CHAPTER TWO

1

Hell is here, Alex had said.

You can’t escape from hell. Because hell’s right here, inside your mind, and you carry it around with you.

Two years had passed since the night I killed the former brigadier general, but to be honest I seemed to be doing a good enough job of evading my own personal hell. I did occasionally return to the land of the dead in my dreams, but that was too peaceful a place to really be called hell.

I never knew what Alex’s personal hell looked like to him. He never did tell me, and now it was too late. As I looked on at his coffin being carried out of the church I wondered whether he had finally made it to that heaven he’d talked about. After all, Catholics had moved on from their unforgiving dogma of the past, hadn’t they? The pearly gates were open to all these days.

Even to those who chose to die.

That’s how it was possible for Alex to have a Catholic funeral service even though he had taken his own life. In medieval Europe, suicides were buried at crossroads. People couldn’t forgive the grave sin of taking away the most precious gift given by God, and so the sin was punished by forcing the ingrate’s spirit to roam the earth without respite until the ultimate release of Judgment Day.

These days the Catholic Church didn’t feel the need to punish the dead who had, presumably, already suffered enough. Alex’s ceremony and burial were just like any other Catholic funeral service—solemn, dignified, and grave. The eulogy was given by the same old Irish priest who had delivered Alex’s first communion.

We were all notified immediately on the night that Alex gassed himself in his car, and it was our job to enter his lodgings to find his last will and testament. His room was orderly to the point of obsession. His book collection consisted entirely of theological monographs and various editions of the Bible. Once upon a time Williams had asked Alex to recommend him a good book. I’ve finished all mine and I’m bored, he had said. What sort of book do you like, sir, Alex had replied. I dunno, something entertaining, plenty of sex, drugs, and violence, Williams said. Then Alex just laughed and proudly presented Williams with a Bible.

We scoured the apartment but found no sign of a will or a suicide note. Alex had evidently made up his mind to sail his ship alone, without saying anything to anyone.

Alex was actually the second suicide I had known in my life.

As a result—and no offense to Alex—his death didn’t have as much of an impact on me as it might have. After all, the first person I’d known who’d killed himself had been my dad, and they say there’s no greater trauma than that—although that’s horseshit, frankly, as I was still a little brat when my dad offed himself and had no real conception of what death meant, so how was I supposed to be shocked by it? All it did was set the precedent for people close to me dying all the time, something that I could never quite get away from.

Why had my dad chosen death? Best rephrase that question. I doubt my father had the capability to choose. Suicide isn’t a choice; it’s what you do when there are no choices left. At least I’m sure that’s the way it was in my father’s mind—blank, except for one final course of action.

It might not be correct to say that he chose to leave this world, but he sure did choose how he left it. After a number of failed attempts at hanging himself when no one was at home, he fell back on the nation’s favorite default method of suicide. In other words, he blew his brains out. The method of choice of roughly fifty percent of all American suicides, statistically. That’s how it was twenty years ago when my dad did the deed, and it’s still true now. It’s such an easy way to go. When you look at the demographic of people who already have access to firearms—most adults, in other words—you’ll see that for them the statistic is closer to seventy percent. From the bum on the street to the mightiest CEO, the gun was the great leveler: all citizens were alike when their brains were splattered on the wall. Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson and Kurt Cobain all used this method; and as it needs no special preparation beforehand it can be as quick and easy as whipping it out of your pocket and blasting your head off. There’s still footage circulating on the web of Budd Dwyer blowing his brains out at a press conference. In a sense it’s unfortunate for minors that they can’t easily get their hands on guns, and thus have to resort to hanging themselves or some other inferior method. Hanging is the second most popular method of suicide in the States.

They couldn’t pin down a precise time of death for my father. Well, back then they didn’t yet have the Firearms Registry that we have now, and it goes without saying that guns weren’t routinely tagged at the point of sale either. These days, if you used a gun to kill yourself, the Federal Firearms Registry tag implanted in the grip would take an exact record of when the shot was fired, and the data would be transmitted instantly to the central database of the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco, and Explosives, so it’d be possible to get an accurate time of death, or rather the exact time the bullet ripped through its owner’s brains. The time recorded on the BATFE database was a de facto gravestone. My father didn’t have the benefit of this modern technology to mark his legacy, though, so his epitaph had to state “died at some unspecified time one afternoon when everyone else was out of the house.”

Of course, there was also no way of asking my father why he had gone to the effort of trying the second most popular suicide method first. Why did you decide to die? Why did you settle on a gun in the end? You can’t interrogate a dead man. You can’t ask him any questions, and you can’t ask him for forgiveness.

I’d like to tell you that, with a child’s intuition, I picked up the scent of death and was unusually affected by my father’s suicide, but as I said before, that’d be a lie. What I actually remember is that one day my father was there and then one day he wasn’t. He disappeared. Don’t put too much stock in this “children’s intuition” bull.

People are like that—able to disappear without rhyme or reason, without others being able to make sense of their sudden absence.

There were a few times when I asked my mom why my dad killed himself. But then I gradually stopped asking. After all, the only answer I ever got was I don’t know. Every time I asked I would get the same answer and my mother would make the same face of wretched incomprehension.

To depart without giving a reason why is to leave a curse on those you leave behind. Questions linger: Why didn’t I realize something was wrong? What could I have done differently? Was it my fault? And, of course, the dead don’t reply. So there’s basically no way to lift the curse. Time is a great healer, but an imperfect one, as anyone who has ever been assaulted in the dead of night by uneasy, shameful feelings knows. Even those memories consigned to oblivion by the conscious mind may still be in there somewhere, lurking, never completely forgotten by the unconscious mind.

That’s what I mean when I say my mother was under my father’s curse.

There’s one unsolved puzzle about my father’s death that I never asked my mother, not even at the very end. The question of who cleaned up the blood and fragments of splattered brain on the ceiling and walls. Did the police do it? Or was there some sort of specialist cleaning company that you could hire? What sort of slogan did they have—WIPING THE REMNANTS OF YOUR LOVED ONES FROM YOUR WALLS SINCE 1965?

Whoever it was, I have absolutely no conscious memory of it. What I do remember is that once, in my movie-geek teenager years, I watched a Reagan-era oldie called Angel Heart on late-night cable. I remember how it made me shudder: a scene with a woman in full mourning regalia wiping red bloodstains from the wall. I supposed she was the widow of the man who had just killed himself. The movie never did go into detail on that point, and in my mind that scene seemed curiously detached from the rest of the movie.

Come to think of it, I guess it could have been my mother who wiped up my father.

It’s the nature of your work that is causing you so much stress.

I wondered if this was the sort of thing Alex’s counselor would have said to him during their sessions—if he’d been going for any.

Kill, kill, and then kill some more. Plan missions down to the last detail so that you can kill even more people even more efficiently. Conjure up in your mind, vividly, an image of the target you are about to kill. Predict your target’s next movements. Know whether he has a wife, whether he has children, whether he read Harry Potter to his daughter at bedtime.

Would stressful even be the right word to describe this line of work? Alex was a staunch Catholic, so I guess it’s more likely he would have confessed to a priest than gone to counseling. When he was in that little confessional, would he have begged for absolution for all the men he had killed in the line of duty? If so, I wondered if the priest who heard his confession now felt guilty for not being able to grant that absolution, for not being able to provide Alex with the words that could have convinced him that he was indeed forgiven.

It’s the nature of your work that is leading you into sin.

I could just imagine a priest saying something like that, a grotesque parody of my hypothetical counselor. It seems that your work is inextricably linked with sin, and as long as you perform it you’ll carry the weight of hell on your shoulders. Perhaps you should consider speaking to your superiors to see if you can be reassigned. Or maybe consider taking a holiday somewhere nice and warm this year? That’ll take your mind off all the sin and hell around you.

It was true that we had been worked to the hilt these past couple of years. The orders from Washington had been coming down thick and fast, and perhaps it was the case that there was simply not enough time in between assassination assignments for us to be able to deal with our personal hells and sins.

Not that you could blame Washington entirely, of course. The past two years had been crazy, or rather it seemed like the world had decided to turn crazy round about the time we dispatched a certain former brigadier general. Africa, Asia, Europe: it was the whole world going mad, with civil wars and ethnic conflicts in quick succession. With most of these a UN resolution was quickly enacted. The principle of the day seemed to be “It is a crime against humanity to stand idly by while people kill each other.”

It was as if one day somebody had changed the rules stating that you could no longer have a civil war without genocide.

The last two years alone had witnessed a ridiculous number of worldwide civilian casualties in internal conflicts—something like sixty percent of the number of all casualties of terrorism and civil war since the beginning of the twenty-first century. There were so many new reports of massacres popping up all over the place that journalists were finding it hard to keep track.

