Borderless Deceit

by Adrian de Hoog

  The first paragraphs, the first result, consisted of letters run together. No spaces or punctuation. But a cursory glance was enough to see words.

  philliphache marseilles contract colon elmedhi afsaritehran hirty two exocet missiles fixed by gurb a asanvancouvercontain erssevenyceightlp comma one six bqpcommaninekfivethree hzarrivingbatumifeb three bonapar tedepar tfebtwel vetruckturkeyiran transport vladimirrustavelitbilisintervention window feb four eleven act

  Behind her the search computer was ejecting more intermittent monotonal pings, but Jaime stuck to file 3784, sending it to yet another computer, adding spaces, some missing words, and punctuation.

  Phillip Haché, Marseilles, contract with Colonel Medhi Afsari, Tehran. Thirty-two Exocet missiles. Fixed by Gur Basaan, Vancouver. Containers 7YC8LP, 16BQP9, 9K53HZ arriving Batumi Feb 3 on N. Bonaparte. Depart Feb 12 by truck into Turkey to Iran. Truck transport Vladimir Rustaveli, Tbilisi. Intervention window Feb 4-11. Act.

  The other paragraphs provided the details. Gur Baasan, born in Mongolia now of Vancouver, owned a business which staged fireworks. In fact, it was a front for deals involving more potent pyrotechnical devices. Baasan owned a cottage on an island in Georgian Bay. Rustaveli had journeyed to the cottage, as had Haché. Baasan travelled widely. He’d also met Haché regularly in a Paris suburb close to Versailles. From there he travelled to Amman for consultations with a certain Colonel Afsari. Carson’s report had dates, places, texts of telephone intercepts, e-mails and other documents hacked out of the memories of all kinds of computers. The missiles were to be delivered to Rustaveli who would shepherd them along to Afsari. The Iranian colonel, it was clear, had scrupulously adhered to a pre-delivery payment schedule involving a bank in Dubai.

  Jaime scanned the pages. She went back to the last word in the summary. Act. Was it advice, or an instruction? Who, she wondered, was Carson advising, or ordering? Did he control a network? If so, how far did his control extend? And what, she mused, had eventually happened to the missile shipment?

  As an opener, file 3784 would touch most people’s curiosity. But Jaime had never cared much for that part of the world’s affairs, about the dark personae that organise destruction. In any case, files like this, she was sure, would be assembled by spooks for other spooks and that exotic brotherhood played its complicated games with perverse rules. How does spooks’ information arise? Jaime could imagine it. She could see spooks creating hierarchies of lies stored in out of the way locations to ensure their discovery isn’t easy. And as happens with all cults, the lies of the few grow into the truths of the many. Information, disinformation – two sides of one coin. With files like 3784, who could really tell who was doing what to whom?

  No, it wasn’t the dismal Exocet transaction, nor the shadowy sellers and buyers, that interested Jaime. She was hoping the pinging sounds implied other kinds of insight.

  Time became motionless in Jaime’s lab. Did one hour pass, or two, as she read about machine gun shipments to guerilla armies in Africa and heavy ordnance destined for the West Bank? Was it past midnight when she went through reports on shoulder-launched anti-air missiles shipped from a secret Taiwan factory to drug cartels on various continents? She scanned enough material for days, even weeks of careful reading. But, if you stood back and took a bird’s eye view, and scanned this dismal forest from up high, what were Carson’s classics yielding, what were they really saying? That the future will be filled with carnage. Which is the same as saying that it will be just a replication of the past.

  Then a blip in the pattern, a perturbation in time’s stagnancy, a clearing in the forest. On Jaime’s screen, with her hand operating the mouse suddenly showing a light tremor because of the sudden excitement, a note appeared that was unlike the other documents. It seemed to be something Carson had written to himself using words having nothing to do with instruments of conflict. It was about the plague and provided facts Jaime hadn’t seen. Her eye raced over the screen from top to bottom. Pay dirt. She balled a fist in triumph.

  First nugget: Heywood’s suspicions about Carson had a basis. Information on the plague had passed between Carson and the Americans. Jaime giggled with delight. How Heywood would erupt when he learned this! He’d spew lava. But not for long. She knew the Czar by now. He’d transform quick. Soon enough he’d pat himself on the back, turn smug and grandfatherly. In his practised conspiratorial manner he’d say: I read him, Jaime. Course I did. Carson’s a horror story. Who doesn’t know it? His is a life full of unknown and gruesome details. But I read him. A bad book, a persona marked by an absence of things human. No capacity to feel. No ability for fine sentiment. He’s not like you and me.

