The Cause (2 page)

The rest of the conversation felt like an interview. His questions were laced with intent but then would suddenly veer off course. From peak oil to peak population to war and destruction, we talked about it. He seemed unconvinced. He told me we were living in a world where moral climates had no atmosphere. He seemed the type to mole up in a motel room and glue himself to the green glow of a computer screen. A hacker, subverting vital information, ruining lives, twiddling his pencil mustache in rhythm to the keys that were the preludes to the concertos to come. These sorts of men I was familiar with, and I had a strange sense I was talking to a kindred spirit even though our views were in discord.

He rested his hands on the table as if he were about to go into prayer. “Mr. Corvus, you seem to be a cynic.”

“People have called me worse.”

Bloom laughed. Then, after his high-pitched guffaw sputtered, he paused and his smile went cold. “Kill your father
and a cynic is born, is that it, Mr. Corvus?” He watched my reaction as I stood up. I bumped the table, and the plates and glasses clattered. He leaned back abruptly in his seat and said, “Sit down, Mr. Corvus. The Company knows what really happened.”

Perhaps even then Seee was watching, wondering, listening through the avatar Bloom, whom later I would find out was one of Basim Hassani’s personas. By that time, Seee must have known I had been accepted to The Farm. Seee—breathing me in, probing me with cameras and the wandering-eyed henchman recruiter strategically seated opposite my side of the table, wondering if I’d make it through CIA camp. I never asked Seee whether preemptive surveillance from The Company was part of standard routine, or his own precise machinations before we even got there.

The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics states that for each possible outcome of a particular action, the world replicates itself into a copy such that each potential action is played out in a separate universe. The key to this is that these universes don’t interact.

The computer is a similar system where the many-worlds theorem has great appeal. Such Black Hat hackers see the computer as simply a virtual world, split from this one, yet alike, able to learn and evolve, one with a myriad of potential outcomes, but different in that it can seek out and stretch the real world. If every outcome is known, or at least can be hypothe- sized, then one can inflict much damage onto the real world from the virtual one. Just because there is a screen in front of you, does that mean it should be believed? A particular example of duality in the real and virtual worlds took place on September 23
^rd
of 2018 when an Anonymous hacker named Cerberus broke into CNN’s Twitter account and claimed a dirty bomb had exploded in the Capitol only a few blocks away from the White House. After this bogus news hit the Internet, another hacked media site reported the same story and within the short span of a second,
high-frequency trading programs reacted by yanking their bids. Liquidity went dry. The result was a flash-crash in all of the major equity market indices. The Dow Jones Industrial Average crashed 663 points in less than a second. Other markets followed. System triggers tripped. The market shut down.

One over-leveraged CEO running a high-frequency trading company whose algorithms had gone awry jumped off a bridge the same day—all because of a keypunch sent from a 5x5 StorQuest storage unit costing $70 a month that had access to the Wi-Fi of an OfficeMax across the street where the command was sent.

There it was—one machine fooling a host of others—opening Schrodinger’s box and forcing an outcome—puncturing the superstate of the real system by that of the virtual. Quantum suicide in motion. What was the proof? The body of CEO Johann Jennings floating down the Hudson, a red stain on the chilly waters. The virtual world is a blaze that’s difficult to backburn, even if you wish you could. Like the photon, it’s moving in two directions at the same time, stuck in a coherent superposition, and when you observe it, it suddenly changes, morphs and adapts, such that the original state is lost by the observation itself.

So on the morning of September 23
^rd
2022, four years later and two days after graduating from The Farm, the notion of the multi-world would flick back on again and I would remember the work of Cerberus the Hellhound. The “what if I did, what if I didn’t” sort of metaphorical fork in the road. It was another important day in my history, not a news-breaking headliner like the 2018 flash-crash.

It was a day that started by schlepping along after forty-eight hours of nephrotoxic celebration. I had a hangover after waking, and the only cure had been hair-of-the-dog, luke-warm beers and a vodka-weighted Bloody Mary. Now, standing at a bus stop heavy-headed and aspirin-filled after a dizzying Williamsburg pow-wow in colonial town, I thought about the previous night at
Franklin’s Tavern—double-fisted with friends Samuel Adams and Jim Beam at a staff-only after party. Drinking with Bunker-the-Blinded, waitresses Darlene and Kay (William & Mary girls) were dressed in uniforms of cheap Rococo strapless dresses. They wrestled with keeping their mobcaps away from Bunker while guzzling rummers. After hours more of drinking, sometime pecking the edge of dawn, Bunker decided to name his M40 rifle euphemistically “Titty Licker” instead of Daniel Boone’s “Tick Licker”—this while he undid the spiral laces of Darlene’s stay and wet her nipples with the foam of a lager. And then panniers, undercoats, shifts, stockings, garters flew into the air, tossed along with brain and body. The two days had been a breakaway from habit and discipline, and there was a bit of shame in the whole charade, although my frown still seemed to be worn upside-down.

