“Oh sure.” Jaime’s eyes sparkled. “What you and Claude and the others talked about, all silly-billy stuff. Ranjit sure played it up. Forty million years for back-up tapes to come back? What a hoot. Forty days max. Maybe forty hours if I can get a hold of some good kit. Problem is, Irv, you guys don’t go abstract. No one discovers new truths by starting with known theorems. The dog that came swimming up to bite you was clever, but for sure there was a wake. We’ll catch a ripple, follow it back, and get him. You never know, you might catch yourself a thoroughbred show dog. Or maybe just a likeable pooch.”
The Czar was ceasing to be Czar. Going with Jaime’s flow, he was turning disciple. “I’m with you,” he said. “We play a game. It’ll be abstract. From now on we hate logic. That gets us explanations.” He stopped. There had to be a limit. He had learned the hard way the importance of setting good limits, so he created one. “Everything is on, Jaime, except one thing. The clever dog that did it, we’ll never think he’s likeable. Okay? That’s not on.”
Jaime spread her hands. “Hey dude. Solid. Okay with me. So now a name.”
“A name?”
“It isn’t strictly vital, but it helps. My brother is interested in religion, so he goes to it for inspiration. In one of our games – a good one he called Taoism’s Delight – we chased each other through the data banks of the Hong Kong central bank and pasted New Year’s greetings into their currency transactions. That was two years ago. Then there was Lucifer’s Lair and Vishnu’s Vista. Recently we had a game of hide-and-seek in the files of a London arms dealer. Gates to Islam we called that one, but the database was not that complex. Let’s think, what would be good?” Jaime was reactivating her tiny high-tech device.
Heywood racked his brain. Religion? As a boy he had a Sunday school teacher called Miss McQuarrey, while a chum in university had been an active Quaker, and though Hannah was Anglican, she didn’t practise. In the area of religion, he had to admit that his mind had always been generally quite empty. So what religious association would help lead to the plague’s origin? Then he recalled his posting in Africa where he’d seen a tribal witch doctor do weird dancing. “Voodoo’s Folly?” he proposed carefully.
“No,” ruled Jaime. “Here’s one.” She was stroking the keys on her PDA. “I’m borrowing from my brother. He was going to use it to get at someone who wasn’t adding to his happiness, but he dropped the idea. So the name is still available. Zadok.”
“Zadok?”
“Sure. Zadok. King David’s High Priest. His descendants were Zadokites. They ran the Temple, the only ones allowed close to the altar. Gung-ho they were. I mean, for sacrifice. Makes sense for us, Irv. We find the hound that’s making your life miserable, then we sacrifice him. On the altar of truth. The Zadokites did that, so why not us?”
The Czar of Service operations took a moment to regroup. He began nodding. “You’re right. You put that perturbed mind on a platter, I light the fire, then we fry it.”
“Right on. First thing, I’ll whip up a cozy spot in your computer, a place for us to hang out, where you can peek at what’s on the platter. Don’t worry, it’ll be hidden. Zadokite Port. Sound okay to you?”
Jaime’s new disciple declared he was utterly charmed by the prospect of hanging out in a place called Zadokite Port.
Late that evening Irving Heywood, making his way home from the Service complex, eased his car out of the building’s depths into a fearsome night. A cold wind was blowing and the light beams, stuffed full of demonic snow flakes, were like two horizontal pillars pushing forward. The car crept over the steel bridges traversing the arms of the river and inched ahead into his neighbourhood, down Union Street, a right into MacKay, then a left into Ivy Crescent and so home to Hannah. In the wintry invisibility the going was slow, though it took no more than ten minutes. But it was long enough, long enough for Heywood to formulate one clear thought: never underestimate the power of the Service to wring your guts until you scream, upon which all then changes fast, so that by the day’s end you feel so soothed you might well have entered heaven. Jaime. What a perfect creature for the troubled times. What a delight for an old, poor, downtrodden Czar.
“How was it today, darling?” a tired Hannah asked when he approached the bed.
