Mr. Miller

by Charles den Tex

  ‘There are nine people on the board of the foundation. Names that don’t mean anything to me, except for Ralph Well, the owner of Datwell Computers.’

  Everyone knew Datwell, the company that within the space of five years had captured more than forty percent of the PC and laptop market with good merchandise for less money.

  ‘I still have to look up the rest of the names. There they are.’ She leaned back a bit and turned the screen so we all could read the list. Alphabetical. Ralph Well was there, all right, almost at the bottom. But my eyes were drawn to the second name, Herbert Colland, co-founder and owner of the largest consultancy in the world, the ‘C’ in HC&P.

  ‘The foundation is based in Houston, Texas,’ Sacha said, ‘and it has a small office there with a few staff members. Not many. The Larkowl Group itself is small and avoids any form of publicity.’

  ‘Except the internet.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Sacha gave me a puzzled look.

  ‘Apparently,’ I said, ‘because you were able to find all this information there.’

  ‘Oh, this,’ said Sacha. ‘This didn’t come from the internet. You won’t find anything about the Larkowl Group on the internet. We looked ourselves silly, but you can’t find anything about this organization through the normal channels. Nothing. This,’ she said, and she tapped the monitor with her finger, ‘is from Mr. Miller. I’m in their computer. It’s from the M-drive.’

  ‘How long have you been there?’

  She looked at her watch. ‘Half an hour. Maybe a little longer.’

  Too many thoughts were crowding into my head. Questions, concrete questions and vague uncertainties. What were Herbert Colland and Ralph Well doing on the board of this foundation? What did the foundation itself actually do? How much time would it take for them to find us here? And what then? What was this all about, anyway? The Larkowl Group? Safeguard interests? For Jesus Christ? What was going on here?

  ‘What kinds of interests do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ said Sacha. ‘You need a password and user name for most of the information, and we still have to get around that.’

  I thought for a minute. ‘And who is Mr. Miller?’ I asked. ‘Is he in the foundation, too?’

  Sacha shook her head. ‘Not that I know of.’

  I cursed. ‘Why should these people have anything to do with me? That’s what I want to know. Why should they want me …’ These were questions without answers. I wanted to know too much all at once. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘another question. What kind of computer do they have there at the Larkowl Group?’

  ‘You mean type and specifications?’

  ‘No, what brand?’

  She clicked the mouse a couple of times and a window appeared on the screen. She read what it said. ‘A Datwell Pro 8100. Big brute. Not the very newest, but very, very good.’

  ‘Datwell,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Almost everybody has a Datwell, so there’s nothing unusual about that.’

  ‘You, too?’

  Sacha and Karl laughed. ‘No, we don’t,’ said Karl. ‘We buy components and put them together ourselves. It’s cheaper and better and you can adapt the equipment to your needs faster.’

  ‘But does this mean that all the computers with an M-drive are Datwell computers?’

  There was silence. That was another question waiting to be answered. I could guess, and I did, too, but it was no more than a guess. ‘Because somebody’s got to handle that end of the business, right? On a regular basis. Without anyone knowing.’

  ‘I could point out a few at random,’ said Sacha. With a click of her mouse the image on her screen changed faster than I could keep up with. ‘Datwell,’ she said. ‘And here’s one, too, Datwell. And this one. And this. That’s only five, but …’

  ‘But all five are Datwell,’ I said. ‘And then the next question. How do they manage to sell the machines at a lower price than anyone else while there’s twice as much stuff inside? My laptop had two hard drives, two CPUs and who knows how much extra circuitry, and it cost a hundred and fifty euros less than the laptops from other companies that don’t have all those things. How do they do it? How can those guys make so much money? Datwell is pretty much the biggest in the world. There are almost four and a half million computers on Mr. Miller’s network. Four and a half million! Considering the cost price alone these things ought to be fifty euros more expensive. Not less! I mean, we’ve all seen how a business works on the inside. So why didn’t this outfit go bankrupt long ago?’

  We stared at the computer screen in silence.

