Borderless Deceit (15 page)

“Irv,” she broke in. “Got a minute?”

“Jaime! My child. Of course. Come in.” He pushed his theological work aside. “I want you to know,” he continued proudly, “that this morning I reviewed the material you posted on Zadokite Port. Marvellous. I'm delighted. I'm just now completing an update for Étienne and all your good work will be in it. It will knock his socks off. Sit down. Coffee? Juice? I can have it brought in.”

Heywood ushered Jaime to the small round table and began clearing it of paper, stacking it into an untidy pile which he carried to a vacant spot on a ledge by the window. Some of the pages began flapping in the air rising from the heating register and the pile itself started tilting sideways, but with fashioning hands the Czar pushed and squeezed and formed a stabler column. Outside the window, below on the street, a scene arrested his attention. Giant graders were shoving the weekend snow into a long straight windrow, a ragged dike of ice
down the middle of the road, and a huge and merciless machine with jaws and rotating blades was digesting it, spewing a stream of winter slurry through a funnel into a trailing truck. A battery of empty dumpsters stood at the ready farther down the snow-cleared road. The city was digging itself out, getting back to normal. “Not high tech,” Heywood observed distantly, “but effective. Did you enjoy the winter weekend, Jaime? Used to be my favourite season when I was young – hay rides, cuddling to stay warm, that sort of thing.”

“Spent the weekend feeding Zadokite Port, Irv.”

“Ah, no cuddling…” The Czar sat down at the little table. “Someday I'll tell you how I helped Hannah through her first Ottawa winter. We were living in Lagos before. Everyone warned her it would be worse here than Moscow. It gave her a terrible apprehension. But once we were here and winter started, its beauty drew us together. I remember the first spring too. We went to a maple grove to see the sap getting boiled down into syrup. Arboreal nectar, that's what she called it. Ever since, when she cooks pancakes, we drench them in it.” The Czar patted his bloated belly.

“I've never worried about winter cold,” Jaime said to set that fact straight.

“I'm sure. New Brunswick, North Bay, places farther north… we're like that, Jaime. Fearless. Let blizzards roar.”

Jaime observed the Czar. His hands were clasped behind his head and he was looking up, maybe at savage weather taking shape somewhere beyond the ceiling. Whatever he saw, he was enjoying it.

“So you looked into Zadokite Port,” she said. “You managed your way in.”

“I managed, oh yes. And I saw! Wonderful material. Such a turn of events. Can't wait to rub a few High Council noses in it.” A mean little chuckle escaped the Czar's bulky chest.

“Don't oversell it, Irv,” Jaime cautioned. “Not yet. I've decrypted some of the back-up tapes. But I don't know that much about the virus. Not yet. A lot of work remains.”

“I know, but…” Heywood, full of mettle, anticipating the High Council's next session, smacked a fist into a palm. “The point is, we've proved that data can be recovered. We're on target replacing the hardware too. Twenty percent of HQ done today; forty tomorrow. And
new equipment's being shipped to the embassies as we speak. And I read in Zadokite Port that some of the watchers are back on-line. So they'll be doing their casting about, picking up clues. We're gonna get the turkey that did it. A good feeling, Jaime, that's what I've got. We're back. You did well. I'm proud.” He reached out to pat her shoulder, but couldn't reach it and the movement was of a fleshy hand flapping in the air. “All along I've said that hard work may be old-fashioned, but it's not yet a lost art.”

Jaime shrugged as if to say:
you call it work, I call it play
. She explained that the watchers weren't fully back to work. “They can make-do for now. There's no new server down there yet and they're temporarily using another, so there's a capacity limit. But that's not why I'm here. There's another problem with the watchers.”

“Shoot, Jaime. Someone not playing ball? If so, I'll have his head.”

“Not that. It's subtler. Remember I said I'd look for irregularities on the back-up tapes?”

“I recall.”

“A perturbation prior to the network going dead could show where the virus entered.”

“And?”

“Well, there are some candidates. The line to Europe had lots going on, and the portal zipping stuff back and forth to the United Nations was hot too.”

