Borderless Deceit (5 page)

Work plans, time frames, mechanisms for delivery, ad-hoc support teams, outside consultants: they agreed on the contents of the breakfast binder and a meeting to review it was scheduled before dawn next day. With military precision the recovery campaign was underway.
Jihad
, whispered Ranjit, eyes blazing, two fists out front grasping the diamond-studded handle of a virtual scimitar. His resolve, like the flames of war, leapt to the others, and pumped-up, they marched out single file, Claude whispering to Eric he'd be acting as deputy to the Czar until midnight because until then a few ladies required his presence first.

Heywood said, “Stay a minute, Jaime, won't you?” She stopped stashing away her PDA. Impish eyes looked up. “Sorry you had to sit through a seminar in basic planning.”

“It's okay,” Jaime said brightly. “Guys your age aren't naturally quick. It's known you need to say things more than once.”

Heywood took this in. “If we're thoughtful and careful, it's because we know mistakes happen. We've learned.”

“It's okay,” Jaime repeated, smiling. “It was a scream watching.”

Heywood pursed his lips. “Where are you from?” Jaime said she was from up north. “Up north?” Heywood was suddenly inspired. “Where? North Bay? Black Creek? Rock Falls? That's tree country. I'm from tree country. New Brunswick. Your daddy…was he a logger? Mine was. So was the granddad. In those days they used hand saws and axes. I still got an axe in the basement. Bigger than you. Felling
trees…it used to be a noble thing to do.” Heywood gave in to his memories, reliving the sounds of great pines crashing down to earth, then getting pulled through winter forests by teams of snorting horses.

Jaime watched the Czar's eyes drop shut and the wrinkled face turn soft. She broke in by saying she never knew her father. Nor did her mother ever mention him. She doubted he'd been a logger. A drifter maybe.

“I'm sorry,” Heywood said.

No problem, was Jaime's reply. She never missed her father because she had an older brother who had become an important computer system designer working in Silicon Valley.

“Did Claude say why you're here?”

“I can guess. You want the clever dog behind this mess.”

“That…for sure. But more…” Heywood's shoulders stooped forward. His voice dropped. “I want the how and why of it.”

“Yeah.”

“Claude says you know your way around cyberspace. Runs in the family, does it?”

“My brother showed me the ropes. I learned them playing games. We still do. We hide our messages somewhere out there.” She lifted her arms, metal bracelets jangling, and drew a graceful arc. “A few hints, then we go looking. Last year I found my birthday greeting inside a phoney file on me in the records of the Swedish police. I think the Swedish police have a file on everybody, criminal or not. So it's easy to hide one there. It took a couple of days, but I got it. The birthday wish was really sweet, so I hid my thank-you note to my brother in the records of the international sugar trade kept by the US Special Trade Representative. Fitting, right? My brother's fast. He figured that out in half a day. He's got a system so it's no big deal for us to get through firewalls.”

Heywood's hands had slipped to the table's edge which he gripped hard. “Can we hire your brother?” His voice had lost its gravelly self-assurance.

“Not right now. He's on vacation. Visiting a casino in Monaco. I wished him good luck with the gambling.” Jaime chuckled. “It was a footnote in the English translation of the latest monthly report by the German central bank. Good one, right? Breaking the bank! Last night
I checked and the report was still sitting on their server. My message got bumped though, replaced by one word –
NASA
. Hot hint, so I hacked into NASA, grubbled around, you know, in the history section and other places, and guess what – in the Apollo Program files – what was there? His initials below a line:
I'm shooting for the moon
. Don't you love that? I love my brother. Anyhow, you don't need to think about hiring him because I work for you already.” Jaime's uplifted eyebrows and jaunty smile made a statement:
Mr. Heywood, count your blessings
.

“What exactly has your brother taught you?” he asked, eyes narrowing. Uncharitable thoughts about Ron Hunt and Claire Desmarais were entering his mind. Were there back doors to unknown chambers storing undisclosed aspects of their earthly existence which he might snuffle through so as to find odd, but handy facts? Who was this Jaime, this street-smart practitioner of today's version of antiquity's black arts? What valuable, esoteric formulas did she have in her possession? “Tell me, what's the method?”

