A Murder of Crows

by David Rotenberg

The immigration officer signalled him to come forward. He stepped onto the electronic pad and offered his palm for the hand scan.

  “Passport,” the man said.

  Seth gave him his passport.

  “Put your hand down. You’re a Canadian, no need for a scan.” Then under his breath, clearly for the benefit of the immigration officer in the next booth, he said, “Don’t ask me why.”

  The guy in the next booth chortled.

  The immigration officer opened Seth’s passport and slid it through the digital reader. As he did, a ding sounded in the Junction, and Eddie turned in his swivel chair and reached for his computer.

  “What’s the reason for your visit, son?” the immigration officer asked—no, demanded.

  Seth took out the treatment regime that had been sent to him by the San Francisco Wellness Dream Clinic. The immigration officer read the document quickly and then asked, “You have an address for this . . . clinic?”

  Seth pointed at the address on the bottom of the document, and the immigration officer typed it into his computer. Then he stopped. His cursor was hopping around his screen. “Hey,” he called to the next booth. “Your computer okay?” After receiving an affirmative he turned back to his screen—and his cursor had stopped hopping.

  Back at home in the Junction, Eddie copied down the address, made a second check to be sure that it had been Seth’s passport that had dinged his computer, then found the address on Google Earth. As he did he said aloud, “What’re you up to, Seth?”

  20

  A DRUNKENNESS OF COPS: GARRETH SENIOR—T MINUS 16 DAYS

  THE RETIRED TORONTO HOMICIDE COP WAS SITTING IN THE living room of his home in Seaside, Florida—the house that a drug dealer’s money paid for—watching the news on Fox when he got the call from his son, who was a detective on the Toronto police force.

  Seaside, Florida, is the crème de la crème of planned communities—rich planned communities. Every house was designed by the central design team. All the houses are named and had the names of the owners proudly displayed on brass plaques hanging from their front picket fences. Several had an added sign that said Be Nice or Go Away.

  It was Garreth Senior’s gift to himself after forty-plus years of honourable service on the Toronto Police Service—most in homicide. Honourable that is until the day—almost four years ago now.

  He had awoken that day thinking about Decker Roberts. He remembered having a beer with his soft-boiled eggs. And another with his toast. But still, Decker Roberts’ image was with him, and the image of that little girl who bled to death in the snow. By noon when he stumbled on the Vietnamese drug dealers he was rollicking drunk and it seemed like destiny that he appeared at the exact moment when the money was changing hands.

  He’d never been so scared in his life. He’d also never seen so much of what his father would have called cash money. He was on autopilot—the booze was in control. No, fuck that—Decker Roberts was in control. The money was in his hands before he knew it. Then it was in the safe beneath his bed. Then in the Bahamas bank—now in his Seaside house.

  The phone was ringing. For a moment he couldn’t identify the source of the sound—was he having a fire, or was it the damned carbon monoxide alarm? Then he remembered—it was his phone. It rang so seldom.

  “We found his son, Dad.”

  “Decker Roberts’ son?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where?”

  “He just crossed the border at Blaine, Washington.”

  “And Mr. Roberts Senior?”

  “We’re not sure. Last we knew he was out of the country—somewhere in Africa.”

  “Well, perhaps the boy knows his father’s whereabouts.” The idea hung out there for Garreth Junior to comment on, but he didn’t. “Do we know where the young Mr. Roberts is heading?”

  “Dad?”

  “Come on, Son! If you tracked him to the border you know where he’s going.”

  Garreth Junior sighed then gave him the address of the Wellness Dream Clinic just north of San Francisco.

  “Wacko California stuff?”

  “Sounds like it to me, Dad. You going to check this out?”

  Garreth Senior thought of an old film—Hud or Hush or something else beginning with an H that was about a killing in one of those weird-assed places—then asked, “Do you really want to know?”

  “No. Actually I don’t.”

  “Fine, then we never spoke. One more thing.”

  “What?”

  “What’s the young Mr. Roberts’ name?”

  “Seth. Seth Roberts.”

