Borderless Deceit (22 page)

Jaime pushed on, setting up the equipment, readying 146 works of literature for an unusual analysis.
The Prince
linked with
The Mill on the Floss
;
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
roped to
Jude the Obscure
;
Tender is the Night
hitched to
Sense and Sensibility
;
Moby Dick
conjoined with
The Iliad
; and
Nostromo
coupled to
Our Man in Havana
. After
a first pairing, all were paired again with others, and again, until all possible pairings had been set up – for each of the three programs. Jaime clicked
run
and the obedient machine purred.

She observed the monitor….10% finished, 15%, 20%…Waiting for the word
done
, she stroked her lips, filling this empty bit of time, enjoying the tingling of flesh on flesh.
That Carson
, she kept thinking,
ninja skills, a no sweat dude
.

When the computer finished, when a letter by letter matching from every possible pairing had yielded vast numbers of unique strings of letters, Jaime's fingers descended to the keyboard. Slowly, aware she still had time not to take this road, vaguely knowing her hypothesis could bring unintended consequences, she entered new instructions. Each of the letter strings was overlaid with every one of the 73 series of numbers. This larger computation took much longer. Once more she waited, once more she caressed her mouth. A wave of goose-flesh set her shivering and she wondered what of Carson she might now find out.

Soon enough over half a million new, much shorter strings sat in the computer's memory. Somewhere in that vast, dense alphabetic jungle there just might be 73 sequences forming meaningful words.

Had she arrived at the last step? What kinds of words, Jaime speculated, would Carson use to record what he knew? She pictured him at work. He typed fast. She'd seen that when she shadowed him on-line. Fast key strokes from fluent fingers. And from what of him she'd physically observed, in the watchers' common room, or in the cafeteria, or from a distance in the hallways, she knew the fingers belonged to restless hands which extended from long arms attached to solid shoulders. With his size, she thought, Carson would hunch over his keyboard. She could visualise the posture as being the same as her brother's. When her brother worked, as she imagined him in his virtual world, he would be protecting with his body what he was creating. Carson, Jaime thought, would also have that tendency to shield. The reflex is natural if you care for something.

Since Carson monitored the illegal trade in arms, she typed associated words into a search function: Russia, China, Arabs, oil, missiles, terrorists, bankers…Thinking of what she had observed a few days before when he combed through databases, she jotted down more
words: names of airports, airlines, yachts, hotels, the name of Rachel Dunn…She thought of the plague and the American report which had so ulcerated Heywood and which she had obtained, read and scanned into a digital file. So the search list lengthened: Transylvania, monastery, pipeline, virus, Romania, Radu Corioanu… Would any of the half million final alphabetical strings, each one a separate file, contain such words? Sensing after three days of uphill slogging that she was nearing a crest, Jaime's heart beat faster. If something existed, this was the moment of truth. Taking a deep breath, she paused momentously, then clicked. The monitor sprang to life. File numbers flashed by, too fast for the eye to follow. Soon enough a hundred strings had been dredged through but, as with
Tom Jones
and
Anna Karenina
, they were producing nothing. Another hundred, and another. Then a thousand. Nothing was coming out. Random letters passed by in piles like crushed rock on a conveyor belt.

Then…a ping. File 3784. Jaime hit the pause function and scrolled back. Something had born fruit. But what? She saw it came from
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
paired with
Is Paris Burning
?

She sent file 3784 to another computer and pressed
resume
. In the lab's stillness, on another monitor, a number of paragraphs slipped onto the screen and so into the world. Jaime rolled over on her chair to look. Would this be her first glimpse at a Carson Pryce secret?

Another ping disturbed the stillness. Jaime couldn't help it; she began grinning. From ear to ear. She was as delighted as a child given some candy by an aunt.

The first paragraphs, the first result, consisted of letters run together. No spaces or punctuation. But a cursory glance was enough to see words.

philliphache marseilles contract colon elmedhi afsaritehran hirty two exocet missiles fixed by gurb a asanvancouvercontain erssevenyceightlp comma one six bqpcommaninekfivethree hzarrivingbatumifeb three bonapar tedepar tfebtwel vetruckturkeyiran transport vladimirrustavelitbilisintervention window feb four eleven act

Behind her the search computer was ejecting more intermittent monotonal pings, but Jaime stuck to file 3784, sending it to yet another
computer, adding spaces, some missing words, and punctuation.

