“I’ll do no such thing,” erupted Claire. “If a bank gets robbed because there are no precautions, isn’t the management at fault? That’s the question I see in this report. Nor do I think the style is hypothetical. It’s gentle, even generous. In a nice way the Americans are saying our network was badly designed from the start. I’d like to know, is the new one better? Have the Americans vetted it? They offered help. Was it accepted?”
Here was the opening Heywood needed. “Speaking of robbed banks,” he said, wagging a finger, “it was their vault that stood wide open. Not ours. You know the pipeline. It’s just a corridor from them to a cubbyhole we’ve got someplace downstairs at the back. There’s no fence in it between us and the Yanks. Once the virus came in through their perimeter we were sitting ducks. They let the robbers walk in, not us.”
Claire slammed the report down hard. A mother superior frustrated. The Czar’s bile began to ebb.
But the others were now buzzing. Complaints about new access codes, concern that the firewall was impenetrably thick, apoplexy over the network’s different look and feel, incomprehension at automatic shut-off switches – petty stuff, the usual darts easily snapped back, a game Heywood played well and which he loved. His innards calmed. And by the time Abbie, the chief lawyer in the Service, shared her thoughts, he was feeling generous, nearly patriarchal.
“I think the network is an organism,” Abbie began, “and I’d like to know – if it’s now hermetically sealed off, if it doesn’t get outside nourishment or outside stimulation – does that mean it might expire inside this thing called a firewall?”
The Czar felt a rush of kindness. “It won’t, Abbie,” he said gently, “because you’re the sustenance. You come in…every day…from the outside. You feed it. You shoot it full of vitamins and minerals. You, in front of your computer tapping away, you give it life.”
“I was afraid of that,” Abbie frowned. “I have to say it. The network makes me feel neutered. More every day. I worry I’m in the grip of some…some…being…and it’s socially cancerous.”
Étienne des Étoiles’s eyebrows tightened. “Irving has been sending me regular reports on the network’s resuscitation,” he announced in a voice as flat as an accountant’s. “I believe it has gone well. He has assured me the new design has had a thorough peer review. Now I would like the American report analysed. Something went wrong with the immigration review process in Vienna. We must understand that. We can’t be creating grudges like this all over the world. I propose Irving pursue that and report back on lessons learned. In two weeks shall we say?”
“Peer review?” Claire Desmarais asked suspiciously.
“Weeks ago,” affirmed the Czar. “Done by some excellent men.”
Claire Desmarais wanted to cross-examine, but des Étoiles rapped the table with a knuckle, a single knock, signalling the session was concluded. He seldom lingered, but this time his private door beckoned especially strongly and he hurried to it.
Ron Hunt and Harry Berezowski stayed to have an impromptu tussle over instructions for a departing delegation. The discord was instant, spinning up like a whirlwind, but it ran out of steam and they wandered off. Claire Desmarais remained. She was dazed and stared at Heywood with frigid, lifeless eyes. He blandly asked if she would now pass him the Yankee document. He could have sworn a long narrow tongue flicked out her mouth. “You’ll get a copy,” she hissed.
Afterwards, Heywood described Claire’s leaving the room to Jaime. It was, he observed, very un-Christian, not very reverend-mother-like at all. An almost reptilian quality hung about her – a serpent in silk slithering off. Alone in the chamber, Heywood sat for a bit. He pushed another chair around, lifted one foot, then the other onto it, and forced a long, loud expiation. Relief. A close thing, the High Council session, going nearly wrong, leaning towards disaster, almost capsizing. He folded his hands across his stomach and closed contented eyes. That peer review, forcing it weeks ago, forward planning at its best. In retrospect, it was a truly canny move.
The scene had been fanciful.
Assembled in his office around the small round table were Claude, Ernest, Ranjit, Eric and Paul Liu. Not being the sort of event Jaime would understand, she wasn’t invited. Ernest chewed on a toothpick; Ranjit was quiet but tense; Claude described rocks he had heaved the night before; Paul Liu busied himself flipping through programs on his laptop; and Eric massaged his forehead.
