Watchlist (19 page)

Henry's clearance level is Five. Carol's is Seven. Yours is Three, so in general, you know a fair amount less than Henry does about security matters, and much, much less than Carol does. But you know things about each of them individually, and about both of them in relation to each other. You know things about what they know. So in that sense, you aren't purely a Three. You are something else. You're a Three Plus. If you were all animals, Henry would be an ox. Carol a bear. And you, you are a lowly canine. Smaller, weaker, less fearsome. Except to larger, slower animals. You aren't a wolf. More like a coyote.

Henry asks you how your investigation is coming along. You say just fine. He says he has heard good things about the work you are doing. He hopes that you'll succeed in your objective. You make a mental note to yourself to recheck the file because you were pretty sure you didn't see any objective in there. You and Henry and Carol go out to lunch at Olive Garden. It was not your choice. It was no one's choice, really. Olive Garden is the only walkable place for lunch, and the three of you only get an hour. The soup of the day is vegetable minestrone. You order a cup and have the bottomless breadsticks and salad. Carol orders a glass of the house red. Halfway through the meal, Henry and Carol excuse themselves at the same time. They head off toward the restrooms, but a minute later you see them outside talking to each other. Henry is nodding a lot and looking over in your general direction. Carol has a look on her face which you have a hard time interpreting. You consult your handbook of unintentional facial expressions. This book has a chart that shows how people intend to convey Emotion A but unintentionally convey their real feeling about someone, call it Emotion B. If you can properly identify the intended Emotion A, and then identify certain indicators of stressors in their voice and demeanor, you should be able to zero in on the real Emotion B. The difference between A and B is called leakage. Leakage is a bad thing if you have a security clearance, especially if it is as high as Five or even Seven. You have previously noted in your daily reports that Carol is leaking pretty bad. She wants to convey benevolent apathy toward you, given that you are significantly lower than she is on the totem pole. But instead what Carol unintentionally conveys is that she hates your stupid face, or something of that approximate nature. You eat your salad and breadsticks and expertly convey naive unawareness of all of this. When the waitress comes by to ask if your absent dining companions want free refills, you lie to her and say that they don't, even though Carol specifically mentioned that if someone came by she'd like another Arnold Palmer.

When you get back from lunch, there is another envelope on your desk. You do the whole thing with the thumb, and the breath and the breaking of the seal and all of that, and you slide the picture out. It's Carol. The note at the bottom explains that you are not to investigate Carol (except to the extent necessary or unavoidable in connection with your investigation of Henry). This communication is merely to inform you that Carol is investigating you. You quickly reassess the division of knowledge. Carol, if she is looking into your file, knows you are investigating Henry. And therefore investigating her, albeit indirectly. And now you know that she knows that. And you also know that she doesn't know that you know she knows. You need to figure that out, or you might be fired. Or killed. You are thinking of getting a snack from the vending machine. Either the one-hundred-calorie snack package of Wheat Thins or a package of Lorna Doones. Carol pops her head into the cubicle. What's up, rook? she says. That's what her mouth says, anyway. Again with the leakage. You look at your desk, but the image of her has already faded to white. Now you're no longer sure whether she knows you know she knows. This uncertainty about the exact epistemological environment could mean big trouble for you down the road. How you handle this could lead to a major breakthrough in your investigation, or to your downfall at the Division. You choose the Lorna Doones, because why not. Life's too short to count calories all the time.

You're in an elevator with Henry. You think about saying something to him. What would you say, though? I know things about you. That's not true. You don't. You know things about what he does and does not know about Carol. What would that accomplish? You just like the fact that you are on one side of a wall, and he is on the other, and he doesn't know there is a wall there. Everyone in the Division initially enjoys this part of the job, and then eventually comes to feel conflicted about it. On the one hand, the human condition is already so isolating, to celebrate the systematized compartmentalization of knowledge and awareness among a large group of people for the purpose of maximizing control and informational leakage seems, at best, insensitive. On the other hand, Henry kind of deserves it. Carol steps onto the elevator, along with another woman, whom you have not yet met. Henry nods to Carol and the other woman and steps off. You stand there silently, as the elevator goes from the seventeenth floor to the forty-seventh, staring at the back of Carol's head.

The new woman's name is Donna. She has just transferred to the Division. You see Donna in the lobby sometimes, or rather, right outside it, near the ashtray, smoking a cigarette. Previously, she was an operative in the field. You know this because Henry has been assigned to investigate Donna, and what he learns about her makes its way into your file on Henry. You are now a Four, and Henry is now a Six. Carol has progressed above the number clearances and is now into the Greek letters. There are five levels of those clearances, Epsilon, Delta, Gamma, Beta, and Alpha. After Alpha there are more levels but your level of clearance doesn't allow you to even know the names of clearances above Alpha. Needless to say, Alpha is pretty high. Carol is at Epsilon, which is not as high, but still way higher than you are likely to ever get. You start to feel resentful about your situation. Low on the totem pole, and yet, by virtue of this odd circumstance, functionally much higher than your clearance. You don't know anything. All you know is what the people above you don't know. It's as if everyone who works at the Division is standing in front of a huge viewing window, looking out into some kind of vista. You can imagine what Henry and Carol and Donna are looking at. The grandeur, the absolute incontrovertibility of the brute fact of nature. They can see out the window. And all you can see is the backs of their heads. You are trapped behind them, for some reason, or maybe no reason. And yet despite the wide gulf of disparity between your point of view and theirs, you know something about each of them that none of them can ever experience in the same way that you do. You know what they look like from the back. Donna's preferred cigarettes are Parliaments, although she'll accept almost anything if she's bumming off of someone else. Sometimes, you have noticed, Donna smokes two in a row, especially if she is talking to Henry.

