To Kill The Truth

by Sam Bourne

  It took her a while to work out what she was looking at, but when a couple of the agents filed out, she got a clearer view. Almost every inch of available floor space was filled with tottering piles, wobbling columns, of books. Apparently Martin Kelly, the Bookburner, had decided he could live without running water, without human company, without a cupboard for his clothes – but that he could not live without books.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  FBI headquarters, Washington DC, 7.08pm

  Maggie stood towards the back as she listened to Craig Lofgren praise the ‘team effort and professionalism that made today possible’. The Director did not hint at his disappointment, but everyone present knew this was not the outcome he had wanted. Much better to apprehend a prime suspect alive rather than dead. But still, he wanted to acknowledge those who had ‘removed the threat which the FBI concluded Martin Kelly posed to the nation and the world’.

  There was a smattering of applause in Maggie’s direction when the Director said, ‘We would not be here were it not for the tenacity and ingenuity of one individual who is not even a member of the Bureau: Maggie Costello.’ She tried to feign a smile, even though all she could see was the face of Edith Kelly and all she could hear were the words the old lady had left her with: Will you ask them not to be too rough with him? The truth is, he’s a gentle boy.

  Maggie dipped her head to recognize those who applauded her, even though she knew those same people would have crossed the street to avoid her twenty-four hours earlier. Those same people who had sniggered, or worse, when they thought they had seen her naked and on her back in a #sextape.

  She had also listened politely as a huddle had watched the president address the nation on television, his live statement intercut with still photographs of himself in the Situation Room, apparently commanding the operation to ‘bring Kelly to justice’, as the White House statement euphemistically referred to his death. She had clocked the fleeting side-eye she received from Andrea Ellis when the president said, ‘People said we wouldn’t find the guy behind these terrible crimes. Horrible crimes. But I found him and I took him out.’ The team around her were too self-disciplined to groan audibly at that.

  Her phone buzzed with the arrival of a text, associated with a list of numbers she once again could only guess at. She clicked on it.

  M, I know you understand why we had to do what we did. But I couldn’t be more grateful. I owe you a great debt of gratitude. D.

  Maggie registered the ‘we’ for the bitter pill and the ‘I’ for the sugar coating. Politicians, even ones who used to be your friends: they couldn’t help themselves.

  It was during all this, not twenty minutes after the fatal raid in Montana, that word came through of the fire at the National Library of Iran, the largest library campus in the Middle East. As Maggie headed back to her apartment, she listened to the talking heads – the audio of cable TV, carried on the radio – as they reassured their audiences that this latest development did not undermine in any way the significance of Kelly’s ‘elimination’.

  There’s a delay, a time lag, if you will, in these things. Clearly, this was a huge undertaking masterminded by Kelly and he’d have set some of these wheels in motion days, weeks or even months ago. Of course, those wheels will still be turning for a day or two longer. That’s perfectly natural.

  I think that’s right, Kirsten. It’s not like, say, a serial killer where, once you get the guy, the murders stop. This was clearly a vast operation and law enforcement sources are certainly clear in telling this network that they would always expect some ‘momentum’ in a situation like this. This is not denting their confidence in any way. Besides, and this is new reporting this hour, they are already looking closely at financial transactions involving Kelly, bank transfers and the like which put the Montana recluse at the centre of a global network of—

  Because of course the question of financial resources has been a big one here, right? However Kelly organized this thing, it would have cost a lot of money.

  That’s right. So this new information could supply that missing piece of the puzzle . . .

  Maggie went back to her phone, scrolling through the texts. I bet you had something to do with this, from Liz. I knew you’d do it, from Uri.

  She looked at Twitter. The Iran news – complete with graphic now showing just three green bottles – had set off yet another argument about jihadist violence. One camp said the destruction of a library in Tehran, a world capital of Islamism, was further proof that ‘radical Islamist terror’ had not played any role in this wave of terror. Others denounced such thinking as moronic: surely it was obvious that this was a Sunni attack on Shia Islam, whose global centre was Tehran. That latter group further subdivided into two camps, one that believed that evidence would soon emerge showing that Kelly had recently converted to Sunni Islam and had been radicalized online, and another that insisted the hermit in the Montana cabin was clearly a fall guy for a larger, more shadowy conspiracy.

  None of it persuaded Maggie and yet something didn’t feel right. Part of it was the notion of a lone wolf, an oddball, like Kelly, at the centre of such an accomplished and advanced global enterprise. The picture Edith Kelly had sketched of her son made clear that he was smart, dogmatic and, potentially, violent. But did that make him plausible as a criminal mastermind, funnelling cash and instructions around the globe? She wasn’t sure.

  And part of it was the whispered exchange she’d had with Andrea Ellis as she’d left. Ellis had explained that she was not getting ‘full co-operation’ from the agents involved in the raid on Kelly’s cabin. She suspected they were covering their traces in the matter of his shooting. She had, however, received a tip, as yet unconfirmed, that in his final seconds Kelly had not been reaching for a weapon at all, but for a black notebook held in his desk drawer. Before Maggie had a chance to speak, Andrea told her that of course she was getting the notebook fully analyzed, but so far the handwriting it contained was ‘barely legible’.

