Borderless Deceit (40 page)

Heywood knew no agent on earth was powerful enough to disrupt this, not as long as the quaint notion of international sovereignty remained. Sovereignty spells chaos and chaos spells opportunity. The Junker and the Caliph perceived this brilliantly and exploited it masterfully. As for a mechanism to cleanse the dirty profits, why not a foundation for underprivileged and malnourished children?

The Caliph's Foundation wasn't exactly a stroke of genius, but, Heywood grudgingly acknowledged, it wasn't a silly gag either. Its beauty was that no one had a right to look into its affairs. Anonymous donations arrive from the numbered offshore accounts. On paper the Foundation puts them to use. Do-good projects off and running all over Africa and Asia. Cash from the Foundation is deposited into project accounts that pay service agencies. The agencies appear to have proper legal structures, but their directors exist in name only. In reality they are illusions with mythical directors who hire nonexistent consultants. The nonexistent consultants are sent abroad by two competing service companies located in Monaco. A holding company incorporated in Bermuda owns them both. Jaime, after some light-duty hacking into that island's banking sector, found that the holding company was privately owned, 50% each by the Caliph and the Junker.

Heywood smiled with savvy. You had to have been raised in the backwoods of New Brunswick to appreciate the cunning. Dirty money flows into the immense morass of world poverty kept going by the desertification of semi-arid regions, the dwindling offshore fisheries, the disappearing rain forests, the mushrooming slums in toxic valleys. In a perverse way poverty constitutes a stable market for Foundation funds which pour in. Who can monitor what's going on? Who can prove, or disprove the projects? Who knows that no services are really rendered, that no squadrons of expensive experts really travel, that no fleets of four-wheel drive vehicles, or solar water heaters, or water pumps, pipes, or drills, are ever bought? Only paper says it happened. On paper it's all paid for. In complex ways money from the Foundation cycles back to the service agencies in Monaco which are despatching
all the non-existent advisors. From there it moves to the holding company in Bermuda, and so returns to Nikko and Morsi. Fool-proof, Heywood had to admit, how dirty philanthropic donations transform into spotless income. To succeed all you have to do is satisfy fee-hungry middlemen and maintain a small platoon of script writers good at producing fake project documents. Oh, and take out some insurance too, such as financing one or two real projects. That's in case someone asks to see what's happening. They get zipped out to some malaria infested swamp where grateful children in nice uniforms sing and dance and wave flags. It never fails to dew the eyes.

So that explains the business of the Junker and the Caliph. But what about that other scam artist, the one going about his business scot-free one tower over and a few floors down? What's Carson's contribution to all this? Why for years would he have kept information on the Foundation to himself?

“Find the chink in the armour, Jaime,” the Czar had commanded. “Expose his Achilles heel.” Jaime soon came back saying she'd looked everywhere and Carson was squeaky clean. “No armour, Irv, so no chink either. He devotes his days to doing good. What you've got is what you see.”

The Czar had squinted with suspicion.

Jaime then came up with more nonsense about Rachel. “It's her comings and goings with Nikko and Morsi, Irv. No good. Smelly. You could add her to that moniker of yours, make it
The Junker, the Caliph, and their Courtesan
.” How irritating the chiming of the baubles on Jaime's wrists had been.

Heywood could only sputter. “Jaime, you're a fine hacker. You've got no equal. I'll say that. But I know people. And I say it's a set-up. Someone is framing Rachel.”

“Someone? I know who you mean. What did you call Carson the other day. Killjoy? I'm telling you, he isn't. And he isn't framing anyone.”

They had eyed each other silently. “I like that,” Heywood had said calmly. “
The Junker, the Caliph, and the Killjoy
. That sounds much better.”

