Six Degrees of Freedom

by Nicolas Dickner

  When she finishes the second coat, around one in the morning, the container is absolutely anonymous, a perfectly smooth white. All that’s needed now is to stick on the new codes; the pile of self-adhesive vinyl numbers and letters lie in a jumble on the workbench.

  She and Éric chose the code following a long and lively discussion. They agreed on at least one thing: the numbers and letters couldn’t simply be picked at random. For one thing, the code must conform to the ISO 6346 standard. For another, they had to make sure the code was not already used by a company or, at the very least, was not registered with the International Container Bureau. Lisa insisted all the same that the code have a certain aesthetic, whereas Éric was mainly concerned with its “forgettability.”

  “Imagine if we chose the code LULU 2323237—I’m oversimplifying, but you get my point. One glance and it’s etched into your memory. We want a code that your eyes will just slide over.”

  Still, camouflage is not an exact science, and their deliberations went on for some time before they could agree on PZIU 127 002 7, which was both “reasonably forgettable” and “fairly aesthetic.” The new code would serve every purpose: entry into the databases, visual tracking, company identification. It would be used by customs, shippers and exporters, dockers and port administrators. It would be entered on forms, bills of lading, receipts and invoices. The code would identify the container and make it invisible, at once unique and like the others, lost in a sea of numbers and letters. Security through mimicry.

  But before Lisa can stick on the codes, the paint must dry. This gives her forty-eight hours to deal with a headache that won’t go away. The accumulated smell of everything that was splashed, sprayed, rolled, spread, injected, cut and daubed in this garage since June is enough to kill an ox.

  Lisa scans the workbench. She runs her hand over a row of jars containing nails, screws, rivets, a poisonous tropical spider, and stops on a bottle of ibuprofen. She pops it open, drops three capsules into her palm, lifts the top of a cooler full of cans and ice cubes, and grabs an iced tea.

  Then she does what she has not dared to do since the month of June: she punches the big red button, and the garage door opens amid a clang of metal.

  Lisa steps away from the door and removes her mask. Even at a distance of ten metres, she can smell the toxic vapours flowing out of the building—worlds apart from the fragrance of mahogany and beeswax. Lisa massages her temples. This place is going to make her sick. She looks at the door; there are whorls of fine particles floating against the light of the floods, and she suddenly doubts she’ll be able to go back inside.

  It’s a busy night across the street: some fifteen containers are parked at the loading docks. A few tractors wait with their trailers attached and their engines purring. The foam block seals around the docks keep any light or sound from filtering out. There’s no way of knowing what is going on inside that warehouse.

  Sitting in front of the main door, Lisa opens her iced tea with the hollow sound of aluminum being stove in. She swallows her ibuprofens and takes a sip of tea. Every two minutes, a plane roars off runway 24B, its huge shape looming against the bluish glow of the airport. The voyage beckons you, one way or another.

  —

  Twenty hours elapse: twelve hours of fume-coloured sleep and eight hours of chores. Lisa grimaces as she pushes a cart brimming with sacks of rice and flour, dried fruits, sugar, oil. She is the last customer in the supermarket. The ambient music playing on the loudspeakers is interrupted:

  “Dear shoppers, the store is about to close. Please proceed to the checkout counters.”

  Lisa consults her notebook, where pages and pages of shopping lists have been progressively crossed out. Okay, this should do it. Counting the frozen and freeze-dried foodstuffs she bought earlier today, nothing seems to have been missed.

  She briskly pushes the cart along, negotiates a tight turn and heads straight for the express checkout, where she recognizes the passive-aggressive cashier and the narcoleptic bag boy. This is the seventh such cart that Lisa has filled this evening, and she is getting to know the staff. She didn’t take paranoia to the point of shopping in different stores. After all, what’s so suspicious about buying three thousand dollars’ worth of non-perishable foodstuffs and paying in cash?

  The cashier scans the bar codes and sighs, and her helper stuffs the items haphazardly into the bags. On the cash register screen, the total keeps climbing until it finally stands still at $555.99. Taking the money with the utmost indifference, the cashier counts the bills twice and hands the change to Lisa, who then propels the cart toward the exit while the bagger looks on blankly.

