by Sam Bourne
But of course she could do none of that, because she didn’t have any numbers in her phone – which was now a husk, dumb and empty – and, this was the insanity of it, she didn’t know Liz’s number. Her own sister.
Maggie fell into a chair and murmured out loud the landline number of the Dublin house they had grown up in. Nine five three, seven five nine nine. And then the number for Kathleen McEntee, her best friend in primary school. Four five eight, two one six one. And then the number for their Auntie Deirdre, who she was always to call if their ma . . . was having one of her bad days.
She was finding it hard to see. The tears were obstructing her vision. She hardly ever thought about her childhood, about the tiny house on Quarry Street, but suddenly she missed it. The simplicity of it, of life before inboxes and hard drives and ‘contacts’, when clouds were in the sky and friends were people you knew. She missed the days when you knew where your sister was and how to reach her and, if you wanted her to give you a hug, you didn’t have to get on a fucking plane.
Maggie went to the bathroom to clean herself up, catching sight of her face, still a throbbing pink on one side from the fire: she looked sunburned. And also, she reflected, as she saw the auburn hair that framed her pale skin, so stubbornly Irish.
It was then she caught just the faintest hint of the dream she’d been having seconds before she woke. She and Liz were swimming with their mother, in a pool on a summer’s day. Liz was a toddler, so their ma was keeping her afloat, with her palm under her tummy. Maggie was paddling around them, but then she suddenly realized that Liz was sinking, that Ma was failing to keep her head above water. Maggie had started to scream and then to flounder, splashing wildly as she tried to reach her sister. Some water got in her mouth, but it didn’t taste like water. It tasted strong and sharp . . .
The phone was ringing in the kitchen. She dashed back in and looked at the screen: a string of digits that her phone no longer recognized and to which, therefore, it could not attach a name.
Which meant all Maggie could manage was, ‘Hello?’
‘I’m in DC.’
It was Donna Morrison.
‘I’ve been trying to reach you. Donna, this is way bigger than—’
‘I know. Maggie—’
‘I mean, it’s not just buildings. They’re killing historians too. And survivors and eyewitnesses. The point is—’
‘You can fill me in on your way over here. Maggie, you need to get in a car.’
‘Where to?’
‘I’m in with the Director of the FBI. Come here right away. There’s something you need to see.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Melita Island, Montana, 8am
‘OK, listen up, gentlemen. And, of course, ladies.’ The latter added as if it were somehow charming. ‘Things are proceeding as we thought they would, and as we planned. I want to congratulate you on your work so far. We’re making steady progress. And so far we’ve managed to do that without drawing attention to ourselves. Let me reiterate, however, that this is no time for complacency. None whatsoever. We are where we are – we’ve achieved what we’ve achieved – by adhering scrupulously to our practice of total confidentiality. That’s why we’ve come all the way here and why we’ve taken such steps to maintain one hundred per cent secrecy. Is anything I’ve said so far unclear?’
They were in the dining hall, the same room where they had gathered on day one for orientation. Jason watched from the back row, assessing his colleagues as much as he was listening to Jim, their team leader or boss or commanding officer: he used none of those titles, though his role had elements of all three. He would have been ready to bet that Jim was ex-military, though personal disclosure was very much frowned upon, especially by him.
Jason was curious to see how they would react to what was about to unfold. Jim had not told him much, just enough to know that it would require a shift on the part of his fellow workers.
Until now they had simply had to draw up work plans for the targets they were given: starting with location, movements, weak points and then, from those, devising a suitable method of ‘filing’. But in the last few days, as the implementation phase had gathered pace, there were other decisions to take.
Jim had given Jason an early sense of that shift. Perhaps Jason was flattering himself, but he liked to think Jim had singled him out for a greater degree of respect than the others by hinting that there were some judgements that had not already been made by the unseen high-ups, but for which his input might be of value.
These were judgements that had arisen only now, questions that had not been foreseen in the planning stage. Jim had made the point twice, first by saying that, ‘In the wise words of Field Marshal Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke, Chief of Staff of the Prussian General Staff, “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy”,’ before adding, ‘Or, as I like to put it, quoting Field Marshal Mike von Tyson, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” ’ How exactly they had been punched in the mouth, he didn’t say.
If all this was a tactic on Jim’s part, designed to strengthen Jason’s commitment to the project, to the cause, by appearing to include him in the circle of trust, then it had worked. Jason was devoted to what they were doing.
But he worried about his colleagues. Not that they lacked application to the task. Far from it. But he suspected that most of them – even the ones with the tattoos and the ‘Live Free or Die’ belt buckles – were ultimately worker bees. They were built to work on tasks they were given, their little bit of the assembly line, rather than looking at the bigger picture. Jim had been right to include him, Jason, in the decision-making circle – even the outer rim of it – but these others? Not so sure.
‘What I’m going to ask of you is mainly operational, where I know you all have proven expertise. But there is also a strategic element. A values dimension, if you will. In some ways, I’ll be asking you to make a value judgement.’ His voice italicized the last two words, as if they were in a foreign language and needed to be spoken slowly to be understood.
