Borderless Deceit

by Adrian de Hoog

  “I’d say, leave him alone. Let him carry on.”

  “Why?”

  “If he’s himself he won’t go defensive.”

  “You plan to shadow him. Am I right? I’d support that. I hope you snare him doing something awful. Can you get files on him like the ones we saw in the Dallas Police Department?”

  “Yeah, I was thinking of doing some monitoring. Okay with you?”

  “Indeed it is. I’d love to watch it – I mean – you circling him. Ask me to come down when you’re doing it.”

  “It might not work. You never know, Irv. He’s good at circling too.”

  A light went on for Heywood. “Ah, you two out in cyberspace. Like in a boxing ring. Sparring with abandon. No rules, no referee.”

  Jaime laughed and threw a mock punch, setting her bracelets jangling.

  9 CHAPTER NINE

  The snow continued its irresistible accumulation throughout the weeks that followed. Nor was there much respite from the northwest gales and record wind chills, or cleanups from the steady dumps of twenty, sometimes thirty centimetres. The shovelled mountains grew high; the suburbs mutated into vast white tombs; only wisps of smoke from chimneys signalled that inside a citizenry was surviving. The muttering down there in the buried chambers was about the deep freeze, about the forced incarceration. This squeeze on life, how long could it go on?

  Then, topsy-turvy quickly, the outlook turned; the sun’s strength grew; dripping water from the roofs turned into rivulets; wet stains on the sides of roads swelled into urban lakes which drained (or did not drain). And the rivers, still sealed, creaked and heaved, until the inexorable pressures from below caused the surfaces to splinter and waters to overflow.

  Which, more or less, when it arrived during that spring thaw, was how the report on the plague’s origin affected Heywood. In his case it was his equanimity that was ruptured, though not on account of the contents – he dismissed most of that. What churned up his insides, what made him splinter and caused his bile to overflow, was that the report was the work of our friends to the south.

  Yet, not only Heywood’s equanimity lay shattered. Because it was about that time that Zadokite Port flashed on my screen. And so I too became agitated and turned still busier building up defences. To no avail. As Jaime eventually confided, her computer operation had laid bare my secrets long before.

  From Irving Heywood’s point of view, the first bad thing about the report from the Americans (with the pretty aerial photo of the abandoned Transylvanian monastery on the front cover) was that their ambassador delivered it to Claire Desmarais instead of him. The second was how Claire presented it.

  With austere formality, like a reverend mother handling a holy text, she had ceremoniously lifted the document out of a cloth jacket. Her urgent, probing fingers opened it. Then, with her nasal passages resonating, she began reading, one page after another, each setting free damning revelations courtesy of the Yanks. Not only that, but all this happened in the High Council chamber. Could the scene have been worse for Heywood? After all, it was his topic, yet he was not the first to speak.

  Of course, neither Claire Desmarais, nor Irving Heywood, nor anyone else, apart from Hugh-S and me, knew that only part of the report was penned by our friends to the south. In truth, key sections were mine. I had written the ones containing substituted facts. Hugh-S and I had worked this out. And so, in parts, the document was no more than a pale reflection of what really caused the plague. Correctly reported was that the Audiles were the gateway. Also honestly described was how Hugh-S’s powerful photograph satellites yielded the picture of the monastic rooftop with the antenna and the yellow graffiti splashed down on it in a crude circle. But the name of the perpetrator of the plague, the man who cursed his deniers, a certain Benedictus Athanasiu (whom I had levered out of global databases), was nowhere mentioned. For him there was a substitute. Hugh-S had agreed this was important – to protect Benedictus’s future – while for me it shielded Rachel from unpleasant repercussions.

