“So you tell your chain of command that unless I am allowed to inspect what’s hidden in that tent in the Grand Palais before Sunday, the white tornado tape recordings get released to the media on Saturday.”
“We,” blurted Monique Calhoun. “We’re in this together, sweet prince.”
“So be it,” said Eric.
Monique Calhoun eyed him more narrowly now, as if studying a new Eric Esterhazy, a man she had never really seen before.
And, thought Eric, maybe she’s right.
“You don’t really have the authority to make a threat like that, do you, Eric?” she said softly. Admiringly, he was flattered to think. “You’re taking a big personal chance, aren’t you? You don’t know that your . . . chain of command would really back it up, or . . . or . . .”
Eric gave her the great big stoic hero smile, half-convinced in that moment himself.
“Your chain of command might just think that,” he said. “But would they dare to take the chance?”
For the first time since they had come up on deck, Monique smiled at him. It wasn’t a lustful smile, it wasn’t a loving smile, it might not even be a friendly smile, but it seemed quite sincere.
“You know what I’m thinking, Eric?” she said.
Eric shook his head.
“Let’s find out who and what we’re really working for, you and me, Prince Valiant,” she said. “That’s what I’m thinking.”
She didn’t kiss him, she didn’t embrace him, but she did take his hand and squeeze it quite hard, like a comrade-in-arms.
Which to Eric, in that moment, seemed quite enough, quite right, quite appropriate.
“SO, MOM . . . ?”
“So, Eric?” said mom, taking a long slow sip of her Mimosa.
“So what do you think Eduardo will say?”
Rather than deal directly with Eduardo, Eric had decided that much the best course was to use Mom as a buffer, at least initially.
He had told her to meet him for brunch—Mom seldom arose early enough to eat anything that could properly be called breakfast—aboard the Café du Monde.
This was a converted river barge anchored behind the Ile de la Cité where a branch of the Seine separated it from the Ile St. Louis. It was done up as a disney of a famous café by the same name in the French Quarter in sunken New Orleans, which, in turn, had been a disney of a “typical” café in the Latin Quarter of “gay Paree.”
It served coffee with chicory, sugar-dusted doughnuts it styled “beignets,” eggs bienville, and an assortment of other faux-Louisianne brunch fare; decently cooked, but most of it disney, sometimes, like the restaurant itself, twice removed.
“I think Eduardo will be pissed off,” Mom told him, unsurprisingly.
Eric nodded grimly.
When choosing a restaurant for this brunch, Eric had forgotten, at least on a conscious level, that the Café du Monde was anchored close by the Monument to the Deportation, built to commemorate one of the many ghastly events of the ghastly twentieth century’s most ghastly war.
Be that as it may, the river view thereof was an iron grille in a stonework quai resembling nothing so much as the Thames-side prison gate to the Tower of London through which prisoners of state were once taken to be beheaded.
Somehow this did not now seem like favorable feng shui.
Worse still, the Parisian version was overgrown with vines, often semi-submerged, and, given its proximity to a restaurant boat that tossed its scraps into the river to attract them as local color, was a favorite hangout of the Seine alligators. If these creatures yet retained too much dignity to beg tidbits from the diners, they were cruising slowly back and forth below the railing table where Eric and his mother sat in dim reptilian hope that someone might fall overboard.
Or be thrown their way, perhaps, in a fit of ire.
“That’s why I want him to hear it from you first, Mom,” Eric told her.
Mom shook her head. “That would really piss him off,” she said. “He’d be insulted.”
“Insulted?”
“You take it upon yourself to tell Little Mary Sunshine that the white tornadoes are fakes and Bad Boys has the stuff to prove it, and then you go ahead and use the recordings that maybe the Siberians will buy as your own little offer the Big Blue Machine can’t refuse, and maybe blow an eight-figure deal in the process,” said Mom.
She took another sip of Mimosa.
“I’d say you had some nerve, wouldn’t you, Eric?” she said.
Eric nodded morosely.
“You’ve got the nerve to do all of that,” said Mom, “but you don’t have the balls to tell him yourself? Insulting, Eric, insulting. I mean, what does that make Eduardo?”
“Well, when you put it that way, Mom . . .”
“Be a man, kiddo!” Mom told him. “I don’t know how pissed off Eduardo will be at what you’ve done, but sure as shit, he’ll detest you for the craven pussy you’d be if he has to hear about it first from your mother!”
She leered at him toothily.
“Anyway, kiddo,” she said, “what’s the worst thing that can happen?”
She flipped a forkful of Cajun blood sausage over the side.
An alligator snapped it up before it hit the water.
Monique Calhoun found herself “getting professional.” She called Avi Posner and told him to meet her by the southwest pillar of the Eiffel Tower at noon; that is, outdoors at a randomly chosen location, where there could be no possibility of bugging. For the same professionally paranoiac reason, she refused to tell him why.
Another wall of hot saturated air had moved in on northwestern Europe, or, Monique suspected, given what she knew now, had been shepherded in from on high by the loathsome “clients’ ” orbital mirrors, and the noontime clime this Paris day was a fair disney of Lost Louisianne or the equatorial coast of Africa, whence this condition might just have been deliberately exported.
