‘This is Karl,’ said Batte.
A small man in his late forties turned to look at me. Deep-set eyes. Forehead like a duplex, brains on two floors. He shook my hand.
‘And you’re the owner of this victim,’ he said, pointing to my laptop. ‘Vince says we’re not supposed to do anything unless you’re around.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ I said, and I told him what they were dealing with. The network, and mainly the network’s pernicious ability to locate users and eliminate them. ‘There’s a certain Mr. Miller, who personally sees to it that unauthorized users are done away with. And not just here, because I’m afraid that my contact person in South Africa has disappeared, too. I haven’t heard from him in days, and that’s unusual.’ I told him how I had found Huib, what he had done and the secure server he had created, which I wasn’t sure was secure any more. ‘If they’ve got Huib, they’re not far away.’
‘A secure server is no problem,’ said Karl. ‘That’s technology, we’ll take care of that here. No, the real problem is why. Why does this happen? I myself can think of a hundred different reasons, but there’s always only one that’s the real culprit. And you don’t know what to do next until you find it.’
I said nothing.
‘So that’s the question,’ Karl repeated. ‘Why?’
‘Did you google my name?’ I asked.
He shook his head.
‘Do you mind if I do?’
Karl took me over to a keyboard and a monitor. He clicked the mouse a couple of times and the familiar icon of the search engine appeared. I typed my name into the search field. ‘Michael Bellicher.’ Within a second the search engine had come up with 14,978 internet hits containing my name.
‘Popular guy,’ said Karl.
‘Depends on how you look at it,’ I said. I slowly scrolled down the list of hits. Each and every one was a report of violence, murder and the fact that I was on the run. Comparisons with American Psycho. The respectable consultant turned brutal murderer. ‘That’s me,’ I said. ‘Apparently.’
Karl took over the mouse and scrolled down further. ‘And you didn’t do this?’ he asked. ‘None of these things? So not this either. Here. Woman raped and murdered in Amsterdam South. A Jessica Polse. You didn’t do this either?’
My eyes found the report on the screen and I stumbled over every word I read. I was being sought for the murder of Jessica. Forensic evidence connected this incident with the murder of I. Radekker, administrative assistant at the same firm. Everything matched, from my hair on the handle of Ina’s bag to the traces of my blood found in her apartment, from my fingerprints at Gijs’s place to my semen in Jessica’s body. Everything I had done proved that I had done something else.
Karl’s eyes went back and forth, from the reports on the screen to my face. He saw the bewilderment, which slowly turned into rage. Then he reached for the mouse and clicked the page away.
‘Okay, somebody’s manipulating information. Is that what you mean?’
I nodded.
‘To provoke you?’
‘No,’ I said, and I shook my head. ‘No, I’m nothing but a glitch, a speck of dust.’ I paused. ‘I don’t know why they’re doing it. And I don’t know how they’re doing it, either. It has to do with those things,’ I pointed to the laptops. ‘But what I don’t understand is how they can tamper with so many files without anyone catching on.’
‘It’s easier than you think,’ said Karl. He put his hand on a monitor. ‘Because this is God.’
‘Excuse me? Are you starting in on that, too?’
‘No, listen. We used to have God for everything we didn’t understand. All we could do was scratch the surface, like chickens in a pen. But no more. All the deeper stuff, like the creation and the natural order of things—God did that. He was there for all the really complicated things. Right? Well, very little has actually changed in that relationship. Except the complicated things are now the complex structures and technological systems that govern our daily lives. We are still human beings with a free will, but the systems decide whether it’s time to renew my passport, or whether I’m even going to get a new passport or not.’ He pointed to the monitor. ‘We, the human race, devised and built all those systems, but now they’re surpassing us in terms of strength. There’s little that you or I alone can do about it, and whether we like it or not, the systems are controlling our lives more and more. Determining our fate. In the end, most people trust that what comes out of the system is good. Without that trust we can’t go on. We have to trust, in the depth of our being, that the systems have our best interests at heart. Just like God,’ said Karl. ‘Or whatever you want to call it.’
