by Sam Bourne
‘Here’s my question. Of all the libraries that could have burned down last night, the one that did was the country’s – and perhaps the world’s – pre-eminent archive of the era of American slavery. I know you’re going to tell me that there was no such thing, but here’s what I can’t help thinking: that case is a whole lot easier for you to make now that those documents have gone, isn’t it? I mean, all that proof, all that evidence – it’s gone up in smoke.’
Keane smiled at her and then, making a little explosion mime with his hands, he made the sound: ‘Pufff.’
‘Should I take that as a yes?’
He smiled, waited a beat and then changed his expression. Once again, he was a professional, abiding by the accepted norms. But this readoption of the mask only confirmed the sense that she had briefly glimpsed the face behind it. For that second or two, she had seen a playfulness that knew, and took delight in, its own cruelty.
‘If I may, there is a small lacuna in your argument, Miss Costello.’
‘A lacuna.’
‘Yes, a small gap in your—’
‘I know what the word means.’
‘Forgive me. Occasionally, I forget the education system of almost every other English-speaking nation is superior to our own.’ He cleared his throat. ‘The lacuna is, in a word, timing.’
Maggie said nothing.
‘Let’s say, purely for the sake of your argument, that the disappearance of these records somehow aids my case.’
‘It obviously does!’
He held up his palm in a plea for patience. ‘As I said, let us follow your logic. Let us suppose this helps me. The question you would have to answer is: why would I do this now ? As we’ve already discussed, this trial is in its very closing stages. If I were going to take such drastic – nay, barbaric, action – I should have done it months ago, when it might conceivably have helped me. Now it’s too late to make any difference.’
Of course, Maggie had considered this. She had turned it over in her own mind during the hour’s drive from Charlottesville. He was right. It made no sense. Why would he destroy the documents in the UVA library, but not touch the ones with which he’d been confronted during the course of this trial? Why would he kill the likes of Aikman and Boult, but leave alive the historians who had taken the witness stand? Why on earth would he embark on this rampage of death and destruction after the trial and not before it?
She had wrestled with it and come up with only one answer.
‘Because this is much bigger for you than winning a court case. You want to expunge slavery from the record. You want to rip out that page of history altogether. You thought the trial might do it, and – who knows – you might just win it. But that would be on a technicality. You’d persuade the jury that this or that document is a forgery, but what about all the others? What about the millions and millions of pages kept in archives like the one in Charlottesville? You can’t explain all of them away. How much better for you if they were all gone.’ And here she mimicked his little mime of an explosion, complete with sound effects.
He smiled. ‘I like you, Miss Costello. You’ve got spunk.’ He paused, as if he was considering telling her something and then thought better of it. ‘But you’re wrong.’
He began to pace, looking not at her but at the leather-bound volumes that lined the shelves of this boardroom. ‘You know, I’ve learned a thing or two about the law doing this case.’ He spun round and with a genial twinkle added, ‘I’ve had to! An amateur like me up against all those fast-talking city slickers from New York. Imagine that: a southern boy taking on the Aronsons and Goldsteins, with all their friends in the media.’
Maggie felt her hackles rise. She resorted to a technique she had relied on when surrounded by all those bigots during her final few months in the White House. She gripped the table. If she channelled the rage through her hands, then it might not come out of her mouth.
‘So I’ve learned a lot of law. And now I know what all these law books’ – he stopped to gesture at the shelves – ‘come down to, when you boil it all away. Means and motive. Means and motive.’ He carried on pacing.
‘I certainly don’t have the means.’ He indicated his suit which, now that she looked at it, Maggie could see was fraying at the lapels and sleeves. He nodded towards a stack of Office Depot cardboard boxes, each one labelled in a simple marker pen. She could make out one from here: ‘Northup’.
‘You see, it’s just little ol’ me and a few ten-buck donations from the odd generous old lady.’ He gave her a butter-wouldn’t-melt grin. ‘And when I say odd, I mean odd!
‘So how on earth would I have the resources to stage what happened last night? A big fire an hour away, while I was here, watched and observed by the national media around the clock. You think I have the wherewithal to organize such a thing? To hire the people, to lay the fuses or what-have-you? Besides, didn’t you see the news? They’ve said the digital archive has gone too, methodically hacked and destroyed over a period of months. Now, how much of an evil genius do you think I am?’ He laughed warmly, pleasured by his own joke.
‘Which brings us to motive. Your theory sounds all well and good. But here’s the thing. I don’t need to destroy anything.’ He returned once again to the table, sitting closer to Maggie this time.
‘You been in court, Miss Costello? You seen the way this jury are reacting to the evidence they’re hearing? To the arguments I’m making? I’m winning, Miss Costello. I’m winning.’ He sat back, and dusted some unseen fluff from his knee.
‘I’m winning this case. Not only do I not need to start burning historical documents, especially when this trial is nearly over, but it could only do me harm. Why would I take that risk? Here I am, on the brink of vindication. Why would I risk being brought down as nothing more than an arsonist and online saboteur? Can you imagine what the New York Times would do with that?’ He adopted an East Coast accent to declaim the imagined headline: ‘ “The Cracker Hacker!” It doesn’t stack up.
