Borderless Deceit

by Adrian de Hoog

  “Got my files back, Carson!” Beausejour insisted. “Jaime… Heywood’s helper…she did it. Damn it, get off your pedestal. For God’s sake. It’s a big deal.”

  “Your files shouldn’t have been lost in the first place.”

  “Yeah? Well, it happened. Maybe you were bored to tears by that crisis, but me, I tell you, I stared down a shaft and, yeah, I blinked.”

  “Heywood’s sidekick. What did she do?”

  “Broke the code. Our own code! She called me Saturday. She’s got fancy digs in Operations Tower. The equipment sitting around, you ought to see it. All hers. Big lock on the door. I knock. She lets me in. I ask what’s happening. Well, she’s been busy decrypting our backup tapes. She asked me questions, entered some stuff into a computer, ran a program she said she wrote the night before. Don’t know how it worked. Okay, the first hour was a waste. Nothing much happened. She said it took her program a while to get a toe-hold. Then…bingo!…Wish you’d seen it, Carson…incredible. Out of a swirl of symbols you could see bits of words form, real slow, then phrases, and suddenly – I mean, whammo – there were sentences, paragraphs, whole documents. I’m telling you, three hours later, everything I had on my hard drive – 30 gigs at least – it was back. All decoded. Who said our encryption would last to the end of time?”

  “Not me,” I sneered. Despite frequent resolutions to try to be more pleasant to Arthur, I felt scorn coming on and was powerless to keep it from my voice. “So Heywood’s little helper saved you. Why didn’t you fix your problem yourself?” I continued down the corridor.

  Beausejour yelled after me, “Give her a call, Carson! Accept some help!”

  Inside my cell I hung my parka on a hook, slipped out of overshoes, took out the new laptop, plugged it into an outlet, and fired it up. Waiting for it to load I dropped into my chair, lifted my feet onto a table next to the computer and stared at the wall. I knew the ways of unravelling complex encryptions. They required powerful data crunching hardware and highly classified software. I could only do it remotely using the resources of Hugh-S. How had this Jaime managed it? Who was she? She had converted Arthur, that was obvious. How many others were indebted to her by now? The way she was inserting herself made me uneasy. I concluded I ought to visit her computers for a look.

  But first, keen as a schoolboy, I wanted to test my weekend theory about the plague’s origin and why it had been inflicted on us. Possibilities of all kinds had been running through my head, starting with the fact that Hugh-S was having difficulty figuring it out. There had to be a twist, a dimension easily overlooked, something cleverly deceptive that conferred potency and stealth.

  My hypothesis required access to the records of the flight paths of Hugh-S’s flock of listening satellites orbiting the globe. I punched a button on the direct-line scramble phone. He picked it up on the second ring as if he’d been expecting me. His eternal southern charm came rushing at me through the line. “Cahsun. You’re alive. Your number didn’t come up on Saturday. We share a time zone, but I hear that don’t mean nothing when it comes to climate. You might like to know that Colonel Rickman survived too. He dropped your file off late and kept right on goin’. I mean south. Snatched himself a week of leave in Key West. Wanted to thaw out. You ever thaw out up there, Cahsun?”

  “Colonel Rickman was impressed by the weather? It didn’t seem to bother him much. I had a feeling he’d seen worse, that he’s probably been plunked down in Siberia a few times for a good look around and then shot his way back out. Anyway, the file he brought you, it was helpful?”

  “Fine piece of work, Cahsun. Up to your standard. Posse’s gone out. Left yesterday. That why you’re calling?”

  “Not that.” I described to Hugh-S my hypothesis about the virus that destroyed our network. “Because it came in through the pipeline, I’m guessing it could have arrived from the satellites.”

  “The Audiles? No way, Cahsun. We checked that out. Over a gig a second passed through the pipeline. The duration was about three minutes. That’s a couple of hundred gigabytes more or less. Not one of the Audiles processed anywhere near that amount of data in that short period.”

  I pressed Hugh-S. If not the Audiles, what other explanations were there?

  “Got us stumped, Cahsun, the way it was there, suddenly gushin’ in, wipin’ you out. We doan feel good about it.”

