Judgement

by Fergus Bannon

  'He had guts, though, and a fine command of abuse. I hadn't liked what he tried with the kid. He got me so mad I shot him through the perineum,' he must have seen Leith's look of puzzlement. 'That's the soft bit between your balls and your ass, where the vagina is in a woman. It’s an old El Salvador trick. You pretend you're aiming for their balls and miss. If that doesn't unnerve them, nothing will. Shoots out some gut but misses all the arteries and stuff. Provided they get medical attention they usually survive.'

  Durrell suddenly sighed. ‘But there was no medical attention in the village. I'd killed him, though he'd take days to die.

  'I'll never know if he'd have talked because at that moment I heard the rumble of a shit load of Backfires coming our way. The dirty, battered bloody little guy looked up at me. 'You've killed me and now I've killed you,' he said and smiled. I don't know how it happened. He couldn't have had time to radio his position. Maybe they'd lucked out and had given their position out of routine just before the Stinger hit. Maybe he knew he was being covered by a Moss, which is like a Soviet AWAC. I'll never find out.'

  He ran a hand through his short hair. ‘I’m big but quick on my feet. I was out of the door and running down the hill before the first bombs hit. There were rebels and villagers all over the place, heading for the air-raid trenches the rebels had dynamited out of the rock for them. Me, I knew there was like a little cliff a hundred yards from the village. Sheer rock but only about twenty feet of it. I was gonna jump down it anyway but I was helped over by the first blast as the five hundred pounders started to land. Damn near broke my ankle but I was up right away and trying to squeeze myself into tiny cracks in the rock while the world fell in on me.

  'I guess they dropped three loads of bombs on the village. One lot went wide and blew some rocks to shit but the rest hit the village. I dug myself out and went to help but there was nothing left. Where the village had been there was just fifty or so craters. Those trenches could take whatever a gunship had to throw at them, but not the stuff from the belly of a Backfire.'

  'You didn't actually kill him then.’ Leith felt unmoved by the suffering of others so many miles away.

  'Technically, no.'

  'Ever killed anybody?'

  'Sure, you saw me.'

  'Apart from last night.'

  'Yeah, Grenada, El Salvador, Panama. I've been in this business a long time.’ He spoke as though that excused it.

  'Have you ever killed anyone who was unarmed, who was not trying to kill you at the time?'

  'I don't do wet-work. That doesn't happen now anyway, at least not very often. Would have done if I thought it was necessary and if I'd been asked, but no, the situation has never come up.'

  Durrell licked his lips thoughtfully. 'You think System X punished me for what I did, right? But that's my point...they couldn't have known. The only person who knew what I did to the Soviet was the Soviet himself, and he's dead along with everyone else in that village. That's what I can't understand. Nobody knew, nobody could have known.'

  'They could,' said Leith softly to himself, 'they could.'

  CHAPTER 16

  Langley, Virginia

  There was a loud noise from off camera and the portly little bespectacled man looked up. Kindly eyes, now heavy with sadness, looked at some point behind and to the left. Someone not visible said something rapid in Spanish. The portly man took off the army helmet he had been wearing and placed it on the top of the desk. It had looked out of place against his civilian clothes, the charcoal grey jacket covering a jumper with a chevron pattern. Then he stood up straight and proud.

  The camera held this view for a couple of seconds then swung slowly round, always keeping the little man in shot, to reveal who had spoken. Three armed men stood by the door. Two were in battledress and were covered with camouflage paint. The third was dressed in a fawn safari suit and was lighter skinned than the others. He had fair hair where theirs was black.

  The two soldiers trained their automatic weapons on the little man but seemed to hesitate. They glanced at the fair-haired man. He shrugged and stepped forward. Without any expression he raised his gun and fired, shutting the door on democracy in Chile for twenty years.

  'Oh my God,' said Stallard running his hand through his hard white curls.

  'Nasty,' Leith was growing accustomed to death, 'but surely not news. I thought all this came out in Church's Senate investigations years ago.'

  'Not quite. It was established that the CIA helped to depose Allende but not that one of our agents actually shot him. That was denied, as it was with the assassination of Schneider. Allende was supposed to have died from 'self-inflicted wounds' at the time of the coup.'

  It was like holding a conversation in a bar when a TV is playing. Your eyes were always drawn to the screen. But the TV was attractive now to Leith and Stallard not because of some residual atavistic sensitivity to motion, but because it was giving out pure information, and information had always been the lifeblood of the company. Throughout Langley people would be clustered round imported monitors. The sense of shock was almost palpable.

  Here in Nevis' room, which was Leith's now, he had four screens of his own. He tried to drag his eyes away, trying to focus on Stallard who was partly camouflaged in the darkened room by his black suit. Only his face and hair diffusely reflected the light from the screens.

  'Well, at least I can't see many of the great American public having had the attention span to follow it this far.'

  'Indeed.'

