her theory: “I was beginning to think that maybe you, uh, had him eliminated. That maybe you decided that no one having Level 25 was better than everyone having it. And that you’d—“
Deng’s look-alike cut her off: “You impetuous wench! You wish that we’d decided on some such nonsense! Because you want off the case—or,” he paused for a few moments, looked out the car window, then back at Norma, “or maybe you want to retire, after you sell Level 25 to the highest bidder in the Third World! We suspect that you have contacts in some of the Service Sector Nations—Germany, Benelux, Amalgamated Britain. We know that your boyfriend did.” And with this he pulled Norma’s pay card, Cayman Islands bankcard, and phony ISPAC card out of his pocket and waved them furiously in front of her face.
No! she thought, Lobsang! Pemma!
The man in the gray suit pulled a syringe out of his breast pocket. “Please don’t kill me!” Norma pleaded.
“No…we’re just sending you on a little trip, to finish the job you’ve been hire to perform,” said Deng’s evil twin, as the gray-suited official inserted the needle into a small vial of black-market Trianeze.