He had turned on his heels to leave Jaime's lab and puffed his way back up the stairs feeling hurt. Rachel a courtesan? Slanderous. He
stopped on the first landing to regain his breath, and it was there that he realised Jaime had a blind spot. Continuing to the second landing, his clairvoyance deepened. Jaime had a blind spot because she had a soft spot…for Killjoy. Carson squeaky clean? Not likely. If anything he was a cesspool. How could she miss it? Because, Heywood reasoned, regaining his breath, she'd become partial to him. Carson had found a way to take her into his power; he had turned her into an emotional hostage. The only thing was, she didn't know it. And in her vulnerability she had developed an attachment to her captor.
Why did it take me this long to see it?
The Stockholm Syndrome all over again. The thought sickened him. By the time the wheezing Czar was back in his office he'd worked it through, he'd drawn the consequences. Jaime had turned unreliable. From here on, he'd have to work alone.

And how majestic it is
, he thought as the Sunday afternoon wore on,
true solitude, a big picture coming into view
. The Junker and the Caliph he had figured out, but Killjoy was proving trickier.
Take stock
, Heywood urged himself.
Rearrange the tea leaves. Enter the subtle psychic in-between spaces, the ones beyond the grasp of ordinary folk
.

The Czar leaned back in the tilting chair, closed his eyes, opened his mind and waited for truth to rush in.

He waited. An item appeared. It was good, good enough for him to jerk back up in the chair, grab a pencil and a sheet of paper and jot down a quick note.

Killjoy knows about the Junker and the Caliph, but files no reports. He keeps what he knows to himself. He encrypts it in a cipher so devious it took Jaime three days to figure out
.

He protects them
.

One good thought begets others. In high gear, Heywood's mind dwelt on other Carson oddities.

Killjoy doesn't like reality. He alters it to suits himself
.

Take the plague. Jaime proved Carson doctored computer files to hide the fact that Benedictus Athenasiu launched it from Romania. If he changed what happened then, how many other times had that been done?

Love this clear thinking, Heywood murmured, jotting down more insight.

Killjoy hates Rachel
.

Does he? Think about it? Yes, he does. Sure he does. He must. He's fixed on destroying her. That's why he alters reality. He goes out of his way to make it appear that she is in cahoots with the Foundation. Why? Heywood mulled over the possibilities. Was Carson busy preparing Rachel's ruination because he was spiteful, because she had energy and passion, and loved living, because she was so contrary to Carson's sullen cynicism. Or, was Rachel a cog in a bigger, more complex machination? Perhaps he, Irving Heywood – given his elevated purposefulness – was Carson's larger target. Heywood nodded. It could be that. He had suspected it before.

Outside, the sun was well past its zenith; inside, the Czar was still approaching his. Once more he leaned back. For longer than before, there was no motion while he reasoned.
If Carson is out to ruin Rachel as a stepping stone to me, what have I done, what do I have that offends him? What in the records have I overlooked?

The Czar raised himself. Confronting the screen, he began tapping. Zadokite Port required a new prism. This time he wanted it to go beyond facts and figures. Attendance records, employee appraisals, foreign travel, correspondence, memos, minutes of meetings, telephone logs, lists of e-mails sent and received, all this was good fodder, but something subtler had to be broken out. He wanted Zadokite Port to target instances of aberrant behaviour.

The instruction given, Heywood watched. How Zadokite Port sifts, he mused as a list formed. And love the delivery speed. The titles in the index appearing on the screen were nothing if not promising.

It took a while to work through the new material because much of it brought back memories and Heywood enjoyed reading it. Take that disarmament task force he'd run a dozen years before. The minutes of the meetings were all there, chronologically itemized. In retrospect they were too stark, too bleached, like skeletons on a desert floor. They barely hinted at the throbbing pulse of the debates. Carson had been a member of the task force at the start. How they had clashed! Heywood took a minute to relive it. Disarmament was his fief back then. He'd been under pressure from the top to forge new policies. “The other side will respond if we show them trust,” he argued to the task force. “Shall we make that our starting point?”

The task force mumbled agreement. But not Carson. Puffing himself up, looking sour as a lemon, shaking his insolent head, he said, “Trust?” The tone was disparaging. “Never trust the other side, especially not with disarmament. The other side is driven solely by self-interest. Find out what that is, then go on. Trust them and you're dead.”

