Turing's Delirium (25 page)

He has learned a great deal and continues to feel sorry for Turing's bad fortune, his destiny.

He should have stayed with Svetlana. He left when she needed him most. She will never forgive him. But it was too much for him. Those days, the only thing he wanted was to escape that mournful place, where hearing the shouts of children playing in a nearby yard or seeing a baby in a supermarket caused a pain that seemed to lacerate his skin. Their future child had been fifteen weeks old when he perished in Svetlana's belly. How stupid he had been, the way he had refused to accept fatherhood and with his words provoked a series of events that concluded in the accident.

He feels like calling Svetlana and asking her to forgive his behavior. He picks up the telephone and dials the number he knows by heart.

Svetlana's voice sounds rigid and yet vulnerable on the answering machine. He is about to leave her a message, but in the end does not. What for? Instead he will surprise her one morning at the entrance to her building. He will beg her forgiveness and ask for a second chance. She is very proud and he is unsure of his success. But it doesn't matter. Her answer is secondary. What he needs to do is to make amends for his mistakes and behave decently, even if it is too late.

Yeah, right. Of course I care about the answer.

He closes his eyes. When there is a knock at the door, he has no idea how much time has passed. He looks at his watch: 10
A.M
. It is Baez, standing next to a teenager with messy brown hair and a far-off gaze.
A Rasta wannabe, I know the type.
He has seen many like her at the cafés in Georgetown. She doesn't look at all like her father, he decides. He stands up, asks them in, offers them a seat.

"Thank you so much for responding so quickly," he says, taking a sip of his cold coffee. "We need more people like you. Otherwise, as I'm sure you've seen these past few days, there is chaos."

"I didn't come here out of some abstract sense of patriotism," she replies, crossing and uncrossing her hands. "And don't treat me like a child, with that paternalistic tone. I think the Coalition is a bunch of idiots who only know how to say no to everything and have no alternatives to offer. But I wouldn't lose sleep at night if one of these mornings Montenegro was found hanging from a streetlamp."

Well, well, well: this girl is opinionated. She's not like her father in that respect either.

"Then why did you come, if I may ask?"

"Because Kandinsky is responsible for killing Rafael, a hacker I truly respected. As well as for killing two other hackers this month."

"We didn't know that," Baez interjects. "Rafael who?"

"I don't know. He was killed outside an Internet café in Bohemia. I was with him minutes before. I'm surprised you didn't already know."

"Baez," says Ramírez-Graham, "please find out what information we have in that regard. We must know something."

"And the other two hackers...," Baez says, staring straight at her. "Vivas and Padilla. I read what you posted on your site. From what we've found out, they were just two petty hackers. There's nothing that links them to the Resistance. Even less so their deaths."

"There won't be anything to link them," Flavia retorts. "You'd have to sift through mountains of deleted chat conversations on IRC channels, find their pseudonyms; stuff like that. Just trust me."

Baez looks at her with a mocking expression on his face. Ramírez-Graham wishes that Baez were a little more professional. He sometimes intimidates those who could help them. And yet Ramírez-Graham recognizes that he has not been the ideal role model for Baez. Maybe instead of coming to the Black Chamber he should have stayed working in the solitude of an office, confronting elusive algorithms and taking his fury out on them (pencils that snapped, notebooks and calculators that flew through the air, computer monitors that received repeated blows).

"People like Kandinsky ruin the reputation of hackers," Flavia continues. "There will be more deaths if we don't stop him. He's a megalomaniac who deserves to go to jail."

"I'm surprised," says Ramírez-Graham. "You're the first person to speak poorly of him."

"Besides," Baez interjects, "the reasons for his struggle are all wrong."

"The reasons are good," Flavia contradicts him. "It's his methods that are wrong. Kandinsky doesn't allow different opinions or any hesitations. He takes them as a personal affront. That's not part of a hacker's ethics."

"Excuse me, but those who operate outside the law have no ethics."

"Hackers are in favor of the free flow of information. They hack into systems in order to open up what never should have been closed and then share the information with everyone. A building like this, by its very nature, is their enemy. And people like you are the opposite of what they represent. You'll never understand them."

