Crackdown

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Pratt, this guy did everything in his power to bury you. Davenport was his shovel. Once they restarted that huge machine of a backdoor investigation, no evidence or facts could stop it from acquiring resources, people or an updated operational plan. The assembly belt kept getting longer and longer, and the engine running it speeded up. Ballard wanted out. It didn’t have to make any logical sense; it just had to feed the original premise: that you and I were up to no good. Even if that weren’t true, why risk the chance it was true?”

  “Why would Ballard have left The Quiet American behind for you, and the note?” asked Pratt. “What was his game?”

  “I’ve thought about that. Osborne said Ballard had questioned him about me.”

  “Osborne as a character reference. I’ll try to digest that one.”

  “He told Ballard that I was an okay guy, and that he liked me. That I played fair.”

  “The book was his way to give you a sporting chance.”

  “Maybe he didn’t like being used. He knew I was clean and so were you. But everything was being driven by politics. From what Osborne said, Ballard didn’t think much of DEA political types who had other alphabet agencies working with them. Ballard didn’t have any choice. He couldn’t stop them, but he could warn me.”

  Pratt looked at his watch.

  “I applied for a leave of absence.”

  “So that’s why you’re out of uniform.”

  Pratt shook his head.

  “The application was denied.”

  “You’ve left the department?”

  “They don’t really need me. It was a mistake on both sides.”

  “Why are you looking at your watch, Pratt?”

  Pratt opened his briefcase and removed Calvino’s office-warming gift, the plaque with the Shakespeare quote from Othello:

  The robbed that smiles steals something from the thief;

  He robs himself that spends a bootless grief.

  “When I cleared out my desk, I found this in a drawer. It should have been on top of my desk from day one. The fact that I hid it gives me grief.”

  He handed to Calvino.

  “Keep it for the beach house, Pratt.”

  Pratt took in a deep breath and glanced up at the sky.

  “If I were a betting man, I’d wager that Marley isn’t finished. She’ll dox everyone linked to the Rohingya smuggling network. General Sor was the first. It won’t take much to turn it into a full-scale purge. A lot of people are running scared.”

  Calvino grinned. The year before she’d released the names of girlfriends, giks, minor wives and escorts associated with ranking officers.

  “Yeah, I bet people are afraid,” Calvino said, “and they should be. If General Sor couldn’t stop her with his connections, who’s gonna be their papa?”

  “She’ll target them one by one, until not one of them involved in the Rohingya trafficking is left.”

  A chilling coolness in Pratt’s voice conveyed the inevitability of what would happen. Pratt had painted himself out of the picture. When he’d returned to the department, he had seen what was coming, and that the pressure would be on him to stop her. The best way to stop Marley had been through Calvino. General Sor had run to the Americans for protection, but they couldn’t help him, or wouldn’t. The gamble hadn’t paid off and no one could stop an excavation into a buried mountain of bones. Already a team had begun assembling the skeletons.

  “You can’t be sure it’s Marley,” said Calvino.

  “With Marley no one can be sure, but let me ask you: do you believe for a moment that she’s not behind this purge? No one can stop her. Not me, not you, not the Americans. She uncovered the detailed information about the Rohingya trafficking. She knows who was involved.”

  Calvino had discovered over the years that most people gathered information by using either the pig or the oyster technique. The smart pig had an uncanny ability to find truffles. The pig’s attention focused on locating where the truffles were buried. Marley found General Sor’s role in the trafficking, like a truffle, unearthed his involvement and displayed it for all to see. The second model, the oyster, was just as effective—it only required a single grain of sand clutched inside a wet, soft surface, and over time, with the right chemical reactions and tidal forces, layer after layer would wrap around the grain until a pearl formed. She must have gone through oceans of big data, wrapping her grain of sand, until General Sor jumped out as a fully formed pearl. Marley’s genius had been to evolve hundreds of pigs and oysters into algorithms and send them digging and layering, finding truffles and producing pearls, until the buckets overflowed. No one had ever seen so many truffles and pearls in one place. No one knew what to make of such a bounty or how to process all the corrupt officials swimming among the pigs and oysters.

  “You’re leaving the department because you can see how this is going to end.”

  “There’s a line from King Claudius in Hamlet: ‘Revenge should have no bounds.’ ”

  “She’s discovered new frontiers beyond the old revenge map,” said Calvino.

  Pratt smiled.

  “Remember on the beach you said the department and I were like mismatched socks? You were right. I pretended we matched, and they did their part, too. But reality caught up with us. I feel like a fool. I should have seen this coming. It was a mistake for me to have left the beach house. I’m much better at growing orchids. I do well within those boundaries.

  “I’m meeting Manee for lunch. Later we’re driving back to Banglamung. Why don’t you plan to come visit us this weekend? Bring Ratana along with you. You must hear Manee tell her story about the Generals’ Wives Committee and the fish in the fountain. And I’ll show you the latest orchid project I have in mind.”

  Calvino returned the smile and let it fade as he thought about Shakespeare’s idea of revenge.

