Mr. Miller

by Charles den Tex

  Peter laughed. ‘Then you peaked too early, man. The world is cruel.’

  It took a little while before I realized my mother had left. She had slipped away during the last few sentences and now I didn’t see her anymore. I didn’t hear her either, not in the kitchen and not anywhere else.

  ‘Where’s Mom?’ I asked. My father reacted with as much surprise as I did.

  ‘I thought she was here …’

  ‘I think she just went outside,’ said Peter.

  I cursed, ran through the room and yanked open the door to the hallway. At the other end of the hall I saw that the door was ajar, and in a flash I realized what she was doing. Maybe she could no longer save Kirsten, but there was still a chance for me. An abrupt calm descended over me. I turned around, went back into the living room and walked straight to the back door.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said. ‘Mom went to get the police.’

  My father said nothing. He was standing in the middle of the room, immobile.

  ‘I,’ he said. ‘… but …’

  Peter uttered a curse that was new to me. My family was falling apart before my very eyes, too quickly for me to do anything about it. The glue had become unstuck. The changes that were taking place were exposing principles that had been hidden far too long for the sake of peace and harmony. Now that others had abandoned that peace, the cannons were being lined up, and my mother was bringing in live ammunition. Kurt’s sex change was a frontal attack on the heart of God’s order. My involvement in murder had hit her where she hadn’t expected: in the flanks of her decency. My mother had withdrawn to the position she was familiar with, and she left my father behind, in the vacuum between his wife and his children. For all those years, his family had been the reference point for everything he did or thought. Now he was floundering in the darkness. For years he had kept us together. Now his wife was forcing him to choose: either her, his wife, his son or himself. I saw the hesitation in his eyes, and the fear.

  ‘We may not be seeing each other for a while,’ I said, ‘but no matter what happens, no matter what they say, I didn’t do it.’

  He nodded. ‘I know that,’ he said. And at that moment I saw the familiar bias return. My father looked to one side. His eyes met with Peter’s. ‘We’ll hold them off here. Okay, Pete?’

  Peter responded immediately.

  ‘GO!’ he screamed, and he jumped over the back of the sofa and ran into the hallway. Even before I was out the back door I heard the front door lock click. I looked at my father one more time. I wanted to tell him everything, but all I could do was nod. Twice. I had nowhere else to go and no time to waste.

  Not a second.

  My advantage was that I knew the neighbourhood better. Their advantage was that they could call in as much help as they wanted. But before it got that far, I had to be gone. I ran out through the backyard and out the gate, and squeezed through a thick hedge into the yard of the back neighbours. Before I was all the way through I heard excited voices and footsteps come in through the gate. My backpack got stuck on a branch, and I pulled it loose with one clumsy tug. The bushes behind me waved back and forth.

  From the yard I was standing in I could see into the house. No one was there. I looked around me. In the next yard there were people outside, the Janson family, who had lived here as long as we had. My pursuers were gaining on me. Faster. Closer. I scrambled over the fence and landed in the middle of their happy hour. They shouted and screamed, and as soon as they saw it was me they began to whoop.

  ‘Hey, Michael, can’t you find the door, buddy?’

  I laughed at their joke because it was the appropriate response, but in the meantime I sprinted to their back door.

  ‘My father knows all about it,’ I shouted. Why I don’t know, but it seemed like the right thing to say. And it was true. I stormed into their house, through the back room, into the hallway and out the front door. Without turning around I shot through an alley between two houses on the other side of the street and ran as fast as I could to the far end. There the alley split. One side led back to the street, the other to a small park that separated our neighbourhood from the next one. I took the latter, and soon I was running among the trees and across the grassy fields that I had known for so long I didn’t even have to think about where I was going. I knew every path, every little trail. I knew where they went and where they ended up. It was here that I had first discovered how big the world was. The woods and fields looked infinitely vast back then; now I dashed through as if it were a little city park.

  On the other side of the woods I dove into one of the streets. Here the endlessly twisting and turning street plan worked in my favour, but any gain I made was temporary. I still had to get out of the neighbourhood. I walked and raced and ran until I found someone who was just about to drive away. A man, his car ready, the car door open. He came out of his house, kissed his wife, gave her one last hug. I crept to the other side of the car, opened the other door and sat down in the passenger’s seat, backpack between my legs. What the man would think or how he would react didn’t interest me anymore. This man was going to take me with him, except he didn’t know it yet.

  A few seconds later he got in. As he was lowering himself into the driver’s seat, he saw me. His mouth dropped open to say something, but I beat him to it. I raised my finger in the air and held it in front of his eyes.

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ I said. ‘Drive.’

  28 Leave the net alone

  His fist hit me right between the eyes, on the bridge of my nose. I didn’t even see it coming. My head flew back and slammed against the doorpost.

  ‘What did you think, asshole,’ he said. ‘I’m supposed to be impressed by that finger of yours?’

  He wound up to deliver another punch, but one was enough for me. I threw the door open and dropped out sideways. At the last minute I grabbed my backpack and crept away on my hands and knees. Then I heard him coming after me from behind, cursing and yelling. I scrambled to my feet and ran down the street, shot into the first alley I saw and wormed my way through another hedge and into a backyard.

