At that moment, two things happened. First, the pizzas flew apart. Second, a massive explosion of fireworks came from behind the garage. BA-BA-BA-BOOM! Claire stared slack-jawed through the kitchen window at the billowing smoke and continuing display of pyrotechnics. Multicoloured fireballs and incandescent flares shot across the lawn, ricocheted off the house and nearby trees, and set fire to the postbox. As the display died down, a haze of gun smoke and the stink of sulphur filled the air.
"Annabelle," said Claire, "I'm going to have to call you back."
* * *
"You, inside!" Claire swung open the door to her son's bedroom and pointed, just in case there was any doubt. Alex scowled and shuffled past her, his clothes reeking of brimstone and smoke. At thirteen, he'd already mastered the teenage sulk. As he entered, he artfully turned to avoid her seeing the towel-wrapped bundle hidden behind his back. "And don't come out for anything,"
"What if I gotta pee?" said Alex with a smirk.
"Don't be an ass," Claire snapped. "You're so like your father."
"I wouldn't know."
Claire rolled her eyes. She'd heard it all before. "Well, here's an idea, take a shot at something he never accomplished and grow-the-hell-up. You almost set the damn house on fire." She gave her son a last glare, then slammed the door.
"Bitch," he muttered.
"I heard that!"
Alex shook his head and waited for her to charge back through the door. After two minutes, he decided she wasn't going to. He turned and dropped his carefully concealed bundle onto the bed. The towel fell away, revealing the shiny steel canister within. It still looked as good as new. Tentatively he reached out and touched it. "Ow!" The metal was still hot from the fireworks. For a long moment he stared at it, uncertain what to do next. His mother had sent Gerald home and, along with him, any ideas he might have had about the object. Alex tried to imagine what might be inside but quickly realized he didn't have a very good imagination. It looked like a thermos to him, so he could only envision it containing coffee or chicken soup. He supposed it might contain some more exciting liquid such as acid or nuclear waste. He wasn't convinced that Gerald was right about nuclear waste being a good thing. He then considered something else. It might contain nothing at all. In school they had been reading Le Petit Prince, the story about the Pilot who lands in the desert and meets the Little Prince from another planet. The Little Prince demands that the Pilot draw him a sheep. The Little Prince proves impossible to please, however, rejecting the Pilot's first two attempts. Finally, the Pilot resorts to drawing a picture of a box and tells the Prince that his sheep is inside. "That is exactly the way I wanted it," says the Little Prince. Alex decided that the canister might be like the sheep. It might be more exciting left unopened. Opening it might lead to disappointment, like Christmas presents. Still, not opening it wasn't very satisfying either. The only way to ensure he got something good from it, he decided, was to sell it. He could sell it as it was, unopened. Let someone else blow it up with fireworks, he thought. He woke his computer from sleep and quickly typed "www.ebay.com". I'll set a minimum bid of fifty dollars, he thought. For fifty bucks, who cares what's inside?
Alex quickly filled out the details of the auction, describing the canister exactly. By this time, it had cooled down enough that he was able to handle it freely again. In the light of the window he caught the glint of engraved letters he'd not noticed earlier, burnished by the heat of the fire. "USWR No. 34567234X". He transcribed them into the online description ending with a simple disclaimer, "Don't know what's inside, can't open it. Could be empty, no promises. Buy at your own risk. NO REFUNDS!!!" He then clicked the mouse, sending the auction live. For a while, Alex stared at the screen as if expecting something to happen. He'd set the auction to expire in one week. He glanced at his watch. One minute had passed since the auction had begun. He looked at the screen—0 bids. "This is stupid," he said. Alex turned off the computer monitor and turned on the TV instead. Someone was trying to eat an entire jar of mayonnaise before a timer ran out. He was halfway through and already looked as if he might be sick. Awesome, thought Alex.