  “All other potential sources connected to the pipeline checked out negative.”

  “‘Fraid so.”

  “Suppose someone found a way to use the Audiles without it being obvious?”

  “They’re our birds up there. We know what they’re doing.”

  “This is how I see it. All other potential sources are static. Every data dump coming from them can always be traced back to whoever set it moving. The persona behind this virus was smart; he wouldn’t set himself up for instant discovery. He wouldn’t use a point of origin that’s static. But the Audiles are always moving. You can use that motion. Motion creates opportunities to hide.”

  “I doan figure it that way, Cahsun. We’ve gone through the Audile records. No data dump. Not from them, not from anywhere. So far it looks like spontaneous creation.”

  “Spontaneous creation?” I laughed. “Inside the pipeline? A great mountain of data without an antecedent?”

  “Yup. Sort of a proof of God’s existence. Well, until it’s figured out.”

  I didn’t let go. I reasoned that the chances of the plague coming in through the Audiles were higher than via any other route. I reviewed and rejected the other options one by one. “Open the Audiles vault for me,” I urged. “A couple of hours will do it. Some fast checks. If I come up short, nothing’s lost. One of your guys can ride along with me the whole time if you want.”

  Hugh-S sighed, then became philosophical. “The universe is filled with God’s great mysteries and some days I wonder why we want to understand them all.” Whenever Hugh-S used a southern pastor’s voice, it was a sign that acquiescence was not far off. “Sometimes I think there’s blessedness in not having every explanation,” he continued his preaching. But then, after a pause, I was given the baptismal sprinkling. “Oh, all right, Cahsun. Go forth.”

  Thirty minutes later, elaborate secure link-up procedures completed, the laptop was connected to the vault. Occasions like this were rare; in the past I’d been allowed in for only very specific searches. Yet, each time, once connected, hypnotized by the dazzling world of information unfolding on my monitor, I compared my presence there to being in the middle of a fairy-tale, in a whimsical palace, invisible when the drawbridge is up, but brilliant and inviting once there’s leave to enter. And inside! Unbelievable riches stacked away, an astonishing record of human behaviour, a gargantuan archive of accomplishments and failures. Blessed by Hugh-S’s baptismal drops, inside, with this cornucopia all around, I had an inkling of what it was like to stand on hallowed ground.

  Thirty-three satellites, delicately choreographed, swirl around the globe in a silent dance. Celestial puffs of technology. Up there they listen with unimaginable sensitivity to humanity, that is, to its every electronic signal. The Audiles pick up lovers whispering into cell phones and turn their murmuring into high-decibel songs. Mundane daily acts, the opening or closing of garage doors using hand-held remotes, are permanently inscribed into the Audiles records. When did Mafiosi Leonardo in Napoli depart his hillside mansion that morning? 9:34. That’s when his garage door shut. Even children chattering into walky-talkies (part of the unwanted clutter in the great catacombs of data storage) obtain their place. Yes, the kiddies’ world is there, next to the recorded yappings of terrorists, and the sighs of drug dealers renewing their murderous vows.

  The vault’s galleries and recesses call for lingering, exploring, discovering. Interesting curiosities of every kind abound. But as before, I had no time for distractions. I proceeded directly to the niche where Audiles admin data is kept to begin a methodical manipulation.

  First, I chose the day the Service was
vandalised by the plague. I asked for – and in seconds there appeared on my screen – the transmission charts for each of the thirty operating satellites (three had been out of action that day for reprogramming and maintenance). At first glance the jumble of numbers didn’t add up to much. With a click, the numbers turned into graphs, allowing me to study maxima, the peaks of data transmission. I took a few minutes to program a cut-off number below which I believed nothing was of interest. Six of the satellites had been fairly busy and were candidates for closer study. Each showed that at different times that day there had been peaks of transmission intensity of up to four, even five hundred megabytes per second. The bursts lasted different lengths of time, thirty seconds, a minute, or a minute fifteen seconds. As Hugh-S had claimed, the data was not unusual, nothing in it was big enough to have constituted the program that triggered the plague. I superimposed the graphs, using a standard time line and noticed that two of the data surges, from Audiles AB3Z and CY9P, were separated by a mere fifty seconds. This small delay between data bursts was consistent with my hypothesis. I put another question to the database. Where were these two satellites when the transmission peaks occurred? The co-ordinates of longitude and latitude appeared. I clicked to a map of the world and entered the co-ordinates to obtain a geographic picture. I saw that AB3Z had been passing directly above Andorra and CY9P straight over the Aral Sea.