  The yards here were bigger than on our side of the park, and this one had a long path that twisted around a number of bushes before you got to the house. In the back, near the gate, there was a stone shed with the hedge on one side and a large, overgrown bay laurel on the other. I crept under the laurel and found a spot against the wall of the shed that was out of sight. There I sat down, dense green all around me. I pulled my legs up and rested my elbows on my knees. Cautiously I fingered my face and a felt a warm dampness. Blood was running along the side of my nose. The wound I had sustained in the fight with Ruud had opened up again, above my right eye. It wasn’t bleeding badly, but enough to leave stains on my T-shirt and pants. I dabbed at my face with a tissue until the bleeding stopped.

  Gradually the neighbourhood grew quiet. The screaming man left, and all that remained were people’s voices. Distant voices. Every now and then there was a laugh or a shout, but after a while even those sounds died away. It was the end of the afternoon, around six o’clock. Dark clouds spelled rain.

  I leaned against the wall and was startled by the painful bump on the back of my head. The more I relaxed the more everything hurt. I took the box of paracetamol out of the backpack and pushed two tablets out of the strip. I put them in my mouth, chewed them into a paste and swallowed them without water. Dry granules got stuck between my teeth.

  I sank down onto my side and pulled the backpack under my head. The flat computer served as a kind of pillow, with only an extra T-shirt and underpants to soften the hard plastic.

  In the middle of the night I woke up. The rain hadn’t come, but dampness from the ground was seeping up into my clothes. I was stiff and chilled. Cautiously I pulled myself up. Then I crept between the hedge and the shed, out to the gate, and walked back to the street. I looked at my watch in the light of a streetlight. It was two-twenty. There was nothing there, no one. No bus and no taxi.
I had no choice but to walk to the station. Not that there was anything to do there at this time of night, but staying here was pointless.

  I took the first train to Rotterdam, sitting in an almost empty compartment, and from there I went on to Amsterdam. More and more people got in at every station, and by the time we pulled out of Leiden the train was full.

  At Central Station in Amsterdam I bought a cup of coffee and a sandwich. I wolfed the sandwich down. Only then did I realize how hungry I was. Sitting on a bench in the hall, I took careful sips of the piping hot coffee and stared around me groggily. I was back in my city. That’s just what it felt like. I was back where I belonged. Here I knew where everything was, and here I would remain until I had found a way out of the problems that were tormenting me. This was where it had to happen. I wasn’t going to let myself be sidetracked again. If I was going to stand any chance at all I’d have to concentrate.

  Here.

  I took the tram to the Munt and walked the short distance to the hotel on the corner of the Flower Market and Vijzelstraat. I wanted a room where no one would come looking for me and where everything could be provided. Two hundred euros a night. The man behind the counter looked at me with a restrained but surprised expression. I glanced in the mirror behind him and saw what he saw: a dirty, unwashed, unshaven man with blood on his face and his clothes.

  ‘Is … everything … all right?’ he asked.

  I put seven hundred fifty in cash on the counter and said, ‘I think so,’ and registered under the name of Richard Bakker.

  ‘Three nights,’ I said.

  The man behind the counter repeated what I said.

  ‘And do you have a passport or proof of identity?’

  ‘No,’ I said, peeled off another hundred and put it on the counter. ‘I’m not even here. For no one.’

  The man smiled, put the hundred euros in his pocket and gave me a keycard. ‘There’s never anyone in room 313,’ he said.

  ‘Except room service,’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Room service goes everywhere.’

  I showered and shaved, put the dirty clothes in a bag for the laundry service and ordered a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, bread, coffee and juice. Wrapped in a towel, I sat down at the little table in the room and polished off the meal. Then I put on the cleanest clothes I still had and went out.

  At the internet cafe on the corner I logged in and began searching for whatever I could find out about the company on Breger’s card, the Risk Containment Group. Google couldn’t find anything and no other search engine gave me an answer. There wasn’t a single mention of the company on the entire World Wide Web. More than eight billion pages of information, and the name of the organization didn’t appear on any of them. Not only was that obscure, but it could only have been the result of a conscious choice to remain unknown.

  From my bag I took the scrap of paper with the long internet address on it and entered it one more time. I waited until the connection was made, and while I was waiting I got out Breger’s card. With the mouse I clicked to the first screen. In the middle of the blue field the three words appeared once again: User ID, Location, Log in.

  On the card, beneath the name of Breger, were a number and letter code. I filled these in under User ID. Location: Amsterdam. Then I clicked on ‘Log in.’ The screen flashed, and soon the image appeared that I had seen once before: the earth from space. Superimposed over this the text: You have reached the home of Mr. Miller. Welcome.

  This time without a question mark. A few seconds later the text disappeared and a brief menu appeared of its own accord.

  Applications

  Systems

  Security

  Log out

  I chose ‘Systems’ and a new menu appeared:

  Network

  Embedded

  Host

  Station control

  Configuration management

  Hardware

  Back

  It meant nothing to me, but using his card from the Risk Containment Group, Huib Breger was authorized to enter the site. And if he had access here, then his card was probably good for the HC&P office buildings as well. That meant that the system did indeed recognize different passes and register them separately. And that meant exactly what I didn’t want it to mean: that HC&P had intentionally installed a double system, one for ordinary people and one for secret people.