Chapter 3
"Home is where the heart is" – E. A. Poe
The Berghaus Hotel in Germany had first been built in 1890 as a luxury sanatorium. The mountain air, thin with oxygen, thick with pine, was seen as the ideal antidote to bronchial infections and other maladies. Even shrouded in snow, as it was today, it held a breathtaking panoramic view of the bright green fields of Bavaria below. This vista was considered a perfect panacea for any problems of the mind that visitors might suffer. Of course, if that failed, its plunging cliff-side patio offered a different sort of relief for the deeply depressed and had done so on more than one occasion. Either way, once the Berghaus's patients checked in, they knew they would soon be leaving their troubles behind. During the war, The Berghaus's relative seclusion had made it an ideal retreat for Hitler's inner circle. Often, they would stay there, while the Führer and a select few stayed at his private chalet, the Berghof, just an hour's drive away. The Berghaus, it was said, put the 'party' back in the Nazi Party, with the late night sex romps for the would-be rulers of the world and their eager consorts. Following the war, its image tainted by Nazi frivolity, the Berghaus was largely forgotten. It suffered years of neglect and the loss of a wing to fire before finally being bought, restored and relaunched in 1976 as a grand hotel once more. The stigma of war was then far enough in the past to be dismissed as mere history. Now, it served, not as a retreat for convalescents, but primarily for business men seeking to find a discreet location for their indiscretions.
Inside, the lobby had been faithfully restored to prewar opulence, complete with ornate gold leaf moulding and Bavarian blue carpets. The morning tide of guests checking-out was at its height. The lounge was open for breakfast at that time. If a guest asked, however, he could always order a drink. So it was that a waiter carried a stein of Bitburger, and a glass of Perrier, to a corner booth. There, Mathias Boltzmann sat ensconced, receiving his newly arrived friend and business associate from America, Carl Weiss. "Pröst!" said Mathias with a warm smile as he lifted the glass of sparkling water. Carl grinned back, clinked his glass and took a deep draught. It had been a long flight, followed by an even longer drive up the tenuous mountain roads. For a moment, Carl simply savoured the bright pilsener. It felt good to be back in Deutschland.
Both Carl and Mathias were businessmen and had done deals together many times in the past. While American by birth, Carl's Germanic name was no coincidence. He liked doing business with Germans and considered his heritage to be as much a part of his identity as his official nationality. Carl was convinced that the Germans' loss of World War II was due to a simple "lapse in judgement." Hitler, he believed, had fallen victim to hubris, what with taking on too many fronts and his unfortunate obsession with exterminating the Jews. Carl argued, however, that hubris was an imperfection of greatness. The true takeaway of the war wasn't that Germany had lost, but that for a while it looked as if Germany would win. Hitler stood alone against all of the other countries of Europe, and had very nearly triumphed. Technically he'd had the Italians as allies, but they were the clown princes of the continent and didn't count. The British resisted, of course, but they were a lost tribe of Germans. Carl truly believed that World War II confirmed, rather than belied, the truth of Germanic might. He'd made this belief incarnate in his own way, by building a sizeable fortune as the largest independent distributor of "Genuine German" brätwurst in the mid-western United States. There, he was known simply as "the Sausage King". Flush with profits, Carl soon found himself looking to expand his business dealings beyond big sausage. He met Mathias Boltzmann at a Republican fundraiser in New York. With his silver hair, fierce black brows and handsome face, Mathias reminded Carl of Gregory Peck. Mathias Boltzmann had the sort of magnetic presence that made men feel lucky to be the object of his attention. Mathias complimented Carl on his 'tiny wiener', referring to his new line of c
ocktail sausages. "It's small," he said, "but quite delectable." The two men hit it off both personally and professionally and, when Mathias offered Carl the opportunity to invest in his business dealings, Carl leapt at the chance. Mathias was, at this point, already the largest independent illicit arms dealer in the world. Carl was unfazed by either the illegality or immorality of the business. "If I gave a damn about how sausage was made," he said, "I'd never have gotten into the wurst business in the first place!" If anything, Carl was invigorated by the arms-length element of danger and enamoured of the sheer Aryan might of his new found friend. "Now Mathias, what is this thing that has got you so excited you would actually leave your precious Monaco retreat to tell me?"