‘Evil.’
Karl laughed. ‘Yeah, maybe, but that’s for another discussion,’ he said. ‘Why do you think we’re working here?’
‘To earn money?’
‘That, too. But mainly because the only chance you have is with a system of your own. The only way to keep the complexity under control is with your own structure. At least if you know what you’re doing.’
One month ago I would have found that subversive at best, but mainly extremely uninteresting. A lot of esoteric mumbo jumbo. Yammering by people who didn’t matter, who weren’t important. Now what I saw was exactly the opposite.
‘Okay,’ said Karl. ‘Two things: this Huib Breger in South Africa and the Roadmap. In that order.’
‘Maybe it would be better to set up our own secure server first,’ I said, but Karl shook his head.
‘That’s technology,’ he said with a laugh. For him it wasn’t even a subject of discussion. He slapped me on the shoulder. ‘You can’t help it,’ he said. ‘Most people think it’s all about technology. But it’s not. It’s about people, like this Huib. He was from the same family as one of the bad guys, right?’
‘Namesake, actually.’
‘Very good. Very good. Vince, give Michael a hand, will you? Right away, if you can.’ He turned around and walked over to another table. There he spread his arms, wide, as if he were trying to encompass the whole room. ‘Family,’ he said. ‘Without family we’re free, and if we’re free, we’re lost.’
48 Mail from: HB2
Subject:???
WHERE ARE YOU???
ALL SET TO GO HERE.
MAIL!
49 A genetic directive
The whole group gathered around the computer screen. All of them had taken an interest in the e-mails I had sent to Huib, and all of them had something to say about the messages I had received from him—what he should do and especially what he shouldn’t do. All of them seemed to know better than he did himself. I typed and mailed until my fingertips were black and blue. And until Huib had had enough.
‘NO NO NO!’ he wrote. His agitation erupted from the screen. ‘This is Breger business. This is my family, okay? When one of us takes a wrong turn, it’s up to the whole family to bring him back … as a group. If the family wants Uncle Huib to do something, Uncle Huib does it. Make no mistake.’
‘Very good,’ said Karl. He smiled. ‘Very good. When are they coming to get Uncle Huib? Ask him that.’
I typed the question and sent it. The answer came a couple of seconds later.
‘Next week Monday.’
‘Where?’ I asked.
‘Brussels.’
‘In Brussels? Since when is HB in Brussels?’
‘Hello! Is anybody home? Don’t you guys get CNN?’
Karl picked up a remote control and pushed a button. A large TV set was hanging from a brace mounted to the ceiling. The image flashed and kept on jumping until it got to CNN. The news network was reporting on the EU summit in Brussels. Images showing the arrival of government leaders, smiling and shaking hands, of our own prime minister entering the building with the chancellor of Germany. Laughing for the cameras. Pointing to each other. At people who couldn’t be seen. Microphones being pushed forward from left and right on the waves of shouted questions that were no laughing matter.
‘Is the EU going to adopt the ban on headscarves?’
‘Are the radical mosques going to be closed?’
‘Is freedom of religion at issue?’
Appealing hands, vague expressions. The prime minister stepped forward and spoke into the microphones. ‘One thing,’ he said. ‘The problems are serious and no one denies it, but this is an integration summit, not a disintegration summit, and we intend to let the facts and figures speak for themselves, not the emotions.’
The CNN commentator took over and spoke of the enormous responsibility these leaders now faced. The task was to find a new balance in Europe. The challenge was to find a place and a role for the growing number of Muslims, one that would not threaten democracy. ‘Defining the future’ was what they called it on CNN, but the driving urgency of the American voices betrayed something very different. A threat. I pointed to the screen.
‘We’re going to let the facts and figures speak for themselves,’ I said. ‘But which facts and figures?’
