Six Degrees of Freedom

by Nicolas Dickner

  The train crosses a road, and the sound of the level-crossing bells brushes against the cars and then dies away in the lower frequencies. Everything in life ends up Dopplerized. Even memories shift to red, if you wait long enough.

  Jay pulls out her suitcase and gropes around for the comforting shape of her Eee. She leans her back against the pillow and logs on to the on-board router, whose Internet connection is the slowest in all of Western Europe. The smallest image takes forever to download, but Jay has all night.

  She opens Google and searches for websites indicating the positions of ships in real time. There are dozens of them. ShipTrax will do the job. Jay clicks on India and zooms into the area where the red line ended. It’s a busy corridor and the screen fills up with coloured vectors. Luckily, the map can be configured, and by checking a few boxes Jay eliminates all the cruise ships, fishing vessels, oil tankers, bulk carriers, naval ships and yachts. The map gradually grows more legible. Soon, there are only container ships left.

  Jay clicks on each vector, looking for a ship that might have left the Colombo terminal December 8. There is just one: the Guangdong Express. The ship instantly appears in a thumbnail: a leviathan of the Malaccamax size, registered in Singapore, with a capacity approaching ten thousand containers. The picture makes her head spin. It brings to mind a floating city imagined by a mad Metabolist architect.

  According to the data received eleven minutes ago, the Guangdong Express was entering the estuary of the Ulhas River, at the southern tip of Mumbai. Right now, the ship must be situated off the Nhava Sheva terminal. The helmsman has already taken up his position in the wheelhouse, and the tugboats are nudging against the sides of the ship.

  Jay looks intently at the little red vector. Those few measly pixels represent a massive vessel located eight thousand kilometres away. This does nothing to ease her sense of unreality.

  The train slows down. They are coming into Valencia station, and Jay finally feels sleep overtaking her.

  She awakes at dawn, curled up around her Eee. She gingerly climbs down the berth’s ladder and draws back the curtains. Outside, the world has been transformed. The thin patches of snow glimpsed the night before in the north of Germany have given way to the first tufts of parched vegetation of the south.

  Jay slides her computer under the mattress and goes off in search of victuals.

  It’s still early and the passengers are sleeping in their seats in every conceivable position. The human species is highly adaptable. Jay makes her way to the dining car, where she buys a large coffee and a piece of apple strudel—though she doubts there are really any apples in the strudel or caffeine in the coffee.

  Back in her compartment, she locks the door and sits down by the window with her breakfast and her computer. The screen still displays the ShipTrax site, with the Guangdong Express in the mouth of the estuary. Jay hits Ctrl-R and the map refreshes very slowly, eventually showing the data from eight minutes ago. The Guangdong Express has already left the terminal and is bound for Abu Dhabi, but Jay knows very well that Papa Zulu is no longer aboard.

  She bites off a corner of the strudel and loads the satellite photos of the Nhava Sheva yard: a vast ochre-and-rust-coloured world, composed of thousands of boxes, each one its own world or a fragment of another world, and in one of those boxes a young woman sits busily in front of her computer, maybe with a cup of coffee and some apple strudel.

  Jay opens her e-mail to see if there’s any news from the CIA. Nothing. Laura Wissenberg is asleep at this time, and Jay catches herself envying Laura. Despite her half night of sleep, she is still as tired as before. She thinks of the little hotel waiting for her in Barcelona, in the Barri Gòtic. Maybe there will be a bathrobe.

  After one last glance at the warren of containers, Jay closes all the windows of her browser and erases the cache memory.

  THE CONTAINER WAS OFF-LOADED around six in the morning. An absolutely nondescript white reefer without the slightest distinguishing feature. Even so, it has hardly been deposited in the yard when it draws V2’s attention.

  V2 is a basset hound specially trained to detect stowaways. Dogs have long been used to sniff out explosives and narcotics, but V2 is part of a pilot project. Accompanied by his handler, he trots up and down the entire terminal, including the areas reserved for reefers. More skittish dogs are averse to the din of compressors and fans, but V2 stays calm at all times. Besides, neglecting this area is out of the question: last month a dozen half-suffocated Romanians were discovered in a reefer. There are Romanians everywhere.

