To Kill The Truth

by Sam Bourne

  Irritated not to find the relevant file straight away, he began minimizing a few of the two dozen windows open on the screen. Eventually that exposed a graphic in the top left that Jason instantly recognized. It was an animation, the same wobbling GIF displayed on the websites of each of the libraries that had been destroyed. Now it showed a single green bottle resting on the wall.

  ‘Just a little reminder.’

  Jason jumped, his nerves shot by exhaustion. He hadn’t heard anyone come near. Putting a coffee cup down on the desk by way of retaking his territory, Jim adopted a faux-narrator voice and, nodding towards the graphic, said, ‘And then there was one.’

  Jason got out of the chair, but kept jabbing at the keyboard: a signal that he was engaged in nothing that had to be concealed from his boss. ‘I was looking for the Washington list,’ he said.

  ‘Sure,’ Jim said, gently pulling the keyboard back to himself as his right hand shifted the mouse. ‘Here you go.’ The screen filled with a document in the same format as the other eleven they had used for similar reasons. Jason skimmed the items, listed for this last target: the Library of Congress.

  He was unsurprised by the first objects: the US Constitution, along with James Madison’s personal copy of the Bill of Rights which he had drafted and proposed, Thomas Jefferson’s text of the Declaration of Independence, written and amended in his own inked hand, and the Gettysburg Address delivered by Abraham Lincoln. There was the original map used by explorers Lewis and Clark as they ventured into the American west, as well as a complete collection of The North Star, the mid-nineteenth-century newspaper published by abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Its slogan: ‘Right is of no Sex – Truth is of no Color – God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren.’ There was a snippet of primitive film, capturing an employee of Thomas Edison as he sneezed, evidence of the great innovator’s first experiments with moving pictures, as well as the first ever film deposited for copyright.

  Despite the fatigue gnawing at his insides, Jason found himself enchanted by the treasures listed and itemized. The laboratory notebook of Alexander Graham Bell. One of the earliest known baseball cards. Gershwin’s full orchestral score for Porgy and Bess. And, Jason’s favourite, the personal effects extracted from the pockets of Lincoln hours after his assassination. Among them: two pairs of spectacles, a lens polisher, a penknife, a watch fob, a linen handkerchief, and a brown leather wallet containing a five-dollar bank note – one issued by Lincoln’s mortal enemies in the Confederacy – and eight newspaper clippings, including several warmly in praise of the president about to meet his fate.

  What riches, Jason thought. Without asking permission, he struck the relevant keys on Jim’s machine to send the document over to himself. Soon he would draw up the familiar battleplan, working out an order of priorities and a drill so that they would miss nothing. No point going to all these lengths and missing the crown jewels.

  Back at his desk, he thought again of the graphic on Jim’s computer. How over the last few days, as one after another of the Alexandria libraries were reduced to hot ash, the image would have changed: twelve, then eleven, then ten and on and on. And now there was just a single one left in the entire world.

  What strange work this was, aimed at such completeness. From this cabin on Melita Island he was close to a process that demanded wholesale destruction, across the planet and back through the centuries. He imagined himself inches away from a blaze that was somehow capable of tearing through space and time. He could feel the heat of it on his face.

  But there was that green bottle on Jim’s screen, teetering on the wall. There was only one left.

  Time to get to work.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Secret Service field office, Washington DC, 5.33pm

  Maggie could not have said how long she’d been asleep. The only clue was the way her clothes clung to her skin, her arms and neck coated in that film that tended to be the product only of deep unconsciousness. She didn’t remember lying down on this narrow prison bed at all; maybe she had just keeled over, the last several sleepless days finally demanding what was rightfully theirs.

  The door to the holding cell was now open and in came a guard. Female, hair pulled back in a severe ponytail, her shirt a colour that was not quite khaki but rather a deathly beige. Unsmiling, she did not let her eyes meet Maggie’s.

