Genocidal Organ (15 page)

Or so it went until the World Trade Center disappeared from New York. After that, everything had to change, and quick.

America got serious. Heavyweights were drafted in to build a massive information network from scratch. Administrators who showed the slightest bit of resistance to the new system found that their previously cozy little jobs weren’t so secure after all and were rapidly replaced by people who could get with the program. A truly integrated information service for the various branches of the intelligence infrastructure. And while they might have fallen short of their grandiose claim to have all the information in the world under one roof, they did at least succeed in dragging the US’s information systems kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.

Right now though, there weren’t that many people who knew about John Paul. A handful of bigwigs and a few of my comrades in I Detachment. The fewer people who knew about a topic, the less likely that someone would update USA with useful leads.

Even so, I was in luck. I had posted on John Paul before I set out for Prague, and there were a couple of replies to my thread from some of my comrades who had also been assigned to this case.

“Donald’s left us a message about Prague,” I told Williams. “Check out USA. A topic I started. Search for ‘Prague’ and it should be your first hit.”

Williams logged in and opened the browser on the index page.

“He posted it only three minutes ago. Damn, the indexing on this thing is fast,” Williams said.

Prague is notorious as a place where people can disappear, Donald had written. According to European agencies, someone who disappeared in Prague was considered untraceable, allegedly.

This was news. These days it was virtually impossible to disappear from a developed country, whether you were in the US, Western Europe, Singapore or Japan. You needed to constantly prove who you were to buy food or to travel anywhere. This was true even if you were homeless, so if you were serious about wanting to disappear in any of these countries, you didn’t have many options other than to die in secret or to be locked up in isolation like a modern-day Kasper Hauser.

This was interesting information from Donald, though it was an “allegedly” because his information came from a friend of his in the State Department who had just attended the NATO Antiterrorism Best Practice Cooperation Conference in Frankfurt. The friend had heard it from a Dutchman who was in the same working group as him at the conference, and that Dutchman knew because he had heard so from a French acquaintance who worked in the MAEE, and the Frenchman had in turn surmised this from his own informants and spies and
agents provocateur …
Something like that, anyway, Donald had explained.

Conjecture and hearsay, in other words. Par for the course in the intelligence field. Gossip became rumor became urban legend and was reported at a later date as gospel truth and even old news. There are alligators living in the sewers of New York, that sort of thing. The UN has a secret fleet of black helicopters ready to invade the US at a moment’s notice, and the US government is in cahoots with aliens, with whom they’ve signed a covert treaty. Mostly idle gossip, in other words. The problem was that there were occasionally some useful gems of information among the sea of half-truths and falsehood. Look at Iran-Contra: a broken clock is right twice a day, and sometimes the conspiracy theorists are right. Rumors couldn’t just be dismissed out of hand, as much as that would have made my life easier in this instance.

Prague is notorious for people disappearing.
Sure, I could have ignored this piece of information as two-bit gossip.

But the fact was that John Paul
did
disappear here, correct?

And not just the once. A few years ago, when he first disappeared from the world. And now, again, only a few days ago.

Checkpoint. Checkpoint. Another checkpoint.

I passed through how many checkpoints as I tailed Lucia Sukrova?

When I entered the metro. When I rode a streetcar. When I entered a shopping mall.

After 9/11 the world was dragged into a war against terror. The president granted the NSA authority to spy on American citizens, and military presence in cities became commonplace. Other countries followed suit to a greater or lesser extent. But however hard the world seemed to tighten the screws, terrorist acts seemed to keep slipping through. And so it went, until finally an Islamic fundamentalist group set off an atomic bomb in Sarajevo, wiping it from the map.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no longer the only ones in their select club. Sarajevo had become a giant crater, a land contaminated with death in the air and in the soil.

Hence these checkpoints today. We paid for our daily freedom and existence by having our movements recorded in minute detail. Big Brother is watching you. An invasion of privacy. That’s what some people said, anyway. Most of us—including me—felt that every time we passed through a checkpoint, we were on our way to somewhere safer.

This was somewhere between fantasy and delusion, of course. Each checkpoint was just that, a checkpoint. It showed that you were somewhere. If you traveled from one to another, the checkpoint showed that you’d traveled from one to another. That was all.

Nonetheless, most people were happy to go about their daily business passing through a forest of checkpoints.

As if there were somehow the holy grail of safe places at the end of it all.

I arrived at a square where some sort of demonstration was going on—an NGO demanding more civil liberties. Most people passed by indifferently without giving them a second glance. Lucia Sukrova did briefly look at the changing nanodisplays on the demonstrators’ placards, but she carried on regardless, never slowing her pace. It was impossible to read what her reaction to the demonstration was.