Phillip Haché, Marseilles, contract with Colonel Medhi Afsari, Tehran. Thirty-two Exocet missiles. Fixed by Gur Basaan, Vancouver. Containers 7YC8LP, 16BQP9, 9K53HZ arriving Batumi Feb 3 on N. Bonaparte. Depart Feb 12 by truck into Turkey to Iran. Truck transport Vladimir Rustaveli, Tbilisi. Intervention window Feb 4-11. Act
.

The other paragraphs provided the details. Gur Baasan, born in Mongolia now of Vancouver, owned a business which staged fireworks. In fact, it was a front for deals involving more potent pyrotechnical devices. Baasan owned a cottage on an island in Georgian Bay. Rustaveli had journeyed to the cottage, as had Haché. Baasan travelled widely. He'd also met Haché regularly in a Paris suburb close to Versailles. From there he travelled to Amman for consultations with a certain Colonel Afsari. Carson's report had dates, places, texts of telephone intercepts, e-mails and other documents hacked out of the memories of all kinds of computers. The missiles were to be delivered to Rustaveli who would shepherd them along to Afsari. The Iranian colonel, it was clear, had scrupulously adhered to a pre-delivery payment schedule involving a bank in Dubai.

Jaime scanned the pages. She went back to the last word in the summary.
Act
. Was it advice, or an instruction? Who, she wondered, was Carson advising, or ordering? Did he control a network? If so, how far did his control extend? And what, she mused, had eventually happened to the missile shipment?

As an opener, file 3784 would touch most people's curiosity. But Jaime had never cared much for that part of the world's affairs, about the dark personae that organise destruction. In any case, files like this, she was sure, would be assembled by spooks for other spooks and that exotic brotherhood played its complicated games with perverse rules. How does spooks' information arise? Jaime could imagine it. She could see spooks creating hierarchies of lies stored in out of the way locations to ensure their discovery isn't easy. And as happens with all cults, the lies of the few grow into the truths of the many. Information, disinformation – two sides of one coin. With files like 3784, who could really tell who was doing what to whom?

No, it wasn't the dismal Exocet transaction, nor the shadowy sellers and buyers, that interested Jaime. She was hoping the pinging sounds implied other kinds of insight.

Time became motionless in Jaime's lab. Did one hour pass, or two, as she read about machine gun shipments to guerilla armies in Africa and heavy ordnance destined for the West Bank? Was it past midnight when she went through reports on shoulder-launched anti-air missiles shipped from a secret Taiwan factory to drug cartels on various continents? She scanned enough material for days, even weeks of careful reading. But, if you stood back and took a bird's eye view, and scanned this dismal forest from up high, what were Carson's classics yielding, what were they really saying? That the future will be filled with carnage. Which is the same as saying that it will be just a replication of the past.

Then a blip in the pattern, a perturbation in time's stagnancy, a clearing in the forest. On Jaime's screen, with her hand operating the mouse suddenly showing a light tremor because of the sudden excitement, a note appeared that was unlike the other documents. It seemed to be something Carson had written to himself using words having nothing to do with instruments of conflict. It was about the plague and provided facts Jaime hadn't seen. Her eye raced over the screen from top to bottom. Pay dirt. She balled a fist in triumph.

First nugget: Heywood's suspicions about Carson
had
a basis. Information on the plague had passed between Carson and the Americans. Jaime giggled with delight. How Heywood would erupt when he learned this! He'd spew lava. But not for long. She knew the Czar by now. He'd transform quick. Soon enough he'd pat himself on the back, turn smug and grandfatherly. In his practised conspiratorial manner he'd say:
I read him, Jaime. Course I did. Carson's a horror story. Who doesn't know it? His is a life full of unknown and gruesome details. But I read him. A bad book, a persona marked by an absence of things human. No capacity to feel. No ability for fine sentiment. He's not like you and me
.

