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a novel _ ADRIAN DE HOOG
BREAKWATER BOOKS LTD.
100 Water Street • P.O. Box 2188 • St. John’s • NL • A1C 6E6
www.breakwaterbooks.com
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
De Hoog, Adrian, 1946-
Borderless Deceit : a novel / Adrian de Hoog.
ISBN 978-1-55081-232-9
I. Title.
PS8607.E482B67 2007 C813'.6 C2007-904807-2
© Copyright 2007 Adrian De Hoog
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
We acknowledge the financial support of The Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing activities.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.
Printed in Canada.
For Hermann Gerbaulet,
Frauke Jung-Lindemann
and Clyde Rose whose
interest at the beginning
allowed this venture to start.
I would like to thank Bill Bhaneja and Adriana Duque for their interest and help with early versions of the manuscript, and Rhonda Molloy and Annamarie Beckel for their insightful and artistic input.
1 CHAPTER ONE
The bug arrived in stealth, without warning. And it was virulent, so bad that some – the closet mystics amongst us – supposed it sprang from the occult. A visitation? they murmured, keenly tracking an inexplicable disorder. More sober thinkers took a dimmer view. They were unsure of what had stolen in, but the devastation was plain enough. Infestation was their spin. Yet, they too were ignorant of the grim extent of what was really happening. Only Irving Heywood had it right. He was in an emergency session of the High Council. “Look,” he said, leaning far back in his chair and stroking a ballooning paunch – in bad situations Heywood often acted nonchalant – “there is no remedy.” Although he seemed unruffled, he felt otherwise. Hugging upper arms to his chest to hide stains of perspiration growing on his shirt, he shrugged, adding, “We’re just about wiped out. No embassy’s been spared. I tell you, it’s like a plague.”
The tag stuck. It entered Service history. That black day of digital destruction seared all our memories.
Cyberspace velocity and a voracious appetite for ruination – these were the overt symptoms. But the bug also possessed an inner wizardry, because it was precisely targeted, like a smart bomb. Years of assurances from the techies had wrapped us in a comfortable cocoon. We had come to believe that the Service communication network was invincible, closed to outsiders, protected by a wall of silicon as unscalable, as impenetrable – so its designers claimed and they were never short of hubris – as that cast-in-concrete aberration that once snaked its way through Berlin. But in an hour, maybe less, the years of network building went for nought. Vital spirits gushed from the Service as water through a burst dam. Ten thousand linked computers scattered over all the diplomatic outposts were sabotaged with one stroke. Emptied of all contents, they went dead. Our shocked techies stood by, helpless and slack-jawed. Outside in the rest of the world all the other networks went about their business in robust good health. Why us? Why no one else?
The bug’s origin was eventually pinned down, of course. An ancient, deserted monastery in Transylvania. A satellite dish sat on the roof. Beneath it there may have been a bookless library, or a chapel which long ago ceased to house God. Painted on the roof around the dish in a circle, in crude strokes from a broad brush dipped in a sickly yellow paint, were words in the Romanian language: Cursed are they who deny, for they shall be denied. It sounded like a translation of the writings of an ancient Judaic cult.
The words were studied, of course. One analyst eventually observed they were taken from something unknown, something unusual, possibly a yet-to-be-discovered satanic version of the Sermon on the Mount.
Anyway, the plague during that single wrenching hour transformed me. I didn’t know it then, but now, months later, recognize its impact was transcending. It brought me role-reversal. Always the hunter, I was suddenly the hunted. The plague turned me into quarry, though quarry that escaped. Not an escape of the ordinary kind, not just the usual ducking of suspicion. Nor do I mean that I stayed minutes ahead of accusing knocks on my front door, though that would happen too. No, not that. What the plague’s ravage really triggered off was the opposite of the destruction of digital reality. A link, some form of reverse cause, seemed to exist between it and that other world, I mean the one I inhabit now, the one beyond vulgarity. The bug from Transylvania allowed me to escape from a miserable view of life. It reversed a despicable attitude towards my fellow man. The plague begot the elevation of my soul.
Like all the pestilential horrors that swept through Transylvania centuries ago and, God knows, may linger still, this black animus spread invisibly. And as with human bodies in medieval times, our network once penetrated had no defence. The bug consumed the essence of what we were – our vitality, our plans, our memory – and as it fed off this rich booty it expanded at a terrifying rate. It hitched a ride on a frantic instruction delivered over the network to cut all power. But this only spurred the calamity to spread still faster. Next an SOS reverberated over intercoms and through the international phone lines. In Europe, our diplomats out on the cocktail circuits had their feasting interrupted by chauffeurs whose car phones started buzzing. And in Asia our ambassadors, awakened in the middle of the night, groped irritably in the darkness to stop the ringing. Too late. The network’s servers and connected hard drives were already gone. In no time the limbs of the Service had been severed from the body. Embassies, from Jakarta to Pretoria and Brasilia to Moscow, were splintered off. And here, in headquarters, we lay, you might say, cut-up, beheaded, eviscerated.
