He saw that on her face and lunged toward her. They both had stood up instinctively. “You gave me away!” His terrified face inches from hers.
“I didn’t!”
And because she hadn’t, she could meet his wild-eyed glare with one of her own. For a second they stood there locked in a gaze beyond telling, both of them panicked.
“There are cameras everywhere,” she said. “We must have been seen out on the street.”
“Go tell them you’re okay.” He put his hand in the pocket with the gun.
“All right.”
Heart pounding harder than ever, she went to her door, out onto the landing, down the flights of internal stairs to the building’s outside door on the ground floor. She opened it, keeping the chain on.
Two police officers, or perhaps private security. “Minister Murphy?”
“Yes, what is it?”
“We received a report that you were seen entering your apartment with a man.”
“Yes,” she said, thinking hard. “He’s a friend, there’s no problem.”
“He’s not listed among your known friends.”
“I don’t like the implications of that,” she said sharply, “but for now, just know that he’s the son of an old schoolmate of mine from Ireland. I tell you it’s all right. Thanks for checking on me.”
She closed the door on them and went back upstairs.
Her apartment was empty.
She wandered around. No one there. Finally she checked the door that led out onto the little balcony hanging over the back lot of the place. It had been left ajar. All dark down there. Overhead, the bare branches of the giant linden that covered the yard blocked the stars with a black pattern. She leaned over the metal railing, looked down. Probably one could downclimb one of the big square posts at the outer corners of the balcony. She wouldn’t have wanted to try it herself, but the young man had looked like someone who wouldn’t be stopped by having to downclimb a single story.
“I told them you were a friend,” she said angrily to the darkness.
She was angry at him and at herself. Her mind raced. She felt sick. It took about a minute for her to run through her options and realize what she had to do. She ran back inside and down the stairs to the outside door, ran out into the street calling, “Police! Police! Come back here! Come back!”
And then they were back, hustling to her fast and staring at her curiously. She told them that she had had to lie to them to keep all three of them from being shot by the man who had been with her. He had seized her in the street, held her at gunpoint; he was gone now, having left while she was talking to them. All true, though ever so incomplete. She realized as she spoke to them that she would never be able to tell anyone what had really happened. Things like that hour were not tellable.
They were on their radios, alerting their colleagues. They led her upstairs, guns drawn. She sat back down on her kitchen chair, took a deep breath. Her hands were shaking. It was going to be a long night.
26
You can hide but you can’t run.
There were cameras everywhere, of course. On the public transport systems, in the stores, on the streets. If he went out to get food, he would pass by surveillance cameras several times no matter where he went. If he tried to leave the country, there would be passport control. Not so much within Europe, but still, a check could happen; if he traveled, he would eventually get checked. He had a fake passport, but he didn’t trust it would work in situations like that. He was stuck here, in one of the most surveiled countries on Earth.
But he had already learned where and how to hide. He had a place to live; high on the side of the Zuriberg, overlooking the city, were several blocks of community gardens. These plots of terraced and cultivated land were studded by little wooden garden sheds, storage containers for tools and fertilizers and pesticides and the like. One of them had a side wall panel he had pried off in a way he could glue back into position, and once inside the shed he could replace the panel and lie on the floor in his down sleeping bag, and be gone by dawn, leaving no sign of his incursion. This shed he could use as his base. He could hide in Zurich itself.
His fake passport had been the passport of a man back in the States who had died and never had a death certificate filed. Frank’s photo had been inserted into it, and to that extent he was this other man, Jacob Salzman. It would stay good for another three years. And he had created a credit card in that name, with some money in the account; and he had converted most of his remaining money to fifty-euro bills. He had a visa for his fake ID that allowed him to stay in Switzerland for most of the coming year, and a supposed job back in America, and an apartment rented in that name down in the city. All that had gone well, over a year ago. There were cameras at the entrance to that apartment building, of course, but the back door that led to the trash compactor didn’t have a camera, so he could come and go by that back way sometimes, and use the apartment’s bathroom. As Salzman he was a member of one of the lake swim clubs, and could use those facilities too.
And all day he could walk. He could wander without revealing his presence in any obtrusive way. He ate from food stalls that didn’t have cameras, and bought other food from Migros, and spent his days in parks where the cameras were few. Thus he lived a life that was not much registering in the system, but was not flagrantly off-grid either. Just low profile. No doubt after kidnapping a UN ministry head and forcibly entering her apartment and spending a night haranguing her, he was the subject of a big police search. Not to mention what had happened down at Lake Maggiore. Salzman might have to be abandoned. But for a good while, at least, he could hide just a kilometer or two from the minister’s apartment. And so, for the time being, he did.
27
Now Mary had a new problem: twenty-four-hour police protection.
Of course there were worse problems to have, but it was surprising how upsetting it was to Mary, until she considered it: she had lost her life. Or at least her habits, her privacy. Sad to consider that these were much of what her life had come to.
