by Sam Bourne
fires in libraries all over the world and suddenly there’s a serious fire at
Amazon—
In the books area of the warehouse. The books!
I know, and I get that. But the logic doesn’t quite work here. You see, what we know – just from the targets so far – is that whoever is behind this has a very clear objective. It’s indefensible, but it is clear. They want to take out the twelve core libraries of the world. And, this is a slight tangent, but let me just say, that’s a smart choice: because the Alexandria Group really does cover the core documents of human history. You take them out, you deal a fatal blow to the global historical record.
Remember, John, we don’t do endorsements on this podcast.
That’s a low blow, David.
We’re strictly non-partisan! We’re always aware you have a choice of homicidal arsonist murderers!
Guys, come on.
OK, all right. Finish your point, John.
I’m just saying, on the Bookburner’s own logic, targeting these major deposit libraries makes sense. But on that same logic, hitting Amazon – even the books section of the warehouse – does not fit at all. Because there were no canonical documents stored in Kenosha, Wisconsin! There were no original, precious texts. There were, like, stacks of recipe books and Martha Stewart and self-help and vegan diets and Harry Potter which – no disrespect, I love all those books—
Especially the vegan diet—
Love them all. But the point is, it’s kind of whack-a-mole. You burn one crate of Trusting Your Inner You and there’s, like, another gazillion copies in a warehouse somewhere else. So it doesn’t achieve anything. It doesn’t deplete the sum total of human knowledge by even a single microgram.
Unless—
All right, Emily, you come in here.
I was just going to say, John’s right. It does seem pointless to burn a bunch of books in an Amazon warehouse—
Fulfilment centre.
At an Amazon fulfilment centre unless, that is, your aim is to . . . Well, let me back up here. There’s two ways this might be connected to the Florian stuff. First, it could just be a copycat thing. So there’s a bunch of libraries on fire, everyone’s seen the pictures on TV, and some guy working the night shift in Kenosha thinks—
‘That looks fucking cool.’
Right. So kind of on a whim, he just sets fire to a stack of books. And kills himself in the process. So that’s one way it could be connected.
Like school shootings.
Exactly. The copycat effect. We know that exists. And that could be a danger going forward. So it’s not nothing.
All right. And what’s the other way this could be connected, Emily?
Well, this may seem a stretch, but hear me out. Let’s say you really were determined to wipe out human knowledge, like the manifesto says. It wouldn’t be enough just to wipe out a few big libraries.
And their digital databases. Don’t forget those.
Sure. But even that wouldn’t be enough. You’d basically want to stop people reading books. And so let’s say this incident in Kenosha is not the only one. You saw that report out of Staffordshire, England? Another fire in the ‘fulfilment centre’ there too. Also in the books department, as it happens. So what if this is a concerted effort? What if this keeps happening? My guess is that, at some point, somebody at Amazon corporate headquarters says, ‘Guys, I’ve run the numbers. I’ve done the math, and it’s just not worth it. The money we make from books is just not worth the risk.’
So you’re talking about a deterrent effect?
Or a chilling effect. But yes, basically. Do you remember with Salman Rushdie and the fatwa and all that? There were attacks on publishing offices and, like, a translator got killed?
The Japanese translator.
Yep. And for a while there, people were thinking maybe this isn’t worth it. The price is too high. And that was about publishing one book. So what if whoever is doing this wants the entire book industry to come to the same conclusion? You know, this is too risky.
You’re getting all that from one fire?
Well, there’s now been two at Amazon. And there have been petrol bombs thrown at bookshops in Utah and in Chicago yesterday. And in Turin. And two in France.
So you’re saying this is a plot to eliminate all books?
I don’t know. We don’t know yet, do we? But we didn’t know about Florian at all until a few hours ago. None of us had heard of the Bookburner and his manifesto either. So I think this might be part of it.
David, can I ask a question?
Go ahead, John.
Wouldn’t this make sense only if the Bookburner planned to get every last bookshop? Like, if a copy of, I don’t know, Great Expectations still exists somewhere, then that book still exists. So I suppose I come back to my question. What would be the point?
I think, John, you might be being too literal.
That is a very frequent criticism levelled in my direction, I grant you.
No, no, you’re brilliant in every way. What I mean is, you really don’t have to destroy every single copy. If there are fewer books around, if it becomes really hard to get hold of Great Expectations, if only one copy exists behind a glass case in a museum somewhere, you know, under armed guard and you can’t even get it online because the digital back-up has been destroyed and Google is so wrecked you couldn’t even find it anyway, well, in that sense the book does gradually cease to exist. It begins to fall out of our collective memory.
Look, I hate to be the voice of doom on this podcast – again! – but if this steps up, if there are more arson attacks on bookshops and libraries, if not just Amazon but everyone gets out of the book business, well, pretty soon, the Bookburner will have got his way. It may not happen overnight, it may take some time. But bit by bit we’ll be chipping away at the sum of human knowledge, in the sense of what human beings actually know. And I got to tell you, that scares the living shit out of me.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Cleveland, Ohio, 8.57am
There was a line of bottles on a wall. None of them was green. Instead they were clear and empty.