My own computer, I remember, made one of those digitally clean buzzing sounds of something small working away with passion. Then it was lifeless. Puzzled, I stared at the black screen until I heard sounds in the hallway and opened my door. Arthur Beausejour, the few remaining strands of his much-nurtured hair hanging unstuck from his forehead, looked ragged the way he came forward. I didn’t see Arthur often. He spent the weeks in his cell glued to his monitor the way I was to mine. He studied the drug cartels; I tracked the international weapons trade. We talked only when we saw that a commodity of his was being traded somewhere in the world for shipments of mine. At those times I took care to use my size to hover over him. I don’t know why I tried to intimidate him that way…nor why he took it.
“Carson,” he cried in horror, “it’s gone.” His eyes stood wide open and his hands covered his cheeks. I assumed he was referring to the memory of his computer.
I too was tallying what I might have lost, yet had an urge to rattle Beausejour still further. “Maybe not even the back-up system survived,” I said coldly. Beausejour gave me an insane look and hurried towards the sliding security doors and the normal world beyond. Now others in our line of work emerged from their cells. Lise Landry and Phil Doherty, Ghislain Khan too, plus some of the younger ones. Even Francis Merrick, our leader, who spent most days as if in soporific residence on a foreign planet, came shuffling out in his absent-minded way. They huddled, were perplexed,
and seemed unsure of what would happen next. Some muttered; others laughed nervously. All of us, we – the watchers – the chroniclers of information teased from the world’s dark shadows using unseen techniques – with our tools suddenly melted away, felt true pointlessness that moment.
Once more the sliding doors opened and shut. Beausejour was back, his face ashen, his voice resigned. “It’s not just us,” he said. “It’s everywhere. There’s nothing left…” As this sunk in, the consternation grew and a din revved up, and above it rose Beausejour’s tinny voice. “…and the High Council is going into emergency session.”
The scene – the despondency, the hand-wringing – it irked me and so I turned away. Back in my cell I began to think.
Weeks later, after I had provided the details of my discovery of the plague’s origin to our friends to the south, they completed their report, which then duly appeared before the High Council. It revealed that the plague’s origin was the Romanian satellite dish. The killer program sent from there, the American report noted in a mixture of techno-babble and bureaucratese, had been ingeniously conceived:
…It can be deduced that fixed into the meta-instructional layers of the target communications network were pathways which, through previous reconnoitring, the intruding alien presence came to understand how to exploit. It actively engaged them to access the network’s central repositories of information, as well as designated repository extensions. The intruding presence had a search and destroy nature and supported itself with auto-initiated feedback loops so as to guarantee 100% destruction. From what has been ascertained, the process was characterised by a hyper-complexity, the result of a high skill level assiduously applied during the design phase of the full operation.
“The turkeys that did it were smart for sure!” barked Heywood after the report came out. “Any layman would come to that conclusion. Who needs the Yanks to tell us that?” Finding the perpetrator, he swore to all who listened, would be his next most urgent mission. “I will not rest,” he added for good measure.
Irving Heywood ran Service Operations with an absolutist’s touch which had earned him the corridor nickname Czar. He considered few to be his equal, and certainly not the Americans. As soon as their report appeared he began belittling it. He hated its style and he denied its implied technological leadership. Mostly though, he couldn’t stand that they had issued it without him having asked for it. But he did study the picture on the front cover, the satellite snapshot of the yellow graffiti on the monastery roof. Cursed are the deniers…Was this a cruel little swipe at Heywood’s attitude? If it was, he didn’t get it, but then, irony was never Heywood’s strong suit.
I was convinced that our friends to the south, though outwardly helpful, were privately chuckling. And why not? Heywood and his hordes of techies had bragged too loud and long about their marvel, the great network. The best in the world, no one can beat it. Now, with the plague having pulled the rug out from underneath, the Czar had fallen hard, ending up in a graceless pose, on the floor so to speak, on his fat imperial behind.
About the time the American report came out, during the latter stages of the Service’s operational capability being restored, I picked up a curious signal on my computer. Initially it seemed no more than a minor perturbation, like a puff of cool air on a summer day. Though it puzzled me, I didn’t immediately recognize it signalled bad weather. Only later, when it had turned into a storm – just before I had to run away – did I see that it too was part of the plague’s full impact.
As I say, the network was still being rebuilt, although my personal ultra-classified link to the colossal American databases had been mended first thing. I recall it was late, well after posted hours. I was on personal time, still in my cell, feeding an obsession. Years before, more than a decade, I’d fallen into abusing the privileges which came with my status. I had started monitoring Rachel’s travels.
Back then the Americans had added new features to their information warehouses. One was airline passenger manifests. Through my special line I accessed it and as a test, a kind of schoolboy prank, merely out of curiosity, I entered Rachel’s name. She was there, of course. I tested her name in another source for related information, and another still. Already then at the dawn of the information age much raw data was available, and when it came to Rachel’s comings and goings – and doings – I could dig out quite a bit. It fuelled my imagination and quickly an addiction set in. Soon I was tracking her all the time, unable to restrain myself.