After the police were done with their questions and investigations that night, she went to bed and tried to get some sleep, and failed. Police officers were still in her kitchen, and downstairs outside the front door. That was likely to remain true for the foreseeable future. She damned her kidnapper with a million damns; she was hating him more and more, the more she thought about it.
Even though what he had said nagged at her. Even though the memory of his face troubled her. His wild-eyed conviction that he was right. Usually she disliked and distrusted people like that, but he had been different, she had to admit. A terrible conviction had been forced into him. His brush with death had made him mad. Although in the end he had only shouted at her. Kidnapped her to argue with her— then also, her bathroom door swinging shut on her— in some ways he had fought hard to hold it together, to do nothing more than persuade her. Words like fists to the face. Paper bullets of the brain. It was enough to make her heart hammer all over again. Her face burned with the memory.
So she went into the office that morning in a very foul mood. They had promised her they would keep her apprised of their progress in the case, but she doubted she would learn anything important or timely. The young man had seemed confident of his ability to hide. That in itself was strange. No one should have that confidence, especially not in Switzerland. She wondered if he had some hideaway in Zurich, or near it, so that he could get to it quickly and go to ground, wouldn’t have to go on the run.
She would find out later. Or not. Meanwhile she would be accompanied by bodyguards wherever she went, and some polite Swiss woman or man, or a trio of them, would be installed in her apartment with her. Damn damn damn. The damned fool— she could have killed him.
At her office people crowded around her and commiserated and such. She ordered them to get back to work, and contacted Badim. He was on a train back from Geneva and texted his condolences; he had just heard, he would come to her office
when he got in. He hoped she could meet him for lunch. That was good, actually; get out of the office and talk frankly where no one could overhear. Require her new bodyguards to keep a distance.
So just after noon Badim entered her office, and he went to her and briefly held her hands, looked at her closely, gestured at a hug he didn’t enact. They left the office and walked to the tram stop, bought sandwiches and a chocolate bar and coffees, and walked back toward the office until they came to the little park that overlooked the rounded green copper roofs of the ETH, and the city across the river to the west. They sat on one of the park benches. Her bodyguards were a couple benches down, the obvious bodyguards anyway.
Mary had had to think about what to say to Badim, and in this matter, as in everything else this morning, her exhaustion caused a flurry of contradictory thoughts to ricochet around in her. Something in her was resisting the idea of telling Badim the full story of her night. Not that she could avoid it entirely.
“I had quite a night last night,” she said.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m all right. I guess I was being surveiled? And they saw me go into my apartment with the guy, and they came to check up on me. An hour later, I must say. Must have been camera stuff, and when they saw it they came over. He slipped away while they were inquiring.”
“So I heard. I’m glad you’re okay. Are you okay?”
“No!”
“I’m sorry.”
They ate in silence for a while. The city was its usual forest of cranes over gray stone. No sight of the Limmat from this vantage; to the south, just a narrow arc of the lake, with the long hill that ran south from the Uetliberg backing it.
“I’ve been thinking about our situation,” she said when she had taken the edge off her hunger. “Our dilemma.”
“Which is?”
“That we’re charged with representing the people and animals of the future, in effect to save the biosphere on their behalf, and we’re not managing to do it. We’re failing to do it, because the tools at our disposal are too weak. You said something like that the time we walked to the lake. The world is careening along toward disaster, and we can’t get it to change course fast enough to avoid a smash.”
Badim chewed on his sandwich for a while. “I know,” he said.
“So what are we going to do about it?”
“I don’t know.”
She regarded him. A small dark man, very smart, very calm. He had seen a lot. He had worked for the Indian government and for the government of Nepal, which had begun as a Maoist revolutionary organization. He had worked for Interpol. She said, trying it on, “I think maybe we need a black wing.”
That surprised him. He looked at her for a while, blinking, and then said, “What do you mean?”
“I think we need to set up a secret division of the ministry, working in secret to forward the cause.”
He considered it. “To do what exactly?”
“I don’t know.” She chewed for a while, thinking it over. Her kidnapper’s vivid glare. The fear she had felt.
“I don’t like violence,” she said after a while. “I mean, really. I’m Irish. I’ve seen the damage done. I know you have too. Secret wars, civil wars, the damage never goes away from those. So, I don’t mean killing people. Or even hurting them physically. We’re not the CIA here. But still, there are other things in the black, I’m thinking. Actions that are maybe illegal, or in some senses ill-advised. Undiplomatic. That would nevertheless forward the cause. We could consider them in secret, on a case-by-case basis, and see if any of them were worth pursuing. Things that we could defend doing if we got caught.”
He had stifled a smile, and now he shook his head a little bit. “That’s not sounding very black to me. One aspect of a black agency is that they must be uncatchable. Nothing can be written down, nothing can be hacked, no one can talk to outsiders. The people in charge aren’t to know about them. If there is any break in the secrecy, you as head of the agency would have to be able to deny all involvement, even any knowledge of such a thing, without explanation or defense.”