Karl looked at me. ‘Do you mean somebody’s tampering with the social and political data? Nothing special about that. It’s been going on for centuries. Everybody fudges his figures.’
‘His figures, yes. People fudge their own figures all the time. But this is someone else who’s been tampering with our facts. Interzonal Strategic Confrontation,’ I said. ‘I don’t know exactly where those zones are, but one of them is here. Look.’ I pointed to the TV. ‘When you’re out on the street or in a store or wherever, have you ever felt the threat and the danger that everybody today says is there? The threat that’s in all the reports and that forms the basis of the facts and figures that they’re talking about? Ever?’
‘Impossible,’ said Karl. His tone was decisive, almost abrupt. ‘That would mean an extremely deep form of infiltration. It’s just impossible.’
‘That’s what you think because you don’t yet know about the network,’ I said. ‘Vince?’
Via the routers and Huib’s secure server we went on the internet. I typed the domain name in the browser’s uppermost field and in a flash the computer jumped to the virtual address.
Black screen. White type.
You have reached the home of Mr. Miller. Welcome?
Behind these two simple sentences appeared the slowly revolving earth. Green and white and blue, bathing in the unfiltered light of the sun in space. The home of Mr. Miller looked like a peaceful planet. The website was unchanged since the last time I had visited. With Huib’s help, who was looking on from South Africa, I guided the people of The Pattern through the bizarre network. The first smug comments and jokes soon died away. Within just a couple of minutes they were all staring breathlessly at Mr. Miller’s incredible reach. Karl needed about fifteen minutes to take it in and to comprehend the consequences. ‘You have no life anymore,’ he said. ‘Whoever gets on the wrong side of this system may as well give up.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, happy that finally someone had put into words what I had been feeling for a couple of weeks.
From that moment on things started happening fast. Karl began organizing his people. A couple of men took over the M-drives from my laptop and from Vince’s, removed the network program and began to extract the software, code by code. Others went onto the network and tried to gain access to the underlying data. Each one focused his attention on a part of the system, and soon the big room had turned into a workshop. People disappeared into their various tasks, into the minuscule space between bits and bytes, and each time it was amazing to see how much was possible by gaining control of the tiniest components.
Vince and I withdrew to a separate room to work things out with Huib. If the Bregers were going to go to Brussels the following Monday to restore the prodigal uncle to the bosom of the family, then I wanted to know how they were going to do it. When. And where. And I wanted to be there.
The European headquarters of HC&P was right outside the city in a business district designed along American lines, with broad lawns and manicured parks. I had been there a couple of times, for meetings and once for internal training.
It was the perfect place for the Bregers to strike. Secluded, spacious and easy to reach. The only real problem was access. No one could get in without an HC&P pass—unless they wanted to storm the building.
Huib mailed his pithy answer a couple of minutes later. ‘We will if we have to. We went to fetch a cousin of ours once, someone who had been … uh, how shall I put this … exploited by her husband, okay? And then, too, we didn’t just stand on the sidewalk and wait for him to come out. Didn’t want to, either. We’re not going there for the view. It’s prettier here anyway.’
That thought alone cheered me up quite a bit. Nothing could bring Jessica back and nothing could restore the life I had before that night, before the day I left myself behind. But the idea of Huib Breger being hauled out of the HC&P building by his own flesh and blood brought a smile to my lips.
‘I don’t know how you think you’re going to do this,’ I mailed, ‘but if you show up at the door with three guys, HC&P is not going to be impressed.’
‘You don’t know my family,’ Huib wrote back.
‘We’ll take care of the passes at our end,’ I said, ignoring the surprised look on Vince’s face. ‘How many will you need? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty?’
