To Kill The Truth

by Sam Bourne

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Melita Island, Montana, 8.55pm

  The characters on the screen were beginning to swim. And dive, turning triple somersaults as they plunged from the top board down to the bottom of the page where they made no splash. Jason Ramey closed his eyes and when he opened them again the words were straight enough, but the lines seemed to be wobbling, curving and dipping at the ends like the bending spoons of a trickster illusionist. He reached for the can of Diet Coke, which was very possibly his seventh of the day.

  Though ‘day’ was too quaint a term for a unit of time as he now experienced it. His life was divided into shifts, but those were barely divided from each other. One shift merged into another, broken only by stretches of intermittent unconsciousness that barely deserved to be called sleep. There were no meal breaks now; he hadn’t sat in the communal dining hall for days. Instead, he ate here at his desk, staring at his three screens which now seemed to represent the frontiers of the known world.

  Only when he walked the few yards from this cabin to the dorm did he remember that he was, in fact, living in a beautiful spot, an island surrounded by smooth, untroubled lake water. For a precious few seconds he might hear the song of a chickadee. One morning, after working through the night, he caught a glimpse of a loon. Maya, she of the tattoos, saw it too: they’d smiled about it.

  But that was a blink of an eye next to the endless hours he spent in that chair, staring at the pixels and ones and zeroes that now comprised his waking life. The exhaustion had spread far beyond his brain or his muscle or his joints. It seemed to have seeped into his marrow.

  Jim appeared next to him, pulling up a chair. Jim too looked like shit. The lids of his eyes were thin and raw, the stubble on his cheeks resembled a crust. He looked like he needed to sleep for forty-eight hours straight. They all did.

  ‘Jason, listen.’

  That was the new greeting. The ‘Hey there’ or ‘How you doing?’ of the early days had gone. There was no time for such pleasantries and certainly none for an inquiry that risked an answer. (‘I’m fine thanks, Jim.’) That was nearly a full second gone. And they needed every minute they had. They all knew how long they had to get this done.

  These chats with Jim were getting more frequent. Jason did his work well and on time and so, he guessed, Jim had come to trust him. But he also suspected that his boss – commanding officer? – needed to share the load with someone. It was clear Jim was getting his orders from somewhere, but here on Melita Island he was in sole charge. Jason’s experience of leadership was zero, so what did he know, but he suspected it was tough running an operation like this alone.

  ‘Given the time constraints, like I said the other day, we have to prioritize. The instructions are to zero in on this list of targets.’

  Jim stretched across the desk to start typing on Jason’s keyboard, giving the latter a brief blast of his odour. Maybe they all smelled like that these days; showering had become a luxury.

  Jim was unlocking a password-protected file which now revealed itself to be titled: Right here, right mow.

  He leaned back and let Jason read what was on the screen. Reflexively, Jason moved to correct the spelling of the last word.

  ‘That’s not a typo,’ Jim said.

  Jason crinkled his forehead into a question mark.

  ‘It’s an acronym. M-O-W. Stands for Memory of the World.’

  Jason scrolled further down the document, learning that the Memory of the World project was a UNESCO initiative whose website proclaimed it to be engaged in the fight against ‘collective amnesia’, protecting everything from ancient manuscripts to cave paintings from the ravages of time, neglect and a changing climate as well as wilful and deliberate destruction. Jason gave a sideways glance at Jim at that last one.

  ‘The important thing is this,’ Jim said, scrolling down. ‘The Memory of the World Register.’ He clicked a couple of times and there it was, a list of more than three hundred and fifty documents deemed by the UN to be worthy of international protection. He started at the top.

  The 1703 Census of Iceland

  The Abolition of the Army in Costa Rica

  The Abolition of Slavery in Tunisia

  Jason skimmed ahead, noting the predictable independence declarations, constitutions and decrees and stopping at the unexpected. From Uzbekistan: the archives of the chancellery of Khiva Khans, including papers dating back five hundred years. From Holland: the archive of the Amsterdam Notaries 1578–1915. From Japan: the archives of the To¯ji temple. From England: the Mappa Mundi of Hereford. From Barbados: sheet music of a song chanted by African slaves in the sugar fields for two hundred years, starting in the mid-seventeenth century.

  ‘Wow,’ Jason said. ‘That’s quite a list.’

  ‘Rich pickings, huh?’ Jim smiled. ‘And all neatly listed and tabulated for our convenience.’

  ‘It’s like they knew we were coming,’ Jason said.

  ‘Yep. So let’s not disappoint them. Can you assemble a team? Maybe Dan? And Maya? Make this a priority. Work your way through that list. I know we’re all slammed right now, but this is what you might call a target-rich environment. So let’s get targeting. OK?’

  Jason nodded.

  ‘Good. Because with every one of those you get, we’re making the world a better place. Am I right?’