Jaime gathered her hair with one hand and threw it back, once more setting bracelets chiming. “Method? Not method, Irv. Art. It's thinking abstract. It's revving it up to a higher level. It's seeing meaning where others see nothing. It's playing games out in the ether.” Jaime stopped. For a moment she was deadly serious. “And my brother and I, we erase where we were. What we did never happened. We arrange it so we didn't exist.”

Heywood, who could prattle without effort and fall back on bombast without thinking, was dumbfounded. To exist, yet not exist? He sat still, unsure whether to go with Jaime's flow, unsure whether to allow this seduction of his reasoning to continue “And you can play games like that for me, Jaime?” he asked meekly. “Can you fashion an ethereal comet? Can you get it to light up the heart of the infernal darkness that has settled on the Service?”

“Oh sure.” Jaime's eyes sparkled. “What you and Claude and the others talked about, all silly-billy stuff. Ranjit sure played it up. Forty million years for back-up tapes to come back? What a hoot. Forty days max. Maybe forty hours if I can get a hold of some good kit. Problem is, Irv, you guys don't go abstract. No one discovers new truths by starting with known theorems. The dog that came swimming up to bite you was clever, but for sure there was a wake. We'll catch a ripple,
follow it back, and get him. You never know, you might catch yourself a thoroughbred show dog. Or maybe just a likeable pooch.”

The Czar was ceasing to be Czar. Going with Jaime's flow, he was turning disciple. “I'm with you,” he said. “We play a game. It'll be abstract. From now on we hate logic. That gets us explanations.” He stopped. There had to be a limit. He had learned the hard way the importance of setting good limits, so he created one. “Everything is on, Jaime, except one thing. The clever dog that did it, we'll never think he's likeable. Okay? That's not on.”

Jaime spread her hands. “Hey dude. Solid. Okay with me. So now a name.”

“A name?”

“It isn't strictly vital, but it helps. My brother is interested in religion, so he goes to it for inspiration. In one of our games – a good one he called Taoism's Delight – we chased each other through the data banks of the Hong Kong central bank and pasted New Year's greetings into their currency transactions. That was two years ago. Then there was Lucifer's Lair and Vishnu's Vista. Recently we had a game of hide-and-seek in the files of a London arms dealer. Gates to Islam we called that one, but the database was not that complex. Let's think, what would be good?” Jaime was reactivating her tiny high-tech device.

Heywood racked his brain. Religion? As a boy he had a Sunday school teacher called Miss McQuarrey, while a chum in university had been an active Quaker, and though Hannah was Anglican, she didn't practise. In the area of religion, he had to admit that his mind had always been generally quite empty. So what religious association would help lead to the plague's origin? Then he recalled his posting in Africa where he'd seen a tribal witch doctor do weird dancing. “Voodoo's Folly?” he proposed carefully.

“No,” ruled Jaime. “Here's one.” She was stroking the keys on her PDA. “I'm borrowing from my brother. He was going to use it to get at someone who wasn't adding to his happiness, but he dropped the idea. So the name is still available. Zadok.”

“Zadok?”

“Sure. Zadok. King David's High Priest. His descendants were Zadokites. They ran the Temple, the only ones allowed close to the
altar. Gung-ho they were. I mean, for sacrifice. Makes sense for us, Irv. We find the hound that's making your life miserable, then we sacrifice him. On the altar of truth. The Zadokites did that, so why not us?”

The Czar of Service operations took a moment to regroup. He began nodding. “You're right. You put that perturbed mind on a platter, I light the fire, then we fry it.”

“Right on. First thing, I'll whip up a cozy spot in your computer, a place for us to hang out, where you can peek at what's on the platter. Don't worry, it'll be hidden. Zadokite Port. Sound okay to you?”

Jaime's new disciple declared he was utterly charmed by the prospect of hanging out in a place called Zadokite Port.

