Face/Mask (17 page)

Joe patted his friend’s hand amiably and smiled.

“Antonio, this is a good thing we do today. I am very excited, not nervous. And you? Are you scared about what you will tell Sahar this week?”

Tony blushed, but waved away his friend’s concern.

“I don’t want to think about that, Joe. It does scare me a bit, knowing what I know.”

“And you are certain that Sahar is the right person to tell?”

“What else can I do, Joe? I don’t have connections for something like this, people who can protect me when it comes out.”

“But Sahar?”

“She can do whatever she wants with it. Hide it; destroy it. It doesn’t matter. I just want her to know, because…Well, just so she knows. Do you see?”

“
Si
, Antonio. I understand. And so it is like I say: If this thing you will do is a good thing, there is no reason for you to be scared. Just like I am not scared today.”

Tony smiled at the older man and patted him on the hand before helping him to step gingerly out of the van. Joe saw a man walk out of the building to greet them. His face was tanned and weathered, and Joe self-consciously brought his hand up to his own cheek, aware of the pasty white complexion he had from never being out in the sunlight.

It occurred to him that this man was the first
pellerossa
he’d ever seen other than in old cowboys movies, although Tony had warned him that this was a term that the natives found offensive. Joe would try not to stare, or to say anything inappropriate. After-all, he had come here to help the many who were in need, and not stare in wide-eyed wonder at the natives.

Chapter eight

Translated excerpt from speech by Quebec Premier, Luc St. Charles, September 14, 2018: 
“It was a most cowardly attack, and we must meet it as united Canadians, regardless of our attitude in the past toward international policies that other governments have followed. Our country has been attacked despite our best precautions, and we must now turn our efforts to building the greatest alliance to combat the scourge of terrorism in our world.”

September 14, 2039:

Analyzing the old recordings didn’t take as much in the way of manpower as Sévigny thought. Four agents, working in six hour shifts, sat by the powerful P-screen in the basement of the RCMP headquarters, waiting for the red flags to come up.

The P-screen was programmed to flag anything which referred, even obliquely, to any of a list of 6500 suspicious words or phrases. This list was automatically updated, based on various current events, many of which remained unreported and unknown to the public. The recent theft of classified information from Homeland Security Headquarters in Buffalo was just one of the items on the list.

But protocol was such that no reopening of old surveillance cases was allowed without an authorization by the ranking Security Prosecutor. This requirement didn’t safe-guard the privacy rights of anyone under surveillance, but was caused by a power struggle in the Justice and Security Ministry. It was intended to keep the prosecutors in the loop at all times. Otherwise, the RCMP cowboys, as they referred to their police services, would get all the glory every time an arrest was made. Once again, Prescott’s former prosecution colleagues had come through with the necessary authorization.    

The P-screen took about 30 minutes before it flashed its first of several red lights. The agent on duty,
Caporal
Gérard Rivest, promptly listened to the recording, before filing it in one of the relevant folders: black marketeering, anti-administration activism, smuggling, and so on.

The fourth red light seemed, on first glance, to refer to a purely innocent conversation that had taken place in late June of that year. Giuseppe Pizzi, had just bought a rack of lamb that wasn’t stamped by administration inspectors, and was making small talk with the butcher, Antonio Cirillo. Pizzi complained that the heat was particularly stifling, especially with the orange alerts which had everyone wearing long, heavy coats and “
fastidioso
air masks.”

“When I was a little boy in Asti,” Cirillo replied, “me and Pete Caputto, we swam all day in the river to get away from the heat.”

“Today you can’t go swimming in
our
river,” Pizzi replied, “the acid will burn right through your skin.”

While the two men laughed ruefully over the state of Montreal’s principal waterway, Rivest pondered what significance this conversation could have.

Maybe it’s some kind of code
.

Rivest couldn’t decide where to file this snippet without knowing why the P-screen had flagged it. He looked at the one name that had never come up in any of the briefing reports: Pete Caputto from Asti, Italy, and typed it into his keyboard. Instantly, the RCMP P-screen brought up the name Pietro Caputto, born in Asti, Italy, a civil engineer by trade, deceased from lung cancer 12 years earlier, and father to Emilio Caputto, a level 2A researcher in the Homeland Security office of Buffalo, New York, who had recently come under suspicion of stealing high level information. Emilio Caputto had been arrested, but died in custody in circumstances that were classified as “need to know only.”