  Huib Breger was one of the secret people. No more than that. There had to be others, but who were they? Every question led to more questions, and I kept ending up on the wrong side of the information.

  I clicked to the first choice in the menu, Network, and waited while the computer downloaded a large file. A map of the world appeared on the screen, and with it a wildly complex pattern. Lines moved across the image, not in a swinging motion but as if their purpose was to make various currents visible. Points of connection in those currents lit up for a moment and then jumped. Around each point of connection a sort of local network formed which itself could suddenly expand, only to shrink again in a flash. What the whole thing resembled more than anything else was a large flock of birds that would fan out, then shrink back up and veer off, flying through the sky. It was a fascinating game of shapes that repeated themselves one moment and seemed to dissolve in the next. Sometimes the flock behaved like the centre of the network, but all of a sudden it would jump or shift or disappear from the screen altogether for seconds at a time, without the network seeming to take any notice.

  I was totally baffled.

  The screen was a way of visualizing the status of a network. An insanely large and complex network. Most probably the network of HC&P, but even that was uncertain. I clicked back to the first menu and chose ‘Applications,’ and went from there to ‘Monitor.’ Immediately the short menu I had seen earlier appeared in the upper left-hand corner of the screen: Operate; Run; Link; Back.

  I chose the first option, ‘Operate,’ and clicked on it. On the right side of the screen an elongated text box appeared that ran top to bottom, with a scroll bar beside it. Inside the box was a row of country names, arranged in alphabetical order from Albania to Zimbabwe, with all the other countries in between. I clicked on the Netherlands and a new box appeared with a simpler choice: National government; Local government; NGO; AEX companies; Other quoted companies; Other.

  By clicking ‘National government’ I found the full list of Dutch ministries. I chose the ministry with which I myself had had the most experience, Justice, and as soon as I clicked on it a new list appeared on the screen. Under the heading ‘Choose project’ a list appeared of all the projects currently being worked on at Justice. It took several seconds before I realized that this wasn’t just an overview of the projects HC&P was carrying out for Justice, which at the moment were two, maybe three at the most. This was a list of all the projects the Ministry was working on, internal and external projects mixed together, neatly classified and accessible, and most of them strictly confidential. I had heard the names of some of these projects, but I didn’t know what they were about or who was responsible for them. Everything was here, from the reorganization of the canteen to the criteria for financial cutbacks.

  Using the mouse I scrolled through the list, with names and details shooting across the screen. I clicked on ‘Coaching.’ Under that heading a new choice appeared, ‘Minister’ or ‘Summit.’ I chose ‘Minister’ and was shown which activities were being undertaken to help the Minister of Justice communicate better and more effectively with his own department, his own party, his colleagues in the cabinet, with the Lower House of Parliament and the press. I read an explanation of everything that was being done with the minister and what had yet to be done. The monitor function of the program reported not only the status of the project but also its importance and its relationship to other projects, and to my own utter amazement I learned that the coaching of the Dutch minister had been assigned a high priority by this worldwide network. I clicked, and in a flash the netwo
rk’s map of the world returned to the screen. Now the lines ran from the Netherlands to the rest of the world, and the flock flew by way of France, England and Germany to all the countries of the European Union, to the Middle East and to North America.

  On the right was a brief summary of the status. A little red ball began flashing next to the first point: Coach out.

  That was me. I wasn’t there. I laughed inadvertently, but the laugh felt wrong. It stuck in my throat, like old dry bread.

  An orange ball flashed next to the following point, Critical path. When I clicked on it the map of the world disappeared and a kind of outline appeared on the screen. It was an overview of things I didn’t understand. Dates, project names and places seemed to be arranged without any rhyme or reason. One of the names jumped out at me: RISC. I had seen that name on a document somewhere. I clicked on it, and a logo consisting of five words slowly took shape: Roadmap for Interzonal Strategic Confrontation.

  The logo stayed on the screen for a few seconds and then faded. It was followed by a brief introduction to the project, a combination of elements that could have been part of almost any policy document of any government, such as the increasing complexity of society, rapidly changing conditions, the interconnectedness of all economies on different continents and the shrinking influence that national governments have on conditions in their own country. To this a new notion was added: ‘Interzonal Strategic Confrontation.’ The idea was one of sickening simplicity. After the attacks in the United States, the world had been divided into a number of zones. Each zone played a role in the confrontation between Christianity and Islam. The War on Terror was being strategically carried out on three fronts: all-out war, hard negotiations and social confrontation. The first was occurring in the countries that were under direct attack, the second in the countries in the immediate vicinity of the war zones, and the third was taking place in Western Europe. It had to be Western Europe, because nowhere else were Christianity and Islam so strongly represented in one and the same area. There the confrontation had to occur within the bounds of democracy, but the fight was just as fierce. The roadmap sketched a picture of a war in which the Americans engaged in fighting from a distance, and we, the Europeans, had to drive Islam back in the streets and cities of our own countries.