Mr. Miller

by Charles den Tex

  ‘Everything you do, do it through this address,’ he wrote.

  Fine with me. The lower my chances of being found here again, the better I liked it. ‘And what do you mean by chaos?’ I wrote.

  It took a while before his answer appeared, but once it did it came faster and faster, more and more of it. There he was, thousands of kilometres away, his fingers on the keyboard, and it was almost as if his fingers couldn’t keep up with the thoughts in his head.

  ‘The network,’ he wrote, ‘is the biggest I’ve ever seen. Millions of computers all over the world are connected to each other and are in constant contact with each other. The total computing capacity is beyond comprehension. Taken together, all those separate PCs constitute the biggest computer in the world. The network of the CIA in the United States pales in comparison. It’s not only because there are so many of them, because even if you have a whole airplane hangar full of PCs and whatever else, you still don’t have anything. What makes this so absurdly powerful is the way it’s operated. The network operates itself. There’s no heart, no centre, no monster computer that keeps everything under control and distributes, regulates and manages all the orders. The network regulates everything itself based on the flow of data going through it. And as the number of connected computers gets bigger—and it’s growing by the day—the controls adjust accordingly. The greater the network becomes, the more effective its security is because the network provides its own surveillance. Its lead is constantly increasing. It’s gorgeous and it’s terrifying. And there’s no stopping it. Even if you were to remove a million computers from the network, just pull the plugs and throw the stuff out the window, there would still be a couple of million left over and they’d keep on going as if nothing had happened. The only way to eliminate the network is to disconnect all the computers. ALL OF THEM! Do you realize what this is? This is beyond the internet. This is the new world, and it’s a world no one wants. Whoever has this network at his disposal can do anything. He has control over all the information from all the governments and big businesses in the entire world. Look.’ The screen split, and the chat line dropped to the bottom line of the screen. Above it appeared a web browser, and a little while later the website we were just discussing. Huib logged in and clicked through the menus as if he had spent his whole life doing nothing else. On the screen appeared the map of the world I had seen earlier, with the flocks of information. Huib kept on clicking and we zoomed in on the world map, then further to Europe, then to the Netherlands, and then to The Hague. The network of lines and dots became more and more subtle and distinct. Finally Huib clicked on one dot on one particular spot in one building, that’s how detailed it was.

  ‘This is a computer,’ he wrote. ‘Just a computer somewhere in a building in The Hague. The computer is on. Look.’ He clicked again a couple of times and the map disappeared from the screen. Soon I was looking at an old-fashioned MS-DOS screen. Black. One line with three white characters—M:—and a blinking cursor. It all looked completely innocuous.

  ‘This is the M drive of this computer. I don’t know what an M drive is, but that’s neither here nor there. A drive is a drive. And from this M drive you can just jump to the C drive, which everybody is familiar with.’

  After the backslash he typed C: and a second line appeared: C:.

  ‘And from here you can enter the computer. Look.’

  After C: the word ‘exit’ appeared. One second later Windows appeared on the screen, then Excel.

  ‘Look. Someone’s working here,’ Huib typed.

  I gazed at the screen in silence. Here and there numbers were being filled in or changed. The spreadsheet re-calculated the changes, and new totals appeared neatly at the bottom in the proper boxes. I couldn’t tell what was being calculated, nor what the calculation was for, but what I did understand was that we were online looking into the computer of someone in The Hague who had no idea that two people—one in Amsterdam and one in South Africa—could see everything he was doing. Literally.

  ‘But how is this possible?’ I wrote. ‘How can we look into someone else’s computer? Does this mean that the computer has been hacked?’

  ‘No,’ Huib wrote. ‘Not hacked. That computer is simply part of the network. Which means you can get in. Whenever you want. Even when this guy turns the thing off later on and goes home, you can still get in.’

  ‘But how can we get in if this computer isn’t hacked?’

  ‘Through the M drive,’ Huib wrote.

  ‘And what is an M drive?’

  ‘Who knows? Maybe a partitioned part of the hard drive. That’s what it usually is. This computer has one at any rate, and it doesn’t matter what point you click on in the network, they all have one.’

  It was making my head swim. Millions of computers connected in a network that not only could export and import information to and from those computers, but could also change the calculating capacity of all those computers. Huib was right: this was taking place on a scale that far surpassed the powers of my imagination.

  Man is the information he carries. Whoever controls the world’s information controls the world. This network made it possible. And someone was at the controls. Uncle Huib Breger, for example. That’s as far as my thinking took me, because at that very moment a heavy hand came down on my shoulder. In a split-second reaction I jumped out of my chair and tried to drop to the floor behind the table, but the hand wouldn’t let me go. I lost my balance, tried to roll away and knocked my head on the edge of the table. By falling I slipped from the grasp of the man behind me. I turned around and crouched down, arms stretched forward, hands in a defensive position to fend off anything that might come at me.

  The manager of the internet department looked at me with astonishment. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Take it easy. It’s five to six. We close at six, so you only have five more minutes.’ He took a couple of steps forward and came up to me, pointing to a wound above my eye. ‘You okay?’ he asked.