  And at that, through their exhaustion, both men smiled.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Washington DC, 7.54pm

  More mystery numbers on her phone. Who could this be? For a second, Maggie was returned to her Dublin adolescence, when the phone would ring at home and it was anybody’s guess who was calling. You might screen it, letting the answering machine take it, but that was fraught with risk. What if it was a boy and he began broadcasting his private message to you all over the house? Avoiding that catastrophe was incentive enough to trigger a sprint to the phone, to ensure you got there before Ma and, more importantly, Liz. Sometimes the two sisters would be in a duel that was part running race, part wrestling bout, each one grabbing or tugging at, or tripping over, the other so they could get to the phone first. If Liz won, and it was indeed a boy at the other end, Liz would insist on engaging the poor, ambushed creature in tortured conversation, usually ending in: ‘And may I ask what your intentions are with my sister?’

  This time there was no race with Liz, but the same sense of the unknown as the phone rang in her hand. And as it happened, it was a boy who was calling.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Maggie, it’s me.’ A pause. ‘Uri.’

  ‘Hi.’

  Another pause, as if he were waiting for her to say more. But she wanted him to move first.

  ‘Listen, Maggie. I want to say I’m sorry. But I don’t want to do it like this, on the phone. I’m downstairs, outside.’ She looked out the window, and she could see him, standing under the tree on the other side of Corcoran Street. He didn’t look up. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said, in a voice that stressed that entry was not to be read as a concession.

  Minutes later he was at her kitchen table. He didn’t do what he could have done – putting himself near her, allowing the chemistry between them to overcome her resistance. He was going to let the words do the work. It told her he was serious.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he began.

  ‘Sorry? For what?’ Most men would have taken that as absolution. Sorry? What do you have to be sorry for? But Uri knew her better than that. He knew she needed to hear him say it.

  ‘I’m not sorry for the opinions I hold. It’s not a crime for me to have a different view from you. I grew up . . . my bringing-up was different from yours.’

  Bringing-up. Uri’s English was so good that the rare lapse was always unfailingly charming. She wondered if he had done it deliberately.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘But that was not the time to get into it. You didn’t need a philosophy seminar. Not then.’

  ‘No, I bloody well didn’t.’
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  ‘You needed an ally.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  More silence. Was she waiting for more? Would he give it?

  ‘You always said that that’s what you need in life. A comrade.’

  ‘Was that the word I used?’

  ‘Sometimes you’d say “friend”. But then you said Facebook ruined that word, so you went back to comrade.’

  Maggie laughed at that, the first crack in the ice. There was a time when he’d have seized on that opening, made another joke and the shared laughter would have rapidly turned into an embrace which would, inevitably, have turned into something more. But he didn’t take that route.

  ‘The thing is, I know the past is everything with you. You’re wary of me now because of what happened with us before.’

  ‘Yeah, that and also the weirdness of what happened at the library. You’re there and all of a sudden you’re not there. And I’m on my own in the middle of a fucking fire.’

  ‘I cannot tell you how sorry I am about that, Maggie. I was taking pictures and I turn around and you’re gone, and I was just so desperate to find you. I was terrified that maybe something had happened to you. And I thought: Please, don’t let me lose her again.’

  Maggie let that last sentence sink in. Then, quietly, she said, ‘I didn’t like that feeling, Uri. And I wondered why you’d turned up here out of the blue, as if maybe it was . . .’ She was embarrassed to say it. ‘You know, a trap.’

  ‘Me, a trap?’

  ‘Because it’s happened before, Uri. With other people, I mean.’

  ‘There we go again, with the past. That’s the point, Maggie. We’re not teenagers any more. There’s always going to be a past, more and more of it. The question is, which past matters more?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The past you’ve had with other men – all the bad experiences – or the past you had with me. The past we had together.’

  She didn’t reply. Instead she sat opposite him at the kitchen table and tried to absorb what he had said. The silence hung between them for a good while, neither awkward nor tense. It was like a blanket that covered them both.

  Under it, she was thinking about what he had said – and she was also remembering. She was remembering Richard, the nights she had spent with him in this same place, and the way it had ended. And she was remembering Uri too, the days and nights they had shared together in this room, in the bedroom, in every corner of this apartment; the closed, private world they had built together – their faces inches apart under the covers, their skin touching, hiding nothing.

  Had she got that wrong? It never felt wrong. Not once. Mind you, it hadn’t felt wrong with Richard either – not until it was too late. But Uri had never betrayed her. She might have feared it, after what happened in Charlottesville, but what were those fears really? They were scars left by Richard, not Uri. Was she really going to carry them around with her forever?

  She got to her feet and walked the tiny – and enormous – distance over to him, placing her hand on his shoulder. Gently, he covered her hand with his own, looking up at her, directly into her eyes. Without planning to, she bent down until her mouth was close to his, her hair falling like a curtain to cover them. They didn’t kiss straight away, but rather reverted to what had always been their habit, letting their lips linger close to each other for a second, then another second, allowing them to feel the proximity of each other’s breath, letting the desire build. And then, with no decision she could remember, their lips were touching, the kiss instantly becoming urgent in its intensity. The taste of him was such a relief after so long.