Heywood wanted to rebut, but Carson wouldn't shut up. He presented a fluent analysis of geo-political trends, then overlaid it with the political dynamics of the world's troubled regions. He drew lucent conclusions, why weapons of all kinds everywhere were being added to the already obscenely large stockpiles. The task force was captivated. A low-volume, sympathetic murmur rippled through the room. “Rubbish,” Heywood cut in to silence the unrest. Using Hannah's way of expressing things, he added, “All that is quite abysmal and truly worthless rubbish. Your kind of thinking, Carson, was fine, oh, say, in about 1919. But let's recall that the Paris Peace Conference led to seven decades of war, a legacy which is only now ending. In the era we are now entering we will pursue loftier aims. Our values have become our springboard.”

But Carson wouldn't back off. He couldn't see that the chairman was doing his best to remain pleasant, taking the high road so to speak, not wanting to embarrass him. Instead of crooning –
Well yes, Mr. Heywood, the impressive way you put it, I can see your point
. – Carson adopted a hint of a smile, a tiny, secretive smile, an expression of disdain. Then he said: “1919, Irv, became problematic because of fuzzy thinking. There was a value back then too. The principle of self-determination. Everyone pursued it as a lofty aim. That principle is not that bad for addressing local matters – like planning a garden – but as a basis for world order it led to endless friction. Values as a springboard? Come on, Irv. In the real world, that kind of springboard always turns out to be pretty limp.”

Heywood stiffened. The innuendo was intolerable. Was a rumour afoot that he sometimes helped his wife with the garden? And why the word
limp
? Was that directed at him? “Shall we deal with this off-line, Carson?” he said icily. “The Cabinet Committee has instructed us to engage in fresh thinking, which we should do. We'll stage our little political philosophy seminar one-on-one when we have finished here. Would that suit you? Or shall I end the meeting now and reconvene another in five minutes without you?”

Carson examined the silent face of everyone in the room, including Rachel who was there as a trainee-observer. He saw no head was moving, not even one throat being cleared, just an awful lot of squirming. And at the table's far end, feeling on top, sat Heywood. Carson gathered his papers and departed, closing the door behind him with great gentleness, as if leaving the solemnity of a reading room.

Aberrancy even in the walk-out, Heywood had thought then and thought now. “It was in my power to eject him and quite properly I did.”

What further aberrations was Zadokite Port laying bare? Ah, an item on Iraq. All good files nowadays have some Iraq in them.

The Czar clicked to see the text – a memorandum from Carson to the PM's foreign policy advisor. The bugger, Heywood thought. He's bypassing the Service hierarchy. Done in secret. Deviant behaviour in itself. The subject was weapons of mass destruction.
There are none,
the text claimed.
Important voices in the US Administration, even in the CIA, claim there is no proof of WMD. But they are overruled, partially because of an irrational hatred for Saddam Hussein and partially because well-connected corporations expect significant and lasting commercial gain from an invasion. WMD is the pretext for going in. However, post-invasion Iraq will be ungovernable for a long time. I advise we stay clear of it
.

Yeah, sure, thought Heywood, not too impressed. Even newspaper delivery boys have rendered that opinion. In fact, he'd said much the same thing himself back then to his neighbour Gerry. Yet, something about the note was special. Why the
assertion
that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction? An unusually categorical statement for an intelligence analyst. Why was Carson so sure when, before the war began, the open-minded, objective members of the CIA went no further than to claim they had no proof either way. And didn't Carson's raw data come from them…through the pipeline? If Carson was cocksure when they were not, did he have some other source?

Heywood rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Find more Iraq stuff,” he ordered, and Zadokite Port obliged. It flew like Pegasus, hooves striking data mountains in promising locations, each kick liberating fountains of insight. I should have known, Heywood thought,
watching more truth emerge. That Morsi Abou-Ghazi, he's a caliph all right, a caliph in many places, Baghdad included.

Morsi Abou-Ghazi's intimacy with the Baathists went back years, prior to Kuwait, all the way in fact to Saddam's spat with Iran decades before. Morsi always positioned himself as Iraq's dependable source for weapon hardware of all kinds – conventional, chemical, nuclear – and he tirelessly helped Saddam's clique to profit from the UN oil embargo.