As a result, even the most atrocious genocide was getting buried, relegated to some corner of the web. Apart from a few particularly brutal ones that had managed somehow to grab the spotlight, most were simply reported like so much material for the archives, which is of course what all the webpages were when nobody much read them. It had become easier than ever to publish new information and harder than ever to get anyone to actually pay attention to it. The world only wanted the information that it was interested in. Information had become just another capitalist commodity.

The last two years had been a whirlwind for us headhunters. We were literally living a jetset lifestyle as we zipped around the world in high-speed aircraft, so much so that Williams would joke that the theory of relativity ought really to have kicked in by now and that time should pass differently for us than for average Americans. How we laughed.

We worked too hard.

The world made too many demands of us. People placed an unbearable burden of responsibility on our shoulders. If even the quintessential genocidal leader, Adolf Hitler, had been voted in by the people—who must therefore on some level share the responsibility for the massacres committed in Hitler’s name—then how right was it ever going to be to try and pin the blame for the killings in one region on a single individual? And yet this was what we were being asked to do, day in, day out.

If you kill this person, the armed insurgents will lose the unifying figure around which the people rally.

If you kill this person, it’ll be easier for both sides to bury the hatchet.

Washington would choose the target—if you kill him, the genocide is most likely to stop—and our job was to take care of things. This first layer of victims could in a sense be seen as martyrs for peace.

Martyrs. In the two years since that incident I’d been directly involved in five more assassination ops, and on two of those I did the killing myself. In a couple of missions we entered the country covertly using the Intruder Pods; on others we entered the country in full view, as tourists or journalists on ordinary aircraft. Each mission was different, with different targets, and the tactics varied accordingly. However, there was one constant factor.

On four out of the five missions the same name cropped up as one of our targets.

The man who, two years ago, in a certain country in Eastern Europe, worked as the press secretary for a group of armed insurgents who were committing genocide. We realized that his name would inevitably be on our target list. It was unusual to say the least. It was almost as if this person was some sort of tourist traveling from war zone to war zone.

Given that Washington seemed to really have it in for this guy, it was inconceivable that he was just an ordinary civilian. The target data files that came with each mission became successively more detailed. It was as if Washington wanted us to get him but at the same time would reveal as little as possible about him. “Fucking bureaucrats, just give us the information we need from the start and stop dicking us around,” Williams grumbled, and indeed it did seem an extraordinarily petty way of going about our task. Not only that, if Washington’s aim was to keep attention away from the man, then their plan was backfiring spectacularly, as the veil of secrecy only added to the diabolical—or legendary—aura that was starting to build around this figure.

John Paul.

The strikingly nondescript name of the man who had been slipping through our fingers these past two years.

“So who is this elusive John Paul?” Williams spoke in an exaggerated parody of a Shakespearean actor. “The American who the American government loves to hate. The fugitive who is wanted dead, not alive. The tourist whose only interest is in viewing scenes of brutal crimes against humanity. Who can say who this John Paul really is?”

“Just a man, like you or me,” I said.

Williams seemed unhappy at my answer, shaking his head sadly as if to say that I just didn’t get it. “Jeez, not you too. Why’s everyone so boring? I know he’s a man, I’m talking about what else!”

“You do that, buddy,” I said, “but he’s still a man, and that’s all we need to know. Men make mistakes. He’ll make one sooner or later, and then we’ll find him.”

“Find him and kill him, you mean.”

I wasn’t really sure why the happily married Williams was here at all at my bachelor pad on a rare day off, let alone why he ordered in some Domino’s without bothering to ask me and was now speculating out loud to himself. I guess Alex’s funeral yesterday must have hit him harder than he cared to admit.

One of the living room walls was shaded from the sun so that we could watch TV and movies better. I was sitting on the couch with a can of Bud almost spilling from my hand, watching the Allies getting slaughtered over and over again at Omaha beach. I had the first fifteen minutes of Saving Private Ryan on loop. There was a reason behind this: not only were the first fifteen minutes the best part of the movie by far, it was also free to preview on the pay-per-view channel I was now watching.

Were we really thirty years old? There didn’t seem anything particularly grown up about this college lifestyle. I guess that was all part of the American Dream—work and consume, work and consume, get sucked into the cycle, and then you never really had to worry about that sort of thing.

“I guess he had some shit on his mind, huh,” Williams said out of nowhere.

“Yeah, I guess he did,” I said.

“Motherfucker … why didn’t he say anything to us?”

“Ask Alex.”

Williams sighed as if to say that was exactly what he would have done, if he could. “Do you think he really was in that hell that he talked about all the time? Out in the field, in training, back at base when we sat around talking shit …”

“Ha ha, we sat around talking shit? You talked shit and we put up with it, don’t you mean?”

I was only joking, but Williams looked at me, surprised. “You mean you never heard any of Alex’s jokes?”

I couldn’t help glancing away from the screen and at Williams for a second; after all, he was right. I had never heard any of Alex’s jokes.

“They were pretty good, some of them, you know,” continued Williams. “What’s the word. Risqué.”

“What, like when you asked him for a great novel and he gave you a Bible?”

“Nah, that was lame compared to his good stuff about Catholic priests, the Pope, choirboys, that sort of thing. He laid into the God of the Old Testament something good too, how retarded and inconsistent many of the commandments were. Had Leland and me rolling in the aisles, so to speak.”

Huh. Not what I’d expected. I’d always thought Alex had been such a strict Catholic. “I … never had the chance to see that side of him,” I said.

Williams looked at me for a while. The sound of Nazi machine-gun fire filled the room. Then Williams took his empty can of Budweiser and aimed for the trash can on the other side of the room. He was a good ten feet away, but it went straight in nonetheless.

“Damn, I’m one down on you and the pizza hasn’t even arrived yet,” I said out loud. But in reality I was still thinking about Alex. What did we use to talk about? God, mainly, I seemed to remember. I was an atheist but never felt the need to be too militant about it, and had neither the desire nor the ego to try and press my views on any believers in my vicinity. Alex was more or less the same but on the opposite side of the coin, and never felt the need to drag me into the light. It meant that we could discuss God, hell, and the nature of sin in an atmosphere of mutual respect. We had done so regularly.

Hell is here. That night two years ago on the mission wasn’t the first time we had heard Alex use that phrase. I’d heard it from him before, lounging around at base. Then too, Alex had pointed at his forehead and said, “Hell is here, Captain Shepherd. We’re all hard-wired to march straight to hell. It’s in our architecture.”

I’d no idea what sort of personal hell Alex had been cultivating in his own mind, and now I never would. The one thing I did know was that Alex ended his own life in order to escape whatever hell he had been building. A preemptive strike against death, to ensure that he never fell into that hell he was so afraid of. What a fucked-up thing to do, and yet I could see the twisted logic in it, and I could imagine Alex taking himself seriously enough to go through with it.

The doorbell rang.

“Nice, the pizza,” Williams said, jumping up to collect it. He identified himself by pressing his thumb down on the delivery boy’s ID device. Confirmation came back from the military database that held all Williams’s (and my) personal data, and the courier thanked us for our business and left.

“One of the perks of being Forces, huh?” said Williams, picking at the jalapeños even before he had thrown himself back down on the couch. “No need to worry about our data; it’s all taken care of. Not much fun on civvy street where you have to pay for data storage.”

“Sure, but Medicare covers most of it, and in any case, strictly speaking it’s not the army that ‘takes care of’ our data. It’s outsourced to InfoSec, a private firm, about as civilian as you can get. The army just picks up the tab.”

“Is that so? Well, whaddaya know. By the time I had any of my own money to play with, I was already career Forces. I couldn’t tell you what life’s like on the other side.”

“Well, think about it,” I said. “It’s a pretty massive operation, taking down your full medical history, fingerprints, retinal scans, brainwave patterns, facial contours, and other details, not forgetting things like your full credit rating. They have to be kept absolutely secure but also easily accessible, so that any part can be checked at any time. It’s not cheap.”

“That’s it!” said Williams, pointing at me. “John Paul. How is he getting around all this? All those layers of security? We needed our thumbprints just to get hold of these jalapeños here. When I was ten years old you could sometimes just about get away with a signature, but these days you need your fingerprints, your retina, your face scanned, to get anywhere. So how the hell is this John Paul getting from Europe to Africa to Asia and back again?”

I hadn’t thought about that before. You needed ID before you could buy a plane ticket. Or rather, your ID was how you bought a plane ticket, no matter what type of bank account you used, or in what country.

So how on earth was John Paul managing to travel from civil war to civil war?