  ‘Maybe it’s not a sales organization,’ said Kirsten.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, maybe we’re not seeing it because we’re looking at it the wrong way. Say you want to build a worldwide computer network. Four and a half million units linked together. Units that offer you access to all the information you might want. And that also make it possible for you to change information at will. Say that’s your objective. How much would that cost?’

  ‘To build?’

  ‘Yes. Approximately. Doesn’t have to be accurate to the last euro.’

  ‘It’s incalculable,’ said Karl. ‘A hundred billion? Five hundred billion? You tell me. You can buy four and a half million computers for four billion, a thousand euros apiece, and that would go a long way toward covering the costs. But then you have to place them all over the world. And all the rest.’

  ‘So,’ said Kirsten slowly, as if pondering every word, ‘if you were able to buy such a system, such a network, fully assembled, operational, fully loaded, for, well, let’s say nine hundred million?’

  ‘You’d be crazy not to,’ said Karl. Instinctive reaction. He turned around and looked at the screen. ‘Huh?’

  ‘It all depends on how you look at it,’ said Kirsten. ‘You can see Datwell as a company that sells computers below cost, which means they ought to be bankrupt. Or you can see it as a company that buys something priceless for a song.’

  ‘So it’s not selling but buying,’ said Karl. ‘You add two hundred euros to every Datwell computer. Probably less, because part of the price advantage is genuine. You deliver the stuff with every order, all over the world, and the customer does all the work. All you need are a couple years’ patience.’ He whistled softly. ‘That’s why Datwell hasn’t gone bankrupt. They’re making the deal of the century here.’

  ‘But who are they making it for? And why?’ Vince asked. ‘To safeguard the interests of the Lord? That’s a load of crap! How am I supposed to understand this?’

  ‘Literally,’ I said. For the first time I saw the logic of the whole nightmare scenario. For the first time I understood why a human life could be ended so easily. For the first time I understood why I was no longer welcome in the home of Mr. Miller: in the interests of the Lord I had been written off ages ago.

  53 Mail from: HB2

  Subject: check-in

  first group has left, checking in one hour from now, late afternoon flight, feel just like a travel agency, hardly ever go on the internet except to order tickets, do the planning, duh, give me hard data every time, huib

  Mail from: Peter Bellicher

  Subject: Dad

  K, Mike, dad’s in the hague. Since yesterday, 21b Trompstraat. I’m going there saturday morning—where are you guys anyway, because this basically sucks, not being together

  cu pete

  54 Everything we have is here

  I saw what I thought I was seeing. Or what others wanted me to see. Actually there was only one thing I knew for certain: everything I saw was somehow being manipulated. To a certain extent that wasn’t so bad; it may have been unavoidable. No one knows what reality is. What hurts one person is barely felt by another. My reality was a battlefield, a great chaos of grief and misery. But for others it was almost the end of a clean-up campaign. Just one more good sweep and the job would be done.

  But what was I seeing? A strange organization on the other si
de of the ocean. Rich men who invested their money in a bizarre and incomprehensible computer network. Men for whom a few hundred million was nothing. I saw things that were too far away. That was it. I had to look closer to home. Dries van Waayen, Huib Breger. Johan Wolfsen. Gijs. Where was Gijs? He’d gone to the corporate headquarters in America, Jessica had said. But what did she really know about it? Did I hear what I wanted to hear, did I hear what someone else wanted me to hear, or was he really there? Someone was bound to be in touch with him. I picked up the phone and called his backyard neighbour.

  ‘Silverschmidt.’

  ‘Emma?’ I said. ‘It’s the shed guy.’ And this time she knew exactly who that was. I waited to see whether she would stay on the line or cut me off.

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘I’m calling for Gijs.’

  ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘No, but I was wondering if you had heard anything from him?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last week.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And before that?’

  ‘The day he got out of the hospital was the last time. I haven’t seen him since then.’

  ‘No phone call? No card?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘Not surprising, after what happened here.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ I said. ‘But that’s the whole point, right? Maybe I don’t think it’s strange, but why do I think that way? Why are you talking to me now when you didn’t the last time?’

  ‘Because I read the newspaper, and nothing there matches the picture of you I’d come to know. You’ve really lost your way somehow, but hey, who hasn’t, you know what I mean? As far as that’s concerned you’re a perfectly normal human being.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I call on my own experience. On what I know. That’s something I can trust. Or no, I said that wrong. I know how far I can trust it.’

