A Dark Perfection

by James, Mark

  “This Aero-Con, how do I contact someone there, someone inside?” Biaggi asked.

  “I’m afraid you don’t. They won’t talk to you. It’s like talking to the CIA, because at this point they’re practically a part of the CIA, or GMA, or whatever. You would have better luck talking to a rock. As Eisenhower warned, beware of the military-industrial complex. Too late for that…”

  “So, what are they using this tagging for anyway?”

  “Well, that’s the big secret. It’s been going on since the Afghan war – the Americans perfected it in tandem with their drone program.”

  Biaggi stared. Global geopolitics was not his strong suit.

  “Alright, let me explain. Back when the Afghan war was raging, the American military and their private mercenary contractors were flying drones into places to kill alleged al-Qaeda members, and later, the Haqqani tribal members who were getting in the way of the exit negotiations. Anyway, their targeting was imprecise because it was based on assets on the ground, mainly information from Afghans who knew of al-Qaeda locations and wanted the reward money that the CIA was throwing around like Christmas candy. The problem was that this information was many times faulty or incomplete and was mostly motivated by the informant’s desire for the money – something that shouldn’t have been too hard to understand at the time. And, if you remember, this is why we saw so many drone casualties related to Afghan weddings, etc. And, of course, all of the village children that were killed made the situation, well, politically problematic, for both the Americans and Karzai.”

  “That’s where the tagging comes in. The Americans developed a sophisticated tracking tag that was the size of a small piece of fabric, like a small dot, that was nearly undetectable when placed on the targeted person. No longer did the informant have to worry that his actions could later be traced back by al-Qaeda; he simply hugged his al-Qaeda colleague like he would at any other time and simply walk away, knowing that the termination action wouldn’t occur for several days, or even weeks, when he would be far away with the American’s money. And, no more did the Americans have to hit the place that the informant had designated, hoping against hope for minimal collateral damage. Now they could track the tag with their satellites and wait for the time when the target was clear of a village, or better yet, at a meeting with other tagged targets. I mean, didn’t anyone think it was odd when the wedding deaths suddenly stopped and, at the same time, the drones became nearly perfect in their accuracy? It wasn’t a coincidence.”

  All of this jumbled Biaggi’s self-imposed and simple worldview. He was as dark and cynical as the next inspector about local drug deals and homicides, but this was too much. Of course, the two bottles of Barolo weren’t helping. “Alright,” he said, “but how could anyone really hide all of this.”

  “That’s what one would think, but remember, don’t ever underestimate the motivation of our governments, when truly motivated. When it’s in their collective interest, it’s amazing how they can work together. Do you remember the drone bases that were set up by the Americans in Mali and then later in Niger? Why would they do that? Because the tagging program had been perfected as their newest toy – no troops on the ground, only military personnel flying drones, as if they were playing video games, the dark experience of war even more remote from the citizenry. Do you remember that book during the Bush administration, by that Watergate reporter? He was going to spill the beans about the tagging program, but the CIA redacted it, every word, shut him up and then everyone else in Washington too – the Patriot Act, don’t you know. Even the media can be a tacit accomplice. It’s all about the money.”

  “So, perhaps, one of these tags made it from some government, or from some government contractor, into my victim. But then how was he killed? It surely wasn’t a drone…”

  “The tag acted like a targeting beacon. It made it easier for the weapon, whatever it was, to find its target, that’s all. They needed a precise kill, for whatever reason. I have nothing more than that. I’m sorry, Giovanni, I wish I could do more. I’ve been out of the real game for too long.”

  Biaggi said goodbye to his old friend and they agreed to a get-together in Rome, when Biaggi was planning a trip there next spring.

  He turned on his computer to check for messages before heading to a witness interview with Ilario in the San Marco District and then on to a lunch with a lady friend.

  His first message was from his boss, “Close up the Anderson file. It’s being transferred to Rome, the main office. Sorry, no reasons on this one. Anyway, it’s off our list. Cease your work, simply do up the file and let them worry about it. Also, drop by this afternoon when you get a chance on the San Marco stabbing...”

  Biaggi stared at the message. He didn’t like being pulled off a case, any case.

  He opened the case program template and entered the information – on Anderson’s name, on the Aero-Con connection, on the kill patterns given to him by the coroner. He hit enter and transmitted the information to Interpol.

  If someone were trying to bury this file, they’d have a tougher time now.

  Now and then, howling at the wind became an option.

  It was another one of his philosophies.

  †

  Lani had brought with her only one nicer outfit, black slacks, white blouse, she didn’t know why. She stood in front of the window looking out at the Paris night.

  Was she falling in love? Was that possible?

  The past four days seemed like forever, then, in the next moment, like a splinter of time.

  “Lani,” Jack said as he entered the room, fresh from his shower and feeling better in clean clothes. He sat on the edge of the bed and opened the laptop. “I think we need to focus on these patterns. Maybe Garneau saw something in his, who knows. Did I tell you I found something interesting on this Garneau? When you read through the French articles, sequentially, you see that all of a sudden Garneau is gone and the case disappears. I think he may have been pulled off his investigation too. You know, like we were pulled off.”