  “Book of Seth,” Garreth Senior said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Okay.” He drew a long breath then asked, “How are you, Dad?”

  Better, now, he thought, but said, “The same. I’m the same.”

  “Hey, you know I’m worried about you.”

  “Are you, now?”

  “Yeah. This thing with this Roberts has become an obsession with you. You know?”

  Garreth Senior hung up the phone.

  He stepped out onto his screened-in porch and felt the thick warm night.

  Decker Roberts.

  So Decker Roberts had produced a child. A devil’s seed.

  He’d met Decker Roberts almost forty years ago. It had been a raw January day outside a fancy house in the Glencairn district of Toronto, before the big synagogue was built and the area became an enclave of Orthodox Jews. When WASP Toronto was still fighting a defensive action against encroachment of Jews of any sort. Decker Roberts was four or five years old. And cold. And frightened. And very possibly responsible for the death of a six-year-old girl.

  Garreth added a bit of sugar to his bourbon and swirled the dark liquid in the highball glass. Bourbon was a newish delight for him; adding sugar was something his southern neighbours had taught him. He had tried the mint sprigs they also added to their bourbon but disliked the way it covered the slow smokiness of the liquor. Besides, he couldn’t get over the feeling that if you added mint you should also add a tiny umbrella and probably a cookie.

  No.

  Alcohol was a grown-up’s pleasure and he wanted to keep it that way.

  He tilted the fine liquid into his mouth and savoured it on his tongue. As long as he was tasting it he wasn’t drinking just to get drunk—or so he told himself.

  Palmetto bugs slapped into the veranda’s screens. Beyond them, fireflies flicked into and out of existence. He metaphorically peered into his own darkness.

  Garreth swallowed his drink in one long gulp, passed by the TV that flickered light across his hardwood floors and headed into his basement, where he kept the files of his unsolved cases, knowing that the one on top had the underlined name of Decker Roberts on it.

  21

  A PLOTTING OF CRAZY EDDIES—T MINUS 16 DAYS

  EDDIE ROLLED A BOMBER THICKER THAN HIS THUMB AND INHALED deeply.

  The Trojan he’d embedded in the new lease he’d e-mailed to Ira Charendoff, Patchin Place Lawyer, was doing its nastiness and had sent him Charendoff’s e-mail contact list, which of course included the man’s daughter’s address.

  Eddie looked at the photograph of the Charendoff girl he’d downloaded from the Paris newspaper’s website, then at the photo of the dead boy almost encased in the ice of Stanstead’s little river. He turned over several possibilities in his mind, then he reminded himself that the sinner was the father, not the daughter, and how very wrong that Old Testament crap was about visiting the sins of the father on his children.

  He fired off a quick e-mail to the daughter and waited for the unsubscribe reply. It came in seconds with a request to remove her from his e-mail list—she did not wish to receive any more correspondence from Iowa Baptist Ministries for Justice and Peace in Moldova.

  Good, Eddie thought. Just wanted to make sure that was you.

  He looked at the photo of the dead Stanstead boy a second time, then replaced the photo of the daughter with one
of her father—the sinner.

  He pulled out his checklist. (1) Get Decker safely away—done. He checked his GPS mapping program, and there he was. Good. (2) Find Marina in Portland—in process. (3) Attack Charendoff—to be executed.

  Eddie opened his STUXNET file and added the few new ideas he’d been able to piece together from his recent explorations into the covert world of cyberwarfare. Eddie, like almost every other computer maven in the world, was pretty sure that STUXNET was an Israeli viral attack on Iran’s nuclear industry.

  Unlike some he believed there were good viral attacks and bad viral attacks.

  On a whim he opened his WikiLeaks folder from his computer desktop and reread the news coverage closely. Mr. Assange had got himself in a passel of trouble. But that wasn’t really a concern of Eddie’s. He had no idea if Mr. Assange was a force for good or evil in the world. Jury was out on that as far as he was concerned, but the American government was clearly anxious to nail his snotty little ass to the wall—which led him back to the PROMPTOR anonymity system.

