Purity (77 page)

The photographer, whose name was Dan Tierney, emerged from the clinic an hour later. His shaved head made him seem older than he probably was. The bandages on his arm and leg didn't look too serious. “Somebody in Berlin seems to have taken care of my bill,” he said.

“A friend of mine,” Andreas said. “How are you feeling?”

“The benchmark for me is getting stung on the eyelid by a scorpion. I'm maybe at four out of ten on that scale.”

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“No. I'm going back to my hotel room and taking a Percocet.”

“Rum goes well with Percocet.”

“So you're my friend now? I wonder where you were when Insane Person was pointing a gun at me.”

“Hiding behind a sport-utility vehicle.”

“Rain check on the rum drink. Sorry.”

“Do you mind if I ask who you work for?”

Tierney limped toward his minivan. “It varies. The
Times
is doing another Milliken story. The macaw thing, the local police. Tech world's biggest creepizoid, et cetera. It's hard to see how my image of him pointing a gun at me changes anyone's opinion.”

“I don't suppose I can persuade you to delete the images of me and not tell anyone you saw me at his place.”

“Why would I do that?”

“To help the Sunlight Project.”

Tierney laughed. “You want me not to shed sunlight on your being pals with Insane Person. Is this irony, hypocrisy, or a contradiction? I'm never sure which term is appropriate.”

“Call it all three if you want,” Andreas said.

“Chutzpah. That's a fourth term.”

“The thing is, I'm not Tad's pal. You'd be shedding false light.”

“Really. I didn't know there was such a thing.”

“The Internet is radiant with it.”

“I'm surprised to hear you say that.” Tierney unlocked his vehicle and got in. “Or half surprised. It's not that I don't like what you do. Your batting average is pretty good in terms of going after the right people. But I have to admit I always sort of figured you for an asshole.”

Hearing this, the Killer stirred again in Andreas. If Tierney had figured him for an asshole, it was likely that many other people had, too. He felt a sudden strong anxious need to get to a computer and find out who they were and what exactly they were saying.

“I have nothing to offer you,” he said to Tierney, “except the truth. Can I buy you a drink and tell you the truth?”

It was his best line, the line he'd used over and over in the past decade. He used it even when he didn't have to, because even when a woman had already signaled availability he loved to see the effect the line had. Everybody wanted to hear the truth from him. He watched Tierney think it over.

“I admit you're not a man I ever expected to meet in person,” Tierney said. “There's a bar at my hotel.”

At the bar, Andreas began with his boilerplate TSP speech, the list of governments he'd embarrassed and the longer list of corporations and power-abusing individuals. He hurried through the latter because Tierney seemed impatient. “So the truth has two parts,” he said. “The first is that the Project lives or dies on the public's perception of me personally. The reason we're still thriving and WikiLeaks is going under is that people think Assange is an autistic megalomaniac sex creep. His tech capabilities haven't changed. What's changed is that people with dirt won't go to someone dirty. People who expose dirt do it because they're hungering for clean. If you don't help me out, we're in danger of going the way of WikiLeaks.”

“Oh, come on,” Tierney said. “It's one picture of two Internet titans inside a gated compound. Unless you're telling me this is just the tip of an iceberg—”

“That's the second part of the truth. This is where you really have to believe me. There is no iceberg. I lead a clean life. I was wild in my twenties, but I was living in a sick country and I was young. Given the level of scrutiny I've been under since then, do you think that if anyone had any dirt on me it wouldn't be all over the Internet?”

“I think if someone did, your hackers would be especially good at getting it buried.”

“Seriously?”

“OK, so you're clean. Whatever. It only proves my point. One photograph is not a big deal.”

“My being seen with Milliken is a disaster for the Project. It's like having one red sock in a load of white laundry. One red sock, and nothing is ever white again.”

Tierney shifted in his chair and grimaced. “I'm sure I don't have to tell you this. But you are one strange dude. Who cares if your sheets are a little pink? Everybody's sheets are a little pink. People still go to Hugh Grant movies. People like Bill Clinton more than ever.”

“Their business isn't being clean. Mine is.”

“What were you doing at Milliken's anyway?”

“I was begging for money.”

“Then I really don't see how you have anyone but yourself to blame for this.”

