Invisible Armies

by Jon Evans

  “Well,” Philip says. “Of course we trust your judgement. And you are Laurent Cinq-Mars of Justice International?”

  “I am.”

  “You and your organizaton have impressive CVs.”

  “We try,” Laurent says. “And who are you?”

  Philip pauses. “How much do you know about the foundation?”

  “Almost nothing.”

  “That’s the way we prefer it. I’m sure you understand. We don’t even have a name. Security through obscurity. But in broad strokes, we are a group of activists who have come together, aided by a number of wealthy supporters who believe in our cause but feel that their role is to support rather than take the risks that we take, in order to be a counterbalance to some of the world’s more egregious examples of corporate exploitation.”

  “You talk like a vice-president,” Laurent observes.

  “I’ve been a vice-president,” Philip says. “I’ve also been a convict, a drug addict, and a punk musician, if you’re questioning my bona fides. I’ve spent months sleeping rough. I’ve broken bones at demonstrations. I’ve negotiated million-pound contracts. The foundation is not some fly-by-night group of freaks and misfits with a single ‘sugar daddy’, to use your lovely North American phrase. We are a thoughtful and professional group. And we think it behooves us to sound thoughtful and professional.”

  Laurent nods, satisfied.

  “So,” Philip says. “To continue. However convincing Mr. Campbell may have sounded, we agree that it’s best that you stay out of France for the foreseeable future. Losing Mr. Kell is regrettable, but he has agreed to perform knowledge transfer to our chosen replacement, yes? Or at least intends to document everything?”

  Angus nods.

  “Mr. Kell isn’t himself a disclosure risk, is he?” Philip asks. “I gather he’s leaving because he’s become disenchanted –”

  “No,” Angus said shortly. “Keiran won’t talk.”

  “Well then. We’re still in a favourable position. We have no smoking gun, but our plan never called for one. We have full access to everything Kishkinda knows. Pulling you out of France on a precautionary basis means we can’t move against their management there. But we have developed a new strategy based on the information you uncovered. Specifically, that Kishkinda is in takeover talks.”

  Angus looks at Philip quizzically. “What does that have to do with us?”

  “Terre,” Philip says. “They own forty percent. Effective control. It’s time to move up the food chain and go after the big dog. We need to show them, and this Zulu Fields outfit, that owning the Kishkinda Mine is not worth the risk. If we convince Terre to shut down the mine, the battle is won. And Terre is based right here in London.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “A few visible actions, a few heart-to-heart conversations with Terre’s senior management, and they will crumble.”

  Danielle knows what that means. More violence. Kidnapping or mugging Terre’s management, threatening them and their families with worse if they don’t leave the company.

  “We’ll know when it’s working,” Philip continues. “We’ll see it in the stock price. We’ll make owning Kishkinda uneconomical. And nobody else will want to buy it and risk the same thing happening to them. They’ll have no choice but to shut it down. The City and Wall Street will demand it.”

  “Sounds lovely,” Angus says. “Let’s return to the world of specifics and details, shall we? What exactly would you like us to do next?”

  “We need to announce to the world that Terre is under assault, and make it clear that Kishkinda is the cause. Something public, to make the City take notice. But nothing drastic. An obvious but unexercised option of violence. The specifics?” Philip shrugs. “Your bailiwick. Do whatever you think is right.”

  “This is a whole new kettle of fish,” Estelle says skeptically. “Kishkinda was one thing, but Terre, how big are they again?”

  “Eight billion pounds of revenue in the last year,” Philip says. “They’re an elephant. Once roused they’ll be enormously dangerous. That’s true. But they’re also slow and clumsy. A little group like you can dance around them as long as you need to. So long as you’re careful. Remember, they’re a business. Your job is to be a thorn in their side that is cheaper to have removed than to destroy.”

  “Where is their London office?” Laurent asks.

  Philip says, “Hammersmith.”

