Due Preparations for the Plague

by Janette Turner Hospital

  The hostages are in an underground bunker which has been sealed. Sarin and mustard gas have been piped in, but the hostages are unharmed. They have been issued with gas masks and protective suits which will shield them for up to twenty-four hours (though some may succumb earlier than this).

  We have named ten freedom fighters who languish unjustly in French prisons. Many others are in Israeli and American jails. Release any ten Islamic freedom fighters and the hostages will be freed. Release one of ours, we release one of yours. You have twenty-four hours at most. If our terms are not met, the hostages will go the way of the plane, though not before they have suffered agonies.

  Transcript of telephone conversation

  (September 14, 1987)

  Salamander:

  Sirocco has the bunker wired and I’m patching you in. He’s a sicko. He wants us to see the death struggles live. This has to go all the way up. Let me know when you’ve got them patched in.

  Responding Voice:

  Receiving visuals. We haven’t decided how far up this should go. We’re monitoring.

  Salamander:

  This has to go all the way up. I know Sirocco. He’s posturing. He can always be bought. Hostages-for-prisoners is window dressing for the benefit of his thugs. He’s playing both sides against the middle, and he has to keep those zealots on a leash. He’ll cut a deal, but it involves oil rights, not just cash, and it’ll take two calls from the top: one from us and one from the Saudis. I can stall him.

  Responding Voice:

  Yes, stall him. That’s your directive.

  Salamander:

  I will, but there isn’t much time. This whole horror shop can be shut down fast with a call to King Fahd or Prince Abdullah. It has to come from the top, though, you understand? Find out where the bunker is. Precisely, I mean. It’s close to Tikrit, twenty miles from the airport or less. There hasn’t been time to go further. We have a contact in Tikrit.

  Responding Voice:

  We no longer have a contact in Tikrit. Saddam destroyed our CIA base a year ago, September ’86. With his Unit 999.

  Salamander:

  You think I don’t know that? He did it with the nerve gas we gave him.

  Responding Voice:

  That was when we needed him against Iran. He was supposed to use that against Iran. We couldn’t have predicted what a double-crossing swine—

  Salamander:

  Right. Wiped out a swath of his own Kurds simultaneously. Just the same, I’m telling you I still have a contact in Tikrit. And there are people I can buy.

  Responding Voice:

  We’re taking this under advisement. Your directive is to stall.

  Salamander:

  The Saudis know he’s getting money from us, so that won’t faze them. They think he’s their double agent, but this guy would sell his mother four times over. You’ve got to show them he’s in the pay of groups plotting to bring down the king. Make sure they understand that at the top.

  Responding Voice:

  We’re receiving you. Incoming visual data is excellent. God, they’re barbarians, aren’t they? This is diabolic stuff, but we have to proceed with caution. The word from upstairs is: we can’t afford to rock any Saudi boats.

  Salamander:

  This isn’t rocking boats. It’s saving their bacon.

  Responding Voice:

  We don’t think they’ll see it that way. Sirocco’s a Saudi.

  Salamander:

  He also carries two other passports that we know of. He’s shipped his family to Algeria so his wife can teach and his daughters can go to school. The word is, his oldest daughter wants to be a doctor and he wants to get her into the Sorbonne. The Saudis can claim he’s Algerian or Libyan if it suits them. Won’t be the first time. But for God’s sake, get them to act.

  Responding Voice:

  But the point is, he is a Saudi, and the princes do not appreciate unpleasant hints. They do not appreciate any suggestion that they have ties to terrorist acts. Stall him as best you can.

  Salamander:

  We’ve got twenty-four hours. No, we’ve got less than that now. You’ve got to arrange the call to King Fahd or Prince Abdullah. Do you have any idea of how horrible these deaths will be?

  Responding Voice:

  We’ll do what we can. Response just in from the spokesman for the House of Saud. The princes have no knowledge whatsoever of Sirocco.

  Salamander:

  Oh, for shit’s sake, what else would you expect a palace spokesman to say? I can give you photographs of Sirocco with the princes. They know him personally, he’s got their ear. I’ve got tapes, video with audio, of social events—

  Responding Voice:

  That’s exactly our point. The Saudis won’t appreciate it, and we are not to rock boats. It would not be in the best interests of national security at this time.

  Salamander:

  The bulk of the funding for this hijacking came from the Saudis (and the rest from us, of course, before we knew we’d been double-crossed).

  Responding Voice:

  We are fully aware of this, Salamander, but it would not be in the best interests—

  Salamander:

  And the weapons are ours, remember, in case some journalist gets hold of this, and so are the gas canisters, so you’d better damn well argue that it damn well is in the interests of national security … For the Saudis too, if their funding connection comes to light. You’ve got to make the president understand the long-term consequences of this, and he’s got to make the king understand.

  Responding Voice:

  Your recommendations are noted, Salamander. We’ll do what we can. But I’ve been asked to pass down from the highest levels that they know you have a highly personal stake in the hostage issue and there is a consensus that this is clouding your judgment. I would urge restraint, Salamander. Issues of national security do override personal concerns.