Then Williams’s cell phone started ringing. I could barely believe my eyes as he shoved his greasy fingers, still dripping with pizza and jalapeño juices, straight into his pocket to retrieve his cell. He pressed the button without qualm. Well, it was his cell, he could do what he liked, but my body couldn’t help but shudder, purely as a physiological reflex. That was Williams for you.

“Roger that, sir,” he said into his phone, sucking the fingers of his other hand as he did so. “Yes, sir. Right away, sir, within the hour.”

Williams cut the call. He used his still-greasy index finger on the wall to call up the command pad. I grimaced. The thin nanolayer membrane on the wall picked up his request and soon the command pad materialized out of nowhere on the wall, ready to accept his oily orders.

Williams tapped the stop button, and Saving Private Ryan stopped streaming. I asked him what happened, but he just sighed …

… and at that very moment my own cell started ringing. I fished it out of my back pocket. Headquarters.

“All units summoned to headquarters,” said Williams.

2

“Take full precautions to avoid being identified along the way.”

Williams and I followed our orders from the Pentagon and proceeded to Washington in our civvy suits. It would have been ridiculous to try to make it there in our uniforms, as our nameplates and decorations would have made us easily identifiable by definition. Basically, the orders were to come as you are, although Williams wasn’t happy about this—he never felt comfortable meeting the top brass unless he was in uniform, he said. As long as you were squeezed into a tight uniform with plenty of medals and ribbons on your chest you didn’t have any tiresome considerations such as fashion or style to worry about. Uniform is just uniform. With your own clothes you always had to worry about other people judging you based on their own values. I don’t like people I don’t know seeing me as an individual, said Williams.

We took an ordinary commercial flight rather than a military plane. It looked like they were trying to keep the general summons as low-key as possible, not just to the general public but within Forces as well. If John Paul was indeed part of a wider organization then it was quite likely they would have a surveillance network in place to monitor any unusual activity among the Secret Service and Special Forces. There was also probably something about the general summons that the Pentagon didn’t want to be broadcasting to the forces at large.

So we did our best to blend in with the crowds as we made it to Washington on our own steam. We were under strict orders not to take a cab from Reagan National, so we took the metro to Pentagon Station and disembarked along with the throngs of the staffers and the other visitors.

It wasn’t my first time in the Pentagon, but nonetheless I couldn’t help but feel like something of a rube.

Watching the crowd disembarking at Pentagon Station it was nigh impossible to distinguish the staffers from the visitors. Due to developments in biometric IDs, clothes had become somewhat less important as a distinguishing feature than they had been years ago.

My ID, for example, was nowhere to be found in my clothes or shoes, of course—InfoSec’s secure servers had done away with the need for all that.

The upshot of all this was that the people here, whether staffers or visitors, had a tendency to rough it somewhat. Take the visitors, civilians mostly. The fashion of the day was “Pentagon style,” which was somewhere between an homage to and a parody of the typical desk-jockey uniforms of way back when—the era when the two worlds stared into each other’s faces in a game of nuclear brinksmanship. So the civilians wore bland, nondescript (or so they seemed at first glance) outfits, and the military staffers either wore similar Pentagon-style clothes or something even more casual. Basically, the likes of me had no chance of telling who was who.

We pushed through the crowds of uniforms, suits, and Birdlegs and walked toward our destination. The Birdlegs, or Birdlegged Porters, always creeped me out, as they looked just like people with no upper bodies.

Walking robot legs made out of synthetic flesh—they’d been part of the furniture these past few years. The Pentagon was a much larger physical space than people gave it credit for—roughly three times the floor space of the Empire State Building, for example, although no one trumpets this fact. Having said that, it was easier to get around by the fact of its pentagonal shape—it was never too far from one point to another. What did slow things down was the constant security checks—we needed to have our palms and fingerprints read, our retinas scanned, and our ears and noses and eyes matched against their database before we reached our appointed conference room.

We arrived at the part of the building where the conference rooms were concentrated. Virtually all of them seemed to be in use, with a variety of signs hanging from each door, indicating the nature of the conference within.

THE COMMITTEE FOR THE LIBERATION OF LIBYA
EAST EUROPEAN STABILIZATION COMMISSION
PREPARATORY COMMISSION FOR HUMANITARIAN
INTERVENTION IN THE SUDANESE QUESTION
THE CONVENTION FOR DISSEMINATION OF BEST
PRACTICE IN COUNTERTERRORISM

All the world’s problems could be found in this little corner of the Pentagon, and presumably some of the solutions too.

Words like liberation were used without compunction; I can’t imagine that the governments of the countries concerned would have been too happy to be discussed in such explicit terms. But unlike the rest of Washington, this wasn’t the place for diplomatic niceties. Indeed, the whole raison d’être of this place was to freely discuss how America was best going to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries.

One of the conference rooms was different, though. The plaque on the door simply read NO ENTRY.

“Here we are,” said Williams, who then spun around to survey the other conference rooms. “Something a bit surreal about a room with a big ‘No Entry’ sign mixed in with all these others, huh?”

“I guess that’s the White Man’s Burden for you yet again,” I said. “If the hegemon wants to rule the world, we just have to man up and shoulder our responsibilities alone, behind closed doors and away from the rest of the world.”

Williams nodded in agreement. “There’s something so Kafkaesque about this whole thing, isn’t there?”

“When have you read any Kafka?” I asked.

Williams shrugged. “Never. I just wanted to see what it’d be like to use the word ‘Kafkaesque’ in a sentence.”

Williams knocked on the door and a man’s voice answered from within: “Identify yourselves using the device attached to the door.”

I pressed my thumb onto the pale green glass pane about the size of a domino; the lock was released and the door opened an inch.

Inside the darkened room a group of men and women were watching a porn flick.

At least, that was what it looked like when we first entered the room. The projector was showing a black man tied up in restraints, and the audience was distinctly middle-aged. They all turned to glance at us as we entered. Amid the dim sea of faces peering at us I spotted our immediate superior officer and boss, Colonel Rockwell, the leader of Special Operations I Detachment.

“My men from Unit G,” said Boss, beckoning to us to fill the empty seats. The men and women sitting at the table were all around Boss’s age or older, so it looked like we were the babies of the group. A man rose from the table to introduce himself.

Undersecretary of defense for Intelligence, he told us. USD (I). In other words, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported to him—we had some civilian bigwigs in our midst, all right. Presumably he was here to speak for the DIA.

Sure enough, intelligence agencies from the CIA to the NSA were also represented to deputy director level, as were numerous members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, including the senate majority leader. To see such a distinguished group of people huddled together in a room to watch a video of a black man being trussed up in what seemed like bondage gear was somewhat disconcerting, to say the least.

“This is a recording taken a week ago,” the USD began explaining. “The fruits of the fourth UNOSOM IV deployment. We identified this man some time ago as being the chief culprit behind the Black Sea Massacre of last October.”

“We arrested him, sir?” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop myself. To capture, rather than simply assassinate, the number one target was contrary to all protocol and operating procedure that had been established by the intelligence community these past years.

“Just so. There were special circumstances,” explained Boss.

The USD continued. “Ms. Erica Sales here captured the man in the recording.”

The woman sitting next to the undersecretary of defense nodded curtly.

Williams leaned forward. “Excuse me, ma’am. The undersecretary referred to you as ‘Ms.’ Does that mean you’re not Forces?”

“If by ‘forces’ you mean those institutions that, at certain rare points in history, have been granted an official monopoly on organized violence by the state, then no, I’m not ‘forces,’ ” replied the woman. She stood to take center stage, and the USD took a seat. As per the civilian fashion of the day, the woman was dressed in Pentagon style. “I’m the director of the third planning department at Eugene and Krupps.”

I sighed inwardly with relief—I had chosen my words well—or at least luckily—when, earlier, I had asked, We arrested him? as opposed to what I really meant: Why didn’t we assassinate him? That would have been too blatant for a civilian—after all, the US did not condone the assassination of foreign leaders, or so the official line still went.

“The latest UNOSOM IV deployment was essentially an outsourced project from its conception,” the USD added in support of Erica Sales. “The forces deployed on the ground at the moment consist almost entirely of civilian contractors. Not just the usual suspects providing security arrangements for the Red Cross and NGOs—the actual execution of the business objectives of suppressing the armed insurgency in the area has also been assigned to independent civilian contractors.”

The execution of the business objectives.

Such an interesting way of putting it. So telling. I was sure there were plenty of people who would be repulsed by such a phrase: peace activists, bleeding-heart liberals, and the like. But the phrase gave me a glimpse into a future I had never previously imagined, and it gave me an illicit thrill. As ever, words could have that effect on me.