  Maggie pushed her apartment door open and felt her foot catch on something as she walked in. She looked down and saw a large envelope, unaddressed and unstamped. She picked it up, shook it and, unaccountably, held it to her ear. It did not rattle.

  She didn’t dare risk falling onto the sofa: once down, she’d never get up. So she headed to the kitchen, poured herself a shot of Ardbeg and, still standing, though with her bottom resting on the kitchen counter, she opened the envelope.

  Inside was a photograph. It was a group portrait, in landscape format, like a team photo. It was black and white, the resolution furry. Maggie wondered if it was a reproduction: a photo of a photo.

  Judging from the hairstyles, this was from the mid-eighties. At the centre was a face she recognized.

  She looked back in the envelope and was relieved to see another sheet, more relieved still when she saw that it was a handwritten note from Uri.

  Took a while, but here it is. Keane’s class, plus a few others, Stanford 1986. Not nailed everyone yet, but I’m getting there.

  She turned the sheet over to see that Uri had provided an extended caption, identifying those in the picture: back row, left to right . . .

  Maggie scanned the names, confirming that the familiar face dead centre was, indeed, a young or younger William Keane. In the bottom corner, three from the right, and staring straight ahead, was Martin Kelly.

  She thought of his mother, sitting alone in that room in the Shady Lanes retirement home. What torture was she putting herself through now? If she had not emailed Maggie, her son would be alive now. If Maggie had not made that call to Andrea Ellis . . .

  His face stared out. While the others were smiling and basking in what looked like summer sunshine, Kelly seemed detached from the others. Had he set himself apart? Or had they rejected him, the son of a New York construction worker disdained by all these Ivy League prodigies?

  As she pictured Stanford in the eighties, Maggie’s eye was caught by another familiar face. Jesus, he
’d changed. There he was, with a full head of hair. He looked cynical even then, his smile knowing. He was standing just a couple of places away from Keane. A young, lean Crawford McNamara.

  Hardly any women, Maggie noticed. A couple of gorgeous young things, a cool customer in shades, a bluestocking in Coke-bottle glasses. She consulted the caption. Uri had found names for two of them, but nothing that Maggie recognized. They’d be middle-aged women now, Maggie reflected. And they clearly hadn’t been at the centre of the action then.

  It was brilliant work by Uri, and utterly typical of him. His documentaries always won praise for their archive footage; somehow he was able to find pictures that eluded everyone else. He’d done it again.

  More than that, though, he was signalling that she was not alone, that she had an ally. Forget roses or chocolates or candlelit dinners. To her, exhausted to the point of hallucination, the hand-delivery of this photograph, and the work that would have unearthed it, seemed the most romantic gesture she could imagine.

  Her plan was to look closely at the picture in the morning, guided by Mac’s advice to follow the money. But the thought of Mac brought back something else he had said, albeit with less of a flourish.

  He had been talking about his fellow students of William Keane, how they had stayed in touch. On one of those private forums. Password-protected, two-step verification, the whole thing. If you were a European faggot, you’d call it a salon. We were trading ideas, working on language, honing arguments.

  She reached for her phone, found the text from Liz and used it to dial her number.

  ‘Can I ask your help with something techie?’

  ‘Have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?’

  ‘Ha ha. Listen, I’ll spare you the details. Someone’s told me about a website – I mean, it’s more a closed chatroom kind of a thing. I’m not asking you to hack into it or anything – I know your rules – but I basically want them to know that I went there, tried to look around. Like, when the post leave you that note: “We tried to deliver your parcel but you weren’t in”, that kind of thing. Is there a way for me to do that?’

  ‘Why would you want to do that?’

  Maggie felt the pitch of her voice rise. The strain of keeping it light. ‘You know, like giving a dog a gentle poke. I want them to know that I know they exist.’

  ‘So that they know you’re on to them?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it exactly like that. But yes, sort of. And I don’t want it to look deliberate. I want them to think I’ve left my fingerprints by accident, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘What the fuck are you up to now, Margaret?’

  ‘You don’t want to know. Just my usual stuff and nonsense.’ A phrase their mother had used. ‘So. What do you say? Can it be done?’

  ‘It could. What you’d need to do is get control of the DNS entry for your IP address, which is normally governed by your ISP. But if you did control it, you could create a reverse DNS which would point back to a domain name, which could identify you. So yes.’

  ‘And now in English?’

  ‘Your internet service provider – you know, whoever you pay for your broadband – issue you with a unique number—’

  ‘You know what: when I said, “Can it be done?” what I really meant was, “Can you do it for me?” Please.’

  There was a silence at the end of the phone. Maggie had another go. ‘Like that time you took over my machine and you had the cursor whizzing around by magic—’

  ‘It’s not cute, you know, Maggie, your ignorance in this area. Not cute at all. It’s completely irresponsible in this day and age. What about that coding course I found? I sent you a link.’

  ‘Yeah, that did look really good. But I think the dates clashed—’

  ‘Christ, Maggie! You have to learn this stuff. Promise me.’