Rivest copied the information on a note palette, and waited to see if any further references came up during his shift. In the following three hours the P-screen combed through recordings for the previous 6 months, with three red flags, all for conversations referring to administration tax stamps. The name Caputto hadn’t come up again.

As the P-screen continued its work, Rivest came to the end of his shift. He signed out, thinking that this Cirillo hadn’t said or done much to warrant this kind of effort by the RCMP. Cirillo’s distant relationship to someone with a high security clearance in Homeland Security, someone who had died recently in circumstances that were being kept secret, was just a coincidence. Then he remembered Montreal’s former head prosecutor, Yves Prescott, who would’ve torn a strip off anyone who uttered the term, “coincidence.” There were no such things as coincidences for Prescott, and he’d been proven correct more often than not.

Preferring to be thought of as over-zealous, Rivest entered the information about Pietro Caputto onto an info-disc and walked down the hall to the office of Inspector Robert Sévigny. Rivest felt a twinge of disappointment when Sévigny shrugged at the reported conversation, as if the whole thing meant little to him.

But, despite his seeming indifference, Sévigny took Rivet’s info-disc and slipped it into the top drawer of his desk. Then he dismissed his subordinate with a look that indicated that he might be more interested in this information than he was letting on.

September 15, 2039:

The following afternoon Sahar buzzed Tony up to her apartment. It had been years since he’d last used her professional services, ever since he learned of the work she’d been doing to help those in need. Since then Tony said it was somehow wrong to satisfy his lust with someone who was doing so much good for other people, although she’d let him know that she was perfectly happy to take him back as a client if he ever felt the urge. It was no good, though. She’d achieved saintly status in his eyes, and there were certain things a man just did not do with a saint.

Tony was an uneducated man, a childless widower who to all appearances had few interests beyond his little butcher shop. This appearance was something that he had actively cultivated, allowing himself to hide behind a false front while he did the work that mattered most. That he’d been running a small underground organization for several years would have come as a surprise to many who thought they knew him.

Today he’d brought Sahar the six boxes of the antibiotics she’d asked for, as well as thermometers, IV bags and several other items that most hospitals took for granted. She invited him for a coffee after he’d wheeled the boxes in on a handcart. They sat at her kitchen table, making small talk, although Tony looked somewhat distracted. When Sahar mentioned some overtly racist remarks that had been recently made by a local politician Tony cleared his throat. She smiled patiently, waiting to hear what he had to say.

“You know, not everybody thinks the same way about…you know,” he said, turning his head away, looking embarrassed.

“You mean Muslims,” Sahar filled in the blanks in his sentence, her voice betraying no emotion.

“Exactly. Muslims,
si
.”

“It is not a dirty word, Tony. You may say it out loud.”

“I know, I know,” he replied hurriedly. “It’s just that I feel so bad about…things.”

“
Things
will not get worse because you say words out loud.”

“Many people feel bad about these camps…About the things they say about you.”

“Yes, Tony,” she spoke kindly, “I know there are people who are sympathetic to our situation. They’ve been sympathetic for twenty years, yet here we still are.”

Her implied reproach caused Tony’s face to redden.

“I’m sorry Tony,” Sahar said. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. You have helped us so much. You know how much I appreciate everything you do. But is there something more you wish to tell me?”

“It’s…it’s not something I can tell anybody else. But I trust you, Sahar…”

She waited patiently while he looked at her for a moment, then quickly away again. The seconds ticked by as he fidgeted in his seat, glancing occasionally at her face.

Finally, he slapped both knees at once, and leaned forward.

“There’s a young man, he works at Homeland Security in Buffalo. I mean he worked there. But he is dead now.”

“Oh…”

“But this is not important for today. Even if it makes me very sad.”

“All right.”

“This young man, this boy, his father came from the same village in Italy. Like me, I mean.”

“I understood.”

