How long did Heywood stay in his charmed state? Three minutes? Thirty? No matter. At the end he jumped up. Not for years had he had such sprightliness.
3 CHAPTER THREE
“I need four, five people in here in a hurry,” the Czar snapped to Claude.
Stiff hips were forgotten during the elevator descent from the executive floor. Half-walking, half-running, partially stumbling, feet almost skipping, trying to keep up with his surging-forward weight, Heywood had rushed through the foyer of the Service complex, beneath the canopy of flags of all the members of the United Nations suspended from the ceiling and past the diplomatic relics in glass cages watched over by the framed photographs of the Service Great. On and on he scampered, towards his realm, to the tower housing Service Operations. Alphonse, the entrance guard, who passed the days whistling popular classical melodies to himself, had a premonition that a mass of flesh was approaching and ended “Ode to Joy” halfway through a quarter note. The Czar normally neared with a slow, easy, swaying inertia, but this time the momentum of a freight train was bearing down and it nearly threw Alphonse right off. “Bonjour, monsieur!” he hailed, frantically yanking the door forward, allowing Heywood with his imperial countenance to sail through.
In the Czar’s office, Claude had remained immobile, in shock really, the whole time his leader was gone, and the sudden order to assemble his five best men wasn’t registering. “What happened for chrissake?” he asked, still dazed.
“Carte blanche,” Heywood growled. “Free hand. Personal instruction from Étienne.”
This woke Claude up and he whistled through his teeth. “Geez! How’d you do that? Thought for sure they’d make heads roll.”
“They didn’t purr, Claude. Got a little rough. Wouldn’t be normal if it hadn’t. But in the end Étienne said: get to the bottom of the mess and get over it. Do what you have to. His words. That’s what we’re doing. Carte blanche. Starting now. There’s money too. A new network. Gotta get one off the drawing boards. Time’s short. I want a binder for Étienne first thing in the morning. Everything in it. Could be an all-nighter.”
Heywood immersed himself into the place from which he governed, a custom-built chair shaped like a throne which, with a mere button push, would recline far down. This time he brought it back halfway and from that position lifted his feet into a small free space on his desk in between tall paper stacks.
The reference to evening work shattered Claude’s numbness. “My curling night tonight,” he protested.
“A few rocks to heave here first, Claude,” Heywood replied dismissively. “Draw ‘em to the button, every one. I need your best guys.” With his feet up high and leaning back, the Czar had interlaced his fingers over the hill that was his midriff.
Claude squirmed. “It’s a mixed four, Irv. You want me to stand the ladies up? It’s for a spot in the play-offs. For chrissake!”
The Czar was resolute. He formulated his requirements. Emergency response memo before breakfast; new design specs for a better version of the network in first draft to accompany said memo; a procurement plan for new hardware; a list of renowned experts to constitute a peer review – A what review, Irv? Oh for chrissake! – a detailed outline of the logistics necessary for fresh hardware to be shipped to a hundred and sixty diplomatic outposts.
“And then, something more, something special,” Heywood added conspiratorially. “I’m on the hook. An explanation. I mean, a real one. Fast too. Before the Yanks get us one.” He shook his head. “That Madame Desmarais…from the planet of reptiles I tell you. So I want your best programmer, Claude. A fresh young mind. A hot shot. A whiz-bang kid. Someone who’ll work closely with me. Someone with whom I can share my insight into evil brains. Someone who isn’t afraid to hack his way into the hell of cyberspace, wherever that takes him, whatever that is.”
Claude thought a while, then recited names: Ernest Cousineau, reliable for responding to emergencies; Ranjit Singh, perfect for network design specs; Eric Berntsen, brilliant at procurement; Paul Liu, a genius at logistics.
Heywood nodded. He knew them, bureaucratic lion-tamers, every one. “And the whiz-bang kid?”
“Jaime,” Claude replied. “If you want someone who thinks hacking is heaven, that’s the one.”
“Jaime who? Don’t think I know him,” the Czar said gruffly.
“Jaime. A she.”
Heywood pondered this. “She’s good?”
