This Eden

by Ed O’Loughlin

  He pulled a face.

  Providence has decided otherwise. I fucking hate providence . . . Anyway, the third time, when I got back here, there was someone waiting for me, right here, sitting on my favourite rock.

  Jesus Christ, Towse. Just tell us who it was.

  He was a young guy, early thirties, in civilian clothes. He said he was American, like me.

  So you really are American?

  Of course I’m American! . . . As well as all the other things. Who the fuck wouldn’t be American? . . . Anyway, his name was Campbell Fess.

  He left the name hanging there. It was Aoife who spoke next.

  Fess worked for Israeli intelligence? It doesn’t say that on his résumé.

  He didn’t. He worked for the National Security Agency. It doesn’t say that on anyone’s résumé . . . He’d just been sent here from

  Maryland to work on a joint project. Very, very secret. And he wanted my help.

  How did he know who you were?

  I had a reputation.

  I’ll bet you’re not going to tell us what that project was.

  Wrong again, Aoife. You ever hear of Stuxnet?

  Michael spoke up:

  It’s a computer virus that the Americans and Israelis made between them. We were taught about it in university. It attacked the computer systems for Iran’s nuclear programme. The Iranians had built centrifuges for refining uranium, potentially to weapons grade. Stuxnet made the centrifuges run at uneven speeds, until the stresses tore them apart.

  Correct, said Towse. Stuxnet was derived from the project that Fess came here to work on. He was part of the NSA’s joint cyberwar team with the Israelis, although he wasn’t particularly high in the pecking order. More of a gopher for the real engineers. But he’d heard I’d written some personal spyware that I was using for my war games. Sneak and peek stuff. He figured that if he could get access to my code, it could take him to the top.

  You didn’t help him, did you?

  We shook hands on it, right here.

  But what was in it for you?

  Nothing, really . . . I just wanted to see what would happen next. You have to dabble in empiricism, every now and then, if you want to stay in touch with reality. I still believe there’s a reality, by the way. I’m very old-fashioned like that.

  What about the truth, Towse? Do you believe in that?

  Of course I do, Aoife! I may tell lots of lies, but I know when I’m doing it . . . Anyway, Fess asked me if he could use my stuff, just for surveillance. No one would get hurt. No innocent victims. And he wouldn’t share it. It would just be between us.

  Aoife and Michael looked at each other.

  You didn’t actually believe him, did you?

  Fuck no. I figured he’d break his word, first chance he got.

  And yet you let him do it?

  I had to give him the chance. I’d just decided that I believe in free will.

  Wow . . . So, what happened then?

  With a lot of help from the Israelis, he began modifying one of my tools to take a weaponised payload. It eventually became Stuxnet. The rest of my stuff he kept for himself. It’s what made him who he is.

  He ripped you off.

  Not really. I wasn’t going to use it. I don’t care about money.

  Jesus . . . What did you do next?

  Like I said, I left Jerusalem. Too many religions in too small a place. I wanted to go somewhere more innocent. Where everyone worships at the same shrine. So I went to work in Wall Street as a quantitative analyst.

  You just said you didn’t care about money!

  I don’t, Michael. But I crave information, and Wall Street gives its quants all the data in the world.

  So that explains the suit, said Aoife.

  I was wearing it the day Alice sent me her first chunk of raw data from Inscape’s dark pool. Three hours later, a bunch of vans pulled up outside my hedge fund. Blacked-out windows. Maryland plates. My own goddamn people. I saw them a mile away. Lucky for me, I was coming back from a stroll. Providence again. So I turned and ran, and I’ve been running ever since . . . Look, here comes our friend.

  The white taxi pulled up beside them.

  Get in, said the man who wasn’t called Jones. I’ll take you somewhere to rest and clean up. I can give you a few hours, then we have to move on.

  You got it? asked Towse.

  Not Jones handed him a thumb drive.

