Borderless Deceit (2 page)

Once more the sliding doors opened and shut. Beausejour was back, his face ashen, his voice resigned. “It's not just us,” he said. “It's everywhere. There's nothing left…” As this sunk in, the consternation grew and a din revved up, and above it rose Beausejour's tinny voice. “…and the High Council is going into emergency session.”

The scene – the despondency, the hand-wringing – it irked me and so I turned away. Back in my cell I began to think.

Weeks later, after I had provided the details of my discovery of the plague's origin to our friends to the south, they completed their report, which then duly appeared before the High Council. It revealed that the plague's origin was the Romanian satellite dish. The killer program sent from there, the American report noted in a mixture of techno-babble and bureaucratese, had been ingeniously conceived:

…It can be deduced that fixed into the meta-instructional layers of the target communications network were pathways which, through previous reconnoitring, the intruding alien presence came to understand how to exploit. It actively engaged them to access the network's central repositories of information, as well as designated repository extensions. The intruding presence had a search and destroy nature and supported itself with auto-initiated feedback loops so as to guarantee 100% destruction. From what has been ascertained, the process was characterised by a hyper-complexity, the result of a high skill level assiduously applied during the design phase of the full operation
.

“The turkeys that did it were smart for sure!” barked Heywood after the report came out. “Any layman would come to that conclusion. Who needs the Yanks to tell us that?” Finding the perpetrator, he swore to all
who listened, would be his next most urgent mission. “I will not rest,” he added for good measure.

Irving Heywood ran Service Operations with an absolutist's touch which had earned him the corridor nickname
Czar
. He considered few to be his equal, and certainly not the Americans. As soon as their report appeared he began belittling it. He hated its style and he denied its implied technological leadership. Mostly though, he couldn't stand that they had issued it without him having asked for it. But he did study the picture on the front cover, the satellite snapshot of the yellow graffiti on the monastery roof.
Cursed are the deniers
…Was this a cruel little swipe at Heywood's attitude? If it was, he didn't get it, but then, irony was never Heywood's strong suit.

I was convinced that our friends to the south, though outwardly helpful, were privately chuckling. And why not? Heywood and his hordes of techies had bragged too loud and long about their marvel, the great network.
The best in the world, no one can beat it
. Now, with the plague having pulled the rug out from underneath, the Czar had fallen hard, ending up in a graceless pose, on the floor so to speak, on his fat imperial behind.

About the time the American report came out, during the latter stages of the Service's operational capability being restored, I picked up a curious signal on my computer. Initially it seemed no more than a minor perturbation, like a puff of cool air on a summer day. Though it puzzled me, I didn't immediately recognize it signalled bad weather. Only later, when it had turned into a storm – just before I had to run away – did I see that it too was part of the plague's full impact.

As I say, the network was still being rebuilt, although my personal ultra-classified link to the colossal American databases had been mended first thing. I recall it was late, well after posted hours. I was on personal time, still in my cell, feeding an obsession. Years before, more than a decade, I'd fallen into abusing the privileges which came with my status. I had started monitoring Rachel's travels.

Back then the Americans had added new features to their information warehouses. One was airline passenger manifests. Through my special line I accessed it and as a test, a kind of schoolboy prank,
merely out of curiosity, I entered Rachel's name. She was there, of course. I tested her name in another source for related information, and another still. Already then at the dawn of the information age much raw data was available, and when it came to Rachel's comings and goings – and doings – I could dig out quite a bit. It fuelled my imagination and quickly an addiction set in. Soon I was tracking her all the time, unable to restrain myself.

This evening too, going back to the period missed while the network was down, I saw that a few weeks before she'd been travelling again, always the same trip now, a flight from Vienna to Cairo with a connection to Alexandria. I searched elsewhere for confirmation that her weekend accommodation had once more been the spacious suite in the elegant El-Salamlek Palace, the one with a view of the small harbour below and beyond it the open Mediterranean. I also saw that the account had been settled as usual by Morsi Abou-Ghazi. He, I knew, passed himself off as an altruist, as a passionate, caring and cultured man. I was also convinced that Rachel was unaware of who he really was and what he truly did.

As I was consigning these details to storage, I noticed a hesitancy in the encryption. It was nothing really, not even a hiccup, and it came just prior to confirmation that encryption had been completed. Had I been looking up I would have missed it. Partially intrigued, partially suspicious, not yet thinking that my watching was being watched, I banged a key to activate a monitoring function. A checklist began forming. All routine. Then an unusual item was shown…
Zadokite Port
…after which the checklist stopped. In the next instant the entry vanished, as if it had never been. Had someone pulled a plug? My mistrust grew. I pressed another function key for a more detailed search. Some moments later the result was in:
Zadokite Port unknown
.

As I say, it puzzled me; then it began to worry me. Had some entity retreated from my cyberspace chamber through an opening which, once shut, would be forever indiscernible? Was someone seeking information from me, but denying me knowledge of them? It made me think of the graffiti scrawl on the monastery roof. Which made me think of Heywood.
Next time we do the denying
, our bombastic Czar had pledged, his indignant voice trembling as much as his excess flesh.
We'll
get them turkeys, I swear. We'll tattoo DENIED on their foreheads. We'll do it with acidic ink
.

This corrosive pledge, or something similar, was first voiced during the High Council's emergency session. At least, that's what the Service rank and file – the scribblers, thinkers, analysts and information diggers, in short, all the crushed souls heaving away in bureaucracy's trenches –believed. Service legends often begin with irresistible snippets of hearsay, and on this occasion the rank and file sensed a great one was in the making.

Fragments of the picture emerged in the corridors, the washrooms, the cafeteria, even at the bus stops before the Service complex. Much was made of the fact that shortly after the emergency session Heywood began making the rounds, showing up everywhere, like a latter day lay preacher. No one recollected him being this visible before. Such perambulating always creates grounds for serious suspicions.