  ‘So you’ll do it?’

  ‘Only if you promise.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Swear.’

  ‘I swear.’

  ‘On our ma’s life?’

  ‘Ma’s dead, Liz.’

  ‘All right. But you know what I mean.’

  ‘OK. I swear on Ma’s life.’

  ‘Good. I’ll do it. But this is the last fucking time, I mean it.’

  ‘And you’ll make it look like it’s me? It won’t show up as you?’

  ‘No. I’ll rent a virtual machine and set up the reverse DNS on that.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means but it sounds great.’

  ‘You are so doing that course.’

  ‘And they’ll notice you? Being me, I mean.’

  ‘That’s a point actually.’ Maggie could hear her sister thinking. ‘Depends on the nature of the host site. I’ll just search for pages that don’t exist, or have them running around searching for things, using up capacity. Basic denial of service stuff. That’ll get their attention.’

  ‘But not too much, right? It’s got to look like it’s just me, rooting around.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll do just enough to get them looking at their logs. It’ll be fine. The kids are asleep: I’ll do it right away.’

  Maggie gave her sister as much information as she had – Keane, Stanford, McNamara, the dates – and thanked her again. They promised to talk soon.

  A last check of Twitter before she staggered into bed brought the news that, by now, had become numbingly familiar.

  Breaking: Russian State Library ablaze, says TASS

  There were photos, like those she had now seen a dozen times, of a night sky filled with plumes of orange. The grand, classical porticoed entrance of the Moscow building was already obscured behind clouds of that same black smoke, generated by the burning of wood and paper. Maybe it was her near-delirious state of sleeplessness, but as she watched twenty seconds of video footage, she was sure that, if only for a moment, she could see a trail of Cyrillic characters rising into the air like vapour, the letters scorched off the page and soaring into the sky, where they – and the poems, novels and scholarly histories they once formed – would be lost forever.

  The instant commentary had begun, of course.

  The “It must be Moscow” crowd have gone very quiet, haven’t they? All those who accused Russia of these library burnings should hang their heads in shame.

  Another had the words Waiting for an apology from the Russiaphobes like . . . attached to a GIF of a child drumming his fingers on a table.

  I hope those who’ve been blaming Russia for the #BookBurnings will publicly recant.

  And no less swift were the replies.

  If you were in the Kremlin, widely blamed for #BookBurnings, wouldn’t staging a fire in the Russian State Library be *exactly* what you’d do? #bitconvenient #falseflag

  Someone else had posted a screengrab of the Moscow library website. Only two green bottles, wobbling more precariously than ever.

  *

  At last she was in bed. Maggie turned off the phone and felt herself descend into sleep even before her eyes were fully closed. In her dreams, the flames were sending not just letters, but whole words, along with punctuation marks and page numbers, high up into the clouds, higher and higher until they were gone.

  Friday

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Washington DC, 3.40am

  The noise sounded primal, like a throbbing from deep in the bowels of the earth. It broke into her dreams, where it seemed to emerge from a dark, narrow pit, perhaps a dry, long-abandoned well. The sound got louder, as if it was rising higher from the well and was about to reach the surface.

  Maggie opened her eyes to hear her heart thumping. It took her a full second to understand that the sound was continuing, that she had not left it behind in her sleep. It was here, right now. A loud, thick pounding: wood against wood. And it was very near.

  She got out of bed, glimpsing the clock on the nightstand: 3.40am. Wearing only shorts and a vest, she opened her bedroom door.

  What did she see first? When she tried to re
collect the moment later, it would prove hard to disentangle the multiple shocks she sustained in the space of a single second, to separate one from another. But, oddly, the first image to surface in her memory was the cluster of red dots that suddenly appeared, hovering like fireflies on her white vest.

  She saw the front door of her apartment, flattened and off its hinges. Framed in the open doorway were two men, gripping a thick wooden battering ram, one handle each. It had the same dimensions, the same unarguable solidity, as the central roof beam you might find in an old Irish farmhouse. It made no sense, but somehow the beam itself looked guilty, sheepish even: for it had just knocked down her front door.

  Only then, last, did her mind take in the dozen or more armed men whose machine guns were trained on her. Clad in black, their giant, hulking bodies bulked up with protective armour, equipment and squawking radios, they filled every corner of her field of vision: four inside the apartment, two on each side of the narrow hallway, two more on the other side of the front door, two more lying commando-style on the communal staircase, one on the landing above, the other spreadeagled on the steps below. Every barrel of every gun was aimed at her and now, though only slowly, she understood the red dots. Instinct told her there were more red dots, more fireflies, that she could not see: concentrated, no doubt, on her forehead.

  And then, as if she had been underwater, holding her breath, and only now burst up through the water’s surface, there was a sudden rush of noise in her ears.

  ‘Put your hands in the air!’

  ‘Right now! In the fucking air!’

  ‘Freeze! Do not fucking move!’

  It sounded like every one of these men was shouting at her, deploying the full force of their lungs. The saliva of the one – what was he? A soldier? A police officer? – closest to her landed on her left cheek as he bellowed his command: ‘Don’t move, bitch!’