To Kill The Truth

by Sam Bourne

  Maggie had not yet demanded the right to a phone call with a family member. She demanded it now.

  ‘Liz? It’s Maggie. Long story, but I need your help.’

  She proceeded to tell her sister as concisely and as calmly as she could that she was being held in a cell by the Secret Service. ‘Jesus fuck,’ was Liz’s considered response.

  ‘Listen, I need you to look something up for me. Are you in front of a computer?’ Maggie gave sweet and blessed thanks that, where Liz was concerned, the answer to that question was almost always yes. And it was now.

  ‘OK,’ she said, giving her the string of four or five words she wanted Liz to search. Her sister listed the results and Maggie told her which item she should read out loud. It was an article from The Times of London, relatively recent.

  Liz read out the first line. ‘A Scottish technology company has used computers to recreate the speech President John F. Kennedy was set to deliver in Dallas the day he was assassinated.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Maggie said. ‘Keep going.’

  ‘Sound engineers formed the 2,590 words of the address that Kennedy wrote but never gave by trawling through 831 of his speeches and radio addresses. From those, they extracted 116,777 sound units, each of which was then split in half and analyzed for pitch and energy. The half units, known as phones, were each about 0.04 seconds long and had to be tested next to each other to ensure that they did not clash. It was those phones the engineers used to form the words in Kennedy’s text.’

  Liz was doing her best, but her voice was trembling. Maggie had been careful to avoid the words ‘jail’ or ‘prison’ but ‘cell’ had just slipped out. She knew her sister well enough to know that, no matter what words were now coming out of her mouth, all Liz was thinking of was that cell.

  As her sister read on, two lines of the Times story leapt out. The first was a quote from the founder of the tech company that had made the breakthrough, hailing its potential as a gift to those losing the use of their voice to illness. ‘There are only forty to forty-five “phones” in English, so once you’ve got that set you can generate any word in the English language.’ The second stated flatly that ‘the technology needs only three to four hours of voice recordings to run clearly’.

  They wouldn’t even have needed that long, Maggie thought: it was a short voicemail message, no more than fifty or sixty words long. And recordings of Maggie’s voice were out there. Given what had gone down in the White House, and how much material had been released during the congressional hearings that followed, it wouldn’t be a surprise if just a few clicks took you to recordings of the phone calls she’d made when she worked there. Probably there were whole phrases that could be cut and pasted in their entirety, with no editing required. Now that she thought about it, she might even have once uttered the words, ‘Remember, I’m a US citizen: the Second Amendment applies to me too!’ Given the nature of office banter, she couldn’t rule it out.

  She almost admired the ingenuity of it. Probably if you listened a hundred times, through headphones, you’d notice tiny, microscopically uneven cadences here and there. But to the regular ear, you’d never know it wasn’t real. It had convinced the Secret Service and Goldstein. It had convinced Maggie herself. And why wouldn’t it? It was her voice, after all.

  So who had done it? Her first thought was the White House itself. Hadn’t her evening with McNamara left her wondering about the sheer scale of the Alexandria project, a task beyond the reach of most, but comfortably within the scope of the US government? Cobbling together a fake voice message would have been easy for anyone within the government machine: they would have had access to the archived White House recordings and a hotline to the Secret Service, to say nothing of the Chief of Staff’s voicemail. For them, it would have been a neat, in-house operation.

  But the timing was crucial.

  ‘Maggie, are you still there?’

  ‘Sorry, yes. I was just thinking. Listen, Liz, that thing I asked you to do last night? Don’t say what it was, but did you do it?’

  ‘Yes, straight after we hung up. Why, has that got something to do—’

  ‘Thanks, Liz. Thank you so much.’

  That had to be it. Within hours of asking Liz to poke around in the Keane alumni chatroom, she had been swatted. In a way, her plan had succeeded. She had lured her quarry out into the open.

  Maggie cleared her throat. ‘Today’s Friday, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course it is. Fuck me, are you losing track of time in there or something?’

  ‘No, no. I know it’s Friday. I just mean, you’re seeing your therapist today.’

  ‘Are you about to take the piss out of me again?’

  ‘No. I’m not. Listen, Liz. I’ve been thinking about what you said the other day, about being on the brink of a breakthrough. You know, about your childhood.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I think I know what it is.’

  ‘You know? How could you know?’

  ‘Because I was there, you daft cow. It’s about . . . Ma.’

  ‘I had a feeling it was something to do with—’

  ‘Let me just say it. I’d rather you hear it from me than from Charles bloody Aznavour.’

  ‘Yves.’

  ‘Whatever. The thing is, Liz. Our ma was—’

  The word stuck in Maggie’s throat. She hadn’t expected it to, but it wouldn’t come out. Not without effort. When she finally pushed it out, it made a crack in her voice. ‘Ma was an alcoholic.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She had terrible trouble with drink, Liz. Especially after Dad, you know, when it was just the three of us. We’d get home from school, and she’d be slumped on the doorstep.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘I wish it wasn’t true, but it is. She’d get into fights in the shops, she’d fall over. She couldn’t cope. That’s why we were sent off to the convent.’