  There are just three or four cars left in the vast parking lot. Lisa empties the contents of the cart into the Dodge already crammed to the roof with foodstuffs, which have spilled over onto the passenger seat. She has to use her shoulder to get the door to close. Better drive cautiously: if she should brake suddenly, Lisa is in danger of being flattened under a half ton of provisions. She drives away leaving the cart abandoned in the middle of the parking lot.

  It’s late at night when she finally loads the last bin of food aboard PZIU 127 002 7. She hangs it on the scales and enters the weight in her computer, something she has done ten million times since June.

  The opening of the container is almost completely filled up with the wall of apple crates intended to dupe a possible inspector, but Lisa isn’t fooling herself: these people won’t necessarily be put off by appearances; they’re perfectly capable of emptying an entire container on the slightest suspicion.

  She slips along the narrow passageway left open between the dry toilet and the trash compactor, steps through a sliding door and ends up in the pantry. She strides over the hose snaking across the floor to convey drinking water to the port-side tank. She glances at the level as she goes by. It’s rising one millimetre at a time. In about ten minutes, it will be full.

  Around her, the deep shelves are laden with sacks of flour, dried fruits and nuts, dried sausages, pasta, yeast for use in the bread machine, packets of spices, jars of honey, and freeze-dried meals. There are even some treats: a bottle of Haitian rum, some Swiss chocolate bars. The freezer is chockablock with frozen strawberries and mangos, orange juice, ravioli, cheese and tofu. The ample medicine cabinet is replete with ointments and drugs for a host of ailments and illnesses, even those she has never experienced, as well as a dozen tubes of toothpaste and several kilometres of toilet paper. In a large chest, there are tools for sewing, others for soldering, gluing, sawing, screwing, spools of thread and string, twelve kinds of adhesive tape, a voltmeter, three flashlights and many packages of batteries.

  Lisa slides the last bin into place and leans back against the water tank to contemplate her work. Everything is carefully stowed away; not one centimetre has been wasted. Nothing could have escaped her attention, and yet she’s afraid she has overlooked some silly thing, an obvious or obscure item—a corkscrew, pipe cleaners, Hungarian paprika—that will turn out to be essential in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

  She exits the pantry through the other door, crosses the kitchen and continues on to the wardroom. The room is compact but comfortable. The bed has been converted into a sofa, and the place looks like any other living room. The arrises are rounded and edged with wooden moulding, and the room is bathed in a cozy light. A bookshelf running the length of the partition is stocked with books and periodicals, in particular a set of Life magazines from the sixties purchased on eBay. On one wall Lisa has hung a photo of the stratosphere taken by Mrs. Le Blanc’s PowerShot and a shadow box containing the Nephila clavipes pinned to a block of cork.

  A circle of light encompasses the chart table, illuminating the VHF radio, the GPS and two small dials indicating the time on board and the time in Copenhagen. The computer is in the middle of a download, and the progress bar, now showing 57 percent, advances a fraction of a pixel at a time.

  After six months of intensive development, Éric finally announced t
hat version 1.0 of the piloting software was operational. Improvable, of course, but operational. Lisa received a download URL in the late afternoon. Installation instructions would follow. “There’s going to be a learning curve,” Éric warned.

  The monster’s name is He2, which Éric described as more than just software, comparing it to a Swiss Army knife with hundreds of tools. The computer has been struggling for two hours to download the files. Lisa feels as though she is torrenting an entire floor of the Alexandria library. At this rate, the sun will be up by the time she’s received the whole software package, but no matter: time zones will soon be irrelevant.

  She makes a mental list of what still needs to be done. Not much, actually. Collect the tools. Make sure no evidence is left behind in the garage. Install He2 and learn how it works. Routine stuff.

  She stretches out on the sofa, adjusts a cushion behind her back. Comfortable. She’s done good work. She shuts her eyes and breathes in the fragrance of wood. For a girl supposedly afflicted with inborn claustrophobia, she has a strange sense of freedom. Now, how about a shot of that Barbancourt?

