The Paladin

by David Ignatius

  The importance of being Eric. There was Eric Blair, Eric Clapton, Eric Idle, Eric Ambler, Eric the Red. But his true namesake was a British historian named Eric Hobsbawm, who had written a book called Primitive Rebels that explained the world. It celebrated the “social bandits” who had been the scourge of the wealthy and powerful in premodern times. Highway robbers like Dick Turpin and Jesse James; the fearless brigands of places like Calabria and the Marche in Italy, who hid away in the mountains sustained by the peasants, to harass the corrupt mercenaries of church and state.

  Eric lay in his bed, trying to remember the last time he had eaten. He was hungry, certainly, but that gave him a measure of control and autonomy. Nobody could make him eat. The afternoon was deepening. From the street below, he could hear people gathering at the café along the quay. The light of the setting sun, filtering through the window, was a pale pink, not quite the color of blood.

  By Eric’s bed was his tattered copy of Primitive Rebels. The man hadn’t even been a professor when he wrote the book in 1958, just a “reader in history.” A lesson in humility. He opened the book to one of his favorite passages:

  A few remarks may complete our sketch of the mechanics of the bandit’s life. Normally he will be young and single or unattached, if only because it is much harder for a man to revolt against the apparatus of power once he has family responsibilities.

  That was the easy part, to rebel in your heart, to be one man apart, but eventually you needed brothers and sisters. Who would take you into their band? And at what price?

  How long a band lasted we do not know exactly. It would depend, one imagines, on how much of a nuisance it made of itself, on how tense the social situation, or how complex the international situation was…

  Yes, but the people who took us up into the hills, who made us swear secret oaths in blood, didn’t they draw us into their own version of the corruption we had been trying to escape? Even as we rebelled against one power, weren’t we being absorbed into another that controlled us just as surely, so that all we had for ourselves really was the anger? Eric turned a few more pages.

  The bandit is helpless before the forces of the new society which he cannot understand. At most, he can fight it and seek to destroy it “to avenge injustice, to hammer the lords, to take from them the wealth they have robbed with fire and sword to destroy all that cannot serve the common good: for joy, for vengeance, as a warning for future ages – and perhaps for fear of them.”

  * * *

  Eric slept for a time, the book beside him, and when he awoke, it was night and he was dizzy from hunger. His pants were falling off, so he put on a belt and then a T-shirt, and a schoolboy blazer. He had a phone with a new SIM card; he stuck that in the pocket of his jacket and headed downstairs.

  Maybe tonight? He was light-headed; his body had no weight, and the part of him that felt fear had been starved into emptiness. He exited by the back courtyard, where they kept the rubbish bins. The colleague in the lair downstairs didn’t stir, but there was a camera trained on the front door, and they always found a way to locate him, even when he thought he had disappeared. But perhaps not this time.

  People were leaning against the railing along the quay, drinking wine and smoking weed. Eric went into a bar on a side street and ordered a double whiskey, which on his empty stomach was like the snort of a drug. He needed to eat something, but most of the restaurants nearby were closed. He found an Indonesian place that was still open, and he ordered a red curry whose aroma of coconut and spices made him even dizzier, but whose taste made him retch. He paid the bill and left the rich meal uneaten on the table.

  In a little Arab takeout he bought some flatbread and a piece of chicken and a tomato, and made himself a dry, doughy sandwich that he ate until the nausea went away. He bought a bottle of rosé wine, too, and with some food in him, the wine tasted fine.

  It was a cloudless night, and even in the center of the city he could see a few stars above. A woman tried to pick him up, and then a man. Eric shook his head. He was lost in himself, trying to think about a way to escape.

  I loved freedom, he told himself. That’s why I joined a bandit gang, I thought I would free myself and others, but I am a prisoner. I thought I would do good, but I harmed people without knowing who they were. The people who bought the machines controlled them. I deconstructed reality, but they had another version waiting. I was an ant in their hill, not even human. How did this happen? Whom can I tell? How can I make things right?

  He had brought along a book from his shelf, this one not a call to rebellion or a post-structuralist text, but a meditation about release. It was called Democracy’s Dharma, about the practice of Buddhism in Taiwan. His colleagues, who kept him under such a tight watch, had suggested that perhaps he would be happier if he could move to Taipei and apply his technical genius to creating logic chips for a semiconductor company there. He was intrigued by the idea of mixing mind and no-mind as a Buddhist computer scientist.

  But first there was someone else who needed release. It preyed on his mind, the wrong that he had done.

  * * *

  Eric walked south toward the Gare de l’Est. He approached a small park just south of the railway terminal; he saw some hookers, maybe, deep in the glen, but there was an empty bench near the entrance, well lit.

  Eric took out his phone and began composing a message. It was an apology. Not in so many words, and not sent directly to the person to whom he owed the explanation, but through a cutout who would know how best to deliver it. It provided useful information. Some details about himself, references, points of contact. That was all he could do. He worked hard to disguise himself in the message, inventing a personality that would seem congenial, hidden with a bit of slang and a memorable nom de guerre. He was a good bandit, but one with a guilty conscience.