  ‘But . . . you always told me she was ill. That she was having a bad day.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Or that she’d taken cough medicine that didn’t agree with her.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You lied,’ Liz said slowly, as if the meaning was only appearing before her now. ‘You’ve lied to me all these years.’ Her voice was trembling.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Liz.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything? Why did you never tell me the truth?’

  ‘I think I was trying to protect you. That’s what I was always trying to do, Liz. Always trying to shield you from the situation. From her. You were only eight. You were barely older than Ryan.’

  ‘But you were so young, Mags. You were eleven, for Christ’s sake. Does this mean . . . that time, when your eye was bleeding. And I could hear her shouting in the kitchen. Had she . . .’

  ‘Liz, it’s such a long time ago.’

  ‘Had she hit you?’

  ‘There’s no point. Not after all these—’

  ‘And you took me to Nan’s. You bundled me out of the house, even when you were bleeding. You were just a child.’ Maggie could hear her sister’s tears and snot through the phone.

  ‘I had to keep you safe, Liz.’

  ‘And you’ve been carrying this alone, all this time?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘Why wasn’t it like that?’

  ‘Because I hardly remembered it myself.’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’

  ‘It’s true. I think I buried it, Liz.’

  ‘But that’s so bad. It’s so unhealthy.’

  ‘I’m not so sure. I mean, look at you. Why did you need to know any of this stuff? You were fine until you started seeing Yves Whatshisname. You were so much better off not knowing, so much better off not remembering.’

  ‘But that never works, Mags.’

  ‘It’s worked for you! Look at you. You’re a brilliant teacher, you’re a fantastic mother – such a good mother, Liz.’ Her voice faltered again. ‘I wanted at least one o
f us to turn out OK.’

  At that, Liz’s tears turned into hard, convulsive sobs. ‘But all these fires and everything. You always said history matters. The past matters. And yet . . .’

  She couldn’t finish the sentence. All she could manage was: ‘I wish I was there with you. I hate living so far apart.’

  ‘Me too, Liz. Me too.’

  They spoke for a few minutes longer, agreeing to see each other just as soon as they could. When they were done, Maggie blew her nose loudly and wiped her eyes. And then she asked the officer on duty for permission to make one more call.

  ‘I want my lawyer,’ she said.

  Chapter Forty-One

  US Secret Service field office, Washington DC, 2.55pm

  The television, Maggie concluded, was less a concession than a pacification measure. Having a TV set on, albeit muted and tuned to Fox News, was a way to stop the inmates getting restless.

  Right now, Maggie was staring at it, transfixed. Maybe it was because this was a building she had actually visited, in a city she had been to several times. Whatever the explanation, the sight of the British Library in London reduced to a charred ruin reached her in a way the other fires had not. She felt her eyes pricking at the sight of it.

  Perhaps it was the exhaustion. Or, more likely, the frustration – of being here, locked up, when this threat, this faceless menace, was still active and raging. The TV news had shown the image that now filled the British Library website: a single bottle, alone and fragile, hanging on that wall.

  She tried to picture the person or people behind this rampage: killing historians, survivors and eyewitnesses, destroying archives, both physical and digital, all over the world. But in her mind, the threat had only one form. All she could see was fire: stealthy, silent but utterly lethal. She imagined herself in a cabin surrounded by a blazing forest, knowing that the flames were getting nearer, the heat rising and there was nothing she could do about it. She was trapped.

  A detective came to interview her, but she just repeated her insistence that she had been asleep at 2.41am and that she had not left that voicemail message. All she would say is, ‘I don’t know how it was done, but I did not leave that message.’

  She had decided to wait for the return of Andrew Goldstein before unspooling her theory. Better he hear it first. When he came, in the mid-afternoon, he listened patiently as she explained. For a moment she saw a look cross his face that she didn’t like, the look the sane have when humouring the unhinged. She saw herself as she must have looked: the crazy Irish chick, unslept and unkempt, raving on about digital software and surveillance and JFK, for Christ’s sake.

  But that expression of indulgence passed as soon as it had come, like a cloud moving across the sun. A second later, Andrew was back, listening intently, scribbling notes.

  ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘The only problem will be time.’

  ‘Time?’

  ‘This is not a quick argument to make. We’ll need to find a technical expert, someone who—’

  ‘But it’s not that complicated, Andrew. Someone made a collage out of bits of my voice. Just like they stuck my face on a porn film. They’re creating fake evidence. That’s what this is about. It’s the flipside of burning all these libraries. They’re showing what they can do, what they plan to do. They’ll get rid of all the real evidence, and then they’ll replace it with whatever garbage they like. And technology lets them do it.’

  There was that look again. Only fleeting, but sufficiently unambiguous, it made Maggie pine for Andrew’s dead brother. Stuart would understand. Stuart would believe her. Stuart would see the danger.

  Though even as she had thought that, she remembered the countless times her old mentor had made her prove whatever claim she had put before him. Hunch is not enough, kiddo. I could care less about your instincts. If I want ‘intuition’, I’ll take a yoga class. Evidence and proof: he accepted nothing less.