  Predicting Heywood was never a challenge. Predicting Carson was. Carson’s character was shrouded. Were there other documents to quarry?

  For the time being the plague file was pure entertainment. Jaime clapped her hands at Carson’s display of cyberspace virtuosity, at his mastery to de- and re-construct events and rewrite history. He commanded an art form with subtle rules, which Jaime knew only too well.

  And so to nugget two. She read that Radu Corioanu was undeserving of the impromptu cafeteria memorial. Radu wasn’t dead. He wasn’t even dying. Nor had he ever set foot in Zurich. A fake death was electronically recorded and certified, or, putting it more delicately, a virtual death had been virtually filed. The plague’s true father, Jaime learned, wasn’t Radu but a certain Benedictus Athenasiu, a fact so significant, she thought, that it qualified as nugget three.

  Give Heywood his due. He’d been right. Carson had contributed to the American report. But he’d been wrong too. Carson wasn’t the plague’s mastermind. Only after Benedictus had completed his havoc, had Carson stepped in, on his own initiative, and found out what was stumping everyone else.

  So why a cover up? Why the elaborate creation of an alternate villain to put into the American report? Why had Carson not basked in the glory of having defrocked Benedictus? Why had he stashed the truth away?

  Might other files explain?

  Jaime activated the scan function once more. A further avalanche of reports arrived on-screen. More detritus really. Stories of commerce in cluster bombs; of unemployed Serb anti-aircraft specialists treated as royalty by Iran’s ayatollahs; of uranium enrichment technology (disguised as hydroelectric generator blueprints) making the journey to North Korea from Ukraine. Jaime rifled through the pile, catching words here and there, scanning dozens of pages of dense, run-on letters in a language she understood, though deep down she didn’t. Why did humanity get so persistently bogged down with this will to self-destruct? Why hadn’t evolution taken the species beyond it?

  She continued scanning and the pile of filtered product lowered. Only a few remained. Jaime pursed her lips and got ready for a letdown. Carson was a nonconformist, he was furtive, but fundamentally he was clean. Three days of effort and that was the conclusion. She looked at the list of remaining reports as if it was spam, good only for the recycle bin. Then her desultory eye fell on unusual, entirely different kinds of words. Jaime would always remember the moment, the surge of energy, a sudden emotion taking hold, as she struggled to absorb them. Slowly and methodically she read this text from beginning to end.

  Days later she pulled apart what she felt that moment – to analyse it honestly. It was a roller coaster of a moment. Her initial jubilation reached a peak seemingly in microseconds; then came a plunge into fierce anger, which scarcely lasted any longer. It was an odd anger, the kind that comes when you’ve just discovered you’ve been robbed. But she hadn’t been robbed, because in the next instant she saw that what the text really said was that she couldn’t continue to be the owner of certain ideas which had been developing deep down in the place where fantasies reside. Whereupon in an instant her mood lifted to a high level as she experienced the dignity that comes with understanding. All this flashed through her in the early morning hours as she absorbed Carson’s final text.

  The note had nothing to do with dreary global p
lots. It was also different from the factual account of Radu Corioanu and Benedictus Athenasiu. This last text was fascinating because it was about the people and places Carson went looking for when she had been at his side on-line: Alexandria, the El-Salamlek Palace, the co-ordinates of Morsi Abou-Ghazi’s yacht. And its introspective tone made it sound like a passage lifted from a diary. And isn’t it in diaries that people reveal their cores?

  Alexandria again. Each month the same. A weekend with Friday and Monday added.

  And the same suite on the top floor of the El-Salamlek Palace.

  What does she think when she stands at the tall windows? Does she look for the launch amongst the boats moored in the bay? Does she search the sea beyond the headlands for a silhouette on the horizon?

  What are her thoughts when the sun falls away and the palms cease filtering light?

  Soon enough she leaves. A walk down from the hotel, a step onto the launch, a bouncing race across the open sea to where it meets the sky. Here the yacht lies waiting.

  Five months. Five visits.

  A pattern. No different than the years before when she went back and forth between Geneva and Berlin in the banker’s private plane.

  I saw it. I see it. I stare at it. It sears my vision.