“We need to do a peer review,” the Czar announced from his desk.
Ernest continued chewing, but Eric stopped massaging, and Claude, alarmed, never did finish the tale of the rock drawing into the four-foot circle which his team needed so as to win the eighth end. “Thought we put that one behind us,” Claude said stoically, putting down a marker, much like delivering a guard stone to the front of the house. Many technical features of the new network were his idea, not to be meddled with by anyone.
“You’ve done a lovely design, Claude. The equipment is in place. The new show is going live at midnight, I know, but I promised Étienne a peer review and we won’t duck that. I’ve thought about it.” With this Heywood opened a drawer in his desk, took out a ruler and, giving a shove to his chair on wheels, rolled to the table.
Claude sighed. One guard stone had been killed off, so he threw another. “We don’t want anyone messing around now. You don’t create art by committee.”
Heywood was unmoved. “I’ve given an undertaking, so we’ll do it. The key to a good peer review is good peers.”
“That’s my point,” argued Claude, deciding to try a draw to the button. “There aren’t any around, none that can understand the new network.”
“Every decent man can be a good peer,” said Heywood.
With another of Claude’s throws wiped out, the Czar now had shot rock. Claude’s final heave. “Irv, for chrissake! It’s nine hours before midnight. There’s no time left for amateurs to go through the new network. It’s complex.” But this last delivery missed entirely – too much weight and way wide of the mark – because the Czar rose.
“This is my intent,” he pronounced. “Using a power vested in me, I will make you Service Peers. Upon that, you will review the new design one final time, and having done your duty, the key on the new network in all good conscience can be turned.”
The men fidgeted and shifted. Ranjit’s eyes grew wide. He was confused. A peer? Was even this a possibility in his new land of boundless opportunity? Paul Liu, for his part, was instantly enamoured by the idea and began murmuring, Sir Paul, Sir Paul, to get used to the intonation. “It’s absurd,” he said, grinning, “but it sounds good.”
Ernest thought about it and asked if he could get a Croix de Guerre instead. Not a real one, just a Service one. “It’s been a pretty damn good battle, là. We won it, eh? Puis, un Croix, c’est correct, n’estce pas?”
“A Croix de Guerre for sure,” Heywood confirmed. He then circled the table and laid the ruler in turn on the shoulders of each man.
Claude regarded the spot where he had been touched with a jaundiced sideways glance. “All done?”
“The act has been completed,” confirmed the Czar. “Go now to perform your duty.”
“Guys,” Claude commanded, “I don’t got much time. Club night tonight. One hour. Then I’m gone.”
The peers did a fine review. Claude forced them through the drawings, the schedules, the access protocols, the filter blueprints at breakneck speed. Pages were flipped so fast they almost got ripped out of the binders. And when all was done, Ernest got his medal too. Heywood drove to a nearby shopping centre the following weekend and ordered it from a stall that manufactures decorations on demand.
Now in the High Council chamber, his feet up on the chair, comfortable, aglow with the success of a battle won, Heywood sank into sentimental thinking. Claude, Ranjit, Ernest, the others – a superb team – they really were. And the High Council – they hadn’t understood they had him on the ropes – so you had to love them just for that. Vie
nna had to be checked out – sure – Jaime would do it quick enough. Jaime! Marvellous how she had restored the Service records, its history, its soul – all by herself – how she figured out the bug, it coming in through the pipeline – all that. Without her he’d have no credibility. Without Jaime, the reports to Étienne would have been thin gruel, sparse stuff. That pipeline! The grief it caused! You had to wonder. Why didn’t Carson do what Jaime did? Why hadn’t he figured the mess out? Wasn’t he the pipeline custodian? He should have known what was happening. But Carson knew nothing. On things that really mattered, like this one, Carson’s output resembled barren earth. Here were the Americans, busily writing a report no one wanted. And Carson? Entirely ignorant of it. What kind of custodianship is that! Why no early warning? Disappointing really, almost sad, the way Carson’s performance had slipped. Yes, the man had become inept.