Maggie could see that something or someone was just behind them, but through the glass it was impossible to make out more than a vague shape. She got closer but the image was still hazy, distorted by the glass. And the closer she got, the more the bottles began to wobble, trembling, the way they would if they were being held in an unsteady hand. She got nearer, readying herself to catch the first one that fell.
A bottle did fall, but it was not the one she expected. She tried to reach it, but was too late. Then another one went, and she missed that one too. And then another. And another. Until, eventually, all but one of the bottles were gone.
Now she could see who was behind the wall. It was her mother, her mouth stretched in a wide, wild smile and her eyes crazed. Maggie looked down and she saw her baby sister, crawling on the floor, splinters of glass piercing her skin . . .
*
Maggie jerked awake, her chest thudding into the steering wheel. She opened her eyes wide in panic, bracing for the sight of oncoming traffic, and heard her heart thump for two beats, then three, before understanding that the car was still. That it remained where she had parked it last night, on a quiet residential street in the Garfield Heights neighbourhood of Cleveland. Outside the local branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library, in fact. (She figured that a woman sleeping in her car would arouse less interest outside a public building than in front of someone’s house.)
‘Last night’ was not quite accurate. She had pulled in at around six o’clock this morning, having driven solidly through the small hours, save for a ten-minute nap at a rest stop, interrupted by instinct as a couple of truckers approached, exhibiting a bit too much interest in the redheaded woman curled up alone in the driver’s seat of a stationary car.
She was still in the grip of that dream. It had come from somewhere deep in her subconscious, dragging with it memories and pain she had
buried so long ago she had almost forgotten them. Almost. She remembered the Friday deadline hanging over her: Liz’s next session with her therapist.
She pulled out her phone and looked again at the email that had arrived last night.
I know who wrote the manifesto that’s on the internet. I know because he’s my son.
It had come from a woman named Edith Kelly. At the bottom of the email she had put an address: Shady Lanes Retirement Home, Cleveland, Ohio. That would fit: anyone old enough to be a parent of one of Keane’s former students at Stanford would be in their seventies or eighties by now.
What gave Maggie pause as she sat in the driver’s seat was a more basic question, one she had chewed over through the long night’s drive. Why would this woman have contacted Maggie? The Times and Post had both given the number of an FBI hotline for people to call with information. Why hadn’t she called that?
How she’d got Maggie’s email address was, unfortunately, no mystery. The big news websites that had run the fake emails purportedly from Maggie had been careful to redact her email address from the screenshots they’d run. But others had not been so diligent. Her contact details were out there now, a fact confirmed by the barrage of garbage, abuse and pornographic fantasy that had been filling her inbox over the last twenty-four hours.
Still, if this were genuine, why would an elderly lady sitting in an old people’s home get in touch with Maggie when she could contact the FBI itself? A couple of stories had linked Maggie’s name to Florian, but why would she—
Of course. Kelly.
She could hear her nan’s voice. Call me all the names you like, Margaret, but sometimes it’s nice to talk to one of your own.
It was that thought that took root once Maggie had followed her gut and decided not to wait for a dawn flight, but to get in her car and make the six-hour drive from Washington to the heart of the American Midwest.
Maggie opened the car door and got out, stretching wide. The details of her dream were already slipping from her grasp, but the sensation of it lingered. The powerlessness, the inability to do anything about . . .
It was just after nine am. Maggie could see that the library was opening. Through the tall glass of the entrance she glimpsed a woman unbolting the door, then poking her head out and looking left and right. Even here, Maggie thought. Even here, at a suburban Midwestern library – where kids would come for reading class and retirees might come to flick through a magazine or borrow a detective story or romance – even here they were frightened. Books had become dangerous. Merely to be in possession of the printed word now posed a mortal threat.
Maggie attempted to straighten herself out, tugging at her top in a feeble effort at removing the creases. Posture, she decided, would have to do the rest. If she walked in confidently – head up, shoulders back – she might just succeed in looking like a woman who had not slept in her clothes. In her car.
She did just that, eyeing the sign for the bathroom as soon as she was inside. There she splashed water on her face and did her best to freshen up. She found some rudimentary make-up in her bag and applied it. Never had concealer been more aptly named.
When she emerged she caught the eye of the librarian one more time, who was standing as stiff as a sentry at the ‘returns’ desk. The poor woman looked terrified.
Maggie got back in the car and prepared to make the five-minute drive to Shady Lanes.
The local NPR station was broadcasting the news from the BBC.
. . . the grief here is palpable, with many Egyptians weeping openly on the streets. This man tells me Cairo is the birthplace of civilization. To lose the Dar al-Kotob, the National Library and Archives, he says, is like ‘ripping the heart out of the Arab world’.
So now, thought Maggie, it was four green bottles, hanging on the wall.
There’s disbelief here that this could happen, not least because the library was under twenty-four-hour armed guard by the Egyptian military. Among the treasures believed to have been lost in the fire are an estimated fifty-seven thousand of the oldest, most valuable manuscripts in the world, including several parchment texts of the Koran, some of them inscribed by renowned practitioners of the art of Islamic calligraphy. The library held illuminated manuscripts, Arabic papyri that were nearly fifteen hundred years old, Arabic coins from the same period, as well as ancient marriage certificates, tax records and land contracts. It was, says the library’s director, the ‘record of an entire world’. And now it is gone.
