Due Preparations for the Plague (21 page)

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee …

Book of Job, 1:14

It’s to the other man, to Borges, that things happen … I live, I let myself live, so that Borges can weave his tales and poems, and those tales and poems are my justification … Little by little, I have been surrendering everything to him, even though I have evidence of his stubborn habit of falsification and exaggeration … Which of us is writing this page I don’t know.

Jorge Luis Borges,
“Borges and I”

S for substructure, subterranean, subterfuge.

S for split selves, Siamesed.

It is by the other man, Salamander, that events have been nudged in dreadful directions. I operate from beneath his line of sight, because someone has to do this. Someone has to set the record straight. Someone has to sort through the rubble of words and ideas, and I note, for example, that when Salamander writes “ideas” in his reports, or rather in his handwritten notes for his reports, he writes “ids” for short, a plurality of ids, which is a singular idea when you think about it, and he uses the abbreviation “id” when he is indicating “idea” in the nonplural form, as a solitary fertilized seed. It bears looking into, this habit of his, this exhibitionism, this allusive shorthand that might mean
id
, ideogram, identity, identical, ideologue, or idiot.

I want you to stop this, Dr. Reuben. I want you to stop words from doing this to me, iddying this way and that, uncontrollably. They are driving me mad. I want you to stop them.

I want you to stop Salamander from taking up more and more space while I am becoming—have you noticed?—smaller and smaller, like Alice in Wonderland with the shrinking potion. I want you to stop me from disappearing.

I want you to stop the dreams.

In this dream, the passengers are all walking around in the fire unharmed, and I am the one who is disfigured. My face and my entire body are as folded and pleated and convoluted as a roasted prune. Children point and stare and make forays into the blackened topography of my body. They climb my welts and slide down my scars. I recognize the children and this is what saddens me beyond what I am able to endure, because I was the one who saved them.

These are the children I saved.

I tried to save everyone, but the children, at least, I did save.

At least I did that. It was something.

I spoke to Sirocco directly, I spoke directly into his ear, because we always kept radio contact, he from the plane, and I from a location which of course I cannot disclose, Dr. Reuben, not even to you, though it was not far from here. We kept radio and video contact until almost the end, and when contact was lost … well, I do not believe that was Sirocco’s doing or his choice.

The most dangerous enemy is the agent you wrongly believe to be on your own side.

While Sirocco and I still had contact, I argued, I negotiated, I made rash and unauthorized offers. I brandished threats and I dangled bribes. This was risky. It is not acceptable, in our line of work, to let personal emotion intrude, and Salamander and I wrestled within ourselves on the matter and I prevailed. I had more substance then. Salamander and I had equal weight. He worked in his sphere, I kept to mine. Operation Black Death was a politically necessary exercise that got out of hand. It was always a gamble, but an intelligent one, and a necessary one, and collateral damage is part of the game. Always. We know that.

Nevertheless.

The official line—Salamander’s line—was this: events set in motion for the best of reasons must play themselves out. They must be allowed to take their course. If you intervene, if you try to throw a wrench in the wheels once the whole idea is in motion, well … To put it bluntly: if you get the children out, those children may grow up to destroy you.

That was the way Salamander thought.

But those children are
children
, I protested, and I gave instructions for which no clearance had been received.

Let my children go
, I ordered Sirocco, because I did think of them as mine, as my mission; I thought of them as under my care. And from the point where I realized that the children’s lives were the only negotiable item, I used the only weapon I had to make Sirocco comply. We have located your own children, I told him.

He had moved them, you see, from Riyadh to Algeria, so that his daughter could attend a French school along with his sons. There will be an accident in this school, I promised him, and many students will be killed. He knew this was something I could arrange. This will come to pass, I promised, if you do not let the children go.

And though Sirocco has a long history of hardening his heart to threat, he did let the children go.

This was a moment of triumph for me, though a short-lived one. In our business, personal hatred of an adversary is a cardinal sin, and we both hated Sirocco, Salamander and I. Our antagonism was passionate, and passion is a major mistake. It clouds judgment.

