Invisible Armies

by Jon Evans

They don’t know how much time they will have. Laurent dumped almost all the gasoline on the top floor, leaving only a thin trail down the stairs for the flames to follow, so the house should burn from the top down. Eventually it will collapse in on itself. The plan – hope, really – is that the men who surround the house will be taken aback by their quarry apparently burning themselves to death, and an opening will appear in their cordon. Failing that, maybe, just maybe, they can hide in this crawl space long enough for the Calangute fire department to come.

  She can hear the crackling noises of fire, now. It lights up the space around the house. Through a knothole she sees an Indian man standing in the garden not ten feet away from her, carrying a massive revolver, gaping up at the burning house. After a moment he turns and walks quickly away, rounding the corner of the house and disappearing from her view. Danielle crawls quickly along the wall he just vacated, looking for others, but seeing none.

  She moves halfway back towards the trapdoor. She can already feel heat on her face, and the air swirls as if there is a draft, funnelling towards the trapdoor, feeding the flames. “This way,” she says. She repeats it louder, in a near-shout, to be heard over the crackling flames. “This way! It’s clear!”

  Keiran scurries towards her. “They’re all on the other side, by the front door!” he calls out. He keeps going, joins her, followed quickly by Laurent. Angus coaxes Estelle into moving too, although Danielle sees that she crawls with her eyes closed.

  Hoping desperately that she is right, that there wasn’t a man left she didn’t see, Danielle leads them to the wall she has identified as safe. Now all they need is a way to get through it – but there, glinting in the flickering firelight, a brass hinge, and another, a section of the wall that folds inwards, secured by two latches that open easily. The doorway is stiff at first, the dirt has grown around it, but once Laurent and Keiran coax the first inch of movement from it, the rest is easy. They pour out of the crawl space. Outside, the trees and bushes of the garden cast dancing shadows in the bright firelight. The burning house doesn’t seem real, it looks like a model, a Hollywood prop. A huge pillar of smoke rises into the night. The flames have already consumed the entire top floor and the heat is intense. No one else is in sight.

  They run, and it occurs to Danielle as they do so that now they have to leave the estate, with its high walls topped by broken glass – but the gates are open, and no one is watching. A Jeep is parked in the driveway. They sprint through the gates and onto the open road.

  * * *

  Danielle’s new passport is so convincing she would be fooled by it herself. Laurent’s French passport seems a little flimsier, but maybe they are in the real world too. He seems pleased by the quality.

  “Your friend does good work,” he reports to Keiran, as he riffles the pages.

  “Mulligan’s attention to detail is unmatched,” Keiran agrees.

  “Come on,” Angus says. “Last taxi ride.”

  Airports seem unreal to Danielle at the best of times. Today, sleep-deprived, still dirty despite their attempts to wash up in a posh café’s bathroom, trailing an odour of wood smoke that won’t go away, having escaped what seemed like certain death for at least the third time in the last two weeks, it feels like a video game, part of Grand Theft Auto: Kishkinda.

  Their arrival at the airport is contemporaneous with that of three huge tour groups full of sunburnt Europeans. They line up at the Emirates ticket desk to buy tickets to Dubai. Once there they will be safe, and from that airport they can fly anywhere in the world. Angus and Estelle look terrified as they approach India Customs, afraid that they will be stopped and taken to the police, but Danielle is relaxed. These sour-faced bureaucrats will only do what their computers tell them to; and in this, as in all technical matters, Keiran is completely reliable. Their passports are stamped and they are waved through to the gate area, where all five of them sit in a tight group, utterly comfortable with each other, as if they have known each other for years. Cheating death twice in two nights will do that to a group.

  “Where were you thinking of going?” Estelle asks Danielle.

  She shrugs. “New York, I guess. But –”

  “Don’t,” Estelle says. “Come with us. Work with us.”

  “I’m sick of these bastards,” Angus says savagely. “Kishkinda and everyone like them. I’m sick of being hunted. I’m sick of running. You should be too. It’s time for us to start hitting back.”

  Keiran nods.