A line of Sunday drivers turtled by. I was somewhere near Market Square, the 10 bus nowhere in sight. I stood inside a bus shelter with a huge poster plastered to the inside wall that said,
Government For You—Putting People To Work One Job At A Time
. I drooped over the glass casing containing a bus schedule and squinted to find 9:35, the time for the next departure. I turned around and looked back at the road. There was a saltshaker tipped over in the middle of the street, the wind so light, sandy grains trailed along the asphalt to where it had come to rest. Up in the sky, a couple of old-model Predator drones flew overhead, tiny white contrails trailing behind. They were in the air nights and days now. The newer models were segmented into different classes of use: sound capture, video surveillance, kill machines, covert spy apparatuses that looked like living things. Now, there were quiet, battery-powered gliders that flew low to the ground called EEDs (eyes and ear drones). They were silent chameleons, verging on imperceptible. They had skins that morphed from cerulean blue to pale white, flying blurs with camouflaged bodies adapting to the color of the sky. Built for video and audio
surveillance, a slew of them had been taken down by organized crime gangs who could afford guided missiles. These were the people who took offense at having their activity monitored. Other people seemed not to care. The latest designs they built smaller, sleeker, but the rumors said these were being shot down too by new, short-lived neutralizer rockets, the hottest-selling item on the black market. Evolution and adaptation were in play across cities in America. To the naked eye most were impossible to see, but if you looked through a telescope at the high-flyer UAVs, it seemed like the sky was a swarm of insects over the big cities.

At the bus stop, my thoughts idled, slowly drifting over the last three months in the CIA at The Farm—paramilitary training, jump school, tradecraft, explosives, tactical driving, engineering, telecom. Flashes of memory blurred with the posted bus times, and I found myself again focusing hard at the bus schedule blank-brained and wobbly. Then I heard Tomray Bunker over my shoulder. “We’re
C,
fucking
I,
fucking
A,
man.” I turned around to his wide-lipped grin. Dumb-faced and giddy, he was out in the morning chill bare-chested and sockless, dressed in black Nikes and a pair of knee-holed jeans. On top of his head was Darlene’s mobcap fluttering in the wind.

“Yeah,” I said. “CIA who’s DOA.” Each of us was a NOC (non-official cover), a field operative—deep undercover where your existence would be denied should you ever be caught. Somehow it hadn’t dawned on me yet, the significance of it all.

“Not me. I feel great,” Bunker said.

“The bipolar feel best when they’re down.”

“C
fucking
I,
fucking
AAAA,”
he droned on, sticking out his wine-stained tongue. I glanced around but the streets were bare. The whole world had gone to sleep. He sensed my agitation and stuck out his tongue at me, shaking his head.

“All I seem to remember was you fucking Dar fucking Kaaaay.”

“Very funny, motherfucker,” he said laughing, tying the straps of the mobcap into a bow under his chin. “But you was there too, if memory serves. Kay, Isse, and Dar. A dark-meat white-bread sandwich—a ‘K’—‘I’—‘D’. A palindrome for DIK, which seems to describe you quite well.”

I laughed—had to—it was Bunker’s way, always one-upping you. A fiery-mouthed kid, smart as a whip with a comeback. IQ of 161. A Rice summa cum laude son-of-a-bitch.

“So, you give any thought to the camp?” he asked, referring to The Abattoir, this time with a bit more discretion to the volume of his voice.

I dodged his question. “Spring training is long over. No need to go back to camp.” I pointed to the saltshaker in the middle of the road.

The previous night he had told Darlene and Kay we were ball players from the Tidewater Tides. I was the slugger, Dirk Harmon who was batting .321 with 40 homers and 151 RBIs, sure to soon go to the show. He was Dan Rollins, a pitcher with a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball. So adamant about it, he piled a heap of salt and pepper shakers in his shirt, and with a bottle of tequila in his other hand, stumbled outside to give us a demonstration.

Now I gazed back at the tumbled saltshaker dusting up the middle of the street and wondered when the bus would get here.

“You’re avoiding the question,” he said, referring back to The Abattoir with a more serious tone. “You know what I mean.”

“I certainly haven’t thought about it today.”

The bus approached, lugged to a stop. The door folded inward with a swish and an old woman in a purple dress and milky-white pantyhose hobbled down the steps.

