“A serpent?” Jaime squealed, her hands rising in delight. “In silk?”
They were sitting on office chairs with backs that gave way. The sole source of light in the room was a dozen screensavers, each dancing out weird, repeating patterns in strong colours. The reflections from the ceiling and the walls gave the effect of a primitive lingering in a cave with the embers of a fire still glowing. In this elemental intimacy, the burly Czar and petite hacker rocked lightly back and forth, gossiping and sniggering, like two children playing. The crescendo of hilarity came when he described how Claire Desmarais had slithered off. Jaime watched the Czar’s bulbous frame quiver with convulsive laughter. When it became too much he began to wheeze and that ended with a stream of tears dribbling down his cheeks. A shirt sleeve turned into a temporary napkin which he used to wipe his face.
What a transformation.
When the Czar arrived his teeth were gnashing and his eyes blazed with fury. It took a while for the ill temper to subside. First, Jaime invited him to sit. She pointed at her latest toys, some cases full of miracle equipment – new brain-imitating micro-electronic devices operating near the speed of light. Then she announced there was good news. “Got some dynamite stuff for you, Irv. You’ll love it. First things first though. How was the High Council? Kick butt?”
The Czar’s jaws relaxed a little. “Guess so,” he said, not minding the imagery.
His account started slow, but warmed up with the telling: the meddling report from the Yanks, Claire’s snobbish-screechy voice, her sad attempt to be a warring heavyweight which floundered when the fickle barons declined her support on the flanks. “Yes,” the Czar sighed, turning mellow, “it went fine. Thanks to you, Jaime. The network’s restored. The files are back. You figured out the virus got in through the pipeline. That trashy report from the Yanks, not much in it we didn’t know already. You figured it all out weeks ago and I told them that. But Claire wanted to strike. She reared up to throw her venom. Too bad she got trampled and had to creep out. Back to the snake pit, I guess, or some infected swamp.” He chuckled. “I’ll say this, Jaime, you and I, we might be hicks from nowhere, but when we see spoor we read it. We know what it’s like to survive in the wild.” In the feeble light, Jaime watched him restart his slow and peaceful rocking, hands interlaced over the abundant gut, looking satisfied, reliving a heroic past. “Speaking of survival,” he said in a gravelly voice which arose from deep inside where memories reside, “was it hard for you, Jaime, growing up? I mean, not knowing your father.”
Jaime didn’t answer. The Czar came to her place about once a week and the visits had a pattern. Initially there would a feeble excuse for barging in. Thought you should know what Ranjit Singh just told me. Or, Claude’s had this clever new idea and I’d like to know what you think. The kinds of things you’d say to a neighbour to start a conversation on a lazy summer afternoon. Next, there would be some sort of account, pompous and virile, about bizarre vendettas which only the highly experienced – such as himself – could survive. Then, a little homily, a lesson drawn from the struggle, a link perhaps to some grand romantic value, such as a childhood spent close to nature. Often that would be followed by an update on his private life. And in this way Jaime learned that Hannah was finally on the mend, getting stronger by the week, and Irving was planning to surprise her with a two-week vacation in an RV. Lake of the Woods, I think. Just the two of us, cooped up like doves in our little house on wheels. She also listened to expressions of affection for his sons. Frequently those ended with the observation that the unpredictable swirl of procreation had denied him a daughter, which he saw as a source for regret. Finally, there was the suggestion that she and he were similar, and that led to an invitation that she become personal as well. How was that for you, Jaime, when you grew up? Tell me. Or, Ever had those kinds of thoughts, I mean, about your childhood up north? Jaime didn’t mind listening, though she didn’t answer the questions. She didn’t see the point to that. When this time Heywood again took that direction, asking if growing up had been difficult for her, she took a moment to collect her thoughts. Why talk about a father who drifted into town, stayed some years, then left in the middle of the night, or about a mother who had a problem with the bottle? Why not set all that aside and focus on good fortune?
“Nah,” she said. “My upbringing was a tear. I had a brilliant brother. And since you ask, he taught me to look for spoor in places you can’t imagine.”
