by Sam Bourne
Wherry was waiting for her, standing in front of her desk with her hand outstretched. Maggie took it and then turned to shake the hand of the two other people in the room. There was an aide in his late twenties who was introduced as ‘chief of staff’ and a man who might have been the chemical opposite of Wherry. Tall, middle-aged, bearded and unkempt, he was what you’d have expected in a library: eyes twinkling with intelligence, he looked part scatty professor, part Old Testament prophet.
‘I’m the Principal Deputy Librarian,’ he said, a small smile playing on the edge of his lips, apparently at the absurdity of the title. ‘Irving Herman.’
Soon they were in the small seating area, as Maggie explained the threat as the authorities now saw it. Wherry nodded at all the right moments, and then said, ‘We’ll work with all the relevant authorities, metropolitan and federal, to ensure that our security arrangements are at the right level.’ She ended the sentence looking at her chief of staff, who picked up.
‘If that means lockdown, we’ll lock down.’
Maggie was about to say that she was glad they were all on the same page and that there was therefore little more to add, when Herman spoke up.
‘What my colleagues say is reassuring, but only up to a point, Lord Copper, only up to a point.’
Herman continued, oblivious to the look of bafflement on Wherry’s face. ‘Perhaps I’m too close to this institution to see it the way others would. Thirty-three years does tend to warp one’s perspective! But this is the foremost and most precious collection of books in the United States, and perhaps the world. It stands to reason that this institution will be a prime target.’
‘Right, and we just agreed to take immediate action to be guarded against that threat, Irving.’ It was the chief of staff.
‘No, we agreed to take immediate action to be guarded against all known threats, using known and established methods. But the point is, unless Miss Costello corrects me, the method here is unknown.’
Maggie nodded. ‘That is true. As things stand, we don’t know how the perpetrators are burning down these buildings. The investigations are necessarily at a very early stage.’
‘Exactly. So until we do, I think we have to take extraordinary measures to protect these extraordinary books.’
The chief of staff rolled his eyes, a gesture rapidly explained by Wherry. ‘Irving thinks we should close the library completely. Right away.’
‘Just until we—’
‘We cannot wave the white flag, we cannot let them change our way of life. Ring of steel, fine. Airport-style security at every entrance, fine. Limited public access, fine. But we can’t close the library down. We can’t let the terrorists win.’
‘That sounds very good as a soundbite on television,’ Herman said, ‘but does nothing to protect this precious, irreplaceable collection.’ He was addressing Maggie, as if she were the chair in a debate at the Oxford Union. ‘Anyway, I’ve had a better idea since then.’
‘What’s that?’ Maggie deliberately kept her gaze on Herman, ignoring the sighs of exasperation coming from Wherry and her helper.
‘I suggest we call for volunteers to come to the library, to occupy every room, to stand by every doorway. Around the clock.’
‘Irving wants a permanent sleepover in the Library of Congress.’
‘It’s happened before.’
‘With kids, Irving! It was ridiculous then too. Hundreds of children and teenagers in a building of this status, lying around in sleeping bags.’ Turning to Maggie, she went on, ‘My predecessor said it “forged a connection with the next generation” but it was not practical. I eradicated that programme very early on in my tenure, and now Irving wants to revive it – for adults!’
The chief of staff joined in. ‘Our view is that that could be an additional security hazard, admitting uncredentialled adults into the estate. It raises the risk threshold, given that they would be unsupervised.’
‘We could limit it to Friends of the Library,’ Herman said, but his heart was not in it. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘I just fear for these books. For their pages. For the wisdom they contain. For our ancestors who wrote them. For all the people who have read them and will read them in the future. For the proof that we are not just random atoms of flotsam and jetsam, but links in the great chain of human civilization.’
Wherry and her lieutenant were shifting in their seats, staring either at their feet or each other. But Maggie was ignoring them and so was Herman.
‘I’d do anything to protect these books. I’d stand over them myself if I could,’ he said and then, as if to break the tension, he raised his chin and the register of his voice. ‘I’d stand at the entrance to this great library with my rod and stave, warding off all intruders and men who threaten harm!’ He smiled at Maggie, but she could see his eyes were moist. In a quieter voice, he said: ‘We saw what happened to those other libraries. We watched them burn. I could not bear to witness such a sight here, Miss Costello. I know I could not bear it.’
Maggie brought the meeting to a close by giving out her cellphone number – though only Herman took it – and urging them to stay in touch. She was keen to wind things up, partly because she was not sure what more she could say and partly, perhaps mostly, because she was itching to get back online and deal with the other fire that was blazing in a separate, if poorly sealed, area of her mind.
‘Mr Herman might be right,’ she said finally. ‘Guarding against past threats, using old methods, may not be enough. You need to think differently. We all do.’
For perhaps the thousandth time in the last decade, Maggie left a Washington meeting uncertain what good she’d done or whether she’d done any good at all. But as she hailed a cab and headed to her apartment she put that out of her mind. As one compartment was closing, another, more painful, was opening once more.