You will regret this, Salamander predicted.

Possibly, I acknowledged. Probably.

But I went further. I passed up the chain of command a memo detailing all my evidence against Sirocco: the documents, the meeting times, the tapes. Salamander was ordered to hand them over for destruction. It would not be in the interests of national security, he was informed, to pursue …

Salamander, of course, complied.

I, on the other hand, made copies first, so that someday, some year, the truth will be known.

I wear Salamander like a hair shirt. Like an iron lung. But now I want to plead these moments of escape when I defied him. I want to offer them to the children of Flight 64, I want to offer them to my second wife, and to our son L, and to my daughter F, to history, to whatever judges are waiting on the other side of the last abyss. But when I try to explain this to the children in the dream, my words fall from my mouth like hot tar.

Here, where no birds sing, I do not ask for anything unreasonable. My demands are modest, I think, Dr. Reuben, given the price that I have paid. These are my requests:

It is the nights that I wish to avoid. I want you to stop the nights.

On those nights when the torment comes, when nothing else helps, I want continuing access to the basement apartment which is not in my part of the city. Not at all. It is nowhere near the well-groomed tree-shaded streets of Georgetown where I live with E. The building through which one gains access to that dark and desirable basement is quite dissimilar, even violently so, from the graceful town house where I live with my young wife. As you, the ultimate voyeur, inquisitor, lascivious decoder of my journal, as you are very well aware (for remember, I know who you work for, Dr. Reuben. I am always watching you watching, and your reactions are useful and revelatory to me, and are being recorded) … as you are aware, I refer to the cramped below-street-level space of the young courtesan, the lovely Anna in leather and chains.

Anna lives in that distant, refreshing, bracingly unsafe northeastern sector of our city. Our lovely city. She lives outside the rings of the satin bus routes and beyond the immaculate white aura of the Capitol, which is not visible from the shabby front porches of her street. She lives on the dark side of the moon. Let me be specific, since I know perfectly well that I am followed and watched (I watch you following me): we are speaking of the derelict rowhouses far out along New York Avenue, sardined between the railway lines and those cavernous potholes where even the purring limousines flowing from and toward the Baltimore-Washington Beltway must, for a harsh moment, touch reality. The lovely Anna, my Nefertiti, is black and croons the blue news of underground, which it is my professional duty to keep beneath sewer caps. We have a contract which both of us understand.

I want Anna to keep that contract.

I want to be inside a different skin. (You could hang up the Salamander one, the burned skin, carefully, like a wedding tuxedo, and someone else could use it secondhand.)

I want you to make that little girl shut up, the one in the blue coat, the one who is bearing down like a vengeful Fury. She does not know, she has no idea, where the fuse she is lighting leads or what dreadful detonations will be sparked. I want you to get the scorch marks off the blue coat.

If you can make that little girl shut up, I will tell everything I know. I will sing like a prisoner on the rack. In any case, I am setting everything down, everything, I swear it; and you alone will hold the code-breaking key.

Is my hour up?

Shall I leave with you the journal of my dreams?

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Cal Tech, and all of you, each and every one, Phi Beta Kappa as well. You happy few. You have not only graduated with distinction from our best and brightest institutions, but you have passed through a rigorous vetting system of psychological and security tests. You are clean. You are high-tensile steel. Even so, not all of you will graduate from this course.

You will have noted that there is no standard text. There will be handouts, however, and as you leave the seminar room at the end of this class, please pick up one of these spiral-bound books, to which—please watch as I demonstrate—pages can be added with ease. Ours is a field of knowledge for which new data comes in every month. The chapters of this bible are being written as we speak.

Let us take, for example, an incident that occurred in the Soviet Union in 1979. An accident in Sverdlosk—a leak at the military’s microbiology research unit—released anthrax spores into the air. Result: sixty-eight deaths. What do we learn, what projections can we make from this data?