Can’t imagine? The Czar ceased rocking. As far as he knew there was nothing wrong with his imagination and he tried to imagine what Jaime might think was beyond him to imagine. All around, the screensavers did their bouncing. He stared at one, then another. The colours – arising, merging, subsiding – were they sources for Jaime’s imagination? Could they be sources for him? In some ways it looked like chaos, but could it be more? Suppose you looked at the screens in a certain way. They could be representing something. You could conclude the universe was like them. He’d seen space photos of exploding supernova. And, if you shifted the perspective some more, the screensavers were sort of like life on earth as well – for example, the arbitrariness of genes which suddenly threw up specimens like him, especially fit to survive. Or, you could see the exploding and imploding colours as a kind of turbulence, of the kind people experience in their dreams. Heywood settled back. This was good. This was imagination on a roll. He began to rub his eyes, which stimulated further images, behind the retinas, abstractions of the screensavers, other kinds of lovely patterns, coming together, reaching a climax, then breaking apart. He leaned back still farther to savour this opening up of a lovely experiential world. There were sensuous thoughts, pleasurable reveries – ones impossible for Jaime to imagine he was imagining! Soft round forms, lovely breasts, ample buttocks, the inspiring curves of undraped female hips. A tingling began in his groin which was soon pulsating all through him. “Ohhh,” the Czar groaned, slung back so far on the chair on wheels that he was nearly horizontal.
“Irv?” Jaime said in a voice that sounded like the snapping fingers of a hypnotist.
It brought him back. “Oh…Oh my. Jaime. Sorry. Working too hard. Tired. Started to doze off.” He jerked himself upright. “Where were we? You have news, I think, something about dynamite.”
“Yeah. This is awesome. Hold on to your seat.” Now Jaime did the talking. She’d been restoring data on the back-up tapes. So far she’d gone back about eighteen months, but some of her clients in the Service wanted more – three, four, five years – the watchers for instance. “So I’ve been working on earlier tapes, digging around, looking for older files. And guess what?”
The Czar strained forward. What ancient files had she found? What new pearls of wisdom were there? “Tell me,” he urged.
“Remember, we talked about Carson Pryce?”
He tensed. “Carson! You’ve discovered stuff by him?”
“I told you about his paranoid habit of cleaning out his drives so they’re always empty, so that nothing ever got copied to the back-up tapes?”
“Yes. Yes. You were going to check it out.” Heywood’s voice had taken on sharpness. His chin was jutting forwards.
“Well, I found some material of his…not a lot. But he slipped up a few times. Guess he’s human. Data got copied and stored in the archives.”
She saw Heywood move his legs then, so that the chair began to roll. Coming towards her he was sort of walking while sitting, like a fat duck waddling.
“Could you read it? This is important, Jaime.”
He came so close she could smell deodorant mixed in with the dried sweat. “I could read it,” she said casually.
Heywood snorted. “And? What was it? Strange stuff?”
In the faint light Jaime saw his eyes were losing balance, turning harsh and primitive. “Loopy stuff,” she said.
“Something incriminating?” the Czar pressed.
“Nope. No red flags flying. Literary thingies – chapters from Anna Karenina, a play by Shak
espeare, “The Gettysburg Address,” a passage from Alice in Wonderland, poems by Shelley, a Bertrand Russell essay.”
“What’s special about that? So he likes to get his reading jollies by looking at a screen? So he’s wacko. We knew that already. You said you had dynamite stuff.”
“It’s not what’s there, Irv, not what’s on the surface. It’s what it points to. Suppose he uses such texts as a means. Suppose that’s how he hides his stuff. That’s what I’m thinking.”
Heywood backed off. Imagination – that’s what she was telling him. Use your imagination. Once more he focussed on the brilliant, shifting hues. He tried squinting. All those dots of light coming and going on the screens. His eyes narrowed further, until the dots began connecting. “My God!” he cried. “It fits. Yes, it all fits. That’s the proof. He is a hypocrite…a measureless hypocrite…a two-timer, a double crosser…a shame to the Service…it’s there before us inscribed in the classics.” Awed by these truths Heywood’s eyes opened wide, mesmerised by the movement of colour. “He is a creature that hides and strikes and runs and hides again and in dark places generates his poison.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. For sure though, he likes to stash things away. Something’s locked away in those texts. I just gotta figure out the key.”