“Forget that last one, Jaime. All that UN blarney. Stacks and stacks of reports. There's nothing in them. Lots of smoke, no fire.”

Jaime nodded. “You'd know. Anyway, both lines, steady volume at a high level. Then I found a third portal. It almost blew a fuse coping with a sudden data dump. Care to guess which one?”

The Czar's forehead developed a furrow.

“A hint,” she continued. “One of your mission-critical nexus points.”

“Jaime! No techno-babble. Can't stand it.”

“The watchers!” she cried. One of Jaime's hands drew an arc of triumph over her head. She was wearing her metal bracelets and they jangled. “I think the bug came in through their server.”

“Jesus,” Heywood swore. His great shifting weight made his chair squeak.

“It's preliminary,” she advised. “Nothing sure yet. But on the tape for that server there's a piggin' dirty great bulge. Two minutes later network disintegration begins.” Jaime underlined these facts with snapping fingers and animated gestures, her bracelets sounding like a gypsy dancer's. “Problem is, I can't decipher it. I went at it all weekend. It's a blob and it won't yield.”

“Need stronger hardware?” The Czar didn't understand Jaime's arcane skills, but if the excursion to the Dallas Police Department was anything to go by, no data bulge had ever been created that would resist for long once she went at it.

“I'd like the Service network specs.” Jaime began tapping the table with a finger, making it resonate with the urgency of her demand. “I have to know more about that server.”

“That's Claude. He'll help. I think the information might be classified.” The Czar paused, then realised something. “Was classified. Something that doesn't exist can't be secret. Ask him tomorrow. He's at a bonspiel today. He loves chucking them rocks.”

Jaime grimaced. “That's a day gone.”

“I know you want to sweep the winner into the house right away, Jaime, but we're far ahead. We can enjoy each end from here on in. Ever curled? I have. Enjoyed hockey more though. With the neighbourhood kids. Ever done that? Chase a puck along the boards, the snow flying, the wind smarting, toes freezing off?”

“Sure. With my brother.”

“Bet you were good.” Heywood crossed his arms on his chest.

“Started out on figure skates,” Jaime said. “Got better at hockey once I switched.”

“Sure, that's understandable. You gotta have the right equipment. You know, I used to be on the rink a lot. Shot right-handed. Don't know why. My youngest, Danny, he played goal. When he was six, he wanted me to pepper him with slapshots. Little nipper stopped them all. He's got his own tikes now.” Heywood sniffed.

Jaime watched a dreamy look filtering into the Czar's eyes – an old geezer reminiscing about what he once proudly possessed and had now eternally lost. An hour could go by with old guys in that mood. “Could I come back to that server,” she interrupted. “Know anything else
about it? Maybe I can get going on something before Claude excavates the specs.”

“Server? Ah, yes, the watchers. Uh, not much. It's there for a dedicated data line connecting us to the Yanks. For the intelligence relationship, if you want to know. Doubt it does much good. Carson Pryce is gatekeeper. With him no one gets near it. The Yanks seem to like him.” Heywood scowled. “Proves they know how to pick their friends. Bothers some of us, frankly.”

“Carson Pryce? I've met all the watchers. I'll say this, they're a palsy-walsy bunch. And then…” She began to shake her head.

Heywood's laughter was immediate. “And then? I know…” He laughed so hard it brought on a wheezing. “And then there's Carson Pryce.” The Czar pulled out a handkerchief to clean his nose. “So you met him. You felt exalted in his presence?”

When Carson's door slammed shut on Jaime, Arthur Beausejour had appeared around a corner with hands thrown up in apology.
Sorry about that,
he said, escorting Jaime politely to the sliding doors.
Carson experiences a lot of pressure. He gets ornery sometimes, but it's never personal
.

“He was loaded for bear,” Jaime admitted to Irving. “But it didn't seem personal. Just, sort of curt.”

“Curt! Hah. He's a source of pain. Someone should point a bear gun at him.”

“He's more a source of puzzlement. He sure is out of sync with the procedures the others use down there.” Jaime described meeting the watchers one by one. Each gave her some data, their PINs, that kind of thing, and files were recovered no problem. “So then, there's only Carson Pryce to go. Except, all the tapes were done. Nothing left to retrieve. Seems he never stored a thing. It struck me as unusual.”

