Due Preparations for the Plague

by Janette Turner Hospital

  I want Anna to keep that contract.

  I want to be inside a different skin. (You could hang up the Salamander one, the burned skin, carefully, like a wedding tuxedo, and someone else could use it secondhand.)

  I want you to make that little girl shut up, the one in the blue coat, the one who is bearing down like a vengeful Fury. She does not know, she has no idea, where the fuse she is lighting leads or what dreadful detonations will be sparked. I want you to get the scorch marks off the blue coat.

  If you can make that little girl shut up, I will tell everything I know. I will sing like a prisoner on the rack. In any case, I am setting everything down, everything, I swear it; and you alone will hold the code-breaking key.

  Is my hour up?

  Shall I leave with you the journal of my dreams?

  2.

  Lecture notes (preliminary): Technology of Modern Warfare and Intelligence Gathering:

  INTRODUCTION

  Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Cal Tech, and all of you, each and every one, Phi Beta Kappa as well. You happy few. You have not only graduated with distinction from our best and brightest institutions, but you have passed through a rigorous vetting system of psychological and security tests. You are clean. You are high-tensile steel. Even so, not all of you will graduate from this course.

  You will have noted that there is no standard text. There will be handouts, however, and as you leave the seminar room at the end of this class, please pick up one of these spiral-bound books, to which—please watch as I demonstrate—pages can be added with ease. Ours is a field of knowledge for which new data comes in every month. The chapters of this bible are being written as we speak.

  Let us take, for example, an incident that occurred in the Soviet Union in 1979. An accident in Sverdlosk—a leak at the military’s microbiology research unit—released anthrax spores into the air. Result: sixty-eight deaths. What do we learn, what projections can we make from this data?

  Think like a terrorist.

  Could an anthrax scare occur by malicious planning? Could a small plane—a two-seater, say, trailing GO METS banners—dust anthrax over New York? Could we have anthrax weather? An anthrax mist would be odorless and invisible. It would drift in air currents for great distances before dispersal. Would mass deaths result? What defensive precautions could be taken? Could due preparations be made? On this score, we know too little, though all our evidence does suggest this: only we ourselves, at this point in time, are producing high-octane anthrax of the kind that a terrorist would need, though we are keeping a sharply watchful and deeply nervous eye on Iraq. Later, we will consider in detail all the implications and possible scenarios—offensive and defensive—of bioterrorist anthrax attacks.

  So what is our syllabus? You will be expected to know the composition and structure of chemical agents, nerve agents, blister agents, and penetrants. There will be newsreel footage of recent and current deployments. In this field, we learn on the run. We have more data than time to process it. For example: the sarin incident in the Tokyo subway, March 20, 1995, carried out by the Aum Supreme Truth cult. That was rehearsed in outback Australia on a sheep station. It was rehearsed one full year before deployment, and we had evidence, we had satellite photographs: hundreds of acres of sheep carcasses and skeletons. We failed to interpret adequately, we did not make the necessary connections in time, but then Tokyo is not strictly our affair. Within our own borders, I assure you, the Aum Srn Rikyo adherents are being tracked.

  There will be lab simulations from time to time.

  There will be fieldwork.

  We are, if you will pardon the irony of the expression, fortunate in having, at our weekly disposal, a veritable smorgasbord of aggressive operations. Limited spheres of hostility proliferate and the increase in contained war zones is exponential, all of which is ideal for our purposes. You will visit these intimate theaters of belligerence, sometimes literally, and sometimes virtually, by way of our surveillance systems. Both situations will be interactive. The value of information from actual deployments is immense, indeed, it cannot be overstated, since only by such hands-on experiments can we gauge the ripple effect, which is to say, the subsidiary physical and psychological outcomes. Subsidiary physical effects are not restricted to personnel; they may be environmental. A chain reaction in the contextual territory, in turn, devolves into further physical sequences for personnel.

  A firestorm, for example.

  “All things are on fire,” the Buddha said. “The eye is on fire; forms are on fire; impressions received by the eye are on fire.”

  Siddhrtha Gautama, or the Buddha, as he is generally known, was born in India in the sixth century BC, in the very year that King Nebuchadnezzar died. I like to toy with the fantasy that the Buddha saw in utero the fiery furnace which the Babylonian king had made.

  Does it surprise you that this course stretches back to the literature of the ancients? It should not. Technologies change, but the essence of warfare is, and always has been, psychological. We ignore, therefore, at our peril the artist’s insight. It is the artist—it is Homer—who observes and names Achilles’ heel. The astute warrior makes use of this information. It was Paris, the great Hector’s younger brother, who shot the arrow which slew Achilles through his vulnerable foot.

  And who was Paris, that he killed the greatest warrior of all time?

  Paris was nothing. Paris was a dreamer, a philanderer, a lover, a coward despised by his own people, the Trojans. Paris was a madman with a stupid cause, the obsessive love of fickle Helen: and it is this, the madness, the cause, which makes him the joker in the pack, the most dangerous figure of all.

