by John Sweeney
The psychiatrist stood up, and Zeke led the way through the kitchen and down a flight of stairs into his den at the back of the cabin. The room had a sublime view of the Rockies above and was lined with books, many of them with titles in Cyrillic, some Japanese, some Arabic. A fat little wood-burning stove burbled in the corner.
‘You read Russian, Dr Wilkinson?’
‘Call me Jean, please, Ezekiel.’
He smiled thinly, an acknowledgement that he would.
‘No, I’m afraid not,’ she added.
‘Pity.’ Zeke fingered a large tome boasting cover photographs of Brezhnev and Edvard Munch’s The Scream. ‘This one’s about Soviet abuse of psychiatry – how they used it to suppress honest dissent.’ He smiled his gap-toothed smile and the psychiatrist couldn’t help but smile back.
‘Still, their record wasn’t all bad. They did some great work. The greatest psychiatrist that lived in the twentieth century was Snezhnevsky. He understood the nature of schizophrenia better than any man – sorry, ma’am, don’t mean to be disrespectful – than anyone alive. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you?’
She nodded, vigorously.
‘A great man,’ said Zeke.
She inclined her head a trifle. Not much, but enough.
‘Does “sluggish schizophrenia” ring a bell with you?’ asked Zeke.
This time she demurred, her face reddening slightly.
Once more the open smile, the empty-headed gaze.
‘So?’ he said.
She started with his intellectual divorce from Mormonism – ‘the whole thing’s hogwash, Jean’ – and Mary-Lou’s threat of divorce, the fear of which had kept him in the Church for so long. When the psychiatrist raised that and the reaction of his children and grandchildren to his apostasy, he turned his face away, his features disfigured by melancholy.
‘The alcohol, Zeke? The police officers reported red wine, white wine, beer, liquors?’
‘I was just curious. I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol my whole life and I just fancied knowing what intoxication was like. Not going to do it again, don’t you worry.’
‘You still mad at the Agency?’
‘Why would I be mad at the Agency?’
‘No action followed your memorandum on Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. You were sidelined, then out. In some people, rejection from an institution they’ve spent their whole lives in might lead to a psychotic breakdown.’
‘I didn’t have a psychotic breakdown. I broke with the Church and then I decided to have a bit of fun. Nothing more. As to the Agency, well . . .’
Sap in the stove hissed, then crackled.
‘ . . . you’ll have noted the date I wrote my memo,’ he said.
‘My clearance level means I’m not across that.’
‘Oh.’ Again, the wide-open smile, the genial countenance.
‘Have you read it?’
‘Again, my clearance level.’
‘Oh.’
He turned his back on her, scrimmaged through a pile of papers and found a single sheet of A4.
‘Here it is. My clearance level says you can read it. It’s only common sense.’
‘May I?’
‘Go ahead. It’s three hundred and three words long, including sign-off. When I was in the business, I made a thing of being crisp, so every single memo I wrote was that long. Not a word more, not a word less.’
The undated memorandum was headed ‘On the World Trade Center Attacks’, authored by Ezekiel Chandler, Deputy Director. It read:
The attacks on the World Trade Center are without doubt the work of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network. He is a high-born Saudi, who hates the West. My friend Professor Fred Halliday of the LSE says al-Qaeda ‘has no apparent antecedents in Islamic or Arabic political history’. Halliday suspects the name comes from a 1951 Isaac Asimov novel, Foundation, where the title was translated as ‘al-Qaida’.
Bin Laden means to goad us to make war against Islamic nations: Afghanistan, Iraq and ultimately Saudi Arabia. He wants us to want blood, to want revenge. Grim as the spectacle of watching thousands of Americans jumping to their deaths in New York may be, the spectacle of Americans killing Muslims to sate a blood appetite engendered by this moronic, science-fiction-reading psychotic is grimmer. The United States should be wary of being played by a fanatic. The US should be wary that in fighting back against al-Qaeda we lose something good for no serious gain. I’m picking up talk within the Agency of ‘going in hard’, of employing ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’, of torture.