  He reduced the WikiLeaks file and opened his PROMPTOR file. There he quickly scanned the few scraps he’d been able to put together on the founder of PROMPTOR—and, once again, on the American government’s interest in silencing him. Two people “of interest” to the American government—the head of PROMPTOR and Mr. Assange.

  Eddie thought about that—“people of interest to the American government.”

  Now if he could get the authorities to take the same kind of interest in Lawyer Charendoff in New York City . . .

  He enlarged the article on the second arrest of the head of PROMPTOR and read it slowly, highlighting the claim that the guy made that he was not the real head of/or programmer of PROMPTOR.

  “But what if I could make the authorities believe that Lawyer Charendoff was that guy—the head of/programmer of PROMPTOR?” Eddie swivelled in his chair. How sweet to have a man—fuck, a lawyer—like Charendoff hounded by a government that he thought was there to protect him and his property.

  “So PROMPTOR is the weapon,” he said aloud. “Time to get up close and personal with the world of PROMPTOR.”

  He hit three keys and entered a sixteen-letter password corresponding to the correct algorithm generated from the date, then pressed enter. Hundreds of seemingly delighted clicks announced that every library computer in the entire metropolitan area was at his beck and call. He pressed two more keys and several thousand more clicks followed: all of the computers at York University and the University of Toronto awaited his bidding. Good, he thought. I’ll need the computing power to begin this little exercise.

  He called up his own PROMPTOR program and sent himself a message—“Hey you, it’s me, don’t disappear up your own asshole!”—and waited for it to bounce through hundreds, perhaps thousands of volunteers’ computers, each of which removed a bit of his identity then passed it on. A ding announced his e-mail’s return. It showed absolutely no clue as to his identity as the sender.

  Then he sent a second e-mail to himself from one of his other accounts. Its dinged return was speedier, but it gave out all the information about who he was and where he was writing from.

  He reduced both to half a page and aligned them side by side, then took a deep drag, sat back and studied the two e-mails as he thought about Marina and what he’d need to make the U.S. government think that Ira Charendoff was the mastermind behind PROMPTOR. If he could do that he’d then offer Charendoff a way off the hook—he’d have the leverage he needed to get Ira Charendoff off his fat lawyer’s ass and have him arrange for Marina’s return.

  22

  A TENTATIVENESS OF APPROACH—T MINUS 14 DAYS

  TAKING HIS FATHER’S $20,000 BANK DRAFT FROM HIS WALLET AT the San Francisco Wellness Dream Clinic was one of the hardest things Seth had ever done. It surprised him. Shit, no—it shocked him what he was feeling—the intense guilt as he considered handing over the check to the pert blond receptionist.

  But he had done his research and knew he needed to move beyond the temporary pause in his cancer that BCG treatments offered.

  The past few times he’d been cystoed he’d read the growing concern on the doctors’ faces. The last time he hadn’t even seen his own doctor—another physician, a British lady, had treated him like, well, like nothing more than a body for the growth of a disease. She’d clucked when she saw the cancerous growths on his bladder wall and even said to the attending nurse, “What is that bladder still doing in him?”

  There’s something infinitely obscene about two women hovering over a naked man with a tube shoved up his penis and treating him like a piece of diseased meat. At times it felt like the Canadian medical system didn’t really treat him. The disease they treated; him they sometimes ignored and he was getting the eerie feeling that he was running up against some sort of protocol in the system. Yeah, his bladder grew tumours, but they were surface tumours that could be lasered out, either under local or general anaesthetic. He’d had both done. But he was getting the distinct impression that the system had a maximum number of times they were willing to do this before they went to the more final solution of removing his bladder—something that in all likelihood would profoundly change his life.

  Yes, Ms. Palin, there are no death panels in the Canadian medical system, but all systems have limitations, and those limitations force the system to prioritize. There is never enough money and/or expertise to manage everything, so in Canada diseases are triaged. America does the same thing, but they use money as the determinant—just another form of triage where the poor are last on the list.

  So he’d gone in search of an actual cure, found an experimental option in Northern California and requested the fee—$20,000—from Eddie, who got it from his father.

