Due Preparations for the Plague (24 page)

Of course, I secretly taped our meeting in the restaurant. No doubt Sirocco did too. Here’s my own transcription and commentary.

“You lied,” Salamander says to Sirocco. He says it quietly and civilly (though his voice is intense) because they are in one of the most elegant restaurants in Paris. Waiters hover around them, discreet. “You were planning to double-cross me,” Salamander says. “I have proof. Operation Black Death is aborted. I’m calling it off.”

Sirocco smiles and signals the sommelier. “I’m afraid you’re too late,” he says. “Preparations are under way as we speak. I’ve moved Black Death forward.”

Salamander presses a button on the radio transmitter in his pocket. “We had an agreement,” he says, his voice low. “A sting operation. Let me remind you of the terms of our deal. No passenger deaths. You lure the entire Paris cell into the operation, we get them, or our sharpshooters do. Those that live, we keep for interrogation. We let you escape. And absolutely no passenger deaths, that was agreed.”

“Monsieur,” Sirocco says to the wine steward, though without shifting his gaze from Salamander. “Another bottle, if you please. My business partner and I are celebrating a new level of understanding of our deal.”

“Information has come to me,” Salamander says, and in spite of a lifetime of practiced disassociation, his voice trembles. “I have irrefutable information that you have other intentions. You are planning to double-cross me. Therefore the operation is now aborted. Charles de Gaulle Airport and the French police have been put on high security alert. You will contact your hirelings immediately, or I regret to tell you that the French police will suddenly become aware of the counterfeit nature of your
carte de séjour
. You will be arrested before midnight.”

“Ah, thank you, monsieur,” Sirocco says to the sommelier, though he takes the bottle from the wine steward’s hands and pours wine for Salamander and himself. “I think you have not fully understood our situation, my friend.” He touches Salamander’s glass with his own. “Certain people with whom we are both working (indirectly, in your case, but your partners nevertheless) would like to see a lot of Americans, especially American Jews, die all at once, and they are willing to pay a great deal of money to make this happen.”

“Willing to pay this money to you, for example,” Salamander snaps.

“Of course to me. How else can I gather the intelligence you want?”

“You want me to outbid them. You are auctioning lives.”

“I’m not asking you to outbid them. I am trying to explain realpolitik. I had to select a certain kind of flight, with a certain kind of passenger list. There’s no other way to lure the people you want into your trap. It’s true, you said the passengers must not die, but our partners whom we shall not name say they must. Why? Because that is the point of the exercise, as far as our partners are concerned. Not because they care much one way or the other about individual Jews, you understand, but because they want to goad Israel past endurance. This is their strategy: to push Israel to retaliate violently, and of course we know that Israel will oblige. If not this time, then next time, after a little escalation. It’s a very simple equation. You know it and I know it. All our governments know it. So please spare me your righteous surprise.”

Salamander is breathing rapidly. “At least,” he says coldly, “it is now clear where your priorities lie.”

“Please,” Sirocco says. “Can we skip the sanctimonious hypocrisy? The simplistic nature of American thinking is too tedious for words. And let’s not be disingenuous about the advantages to your government of a little redrafting of the plans. Believe me, martyrs are an ace up any sleeve.”

“A contract means nothing to you.”

“The desert wind bloweth where it listeth.” Sirocco smiles. “Incidents distressing to many of your countrymen (though not to all), and to Israel, will happen many times in the months and years ahead, whether or not you are leaning over the shoulders of the perpetrators permitting this, permitting that, saying, ‘That is enough; stop here.’

“You knew this perfectly well, whatever you wish to pretend with your hand held over your heart. Our agreement was to
channel
the obsession of the true believers, to reveal to you the names, the faces, the modus operandi of what you call a terrorist cell. How you catch them is strictly your affair.

“And please, spare me the complaining. We do the dirty work and take all the risks while you sit back in your armchair and watch on surveillance monitors, free to tut-tut and wring your hands if things go wrong. I’ve even written your speech for you, Salamander.
These barbaric acts will not go unpunished …
!”

