The Tsunami File

by Michael E. Rose

  “Hey Frank, I got some real good shots of that funeral service this morning,” Bishop called out when he saw Delaney approaching. He pushed the computer over as Delaney sat down at the low round table. “Have a look at these. Might be a cover shot in there somewhere.”

  Bishop picked up what looked like a lemonade and slurped at it contentedly through a straw. He took a piece of ice in his mouth and crunched it energetically. A waiter came over. Delaney ordered a beer.

  “Bit late in the day for lemonade, isn’t it Tim?”

  Delaney said.

  “Funny guy. Bit early for a beer?” Delaney liked Bishop, had worked with him a number of times. But it was their assignment together in Iraq that had cemented the relationship. Delaney got himself, and Bishop, into bad trouble in 2003 and bad trouble always creates an unbreakable bond between journalists, if the troubles end happily and sometimes even if they don’t. Delaney and Bishop had been lucky. They had refused to swim along with the media tide and wait for briefings or official “embeds” with U.S. troops gathering for the Iraq invasion. Instead, they rented a four-wheel drive in Kuwait and simply drove it deep into southern Iraq just hours before the fighting started.

  They were eventually arrested by a squad of very, very agitated Iraqi soldiers. They never saw their rental car or their computers and photo gear again. They were interrogated and slapped around and shouted at for two days, accused of spying for the invaders, and then they were driven all the way across Iraq, under heavy bombardment, to be placed under house arrest at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. Why they were not simply executed in the desert, Delaney could never understand. Bishop had handled the situation well, hadn’t panicked, and when it was over it gave both of their careers a big boost—Bishop early in his career; Delaney much nearer to the end of his own. Delaney got a strong story for International Geographic and Bishop got great pictures in Baghdad, after the Americans arrived and he had managed to buy himself a new camera.

  Delaney’s misadventures in Iraq had also given things a boost between himself and Kate Hunter.

  There is nothing like a life and death assignment, Delaney had found, to attract a new lady friend or to paper over problems with an existing one. He and Kate had had a very good stretch after the Burma debacle, right through until mid-2002. She had battled past the defences he erected after Natalia died, well before Kate came along. He had battled past his own defences as well, after Burma, and after he had once again led a woman he thought he might be in love with into danger. He got past blaming himself for Natalia’s death and stopped swimming against the tide of his relationship with Kate.

  For a while, it worked. Then Kate, as he expected, wanted more, wanted domesticity and almost-marital bliss. When she didn’t get it, she hooked up with a policeman who worked with her at the RCMP and she lived with him in Montreal for more than year while Delaney played globetrotting journalist and, increasingly, spy. She threw herself into her police work, more and more important after the 9/11 attacks, of investigating sources of terrorist funding with Canadian traces. Delaney threw himself back into whatever his information-gathering skills yielded in the way of clients, journalistic or otherwise. But his near-death experience in Iraq had given both of them a jolt and now he and Kate were back on again as a couple. Just.

  Bishop didn’t bother with women, it seemed. He took pictures in hell holes, drank lemonade and jogged. He never talked about his family back in Boston and Delaney never brought it up. The pictures Bishop had taken that morning at the funeral were excellent. He had gone in tight, to the emotions on the faces of the Swedish mourners and the priest.

  “What’s up for tomorrow, Frank?” Bishop asked.

  “I’m going to put in a request to interview a Scotland Yard fingerprint guy, so we’ll probably need some head shots of him and some of him working at a screen, or whatever,” Delaney said. “I think that will come off. Still waiting for word on whether I can get Braithwaite, the commander.”

  “OK,” Bishop said. “I may go back over to the mortuary site tomorrow morning until you hear. Do up some arty shots of the containers, maybe.”

  “Dinner?”

  “A quick one maybe,” Bishop said. “I want to Photoshop some of these pics from today. I’ve got emails to write. And there’s a documentary on CNN tonight I want to watch.” “Party animal,” Delaney said.

  “The guys in fedoras are all dying off, Frank. Too much hard living.”

  “I’ve never worn a fedora in my life.”

  “Stop the presses. Hold the front page. Sweetheart, get me rewrite,” Bishop said with a grin.

  “Fuck off, Tim.”

  “You’ve got no one to play with anymore.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “It’s the twenty-first century,” Bishop said.

  “Unfortunately,” Delaney said.

  Interpol’s press officer was having another shouting match with the Kendall man. Delaney had seen her do that the first day he arrived in Phuket. This time, Ruth Connolly was shouting at the Kendall man under a tree just outside the management centre. She didn’t seem to care who overheard.

  “You guys are not even police officers, for fuck’s sake,” Connolly roared. “I’ve told you over and over to back off and stop issuing press releases. I won’t have it.”

  It was the same issue Delaney had heard Connolly shouting about on the day he arrived. She had been given the unenviable assignment of coming out to Phuket from Lyon to wrest control of the media machinery from Kendall International, a giant company that specialized in postdisaster relief logistics. Kendall was based in Australia but active all around the world. The company had put their people on planes in the first hours after news of the tsunami broke on agency wires. Before the world’s police had got to Phuket to help with the massive DVI effort, Kendall had signed lucrative contracts with the Thais for high-priced pathology equipment, body bags, refrigeration units, coffins, food services, transport aircraft—anything the overwhelmed Thai officials needed or were told they needed.

