Borderless Deceit (17 page)

The Czar took his time. “Mostly not,” he finally replied. With a nonchalant flip of his hand he dismissed the whole text. In fact he waved away the very notion that there should be a report. “It's hypothetical and…as we know…hypotheses come cheap.”

The ensuing dreadful silence was disturbed only by Ron Hunt's gunshot-like cracking of his knuckles and the soft rustling of a severely agitated Claire Desmarais inside her silk dress. Heywood leaned forward and glowered. Survival at the High Council table requires observance of a few simple rules – know everything even if you know nothing, divert attention through unceasing bullying, and trample energetically all over the world that's outside the room. “
Mays, mights, could have beens
,” he sneered. “That's all I heard. We know that style…gobs of words saying nothing. Let's face it…for the most part the Yanks don't have a clue.”

Young Harry Berezowski started snickering, but Étienne des Étoiles raised a hand. “For the most part?” he inquired.

“For the most part,” Heywood repeated. “Some parts that Claire
read are pretty precise. The chances are they're true. The bit about this guy…Radu something…Coriander I think she called him… anyway, the guy who did it, some turkey living in Austria who went back to Romania to do it, it sounds plausible. Well-written stuff and I guess I buy it. Too bad he's dead though.” He sounded genuinely disappointed. “We figured out long ago the bug came in through the pipeline with the Yanks. That report doesn't add anything we didn't know before in that regard. Now, mind you, we don't have spy satellites, so we're happy the Yanks shared their picture of the monastery with us. But let's face it, if every hick-town pea-shooter in the world can take aim at us because there's no decent virus filter put in place on the Yankee side of the pipeline, maybe it's time for some rethinking. Maybe we don't want that vulnerability. I don't mind, Claire, if you pass that along to the good ambassador.”

“I'll do no such thing,” erupted Claire. “If a bank gets robbed because there are no precautions, isn't the management at fault? That's the question I see in this report. Nor do I think the style is hypothetical. It's gentle, even generous. In a nice way the Americans are saying our network was badly designed from the start. I'd like to know, is the new one better? Have the Americans vetted it? They offered help. Was it accepted?”

Here was the opening Heywood needed. “Speaking of robbed banks,” he said, wagging a finger, “it was their vault that stood wide open. Not ours. You know the pipeline. It's just a corridor from them to a cubbyhole we've got someplace downstairs at the back. There's no fence in it between us and the Yanks. Once the virus came in through their perimeter we were sitting ducks. They let the robbers walk in, not us.”

Claire slammed the report down hard. A mother superior frustrated. The Czar's bile began to ebb.

But the others were now buzzing. Complaints about new access codes, concern that the firewall was impenetrably thick, apoplexy over the network's different look and feel, incomprehension at automatic shut-off switches – petty stuff, the usual darts easily snapped back, a game Heywood played well and which he loved. His innards calmed. And by the time Abbie, the chief lawyer in the Service, shared her thoughts, he was feeling generous, nearly patriarchal.

“I think the network is an organism,” Abbie began, “and I'd like to know – if it's now hermetically sealed off, if it doesn't get outside nourishment or outside stimulation – does that mean it might expire inside this thing called a firewall?”

The Czar felt a rush of kindness. “It won't, Abbie,” he said gently, “because you're the sustenance. You come in…every day…from the outside. You feed it. You shoot it full of vitamins and minerals. You, in front of your computer tapping away, you give it life.”

“I was afraid of that,” Abbie frowned. “I have to say it. The network makes me feel neutered. More every day. I worry I'm in the grip of some…some…
being
…and it's socially cancerous.”

Étienne des Étoiles's eyebrows tightened. “Irving has been sending me regular reports on the network's resuscitation,” he announced in a voice as flat as an accountant's. “I believe it has gone well. He has assured me the new design has had a thorough peer review. Now I would like the American report analysed. Something went wrong with the immigration review process in Vienna. We must understand that. We can't be creating grudges like this all over the world. I propose Irving pursue that and report back on lessons learned. In two weeks shall we say?”

“Peer review?” Claire Desmarais asked suspiciously.