  I knew then, instinctively, that nothing would be done, that there would be a cover-up, that all evidence would be destroyed. I knew, as I replaced the receiver in its cradle, that my own days were numbered from that moment.

  It was not long after this that my telephone contact with my own superiors ceased altogether. My calls were not answered. I have never known, of course, what level of the administration my pleas and proposals reached, though I have made hypotheses based on after-effect, and based on the insistence that the tapes be surrendered and destroyed. I have been aware of repeated attempts to search for any possible illegal copy I might have made.

  At about the same time that I lost contact with our own people, I also lost contact with Sirocco. The break was abrupt. Both visual and sound transmissions were cut. Perhaps that was ordered and controlled from our end, perhaps from his. I do not know. I do know that the silence of the devil is more alarming than the silence of God because we ask ourselves fearfully: what is the Evil One planning, beyond the range of our ability to listen and observe?

  Under some distant and future administration, when different treaties and alliances prevail, we will perhaps learn finally of the whereabouts of the bunker that is somewhere in Iraq, and we will recover the remains of those who perished there.

  Did everyone die?

  Almost certainly. And yet we cannot know, since contact was lost before the end. Even a sealed bunker is porous and subject to draft, and there is a chance, a slim chance …

  I find myself hoping.

  This, you will be quick to accuse, is wishful thinking. I know it is. Even so, until conclusive evidence is obtained …

  As for Sirocco, he was considered too useful, too essential to our Intelligence needs in Afghanistan—against the Russians—to be eliminated or exposed. He has been receiving arms shipments, support, and various payments in kind as our double agent throughout the nineties. When the rogue agent is all we have, the rogue agent is what we use, balancing hazardous odds and short-term gain.

  Once it was clear that sucking doubt was pulling me unde
r, my own access to official Intelligence information was at first gradually, then rapidly, curtailed. I was reduced to training recruits. I was subsequently relieved of this duty and charged with “lack of academic neutrality” and “inappropriate and overly emotional lectures”. Nevertheless, my own unofficial sources are my own unofficial sources, an agent’s contacts remain his contacts, and I do have reliable information that at the time of my compilation of this edited tape, in the summer of 2000, Sirocco moves between Kabul and Peshawar and is considered useful to our national purposes.

  That which I have done—though I can never atone for its outcome—I continue to believe was that which was required at a time of complex risk to our nation and to international equilibrium and world peace. I believed I could lure all the members of an elite terrorist cell into one confined space and neutralize them.

  Things went wrong.

  If I could pinpoint the sole moment when I acted improperly, it would be the moment when Nimrod urged that Operation Black Death be aborted and I declined to support him. Hubris: I still believed I could pull Sirocco into line. Also: I did not wish to pay the price that Nimrod paid.

  I know that price will fall due.

  Against my terrible (though unintended) crimes, I post these small achievements: the children were released from the plane; I saved the life of my daughter Françoise; through contacts with French Intelligence and the French police, I have made it impossible (or as close to impossible as such things can be) for Sirocco ever to reenter France.

  The rest is silence.

  How, then, can I begin to re-create the effect of Sirocco’s live transmission from the bunker?

  Imagine this:

  The screen is almost, but not quite, dark. Strangely shaped shadow-beings, with grotesque heads, move about in a slow ballet, and if it were not for the dread fact that we know all too well what we are watching, we might think we were in the first circle of Dante’s hell.

  The light is murky, somewhere between the color of muddy water and of twilight in thick industrial smog. Hooded shapes, stumbling about like the damned—they are the damned—reach out and grope at each other. They feel the walls, they stretch their padded arms against it, reaching up, reaching down, describing large arcs in many directions, measuring the dimensions of their cage like blind men who have been told that somewhere on the walls is an Open Sesame switch. They have twenty-four hours to find it. Their hands are rounded and fingerless, like lepers’ stumps. Their body shapes resemble prehistoric insects; they have puffy segmented bodies and bug eyes. The stage set seems to be a room, or a bunker, about twelve feet square. There is no furniture. There are only the ten padded shapes which sometimes curl up on the ground, immobile, and sometimes bump into one another. When collision occurs, sometimes the bodies embrace and cling. At other times, they start apart like similarly charged magnetic poles repelling each other. High in one corner, where two walls and the ceiling meet, there is an eye of infrared light.

  The camera was set up by Sirocco, who wanted me, in particular, to watch, and who wanted the world to watch. See how calmly torture can be inflicted, he wanted to say. I am setting up shop in your nightmares. I live under your pillow and under your skin. You will never sleep peacefully again.

  Sirocco’s scheme was a long time in the planning. It was meticulous. It held just one small flaw. The decision makers not only achieved total blackout, they unmade Sirocco. They shifted him into the realm of the bogeyman, the hoax, the figment of nightmare. They deconstructed hell.

  And they were right to do so. They were right to puncture Sirocco’s fantasy of global scope and mythic power. They turned him into a shadow-play on a wall.

  I have no quarrel with that.

