by Project Itoh
I sat down, tasted the bowl of Czech sauerkraut soup in front of me—not bad—and started reading Lucia Sukrova’s file. Poring over the details of her life like some sort of stalker. Sure, I could justify it by telling myself it was just work, but was what I was doing any less sordid than Williams’s search for cum stains? I couldn’t really concentrate and closed the file.
I decided to access USA, partly to forget that I was in this den of professional peeping toms.
The network acknowledged my account, and the USA home page opened up.
Recently updated Intellipedia pages and the latest news items popped up in the topics area. The “hot topic” illustrated RSS feed was about the pictures of the massacres in India captured on keyhole satellite, complete with furious commentary from other members of the intelligence community who were logged in. The developments in post-nuclear-war India were a source of heated discussion for members of intelligence agencies across the world, and the discussion boards were buzzing.
A subpage in a window also showed a number of topics particular to my level of security clearance, along with dictionaries and wikis. USA’s official name was something like the National Defense Information Sharing Network, but for some reason everyone referred to it as the United Spooks Association, or USA for short.
Could you ever imagine a situation in which a company could easily store its information on a network for all its departments to access as necessary, saving time and money, and yet its various departments bypassed the network completely and kept on using their own local systems for the pettiest of reasons, such as not trusting the developers of the network, or due to simple precedent and inertia? To keep their entire infrastructure offline, despite the obvious cost and inefficiency? Well, this was exactly what had happened on a national scale—with the old United States information systems.
Departments insisted on sending executives to rendezvous with other departments in person despite the costs involved. Offices insisted on sending and receiving faxes, laboriously reentering data by hand every time. Administrations persisted in using outdated systems when far more efficient ones existed, and they did not even know where and how to look for them. Everyone looking out for their own little patch, battening down the hatches, reinventing the wheel that had been invented—and would continue to be invented—countless times by countless other organizations, all ostensibly on the same side. Such was the daily reality of the information agencies in the US.
Or so it went until the World Trade Center disappeared from New York. After that, everything had to change, and quick.
America got serious. Heavyweights were drafted in to build a massive information network from scratch. Administrators who showed the slightest bit of resistance to the new system found that their previously cozy little jobs weren’t so secure after all and were rapidly replaced by people who could get with the program. A truly integrated information service for the various branches of the intelligence infrastructure. And while they might have fallen short of their grandiose claim to have all the information in the world under one roof, they did at least succeed in dragging the US’s information systems kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.
Right now though, there weren’t that many people who knew about John Paul. A handful of bigwigs and a few of my comrades in I Detachment. The fewer people who knew about a topic, the less likely that someone would update USA with useful leads.
Even so, I was in luck. I had posted on John Paul before I set out for Prague, and there were a couple of replies to my thread from some of my comrades who had also been assigned to this case.
“Donald’s left us a message about Prague,” I told Williams. “Check out USA. A topic I started. Search for ‘Prague’ and it should be your first hit.”
Williams logged in and opened the browser on the index page.
“He posted it only three minutes ago. Damn, the indexing on this thing is fast,” Williams said.
Prague is notorious as a place where people can disappear, Donald had written. According to European agencies, someone who disappeared in Prague was considered untraceable, allegedly.
This was news. These days it was virtually impossible to disappear from a developed country, whether you were in the US, Western Europe, Singapore or Japan. You needed to constantly prove who you were to buy food or to travel anywhere. This was true even if you were homeless, so if you were serious about wanting to disappear in any of these countries, you didn’t have many options other than to die in secret or to be locked up in isolation like a modern-day Kasper Hauser.
This was interesting information from Donald, though it was an “allegedly” because his information came from a friend of his in the State Department who had just attended the NATO Antiterrorism Best Practice Cooperation Conference in Frankfurt. The friend had heard it from a Dutchman who was in the same working group as him at the conference, and that Dutchman knew because he had heard so from a French acquaintance who worked in the MAEE, and the Frenchman had in turn surmised this from his own informants and spies and agents provocateur … Something like that, anyway, Donald had explained.
Conjecture and hearsay, in other words. Par for the course in the intelligence field. Gossip became rumor became urban legend and was reported at a later date as gospel truth and even old news. There are alligators living in the sewers of New York, that sort of thing. The UN has a secret fleet of black helicopters ready to invade the US at a moment’s notice, and the US government is in cahoots with aliens, with whom they’ve signed a covert treaty. Mostly idle gossip, in other words. The problem was that there were occasionally some useful gems of information among the sea of half-truths and falsehood. Look at Iran-Contra: a broken clock is right twice a day, and sometimes the conspiracy theorists are right. Rumors couldn’t just be dismissed out of hand, as much as that would have made my life easier in this instance.
Prague is notorious for people disappearing. Sure, I could have ignored this piece of information as two-bit gossip.
But the fact was that John Paul did disappear here, correct?