Killing begets killing, torture begets torture, execution begets execution. If we treat this enemy cruelly, he will repay us a thousandfold. We should use all our power to track down this enemy and destroy him, but we must not be distracted into vengeance for vengeance’s sake. That would be foolish and may become a recruiting sergeant amongst many disaffected young Muslims. What has happened is bad, very bad. But Bin Laden is no Hitler or Stalin – he doesn’t have territory to build upon, at least not yet – and we should not abandon the laws that govern us. Otherwise, we are in danger of becoming no better than the enemy – an enemy that seeks, above all, the goal of bringing us down to their level.
Ezekiel Chandler, DD Counter-Intelligence, CIA.
She shook her head in disbelief. ‘That’s almost psychic. When did you write it?’
It was his turn to shake his head. ‘I don’t have clearance to tell you. On my memorandum, I suggest what I wrote was common sense. Al-Qaeda killed some three thousand Americans in one day, but that should not change how we do things. Not with al-Qaeda, not with ISIS, not with whatever the monster mutates into next. Otherwise, we’re letting them win. Letting them dictate how we behave. The Agency calls it “EITs” – Enhanced Interrogation Techniques – fancy talk for torture. ’Tis both morally wrong and inefficacious as a tool of investigation. The subject – the victim – will tell you what you want to hear, not necessarily what he knows. You’ve heard of Radek?’
‘Is he a congressman?’
Zeke smiled inwardly and shook his head. ‘Radek was on the sealed train with Lenin, from Switzerland through Imperial Germany to Russia in 1917. One of the Bolshevik aristocracy, if you’ll allow the oxymoron. But under Stalin, the weather changed. Radek joked about the Vozhd behind his back once too often and inevitably . . . a show trial. Poor Radek ended up confessing to a whole bunch of things that were nonsense. A useful idiot called Lion Feuchtwanger said that any improbabilities in the confessions were due to faulty translation. In the show trial, Radek, who would rather have died laughing than truly submit, played with the meaning of words. If memory serves, Radek said in his courtroom speech: “If the question is raised whether we were being tortured during interrogation, then I have to say it wasn’t me who was tortured, but the interrogators who were tortured by me, since I caused them unnecessary work.” That’s the problem if you use torture. You end up in a Through the Looking Glass world where the truth is flipped inside out.’
‘That sounds rather theoretical to me,’ said Wilkinson.
‘But not to me. I was tortured myself, an honour I sometimes wish on some Americans who may disagree with me.’
‘Where were you tortured?’
‘Afghanistan.’
‘Can I ask you again: are you still mad at the Agency for rejecting your memorandum on Enhanced Interrogation Techniques?’
He’d written that memo to try and stop Crone from doing what he knew Crone was going to do. He looked at her.
‘You mean, do I accept the Agency is right to torture?’ he said. ‘During the Cold War I spent too long in dungeons – some our side’s, some the other’s. But the truth is we always succeeded as spies, as intelligence officers, not by force or by threat, but by going to the bad places and beyond and by keeping our eyes open and watching and listening. The Agency has never learnt a fact it could rely on through torture alone.’
‘That wasn’t my question,’ Dr Wilkinson said. ‘It’s personal, not
policy. Are you, Zeke, still mad at the Agency for rejecting your memo on EITs?’
Zeke failed to see how his opinion of the Agency’s use of torture could determine his sanity or otherwise. No genuine psychiatrist would ask such a question. He smiled his gap-toothed smile and asked, ‘Mad as in angry, or insane?’
‘Angry.’
He shook his head.
‘Tell me more,’ she said.
‘No. You’ve told me enough, Dr Wilkinson or whatever your name is. This charade is over. You’re no psychiatrist. You’ve tried to trick a sixty-three-year-old man into opening up a window into his soul, and I hope that I haven’t given too much away.’
Dr Wilkinson tried to salvage her dignity: ‘What do you mean, I’m not a psychiatrist?’
‘Earlier, I mentioned that Snezhnevsky was a great man and you agreed.’
‘So?’