“Weeks ago,” affirmed the Czar. “Done by some excellent men.”

Claire Desmarais wanted to cross-examine, but des Étoiles rapped the table with a knuckle, a single knock, signalling the session was concluded. He seldom lingered, but this time his private door beckoned especially strongly and he hurried to it.

Ron Hunt and Harry Berezowski stayed to have an impromptu tussle over instructions for a departing delegation. The discord was instant, spinning up like a whirlwind, but it ran out of steam and they wandered off. Claire Desmarais remained. She was dazed and stared at Heywood with frigid, lifeless eyes. He blandly asked if she would now pass him the Yankee document. He could have sworn a long narrow tongue flicked out her mouth. “You'll get a
copy
,” she hissed.

Afterwards, Heywood described Claire's leaving the room to Jaime. It was, he observed, very un-Christian, not very reverend-mother-like at all. An almost reptilian quality hung about her – a serpent in silk slithering off.
Alone in the chamber, Heywood sat for a bit. He pushed another chair around, lifted one foot, then the other onto it, and forced a long, loud expiation. Relief. A close thing, the High Council session, going nearly wrong, leaning towards disaster, almost capsizing. He folded his hands across his stomach and closed contented eyes. That peer review, forcing it weeks ago, forward planning at its best. In retrospect, it was a truly canny move.

The scene had been fanciful.

Assembled in his office around the small round table were Claude, Ernest, Ranjit, Eric and Paul Liu. Not being the sort of event Jaime would understand, she wasn't invited. Ernest chewed on a toothpick; Ranjit was quiet but tense; Claude described rocks he had heaved the night before; Paul Liu busied himself flipping through programs on his laptop; and Eric massaged his forehead.

“We need to do a peer review,” the Czar announced from his desk.

Ernest continued chewing, but Eric stopped massaging, and Claude, alarmed, never did finish the tale of the rock drawing into the four-foot circle which his team needed so as to win the eighth end. “Thought we put that one behind us,” Claude said stoically, putting down a marker, much like delivering a guard stone to the front of the house. Many technical features of the new network were his idea, not to be meddled with by anyone.

“You've done a lovely design, Claude. The equipment is in place. The new show is going live at midnight, I know, but I promised Étienne a peer review and we won't duck that. I've thought about it.” With this Heywood opened a drawer in his desk, took out a ruler and, giving a shove to his chair on wheels, rolled to the table.

Claude sighed. One guard stone had been killed off, so he threw another. “We don't want anyone messing around now. You don't create art by committee.”

Heywood was unmoved. “I've given an undertaking, so we'll do it. The key to a good peer review is good peers.”

“That's my point,” argued Claude, deciding to try a draw to the button. “There aren't any around, none that can understand the new network.”

“Every decent man can be a good peer,” said Heywood.

With another of Claude's throws wiped out, the Czar now had shot rock. Claude's final heave. “Irv, for chrissake! It's nine hours before midnight. There's no time left for amateurs to go through the new network. It's complex.” But this last delivery missed entirely – too much weight and way wide of the mark – because the Czar rose.

“This is my intent,” he pronounced. “Using a power vested in me, I will make you Service Peers. Upon that, you will review the new design one final time, and having done your duty, the key on the new network in all good conscience can be turned.”

The men fidgeted and shifted. Ranjit's eyes grew wide. He was confused. A peer? Was even this a possibility in his new land of boundless opportunity? Paul Liu, for his part, was instantly enamoured by the idea and began murmuring,
Sir Paul, Sir Paul
, to get used to the intonation. “It's absurd,” he said, grinning, “but it sounds good.”

Ernest thought about it and asked if he could get a
Croix de Guerre
instead. Not a real one, just a Service one. “It's been a pretty damn good battle,
là
. We won it, eh?
Puis, un Croix, c'est correct, n'estce pas?
”

“A
Croix de Guerre
for sure,” Heywood confirmed. He then circled the table and laid the ruler in turn on the shoulders of each man.

Claude regarded the spot where he had been touched with a jaundiced sideways glance. “All done?”

“The act has been completed,” confirmed the Czar. “Go now to perform your duty.”