  “Pratt, let me ask you something.”

  Pratt was still smiling.

  “Do you believe in evil?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you believe revenge can expel evil from the world? Did Shakespeare? That it was something a man could crush or cage?”

  “What about you, Vincent?”

  Pratt flashed a lawyer like smile.

  “Answering a question with a question—I know that trick,” said Calvino. “I don’t think that evil can ever be eradicated. The seed is in all of us. You rip it out by killing some people. The revenge feels good, but it doesn’t change anything. The seed grows somewhere else, changes shape, shift locations, like the tiny grain of sand that a black pearl grows from. Marley believes in the necessity of doing battle with evil. She knows no battle is decisive but still believes that not putting up a fight is a mistake. That’s why she tried to help the Rohingyas.”

  “How did that work out?”

  “Not so well.”

  Calvino looked at his watch and brought their discussion to an end.

  “It’s time for a drink.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  “With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.”—Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings

  “A fool tries to look different: a clever man looks the same and is different.”

  —John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps

  THE LOFT SPREAD out like a minor principality, curving elegantly, covering a territory of more than four hundred square meters. Gallery lighting, temperature control, air-conditioning compressors out of sight, and Bach’s Sonata No. 2 filling the space from a system of hidden speakers. The open area, divided by temporary walls, had a strange arrangement of geometric spaces that only a mathematician could calculate, with angles leading to dead ends like wrong turns in a maze.

  “Is this a museum?”

  Yoshi smiled at Calvino.

  “More like a private gallery. Museums suggest dead things. You’ll discover everything you encounter here is very much alive.”

  Yosh
i’s guided tour started just inside the door. The unit occupied the entire twenty-second floor, and only a special key allowed the lift to stop there. He pointed his iPhone at one panel to activate the lights. Colors formed waterfalls of reds, blues, greens and yellows on the walls. The ceiling coned into a dome with concentric green and jasmine circular lines, changing places, jumping one over the other.

  “Let me show you a series of walls you may find of interest.”

  The first wall had ancient maps hung beside digital maps that constantly updated in real time: for instance, a map of the world’s current, growing population next to a map from the fifteenth century. Maps of the analog and digital worlds were hung side by side—one side fixed, static, permanent, the other side in constant flux, the borders, features and numbers continually changing. The walls had many themes such as political space, social space, economic space, technology, metals, mountains, rivers and climate.

  Big-screen digital maps projected the Milky Way galaxy, our local system, nearby galaxies and the rest of the universe. Other walls featured regional maps: Europe, Africa, South America, North America and Asia. Yoshi showed Calvino the Southeast Asia wall. The wall displayed dozens of maps—some depicting political borderlines, others languages or ethnic populations, as they evolved through time. Ancient maps, maps from three hundred years ago, from colonial times and post-World War II.

  “It’s difficult to know where to start,” said Yoshi. “But there is one map in particular I want to show you. I think you’ll like it.”

  A digital map of Thai rivers, each river represented by a wiggly blue line registering motion shifts—the Mekong, Chao Phraya, Pong, Ramphan, Prachin, Nan, Salween, Pa Sak, Sakae Krang, Wang, Dom Noi, Ping, Tarang, Wa, Yai, Ing, Pao, Tha Chin and Tron. Yoshi explained to Calvino that the tributaries and rivers on the map shared a common destiny, one that carried them home either to the Gulf of Thailand or the Andaman Sea.

  “If you want to understand the true nature of a people, read a map of their river system,” said Yoshi. “Water is the story of life. The major rivers, from the Amazon to the Nile to the Mississippi waterways, add up to a library of human history. You can’t know the story of change until you study a river system. We struggle to control the rivers. We dam them, divert them, build locks and canals. None of these attempts are new. Each generation learns that rivers are free to choose, and we can be carried along or we can resist and fight the current. The river, in the end, wins.

  “The political river system looks like it is about to jump channels. Looking for new boundaries. That’s what makes this a dangerous age. The old boundaries no longer hold people as before. They are porous and weak.”

  Calvino looked around, and in every direction were digital panels, holograms and virtual reality alcoves.

  “This room is finite,” he noted, “but the panels in it seem to go on forever.”

  Yoshi moved ahead to the next panel, featuring a neurological map, a DNA map and a human capillary map.

  “The infinite within the finite. What we see is a small percentage of one percent of what has been mapped, measured, bounded, contained. What you see is a beginning.”

  Calvino followed Yoshi about twenty feet and entered a space different from the others, with old-fashioned tables and chairs and display cases. It was a perfect replica of a room at Bletchley Park Museum—rotary Bakelite telephone, desk and chair, a teddy bear dressed in bib overalls inside a glass case, a statue of Alan Turing seated at a table, his hands gripping a decoding machine. Hanging from the walls were duplicates of all twenty-nine of the Elite John photographs. As Calvino walked into the room, a chair turned around and there was Marley, sitting cross-legged, smiling, her blue eyes filled with life. Calvino had known women whose face radiated life; Marley had gone a step further, entered another level of being.