  My excitement began growing.

  The next step took some time. I programmed in the movements of these two Audiles over time, including the outer boundaries of their listening zones. Within fifteen minutes I had it. On the same map of that region – stretching west-east from Spain to Kazakstan and north-south from Ukraine to Chad – the zones covered by each Audile during that fateful hour were sketched in. I was looking at two great discs, each tracing a broad swath over the surface of the Earth. I narrowed the AB3Z band down to the period of its transmission peak, and did the same for CY9P. The screen now showed two slightly bulging elliptical areas separated by an empty space which had the shape of a narrow hour glass. I focussed on the western edge of the area covered by CY9P above the Aral Sea and the eastern line of AB3Z over Andorra. My hypothesis was that someone situated in that hour-glass shaped piece of space had beamed half of the virus program to one satellite for about a minute before losing the connection as the satellite moved out of range. He then had fifty seconds to re-direct his antenna, and sent the second half of the program on its destructive journey as soon as the next satellite rising over the horizon was coming into range. Two separate but complementary doses of the killer program could have made their way into the vault. Part of the complex program must have been devoted to stunning camouflage, because neither the first half of the virus, already sitting in Hugh-S’s vault waiting for the second to arrive, nor that of the second one coming in, and then the two halves combining, had been picked up. The only evidence left behind by this complex manoeuvring – entering the vault by stealth and combining into a destructive force – was the final reassembled virus rushing down the pipeline. That short and final journey was all that anyone picked up. No other trace of it remained in the vault. As Hugh-S put it, its appearance was like a spontaneous creation, God’s own work. Once embedded in a defenceless Service server – which happened to be ours, the watchers, the end point for the pipeline – the virus had sent out its pestilential tentacles in all directions and in the end, to destroy all evidence, had obliterated itself.

  If all this was true, what spot between Andorra and the Aral Sea had housed the antenna from which the two halves of the eventual plague were launched?

  It took a while to instruct the laptop to calculate the area containing all the mathematically possible sending sites that accorded with the 50-second interval between one Audile moving out of range and the next one coming in. Once this data was crunched, I mapped them as dots of light. Concentrated as they were in one place on my screen they seemed to wink at me, as if each dot was proud to be part of a patch of perverse enlightenment. I asked for a times fifty magnification of the area and found myself studying towns and villages with unknown names, and lines on a map that showed ancient winding paths. There were serpentine rivers too, plus an impressive mountain range.

  Eastern Transylvania.

  Was this believable? Who there could have had the competence and the desire to annihilate the Service? What could have been the motivation? Mulling this over, I switched to a map of all Romania. I looked at the capital, Bucharest, a nasty Stalinist place for many wasted years. Then a mental switch was thrown, giving me a sudden shock as Rachel jumped into my thoughts. She was living there, had been for nearly a year, ever since her appointment as ambassador. It was from Bucharest, through Vienna, that Rachel was making her periodic weekend visits to the El-Salamlek Palace in Alexandria. As I weighed what this could mean, an apprehension grew. I began wishing the map on my computer screen was of some other location, an isolated outpost in the African veld, or some remote island far away in the Pacific. Anywhere but Romania. Transylvania was part of Rachel’s territory. An investigation into the virus would widen once its origin was known. Checks on embassy staff would be done. Everything imaginable would get probed. What I knew about Rachel’s private life others could find out; conspiracy theories would get spun; there would be no end to the sordid accusations she would have to face.