‘So here’s the deal. The focus of the question I need to raise with you, the targets if you will, are inanimate rather than animate. High-value items, all of them. I want you to prioritize, based on a combination of both operational factors and relative worth. How easy are these targets to achieve and how much are they worth it.
‘What I want you to do is to rank the three items that I’m going to give you in order of priority. Which ones should we move on first, bearing in mind those two different sets of criteria: both how possible is it that we can get to them, and how important is it that we do. Blending those two factors, rank these three items in order. All right, are we all clear? Good.’
Jim now clicked on a device in his right hand which Jason hadn’t noticed until now. Instantly, the wall behind him lit up, illuminated by the beam of a projector. It had become an impromptu screen. Jim clicked the device again, which appeared to divide the screen into three parts. The first two showed images of scrolls or parchment; only the third was a bound, if ancient, book.
‘These are the three items. On the left, gentlemen, is the original, signed text of the United States Constitution, preserved under permanent, climate-controlled surveillance in Washington, DC. In the middle are the Dead Sea Scrolls, similarly protected in Jerusalem’s Israel Museum, documents dating back two millennia, some of them three centuries older than Jesus, including manuscripts of texts later included in what we think of as the Holy Bible. And finally, fragments of the first known edition of the Koran, the sacred text of the world’s nearly two billion Muslims, a manuscript which scholars believe was hand-written by someone who had themselves heard the Prophet Muhammad preach – a document kept under lock and key at the University of Birmingham, England.
‘So that’s the choice we need to make. I know, given the nature of this project, we’d like to target all three. The world would be a better place if we could. But we have to prioritize. So what
’s it to be, gentlemen? Which of these is our target?’
Chapter Twenty-Two
FBI headquarters, Washington DC, 8.30am
Rule one for Washington meetings: never be late. It wasn’t a courtesy thing. It was a power thing. Walk in late, and your first words were an apology, even if you tried to mouth it silently to minimize disruption. That put you on the defensive from the very start. In the Washington shark tank, you’d left blood in the water.
Yet here was Maggie, having dashed out of the cab on 9th Street, introduced herself at the lobby – thereby marking herself out as that inferior creature in any landmark Washington building: one without a pass – and then waited for the elevator to take her up. From there, more introductions at the desk of the FBI Director’s administrative assistant, who guided her through a vast conference room until they finally reached the inner office of the Director, before uttering the dread words, ‘They’re waiting for you.’
It didn’t matter that none of this was Maggie’s fault, that she had come as quickly as she’d been summoned. Nor that, unlike the Director and the Governor of Virginia and the rest of the half dozen people who now rose to their feet, she was no longer a public official, but someone who’d been drafted back in less than forty-eight hours ago. The instant she’d walked into this room, she was back in the Washington ecosystem, judged once more by their standards and set to be placed somewhere in the all-important DC hierarchy.
That process was underway right now, Maggie could feel it. Of course, Donna and the Director would not be involved. They were ‘principals’ and therefore above such things; they would only care about their status relative to other principals. But everyone else in the room would be working out where exactly to slot in Maggie Costello.
On the one hand, she was a ‘former’, a lower form of Washington life, no matter how elevated the post one formerly held. On the other hand, that could give her a stature the others lacked. She was no one’s employee. She was no mere worker bee, invited here because of the job she happened to fill. She was here on her own merits, requested by the governor herself because she had some expertise that could not be supplied by any other part of the federal bureaucracy. In other words, she had been deemed indispensable by a principal. Which in turn made her – and this, Maggie understood instinctively – a threat. She was here as an individual, untethered to any bureaucracy. It was as if, in a room full of suits, she had walked in wearing ripped jeans. She hadn’t done that, but she could have. And in Washington terms, that amounted to the same thing.
All of this went through Maggie’s mind in the seconds it took for her to move from the door to her place in the circle of stiff-backed, though cushioned, chairs loosely arranged in front of the Director’s desk, in a kind of homage to the choreography and upholstery of the Oval Office.
‘I think you know everyone here,’ he said, though that was not true, before giving half-line summaries of each person present. What followed was a jumble of Deputy Directors, Associate Deputy Directors, Executive Assistant Directors and Assistant Directors. But she got the idea.
The Director himself, Craig Lofgren, was someone Maggie had come across a few times, usually in meetings like this, back when he’d been shuttling between senior jobs at Justice and Homeland Security and she’d been serving the previous president from her perch in the White House. Crucially, he was not an appointee of the current incumbent, a fact which, in Maggie’s eyes at least, vouched for his good character. Like Donna, he did not carry that taint.
White, early fifties, with hair still brown and cut so short and neatly it begged not to be noticed. For a certain kind of Washington man, and plenty of women, when it came to matters of personal style, ‘efficient’ and ‘functional’ were compliments, with ‘practical’ the highest form of praise. Maggie’s loose, flame-red hair, still long enough to reach her shoulders, marked her out as positively maverick.