Or?
The thought hit the Czar with such force that he yanked his feet to the floor.
Or was it otherwise?
Carson’s steady quiet about pipeline issues and Claire’s heinous Yankee book – could they be linked?
“Jesus!” Heywood sucked in his breath and jumped up, his great bulk quivering. The movement was too fast and his blood pressure fell. Fighting blackout, hunched over the table, he steadied himself. His field of vision narrowed to a spot of grey, but then it widened, and when it did, laid out before the Czar was a truly dismal sight. His thoughts began spinning; his breathing became short and pulsed; the reflection in the gleaming surface showed trembling jowls. Irving Heywood stood there staring at his own eyes flashing hate.
A full minute passed.
Time enough for the Czar to quell the anarchy erupting in his mind. He was proud of this capacity – to fall back, subdue strong reactions, impose inner calm – acquired when he first joined the Service. Back then it was a question of survival, because things had been bad, very bad. In those days the offspring of the establishment families ran the place and young Heywood, fresh from the forests of New Brunswick, saw the routine winks, the nudges, the quiet assists which the well-bred reserved for themselves. Naturally, they treated him as an outsider, a backwoodsman, someone from a lower caste. So many slights, new ones each day. But he endured them. Lay off, he thought in the beginning. Then it started getting to him. Bloody bastards! he muttered when there was no let-up. Eventually he went into a silent rage. You goddamn sons of bitches! He developed insomnia, then indigestion and spasms in his back. Eventually his bowels cramped; hours were forcibly spent on the john. One day – in serious agony – from a forward sitting position, staring at the polished washroom floor, seeing there a face skewed with pain, he owned up to a simple fact: he was losing and they were winning. For two more hours, young Irving sat there with his pants around his ankles, meditating, confronting self pity, anger, and resentment – the whole thick broth of debilitating sentiments. It stank as much as the stuff squirting out from him into the toilet. In the end he concluded he had a simple choice: spiral down or ratchet up. Or, as he confessed to Hannah two years later, on his first posting in Lagos, just before they married, There are two kinds of thrones, one for crapping, the other for ruling, so I decided on the latter.
It was the beginning of Heywood’s majestic approach. As he remarked to his future wife, henceforth he channelled anger into action and transformed resentment into an iron will to prevail. But – I’ve got to say this too, Hannah – I’d still be nothing if I hadn’t started taking a deeper interest in my fellow man. What he meant to say by this was that he had figured out he needed to gird himself with that highly refined and most effective of bureaucratic weapons: access to certain, interesting files.
And now, once more, he resorted to self-counsel. Each rapid pulse of breath brought more advice. Irv! Irv! Irv! Do nothing rash, Irv! Turn feelings off, Irv! Mobilize determination, Irv! Elevate yourself, Irv! Above all, Irv, observe the challenge from up high, not from the bottom up. Irv!…Irv!…
Try breathing slower, Irv.
It worked. It always did. He really was quite proud of it.
He began again, this time resorting to analysis. What were the possibilities? What roles were available to Carson? Was he a Brutus, a monstrous betrayer? Or had he really simply missed an obnoxious play by the Yanks? Carson could be past his prime; he could be losing his edge. It happened sometimes – Heywood had seen the shift, even with the gifted – the slow drift to ineptness, the inner fire going out, vigour draining away, brain activity slowing, voices once strong in the heat of confrontation now sounding weak. Had that happened to Carson? Had there been signs of such a change? Was he on his way to joining the other have-been watchers? Not really. Carson remained ramrod, arrogant and insolent as always. There was no softening, no mellowing, no neo-Samaritan charity for his associates. No, Carson hadn’t changed. He was the same pus-filled boil as always. But if he was on top of things, he should – he must – have known what was going on. Why hide the information? Why silence on the pipeline? Why a zero contribution to figuring out the plague? How twisted was his game?