  The taxi left Jerusalem in the early hours of the morning, descending a steep, narrow road through round, stony hills, past olive groves and pine woods, down to the coastal plain.

  It drove, without stopping, through a military checkpoint; Aoife guessed that they had re-entered the West Bank. She sat in the back, her head resting on the window pane, and saw, at intervals, the concrete obstacles that denied the use of this road to the villagers on whose land it was built. Old Mercedes taxis, yellow, with green Palestinian plates, waited for custom beyond bulldozed barricades, sidelights glowing in the mist. Men stood in groups by the roadside, smoking, hoping for a day’s illegal labour in the cities of the coast.

  The car slowed, stopped. A torch shone in Aoife’s face. She glimpsed sandbags, a parked jeep, concrete bollards, the dark green uniforms of the border police. The torch beam found Michael. An angry voice spoke in the dark. Not Jones rolled down his window, answered the border policeman in Hebrew.

  Towse turned to Michael.

  He reckons you look like an Arab. This road’s in the West Bank, but Palestinians aren’t allowed to use it. He’s saying he wants to see your ID.

  You know I don’t have one.

  Not Jones was talking again. He opened the glovebox, took out three passports, gave them to the border policeman. Then he reached inside his shirt, fished out his lanyard. The passports, unopened, came back through the window. The policeman waved them on. Towse handed the three passports into the back.

  This is who we are now.

  Michael saw harps on the front of the passports. He opened his.

  We’re Irish now? My name is Sean Sherrard?

  Irish passports are popular with criminals and spooks. Good for getting into Britain, good for travelling in Europe. Mossad has a bank of stolen Irish identities. They won’t miss these three.

  The car passed a sign with the outline of a plane on it.

  We’re going to the airport?

  Not Jones laughed.

  Ben Gurion? You must be joking. That’s the most closely watched place on earth.

  So where are we going, then?

  To the second most closely—

  To Egypt, said Towse. We’ll be in Alexandria tomorrow night.

  Not Jones dropped them at an all-night petrol station and drove off in his taxi. They bought coffee and doughnuts, and ate them outside in the cold. There was a heavy fog, a smell of the sea. Young army conscripts, off duty, sat on benches on the forecourt, drank coffee and smoked, looking at their phones, too cold and too tired to talk. The fog drifted through the arc lights that corralled the darkness, a theatrical flourish that Aoife quite liked. When Not Jones came back, he was in another military jeep, driven by a much larger man in a green army parka, no beret or hat. He had the face of a boxer who takes a lot of punches just to tire out his foe. Aoife recognised the type. They work in soundproof basements, in cells with doors that lock from the inside.

  Towse looked at this ugly giant, didn’t offer his hand.

  Abu Isa. You’re still working in the zone, then.

  He’s getting you across the fence, said Not Jones. That’s one of the things he still does.

  There wasn’t much room for three in the back of the jeep. It bounced and rocked, in the dark and the fog, down a farm road, unpaved, through fields of winter wheat. Another checkpoint, a cluster of houses and farm buildings, unlit, in trees to the left, then
a glow in the fog up ahead. The jeep stopped.

  Here, said the driver.

  He switched off the engine, killed the lights. They got out, felt their shoes crunch on gravel. A mound of bulldozed dirt blocked the track. Beyond it was a line of lights attached to wooden poles, dimmed by the fog.

  Abu Isa took a rifle from somewhere at his feet and led the way across the berm. There was a bare strip of sand. Lamplight shone in the droplets condensed on the strands of an eight-foot electrified fence. The top of the fence, coiled with razors, bent out into the fog. A scrap of red cotton hung from one barb.

  Abu Isa walked towards the rag. They followed. The ground was smooth sand, scored with shallow grooves parallel to the fence. The border patrols must drag a chain behind their jeeps, thought Aoife, so intruders’ footsteps will leave a tell-tale trail.

  Abu Isa arrived at the scrap of cotton, reached up with both hands. The razor wire came apart easily, already cut. He pulled the coils aside, turned back to them, waiting.