And not just the once. A few years ago, when he first disappeared from the world. And now, again, only a few days ago.
Checkpoint. Checkpoint. Another checkpoint.
I passed through how many checkpoints as I tailed Lucia Sukrova?
When I entered the metro. When I rode a streetcar. When I entered a shopping mall.
After 9/11 the world was dragged into a war against terror. The president granted the NSA authority to spy on American citizens, and military presence in cities became commonplace. Other countries followed suit to a greater or lesser extent. But however hard the world seemed to tighten the screws, terrorist acts seemed to keep slipping through. And so it went, until finally an Islamic fundamentalist group set off an atomic bomb in Sarajevo, wiping it from the map.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no longer the only ones in their select club. Sarajevo had become a giant crater, a land contaminated with death in the air and in the soil.
Hence these checkpoints today. We paid for our daily freedom and existence by having our movements recorded in minute detail. Big Brother is watching you. An invasion of privacy. That’s what some people said, anyway. Most of us—including me—felt that every time we passed through a checkpoint, we were on our way to somewhere safer.
This was somewhere between fantasy and delusion, of course. Each checkpoint was just that, a checkpoint. It showed that you were somewhere. If you traveled from one to another, the checkpoint showed that you’d traveled from one to another. That was all.
Nonetheless, most people were happy to go about their daily business passing through a forest of checkpoints.
As if there were somehow the holy grail of safe places at the end of it all.
I arrived at a square where some sort of demonstration was going on—an NGO demanding more civil liberties. Most people passed by indifferently without giving them a second glance. Lucia Sukrova did briefly look at the chang
ing nanodisplays on the demonstrators’ placards, but she carried on regardless, never slowing her pace. It was impossible to read what her reaction to the demonstration was.
I’d been in many countries in the line of duty.
I’d seen men use old-style gallows to hang opposition forces that they’d captured. Civilized nations were supposed to recognize prisoners of war as such, and according to the strictures of the Geneva Convention POWs were not supposed to be executed. But in countries where there was no rule of law, POWs were dead men walking.
I thought of the country where the boys were injected with ID tags and became soldiers. There was no law in that land. From a philosophical perspective, anything was permitted there. Government had collapsed, and there was no authority to bring order to Hobbesian chaos.
Anything was permitted in that land. In theory, at least. In practice, a boy had two choices—to become a soldier or to die. They were in the land of the free, and yet they were not free to choose life.
You sacrificed one type of freedom in order to gain another. We handed over a portion of our freedoms in order that we might gain freedom from being blown up by an atomic bomb, the freedom not to have airplanes smashed into the buildings where we work, the freedom not to be attacked by chemical weapons while we ride the subway.
Freedom was a matter of balance. It didn’t exist in an absolute sense, in and of itself. It was either a freedom to do something or a freedom from something. In that sense, freedom was a bit like love, in that there was no such thing in an absolute sense, only a love for someone or a love between people.
Take today. Lucia Sukrova had made the decision to sacrifice the freedom of her privacy in order to gain the freedom to go shopping. She seemed mainly to be shopping for groceries and clothing. Williams, the CIA, and I were tailing her in shifts, and I was now looking at her face from afar.
She wasn’t what you would have called conventionally beautiful, but I found her face curiously attractive. Her cheeks had some freckles on them, as if she hadn’t quite finished being a teenager. She had quite a prominent nose, slightly crooked at the tip.
The feature that stood out the most, though, was definitely her eyes. Not because they were big—although they were—but because her eyelids drooped down over them so that her eyes always appeared at least half shut. Personally, I liked this European look, although it would have been considered too melancholy by American standards. I think it was Brian Eno who said after seeing Pulp Fiction that a California girl is just too lively to be a true femme fatale.
Lucia Sukrova was no California girl, that was for sure. She was a long way away from anyone’s definition of lively. If I had to settle on a word to describe her, it would probably have been worldly.
“So, we’ll start off with one month’s lessons and see how we go from there,” Lucia said.
“Yes, please,” I replied shamelessly. After all, this was probably the most straightforward way of gaining regular access to both Lucia and her apartment.
“That’ll be fine. Could I just ask you to confirm the details here?” She passed me her mobile device, and I pressed down on the light green plate. A contract was formed between my businessman alter ego and Lucia’s Czech language school.
“I do hope that one day I’ll be able to read Kafka in Czech,” I said out loud, just enough for Lucia to hear. It was a more subtle version of the Kafka gambit Williams had suggested a while back—not that he would have even known why.
“Oh, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed then,” Lucia chimed in, taking my bait. “Kafka wrote all his fiction in German. Kafka’s father raised him to speak German, you see. It was much more useful to speak German if you wanted to find a good job back then. You did know this country used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire?”
“Yes, I think I heard that.”
“On top of that Kafka was also Jewish. Czech Jews at the time could never really integrate into society, so they spoke German—it made things much easier if they spoke in this ‘borrowed’ language.”