“Guys,” Claude commanded, “I don't got much time. Club night tonight. One hour. Then I'm gone.”

The peers did a fine review. Claude forced them through the drawings, the schedules, the access protocols, the filter blueprints at breakneck speed. Pages were flipped so fast they almost got ripped out of the binders. And when all was done, Ernest got his medal too. Heywood drove to a nearby shopping centre the following weekend and ordered it from a stall that manufactures decorations on demand.

Now in the High Council chamber, his feet up on the chair, comfortable, aglow with the success of a battle won, Heywood sank into sentimental thinking. Claude, Ranjit, Ernest, the others – a superb team – they really were. And the High Council – they hadn't understood they had him on the ropes – so you had to love them just
for that. Vienna had to be checked out – sure – Jaime would do it quick enough. Jaime! Marvellous how she had restored the Service records, its history, its soul – all by herself – how she figured out the bug, it coming in through the pipeline – all that. Without her he'd have no credibility. Without Jaime, the reports to Étienne would have been thin gruel, sparse stuff. That pipeline! The grief it caused! You had to wonder. Why didn't Carson do what Jaime did? Why hadn't he figured the mess out? Wasn't he the pipeline custodian? He should have known what was happening. But Carson knew nothing. On things that really mattered, like this one, Carson's output resembled barren earth. Here were the Americans, busily writing a report no one wanted. And Carson? Entirely ignorant of it. What kind of custodianship is that! Why no early warning? Disappointing really, almost sad, the way Carson's performance had slipped. Yes, the man had become inept.

Or?

The thought hit the Czar with such force that he yanked his feet to the floor.

Or was it otherwise?

Carson's steady quiet about pipeline issues and Claire's heinous Yankee book – could they be linked?

“Jesus!” Heywood sucked in his breath and jumped up, his great bulk quivering. The movement was too fast and his blood pressure fell. Fighting blackout, hunched over the table, he steadied himself. His field of vision narrowed to a spot of grey, but then it widened, and when it did, laid out before the Czar was a truly dismal sight. His thoughts began spinning; his breathing became short and pulsed; the reflection in the gleaming surface showed trembling jowls. Irving Heywood stood there staring at his own eyes flashing hate.

A full minute passed.

Time enough for the Czar to quell the anarchy erupting in his mind. He was proud of this capacity – to fall back, subdue strong reactions, impose inner calm – acquired when he first joined the Service. Back then it was a question of survival, because things had been bad, very bad. In those days the offspring of the establishment families ran the place and young Heywood, fresh from the forests of New Brunswick, saw the routine winks, the nudges, the quiet assists which the well-bred reserved for themselves. Naturally, they treated
him as an outsider, a backwoodsman, someone from a lower caste. So many slights, new ones each day. But he endured them.
Lay off,
he thought in the beginning. Then it started getting to him.
Bloody bastards!
he muttered when there was no let-up. Eventually he went into a silent rage.
You goddamn sons of bitches!
He developed insomnia, then indigestion and spasms in his back. Eventually his bowels cramped; hours were forcibly spent on the john. One day – in serious agony – from a forward sitting position, staring at the polished washroom floor, seeing there a face skewed with pain, he owned up to a simple fact: he was losing and they were winning. For two more hours, young Irving sat there with his pants around his ankles, meditating, confronting self pity, anger, and resentment – the whole thick broth of debilitating sentiments. It stank as much as the stuff squirting out from him into the toilet. In the end he concluded he had a simple choice: spiral down or ratchet up. Or, as he confessed to Hannah two years later, on his first posting in Lagos, just before they married,
There are two kinds of thrones, one for crapping, the other for ruling, so I decided on the latter
.

It was the beginning of Heywood's majestic approach. As he remarked to his future wife, henceforth he channelled anger into action and transformed resentment into an iron will to prevail.
But – I've got to say this too, Hannah – I'd still be nothing if I hadn't started taking a deeper interest in my fellow man
. What he meant to say by this was that he had figured out he needed to gird himself with that highly refined and most effective of bureaucratic weapons: access to certain, interesting files.