“OK. Anyway, this boy, he’s still very young. When he died, I mean. He was only six years old when Quebec City, you know, blew up.”

Sahar winced at these words. Tony knew what she’d lost in the attack on Quebec City, and this must have made it more difficult for him to tell her this story. She cleared her throat softly to get rid of a lump in her throat, and waited for him to continue.

“So, he’s too young to be angry, like so many others were, at, you know…the Muslims. He was just six, like I said. So he was too young, and then he goes to work at Homeland Security in Buffalo. Oh God,” he lightly slapped himself on his cheek. “I’m repeating myself like a senile old man.”

“Do not worry, Tony.” She leaned toward him and clasped his hand affectionately. “Take all the time you need.”

“Yes. Thank you. You’re very sweet to me. Well, anyway, he works in the archives there,
worked
in the archives. In Buffalo; you know it’s one of their biggest offices. He has access to, what do you call it, the mainframe which has all the information in it about…about everything.”

“Yes. Go on.”

“So, a little bit before he died…he sent me this.” Tony quickly reached into his jacket’s inner pocket and pulled out a memory chip which he placed brusquely on the table between them, like he couldn’t wait to be rid of it.

“What is it?”

“An info-chip.”

“I know,” she snapped, before catching herself. “What is on it?”

“It’s the…history. Of a bomb.”

“The history?”

“Yes. When and where it was built by the American military. Who ordered it. Where it was stored. Where it was shipped. Who sold it…in August, 2018.”

Sahar had an inkling of what he was referring to, but was having trouble absorbing it. She was faced with what two impossibilities: the first was the horrible secret that Tony was implying. The second was that a young clerk in Buffalo could have accidentally come upon this information.

“Tony, what kind of bomb are we talking about here?”

“A small nuclear bomb. The news called it a suitcase bomb.”

“Tony. Do you know what you’re saying?”

“Of course I know what I’m saying. Sahar. Do
you
know what I’m saying?”

Sahar didn’t answer him. She touched the memory chip lightly with her index finger, like it was a fragile petal on a delicate flower. She thought of Rafik and their daughters, and the burden of shame and hatred that she and her people had carried for over two decades. Part of her wanted so much to believe the insane things that Tony was alleging, but another part of her just wanted to get up and run away.

“If you have this information, Tony, if what you say is true, why not make it public yourself?”

Tony’s expression showed that he was hurt that she doubted his story, and his voice rose slightly in insistence.

“I try, Sahar. I look on the net, you know, Smart-Leaks and some others. But it’s very dangerous now if you don’t have the right connections. The police are shutting down many sites, and checking out anyone who contacted them. It would be very hard for me to be sure who would get this information. I am not afraid, but I don’t want this to be kept hidden.”

“Why are you bringing me this chip, Tony?”

“I think you are very clever; you get in and out of the camp. You know where we should go to get your supplies. Maybe you know more people than me.”

“And if what you say is true; if I open the chip and read what’s on it. You trust me to do the right thing with this information?”

“Always, Sahar. Because you have lost so much. And because of where you live, with all the other...people.”

“You can say Muslims, Tony. We know who we are.”

“I am sorry. It just isn’t fair for them. For you. Maybe you can live a better life than you do now. I wish to…I don’t know. Maybe I can help you.”

“Do you realize how much trouble you can get into, if anybody ever finds out that you even know about this?”

Tony gulped and took a deep, if shaky breath. Then he straightened out his shoulders, and managed a nervous smile.

“I’m getting old, Sahar. I have no family. They can only make it hurt for a little while.”

Yves Prescott tapped impatiently on the top of a desk which took up too much space in his office. He looked out the window, but there was little to see: the smog had covered the top of Mount Royal as well as the upper floors of Montreal’s skyscrapers. Only the rotating spotlights, intended to warn low-flying aircraft of impending danger, could cut through the beige murk outside. The temperature was dropping and the forecast was for snow overnight, a week before the beginning of autumn.

He shuffled some info-discs across his desk top, finding nothing of interest there. He’d reviewed all the discs he’d been given to study, but had few real responsibilities as Deputy Minister of Public Works. If it wasn’t for checking on the activities of his own subordinates he would have had little useful work to do.