Mathias smiled. His eyes twinkled under his bushy black brows as if enjoying a private joke. He then nodded and slid a thin silver laptop onto the table. He lifted the display as if unveiling something of great, but solemn importance. Its screen showed an eBay auction page. Mathias gazed at Carl with piercing blue eyes and said simply, "This."
Carl looked at the web page. It was offering what looked like a simple steel canister for sale. Carl peered at it more closely trying to discern its value. "What is this? It looks like a... martini shaker?" Carl glanced up at Mathias, who was clearly amused by his response. He considered the possibility that the German was playing a joke, and that the joke was on him. No, he decided, he'd given Mathias too much money over the years. Whatever the man thought of him privately, he surely wouldn't have called him here to humiliate him. It would simply be bad for business. He looked at the page again. "The top bid is $62?"
Mathias nodded. "My bid."
The amount made Carl even more confused. What item for sale on eBay for $62 could possibly be of interest to Mathias Boltzmann? "Surely this is a joke," said Carl, "Unless..."
"Unless?"
"Unless, you know something that the seller does not?" said Carl. Mathias's grin widened. Carl couldn't help but feel that he was being toyed with, but his curiosity had the better of him now, so he didn't care.
"My dear friend," said Mathias, "when you've facilitated the cross-border exchange of surplus military hardware as long as I have..."
"You mean, dealt arms."
"Fine. When you've dealt arms as long as I have, documents and information also have a tendency to fall into one's hands. Information that may, at first, have no immediate value. Such were the papers that led me to this. I am, perhaps, the only person alive who knows what this is, and let me assure you, this is no martini shaker. This? This is something wonderful."
Carl studied the photo again. It had evidently been taken with the canister sitting on the edge of a desk. In the background, he could just make out a poster of a Rastafarian monkey smoking a bong.
Chapter 4
"It's a party line." – J.E. Hoover
The front of the CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia was designed to look friendly and approachable. From its own freeway exit sign to the arching glass canopy entrance, the facility more closely resembled a suburban shopping mall than a spy agency. Like a shopping mall, the agency included an actual Starbucks location. Here, however, in the interest of national security, the baristas were forbidden to write the names of customers on the cups, despite the argument that their spelling could be seen as a form of encryption. Still, the building design was better than the F.B.I.'s headquarters in Washington, where the J. Edgar Hoover building most resembled a stack of giant concrete waffles. It was also less unsettling than the black box that served both literally and metaphorically as the NSA's headquarters in Maryland. The CIA Headquarters was not so much a statement in modern architecture, as a redaction.
"Okay, so what is it exactly?" asked Charlie Draper, as he and Alicia Tremblay made their way down the long windowless hallway. Charlie hadn't been there in months and so found himself noticing the collection of regularly spaced photographs decorating the white walls. The images were uniformly black and white portraits of white men in black suits. Even if they were in colour, Charlie mused, how would you know? The subjects were CIA officials and senior agents from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. One of the photos reminded Charlie of his father, except that his dad had worn glasses while this man did not. Charlie's actual father had been a cattle auctioneer in Houston and, without his glasses, he used to say he couldn't tell a Brahman from a Beefmaster. Charlie was lucky for being born in the era of LASIK eye surgery. A doctor had fired a light beam into his cornea and corrected his vision forever. Despite his perfect eyesight, Charlie had no interest in the classification of cows, or any other livestock for that matter. He was not his father's son. His father had said so himself. At age eight his father had told Charlie bluntly, "You're my second favourite son." In any circumstance this would have been a hurtful thing to say; Charlie, however, was an only child. His mother had tried to persuade him that his father was saying that he was "second to none," but Charlie knew that wasn't true.
"We don't know what it is," answered Alicia. "We need you for clearance. George found it."
Charlie didn't know who 'George' was but assumed he was an analyst. "Well then, what does George say it is?"
"He doesn't, I mean he won't. He'll only tell you."