Suspicion upon suspicion. It made the Czar recall other files chronicling the fallen, the Service members gone astray. He could rhyme off the quiet mutinies, the cases of information being ingeniously supplied to enemies, the hidden paths of perfidy – in short, the Judas factor. The world is big and there is much temptation. One learns to expect a certain quota. The process of combing them out of the Service’s global whirl had its rhythms. A close study of the files, the Czar concluded long ago, allowed a trained eye to spot the signs early on. So dwell on Carson for a minute. Did Carson possess the Judas factor? He had always behaved so weirdly distant. Yes, if you thought about it, Carson wasn’t beyond sucking blood out of his colleagues, sucking when they least suspected it, then hammering them when their guard was down. It had to be this way. Sly Carson was a traitor.
Heywood, with a new wave of fury, rushed out of the High Council chamber. Fellow occupants in the descending elevator noted the Czar’s jaw behind soft folds of skin was set rock hard. In the foyer, beneath the flags, others saw a great wave of flesh rushing forward and Alphonse, guarding Operations Tower, sensed from a seismic tremor in the earth that the Czar was approaching. Bracing himself, he yanked the door open. By the time Heywood arrived at Jaime’s lab he was out of breath and panting.
“Irv!” she said, opening her door. “Hey, man, what a long tongue you’ve got.”
10 CHAPTER TEN
Truth in the Service has a quaint definition. Truth requires contest. Truth is what’s left standing when a round of blood sport has run its course.
The sight of Heywood so obviously out of temper speeding back to Operations Tower was taken as proof by the rank and file that once again the High Council meeting had been a slugfest. When an hour later the American report – SECRET stamped on every page – escaped into the open, no one denied that especially heavy blows must have landed. And once the report was read no one had any doubt about who was the loser. Obviously, the Czar got pummelled. He likely got hit so hard he’d gone down to the canvas, out for the count. Service truth thus established, word of it spread like wildfire.
Heard the latest about Heywood?
Man, yeah. That must have been some beating.
He was ordered, you know, to go to Vienna to chase phantoms.
That’s right. And after that I hear he’s off to Zurich – to desecrate the body of a dead man.
What shape would truth have taken had Claire Desmarais at the end of the High Council session given the report directly to Heywood as he asked? Suppose she hadn’t decided that a copy was to be made for delivery to Service Operations. Because, predictably, once that copy left her office, somewhere along the way a second one was quickly taken. And by the time the text arrived in Heywood’s pit of stacked and aging papers, the Service complex was teeming with copies – copies of copies of copies. The rabble stood in line to run them off. There were jokes and there was glee, as if a public ritual killing ha
d been staged.
Did the report’s style contribute to the carnival atmosphere? It can be deduced that fixed into the meta-instructional layers of the target communications network were pathways… Or was there happiness because the report proved that our friends to the south had finally accorded us some sustained attention? Or was it delight at the Service techies – Heywood’s cast of leviathans – having finally been confronted with an endgame to the years of their comeuppance?
A vague answer emerged in the cafeteria. Someone there had taken a fork and spoon, attached one to the other as a cross, and laid it by the windows. A cardboard sign beside it read: Radu Corioanu – In Memoriam Gratuitam. The sun’s spring rays illuminated it. Judging from the many empty white styrofoam cups, hastily covered with pen drawings of flowers, spreading around it like wreaths, the best explanation for all the Service joy was this: St. Radu – Czar slayer.
Anne-Marie and I were having lunch that day. Carrying our food trays we walked past the make-shift cross and the irreverent epitaph. “Do you know what that’s about?” she asked when we settled at a quiet table. I answered it was my guess it had to do with the leaked report.
Weeks had passed since I made my contribution to it and a distance had set in, as if the report had nothing to do with me, that I’d had no hand in framing it. It being out of mind, I said no more to Anne-Marie. Instead I asked how her family was. She told me stories of children tumbling down stairways, babysitters cancelling out at the last moment, and her own hilarious faux pas at community meetings to which she liked to accompany her politically ambitious husband.
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