  She was carrying a tray, but there was no food on it. Instead, were several small items that Maggie could not identify, including a couple of white plastic cable-ties. The guard crouched down and began fiddling with the various pieces. It reminded Maggie of a toy Liz had once taken off one of their male cousins at Christmas in Cork: a physics kit involving simple circuits, batteries and lights. (Liz had said the boy had ‘given’ it to her, which was not quite true. But it was Liz’s interest in the toy at all, rather than the honesty of its acquisition, that had troubled their nan: she’d wondered if it meant Liz was, you know, not like other girls. Because I would like to be a great-grandmother one of these days.)

  ‘Can I ask what this is?’ Maggie said.

  ‘By order of the court,’ came the reply. Maggie waited to hear the rest before realizing that was, in fact, meant as a complete answer.

  ‘What is by order of the court?’

  ‘This.’

  ‘I know. But what is “this”?’

  The guard looked up, but not at Maggie. She was fiddling with an item on the tray, a shiny disc the size of a nickel, which Maggie guessed was a battery. Oh. Now she understood.

  ‘I need you to expose your right ankle for me.’

  That confirmed it.

  At that moment, with a sound that combined the bustle of a man carrying a briefcase, a stack of papers and at least twenty pounds in excess weight, Andrew Goldstein erupted into the room. His third visit of the day.

  ‘Hold on, hold on, what’s happening here? Officer, what are you doing to my client?’

  ‘By order of the court,’ she said again, blankly.

  ‘Not until I’ve had time to disclose and discuss the court’s order with my client.’

  The guard glanced upward, thought about ignoring the lawyer who was now sweating and exhaling loudly and then took a different course. ‘You have three minutes. Then I’m going to finish what I started.’

  *

  Maggie sat back in her chair, rubbed her eyes and, for no more than two or three seconds, allowed herself to enjoy the sensation of being back home, in her own sovereign space.

  The apartment was in a state, still strewn with the debris of the last several days. The front door had been replaced with a thin, chipboard alternative that was repulsive to look at – Andrew had arranged it – while the contents of several drawers were on the floor, exactly where the SWAT team had left them. But she had never loved this place more.

  She looked over at the bathroom door, delighting in the fact that it was both an actual bathroom and hers. The privacy, the autonomy, the liberty: she had not been deprived of her freedom for long, but now that she had it back she clung to it tightly.

  She looked back down at the desk. On it, framed by her hands, was the group photograph Uri had uncovered. She went through each face one more time. She started, yet again, with William Keane. He was her Greenwich – the centre of the known world – and she worked out from there.

  All of them were accounted for: McNamara, Kelly, the rest. The only puzzle was Tammy French, the woman with the sunglasses.

  She reached down to her ankle, touching the spot where the plastic bracelet rubbed against her skin.

  My advice is, forget it’s there. That had been Andrew’s suggestion as he explained that the court had granted her bail on condition that Maggie be fitted with an electronic tag. He’d been apologetic. ‘It’s a horrible thing, treating a person like a livestock animal. What are you, a goat? I’ll be filing a complaint with the—’

  But Maggie had cut him off, explaining that she could not have been more grateful. ‘Andrew. So long as I’
m out of here.’

  So he had stood back as the guard completed the fitting process, testing the electronic connection and the GPS and the tamper-proof casing. As the woman in her sour beige shirt worked, Andrew explained that the court had allowed tagging because it had been persuaded – by him, of course – that Maggie posed no threat to herself or to anyone else. He had further persuaded the court that no limits needed to be placed on Maggie’s movements, no curfew imposed. ‘But you will be tracked and monitored, by the Secret Service and whichever federal agency they choose to share that information with. So I don’t need to spell out, do I, that you must therefore abide by the—’

  ‘No, Andrew,’ she had said. ‘You don’t need to spell it out.’

  Maggie was still staring at the picture, wondering what she’d missed. Once again, she started with Keane himself. Andrea Ellis had insisted that the FBI had eliminated him as the hidden hand behind the fires and targeted killings. They had been crawling all over him for months, if not longer, monitoring all his contact with the outside world, both physical and digital. She had to take their word for it: the culprit was not Keane.

