Genocidal Organ

by Project Itoh

  People are like that—able to disappear without rhyme or reason, without others being able to make sense of their sudden absence.

  There were a few times when I asked my mom why my dad killed himself. But then I gradually stopped asking. After all, the only answer I ever got was I don’t know. Every time I asked I would get the same answer and my mother would make the same face of wretched incomprehension.

  To depart without giving a reason why is to leave a curse on those you leave behind. Questions linger: Why didn’t I realize something was wrong? What could I have done differently? Was it my fault? And, of course, the dead don’t reply. So there’s basically no way to lift the curse. Time is a great healer, but an imperfect one, as anyone who has ever been assaulted in the dead of night by uneasy, shameful feelings knows. Even those memories consigned to oblivion by the conscious mind may still be in there somewhere, lurking, never completely forgotten by the unconscious mind.

  That’s what I mean when I say my mother was under my father’s curse.

  There’s one unsolved puzzle about my father’s death that I never asked my mother, not even at the very end. The question of who cleaned up the blood and fragments of splattered brain on the ceiling and walls. Did the police do it? Or was there some sort of specialist cleaning company that you could hire? What sort of slogan did they have—WIPING THE REMNANTS OF YOUR LOVED ONES FROM YOUR WALLS SINCE 1965?

  Whoever it was, I have absolutely no conscious memory of it. What I do remember is that once, in my movie-geek teenager years, I watched a Reagan-era oldie called Angel Heart on late-night cable. I remember how it made me shudder: a scene with a woman in full mourning regalia wiping red bloodstains from the wall. I supposed she was the widow of the man who had just killed himself. The movie never did go into detail on that point, and in my mind that scene seemed curiously detached from the rest of the movie.

  Come to think of it, I guess it could have been my mother who wiped up my father.

  It’s the nature of your work that is causing you so much stress.

  I wondered if this was the sort of thing Alex’s counselor would have said to him during their sessions—if he’d been going for any.

  Kill, kill, and then kill some more. Plan missions down to the last detail so that you can kill even more people even more efficiently. Conjure up in your mind, vividly, an image of the target you are about to kill. Predict your target’s next movements. Know whether he has a wife, whether he has children, whether he read Harry Potter to his daughter at bedtime.

  Would stressful even be the right word to describe this line of work? Alex was a staunch Catholic, so I guess it’s more likely he would have confessed to a priest than gone to counseling. When he was in that little confessional, would he have begged for absolution for all the men he had killed in the line of duty? If so, I wondered if the priest who heard his confession now felt guilty for not being able to grant that absolution, for not being able to provide Alex with the words that could have convinced him that he was indeed forgiven.

  It’s the nature of your work that is leading you into sin.

  I could just imagine a priest saying something like that, a grotesque parody of my hypothetical counselor. It seems that your work is inextricably linked with sin, and as long as you perform it you’ll carry the weight of hell on your shoulders. Perhaps you should consider speaking to your superiors to see if you can be reassigned. Or maybe consider taking a holiday somewhere nice and warm this year? That’ll take your mind off all the sin and hell around you.

  It was true that we had been worked to the hilt these past couple of years. The orders from Washington had been coming down thick and fast, and perhaps it was the case that there was simply not enough time in between assassination assignments for us to be able to deal with our personal hells and sins.

  Not that you could blame Washington entirely, of course. The past two years had been crazy, or rather it seemed like the world had decided to turn crazy round about the time we dispatched a certain former brigadier general. Africa, Asia, Europe: it was the whole world going mad, with civil wars and ethnic conflicts in quick succession. With most of these a UN resolution was quickly enacted. The principle of the day seemed to be “It is a crime against humanity to stand idly by while people kill each other.”

  It was as if one day somebody had changed the rules stating that you could no longer have a civil war without genocide.

  The last two years alone had witnessed a ridiculous number of worldwide civilian casualties in internal conflicts—something like sixty percent of the number of all casualties of terrorism and civil war since the beginning of the twenty-first century. There were so many new reports of massacres popping up all over the place that journalists were finding it hard to keep track.

  As a result, even the most atrocious genocide was getting buried, relegated to some corner of the web. Apart from a few particularly brutal ones that had managed somehow to grab the spotlight, most were simply reported like so much material for the archives, which is of course what all the webpages were when nobody much read them. It had become easier than ever to publish new information and harder than ever to get anyone to actually pay attention to it. The world only wanted the information that it was interested in. Information had become just another capitalist commodity.

  The last two years had been a whirlwind for us headhunters. We were literally living a jetset lifestyle as we zipped around the world in high-speed aircraft, so much so that Williams would joke that the theory of relativity ought really to have kicked in by now and that time should pass differently for us than for average Americans. How we laughed.

  We worked too hard.

  The world made too many demands of us. People placed an unbearable burden of responsibility on our shoulders. If even the quintessential genocidal leader, Adolf Hitler, had been voted in by the people—who must therefore on some level share the responsibility for the massacres committed in Hitler’s name—then how right was it ever going to be to try and pin the blame for the killings in one region on a single individual? And yet this was what we were being asked to do, day in, day out.