  Not Jones looked at his watch.

  You have three minutes. Then the fence goes live again. That’s all I can do for you. And Tavass – we’re even, now. I don’t want to hear about that washing machine again.

  OK. We’re even . . . Abu Isa – please, give me a leg-up.

  Towse went over the wire, dropped, swore. Aoife followed unaided, then stopped, waiting for Michael. Towse had already moved away into the fog. Michael landed beside her. When she looked back, Not Jones and his sidekick had gone. The wire was back as it had been before, but the red shred of cotton was no longer there. Beyond the fence, in the east, the sky was turning pale.

  Come on, whispered Towse, somewhere in front of them. The sun will be up soon. And these coastal fogs can lift pretty quick.

  They stumbled on a few yards and found Towse, leaning against the shattered trunk of an olive tree. The soil here had once been tilled, but now it was abandoned to weeds and windblown garbage. The fog was thinning. Aoife could see shapes in the west, broken buildings adrift in the mist. A shattered streetscape, a blacked-out city, crafted by bombardment. Now she knew where they were.

  That’s Gaza City! Are you crazy, Towse?

  No.

  You said we were going to Egypt!

  We are – via the Gaza Strip.

  If the Israelis see us sneaking around their fence, they’ll blow us to froth! And what about the locals? Hamas? What if they find us first?

  Keep your voice down. Look – someone’s coming.

  A pair of headlights detached themselves from the rubble at the edge of the city, a couple of kilometres away, drove towards them, stopped. The lights went out, came on again, repeated their signal twice more. Towse took out a flashlight, returned the signal. Aoife watched him, aghast.

  Who the hell is that?

  Hamas.

  Aoife grabbed Michael’s arm, pulled him back towards the fence.

  Come on, Michael. We’ll take our chances with the Israelis.

  Towse called after them.

  That window’s already closed, Aoife. Touch that fence and you’ll light up the surveillance screens. You know what that means.

  At least it would be quick.

  These guys are Hamas, Aoife. Not Al-Qaeda or ISIS. Say what you like about your old-school Muslim Brotherhood, they know how to network. And they usually stick to their deals.

  He set off towards the headlights.

  Come on. It’s twenty miles to the Egyptian border at Rafah. I’ve booked us a tunnel, and paid off the Egyptians, but it’s better to go before it’s full light.

  What is resumed in the word Alexandria? It’s a duller city now than it was in Durrell’s time. Then, its thousand dust-blown streets were home to five races, five languages, a dozen creeds. Five fleets rode at anchor in its greasy harbour. If the old Alex could not, in the end, hide Justine and Darley (except, alas, from each other), can this new one yet shelter two uncertain lovers? Its population has grown since that war in the desert, but the Turks are gone, and the Jews and Circassians, the Venetian merchants, the British and French, and little remains of that Levantine ferment, the winepress of love.

  We did not, you may have noticed, include the Greeks in that list of post-war departures. The Greeks, who built this city in the first place, maintain a bridgehead, a strategic outpost, on the beach in the old harbour, the place where their forebears first came ashore. There, the Greek Club of Alexandria takes a long view of history. Its terrace bar looks, to the east, over the Citadel of Qaitbay, where the Pharos lighthouse once stood, and across the eastern harbour, where several older Alexandrias, drowned by earthquakes and erosion, lie buried in the silt. To the south, Cavafy’s city still crowds the corniche, its spidery buildings, concrete colonial, held together by grime, the soot from a million deadbeat carburettors. To the west is the Alexandria sailing club, and a flotilla of fishing skiffs and pleasure craft, their numbers diminished in this late winter season, bobbing in the slop from the gusting northwester, that cold visitor from Europe, that sends Vs of unrest through the gaps in the mole, and drives the rain and the spray that beat on the windows, there at the back of the Greek Club, where, in lazier times, members could sleep off their lunches in rooms that faced northward, towards the home islands, but which are now shut away, used mainly for storage.