This evening too, going back to the period missed while the network was down, I saw that a few weeks before she’d been travelling again, always the same trip now, a flight from Vienna to Cairo with a connection to Alexandria. I searched elsewhere for confirmation that her weekend accommodation had once more been the spacious suite in the elegant El-Salamlek Palace, the one with a view of the small harbour below and beyond it the open Mediterranean. I also saw that the account had been settled as usual by Morsi Abou-Ghazi. He, I knew, passed himself off as an altruist, as a passionate, caring and cultured man. I was also convinced that Rachel was unaware of who he really was and what he truly did.
As I was consigning these details to storage, I noticed a hesitancy in the encryption. It was nothing really, not even a hiccup, and it came just prior to confirmation that encryption had been completed. Had I been looking up I would have missed it. Partially intrigued, partially suspicious, not yet thinking that my watching was being watched, I banged a key to activate a monitoring function. A checklist began forming. All routine. Then an unusual item was shown…Zadokite Port…after which the checklist stopped. In the next instant the entry vanished, as if it had never been. Had someone pulled a plug? My mistrust grew. I pressed another function key for a more detailed search. Some moments later the result was in: Zadokite Port unknown.
As I say, it puzzled me; then it began to worry me. Had some entity retreated from my cyberspace chamber through an opening which, once shut, would be forever indiscernible? Was someone seeking information from me, but denying me knowledge of them? It made me think of the graffiti scrawl on the monastery roof. Which made me think of Heywood. Next time we do the denying, our bombastic Czar had pledged, his indignant voice trembling as much as his excess flesh. We’ll get them turkeys, I swear. We’ll tattoo DENIED on their foreheads. We’ll do it with acidic ink.
This corrosive pledge, or something similar, was first voiced during the High Council’s emergency session. At least, that’s what the Service rank and file – the scribblers, thinkers, analysts and information diggers, in short, all the crushed souls heaving away in bureaucracy’s trenches –believed. Service legends often begin with irresistible snippets of hearsay, and on this occasion the rank and file sensed a great one was in the making.
Fragments of the picture emerged in the corridors, the washrooms, the cafeteria, even at the bus stops before the Service complex. Much was made of the fact that shortly after the emergency session Heywood began making the rounds, showing up everywhere, like a latter day lay preacher. No one recollected him being this visible before. Such perambulating always creates grounds for serious suspicions.
Proud and self-important, palming his gut as he went, the Czar called on unit after unit. His purpose was to ask anyone knowing something about the bug’s invasion to come forward. The oratory was fluid, warm, earnest. As Head of Service Operations, Heywood said, he wanted a total reconstruction. The debris of the disaster, he informed solemnly, would be gathered together. Components of exploded jetliners get dredged up from the ocean floor for reassembly, so why not our defunct network? He added he had carte blanche to get to the bottom of the mess. Support for a massive reconstruction operation was already sitting in the wings and normality would return soon. He usually pressed his palms together in the manner of a Swami when he finished, bowed and then whispered, Thank you. God Bless.
Despite Heywood’s dignified body language, his claim that he had carte blanche convinced nobody at all. It merely whetted
an appetite to find the truths which his behaviour hid. The rank and file knew full well that the High Council never issued carte blanche to anyone. Senior committees – the world’s cabinets and diets, the soviets or synods – are all places for balancing cravings for power. Why would our High Council be any different? Everyone knew it was incapable of trusting any one of its members to act decently on behalf of the others. Carte blanche was really, quite truly, quite preposterously impossible. Heywood’s use of the term only served to spur the trench dwellers questing for the truth to dig still harder.
Heywood’s name came to dominate the early morning conversations on the buses bringing the workers in from the outlying hamlets. It was at the centre of remarks during those mid-morning moments of relaxed talk in the washrooms – when the women smooth their blouses before the mirrors and, one wall over, the men stand chatting at the urinals. All were out to assemble the real story of the High Council’s emergency session. And sure enough the snippets began adding up. The picture wasn’t at all as Heywood claimed. He had no carte blanche. The opposite was true. He’d been put on a short leash. Some went so far as to snigger that his head was in a noose and it would soon start tightening.
2 CHAPTER TWO
The High Council’s emergency session had been both farce and drama. The plague still raged when the senior officers of the Service filed into the meeting chamber. They looked peeved, like lords and ladies disrupted, impatient to get the bother over with. Behind them the sound-proofed doors clicked shut.
The Head had not yet entered through his private entrance, which allowed for a few free minutes. The High Council’s favourite pre-meeting game was quickly in full swing: the tossing back and forth of darts dipped in verbal poison. Back and forth the barbs flew. Back and forth. Rhythmically. The poison’s source that day, naturally, was the vexing reality of ten thousand computers suddenly gone dead – and of a darkness descending. Good throws set off a light tittering, the best got loud guffaws.
Borderless Deceit Page 1