  She continued to stare out the window, the Eiffel Tower in the distance dazzling in its flickering, cascading lights, the River Seine calm and reflective. If she turned now, would he see it in her eyes?

  “Lani, did you hear me?” noticing that she hadn’t answered. He looked up and smiled, “Hey, you alright over there?”

  She took a deep breath, feeling that if she turned from the lights she would never see them again. “It’s just so beautiful. I know we have to stay in…Jack, come on over, look at this.”

  He walked up behind her and could smell the light perfume in her hair. The night was clear, the city alive with lights.

  They stood and stared, neither saying anything. If they went down into the crowds, even with the orbs gone, there would still be the police to avoid, their faces all over the Interpol warrant posters. But would any policeman really see them amidst the throngs, within the dancing lights, if they were careful, if they turned away, walked away when they needed to? Everything was a calculated risk, a cost/benefit analysis: between freedom and security, between purpose and chaos, between love and the loveless, between dark and light.

  His mind told him of the calculation, the weighing of its logic, but his intuition – what had gotten him through every interrogation, every trial, through every jam he could ever remember – told him that a different decision was being made. What would be lost if they didn’t go?

  He remembered his words to her: Don’t say that I never took you to Paris!

  He put his hands on her shoulders. She could feel their strength, their gentleness.

  “Come on,” he said as she turned, “Let’s go.”

  †

  She raised her face to the drizzle that had just started as they walked arm-in-arm down the Champs-Elysees. The rain didn’t matter; nothing could bring her down at this moment.

  They spied a street vendor with steam coming off his crepe maker – a large, round griddle that steamed from the r
aindrops and the thin batter. “Oui, the chocolate one,” she said. “How do you say it? Une crepe s’il vous plait? Merci.”

  The rain made the wide boulevard shine with the lights from the stores and restaurants. They passed Le Fouquet’s – the restaurant where Chaplin, Churchill and Jackie Onassis had once dined – the Arc de Triomphe ahead of them, shimmering gold from the floodlights with a stream of cars rushing around the roundabout below.

  “Just a little bit farther,” Lani said, smiling and running ahead. Since a little girl, she’d dreamed of this place. They waited for the light and crossed with the tourists, the Arc overhead much larger than she’d ever imagined.

  They crossed back to the Champs-Elysees and Jack flagged down a taxi. “Where are we going?” she said. “You said we had to head back to the apartment.”

  “A surprise. Haven’t been back in years.”

  He handed the driver a 200 Euro note, whispering something that Lani couldn’t hear. He leaned back and smiled, “First, a detour.”

  They drove from the 8th Arrondissement over the Seine and into the Left Bank. She saw a street sign, Rue de l’Universite. Then, suddenly, she looked up and there it was – the Eiffel Tower. They pulled up to the curb and she looked over at him expectantly.

  “Sure,” Jack said and they exited the taxi, feeling the crisp night air. They walked around the Tower, the rain having stopped, looking up through the glittering lights and the trestles.

  Back in the taxi, they drove back over the Seine and retraced their steps, entering the roundabout at the Arc and exiting onto the Champs-Elysees heading east. Through the corridor of trees she could see the Egyptian obelisk and the lit up fountains at the Place de la Concorde. They proceeded down the Rue de Rivoli and past the Louvre and she looked at him wistfully. He smiled, “I would open it up…if I could.”

  Jack gave the taxi driver another address and they drove back over the Seine and into the Left Bank. They entered the Latin Quarter and passed Café de Flores – where Camus and Sartre had sipped coffees. Down the Boulevard Saint-Germain, they saw the sidewalks and outdoor cafes crowded with people, locals out for a stroll and tourists out for the night.

  They pulled up to a restaurant. She recognized the name – Les Deux Magots.

  She looked up to the perfect white awnings and down at the cobblestone streets. She smiled, “You’re kidding. Now who’s breaking all the rules?”

  Hemingway wrote prose while looking out these same windows. Simone de Beauvoir sat with Sartre and wrote for hours, sometimes stopping to talk with Hemingway. Picasso was introduced to one of his mistresses here. Oscar Wilde took tea on most afternoons.

  Jack told the driver to wait and opened the taxi door for Lani. She looked up at him, “How are we possibly going to get in?”

  “Old connections,” he laughed. “After the book was published and the movie came out, I escaped for that summer, trying to figure out if I was a writer. Mostly though, I spent a lot of time here. Came to know the owners.”

  They entered the turnstile door and were met by the most impeccable maitre d’ she’d ever seen. They were shown to a table for two, silver tableware gleaming from the chandeliers. On the column next to the table were hung the two magots, the colorful statues that gave the restaurant its name.

  “What are those?” she asked as he tucked in her chair and took his seat.

  “Merci,” he said to the waiter, looking at the wine list. “We’ll have a bottle of the ’05 Chateau Margaux.” He looked up at the statues. “What I was told was that there was a play showing in Paris, around 1813, and two of the characters in the play were Chinese tradesmen, or, in French, Le Magot. The play must have been a big hit because those statues ended up here and the name stuck.”

  She looked around – at the white linens on the tables, at the people filling up the room, their conversations melding and an evening in Paris beginning.