Sirocco laughs and pours himself more wine. “You can’t ride a whirlwind,” he says. “It’s not so easy. You can’t order it to stop just like that.” He snaps his fingers. “No more than I can. I use the energy of the zealots, but I don’t control them. I can’t. They are the jokers in the pack. You understand?”

“I understand I have been betrayed.”

“Betrayed!” Sirocco seems genuinely amused. “That is wonderful. That you should speak of betrayal.”

“It is almost interesting,” Salamander says coldly, “in an anthropological way, to observe a monster close-up.”

Sirocco leans across the table and whispers, “It’s too late to stop. Weapons are already being loaded. The baggage handlers, the maintenance crew are our men. The target flight will be hijacked whether I am arrested or not.” He smiles. “I won’t tell you which flight. I don’t want to spoil the surprise. But if I’m not able to be on the plane myself, as planned, I cannot vouch for the relatively moderate outcome I would seek.”

“I already know what outcome you intend. It is not moderate.”

“Imperfect intelligence, my friend.
Relatively
moderate, I said. I wonder if even you understand how ugly things could get if I’m not there. There are fast deaths and slow deaths, there are deaths by ritual mutilation, there are others that linger much longer in the minds of those who are left behind.”

That was when Salamander knew that he was dealing with evil, but even then, Dr. Reuben, even then I could not have predicted the degree to which Sirocco took pleasure from personal revenge. I would not have believed the extent of the trouble he went to to give me pain. To give Salamander pain.

Salamander was a babe in the woods. But to return to the transcript.

“Within an hour,” Salamander says curtly, “the French police will have photographs, documents—”

“Please. Don’t agitate yourself.” Sirocco smiles. He has a way of smiling that makes Salamander think of Eichmann and of Goebbels. “I know you know that I have been living with your daughter,” Sirocco says, “when I am not otherwise engaged.” He spreads his open palms toward Salamander and smiles. “What can I say? Women throw themselves at me. They are willing to do anything I ask, no matter how painful or bizarre.” He takes a photograph from his wallet and shows it. Salamander covers his eyes and turns away. “What you don’t know, perhaps—because I’m aware that there is some friction between you; I’m aware your daughter does not always take you into her confidence; I’m aware that she doesn’t appreciate your protective surveillance—so perhaps you don’t know that your daughter has a ticket for the very flight that I’ve chosen to win our private little lottery. I bought it for her myself.”

There is a bodily sensation that can only be equated with going down on an elevator whose cables have snapped. The freefall leaves Salamander faint. Sirocco leans across the table. “But perhaps if I’m not arrested,” he says, “she could be persuaded not to get on the plane.”

Check. But not checkmate.

Salamander steadies himself against the table. There is a smell of sulphur and of failure in the air. They will put me out to pasture, he knows.

“Monsieur.” Sirocco signals a waiter, smiling. “I think perhaps we had a faulty glass. My companion has had a small accident.”

Salamander stares at the flood of red wine on the white linen cloth and at the blood in his palm. He still holds the snapped stem of the wineglass in his hand. “All right,” he says. “I concede this round. And you may pass on the assurance that we will agree to a further increase in the price of oil, but no deaths.”

“This I am not at liberty to guarantee,” Sirocco says, “but you may call your daughter and tell her to cancel her flight.” He smiles. “Honor among thieves, as you might say.”

“If there are deaths,” Salamander promises, “I will disable you. I will reveal who is bankrolling you.”

“But
you
are bankrolling me. The sarin canisters and the protective clothing are stamped USAF.”

“For use against the Russians in Afghanistan. That route will get you nowhere, you will find.”

“Get us nowhere?” Sirocco smiles. “No questions in Congress? No investigations into why you rob Peter to pay Paul?”

“Documentation will be found,” Salamander promises, “to show you are biting the hand that has fed you. You’ll be finished in Washington.”

“How naive you are,” Sirocco says. “I must say, it’s been greater than I expected, the pleasure of working with you. The personal aspect, I mean. I’ve enjoyed making this personal. You’ll see how I’ve worked at that aspect of the whole operation, and I do promise to keep you informed. I’ve set up a box seat for you, as it were, and I assure you, you’ll have a grandstand view of what’s going on.”