  * * *

  For weeks, Danielle’s imagination of the future ended with the protest, like it was an opaque wall at which the road of time ended. But now they have left Paris she finds herself once again contemplating what is to come. She doesn’t really want to. The distant future has always frightened her. She has lived her life in increments of a few months, a new boyfriend, a new project, a new place to live. Part of what terrified her about law school was the way it made her future stretch out visibly for years; passing the bar, articling, years as a junior lawyer at some firm, a bland red carpet paving the way to being old. She has been content not knowing where she will be, what she will be doing, or who she will be with six months from now. Long-term plans seemed like stagnation.

  But now that she has found a man she can picture spending her life with, the future terrifies her even more, because she can’t imagine, or doesn’t want to, what it could possibly be. Her voice is thin with trepidation when she brings up the subject that night.

  “What’s going to happen to us?” she asks.

  Laurent lies on their bed reading the Guardian, wearing only jeans, his tattoos lurid against the pale flowered bedspread. He looks at her quizzically. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, all this. What we’re doing. What are we doing?” she asks.

  The question isn’t entirely rhetorical. When she first came to Paris, the idea of fighting Kishkinda seemed like just and noble revenge for having been captured, beaten, pursued and nearly murdered by the company’s thugs in India. Breaking into their headquarters to uncover whatever explosive secret had gotten Jayalitha murdered, and organizing a huge anticorporate protest to cover the break-in, that had been both reasonable and rewarding. But kidnapping and torturing a man Danielle is now sure was innocent – and now this new, equally disturbing plan, one intended to damage Kishkinda’s stock price rather than unearth Jayalitha’s secret – have made her wonder. Are Angus and Estelle and their foundation just flailing about at random, trying to attack Kishkinda by any means they can, with no real strategy? She wants revenge, she wants to help Angus and Estelle, and the children poisoned by Kishkinda, but surely there must be some limit to how far she and Laurent will go. When will they have to say enough and dissociate themselves from this war? Or are they, perhaps, already past that point? And what will she do if, as she fears, Laurent is ready to go further – much further – than her?

  “Are we just going to keep going?” she asks. “Keep on breaking the law in the name of a better world until we get caught and thrown in jail? Even if we win, what happens next, we go on to the next company?”

  “No,” Laurent says.

  “You don’t know how glad I am to hear you say that.”

  “No, when this is over, when Kishkinda has been stopped, you and I will go to New York. I will do work there, peaceful work, legal work, for Justice International. You will too, if you like. We won’t join Angus and Estelle in their endless war.”

  “How does JI feel about you doing it now?”

  He shrugs. “They’ve been busy in India, getting our people out of jail. Their blood is boiling. Anything I can do to hurt Kishkinda, they support. But this kind of destructive activism, it isn’t what we do, not usually. When I left the Legion I never intended to go to war again. But I suppose sometimes your war finds you.”

  “So when this is over we move to New York,” Danielle says. She wants this to be very clear.

  “Yes. Maybe soon. I think our next action might be decisive.”

  Danielle swallows. While no one will actually
get hurt, the ‘next action’ he and Angus and Estelle have been talking about is in some ways far more drastic than kidnapping and torturing Jack Campbell.

  “I don’t want to sound like a stuck record,” she says, “but I don’t know about our next action either.”

  Laurent puts down the newspaper and cocks his head at her inquisitively.

  “It’s so major. If we get caught, we’ll seem like…I thought we were going to be subtle. Invisible. Like Keiran always says.”

  “Keiran isn’t with us any more. This time circumstances call for a frontal attack, not stealth.”

  “I don’t think we should do it,” she says. In her nervousness it comes out with more hostility than she intended. “Something else, maybe. But not this. It makes me feel like I did before we, before Campbell.”

  “Come on,” Laurent says, smiling thinly. “It’ll be a valuable learning experience. I’ll teach you how to build a bomb.”

  “I really don’t want to know.”

  “You never know when it might be useful.”

  “You think this is funny?” Danielle asks, appalled.

  Laurent shrugs. “Black comedy. I’m sorry.”