  “We have a plan,” Estelle says. “You can help us. Come with us to Paris.”

  Danielle looks at Laurent.

  “Yes,” he says. “We should go with them. It’s time for you to make the decision.”

  “What decision?” she asks, bewildered.

  “To help. To stop sitting on the sidelines. To stop reacting. To build a better world. You and I, together. With them. All of us.”

  Danielle opens her mouth without knowing what she is going to say. She is distantly aware that this is one of the moments on which her whole life hinges. She wants to say yes. But a voice that won’t shut up tells her the idea of joining an admittedly criminal group devoted to fighting enormously powerful corporations, and risking her life even further than she has this last month, is not just stupid but actually insane.

  But is risking her life so much more insane than wasting it on one of the empty, plastic existences that most of the people she has ever known now live? Is the life on offer really that different from that lived by those brave people, those heros and heroines, who volunteer for Amnesty International and Doctors without Borders in war zones like Afghanistan? Danielle thinks suddenly of the cell-phone ads she saw in Goa’s villages. An IDEA can change your life.

  Changing her life sounds like a very good idea. She has done it so many times before. But she is sure, somehow, that this time it will stay changed.

  “Yes,” she says, to a chorus of smiles. “All right. Yes. What the hell. Let’s change the world.”

  Part 3

  Paris

  Chapter 15

  “Danielle,” Francoise says, her voice grim, “I am sorry to bother you, but we have a problem, a big problem.”

  Danielle looks up from her computer and steels herself. “What?”

  “It is the accommodations. We have too many people coming from outside Paris, already hundreds more than we expected. We have no room for them, not even in the warehouse, we simply cannot keep more people there.”

  “I’ll talk to Estelle. We’ll rent another warehouse.”

  “There is no time. They arrive in only five days. We will be violating the law already, keeping so many people in one space. The owner of our warehouse will pretend not to see, but we have no more friends who will be so willing. I do not know what to do. These people, many of them cannot afford their own rooms, not in Paris, and we promised all of them accommodations. I know they say money is no obstacle but surely we cannot pay to put thousands of people up in hotel rooms.”

  “Maybe not,” Danielle admits, though she isn’t so sure, the mysterious foundation’s fountain of wealth seems to be inexhaustible. “Let me think.”

  As she ponders she distractedly runs her fingers through her hair, which has grown to pageboy length in the last six weeks. An idea hits. “How many volunteers do we have here?” Danielle asks. “A hundred?”

  “Nearly.”

  Not enough. “And how many more in Paris who signed up for the newsletter?”

  “Nearly two thousand.”

  “Send an email to them all. Ask them to volunteer to put up a guest for two or three nights. Have them send in addresses and phone numbers, we’ll make arrangements to route the out-of-towners to the volunteers’ places somehow.”

  “It will be chaos,” Francoise says, offended by the notion. A short, curvy, curly-haired fashionista, Francoise is a finicky detail person; exactly what Danielle needs in her translator and right-hand-woman, but sometimes infuriating.

  “Isn’t it alread
y? Just send the email,” Danielle hesitates, “and forward all the addresses and phone numbers to me. And the emails of the overflow people. I’ll match them up.”

  “You have no time for this.”

  “Neither does anybody else. I’ll make time. I’ll have Estelle help.”

  Francoise shakes her head. “You are an amazing woman, Danielle, but I fear you will die young of exhaustion.”

  Danielle looks at her. She tries to remember if anyone she wasn’t sleeping with has ever called her an ‘amazing woman’ before. She doesn’t think so.

  “I will send the email,” Francoise says hastily, apparently mistaking astonishment for stern disapproval. She turns and exits Danielle’s bedroom/office.

  Danielle wants to bask in Francoise’s praise, but she has no time. She returns to her computer and the sprawling Excel spreadsheet entitled La Défense 25 Apr that has eaten her life. With a sigh she creates a new page. In the past six weeks Danielle has learned more about Microsoft Excel than any well-adjusted human being would ever want to know. She never realized until she tried it that activism was so like accounting.