But the Czar wasn’t listening. One screen had stunned him. “There he is!” he yelled. “That’s him!”
It took Jaime ten minutes to usher Heywood from her lab, humouring him, agreeing to all he asked. “What do you mean?” she had asked. “Where is what?” All she saw was a gob of dark green and yellow shrinking into a dot and disappearing.
“A scorpion!” the Czar had cried, “with claws…and a tail pointing forward…at me. And a head like Carson’s. The beast was starved. I swear it.”
She wanted to make light of it, wanted to say something mildly derisive – Get a grip, Irv. Just because Carson’s a malco, doesn’t mean he’s got his abdomen in a bend. But she thought the better of it. “Look again, Irv,” she said instead. “Nothing there.”
But he said it had to be smashed. So first it had to be flushed out of its hiding, which was something he expected her to do. Jaime said it could take time and what about the current work schedule? Stop everything, he demanded. Focus on the scorpion only. You sure? she asked. You think he’s sleazo ’cause he reads the classics off a screen? The Czar remained adamant. Getting to his feet, hitting the top of a monitor with a pointed finger, he repeated what he wanted. “Carson has abused trust. He has done strange things. It is time he paid for it.”
Jaime looked into Heywood’s eyes and saw a lust for retribution. What set that off? Why all the raging? Had the High Council victory he’d come in boasting about been hollow? It was worth some research. But for now she made light of the Czar’s problem. “Nuff said, Irv. Got the picture. You just keep clicking on the icon of Zadok the smiling priest. I’ll find out about the classics and you keep up to date by signing in.” Then she guided him out.
Jaime sat quietly in her lab for the next half hour. What had brought on this switch in Heywood? He always had disdain for Carson, but in an avuncular kind of way. Now suddenly he hated him with passion. She thought of Carson. She had seen him a few times in the building, always at a distance. He never looked anything but hostile. Once or twice it was in the cafeteria where he was having lunch with a nice-looking, red-haired woman, an energetic type with expressive hands who did all the talking. Sometimes she would touch his forearm to register a point. He was different then, softer, attentive to what she said. The way he listened, nodding, maybe in agreement, maybe as encouragement, it was sort of like him being that woman’s brother. As she thought, as Jaime compared her image of her brother with Carson, she thought they were not that different. Both were sort of anti-social, but effective, great men really, in cyberspace that is. Deep down, she knew, her brother was a caring man. Was Carson like that too? She had tried to obtain info on him, but it was hard to come by. Still, in the travel and leave records, she had seen that although Carson seldom took a holiday, he had finally had one a bunch of months ago, the first one, the only one in years, a short one in Berlin. Never ever a vacation and then that kind of intellectually exotic destination? What did that say about him? In a world of almost zero facts, you could conclude it was significant. And there was the other fact, that he took extreme precautions against his stuff getting hacked into. And when she finally got at something it turned out to be nothing more than literary stuff that on the surface was totally innocuous. Were Carson’s stored texts really saying something else? How could she get into that world? He seemed to exist alone inside an impenetrable cyberspace fortress. Sometimes she looked at it from a distance on the monitors in her lab and she would notice activity, as if he was going somewhere, yet he never left a track. Hours later he’d be back with sacks full of megabytes, tons of coded data. All that stuff, completely covered up, impossible to intercept or read, he would lug it back into his inaccessible bastion. Mind you, she hadn’t taken much time yet to figure out how to de-activate the barriers and alarms; once she had maybe she could wriggle in.
And now Irv wanted it done fast. Jaime began to reorient her banks of computers, turning them into listening posts and sentinels, a full stake-out with every angle covered. A tiny slip, the necessary split-second moment, could come anytime.
12 CHAPTER TWELVE
Jaime didn’t have to lie in wait for long. As Heywood wished, she bombarded me with all she had – her full digital arsenal, the blitzing batteries of software – and her undivided personal attention too. It soon paid off.
