by Sam Bourne
Not for the first time, Maggie marvelled at McNamara’s candour. It made him compelling in a way few backroom operatives ever were. It was why he’d been so powerful in politics once and doubtless would be again, just as soon as his spell of enforced purdah had passed. (There was a time when such a period would be measured in years if not decades. Judging by those copies of his newly minted memoir, what counted as a ‘decent interval’ was now measured in months.) It was risky for him to talk this way – a recording of this conversation would be terminal for him. Or at least it would have been once: these days you could never be sure. But it was the only way he knew.
‘So you’re telling me all this – the destruction of the human memory bank – is just another power grab?’
‘Just? Just? You are hilarious, Costello. “Just another power grab.” Like it’s a small thing! Like having that kind of power is not everything. No wonder your crowd are always losing. You don’t want it enough. My side craves power. We know it’s the whole ballgame. Everything else is just chin-stroking and dick-tugging. Fun, but useless.’
He moved as if to make the masturbation gesture again, but was deterred by Maggie raising the palm of her hand.
‘All right. Since you ask, it’s not the whole story. I’ll save you the Googling: I sent a cheque to Keane’s legal defence fund. You want to know why?’
‘It’s not a defence fund. He brought the case. He’s suing them.’
‘Whatever. The reason why I wrote a big cheque for Professor Keane is—’
‘—because you liked him at Stanford.’
‘Just listen, would you? The reason I back what he’s doing down there in Richmond is that our side, we are hobbled by all that history. I mean, we have been dragging this ball and chain around for decades. In Europe no one wants to be called “extreme right” or “far right”. Why? Because those words mean “Nazis” and that word means “Holocaust”. I mean, that is quite some baggage to carry. And here, it’s not much better. You say you’re on the right here, before you know it the media’ll have you in a white sheet burning a cross. If you say you’re on the far right, then brace yourself, my friend: you’re the Imperial Wizard.
‘You gotta shake off that legacy. Why do you think we invented “alt-right”? Alt to what? It was a way of saying, we’re not the scary KKK crowd. We’re alternative. But that was never going to work, not really. Too defensive. The wise Professor Keane understood that. Bowing your head and apologizing? Doomed. You say sorry, they’ll tell you you didn’t say sorry loud enough. You bow your head, they’ll ask why you didn’t get on your knees. And if you get on your knees, then why didn’t you lie flat on the floor, prostrate before me? Same with reparations. Bad idea. However much you give, it will never, ever be enough. So don’t give a cent!
‘Keane understood you had to attack the problem at its root. If people think you’re guilty of a crime, your only way out is to get them to believe there was no crime.
‘I mean, it was ambitious. More radical than any idea on the right for decades, maybe a century. I wasn’t sure he could pull it off down there in Richmond, but by God, he just might. We’ve been limping around with that ball and chain on our ankles all these years and along comes Keane with his giant pair of bolt-cutters to break it off. Like he’s saying, “Don’t associate me with the evils of Holocaust and slavery. You know why: because there was no Holocaust and there was no slavery!” It’s genius, if you think about it. Thanks to William Keane, we white conservatives can sing it loud and sing it proud: “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we are free at last!” ’
Maggie assessed the moment as an opportunity to come in with a question of her own. At the very least, Mac looked like he needed to take a breath. But clocking that she was about to speak, he pre-empted it, raising a palm and picking up where he left off.
‘Oh, and don’t go thinking this is anything but the American way. I know that’d be tempting. But, come on. What do you think this country was all about if not starting over? A fresh start. They even called it the “New World”. That was the whole, beautiful idea, Maggie. In Europe they were buried under all those layers of dust and shit and past. They could hardly breathe, for all that history.
‘And then Christopher Columbus sails the ocean blue, the founders land on Plymouth Rock, they feel the virgin sand under their feet and they think, “We can start anew. Tabula rasa. We can be born again.”
‘That’s the promise of America. We’re the blank slate nation. Amnesia is right there in our genome. You know the story, Maggie. We came to this land, killed almost everyone who already lived here’ – he raised his hand in the shape of a gun and, like a boy playing cowboys and Indians, made a piow, piow sound – ‘and then we promptly forgot all about them. Forgot we’d even done it. Like we’d just taken out the trash or something. I mean, that is a mighty, mighty thing, the power to forget like that. It’s what makes us great.’
Maggie could feel her revulsion rising, which was not good. She knew it could cloud her judgement. She needed to conclude this conversation soon, which meant steering McNamara towards the information she needed. But asking a direct question was doomed: he would clam up.
Finally she said, in a voice that was calm and casual, modulated by a detached intellectual curiosity, ‘But Keane’s approach was all about the law. Fight it in the courts. He never preached this doctrine of destroying the evidence, did he? That was new.’
McNamara broke out of his reverie and suddenly looked at her. She’d blundered, she could feel it. Now he was staring at her; whatever effect the booze had had on him seemed to have faded.
‘And here I am, chatting away as if you might be genuinely interested in the issues at hand. Treating you like an intellectual peer. Have I made a mistake here, Maggie?