Proud and self-important, palming his gut as he went, the Czar called on unit after unit. His purpose was to ask anyone knowing something about the bug's invasion to come forward. The oratory was fluid, warm, earnest. As Head of Service Operations, Heywood said, he wanted
a total reconstruction
. The debris of the disaster, he informed solemnly, would be gathered together. Components of exploded jetliners get dredged up from the ocean floor for reassembly, so why not our defunct network? He added he had
carte blanche
to get to the bottom of the mess. Support for a massive reconstruction operation was already sitting in the wings and normality would return soon. He usually pressed his palms together in the manner of a Swami when he finished, bowed and then whispered,
Thank you. God Bless
.

Despite Heywood's dignified body language, his claim that he had
carte blanche
convinced nobody at all. It merely whetted an appetite to find the truths which his behaviour hid. The rank and file knew full well that the High Council never issued
carte blanche
to anyone. Senior committees – the world's cabinets and diets, the soviets or synods – are all places for balancing cravings for power. Why would our High Council be any different? Everyone knew it was incapable of trusting any one of its members to act decently on behalf of the others.
Carte
blanche
was really, quite truly, quite preposterously impossible. Heywood's use of the term only served to spur the trench dwellers questing for the truth to dig still harder.

Heywood's name came to dominate the early morning conversations on the buses bringing the workers in from the outlying hamlets. It was at the centre of remarks during those mid-morning moments of relaxed talk in the washrooms – when the women smooth their blouses before the mirrors and, one wall over, the men stand chatting at the urinals. All were out to assemble the
real
story of the High Council's emergency session. And sure enough the snippets began adding up. The picture wasn't at all as Heywood claimed. He had no
carte blanche
. The opposite was true. He'd been put on a short leash. Some went so far as to snigger that his head was in a noose and it would soon start tightening.

The High Council's emergency session had been both farce and drama. The plague still raged when the senior officers of the Service filed into the meeting chamber. They looked peeved, like lords and ladies disrupted, impatient to get the bother over with. Behind them the sound-proofed doors clicked shut.

The Head had not yet entered through his private entrance, which allowed for a few free minutes. The High Council's favourite pre-meeting game was quickly in full swing: the tossing back and forth of darts dipped in verbal poison. Back and forth the barbs flew. Back and forth. Rhythmically. The poison's source that day, naturally, was the vexing reality of ten thousand computers suddenly gone dead – and of a darkness descending. Good throws set off a light tittering, the best got loud guffaws.

“Hey Irv, good show. How did your guys do it? I mean, this bringing down the curtain.” Hunt, the Service baron who delivered the country's conquests in the world of trade, smirked.

Irving Heywood was just sitting down, arranging his great weight on soft calf leather. “We entertain, Ron,” he said amicably, “and we aim to please. We know there's not much levity in the world of commerce.” Some laughter, the loudest from a self-congratulating Heywood.

Claire Desmarais, an icy woman with thin embittered lips, sat across from Heywood and stared at him over her lenses like a lizard contemplating a thick, fat insect. “I have a meeting with the American ambassador in forty minutes,” she said coldly. “Shall I tell him we have a learning challenge, that we don't know how to handle computers?” She had a habit as she spoke of sharply snapping her head from side to side, also like a lizard.

“Why don't you keep him in the dark,” Hunt advised merrily. “We are!”

“Is that true,
Monsieur Heywood
?” Claire Desmarais sniped right back. “Are we in the dark? Will we soon be freezing too?” She did the political work in the Service, so she knew about democracy's light growing faint all over the world and of international relationships getting the chills.

Heywood leaned back in his chair and stroked his paunch. “Ask the good ambassador…in my name, Claire, if you like…” He paused to sneeze. “…to explain to you the details of the last launch of their new missile-interceptor missile.” Another pause. “It failed.” Scattered chirps of pure delight.

“Is that where you got your inspiration?” questioned Harry Berezowski, a much younger man charged with assorted Service duties, such as protocol and the well-being of Canadians jailed in sinkholes all over the world. “Is that where you got the idea for designing a system that self-destructs?”

Ron Hunt hooted.

“Good one, Harry,” Heywood acknowledged.

Even Abbie MacAuley, a severe lawyer who had risen with unstoppable momentum to head that part of the Service sometimes referred to as Hammurabi's Inner Sanctum, was laughing now. With verve she cried, “We reap what we sow!” But no one picked this up.

More darts flew.

Personal liability insurance's all in order, Irv?

How will you restore our trust to use your technology, Monsieur Heywood?

Since work has stopped, why not declare a party?

Heywood snatched them from the air and looped them back.

My personal worth is beyond the reaches of insurance, Ronnie
.

Technology, Claire, is like your friend the American ambassador;
never trust him, but squeeze out what you can as long as he is there
.

Abbie, give me the legal loophole and I'll declare a week of feasting
.

The game ceased. Étienne des Étoiles arrived from the side with two assistants trailing. As with a piece of theatre, des Étoiles seemed to come from nowhere, and so thick was the mist surrounding his high office, so deep the mystery of his leadership, that when he was not on stage he appeared not to exist. Few were invited to spend time with him. Outside the High Council scarcely anyone had ever laid eyes on him. The occasional rare sighting reported a naked scalp, an oversized nose, and hooded eyes – in short, a vulture of a man. In the popular imagination he brooded at his desk and pecked away there at the tender parts of people and of policies.

“Where's D'Aoust?” he asked in lightly accented patrician English. A stiff, quarter turn of his head indicated he expected an answer from behind.

“In Africa, sir,” replied one of the assistants, “chairing the conference on strengthening democracies.”