  We ignore at our peril those who have a cause. No lethal technology will ever exist to stop them. That is why we study the past as well as the future. What, in essence, am I training you for? What is our mission? Our mission is the vigilant observation of, and the channeling of, the madness of true believers, and we do this in the interests of global stability for the greater good of all.

  It is a high calling.

  And so I like to think of the infant Buddha dreaming of those troublesome Jews, those three madmen with a cause, whom Nebuchadnezzar cast in the furnace of biblical lore. Imagine them, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, incandescent. The heat of that furnace, the Book of Daniel tells us, was so great that the men who were stoking the flames were crisped like bacon in their own body fats.

  And yet, you will remember, the king’s counselors, summoned to report on the rebel deaths, said unto him: “We see men like unto gods, O king, walking in the fire unharmed.”

  Remember those words, for we too are consumed with a cause.

  All that we do has already been dreamed of and foretold. From Sodom and Gomorrah to Nagasaki, we walk with alchemists and gods. We make firestorms from air, and we walk through the fire unharmed. We are Zeus of the thunderbolts, and we are the decontamination and survival experts. We may not yet have learned how to make a heaven on earth—though we strive to keep this planet safe for those who indulge in the idea of heaven—but we are specialists in making that other world spoken of in the Gospel of Mark, a place where their worm dieth not, and their fire is not quenched.

  This course will train you in both defensive and aggressive postures: in Operation Shadrach and in Operation Nebuchadnezzar; in Operation Redemption and in exercises like Operation Black Death.

  The profession to which I have devoted my life, and which you happy few aspire to enter, is as much an art as a science, and more like a highly sophisticated game of chance and skill than either of these. We are chess players who move living pieces on the checkerboard of the world. We are as detached and blameless as gods, but like all creators, we must acknowledge an occupational hazard. Our creatures fascinate us: both those we turn into monsters and those who elude us; especially those who elude us. We become obsessed. We run the risk of envying their lives.

  In our profession (making the world safe for stability, as we like to say; and sometim
es, relishing our own esoteric wit, making the world safe for moral systems) it is a given that chaos is all; that order is not only arbitrary but evanescent, and that it is the task of a small strong circle of like-minded people to establish and guard it. Exactly which system of order we sustain—morally and politically speaking—is immaterial. We support the system most likely to stay in place.

  Hence our dilemma. I am not speaking here of personal disintegration, or of that futile and panicked attempt to withdraw from the field, though I have lost more friends and colleagues through those two chutes than I care to remember. This is not a field from which one can retire.

  Let me repeat that fact, though you already know it or you would not have come this far.

  Retirement from this career is not an option. We keep your soul in an escrow account. Take note: of the twenty of you in this room, the crème de la crème who have made the cut and been registered for this course, nine of you will leave us before the end through one of the two trapdoors I just named. The wages of sin in the Intelligence community are erasure. I know you understand this. If you did not, you would not have reached this class.

  But there is one other pitfall rarely acknowledged in our field, and it is the one to which I have already alluded: the risk of obsession with the pieces on the board. To put this in comprehensible literary terms: you are in danger of becoming transfixed by Paris and Helen, those idiots, who care nothing for either Greece or Troy, for Hector or Achilles, for the Trojan Horse or all the brilliant engines of war. They go on making love while the battle rages, and you may become obsessed with wanting to make them pay.

  This can lead to serious errors in judgment.

  Or you can become deranged by Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego; or by Daniel, by Lions’-Den Daniel, stubborn stupid Daniel in the den. You become obsessed with the ones who cannot be broken or bent.

  Watch for this.

  Such an obsession will precipitate fatal errors in judgment.

  Such an obsession will disqualify you permanently.

  Even your code name will be expunged.

  And then, finally, there is the perennial day-by-day challenge of your counterpart on the other side, the zealot whose energy you seek to harness, the rogue agent who can match you ruse for ruse, who can out-double-agent you, double-double-cross you, who can lead you into an ever-more-frenzied dance of death. Outwitting him is the secret addiction that will bind you to this career, that will obsess you to the exclusion of everything else in your life. It is he who will destroy you unless you kill him first, but you dare not kill him until he has served the purpose for which you first caught hold of his tiger’s mane and embarked on the wild ride with him.

  We are gamblers, ladies and gentlemen, in a high-stakes game. Timing is everything.

  One further reminder: should we meet, or should you meet one another, in social circumstances, social names will be used.

  Within this course, within any sphere of our professional endeavor, only code names are permissible. Never use other than a code name in writing. If any evidence is ever found that links a code name with an identifiable name, you will be expunged.

  In the world of shadows you have now entered, you will call me Salamander.

  3.

  I want you to stop the dreams, Dr. Reuben.

  I want the children removed from my dreams.