  It had taken three hours to get to the 'punchline'. Right at the beginning the text on the screen had read: 'US involvement in the destabilisation of Chile and the assassination of its democratically elected leader Salvadore Allende.' It had started with a meeting between Nixon and CIA director Richard Helms, which had lasted only fifteen minutes. Leith had now seen enough of these meetings between statesmen and high-ranking government officials broadcasted by The Truth to no longer be surprised by the hesitancy, disjointedness and downright unreason which seemed to be the lingua franca of such occasions. The concept of destabilisation was worried at but never faced directly, but at least the program had been given a name: Track II. This was the followup to the unsuccessful and so far unscreened Track I. The financial contributions to the program from US companies who had interests in Chile were also enumerated.

  Leith had never liked the look of Nixon before, but at least then the man had always known when he was on camera. Relaxed and unknowing, Nixon made the flesh crawl.

  The film had followed this meeting with a series of shorter edited segments as the responsibility for the operation devolved. Helms' briefing of his team leader was terse but a good summary of Nixon's diffuse rambling. The most important point seemed to be the budget, set at ten million dollars. Helms, too, hadn't wanted to know the details of how it would be done. This however was soon fleshed out as three more sets of briefings took it down to the lower level operatives, the ones who would actually do the job.

  Allende had not as yet come to power but the then government of Christian Democrat Eduardo Freò, and its intended nationalisation programs, was giving the US companies cause for concern. The plan was to help Robert Viaux, an ex-Brigadier General, to reach power through a coup.

  The big problem was the Commander of the Chilean Armed Forces, Rene Schneider, who was committed to democracy. Two failed kidnapping attempts were shown. The men involved were Chileanos under CIA direction.

  The rising disgust of the CIA operatives was evident from edited highlights in subsequent meetings. The election was getting close so they had sent in one of their own, an agent identified by overlaid text as Hector Mendes of San Antonio, Texas who, during a third kidnapping attempt, killed Schneider with his bare hands.

  The briefing of Lars Henderson, Allende's assassin, by the Track II Chileano team leader was very explicit, as were the snippets shot at Langley to establish Henderson's identity as a CIA staff member.

  The film had been timetabled on Channel 3
as having one more hour to run, but already Leith had guessed what was coming next. Scenes of torture and death from Pinochet's prisons were now being shown. Pinochet was the army man who’d deposed Allende and ruled for many years after. He’d had thousands of his opponents tortured and killed in Chile and even a few abroad where some had escaped to. Leith was relieved when Stallard switched back to the timetable channel.

  He looked across at the older man. Secrets, which were the CIA's substance, were leaking away at a frightening rate. Langley had become a manic place since The Truth had started to broadcast, its staff ricocheting from mania to depression and back by the hour.

  'What do you think? Is it all true? Is the footage real?'

  Stallard sighed. 'That was Helms, sure enough. I worked with him on several occasions, although not on the Chile business. I also recognised some of the operatives involved. I've even used Henderson on occasion myself so it won't be long before I'm on screen too.'

  He hesitated and leaned his chin on two fingers. 'This has got to be real. All these people can't be doubles, and even if they were I can't see how they could've got the mannerisms so right. The same applies to a CGI mock-up which is one wild theory I've heard, but I'm no expert in that.'

  Leith shook his head. 'It would take a score of programmers a year to produce that level of realism for just one five minute scene. Perhaps it would be possible with more advanced technology, but your objection to the accuracy of speech patterns and mannerisms still holds. There seems only one conclusion.'

  'Time travel? Good Grief— it's taken me two weeks to begin to come to terms with the fourth dimension, and now you throw this at me.'

  'It's not so much time travel perhaps, as time viewing,' Leith stroked his beard. ‘General relativity introduced the idea of time-lines. It's like everything that has happened is embedded in a block of time. Section it across the time axis and you get an instant in this universe. Focus on a point in space within this section and move through the block, and you have a movie replay of a past event.

  'It's got to be something like that. It certainly can't have been shot at the time, the cameras would have been impossible to disguise. People would have been tripping over them. They'd have known they were there.'

  'I thought you said time wasn't really a dimension in itself?'

  'Well...space and time are really indistinguishable, so it's not a dimension like the three—rather, four—spatial ones. You understand?'

  'Of course I don't. And neither do you!'

  Leith smiled wearily. He glanced back at the timetable. This was only the second day of the broadcasts but their effects had been catastrophic for the CIA. The assassination of Zia, all that stuff with Trujillo, Lumumba, Arbens and Sukarno, the deliberate slayings of unarmed civilians in Nicaragua. None of that had surprised him. The blowing up of a Soviet oil pipeline in '82 to take out a double agent who was passing by on a train: that had been a shock. Hundreds of innocent people on the train had died.

  And Hammarskjold: They blew him away just because he wanted to make peace in the Congo? It was crazy. What revelations would there be tomorrow? How long would The Truth broadcast?

  Stallard interrupted his train of thought. 'The pedantic, almost academic nature of the broadcasts; the time they take to establish the identities of the protagonists. It really would be dull viewing for the average viewer. That is in our favour, as you so rightly point out.'

  'Yeah, that and the abysmal filmic style. Whoever makes these is always so diligent about getting as many of the participants as possible in the same shot, no matter how big the meeting or event. I guess it's to try and avoid any claims of intercutting scenes from different places and times...'

  'You can do anything with film.'

