Mr. Miller

by Charles den Tex

  Bernie switched to another channel, classical music, Mozart piano sonatas. Fleeting notes of a melody that sticks in your head, keeps coming back until it, too, exists without sound.

  At two-ten in the morning we stopped for a red light. The road was five lanes wide, not another car to be seen, the camper alone at an impressively large intersection.

  ‘Why are you driving a camper, anyway?’ I asked. ‘It’s very conspicuous, isn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Bernie. He laughed. ‘But I’ve never had to hide myself until today.’

  The light turned green and he pulled out, bearing right onto the approach to the ring road. The camper sped up. There was no traffic on the ring and Bernie drove onto it without a care in the world. Instinctively I began thinking about the Breger family and the gravity with which HB2 spoke of it. I thought of the groups of people who were now on their way, one coming from Amsterdam (that was us) and three from South Africa. Later we’d find ourselves in Brussels, twenty of us standing at the door of an immense office building. And then what? I had to laugh to myself, my smile reflected in the dark windshield. An empty asphalt expanse stretched out before us, yellow light from the streetlights on the black road surface, white lines in the night. Bernie stepped on the gas and the monster accelerated with indescribable slowness from sixty to eighty-five. Accelerate wasn’t the right word. Evolved. Five thousand revolutions.

  ‘Okay, warp speed,’ said Bernie, and he shifted to the highest gear.

  Somewhere between Antwerp and Brussels I woke up, the deep roar of the diesel engine like an accompanying substructure supporting the peace and quiet of the car, Bernie’s motionless hands on the great steering wheel, his eerie face bathed in an astonishing combination of light: the green of the dashboard and the light blue of the little GPS route planner screen.

  ‘Almost there,’ said Bernie.

  In the back, Kirsten was lying on one of the narrow benches. Vince was sitting at the workbench on the fold-out stool, his glance no more than a stare. There were codes on one of the monitors and commands on the other, neither of which I understood. I unbuckled my seat belt and climbed between the front seats and into the back. I took two cans of Coke from the little fridge, one for myself and the other for Vince.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Something I should have done three days ago,’ he said. He tapped the top of the can with a fingernail. ‘Thanks.’ He pulled the tab up, folded it back and drank half the contents all at once. Then he pointed to the screen on the left. ‘This is the program operated by the pass registration at HC&P: who has which pass and who’s using it when and where, that kind of thing. Somewhere in this program is the order not to register certain passes. If only I could find that part of the program …’

  ‘Then you could disable it,’ I said.

  Vince looked at me. ‘Yes, that’s a possibility,’ he said, ‘but it’s not very interesting. If I could find it, then I could figure out which passes were not being registered. Those passes have a collective code, otherwise the computer can’t recognize them. If I had that code, I’d be able to find them, see what I mean?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘First I have to know what I’m looking for. If I ask the computer: look for unregistered passes, I’d have the answer in no time, because the computer doesn’t know of any unregistered passes. For the computer nothing is unregistered. That’s only true for us, because we don’t pay attention three-quarters of the time. But a computer doesn’t work that way. A computer always pays attention.’

  ‘And?’ I asked.

  Vince shook his head. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘No matter how hard I look, I can’t find any routines that regulate exceptions.’ He typed a new command on the right-hand screen, and on the left-hand screen codes began slipping across the image area at high speed.

  ‘How can you see what’s there?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t have to,’ said Vince. ‘The computer is searching. As soon as it finds something, it stops. Then I take a look.’ He took another sip of his Coke.

  Mesmerized, I stared at the flashing numbers and letters. For me it was meaningless information, it was a language I hadn’t mastered, and for the first time I realized how much I had lost contact with the world. For years I had thought that English, Spanish and Chinese were the great languages of the world, that mastering at least one of those language was a condition for understanding what was happening around us, for joining in the conversation, at whatever level. Now I saw that there was only one world language, a language that was spoken everywhere, in every country, and that was the language of computers, of information technology. All the rest, the languages we speak and have found so essential to our identity, was folklore, an amusement for people who had nothing else to contribute. It was culture, and that was the wrong level. The wrong program. Vince’s words came back to me. Three-quarters of the time we aren’t paying attention. If you’re looking at the wrong program, you’re not paying attention a hundred percent of the time, no matter how hard you look.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘What exactly are you looking at?’