I listened to the official DIA line: The business of war was no different, from a certain perspective at least, from that of a pizzeria making pizzas or of a pest control company killing bugs. People didn’t have to fight for ethnic identity or to be a martyr for their religion—fighting could be just an occupation like any other. I thought about this. It was precisely because war was a business that it became logistically possible to budget for it, to plan, to project manage, to place orders with manufacturers and contractors. Was modern warfare really nothing more than a purchase order to underwrite a country’s desire to throw its weight around?

Of course, the idea that war was nothing more than a business laughed in the face of the blood-steeped casualties of war, just as it laughed at me and my job. The execution of war. The idea that war was just so much business to be taken care of. That it could be forecast, controlled, and managed like any other industry.

This line of thought had been developed in Cold War–era think tanks. It was determined that the only way to truly face the horrors of a full-blown nuclear war was to take a step back and consider all the factors as cold, objective facts. The futurist Herman Kahn, founder of the Hudson Institute think tank, advocated what he called “scenario planning” for a possible “hot” nuclear war and in doing so coined the phrase “to think the unthinkable.” Wittgenstein would have approved.

Megadeath.

In order to deal with the apocalyptic reality of modern warfare, for people to be able to cope with dealing with scenes from the Book of Revelation on a daily basis, a certain finesse had become necessary when it came to terminology. Bland, bureaucratic phrases had become the norm, so that people didn’t have to be constantly reminded of the families who had lost their children or bullet-riddled corpses.

“There are a multitude of tasks required in a massive operation like this: preparing and transporting provisions, canteen setup for local distribution, laundry services, constructing new government buildings, building and staffing rehabilitation camps for the former militia, and constructing and staffing prisons for war criminals. In the past we’ve always had to move in on the ground, establish a GHQ, and call in the military engineers. Now everything can be outsourced in advance to private military companies and UN-approved NGOs, and with UNOSOM IV they’ve gone one step further. No longer is it simply about delegating the logistics to civilian contractors, it’s about having them on board at the strategic and tactical planning stages,” explained the undersecretary of defense, who then turned to Erica Sales.

The woman from Eugene & Krupps, evidently some sort of private military company, picked up where he had left off without missing a beat. “There are only three people on the US government payroll in the entire UNOSOM IV operation. Their role is essentially that of resident auditors, there to monitor our performance and judgment. Eugene and Krupps has received similar instructions from the US, British, French, German, Turkish, and Japanese governments, and we’re currently collaborating with a variety of organizations on the ground, from NGOs to the Red Cross to volunteer organizations to colleagues in the same line of work as us—such as Halliburton, who are responsible for supply train maintenance in this case—in order to lay the foundations for a lasting peace in Somalia.”

At this point Erica Sales turned to us directly to give what seemed like a business pitch. “Our company employs a large number of former Special Forces personnel, and they played an integral role in our special projects last year.”

“In other words they’re Snake Eaters, just like us,” Boss explained, his face expressionless. PMCs cherry-picking his top people by luring them away with “offers they couldn’t refuse” was a perennial headache for Colonel Rockwell, but this wasn’t the time or place for him to publicly tug on that particular thorn in his side. I glanced at Erica Sales’s face to try and see if she had picked up on Boss’s irony-laden use of the term “Snake Eater,” but she was giving nothing away.

“Eugene and Krupps had the privilege of using the results of our R and D department’s research to present a plan to the US government last September. A plan to capture alive Public Enemy Number One for the region, a certain Ahmed Hassan Salaad. Using numerous cross-corroborated sources from within the insurgency, we were able to convince the Senate Budget Committee that our plan was viable and stood a good chance of success.”

I was hearing the businesslike spiel from this woman in front of me, and indeed she was painting a picture of an efficient bureaucratic procedure. But I had seen the other side—the reality that lay behind the anodyne, whitewashed words.

The walls painted red with the blood spurting out of the former brigadier general’s throat.

The burning bodies of the bullet-riddled men and women.

The corpse of the little girl who had her pink brains spilling out from the back of her head.

The images piled vividly on top of each other. Erica Sales talked of being able to “present a plan” and had managed to weave all these words and phrases into her speech that seemed singularly inappropriate when describing war. Her words carefully chosen for their blandness had the effect of erasing all the colors of the battlefield, and it was as if in the version of war that she was weaving, nobody ever died and nobody ever killed, as if war was just like any other ordinary civilian enterprise. A whole layer of meaning was being stripped away …

… the layer that allowed you to describe in words the surprise, the astonishment, the sheer freshness of what it was like to be in the middle of battle where anyone and everyone could kill and be killed.

“After that, the Senate Budget Committee presented the précis to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, and once they’d greenlighted it, SOCOM was consulted,” continued the USD.

Colonel Rockwell nodded. “Yes, and our answer—much as it pains me to say it—was that the plan was well conceptualized and completely viable.”

“As such, we had an Extraordinary Grant approved by the budget committee and then assembled a unit to put the plan into effect. Our company suffered no casualties in the execution of the plan, and there were no unanticipated factors that interfered with the smooth running of the operation. Everything proceeded to plan, you could say,” Erica Sales continued.

I looked at the man in the picture again. The top left corner of the screen showed the date and time, currently paused, and the coordinates where the recording was taken. The jerry-rigged interrogation room was a bleak white box, and we had our Ahmed sitting on a chair in the center. By the looks of it, this was right after he had been captured.

The man was trembling.

“Is this man really a key figure in the armed insurgency?” Williams asked bluntly, pointing a finger at the man. “Wouldn’t one of these two-bit dictators be more likely to denounce us for illegally detaining him and for our Western imperialist ways, rather than just sit there trussed up like a trembling chicken?”

“Well, Ahmed Salaad is Oxford educated. He’s familiar enough with the developed world to know that we’re not about to torture a prisoner of war to death.”

“So why does our boy Ahmed look like he’s about to shit his pants, assuming he hasn’t already?”

“Just sit tight and all will be revealed, sonny.” The undersecretary of defense gave the signal, and I could tell that the footage was rolling again only by the fact that the timer in the top left corner had started counting. When all you were looking at was a single, motionless prisoner in restraints, it was hard to tell the difference. Then an off-screen interrogator started speaking to him in English.

Interrogator: We are an organization acting as a legal proxy of the United States of America, and you are being held as our captive. One of the explicit conditions of our contract with the United States government is that we voluntarily adhere to all the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We will be handing you over to the US government in due course, and provided you do not act in a violent manner yourself, no illegal force will be used on your person.

Ahmed: Aren’t you using illegal force now?

Interrogator: Our client, the government of the United States of America, has gone through all the correct channels to ensure the international legitimacy of our actions in apprehending you. United Nations Resolution number 560097 gives us full authority to take whatever steps necessary to bring about the cessation of hostilities in Somalia.

Ahmed: So this is a legitimate military operation. I wonder who gets to decide what exactly it is that makes an act of aggression legitimate.

Interrogator: Perhaps it is the fact that an overwhelming majority of the international community sanctions our actions?

Ahmed: You know, our actions were also sanctioned by our community. We were supported by the vast majority of our people. Everyone wanted it to happen.

“Seems he’s not shy after all, shaking or no shaking,” said Williams, who almost seemed relieved. “Looks like this is just another run-of-the-mill mass murderer, then. A fanatical worshipper of what’s ‘right.’ ”

“Of course he is,” the USD shrugged. “But keep watching—this is where he starts to get all philosophical on us.”

Interrogator: The people can be wrong, of course. Look at how the German electorate voted in Hitler.

Ahmed: Then who’s to say that the people of the world aren’t wrong about interfering in Somalia’s internal affairs?

Interrogator: You have murdered huge numbers of your own countrymen.

Ahmed: We had no choice.

Interrogator: Are you honestly expecting me to accept that in the space of the last six months you have come to believe that there were all these people in your midst that you now just had to kill? I don’t accept that people can just flip a switch and go from living harmoniously with their neighbors to wanting to kill them just like that.

Ahmed: And yet that’s exactly what happened.

Interrogator: But why?

Ahmed: Who knows? All I know is that we had good reason to kill them.

Interrogator: And yet one year ago such a notion would have been inconceivable to you.

Ahmed: That’s right … you’re probably right about that.

Interrogator: But how could such a mindset develop in such a short time? I can just about understand it happening in one person. But for such a large, disparate group of people to suddenly develop such intense hatred that they felt the need to go about systematically murdering their fellow countrymen? Impossible!

Ahmed: I think you’ll find that we’re living proof that it’s very possible.

The clip came to an end.

“It’s estimated that there were a total of forty-six thousand victims of the Black Sea Massacre,” Erica Sales said, her voice dispassionate. “What we have to remember is that Ahmed here was an agent for peace in Somalia up until a year ago. There were bouts of civil unrest in the late twentieth century, but by the middle of the 2000s, that appeared to have been resolved once and for all. Somalia was about as stable a country as you could have found in the region.”