  If you kill this person, the armed insurgents will lose the unifying figure around which the people rally.

  If you kill this person, it’ll be easier for both sides to bury the hatchet.

  Washington would choose the target—if you kill him, the genocide is most likely to stop—and our job was to take care of things. This first layer of victims could in a sense be seen as martyrs for peace.

  Martyrs. In the two years since that incident I’d been directly involved in five more assassination ops, and on two of those I did the killing myself. In a couple of missions we entered the country covertly using the Intruder Pods; on others we entered the country in full view, as tourists or journalists on ordinary aircraft. Each mission was different, with different targets, and the tactics varied accordingly. However, there was one constant factor.

  On four out of the five missions the same name cropped up as one of our targets.

  The man who, two years ago, in a certain country in Eastern Europe, worked as the press secretary for a group of armed insurgents who were committing genocide. We realized that his name would inevitably be on our target list. It was unusual to say the least. It was almost as if this person was some sort of tourist traveling from war zone to war zone.

  Given that Washington seemed to really have it in for this guy, it was inconceivable that he was just an ordinary civilian. The target data files that came with each mission became successively more detailed. It was as if Washington wanted us to get him but at the same time would reveal as little as possible about him. “Fucking bureaucrats, just give us the information we need from the start and stop dicking us around,” Williams grumbled, and indeed it did seem an extraordinarily petty way of going about our task. Not only that, if Washington’s aim was to keep attention away from the man, then their plan was backfiring spectacularly, as the veil of secrecy only added to the di
abolical—or legendary—aura that was starting to build around this figure.

  John Paul.

  The strikingly nondescript name of the man who had been slipping through our fingers these past two years.

  “So who is this elusive John Paul?” Williams spoke in an exaggerated parody of a Shakespearean actor. “The American who the American government loves to hate. The fugitive who is wanted dead, not alive. The tourist whose only interest is in viewing scenes of brutal crimes against humanity. Who can say who this John Paul really is?”

  “Just a man, like you or me,” I said.

  Williams seemed unhappy at my answer, shaking his head sadly as if to say that I just didn’t get it. “Jeez, not you too. Why’s everyone so boring? I know he’s a man, I’m talking about what else!”

  “You do that, buddy,” I said, “but he’s still a man, and that’s all we need to know. Men make mistakes. He’ll make one sooner or later, and then we’ll find him.”

  “Find him and kill him, you mean.”

  I wasn’t really sure why the happily married Williams was here at all at my bachelor pad on a rare day off, let alone why he ordered in some Domino’s without bothering to ask me and was now speculating out loud to himself. I guess Alex’s funeral yesterday must have hit him harder than he cared to admit.

  One of the living room walls was shaded from the sun so that we could watch TV and movies better. I was sitting on the couch with a can of Bud almost spilling from my hand, watching the Allies getting slaughtered over and over again at Omaha beach. I had the first fifteen minutes of Saving Private Ryan on loop. There was a reason behind this: not only were the first fifteen minutes the best part of the movie by far, it was also free to preview on the pay-per-view channel I was now watching.

  Were we really thirty years old? There didn’t seem anything particularly grown up about this college lifestyle. I guess that was all part of the American Dream—work and consume, work and consume, get sucked into the cycle, and then you never really had to worry about that sort of thing.

  “I guess he had some shit on his mind, huh,” Williams said out of nowhere.

  “Yeah, I guess he did,” I said.

  “Motherfucker … why didn’t he say anything to us?”

  “Ask Alex.”

  Williams sighed as if to say that was exactly what he would have done, if he could. “Do you think he really was in that hell that he talked about all the time? Out in the field, in training, back at base when we sat around talking shit …”

  “Ha ha, we sat around talking shit? You talked shit and we put up with it, don’t you mean?”

  I was only joking, but Williams looked at me, surprised. “You mean you never heard any of Alex’s jokes?”

  I couldn’t help glancing away from the screen and at Williams for a second; after all, he was right. I had never heard any of Alex’s jokes.

  “They were pretty good, some of them, you know,” continued Williams. “What’s the word. Risqué.”

  “What, like when you asked him for a great novel and he gave you a Bible?”

  “Nah, that was lame compared to his good stuff about Catholic priests, the Pope, choirboys, that sort of thing. He laid into the God of the Old Testament something good too, how retarded and inconsistent many of the commandments were. Had Leland and me rolling in the aisles, so to speak.”

  Huh. Not what I’d expected. I’d always thought Alex had been such a strict Catholic. “I … never had the chance to see that side of him,” I said.

  Williams looked at me for a while. The sound of Nazi machine-gun fire filled the room. Then Williams took his empty can of Budweiser and aimed for the trash can on the other side of the room. He was a good ten feet away, but it went straight in nonetheless.