  The container has just been hooked up to the power line when V2 passes in front of its doors and starts sniffing frantically. After the usual to and fro, the dog handler decides the box is suspect and makes a call to the supervisor.

  As a precaution, before disturbing the border authorities, they put the container through the gamma ray scan. The image leaves no room for doubt: there is someone aboard. While the administration tries to contact the shipper, a company with a Russian name, the box is shunted to an isolated part of the terminal.

  The absolutely nondescript white reefer without the slightest distinguishing feature suddenly becomes unique among the thousands of other containers, and the port security personnel eye it curiously while they have a smoke in the grey dawn light.

  The Special Response Unit arrives an hour later in a black SUV. The officers talk in hushed voices while donning their bulletproof vests. A muted argument erupts concerning the security perimeter, which no one thought to set up. A few calls are exchanged with the port administration office. No, they haven’t been able to contact the shipper. Still, they’re not going to wait around for his blessing.

  A second sniffer dog is brought in, one specialized in firearms and explosives. The animal could not care less about the container. Well, at least that can be ruled out. A member of the Special Unit sounds the sides of the container with a stethoscope, but the insulation makes it impossible to hear anything at all. Pulling up the rear, two ambulance operators have parked their vehicle at a safe distance and are betting on whether they’ll be dealing with carbon dioxide poisoning or bullet wounds.

  Everyone finally gets into position: the ambulance operators on the sidelines, the police on either side of the doors, and three sharpshooters kneeling in the front row with their HK416s at the ready. At the signal, a police officer cuts the seal and they yank open the doors. Five flashlights and three assault rifles are trained on the opening of the container, inside which two young men, pale and red-eyed, are sitting in front of a laptop computer, fairly surprised by the turn of events.

  “Policja! Nie przesuwa się o jedną!”

  Minutes later, the two men are on their knees in front of the container with their wrists tie-wrapped. A light snow starts to fall, driven by the northeaster blowing from the Baltic.

  The police inspect the crime scene. The container has been furnished with hammocks, lawn chairs and a coffee table. Screwed down in one corner is an old dry toilet, which, at first whiff, is leaking a little, and a heater is on full blast. The refrigeration unit has been rigged up to provide electricity, and an astounded officer examines the bundles of wires hastily assembled with plastic connectors and bulky adhesive tape. The fact that this setup hasn’t already caught fire is a miracle. An ample supply of provisions was stacked in cardboard boxes, but even a cursory glance makes it clear that the pair of sailors have spent the past week subsisting on M&M’s and Diet Coke.

  The computer is still sitting on the coffee table, with many active windows open in plain sight. No one is able to figure out the purpose of all these applications. A police officer finally unplugs the laptop with due care, as if it were a bomb. Crucial evidence.

  Sifting through the mess, the police discover a pair of Russian passports. In answer to a border official’s questions, the two young men are co-operative and immediately admit that they embarked in St. Petersburg.

  Q:Do you have any weapons or drugs on board?

  A: U
m, no.

  Q:Why have you come to Gdańsk?

  A: We were just passing through.

  Q: To go where?

  The question brings a giggle from the two men. They shrug.

  A: Brest, Liverpool, New York. Anywhere.

  The officer’s eyes shift back and forth between the stowaways and the container. Anywhere. What kind of answer is that? The Romanians at least knew where they were going.

  WINTER GOES BY AND THE phenomenon continues to spread.

  Everything started with the two Russians arrested in Poland aboard an old reefer. It was believed to be a one-off—two Muscovite jackasses hungry for a thrill—but the following week three Brazilians showed up in Miami the same way. A month later, two half-crazed Japanese were nabbed in Seattle, followed by an Australian in Singapore and a Lebanese in Anvers. Then the Chinese began to storm the West Coast, while the Romanians, with their customary sense of timing, took on the East Coast.

  At present, that is, two days before the spring equinox, the tally is twenty-three such containers, not counting the cases that went unnoticed, and they all had one feature in common: a computer found on board, operating with Linux He2.