  Kendall’s media team was savvy, aggressive and effective. Before Connolly arrived, they had the all-important first few days with the world’s media all to themselves. They issued press releases one after the other extolling their company’s services and they called press conferences in which their people had sat alongside senior Thai police and military, reassuring the world that everything that could be done was being done.

  Interpol, and a score of national police forces, now badly wanted a piece of the media action to satisfy their home constituencies that they were front and centre on the scene. Months after the disaster, however, Kendall’s PR chief, a weather-beaten former Australian television journalist named Gary Clarke, was doggedly standing his ground, if only because his job now paid him many times what he could ever dream of earning in the media, and his job very much depended on success in places like this.

  “You can’t stop a global company or any company for that matter from issuing a press release if it bloody well wants to, Ruth. Even Interpol can’t stop us from doing that,” he said.

  “You guys make me want to puke,” Connolly said. “You’re just out here peddling your wares and you’ve got the Thais by the short and curlies. If you want to issue a press release even remotely connected to this police operation, you come to me first. I’ve been telling you that for weeks. How do you know what I might have planned for the damn media on any given day?”

  “I don’t have to coordinate my media strategy with yours, Ruth,” Clarke shouted back “Your strategy is just to make your bloody shareholders rich,” Connolly shouted.

  “And yours is just to make Interpol look good,” Clarke shouted back.

  “I’m representing all the teams here, Gary,” she said.

  “Bullshit,” Clarke said.

  They both noticed Delaney at the same time. “Are we on the record here, my friends?�
�� Delaney said with a smile, and coming closer. “May I quote you on some of this perhaps?”

  “Fuck off, Delaney,” Connolly said, reaching into her shoulder bag for a cigarette. “We’re on the record when I say we’re on the record.” Clarke lit a cigarette as well.

  “Ms. Connolly is practising her inimitable scorched-earth policy of media relations,” Clarke said. “She’ll have me arrested next.”

  “I’m thinking about that very thing,” Connolly said, taking a ferocious drag on her foul-smelling Thai smoke. She was tall, busty, broad-shouldered and strikingly attractive. She wore an Interpol baseball cap and her long auburn hair was tightly tied back. Delaney thought when they met for the first time that she would make an outstanding undercover drugs officer. Perhaps she had done such work in Ireland in her pre-Interpol incarnation.

  “What do you want from me now anyway, Delaney?” she said. “Nobody still reads International Geographic anymore, do they? Except in dentist offices?”

  “I’ll leave you to your fate,” Clarke said to Delaney. “Ruth, shall we leave this for another day?”

  “Just keep your overpaid spin monkeys off their typewriters from now on,” she said.

  Clarke laughed as he moved off. “Good luck, Delaney,” he called out over his shoulder.

  Connolly watched intently as Clarke got into a gleaming emerald-coloured Land Cruiser with Kendall logos emblazoned everywhere.

  “He is one scumbag,” she said bitterly. She laughed, however, as she looked over at Delaney. “Off the record, of course.”

  “Ah, the politics of international police cooperation,” Delaney said.

  “They’re not even fucking police,” Connolly said bitterly. “That’s what gets my goat.”

  “Not everyone can be police,” Delaney said.

  “Pity,” she said. “Now what are you going to bother me about today, Delaney? Can’t you see I’m busy alienating the global business community? Haven’t you got enough for a little magazine story yet? You’ve been prowling around here for days and days.”

  “I’m still waiting for my interview with Adrian Braithwaite,” Delaney said.

  “I’ve made the request,” Connolly said. “He’s a busy man.”

  “And I’d like to talk to a fingerprint expert now. One of your guys actually. Ex Scotland Yard, now at Interpol.” “Smith,” she said.

  “Jonah Smith. That’s right.”

  “He’s not the brightest spark, our Jonah,” she said.

  “Fantastic at what he does, but . . .”

  “Dull?” Delaney said.

  “Yes, rather.”

  “This is not for TV, Ruth.”

  “Lucky.”

  “What do you think?”

  “What about a DNA person?”

  “Fingerprints are yielding a lot of identifications around here. Or so I’m told.”

  “By Smith, for example.”

  “And others.”

  “OK, let’s make a deal,” Connolly said. “I’ll give you Smith, but you talk to one of the DNA guys as well. Keep the peace between the warring camps.”

  “I would have asked you for a DNA angle at some point anyway, once I get a handle on these things,” Delaney said.

  “If you haven’t got a handle on things after this long, Delaney, you’ll never get one. If you don’t mind me saying,” Connolly said with a giant smile. “How complicated is it?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “OK, well, you can talk to Smith,” she said.

  “But I’ll find you a DNA man too. OK?”

  “All right,” Delaney said. “A two for one sale. Plus Braithwaite thrown in.”