Less than twenty minutes later, her hand was trembling as she tried to put the key in the lock and open her front door.
Once inside, she flipped open her laptop and looked again at the tweets and DC Wire story, as if somehow they might have disappeared in the twenty seconds that had elapsed since she had read them all over again on her phone, sitting in the back of that taxi.
She paced the kitchen, then went into the bathroom, then back out again.
Think, she told herself. She tried, but those words kept returning. Misogyny, bigotry and possible corruption . . . fantasized about the anal rape of . . .
Never had she missed Stuart more than she did now. In moments like this, she needed to hear his voice. She fell into a chair and, with eyes closed, tried to summon it. What would he say, right now?
First things first. Did you write those emails?
She went back to her laptop and found the DC Wire story, into which was embedded a PDF file, so that you could click to see the original emails.
She looked hard at them, examining the headers and timestamps. They’d redacted the address details for the recipients, but her own email details were as they were, back when she worked in the West Wing. They looked accurate.
But are those your words? Did you say those things, Maggie? Did you write them? Did you think them?
Suddenly, Maggie felt not quite relief, but the intimation of it, like seeing the first swell of a distant wave on the horizon. No, she thought. No, I did not write those things. Of course I didn’t.
So they’re fakes. We don’t know how they were done or who did it, but they were fakes. Yes?
Yes.
So now you need to say so. Publicly. And quickly. Remember, a rebuttal loses its force by a factor of ten every minute it’s delayed. That’s a law of physics.
Right.
So get out there. Now.
Maggie went to the laptop and called up her email. Normally, the inbox appeared instantly but now there was a delay and a request that she log in. She tried, using the same password she’d always used. But the computer looked at her blankly.
She wondered about contact
ing the TV reporter or the woman who’d written the story for DC Wire. But how? She couldn’t tweet at them: her own account had disappeared. Deleted by her own hand, in an act of mortified shame, according to the tacit implication of that story.
She could set up a new account, unverified and with zero followers that would immediately look bogus and would surely be ignored. If anything, it might only add to the sense that Maggie Costello had gone way off the reservation.
This time she didn’t wait for Stuart. She reached for her phone, dialled the number for information and asked for DC Wire. With a pen in her hand, she wrote down the number they gave her. It rang perhaps two dozen times before someone picked up. She pictured a big Bakelite phone, coated in dust, like the one that used to sit on her nan’s hall table in Delvin Road: the last landline phone in the office.
Maggie could hear the confusion at the other end as she explained that she wished to speak to a person whose cellphone number she didn’t have. She felt as if she were a hundred years old, calling Uber and asking when the horse and carriage might arrive.
Eventually, they gave her a number and she was on the phone with Gaby Hutton, who’d written the story.
‘Hi Gaby. This is Maggie Costello. So I just wanted to clarify something about those emails? They weren’t “leaked”, Gaby. They were totally fabricated. Literally made up. I never wrote a word of any one of them. In fact, this “leak” happened hours after my email archive was wiped, phone contacts were destroyed and my Twitter account zapped.’
‘Why would anyone do that?’
‘I don’t know, but you may have noticed that libraries and archives are being destroyed all around the world—’
‘And you’re working on that?’
Maggie had to think quickly. She never operated in public. And now she didn’t even have an official title to hide behind. She would have to resort to the non-denial denial.
‘I can’t talk about that, Gaby. All I’m saying is that records of the past keep getting destroyed. Important archives – like the National Library of India today – and totally trivial ones, like mine. So given that people are destroying evidence of the past—’
‘We shouldn’t be surprised if they start inventing evidence of the past?’
‘What?’
‘Is that what you’re saying?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe. Anyway, I’d like it if you could tell your readers—’
‘Total denial?’
‘Exactly. Every word of those emails is bogus.’
‘They’ve been well done though.’
‘That’s true. Anyway, if you can correct your story. And tweet it, that would—’
‘Already done.’
‘What, the story?’
‘The tweet.’
Cradling the phone in her neck, Maggie reached for the laptop and refreshed the ‘Maggie Costello’ search. Sure enough, there it was. A new tweet.
Latest: Costello denies emails were hers. “Totally fabricated,” she tells me.
‘Wow. That’s great. Thank you so much.’
‘No problem.’
‘So when will the story come down?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘The story. You know: me talking about “cripples” and all that. When will you remove it?’
‘I don’t understand. I’ll update it with your denial. “Totally fabricated” and all that. I’ll get that included right away.’
‘But the story itself will stay there? So everyone can read these wholly bogus things that I’ve just told you I never said or wrote?’
‘Yeah, and then they can read your denial that you said them.’
‘But . . . this is crazy. Somebody just sat at a desk and made up fake emails, pretending I’d sent them. And then you publish them, so that millions of people read them. Even when you know they’re fake.’
‘All I know is that you say they’re fake. Which is fine. I’m not doubting that. But I can’t say I know they’re fake.’
