The Professor of Truth (9 page)

In detective novels of the kind Emily had loved, the detective or someone else at this point says “a motive.” And sure enough Nilsen said it, or came close.

“We needed motivation. You know what the motivation was. Revenge, retaliation, call it what you will. We were at war with another country, a Middle East state with ideological, political and religious aims diametrically opposed to ours. And that war isn’t over yet. It isn’t open warfare. Some of it makes the news, most of it doesn’t. There’s a lot of rhetoric, a lot of bluster. Back then there was hostage-taking, hostage-trading, military and naval stand-offs, and behind that another level of conflict. Assassinations and arms deals, negotiations that never officially took place, all of that.

“But then something happened that was so big it couldn’t be hidden. One of our warships shot down one of their aircraft. A civilian aircraft. It was a mistake, a terrible one. Three hundred lives wiped out. Yet we didn’t admit responsibility. We said the action was justifiable, because the ship’s commander thought he was under attack. We regretted what had been done, but we defended it. We even gave the guy a
medal. Eventually we paid some compensation, but that was years later. Six months after that warship fired off its missile, the flight your wife and daughter were on goes down. So, sure, there was motivation.

“Motivation, suspects, method. We had two out of three. A hostile government that had commissioned a revenge attack, and a group prepared to do the job with the expertise to do it. It was the method, how the bomb had been ingested into the system, that we didn’t have. And we still lacked a lot of detail. Without the detail there were too many gaps. The narrative wouldn’t hold together. We had to firm it up, then we could do something with it. Make the accusation, take out the offenders, bring vengeance down on the heads of the avengers—whatever we wanted to do. But we couldn’t do it until we had fully constructed the narrative.”

“You keep saying ‘we,’ ” I said.

Nilsen looked quizzical.

“Like you were running the investigation. You, the Americans.”

He seemed to think about that for a few seconds. “The police were running the investigation,” he said, “but we were right alongside of them. These were our people who’d been hit. We had an interest, I think.”

So far nothing was new. I’d been over this territory thousands of times, worked out or guessed it all. I remembered the word “ingestion” from the trial. It made it sound as if the aeroplane had swallowed the bomb. Nilsen wasn’t being specific. He didn’t need to be. We both knew exactly what he was saying, who he was talking about. We were way beyond
the specifics. What I didn’t know was where he was going next, and for a moment even he looked a little lost. Maybe my intervention had thrown him. I wished I hadn’t said anything, willed myself not to speak again. Not to nod or shake my head either: I didn’t want Nilsen thinking I was with him or against him. I just wanted him to continue.

“Trouble was, the narrative we had, we didn’t like it,” he said. “Not at all, but the politicians wanted something from us. The usual thing. They were under pressure to deliver to the media, to the people.” Again, I detected a note of contempt. “Who had done this? Who was responsible? People always want to know the end of a story. So we told the politicians some of what we had but we kept the worst back and they didn’t like even what we did tell them, but for different reasons. When we laid out what we had for them, what they saw was the finger of accusation pointing at the wrong country. How could that be? Its people hated us, we hated them. How could it be the wrong country?”

I kept my mouth shut.

“Time,” Nilsen said. “A couple of years earlier and it would have been the right country, but time passes and things change. The power balance shifts. Your enemy becomes your enemy’s enemy and that makes him your friend. Or your friend becomes ambitious, threatens your other friends, and that makes him your enemy. New alliances are required, new understandings. Realignments. That’s what time does. And then there’s place. No, not place. Context. The Middle East isn’t a place. It’s a cauldron of oil and creeds.”

That watchtower look was on me again. Nilsen seemed now, with that last flourish, to be inviting some response. I heard the subtleties in his sentences, the considered grammar. I thought, I could be marking a student’s clever essay; or I could be the student, being patronised. I declined, at this stage, to comment.

“There was a war coming,” Nilsen said. “A real, open, hot war. We knew it was coming, and that we would be in it. Staying out wasn’t an option. Maybe we could live without the creeds but we couldn’t live without the oil. But if we were going in there with force, into that context, that cauldron, we needed to neutralise some of the countries we usually regarded as hostile. Not just neutralise. Some of them we needed on our side. So we couldn’t go accusing them of having commissioned or paid or in some way facilitated a bunch of terrorists to bring this airplane down. Whether they’d done it or not, making that accusation wasn’t going to help bring about the realignment.”