‘OK, just to bring everyone up to speed, let me loop you all in real quick. As you know, Governor Morrison brought in Maggie Costello to assist with what she believed was a potentially explosive situation in her state, following a series of racially charged incidents.’
Racially charged. Another one of those Washington-isms designed to swerve around words that would sound too intense for meetings like this one.
‘Overnight,’ Lofgren continued, ‘it’s become clear that the threat goes beyond racial tensions in Virginia and perhaps beyond race as the central aggravating factor. It seems we’re dealing with a wider threat penumbra.’
Wider threat penumbra. It had only been a few months, but Maggie had almost forgotten that Washington had its own language.
‘The attacks on libraries and archives in Oxford, Beijing and Paris suggest an organized and international effort to destroy key repositories of documents, many of them precious. Our colleagues in Langley, in discussion with their counterparts around the world, suspect this might be a concerted attack on the so-called Alexandria Group, a network of a dozen of the world’s leading libraries. And, in case any of you were thinking it, that name predates these fires.’
‘Kind of tempting fate though, don’t you think?’
It was Andrea Ellis, Lofgren’s deputy, a woman Maggie knew of only by reputation. Word was, Lofgren outsourced his emotional intelligence to her: she was there to ‘complete his skill set’, which translated as ‘deal with other human beings’. That remark of hers just now prompted Maggie to smile in her direction.
‘We’re already liaising with Langley and of course with colleagues around the world,’ the Director continued, his software only briefly jarred by the intrusion of an unscripted joke. ‘A working group has been established linking MI5 and SIS in London, MSS in Beijing and DGSI and DGSE in Paris. We will obviously prioritize the immediate threat inside the United States, with a focus on the sole American member of the Alexandria Group, namely the Library of Congress. But we will also play our part in the international effort. With that in mind, I wanted our own dedicated leadership team on this matter until it’s resolved. That is the group in this room. Codenamed, Florian.
‘OK, two developments you need to be aware of, both of them strongly indicating a single perpetrator or group of perpetrators behind this threat. First, on the screen behind me is the image that now displays when you go to the website of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Bibliothèque National in Paris or the National Library of China in Beijing. The website for each of those institutions appears to have been destroyed. This is all you see now.’
Like everyone else in the room, Maggie was transfixed by what she was looking at. It was a short animation, a luridly bright child’s cartoon, showing a line of green bottles wobbling on a brick wall. She quickly added them up: nine. There were twelve Alexandria libraries and now three were down. So whoever was behind this was offering a little riff on the old children’s song, with an extra two bottles added for good measure.
‘Apparently these images changed during the night. The Beijing site went down first, replaced by a GIF showing eleven green bottles. Then Oxford, showing ten. After Paris, they all went down to nine. That’s where we are now.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Maggie murmured, bringing a nod from Donna and a sharp look from one of the others.
‘Second,’ and now Lofgren pointedly checked his watch, ‘fifty-three minutes ago, a package was opened in the mail room of this building, addressed to me. It is a treatise some thirty-five thousand words in length, entitled “Remembering to Forget, Forgetting to Remember”. Needless to say it’s anonymous. Equally needless to say, it has been scrubbed of all identifying marks. Obviously, we have agents at work right now, both reading it for content and examining the envelope, print quality and ink to see if there are any clues as to origination. It appears to have been hand-delivered, so we’ll be examining CCTV footage too. But at this very early stage it seems that what we have here is a manifesto.’
‘Seems our Bookburner has written a book,’ Donna said, signalling that none of thi
s was news to her. ‘And they say irony is dead.’
‘And what does it say, this manifesto?’ Maggie asked noticing the man next to her slowly writing out the word ‘Bookburner’ on his yellow legal pad.
The Director replied, even though Maggie had been looking at the governor. ‘Early days, but the first pass suggests that it consists largely of the intellectual case for destroying all evidence of the past. The introduction speaks of “a return to an Edenic state”. As I say, we’re getting it read and analyzed now. We’ll have executive summaries for you soon.’
Maggie frowned. ‘Edenic?’
One of the Assistants, or maybe it was a Deputy Assistant – it was hard to tell since all the men, bar one who was African-American, looked and dressed alike – leaned forward. He seemed, whether consciously or not, to be aping the body language and speech patterns of the Director. She’d seen that in Washington before too: the underling who aspires to be a miniature version of the boss.
‘As in the Garden of Eden.’
‘I know what the word means! I went to convent school, for Christ’s sake. I’m just thinking—’
‘Well, religious language may indeed be a significant factor,’ Lofgren said, keen to retake control. ‘If this is an initiative of global jihadism, then it would not be surprising if this document were to be full of such references.’
‘Is that the working theory for this, that it’s jihadist terrorism?’
The Director looked over to his deputy. ‘Andrea?’
She cleared her throat. ‘That’s always going to be our starting assumption in a case like this. Multiple, iconic targets; simultaneous attacks; destruction of historic sites; violating western norms. Does kind of check all the boxes.’
‘But China,’ Maggie said. ‘That would be a departure, wouldn’t it?’