The expression on Baez's face becomes uncertain—his lips turn downward, the muscles on his cheeks tense—as if he is ridiculing Flavia's reply but at the same time admiring her courage for voicing an indiscreet opinion.

"What do you need to do your work?" Ramírez-Graham asks. "We can put our best computers at your disposal. The office of your choice. I don't know what you were paid before, but I can assure you it will be better now."

"Just pay me. I'd rather work at home. What I need are all the files you have on Kandinsky."

"We'll give you everything we have on the Resistance," says Baez. "But I assume that you already have information on the subject."

"Even more information," adds Ramírez-Graham. "So you're sure that Kandinsky was behind those killings? Young lady, you seem to know more than we do."

"I wouldn't be surprised," she says, her tone biting.

In that quick, confident reply, Ramírez-Graham thinks he can see a bit of Svetlana in Flavia.

I
N THE POURING RAIN
, Judge Cardona passes through the open gate that leads to Albert's house. He crosses the yard and goes up the stairs, reaching out to touch the creeper on the wall; dried leaves fall onto the steps. The door to the second floor is locked. He knocks loudly. He presses his handkerchief against his right eye; it is still bleeding but not as heavily as before. His vision has become blurred, and the pain tells him that the cut is serious. He will do what he needs to do and then there will be time for everything else, even a trip to the hospital. The rain sets off the cowlicks in his hair and runs down his cheeks.

The guard opens the door; his face is elongated, and the white of his eyebrows and the pale pink of his skin make Cardona think that he is an albino. He had an albino classmate when he was in school; he and his friends would make fun of the boy until he cried. They said he was the color of pink toilet paper. They told him that God had taken him out of the oven too soon. If Cardona had known that one day his skin would be covered in spots and that kids would stare at him in the street, he never would have teased that boy. You provoke early on, but the mortifying revenge doesn't come until later. The passing of time most certainly stores up an occasion or two when we'll be spat on in the face.

The guard lets Cardona pass, watching warily how the soles of his shoes leave wet marks on the floor. He seems about to ask Cardona to take his shoes off, but says nothing and goes back to his seat behind a table that rocks on one uneven leg. Cardona looks at the cracked walls, on which hang last year's calendar and cheap watercolors of the landscape around Rio Fugitivo—the bridges and the river and the ocher-colored mountains. Cardona never would've imagined Albert choosing those paintings. Someone probably decorated it all for him—maybe the owner, the one who rented him the apartment. Albert had arrived here unconscious, in a straitjacket, his brain beaten to a pulp after all those years of working with codes, the neurons confused, the power of the synapses weakened by the sheer number of encrypted, dangerous messages.

"Ay-ay-ay, you're cut," the guard says. "You better get that looked at. You might need a few stitches."

There is a notebook and a small black-and-white television on the table. Cardona, briefcase in hand, looks at the screen with its live images of the confrontations between police and demonstrators in the plaza. It is a strange, phantasmagoric sensation to be watching a scene he had been part of a few minutes earlier. He wonders whether he might appear on the screen at any moment, his briefcase in hand, being escorted by the police as he tries to leave the plaza.

"Is he expecting you?"

Cardona shakes his head in reply. What an absurd question—like a butler keeping up appearances when an invitation to a party arrives while his master lies dying in the other room, the butler parsimoniously replying that his master will be unable to attend. Or perhaps the question is to see whether Cardona has permission to visit Albert. The guard's eyes are sleepy. His boots have been shined, and his olive-green uniform looks freshly ironed. He is wearing a green cap. From time to time he looks down, making sure that Cardona doesn't notice, as if to find out whether his recently polished floor has been stained with blood, whether the water running down Cardona's body has left a puddle. He's probably from the countryside, Cardona muses. No doubt the villagers had looked at him as if he were some sort of strange beast, thought that the birth of an albino was punishment from God on the whole town. They would have asked the priest to perform an exorcism or sacrificed a llama to calm the evil spirits.

The guard asks to see Cardona's ID card. He hands it over with a wet hand. "A cut and caught in the rain," the guard says.