I asked if some foreign military power had intervened to put an end to their previous civil strife. I was embarrassed to say that Somalia barely registered on my radar, and I couldn’t have told you much about it. I’d been too occupied with work and eating pizza and watching Saving Private Ryan previews that my worldview was shaped almost exclusively by a combination of the dossiers handed to me in the line of duty, CNN, and the occasional TV movie.

“No, that was the impressive thing—it was the will of the Somalian people that brought about an end to their civil war,” Sales answered. “Their troubles started in the 1970s and intensified in the 1990s to the extent that the international community tried to intervene once, just after the first Gulf War. The problem was that the operatives—your predecessors in US Special Forces, if you will—failed, and spectacularly at that. After seeing the battered corpses of his key operatives being dragged ignominiously and very publicly through the streets of Mogadishu, President Clinton decided that Africa was beyond hope and abandoned the whole area to its own devices. After 9/11, Somalia was initially suspected of being a hotbed of Al-Qaeda activity, but that soon died down once the full-scale invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were underway. In fact, you could go as far as to say that the world at large had thoroughly forgotten about Somalia and its woes.”

The land the world forgot. You could try and publicize its plight online, but you might as well try and push back the ocean for all the good it would do you. There was too much noise, too many layers, and the plaintive cries for help were all but buried. Help us. Help us. The silent death throes of many a country, sinking under the weight of its own plight. No one gave them a second glance.

“But then, in the 2010s, Somalia started to pull itself up by its own bootstraps,” Colonel Rockwell suddenly interjected, and my eyes flicked over toward him to see him grinning. “You’re looking at someone who was actually there on the ground in Mogadishu back in ’93. I was part of Delta Force back then. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was in Bakaara Market when I heard the news of the Black Hawk going down. I’m one of the spectacularly failed predecessors that Ms. Sales refers to.”

“Forgive me, Colonel, I had no idea. Of course. I meant no offense.” Erica Sales put on a show of having the decency to look contrite.

“None taken. In fact, you’re absolutely right. The operation was a spectacular failure. Not so much militarily, as it happens, but certainly a political failure. In any case, I’ve had a keen personal interest in keeping tabs on developments in Somalia ever since. Not that there’s been much I’ve been able to actually do, other than send the odd donation. Anyway, my understanding of the situation—admittedly gleaned from what I’ve observed from afar—is that during the mid-2010s Somalia did indeed, as Ms. Sales suggests, start to drag itself out of the quagmire of civil war, entirely on its own initiative. The AKs and RPGs that had been the weapons of choice were gradually collected up in a general amnesty; civil order and education systems were restored, and the government, police force, and judiciary were rebuilt. The country found a semblance of order where there had been chaos. It’s as if they were determined to prove Hobbes’s theory wrong: that bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all, was not always the inevitable and final result of civil breakdown. And by ‘they,’ I’m talking about one person in particular who was the driving force behind this recovery: a quiet but passionately determined man.”

“And that man’s name was Ahmed Hassan Salaad,” said Erica Sales.

To be honest, I wasn’t surprised when I heard this news. Just saddened a little, though mostly numb. The men who fought oppression on behalf of the weak, children, women, the destitute, and dying—had a habit of transforming into the next generation of oppressor once they had seized power. Power corrupts. It was a common story, and I couldn’t afford to be surprised or affected too much by a common story.

“It wasn’t an easy path, but Ahmed’s group managed to forge a semblance of peace in Somalia for a while. They established a consensus that however poor, however needy, however destitute the country was, there were still fundamental principles that could not be abandoned. Children went to school and learned to read and write. Jerry-rigged armored trucks no longer patrolled the streets at night, and people could sleep peacefully again. Once that basic level of law and order had been established as a fundamental principle, the country could start focusing on its desperate poverty.”

“What sort of natural resources does Somalia have?” asked Williams.

Erica Sales shook her head. “Virtually none to speak of. It is possible that there are some marginal sources of income that remain undiscovered or untapped, but as of the end of the twentieth century there were no significant resources along the lines of oil, ores, or even agricultural products. Investigations were made and surveys were taken, and no potential prospects for an income stream from exports were discovered.”

“They were screwed, in other words,” Williams continued tactfully.

“Not true—not so long as they had their people.” Erica Sales shrugged. “Humans mean human resources, which means potential labor for hire. The UN’s Millennium Development Goals have fostered a reasonably successful track record of seeing underdeveloped, resource-poor countries achieve a level of economic stability. And the African scenery always has significant potential for tourism, given appropriate development of infrastructure. The problem is—”

“—the country was stuck in a messy war for so long that no one wanted to invest, and all the tourists have long since been scared away, huh?” Williams interrupted.

“Just so,” Erica Sales said with an air of finality and looked over at the undersecretary of defense.

The USD nodded and took the stage again. “Thank you, Ms. Sales, for your thorough briefing. We will now proceed to discuss internal matters.”

“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your time and attention.” With that, Erica Sales turned sharply and left the room without further ado. The audience watched the Pentagon style–attired PMC director as she exited.

“Very well, ladies and gentlemen. I will be taking it from here,” the USD said, clearing his throat in such an exaggerated and pompous manner that I had to bite down on my tongue to keep from laughing.

“So, Somalia had experienced some success in its disarmament drive and was making some progress. But the poverty and hardship continued. Some sort of drastic measure was needed to change the world’s attitude toward the country in order to attract some foreign capital. To convince the world that Somalia was once again a civilized country with an educated and willing workforce and a safe place for tourists to visit. After all, all this was true, up until a year ago at least. But it wasn’t enough that it was true—it had to be seen to be true.”

“Public relations, in other words?” I asked.

The USD nodded. “Exactly. Ahmed had studied International Relations at the University of Oxford, and he recognized just how powerful a factor PR was in the creation of Bosnia and Herzegovina out of the ruins of the Yugoslav Wars.”

Hope is a powerful weapon, but exceedingly difficult to wield effectively. Wasn’t that written in some book somewhere? Well, the American people were going to have to believe in Somalia, believe that there was something to be hopeful about, if Somalia were to succeed as a nation. The American politicians in Washington were going to have to believe, as were the news networks. Lobbyists would have to be mobilized. How to achieve all this? Step onto the scene a certain PR specialist who was prepared to take Somalia on as a client.

A press conference was held in Washington. Somalia’s cabinet ministers were trotted out. They were granted an audience with key US political figures. The dire straits of the Somalian economy were impressed upon them. Articles were written for the media. The word got out. And so the wheel started turning, and the powerful weapon called hope started creaking into action—at least, that was how the world was supposed to work …

“They needed to get the word out one way or another. The world needed to know that the fighting in Somalia was over, and that Somalia was now a progressive, forward-looking country with massive potential that just happened to be desperately poor at the moment. And that’s when Ahmed made the decision to hire a former PR man as press advisor to the Somalian government,” explained the USD.

He didn’t need to say any more—I could see what was coming next. “John Paul, of course,” I said out loud.

The whole room seemed to swivel toward me. I hadn’t particularly intended—or expected—to draw focus, but apparently everyone was surprised at my prescience.

“Exactly. And I’m sure, Captain Shepherd, that you know exactly what happened next after John Paul entered Somalia.”

Think of a murder case. Except the murderer is a country.

A reporter interviews the next-door neighbor for a sound bite. “He was a quiet type,” Mrs. Smith (56) says. “His lawn was neat and trimmed, and he always took the trash out on time. Never in a million years would we have imagined him doing a thing like this. It’s such a shock to the entire neighborhood …”

That was the best analogy they could give us. I nodded, listening to the USD’s words. “Yes, in other words, that’s where we are now. The country was plunged back into chaos in a heartbeat. A Hobbesian war of all against all. Chaos. Lines were drawn: the killers and the killed. And then—”

“—the famous scenes on the beaches of the Black Sea with the thousands of corpses like so many beached whales.” Williams finished the story. The room was heavy with silence.

John Paul.

It was pretty clear now that he wasn’t just some tourist with a bizarre penchant for seeing civil war zones. Well, it had been clear from the start to those at HQ who had given us the command to assassinate him; this was just the first time anyone had properly explained the situation to us.

This man who we’d tried and failed to kill on numerous occasions had somehow been a catalyst for genocide in locations throughout the world.

For some reason, when this man went into a country, it plunged into chaos.

For some reason, when this man went into a country, the blood of innocents would pour forth.