  Who was this Benedictus Athanasiu? I found out he was a physicist who worked for years on the Romanian Candu nuclear project near Cernavoda on the Danube. Benedictus was also a mystic. It so happened that the physics of the Canadian reactor – admittedly an elegant machine – caused him to live in awe. He came to believe its workings held metaphysical implications, that it posed complex symmetries and grandly unifying relationships. The conviction grew on him that the device possessed unique internal forces which would one day rise out of it, just as the vital powers of biology once sprang into existence from inanimate organic molecules. Whenever he was near the Candu, Benedictus felt his consciousness propelled towards oneness with both the sub-atomic and the cosmic. Some days Benedictus fairly swooned from pure, unfettered ecstasy. On such days his equations on the metallurgical stresses experienced by the pressure tubes (through which the nuclear fuel bundles pass) would be written down in ways that had poetic quality.

  Canadian expats on the project thought Benedictus was smart, gifted even, but also eccentric, bent in some ways, if not downright mad. He stooped when he walked, tugged nervously at his suspenders, and had loud, demonstrative conversations with himself, all the while vigorously shaking an emaciated head. They were unaware that Benedictus was experiencing visions of the Candu as his personal spiritual portent. Nor did they know that in his soul he felt an increasing urgency to get to the Candu’s source, that is, to the country where it was created.

  Quietly, discreetly, Benedictus applied for an immigration visa at the embassy in Bucharest. Unfortunately, for reasons having to do with the global surplus of experts on the Candu system, the application was rejected. An instantly wrathful Benedictus, like a lover spurned, became determined to destroy. Cursed are the deniers…for they shall be denied…

  The Service communication network was a symbol and so became his target.

  Two days of hard searching had led me to Benedictus. At first I looked for an evil genius determined on destruction, but once I found him my view changed. As I closed in on his identity I saw he had childlike vulnerabilities, and I learned he was a clever game player too. For he left behind a series of cryptic clues. Clearly he was waiting for me, or someone like me, to enter into a contest with him: Come and get me, if you can.

  My process began with the usual tedious information gathering: on satellite antennae manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, and of course on the black market transactions in such equipment. Next I switched to high-end computer systems delivered into Romania and surrounding countries, the organisations that bought them and the employees working for them. Thousands of names came together and were tagged. Internet access data was sifted too. Whoever initiated the plague would have scouted out the Service network from afar and would have spent many days on-line, some of them in Hugh-S’s great vault, some looking at our network servers. Hundreds of millions of telecom transactions had to be trawled through. Hour upon hour I constructed one net after the other, threw it out, hauled it in, and eventually determined that twelve organisations in Romania had direct satellite telecommunication access (the Cernavoda nuclear station being one). I gathered the names of employees at these organisations too and checked them against those I had acquired from my lists of satellite antennae and computer suppliers in countries such as Austria, Switzerland, Germany. Out of this sifting and resifting emerged a smaller group of several hundred names, though there was no certainty that the monastery rooftop genius would be amongst them.

  At the end of the first day, late in the evening, during a half hour of downtime, I recalled the flippant answer I gave Hugh-S when he asked why someone would target us peaceful Canucks. I had said it might have been the grudge factor. Reflecting on this – what animosity could a Transylvanian have towards Canada? – I wondered if something could have happened at the embassy.

  On day two, pursuing this hunch, I downloaded the applications processed by the Bucharest immigration section. I compared them with the group I had alrea
dy narrowed down. A few seconds passed before one name appeared. Benedictus Athanasiu. The way it glimmered on my monitor it looked so innocent, so lonely, as if in the whole wide world there was only him.

  Often enough I experienced doubt that the names which materialise out of computer searches represent people who are real, and that’s how it was with Benedictus. But several hours later I knew he was made of flesh and blood. Not only that. I had also become convinced that he was a complex character. His birth information showed he came from Toplita, a town in eastern Transylvania. He was now forty-seven, single, having been educated in Dresden, Warsaw and Leningrad. After communism failed in Europe he travelled widely. He opened international bank accounts in which, over the years, regular and significant deposits were made by companies in Taiwan, Brazil and Germany, payments for esoteric programming work he did on the side. Benedictus might tug at his suspenders when he walked, and in his spare time he might mostly engage in grumbling monologues, but he was a very competent moonlighter.