  ‘You know the limits?’

  ‘Yes, I know the limits of my own trustworthiness. That’s it. And I can use that to assess the trustworthiness of other people. Not whether something is true or not. When you get right down to it, I don’t really know whether you killed someone or not. I’m sorry I have to say it, but as long as I don’t know, I can only look at the likelihood of its being true. And that’s easy. The trustworthiness of the media pales in comparison with mine.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Gijs and I talked to each other every day. For three years straight. About nothing. About everything. Work, women, cars, houses in France, loneliness, orgasms, shoes …’

  ‘Shoes?’

  ‘And now I haven’t heard anything from him in almost two weeks.’

  Emma Silverschmidt was silent.

  ‘My own experience tells me that that is very, very odd,’ I said, ‘regardless of what I did or did not do.’

  ‘I agree,’ she said. ‘But you probably didn’t call to hear me tell you that I agree with you.’

  Suddenly I had to laugh, because that was exactly why I did call. No matter how strongly she insisted that you have to base your judgments on your own experience, I had an enormous need for someone who agreed with me. Certainly as far as Gijs was concerned.

  ‘Would you do something for me?’ I asked. ‘Go into Gijs’s house through the shed and see if you can find anything. A note, a message, a letter for the cleaning lady. Something.’

  ‘Will do,’ said Emma. She became practical from one minute to the next. She wanted a number where she could reach me. Apparently she was just as eager to know Gijs’s whereabouts as I was.

  Gijs had turned my head upside down. Suddenly I was looking at the people who were closest to me. In my immediate vicinity. Gijs had disappeared, and the more I thought about it the more convinced I became that he wasn’t in America at all. It didn’t make any sense. I had believed it because Jessica had said it. Once again I had seen what someone else wanted me to see. Gijs was in the States. Working on a big project. International level. Nothing could be easier to believe, especially because the person who told me was someone I trusted. Someone I wanted to trust. Jess.

  And this brought me to the one place I didn’t want to be, the place I had been avoiding so carefully all that time, sidestepping with my eyes closed, with my head averted. To Jessica. Jess. Golden Jess. To the question that had stuck with me long after her death because I didn’t want to hear the answer. Jessica was dead and there was no room for doubt. Emotion is a tough director. Tough as nails. Whatever doesn’t suit his purpose gets the boot. Ruthless. Questions? What do you mean, questions?

  These, for instance.

  Why was Huib Breger in her apartment?

  Because I had gone on the internet from her apartment. That was the easy answer. I had made contact with Erik Strila’s computer via the secure server and had stayed in contact with him for half an hour. At least. Since bumping into Breger and his men in her apartment, I had assumed that the secure server had been hacked. That they had cut through all the ingenious defenses and had found me. After all, HB2 in South Africa had disappeared, too. The conclusion seemed logical—until I got back in touch with him and learned that his server was still secure. HB2 hadn’t disappeared at all. No one had tracked him down. He was as safe as anything, so Jessica and I should have been safe as well.

  Why were those men in her apartment?

  Because Jessica herself had let them in. That was the difficult answer. The answer I had been afraid of all that time and for which there was no longer any alternative. Jessica had reported that I was in her apartment. She had told Dries van Waayen, perhaps, or another one of the partners. I didn’t think she had ever had direct contact with Huib Breger. But she had reported it herself, and in doing so she had called in the clean-up team of the Risk Containment Group. There was no other explanation. What had she e-mailed me from America? ‘Our relationship is really starting to make things shaky for me here. You know how they are: you’re either for us or against us. The corporate family is sacred and I don’t know what I’m supposed to say anymore.’

  The limits of trustworthiness could only be seen in one way. And if Jessica had said that Gijs was in America, I now had every reason not to believe her.

  My head was spinning. I was dizzy with betrayal. Even though Jessica and I had often toyed with the border between our careers and our relationship, and taunted each other with the loyalty that the company demanded, we still assumed that the balance would always end up in our favour. Tacitly. Maybe I was the only one who thought so, and I was too quick to take it for granted that Jessica would agree with me.