  But who else? She had ruled most of them out: they were either dead, dying or else so clearly without the means to stage an operation of this scale that they were eliminated just as surely.

  What about Mac? It was true that he had rich and powerful friends. His linguistic fingerprints were on that manifesto. And yet Maggie had found his denial of involvement convincing, not least because she knew that, given all that had happened, he too would have been under the constant and intense scrutiny of the authorities. He couldn’t have pulled this off without their knowledge.

  And so she came back, for the hundredth time, to the woman in shades. She was as sure as she could be that, once she found out more about her, she too would be ruled out. She’d be living a life of suburban blamelessness outside Tucson or Philadelphia, and Maggie would have nothing.

  She checked her phone again. She was waiting for an update from Uri, any info he’d gleaned at all on Tammy French. Her own searches had proved futile, trailing down the same dead ends he’d already exhausted.

  Maggie looked hard. Thanks to those sunglasses, there was so little to go on. If eyes were the window to the soul, here the curtains were firmly drawn. It was infuriating: she was the only person in this picture to have kept her shades on. If only Maggie could just reach in and take them off . . .

  There was nothing else you could see. Tammy was wearing a T-shirt: a tight, seventies number with some kind of image on it. Most of it was obscured: all Maggie could see were two white blobs, indistinct curved shapes, one a few inches above the other. With a squint, you might just about see the higher one as a triangle, the lower looked more like a banana. Maggie remembered some of the tie-dye numbers her mum kept at the back of her wardrobe, with the swirling patterns and prints of that era, every one of them random. This T-shirt was going to give nothing away; it was as opaque as Ms French’s sunglasses.

  And yet, it was all Maggie had. She couldn’t look away. Those two little white blobs were somehow nagging at her. They weren’t familiar exactly, and yet some corner of Maggie’s brain was worrying away at them.

  She went to the kitchen to pour herself a whisky. As she felt the warmth hit the back of her throat, a memory returned of a hokey old quiz show which Maggie and Liz would watch as kids when they were spectacularly bored, mainly to laugh at the super-nerdy contestants. It pitted two epically swotty families against each other, as they were asked questions about science, history or general knowledge. The two sisters would roll around at the lank-haired daughters, spotty sons and bespectacled mothers. And, almost hidden amongst the giggling and excluded from their mockery, was their own ability to answer a good portion of the questions.

  Not that they’d ever have admitted it, but a favourite round involved a close-up photograph. The contestants had to guess what the strange zig zag lines or jagged shapes signified, resolution coming only when the camera zoomed out to show the tread of a shoe or a front-door key. Both Maggie and Liz got rather good at it.

  Now Maggie went back to the living room and that photograph. She was looking again at the white blobs, meaningless on Tammy French’s T-shirt. If the camera were to pull out, and if the man standing in front of French were to get out of the way, what would it reveal?

  Hold on.

  Suddenly Maggie saw a hint of coherence in those shapes. Were they not random after all, not even abstract, but one end of a line drawing? Indeed, not just any line drawing, but a logo?

  Maggie reached for her laptop and typed in the single word ‘logos’ and then opted to see only the images. Instantly the screen filled with the emblems of soft drinks, hamburgers and shoes that would be recognized the world over. She scrolled through them all, but not one of them mapped onto the image on that T-shirt.

  Think, she told herself. Think.

  This woman, Tammy French, was young. She was a student. It was the 1980s. She wouldn’t have been wearing a corporate brand. T-shirts were for causes.

  Now Maggie typed in the words ‘charity logos’ and before her was an array of designs, most of them involving hearts, outstretched palms or children. And then she saw it, as clear to her as that moment of revelation on the old TV quiz show. An image of a skipping young deer, in profile.

  Maggie grabbed for a piece of paper and held it to the screen, covering most of the animal, so that only the rightmost portion was visible. What you saw were two white blobs, one a soft triangle, the other a banana shape. They were, in fact, part of the deer’s face and one of its front legs. This was the logo of AFN, the American Fund for Nature.