  “It’s a hologram, right?”

  He turned to look at Yoshi, but Yoshi had already moved to Marley’s side. The two exchanged a look.

  “Vincent wants to know if you’re real.”

  Ever since the coup, what was and was not real had become a political controversy.

  “You’re asking if I’m real? Is this place real?”

  “Is it?”

  “Marley,” said Yoshi, “you’ve assembled this exhibition. You should explain it to Vincent.”

  “My dear curator, you are unusually modest,” said Marley.

  “You were Christina Tangier’s patron,” said Calvino.

  “I gave her an idea,” said Marley. “I thought it right to add Crackdown: Teddy Occupies the 1% to Alan Turing’s room at Bletchley Park. What do you think, Vincent?”

  Calvino moved among the exhibits and the photos, Marley watching him as he stood before each one. He turned to her.

  “Marley, what are you doing here? I get it that you’re famous and complicated, and I like complicated women, but this...”

  “This is for you.”

  He turned around with his hands stretched out, palms up.

  “You’ve been generous. The rare map, the Hong Kong Harbor show. You uploaded an encryption so powerful that the best minds at NSA couldn’t crack it. And now you bring me to this place. I’ve been thinking about all these gifts, your interventions like a fairy godmother—not a lover, but a protector—and asking why. Then I figured it out. Why you stayed in the background. Unnoticed. Paying attention but remaining invisible. It was your way of showing love, in the only way you knew how. To make yourself a part of not just my life, but the way I thought about life and about myself.”

  “You taught me something about myself, Vincent.”

  “What could I possibility have taught you?”

  “When a man really loves a woman, he gives her the space to cultivate her garden, even when it takes her far away. You let me go. That was the greatest gift of all because if you’d asked me to stay, I would have.”

  “You should have left me to handle Osborne and Ballard,” he said.

  “Solving a murder requires better tools than those used by the murderers.”

  Marley’s fingers danced over a control panel in the arm of the chair, and a map lowered from the ceiling. It bore the legend “Ballard Map Co-ordinates.”

  “It’s his digital history: schools, friends, family, teachers, coaches, employers, wives, girlfriends, banks, insurance, medical, dental, preferences, likes, address book, fingerprints, literary tastes, associations, links and connections to on-the-record and off-the-record agencies, and their connections to each other. A person’s life is like a river flowing into the sea. All the small streams that feed into canals and rivers show the direction of a life, where it overflowed the banks and when it went parched and dry, on its rush to meet the sea.”

  “How did you get this information?”

  “NSA files are less secure than you’d expect. They have millions of files, and a forest of trees to patrol, prune, cut, replant and modify. Trees of generals, admirals, prime ministers, dictators, moguls, inventors, politicians, writers, scientists, intellectuals, academics and the wealthy. Think of Google Maps but with thousands of times more detail and resolution, all of it automatically updated every second with every phone call, email, Internet search, tweet, Facebook comment, ‘like’ and retweet.”

  “Have you seen yours?” he asked.

  She smiled.

  “They have the tree, and I’ve let them grow it.”

  The screen filled with the tree of information on Pratt.

  “You’ll recognize your friend’s tree. You’ll see yourself, Ratana and Manee in the structure. And here’s the one for Ballard.”

  Ballard’s tree had a gnarled root structure, jumbled, overlapping and tapering into nothingness, and above the ground, hundreds of branches created the body of a huge tree. It looked like the Bodhi Tree near Marley’s seafront house in Chon Buri—the tree the locals called the Marriage Tree, where wedding dresses were hung for the spiritual union of a dead young girl with her pop-singer suitor. Monks performed the ce
remony of marriage, and Marley had placed a dress for her own unborn daughter in that place.

  “It looks like a Bodhi Tree.”

  Marley tilted her head.

  “His personal Bodhi Tree.”

  “Are you going to show me mine?”

  “And if I did, what would you choose to see? How the tree is also a river empting into the sea?”

  “You mean dying?”

  “Rivers don’t die, Vincent. The old saying is you can never step into the same river twice. The water moves; it’s never still. Water enters the system and finds its way to the ocean. We are those streams and rivers.”

  She rose from the chair, walked over and kissed him on the lips.

  “Hi, Vinny,” she said. “Let me show you something else.”

  She stopped in front of Ballard’s mental map.

  “This one is difficult to decode without knowing what shaped the mind.”

  “Is Ballard alive or dead? And don’t give me some uncertainty-principle mumbo jumbo for an answer. He’s not a cat.”

  Marley responded with a laugh.

  “A practical man who avoids ambiguity. That surprises me, but why should it? I’ll give you an answer but not now. The probability is that Ballard is alive and on a remote island off the coast of Africa.”

  “Madagascar?”

  Osborne had met him there. Osborne had been the middleman in an aborted yacht deal involving Ballard and another foreigner, only the deal had collapsed after the coup. Osborne had flown his young bride to Madagascar.