  “You should be. Jesus. We’re talking about – how can you fucking joke?”

  “It’s my way of dealing with being angry at you.”

  At first she doesn’t know what to say to that. She sits at the end of the bed and looks at him. She feels cold and frightened. “Angry at me? At me? For what?”

  “Because you’re acting like a tourist. Sometimes I wonder if you are a tourist. Everything you do. Just visiting, trying things out, moving on. You’ve never belonged to anything. You’ve never given yourself to anything. Or anyone. You’ve never committed yourself to anything enough that your actions have real consequences. And then you wonder why the world seems so meaningless. So you run back to your daddy’s bank account and find some new thing to try to make yourself happy. You try being with me, you try being political, working for a better world, and then you find out it doesn’t happen overnight, it requires years of hard work, and doing things you don’t enjoy, and we can’t have that, can we? You’re not willing to make sacrifices. You don’t even know how.”

  “You’re talking about building a bomb,” Danielle says after a moment. “And you’re angry because I won’t support that?”

  “It’s no more a bomb than a movie prop. It won’t go off. It’s performance art. You know that. But you think it’s awful. No, you think it’s beneath you. Like maybe you think I’m beneath you.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe I’m just your man of the hour. A little excitement, a little military revolutionary fun, but soon it’s time to move on, isn’t it? Is that what you’ve been working up to? Is it time to run back to Daddy and find a nice corporate lawyer to marry? If so, just tell me now and walk away. Please. Tell me now. It will hurt less.”

  “No,” Danielle says. “No, no, no, no, no. I love you. That hasn’t changed. That won’t change. Jesus, Laurent, if you believe anything I’ve ever said, believe that. Please.”

  “I want to.”

  “Then do. God. How long have you been thinking this?”

  “I’ve been worried I wasn’t worth you since the day we met,” he says.

  “Well, stop worrying. That’s, that’s an order.”

  He smiles faintly, warming her heart, the fight, and it wasn’t much of a fight, is over, and they have passed through it OK. “Yes, ma’am,” he says, and snaps a salute.

  She doesn’t want to risk anything further. But she has to. “I love you, but we shouldn’t do this.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Laurent says after a long moment. “We will do this. But if it doesn’t work as planned, if anything goes awry, then you and I will follow your instincts, give up and move to New York.”

  “We won’t be going anywhere if we get caught,” she says harshly. “Except jail and the front page.”

  He nods. “Yes. But we have to give them this one last chance, this one last risk. We owe them that much.”

  She doesn’t want to. But it sounds so reasonable. She nods helplessly.

  * * *

  A bomb, Danielle learns, consists of four elements. The case that contains it; in this instance, a gleaming metal suitcase. The secondary explosive, which makes up most of the bomb’s bulk and power. Here, fuel oil and the common fertilizer ammonium nitrate, mixed to the consistency of mud, cut to the size of bricks, and baked in an ordinary oven until it feels like bread. Touch a match to secondary explosive, and it will puff into flame so quickly your eyebrows are unlikely to survive the encounter, but it will not explode; only an shockwave from some initiating explosion can detonate it.

  This detonation is the job of the primary explosive, which Laurent assures them can also be made with the spoils of a shopping trip to a supermarket and a hardware store, but in this bomb consists of industrial blasting caps supplied by the foundation, triggered by twelve volts of DC power. The blasting caps are connected to the last element, the trigger. Bombs can be triggered remotely, by cell phones; automatically, by cheap alarm clocks; by motion, with the aid of a mercury switch; or directly, by simply completing an electrical circuit, hopefully from a considerable distance. There can be a fifth element; shrapnel, ball bearings or nails packed around the secondary explosive, designed to shred any soft material – such as human beings – unfortunate enough to be close to the device when it goes off. But this bomb includes no shrapnel. There would be no point. It is not intended to ever explode.