  But someone has to do the detail work, and there is so much of it to do. They need thousands upon thousands of people in La Défense on what she has been thinking of as The Day. When she, Laurent, Angus and Estelle decided, six weeks ago, to stage a protest at the International Trade Council’s annual meeting in La Défense, Danielle thought it was just a matter of sending out an email to the world’s activist groups, telling them where and when, then sitting back and watching them stream down the street on the day.

  But no. Angus and Estelle have a web of contacts in the global justice movement around the world, friends in Paris able to recruit dozens of volunteer aides, phone numbers for hundreds of organizations, lists of thousands of supporters’ email addresses; they are willing to spend a sum of money that impresses even Danielle, daughter of millionaires; but you still have to give people a reason to come, and six weeks’ notice isn’t much, and the International Trade Council is not a sexy target. A simple invitation will not do. This protest needed marketing, and then, after the marketing succeeded beyond all hopes, it needed organization.

  None of the other hundreds of loose-knit groups that make up the global justice movement joined the call for a demonstration. Some of them might pause to criticize the ITC in passing, in speeches and literature, but their rage-on-the-streets ammunition was conserved for bigger targets like the G8 and WTO. By itself that should have doomed Danielle’s protest before it began. The conventional wisdom, among the movement, was that a single voice calling for action would never be heard. But they have proved that wisdom wrong, and Danielle gives herself some credit for that. It was Estelle’s idea initially, of course, that if we build it they will come, but it is Danielle who has worked twelve-hour days for six straight weeks.

  Since their first week in Paris she has hardly seen Laurent except to crawl into bed beside him. Protests of this size require logistical organization on the scale of a military invasion. Except that armies do what they’re told, and the international global justice movement consists of people deeply skeptical of all authority. Organizing more than five thousand people, orchestrating the myriad of groups that they belong to, is a profoundly complex and difficult task. But Danielle is good at it. She has never been quite so good at anything before. Between the ordered productivity she learned in law school, and her years of dealing with the same counterculture types who make up the global justice movement, she is perfect for the job. And she enjoys it. All the endless niggling details, the hassle of translating everything to and from French, every crisis du jour, every roadblock, they are a new chance to get something done, something she believes in.

  If only she could be left alone to simply do her work. But as the protest has grown, and other groups have gotten involved, the Steering Council has become a battleground. Danielle sighs and begins to order her thoughts and evidence for the council, where once again, she is sure, she and Estelle will have to defend everything they have done against the jealous cows who wish they had done it instead.

  * * *

  “We’ve examined your preliminary list of speakers,” the gray-haired woman who has become Danielle’s bete noire says, “and we thought it would be worthwhile to discuss it further until we reach a consensus.”

  Dr. Laura Sayers. American-born, Yale-educated, French resident, author of several academic books about the language of economic inequality, and the chairperson of Accat, a French organization whose full unacronymed name Danielle can never remember, but which has a membership of forty thousand dues-paying members and thus considerable economic weight in the perpetually underfunded global justice movement. Dr. Sayers is also the de facto spokesperson for the seven members of the thirteen-person Steering Committee who are both offended by and opposed to the very idea of Danielle’s protest in La Défense.

  “Of course I’m open to a quick discussion,” Danielle says, smiling brightly. She leans back and looks out the window. The steering committee meetings are held around a table in a spacious room with a timbered ceiling, in an old warehouse along the Canal St-Martin in Paris’s 18th arrondissement. Through the dozen westward windows she can see across the canal to another warehouse, this one so dilapidated that few of its windows have not been shattered. There are barges parked on the bank of the canal, and a few trees onshore, leafy with new growth. Danielle looks at the trees and affects an air of not really listening. She learned this looking-out-the-window trick from a fellow law student who used it to infuriating effect in a law-school show trial.

  “Frankly, Miss Leaf, of course we understand that you’re unaccustomed to organizing anything on this scale –”

  “Danielle works with me,” Estelle says, an edge in her voice, “and I have put together dozens of protests. I helped organize a million people in Hyde Park, Ms. Sayers. Seven thousand is pocket change.”