“You're right, I don't. I was desperate and I had shit luck. You have total power over me.”

“Is this the point where you offer me money?”

“If I had money, I wouldn't have been at Milliken's. And I'm less hypocritical than you think. I wouldn't offer money even if I had it. That would be a true betrayal of Project principles.”

Tierney shook his head as if confounded by Andreas's strangeness. “I can probably get a couple thousand dollars for a picture of you two. I was also attacked by Rottweilers.”

“If it's a matter of simple compensation, not hush money, my friend in Berlin can pay you a fair market rate.”

“Nice friend.”

“She believes in the Project.”

“No matter what you say, you want me to not do to you the thing you do to other people.”

“That's the truth.”

“So you are an asshole.”

“Sure. But I'm not Tad Milliken. I own nothing. I live out of a suitcase. Repressive governments hate me. There are only about ten countries in the world I can safely travel to.”

This sounded good, came out well, and Tierney sighed. “Get me five thousand dollars,” he said. “I'd be suing your pal Tad if I thought I could win a lawsuit in Belize. I'm still going to report him to the police. They'll ask who else was there. Do you want me to lie?”

“Yes, please.”

“Of course you do.” Tierney turned on his camera and let Andreas watch while he deleted, one by one, the images in which his face was visible. Andreas was reminded of the day, in a different decade, a different life, when he'd scrubbed the porn from his computer, and of his favorite lines of Mephistopheles:
Over! A stupid word. How so over? Over and pure nothing: completely the same thing! “It's over now!” What's that supposed to mean? It's as good as if it never was.

But it hadn't never been. All Tierney had to do was mention the incident somewhere online, and it would stay in the cloud forever. In the weeks following the incident, while Andreas was closing down the beach house and exchanging strongly encrypted emails with Tad Milliken, his paranoia spread roots and flourished. With every different keyword he entered with his name in every different search engine, he was no longer content to read the first page or two of results. He wondered what was on the next page, the one he hadn't read yet, and after he'd looked at the next page he found yet another page. Repeat, repeat. There seemed to be no limit to the reassurance he required. He was so immersed and implicated in the Internet, so enmeshed in its totalitarianism, that his online existence was coming to seem realer than his physical self. The eyes of the world, even the eyes of his followers, didn't matter for their own sake, in the physical world. Who even cared what a person's private thoughts about him were? Private thoughts didn't exist in the retrievable, disseminable, and readable way that data did. And since a person couldn't exist in two places at once, the more he existed as the Internet's image of him, the less he felt like he existed as a flesh-and-blood person. The Internet meant
death
, and, unlike Tad Milliken, he couldn't take refuge in the hope of a cloud-borne afterlife.

The aim of the Internet and its associated technologies was to “liberate” humanity from the tasks—making things, learning things, remembering things—that had previously given meaning to life and thus had constituted life. Now it seemed as if the only task that meant anything was search-engine optimization. Once he was up and running in Bolivia, he created a small team of truest-believing hackers and female interns who performed SEO by means both fair and foul. Tad's dream of luxury reincarnation may have been technically unrealistic, but it was a metaphor for something real: if—and only if—you had enough money and/or tech capability, you could control your Internet persona and, thus, your destiny and your virtual afterlife. Optimize or die. Kill or be killed.

For a year, he searched “tierney andreas milliken” two and three times a day. He monitored Tierney on Facebook and Twitter no less compulsively. His paranoia was evidently a fixed quantity. If he suppressed it in one place, it popped out in a different place. When Tierney finally ceased to worry him so much—if the guy was going to blab, he would have done it by now, and Andreas would have known about it—he didn't become any less anxious. He worried, serially, about former girlfriends, about disgruntled former employees, about surviving Stasi functionaries, until he arrived at the mother of all worries: Tom Aberant.

For a long time, for twenty years, he'd assumed that the secret of his homicidal past was safe with Tom. By helping to move the body, Tom had committed a serious crime himself, and in the letter he'd sent Andreas some months later, from New York, he'd apologized for “bailing” on him, had assured him that nothing he'd said in Berlin would ever see the light of day, neither in
Harper's
nor anywhere else, and had expressed the wish that their “little adventure” would allow Andreas to have the life he wanted with his girl. Injured though Andreas had felt by the distant tone of Tom's later postcards, especially the one in reply to his confessional letter, he hadn't been
worried
by it. Even when he'd taken one last stab at reviving their friendship, in 2005, by calling Tom in Denver and offering a major leak to Denver Independent, and Tom had rebuffed him, he hadn't worried. At worst, he'd thought, Tom was in professional competition with him. It was the sort of thing that could happen in abortive friendships.