“If there are any deaths, you’ll be finished. I swear to you, so help me God.”

“I’m assuming I will not be arrested today”—Sirocco smiles—“and, interesting though this discussion is, I’m afraid I must go. Some people are waiting for me.” At the door, he turns and comes back to the table and says casually, loudly enough for several other tables to hear, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I collect on forfeits. Always. Every time.” He is smiling as he leaves.

The only words that would come to me were:
Lords farewell
.

And then I called Françoise and left a message on her answering machine. “Françoise? It’s Papa. I’m in Europe. I’m not at liberty to say where.”

I counted two beats. I was unnerved by the thought of her expression as she played back the tape. “I know you have a ticket for New York. On no account, Françoise, must you board that flight. This is a matter of life and death, do you understand? Don’t board that flight.”

I hung up, and then I called the French police. I urged extra precautions, especially for all flights to New York. Screen the baggage handlers, I said. Screen the maintenance crews. I was confident I could shut the operation down. I did what I could—every passenger was security-checked and all luggage was closely scrutinized—but Sirocco outmaneuvered me. Airport Security itself was in his pocket. The ground crew and the loading crew, and even two of the airport police, had been replaced by Sirocco’s men. All this I learned months later, from an internal security report. The results of the report—
in the interests of national security
—were never made public.

Salamander did what he could.

He was too late. He was out-double-crossed.

He lost his daughter. After the hijacking, he knew she knew and he knew the knowledge broke her. She would not speak to him again. She disappeared.

Even so, I played my trump card and saved the children. Later, I fought for the hostages and lost, but I refused to destroy the evidence of that struggle. I handed over the videotapes, as ordered, but I made secret copies of those tapes, and I hid them in burglar-proof ways, and I have made arrangements to send them forward through time.

I am surrendering my life, in the end, to preserve the tapes.

I know that what will be required is my life.

This is what Salamander and I would like our tombstone to say, Dr. Reuben:

In extremity, we yet achieved two good things: we saved the children; and we saved the tapes.

You are breathing and you think nothing of it.

Now, close your eyes. Breathe. Think about it.

The act of breathing transfers oxygen from the atmosphere into red blood cells. At the same time, carbon dioxide is expelled from your blood. Most of the time, your breathing is regulated by the CO
2
level in your arteries, and oxygen only becomes a regulatory factor when it is missing: that is, when its concentration in your breathing environment plummets.

Normal breathing consists of an active inhalation followed by a passive exhalation. Any system requiring forced exhalation will rapidly produce discomfort and fatigue. Consequently any device giving respiratory protection against chemical agents must minimize the difficulty of breathing out.

The typical gas mask consists of a hood that contains fiber screens and charcoal filters, an exhalation valve, and eye goggles. The filter pouches are in the cheeks of the mask. When the wearer inhales, air is drawn through the filters and thus is stripped of contaminators, but oxygen is not added to the air. If extra oxygen becomes essential (as it does with prolonged exposure to contaminated air), the hood must be connected to a portable oxygen tank.

Although it is possible to design filters that will neutralize almost any toxic agent, it is impossible to combine in one mask protection against
all
toxic substances. Gas masks, it should hardly be necessary to say, are effective only against agents that are vapors or true gases. Mustard gas, for example, which is dispersed as a liquid, attacks via the skin, and consequently protective clothing must be worn in addition to masks.

The C4 mask is a NATO standard. It has a bromobutyl rubber face piece and the goggles provide good vision and are scratch-resistant. Air flow is designed to minimize fogging. There is also a drinking tube and speech transmitters, though the distortions to speech, hearing, and peripheral vision can rapidly cause acute emotional distress.

This distress is significant.

This distress is a secondary weapon and its combat potential—with implications for both aggression and defense—should not be overlooked. Those with vivid imaginations are at greatest and most immediate risk. Conversely, with proper training, this same proclivity of the imagination to conjure up airy nothings can be the most potent indicator of those who will survive.