“The time span for all of this was a mere six months,” the USD continued. “Now, the silver lining was that these countries that attracted nothing but the world’s indifference when they were peaceful did at least manage to capture the world’s attention when the massacres were as graphic and vivid as they were. With public opinion being what it was and with a presidential election looming, the US’s response was all but inevitable. The problem was, the US Army was already massively overcommitted, thanks to all the existing civil wars and terrorist cells and ethnic conflicts around the world, and was in danger of spreading itself too thin to be effective. That’s how, for the first time in modern warfare, outsourcing on a massive scale became the norm.”

“The US forces are being worked to the bone,” interjected one of the Congressmen. “This sudden escalation in overseas conflicts is simply unnatural, that’s what it is. All these countries that have pulled themselves away from their violent pasts and were looking forward to bright futures suddenly seemed to collapse. It’s one step forward, ten steps back! Even countries with absolutely no history of racial tension suddenly find their citizens at one another’s throats. We’ve commissioned all the major think tanks to analyze the situation to come up with some sort of explanation, but so far they’ve been firing blanks.”

“And yet you’ve all known the answer from the start, haven’t you?” I asked. “From before I received orders to assassinate John Paul?”

Nobody said a word.

I didn’t move. My eyes were fixed on the men and women around the table.

The sea of faces also remained motionless, except for almost imperceptible twitches. Who could be used as the scapegoat? None of them wanted to be the first to speak in response to my question, lest a wrong answer cost them their job. Such were the dynamics of Washington.

Eventually a woman in a navy blue suit broke the abstruse Washingtonian silence. “That’s right. We attempted to capture John Paul a number of times prior to issuing the assassination order.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Williams asked bluntly, pointing a finger at the woman’s face. The woman was visibly taken aback by his bluntness and lack of respect but said nothing to object—neither did Boss or the undersecretary of defense.

“CIA. Overseas is our territory after all,” the woman in the blue suit replied.

“No it’s not. It’s not your ‘territory.’ The world is what it is, a giant mess of a place full of confusion and chaos. Thinking that it’s somehow ‘your territory’ is what’s caused this whole clusterfuck in the first place.”

Despite the extraordinary words that were coming from his mouth, Williams was absolutely calm. He wasn’t riled up or trying to pick a fight, particularly. He just had no time for amateurs.

Colonel Rockwell had to rein him in. “Watch your tongue, Captain.”

“Apologies, sir. I take my words back fully, although not the sentiment behind them. If there’s anyone who’s being rude here, it’s the lady over there. Calling the world her territory is disrespectful to the rest of the world and disrespectful to us.” Williams seemed to accept his reprimand but showed no remorse for his outspokenness. We were the ones who had been fighting for the US abroad after all, unlike the CIA, who basically played teddy bears’ picnic with their “paramilitary” activities. What right did they have to call the world their territory? I could figure what Williams was thinking.

The USD urged the CIA woman to continue, and she did so without changing her blank expression.

“As you say, we did indeed fail on a number of occasions to capture John Paul. In our defense, it hadn’t yet been established at that stage that he was instrumental in fanning the flames of conflict around the world. There was a correlation, but there were numerous factors involved at that stage, and all we could say for sure was that he seemed to be cropping up in the shadows quite a lot whenever there was some sort of atrocity. It was only when the level of the atrocities started intensifying exponentially that we started receiving reliable intel confirming that John Paul was at the heart of all this.”

I wondered how many innocent people had been murdered in John Paul’s wars and atrocities in the time it had taken the CIA lady to explain this to us with her arms folded in front of her.

Just one single man, traveling around the world, leaving a bloodbath in his wake. He seemed to find his way to the heart of power—government or insurgency forces, it didn’t seem to matter to him, so long as he could whisper his seductive spell into the ears of those who had the power; and then, as if by magic, piles of dead bodies would start appearing.

Was that a credible explanation of events?

I thought back. Two years ago, when I had killed the ex-brigadier general. Why? Why? Why has my country ended up like this? The former brigadier general hadn’t been asking a hypothetical question born of regret, he’d been genuinely trying to work out what had happened. I remembered his expression when I confronted him; even though he knew what his motives were, what he was trying to achieve by causing those atrocious scenes of mass murder, he didn’t know why.

I remembered that expression and I saw it now, on a different face, right in front of me: the trembling face of Ahmed Salaad projected onto the wall.

“So, Boss, why have we been summoned here today?” I asked. Colonel Rockwell adjusted his beret as he looked around at the other people in the room to secure their tacit consent to continue. Having received it, he said in a calm voice:

“It’s been decided that we’ll be putting into effect a plan to assassinate John Paul.”

Williams frowned. Uh, wasn’t that already decided a couple of years ago when you first sent us in to try and kill him? he obviously wanted to say.

I, on the other hand, immediately grasped what Boss meant. “A search and kill op, sir? Will we be trailing him?”

“Exactly.”

A trailing op. Find him and hunt him down like a dog. A team of us were going to be dispatched into the thick of a war zone, armed to the teeth with the latest gadgets, primed with all the prep work the intelligence community could throw at us, and then left to it.

“It’s thought that John Paul is currently entrenched somewhere in Europe. Now, Intelligence Corps assassination work has, of late, been producing spectacular results. In particular, Unit G’s stock has never been higher. There’s only one fly in the ointment, and that’s John Paul.”

“So you want us to go undercover? Like spies?” I asked.

“Exactly,” the navy-blue-suited CIA lady spoke up. “As much as we hate to admit it, the CIA simply doesn’t have the experience or the track record that you do at assassination, and even our best operatives simply don’t match up to your level of toughness and training. We did consider the option of having one of our moles on the ground do the work, one of the local radicals, but this is an extremely delicate and precisely planned operation, and we need to do everything we can to maximize our chance of success. Once upon a time this was the sort of plan we would have put in the hands of the Green Berets or Delta Force. As it is, Special Operations I Detachment is undoubtedly the most suited to this line of work.”

“Most of all, the important thing to remember is that this is a preemptive strike,” Colonel Rockwell continued, turning to look directly at us. “So far, it’s always been a case of a massacre occurring followed by Intelligence determining that John Paul has somehow been involved, before finally sending us in to try and tidy up the mess. Considered from this perspective, our missions in the past have essentially been nothing more than glorified police work after the event.

“This time, though, it’s different. This may be a tracking mission, but it’s not a simple case of finding a target of opportunity and taking him out. When the chance presents itself, you’re not just to kill him—you’ll need to discover the seeds of the next genocide he’s planting.”

Colonel Rockwell finished speaking, and the undersecretary of defense took over. “You will be appointed staff officers and temporarily attached to the Intelligence Department of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

No surprises, given how closely integrated the two intelligence departments of the DIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were. “In other words, under your command,” I said.

“You’re being assigned to J2,” said Boss, “but as this is a joint operation between Intelligence and DIA, we’ll be able to provide you with comprehensive support from our end too. This is a crucial mission after all. There are a lot of people relying on our success.

“In short, gentlemen, to coin a phrase, you could well be our only hope. Our last line of defense before another massacre takes place. Shit, even as we speak, what’s to say that John Paul isn’t trying to turn a country somewhere in the world into a new living hell?”

3

Corpses.

The crater in the ground was like a giant’s stockpot, packed full of the remnants of charred people.

Humans have a higher proportion of subcutaneous fat than most mammals, which means that when they’re heated up good and proper, their skin crisps up like pork crackling, and were it not for all the other things that inevitably end up getting burnt to a crisp with them, they would give off a similar savory aroma. Burning corpses get their characteristic foul odor from things like clothes and hair in particular. Were it not for those, burning humans wouldn’t smell much different from any other meaty barbecue.

All these thoughts ran through my head as I sat on the edge of the still-warm crater and surveyed the mass of human flesh that spread out before me. A thought flickered through my mind: the carnage in front of me was really no different from a meal that someone, somewhere was about to eat. As I brooded, one of the corpses opened its eyes, its eyelids cracking as it did so. Its skin and bone and flesh were all burnt to a crisp, and the eyes that stared out through the eye sockets made the corpse look like something from a Hammer horror movie.

“I’m all burnt to a crisp,” my mom muttered, looking at her charred hands.

“Yep, like a crispy Peking duck,” I said.

“I wonder if I taste as good as Peking duck,” my mother said with a laugh. As she did so, a crack appeared in her hardened cheeks. She was like a painting that had been in the sun for too long.

This was really funny. “Looking at you like this, Mom, I can’t help think that you’re nothing more than a pile of flesh and bones.”

“Manners, manners! After all, you’re not exactly much more yourself, are you?” Mom seemed offended. “If a corpse is just a pile of flesh and bones, then how can you pretend that a person who just happens to be alive is any more than that either? We’re all just objects.”

“Just objects, huh? Try telling that to Williams. Better still, try using him as an object … what, like an ashtray, maybe?”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t be too happy at first. But he’d come around sooner or later.”

