Due Preparations for the Plague (26 page)

Under some distant and future administration, when different treaties and alliances prevail, we will perhaps learn finally of the whereabouts of the bunker that is somewhere in Iraq, and we will recover the remains of those who perished there.

Did everyone die?

Almost certainly. And yet we cannot know, since contact was lost before the end. Even a sealed bunker is porous and subject to draft, and there is a chance, a slim chance …

I find myself hoping.

This, you will be quick to accuse, is wishful thinking. I know it is. Even so, until conclusive evidence is obtained …

As for Sirocco, he was considered too useful, too essential to our Intelligence needs in Afghanistan—against the Russians—to be eliminated or exposed. He has been receiving arms shipments, support, and various payments in kind as our double agent throughout the nineties. When the rogue agent is all we have, the rogue agent is what we use, balancing hazardous odds and short-term gain.

Once it was clear that sucking doubt was pulling me under, my own access to official Intelligence information was at first gradually, then rapidly, curtailed. I was reduced to training recruits. I was subsequently relieved of this duty and charged with “lack of academic neutrality” and “inappropriate and overly emotional lectures”. Nevertheless, my own unofficial sources are my own unofficial sources, an agent’s contacts remain his contacts, and I do have reliable information that at the time of my compilation of this edited tape, in the summer of 2000, Sirocco moves between Kabul and Peshawar and is considered useful to our national purposes.

That which I have done—though I can never atone for its outcome—I continue to believe was that which was required at a time of complex risk to our nation and to international equilibrium and world peace. I believed I could lure all the members of an elite terrorist cell into one confined space and neutralize them.

Things went wrong.

If I could pinpoint the sole moment when I acted improperly, it would be the moment when Nimrod urged that Operation Black Death be aborted and I declined to support him. Hubris: I still believed I could pull Sirocco into line. Also: I did not wish to pay the price that Nimrod paid.

I know that price will fall due.

Against my terrible (though unintended) crimes, I post these small achievements: the children were released from the plane; I saved the life of my daughter Françoise; through contacts with French Intelligence and the French police, I have made it impossible (or as close to impossible as such things can be) for Sirocco ever to reenter France.

The rest is silence.

How, then, can I begin to re-create the effect of Sirocco’s live transmission from the bunker?

Imagine this:

The screen is almost, but not quite, dark. Strangely shaped shadow-beings, with grotesque heads, move about in a slow ballet, and if it were not for the dread fact that we know all too well what we are watching, we might think we were in the first circle of Dante’s hell.

The light is murky, somewhere between the color of muddy water and of twilight in thick industrial smog. Hooded shapes, stumbling about like the damned—they
are
the damned—reach out and grope at each other. They feel the walls, they stretch their padded arms against it, reaching up, reaching down, describing large arcs in many directions, measuring the dimensions of their cage like blind men who have been told that somewhere on the walls is an Open Sesame switch. They have twenty-four hours to find it. Their hands are rounded and fingerless, like lepers’ stumps. Their body shapes resemble prehistoric insects; they have puffy segmented bodies and bug eyes. The stage set seems to be a room, or a bunker, about twelve feet square. There is no furniture. There are only the ten padded shapes which sometimes curl up on the ground, immobile, and sometimes bump into one another. When collision occurs, sometimes the bodies embrace and cling. At other times, they start apart like similarly charged magnetic poles repelling each other. High in one corner, where two walls and the ceiling meet, there is an eye of infrared light.

The camera was set up by Sirocco, who wanted me, in particular, to watch, and who wanted the world to watch. See how calmly torture can be inflicted, he wanted to say. I am setting up shop in your nightmares. I live under your pillow and under your skin. You will never sleep peacefully again.

Sirocco’s scheme was a long time in the planning. It was meticulous. It held just one small flaw. The decision makers not only achieved total blackout, they unmade Sirocco. They shifted him into the realm of the bogeyman, the hoax, the figment of nightmare. They deconstructed hell.

And they were right to do so. They were right to puncture Sirocco’s fantasy of global scope and mythic power. They turned him into a shadow-play on a wall.

I have no quarrel with that.

It was the failure to save the passengers and the hostages that appalls. Their deaths were avoidable, though “not without unacceptable risk to the national good.” (I quote those who decide our fates.) Even this I could possibly accept: that in times of crisis, triage may be necessary. Some must perish for the greater good of all.

But if so, I pleaded, the many owe homage to the few. The record of their sacrifice should not be expunged. It is our side, our own side, which has obliterated the hostages more absolutely than Sirocco did. It is we who have denied them due rites and obsequies.

This is blasphemy, I argued. It is a moral stain on the national conscience.

I was sternly rebuked.

“Though collateral damage was regrettably high,” I was instructed, “Operation Black Death was a success. A qualified success, perhaps—we would have preferred to save the passengers—but nevertheless a success. A terrorist cell was neutralized, its remnants scattered. (From remote caves in Afghanistan, where they now must hide, what possible harm can they do, except to Russia?) Beyond and above this, a benchmark for strategy, we did not buckle under to blackmail. No unacceptable precedent has been established. This is a mark of our strength. When dealing with terrorists, this is triumph.”

And so I came to Carthage and to Scipio. I began to ask the troubling question Scipio asked:
How can we tell triumph from horror?

In my chosen career path, this line of questioning is fatal. It signals the beginning of the end.

