Borderless Deceit

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a novel _
ADRIAN DE HOOG

BREAKWATER BOOKS LTD.
100 Water Street • P.O. Box 2188 • St. John's • NL • A1C 6E6
www.breakwaterbooks.com

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

De Hoog, Adrian, 1946-
Borderless Deceit : a novel / Adrian de Hoog.

ISBN 978-1-55081-232-9
I. Title.

PS8607.E482B67 2007 C813'.6 C2007-904807-2

© Copyright 2007 Adrian De Hoog

A
LL
R
IGHTS
R
ESERVED
. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit
www.accesscopyright.ca
or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

We acknowledge the financial support of The Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing activities.

Printed in Canada.

For Hermann Gerbaulet,
Frauke Jung-Lindemann
and Clyde Rose whose
interest at the beginning
allowed this venture to start
.

I would like to thank Bill Bhaneja and Adriana Duque for their interest and help with early versions of the manuscript, and Rhonda Molloy and Annamarie Beckel for their insightful and artistic input.

The bug arrived in stealth, without warning. And it was virulent, so bad that some – the closet mystics amongst us – supposed it sprang from the occult.
A visitation?
they murmured, keenly tracking an inexplicable disorder. More sober thinkers took a dimmer view. They were unsure of what had stolen in, but the devastation was plain enough.
Infestation
was their spin. Yet, they too were ignorant of the grim extent of what was really happening. Only Irving Heywood had it right. He was in an emergency session of the High Council. “Look,” he said, leaning far back in his chair and stroking a ballooning paunch – in bad situations Heywood often acted nonchalant – “there is no remedy.” Although he seemed unruffled, he felt otherwise. Hugging upper arms to his chest to hide stains of perspiration growing on his shirt, he shrugged, adding, “We're just about wiped out. No embassy's been spared. I tell you, it's like a plague.”

The tag stuck. It entered Service history. That black day of digital destruction seared all our memories.

Cyberspace velocity and a voracious appetite for ruination – these were the overt symptoms. But the bug also possessed an inner wizardry, because it was precisely targeted, like a smart bomb. Years of assurances from the techies had wrapped us in a comfortable cocoon. We had come to believe that the Service communication network was invincible, closed to outsiders, protected by a wall of silicon as unscalable, as impenetrable –
so its designers claimed and they were never short of hubris – as that cast-in-concrete aberration that once snaked its way through Berlin. But in an hour, maybe less, the years of network building went for nought. Vital spirits gushed from the Service as water through a burst dam. Ten thousand linked computers scattered over all the diplomatic outposts were sabotaged with one stroke. Emptied of all contents, they went dead. Our shocked techies stood by, helpless and slack-jawed. Outside in the rest of the world all the other networks went about their business in robust good health. Why us? Why no one else?

The bug's origin was eventually pinned down, of course. An ancient, deserted monastery in Transylvania. A satellite dish sat on the roof. Beneath it there may have been a bookless library, or a chapel which long ago ceased to house God. Painted on the roof around the dish in a circle, in crude strokes from a broad brush dipped in a sickly yellow paint, were words in the Romanian language:
Cursed are they who deny, for they shall be denied
. It sounded like a translation of the writings of an ancient Judaic cult.

The words were studied, of course. One analyst eventually observed they were taken from something unknown, something unusual, possibly a yet-to-be-discovered satanic version of the Sermon on the Mount.

Anyway, the plague during that single wrenching hour transformed me. I didn't know it then, but now, months later, recognize its impact was transcending. It brought me role-reversal. Always the hunter, I was suddenly the hunted. The plague turned me into quarry, though quarry that escaped. Not an escape of the ordinary kind, not just the usual ducking of suspicion. Nor do I mean that I stayed minutes ahead of accusing knocks on my front door, though that would happen too. No, not that. What the plague's ravage really triggered off was the opposite of the destruction of digital reality. A link, some form of reverse cause, seemed to exist between it and that other world, I mean the one I inhabit now, the one beyond vulgarity. The bug from Transylvania allowed me to escape from a miserable view of life. It reversed a despicable attitude towards my fellow man. The plague begot the elevation of my soul.

Like all the pestilential horrors that swept through Transylvania centuries ago and, God knows, may linger still, this black animus spread invisibly. And as with human bodies in medieval times, our network once penetrated had no defence. The bug consumed the essence of what we were – our vitality, our plans, our memory – and as it fed off this rich booty it expanded at a terrifying rate. It hitched a ride on a frantic instruction delivered over the network to cut all power. But this only spurred the calamity to spread still faster. Next an SOS reverberated over intercoms and through the international phone lines. In Europe, our diplomats out on the cocktail circuits had their feasting interrupted by chauffeurs whose car phones started buzzing. And in Asia our ambassadors, awakened in the middle of the night, groped irritably in the darkness to stop the ringing. Too late. The network's servers and connected hard drives were already gone. In no time the limbs of the Service had been severed from the body. Embassies, from Jakarta to Pretoria and Brasilia to Moscow, were splintered off. And here, in headquarters, we lay, you might say, cut-up, beheaded, eviscerated.

My own computer, I remember, made one of those digitally clean buzzing sounds of something small working away with passion. Then it was lifeless. Puzzled, I stared at the black screen until I heard sounds in the hallway and opened my door. Arthur Beausejour, the few remaining strands of his much-nurtured hair hanging unstuck from his forehead, looked ragged the way he came forward. I didn't see Arthur often. He spent the weeks in his cell glued to his monitor the way I was to mine. He studied the drug cartels; I tracked the international weapons trade. We talked only when we saw that a commodity of his was being traded somewhere in the world for shipments of mine. At those times I took care to use my size to hover over him. I don't know why I tried to intimidate him that way…nor why he took it.

“Carson,” he cried in horror, “it's gone.” His eyes stood wide open and his hands covered his cheeks. I assumed he was referring to the memory of his computer.

I too was tallying what I might have lost, yet had an urge to rattle Beausejour still further. “Maybe not even the back-up system survived,” I said coldly. Beausejour gave me an insane look and hurried towards the sliding security doors and the normal world beyond. Now others in our line of work emerged from their cells. Lise Landry and Phil Doherty,
Ghislain Khan too, plus some of the younger ones. Even Francis Merrick, our leader, who spent most days as if in soporific residence on a foreign planet, came shuffling out in his absent-minded way. They huddled, were perplexed, and seemed unsure of what would happen next. Some muttered; others laughed nervously. All of us, we – the watchers – the chroniclers of information teased from the world's dark shadows using unseen techniques – with our tools suddenly melted away, felt true pointlessness that moment.