But the pillars of the Tower had long since become great iron trellises overgrown with honeysuckle, ivy, bougainvillea, and morning-glory vines all the way up to the first-level platform, so that the area beneath it, thronged with tourists, vendors, and buskers, was an immense shaded and perfumed arbor that at least afforded some respite.
Avi Posner was already seated on a wooden bench when Monique arrived. “So?” he said without bothering with the courtesy of rising to greet her.
“What do you want first, the good news, the bad news, the worse news, or the worst news?” Monique said, sitting down without bothering with the niceties either.
Posner just gave her a glacial impatient stare.
“The good news is that I’ve found out that ‘Lao’ is the code word for some kind of Siberian operation against our . . . client’s interests at UNACOCS.”
She held up her hand for silence. “And don’t ask me how!” she told him.
“May I ask if it involves Davinda?”
“You may ask, but the best answer I can give you is probably.”
Posner did not look tremendously pleased. And that had been the good news.
“And the bad news?”
“Very bad indeed,” Monique said.
Avi Posner tapped his foot impatiently.
Monique frowned, paused, hesitated, glanced around. She realized on a rational level that she really was being paranoid, but, well . . .
“You once told me to assume that everywhere was bugged . . .” she said.
Now Posner’s impatient demeanor became one of worry, of professional concern. “That bad?”
“Worse,” Monique said.
“Let’s walk.”
Southeast from the Tower to the École Militaire, the long oblong park of the Champ-de-Mars ran through a corridor of immense live oaks, another canopy of shady greenery.
A “natural” disney, Monique thought sourly as they ambled slowly down a path through the leafy tunnel toward the incongruous square shape of the École Militaire. Lost Louisianne re-created in a Paris that was itself the prod
uct of climate change and sustained by climatech. Climatech which was now perhaps being turned against it. The same climatech which was at least temporarily turning the world into a disney of Condition Venus. Disneys within disneys within disneys.
“The white tornadoes are fakes, Avi,” Monique finally said. “It’s being done with orbital mirrors.”
Posner froze in his tracks. “How do you know this?” he said sharply.
“Esterhazy told me.”
“Esterhazy! You expect me to believe anything he tells you isn’t disinformation?”
“They have proof. They have recordings of conversations.”
Posner sat down on a nearby bench. It seemed like a involuntary action. He seemed quite stunned. Even more stunned, or so it seemed to Monique, than the revelation warranted.
“Our client is creating the white tornadoes with orbital mirrors . . . ?” he said softly.
“And they could just as easily be creating the rest of this so-called Condition Venus weather, couldn’t they?” Monique said, sitting down beside him.
“Adjust some mirrors, move some jet stream, fiddle with the ocean currents . . . no one would spot it unless they were monitoring their orbital mirrors very closely . . . from orbit . . . and only the Big Blue Machine itself has that kind of gear. . . .”
Posner had descended into muttering to himself, and the frowning set of his brows grew deeper and deeper. “Human brains . . . faked tornadoes . . . Condition Venus disneys . . .”
“That’s not all . . .” Monique told him tentatively.
“There’s more?” Posner groaned.
Monique nodded nervously.
“Well?”
“Well . . . I had to trade information to find all that out . . .”
“This is supposed to be a surprise?” Posner snapped. “You told Esterhazy what?”
Monique hesitated. “That the Davinda climate model may be run on a computer with human meatware in the circuit,” she blurted quickly.
“And?” Posner demanded.
“Look, Avi, I’m no professional at this, and I don’t want to be, so you can’t blame me,” Monique said, adopting a strategically defensive whine. “I didn’t know they’d . . . I mean . . .”
Another set of disneys within disneys within disneys, for that very disclaimer was a calculated move itself, masking her collusion with Eric, her betrayal of B&C’s client, Mossad’s client, in the service of Bad Boys’ client, to find out the truth about what her client was hiding.
No professional? It seemed to Monique that she was becoming more of a professional at this moment by moment. But just what her profession had now become and whether it was any younger than the oldest did not at the moment bear close contemplation.
“And, well, Esterhazy, Bad Boys . . .”
“Out with it, will you!”
Me thinks the lady has protested long enough, Monique decided.
“Bad Boys intends to find out what’s being hidden under guard,” she said breathily, making her final show of reluctance. “And, well—”
“Spit it out!”
“And they’re using the recordings to do it. I’m to deliver their ultimatum. Esterhazy is given access to the computer that’s going to run Davinda’s climate model on Sunday, or they release the recordings that prove the white tornadoes are fakes to the media on Saturday.”
Monique shrugged, smiled wanly. “And now I have.”
Avi Posner took a moment to digest this. Then, unexpectedly, he favored her with a grim little smile. “Good,” he said.
“Good?” Of all the reactions she had imagined, this certainly had not been among them.
“You have done well. And you have also done right. And so have Bad Boys.”
“I have? You’re not angry?”
“Oh, I’m quite furious, at least provisionally,” Avi Posner told her. “But not at you. And not at Esterhazy or his syndic.”
“At . . . our client?” Monique said, beginning to get his drift.