But then one morning, in the barn at Los Volcanes, reading the daily digest of news about himself, he came across an interview that a Denver Independent journalist, Leila Helou, had given to the
Columbia Journalism Review
.

The leakers just spew. It takes a journalist to collate and condense and contextualize what they spew. We may not always have the best of motives, but at least we have some investment in civilization. We're adults trying to communicate with other adults. The leakers are more like savages. I don't mean the primary leakers, not Snowden or Manning, they're really just glorified sources. I mean the outlets like WikiLeaks and the
Sunlight Project
. They have this savage naïveté, like the kid who thinks adults are hypocrites for filtering what comes out of their mouths. Filtering isn't phoniness—it's civilization. Julian Assange is so blind and deaf to basic social functioning that he eats with his hands.
Andreas Wolf
is a man so full of his own dirty secrets that he sees the entire world as dirty secrets. Fling everything at the wall, like a four-year-old flinging poop, and see what sticks.

Dirty secrets?
Andreas reread the offending passage with cold dread. Who the fuck was Leila Helou? A quick search turned up photos of her and Tom Aberant together at professional functions, along with catty remarks, on bottom-feeding blogs, to the effect that sleeping with Denver Independent's publisher had done wonders for her talent. Leila Helou was Tom's girlfriend.

Dirty secrets? Flinging poop?
Where was the filtering in
that
?

He thought of the call he'd made to Denver in 2005. The Halliburton Papers had been the Sunlight Project's most significant international leak to date. He could have taken them straight to the
New York Times
, but he knew that Tom had started up an online news service and would probably jump at the chance for overnight notoriety. Although his motive in calling Tom was less than fully pure—he enjoyed the idea that Tom now needed something from the friend he'd abandoned, the friend who was now more famous and powerful than he was—the old yearning for his friendship was part of it. He'd imagined that Denver Independent could be the Project's American mouthpiece; that he and Tom could finally work together, albeit from separate continents. And Tom, on the phone, had sounded interested. Yes, almost gushing—it was fifteen years since they'd heard each other's voice. He'd asked Andreas for one hour to discuss the leak with a “trusted adviser.”

This had sounded like a mere formality. But when Tom had called back, after an hour and fifteen minutes, his tone of voice had changed. “Andreas,” he'd said, “I really appreciate the offer. It means a lot to me, and it's a tough call. But I think I have to stick with my core mission, which is to nurture investigative journalism. Boots-on-the-ground journalism. I'm not saying there's no place for what you're doing. But I'm afraid that place isn't here.”

Hanging up the phone, Andreas had vowed never to let himself be hurt by Tom again. But only now, eight years later, when he read the Helou interview, did he understand that Tom wasn't merely indifferent to him. Tom was an existential threat.

What he saw all at once: that Tom had glimpsed the Killer. In the light of dawn, in the Oder valley. The monster stiffy that hugging Tom had given him was not, as he'd supposed, the natural unleashing of the libido he'd suppressed since the night of the murder. Nor was it a gay man's stiffy, not in any meaningful sense. But it was nonetheless a stiffy
for Tom
. He had it for the same reason he'd had it for the fifteen-year-old Annagret: because Tom had made himself part of the murder. Man, woman—the Killer didn't trouble with such distinctions. And what had he done then? He couldn't remember for sure, it might have been a dream. But if it was a dream it must have been a vivid one. Straddling the grave, his stiffy in hand: had this really happened? It must have happened, because how else to explain why Tom had thenceforth shut him out? Tom had witnessed the thing the Killer had made him do. Tom had promised to have dinner with him but instead had run home to New York, taken refuge in his woman. And Andreas had proceeded to pursue him with a totally uncharacteristic lack of pride, sending him postcards, writing him a self-exposing letter, and finally calling him on the phone, not because the two of them were destined to be friends but because the Killer never forgot what it wanted, once it wanted it. There was no such thing as love.