  Laurent orders Angus, Estelle, and Danielle out of the garage while he attaches the trigger. In order to be convincing, the bomb has to look potentially lethal, as if the trigger was erroneously connected. Laurent wants as few people as possible around during final assembly, in case of a slip of the hand. Danielle waits on the street outside the garage, located beneath a railway line in an industrial area of south London, watching for oncoming trains. If one appears, they are instructed to shout and warn Laurent before it rattles overhead and causes his entire workplace to shake dangerously. Other than that risk she is not worried for Laurent. He has built the device with such confidence, such total lack of fear, that the odds of his hands slipping seem like those of a Tour de France winner falling off his bicycle on a dry, flat road. One thing she has learned in the last hour is that successful bomb making is more about steady hands and confidence than any elaborate chemistry or engineering. If anything it is frighteningly easy.

  Laurent appears in the grimy brick doorway a few moments later, smiling. “Fini!” he calls out. “Safe as houses. Come in.”

  The open suitcase looks like it has been filled with childrens’ mud cakes, into which two small discs have been pressed. These blasting caps, which look like ceramic rather than high explosive, are connected via two sets of wires to a cheap alarm clock taped to the secondary explosive with duct tape. It looks completely amateurish, like some sort of high-school science experiment.

  “If it exploded,” she asks, “what would it do?”

  Laurent considers a moment. “We’d get smeared all over the walls. But the walls wouldn’t be there, this place is made of brick, they’d fly fifty metres. Probably open a thirty-foot hole in the railway line.”

  “Just from that?” Estelle asks.

  “Just from this.” Laurent closes the briefcase. “Let’s go make our delivery.”

  “Need a hand?” Angus asks.

  Laurent shrugs. “It’s not too bad.” He hoists the briefcase. All the others flinch.

  “Don’t worry,” he says, smiling. “It’s not dangerous. I’ve wired it so it looks like the real thing, but you could hit this with a sledgehammer and it wouldn’t go off.”

  “If you say so,” Estelle says, unconvinced.

  Laurent lets go of the bomb. It slams into the ground with a loud metallic clunk. Danielle gasps; Angus twitches; Estelle cries out.

  “Satisfied?” he asks.

  “Prat,” Angus mutters.
/>
  “Now you won’t be afraid of it on the way over,” Laurent says.

  * * *

  Assembling the bomb was easy. Depositing it at Kishkinda’s London offices, and calling it to the attention of the media, is more challenging. A single overlooked hair can provide the police with DNA evidence. London is full of thousands of closed-circuit cameras; they would certainly be captured on camera en route to Terre, and if their car is ever associated with the bomb, the police might track down such footage, or witnesses might remember them. Phone calls made from a land line to alert the media and authorities to the bomb’s presence can be easily traced to a specific location if from a land line, and a fairly small region if a cell phone, and cameras and witnesses at those sites are also a concern. Danielle has never appreciated how many pitfalls modern criminals face.

  Criminals and terrorists. She realizes, en route to the suitcase’s destination, that ‘terrorist’ is, somehow, exactly what she has become. Their reluctance to use extreme violence does not exclude them from the label. Their objective is to terrorize Terre’s management.

  Terre’s office is in Hammersmith, but their destination is on the other side of the city; a deserted building on a quiet street in north London with no onlooking cameras. Angus parks their Vauxhall with tinted windows, another exhibit of the foundation’s largesse, across the street. Laurent carries the suitcase to the steps outside the building and leaves it there. Danielle watches him, trembling nervously. If anyone sees her in the next thirty seconds, she will likely be jailed for life.

  Laurent comes back towards the car, walking with exaggerated jauntiness; she emerges and joins him on the sidewalk; and they walk away. Danielle reminds herself to look casual, forgettable. There is no one on in sight but she is icily sure some old biddy is watching them from behind a window. Her heart thunders in her chest. Her legs feel fluttery, she is certain she is walking with visible weakness. She is sick with fear.

  “No more,” she says breathlessly. “I can’t do this any more. Never again. This is the last time. I’m sorry. I just can’t. No more.”