How on earth were they getting past armed guards to burn these libraries? What kind of sorcery was this Bookburner capable of?
There followed an interview with an Oxford professor of medieval Islamic history, who described himself as heartbroken. He talked about the specific loss of Cairo, and the significance of an attack on the Alexandria Group member closest to the ancient city that gave those dozen libraries their name. ‘It’s fair to say that Egypt never really did recover from the fire that destroyed the library of Alexandria nearly two thousand years ago. There are some cultural losses that can never be made good again.’
Then he broadened out, his sorrow turning to anger. ‘When you look at what’s happened around the world, and when you consider what’s been lost – the human race has destroyed in a matter of days what took our ancestors many centuries, millennia really, to build up. I know this is not a war or a genocide, where millions of people are killed. But this is one of the greatest tragedies in human history. They are destroying unique documents that have no copy. They are destroying the digital back-ups. It seems that whoever is doing this is determined that there will be nothing left. We won’t remember our past at all.’
Maggie pulled out her phone to check the address for the retirement home. Twitter was abuzz with the publication of the Bookburner’s manifesto, with everyone suddenly an expert on counter-terrorism. She saw that Mac had weighed in, condemning the Times and the Post for the ethics of their decision. Americans of all generations, old and young, will be appalled by this move – the liberal media insist on acting as enablers to those who wish us harm. Those in favour of publication commanded much less firepower. Typical was the tweet that came from the woman Maggie had seen vainly try to hold the middle ground during that debate at Georgetown. According to Pamela Bentham of the Bentham Center for Free Speech: In moments of crisis, free expression makes us safer. Airing this “manifesto” should enable both citizens and leaders to make better informed decisions.
Maggie paid more attention to a report from the Post’s London correspondent, saying that the Alexandria project was now the focus of unprecedented global co-operation among intelligence agencies. In Downing Street, the “Cobra” group of ministers and officials is meeting twice daily, hoping to protect Britain’s libraries after the loss of the Bodleian and lending what support they can to counterparts overseas. As to identifying a perpetrator, the authorities admit privately that they have made little concrete progress.
Maggie set off, arriving just as soon as the app on her phone said she would. As she parked up, she wondered whether Edith Kelly would prove to be a delusional fantasist or the woman who might just stop the world being robbed of its past.
*
If ever there were a slamdunk candidate for prosecution under truth in advertising laws, ‘retirement homes’ were surely it. The names alone were almost always a lie. ‘Sunny Side’ would turn out to be a battery cage for the elderly, permanently shrouded in cloud. ‘Sea View’ would be a barracks, housing the aged in a penitentiary whose only glimpse of the ocean would come from the twenty-four/seven TV sets permanently tuned to the Weather Channel. And though they would always claim to be a ‘community’, too often they consisted of individuals seeing out their last days in atomized solitude.
In other words, Maggie Costello had low expectations of Shady Lanes. Expectations which turned out to be wrong.
This was a cluster of low-rise, one- or two-person units set in landscaped gardens surrounding a reservoir. There were signs
here and there, pointing out the birdlife that had been lured back to the area by means of reedbeds and marshes. The reservoir was circled, and the buildings linked, by narrow pathways, just wide enough for a couple to walk two abreast or for a mobility scooter. Maggie thought of her own mother and how she might have liked it here. Maybe.
Edith Kelly also confounded expectations. Sitting on a lawn chair in front of her ground-floor apartment, its compact verandah behind her, she was not the wizened old Irish lady Maggie had decided upon en route here. Instead, she was tall and agile, leaping to her feet when Maggie arrived, shaking her hand firmly. Her hair was white, but her first words on seeing Maggie were, ‘A redhead, just like me. Back in the day.’
She explained that she was an avid consumer of news, had been even when her husband, Terence, God rest his soul, was alive, but especially these days: ‘You have to be, don’t you, love?’ Her accent was New York via County Cork. Maggie felt like she was visiting an aunt.
She had seen the stories about Maggie, both the emails and that awful business with the pornography. ‘I tell you, I wouldn’t be young now for all the tea in China. Much harder for all of you than it was for us, love.’
And then she had read the manifesto. ‘I’m not saying I understand every word in it, because I don’t. But I read enough to hear his voice. Not how he spoke when he grew up and lived under our roof, mind, but how he talked after he’d been off to college. How he spoke, how he wrote. How he thought.’
‘You’re talking about your son.’
‘That’s right. Martin.’
Maggie decided to say as little as she could. She would sit and listen and assess. She reminded herself that the right starting point for such a conversation was, to quote William Keane, radical scepticism. For one thing, as soon as the scale of this threat had become clear to her, Maggie had assumed that this was not the work of a lone individual – how could it be? – but that of an organized, collective operation. For another, it would have required enormous resources: men capable of burning landmark buildings to the ground without detection did not come cheap, and nor did the contract killers who had doubtless been hired to murder the likes of Russell Aikman in Charlottesville or Judith Beaton in London.