Think like a terrorist.

Could an anthrax scare occur by malicious planning? Could a small plane—a two-seater, say, trailing
GO METS
banners—dust anthrax over New York? Could we have anthrax weather? An anthrax mist would be odorless and invisible. It would drift in air currents for great distances before dispersal. Would mass deaths result? What defensive precautions could be taken? Could due preparations be made? On this score, we know too little, though all our evidence does suggest this: only we ourselves, at this point in time, are producing high-octane anthrax of the kind that a terrorist would need, though we are keeping a sharply watchful and deeply nervous eye on Iraq. Later, we will consider in detail all the implications and possible scenarios—offensive and defensive—of bioterrorist anthrax attacks.

So what is our syllabus? You will be expected to know the composition and structure of chemical agents, nerve agents, blister agents, and penetrants. There will be newsreel footage of recent and current deployments. In this field, we learn on the run. We have more data than time to process it. For example: the sarin incident in the Tokyo subway, March 20, 1995, carried out by the Aum Supreme Truth cult. That was rehearsed in outback Australia on a sheep station. It was rehearsed one full year before deployment, and we had evidence, we had satellite photographs: hundreds of acres of sheep carcasses and skeletons. We failed to interpret adequately, we did not make the necessary connections in time, but then Tokyo is not strictly our affair. Within our own borders, I assure you, the Aum Srn Rikyo adherents are being tracked.

There will be lab simulations from time to time.

There will be fieldwork.

We are, if you will pardon the irony of the expression, fortunate in having, at our weekly disposal, a veritable smorgasbord of aggressive operations. Limited spheres of hostility proliferate and the increase in contained war zones is exponential, all of which is ideal for our purposes. You will visit these intimate theaters of belligerence, sometimes literally, and sometimes virtually, by way of our surveillance systems. Both situations will be interactive. The value of information from actual deployments is immense, indeed, it cannot be overstated, since only by such hands-on experiments can we gauge the ripple effect, which is to say, the subsidiary physical and psychological outcomes. Subsidiary physical effects are not restricted to personnel; they may be environmental. A chain reaction in the contextual territory, in turn, devolves into further physical sequences for personnel.

A firestorm, for example.

“All things are on fire,” the Buddha said. “The eye is on fire; forms are on fire; impressions received by the eye are on fire.”

Siddh
rtha Gautama, or the Buddha, as he is generally known, was born in India in the sixth century BC, in the very year that King Nebuchadnezzar died. I like to toy with the fantasy that the Buddha saw in utero the fiery furnace which the Babylonian king had made.

Does it surprise you that this course stretches back to the literature of the ancients? It should not. Technologies change, but the essence of warfare is, and always has been, psychological. We ignore, therefore, at our peril the artist’s insight. It is the artist—it is Homer—who observes and names Achilles’ heel. The astute warrior makes use of this information. It was Paris, the great Hector’s younger brother, who shot the arrow which slew Achilles through his vulnerable foot.

And who was Paris, that he killed the greatest warrior of all time?

Paris was nothing. Paris was a dreamer, a philanderer, a lover, a coward despised by his own people, the Trojans. Paris was a madman with a stupid cause, the obsessive love of fickle Helen: and it is this, the madness, the cause, which makes him the joker in the pack, the most dangerous figure of all.

We ignore at our peril those who have a cause. No lethal technology will ever exist to stop them. That is why we study the past as well as the future. What, in essence, am I training you for? What is our mission? Our mission is the vigilant observation of, and the
channeling
of, the madness of true believers, and we do this in the interests of global stability for the greater good of all.

It is a high calling.

And so I like to think of the infant Buddha dreaming of those troublesome Jews, those three madmen with a cause, whom Nebuchadnezzar cast in the furnace of biblical lore. Imagine them, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, incandescent. The heat of that furnace, the Book of Daniel tells us, was so great that the men who were stoking the flames were crisped like bacon in their own body fats.