  Is tearing out my eyes the only remedy?

  Jaime studied each line and phrase. Peepholes into Carson’s inner space. She had wanted this, yet having it, it now muted her. She imagined Carson’s red-stained eyes. She touched her own. Like his, they had seen; they too felt singed.

  More mundanely, the night was ending and her eyes really were exhausted. She rubbed them, but the diary page would not release her. She wanted to know more and swung over to another computer. An on-line search brought the El-Salamlek Palace up in an instant. She saw that, yes, it really was a palace, not large, but of a size and with a style that befitted its first occupant, a favourite concubine of an Egyptian king. In her tiredness, trying to form an image of the view from the top floor windows, Jaime had a vision too. Completing Carson’s page she saw the launch arriving at the yacht. There on the lower deck stood a darkly handsome Morsi Abou-Ghazi with arms spread wide in welcome, as if accepting converts to his faith…

  An hallucination. A mind playing tricks.

  Jaime didn’t like it, didn’t want to observe what happened next, and with a start she was back in her lab, her head shaking. She grimaced at her stark surroundings. A dismal place for visions of Mediterranean sunsets with ships designed for romance. Time to quit. Get some rest. But one final bout of curiosity, one last thing to know, made her roll her chair back to the computer that crunched Carson’s secrets. Swift key strokes dug out his diary page’s antecedents. Antony and Cleopatra had been paired with Gone with the Wind. Two stories of passion with unhappy ends.

  It sears my vision. An expression of passion.

  Tear out my eyes. A prophesy for an unhappy end.

  Jaime shut down – the computers, the whole day. Carson’s classics had yielded answers, but all she really had were questions. An urbane Egyptian, a Berlin banker, a certain Rachel Dunn. And most intriguingly, Carson emotionally linked to it all.

  13 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “It didn’t take long to figure out the banker was Nikko Krause,” Jaime was saying.

  In a cocksure pose on a stool in my cell, she was telling me a story – my story – waving her hands up and down and sideways, setting her bracelets jangling. Sometimes she pointed at my chest. Gotcha! the gesture seemed to say, whereupon her laughter saturated our small space.

  I listened in stony silence. The revelations laid me bare, drained me of resistance.

  “Quite a man, Herr Krause,” she continued mischievously. “A wife. Four children. Quite a banker too. Talk about a Midas touch. No deal less than a hundred million. So tell me, what happened in Berlin? The attendance and leave records had that vague reference to you going there. Tantalising, but nothing specific. And your hard drive only had that one mention, you know, the poetic piece, the rhapsody, the view from the top floor of the Alexandrian palace. I’d like to know. What was so special about Berlin?”

  Jaime’s jesting tone scraped my psyche. “Nothing,” I replied. “Nothing happened in Berlin.” The disavowal came easy. My memories of the time spent there with Rachel were precious. To share them would be to soil them.

  “I imagine he had charm. It’s like that with bankers, right? The most corrupt do all the dazzling.” She rattled off some evidence of Krause’s tentacles reaching deep into many loathsome ventures on a global scale.

  None of it was news to me and I scarcely listened. Jaime’s spotlight on the years I always jealously kept secret was disorienting me. A distance was setting in between her voice and what my brain perceived. Syllable by syllable it grew more hollow until it was a distant echo only. I tried to analyse what was happening. Was my will to admit to nothing crumbling? Or was it escapism, pure and simple, that made me slump forward so far that I was staring at the floor? And was it desire for some kind of a release that caused me suddenly to see between my feet a chasm opening up? And why in the next split second, as blackness rushed in from the periphery, why did I see in that netherworld a form, an abstract monument, some kind of monolith, finely sculpted, brilliantly lit-up, beautiful yet menacing? I recall my shock at its perfection and how it seemed to threaten me. But threaten what? My future? My soul? My privacy? I recall I reached for the back of my chair, wanting to grab hold, fighting to stay up.

  In vain. I groaned and the last I heard was Jaime’s alarmed voice far away asking what was happening.

  When I came to I was spread out on the floor with Jaime hovering over me, dabbing my forehead with a wet paper towel. “Take it easy,” she soothed. “Man! If corrupt bankers bug you that much, how do you cope with all the other slimebags running the world?”