  I gained entry to the servers at the Cernavoda complex. (The firewalls were not robust.) Data there confirmed that Benedictus spent many hours connected to telecom satellites during the month immediately after his immigration application was rejected, but I found no record of what he had connected to. Was it to our network, or to Hugh-S’s vault, or both? The information had been erased. I also noticed that when this intense on-line phase was behind him, he left for an extended period of medically prescribed rest. It was two months into this special leave that the virus was let loose.

  Circumstantial evidence was adding up, yet I had no conclusive proof, no smoking gun. Reviewing such border crossing data as was available, I saw Benedictus had travelled through Hungary and Austria into Germany when he was on leave. For procurement? Was there a link between Benedictus and satellite transmission equipment acquisition that had so far stayed hidden? One bank account showed significant withdrawals during a week he spent in Munich, and so I focussed on electronic company sales transactions there. One of them – Funk Ausrüstung AG – showed a high quality antenna kit had been sold that week to a certain B.A. Denegabar during this period. Cross referencing this name with other lists drew a blank. No Denegabar anywhere.

  Denegabar. An odd name. I consulted reference works, but none showed it was a name. If not a name, what then? Something in code? A message? The initials were B.A. Did this stand for Benedictus Athenasiu? If the initials were his, what significance could that odd word have? I looked in dictionaries – Romanian, Italian, Spanish – but found nothing. I checked Latin. Denego: I refuse absolutely. Infinitive: denegare. Some similarity there. I looked at this word for a while and then some high-school Latin came back. I recalled the interesting ways verbs were conjugated. I consulted a grammar text. And there it was! In an appendix, clear as day, was irrefutable proof. The first-person imperfect passive of the verb denegare is denegabar.

  B.A. Denegabar. I, Benedictus Athenasiu, was denied.

  For a while I sat still, a little stunned, shaking my head. Then I began to laugh. This was the moment Benedictus won me over. This gangly eccentric had been angry and had destroyed, but he had also played a game. He had planned his moves, expected counter-moves, and looked ahead. The plague conceived in wrath had been raised into a kind of chess match. Painting the graffiti onto the roof, the way it meshed with the name registered as the equipment buyer, the two were designed to constitute a trail laid for his opponents. If the clues were read correctly, they would lead to him. I got you, Benedictus had shouted from the monastery roof when he dabbed his rough brush in the yellow paint. I want you to know why I did it and here’s enough to get me in return.

  For me, the plague was now all accounted for and I immediately called Hugh-S. Again I urged him to put Benedictus on the payroll. “He’s got a fertile brain. He sees developments four, five moves in advance.” But on the phone Hugh-S was non-committal.

  I learned later that when two American agents walked up to a run-down little house on the outskirts of Toplita where Benedictus was staying with his mother, the first words he said in good English were: Congratulations. It’s been nine days. I had expected it would be twelve. He was interviewed several times and it wasn’t long before Hugh-S was convinced he had a rare resource on his hands. Benedictus was brought into his operation. When it dawned on Benedictus what this meant, that he would be spending the days being creative in the pretty countryside of Virginia, his metaphysics changed. He now crossed himself. Benedictus, he whispered repeatedly as he went, Benedictus. The blessed one. At last.

  For Hugh-S it was essential that Benedictus’s employee file show a clean record, which matched my needs too. We agreed that no connection between Benedictus and the plague should come to light. And thus I wrote certain sections of the report which the American ambassador was to hand over to Claire Desmarais. As part of this I began looking around for someone who could be substituted for Benedictus in the role of villain and it wasn’t long before I found a certain Radu Corioanu as a convincing replacement. The switch, one might say, was akin to that of the rubber boots pouring out of the crates supposedly containing Exocet missiles.

  And who was Radu Corioanu? Also a Romanian and a computer engineer. He had a residency permit in Graz, Austria. When I cast about for a suitable doppelgänger for Benedictus, I stumbled onto him in the immigration files at the embassy in Vienna. As with Benedictus, Radu had applied for an immigration visa and was also rejected. Perfect substitute credentials. The problem was that Radu was alive, could be questioned, and could plausibly deny that he had cursed his deniers. This required that I engineer a final substitute fact. I chose Zurich as the place where this would happen. I made it appear that Radu, visiting there, died unexpectedly of a heart attack. The city’s computer register of deaths was easy to get into. Within minutes the records of that ancient city were amended. Now, on paper, as perpetrator of the plague but no longer living, Radu became immortalised in the American report.