  All at once, she opens her eyes and sits up. There’s one more crucial thing she needs to do.

  JAY ISN’T THE ONLY ONE to benefit from Laura’s good turns—nor is she the only one to go without sleep because of them. Apparently, Miss Wissenberg passed along to Mahesh documents obtained by the CIA, which, despite being redacted with a shotgun, proved to be a mine of revelations. The poor computer analyst left the office late last evening and, after a brief and troubled night, showed up at the RCMP building at dawn. If the empty sugar packets littering his desk are any indication, he has just downed his fourth coffee, and he has clearly not yet recovered from yesterday’s overdose of Whippets. (A dollar twenty-five a bite!)

  Jay stays calm. She unhurriedly deposits the press clipping binder on her desk, slings her bag over the back of her chair, hangs up her coat and turns on her computer. Then she gets to unlacing her boots, while Mahesh fidgets, waiting for her to finish these exasperating preliminaries. Jay finally wiggles her toes.

  “Okay, so, about this secret?”

  He rubs his hands. “How does Rokov manage to move Papa Zulu around?”

  “By modifying the databases, right?”

  “They use a blend of exploits and social engineering. First, they send real fake forms—or fake real forms, depending on your point of view—and then they directly manipulate the databases. This combines the best of two worlds: it allows the container to disappear and reappear, to erase its tracks, and at the same time to look perfectly straightforward on the administrative level.”

  “Bonus points: social engineering makes it possible to skip some steps. It’s quicker than brute force.”

  “Exactly.”

  Mahesh grabs his Pyrex mug and visually assesses the toxicity of the centimetre of coffee sloshing around at the bottom. He decides to risk it.

  “What interests me is the alteration of the databases. There’s nothing in the CIA documents about that, but you don’t have to be Gary Raskapov to draw a few conclusions.”

  “Kasparov.”

  Ignoring the remark, he tears open three sugar packets, which he taps against the side of the cup to eject every last crystal.

  “The main conclusion is that there was no infiltration. At this point, it would have taken dozens of infiltrators in four or five countries. Actually, I saw the list of procedures. Injection, sniffing, brute-force attack. The databases are altered sometimes through direct queries, sometimes with the same software as the port administration—which in itself is surprising, since the ports all use different software.”

  He tastes the coffee. It’s the Attila the Hun of morning beverages. He decides to add a fourth sugar.

  “Still, what’s happening is no surprise. I’ve said it before, but it’s been known for a long time that the industry is poorly prepared. Everyone assumes compa​rtmen​taliz​ation makes the systems secure, so we inevitably end up with every mistake in the book: weak passwords, three-year delays in updates, suboptimal configurations, badly filtered queries. But even given all that, Papa Zulu moves fast. Rokov needed eighteen hours to get into the system in Montreal. Twelve hours in Caucedo. Fifteen hours in Panama. Three hours—three hours!—in Shenzhen.”

  Sip of coffee. The hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

  “This can’t be the doing of just one person working manually. It’s too fast and too diversified.”

  “So you think there’s a team working on this?”

  “Precisely. Possibly a dozen hackers. Each specialized in a different area. They don’t even need to know each other. They could be subcontractors, with a coordinator.”

  “Distributed hacking.”

  “You can farm this out to people in Belarus for a song.”

  Jay is about to add something when she catches sight of Maurice F. Gamache and Laura Wissenberg marching up the corridor. Even at this distance, she can tell they are deep in conversation, and when she notices the sergeant is not carrying his usual bag of bagels, Jay realizes it’s serious. Mahesh has followed her gaze and instinctively stands up.

  Without slowing down, the two colleagues enter the Enclave all smiles. Maurice F. points a triumphant finger skyward and lets out what could pass for an altogether acceptable battle cry.

  “Singapore!”

  ALL’S QUIET AT THE WESTMACOTT Building. Apart from the staff’s cars, there’s only a black Dodge Ram in the parking lot. A nurse greets Lisa with an intrigued smile.

  “You’re early today!”