Evaporation causes cooling. The body is cooled by the evaporation of sweat, but if moisture on the skin cannot evaporate, the body will respond by increasing the rate of sweating. Typically, while wearing IPE, an individual can lose from one to two quarts per hour. This results in sodden clothing next to the body and a net fluid loss. Consequently, personnel wearing IPE must drink at regular intervals.

The standard protective coverall is designed to provide protection for twenty-four hours in a toxic environment. In the absence of liquid contaminants, it may be used for up to twenty-one days against vapor hazards, though heavy sweating can reduce this time.

Protective gloves keep toxic agents from entering body via hands for twenty-four hours though they limit dexterity. If possible, gloves should be removed (in a protected environment) for thirty minutes every eight hours to allow dissipation of moisture. The gloves are made of butyl rubber.

Protective overboots are made of neoprene rubber with fabric on the inside and are designed for wear over combat boots. They give protection for twenty-four hours.

1. 1. Thermal Stress.
   Energy generated by activity must be dissipated from the body or the body temperature will rise. Such dissipation is normally achieved by the evaporation of sweat. The face accounts for twenty percent of body heat loss. The hands account for a further fifteen percent. The impact of wearing gas mask and protective gloves on the body’s heat budget can now be seen. Body temperatures skyrocket; endurance levels fall.
       Personnel engaged in strenuous physical activity will experience fainting spells and unconsciousness after an average of 5.2 hours in combat clothing; 5 hours if wearing IPE but not gas mask; and after 4.1 hours if wearing full IPE and mask.
   
2. 2. Psychological.
   Many wearers—especially civilians during emergency situations—experience such acute claustrophobia inside a gas mask that involuntary vomiting occurs. Unless the vomit is instantly removed (by rapid change of mask, or by rapid removal of vomit using scooping movement of the hand), asphyxiation will result.
       Other implications of wearing IPE are more subtle, and the degree of psychological distress will depend on the individual. The sense of isolation can be profound and disorienting. Everyone looks the same; wearers cannot detect the gender or race of other wearers; a child cannot tell his father from his mother; and this absence of standard signifiers eventually causes dizziness, confusion of mental processes, and inability to concentrate. Communication is difficult and is distorted. Peripheral vision is lost. Performance of bodily functions (eating, drinking, urination, defecation) is problematic and this has a major impact on the wearer’s ability to sustain resistance to the toxic environment.
   

It should be clear that if personnel are
at risk
in an environment where CW agents have been deployed, survival times are short unless the area can be decontaminated within twenty-four hours, or unless weather conditions result in dispersal of toxic elements. (CW agents are extremely meteorologically sensitive.) Proper training and drills in psychological survival techniques will be paramount.

When personnel are involved in the
deployment
of CW agents, it is obviously advantageous to use both gaseous and liquid agents (thus requiring target population to wear full IPE clothing) and to maintain their presence in the atmosphere for more than twenty-four hours. Psychological attrition of the target population will augment the biochemical count.

Each of you has been issued a personalized survival weapon, top secret, to be deployed at the limits of IPE protection in CW zones. Please prepare yourselves for the most crucial piece of classified information you will ever receive: instructions for use. Be attentive.

Please tattoo the routines on your memory.

Code name: Operation Shadrach.

Chemical-physiological principle: the body can be fooled by the mind.

Do with this secret what you will. When
in extremis
, close eyes, open mind, step out into the uncharted abysses of your own memory and imagination, open parachute, create a floating world, explore its tunnels and byways, stay there until All Clear signal sounds.

Prisoners have evolved rarefied forms of this weapon. Some have survived solitary confinement—years of it; more than was once believed possible—by mentally walking from New York to Los Angeles on B roads; or by retracing a Himalayan climb, rock by rock and rappel by rappel; or by re-visioning every house and every garden on their childhood block; or by restaging every Shakespearean play they ever saw. A man trapped under a steel girder, his arm severed, endured pain and blood loss until rescue by recalling the perfumes of every girl he had taken to bed.

To be recent and specific as this relates to terrorism: French journalist Jean-Paul Kauffmann, captured by Islamic zealots in Beirut, survived three years of solitary confinement, in blindfold and chains, by mentally recalling the aromas of Bordeaux wines. He smelled and tasted each one. He recalled the restaurant, the year, the dinner, the menu, the woman across the table from himself.