  So she did not protest when Andrew said he would have to make some calls and consult with colleagues. His main focus now, he said, was on bail: he needed to prove that Maggie posed no danger and would not try to abscond. ‘We may need to surrender your passport.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ she said, offering a thin smile. ‘I’ve got another one.’

  They said goodbye and she had more time to stare at the silent TV as it carried those pictures from London – a burned husk of a building; a black, acrid sky; grieving library staff; sober politicians; a visiting royal on the scene – on a loop. She read the subtitled words as they crawled, in broken English, across the screen. In among the punditry and speculation, one line recurred:

  Of the dozen libraries in the Alexandria Group, only one remains left untouched.

  An hour or so later – though it could have been much more – Maggie had a visitor. When she was led into the visiting room, she wondered if she’d ever been more delighted to see him than she was now.

  ‘Oh, Uri.’

  ‘What? Don’t pretend you’re surprised to see me. Where else would I be?’

  She felt that same pricking sensation in her eyes. She dabbed at them and said, ‘Sorry. I’m just so . . .’ She wanted to say ‘tired’, and also ‘grateful’, and maybe a hundred other things, but nothing would come. Her voice crumbled into a croak.

  ‘I know,’ Uri said. ‘I know.’

  He moved to hug her, until the guard in the corner bellowed a reminder that ‘Physical contact is prohibited’. Uri shrugged and sat down, on the opposite side of a table, as if he were another interrogator. But still she could catch the scent of him and feel the effect it had on her insides.

  ‘I brought something for you.’ He reached into his shoulder bag and pulled out a photograph. It was the Stanford class portrait that Maggie had found on her doorstep last night.

  ‘Yeah, I saw that. I should have said. Thanks so—’

  ‘No. I’ve got more information now. I’ve filled in more of the blanks.’

  He pointed at each face in turn, offering names now for all of them. For each one, he offered a line of potted biography, one that served as a concise, common sense exoneration.

  ‘This guy died in 2004. Just behind him, this one, was a star of the class, apparently: he now has early onset dementia . . . That guy is the administrator of the San Francisco Opera.’

  Maggie pointed at a tall, smiling man with big eighties hair. ‘What about him?’

  ‘That’s Clive Soderberg. Interesting. He became a regular, mainstream historian. Presented a podcast: “Your History”.’

  ‘Presented? Past tense?’

  ‘Yeah. He was found dead in a boating accident last week.’

  ‘An “accident”?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Uri kept going, his finger hovering over each of the bright young faces. ‘Him you know,’ he said, as he reached Crawford McNamara. ‘And him.’ He pointed at Keane.

  ‘What about them?’ Maggie indicated the small peppering of women.

  ‘Oh yes, I got more on them. These two I had already,’ he said, explaining that the long-haired beauty on the left was an overseas student, now known as Anna-Sofia de Lance-Holmes, having married a London property magnate and become one of the pre-eminent society hostesses of that city. ‘The only public involvement I can see is that she supports children’s theatre companies. Drama groups, amateur dance.’

  ‘Nothing in our area?’

  ‘Not that I can see.’

  ‘And this one?’ She was pointing at the woman in the Coke-bottle glasses.

  ‘She practises medical law in Toronto. Defends victims of hospital accidents.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Maggie had picked up Uri’s pen and was chewing the top of it. She could have killed for a cigarette.

  ‘That one,’ Uri said, picking out a striking woman not far from Keane. ‘I did wonder about her. There was some talk of an affair with Keane, way back. But I couldn’t nail it down.’

  ‘Really?’ Maggie’s mind was turning over.

  ‘
Don’t get too excited. It’s not her.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She died three years ago.’

  Maggie’s finger had stopped at the cool customer, her eyes and much of her face concealed by large, eighties sunglasses. ‘And her?’

  ‘That’s Tammy French.’

  ‘OK?’

  ‘I know she was in the class, because she’s mentioned in the records. She took the course. But she barely registers in the alumni blog. I think she was pretty peripheral.’

  ‘Or they were all so sexist, they didn’t notice the women unless they looked like models.’

  ‘Definitely a possibility. But it’s hard to know, because there’s just nothing else on her.’

  ‘How do you mean, nothing else?’

  ‘Online. I’ve searched. I mean, there’s people with that name, but they’re not her. Wrong age, wrong place.’

  ‘What about all those college alumni things?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit weird?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t—’

  ‘You’re saying, the college newsletter or whatever mentions everyone else, but—’

  ‘They don’t mention exactly. Sometimes it’s literally just their name and the dates they were at—’

  ‘But she doesn’t even get that?’

  ‘No.’

  Maggie stared hard now at the blurred face in the photo, trying to see behind those oversized dark glasses. ‘I really do have to get out of here, Uri. We need to know everything we can about Ms Tammy French. And we need to do it soon.’

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Melita Island, Montana, 3.29pm

  All previous boundaries of rank and status had now eroded entirely, so that Jason didn’t hesitate to sit in Jim’s chair and type into his keyboard as if it were his own. The demands on them had been so complete for so long, none of them had any energy left for social niceties, including deference to Jim as manager or the attendant sanctity of his workspace. Jason was looking for something and if that meant commandeering his boss’s machine, so be it.