  The desire that followed almost shocked her. It moved so fast and so completely, seeming to reach every part of her, as if it were carried through her bloodstream. When his hand cradled her neck, just the touch of him on her skin made her moan.

  From then on, their movements required no direction or conscious thought. Their fingers, their tongues, knew exactly what to do. Only later, once they were lying together in her bed, naked and spent, did the thought strike her: that whatever goes on in the heart or the head, the body too has a memory.

  She was coming back from the bathroom, marvelling at how good he looked, propped upright on several pillows, when Uri smiled and said, ‘Since I’m here, why don’t you tell me what’s happening?’ They grinned at each other, aware that, for both of them, work, even when it looked like a war zone, was also a comfort zone.

  Within minutes Maggie had told him about the manifesto, the reading list and her visit to the Vietnam Memorial.

  For now, she had said, let’s assume Andrea Ellis is telling the truth. In which case, she explained, Keane is not the man behind these arson attacks and killings. And yet we know that the manifesto has got Keane’s fingerprints all over it, drawing directly from the course he taught at Stanford in the mid-1980s. Logically that left only one possibility. The author of that document – the arsonist, the murderer – was not the professor who had set that reading list, but one of the students who had followed it.

  Uri understood immediately and was just as swift to realize why Maggie was telling him. ‘You want me to come up with a list of everyone who took that course in that period?’

  ‘How did you guess?’ Maggie smiled, leaning in for another kiss. She had missed the sex, no doubt about it, but this – the easy familiarity – she had longed for almost as much. ‘There’s no one better at that stuff and you know it.’

  They got dressed and she saw Uri to the door. Within an hour, helped in part by the alumni blog that had first led Maggie to connect Keane with the manifesto, he had sent over a list of names. One by one, she looked them up online. The responses were painfully slow.

  Thanks to Liz, her email was working again, but was something up with Google? She was tempted to Google it, but instead went over to Twitter and typed in ‘Google’.

  The tweets from a few hours ago were variations on a theme.

  Is it just me or is Google like *crawling* today?

  Am Googling the words ‘glacial pace’. Still no results . . .

  Just Googled ‘slowest search engine in world history’. Google response: *About four results (0.43 weeks)*

  Before long, the meme artists had got busy, several of them riffing on an image of Albert Einstein scratching his head.

  Grandpa, was this what life was like before Google?

  Hey, remember when we actually remembered stuff?

  A more po-faced version came from the blue-ticked author of a global bestseller on human evolution:

  A reminder that we were once a species that relied on its own collective memory rather than on a single algorithm

  Finally, Maggie followed a link to a story from the Washington Post.

  PALO ALTO—Internet users the world over suffered an unprecedented loss of service late Wednesday as Google, the world’s biggest search engine, reported what it described as “an exceptional drop in performance.”

  The tech giant refused to confirm that it had come under cyberattack, but senior figures in the company’s Mountain View headquarters speaking on condition of anonymity told the Post they believed they had indeed been the victim of a “serious, sustained assault aimed at Google’s central nervous system.”

  Users in the Middle East and Europe were the first to report a problem early Wednesday evening, as the search engine’s usually lightning-fast search function began to slow. The trouble spread westward, affecting service in the US by 1pm EDT. As the malaise widened, it also deepened, with initially sluggish response times grinding to a virtual halt.

  Google sources said this was not a conventional “denial of service” attack, but one they deemed more sophisticated. One executive hinted that the source of the virus may well have been internal. “The call is coming from inside the house,” he said.

  Others suggested that “thinking in terms of a virus may be the wrong template” and this might have been a deliberate act of sabotage embedded deep inside Google’s own coding
several days or weeks ago.

  Internal investigations are already underway, with the company’s senior management team—including the founding duo—said to be in permanent session. “We are working around the clock to restore Google to the consistently excellent level of service our users have grown used to,” a spokesperson said.

  Maggie sat back in her chair and bit hard on the pen top she had been chewing. She had seen a tweet which distilled the conclusion she had already reached.

  Google down? Don’t worry. We can look up whatever we need at the library. Oh wait . . .

  So Operation Florian would have to widen its scope. Not content with destroying the world’s libraries, whoever was doing this was obviously determined to go much further: to destroy not only the physical foundations of the world’s knowledge, but also the electronic means by which human beings had come to access it. The author of that manifesto was not exaggerating the seriousness of their intent. They were out to rob the human race of all it knew.

  There were other search engines and she would have to use them. They too were slow – perhaps they’d come under similar attack – but name by name, she began to work through Uri’s list.

  Keane had taught for three years. His had been a fairly niche course – New perspectives in historiography and the case for radical scepticism – with perhaps no more than forty students a year. The eventual total should be around one hundred and twenty names. So far Uri had sent over about fifty.

  She scanned the one-line summaries of the former students. Uri had eliminated six names from the start: they were dead. But it was hard to make even a crude cull of the rest. She saw at least four graduates who were now involved in banking or high finance. Not her area, but if one of these four (three men and a woman) had made serious money, they might have the resources to mount an operation like this. She would come back to them.