I’d been in many countries in the line of duty.

I’d seen men use old-style gallows to hang opposition forces that they’d captured. Civilized nations were supposed to recognize prisoners of war as such, and according to the strictures of the Geneva Convention POWs were not supposed to be executed. But in countries where there was no rule of law, POWs were dead men walking.

I thought of the country where the boys were injected with ID tags and became soldiers. There was no law in that land. From a philosophical perspective, anything was permitted there. Government had collapsed, and there was no authority to bring order to Hobbesian chaos.

Anything was permitted in that land. In theory, at least. In practice, a boy had two choices—to become a soldier or to die. They were in the land of the free, and yet they were not free to choose life.

You sacrificed one type of freedom in order to gain another. We handed over a portion of our freedoms in order that we might gain freedom from being blown up by an atomic bomb, the freedom not to have airplanes smashed into the buildings where we work, the freedom not to be attacked by chemical weapons while we ride the subway.

Freedom was a matter of balance. It didn’t exist in an absolute sense, in and of itself. It was either a freedom
to do
something or a freedom
from
something. In that sense, freedom was a bit like love, in that there was no such thing in an absolute sense, only a love for someone or a love between people.

Take today. Lucia Sukrova had made the decision to sacrifice the freedom of her privacy in order to gain the freedom to go shopping. She seemed mainly to be shopping for groceries and clothing. Williams, the CIA, and I were tailing her in shifts, and I was now looking at her face from afar.

She wasn’t what you would have called conventionally beautiful, but I found her face curiously attractive. Her cheeks had some freckles on them, as if she hadn’t quite finished being a teenager. She had quite a prominent nose, slightly crooked at the tip.

The feature that stood out the most, though, was definitely her eyes. Not because they were big—although they were—but because her eyelids drooped down over them so that her eyes always appeared at least half shut. Personally, I liked this European look, although it would have been considered too melancholy by American standards. I think it was Brian Eno who said after seeing
Pulp Fiction
that a California girl is just too lively to be a true femme fatale.

Lucia Sukrova was no California girl, that was for sure. She was a long way away from anyone’s definition of
lively
. If I had to settle on a word to describe her, it would probably have been
worldly
.

“So, we’ll start off with one month’s lessons and see how we go from there,” Lucia said.

“Yes, please,” I replied shamelessly. After all, this was probably the most straightforward way of gaining regular access to both Lucia and her apartment.

“That’ll be fine. Could I just ask you to confirm the details here?” She passed me her mobile device, and I pressed down on the light green plate. A contract was formed between my businessman alter ego and Lucia’s Czech language school.

“I do hope that one day I’ll be able to read Kafka in Czech,” I said out loud, just enough for Lucia to hear. It was a more subtle version of the Kafka gambit Williams had suggested a while back—not that he would have even known why.

“Oh, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed then,” Lucia chimed in, taking my bait. “Kafka wrote all his fiction in German. Kafka’s father raised him to speak German, you see. It was much more useful to speak German if you wanted to find a good job back then. You did know this country used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire?”

“Yes, I think I heard that.”

“On top of that Kafka was also Jewish. Czech Jews at the time could never really integrate into society, so they spoke German—it made things much easier if they spoke in this ‘borrowed’ language.”

I said that this made sense, given the themes of his works such as
The Castle
and
Amerika
, and asked whether she thought that he was trying to convey his ambiguity toward the place where he lived but could never really call home. I took a sip of the tea that Lucia placed before me.

She answered, “I’m sure that Kafka would have seen himself as a man living in a borrowed country using borrowed words, yes. Like the surveyor in
The Castle
.”

“Another point in favor of your hypothesis that language doesn’t frame your thought process, I think, Ms. Sukrova. And, come to think of it, Nabokov didn’t write
Lolita
in his mother tongue either.”

“You certainly are well read, Mr. Bishop,” Lucia said. Bishop was my alias.

“Well, you know, quite a few English majors end up as advertising agents like me.”

“Maybe so, but I can tell that you didn’t just study literature for school. You really do love reading,” Lucia said, lifting her hand from the armrest and stroking her chin. There was something about this gesture that struck me. I wondered if she had ever sat there discussing literature with John Paul sitting where I was sitting.

Discussing literature—or genocide.

“I’m hardly what you’d call a bibliophile, though. My job is to talk to people, you know? You’ve got to be a bit of a dilettante in all sorts of subjects. Tricks of the trade, nothing more. And if it gets the conversation flowing with a charming lady such as yourself, then so much the better.”