“You sound like you’ve had experience with such things.”
“Yes.” He was looking out at the city now.
“When was that?”
He regarded the gray city, thinking it over. He heaved a small sigh, took another bite of his sandwich, washed it down with a big sip of coffee.
“Now …” he said, as if starting a sentence and then not continuing it.
“Now what?” she said, after he had paused for a while.
“Now,” he repeated more firmly, and then looked at her. “Always, in other words.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t talk about it.”
She found she was standing over him. Her paper coffee cup was quivering in her hand, half-squished. He was wincing as he regarded her. He glanced at her coffee as if she might sling it in his face.
“Tell me what you mean,” she demanded in a grating voice. “Now.”
He sighed again. “Imagine that there might already be a black wing of the Ministry for the Future. That even I myself might have started it after you hired me as your chief of staff.”
“You started it?”
“No, I’m not saying that, please. I’m like everyone else. I have some friends in the office. Whatever they do as friends, it would not be quite right to tell you about, precisely so that if something got out and you were asked questions, you could honestly say that you didn’t know about it.”
“Plausible deniability?”
“Well, no. That I think refers to having a good lie in hand. This would be more like proper functioning of an agency, keeping things as they should be. If ever questions were asked, which hopefully would not happen, but if they did, you would say you didn’t know about it. If there were improprieties, others would take the fall, and on you could go with the ministry undamaged.”
“As if it would happen that way!”
“Well, it has before. Pretty often in fact. It’s a common form of organization. Most unorthodox operations take place without their political heads knowing they exist. Certainly never the details, even if they’re aware in a general sense that such things exist. As I thought you might be.”
The previous night’s events all of a sudden crashed into her and shook her to the core, and she shouted, “I won’t be lied to!”
The bodyguards across the little park looked over at them.
“I know,” Badim said, looking pinched and unhappy. “I’m sorry. I haven’t felt good about it. I’ll tender my resignation this afternoon, if you like. Happy to fall on my sword right here and now. But I will remind you that you were just talking about the possible need for such a thing.”
“The fuck I was,” she said. She waited for her heart to slow down, thinking that over. Too many thoughts were jamming her head at once, creating something like a roar. “I didn’t really mean it. And even if I did, I’ll be damned if I’ll have secrets being kept from me in my own fucking agency!”
“I know,” he said, looking down. He took a deep breath, steeling himself. “Tell me, did this not happen to you when you were a minister in Ireland’s government?”
“What do you mean?” she cried.
“I mean, you were head of foreign affairs, wasn’t it? Did you think you knew everything your agency was doing?”
“Yes, I did.”
He shook his head. “Surely not. Of course I don’t know for sure. But Ireland was in a civil war for a long time, and that always has aspects that are out of the country. Right? So, your security forces almost certainly kept things from you, and they probably understood you to be knowing about that, and wanting to keep it that way.” He shrugged. “It’s certainly been true in Nepal and India, and at Interpol too for that matter.” Interpol was the agency Mary had hired him out of.
She sat down beside him, hard. Her coffee cup was smashed; carefully she sipped
the remainder of the coffee out of one of the folded spots in the rim, put the cup on the ground.
“So I’m naïve, is it? An innocent stateswoman in the world of Realpolitik? Which is no doubt the reason they gave me this job?”
“I’m not saying that. I think they assumed you knew what you were doing.”
“So what has this black wing of yours done so far? And who does it consist of?”
“Well, but this is just what you should not be asking. No no, please”— he held up a hand as if to ward off the blow she was about to give him— “people might resign if they knew that their actions were known to higher-ups. Anyway you might not even know these people, I’m not sure how acquainted you are with our whole staff.”
He watched her calm down. She picked up her crushed coffee cup and sipped from it again. “I’m head of whatever happens operationally,” he went in a low voice, as if sharing a secret to conciliate her. “That’s what a chief of staff does. People who help me when doing the needful gets tricky, they would naturally come from various divisions. Cyber security of course, it’s in the nature of their work to be preemptive sometimes. Nat cat guys are often helpful, they’re used to getting dirty— I mean just physically dirty, you know, working with machines and such. They’re at the coal face. They see the damage being done, and they get impatient to do something about it.”
That struck a nerve, and her sleepless night came back all in a rush, not that it had ever left. Her stomach was a knot that the sandwich didn’t quite fit into.
“I met someone like that last night,” she said. She reached out and grasped the back of Badim’s hand. “That’s the kind of person kidnapped me last night! He was sick of doing nothing, of nothing happening.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again. He turned his hand up so that it held hers. “Tell me what happened?”
She took her hand back and told him briefly, leaving parts out.
“We probably should have been guarding you more closely,” he said when she was done.
The Ministry for the Future Page 11
