This Eden

by Ed O’Loughlin

  And each of them was reasonably sure of only two things: that they’d done nothing to deserve this thing that had happened, and that it must therefore be the other one’s fault.

  So they said nothing to each other, or to anyone else, when they were taken from the van and found themselves, blinking, on the side of a mountain, brown rocks, green grass, streaks of melting snow. The van had stopped on a rough track, just short of a ridge line. Up on the ridge was an American pickup with Iraqi plates. Beside it, armed men wore camouflage and Kurdish scarves, but none of them was a Kurd.

  Nadia and Samvel were ordered to walk towards these strangers. They went slowly, heads bowed, not daring to look up, not wanting to look back.

  The extraction team drove them to the airport at Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, and put them on a military transport. No one bothered to talk to them. They were treated like freight.

  It became clear to them, once they reached America, that they were to act as if they were still a couple, however they felt about that themselves. At their point of arrival, a military base the name of which they never knew, they were given a room with one bed to share. Both slept on the floor, in opposite corners. It was what they’d been used to in jail. Their new papers, the names assigned to them, assumed that they were man and wife. They were given new clothes, some money, a few lessons in basic English, and then flown to Minnesota. There, they were told to live quietly, keep to themselves. Iran has a long reach, they were told, incorrectly. If you tell anyone your story, they can find you, even here.

  They were left there, alone together, in a flat winter waste. They didn’t even know which agency owned them. They hadn’t been debriefed. No one cared what they knew, or didn’t know, and no one cared what they did with the rest of their lives, so long as they did it in secret. What choice did they have but to stay together, however much they hated each other at first?

  Their new home was a trailer on the edge of a small town in the heart of the prairie. They looked at the flat horizon, saw their deaths in the snow. Anything could happen to them here, and who would know or care? They were to sit here and wait, but wait for what?

  On their third night in their new home they left their fake IDs on the kitchenette table and walked out into a blizzard. They didn’t have a car, or winter coats or shoes. It was presumed that they hadn’t got far.

  Why them?

  Michael stared at the cigarette held in his hand. The tip had almost burned down to his knuckles. Towse took the cigarette, stubbed it out.

  Stuxnet. To see if it would work, they had to introduce a test version into Iran’s nuclear systems, a dummy run. But this was back in the nineties, so it had to be done manually. Your father’s physics lab was thought to be a weak point in the Iranian network. But the Iranians still detected the attack.

  You’re saying my parents were foreign agents.

  No. But your father’s supervisor was. He liked money and underage boys, so he was easily recruited. But when that first scouting attack was detected, Fess needed to protect his agent for a second try.

  So they pinned it on my father.

  Your father’s supervisor chose him. He knew about his affair with your mother. It offended his principles.

  You said he was a paedophile.

  Sure, but he was very devout. And he didn’t like people from other religions. Your father was an Armenian Christian.

  A Christian who was having an affair with a Muslim?

  Your mother wasn’t Muslim either. She was a Yazidi.

  What’s that?

  An ancient people from the Zagros. Some call them devil worshippers, although they worship the same god as everyone else. But they venerate one of his angels above all the others. Melek Taus –

  the Peacock Angel. The only one with the guts to say no to an absurd command.

  Beyond the kitchen door, someone scored a goal in the televised football game. The ex-legionnaire spat bitter words in German. Finally, Michael looked up.

  Why do you care what happened to my family?

  Towse moved his wine glass to a red square on the table.

  Fess promised me that no innocent people would be hurt. That was the deal. But your parents were hurt. They were innocent. And I always collect on a deal.

  Your stories keep changing, Towse. I thought I was dragged into this because of Alice. Now you say it’s because of my parents?

  That’s the problem, Michael. It’s both.

  You can’t die on a public street in Canada and not come to all sorts of attention. Particularly when the police realise that nobody knows who you are. They circulate fingerprints, photographs. Appeals are sent out on the Interpol network. And so, twenty years after they disappeared in a Minnesota blizzard, Nadia and Samvel reappeared on the radar. Not that anyone cared by then. They’d long since served their diversionary purpose. Their death was an accident. The world had moved on.

  But they also had a son, just graduating high school. Should they pick him up, see what he knew?

  Better to let things stay as they were. From what the RCMP said in their case notes, the kid didn’t know who his parents were either. Tipping him off could only bring trouble.

  That money in that bag, said Michael. The one in Grande Prairie. That was from you.

  I felt some responsibility for you, if only second-hand. I paid it off.

  But then, years later, your name popped up again. Only now you were living with someone else I knew.

  Alice.

  Her parents were part of my first private network. Cryptographers and math geeks. Anarchists, a lot of them. We sent messages by snail mail, disguised as moves in correspondence chess. Years later, Alice got in touch with me herself about her own big idea. Yoyodime. It was going to be the antidote to OmniCent, hidden inside it. It was like she was deliberately designing the flaw in the Death Star. But she never got to finish it . . .