“Oh, she is. A piece of work, I tell you. When she’s on the keyboard, it’s a sight. Fingers too fast for the eye. Gotta warn you though. She’s a metal type. Know what I mean? Here and there the steel sticks out. Got one like that in the curling club. Rings everywhere. Ears, brows, lower lip, you name it. Maybe even one near the private parts. Throws a mean rock though.”
The Czar shrugged. “A walking antenna, huh. I see ‘em in the mall. But if metal helps her pick up waves, why not?”
Ten minutes later the task force – Jaime included – had assembled around the Czar’s table. Some computer notebooks stood open; paper note pads rested in between. The bulky men hunched forward like scribes, ready to record edicts, chronicle history, or draft new laws. Reverentially they eyed their Czar.
To all of this Jaime was the exception. She was slight. Nor did she hunch. And mostly she ignored the Czar. Black hair – a strand of platinum down one side – hung back behind her ears. Her dark eyes mocked both the docile entourage around Heywood and the office stacked too full of paper.
Heywood, his throne back up to sitting, pushed off and rolled over to the table. He initiated small talk about the weather (the city being in the grip of a truly horrendous arctic blast) and made a curling joke at Claude’s expense. Couple more nights like last night and you’ll be chucking rocks on the river, sweeping them all the way to Montreal. “Good to have you with us,” he then said curtly to Jaime.
“Hello Mr. Heywood,” Jaime answered.
“Irving,” he replied. “Irv’s fine too.”
“Hey Irv,” she responded brightly. “Cool.”
The Czar watched her lift a small personal digital device from a bag. “Tiny little thing,” he remarked. He could as easily have been referring to the silver ring through her right nostril. It was as Claude had said. She was wearing plenty of metal – on her fingers, around her wrists, from her earlobes – but fascinating him most were three eyebrow rings pierced in a neat row.
With a long inhalation through his nose, the Czar began. “We are here to make…shall we say…a mid-course correction. Let’s take stock first. What more do we know?” The voice was gravelly and deep. “Ernest, what’s your take?”
Ernest Cousineau was still in denial. He was savaging a toothpick, rolling it from one side of his mouth to the other. “A sucker, eh, la bête. And the firewall…Chalice… like fluff.” He made a hacking motion as if he held a cleaver and waved aside what he had just chopped up. “Et puis, the sack. Attila the Hun. I thought he was dead. No? So nothing left, là. Nothing. Rien.”
The Czar frowned. “Nothing? What about the back-up tapes?”
This was Ranjit Singh’s department and he broke in. “Back-up tapes? Yes, yes,” he sang, his turban gently rocking sideways. “But in principle only, Mr. Irving. I am saying only in principle.” The melody took on force. “I am also saying the tapes, there are very many, and on them each file had a unique code, I am saying, each file had a code linked to the work station it came from. The codes, you appreciate, they were kept on a server for people with special passwords. So, I am saying, that server, it has also been incapacitated and the codes, they are gone. We are not now in the clear which back-up tape may have stored them. I mean the codes.”
Heywood growled. “Are you telling me the combination to the vault got locked away inside the vault?”
Jaime’s impertinent stare went from Heywood to Ranjit and back again. She could have been following a ping-pong game.
“That analogy is pretty excellent, Mr. Irving,” cried Ranjit. “Spot on. You s
ee the problem most clearly.”
“And so?” the Czar asked.
“And so!” confirmed Ranjit. “What I am saying is that the codes, without them, we are not able to get into the back-up tapes. So, an e-mail, I am saying as an example…pardon my language, yes please…any shitty e-mail, it will require two weeks maybe of decryption to read it. So, what we decrypt, what it is decided will be the focus of our attention, I am suggesting, we may not know until after, at the end of two weeks, what it is.”
“So what you are saying,” interjected Heywood, “is that it could take weeks to know whether we’ve been deciphering something important or a piece of crap.”
“Oh yes. It is just so. And I am also stating very humbly,” continued Ranjit, nodding vigorously, “that there are maybe two billion filed items on the tapes. At two weeks for each item, I am concluding that eighty million years of decryption will be necessary.”