  “Dr. Sayers, please, for the sake of accuracy, and attention to detail, and of course we understand that you young women are very well-meaning, but I think attention to detail is just why you should be willing to consister a greater share of assistance in the organizational efforts on the part of Accat and the other groups represented here. To say nothing of the perception, the unseemly appearance, of two Americans running a protest here in Europe.”

  “You’d rather it be three?” Danielle asks dryly.

  Dr. Sayers winces. “Please. Miss Leaf. I do not consider myself American, that’s only an accident of birth, and more to the point I am by no means putting my name forward, what I am saying is that your organizational techniques seem to verge on autocracy rather than consensus. Take this list of speakers, for instance. It’s unprecedented to simply come in with a list of speakers and ask us to accept it. As the council facilitator, I must remind you that the accepted behaviour is to allow all members of this spokescouncil to nominate and vote on the names, rather than dictate to us who we will and will not hear. That flies in the face of the notion of consensus.”

  Middle-aged faces nod sober approval. Danielle smiles sardonically. She knows Dr. Sayers is no more interested in consensus than Stalin was. Danielle wishes that when the council was first formed she had known enough to veto Dr. Sayers’ acclamation as Facilitator, a role the older woman has been trying hard to transform into Agenda-Setter, Chairperson, and Dictatrix ever since. At least the ridiculous position of Vibes-Watcher has been abolished, ever since Irina, the meek Italian women who held it, burst into tears and fled the room during a previous battle between Danielle and Dr. Sayers.

  “Of course we would have preferred to do it that way, but you do understand that the protest will take place in,” Danielle glances ostentatiously at her watch, “one hundred and eighteen hours. We simply don’t have time to take suggestions, assemble a list, and then get in touch with people and see if they can come.”

  “But this list is ridiculous. Are you seriously suggesting that we give Silas Warren a full fifteen
minutes’ time?” Dr. Sayers demands. “He’s no more than a thug.”

  “Diversity of tactics should necessarily imply a diversity of speakers,” Danielle says smoothly. It is amazing how quickly the right lines come to mind now, as if she is an actress with a little earpiece that gives her exactly the right words, the coded language of angry diplomacy. Six weeks ago she stuttered when talking to Dr. Laura Sayers. Now she treats her adversary across the table with something like contempt.

  “‘Diversity of tactics’.” The gray-haired woman says this as if she wants to spit. “Code for black blocs. Code for violence. Code for smashed windows and smashed faces and all the worst, wrongest kind of media attention. Miss Leaf, I have no time, none whatsoever, for your ‘diversity of tactics.’ I move in the strongest possible terms that we expel Mr. Warren from the agenda, and further than we make it clear that this protest has no time for the black blocs and, further, if any turn up, we as organizers will do our best to prevent them from attending and will help turn them over to the police if they do appear.”

  Danielle looks over at Estelle, who is sitting absolutely motionless with the rictus smile on her face that means she’s on the verge of eruption. Danielle represses a wave of irritation – she likes Estelle very much, but can’t she control herself around these useless old biddies? – and intervenes quickly before Estelle can say anything.

  “Of course we respect your personal views, Ms. Sayers,” Danielle says, her voice honey on treacle, “but as a representative of Accat you’re presumably here to represent its members and the desire to participate in this protest that many of them have expressed. Naturally if you feel that your personal views conflict with your duties to the extent that you can no longer continue on this committee, we will understand.”

  “You’ll understand? You’ll understand?” Dr. Sayers demands, getting to her feet. Danielle smiles inwardly. Victory. “Young lady, you don’t understand the first thing, not about how the movement works, not about our goals, not about the need for ethical and non-violent means, not about anything that I have devoted my life to! All you want to do is come to France and wave your dollars around and put ten thousand people in the streets for the sake of your own vanity. It’s publicity hounds like you two who will destroy this movement, destroy any hope we have of making a better world, just so you can see yourself on CNN and tell yourself how important you are! Well, you won’t, we won’t let you get away with it. We are not for sale!”