‘Moreover, it does not fit my argument. What is the case I am making here, Miss Costello? I am not arguing that the key records of that period don’t exist. I am not pretending that these stacks of paper aren’t there. I readily concede that they are there. It’s just that we’ve misunderstood them all these years. We’ve misread them. We’ve read novels as if they were history books, we’ve—’
‘What about the Constitution?’ Maggie couldn’t help herself. It blurted out.
‘Excuse me?’
‘The Constitution. Of the United States. It refers to slavery. It abolishes slavery. How can it have abolished something that didn’t exist?’ This was exactly what she had vowed not to do. She had promised she would not play William Keane’s parlour game with him. He had been doing this for years; he was in finely tuned form, having played the game at the highest level in that courtroom for weeks on end. He would wipe the floor with her. But now it was too late.
‘Do you want to know something odd about me, Miss Costello? Something strange.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I know the entire text of the US Constitution by heart. And I have done so since I was nine years old. Go on.’ He paused, waiting for her. ‘Go on. Test me.’
‘No, Mr Keane. I will not test you.’
‘What was the passage you referred to just now?’
‘I was thinking of the Thirteenth Amendment.’
‘The one that abolishes “slavery”, you mean?’ The quotation marks were audible.
‘Yes.’
‘ “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified on the sixth day of December, 1865.’
‘Very impressive. And it makes my point.’
‘But what exactly were they abolishing, Miss Costello? The legal effect of that amendment was to nullify Article Four, Section Two
, Clause Three. And do you know what that says?’
‘No. But I have a feeling you’re about to tell me.’
He looked upward, addressing the ceiling as he began to recite. ‘ “No Person held to Service or Labor in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labor, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labor may be due.” ’
Maggie knew what was coming.
‘Did you hear what word was missing, Miss Costello? “No person held to Service or Labor in one—” ’
‘Slavery. It doesn’t mention slavery.’
‘That’s right! All it speaks of is persons held to Service or Labor. Why, it’s speaking of workers bound by contract.’
‘So you think that America fought the civil war over a dispute about employment law ?’
‘Oh, I do like you, Miss Costello. I like you. You remind me of one of my most interesting students. Though she wasn’t quite as bright as you. But the passion. It’s most charming, I confess.’
Maggie could feel herself shudder. ‘None of this explains why you had no motive to burn down the UVA library.’
‘Oh, but it does. I don’t need to destroy inconvenient documents or texts or books or novels or any of it. That’s far too crude. I just need to explain them. And, as I think I have just demonstrated, I can explain them all.’
He rested his hands on his lap and dipped his head, like a concert pianist who’s completed a recital and who now waits, exhausted yet moved by the immensity of his own talent, for the applause.
Maggie rose to her feet. ‘I think I’ve heard enough, Mr Keane. You’ve been generous with your time.’ She was about to mention the evidence she had held back – the deaths of Aikman, Boult and the others – when there was a light knock on the door. Without waiting for an answer, a young woman, also helmeted in blonde, poked her head around. She looked nervous.
‘Mr Keane?’
He broke from his reverie to swivel around.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, sir. Mr Brice asked me to come here with a message.’
‘Yes?’
‘He says you need to put on the TV. Right away.’
Keane got up, and began searching for the remote. Eventually, he found it on top of one pile of cardboard boxes and aimed it at the opposite wall.
Fox News burst into life, with a ‘breaking news’ chyron across the bottom of the screen. The voice was urgent.
. . . live pictures coming to us from Israel’s Channel Ten this hour. This is the scene in Jerusalem, which seems to confirm initial reports we brought to you just a moment or so ago. And, Katya, the building we can see in the middle of our screens there, that is Yad Vashem?
That’s right, Bill. The world’s most famous Holocaust museum, a landmark in this country, a must-see destination for visiting dignitaries and world leaders, is in flames. The fire is far advanced and, according to Israeli government sources, it has already caused devastation. One minister saying, ‘We are watching the memory of the Holocaust turn to ash.’
Chapter Sixteen
Melita Island, Montana, 8.31 am
Until now, if you’d have asked him, he’d have always said he grew up in the middle of nowhere. But that was before he moved to this place, which made his home town – just outside Cedar Rapids, Iowa – look like a throbbing metropolis. Occasionally, he would go online, drop a pin to show his current location then zoom out. It would confirm that he was a pinprick on a tiny island, alone inside a wide, endless lake, inside a vast national park, inside the state of Montana, itself one of the least populous states in the union.
His home these last six weeks was Melita Island, its sixty-four wooded acres inhabited for most of the year by mule deer, osprey, woodpeckers and a nesting pair of eagles. ‘Most of the year’ because, for two summer months, hordes of Boy Scouts would row across the lake to this deserted spot to learn how to build a raft or forage for food among the cottonwoods and firs for their annual summer camp. But that was some way off. For now, the Scouts’ empty log cabins, still carrying a scent of summer that instantly took him back to his own boyhood, had become home to a camp of a different kind.