  “What sounds good?” Jack asked. “If you want something different, this would be the place.”

  She looked at the menu, all in French, “Do you remember any of your French? Fish does sound good, though.”

  “A bit. Let’s see, the fourth one down is Dover Sole with wine, lemon and capers. Then – and this one sounds good too – Saumon ‘d Ecosse avec Pommes de Terre, Scottish salmon with boiled potatoes. Then, number…”

  “You know,” Lani said, “the Dover Sole sounds perfect. I’ll have that.”

  “Alright, and I’ll have the steak, number twelve. Haven’t had a good steak in a while.”

  The meal was one of the best she’d ever had, the ambiance a dream. They talked about Jack’s time in Paris – about when some of his friends had visited from the U.S. and they ended up closing the Chez Papa jazz club for two days running, about his mornings writing under the fountains at the Jardin des Tuileries, and about how the skies in the painting, Starry Night, seemed to move if you looked at them long enough.

  “It sounds crazy,” he said, “but the stars actually seemed to shine, on their own. I wonder if Van Gogh knew that, as he was painting it?”

  She talked about her summers on Kauai and about how the days went by as if time never existed, only the green mountains and the skies, about the summer she stayed with friends in Big Sur, about the smell of the sea brine and the spice from the firs and the rugged California coast, about the sea otters on their backs cracking oysters, floating above the kelp jungles rising from the sea floor, and how she’d realized, looking at the waves, that this same water had come from her Hawaiian home, pulled there on the currents.

  After espressos and what she declared a “divine” chocolate desert, they left the restaurant, still swimming from the wine. Overhead, the clouds had cleared and the stars showed out against the lights from the Eiffel Tower. He pointed down the street, “We can walk from here.”

  They walked down the Boulevard Saint-Germain, taking the night in, and turned on Rue Saint Benoit. “In here,” he said.

  “I thought we were heading back to the apartment?”

  She looked up at the sign, which only read, ‘Jazz Club.’

  Inside Chez Papa, the lights were low with candles on the tables. Against the back of the room was a piano and behind it a wall covered in signatures, of the famous who had passed through. Soon a woman in a white-sequined dress came out and started singing a languid song, the piano player sometimes following her, sometimes moving ahead in soft rifts.

  “Now, you can’t have late night jazz in Paris without champagne,” Jack said. He ordered a bottle and they sat back into the music, their hands close on the stems of the glasses on the small table, telling their stories, their stories mixing with the cacophony of others wending through the air, the tinkling of glasses as a backdrop.

  On their way back to the apartment, only a few blocks away, she laughed from the champagne. He released her arm and she headed up the stairs, slightly tripping and looking back at him and laughing, taking off her heels.

  †

  Mac sat opposite from Aisha in her white, sterile world.

  There was something different in his posture, more rigid, tense, she could sense it.

  Mac knew when a case was going cold; it felt like a fading memory one could no longer hold onto, a train whistle falling fast behind.

  Josh had told him that morning, “We have to be honest, Mac. These Croatian accounts, I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’re going to get anything there. The code entry is like a labyrinth, as if each time I get close, the combination falls further away. Almost like a taunt.”

  Yesterday, Takamura had called, “Mac, it’s as I said. Everyday it gets harder to make the identification match to the bombers. The white orchid extracts in the skin samples, they’re just too degraded at this point…”

  The world was closing in on Jack and Lani and, at once, the means to help them was falling farther away.

  But in Aisha was the key, their key. She’d told Jack that her main position with the Yemeni cell had been as a “launderer” of mone
y from the U.S. to Yemen, that she knew all of their accounts – the amounts, the banks, the account numbers. Would she know the numbers for the Croatian accounts too? Had the cell set them up in Croatia before they left Yemen? If so, those accounts would show that the money in Jack and Lani’s bank accounts hadn’t come from the terrorists. He had to get this information from her. She had to give it to him.

  “I’m only going to explain this to you one more time,” he said, wanting to yell at her. “You can sit there and play stupid in your blank little world, but you’re going to hear this, and you’re going to know that if you don’t help me then Jack will die. That’s right, he will die, just like all of those people in all of those theaters. More blood on your hands.”

  She sat without moving, her white gown motionless.

  He pleaded with her for the information, on how to obtain it from the Croatian cell, on where the cell would be located.

  “Listen to me!” he yelled with all of his frustrations – from the bombings and their aftermath, from the GMA battles, from Jack and Lani – all coming out of him at once.

  He was standing, his hands clenched on the table leaning over her, but she did not change – nothing seemed to change her.

  He stood, picked up his suit jacket and slowly walked to the door. He opened it and paused.

  “Blood on your hands,” he whispered and closed the door.

  †

  There had been times between them – fleeting moments – that had gone unspoken; as they were leaving Voil Manor, when they both reached for her bag, that first time when you catch the deeper scent of a person; at the cottage, laughing so hard at an old sitcom that they forgot the world outside; then, the moment before separating at Nord Station, when they’d looked up at each other and smiled in their strange, shared universe. Whether such moments were real and lasting, or merely the products of the surreal place they found themselves, had gone unspoken. There was simply no time.