  Except for this one room, under the roof of the square, yellow building, its window obscured by the brutalist colonnade. Reached by a stair full of junk and old furniture, this room – red tiled floor, whitewashed plaster, high stucco ceiling, with a rotary fan that doesn’t work, but isn’t needed in this winter weather – is empty apart from three metal beds. Two, unmade, have been pushed together in one corner, away from the draughts that gust through loose windows. The other bed, with sheets but no blankets, stands by itself against the far wall. Towse hasn’t used it. He’s been gone for three days, leaving Aoife and Michael alone in this hideout, where they wait for him together, with a broken metal dining chair, scavenged from the hallway, jammed under the door handle. They don’t know when Towse will come back, or when the Greek concierge, who wears a black dress but is, disappointingly, neither old nor disapproving, will sneak them their next meal. And they don’t want to be interrupted when they are distracted.

  This time, it had been Michael’s idea, more or less. Until then, neither had mentioned what had happened between them in Gulu, and Aoife for one would have left it at that. She hadn’t known, until it happened, that she’d wanted it to happen, but it seemed to her that she had, and she wasn’t going to let herself feel bad about it afterwards. She liked to think she was pragmatic; it had been good for her at the time, and he’d seemed to enjoy it. And if he felt any guilt, on his own account, or because of Alice, he had the manners not to let it show. Aoife admired that. She had manners of her own.

  But Towse had left them at the door of this room, the evening they arrived in Alexandria, saying he had business in the city, and might not be back until the next day, or the day after, and Aoife, who had gone to look out of the window, across the breakwater to the wild sea beyond, silver and pink in the storm and the sunset, had been startled by a scraping sound behind her, metal on tiles. Turning, she saw Michael in the middle of the room, caught in the act of pushing the centre-most bed, as if testing its weight. It must have been lighter than he’d thought, and skidded loudly across the tiles. He straightened slowly, looking back at her. It was the first time they’d been left alone together, in private, since that night in Uganda. Funny, she’d thought. He doesn’t seem embarrassed. Or expectant. But he’s right; there would be no alcohol to ease a second transition, no adrenaline, no exhaustion, no easy words. They only had the light from the sunset, which picked out his face but left hers in shadow. If they were going to do this again, it would have to be matter-of-fact.

  Go on, Aoife said. Push it against that bed in that corner . . . We could be here for a while.
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  And she had crossed the room to join him.

  Towse, wherever he is, has since sent them some books – stolen, he claimed in a note, from the club’s informal library. But Aoife has reason to doubt this. Towse was too on the nose with his choices, as if he’d found his books with a search engine, based on their subjects, but hadn’t read them himself. Lawrence Durrell was a bit bloody obvious . . . Next, Slow Learner, paired with an 1899 Baedeker guide to Egypt. Towse must have looked up Alexandria on one of his burner phones, or the catalogue of some bookstore, and these titles had come up. Maybe he didn’t understand, as Aoife did, that fictions are also a kind of war game, models that run in the mind of the reader, designed to compute not so much what might happen as how it might feel.

  Then again, maybe he did understand that. The edition of the Alexandria Quartet that he gave them contained all four books in one volume. So they had to take it in turns to read Justine to each other, lying together on the two kissing beds. It was another way to pass the time.

  Towse had never asked them to shake hands with him. No spitting in palms, no devil’s bargain. He was fair to them like that, careful to leave them their freedom. But it was only their freedom from him, and not from each other.

  The room was unheated. On their third night together, the coldest one yet, they took the blankets from Towse’s bed and added them to their own, laying them sidewise, to cover the gaps between the two beds, sharing their warmth. The wind, unabated, tugged at windows, uncurtained, which let in light from the cars that passed on the breakwater. The lights rose and fell like waves, high on the wall. If only, thought Aoife, there was still a lighthouse. How unlike Towse, who had conjured this scene for them, not to have thought of a pharos, here, of all places.