Heywood kissed his sick wife with tenderness. “Marvellous, sweet, the best day for some time.” He proceeded to explain, as best he could, the relationship between the plague (like the ones that once hit an unlucky Pharaoh), the Old Testament High Priest Zadok, and some kind of dog – a hound, or maybe a pooch – which would soon be sacrificed on the altar of truth. But luckily for Hannah, she had dropped off to sleep.
4 CHAPTER FOUR
Zadokite Port: two words on my screen appearing and disappearing like a passing shadow. I looked them up, of course, but what was I to make of a reference to a priesthood of the ancient Israelites? All the same my guard was up and eventually I came to look back to that day and that quick blur as yet another turning point. Months would have passed. By then it would be spring. Mounds of snow reaching steadily higher all through the winter, crushing down the earth, keeping nature bottled up, would be under attack, eaten at by flanking eddies of warm air and mined by insistent rays from the sun.
But for now, the dark season still had us at its mercy – which also happened to be true of the mysterious computer virus. Because, in the early aftermath days, everyone in the Service was feeling uncertain, stifled – yes, bottled up – in the grip of a digital winter. And in that bureaucratic deep freeze Irving Heywood came to us. I recall when he stood before us in the flesh that he had, well, bounce, a special look. You can spot the people who know opportunity’s come calling. He also acted out a bewildering range of roles: lay preacher delivering a fiery sermon, then armed crusader with a thirst for vengeance, and finally paterfamilias, caring and providing. Most of the watchers were entertained, though his performance left them little wiser. When would the network and our special way of doing business be back up and running? That’s what they wanted to know. They got no answer.
Try to visualize our Czar Irving.
He came swinging in through the sliding doors with a supple girl in tow. What a sight, that pair. He, a slow, worn-out bull elephant, she, a small, quick vixen at his side. The watchers – those who managed to get in that morning – had assembled in a small open area off the hallway, a sort of common room, lined with a microwave, a battered old fridge and by the windows, some filing cabinets adorned by a row of straggly geraniums. I hung back in a corner, overhearing the small talk which was mostly about the violent snowstorm that raged overnight. The depth of the snow was being measured against parts of the body: Up to my thighs in the driveway, or, The drifts on our walk – past my waist! I listened to stories of working women and men wading out of homes to fight their way to work through confused traffic arteries clogged with snowplows, stuck cars and busses spinning wheels. It all seemed an appropriate prelude to the message Heywood delivered. He too spun wheels; there was confusion at every turn; and the verbal detritus he heaped up was higher than any snow mountain.
Perhaps ten of us were there. Our minder, Francis Merrick, who long ago began resembling the parched office plants, stood next to the two guests. Arthur Beausejour, obsessively chewing his nails, had planted himself directly opposite. Finger after finger visited his teeth. I kept to the rear. I admit I was feeling superior that morning. It came, I suppose, from knowing I already had more information about the plague’s origins than all of Heywood’s high-tech battalions put together.
Francis Merrick, in a hoarse whisper, thanked Heywood for coming to us so early in his rounds. The Czar responded with a little joke about the weather, something about the city being at a standstill, contrasting it with the speed – double quick – that the Service was digging itself out of its hole. He introduced the girl, Jaime from somewhere up north, who had been given special duties. The Czar laughed and some of the watchers sniggered when, in reference to digging and clearing away the
Service mess, he remarked: She’s our new snowplow. Jaime From-Up-North had an inner energy, a restlessness, a forward-leaning readiness to encounter. She grinned – Hi! – and waved grandly as Heywood applauded her with three or four noiseless claps of his hands.
The girl struck me as a certain type, the way she laid on the gaiety. Some people rehearse that mood. And what about the rings, here and there and everywhere, and the strange, discoloured strand of hair? She seemed to want to come across as punk, yet had stopped halfway.
The Czar turned serious. His voice dropped. But it wasn’t long before his hyperbole seeped in. And so the watchers, like soldiers away at a war who are deprived of their loved ones, settled down to being entertained. As for me, as my contempt for the performance grew, I began to glower, kicking myself for having shown up. I should have concluded before I came in that it would waste my time.