And yet, you will remember, the king’s counselors, summoned to report on the rebel deaths, said unto him: “We see men like unto gods, O king, walking in the fire unharmed.”

Remember those words, for we too are consumed with a cause.

All that we do has already been dreamed of and foretold. From Sodom and Gomorrah to Nagasaki, we walk with alchemists and gods. We make firestorms from air, and we walk through the fire unharmed. We are Zeus of the thunderbolts, and we are the decontamination and survival experts. We may not yet have learned how to make a heaven on earth—though we strive to keep this planet safe for those who indulge in the idea of heaven—but we are specialists in making that other world spoken of in the Gospel of Mark, a place
where their worm dieth not, and their fire is not quenched
.

This course will train you in both defensive and aggressive postures: in Operation Shadrach and in Operation Nebuchadnezzar; in Operation Redemption and in exercises like Operation Black Death.

The profession to which I have devoted my life, and which you happy few aspire to enter, is as much an art as a science, and more like a highly sophisticated game of chance and skill than either of these. We are chess players who move living pieces on the checkerboard of the world. We are as detached and blameless as gods, but like all creators, we must acknowledge an occupational hazard. Our creatures fascinate us: both those we turn into monsters and those who elude us; especially those who elude us. We become obsessed. We run the risk of envying their lives.

In our profession (
making the world safe for stability
, as we like to say; and sometimes, relishing our own esoteric wit,
making the world safe for moral systems
) it is a given that chaos is all; that order is not only arbitrary but evanescent, and that it is the task of a small strong circle of like-minded people to establish and guard it. Exactly which system of order we sustain—morally and politically speaking—is immaterial. We support the system most likely to stay in place.

Hence our dilemma. I am not speaking here of personal disintegration, or of that futile and panicked attempt to withdraw from the field, though I have lost more friends and colleagues through those two chutes than I care to remember. This is not a field from which one can retire.

Let me repeat that fact, though you already know it or you would not have come this far.

Retirement from this career is not an option. We keep your soul in an escrow account. Take note: of the twenty of you in this room, the crème de la crème who have made the cut and been registered for this course, nine of you will leave us before the end through one of the two trapdoors I just named. The wages of sin in the Intelligence community are erasure. I know you understand this. If you did not, you would not have reached this class.

But there is one other pitfall rarely acknowledged in our field, and it is the one to which I have already alluded: the risk of obsession with the pieces on the board. To put this in comprehensible literary terms: you are in danger of becoming transfixed by Paris and Helen, those idiots, who care nothing for either Greece or Troy, for Hector or Achilles, for the Trojan Horse or all the brilliant engines of war. They go on making love while the battle rages, and you may become obsessed with wanting to make them pay.

This can lead to serious errors in judgment.

Or you can become deranged by Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego; or by Daniel, by Lions’-Den Daniel, stubborn stupid Daniel in the den. You become obsessed with the ones who cannot be broken or bent.

Watch for this.

Such an obsession will precipitate fatal errors in judgment.

Such an obsession will disqualify you permanently.

Even your code name will be expunged.

And then, finally, there is the perennial day-by-day challenge of your counterpart on the other side, the zealot whose energy you seek to harness, the rogue agent who can match you ruse for ruse, who can out-double-agent you, double-double-cross you, who can lead you into an ever-more-frenzied dance of death. Outwitting him is the secret addiction that will bind you to this career, that will obsess you to the exclusion of everything else in your life. It is he who will destroy you unless you kill him first, but you dare not kill him until he has served the purpose for which you first caught hold of his tiger’s mane and embarked on the wild ride with him.

We are gamblers, ladies and gentlemen, in a high-stakes game. Timing is everything.

One further reminder: should we meet, or should you meet one another, in social circumstances, social names will be used.

Within this course, within any sphere of our professional endeavor, only code names are permissible. Never use other than a code name in writing. If any evidence is ever found that links a code name with an identifiable name, you will be expunged.

In the world of shadows you have now entered, you will call me Salamander.