  It worked. The mix of truths – real and tainted ones – fooled everyone, including Claire Desmarais. With thin, sexless lips that scarcely moved, she read long passages from the report to the High Council. Was it the way she read, or was it the report’s word inflation that caused everyone around the oval table to fall into a trance? Claire reading Yankee syntax – this was sadism, pure and naked. You just had to tune out. And so the milords sat stone-faced, private in their thoughts, twitching only when the abuse of their ears became too much.

  A strong and steady commitment to multi-faceted and continuous investigations of enhanced security options may have been neglected by network engineers. Intrusion opportunities, ab initio, would have been elevated and could have saturated all current and further sequential design steps. Therefore it is hypothesized that resistance to foreign encroachment was ineffective already in early network conceptualization and system owners may not have sought due remedy in any subsequent project phases…

  Claire Desmarais paused to purse the narrow lines that were her lips and lifted her accusing eyes at Heywood. His grandiose smile was permanent, hewn from granite, and his hands were planted confidently on the gleaming table. I love my neighbour, the Czar was signalling. I even love Claire Desmarais. But behind the appearance of generosity were bile-fuelled teeth ceaselessly grinding. Furthermore, apart from having to listen to the excruciating prose, the Czar was going through an inner confrontation. It was true, the network had been concocted in a hurry. He had felt compelled to whip the project forward. Behind the funny words, that’s what the report was really saying. If that drew more attention, if there was a sustained High Council focus on that, he might still have that rendezvous with someone brandishing the sacrificial knife. Outwardly Heywood was self-assured, but inwardly he was seething.

  Claire turned a few pages.

  …Emergency response measures may have been inconsistent in their conceptualization. With this discrepancy available for exploitation, malevolent influences could diffuse to network periph
eries because the means for vigorous defence and early apprehension was not dynamically enactable…

  …and it continued in this way…on and on…and so forth and so forth…until Étienne des Étoiles had had enough. He ended the assault. In his crisp, aristocratic accent, he said: “Thank you, Claire. That helps.” He turned to Heywood. “Irving, is what we hear consistent with what you know?”

  The Czar took his time. “Mostly not,” he finally replied. With a nonchalant flip of his hand he dismissed the whole text. In fact he waved away the very notion that there should be a report. “It’s hypothetical and…as we know…hypotheses come cheap.”

  The ensuing dreadful silence was disturbed only by Ron Hunt’s gunshot-like cracking of his knuckles and the soft rustling of a severely agitated Claire Desmarais inside her silk dress. Heywood leaned forward and glowered. Survival at the High Council table requires observance of a few simple rules – know everything even if you know nothing, divert attention through unceasing bullying, and trample energetically all over the world that’s outside the room. “Mays, mights, could have beens,” he sneered. “That’s all I heard. We know that style…gobs of words saying nothing. Let’s face it…for the most part the Yanks don’t have a clue.”

  Young Harry Berezowski started snickering, but Étienne des Étoiles raised a hand. “For the most part?” he inquired.

  “For the most part,” Heywood repeated. “Some parts that Claire read are pretty precise. The chances are they’re true. The bit about this guy…Radu something…Coriander I think she called him… anyway, the guy who did it, some turkey living in Austria who went back to Romania to do it, it sounds plausible. Well-written stuff and I guess I buy it. Too bad he’s dead though.” He sounded genuinely disappointed. “We figured out long ago the bug came in through the pipeline with the Yanks. That report doesn’t add anything we didn’t know before in that regard. Now, mind you, we don’t have spy satellites, so we’re happy the Yanks shared their picture of the monastery with us. But let’s face it, if every hick-town pea-shooter in the world can take aim at us because there’s no decent virus filter put in place on the Yankee side of the pipeline, maybe it’s time for some rethinking. Maybe we don’t want that vulnerability. I don’t mind, Claire, if you pass that along to the good ambassador.”