  You see that one, the little one with the dark hair and solemn eyes? His breath is a sweet concoction of curried food, fear, and something resembling cardamom. “What’s your name?” I ask him, and he says, “Agit,” and I promise him, “Everything’s going to be all right, Agit.” That was my promise to the little face that filled the screen of my monitor. The way I tell it, the way I feel it, the way the keeping of my promise feels true to me, is the moment when I set him (so to speak) on the escape slide, which is to say when one of Sirocco’s thuggish crew gave him a push and he slid into Germany.

  But he does not grow up into gratitude.

  Would it have been better then, back then, to let him stay with his mother on the plane? That is the question. Would it have been better to let him slip across that line that all must cross in the end? Would it have been better then, back then, instead of thirteen years later, the way it happened, had to happen, as required? This is a grave moral question. Such dreadful accidents are the things I have been called upon to arrange.

  No more, I said.

  I refuse. Arrangements for Agit Shankara will not be made.

  But what difference does it make when there are always others who will handle these matters?

  Nevertheless, I refused. I know the price I will pay.

  I am racked by what has been required. I am in blood stepped in so far, and Macbeth too started out with ordinary clean ambition and extraordinary zeal and simply got out of his depth, because one does not notice it happening, that is the trouble, until the day one takes a step too far and suddenly one is sloshing through blood and there is blood on one’s hands and blood on the ceiling and walls and blood in one’s breath and in one’s thinking and one recognizes Operation Macbeth, or Operation Blood, and yes, yes, I am stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

  There is nothing new under the sun, Dr. Reuben.

  You see the little girl in the blue coat? I have picked her up a thousand times in my mind. “Don’t be afraid,” I murmur, because I am in fact a very gentle man, especially and invariably with children. I slide her coat off her shoulders because it will be easier for her that way, and I stroke her cheek when I set her down at the top of the chute. Her cotton dress catches on something, a metal edge, the lever of the escape hatch, and how frantically I work to unhook her clothing and let her slide free (there is so very little time available), and I am left with a swatch of cloth between my fingers. It is white, sprinkled with forget-me-nots, and there is a fragment of smocking at one end: a few ruchings of cotton, some white thread, a smocked rosebud. On the monitor, I watched one of Sirocco’s thugs put it in his pocket, and I keep it in a pocket in my mind. It is there at all times.

  She, sweet little bird, flies down to the tarmac, unharmed.

  And now look. What can it mean, that such innocence should be so harsh and vengeful? She has the face of an angel. Her wings are silken and they glide like languid blue kites, fantastically beautiful, but the tips of the wings are barbed.

  I cry back into the dream: You don’t understand. You do not know what riding a tiger is like. If it had not been for me, not one of you would have been saved, not one. Not one single child would have been led off that plane, if not for me.

  But no one hears.

  4.

  Tocade. I suppose I became as obsessed with him as my daughter did and as Sirocco did and as the woman whose code name is Geneva did, and you can imagine how that particular collision interested us. When two separate people whom we have under surveillance make connection, we assume our suspicions were correct.

  You can see that, can’t you, Dr. Reuben?

  You can understand that the compound unit becomes an object of the most intense scrutiny, and in this case, in their case, the Tocade-Geneva case, there was the additional factor, the X factor, the goad. We—my colleagues in the profession and I—are fascinated by those objects of surveillance who are not suggestible, who have a zero suggestibility index, as we say, who do not succumb to inducement, who do not crack under pressure, who often do not even understand the exceptional nature of their own stubbornness, which may be sheer stupidity, I often think that, or may be a certain kind of obtuseness of comic-book dimensions, like the coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons, for example, with his lunatic inability to understand when he has been utterly expunged and flattened and wiped out, and it is precisely his insane thickheadedness which paradoxically makes him impossible to kill. You will understand that is why Tocade and Geneva became an obsession with me, and hence with Sirocco.

  With us.

  We are as attracted to people like t
hat as we are deeply wary of them. We keep them under close observation. They are dangerous. If they do not already work for someone else, we want them to work for us, and not only because their line of work would make them such ideal covers for our purposes. We are, perhaps, not unlike vampires—I can say this sort of thing to you, Dr. Reuben, because the dark corners of human behavior would be no surprise, would they?—we are not so unlike vampires, I admit it. We have lost our own souls and so we seek out people whose vibrancy reminds us painfully of what we once were, because in this career we all began as idealists, that is our tragedy. We began because we believed—most passionately we believed—in the idea of a free society. We believed that our way of life had to be preserved. We believed that our forms of government must, at all costs, be upheld.

  Aye, there’s the rub: at all costs. That is where the slide begins …

  We slip, we make one small, compromising—yet absolutely necessary—decision, an expedient decision, a complex and difficult and informed choice between the lesser of two evils, and this decision leads, in one month or ten, or in a year, to another slippery but essential decision, and then we find ourselves on loose scree, slipping and sliding and falling and falling and falling …