Warplanes were circling the sky at a dangerously low altitude; they reminded me of the underbellies of great whales. There was an occasional smattering of gunfire, and the smell of gunpowder permeated the area.

“He’d come around to what?” I asked. “The idea that he’s just an object?”

“Yes, that he’s just a piece of meat, O-son-of-mine-who-calls-himself-an-atheist-but-can’t-quite-bring-himself-to-accept-one-of-the-central-tenets-of-his-so-called-belief-system.”

I laughed. O son of mine. That’s what Mom always used to call me when we played our high-falutin’ language games. Putting me in my place for being the innocent that I was.

“ ‘I am naught but flesh, and the flesh profiteth nothing,’ ” I countered.

“Naught but flesh, maybe, but don’t take that as a bad thing. Your body is not a prison, you know.”

I nodded. Because Mom was always right. If she said something was so, it must be so.

“Look, your friends are here to pick you up,” she said.

There was a roar. A transport craft was descending from the skies, and the blast was whipping up the air around us, causing the trees around the crater to blow this way and that. I lifted a hand to my face to shield myself from the debris that swirled in the air. The plane’s hatch opened, and there was Williams, beckoning me toward him.

“See you later then, Mom.”

“See you later, O son of mine.”

I waved goodbye to my charred mother.

My mother waved her blackened matchstick arm back at me.

The personnel carrier started its ascent. I lay back in my recliner seat and before I knew it I was asleep and the crater full of corpses was no more than a speck in the distance, a memory.

I fell asleep on a passenger craft in the world of the dead; when I awoke it was on a passenger craft in the world of the living.

My visits to the land of the dead had become more frequent since Alex’s death. So much so that I’d even considered seeing one of the counselors that the forces supplied for us. I hadn’t quite gotten around to it, though, and I probably wouldn’t. After all, it wasn’t like it was affecting my work in any way. Basically, I’d resigned myself to the nightly call of the deadlands.

The scenes in which Mom had something to tell me were really just an echo of my childhood. Mom never remarried and brought me up by herself. She used to talk to me about anything and everything. My abnormal interest in literature and words, my teenage obsession with movies, all were due to Mom’s influence on me. In other words, the scenes in the land of the dead were really just like the sort of everyday interactions we had when I was growing up, at dinnertime or just lounging about in the living room. Apart from the obvious fact that Mom was now dead, of course.

Mom watched over me constantly. Her greatest fear was for me to be out of her sight. I guess she thought I might disappear. Just like my father did. People could disappear in the most inexplicable of ways. My mom was terrified that would happen with me.

I was fairly young when I cottoned on to this fact about my mom, and I guess I did my best to try and assuage her fears. I became a careful child. I took pains never to get into fights and always paid close attention to how other children spoke and acted to make sure I kept under the radar. I never stood out, never rubbed anyone the wrong way. On those rare occasions that something did happen, I made absolutely sure that Mom would never find out. I made sure she had nothing to fear. To constantly prove that she didn’t need to worry, that I wasn’t about to suddenly disappear. Reassuring Mom had always been my number one priority, dawn through dusk, kindergarten through college.

I guess I joined the forces, and put in for Special Forces to boot, because I’d grown bored with myself. I applied to the brand-spanking-new Intelligence Department, put myself forward for the fifty-to-one selection procedure for their new, experimental Special Forces, and passed. Strangely enough, my mom didn’t have too much to say about that. She smiled and said, You have to follow your own path.

Despite the perilous line of work I was now in, ultimately it wasn’t me who was to suddenly disappear one day like my father did. It was my mother, she who had spent her days worrying about me disappearing. And now her body was in a cemetery in Washington and her soul visited me every night to talk to me in the land of the dead.

For now though, when I opened my eyes the land of the dead disappeared, and I found that the aircraft was about to land. I looked out the window and saw the surface of the plane pulsing and rippling grotesquely, just as the surfaces of Intruder Pods did. As with the Intruder Pods, the wings of these Meatplanes could twist and contort in the air to absorb and adapt to the worst of the air currents, making for a supremely stable flight.

I wondered how much flesh there was on one of these giant wings. These aircraft weren’t called Meatplanes for nothing. I felt like stripping the wing down to its bones with a knife to see what the flesh was like underneath, to see the blood dripping from its carcass.

I swallowed a Regionsync pill to reset my body clock. These pills always reminded me of the pill women take to regulate their fertility. Still, I had no desire to meet up with Williams while I was suffering from jet lag, so I gulped it down.

The Meatplane touched down gently on the runway at Ruzyne Airport. Its wings contorted—pretty alarming, if you’re watching it for the first time—and the forward momentum of the plane was absorbed. It was like being inside a bird who uses its wings to elegantly guide its landing onto a tree branch. As a result, these Meatplanes could land on the narrowest strip of runway, decelerate massively, and yet the people inside would barely feel a thing—g-force was kept almost constant. This was also helped by the polymer seats going into shock absorption mode, of course. An electric current subtly modified the seats on a macromolecular level to turn them into something like giant mushrooms, and by the time the seats returned to normal, we passengers were greeted by the smiling faces of the cabin crew guiding us toward the exits. I always enjoyed my flights on these sorts of civilian planes—they beat the hell out of those surreal military stealth craft on the comfort stakes.

Prague. City of culture. City of a hundred spires.

I left Ruzyne Airport and took the metro to emerge on an overcast morning.

“Which genius’s bright idea was it to use Charles Bridge as the dead drop?” Williams asked.

We were standing on the bridge watching the amber clouds cast their shadow over Vltava River.

Williams had been late for our rendezvous, of course, and as usual was just trying to bluster his way out of it. I nodded and said nothing. He did sort of have a point: Charles Bridge was indeed overloaded with tourists. It was as if some mob had decided to get together to try and sink the bridge using its own body mass.

Having said that, Williams was still a paid-up veteran of the elite Special Forces, and his job over the last few years had, to a greater or lesser extent, consisted of playing “Where’s Waldo?”—tracking down and identifying his target from the surrounding rabble. Finding a person for a prearranged rendezvous was surely easier than when you were trying to neutralize them. On a scale of one to ten, the likelihood that Williams had simply been a bit lazy and arrived late was probably an eleven. As always. I knew from experience that it wasn’t worth calling him out on it, though—not unless I wanted to get into a heated debate that would soon descend into a farce.

I asked Williams how things were. Williams scowled—he seemed almost disappointed that I wasn’t challenging him. He had obviously rehearsed his story in his mind and had been ready to stand his ground.

“Not bad. Same old, same old,” he said.

“ ‘Same old, same old’? Williams—you just got here forty-eight hours before I did!”

“And there it is. Dude, I knew you were annoyed about having to wait. I told you, it’s not my fault, there are too many people on this stupid—”

That’s our Williams for you …

“Williams, have we really come to Prague to act out a Monty Python sketch?”

“Well, it’s not like we’ve got anything better to do. John Paul ain’t here.”

Huh. Well, it looked like we were in the middle of some sort of comedy after all. Or at least a shit-show. Not that I was too surprised; this was hardly the first time we’d been sent halfway around the world to a place where John Paul wasn’t.

“Isn’t here? Does that mean he was here up until—”

Williams cut me off. “Yeah, the morning I arrived I had a coffee with the latest CIA genius in a Starbucks. ‘Unfortunately, sir, we appear to have temporarily let him out of our sights.’ Fucking Langley brat. Straight out of Harvard, wet as piss behind the ears, not even enough Czech to read the sports pages, and still he’s landed himself a nice little posting at the embassy here.”

“Huh. Says all you need to know about Langley, putting a greenhorn like that on such an important target.” I sighed, but truth be told I was hardly surprised. These days the CIA was little more than a throwback to a bygone era, a vestigial bastard child of the Cold War. As had just been proven, again. And, yet again, it was up to us in Intelligence to pick up the slack and clean up after their latest operational clusterfuck.

“Yeah. You know those spy novels where the agents can always rely on the desk jockeys? M to cover your back, Q to give you just the right gadget at the right time? I say we burn those books. Every time Langley fucks up, we burn them all.”

Williams was only half joking—I could tell he was seriously pissed. With good cause, to be fair. The CIA just can’t get the staff anymore. I surveyed the statues of the saints that lined the bridge. One of them in particular caught my eye: the saint had a number of samurai-like figures kneeling at his feet, waiting to be baptized. It was like a scene from a Kurosawa movie. I knew that quite a lot of these statues were of famous Jesuits, so I guessed that this one was probably one of the missionaries who first proselytized Christianity in Japan.

I wondered how this saint could have gotten his message across when he was a stranger in a strange land. How did he communicate with the Japanese? What did they understand by his reverential treatment of God? What did they even understand by the word “God”? How was it translated?