I was ordered to hand over the tapes and I did so, and in the interests of national security—so I was told—the tapes were destroyed. Before I surrendered the originals, however, I made secret copies. When you watch my Decameron tape, you are watching the same screen that I was watching live, knowing, as I watched, that I was being watched. Consider that it is entirely possible that you too are being watched as you watch.

On the tape, shadow-figures move and grope, watched by an infrared eye. By the paisley swirls of their motion, though not by the speed, the wraiths suggest a colony of ants in organized search of a mate. The mittened hands of one on the padded shoulders of another, two by two, they meditate, goggle to goggle, snout to snout. Then, often, they will embrace like fat clowns. They stand coupled; for ten seconds, thirty, one full minute, but then some knowledge, or some sense of dismay, must pass by osmosis. Each seems to sense error. The two will part, bowing with regret like Sumo wrestlers, to continue a dream minuet.

As the partners change, then change again, and then again, you, the watcher, will find yourself wondering if the unchanging partner that each shadow seeks is Death Himself.

Even out of atrocity, one is stirred to make art.
Especially
out of atrocity. One feels impelled to transform it.
They
felt so impelled. The Decameron tape is my own act of creative transformation and my act of atonement.

What I am preserving are stories fashioned in hell.

What we learn in a time of pestilence
, wrote Albert Camus,
is that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.

Lowell lies full length on the carpet, face down, his forehead cradled on his arms. “
My son whom I am terrified of losing
,” he murmurs to the floor. He rocks his head the way people with migraines do.

Declassified fragments and seventy-six blacked-out spaces tramp through Samantha’s head, left right left right, with a hundred and one halflines close behind:
Salamander in charge of operations …
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
loose cannon, Salamander warns, but as rogue agents go, we can use
XXXXXXXXXX
backstairs contacts in the Saudi palaces and has usable information
…
XXXXXX
payments and arms supplies to be arranged
XXXXXXXXX
Salamander to meet with Sirocco …

Boom, boom, boom, beats the drum of indictments. Boom: the stroke of the censor’s pen. Boom, boom, faster and faster, Samantha’s noisy blood keeps time. It pounds at her temples. She feels a surge of incapacitating rage and pain. She wants to pound on the walls with her fists. How could you not have known? she wants to ask Lowell. She wants to scream.

I would have known, she believes. If my father had crimes on his head, I would have known. I would have confronted him, I would have argued, I would have raged.

If necessary, I would grab his ghost by the lapels.

“He lived in perpetual terror that his son would come to harm,” Lowell says. He recites the words like a child memorizing a catechism or a magic charm. He begins to move around the room like a sleepwalker, stumbling against the bed, bumping into the dresser and chair, butting the wall with his head. “My father was Salamander,” he says. The room seems to tilt and spin. His voice drops to a whisper. “My God, my God. My father was Salamander.”

Sam slides the Number Two cassette into place. She presses the
POWER
button on the remote. She clicks to VCR mode. She presses
PAUSE
.

“Say something,” Lowell demands.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Say something, damn it. You made Salamander your north star. You’ve been steering your life by my father. You had fantasies of making him pay.”

“He seems to have paid,” Sam says with difficulty. (But did he pay
enough
? she asks herself. Is he
paid up
? How do we get due reparations for and from the dead?) She says in a flat quiet voice, “Your father couldn’t have killed my Jacob. Your father was already dead. Someone else was pulling Salamander’s strings.”

“He was
afraid
for me. I thought he watched me like a hawk because he expected me to fuck up. I thought he was ashamed, and all the time …”

Samantha goes to the window and parts the heavy drapes. A single floodlight puddles gold on the only car in the lot: the proprietor’s van. The small motel office is lit; the rest is darkness. On the other side of the room, the windows look onto the marsh. Sam lifts the drape and looks out. The expanse of water and sweetgrass is eerily beautiful in the moonlight. Nothing stirs except the grasses and the night birds, the slow-gliding seabirds of the night.

“Lowell?” Sam touches him on the shoulder. “The other cassettes …?”

“I don’t know if I can,” he says.

“It’s what he asked of you.”

“I’m afraid.”

“So am I. We have reason to be.”

“I’m afraid of disappointing him yet again. I’m afraid of not measuring up. I’ve already lost the ring binders.”

“You saved the tapes.”

“If you’d seen my apartment after they ransacked … How am I going to keep these safe?”

“You’ve kept them safe. They’re here.”

“Sam. Samantha. How are we going to stay alive?”

Sam considers peering between the drapes again, but is afraid to. “We’ll figure that one out later,” she says. “Don’t think about it. First we have to watch the tapes.”

“I’m afraid of what he wants us to see.”

“So am I.”

Lowell checks the chain on the door. “What if I was followed?”

“We’ll sit in the dark.”

“The psychiatrist,” Lowell says. “He knows I’ve got them. Someone’s bound to have been tailing him. They could be at the boathouse by now. They could be at the motel office.” He peers between the drapes. The parking lot is still quiet as death. “You’re right,” he says urgently. “We have to watch these before—” He takes the remote. “We have to watch while we can. Where’s the—?”

“I’ve already put it in the VCR,” Sam whispers. “Keep the sound low.”

Lowell presses
PLAY
. Sam turns out the lamp and they sit in the dark, side by side on the double bed, propped against pillows and headboard, their faces ghostly in the flickering light from the screen.