"Uh-huh. Seems like nothing's going right this afternoon. I should have stayed in my hotel room."

"Would you like to hang up your coat?"

"No, that's all right. I won't be long."

"If you're lucky, the rain will be over soon."

The weather: obligatory topic of trivial conversations between strangers in elevators and taxis. Meteorological changes save us from our panic at empty spaces, required moments of silence. The untimely fury of our words, desperate to fill the void. The guard notes down Cardona's name and asks him to sign.

"I'll hold on to your identification."

"No problem."

Everything is much easier when the objective is clear. Cardona is not interested in hiding his name. It will all come to light, sooner rather than later. They will be surprised by his cold-heartedness; they will speak of a man who went insane when he was fired from the ministry. Or had he resigned? A bit of both: he was forced to resign. He did everything they asked him to, enthusiastically at first, then reluctantly. They had come to realize his lack of goodwill. Well, it wasn't exactly that. Everybody has a right to doubt, and that he did. The problem was, he wanted to swim in the river and stay dry. He felt remorse at losing his most cherished convictions, but at the same time he loved wandering the halls of the Presidential Palace, feeling that so many people depended on his decisions. The gall they had—they made him realize his worth and then they turned around and closed the palace doors on him. He regrets not having given a farewell speech before resigning. In front of the photographers' cameras, he could have pointed his finger in a magnificent, dramatic display at the regime's corruption, from the president on down. Montenegro was no longer a dictator, but he was still corrupt. There were no more deaths under his administration, but it was still a dirty regime. He was privatizing the country, or rather capitalizing it, to use the euphemism of the day, though not even to the highest bidder, for the good of the country, but to the one most willing to be bribed, the one best at bribing.

Farewell speech? He was very good at speaking the truth in front of mirrors, but he wasn't able to talk when he had to. Around Montenegro, he always behaved as if he had no tongue. He had lost his chance. Even now, he has to accept that he is afraid of confronting Montenegro. He needs to take his revenge on other people. Should he have continued to see the shrink? He distrusted her; she was making quick money off him, diagnosing platitudes. She wouldn't tell him anything about himself that he didn't already know.

Montenegro hadn't given him the opportunity for a glorious finale. Cardona had left the government through the back door, one afternoon when pinkish clouds lay on the horizon outside his window, when three soldiers from the military police had come to his office and asked him to accompany them. He feared the worst. They drove him home in a Jeep, left him at his door, and told him not to go back to the ministry. They took his office keys and asked him, with a courtesy that hid the violent repercussions if he did not comply, to refrain from making statements to the press. Was that any way to treat him?

His cold-heartedness, however, comes from having nothing to lose, nothing to live for, once the necessary acts he has been preparing for have been carried out. And in the face of being able to plan something in minute detail, to perfection, his biggest surprise derives from the lack of surprise. He will do this without hiding his identity, in the light of day, blessed by the luck of having the military and police forces distracted by the unrest all over the city. In any event, he would have done this even if there had been no commotion at all. He heads down the hallway to Albert's room.

"Just a minute," the guard says. "You can't go in with that briefcase."

Cardona knew it couldn't be that easy. What would Turing's wife say when she found out? Poor naive thing had gone to get the documents that corroborated her story, the proof of the crimes that Turing and Albert had committed. Her words had been enough to condemn the two men. Cardona sets his briefcase on the table. The rain falling on the roof becomes heavier.

"Can I take a gift I brought for him?"

The guard nods his permission while looking distractedly at the television screen. The manager of GlobaLux, a man from La Paz who pronounces his r's and s's as if his life depends on them, is making a statement before the cameras. The local face of a global project, Cardona muses. Very smart. The manager has a thin mustache and continues to speak, threatening lawsuits, millions in compensation. Cardona stops listening and suddenly remembers the title of a movie:
Albino Alligator.
He takes out a silver revolver with a silencer, which he purchased from one of his bodyguards when he was minister, and in one quick movement extends his arm and shoots the guard twice. The guard's hat falls off and there is surprise in his sleepy eyes; his body collapses heavily. The olive-green uniform is stained a dark red.