  He looked at Michael. Michael said nothing. Towse continued:

  Anyway . . . she contacted me to say she was worried for herself and her boyfriend. She mentioned your name. And that’s when my warning lights started to flash.

  It was just a coincidence, Towse.

  It wasn’t just one coincidence, Aoife. It was a bunch of them. Michael was living with Alice. Alice was working for Fess – Fess, who ratted out Michael’s parents. And I was connected to all of them separately. There’s an old rule of thumb in intelligence: once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; three times or more, it’s enemy action.

  I’ve heard that before.

  Ian Fleming used it in one of his Bond novels. Goldfinger. And Fleming knew what he was talking about. He was in British intelligence during the war. He’d worked in Room 39 at the Admiralty, which was naval intelligence, and Room 40, next door, was the birthplace of signals intelligence, electronic surveillance, electric computers – all the shit that we’re living with now.

  What about Room 38?

  Towse shot up in his chair.

  Who told you about Room 38, Aoife?

  She hadn’t seen Towse look flustered before.

  I was joking. I made it up. You were banging on about Room 39, Room 40, Room whatever.

  Don’t ever joke about Room 38.

  He subsided in his chair.

  Anyway, third time, it’s enemy action. But who was under attack? Me? And who was the attacker? I had no clue. And I hate that.

  It was the money, said Michael. It’s alive. You already told us that one.

  Towse pushed back his chair, went over to the bar, returned with another bottle of wine. He put it down and started walking back and forth.

  On one level, yes. But can money shape coincidence? Can it breathe life into matter and move it around? Can it make people fall in love, and raise children, and build a whole world for them? People were doing that long before money showed up. That’s what history and science tel
l us . . . If history and science are real.

  There it is, said Aoife heavily. I’ve been waiting for that one. Metaphysics 101.

  Don’t mock. You must have heard of the simulation hypothesis? What if we’re just software and the universe is a supercomputer? According to the simulation theory, most of the glitches in our reality –

  like crazy coincidences, and dumb luck, and crushing irony, and déjà vu – are caused by the game looping back on itself, to save on storage and processing power. That’s what Alice thought she saw when she looked into OmniCent: that money is the source code that powers our game, a binary based on have and have not, instead of ones and zeros. I think she couldn’t live with that idea. She’d always thought she was a player, not somebody’s bot. She always needed the world to be real.

  Michael was silent.

  That’s all very well, Aoife said. But we want out.

  Don’t you want to have free will, Aoife?

  I want to have the quiet life. Right now, that seems crazy enough.

  Towse stopped pacing.

  It’s not, he said. You could hitchhike from here into Italy, or Spain. People still hitch in France, you know. You could stay off the grid, pay for everything in cash. No one will find you. And it won’t be long before they stop looking.

  Fess won’t give up that easily.

  Fess will stop if he catches me. Or if I stop him. One way or the other, this will end soon. In Dublin, of all the dumb places. That’s where I make my move against OmniCent. It launches next Friday, in secret, and that’s when it will be vulnerable, before it metastasises. But my odds are much better if I have your help.

  Aoife and Michael looked at each other.

  It seems to me, said Aoife, that we’d be safer without you. We’ll take our chances on the road.

  Alone or together?

  They looked at each other again.

  Together, said Aoife.

  Together? . . . Well, that’s something, at least . . .

  Towse tore a strip from his cigarette pack, wrote down a number.

  That’s my contact in Ireland. It’s a landline. You might have to call it a few times before someone answers.

  We won’t be doing that, said Aoife.

  But she took the number anyway.

  Towse lurched towards the kitchen. Beyond its door, the soccer match had reached a crescendo, the kind of noise you only hear when there’s a sending off, or a riot, or a perverse decision by the referee. Towse reached the door, turned back to them.

  There’s a room for you out back. I left your money there, and some clothes and gear that will suit you for the road. If you change your mind, I’ll be in Dublin on Friday next week. That’s when I’m going to find out if I’m right about the money. That’s when I attack. It has to be there, and then.

  We won’t be there, said Michael.

  Friday next week. Good luck, if such a thing exists.

  The following day, the wind had grown stronger and now carried rain. Aoife and Michael sat on their packs in a petrol-station forecourt on the edge of Golfe-Juan. They were dressed in jeans, scuffed boots, old army jackets – the gear that Towse had arranged for them, to fit their new legend, travelling drop-outs, sans toit ni loi. They looked a lot like Alice’s parents, in that photo over the bed in Vancouver.

  They had bought food in the petrol-station kiosk – a baguette and cheese and ham. Michael was trying to build them a sandwich.

  Towse said we should go to Italy or Spain.

  Then we go north, said Aoife. To Copenhagen, I think.

  Why there?

  We’d fit in without being noticed. We could find somewhere there to stay for a bit. Somewhere indoors, until the weather gets warmer.

  Paris is on the way. I’ve never been there.

  I have. Too many watchers.

  Oh.

  She relented.

  I suppose it is on the way.

  She watched him gluing the ham to the bread with smeared Vache Qui Rit, to hold it down in the wind. He spoke again, without looking up from his work.