Once upon a time Ranjit Singh fled the Punjab, but he hadn’t quite escaped its cultural grip. Eighty million years wasn’t an outlandish concept for him. It represented timelessness, part of the view that past millennia are like a day and today is merely the advancing edge between them and all the millennia to come. Eighty million years, one minute – to Ranjit it was the same. With charming optimism he added, “If the lady of good fortune smiles down upon our persons and if per item it takes only one week, the time in total would be half. Not eighty million years, I am calculating, but forty.” Ranjit’s palms came together at the level of his chest and from the sitting position he brought his turban forward in an elegant slight bow.
“Good math, Ranjit,” Heywood said, crudely copying the graceful gesture. “Forty million more years of Service history makes me feel good.”
“But actually it is only twelve years lost, sir,” Ranjit consoled. “Let us not forget, before that it was paper. The paper years we have still.”
The Czar sat motionless. He observed Jaime’s wry amusement. He saw her studying the perilously slanting pillars of documents loading down his desk. Was she admiring so obvious a monument to dedication? A wave of happy memories about the good old paper days flooded over him. “There’s something comfortable about paper,” he said.
“Spiritual, I am thinking,” answered the former Punjabi.
“Spiritual. Yes. And there’s the smell. And the soothing sound of pages turning.”
Had nostalgia invaded the Czar’s mind and turned it into mush? Paul Liu was tapping at his electronic notebook and entered that word. Mush. Much mush. Ernest Cousineau licked his pencil and jabbed the paper with three strong exclamation marks. Jaime continued her affectionate detachment.
Two hepped-up clerics, you and Ranjit, she said weeks later to Heywood, when there was a break in the action. Did you guys practice that before? I mean, the wailing? It was wicked. Paper spirituality? Hey, pow!
Slowly the veils came off the Czar’s plan. Calmly, stopping frequently, affording each man opportunities to query, he outlined the tasks ahead. One hour later, still clarifying details, Ernest undertook to send urgent messages to every corner of the world. “Program the fax machines, n’est-ce pas? C’est facile.” Paul Liu wanted precision concerning co-ordination on the flanks, that is, between acquiring replacement computers and new network design. Eric Berntsen, whose life’s calling was acquiring items that can never be obtained in sufficient quantities to satisfy the appetite of bureaucracy – he’d started off with pens and pencils, moved up to book cases, desks and dial telephones, and had recently arrived in the world of kilobauds, megaherz and gigabytes – offered to put the breakfast binder for des Étoiles together. He would do the editing, mesh the parts, conceive of an art work for the front cover. “There will be a title,” he said. “The Phoenix Flies – that’s what we’ll call it.”
Ranjit Singh disagreed. “I am stating I am not so partial to birds, not in the title. But I would be most gladdened to see on the front cover a symbol of determination. A sword, I am thinking, and in the handle precious stones.”
The Czar ruled that responsibility for the title would be his.
Claude now. The engineer-in-chief had been biting his tongue. “It’s the peer thing,” he admitted. “Frankly, it bugs me.” He’d viewed it from different angles and concluded it was like having a rock sail down the ice with the other side doing the sweeping. “It ain’t gonna work, Irv. When the buggers on the opposition have to deliver what you do best, you’ll never draw to the button. You’ll find it bloody-well overshooting, or stopping short.”
“Let’s think if there’s another way to skin that cat,” the Czar replied evasively.
“Irv, for chrissake,” Claude sighed. “Put that one on the back burner.”
Work plans, time frames, mechanisms for delivery, ad-hoc support teams, outside consultants: they agreed on the contents of the breakfast binder and a meeting to review it was scheduled before dawn next day. With military precision the recovery campaign was underway. Jihad, whispered Ranjit, eyes blazing, two fists out front grasping the diamond-studded handle of a virtual scimitar. His resolve, like the flames of war, leapt to the others, and pumped-up, they marched out single file, Claude whispering to Eric he’d be acting as deputy to the Czar until midnight because until then a few ladies required his presence first.
Heywood said, “Stay a minute, Jaime, won’t you?” She stopped stashing away her PDA. Impish eyes looked up. “Sorry you had to sit through a seminar in basic planning.”
“It’s okay,” Jaime said brightly. “Guys your age aren’t naturally quick. It’s known you need to say things more than once.”