"I see," said Charlie when, in truth, he did not. None of this made sense. Of course, it didn't help that this was his first day on the job. He'd been on a leave of absence for the past five months and wasn't supposed to return for several more. Something had happened, however, with Doug Cranberry, the official who had been running the cyber-espionage division—something embarrassing. All Charlie had been told was that it involved "3D midget call-girls," whatever that meant. He assumed it was code for something else, or at least he hoped it was. Doug had resigned a few days ago. Charlie, having once worked for a software company, was perceived as the best and, probably, only qualified choice among senior agency officials. So they'd asked him to come back early and take charge of a team he'd never met. Not to worry, he had been told, "the unit largely runs itself." It was seen as a cabal of computer geeks who were accustomed to working for people who didn't understand what they did. Of course, normally an incoming director had time to get up to-speed, sit in a few meetings and at least read a dossier or two before taking the wheel. Charlie felt as if he'd woken from a dream to find himself driving a car, at night, with no headlights.
"So who exactly is this George?"
"You don't know?" Alicia stared at him to see if he was joking. Charlie's blank stare answered her question. "They really did drop you in dark didn't they? Hmm... Well, you'll meet him in a moment. It's probably easier that way."
"Can you at least tell me where George found it?"
"On the internet."
"Well, that narrows things."
They'd arrived at the elevator at the end of the hall. Alicia pressed her finger on the down button, which doubled as a biometric scanner. The white disc lit up, scanning her fingerprint. "Access denied," said a computer-generated female voice. Alicia pressed her finger once more. "Access denied," said the voice again, sounding, in Charlie's opinion, a little self-satisfied. Alicia sighed and gave the console a hard smack. "Access granted." The elevator doors opened, and they stepped inside. Alicia ignored the numbered floors, which only went up, and inserted a passcard instead. The elevator began to descend.
"And when did you find it?" Charlie asked. He hadn't much luck finding out what, who or where it was and decided that this was the only question left to not get answered.
"Ninety minutes ago," said Alicia.
"Wow, specificity. It's fortunate I was nearby."
"Very."
"I was shopping for socks."
Alicia looked at Charlie wondering why he'd shared this with her. Charlie wondered the same thing and decided he hadn't a clue. He sometimes felt as if he were an undercover alien who'd forgotten how to communicate with humans. Lisa, his wife, had always been so much better at it than him. She could talk to anyone, including perfect strangers. She called it 'the gift of the
gab'. She'd passed that gift onto their daughter, Faith. Faith could hold an intelligent conversation from the moment she could string two words together. Charlie, on the other hand, had always been the master of awkward pauses. Despite being conventionally good-looking, in college he'd been mostly dateless. Girls would want to talk to him, and he'd respond with "um... uh..." He knew that the words most often used to describe him by girls were 'boring' and 'disappointing'. Lisa was the exception. Lisa was able to get him to talk before he started to think too much. That was the trick of easy conversation, he'd learned—avoid thinking. Talking to Lisa was somehow effortless, and he'd loved her for it. Of course, at the funeral no one had expected him to talk. Not that he was thinking much either. It felt that day, as if his brain had been vapourized. It still did. Charlie Draper had a smoking crater between his ears. Now and again, the smoke still made his eyes water.
"We're all very sorry for your loss," Alicia said softly.
Charlie nodded. The elevator doors opened, and they stepped out.
The room looked like a university computer lab made entirely of metal. Dozens of PCs manned by dozens of young men, mostly about college age, glanced up as they entered. The analysts then quickly returned their attention to the screens before them. This was the secret cyber lab. There were three other less secret cyber labs in the building with the unimaginative names of Cyber Lab 1, Cyber Lab 2, and Cyber Lab 3. This lab was different and its existence was known only to a select few. As the confidential dossier on it explained, the only people who knew of it were a handful of senior officials; its direct manager, Alicia Tremblay; and the highly skilled personnel who worked there. There were, of course, also the day janitor, the night janitor, and the guy who restocked the soda pop machine, but that was it. Such was the reality of running a massive intelligence facility. There were cleaners who had higher access levels than half the management staff. Someone, after all, had to empty the wastebaskets. The name of the super-secret lab was Cyber Lab √-16.
Chaos Theory: A Feel Good Story About the End of the World Page 3