I pushed the plunger down on the fresh jug of coffee, thinking of old war movies and men behind enemy lines blowing up bridges, and refilled our cups.

“So the politicians wanted a different narrative,” Nilsen said. “That was something of a relief to us. The one we had didn’t make us look good. It made us look … incompetent at best. We’d been watching the group in Germany a long time. A situation like that, you try to leave things undisturbed if you can. Then suddenly it’s time to move, you go in and make the arrests, break the thing up. You hope you haven’t cut it too fine. When you’re working with other agencies
co-ordination is always an issue. We were working with the Germans, plus some others. We cut it very fine.

“You know this,” he said again. And he was correct, but it was as necessary for me to hear it now as it seemed to be for him to let it out. “There was somebody inside that cell. Someone who’d switched loyalties. That’s how we were so well informed. When there’s someone in deep there is one priority and that’s to keep him there. He’s an investment, a lot of time and effort has been spent on him. You expect payback. Someone in that position, he’s living on the edge. If his cover goes, he’s dead. So he has to be authentic. This man was authentic. He was part of the factory. He had a history as a bomb-maker. Ten years earlier, we’d have happily seen him dead. But he’d changed sides. He was our early-warning system.”

“What was he supposed to warn you about?”

“About the bombs. Their state of readiness. He was supposed to build them so they were inoperable but he couldn’t do that and remain authentic. What he could do was give us updates, so we could move in time. Because obviously we couldn’t have a scenario with a device he’d been instrumental in preparing. If one got away, if a device like that was ever used, even if there had been good reason for our involvement, it wouldn’t be forgiven. Wouldn’t really be forgivable.”

“No,” I said. “It wouldn’t.”

“So we had to make sure that scenario never arose.”

A little pulse of excitement ran through me. Sit tight, I told myself, let him talk. I’d felt that pulse too often before not to repress it now, but Nilsen was circling round
something. I was sure his words were edging towards some kind of admission or confirmation.

“What I’m saying,” he said, “is we had motivation too. Everyone had motivation.”

I inspected my fingernails. Give me it, I begged him silently. I can’t make you but you’ve come here with something. Give me it.

But already he was veering away. “It became in our interest to make the narrative fit the destination,” he said. “There had to be another way that the bombing could have happened.” I tried to keep listening, but had I missed something? “We unpacked everything we had, and we ditched what was now irrelevant and re-used what couldn’t be retracted and we built the narrative back up again. You have to understand something: we weren’t lying to ourselves, or to anybody.” He raised his hand to stop whatever I might have to say about that. “We were coming at it from another place. Who could be in the frame? It had to be a hostile regime or organisation but one with no current strategic importance. A regime we didn’t need any favours from but which had plenty of reasons for wanting to hurt us. We had a fat file full of outfits like that. Any one of them could have the motivation to do this thing. But
how
did they do it? Not the way we’d thought. The methodology had to change. Same explosive, different timer, different bomb-maker. Same suitcase, different location for ingestion. We looked again at the flight schedules, the feeder flights, how unaccompanied baggage was transferred. None of this was easy. Some of the evidence didn’t fit. We downgraded it and we searched for new
evidence to put in its place. We had people in research who knew what we needed. I’m not saying evidence was fabricated. It’s what I said before—we didn’t just want to solve the crime, we needed to solve it. So much was riding on achieving an outcome. You could say we were desperate.”

Another pause. His coffee was untouched. An oily sheen lay on its surface. I could see that he was struggling with something. He looked even greyer than when he had first come in.

“No,” he said. “No, you see that’s not good enough.
That’s
why I’m here.”

Just for a minute it was as if he were alone in the room, arguing with himself. His hand went to his head and off came the woollen hat again, and he hit his knuckles against the threadbare dome. Then he sat, eyes down, with his elbow on the table and his hand covering his brow. I heard sharp little breathing noises coming from him and thought perhaps he was crying. Then the noises stopped and he looked up, first to the ceiling, then back to me. He hadn’t been crying. He’d been praying.

