by Sam Bourne
True, there were plenty of books that had been printed by the million and that would surely never disappear completely: there would always be Dickens or Shakespeare. But if the first editions were gone, as that first folio of Shakespeare had been burned in Oxford, then what was to stop the likes of William Keane casting doubt over the authenticity of any text he singled out for questioning? With no original to go back to, what was to stop him and his ilk from playing the same games he had played in that Richmond courtroom? Anyone could get up at any point and say, You claim this is the opening line of the Magna Carta, but how can you know? How can you know for sure?
There’d been people willing to say it for years about the Holocaust. Keane had made it acceptable to say it about slavery. But with all the libraries gone, anybody could say it about anything. Did the Catholic church in Spain burn heretics at the stake? Who knows? Did Henry VIII have six wives? Search me. Given there are no documents left to prove it, it might just be a fairy story. This town you’re from: sure, the street signs say Dublin, but how do you know it’s not all a big, elaborate trick?
Maggie didn’t want to live in a world like that, where anyone could lie about anything. Because if no one could be certain about history, with all its mistakes and its warnings, then they could do whatever they liked right now. Agreed facts were the boundaries that marked out the public square, where people could meet and discuss and debate how to proceed. Beyond those lines lay the jungle, where the law was dictated by the mightiest beast and history was whatever the powerful said it was. You needed the past. Without it there was no future.
A picture floated before Maggie’s eyes of her grandmother back in Ireland, and her gradual slide into dementia. The less Nan had remembered, the less she was herself. Eventually she couldn’t place her granddaughters’ faces, she couldn’t remember her own children or her late husband or, by the end, even her own name. She stopped being Nan Costello, she became . . . empty.
The day she died, somebody – was it a counsellor from the hospice? – had tried to comfort Maggie and Liz by saying, ‘Your grandmother left us long ago.’ And in a way, she was right. If you can’t remember what you did or said yesterday or last month or last year or even fifty years ago, then who are you today? And if that was true of people, surely it was true of societies too. Without memories we were nothing. Just packs of animals, scrapping for survival.
So Maggie might have had her access withdrawn and her privileges revoked. She might be off the team and on the outside. She might not have access to a single email or text message that was more than an hour old, – though Liz was working on that – an empty contacts book that was worse than useless and no photographs save for those in the biscuit tin she kept at the top of her closet and which she had not taken down in years. And she might, even now, be the subject of global ridicule and shame, either laughed at or wanked over thanks to that video. But she couldn’t give up. She would do whatever she could to find these people who were burning the past – to find them and stop them. What else was she going to do, submerge herself in a post-grad reading list and a bottle of Ardbeg?
Hang on. She very nearly said it out loud. She had given herself an idea.
She rushed to the kitchen, poured herself a large glass of water, downed it in one, and then poured another, in an attempt to dilute the forty-six-per-cent-proof whisky in her bloodstream. She all but sprinted back to her desk and the manifesto and, with a pen in her hand, got to work.
Reading list. She went through each page, picking out the references the author or authors made to other works. Not simply quotations, like those from the Bible, but citations, aspects of the argument that leaned on the writings of others. Soon enough she had jotted down the names of E.H. Carr and C. Vann Woodward and then Herodotus, Tacitus, Gibbon, Carlyle and Macaulay as well as Ibn Ishaq, Michelet and Taine. She looked for some more current names, but besides Rieff and the Spanish writer, Javier Cercas, there weren’t many.
She went to her laptop and typed the words ‘reading list’ into the search bar followed by the full list of names. It was slow, the page seeming to take an age to load, but eventually hundreds of results appeared. The links were to history faculties at universities everywhere from Northwestern in Illinois to Nuremberg in Germany, from Miami to Manukau. She clicked on one at random and saw that it was indeed the undergraduate reading list for a course on ‘historiography: the study of historical method and the emergence of history as an academic discipline’. The next entry she opened at random also spoke of historiography, which it preferred to describe as ‘the history of “history” ’.
She needed to narrow it down. She went back through the text, looking for anything she’d missed. Only then did it strike her that she needed to break her old student habit of skipping all the footnotes. Her attitude to reading academic books of any kind was consistent: if it was important, they wouldn’t shove it in a bloody footnote, would they? So she’d had an iron rule of ignoring anything in a smaller font, endnotes and footnotes alike, especially if they appeared in a report back in her State Department or White House days: height of pretentiousness. But now she went through each one that appeared in the manifesto, as if scavenging for gold.
That yielded a whole new crop of names: Burckhardt, Bloom, Hughes, Reiter, Toynbee, Eisenstadt and Spengler. Excitedly now, she typed in that list, again with the words ‘reading list’. Once more, the search engine seemed to be coughing along at quarter speed.
Eventually, though, she was looking at a page showing perhaps fifteen substantive entries, most of them relating to history courses in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, Australia and Holland. Maggie scrolled down the page of results where, lurking at the bottom, was one that looked less official than the rest. While the others linked to official university websites, this one directed to a personal blog. What’s more, for this result Google had bashfully crossed out two of the names on her list – Hughes and Spengler – as if it had drawn a blank on those. The article it was offering would include references to only five of the historians she had typed in.