Posner nodded. “Let’s walk,” he said, getting up from the bench, reversing course and leading Monique slowly through the overarching glade back in the direction of the Eiffel Tower.
“What do you know about Mossad?” he said after a few silent moments.
“It began as the Israeli secret service?” Monique said. “It became a syndic when the Israeli government shed most of its sovereign functions? It provides security and intelligence services to its clients?”
And does dirty work and wet work when the price is right, she found it impolitic to add.
Posner nodded. “The operative point is that Mossad is a syndic with a charter and citizen-shareholders. We are not the dedicated security service of any entity, corporate or sovereign. We work under contract. And under our charter, there are limits on the contract terms we will accept.”
“What are you trying to tell me, Avi?”
Avi Posner seemed somehow elsewhere. He made direct eye contact with her, but he didn’t answer directly.
“Israel itself was partially founded by kibbutzniks,” he told her. “The kibbutzes were one of the direct ancestors of modern syndics. They had charters, they were collectively owned by citizen-shareholders who elected their governing boards, this even in the era of capitalism and absolute national sovereignty.”
“I don’t get it, Avi, what’s the point . . . ?”
“The point, Monique, is that Mossad’s syndicalist roots go back deep into the capitalist era, and the organizations our syndic has indirectly evolved from were not corporate capitalist ones, but collectives of Utopian idealists.”
“So okay, Mossad is a respectable syndic, so—”
“So our client is not, Monique!” Posner snapped. “Do you know who really runs the Big Blue Machine?”
“Kutnik? Hassan bin Mohammed?”
“No one, Monique. There are no citizen-shareholders for the boards of its constituent corporations to be responsible to. And no syndic charters setting forth a moral philosophy. It’s a loose collection of capitalist revenants, each a corporation whose default and only value is the maximization of profit. The Big Blue Machine is . . . a machine. A mechanism for generating profit with no human moral responsibility in the circuit, individual or collective. This was why the capitalist world order could blindly destabilize the planetary climate in the process of destroying itself. It wasn’t evil. It didn’t recognize evil or good. In that sense, in a moral sense, it had no soul.”
“So . . . ?”
“So we are not capitalists!” Posner declared with a passion that quite took Monique aback. “Not Bread & Circuses, not Bad Boys, and certainly not Mossad! Your syndic, and mine, and even Esterhazy’s, may have different moral philosophies, but unlike Big Blue we have them. And our charters agree on one thing—no contract binds us to aid capitalist clients in committing moral atrocities for no higher cause than their own profit!”
“Such as using human brains as meatware processors in computers? Such as faking the onset of Condition Venus?”
“It depends . . .” said Posner, suddenly pensive.
“On what?”
“On the ends to which they are the means. You have surely been subjected to the asinine aphorism that claims that the ends do not justify the means. But of course, the reverse is true. Nothing but the ends justify the means.”
“What ends can possibly justify means like using human brains as computer processors and faking the onset of the end of the world?”
“Saving the planet from the real end of the world, of course,” Avi Posner said. “If we were convinced that it was indeed necessary to save the biosphere, Mossad would commit atrocities that would make Hitler himself cringe if we had to.”
They were back under the Eiffel Tower now, surrounded by the tourists and the vendors and the buskers, shaded by the vines overgrowing the pillars of the tower, breathing the rich floral perfumes.
Even in the shade, the humid air was still sweltering, but foul though the current weather might
be, disney though this sweet arbor might be, this was still, at the moment at least, part of the tender biosphere of a living world.
Would I commit atrocities that would make Hitler cringe to save it? Monique wondered.
That she didn’t know, and hoped to never have to find out.
But she did believe that she understood what Avi Posner was trying to tell her. She understood his hard and ruthless moral logic, and could only agree with it in her own hardest heart of hearts.
She knew that whether she would do evil to save her living breathing world was not a question of whether it was right or wrong but of courage.
For the first time in her life, Monique was confronted with the cruel realization that greater than the courage to do right in the face of danger or adversity was the courage to commit a lesser evil to prevent a greater.
And that if the evil that needed preventing was the ultimate one, the death of all living things, then Avi Posner was right. Any means were justified to accomplish that end. Anything at all.
“You’re right, Avi,” Monique said quietly. “Some ends do justify any means.”
“But merely turning a profit is not one of them!” Posner said savagely. “And if those capitalist sons of bitches are committing such evils for no higher cause than profit, any contract they had with Mossad is null and void!”
He made a visible effort to calm himself. “And so . . .”
“And so?”
“And so I have more need to know whether my client has installed a human brain in that computer that you and Esterhazy do,” Posner said. “Because, now that we know they’ve lied to us about faking the white tornadoes and probably this stinking Condition Venus weather too, if they’ve installed a human brain in the Davinda climate model computer and hidden it from us, Mossad is not about to continue to honor its contract without at least extracting the full truth. By whatever means necessary.”
“Then you’ll transmit Esterhazy’s blackmail threat up the line?”
“Oh indeed I will,” Posner told her. “And on behalf of my syndic I will add one of my own—there will be no further provision of the contracted services by Mossad until I see what they are hiding myself!”
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