  In response, Lisa nods ambiguously. The nurse watches her as she walks off down the corridor. She finds there is something oddly solemn about Lisa, and it takes her a few seconds to understand why: for months now, Lisa has shown up at the residence in dirty overalls and steel-toe boots, with blackened hands and sawdust in her hair. This morning, she’s wearing a clean pair of jeans, a spotless pullover, and sandals. Her sunglasses are perched atop a freshly washed head of hair.

  Lisa saunters up the corridor. It smells of coffee, toast and strawberry jam. The doors of the rooms are open; the residents are eating, watching TV, doing sudokus. A lady lying on her bed is having a discussion with the ceiling.

  Lisa arrives at number 19. From the doorway, she watches her father rock in his chair, facing the window. He is dressed but wears his old bathrobe over his clothes all the same, and he has put on a John Deere cap that doesn’t belong to him. Lisa feels a knot tightening in her stomach. She notices all at once how much thinner he is, how prominent his cheekbones have become. Against the morning backlight, he’s like a skeleton.

  Not only did her father not fully recover from his stroke in late July, but his condition has steadily declined. According to the doctor, he’s constantly at risk of another episode, and the slightest cold could be fatal. His complexion is pale and he has the life expectancy of a beetle. He doesn’t leave his room anymore, not even at mealtimes, and hardly touches the food they bring him. Lisa looks around the closet-sized room, where nothing is left of the few souvenirs she salvaged from the Domaine Bordeur. Trinkets, photos, knick-knacks—Robert chucked everything in trash cans all over the residence. The third spider plant has disappeared from its hook, probably dead from lack of water. Without these particular objects, there’s something fragile about the atmosphere in the room. Yet Lisa realizes her father will never be transferred anywhere else. He won’t last long enough for a spot to become available in a long-term care facility. This cramped room will be the last place he’ll see.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  He turns toward the door, sees his daughter. He gives her that hollow half-smile, his only smile now, and Lisa knows right away he doesn’t recognize her. Still, he lets himself be kissed on the cheek. There’s an abandoned breakfast tray in front of him. He’s nibbled the corner of a slice of toast, hasn’t touched either his tea or the piece of orange. Soon he’ll have to be fed intravenously.

  As is her habit
, Lisa drives away the uneasiness by busying herself. She asks questions, talks about the weather or the state of the room. She inspects the drawers to make sure everything is all right, that there are no hamburger patties hidden among his T-shirts. She notes the inexorable disappearance of his underwear. Robert is oblivious, hasn’t noticed a thing. He’s no longer interested in the present; he lives in the past—or, rather, in several simultaneous pasts. It’s hard to tell if he is in 1978 or 1991 or 2007. His memory has different floors, and he circulates among them through secret stairways and invisible trap doors.

  The drawers are in order, although Lisa detects a faint odour of urine emanating from a source she is unable to locate. She goes around the room sniffing the air and gives up. She finally sits down beside her father and plays nervously with her earlobe. She casts a glance at the door. Too late to duck out.

  “Dad…Remember that big house we renovated, in Hinchinbrooke? The Baskine house?”

  Lisa doesn’t expect an answer. Her father nods purely as a reflex. He appears to have no memory of the Baskine house or Hinchinbrooke. Unfazed, Lisa continues regardless.

  “You found a passageway inside the larder, behind the wallpaper. A passageway between the walls, with a ladder going up to the second floor.”

  Robert moves his chair, obviously incapable of grasping the subject of the conversation. Surrounded by people who carry on monologues, maybe he’s forgotten the very nature of a dialogue. Lisa’s insistence bothers him. He squirms a little, averting his gaze.

  “I went into the passageway with a work light and climbed up the ladder, and when I came back, you asked me if I’d seen anything, and I told you no, that there was nothing to see.”

  Silence. A man in the next room can be heard singing “Love Me Tender” very loudly and slightly off-key.

  “I lied. There was…a secret room. With an old flashlight, an ashtray, some magazines. A cushion. A bottle of rum. It had been deserted for years, but long ago, in the fifties, someone had hidden there. A woman, I think. A woman who spent hours hiding inside the walls.”