‘Any psychiatrist worth their salt – especially one in the pay of the CIA – would know that Andrei Vladimirovich Snezhnevsky was a monster. His “sluggish schizophrenia” was evil nonsense. He reduced Soviet psychiatry to a kind of pharmaceutical version of the thumbscrew. Dissidents jabbed full of chemicals to make them mad. They were sane. The doctors were mad, gaolers of a nation locked up in a madhouse. And you had no idea of whatever I was talking about. Dr Wilkinson – or whoever you are – you’re not far off pulling the same damn trick.’
She stared at the floor.
‘This isn’t an official visit, is it?’ Zeke continued. ‘You wouldn’t have brought that damn fool limousine up here. Some kind of freelance operation, I guess. Weaver’s asked you to help him out, hasn’t he, as a personal favour?’
Her focus remained on the floor.
‘He’s having an affair with you, but he won’t leave his wife. You know that, I guess, at some level, but you’re hoping you’re wrong. But he isn’t running this. He doesn’t have the balls. It’s Crone, isn’t it?’
She nodded.
‘Crone’s worried about something, something from the past, something I did that – for some weird reason I can’t figure – has become difficult now, is causing him heat. But you don’t know what that is. You know less than I do. You’re going to have to tell them something about what I’ve talked about here.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Tell them I feel lost without the Agency,’ he said. ‘Hell, it’s true anyway. But say that for much of the time we sat in silence. That’s also true. I’m going to let Weaver know that I might have twigged you’re not a psychiatrist. Let me do the talking.’
Her head dipped, the slightest-possible physical sign of acknowledgement.
‘Dr Wilkinson – or whoever you are – this isn’t your fault. Crone and I, we’ve been fighting our pathetic little war for a long time, longer than you’ve been alive. One day this will get sorted. But not today.’
He stood up and led the way into the main room overlooking Bear Lake.
‘We’re all done here, Weaver,’ Zeke said. ‘I have no objection to assisting the Agency with legitimate enquiries. But I’m not sure today’s adventure fits into that category.’
Weaver, a head taller than Zeke, pulled himself to his full height. ‘Calm down, old man. Don’t get excited. There must be some misunderstanding.’
‘There’s no misunderstanding.’
Zeke was still, his voice quieter. ‘There’s no misunderstanding,’ he repeated, ‘but it seems there is some anxiety. Twice your trick cyclist here asked me was I mad at the Agency about suppressing the Chandler memorandum on EITs. It’s as if someone else is getting interested in my warning on torture, is asking the same questions. It’s almost as if my memo was never circulated as Crone promised me it would be. Am I right?’
For the second time that day, the bland mask on Weaver’s face slipped.
‘Quite a twitch you’ve got there, Mr Weaver,’ Zeke said. ‘Better get some counselling.’
‘Do you want ISIS to win, Zeke? Do you want the jihadis to come out west, to establish a caliphate in the Rockies? You want to be burnt alive like that Jordanian pilot? Or drowned in a cage in a swimming pool? Is that what you want?’
‘No, I don’t. Of course not. Don’t overdo the passion, Mr Weaver. That’s not your forte’ – Zeke pronounced the word with an exaggerated hick accent – ‘I’m not sure you care so much about those poor people. You’re more of a professional chameleon. Not fiery red – bureaucratic grey suits you better. That’s the colour of your office in Langley. My advice? Next time Mr Crone suggests you do something, don’t do it.’
‘You done insulting Mr Crone and I?’
‘If by insulting you, you mean explaining in simple, hillbilly American why you’re wrong – well, no, I’ve only just started. Worrying thing here, Mr Weaver, is that both you and Mr Crone are looking at the postcard, not the big picture.’
He smiled his gap-toothed smile, which ‘Dr Wilkinson’, having got to know Zeke a little, realised was not in the slightest bit simple.
‘Sure I don’t want ISIS to win, in exactly the same way that I did not want the Soviet Union to win,’ Zeke said. ‘And I am fully aware that right now I’m on the losing side of this argument. But they start winning when we lose our sense of history, a sense of what’s right and wrong – not this week, not this year, but over decades. Mountain time. Now get out of my house and leave me and mine alone. And that goes for the man who sent you. Go.’
