The Greed

by Scott Bergstrom

  When the cabin door opened, I stepped into the queer chill of a desert at night. As I climbed down the staircase to the ground, I saw nothing but a small airstrip with a few hangars and unmarked military trucks, all painted tan. A woman with olive skin pulled tightly over fine features and black hair cut close to the scalp waited for me beside a jeep. She wore a green serge army uniform with no patches or markings, not even a flag.

  “Hello,” she said in English that had no accent. “We’re pleased to have you here, Student 312.”

  * * *

  There was no official name for the place, so someone who came before me gave it an informal one: Orphan Camp. We called it that because that’s what we were, at least in a way. There was no wall and no guard tower, only a fence, a mere two meters high. This wasn’t, the instructors were quick to remind us, a prison; it was the safest place in the world we could possibly be. Besides, who needs a wall and a guard tower when you’re surrounded by untold miles of desert?

  A few minutes after my arrival, another woman in the same unmarked uniform stood me up before a dozen serious faces and introduced me.

  “Welcome, 312,” they all said back in frightening unison.

  There was a hardness to each student’s face, something born of trauma and sadness that had petrified their features into a kind of stony beauty that was nearly angelic. They weren’t surprised by anything anymore, nor could they be hurt by anything anymore. The color of the students’ skin ran from nearly black to paper white, but there was a commonality of experience that made them appear almost like siblings. We had all, for reasons known only to Tel Aviv, somehow fallen into Israel’s orbit. Hence our presence here.

  Student 309, a wispy Arab boy who spoke English like a British duke, was assigned to show me around the camp. There wasn’t much to it besides a few metal buildings, some farm equipment, and fields beyond the fence where wooden lattices held up plastic plants. Just what kind of plants they were supposed to be—grapes, maybe, but in the desert?—I had no idea. Afterward, 309 helped me collect my bedding, toiletries, and uniform: blue fatigues identical to the instructors’ except for the color.

  Our final stop was the barracks, where he tapped on a thin mattress on an upper bunk. “Days begin at six,” he said. “Except when they don’t.”

  I looked at him with a tired smirk that showed I was too exhausted for riddles.

  “Sometimes it’s a four-in-the-morning run through the desert,” he said. “Other times, it’s a tear gas grenade through the door.”

  “A tear gas grenade?”

  “To get the blood flowing,” he said. “Orphan Camp coffee.”

  They allowed me to rest that first day, something 309 told me it was better not to get used to—“As you shan’t see much more of it for the next six months.” Shan’t. The first time I’d heard someone use that word in real life.

  The heat in the barracks was sweltering, and I knew it would be worse when the others came back, with too many bodies too close together. As I drifted off—too tired to be frightened or even intrigued by what was in store for me next—I heard through the metal walls shouting instructors and, every once in a while, a factory whistle.

  I managed to sleep until the students returned in what I took to be the late afternoon. They were beaten and dirty, their uniforms soaked through with sweat. No one had the energy to speak, so they simply stripped naked and either crawled into bed or sat around in exhausted silence. This nakedness, I would come to learn, was no more than a biological fact, signifying nothing other than how hot it was. The temperature was simply too high and our bodies too empty for anything like arousal.

  I climbed down off the bunk and saw the person who slept below me was a parchment-skinned woman with red hair, no older than twenty. She went by 303, or, as she pronounced it, “Tree-oh-tree”—hard t’s, trilled r’s. I recognized her look and her accent.

  “Vuy Russkiy?” I said. You Russian?

  She looked at me coldly. “As I said, I’m 303.”

  No names here, and no nationalities, either.

  * * *

  Firearms training always came first thing in the morning and was taught by a blond-haired, blue-eyed giant of a man who introduced us to the wonders of the world’s most common pistols and assault rifles. Thousands of paper targets later, there were blisters on my trigger finger and on the webbing between my thumb and hand. We repeated exercises on disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling the weapons so many times that by the end the instructor blindfolded us, and we could do it in the dark.

  After firearms, it was hand-to-hand fighting, taught by a cheery middle-aged woman who looked like her hobbies included scrapbooking and collecting porcelain cats. She was, however, never to be crossed, and when a boy I thought from his accent might be from West Africa failed to deliver a hard enough blow to her during sparring, she twisted his arm behind his back until he screamed.

  This class always ended with the mysterious factory whistle. As soon as it sounded, everyone—students and instructors alike—retreated to the nearest shelter. A tractor dragging an enormous sheet of plywood by a pair of heavy chains went out, driving around the grounds, erasing our tracks. I learned why on my first day. Student 300, an Asian girl in her late teens, pointed to the sky as we waited inside a barn and said, “Satellites.”

  The schedule of the whistles was fairly regular, but there were enough variations—one day, it sounded a total of thirteen times—that I wondered just how the instructors knew when the satellites were overhead. In any case, the images the satellites sent back to Washington and Moscow and Beijing were of a small farm consisting of a few buildings, some crops, and scattered pieces of equipment. Nothing of interest. And certainly not a summer camp at which “Kumbaya” sing-alongs were substituted for AK-47 training.