translated by Annie McDermott

This story begins when João sees a photo of the K2 mountain on Facebook. We'll call him João instead of using his real name in order to respect, at the very least, that minuscule detail of his privacy. Next to the photo is the phrase: “Mountains are not fair or unfair, they're just dangerous.” Both the photo and the phrase were posted by Paulo, who, by the looks of things, is a fan of mountains but not of intellectual property: he doesn't say who the author of the phrase is. Some of his Facebook “friends,” especially the ones who don't know him in “real life,” could even come to believe that Paulo himself is the author of the phrase, that Paulo himself has scaled the K2 in “real life,” and that, as he stood on the summit, his face lashed by the icy Himalayan winds, the mountain muses whispered that profoundest of thoughts into his ear. A thought of a profundity inversely proportional to the height of the K2. And yet, Paulo is a sedentary character. Paulo has not scaled the K2, and neither has he left his city in the past three years. To tell the truth, he has hardly even left his house. Indeed, the K2 mountain is located more than fifteen thousand kilometers away from where Paulo is currently resting his behind, his eyes on his computer screen.
That
sets alarm bells going in
Some Place in the Empire
.
That
and the fact that João, who really did like the photo and the phrase, has clicked “like.” And take note:
João is the only person who has liked the photo
. A photo that beautiful and a phrase that profound, of a profundity inversely proportional to the height of the K2, and only one like? Very suspicious. Tremendously suspicious. Or rather: terrifyingly suspicious. For one thing, because João and Pablo live in different cities and, according to the records kept by
The System
in
Some Place in the Empire
, they haven't seen each other for ten years, not since João was nineteen years old and Paulo was eighteen.

The System
sets its algorithms running and detects three terribly serious issues that could result in a
Threat to National Security
. To the
National Security of the Empire
, that is, which is the only kind that matters.

Firstly, that João and Paulo met in Porto Alegre (they're Brazilian), at the World Social Forum: that hotbed of revolutionaries of various kinds, including communists, eco-warriors, cannabis smokers, landless farmers, defenders-of-Fidel-Castro-and-Hugo-Chávez, greens, pro-Palestinians, vegans, union members, peasants, university students, and so on and so forth.

Secondly, that the K2 is located on the border of Pakistan, Kashmir, and China. In the so-called Northern Regions of Pakistan, also known as Gilgit-Baltistan, a gunpowder barrel crowned by snowcapped mountains. There are only two things there: terrorists and tourists.

The third problem is rhetorical: the use of the adjectives “fair” and “unfair,” which refer to the fairness/unfairness dichotomy. Classic anti-imperialist rhetoric.

Three coinciding factors: alarms sound in
Some Place in the Empire
. Are João and Paulo potential tourists or actual terrorists?

Whatever the answer to that might be, something must be done urgently. One of two things: either detaining and torturing them immediately to extract the information about their terrifying terrorist plans, or unleashing a spam attack of all-inclusive travel packages to the Himalayas.

Who will take responsibility for deciding? An analyst from
The System
, whom we'll call Anyone.

João and Paulo are Latin American, and
that
puts Anyone on the defensive: he knows only too well the kind of third-world anti-imperialist resentment that can build up in countries like that. Resentment that could easily fill the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to overflowing. Resentment that so often turns into anger, anger that is then channeled in just the same way as the anger of terrorists.

Anyone is a specialist in Latin American resentment and anger, which is why the alert was assigned to him and not to any of the other thousands of Anyones who manage
The System
. He's just the man for the job: on September 11, 2001, when he was an exchange student in a Latin American country, he saw on television how the twin towers collapsed amid the applause and cheers of no small number of students and, worse, teachers. The union of Latin American resentment and anger with terrorist resentment and anger seems quite plausible to him. What's more, he's been expecting it for years. So Anyone postpones what he's doing (following the trail of a girl in Guatemala who has been obsessively visiting Nepalese handicraft websites, among them the website of an NGO funded by a shady Qatari emir, and combing the biography of an old man in Venezuela—oh,
Venezuela
!—who just this morning, moments after waking up, tweeted something that Yasser Arafat said in 1963), and makes a start on the new investigation.

There are no emails between João and Paulo. João uses Twitter and Paulo does not. Paulo uses Google+ and João does not. Trawling through the other
Subsystems
(YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Candy Crush, Match.com, Ashley Madison, Gaydar, etc.) doesn't reveal anything interesting. For the time being, the only link between the two of them is Facebook. Anyone thinks once again, as he always thinks, that
The System
could not have invented anything more perfect than the
Subsystem
Facebook: information that agents of
The System
would once have had to kill themselves to get hold of, people now distribute quite contentedly of their own accord.

Anyone builds up a profile of João using the
Multi-Platform Method
: that is, with the information gleaned from all the
Subsystems
that João uses. João is twenty-nine years old, mixed-race, heterosexual, married, with a two-year-old son, a degree in communications, and a job in an advertising agency . . . Then comes all his contact information, followed by his favorite brands of chocolate and shampoo. Et cetera.

Paulo's profile: twenty-eight years old, white, homosexual (alert!), single, no children, a degree in journalism, a doctorate in social anthropology (alert!), has lived in five different cities on two continents (alert!), works freelance for various magazines and newspapers (alert!), et cetera.
The System
also informs him that over the past ten years, Paulo has spent an average of fourteen hours a day connected to the Internet. That is to say, he moves between cities and countries only to remain shut up in his bedroom. He belongs to a tribe that postmodernity has named “sedentary nomads” (alert!).

João and Paulo have been Facebook friends for just eleven months. Why? Why did they get back in touch only now if they've known each other for ten years? This is very interesting indeed: if something's going on, some terrorific and terrifying plan in which both João and Paulo are to play a part, this plan is already in progress. This plan has been in progress for at least eleven months.