  I’ve been thinking, Aoife . . . Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this.

  What?

  Maybe we should split up.

  Aoife hadn’t seen this coming, even though she’d been thinking it herself. Alice, she thought. He hides his guilt well.

  Why do you say that, Michael?

  Maybe we’d be safer if we went our own ways . . . I’d be all right. I could manage by myself.

  Could you?

  He looked up at her.

  Yes I could, Aoife . . . I learned a few tricks from my parents, you know. I didn’t know why we had to live under the radar, but I know how we did it. It’s not that hard.

  He went back to making the sandwich. And Aoife thought, maybe he’s telling the truth. Maybe he does have some game in him. Maybe I should let him go. It was true that if they split up they’d both be harder to track. And she was pretty sure that no one would catch her, if she wasn’t encumbered. What Michael was saying made logical sense, especially for Aoife.

  And yet she found she didn’t want to do it. Not just yet. I must be feeling guilty too, she told herself. I shouldn’t have dragged him into this mess, way back in Palo Alto. And I shouldn’t have come between him and his Alice. That was low, even if I was just trying to be kind. I should look after him for a little while longer, to make it up to him. He won’t know that’s why I’m doing it. But it

  will be.

  Aoife considered the immediate problem, came up with a half-lie to solve it.

  We can’t split up, Michael. I need you.

  He was peeling another slice of ham from the packet.

  What?

  I need you to stay with me. It’s not safe for me to travel alone.

  I’m pretty sure you could handle yourself.

  Maybe. But the secret of defending yourself is not to have to do it in the first place. Travelling alone, looking like this, I’d attract all kinds of creeps. Especially policemen. I’d look a lot less vulnerable as half of a couple. Men would leave me alone.

  So you really think we should stay together?

  Sure . . . At least for now, until things die down. Then we can go our own ways.

  The sandwich was finished, Without saying anything, he tore the baguette in two and handed her half. This breaking of bread was, she realised, their first meal alone together as acknowledged partners. Though what kind of partners, she wasn’t sure.

  It started to rain properly, slanting out of the north, and Aoife wrapped them both in the old shelter-half that she had for a poncho. The rain pattered on its canvas with a comforting sound.

  I get the feeling, said Michael, that Towse isn’t finished with

  us.

  We won’t make it easy for him . . . The direct road north is through Grenoble. That’s how Napoleon went, on his way to Waterloo. So we won’t go that way.

  Michael took out a map, unfolded it awkwardly. We don’t do maps anymore, do we? thought Aoife. We’re too used to our phones.

  There’s another road that goes west and then north, he said. It runs along the Rhône river . . . The N7, it’s called.

  She took the map from him.

  The N7? Really? Is that what they call it?

  What’s the big deal about that?

  I grew up near an N7.

  Just another coincidence.

  I hope so . . . It’s the road we have to take.

  Aoife had an early memory of a line of people, spaced politely apart, by a stand of dark firs on the western edge of Dublin. Newlands Cross. It was where the city began and the N7 ended. The people had cardboard signs for Cork, Kerry and Limerick. Some were young women, travelling alone. One day, when she was much older, passing that same crossroads, she remembered that hitchers had been a thing once, a long tim
e ago, but now they were gone.

  Why had people stopped hitching? Why was it no longer done, to ask a stranger to give you a lift, when they were already going your way? Stories of murder and rape, or of drivers ruined by false accusations? Cheaper bus fares? Mobile phones? Ride-share apps? Harder hearts? How had the change revealed itself to those on the roadside? The waits must have grown longer and longer. Who was the last hitcher, and where had they gone? Had they given up and walked off, or waited there stubbornly, for the last free ride to the end of the road?

  In France, her new world was chopped into segments that ran at different speeds – the pulse that raced as an approaching car slowed, the smooth rush of the journey, the feeling of loss at the end of the ride, and then, most likely, the long slow trudge through some small town to the next good place for hitching, leaning into their shoulder straps, shopping for food at roadside convenience stores, eating in parking lots, in forgotten corners, then taking out the cardboard sign that said Paris, with the flowers that Aoife had drawn in coloured marker, and toeing the white line again.

  Golfe-Juan. Fréjus. Aix-en-Provence. She watched the cars and trucks escape the gravity wells of the towns, gathering speed, reeling in the worlds they were bound for, mysteries round the next bend in the road. She didn’t mind when they didn’t stop for her and for Michael. Everyone has their own mission. Hers was to stand in the cold wind and smile.

  Her French was only fair, and Michael’s was worse. But no one seemed to mind. Most drivers were happy to sit there in silence. Were they doing this out of mere kindness?

  At Avignon, they slept in a park by the river, at the end of the broken bridge. They unrolled their sleeping bags but left them unzipped, their tent unpitched, in case someone attacked them while they slept. In the cold early hours, the sprinklers, activated by a timer, chased them out of the park, into the town centre, where they bought coffee from an all-night cafe and waited until it was light enough to move on.