  Firearms and hand-to-hand combat were only two of the subjects we were taught in what turned out to be a comprehensive education in clandestine life. Other instructors in anonymous green uniforms taught us old-school tradecraft, things like street passes, dead drops, surveillance detection—analog alternatives to the high-tech, and of more use today, they told us, than ever before. They taught us how to hot-wire and drive anything with an engine, from a scooter to an elephantine military truck. We learned how to slam through a roadblock, and how to spin a car 180 degrees with just a flick of the wrist and deft dance on the brake and gas.

  There was a special sort of pleasure to the training. The tools of revenge is how I saw it. Especially when I got to the knives. Easy to get, the instructor said, and devastating, even in the hands of an amateur. We started with fancy ones, built for fighting. Then cheap ones, made for cutting tomatoes and available anywhere on the planet. It turns out, knives were what I was good at, and the instructor said she liked my technique. There was, in her words, a certain “elegant aggression” to my style.

  That’s the thing that happens to anger when you live with it awhile—elegant aggression. The fury doesn’t make your hands shake or your skin buzz anymore. It just lives in your veins, like a drug, making you stronger and that much faster. Making your aim at the carotid or femoral or liver or kidney that much sharper. The guns were fine, and the driving fun, but that—the ten centimeters of steel coming to a point like an extension of my very arm—is where I found my real pleasure.

  Each night, back in the barracks, there was little talk and almost no camaraderie. It’s hard to make friends when you go by a number and aren’t allowed to say so much as where you came from. Only 303 became something approaching a friend. It turned out both of us had trouble sleeping, haunted by memories that had followed us all the way here. So after lights-out, we’d sneak into the yard to escape the heat. Hushed conversations were all that followed, and those always in the present and future tenses, never the past.

  “We’re in Israel, you think?” she said one night.

  She’d been better with the th’s lately. No more turning them into t’s or d’s.

  I shrugged. “Too obvious
.”

  “North Africa somewhere.”

  “Maybe.”

  She leaned back against the barracks wall. “They say someone got a radio once. Climbed up on the roof to listen for a signal, maybe figure out where this place is.”

  “Did they hear anything?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking at me through the darkness. “A voice telling them to turn off the radio and get off the roof.”

  We both laughed into our arms until tears came. It was too absurd not to be true.

  * * *

  People came and went. Student 309 vanished one day, and a week later Student 303 did, too. Where they went, none of us knew. New arrivals showed up at random times. Student 313 turned out to be a kid I thought was Japanese until she opened her mouth and out came pure Chicago; 314 was a Latino boy who became the hand-to-hand teacher’s star pupil within a single day.

  My time came after I’d been there six months. As the others retreated to the barracks one afternoon, I was summoned to the office of the camp’s director, the same woman with olive skin and fine features who’d picked me up from the airfield.

  “Your father’s doing well, happy to say,” she said with no hint of emotion from behind a battered wooden desk. “Question is, how are you doing?”

  It was a startling question in an environment where what they teach you is trickery and deception and how to kill. “I’m—doing well also,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Our goal was to teach you survival skills,” she said. “For a new life, in a new world, with a new name. Do you feel we’ve met that goal successfully?”

  I nodded. That had been the line from day one, but it hadn’t fooled any of us. Survival skills are how to start a fire or open a bank account. What we’d been taught was more aggressive. We weren’t being trained for defense but offense. And it wasn’t lost on me that I’d incurred a debt to the state of Israel that they weren’t likely to forget.

  “Yes,” I said. “You did that successfully.”

  She didn’t acknowledge the answer and instead pulled a sheaf of papers from a manila folder. “Your Spanish,” she said. “Still fluent?”

  “Tal vez,” I said.

  She blinked at me from across the desk.

  I tried to smile. “Maybe.”

  She slid the sheaf of papers toward me. “Montevideo, Uruguay,” she said. “Your name is now Judita Leandra Perels.”

  Four

  Dear sir or madam,

  Contained in the enclosed documents are details of forty-seven (47) operations undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. All transpired with the knowledge of, support of, and/or participation of members of the Department of Defense, the executive branch, and key members of Congress. The events are described from personal memory, as I was a participant or observer in all the cases described here. Each scream of the tortured, each body disposed of in an anonymous grave or in the sea or left in the sun, is precisely accurate to my memory.

  Nothing is conjecture or supposition.

  What you are reading is a catalog of crimes. This catalog describes torture and brutality perpetrated against probably innocent individuals, and murder perpetrated against same. This catalog describes the CIA’s collusion with dictators and enemies of the United States, as well as collusion with organized crime syndicates, including, but not limited to, the Zoric crime family based in Belgrade and Sarajevo, the Kladivo crime family based in Prague, the Solkov syndicate based in Moscow, the Al-Alwadi smuggling organization based in Damascus, and several others. This catalog describes the participation of CIA operatives and agents in arms and narcotics trafficking, and the trafficking of human beings, often women, often children, for the purposes of sexual exploitation. This catalog describes the profiting from these actions by members of the intelligence and defense establishments, members of the executive branch, members of Congress, and private interests—all of whom are herein named.