Heywood took this in. “If we’re thoughtful and careful, it’s because we know mistakes happen. We’ve learned.”
“It’s okay,” Jaime repeated, smiling. “It was a scream watching.”
Heywood pursed his lips. “Where are you from?” Jaime said she was from up north. “Up north?” Heywood was suddenly inspired. “Where? North Bay? Black Creek? Rock Falls? That’s tree country. I’m from tree country. New Brunswick. Your daddy…was he a logger? Mine was. So was the granddad. In those days they used hand saws and axes. I still got an axe in the basement. Bigger than you. Felling trees…it used to be a noble thing to do.” Heywood gave in to his memories, reliving the sounds of great pines crashing down to earth, then getting pulled through winter forests by teams of snorting horses.
Jaime watched the Czar’s eyes drop shut and the wrinkled face turn soft. She broke in by saying she never knew her father. Nor did her mother ever mention him. She doubted he’d been a logger. A drifter maybe.
“I’m sorry,” Heywood said.
No problem, was Jaime’s reply. She never missed her father because she had an older brother who had become an important computer system designer working in Silicon Valley.
“Did Claude say why you’re here?”
“I can guess. You want the clever dog behind this mess.”
“That…for sure. But more…” Heywood’s shoulders stooped forward. His voice dropped. “I want the how and why of it.”
“Yeah.”
“Claude says you know your way around cyberspace. Runs in the family, does it?”
“My brother showed me the ropes. I learned them playing games. We still do. We hide our messages somewhere out there.” She lifted her arms, metal bracelets jangling, and drew a graceful arc. “A few hints, then we go looking. Last year I found my birthday greeting inside a phoney file on me in the records of the Swedish police. I think the Swedish police have a file on everybody, criminal or not. So it’s easy to hide one there. It took a couple of days, but I got it. The birthday wish was really sweet, so I hid my thank-you note to my brother in the records of the international sugar trade kept by the US Special Trade Representative. Fitting, right? My brother’s fast. He figured that out in half a day. He’s got a system so it’s no big deal for us to get through firewalls.”
Heywood’s hands had slipped to the table’s edge which he gripped hard. “Can we hire your bro
ther?” His voice had lost its gravelly self-assurance.
“Not right now. He’s on vacation. Visiting a casino in Monaco. I wished him good luck with the gambling.” Jaime chuckled. “It was a footnote in the English translation of the latest monthly report by the German central bank. Good one, right? Breaking the bank! Last night I checked and the report was still sitting on their server. My message got bumped though, replaced by one word – NASA. Hot hint, so I hacked into NASA, grubbled around, you know, in the history section and other places, and guess what – in the Apollo Program files – what was there? His initials below a line: I’m shooting for the moon. Don’t you love that? I love my brother. Anyhow, you don’t need to think about hiring him because I work for you already.” Jaime’s uplifted eyebrows and jaunty smile made a statement: Mr. Heywood, count your blessings.
“What exactly has your brother taught you?” he asked, eyes narrowing. Uncharitable thoughts about Ron Hunt and Claire Desmarais were entering his mind. Were there back doors to unknown chambers storing undisclosed aspects of their earthly existence which he might snuffle through so as to find odd, but handy facts? Who was this Jaime, this street-smart practitioner of today’s version of antiquity’s black arts? What valuable, esoteric formulas did she have in her possession? “Tell me, what’s the method?”
Jaime gathered her hair with one hand and threw it back, once more setting bracelets chiming. “Method? Not method, Irv. Art. It’s thinking abstract. It’s revving it up to a higher level. It’s seeing meaning where others see nothing. It’s playing games out in the ether.” Jaime stopped. For a moment she was deadly serious. “And my brother and I, we erase where we were. What we did never happened. We arrange it so we didn’t exist.”
Heywood, who could prattle without effort and fall back on bombast without thinking, was dumbfounded. To exist, yet not exist? He sat still, unsure whether to go with Jaime’s flow, unsure whether to allow this seduction of his reasoning to continue “And you can play games like that for me, Jaime?” he asked meekly. “Can you fashion an ethereal comet? Can you get it to light up the heart of the infernal darkness that has settled on the Service?”
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