Late that evening Irving Heywood, making his way home from the Service complex, eased his car out of the building's depths into a fearsome night. A cold wind was blowing and the light beams, stuffed full of demonic snow flakes, were like two horizontal pillars pushing forward. The car crept over the steel bridges traversing the arms of the river and inched ahead into his neighbourhood, down Union Street, a right into MacKay, then a left into Ivy Crescent and so home to Hannah. In the wintry invisibility the going was slow, though it took no more than ten minutes. But it was long enough, long enough for Heywood to formulate one clear thought: never underestimate the power of the Service to wring your guts until you scream, upon which all then changes fast, so that by the day's end you feel so soothed you might well have entered heaven. Jaime. What a perfect creature for the troubled times. What a delight for an old, poor, downtrodden Czar.

“How was it today, darling?” a tired Hannah asked when he approached the bed.

Heywood kissed his sick wife with tenderness. “Marvellous, sweet, the best day for some time.” He proceeded to explain, as best he could, the relationship between the plague (like the ones that once hit an unlucky Pharaoh), the Old Testament High Priest Zadok, and some kind of dog – a hound, or maybe a pooch – which would soon be sacrificed on the altar of truth. But luckily for Hannah, she had dropped off to sleep.

Zadokite Port
: two words on my screen appearing and disappearing like a passing shadow. I looked them up, of course, but what was I to make of a reference to a priesthood of the ancient Israelites? All the same my guard was up and eventually I came to look back to that day and that quick blur as yet another turning point. Months would have passed. By then it would be spring. Mounds of snow reaching steadily higher all through the winter, crushing down the earth, keeping nature bottled up, would be under attack, eaten at by flanking eddies of warm air and mined by insistent rays from the sun.

But for now, the dark season still had us at its mercy – which also happened to be true of the mysterious computer virus. Because, in the early aftermath days, everyone in the Service was feeling uncertain, stifled – yes, bottled up – in the grip of a digital winter. And in that bureaucratic deep freeze Irving Heywood came to us. I recall when he stood before us in the flesh that he had, well, bounce, a special look. You can spot the people who know opportunity's come calling. He also acted out a bewildering range of roles: lay preacher delivering a fiery sermon, then armed crusader with a thirst for vengeance, and finally paterfamilias, caring and providing. Most of the watchers were entertained, though his performance left them little wiser. When would the network and our special way of doing business be back up and running? That's what they wanted to know. They got no answer.

Try to visualize our Czar Irving.

He came swinging in through the sliding doors with a supple girl in tow. What a sight, that pair. He, a slow, worn-out bull elephant, she, a small, quick vixen at his side. The watchers – those who managed to get in that morning – had assembled in a small open area off the hallway, a sort of common room, lined with a microwave, a battered old fridge and by the windows, some filing cabinets adorned by a row of straggly geraniums. I hung back in a corner, overhearing the small talk which was mostly about the violent snowstorm that raged overnight. The depth of the snow was being measured against parts of the body:
Up to my thighs in the driveway,
or,
The drifts on our walk – past my waist!
I listened to stories of working women and men wading out of homes to fight their way to work through confused traffic arteries clogged with snowplows, stuck cars and busses spinning wheels. It all seemed an appropriate prelude to the message Heywood delivered. He too spun wheels; there was confusion at every turn; and the verbal detritus he heaped up was higher than any snow mountain.

Perhaps ten of us were there. Our minder, Francis Merrick, who long ago began resembling the parched office plants, stood next to the two guests. Arthur Beausejour, obsessively chewing his nails, had planted himself directly opposite. Finger after finger visited his teeth. I kept to the rear. I admit I was feeling superior that morning. It came, I suppose, from knowing I already had more information about the plague's origins than all of Heywood's high-tech battalions put together.

Francis Merrick, in a hoarse whisper, thanked Heywood for coming to us so early in his rounds. The Czar responded with a little joke about the weather, something about the city being at a standstill, contrasting it with the speed –
double quick
– that the Service was digging itself out of its hole. He introduced the girl, Jaime from somewhere up north, who had been given
special duties
. The Czar laughed and some of the watchers sniggered when, in reference to digging and clearing away the Service mess, he remarked:
She's our new snowplow
. Jaime From-Up-North had an inner energy, a restlessness, a forward-leaning readiness to encounter. She grinned –
Hi!
– and waved grandly as Heywood applauded her with three or four noiseless claps of his hands.