Vince disappeared into the workshop. Producing twenty untraceable passes was much more difficult than I had let on. After the stunt I had pulled that night in the office here in Amsterdam, Vince had been identified as the maker of my new pass. Now he would have to find a way to erase the automatic registration of his work, and so far he had not been successful. Security measures had been taken that blocked every form of interference. If those security measures couldn’t be hacked, then all the passes he produced would be spotted immediately—making them unusable. So he sat in the back of the big room, plugging away with one of the other programmers from The Pattern. Everyone was working with the same single-mindedness, with the same determination. For these people, the internet and information technology were the biggest achievements of individual freedom, symbols of man’s ability to make information available and to decide what he did or did not want to know. The presumptuous statement by Mr. Miller, that it was his home and that he was the one to decide who was welcome and who wasn’t, was an outright declaration of war.
A couple of hours later Karl came up to me. He told me how they were getting along. The security measures for the passes had been hacked. The network operating system on the laptops had been identified, and now they were trying to create a sabotage program, a sort of computer virus that would knock out the entire network.
‘It’s not as easy as it sounds, though,’ he said. ‘You can’t just disable a couple of parts here and there. That has no effect whatsoever. The system simply overrides the defective part and makes itself a replacement. The controls aren’t located in a single computer, either, so you can’t just disconnect them. If only that were true. And not only that,’ he hesitated a moment, ‘but the whole thing is beautiful to behold. It’s software with a kind of genetic directive. It would almost be a shame to disable it.’
‘That’s where you cross the line,’ I said. I wasn’t in the mood for his techno-romanticism.
‘Probably,’ he said. ‘And that’s not what I came here for anyway. In all the commotion we still haven’t gotten to the second point.’
‘What was that again?’ I had forgotten his list of important things.
‘The roadmap,’ he said. ‘What did you call it again?’
‘The Roadmap for Interzonal Strategic Confrontation.’
‘Right. Where can I find that thing? I’ve looked everywhere, but …’
I shook my head, shrugged my shoulders and spread my hands. ‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘Where have you looked so far?’
Everywhere. He’d looked in every place I could think of. Every corner of the internet. The few
references to the roadmap did not provide links to other pages or other sources.
‘If it already exists,’ said Karl, ‘then it’s not on the internet. And if it is on the internet, it’s not in a place where search engines can reach.’
‘What are you suggesting?’ I asked.
‘Intelligence services. Pentagon. Guys like that.’
If the information was tucked away in an organization like Huib Breger’s or some other kind of secret service, I wanted to avoid it like the plague. Karl’s confidence in his own safety measures was encouraging, but I wasn’t totally convinced. For the time being no one knew where I was, and I wanted to keep it that way.
If possible.
‘Wait a minute,’ I said. Suddenly I remembered Jessica and Ina’s papers and documents. ‘Be right back.’ I raced through the corridors to the shed and found the plastic bags in the camper. There they were, side by side in a corner between the little countertop and one of the benches. Bernie kept his spaceship neat and tidy.
50 Mail to: Jess
Subject: forever
I don’t expect an answer, but I really miss you.
belli
51 The chessboard
Everything was all mixed up. After my fall in the HC&P stairwell I had gathered up all the papers that had been arranged in folders according to subject and simply stuffed them into the bags. All semblance of order was gone. I laid the sheets out on the floor one by one, side by side. Three bags full. There were hundreds of pages.
I examined the pages for identifying marks, connections, typefaces, anything I could find that would help me determine which papers belonged together. My eyes ran down the endless numbers of words. I didn’t read. I scanned the pages, looking for an overall picture, a verbal image.
Many of the pages could be eliminated right away. As soon as I saw the name of a client, I knew I didn’t have to look any further. HC&P would never entrust a client with what I was looking for. I made slow but steady progress, and at the end of the day I had three pages, three solitary pieces of paper, each one with a reference to RISC. That’s all. All the references together did tell a story, but it was far from complete. It didn’t explain what RISC was, or how it was constructed, or where it came from. Or who was behind it. Disappointed, I dropped the papers on the floor. Karl picked them up and gave them another look, but he couldn’t see any more in them than a vague description of something we had no use for.
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