  One minute I was relieved, the next minute I felt deceived. The new certainty I had found came with a high price tag. The old one I had traded in for it had left a hole, an absence that was bigger than lost property. As if the surgeon had amputated a leg to save my life. I was alive, I was healthy again, and that knowledge made me stronger than I had felt in a long time. But there was no denying the handicap.

  Vince, Bernie, Karl and Kirsten were staring at the screen with eyes agog. Next to the keyboard was a digital camera, and on the screen there were photos of an apartment. It had been a modern place once, but now the interior was in ruins. Chairs were lying on the floor with shattered legs. A table was broken in two. The couch had been cut open. In the kitchen the exhaust fan was hanging crookedly from the wall, doors had been pulled out of the cabinets and the contents were scattered all over the floor. The mess was mind-boggling.

  ‘Look,’ said Vince. ‘My CDs!’ He pointed to the twisted and warped plastic boxes and disks. Black streaks of soot ran up to the ceiling. The wooden shelves were scorched. ‘It looks like somebody took a flame thrower to it!’

  ‘And you haven’t even seen the bedroom yet,’ said Bernie. He pushed a button on the camera and the image changed. The bedroom was beyond all recognition. ‘This is where the fire department went to work,’ said Bernie. Water lay on the floor in puddles. Everything was black, charred.

  Karl t
urned around and looked at me. ‘And this is all because of you?’ he asked.

  ‘This is nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, no?’ He stood and walked up to me. ‘I’ll be the one to decide that, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘You?’

  Karl nodded. This was his place, his world. He was spoiling for a confrontation that I wasn’t the least bit interested in, but now I realized that I couldn’t step aside.

  ‘And why would you be the one to decide that? Nobody’s been here yet. There are three other people here who have some deciding to do, and that’s Vince, Kirsten and me. You’ve only seen a few photos. No more than that!’

  We faced each other in silence, not sure of the next step. I had no intention of taking the blame again for whatever happened. At some point it had to stop. I understood Karl, all right. He had opened his door to Kirsten and me. He was fascinated by Mr. Miller’s network, by the technology involved, by the software, which he was opposed to in principle but found so beautiful that he wanted to learn all about it. Now suddenly the world was more than virtual. Physical threats came closer to the bone, and he hadn’t counted on that.

  ‘If anything happens to these people …’

  ‘It already has,’ I said.

  ‘Hey, it’s just stuff,’ said Vince. He walked over and stood between us, putting an arm around Karl’s shoulder. ‘Now I don’t have to move. That’s one way of looking at it.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Karl. ‘But it’s not my way of looking at it. This is my place. Our place. Everything we have is here. This site is our haven, literally and figuratively. On the banks of the IJ, in the heart of Amsterdam. If we let someone in, we expect them not to abuse our trust.’

  ‘You have reached the home of Mr. Miller.’ I didn’t know why I said it, but it was just the right thing to say. On another scale, and with other people, but the meaning was the same. Everyone drew a line somewhere to determine who he was. My mother drew the line between herself and her family. She no longer recognized herself in her husband and her children. No, it wasn’t recognition, it was stronger than that. In order to stay with her family she would have to change, and if she did that she wouldn’t be herself any more. That’s what drove her, the protection of her identity. The home of Mr. Miller. Kirsten had to look deep inside herself and choose between her body and her spirit, between what she knew and what she was. My father hadn’t known who he was for years, but when my mother threatened to break the bond between him and his children, his choice was made, too. If you know who you belong with, then you know who you are. It’s a topsy-turvy world, but the world has been standing on its head for so long that we aren’t used to anything else. Jessica chose power, the road to the top of the international business community. That road was open to her, but the power didn’t want her because she was tied to me. Mr. Miller drew the line somewhere else. Right through the middle of her. And me? I had never made a choice. Not one like that. For ten years I outpaced my own time. Late nights blended seamlessly into early mornings. Sleep was a lost moment between projects. Deadlines sucked the life out of the love I was supposed to be feeling, which slowly but surely degenerated into nothing more than an arrangement. Just another arrangement. The pressure of work was always a valid reason for not choosing. Not today. Not now.