  35 The reassurance of smooth skin

  It still wasn’t dry. It had been raining for two days straight—not very convincingly, to be sure, but it was still wet. Summer wet. I was standing outside on the sidewalk with a new band-aid above my eye. The most important questions had still not been answered. What I really wanted to do was talk to someone else from HC&P, to deliberate. I missed that, contact with someone who understood where I was coming from. HB2 helped, of course, but he didn’t know the company, he didn’t know what kind of work we did. The names of people, projects and places meant nothing to him. I needed someone else for that. Gijs, for instance. But Gijs was gone, and I couldn’t even get near Wolfsen.

  I wandered around, from fast-food joint to cafe, until just after eleven when I found myself in Gerrit van der Veenstraat, looking up. There was a light shining on the first floor. She was back, after almost a month and a half. I stepped up to the entranceway, rang the bell and waited. From behind the door I heard thumping and cursing from someone hurrying clumsily down the stairs.

  We stood there facing each other, speechless.

  ‘Hey, Belli,’ she said.

  ‘Jess.’

  I don’t know what was going through her head, but it was moving fast. She put out her hand, grabbed me by the wrist, pulled me inside and threw her arms around me. Her mouth on mine. Tongue against tongue. Moving together. Physical contact that finally made it impossible for me to think. Finally. Peace and quiet is the body of another. She let go of me and pushed me up the stairs. Without saying another word she set me down on the couch in the living room.

  I heard her footsteps in the hallway, back and forth. Slowly the tension disappeared and domestic noises gained the upper hand. The longer it lasted, the more fatigue took possession of my body. I had been hacked. My legs felt shorter by half, my heels were up in my buttocks, my head hurt, both inside and out. I was sitting on the couch, a big, tightly upholstered, dark blue affair, with my backpack on my knees, my arms wrapped around it and my head resting on top.
The two minutes became three, and after that all my ideas vanished. I woke up, lying outstretched on the couch, a pillow under my head and a blanket pulled up over me. I was still in my wet clothes. I no longer knew where I was or why I was there, but my backpack was gone. I began groping around in a panic. I couldn’t see anything in the dark, but it wasn’t next to me on the couch.

  ‘Shit!’ I said.

  A lamp went on in a corner of the room. Jessica was sitting in the chair beside it. Her one hand operated the button on the lamp, the other pointed to a spot on the floor.

  ‘You looking for that?’ she asked.

  On the floor next to the couch was my backpack. Intact. All the zippers shut. I picked it up and looked inside. Everything was still there (there wasn’t all that much).

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘De nada.’

  ‘I’m sorry, by the way, that I …’

  She laughed. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘Although you look as if you’ve got a whole lot to worry about.’

  It was twelve thirty. I had slept for more than an hour, and that was only the beginning of the sleep I needed. My body was longing for unconsciousness, for a peaceful disconnection. The hour had been too short for any recovery and too long to just let go.

  ‘Come,’ she said.

  She took me with her to the bathroom, helped me out of my clothes and put me under the shower. Hot water streamed over my body and for the first time I felt safe. All the weight seemed to drain out of my body and to dissolve. Clouds of steam filled the shower stall and shielded me from the rest of the world.

  My clothes were gone, and laid out on a stool were some dry things, Jessica’s, which I could wear in the meantime. Sweatpants and a sweatshirt. In the kitchen she took the band-aid off my eyebrow and examined the wound, cleaned it again and put a new band-aid over it. Then she looked at me from a short distance. She shook her head.

  ‘Belli, my friend. Do you have any idea what you’re doing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because in the States they do.’

  I looked at her. This was the beginning of the question, and Jessica had gotten to it faster than I had wanted. I would have been happier if she hadn’t asked it at all. Asking it showed a lack of trust, something my mother had already exhibited. I couldn’t take any more. But now that Jessica had raised the question there was no going back. Pretending she hadn’t said anything was not a solution. In the States they know. That’s what she said, consciously or unconsciously, and that was also her opinion. Understandable, perhaps, because she only knew what she had heard from others, and that was something I couldn’t accept.

  ‘What do they know in the States?’ I asked.

  ‘That woman. The one you …’ She didn’t want to say it, afraid that saying the words would make them true. What’s said is said. Words only last a few seconds, but they hang in the air for years.

  ‘What?’ I asked. Going step by step through the minefield, and asking what’s there at every step.

  ‘You know,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe, but that’s not what I asked.’

  ‘Okay, I want to hear it from your own lips,’ she said. ‘You can understand that, right?’

  That was a real kick in the soul. She was asking me to issue a statement, an oath, and she thought I’d understand why. But what I did understand was that I needed a statement from her now as well. Mr. Miller had made his way to the deepest layers of my life.

  ‘And what was I supposed to have done to this woman?’ I asked.

  ‘You were supposed to have murdered her,’ she said all at once, almost impersonally.

  ‘Do you believe that?’ I asked.

  She acted as if she didn’t have to think twice. It almost worked. ‘No,’ she said, ‘but everyone says so.’

  ‘Just what I need,’ I said. Jessica had set out my problem with crystal clarity. Everyone said that I had murdered Ina Radekker, so I had. No one else was present that night, and that was sufficient proof. Plus the fact that communications people were not to be trusted. They said whatever came into their heads. Everybody knew that. I had been convicted and carried away. Perpetrator identified. Everybody happy. Except me.