  'Yes, but not on this scale, as we said before. Anyway, it makes for a distracting and uninteresting viewing. It makes it look amateurish, in fact. But the people don't have to watch it anyway, the rest of the media are doing it for them, summarising the day's viewing to make it palatable for the public.'

  'The media doesn't seem to know what to make of it yet, but with information of this quality, I can't see that lasting for long.'

  'Yeah, the murder channel was a masterstroke. What better way to get the attention of the man in the street,' he looked across at the other monitor screens. At Stallard's insistence they showed the outputs of the three big networks and the global news channels. Stallard had to judge how far the secret information was being disseminated. Leith could guess how shocked and helpless he must feel, though Stallard hid it well.

  One network was still keeping to its program schedule but the other two had already abandoned them in favour of non-stop reporting of The Truth's broadcasts. There was as yet little to worry Stallard in terms of political and intelligence implications. It was upon the 'Murder Channel' that the media were focussed. Three of the top ten serial killers had already been arrested. Genetic fingerprints had been taken and the results would take a day or two: but Leith now had no doubts they would prove positive. Clinically and without comment The Truth had shown the murders, nearly one hundred of them dating back from 1982, which the ten had committed. It had established the identities of the killers and their real-time locations. That seven had not been apprehended was probably due to them watching the broadcasts as well and high-tailing it fast. They would not get far.

  That had been yesterday. Today, the channel was concerning itself within some of the tastier unsolved murders round the globe.

  On impulse Leith picked up one remote control and switched to the Murder Channel. It was blank but for some text on the bottom of the screen. 'National police forces may use The Truth in the following way: place advertisements in your highest circulation national newspaper listing unsolved murders or other serious crimes you wish The Truth to investigate. The results will be broadcast on this channel.'

  'Christ. They're even doing requests now,' Stallard's voice was disbelieving.

  Leith flicked back to the timetable. The Kennedy assassination was still running. Surprisingly it had been shown that Oswald was indeed the lone assassin, but the photography used to ascertain this had placed even greater strain on credibility. Leith had seen enough of the other broadcasts to realise that it had probably been true, but thought it a mistake by System X to show it at such an early stage.

  At a rate of what must have been tens of thousands of frames a second the camera had seemed to follow the trajectory of Oswald's bullets as they left the gun. Time and spatial resolution was so good you could even see the lead spinning from the effect of the rifling. Even though the camera must have been moving almost as fast as the bullet, Kennedy and his entourage were in sharp but apparently frozen focus as the slugs continued their inexorable approach.

  The camera at least hadn't followed the bullets into Kennedy's body but hadn't needed to. From the shockwaves that distorted his flesh as the bullet ricocheted internally, no doubt was left about its trajectory. One slug was seen to enter Kennedy's body not once, but twice, after a series of extraordinary ricochets.

  That had taken a morning to establish. The next afternoon and this morning had been spent analysing Oswald's motivations. Leith hadn't bothered to watch the morning's broadcast, but had read the precis from the 'National Intelligence Daily’, which was the CIA's internal news-sheet. This had a circulation of less than a hundred of the most senior officers. Its normal thirty-page size had been suddenly increased with reports of internal problems in foreign intelligence services. Imprisonments, disappearances and assassinations: just like us, he thought.

  Today's 'Daily' had expanded to over two hundred pages. According to the agent who had viewed the Oswald footage, it consisted largely of the man's conversations over many years with a variety of people. The identities of these people would then be established using scenes from other places and times. Oswald's trajectory through life seemed to have been as weird as 'The Magic Bullet', and he'd met a lot of strange people who'd wanted Kennedy dead. There had been
Cubans who had worked for Castro's Direccion Generale de Intelligencia, who spoke angrily of the numerous assassination attempts on Castro by the CIA (three hours were then spent in establishing that the CIA had had a hand in only nine, ranging from botulism contaminated cigars to a car bomb. The lame and absurd 50's figure of Dr. Stanley Gottlieb, the CIA's technical specialist, in his exotic lair across the Potomac in Rosslyn, had dominated this section).

  But there were also Mafia people who seemed offended at Kennedy's apparently traitorous attitude towards them. They'd been approached by the CIA to kill Castro, then Kennedy had rewarded them by cracking down on organised crime. There were also CIA men opposed to Kennedy for the same reason.

  So far, the agent reported, nobody had been shown actually telling Oswald to kill Kennedy. Perhaps Oswald had just been trying to impress a lot of these people.

  Like the CIA, the KGB had almost a whole channel to themselves, with Mossad, BOSS and others making occasional guest appearances.

  Nearly half of the 'National Intelligence Daily's' pages were devoted to analyses of the KGB's internal and external operations before the Soviet Union fell apart. Leith's profound reservations about the CIA's long history of covert actions in Central and South America paled into significance with what the KGB had got up to on its own soil. Two hours were spent showing edited film of the use the KGB had put to the in-house crematorium in its Latvian headquarters. Text on the lower right of the screen gave the time and identities of the 159 bodies burned there over the five years from 1980 to 1984. The 'Daily' confirmed that twenty-two of these had indeed been working for the CIA.