The sun was setting, the valleys below filling up with mist when the four visitors trooped out of the house, got into the limousine and closed the doors behind them. Zeke followed the car with his eyes until it was out of view. On the last corner, as the limo picked up speed, a thud sounded as its sump hit a bump.
He closed the front door and went to a saffron box on the mantle shelf over the fireplace. From there he retrieved Mary-Lou’s letter asking him for a divorce. He threw it on the fire and watched it curl and burn to a cinder.
In the limo, they managed to get down the mountain without losing too much oil. Weaver made one phone call to Crone – crisp, not celebratory.
‘Dr Wilkinson’ held her tongue for two hours, and then she couldn’t bear not to know the answer.
‘When did Mr Chandler write his memorandum?’
Weaver said nothing but the grunt in the passenger seat, who’d made not a sound since they’d left Salt Lake airport that morning, swivelled his hulk and faced her: ‘9/11, miss.’ Then he turned back to face the road. In the rear-view mirror she shot him a glance, puzzled. ‘He wrote it in the afternoon of 9/11,’ he continued. ‘You’d think a guy that smart, he shouldn’t be wasting away in the sticks, he should be running the Agency.’ The driver next to him tilted his head in agreement.
THE CAUCASUS, SOUTHERN RUSSIA
If you were foolish enough to walk up into the mountains for two days straight, eventually a man in black cradling a sub-machine gun would tell you to turn back, that the place was only a global warming research station. Zoba’s sense of humour was dry as moon dust.
They called it Lunnaya Polyana – Moonglade. It was the one place on earth where Zoba could go and no one could find him without his express permission. Here, his control over his environment, always an obsession with him, was nigh on absolute. Here, only his innermost circle was permitted – the oligarchs who always paid up, who had never wavered when things hadn’t been so rosy for him. And their women and – how to put it? – the other entertainers.
Minions had to tramp through the snow for two, sometimes three days to see Zoba and his inner circle when he was in residence, because no roads were allowed up here in the High Caucasus, lest the national park lose its special UNESCO status. So it pleased Reikhman to be flying in a helicopter, and not just any old helicopter, but a special service troop-carrier with not one but two rotors. It was a symbol of his status these days, and besides, he was on special business.
Down below, sunlight splintered off peaks of ice as bright as knives. Reikhman knew that he had to tread warily. He had dealt with Pyotr, Vysoky and the old
schoolteacher. That had been easy. He’d been told to take care of them by the highest authority. Besides, they were insects, and even if some louse of a police officer got ideas above his station, the special service would very quickly deal with him. Konstantin, the driver, had been a nobody. But Iryna had some qualities. A foolish mistake to kill her? Maybe. But he had been told by the highest authority to leave behind no living witnesses. Iryna could have become an inconvenience, which would have had consequences for him, too. Hence the insurance policy.
Mirroring the contours of the Caucasus beneath them, the helicopter rose and fell, fell and rose. They had half an hour to go. Reikhman climbed up the two steps to the cockpit to talk to the pilot, an old friend from the Second Chechen War, when they had flushed the hajis – as they called the jihadi fighters – down the bog. The co-pilot noted Reikhman, unbuckled his belt and got up and left, closing the cockpit door. The two of them were left alone in the convex plastic bubble; below was a world of ice and rock. Over the racket of the rotors, Reikhman studied the communications console, then made a throat-cutting gesture. The pilot hit a switch. No one could overhear them.
Reikhman raised the flat palm of his hand: a question.
The pilot raised two fingers, and then moved them backwards.
He mouthed ‘yesterday’ and the pilot nodded.
Reikhman said nothing.
The pilot put out his left hand, five fingers spread, then two, three fingers of his right hand, and wobbled it. Seven, maybe eight.
Reikhman twirled his finger, a suggestion of a tape or a camera reel spooling away. The pilot nodded and fished out a tiny digital card from his left breast pocket. Reikhman palmed it and went back to his seat for the corkscrew landing. The border wasn’t far away and you never knew what new tricks the hajis might get up to.
The landing was so-so, the pilot nervy, the chopper coming down with a heavy clunk. Reikhman had seen him land a big troop-carrier under fire in Grozny with the gentleness of a kitten lowering itself onto a duvet.