  And now Seth was fingering the $20,000 bank draft.

  As he did, he was watched on a closed-circuit monitor by a tall, slender man with long grey hair.

  Seth handed over his $20,000 and entered the corridor leading to the clinic, unaware that the heavy steel door closed silently behind him, and bolted shut.

  23

  A CRASH OF RHINOS—T MINUS 12 DAYS

  SOMEONE WAS BANGING ON THE METAL DOORS OF THE women’s restroom stalls.

  Then shouting, “Hicks! Hicks! Get the fuck out here!” It was Harrison—in the women’s restroom. What the fuck was Harrison doing in the women’s restroom?

  As Yslan stepped out of the stall she saw Harrison pacing and muttering to himself. No, not muttering—cursing. Now he was yelling.

  “Did you find what’s his name?” he demanded.

  “Decker Roberts? Yeah. We’ve tracked him to South Africa and we’re on him now.”

  Harrison laughed, turned to the sink and stared into the mirror.

  “Something’s funny, sir?”

  “No. Nothing’s funny. Nothing’s funny anymore.”

  The finality of his statement stunned her.

  Then he smashed the mirror with his fist.

  Glass tinkled off the porcelain sink and to the floor; blood blossomed from his fist.

  And she knew.

  It had happened—shit, it had happened again.

  She stood perfectly still and said only one word. “Where?”

  24

  A FURY OF BLASTS—T MINUS 12 DAYS

  TWO HOURS LATER YSLAN AND HARRISON ARRIVED AT ANCASTER College. The campus was beautiful in the early spring light. Mature oak and maple trees were in bud and seemed to leap up the mountain upon which the famous college housed its vast lab complexes and state of the art research facilities.

  They noted that if you looked up the hill the upper New York State idyll was on view and complete—an elite college for the best and brightest science and math students in the country, perhaps in the world.

  But when they lowered their gaze to the base of the mountain they saw a scene reminiscent of a war zone. Two buildings teetered ominously just north of the blast site. The late eighteenth century Calvinist church was no longer a
model of perfect symmetry as its iconic steeple, which embossed every piece of the college’s stationery, listed far to one side. And almost half a square mile of pavement had evidently been shot into the air. Some of it was now embedded several feet deep in the earth at angles that seemed to defy the laws of physics.

  In the epicentre was the huge crater. It was now surrounded by police tape and so many armed and body-armoured soldiers that this could easily be mistaken for a street in Tripoli rather than a quiet upper New York State town that prided itself on its college, its green approach to the environment and its massive U.S. military contracts.

  Yslan and Harrison badged their way through the cordon of soldiers and cops until they stood on the very edge of the gash in the earth. The gaping hole before them was still populated by the remains of hundreds of human beings and the obscenely twisted flimsy folding chairs upon which they had been seated only four hours earlier—some of which seemed to be bowing down in prayer to some as of yet unnamed underworld god of vengeance.

  From the few still-standing poles the remnants of the huge graduation tent flapped with obscene gaiety in the fresh spring wind.

  Yslan was surprised by the overall quiet of the place. She looked skyward at the bright sun, which seemed to be mocking them all. Then her eyes were drawn by some motion down in the pit. At first she thought it was a large stone rolling down the east wall of the blast site, but she was wrong. When she understood what it was that had drawn her eye, her gorge rose. The head bounced, then came to rest on the blast floor, a single eye open—staring, or at least seemingly staring—right at her.

  Yslan looked away and tried to concentrate on the preliminary forensic reports that she’d just been given.

  There’d been two devices. Why techs insisted on calling bombs devices was beyond Yslan’s understanding or concern.

  The fucking things blew up—period.

  But the devices—bombs—and the hundreds of pounds of scrap metal that had surrounded them were placed perfectly to cause maximum damage. The first blast instantly killed forty-three of the finest maths and science professors in the western world. The second immolated the entire summa cum laude and cum laude graduating class—amongst them seventy-two degrees in advanced electrical/civil engineering, thirty-nine in computer science, twenty-two in nuclear physics and twenty-one in chemical engineering.