  14 Geneva – September 2016

  Michael Dunne didn’t think he would ever see the woman called Veronika again, after the night he chanced to meet her in the club. He was busy the next few days with his support team, rising each morning at five-thirty and making breakfast the way he did for his techs on an operation. The three were at their computer screens by seven-thirty, combing the digital world for information that would decode the organization that called itself Fallen Empire, whose presumed base of operations was in the hills of northeast Italy.

  Dunne was eager to take the next step of his mission. But only the deputy director for operations could authorize it, and he was on a tour of stations and bases in Asia, the watch officer said. So, Dunne kept gathering information. It was like tracking the call of a mockingbird that can mimic disparate sounds, but whose identity is elusive.

  Fallen Empire was an anger machine, and it was accelerating. Nearly every day the group posted new videos of police brutality against black and brown people. On some sites, you could see a loop that showed a white fist punching a black face over and over. But race was just one channel of rage. Others conveyed different images of America’s malign power, focusing on the martyr to Internet freedom, Edward Snowden: The group organized flash protests in several European cities to demand a pardon for Snowden. They were hashtag freedom fighters; the organizers never showed up at the Snowden rallies, only followers.

  “Nobody is my leader,” was one of the Fallen Empire slogans. They wore masks with the image of this Nobody – crew cut, bland demeanor, Snowden-like but not Snowden. It was the face of Nobody. But where did the masks come from, and the carefully painted banners celebrating Snowden and demanding his freedom?

  * * *

  Arthur Gogel found the next links in the chain. He had been up through the night reviewing video and running coherence and consistency tests on various bits of imagery and code. He knocked on Dunne’s door at five-thirty, when his alarm went off.

  “I’ve got to show you some stuff,” he said, in the breathy voice of someone who was excited and exhausted at the same time. Gogel was a CIA “millennial.” For his generation, the old exotica of tra
decraft had collapsed into zeros and ones. Dunne put on a robe over his T-shirt and shorts and went into the study that had become a computer lab.

  “Fallen Empire is a robot,” Gogel said. “I mean, it’s machine learning. A generative adversarial network. Nobody is feeding the machine. The machine is feeding itself.”

  “How on earth do you know that?” demanded Dunne, still groggy with sleep.

  “I compared the source code of Fallen Empire’s sites with those of Save the West, the right-wing version. And guess what? The right-wing sites use the same shortcut for coding images as the black-power sites, and the anti-fracking ones, too.”

  Gogel brought up the image-sizing code from a Save the West pro-police site, and then put it side by side with comparable code for one of Fallen Empire’s sites supporting Black Lives Matter. The two sets of code were identical.

  “The match is too perfect,” said Gogel.

  “Meaning this wasn’t done by a person, but a machine.”

  “Correct. And let me show you another weird thing I found. Maybe I’m nuts, but I think they’re trolling companies now.”

  “Show me,” said Dunne.

  Gogel called up several of the anti-fracking sites, on different screens. They were all linking to news footage of an oil spill from a huge tanker in the Sea of Japan.

  Gogel clicked on the link. The imagery showed oil leaking from a hull-side storage tank directly into the water. The footage appeared to have been taken by a camera onboard the tanker. The banner across the bottom of the screen said: “Secret Video Shows Environmental Disaster.”

  “Holy crap!” said Dunne. “Where did this come from?”

  “Supposedly it was posted by a whistleblower inside the oil company. But I did a very high-res check of the footage. The continuity is off. It looks real, but it isn’t.”

  “What does the company say?”

  “They deny there’s any spill. But nobody believes them. Their stock price is tanking in Asia. The Japanese government has already said it’s launching an investigation.”

  “My god!” said Dunne. “They’re taking down companies they don’t like, just for sport.”

  “Maybe they’re shorting the stock,” said Gogel, wide-eyed.

  “Sure they are,” said Dunne. “They’re creating the news. Why not profit from it, too?”

  Dunne drafted a message for Hoffman, copied to Strafe, asking them to look for recent product safety issues driven by insider documents or leaked videos. He gave some possible examples: lettuce producers quarantined for supposed food-poisoning scares; automobile recalls triggered by supposed internal documentation of safety flaws; fast-food chains accused of unsanitary conditions.

  Slow down, Dunne told himself. One step at a time. If you start looking for a panic, you’ll create one. He left the message unsent and went off to prepare breakfast for the boys.

  * * *

  Dunne received an urgent message that afternoon from European Special Collection. It was from Hoffman, asking him to contact George Strafe immediately. Dunne used the secure-handling channel and routed the call through the operations center. He asked the watch officer to organize a time for a call with the deputy director. To Dunne’s surprise, Strafe came on the line immediately.

  “We need to hurry up,” he said.

  “What’s happened?” queried Dunne. “Has the target gone to ground?”

  “Worse. The Russians are sniffing up the same tree we are.”

  “How do we know that?”

  “Special Intelligence. Don’t ask. We just know they’re getting close to the same target. I’ve taken care of it, for now.”

  “How, if I might ask?”

  “The GRU case officer had an accident. He got caught by the Italian service. We managed to feed him some chickenfeed that makes him think he was looking at the wrong target. The Italians are running him as a double, but he’ll play it all back to Moscow. They’ll figure it out eventually.”