She clicked and in an instant could see that the blog was both old and defunct. Its design was from the web’s infancy. Sure enough, the article had been posted in 2004. She didn’t recognize the author’s name, but she skimmed the text.
To her surprise, the article was not a dense academic treatise but far more personal. It was a reminiscence of college days written by a graduate of Stanford University.
. . . eccentric, to say the least. The ethos that semester was something like “know thine enemy,” as we were guided to master existing approaches to history in order to expose their flaws. “You will be a feeble opponent unless you know the devil’s battalions as well or better than he does,” that kind of thing, always delivered in that same trademark, melodic voice with its rising and falling, almost musical, cadences. The room was packed, as always. There’d be people there who weren’t even history majors, all squished up sitting on the stairs, some of them sitting cross-legged right in front of the podium, lining up outside the lecture theater. I can’t tell you how much history we learned that semester, though I can probably still recite that monster reading list in my sleep – Bloom, Eisenstadt, Reiter, Toynbee, Burckhardt – as well as all the old favorites, from Herodotus to Gibbon, Tacitus to Macaulay . . .
Maggie scrolled up and down, searching for the name she was looking for. Maddeningly, there seemed to be no reference to it, the blogger working on the assumption that his readers would know it already. Finally, at the very end there were two initials. The ones she was expecting. The ones she was hoping for.
She would cross-check it first, just to be sure. It took a while – interestingly, that particular academic posting was missing from his résumé – but on Stanford’s own website, she found confirmation.
It couldn’t be a coincidence. She reached for her phone, the urge strong to text Donna and tell her what she’d found. But then she imagined how such a message would look, as if Maggie was
too thick-skinned to have got the message, as if she was desperate to be allowed back into the circle, like a spurned lover calling up to the bedroom from the street below.
No, she would have to call a virtual stranger, one who instinct nevertheless told her she could trust. As it happened, she had the phone number because Donna had written it down in her notebook, the one she had accidentally on purpose slipped into Maggie’s bag.
Slowly, checking each digit, she dialled the number of Andrea Ellis, Deputy Director of the FBI.
‘Ellis.’
‘This is Maggie Costello. I think I have a suspect for you.’
Chapter Thirty
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington DC, 7.07pm
The official version, the story she would tell friends in Dublin when they gathered in the pub on Christmas Eve, was that Maggie hated Washington. The stuff-shirted, buttoned-down men; the po-faced women all badly in need of an irony infusion; the obsessive power games; the preening of the media bigwigs; the smallness of a place that somehow made Dublin seem like a metropolis – she could rail against them all. (Though she had stopped doing that with Liz, lest it bring another wave of ‘So leave! Move back to Dublin. Or come live here in Atlanta, so you can be near your sole surviving family, you daft cow.’)
But the truth was, there were parts of this town that she had grown to love. There were still few better places to see a band than the 9.30 Club. She loved to walk through Rock Creek Park. And, though she’d pretend to find it a chore taking visitors around and playing the tour guide, she had become a sucker for the memorials.
Climbing the steps to see the seated Lincoln still had the power to awe her. She found the circular colonnade on the Tidal Basin which housed Jefferson a place of rare tranquillity. And flying over the city, seeing the simple needle for Washington, was a sign that she was back, even if not quite home.
So she was glad when Andrea Ellis had suggested this place to meet. A phone call was too risky and so was any electronic communication, even, apparently, the messaging apps which boasted of their end-to-end encryption. (Maggie noted that reluctance and filed it away: if it wasn’t good enough for the top brass at the FBI, it probably wasn’t good enough.)
Maggie was there first, taking in the long wall of black marble as she approached it. Instantly she greeted it the same way she always did, the same way most visitors did: with her hands.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial all but cried out to be touched. Partly it was the cool dark stone, stretching so high and long, metre after metre of it, as if it might go on forever. But mainly, Maggie thought, it was the names, etched in gold. Touching them seemed obvious, a gesture of tribute, but also the only way to make them real, to make the one name your eyes and your fingers had picked at random become a person.
At night, it was especially beautiful, at least to Maggie. The wall was picked out by a series of lights studded into the ground, forming an avenue pointing towards the Washington Monument. There was bound to be some elaborate essay written somewhere about the symbolic meaning of that proximity – something, no doubt, about patriotism and military sacrifice – but for Maggie it was simpler than that. It was a reminder that noble ideals so often ended in blood and grime and wasted lives.
But on this evening, she was nagged by another thought. How long till they came after this place? After all, the wall was a kind of document too. Its list of names was a record. Surely it too would have to be destroyed eventually. Whoever was doing this would want it vanished. Or perhaps they’d be content to say that ‘nobody really knows’ how many died in that war or what the war was about or whether it even happened.
‘Hi there.’
Maggie turned to see that Andrea Ellis had appeared at her shoulder. She had materialized out of nowhere, making barely a sound. A former field agent.
‘Andrea. Hi.’