  It was the failure to save the passengers and the hostages that appalls. Their deaths were avoidable, though “not without unacceptable risk to the national good.” (I quote those who decide our fates.) Even this I could possibly accept: that in times of crisis, triage may be necessary. Some must perish for the greater good of all.

  But if so, I pleaded, the many owe homage to the few. The record of their sacrifice should not be expunged. It is our side, our own side, which has obliterated the hostages more absolutely than Sirocco did. It is we who have denied them due rites and obsequies.

  This is blasphemy, I argued. It is a moral stain on the national conscience.

  I was sternly rebuked.

  “Though collateral damage was regrettably high,” I was instructed, “Operation Black Death was a success. A qualified success, perhaps—we would have preferred to save the passengers—but nevertheless a success. A terrorist cell was neutralized, its remnants scattered. (From remote caves in Afghanistan, where they now must hide, what possible harm can they do, except to Russia?) Beyond and above this, a benchmark for strategy, we did not buckle under to blackmail. No unacceptable precedent has been established. This is a mark of our strength. When dealing with terrorists, this is triumph.”

  And so I came to Carthage and to Scipio. I began to ask the troubling question Scipio asked: How can we tell triumph from horror?

  In my chosen career path, this line of questioning is fatal. It signals the beginning of the end.

  I was ordered to hand over the tapes and I did so, and in the interests of national security—so I was told—the tapes were destroyed. Before I surrendered the originals, however, I made secret copies. When you watch my Decameron tape, you are watching the same screen that I was watching live, knowing, as I watched, that I was being watched. Consider that it is entirely possible that you too are being watched as you watch.

  On the tape, shadow-figures move and grope, watched by an infrared eye. By the paisley swirls of their motion, though not by the speed, the wraiths suggest a colony of ants in organized search of a mate. The mittened hands of one on the padded shoulders of another, two by two, they meditate, goggle to goggle, snout to snout. Then, often, they will embrace like fat clowns. They stand coupled; for ten seconds, thirty, one full minute, but then some knowledge, or some sense of dismay, must pass by osmosis. Each seems to sense error. The two will part, bowing with regret like Sumo wrestlers, to continue a dream minuet.

  As the partners change, then change again, and then again, you, the watcher, will find yourself wondering if the unchanging partner that each shadow seeks is Death Himself.

  Even out of atrocity, one is stirred to make art. Especially out of atrocity. One feels impelled to transform it. They felt so impelled. The Decameron tape is my own act of creative transformation and my act of atonement.

  What I am preserving are stories fashioned in hell.

  What we learn in a time of pestilence, wrote Albert Camus, is that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.

  3.

  Lowell lies full length on the carpet, face down, his forehead cradled on his arms. “My son whom I am terrified of losing,” he murmurs to the floor. He rocks his head the way people with migraines do.

  Declassified fragments and seventy-six blacked-out spaces tramp through Samantha’s head, left right left right, with a hundred and one halflines close behind: Salamander in charge of operations … XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX loose cannon, Salamander warns, but as rogue agents go, we can use XXXXXXXXXX backstairs contacts in the Saudi palaces and has usable information … XXXXXX payments and arms supplies to be arranged XXXXXXXXX Salamander to meet with Sirocco …

  Boom, boom, boom, beats the drum of indictments. Boom: the stroke of the censor’s pen. Boom, boom, faster and faster, Samantha’s noisy blood keeps time. It pounds at her temples. She feels a surge of incapacitating rage and pain. She wants to pound on the walls with her fists. How could you not have known? she wants to ask Lowell. She wants to scream.

  I would have known, she believes. If my father had crimes on his head, I would have known. I would have confronted him, I would have argued, I would have raged.

  If necessary, I would grab his ghost by the lapels.

  “He lived in perpetual terror that his
son would come to harm,” Lowell says. He recites the words like a child memorizing a catechism or a magic charm. He begins to move around the room like a sleepwalker, stumbling against the bed, bumping into the dresser and chair, butting the wall with his head. “My father was Salamander,” he says. The room seems to tilt and spin. His voice drops to a whisper. “My God, my God. My father was Salamander.”

  Sam slides the Number Two cassette into place. She presses the POWER button on the remote. She clicks to VCR mode. She presses PAUSE.

  “Say something,” Lowell demands.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say something, damn it. You made Salamander your north star. You’ve been steering your life by my father. You had fantasies of making him pay.”

  “He seems to have paid,” Sam says with difficulty. (But did he pay enough? she asks herself. Is he paid up? How do we get due reparations for and from the dead?) She says in a flat quiet voice, “Your father couldn’t have killed my Jacob. Your father was already dead. Someone else was pulling Salamander’s strings.”

  “He was afraid for me. I thought he watched me like a hawk because he expected me to fuck up. I thought he was ashamed, and all the time …”

  Samantha goes to the window and parts the heavy drapes. A single floodlight puddles gold on the only car in the lot: the proprietor’s van. The small motel office is lit; the rest is darkness. On the other side of the room, the windows look onto the marsh. Sam lifts the drape and looks out. The expanse of water and sweetgrass is eerily beautiful in the moonlight. Nothing stirs except the grasses and the night birds, the slow-gliding seabirds of the night.