I was in turmoil that afternoon after lunch with Anne-Marie. Back in my cell, still dazed by what she said, feeling the urge to be near Rachel, I logged on. My fingers began to ram the keyboard. Frenzied commands, combinations of noughts and ones, were sent streaming into cyberspace and they brought me my gradual release, no different than a junky shooting up in a back alley. And in this agitated state, this one time, I overlooked the protocols which confer stealth. Jaime, already hiding in the shadows, saw all I did, keystroke upon keystroke. What luck, she must have thought. What opportunity. Of course she wasted no time, slipping in commando-style, hitching a ride, sticking with me, watching me delve into Rachel’s latest trip. She saw me trawl through airline and hotel databases. She observed me deploying search strings for the whereabouts of Morsi Abou-Ghazi. To top it off, while I was busy combing through the sources, she penetrated my laptop and copied everything stored on the hard drive. So now she had her booty, and with it she ran off. No clues. A perfect job.
One lapse. Disaster followed.
Weeks later when Jaime confided to me what happened, I learned she acquired enough information during the afternoon spent silently at my side to clone me, more or less, that is, my cyberspace style, my way of operating. At first she lacked the key for deciphering the files I had stored, but soon enough she figured that out too, so that within days she wasn’t just studying my files – reading the classics – but penetrating them, accessing the information they implied. Sampling my secrets turned into such an easy-going pleasure for Jaime that she likened it to picking grapes off a vine.
“Carson,” she said, “gotta hand it to you. The way you hid your stuff…ripe, juicy. You’re a match for my brother.”
I was dazed, too dazed to appreciate the compliment, too dazed to be furious. I merely shook my head. “Who else knows?” I asked. “Does Heywood? Was he copied?” She acknowledged he was and in the next breath advised me it was best to run. “Leave town. Go somewhere far. Hunker down. Wait till it blows over.”
I could see events were spinning and I no longer had control. Like puffs of humid air over an equatorial sea transforming into a hurricane, a sequence of random trivial acts was amassing into a great tempest. Anne-Marie’s matchmaking, Jaime’s smarts, Heywood’s spite, my stupidity, all these unconnected dispositions were linking up. That day – when Radu Corioanu’s cross appeared in the cafeteria and Anne-Marie chastised me f
or squandering the time I had in Berlin, so that I, feeling stung and wretched, logged on with too much haste to have my fill of Rachel – that day spelt catastrophe.
Yet now, looking back, I see it generated energy too. An auspicious wind replaced the ill one. It propelled me, pushed me through a portal, forced me onto a journey. Malice, sullenness, guilt – all that ended when my journey did. The day came when shame ceased to burden me and I could laugh, because I had been freed.
So what began to happen?
Jaime, having seen and stolen, drew back quickly from my on-line session, although inadvertently she made one false click. Noticing it immediately, she made the correction with a few nimble key strokes, thereby obliterating all sign of her retreat. Yet her home base, the destination for her booty, Zadokite Port, momentarily got looped back to my computer. By chance, as I was about to encrypt the day’s data haul, I saw the two words appearing (and disappearing) on my screen. Instantly ill at ease, I punched in a trace command, which brought nothing. My fingers quickly jabbed out orders for all-out searches, but they drew blank after blank. For hours my attitude swayed back and forth between wishfully thinking that Zadokite Port was a meaningless, stray occurrence, while knowing that in the digital world, with its merciless rigour, there are no causeless events. Some other intelligence had penetrated my perimeter. Deep down I knew it. What had it seen?
Late into the night and for several days following I continued checking. I even broke an unwritten code; I delved into the work of my fellow watchers. But I saw they were blissfully at work, monitoring the proliferating cauldrons of the black partnerships in the world. No Zadokite Port there. I studied other locations, inside the Service network, and outside: of global corporations and their well-bankrolled armies; of gangs of lawless para-militaries; of terrorists and bounty hunters; of the numerous clandestine research centres developing new tools for international blackmail and totalitarian control. Yet all this effort yielded not one clue. I studied Jaime’s lab, that is, I tried. She had built up a complex, potent computing capacity – money had been no object – and she had girded it with impeccable defences. An early warning system was deployed around it like an elaborate sonar array on the ocean floor. No way of getting close without detection except through very sophisticated decoys and counter-counter-intrusion measures. I spent hours manoeuvring around her citadel, searching for chinks, trying to devise ways in. Jaime eventually told me that all the while, in her control centre, she was watching me. She praised my ruses. You came as a knight dressed up as monk, she said, bursting into merriment. Full marks for appearance, Carson, but there was something telling in the bearing.
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