  I don’t know how long it was until I spoke. Minutes? Probably longer. The monolith’s stark and stunning form, its after-image, continued taunting me, although I couldn’t then think why. Only now, with the tyrannies of all those years dispersed, is my perspective clearer. I believe the monolith was pointing at what was to come by forcing a crystallisation of what had been. Because with Jaime gazing down I suddenly beheld Rachel’s Geneva years, when she was always travelling to Berlin, when she held ascendency over Krause. Those four years which she lived flawlessly, her full sensuality effortlessly kept in balance with her work, how those years had troubled me.

  As Jaime probed the cause of my collapse, the details came back. And as she dabbed, with me flat on my back staring into her lively eyes, and while my spirit continued to be racked by spasms and my body trembled as if fighting a disease, and with my lips expressing what was going through my mind, under Jaime’s steady scrutiny I was transported back to when it began, to Geneva, to the boat on the lake…

  Krause has made the arrangements for the boat on behalf of other international bankers who, like him, are in town for a conference.

  It is a tranquil Sunday afternoon in spring. The Alps tower to the south, white-topped pewter pyramids, Mont Blanc rising the highest, all chiselled laser clear. The lake’s shores seem painted in resurgent green. And the air is mixing, winter’s grip being released from the water, the sun’s new strength brought in on the breeze.

  On deck there’s mixing too. The bankers’ invitation to go on the cruise was extended to finance ministers from poor countries. Scattered amongst them as well are some handpicked local diplomats and the odd UN heavyweight. At this early stage during the outing everyone is drinking Krause’s champagne. As voices rise, the string quartet on the back deck jacks up the volume and the merry music spreads out across the water.

  Rachel is there because she’s been chosen to chair a UN committee for working up guidelines that will promote private sector financial flows to developing countries. The committee was her idea. She proposed it, argued for it, won a UN resolution that created it. And now the committee is on the boat. Because of her role, both here on
the lake and for the week to come, she is being treated with deference. And she’s dressed for the part, elegantly conservative, looking older than she is. A tan blazer, an elegant floral gold brooch on one shoulder, a brown-striped white blouse, a scarf with brilliant colours, beige slacks, simple shoes with heels, though not too much heel. The breeze plays in her hair, collaborating with the sun to tease out subtle ash-blond variations. Small diamond earrings animate the light. Rachel is a picture of great beauty, the greater because it is constrained.

  Krause is doing introductions. He knows all the bankers and most of the ministers and has memorised the names of the UN crowd. In a correct accent – a touch of Oxbridge, no hint of German – he treats the outing as if it’s a reception after an annual shareholders’ meeting. He squeezes shoulders, pumps hands, listens, laughs freely and makes everyone feel special. Rachel watches it. She sees his eyes flash, as if a switch flicks an inner intensity on and off. He’s used to ruling, that’s clear. The strong aristocratic nose, the precise short movements of his head, the lean body, the confident bearing, it all points to power. Even his hair – cut short like Caesar’s – adds to the imperial air. Missing only a laurel wreath. She suspects much of Krause’s show, the authority, the crisp ordering, is staged for her, because she’s constantly at the centre of it.

  “Ah, Samson, there you are,” he says. “Come here. Met Rachel Dunn? Our chair this week. Rachel, this is Samson Lenana, Finance Minister of Kenya.”

  Lenana, a Masai, tall and thin with a rising forehead gleaming in the sun, towers over Rachel. With a broad grin he remarks she’ll be presiding over the destiny of millions of poor people. If Krause sounds too close to being English to be English, somewhat the same is true for Lenana. His lazy drawl makes him sound almost American. Rachel, warm and friendly, like Lenana, politely disagrees with the African. It’s not the meeting she will chair, but politicians afterwards doing something useful that will make the difference. Lenana nods then laughs heartily. Where in Kenya is he from? she asks. Narok is the reply. Lenana describes an administrative centre in Kenya’s south, in Masailand. Rachel wants to know about Masailand, and in a sing-song voice he describes grassy plains, distant escarpments and bomas, the black circles of huts within which the Masai shelter their cattle at night from lions. And where is Rachel from? Oak Lake, she answers, telling him about the grassy plains there. No escarpments or bomas though. No lions either. Only gophers. In this way they discover they have open landscapes and soaring skies in common. Before Rachel can question the source of Lenana’s drawl, Krause interrupts with an apology. All he can boast about as origin is soggy Schleswig Holstein. He takes Lenana by the elbow, steers him towards a Parisian banker and hauls the Pakistani minister into Rachel’s presence.