  The origin of the system was quickly tracked down; it had been uploaded to the Web by a certain Harry Houdini via an anonymous connection. One interesting coincidence was that the initial upload took place on October 13, the very day Papa Zulu left Montreal.

  Harry Houdini was a person of few words. His description of He2 amounted to two sentences: A live USB Linux distro with tools and instructables to hack a shipping container, from the yard to the hold, and beyond. Use wisely.

  According to an old Persian proverb, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. The He2 files were erased, and Harry Houdini’s account was shut down, but new copies instantly reappeared on various mirror sites, GitHub and the Pirate Bay and obscure Russian FTP servers, whose links circulated in forums and on social media. Clearly, He2 occupied a minor but vacant ecological niche, devoid of competitors or predators, a situation that fostered rapid proliferation. Harry Houdini, meanwhile, was conspicuously absent. With a name like that, he certainly was not about to let himself get caught.

  The authorities couldn’t even be bothered to hide what seemed to them a micro-phenomenon, one more incomprehensible fad that would soon peter out. In late February, a reporter from Wired launched He2 on the extranets of a number of shipping terminals on the West Coast of the United States. The report struck a nerve: some ports were using laughable passwords, which He2 succeeded in breaking in fifteen seconds.

  By the time the story hit the mainstream media, derivative versions of He2 were already in circulation—more powerful, faster, stealthier. Rumour had it some copies had been infiltrated by the NSA: the Trojan horse now contained another Trojan horse. No one knew if the rumour was true or just a conspiracy theory, or whether it had been started to undermine He2‘s reputation. It all probably amounted to the same thing.

  Early in March, Mahesh announced he would give a demonstration of the system in the conference room for the benefit of any interested geeks. The episode left a lasting impression on those in attendance.

  Within seconds after it was launched, the system scanned the surroundings and identified not only the routers but also every software port, open or not, of the computers and peripherals connected to the network, the servers and telephones, and the lowliest smart gadgets. Only the coffee machine was left out. No need to touch anything; the whole process was automated—you just had to sit back and make yourself comfortable. He2 triggered the interruption of the nearby connections one by one, like a mischievous child, and waited for the devices to reconnect so it could intercept the authentication messages, which it instantly set about decrypting. If left running for an hour or two, it would eventually obtain practically all the passwords in the vicinity.

  The demonstration prompted a mild panic among the personnel on the seventh floor, who all of a sudden decided it was time to use more elaborate passwords.

  Mahesh was in seventh heaven. He studied every nook and cranny of the system with teary eyes.

  “They thought of everything!”

  In addition to an astonishing arsenal of software, He2 came with a vast reference library: hundreds of technical and theoretical texts, detailed maps of shipping terminals, user’s guides, organization charts, immigration forms and bills of lading in a dozen languages, legal documents, and an address book with the contact information of lawyers and human rights groups in seventy-five countries.

  But the crowning glory, naturally, was the Claustronaut Cookbook, a comprehensive handbook on the art of transforming a reefer into an intercontinental capsule, with plans covering the subject down to the last detail, from the power supply to the toilet. There were even a yoga manual, workout routines for tight spaces, cookbooks and a huge portion of the Gutenberg Project’s catalogue.

  He2 was not a garden-variety dashboard: it was a manifesto, a challenge issued to humankind, an invitation to conquer a new continent. The message had been heard.

  Within this sudden surfeit of clandestine containers, Papa Zulu remained in a class of its own, the stealthiest among the stealthy.

  The CIA investigators were 100 percent certain of nabbing it at Nhava Sheva, but all they caught was a handful of wind. The databases in Colombo were categorical: PZIU 127 002 7 had been loaded aboard the Guangdong Express bound for Mumbai, but apparently the damned box was never off-loaded. Lost at sea, so to speak.

  The analysts worked on the case for two weeks before hitting on an explanation: the container’s identification number had been slightly modified. Starting in Mumbai, Papa Zulu began to travel under various codes: PZLU 127 200 7 or PZJU 217 020 7 or PZTU 127 002 7—making it difficult, even impossible, to search for it in the databases.