‘The funny thing is, what irritates me is not the crude effort to get me to speculate about the identity of the so-called “Bookburner” that all the hot chicks on MSNBC are soiling their panties about. Though that is irritating. No. What’s disappointing is the narrowness of the liberal mind.
‘Because you’re still looking for the mastermind, aren’t you? The evil genius pulling the strings. I mean, that is the liberal failure in a nutshell, isn’t it? That’s what you thought when the big guy won too. “It must all be an evil plot. Someone was pulling the strings, but who?” Maybe it was Moscow! Maybe that batshit data company and their secret, scary algorithms! Maybe it was both of them! Same with the Brits and that Europe thing. You and the rest of the cool kids keep looking for the Wizard of Oz, the master villain who’s cunningly making it all happen.
‘Which is funny, because it makes you as dumb and as naïve as those saps in their mothers’ basements, the losers who lapped up all that shit I served them and made me a millionaire. You’re as bad as they are, with their wingnut conspiracy theories. OK, you guys point the finger in a different direction – though, it’s gotta be said, you often end up in the exact same place – but the one thing that never crosses your minds, any of you, is that maybe this is not about a single super-bad guy that you and the rest of the vegans can hate. Maybe this is something much scarier.’
‘Scarier?’
‘Yes, Maggie. Way scarier. Because what if the truth is that what got the president elected, or that referendum won, wasn’t some monster like me, with a cat on his lap and a big scar down his face, but a movement? What if it’s lots of people who feel this way, millions of them? I mean, how much worse is that?
‘And guess what, Mags: that’s the truth. You seen the crowds outside that courthouse in Richmond? He’s got a following, Professor Keane. Always did have. Could have run for office himself, back in his prime. Became a bit, you know, eccentric. But still. One of those guys you can’t take your eyes off. Like you-know-who.
‘But fuck the messenger. It’s the message. There’s a real big market for Keane’s message, believe me. Get all this history off your back? All this guilt? Oh yes, there’s plenty of people ready to buy that. In
this country, for sure. You tell some white guy in Alabama that, hey, how’d you like a world where slavery never happened and all those moaning, whining liberals can do shit about it, and all you gotta do to make it happen is light a match here and there. You’d have some takers for that, no doubt about it. Where do I sign! And in Europe? Get that Nazi monkey off your back? No more apologizing for all the “sins of empire” and all that crap? They’d form a nice, orderly “queue” ’ – the English accent again – ‘for that.
‘And that’s just the ones giving you active help. You also need the others who stand by and let it happen. They’re crucial, those folks. I love those people too, I gotta tell ya. “All it takes for evil to prosper is that good men do nothing.” I agree! We’d be nothing without the people who do nothing. The bystanders. And we have millions of those. I mean, have you seen the poll numbers on the Keane trial? No wonder that friend of yours, the governor, the African Queen, no wonder she was reaching for the panic button and calling for Maggie Costello. She saw the way things were going.
‘Even now, all these buildings on fire, these historians waking up dead. Oh, sure the PBS NewsHour is having a stroke and the New Yorker is weeping buckets, but out there? You think they care about a few old books that no one ever read? Even if you call them “documents”, you think they could give a flying fuck? Give them a job, keep the price of gas and beer down and they couldn’t give two shits whether some old scrolls are on fire in Ethiopia.
‘So call off the search, Maggie. You’re not looking for Mr Big. It’s the people, that’s your enemy. The people, who keep voting the wrong damn way in all these elections, stupid little fuckers. They’re the villain you’re after. But what’re you gonna do? You can’t put all of them in jail, can you?’
He sat back in his chair, tilting it onto its hind legs so that he could return his feet to the little coffee table, where they invaded Maggie’s space. He was pleased with himself, she could see that. Maybe these days he didn’t get the chance to sound off like this that often.
Maggie cleared her throat. ‘It’s very impressive, Mac, it really is. The way you tell it, everything’s always so clear. Unambiguous. None of those infuriating shades of grey.’
‘Well, sometimes that’s how life is. Sometimes things really are white and black. I know you liberals love to overcomplicate things—’
‘See. You did it again.’
‘Did what again?’
‘ “White and black”. Most people say “black and white”. Or “life and death”. Or “right and wrong”. But you have this strange tic. You always do it the other way around. You and the author of the manifesto. Funny that, don’t you think?’
McNamara looked at his fingernails, picking at the cuticles. He glanced up at Maggie and then back to his nails. It was the first time she’d got here that the great torrent of words had stilled, even for a few seconds.
The words were forming in her mouth: It’s you, isn’t it? But she held her tongue, and kept her eyes on him. Eventually he spoke.
‘Look, there were a few of us. On one of those private forums. Password-protected, two-step verification, the whole thing. If you were a European faggot, you’d call it a salon.’ He put the emphasis on the last syllable. ‘We were trading ideas, working on language, honing arguments.’
‘Who’s we?’
He sighed, an errant child reluctantly confessing to his mother. ‘Keane’s boys. His favourites.’ There was something else in that sigh, Maggie understood: wistfulness, nostalgia for an earlier, golden era when Mac was young and singled out by his charismatic teacher.