“What are you taking a bus for?” Bunker asked. “You could walk it.”

“I need a ride.”

“I’m going to the show,” he said, meaning he was going to
The Abattoir. There was a pause, and finally I nodded. He looked at me for a sign, eyes in bloom for a tell. I gave him nothing, because that was what I had to give.

“You coming?”

“I’ll jump later,” he said, moving off through the patch of grass toward the sidewalk.

“Catch you later then.”

He nodded with a pointed head-jerk and was off in a lope, mobcap blowing in the wind.

Before the ceremony, head of training Basim Hassani—aka Dr. Bloom, aka The Paki, aka The Overzealous Immigrant, aka The Trainer—offered each recruit who was chosen to be a field operative a choice to go to The Abattoir for hardcore training off the grid. Rumors amongst the trainees were plenty—the real deal, live situations. Not only off the grid, but not condoned by the Office of the General Council. It was an important program for the CIA, who was losing the budgetary war to the NSA. Signal Intelligence (SigInt) was killing HumInt, and The Company was tired of embarrassments.

The Abattoir remained off the books, off the records. It wore the same clothes as the NOC—the jacket of deniability. For those who wanted to go, a leave of absence was granted—off the payroll. A rumor circulated that an Abattoir graduate received the most dangerous jobs—the multiple passports, the hits, the black-ops with secret funding. These were the frontline men of the CIA, the HumInt guys who counted because they were the ones with the guts to hit the self-destruct button should they get caught. Most of the guys had already made up their minds before the offer was given. We had until that day to respond. In the end, sixty percent of the recruits would go. Pride and honor were at stake. The
pussy
word was used for those who abstained, and here I was in a hangover haze trying to make the biggest decision of my life.

I had more to contemplate than most. Three days ago, a man
up the ladder had asked me for an interview. Told me not to disclose the meeting to anyone. He was a station chief. Claimed his name was Pelletier. Didn’t give a first name, as if it didn’t matter. We met at a restaurant called The Shake and ordered steaks and chatted about the future. I was skeptical, but he had all the right credentials. Talked a smooth game, said he had heard I was going to The Abattoir.

“Perhaps,” I said, “I haven’t come to any definite decision yet.”

“There’s a person there we have an interest in.”

“Like a ‘Dear Friend’ sort of interest?” I asked, referring to the letter a Clandestine would send.

“Not so much.”

“That’s what the ops guys are calling the guys working the diplomats, The Dear Friends. Did you know about that?”

“I have no idea what anyone calls anyone,” Pelletier said.

“I hear a lot of good agents have come out of this camp.”

“I admit, the agents coming out are high quality. It’s why the tops secretly support this program. But that’s not why I asked you here.” Then Pelletier explained they received a message, something passed along from the NSA. Said they hadn’t decoded it yet, but the communication itself was suspicious. The NSA hadn’t broken it yet. They had a suspicion it was going to an unfriendly satellite. All of this is top secret he said, he shouldn’t even be telling me. Telling me what, I said. Exactly, he said. Then, he asked what assignments I was keen on in six months. He explained the mission and said I would be doing a great service to my country should I accept.

“I won’t kill a man without a good reason.”

“Who do you think you are?” he asked bitterly. “You’re green and untested. I’m giving you an opportunity here. I thought you wanted to play this game.”

“I do, but that doesn’t mean I’ll take out one of our own without knowing why.”

“He’s a traitor to this country.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, a bit suspicious of the accusation.

“We have it from a good source.”

“What source?”

“The source has to be protected. You’re going to have to trust me on that.”

The problem was, I didn’t. He had the slippery tongue and mannerisms of Bloom, Hassani’s alter ego. In The Company, you never knew what to believe. Pelletier was a stocky man, a heavy-breather with a stomach that had eaten too many buttered sauces—a hungry girth that wasn’t afraid to take an extra dollop of sour cream with his baked potato. He had a head of brown curly hair no man his age should have had the luck to keep. Hassani had joked never to trust a man with curls. If a man’s hair wasn’t straight, how could he speak the truth? Hassani, Pelletier—these guys were a cult, and trying to read them was like hacking a password—you never knew how many attempts it was going to take to get it right.

I thought about things for a minute. What would my dad, the Marine, have done? Would he have done this man’s bidding for the sake of country? I came to the conclusion he’d be proud to do it. I thought about his Purple Heart framed and mounted in the hallway of the old house. I thought of when I was a boy and him polishing and oiling his M16, shining the black metal until it gleamed like the waters of a dark lake under a shining sun, keeping it clean even though he never shot it anymore. “I’ll give it some thought,” I concluded.