  It is my only hope that my daughter, Gwendolyn Bloom, likely the deliverer of this document, be protected by whatever means you have at your disposal. She is innocent in these affairs, though hardly unstained by them. Gwendolyn’s safety is, as I write this, my foremost concern in this world. Had it always been my foremost concern—which, as a father, it should have been—it would not have been necessary to write this document in the first place.

  Yours, in trust,

  William Bloom

  Montevideo, Uruguay

  So begins, in his spidery, formal cursive, the first pages of his confession, what he calls his “doomsday device.” It spans some seven children’s school notebooks in all—two with blue covers, three with pink, and two Hello Kitty. Each page is filled, front and back, with careful prose in ink, virtually uninterrupted by redactions or corrections, as if he were merely transcribing something that already existed fully formed in his head.

  The murder of a French spy by the CIA as a favor to a corrupt colonel in Pakistani intelligence. A meeting in a Saudi hotel suite between American businessmen, a US senator, and a Saudi prince in which advanced weapons technology was traded for cash. CIA officers being treated to a buffet of child prostitutes by Viktor Zoric in the city of Munich.

  And so on, page after page, brightly colored children’s notebook after brightly colored children’s notebook, until he has damned everyone he has ever known, including himself. I read the pages only incidentally, to and from the network of Internet cafés where I scan the notebooks and upload the videos he makes of himself reading the whole confession aloud. There are hours of footage, my dad sitting in dim light, speaking low so as not to be overheard by the neighbors, occasionally fiddling with the camera on the smartphone I’d gotten at his request from a pawnshop.

  I don’t watch the videos, though, which would make it impossible to pretend the character of “I” in the notebooks refers to someone other than my father. He, William Bloom, the I, comes off better than the others, of course, actively participating in no torture, and only three or four or maybe five murders depending on where one draws the line between participation and observation. At no point does he accept any gift or bribe.

  I love him. Still. Despite. Maybe because he’s my father and nothing can change that, or maybe because he’s the only thing left to love. But it’s different now. Since coming here, since reading his doomsday device for myself, the love is different.

  * * *

  Carga Completa, says the screen. Upload Complete.

  Counting this, the latest and hopefully final episode of Dad’s doomsday device, there are fourteen videos in total—two each for each of the seven notebooks.

  My dad put together a list of editors at newspapers, magazines, blogs, and television news networks most likely to be interested in the story. Some were old-school journalists for whom integrity and telling truth to power mattered above all. Others were simply scandalmongers, eager for any kind of scoop. The e-mails to the editors linking to folders in several redundant cloud storage sites around the world are already written and waiting in the drafts folder of several different e-mail accounts. All I have to do in case my dad is captured or killed is log in to just one of them and hit SEND.

  I move on to the next cloud storage service and start the process of uploading the video and scanned notebook pages again. Turns out, prepping to bring down the world is tedious business. I have to use the TOR browser for anything I do on the Web. It bounces the traffic through servers all around the world before it finally reaches its destination. It’s slow at the best of times, but here in Uruguay, it absolutely crawls.

  When watching the progress bar creep along becomes too painful, I turn back to my book. It’s hard to concentrate here; the pew-pew-pew from games and moaning from porn are relentless. And the book I’m reading, checked out from the library, isn’t helping, either. CIA Involvement in Central and South America, A Critical Analysis. I keep the book’s dust jacket off, so only the plain cover is ever visible to the curious.

  The topic is interesti
ng enough, but getting through it is like hacking my way through a jungle. Dense, mosquito-infested text, by an author who has no interest in getting to the point anytime soon.

  But at least it’s mind work, not physical work, not schlepping steaks to tourists and having my ass grabbed. I delight in sorting it all out, drawing the connections between one thinker and another, of wondering whether the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the state of things today are related, and finding out that they are.

  To me these books are more than abstract ideas. They show me my place in the world. There are reasons the world looks the way it looks and behaves the way it behaves. My story—a woman of nineteen caught between borders and ideologies—isn’t even original. Everything has happened before. Everything will happen again.

  Carga Completa.

  I put the book down, go to another cloud service, and start the upload again. It’s the last one, thankfully, and moving pretty quickly now by TOR-in-Uruguay standards. I indulge myself and open another tab.

  Argentina, this month—just a single border away. Somewhere in the countryside, photos of Argentine cowboys and little villages. The month before it had been China, with wonderful photos of Shanghai and Beijing. Couples on the streets. Children holding balloons. Skateboarders midair.

  I’m not an artist, and no photographer, but I know good when I see it, and Terrance’s work is good. Forget for a second the colors and the light, and look at how the photos are structured. Their composition. See how that little girl is there, and her grandmother, over there? See how the rake the grandmother is holding cuts at a perfect diagonal that mirrors the shape of the bicycle in the background? It’s Terrance’s eye that makes him so good. His way of looking at the world.

  TerraFirma is what he goes by on Tumblr. That’s all that’s left of Terrance Mutai IV these days. The wonderful, brilliant, deliriously gorgeous high school kid who always looked like he just stepped out of a Ralph Lauren photo shoot. No more Facebook profile. No Twitter feed. Just a Tumblr full of photos seen by 143 followers.