  ‘What I just said. At …’

  ‘No, I mean how?’

  ‘Well, like we always do when we have to modify or update something, via the WorldWare operating system. By plugging in directly.’

  ‘Maybe that’s the problem,’ I said. ‘Maybe you’re approaching it from the wrong angle, from the angle of the manager.’

  ‘The only other angle is that of the user, and they don’t get to see anything.’

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said, ‘there’s still a third angle. The angle of the owner.’

  Vince stared at the screen.

  ‘You mean Mr. Miller.’

  59 Searching eyes

  A business park at night is a confrontation. It’s as if the neutron bomb had finally been tested and the buildings had been left to their own devices. Perfectly feasible, since everything is computerized. The heating system turns on when it gets too cold, the awnings come down if the sunlight is too bright, when it gets dark the lights go on, air conditioning maintains a pleasant climate. The supply of electricity and gas can go on forever because without people energy doesn’t have to cost anything. Not only that but the consumption of energy is also drastically reduced. All the systems are in place and working on their own, and even the most basic computer can understand that if the electricity gets shut off the computer alone will suffer. Buildings are happier at night.

  You can feel it.

  Slowly the camper rolled through the wide, empty streets, followed by the ever-suspicious logos in every shade of neon that keep watch high up on the gleaming façades. It was four-thirty in the morning and there wasn’t a soul to be seen in the entire area. We crept further and further, street after street, until we finally came to a stop at HC&P’s main European office. It was deathly still. A minimum of lighting in the office buildings. You could see a smattering of lights in the residential tower next door, the first sign of human presence. Gijs was in there somewhere, behind one of the hundreds of windows.

  Bernie turned off the headlights and drove into a parking lot on the other side of the street, opposite the entrance to the office. He backed into the first space along the side. Through the back window we had an unobstructed view of the main entrance. He turned the engine off and rolled down his window. Silence, and the irresistibly fresh smell of a summer morning just about to begin, swept into the camper.

  I could hear Kirsten moving behind me. She yawned and turned over on the bench, muttered something unintelligible and kept on sleeping. Vince worked steadily on. His pace had slowed considerably over the last hour but he wasn’t giving up. His fingers could be heard again and again tapping the keyboard, the little clicks of the mouse, the short beeps when the computer finished an operation or wanted an answer to a question.

  Bernie opened his door and stepped out. ‘Leave Vince alone,’ he said. He stretched and went to the fr
ont of the camper, where he sat down on the bumper.

  I got out, too, and I walked over to him. Together we sat on the bumper and stared at the empty parking lot, and at the light of dawn cautiously spreading upward behind the heavy buildings. Bernie took a joint out of the breast pocket of his shirt and lit it. The thick sweet fragrance of weed curled up in the silent morning air.

  ‘You?’ he asked, offering me the joint.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I have to make sure I’m still good and angry later on.’

  ‘Aggressive,’ said Bernie. He nodded, took another hit, held the smoke deep in his lungs and slowly let it escape. ‘So you have to know what your limit is.’

  ‘Or not,’ I said, ‘but then I’d have to know that, too.’

  Bernie laughed. ‘It’s always something,’ he said. He paused. The joint crackled a bit between his fingers. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘What an absolutely beautiful parking lot.’

  I went inside the camper and made coffee. Bernie had taken out the counter, but otherwise everything was just as it was. There was a toilet, a shower, a fridge, there were plates, mugs, silverware, a cabinet full of food and an industrial-size pack of Nuts candy bars. I opened the pack of Nuts and took out three. Kirsten was still sleeping. Vince took the mug I offered, tore the wrapper off the Nuts and took a bite. With his mouth full he mumbled something, a cross between a groan and a word. I went outside and gave Bernie a mug and a candy bar and sat down next to him again.