Some still had their bunks, but the rest had been replaced with banks of computers resting on simple trestle tables, the floor covered with thick coils of exposed cabling. The connection was faster and steadier than any Jason Ramey had ever known – ‘We’re plugged into the spinal column of the internet,’ Jim, the ‘project co-ordinator’, had announced when showing them around – and, crucially, secure. Every search, every electronic communication that went in or out of Melita Island was, they were assured, triple-encrypted and impregnable.
Jason had been struck by the degree of secrecy that cloaked everything they did here. Of course, he’d mixed in these circles long enough to know that no one would take any chances. Everyone always took it as read that, as Jim put it, ‘They’re listening.’ (He went on to say: ‘They’re always listening. The trick is to make sure we give them nothing to hear.’ No one had asked Jim to identify ‘they’.)
Still, the precautions here were more extreme than anything Jason had encountered before, and he considered himself a seasoned traveller in this world. The day each one of them had arrived, they’d been handed a non-disclosure agreement which contractually bound them to total and blanket silence about everything they saw, heard or did on this project. Jim literally did not speak until Jason had signed the piece of paper, agreeing to be gagged on pain of a penalty ‘of no less than ten million dollars’. In return they would receive ‘the greatest possible reward’ for their efforts.
Only then did he meet the other recruits. Most were just like him: men in their twenties or early thirties. The instant he saw them all, two dozen of them gathered together in the largest cabin on that first morning for an hour’s ‘orientation’, he could guess who was who and, it turned out, he was mostly right. The largest group were the basement dwellers, introverted men who had been raised like indoor plants in the artificial light of a computer screen. They, in turn, divided into two sub-groups: some were professional geeks, paid in adulthood to maintain their adolescent vocation in programming or coding, while others were activist types, equally skilled in tech but who, so far as Jason could tell, spent their lives online reading, posting, agitating for the cause. The final group, and there was some overlap of course, were ex-military or law enforcement.
Jason counted a total of four women, two of them tattooed, one of them conspicuously attractive. He allowed himself to wonder what the early autumn on this unspoiled island might have in store for him, conscious that the same thought was surely passing through the head of every single man in the room. Well, maybe not every man: he suspected the incel community had a couple of representatives here.
They were set to work on that very first day and that ethos held thereafter. The work was constant and pursued with total discipline. They worked in shifts, around the clock, their focus moving around the globe with the sun. Early evenings, you worked on Asia; small hours of the night, Europe; mornings, the US East Coast; afternoons, California and the west. Eight hours at a stretch, meal breaks taken like Boy Scouts: food served in the dining hall, canteen-style.
As for the work itself, it began with an order sheet from Jim. He would present the target list for that shift: sometimes a place or an object, usually a person. Then the researchers – that was the term Jim used – would be tasked with finding out all they could. Precise location, usual daily movements, domestic arrangements, access points to place of work or home. They would then devise what Jim called a ‘work plan’ so that that person or object could be ‘filed’. That was the preferred term and they all now used it.
Jason was on the day shift, which meant his focus was on the continental United States. He looked hard at the screen, staring at the face that was staring back at him. He was looking at a digitized version of an old newspaper cuttin
g, taken from the Detroit Free Press. This was the first item he had found, before he had checked – hacked might be another word – local hospital records, along with the databases of the social security system, Medicare and the Department of Motor Vehicles. He now had the basic details: exact address, contact telephone number and so on. This one had been especially easy. The target was on Facebook: she might as well have left her front door unlocked.
Officially, then, there was no problem. He had the basic information that was requested of him. Drawing up a work plan would be simple, not least because their human resources were, if not quite unlimited, then plentiful. Jim had made clear that, just as their online connectivity was state-of-the-art, so they had abundant ‘assets’ IRL – in real life. If they did not have someone on the ground or nearby already, an asset could be brought on board quickly, reliably and discreetly.
In this case, as with several others, the target was in an assisted living facility which posed some superficial difficulties – closed circuit TV cameras, witnesses and so on – but also had significant advantages: people were in and out of those places all the time. Whichever on-the-ground asset was deployed, Jason was confident that they could get to the target without any need for forced entry, without arousing suspicion at all. They could pose as the great-nephews from Oak Park that, thanks to Facebook, Jason had identified and located within minutes.
No, the problem was not at the operational level. Rather it was with the necessity of this particular task. Their instructions were clear: they were to do as they were told, simply implementing that day’s order sheet. Decisions about priorities were the preserve of Jim or, he implied, those above him – those who the researchers had never met, heard from or seen.
And yet, every now and again, Jim had hinted at a degree of discretion in their work. Or at least in Jason’s work. Sometimes, as he hunched over his machine, staring at his triple-screen display, Jim would lean over Jason’s shoulder, watch the profile he was constructing take shape and say, ‘What do you think? Based on what you’ve got, would you say this one needs to be actioned right away? Or could it wait?’