  “Damn, I’m one down on you and the pizza hasn’t even arrived yet,” I said out loud. But in reality I was still thinking about Alex. What did we use to talk about? God, mainly, I seemed to remember. I was an atheist but never felt the need to be too militant about it, and had neither the desire nor the ego to try and press my views on any believers in my vicinity. Alex was more or less the same but on the opposite side of the coin, and never felt the need to drag me into the light. It meant that we could discuss God, hell, and the nature of sin in an atmosphere of mutual respect. We had done so regularly.

  Hell is here. That night two years ago on the mission wasn’t the first time we had heard Alex use that phrase. I’d heard it from him before, lounging around at base. Then too, Alex had pointed at his forehead and said, “Hell is here, Captain Shepherd. We’re all hard-wired to march straight to hell. It’s in our architecture.”

  I’d no idea what sort of personal hell Alex had been cultivating in his own mind, and now I never would. The one thing I did know was that Alex ended his own life in order to escape whatever hell he had been building. A preemptive strike against death, to ensure that he never fell into that hell he was so afraid of. What a fucked-up thing to do, and yet I could see the twisted logic in it, and I could imagine Alex taking himself seriously enough to go through with it.

  The doorbell rang.

  “Nice, the pizza,” Williams said, jumping up to collect it. He identified himself by pressing his thumb down on the delivery boy’s ID device. Confirmation came back from the military database that held all Williams’s (and my) personal data, and the courier thanked us for our business and left.

  “One of the perks of being Forces, huh?” said Williams, picking at the jalapeños even before he had thrown himself back down on the couch. “No need to worry about our data; it’s all taken care of. Not much fun on civvy street where you have to pay for data storage.”

  “Sure, but Medicare covers most of it, and in any case, strictly speaking it’s not the army that ‘takes care of’ our data. It’s outsourced to InfoSec, a private firm, about as civilian as you can get. The army just picks up the tab.”

  “Is that so? Well, whaddaya know. By the time I had any of my own money to play with, I was already career Forces. I couldn’t tell you what life’s like on the other side.”

  “Well, think about it,” I said. “It’s a pretty massive operation, taking down your full medical history, fingerprints, retinal scans, brainwave patterns, facial contours, and other details, not forgetting things like your full credit rating. They have to be kept absolutely secure but also easily accessible, so that any part can be checked at any time. It’s not cheap.”

  “That’s it!” said Williams, pointing at me. “John Paul. How is he getting around all this? All those layers of security? We needed our thumbprints just to get hold of these jalapeños here. When I was ten years old you could sometimes just about get away with a signature, but these days you need your fingerprints, your retina, your face scanned, to get anywhere. So how the hell is this John Paul getting from Europe to Africa to Asia and back again?”

  I hadn’t thought about that before. You needed ID before you could buy a plane ticket. Or rather, your ID was how you bought a plane ticket, no matter what type of bank account you used, or in what country.

  So how on earth was John Paul managing to travel from civil war to civil war?

  Then Williams’s cell phone started ringing. I could barely believe my eyes as he shoved his greasy fingers, still dripping with pizza and jalapeño juices, straight into his pocket to retrieve his cell. He pressed the button without qualm. Well, it was his cell, he could do what he liked, but my body couldn’t help but shudder, purely as a physiological reflex. That was Williams for you.

  “Roger that, sir,” he said into his phone, sucking the fingers of his other hand as he did so. “Yes, sir. Right away, sir, within the hour.”

  Williams cut the call. He used his still-greasy index finger on the wall to call up the command pad. I grimaced. The thin nanolayer membrane on the wall picked up his request and soon the command pad materialized out of nowhere on the wall, ready to accept his oily orders.

  Williams tapped the stop button, and Saving Private Ryan stoppe
d streaming. I asked him what happened, but he just sighed …

  … and at that very moment my own cell started ringing. I fished it out of my back pocket. Headquarters.

  “All units summoned to headquarters,” said Williams.

  2

  “Take full precautions to avoid being identified along the way.”

  Williams and I followed our orders from the Pentagon and proceeded to Washington in our civvy suits. It would have been ridiculous to try to make it there in our uniforms, as our nameplates and decorations would have made us easily identifiable by definition. Basically, the orders were to come as you are, although Williams wasn’t happy about this—he never felt comfortable meeting the top brass unless he was in uniform, he said. As long as you were squeezed into a tight uniform with plenty of medals and ribbons on your chest you didn’t have any tiresome considerations such as fashion or style to worry about. Uniform is just uniform. With your own clothes you always had to worry about other people judging you based on their own values. I don’t like people I don’t know seeing me as an individual, said Williams.

  We took an ordinary commercial flight rather than a military plane. It looked like they were trying to keep the general summons as low-key as possible, not just to the general public but within Forces as well. If John Paul was indeed part of a wider organization then it was quite likely they would have a surveillance network in place to monitor any unusual activity among the Secret Service and Special Forces. There was also probably something about the general summons that the Pentagon didn’t want to be broadcasting to the forces at large.

  So we did our best to blend in with the crowds as we made it to Washington on our own steam. We were under strict orders not to take a cab from Reagan National, so we took the metro to Pentagon Station and disembarked along with the throngs of the staffers and the other visitors.