  I stared at the map and recalled the day Rachel Dunn from Oak Lake, Manitoba, not yet thirty-five, was named ambassador to Romania. News of the appointment, along with a photo, was carried by the papers. There was no mention of her age and the picture they used made her look older. It was a bland snapshot, really, of the kind reserved for routine announcements. She appeared distant, even cold, as if she was off to take charge of something truly bloodless, a global mining conglomerate perhaps. Yet, the cheerless photo had the opposite effect on me – because it was so obviously not her. Everyone looking at the photo was seeing an unreal version of Rachel, a badly manufactured effigy. The real Rachel – cordial, convivial, genial, she of that playful, knowing look which long ago took up permanent residence in my heart – was not available to others, at least, not through the papers. I recall thinking how favoured I was, one of the few to have insight into who she truly was. Strange how that lifeless photo had made me feel on top.

  Though I did wonder why her coldness. It’s true that in the months leading up to the Bucharest appointment a change came over Rachel. Anne-Marie noticed it first. Anne-Marie, back at work full-time because her fourth child was off to school, had renewed our monthly sandwich sessions in the cafeteria. Mostly we talked about her children, but occasionally I would ask for news of Rachel, and so I learned that some months before arriving in Bucharest, Rachel’s habit of sending regular postcards had flagged. Her last few scribbles, Anne-Marie told me, had been positively flat.

  A listlessness in Rachel’s countenance and a lethargy in her writing. Why was that? As far as I could tell it set in before she started travelling to Alexandria, so it seemed the Egyptian wasn’t the cause. I did wonder, though, when I saw the ambassadorial announcement, whether Rachel’s cold expression and the regularity of her trips to Egypt sprang from the same source.

  Who could have predicted, when Rachel moved to Bucharest, or when the plague struck, or even when in my mind the two events became linked – before the struggle with Jaime began and Zadokite Port flashed on my screen – that I would soon be monitoring Rachel’s final world-weary excursion to Alexandria, that she would soon check into that sumptuous hotel for the last time? Because not long after that fateful trip, once back in Bucharest, Rachel disappeared from Romania. In fact she vanished from the face of the earth.

  But that lay in the future, while in the present I was thinking through what I should do about what I had just found out. The plague, the Audiles, Transylvania, Rachel’s embassy in Romania – how could I ensure she wouldn’t get dragged into the mess? How could I prevent her downfall? Should I pretend I hadn’t found much, push buttons to destroy
that day’s search path, and let the virus remain what it still was: a spontaneous creative act courtesy of God, one that took place not in a virgin’s womb, but in our pipeline? If the American ambassador reported this back to Claire Desmarais, everyone, including Rachel and even Heywood, would be off the hook. But this option, I knew, would no longer work. I had uncorked a genie. Information gathered in the vault is not suppressible. What gets dug out remains that way. Someone would notice what I had found and ask why I hadn’t honoured my undertaking to Hugh-S to report back. I had no choice but to continue according to the set routine. And so, despite deep anxiety about the consequences for Rachel, I assembled my morning’s work into a digital file. Yet, as I was capturing the data I had viewed, labelling the package top secret and encrypting it to the highest level before despatching it to Hugh-S, I began thinking of next steps. If I dug deeper into the source of the plague to identify who orchestrated it, that knowledge could open up the possibility for developing a plausible, alternative explanation. I might be able to move the scene – all that had happened – out of Romania and away from Rachel. I could create a perfect cover-up.

  Minutes later, convinced it was worth a try, I called Hugh-S to tell him only what I had found, not what I might soon ask him to hide.

  “The western slopes of the Carpathian Mountains?” he said with disbelief.

  “I’m convinced of it.”

  “Cahsun, you sure you’re not stretchin’ it?”

  But he didn’t argue the Audiles evidence for long. “I don’t know,” he sighed. “The stuff you come up with, never breaking a sweat. If I didn’t know better I’d say you’re plugged into some kind of inner circle with God, or Satan, or both, all of you holding hands.”

  We talked a while about that poor and backward part of Europe. Antennae set-up there shouldn’t be difficult to spot. Hugh-S undertook to review satellite photographic data for Transylvania – every square metre would be checked off – whereas I proposed to concentrate on finding the mind that had programmed the virus and positioned the antennae. Satellite antennae sending up data in huge chunks leave big commercial tracks.