Predicting Heywood was never a challenge. Predicting Carson was. Carson's character was shrouded. Were there other documents to quarry?

For the time being the plague file was pure entertainment. Jaime clapped her hands at Carson's display of cyberspace virtuosity, at his
mastery to de- and re-construct events and rewrite history. He commanded an art form with subtle rules, which Jaime knew only too well.

And so to nugget two. She read that Radu Corioanu was undeserving of the impromptu cafeteria memorial. Radu wasn't dead. He wasn't even dying. Nor had he ever set foot in Zurich. A fake death was electronically recorded and certified, or, putting it more delicately, a virtual death had been virtually filed. The plague's true father, Jaime learned, wasn't Radu but a certain Benedictus Athenasiu, a fact so significant, she thought, that it qualified as nugget three.

Give Heywood his due. He'd been right. Carson
had
contributed to the American report. But he'd been wrong too. Carson wasn't the plague's mastermind. Only after Benedictus had completed his havoc, had Carson stepped in, on his own initiative, and found out what was stumping everyone else.

So why a cover up? Why the elaborate creation of an alternate villain to put into the American report? Why had Carson not basked in the glory of having defrocked Benedictus? Why had he stashed the truth away?

Might other files explain?

Jaime activated the scan function once more. A further avalanche of reports arrived on-screen. More detritus really. Stories of commerce in cluster bombs; of unemployed Serb anti-aircraft specialists treated as royalty by Iran's ayatollahs; of uranium enrichment technology (disguised as hydroelectric generator blueprints) making the journey to North Korea from Ukraine. Jaime rifled through the pile, catching words here and there, scanning dozens of pages of dense, run-on letters in a language she understood, though deep down she didn't. Why did humanity get so persistently bogged down with this will to self-destruct? Why hadn't evolution taken the species beyond it?

She continued scanning and the pile of filtered product lowered. Only a few remained. Jaime pursed her lips and got ready for a letdown. Carson was a nonconformist, he was furtive, but fundamentally he was clean. Three days of effort and that was the conclusion. She looked at the list of remaining reports as if it was spam, good only for the recycle bin. Then her desultory eye fell on unusual, entirely different kinds of words. Jaime would always remember the moment, the surge
of energy, a sudden emotion taking hold, as she struggled to absorb them. Slowly and methodically she read this text from beginning to end.

Days later she pulled apart what she felt that moment – to analyse it honestly. It was a roller coaster of a moment. Her initial jubilation reached a peak seemingly in microseconds; then came a plunge into fierce anger, which scarcely lasted any longer. It was an odd anger, the kind that comes when you've just discovered you've been robbed. But she hadn't been robbed, because in the next instant she saw that what the text really said was that she couldn't continue to be the owner of certain ideas which had been developing deep down in the place where fantasies reside. Whereupon in an instant her mood lifted to a high level as she experienced the dignity that comes with understanding. All this flashed through her in the early morning hours as she absorbed Carson's final text.

The note had nothing to do with dreary global plots. It was also different from the factual account of Radu Corioanu and Benedictus Athenasiu. This last text was fascinating because it was about the people and places Carson went looking for when she had been at his side on-line: Alexandria, the El-Salamlek Palace, the co-ordinates of Morsi Abou-Ghazi's yacht. And its introspective tone made it sound like a passage lifted from a diary. And isn't it in diaries that people reveal their cores?

Alexandria again. Each month the same. A weekend with Friday and Monday added
.

And the same suite on the top floor of the El-Salamlek Palace
.

What does she think when she stands at the tall windows? Does she look for the launch amongst the boats moored in the bay? Does she search the sea beyond the headlands for a silhouette on the horizon?

What are her thoughts when the sun falls away and the palms cease filtering light?

Soon enough she leaves. A walk down from the hotel, a step onto the launch, a bouncing race across the open sea to where it meets the sky. Here the yacht lies waiting
.

Five months. Five visits
.

A pattern. No different than the years before when she
went back and forth between Geneva and Berlin in the banker's private plane
.