I said that this made sense, given the themes of his works such as The Castle and Amerika, and asked whether she thought that he was trying to convey his ambiguity toward the place where he lived but could never really call home. I took a sip of the tea that Lucia placed before me.
She answered, “I’m sure that Kafka would have seen himself as a man living in a borrowed country using borrowed words, yes. Like the surveyor in The Castle.”
“Another point in favor of your hypothesis that language doesn’t frame your thought process, I think, Ms. Sukrova. And, come to think of it, Nabokov didn’t write Lolita in his mother tongue either.”
“You certainly are well read, Mr. Bishop,” Lucia said. Bishop was my alias.
“Well, you know, quite a few English majors end up as advertising agents like me.”
“Maybe so, but I can tell that you didn’t just study literature for school. You really do love reading,” Lucia said, lifting her hand from the armrest and stroking her chin. There was something about this gesture that struck me. I wondered if she had ever sat there discussing literature with John Paul sitting where I was sitting.
Discussing literature—or genocide.
“I’m hardly what you’d call a bibliophile, though. My job is to talk to people, you know? You’ve got to be a bit of a dilettante in all sorts of subjects. Tricks of the trade, nothing more. And if it gets the conversation flowing with a charming lady such as yourself, then so much the better.”
“Well, you certainly do know how to spin a line, Mr. Bishop!”
Except it wasn’t a line, not completely. Part of me was absolutely serious. But rather than say this, I decided to carry on playing the part.
“And what about you, Ms. Sukrova? There must be someone in your life who can read you a good bedtime story?”
“No,” Lucia replied, shaking her head. “Not anymore.”
“Not anymore?”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Bishop, you’re in danger of straying into some rather personal territory. Do I have to remind you that you have a wife and a child?”
I opened my arms. “Forgive me. But it’s precisely because I’m happily married that I sometimes overstep the mark. After all, it’s not as if I’m going to try and seduce anyone.”
“Well, forgive me, Mr. Bishop, but being married is no guarantee these days.”
“Maybe not, these days. But I’m an old-fashioned guy with old-fashioned morals. I assure you, your virtue is quite safe with me.”
“I’ll just have to take your word on that,” Lucia said. Then, hesitantly, “It was a while ago, now. A fellow linguistics researcher.”
“At MIT?”
“Yes. Although when I say fellow researcher, he really was on another level. He was involved in a language project for the National Military Establishment.”
“I didn’t realize that the National Military Establishment funded linguistics research.”
“Well, he told me that an agency called DARPA provided the research grant. I never knew the exact details.”
This was news to me. There was nothing in John Paul’s profile that said anything about his working on a project for national defense—it had just said he was involved in a federally funded language project. It had never occurred to us that his linguistics research could have been directly involved in what came next; Williams and I had both been content to gloss over his early life as being more or less irrelevant.
“He sounds like quite a guy.”
“Yes, I met him at MIT and was going out with him for a while. But then one day he went away. Just disappeared completely. After that, I returned home to the Czech Republic and started this line of work here.”
“Couldn’t you find any work over there?”
“Oh, there was some, but it wasn’t easy. I’m a researcher at heart, so I probably should have remained with the university. I just couldn’t quite bring myself to stay …” Lucia shrugged.
I nodded sympathetically. “And did he like books too?”
“Well … he read a lot of Ballard. Have you heard of Empire of the Sun? It was made into a movie last century.”
“The Spielberg film, right? Sure, I love old movies.”
“Well, the movie was based on a book by an author called J. G. Ballard. The book’s even better—full of dry humor, but at the same time so wonderfully evocative of the end of the era.”
“Doesn’t sound much like the film.”
“Well, the adaptation was faithful enough to the story. But the original was much bleaker, more harsh. Ballard’s work often has themes of decay and of things coming to an end. He was a science fiction author, mainly.”
“Sorry … I’m not so up on my sci-fi.”
“That’s fine. John was always reading Ballard, though. Novels set in nuclear wastelands or on a desolate space station.”
“This John … he sounds like he sure did like a good apocalypse,” I said, trying to visualize the sort of scene that attracted John Paul. The eschatological stories favored by the man who now traveled from land to land leaving piles of corpses in his wake.
I wondered if John Paul dreamed of a world in ruins. Spaceship Mother Earth, a giant, unmanned satellite that silently orbited the sun. A world where aliens would land one day and find only the traces of civilization long destroyed, the empty husks of building after building whose inhabitants had long since disappeared.
As I imagined the scene, I realized that I was feeling a strange tranquility wash over me.
After all, how different was John Paul’s dream from my dream of the land of the dead?
6
I noticed them as soon as I left Lucia’s apartment.
There were at least two of them. Tailing me? Or staking out the building?
Given that we’d been keeping a lookout on the front of the apartment ourselves, I figured that it must have been me they were tailing.