Ellis was looking at the wall, her eye running over the names. They were at the point where the Bs turned to Cs. ‘Should I be looking for a Costello?’
‘As it happens,’ Maggie said, also staring ahead, ‘there are five. I always say hello when I’m here. Look, there’s Lawrence R Costello.’
‘Family?’
‘Not that I know of. But lots of Costellos got on the boat, back in the day.’ Involuntarily, Maggie touched the name, letting her finger trace the C and the O. Mutely, she sent something like condolences or commiserations across the decades to the young Lawrence, whose face she had never seen.
‘So, Maggie,’ Andrea said, shuffling slowly along the wall, her eyes now on the block of Ds. ‘You haven’t dropped this.’
‘I haven’t. I never do.’
‘That’s what I hear.’ Ellis said it with a smile which, even glimpsed side-on, confirmed that Maggie had not called the wrong person.
‘I’ve checked the document, the manifesto. I’ve read it closely.’
‘We have computers doing that right now. Pattern recognition analysis.’
‘And I’m sure that’s going to yield great results.’
‘But?’
‘But,’ Maggie began, ‘I’ve seen something else.’ She explained about the citations and how she’d cross-checked them with university reading lists, and how that had led her to a blog post apparently aimed at alumni of a course taught at Stanford in the 1980s. Now she prepared for her big reveal. ‘The man who taught that course was—’
‘William Keane.’
Maggie turned away from the wall to look at Ellis directly. The FBI official did not react, keeping her gaze trained on the wall. She was looking towards the Es.
‘Yes, William Keane,’ Maggie said. ‘So you knew.’
‘Actually, I didn’t know. Not about that specific course, I mean. But I guessed that’s what you were going to say.’
‘Because of the trial?’
‘Because he brags that he’s in the history-busting business; because he’s high profile; and because he’s one of the few people out there cheering the destruction of all these libraries. Which makes him an obvious target.’
‘And now there’s a link between him and the manifesto. That document cites the very books he recommended when he taught that course at Stanford.’
‘Which would be important—’
‘The very same ones. Even quite obscure books. I can show you.’ Maggie reached into her bag, ready to produce the reading list. Andrea put her hand on Maggie’s wrist.
‘It’s not him, Maggie.’ She was still scanning the names.
‘What?’
‘Keane. It’s not him.’
‘How can you be so sure? He’s very manipulative and very—’
‘I know. But it’s not him.’ Now she turned to look at Maggie, which stilled her. For a few seconds, the silence lingered between them like vapour: two pros who knew that the best way to get the other person to talk was to say nothing.
It was Ellis who spoke first, continuing her slow march along the wall.
‘He’s been under tight surveillance for months. We’ve been all over his calls, his meetings – including with your good self shortly before twelve hundred hours on Tuesday – his emails, his social media. If he changes the channel, we know about it. If he has fries with that, we know about it.’
Maggie waited for more.
‘There’s no way he could have pulled off anything like this without us knowing about it. Directing an international operation on this scale – targeted assassinations, arson attacks timed and co-ordinated in multiple cities – that’s a major enterprise. Would have left a huge footprint.’
‘And there’s nothing?’
‘Not quite nothing. A few meetings with supporters. Some events for his legal defence fund. All exactly what you’d expect him to be doing given that he’s fighting a court case that has got every wingnut in this country dusting off his Klan costume.’
‘Right. OK.’
‘You’re disappointed.’
Maggie exhaled. ‘It’s been a tough day.’
‘So I hear
.’
‘Those emails, that tape. They’re fake, you know.’
‘I thought so.’
‘But Donna – the governor’s fired me anyway.’
‘You don’t need me to tell you how politics works.’
There was silence for a moment or two. They both took in the names.
‘I wouldn’t be too down on yourself, Maggie. The reading list thing, that’s good.’ Suddenly her tone changed. ‘Obviously, I cannot disclose any information derived from or related to an active investigation by the Bureau,’ she said, the words delivered with a hint of ironic detachment so slight it was barely audible. ‘Given that legal restriction, I am unable to confirm or deny that your conclusions mesh with the Bureau’s initial findings of linguistic analysis. For the same reason, I cannot confirm if they mesh very precisely with what the pattern recognition software is indicating.’
‘You mean, the analysis points at Keane too?’
‘That is obviously not something I could officially confirm at this time.’
Maggie turned to look at the Deputy Director, but Andrea Ellis was still examining the wall. There was no smile, no wink. Just a woman looking at a memorial.
‘And yet you know it was not Keane? That it can’t be Keane?’
‘It’s been good to talk, Maggie,’ Andrea replied. ‘But I’m going to have to say goodnight now. I need to have a word with my dad.’
Maggie followed the woman’s gaze as it came to rest on the name of Henry R Ellis. She watched his daughter trace the letters with her fingers, one by one.
Maggie said nothing, turning away quietly, with one last glance at the Washington Monument, which seemed to shine on this early autumn night. Was it that sight which made her see it? Or perhaps that hint of encouragement from the Deputy Director? Whatever it was that had done it, Maggie Costello flagged down a cab suddenly knowing exactly where she had to look next.