That was because I knew Heywood personally. Our paths had crossed years before, in the days when he was doing global disarmament and I was an intelligence analyst studying the Warsaw Pact. When the Cold War ended Heywood switched to another part of the Service: personnel matters and overseas assignments. In his overbearing way he referred to it as Investitures and busied himself doling out ambassadorial positions to people who suddenly were his best friends. Some years later he moved up one rung higher still on the Service ladder and changed his style. Religious solemnity was gone. The metaphor became one of absolutism and of empire. Soon enough everyone referred to him as Czar.
And now with his great circumference and soft corpulence, he was telling us he had been entrusted with full carte blanche. He explained he was conferring with key players. The aim was to coalesce strengths and integrate capabilities – to fuse technical excellence with powerful analysis – to put every Service shoulder to the wheel of comprehending why and how the plague set in.
Heywood became expansive, palms opening, spreading, and rising. In the pose of an evangelist he informed us of his policy: the network would be rebuilt fast, but the number one priority of all priorities was to re-establish access for us, the watchers. We had to get back to taking the pulse of the world’s depravity. He expected every individual in the little common room to sniff around cyberspace, to comb through global information dumps, probe for evidence, dig up and analyse debris, and come up with clues pertinent to the plague. A complete picture had to be assembled. And anything we found was to be shared with Jaime. Jaime would review the data and run corroborating tests. The breezy girl beside him would fashion a composite picture so as to furnish everyone with new collective enlightenment.
Groans filled the room. From where did the Czar get his jokes?
Heywood wouldn’t be thrown off. In her field she’s tops…an Einstein…take my word for it.
When it sunk in that he was serious, that he was handing power to his sunny young companion, alarm could be felt rippling through the room. The watchers were a guild; they had traditions; they had rights; never before had they reported to an outsider. One voice after another expressed concern that lines of authority were getting smudged.
Heywood backtracked smoothly. The young genius beside him would arrange the input, he insisted, co-ordinate the parts, create a total picture to spin a web…so the turkeys that did it will get all tangled up. She would receive information, not give orders. Orders would remain the prerogative of Francis Merrick. Still, the cascading restlessness was forcing the Czar to change tack and he resorted to an age-old imperial trick: he turned jingoist.
No one sullies the Service and gets away with it!
I recall, in the disarmament years, Heywood often was this way, making cheap appeals to chauvinism and other such instruments for manipulating mass opinion. He and I hadn’t got along. I still tighten up when I think how in those days he would casually inform me that he wanted me to recast my intelligence analyses. He didn’t care whether input from me, or anyone else, was accurate or distorted, or even entirely contrived, as long as it supported his viewpoint. His porous standards, the absence of rigour, the artful ploys – it would set my blood boiling. I refused to go along. Tersely I once said, “You may not agree, but that’s my professional opinion and I’m not about to change one word.”
His reply? “In that case, we shall once again ignore it.”
Back then, he was merely stout, but now his girth took in the universe, and the dozen years since had thinned his hair to a few tufts. It was this unlikely czar, this caricature, this loose sail flapping in the wind, who was inviting us to join him in a flaky operation to root out the causes of the plague. It pained me.
Beausejour had been switching his weight impatiently from one foot to the other trying to interrupt. But! he would begin, or, Wait! and, Can I ask?… But Heywood’s loping oratory couldn’t be stopped. He made a show of looking us in the eye, one by one, following which he engineered a majestic half-turn to gaze past the struggling geraniums to the wintry happenings outside. The snow was blowing around on violent gusts of arctic wind. The chaos seemed to inspire him. Eventually his eyes came to mine and rested a moment before continuing their sweep. To this day I can’t say what exactly transpired. He appeared to be sending me some kind of thunderbolt. Was it to renew our mutual aversion? Did he wish to confirm that bad memories still lingered? Or was it suspicion? Was he guessing that, just as in former times, I knew more than he about the things of which he spoke?