  ‘Very good,’ he said. He laid the Nuts down beside him on the bumper and enclosed the steaming mug in his big hands. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen later,’ he said, ‘but before you go inside, I’m going to give you a cell phone with an open connection to the camper. From here I can put you through to Amsterdam or to whoever you want. I can organize a conference call, you name it. I’m operating the phone from here. Make sure you don’t break the connection with the camper, whatever you do. We’re here. Vince can get anything you’re looking for from a computer, and I can make any connection you need. And Vince and I are on the same wavelength. We’ve known each other since grade school in Alkmaar. What we don’t know about each other isn’t worth knowing.’

  ‘That’s why you’re here,’ I said. ‘Because Vince wanted it.’

  ‘Because Vince wanted it,’ he repeated. ‘Because let’s be honest, what do I know about you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘That’s why,’ he said. ‘Even so, it’s important for Vince.’

  ‘For me, too,’ I said.

  A car drove into the parking lot in the early morning light. It was a quarter to six. The first consultant had arrived for his work.

  ‘Time to go in,’ said Bernie. We picked up our mugs, Bernie grabbed the wrapper from his Nuts and soon we were closing the little door behind us.

  In the confined space of the camper everyone moved more slowly. Kirsten was awake, and while Vince continued working, she, Bernie and I sat at the table. From behind the curtains we watched the parking lot slowly fill up. Between six and seven o’clock hundreds of people went into the building. Bernie made another pot of coffee, took a carton of milk out of the fridge and put bowls, spoons and a box of Cruesli on the table. We ate and drank in silence.

  At seven-forty Vince straightened his back and stood up.

  ‘Done,’ he said. He looked at the screen as if he couldn’t believe it himself. Laughed. Sighed. Turned to me. ‘You want to see this?’

  All the codes and program language had disappeared from the screen. All that was left was a small, neatly organized menu.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.

  ‘Who was in the HC&P office building in Amsterdam on the night of Wednesday, May 25th to Thursday, May 26th?’

  Vince clicked on the menu, selected the date and the office and filled in the times, and in less than a second three names appeared on the screen. And an automobile license plate number. Time of arrival. Time of departure. A ruthless logbook.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. This was the proof I needed: a digital record that I had not been the only one in the building. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time, trapped by strange, contradictory emotions, overtaken by the longing that had been hounding me for weeks and was now racing past me and disappearing like a fading siren. Vince had worked uninterrupted for a day and a night, and this for him was a breakthrough. He had deciphered a code. Beautiful, even tremendous, but for me it was something quite different. For me it was a new beginning.

  From that moment it felt as if time was being compressed. I took a shower in the little stall, shaved and dressed. Shirt and suit. Tie. Shining shoes. Attaché case.

  ‘What’s in there?’ Kirsten asked.

  ‘Nothing.’ I put it on the table and opened it up. The attaché case was empty.

  ‘Why do you have it then?’

  ‘It’s a disguise,’ I said. ‘A consultant without an attaché case is no consultant.’

  Bernie gave me a belt with a cell phone in a leather holster attached to it.

  ‘It has an extra powerful battery,’ he said. ‘It’ll go for at least six hours. Probably seven.’

  ‘I’ll have to be back outside long before then,’ I said. ‘Otherwise it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It always matters,’ said Bernie, and he ran a wire across my back and under my shirt. The wire reappeared behind the collar. Then he pushed an ear bud into my ear.

  ‘That feel okay?’ he asked as he straightened my shirt.

  I pulled the wire forward a little so the microphone hung closer to my mouth.

  ‘Fine,’ I said.

  The telecommunication connections were shown on one of the monitors. Bernie could turn the phone on and off with the computer. He put on a headset, clicked the mouse a couple of times and began speaking softly.