“Thank you for your patience,” he said, and I might have said something about that, about just how long I’d been waiting, but he went straight on. “What I said then. We were desperate but that’s no excuse. There
was
fabrication. There
was
tampering. It wasn’t just that we dropped irrelevant evidence, we suppressed things that were relevant but disruptive. Maybe the first time you do that it’s some tiny, insignificant detail. Everything else fits but this one piece won’t click home. You try it every which way. It just won’t go,
but if you trim it a little it will. Or maybe you don’t trim it, you find something else that doesn’t belong but fits better in the space. You put it in and it looks perfect and after a while you don’t want to take it out. Then you have to get rid of the awkward non-fitting piece. You go through that process once, and the second time it doesn’t seem such a big deal, and then you remind yourself that what you’re trying to do is reach a destination and it doesn’t matter so much how you get there, just get there. And there is urgency, pressure from above. So you keep going.”

I felt an unearthly dislocation from everything, there, in my own home, hearing this. I was not recording it, it was not being written down, there was no one to hear it but me. It was worthless. I could not imagine myself beyond the confines of the room. I guessed it was still snowing but could not bring myself to look. The kitchen was a capsule floating in space. Time was frozen, suspended. Only, of course, for Nilsen it wasn’t, not if he was telling the truth about his cancer. But was he telling the truth about anything?

“It is despicable, what you’re saying,” I said.

“I’m not excusing it.” He fitted the hat back on his head. “I’m telling you how it happens. I said I would level with you and that’s what I’m doing.”

“You’re too late,” I said.

“No, I’m not too late,” he said. “I can’t be.”

This was a man whose whole life had been about getting results: a man of certainties faced with one looming certainty, one last result. But the conviction in the way he insisted he was not too late, that it was not
possible
that he was
too late—it struck me that this was not a conviction based on his own abilities. It came from somewhere else, from his God, and I realised that I did not trust this source any less than if he had been feeding me the other, more worldly, harder-edged certainties I’d been getting from people like him for twenty years. On the contrary, and much to my astonishment, I trusted it more. Nilsen’s faith was
more
credible than all of the rational bullshit.

“Forensics,” he said, as though somehow tapping into my thoughts. “Don’t you love the clinical precision of that word? How can such a word lie? How can that science be wrong? But it’s never the science. It’s the application, the people doing the science. They weren’t immune to hubris, or the need for self-protection, or career enhancement, any more than the rest of us. Some of them weren’t even real scientists, they’d moved sideways from other careers and picked up their knowledge as they went along. They’d messed up in other cases, both sides of the pond, but we didn’t want to hear that, not then. Sure, they’re discredited now. A man who’s never going to work for the FBI again, washed up in some dirty little laboratory in California, a mile from the Mexican border. Another over here—what does he do for a living? He’s a chiropractor. This is his daily job. He analyses your spine and tells you that if he can straighten it out all your other health problems will disappear too.”

He shook his head, the belief of a minute earlier now replaced by disbelief, or so it seemed. It occurred to me that there were less useful occupations than easing people’s back pain.

“Let me tell you the rest,” he said.

“I know the rest,” I said. And yes, I could have picked up his story and gone with it to the end, and it wouldn’t have been so very different. The difference lay in who was telling it. This stranger—this man I had never before seen from a world that I could, in my previous life, never for a moment have imagined would touch me—was telling it. To hear him was an experience both dreamlike and real. Like a dream, because he went on talking in a kind of coded, non-specific language, as if he were trying to ward off the bogeyman of betrayal, of broken confidences, the possibility of another listener outside in the snow. He spoke of this regime or that regime, of “the island,” “the airport,” not naming names, or inventing new names for old familiar characters. I understood what he was saying, inferred everything I was supposed to infer, but the words were cloudy, the room as thick with them as the air outside was thick with snowflakes. Yes, it was like a dream, but it was also real because it was happening in my own kitchen, across my own kitchen table, and on the wall behind Nilsen the second hand of the kitchen clock ticked its relentless way round and round the dial. And as he talked, something changed between us. We became—I hesitate to use this word but can think of no other—more intimate. Something intense, almost tangible, stretched between us, and this is the strongest sensation of memory I retain of the hour that thus passed. That, and the admonishing wag of the clock’s second hand. These things might, of course, not have happened, Nilsen might never have said what he said, and the memory could
be the memory of a dream. But then, everything could be the memory of a dream.