  “Braithwaite will cost you, my dear Mr. Delaney,” she said, batting her eyes in a poor imitation of a screen vamp.

  “You wouldn’t be flirting with a member of the press, would you Officer Connolly?”

  “Good gracious, no,” Connolly said, smiling ever more broadly. “Never. Those days are gone.”

  “You’re the second person who’s found it necessary to remind me of that in two days,” Delaney said.

  “There is a message in there for you somewhere,” Connolly said.

  Delaney didn’t get to sit down with Smith until two days later. And Smith didn’t tell Delaney about the blackmail attempt until very late in the interview. Delaney didn’t think Smith had purposely saved that bit for last. He could see that Smith was a methodical man, far from dull as it turned out, but someone who wanted to set things up properly. First explain background, procedure, situations properly, before going off on any tangents, no matter how important. He had done all of that for Delaney at length, providing outstanding material for a magazine story, before diverting a journalist’s attention to missing files, and to blackmail.

  The interview took place in the management centre, in a bare anteroom well away from the other DVI team members. Delaney had first been given what amounted to a short course in the history of fingerprinting from Victorian days to the present moment. He sensed that Smith had given his little potted history many times before, whenever an unsuspecting listener had been snared.

  “So you see, the issue in those years was actually trying to keep track of everyone,” Smith had said.

  “Not just criminals, but people who were suspect in a more general way. Migrants, strangers, foreign born staff, people who didn’t fit into the mould of middle-class Victorian society. The authorities were very keen to develop a way to keep track of these people and fingerprints were a very effective way to do that. Who was actually who, who was entitled to what, what sort of record a person had. First out in the colonies, and then more and more for police work back in England.”

  As they talked, Smith constantly sipped mineral water from a small bottle. He sweated heavily in the heat and, it appeared, in his intense enthusiasm for the topic. Delaney drank tea that a young Thai policewoman had brought him.

  “But they gave up, eventually, on the other matter of trying to use fingerprints as a way to actually predict who might be liable to commit criminal acts,” Smith said. “They’d been searching for a long time for ways to do that, the Victorians, with analysis of facial characteristics and measuring skull shapes and limb length or whatever, and then with fingerprints. But eventually they gave up on all of that. There’s no recurring pattern anyone’s ever been able to determine in criminal fingerprints.”

  Delaney sipped tea, wrote in his notebook. He let Smith ramble on.

  “But then of course the whole business of using fingerprints to identify dead bodies is another issue altogether,” Smith said. “In a different category. As you’ve seen out here in Phuket.”

  “I’d like to get into that aspect a little further now,” Delaney said. “The technical side of it, getting prints from the corpses you can use in your work, that sort of thing.”

  This launched Smith into yet another lengthy monologue about the pitfalls and trials of obtaining quality finger marks from deteriorating bodies, and of obtaining quality antemortem marks from home countries. Delaney scribbled notes. Smith enthused, stopping occasionally to refuel himself with water.

  “In the end, though,” Smith said, “at the end of the day, it comes down to the skill of the individual fingerprint examiners. The AFIS system is very good at winnowing down thousands of fingerprints to a handful of possible matches. Computers are fast, but they’re dumb. It’s the experienced fingerprint examiners who make the final determinations, always. If they’re any good and if they do their work properly. You can never eliminate the human factor.”

  Smith paused for a moment, allowing his captive listener to appreciate this fully.

  “And it also comes down to very rigorous record keeping,” he said. “In a big operation like this in particular.”

  “I take it things are going well now that the proper sys
tems are in place out here,” Delaney said. “You’re getting a lot of fingerprint matches now.”

  “Yes, lots,” Smith said. “Far more than DNA and dental combined, at this stage.” He smiled ever so slightly.

  “That’s not always how it goes, is it?” Delaney said. “In New York City after 9/11, for example, it was almost all DNA, wasn’t it?”

  Delaney had been in New York in the months after the World Trade Center attacks, on assignment for CSIS and a Canadian magazine at the same time.

  “Oh, well, sure, there it had to be DNA in that case because you had mostly just body parts, most of the bodies in New York were broken up, pulverized,” Smith said quickly. “It’s very different here.

  Fingerprints are still the thing.”

  “That’s good news for you,” Delaney said.

  “Of course there are always some hitches,” Smith said. “In a big operation like this.”

  Delaney’s journalistic radar was immediately activated.

  “I see,” he said. “Can you give me some examples?”

  Smith hesitated. He peered at Delaney through his thick glasses. All good fingerprint specialists, he had explained to Delaney early in the interview, had ruined eyes. If they didn’t, he had said, they mustn’t be looking closely enough at their files.

  “You running into problems?” Delaney asked again.

  “It’s natural to have some problems in any big disaster operation, with teams coming in from all over the world,” Smith said.

  “But?”

  Delaney knew, after dozens, hundreds, of interviews with officials and experts and politicians of all persuasions that something important was coming, that his interview subject wanted to say something significant, perhaps share a secret. He knew the tone shifts and the signals all too well.