‘And you’re saying these writings formed the manifesto?’
‘Seems that way. When I read it, I recognized chunks of it as sounding like me. Some of it sounds like Keane. Hard to tell. Maybe we all just sound like each other.’ That wistfulness again. ‘Maybe we all just sound like him.’
‘Like Keane, you mean? Does he do that “white and black” thing too? Is that where you got it?’
Mac shrugged. Maybe.
‘So who were the others?’
He looked up. ‘I told you. Private forum. That means confidential.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Mac. You don’t think the FBI are not going to work this out sooner or later? They’ll crack open your “private forum” soon enough. And then you’ll be looking at charges of conspiracy. Several people are dead, here and abroad. That’s jail time.’
‘I’ve got good lawyers, Maggie. You know that.’
She did know that. She’d had him on the hook months earlier. And yet here he was.
‘So you knew that what you were writing was a manifesto for what is basically a global terrorist operation, perhaps the biggest in history?’
He looked at her with an expression she had not seen before, at least not on the face of Crawford McNamara. She guessed it was sincerity.
‘I absolutely knew no such thing. None of us did. Including Keane. We were debating, we were arguing. We were perfecting the intellectual case against memory, against history. Jesus, none of us realized some looney tune was going to take the idea and implement it.’
‘So who did, if it wasn’t you?’ Maggie felt a wave of frustration so strong, it was physical, a surge of bile that seemed to push through her gut and into her throat. ‘Who was it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Come on, Mac. It’s me or Lofgren’s agents. If they talk to you, they’ll want a conviction. All I want is to know what the hell’s going on.’
‘So you can stop it?’
‘Exactly.’
There was a silence between them. Oddly, it was the closest they’d come to dialogue since she’d got here.
‘The truth is, I don’t know who’s doing it. No one in the group knows either. No one knows how they got access to the writings.’
‘You’re sure about that?’
‘I’m sure. It’s our words, I grant you. But it’s not us who are . . .’ The words trailed off.
‘So who the fuck is it, Mac? Who?’
‘I truly don’t know. I can only give you one piece of advice.’
‘I don’t need advice, Mac. There are only six Alexandria libraries left in the world. Six. When they’re gone, it’s over. This is not some college prank any more. This is not some intellectual thought experiment, taking an idea to its logical conclusion. This is the real world. And whatever you know, you need to tell me. Otherwise, the next knock on that door is going to be Director Lofgren with a warrant for your arrest.’
‘My advice to you, Maggie, is: follow the money.’
‘Don’t give me the Deep Throat shtick, Mac. Please.’
‘I mean it. This operation is sophisticated. It will have cost big money. The technology to pull all this stuff off, hiring contract killers, if that’s what they’ve done, none of this comes cheap. I’ve told you as much as I know. But if I were in your shoes, that’s what I’d do. Follow the money.’
Maggie collected her things and said goodbye, carefully avoiding so much as a handshake, let alone an attempted kiss on the cheek. As she returned to her car, she reflected that Mac had ended their conversation in typical fashion: with a knowing nod to Washington folklore and nothing concrete enough to use.
And she was left with a question that, even just formulated in her head, sounded absurd: could she trust a word he had said? If he was involved, if that manifesto was his, would he admit it? His ego was enormous, but he was not stupid. Even his parting observation – that the Alexandria operation would be costing big money – was as incriminating as it was exonerating. McNamara used to be a senior figure in the administration, the former lead strategist and continuing close counsel to a president who, by his own admission, was the chief warrior against the truth. If it came to it, who had deeper pockets and bigger reach than the US government itself? Once she’d have dismissed that thought as deranged paranoia. Now she ruled nothing out.
She checked her phone. There was a breaking news alert: Reports of
serious fire at National Library of Mexico in Mexico City. She went to the library’s website and, sure enough, there they were, five green bottles, hanging on the wall.
A few routine emails and then one from a woman whose name she didn’t recognize. The subject line was Operation Florian.
Maggie clicked it open and read it twice before she had absorbed its meaning.
I know who wrote the manifesto that’s on the internet. I know because he’s my son.
Thursday
Chapter Thirty-Four
The following podcast contains explicit language.
Welcome to the gabfest, where we are talking about a development that has only now come to light – a lethal fire at an Amazon warehouse, or ‘fulfilment centre’, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The company waited several hours before revealing information about the fire, which at first was said to be an accident but which is now known to have been an act of arson by an employee or an ‘associate’, to use Amazon’s preferred term, who lost his own life as a result. Emily, what’s this all about?
You know what, David, I admit I’m confused by this story. At first, I was, like, ‘OK, it’s a fire at a warehouse. That happens.’ But the fact that the company seems to have changed their story—
A complete one-eighty—
Right. So that’s kind of fishy. But just given everything else that’s going on, it does make you wonder if perhaps—
Perhaps, what?
Well, if perhaps it’s related to the Operation Florian story.
You know, I can see why people might think that. Sorry, I interrupted you, Emily.
John, you go ahead and then back to Emily.
Well, I get why people might see a connection. Like, here are all these