  Laura was appalled. “They didn’t even bother to repaint the codes showing on the container! No one noticed that the number on the container didn’t coincide with the one in the databases?”

  Mahesh didn’t understand either, but Jay suggested an explanation.

  “Nobody looks at the codes on the containers, Laura. Thousands of boxes are processed. They whizz by. Everyone trusts the system implicitly. And even if someone did decide to open their eyes, Papa Zulu’s codes all look alike. It affects people like dazzle camouflage, you know, those old navy ships with zebra stripes? Same thing. It creates a moment of confusion, just long enough to steal away.”

  “The terminals don’t use automatic code readers?”

  “Not for transshipments.”

  “I think I already heard that somewhere.”

  “Human history is a long series of repetitions, Laura.”

  Having been apprised of this theory, Maurice Gamache grumbled that Jay ought to come work for the Port Enforcement Team rather than wasting her time on credit card numbers; without waiting to hear the concerned party’s views on the subject, he got it into his head to follow this through. There’s likely to be some gnashing of teeth, upstairs.

  —

  It’s dead calm in the Enclave. Everyone has gone for lunch, except Jay, who, sitting on her desk, skims a report that Laura has passed on to her. She skips over several chapters and goes straight to the end—and to the peculiar epilogue to this investigation.

  Three weeks ago, Papa Zulu was found, completely by chance, in an industrial zone of Athens. A scrap dealer had bought it on Alibaba for five hundred dollars, and the container sat in a forgotten corner of the yard waiting to be reduced to steel chips. The workers had quite a surprise when they opened the doors: the box was fitted out like a Westfalia! After posting their discovery on YouTube, they called the police. In less than twenty-four hours, the news had reached the CIA and, incidentally, the RCMP.

  According to the report, Papa Zulu’s occupants had carried off every last item that could have provided clues, and not a trace of He2 was left aboard. The fingerprints and DNA were consistent with those found at Autocars Mondiaux but did no
t match any of the records at the National DNA Data Bank.

  Jay flips through the report until she finally gets to what really interests her: pictures—ultra-confidential—of the container’s interior. The truth was beyond anything Jay had expected. Unlike the makeshift constructions intercepted since January, Papa Zulu looked like the cabin of a luxury ketch, and Jay could easily picture Élisabeth sitting at her chart table, stretched out with a book, busily cooking a risotto.

  She closes the report, lost in thought. She wishes she knew for sure that her young protege was all right. Two or three times, she has discreetly gone behind Élisabeth’s apartment near Notre-Dame-de-la-Défense. Still no sign of life. For weeks, she has contemplated getting in touch with Éric Le Blanc—but she holds back. She must stick to the script and do what she has to do. She triangulates credit cards, she drinks coffee. She has started cooking ceviche and bacalao again.

  And she has made a major decision: she’ll give Alex Onassis a call and buy the old duplex that no one is interested in. She’ll play hardball, bargain him down and boot out those loudmouths on the ground floor. No one is ever going to force her out of anywhere again.

  She tosses the report onto Laura’s desk, stretches and pulls on her jacket. She has one (1) year, eleven (11) months and seventeen (17) days left to serve—right now, though, it’s time to eat.

  IT’S MIDNIGHT, BUT ÉRIC ISN’T SLEEPY. Sitting in an armchair, his feet resting on the coffee table, he sips a glass of oolong. Around him, in the dim light, the floor is littered with Lego pieces.

  Through the picture windows, Copenhagen seems to be deep in hibernation, but the port doesn’t sleep, the port never sleeps, and gantry cranes are unloading an old Panamax flying the Lebanese flag.

  Éric thinks back to that woman who came ringing his doorbell last December, the edgy woman with dishevelled hair, who lacked sleep and chafed at geography, and about whom he knew almost nothing, not even her first name. Now even her features are starting to fade from his memory. He could have traced her quite easily—it’s not as if the RCMP in Montreal has thousands of people working on online fraud—but he thought better of it. He prefers to picture her wreathed in mystery, like a guardian angel paratrooper. A member of the elite commando of serendipity. A rescue worker of the improbable. Something like that.