Arthur’s opportunity came. He described how for months he had been on the trail of a gang of pseudo-Mennonites controlled from Hamburg which operated mission schools on every continent. In Latin America bogus pastors had swarmed out to little, start-up congregations. They supported cottage industries in the countryside and helped small companies with micro-financing to allow their products to enter the global marketplace. The gang’s tentacles reached deep into coca country. A firm on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, owned by an outwardly devout member of that religious conviction, specialized in cut flowers imported from a cooperative in Uruguay. With the fresh flowers came little packets of preservatives for adding to water to keep the bouquets looking vigorous longer. But the little packets contained substituted substances and in this way the syndicate was flooding the Toronto market not only with spectacular carnations, stunning lilies and marvellous birds of paradise, but plenty of good cocaine alongside. Beausejour had figured out the links. He had assembled the full picture: names, telephone intercepts, copies of bills of landing, flight data, the comings and goings of containers, everything. Except, the evidence was digital, had sat on a server; and that server had gone to hell. Where, Beausejour asked, were the back-up tapes? When would they be copied back into a new network?
The Czar gave a polite political reply, answering without saying anything. Beside him, his vixen produced an enigmatic, knowing smile.
That look – an invitation to share life’s mysteries – it pierced me. Never mind that it took place in public, or that it was directed at nobody, and had nothing to do with me. The smile with its comprehending quality jolted me because it was Rachel’s smile. For an instant Rachel seemed to be standing by the Czar. There was no other resemblance, of course. This girl was slight, half trendy and half punk. Rachel was refined and elegant and tall. In every respect they were miles apart. Yet, the abrupt flash of similarity filled me with a feeling of defilement. It seemed that a place where I was accustomed to roaming alone, where I found peace contemplating Rachel, had been infiltrated, and it infuriated me. How dare this Jaime From-Up-North violate my privacy?
Recovering, annoyed at the disorientation, I studied her a bit. She was playing with her hair, constantly sweeping it out of her face and back over her head, or fixing it behind her ears. And why that one strand coloured in platinum? To be unique, or appear glamorous? And there was the metal too, the nostril ring, earrings long as braids, bracelets weighing down her wrists and eyebrow loops which looked like barnyard tethering things. What was she saying with all that? Mostly, though, I wondered why she flogged the world with such
excessive cheerfulness.
As I peered at her, my hostility deepened. Was this a knee-jerk reaction, a sign of mind-blindness? Months later, I saw it was. But how could I have known that moment that she was not what she seemed to be – a piece of fluff drifting in from somewhere up the valley? How could I have predicted that a day would come when she, having thoroughly outwitted me, would be dangling the keys to my demise before my eyes? How could I have anticipated that Jaime, who may not have been nearly as young as she appeared, would throw those keys away and, as agent for my enlightenment, treat me with generosity and grace?
But all that was to come. For the moment, on that wintry day in the common room, the transient smile from Jaime cheapened a memory I held dear.
We were in the grip of winter then too; for weeks the city had been mired in a record-breaking deep freeze. Rachel had joined the Service a year before, had just finished as trainee and was assigned to a group which, after the demise of the Soviet Empire, was working to put Russia on its feet. I had done an analysis of the financial system of that sad country, answering practical questions about the former communist party apparatchiks who had grabbed ownership of the banks and were advancing the interests of the post-Soviet mafiosi. There was a planning meeting for a delegation going to Moscow. Rachel would be a junior member. The meeting was long. My turn came. I delivered facts. I mentioned names, described secret loans and kick-back schemes, produced statistics on illegal international financial flows, and set out reasons why nothing in Russia would work, how all money – ours too – would get siphoned off, or be otherwise appropriated.
“Write all that down in a brief, won’t you, Carson,” said Yablonski. He was running the meeting. He would be responsible for negotiating an assistance package for the Russians. “I’ll review it on the plane.” I said I couldn’t do that and he ought to know that. Highly classified information can’t just be taken anywhere, most certainly not to Russia. I was unable to keep my voice from being prickly. Yablonski responded. “For crying out loud. You guys in Analysis, always thinking you’ve got the inside dope when the stuff’s in all the papers anyway.” I stuck to my guns. Yablonski complained he’d be prevented from doing his job. The standoff didn’t last.
Borderless Deceit Page 4