  ‘Do you know where Gijs is?’ I asked.

  ‘In San Francisco,’ she said.

  The main office. He had been called to the other side of the ocean without any kind of announcement.

  ‘Since when?’

  She hesitated, as if this was information not meant for my ears. ‘For a while already,’ she said, ‘as far as I know. He’s involved in the economic side of security. You know, coming up with systems for tracking and blocking the flow of money to terrorists, that kind of work.’

  ‘And you?’ Slowly it was dawning on me that the things people around me were doing were very different from what I thought they were doing. Mostly that was my own fault, since I tended to overlook the obvious. But it was also the fault of the others. There was a double agenda at work here. Some people knew more than other people, a feeling I had had just a bit too often recently.

  ‘Do I work for the EU? Yes, but at a very different level, more general.’

  ‘RISC,’ I said.

  Never before had I seen such unambiguous proof of Jessica’s devotion to power. She said nothing, but stared at me with a look I had come to know all too well, her nuclear look, the unfiltered look of the particle accelerator in her head, the look she used to split people open and mess around with their nuclei. Although I knew this about her, I had never been the object of the look until today. Now I was. Now I could feel her weighing me. Where did I stand in the hierarchy? Where did I stand with respect to her? If I knew about RISC, then I myself was also occupying a position she didn’t know about. Who did I know? And who did I work with? What was my level? What was she able to say and what did she want to say?

  Position and interests, influence and information. Power. Jessica couldn’t get enough of it. Her body instantly began producing all the hormones she needed for combat. It made her sharper, faster and tougher. She dominated in every sense of the word, and that’s just what she wanted.

  ‘RISC?’ she repeated. ‘RISC isn’t the European Union. RISC is an internal project, a sort of developmental prototype, a new analysis model we’re testing.’ She rattled off her story, which was not intended to answer questions but to keep them at bay.

  ‘HC&P doesn’t have any internal projects,’ I said. It was a bluff. I didn’t know a thing about it. But somehow I wanted to coax her into making statements she didn’t want to make.

  She laughed. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ she said. ‘HC&P is an internal project. Everything the firm does is internal.’ She stood up and walked to the refrigerator. From the freezer she took out a bottle of vodka, put two glasses on the table and filled them to the brim.

  What Jessica then told me took half a bottle to explain. RISC was a worldwide project. In all the countries where HC&P was active, inventories of strategic interests were being taken—not only the interests of individual companies but also those of governments, so they could be compared and so the firm could offer better and more focused advice.

  ‘The trap we all find ourselves in,’ she said, ‘is that one person’s strategy either enables that of the other or blocks it. Companies and countries keep each other in a kind of balance by not all wanting or being able to have the same thing. And if they do want the same thing, there’s a limit attached to it. That’s the trap. And it worked perfectly well until a couple of years ago. But because of recent events—the attacks and declaring the war on terror—the strategic interests have changed dramatically. Strategy always begins with yourself, taking others into account is second, not the other way around. Take you, for instance. You have to ask yourself what you’re actually capable of. But you don’t do that. You always ask yourself what other people are doing. And you respond to that. That’s not strategy, it’s running away.’

  ‘Survival comes first,’ I said, �
��I’ll see what happens after that.’ What Jessica said made sense. But it also didn’t make sense. I had different information about RISC, the strategic confrontation between Christianity and Islam, which she didn’t mention. Maybe it was because she didn’t want to say anything about it, or maybe because she couldn’t say anything about it. The latter seemed more likely. ‘Why do you think I’ve come here?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I was the only one you could turn to?’

  ‘Partly that.’

  ‘Any other reasons?’

  ‘Because I love you and because my need to love you has been getting stronger and stronger lately.’ I fell silent. She didn’t respond. Just what I wanted. There seemed to be a delay in her reaction, as if she were assessing the situation first. ‘And because the best hiding place is the one closest to your enemy,’ I said.

  ‘And that would be me? Thanks very much.’

  Jessica was closer to me than she herself realized. That finally occurred to me as the night wore on. She wasn’t the enemy, but she could be at any moment. Only when she had been drawn deeper into the HC&P network would she know why people were saying that I and no one else had murdered Ina Radekker. That would take a while, and until then I didn’t have anything to worry about. As long as I was with her. I smiled.

  ‘I’ve got to go to bed,’ I said.

  ‘It’s about time,’ she said. She pulled me out of the kitchen chair and pushed me into the hallway, turning out the lights behind me. Then she took me to the bedroom.

  I undressed and got into bed, sliding between the sheets. Jessica followed. She stayed on her side for about thirty seconds, questions flying between us. Then we nestled up together. My body shook and trembled in her hands. Never had I needed sex so badly. I could no longer tell what Jessica was thinking, but judging from her body she was thinking as little as I was. The sex was hard and long, as if both of us were trying to postpone the end. Push it away. It wasn’t until much later that I sensed the closeness of the other, of her—the warmth of her body and the deceptive reassurance of her smooth skin. I slept.