‘But you don’t know they’re real either.’
‘No. Which is why we include both. The emails and your denial. Both sides. And then the reader can decide.’
‘So, so . . . what you’re saying . . .’ Maggie could hear herself spluttering. ‘You’re saying that someone could just sit down and with a bit of natty software they could produce a whole lot of, I don’t know, text messages that suggest you’re a paedophile and a raging racist and all they have to do is press send and then the right thing to do is, is, is publish them everywhere so that everyone then thinks that’s what you are – and that’s right, is it? That’s journalism?’
‘Well, obviously we have to make sure something is credible—’
‘Credible?’
‘Yes. We check to make sure a claim is credible before we—’
‘And how exactly are these totally fucking fake emails “credible”?’
‘Well, we checked them against White House emails we’ve seen before and they have the same characteristics.’
‘You mean the forger got the email addresses right?’
‘More than that. You know, the timestamps, the fonts.’
‘So fake documents are fine, just so long as the faker is good at it. Is that it? And let’s say they were real – which they’re not – didn’t we go through all this? Forces hostile to the United States dumping emails to mess with us and mess with our politics? I mean, seriously, did we not learn our fucking lesson?’
‘Look, I can see why you’re upset. But right now the only thing preventing me getting your denial into the story is the fact that we’re still talking on the phone.’
‘This is so . . . fucked up.’ Maggie had a strong urge to scream which she only just managed to repress. ‘All right. Run the denial.’ And then, remembering Stuart, she added, ‘And put it high up. First paragraph.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘All right.’
‘Before you go—’
‘Yes?’
‘What’s the deal with all these libraries?’
Maggie sighed. ‘I don’t . . .’ She remembered Stuart again. ‘I’ll talk to you on background if you promise to get my denial into that first paragraph.’
‘OK.’
‘Deal?’
‘Deal.’
‘The truth is, we don’t know. But it’s serious. The attacks seem co-ordinated.’
‘Terrorism?’
‘It’s definitely that. And now all the agencies are on it. FBI, CIA, Homeland Security. International co-operation.’
‘Anything else?’
‘It’s not just libraries. They’re killing historians too.’
‘And is there any—’
‘I’ve got to go, Gaby.’ One thing Maggie had learned watching Stuart: no journalist ever ends any conversation voluntarily – they’ll always have one more question.
‘OK. And this cell is good for you? If I need to know—’
‘Sure.’
Maggie exhaled deeply. She resolved not to look online and not to check Twitter, to try to put this whole business out of her mind. Yes, the messages from friends – and, oh God, from Liz – as they saw the story, would start piling up. But she had to ignore them. She needed to focus. They had just two days, before everything was lost.
After all, wasn’t it obvious that this was what they wanted? Whoever had ginned up those emails had certainly wanted to destroy Maggie’s credibility, but a parallel motive might have been even more basic. Aware that she was in pursuit, they wanted to divert her attention, to tie her up with hassles that had no connection with the operation they were conducting. If she was on the phone to DC Wire, if she was having to look up old, deleted phone numbers, if she was embarrassed about emails she hadn’t even sent, then she was distracted from the fight against them. She was taken out of the game. It was what they wanted and she was damned if she was going to give it to them.
So now she would concentrate. She put the phone over on the other side of the ro
om. She would have cable news on, but muted: that way she could know what was happening in the world, while avoiding any tweets or messages about herself.
She opened her bag to pull out her notebook, but there seemed to be two in there. Side by side, two full-size, spiral-bound pads. She took them out and realized what must have happened. In that confusion over the bags, Governor Morrison had accidentally put her notebook in Maggie’s—
Hold on. This was no accident. Tucked inside the second pad was a document that Donna had obviously sought to conceal, a document that the FBI Director had explicitly said was not to be shared or circulated. Clearly the governor wanted to give Maggie a head start on the manifesto, rather than making her wait till Lofgren released it into the public domain. She had smuggled her copy to Maggie, who now held it in her hands.
Maggie took in the title page, felt a chill shudder through her and prepared to read.
Chapter Twenty-Six
‘Remembering to Forget, Forgetting to Remember’ by Lethe
1. Memory and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Every war has been the result of one side seeking to avenge the remembered calamity inflicted upon it by another. The calamity may have been real or exaggerated or no calamity at all, but no matter: it is the “memory” of it that drives men on to take up arms and kill their fellow man. They hate a stranger from a distant land because they “remember” what that faraway stranger did to them, and so they must act in the name of that memory.
2. This destructive habit has been the curse of mankind from the very start, a terrible cast of mind imposed on humans by God or the Bible (depending on your religious or philosophical opinions). This need to avenge spilled blood, to honor the memory of the dead by acts of vengeance, starts with God. After Cain killed Abel, what does God say? “What hast thou done?” he asks. “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto Me from the ground.” We have lived with that curse – that delusion that blood cries out from the ground – ever since.