“He keeps it someplace else,” Heywood concluded, surveying the leaning stacks of dossiers on his desk and the slanting rows of reports on the ledges by the windows.

“Naturally he keeps it someplace else,” Jaime said dismissively. “But why? He's a high tech guy. Why doesn't he store it like everyone else. What's so special about him?”

“Nothing's special about him except the spook stuff he does with the Yanks. Because of that, he
thinks
he's special. He thinks he's
the only one
that's special. It's gone to his head. I said that before.”

“Something is in his head,” Jaime agreed. “He isn't mellow. Anyway, I went to see him.”

“And his charm touched you.”

“Thought I'd fly a kite.” Jaime smiled. “Told him I knew the virus came in through the server he used a lot. To see how he'd react. Well, he didn't lose a beat.”

“What did he say?”

“That we had nothing to talk about. Then he closed his door.”

“In your face?”

“It was controlled.”

“He's a hater, Jaime. He hates everything. I think he hates love.”

“He's an interesting case.”

Heywood began to hit his palm with a fist again. “I'm not happy Carson closed his door on you. It's intolerable. Sons of darkness do that, but not we, those of us who value the Service. We strive for mutual respect. I'm prepared to call him in, sit him down, and tell him so. I grew up learning to respect. I'm sure you did too. We cannot condone a lack of it.”

“I'd say, leave him alone. Let him carry on.”

“Why?”

“If he's himself he won't go defensive.”

“You plan to shadow him. Am I right? I'd support that. I hope you snare him doing something awful. Can you get files on him like the ones we saw in the Dallas Police Department?”

“Yeah, I was thinking of doing some monitoring. Okay with you?”

“Indeed it is. I'd love to watch it – I mean – you circling him. Ask me to come down when you're doing it.”

“It might not work. You never know, Irv. He's good at circling too.”

A light went on for Heywood. “Ah, you two out in cyberspace. Like in a boxing ring. Sparring with abandon. No rules, no referee.”

Jaime laughed and threw a mock punch, setting her bracelets jangling.

The snow continued its irresistible accumulation throughout the weeks that followed. Nor was there much respite from the northwest gales and record wind chills, or cleanups from the steady dumps of twenty, sometimes thirty centimetres. The shovelled mountains grew high; the suburbs mutated into vast white tombs; only wisps of smoke from chimneys signalled that inside a citizenry was surviving. The muttering down there in the buried chambers was about the deep freeze, about the forced incarceration. This squeeze on life, how long could it go on?

Then, topsy-turvy quickly, the outlook turned; the sun's strength grew; dripping water from the roofs turned into rivulets; wet stains on the sides of roads swelled into urban lakes which drained (or did not drain). And the rivers, still sealed, creaked and heaved, until the inexorable pressures from below caused the surfaces to splinter and waters to overflow.

Which, more or less, when it arrived during that spring thaw, was how the report on the plague's origin affected Heywood. In his case it was his equanimity that was ruptured, though not on account of the contents – he dismissed most of that. What churned up his insides, what made him splinter and caused his bile to overflow, was that the report was the work of our friends to the south.

Yet, not only Heywood's equanimity lay shattered. Because it was about that time that
Zadokite Port
flashed on my screen. And so I too
became agitated and turned still busier building up defences. To no avail. As Jaime eventually confided, her computer operation had laid bare my secrets long before.

From Irving Heywood's point of view, the first bad thing about the report from the Americans (with the pretty aerial photo of the abandoned Transylvanian monastery on the front cover) was that their ambassador delivered it to Claire Desmarais instead of him. The second was how Claire presented it.

With austere formality, like a reverend mother handling a holy text, she had ceremoniously lifted the document out of a cloth jacket. Her urgent, probing fingers opened it. Then, with her nasal passages resonating, she began reading, one page after another, each setting free damning revelations courtesy of the Yanks. Not only that, but all this happened in the High Council chamber. Could the scene have been worse for Heywood? After all, it was his topic, yet he was not the first to speak.