  It was disappointing, no doubt about it. The organization was huge; support for it was generic rather than revealing; and it bore no relation to the project of destroying the world’s memory of its past. Whatever satisfaction there was in decoding the image – the same pleasure she and Liz had experienced as TV viewers – had given way to the frustration of colliding with another dead end.

  Going through the motions, Maggie now did a quick search of AFN. The organization was younger than she would have guessed, founded in the 1970s, which meant it would have been just a few years old when Tammy was promoting it across her chest at Stanford. Back then, it seemed, it was a fairly radical outfit: more animal rights than animal welfare. But these days AFN was all fluffy bunnies and cute pandas, safely mainstream. A quick survey of the current board showed a line-up of the great and the good, a couple of Hollywood names and some corporate chieftains, among them the prolific giver, society hostess and free speech enthusiast Pamela Bentham, the same Pamela Bentham who had endowed the centre that hosted that debate Maggie had attended at Georgetown several lifetimes ago. Of French, there was no sign.

  Maggie clicked through each of the listed donors in turn, not even in hope let alone expectation. AFN was surely the tamest kind of corporate giving, a bland, inoffensive way to tick the ‘social responsibility’ box in time for the annual company report. Board members attempted to project some profound, long-standing connection with animals – Walter spends his weekends riding herd on his Montana ranch – but none of it was very convincing. Interestingly, Bentham was the one whose connection seemed deepest. Now serving as our Life President, Pamela has been with AFN from the very start, supporting our work since our founding.

  Maggie scratched again at her ankle. How long had she spent at this now? It was pointless. All she had established was that Tammy French wore an AFN T-shirt back in the 1980s, when it was a bit edgier. There was no sign she was still involved. Her name did not appear anywhere on AFN’s website, just like it did not appear anywhere else.

  Maggie wondered again about Bentham. If she was involved from the beginning, back when AFN was quite niche, was it possible she had known French? Maybe the group was small enough then.

  Now she searched for Bentham, and Wikipedia confirmed that the two women were about the same age: both in their mid-fifties. But the en
try was very sketchy on her education. There was no sign of a college degree that Maggie could see.

  Maggie went to a Vanity Fair profile of Bentham that referred to a ‘college romance’ and another that talked about a junior year abroad in Europe. But neither said anything about where exactly she had studied.

  The Vanity Fair piece was accompanied by the requisite lavish photoshoot, in which Bentham posed with her husband and, in one picture, her billionaire father in their enormous, antebellum home, a sometime Virginia plantation. Alongside it was a gallery of smaller shots, including a black-and-white image of a young Bentham bottle-feeding a lamb as part of her work with AFN.

  Maggie scrolled lower and now there was another cluster of pictures. The central one was from two decades earlier, showing Bentham in a shoulderless ballgown, dancing at a New York fundraiser with her husband, then a rising star on Wall Street. Next to it was what seemed to be a holiday snap, the couple sunning themselves on the deck of a yacht near Antibes, France, shielding themselves with sunglasses and matching his-and-hers baseball caps.

  Which was when it hit her with perfect clarity. Of course, of course, of course. It all made sense. She remembered Mac’s words: Follow the money.

  Her hands were trembling as she reached for the phone. She dialled his number and, thank God, he answered after one ring.

  ‘Uri, it’s me. I need you to find something out, right now. I’ll explain but—’

  ‘Slow down, Maggie. What’s going on?’

  ‘There’s no time to slow down, I just need you to—’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I’ve worked it out.’

  ‘Worked what out?’

  ‘Tammy French. I know who she is.’

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Court 73, Richmond, Virginia, 2.40pm

  ‘Mr Keane, your closing argument please.’

  For a moment, the courtroom, packed and hushed, wondered if William Keane had not heard the judge. Those jammed into the public gallery craned to see the man in the white suit arranging his papers at his desk, his head bowed. Only after four long seconds had become five, did he finally look upward – the lead actor who knows never to rush the final speech.