Daniel was thrown to lions. Millennia before digital editing, he saw them as pups; golden retrievers, perhaps; or Labradors—this is my belief; this is what his rabbinic training with its rigors of thought made possible—and the lions licked his hand and did no harm. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, whom I have mentioned in my lectures before, smoothed the flames of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace like soothing ointment on their skins. The Buddha gentled a stampeding elephant by thinking Nirvana. Christ walked on water, which is not necessarily a miracle, but is rather a function of the well-trained mind, since Holy Men in India continue to stroll on hot coals and their bare feet are not so much as singed.

Oh, certainly, my fellow upholders of the principles we hold most dear, certainly there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your average understanding of what a man or a woman can survive, and in this career that you have chosen, in this career which has chosen you, it is your mandate and your duty to survive; to survive not only the horrors to which the course of duty may subject you, but the horrors you may be called upon to inflict.

To return to the subject in hand: in situations of chemical warfare that outlast the protective equipment, I can assure you (by historical precedent, by the abiding principles of literature and art, and by personal experience in the field) that statistics signify nothing.

Consider Boccaccio.

In 1348, as he tells us, the plague came to Florence and killed off one-third of the populace in months.
Between March and the following July
, Boccaccio wrote,
what with the virulence of that pestiferous sickness and the number of sick folk ill-tended or forsaken in their need … it is believed for certain that upward of a hundred thousand human beings perished within the walls of the city …

At night, corpses were thrown from the windows and the death carts bore them to mass graves. Boccaccio, thirty-five years old, lost his father, his stepmother, and a host of peers and friends.
Reflecting on so many miseries makes me melancholy
, he wrote, and therefore he curled up into himself and took refuge from despair, and it came to pass, in the venerable church of Santa Maria Novella, he overheard Pampinea as she spoke to her circle of close friends: “
My dear ladies
,” she said, “
each of us is in fear for her life. If we go forth from here, we see the dead and the dying in the streets. Therefore what are we doing here? What are we waiting for? What are we dreaming about? Let us flee the city and take refuge in the country and build a safe house of stories in which to hide and shelter ourselves
,” and they all gave inner and urgent assent, and so ten young aristocrats (plus the eavesdropping Giovanni Boccaccio, the father creator, the voyeur, the devoutly penitent purveyor of bawdy tales), all eleven left the horror of the city behind them and traveled up into the high places of the imagination where Boccaccio wrote the
Decameron
and lived to tell the history of surviving the plague.

Plagues come and they go. They mutate and return in different form. Camus, covertly publishing for the Resistance and running interference with Nazi blight, knew this. He might not have specifically foreseen hijackings, sarin, and mustard gas, but he knew the rodents and their toxins would reappear. And, like his narrator, Dr. Rieux,
he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror … by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers. He knew … that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years …

But it
will
return, my fellow keepers of the public safety. It will return.

Are you surprised that I expect you to know Boccaccio and Camus in this class? That I expect you to familiarize yourself with their work? That I expect you to
memorize
them? Let me tell you something: in the course of this career, you will remember many things you wish you could forget. You will find immeasurable comfort in reciting the words of other men in the effort to crowd unwanted words offstage.

Let me explain one further thing.

Do you think it was the plague—the plague itself—that Boccaccio, Defoe, and Camus all sought, with such frantic scribbling, to keep at bay? Were their stories to ward off the buboes, the excruciating swellings of the lymphic nodes, the bright ring of anthrax scabs that so many medieval and seventeenth century parish registers describe?

No. I can attest to this: no.

What is the brief agony of the body that comes with its own anesthetic of shock? It is nothing. Believe me, Boccaccio, Defoe, and Camus were haunted by their own nightmares, by their own betrayals, and by their dead. Like the Ancient Mariner, they were condemned to tell the stories of those who haunted them as an act of propitiation, to keep their Furies at bay.

The dead never stop telling us stories.

Those whom we have betrayed, no matter how pure our intent, how scrupulous our reasons, they tell their tales to us night after night, which is why some of you will lose all capacity to sleep.