  ‘Okay, Michael, this is a test. Speak softly and speak straight ahead.’

  His voice resonated deep in my ear. He was calm. For the first time it struck me how much control he had over the volume and tone. What he said was free of judgment and opinion. His intonation was neither upbeat nor serious. It was neither an order nor a command, but it wasn’t an offhand suggestion, either. It was logical, straightforward, which made it immediately trustworthy. ‘I have Amsterdam here for you.’

  I watched Bernie move the mouse around and heard two clicks.

  ‘Michael?’

  It was Karl.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘A bug is born,’ he said. In Amsterdam they’d hacked the security system for the M-drive and had written a virus that could spread throughout the network. It consisted of a nice little program that would immobilize the security system, a program that would send itself to two other computers in the network, wait to receive the confirmation that it had lodged itself in the next two computers, and then carry out a stunningly simple series of commands: format the M-drive.

  ‘It’s ready to go,’ said Karl. ‘In just over an hour and a half the whole network could be down. Twenty-one steps, each one taking about five minutes. You say the word.’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘I want everyone to be here before we do anything. In the meantime Vince has found something here that has to go to the police and the press today. Can you guys take care of that?’

  I wrote a brief report to go with the data. ‘New development in the Radekker murder case.’ Vince pasted the summary below it along with instructions on how journalists could access the information themselves. We sent this to Amsterdam.

  Then the waiting began. Vince used Mr. Miller to keep an eye on who was entering the Brussels building. Every time someone held his pass up to a scanner, his name would appear on our screen. I had drawn up a short list of names and put it on the workbench next to Vince. The names of the people who had to be there.

  The first partners began arriving at nine-fifteen.

  ‘Vogels is in,’ said Vince. Caspar van den Vogels, managing partner of the Amsterdam office. Van Waayen followed five minutes late
r.

  ‘No Olde Nieland yet?’ I asked.

  Vince shook his head.

  ‘Can you see who’s in the tower?’

  Vince clicked through the screens until the logo of HC&P Residential Facilities appeared. He scrolled down the guest list and shook his head. No Olde Nieland. I could have expected so much, but even so I was disappointed.

  ‘Can you print that list?’ I asked.

  Vince nodded and clicked a couple of times with his mouse, and soon I had three A4-sized sheets of paper in my hand. Seventy-four names. Not one that I knew.

  ‘Breger’s in, too,’ said Vince. ‘That was the last one. What now?’

  I was silent. I looked around me—from Vince to Kirsten to Bernie. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘You wanted to go inside, didn’t you? What are you waiting for?’

  ‘For the Breger family. Ten or fifteen of them were supposed to be here to pick him up.’

  ‘Breger’s family? What do they look like?’ asked Bernie.

  ‘I have no idea.’

  Every minute seemed longer than the last. Under the pressure of steadily building expectations, plus all the planning and effort everyone had made just to get us here, time was becoming distorted. I had to wait. Without Breger’s family I couldn’t do a thing. They had to neutralize Huib Breger so I would be free to focus on the firm’s partners. As long as Breger was still at large the partners would be inaccessible.

  ‘At least let’s shove that virus into the network,’ said Bernie. ‘The sooner we do that, the sooner we’ll shut it down.’

  I shook my head. ‘No. No. No,’ I said. ‘If we release the virus too soon, they’ll know there’s something wrong, they’ll block our way and Breger will be beyond reach. You have to wait until we’re in. Not before.’

  Adrenaline was surging through my body. It took an enormous effort to control myself. If I were to start ranting like a lunatic I wouldn’t stand a chance. I’d be picked up by the security service and locked up somewhere within ten minutes. That would be the end of me. The whole operation rested on the simple fact that later on, in that building, I would have to act as if I belonged there, calm, controlled, smiling, without rushing and without dawdling, with the self-assured decisiveness that is second nature to every consultant. If I couldn’t manage that, I didn’t belong there.