  “Meaning that we need to get there before the Russians wise up.”

  “Correct. There’s one good thing in that respect, Mike.”

  “What’s that?” Strafe rarely called Dunne by his first name.

  “The Russians were using an illegal. He supposedly was a member of an underground hacking group in Germany. This gentleman was planning to visit a certain hill town in the Marche called Urbino, until the Italians convinced him it was a dry hole. That’s what I needed, in terms of authorities.”

  “Sweet,” said Dunne. “I’ll head for Urbino and install some surveillance.”

  There was a long pause, and then Strafe came back.

  “Send Adrian White to do the recon. Keep your powder dry. I need you for later.”

  “Are you sure?” Dunne was itching to move.

  “Yup. Adrian is perfect. He’s good at getting in and out of places. Prejudiced Europeans would never imagine that a black man could be installing a sophisticated surveillance device. It doesn’t compute. The operational utility of racism.”

  “I’d rather do it myself.”

  “Soon enough, hotshot. The fun is just beginning. You’ll get your chance.”

  * * *

  Dunne accepted Strafe’s decision, but he wasn’t happy about it. He wasn’t built for watching and waiting. He was always ready to plant the bug right now, up through the floor of the target’s apartment or down from the ceiling above. Sometimes people get into a bar fight just because they want to feel the sting; there was something of that in Dunne when he got restless.

  Hoffman supplied the target; it was called Digito Urbino, a computer company that had ordered the extra power lines. This was the front for Quark Team and its “news” operation, Fallen Empire.

  Dunne told Adrian White to pack his bag. He proposed two surveillance cameras: One would watch the front door, the other the back. In the kit they had brought from Langley they had concealable cameras, signal processors, relays, and transmitters that would send the signals via satellite to Headquarters and then to their base in Geneva.

  Dunne made the train reservation for Adrian. He tried not to act upset that he wasn’t going himself. He was meticulous in designing and testing the gear that Adrian would install. But he was frustrated.

  15 Geneva – September 2016

  Dunne exercised at a twenty-four-hour gym in Carouge. He worked the weights too hard, too long. His muscles were getting bulky and his shirts were tugging at the buttons. What was it that kept him on the bench doing set after set? Sometimes people get a loop inside their heads that keeps replaying: a song you’ve heard, or the image of a woman on a dance floor, maybe. The blink of her eyes, the feel of her skin; the mocking tone of her voice. What began as a mild buzz of desire becomes a throb in the gut. You could have forgotten about it another time, but now it’s inside you, wanting to be fed.

  Dunne walked past La Minette on his way to the gym one night and again on the way back. He returned the next night and stood in the shadows near the door. He was on the verge of going inside to look for her, but he stopped himself. Walking away, appalled by what he had nearly done, he muttered aloud. But the compulsion was still there.

  Veronika had said she worked at a bank called Maison Suisse. That was the only thing Dunne knew about her, or thought he knew. Did she really work there? He wanted to be sure, though he couldn’t have explained why.

  One morning, after several hours of work, he told the boys he was going to take a walk. He put one of the burner phones in his pocket, and when he had walked half a mile from the office, he called the switchboard at Maison Suisse and asked to speak to Veronika. The operator asked, “Which one?”

  “Private Wealth,” said Dunne, and there was a click, and then a woman’s voice answered.

  Dunne felt a quickening in his stomach. He closed the connection and put the phone in his pocket, feeling an emotion somewhere between panic and exhilaration. He began walking northeast toward the business district, a block south of the Rhône, below the lake and the Jet d’E
au.

  The bank’s headquarters were on a tidy avenue a half mile from the river. Dunne had checked the address a dozen times already. He walked in that direction, swaying slightly on legs that didn’t quite match because of his old football injury, slowly at first and then quickly.

  Maison Suisse occupied an austere old building with a gray stone façade, no sign out front to advertise its business. Dunne approached from the south and walked past the building, not stopping, and continued all the way to the Rhône. He was going to go home then, after he had scratched the itch. But on an impulse, he turned and walked back up the street, pausing in the courtyard below the bank building and looking up at the windows, wondering if she was inside.

  She was unsafe. That was what made her so tempting. Standing at the edge of a cliff, who doesn’t think for a moment about jumping off?

  * * *

  Dunne was back again the next day at noon. Adrian had left that morning for Italy; Dunne told Gogel that he had to go out. Arthur shrugged; Dunne was the base chief; he could do a backflip out the window if he wanted.

  Dunne sat across from the bank’s entrance in a tearoom, where he could watch the front door. He waited through lunchtime, until two, but he saw no sign of her walking in or out of the building. Did he even remember what she looked like? He left the tearoom, but as he turned toward home, he felt a tightness in his chest and his breath came in quick, shallow gulps of air.

  This time he walked right up to the front door, and stared at the porter who guarded the entrance. He caught his reflection in the window; saw the flush in his face. He took from his pocket a blank index card. He wrote the word “Veronika” on one side and on the other side, “La Minette.” He gave it to the porter, who took it silently.