“Dude, are you even listening to me?” Williams interrupted my reverie.

“Sure, sure. I was just thinking about that wet-behind-the-ears CIA brat. How he feels in a country where he barely has enough of the local language to get by.”

“What? Fuck him and the fucking horse he rode in on. And fuck Langley for not sending some fucker who speaks the fucking lingo.”

“Indeed. Anyhow. What now?” I asked.

Williams shrugged. “Look up John Paul’s woman, I guess.”

“He has a woman?” The first I’d heard of this.

“A woman John Paul visited, at least. That’s how the Secret Service knew he was in the area.”

“Shit, sounds like we’d have captured him already if they’d been doing their job properly.”

“Well, the CIA say that they’ve been keeping a close watch on her. Not that I believe anything those idiots say anymore. But that’s what they say. And according to them, John Paul’s recent appearance by her side was the first incident since they’ve been tracking her.”

“What’s the probability John Paul has already left the Czech Republic?”

“Dunno. Hard to say. His ID doesn’t seem to register at airports after all. Maybe he left, maybe he’s still hanging around. I guess our best bet is to hope he’s still here and keep a close watch on the woman,” Williams said half-heartedly. He was right, of course; there wasn’t exactly anything else we could do, according to procedure. That didn’t make it any better, though.

“Hey, Clavis. This is just like that Kafka play, no? Except in our case it’s Waiting for John Paul.”

Williams was being uncharacteristically literary again, or at least was trying to be, so I felt I needed to point out two things. Number one, Waiting for Godot was by Beckett and not Kafka. And number two, Godot never actually appears in the play, leaving the two protagonists to speculate about his whereabouts with an ever-increasing sense of futility. Don’t jinx us, in other words.

“Meh. It’s all Kafka to me,” said Williams.

4

Gregor Samsa woke up one morning to discover that he had turned into some sort of disgusting insect.

Kafka had written these words in German.

The Hapsburg dynasty that once ruled the Czech lands had wanted German to be the lingua franca of their empire. German was decreed the second official language in all Czech lands in 1627 and was gradually adopted in all governmental offices, while Czech became the language of the peasantry. German remained an official language until the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Fast-forward thirty-something years after the collapse and the Czech lands were, for the second time in living memory, one with their Slovak neighbors. This time they were the Czechoslovak Socialistic Republic, although still commonly referred to by their pre-WWII name of Czechoslovakia.

Anyhow, that’s why you could buy maps in German in this country, and that’s why there were plenty of Slovak-speaking natives. Not that there was much by the way of difference between Czech and Slovak—it was perfectly possible for two people to have a conversation where one was speaking Czech and the other Slovak. And the older generation, in particular, were in the habit of peppering their Czech-Slovak conversations with a liberal sprinkling of German nouns.

So there were still three languages in this country, really. There was only one official language now, Czech, but there were plenty of landmarks that had a number of names, which could be pretty confusing for tourists when they wanted the Opera House and were given directions to the Státní Opera by one local, the Smetana Theater by another, and the Opernhaus by yet another without realizing that they were all one and the same building.

The many place names, and the many languages spoken by the old folk …

Czech was a hard enough language as it was without having to worry about “interference” from Slovak on one side and German on the other.

“So I suppose that Czech could be considered something of a ‘hard language’ compared to your run-of-the-mill romance languages.” Lucia Sukrova was explaining all this to me as she served tea. “Czech is a Slavic language, just like Russian and Croatian, and like all Slavic languages there are a huge number of possible noun declensions. Some nouns have over two hundred possible different forms, depending on which way you count them.”

“That’s very interesting, ma’am. So you could spend a whole month on a single word and not master it,” I observed, placing a slice of lemon in my tea.

“Yes, although admittedly that’s an extreme case.” Lucia smiled. “But the really tricky thing about Czech isn’t so much the nouns per se, as the difficulty of getting them out in the correct order to say exactly what you mean, and in an accent that comes even close to a native speaker’s. Did you know, for example, that some Czech words don’t have any vowels in them? How’s this for a sentence: Strč prst skrz krk. And we even have our own unique phoneme, the Ř. Linguists call it the raised alveolar non-sonorant trill, and it’s a rare bored housewife who can master that with any degree of panache, I can tell you.”

“I see,” I said.

“That’s why it’s hard to teach this sort of direct interpersonal communication over the Internet. There’s just too much you miss, too many subtleties.”

She was absolutely right, of course. Web-based learning could only ever get you so far, even with the advanced e-learning technologies we had at our disposal these days. Virtual reality learning environments were the order of the day for most of our classroom training sessions, but language learning was still firmly a face-to-face, offline experience, precisely for the reasons she named.

Lucia Sukrova’s livelihood was teaching Czech to foreigners. We were in her studio, a spacious room in her traditional apartment in the center of Prague’s old town, where all her students came to study.

“I have to confess, ma’am, that I’m relieved that your English is so good. You speak like a native, unlike some language teachers I’ve worked with in the past.”

“Well, English does seem to be the hegemonic language these days, after all …” Lucia smiled. If this was a subtle dig, for once it didn’t seem to bother me, even though I was usually pretty weary of having my country’s foreign policy rubbed in my face by disgruntled locals.

“I’m sure it must seem that way to you, ma’am, although you might be interested to know that according to the latest web traffic analysis that might not strictly be true. More content is created by Japanese bloggers than in English, for example. Perhaps because the Japanese like to have a virtual outlet for their opinions and feelings that they suppress in everyday life.”

My cover is that I’m in advertising, recently transferred over here to manage a big new account. Here to be a pioneer in the burgeoning interstitial market. To infest and infect beautiful Czech websites with opportunistic pop-ups of airbrushed models proclaiming their undying loyalty to a diet pill du jour. And these sorts of ads did, as it happened, have a tendency to appear on both English and Japanese blogs.

“Is that so? I have to admit I can’t really relate to that on a personal level, as I’ve never felt the compulsion to document my life for the whole world to read. But if what you say is true, I imagine that the web is drowning in a sea of words.”

“Did you ever keep a diary?” I asked, trying to find a way to relate the conversation to her.

“Hmmm … yes, I believe I did. Some time ago, though.”

“And if you don’t mind my asking, ma’am, where did you learn your English?”

“In the States. I studied linguistics,” she said.

“So you could say you’re a master of words?” I asked.

“Hardly. If I were so good with words I’d have ensnared a man or two to look after me by now, no? I studied the academic framework of language, not its sensual power.”

“Sure, you could describe Noam Chomsky as many things, but sexy is probably not one of them,” I joked.

“I don’t know about that. Not for most people, you’re right, but there are some oddballs in this world who feel the sensuous beauty in his work. Take me, for instance.”

Lucia smiled again. She sure liked to smile, I thought. And not just any old smile. Hers wasn’t the superficial smile of someone trying to make polite conversation. It was the smile of someone who loved words and loved communicating exactly what she meant in her heart. When she smiled she looked so much younger than the thirty-three-year-old she was. When she smiled, she could have probably passed for a teenage girl.

“Where were you based in the States?” I continued.

“I was at grad school in Massachusetts.”

“MIT?” I asked, and she nodded. “Wow! Impressive! I had no idea.”

Not true. I had every idea. It was my job to seem impressed by this piece of information, as if it were new to me, as if Intelligence hadn’t profiled this woman down to the last minute detail. It was my job as a spy to be able to pull off this sort of lie convincingly. Normally I could. Right now, though, I had no idea whether or not she was convinced.

“It’s not that impressive really. It happened to be the only school where I could continue my research in my field, and so that’s where I went.”

“Oh, really? What sort of research was that exactly?”

The conversation that had been flowing so naturally up until this point now hit a wall. This was one question too many for a casual conversation, evidently, although Lucia did her best not to show it.

Who’s asking? she must have wanted to say.

Instead, she chose her words carefully, blandly. “I suppose you could say it was mainly to do with how language can exert influence on people’s behavior.”

“You mean linguistic relativity? Like how Eskimos have over twenty different words for snow, and how the very existence of these words affects their worldview?”

“You mean the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? No, not quite.” Lucia smiled again. And truth be told I was relieved. Not so much because I was worried about her being suspicious, but because I didn’t like looking at her face when she frowned. She was a beautiful woman when she smiled.

“Actually, the story about the Inuit is something of an urban legend. The number of words that they apparently have for ‘snow’ seems to increase every time the story’s told. When Boas first reported his findings it was four, Whorf spoke of seven in his hypothesis, and the seven became ‘almost ten,’ ‘over ten,’ and so on and so forth, until you get ‘the Eskimos have a hundred different words for snow!’ being reported as fact in National Geographic. Scratch a little deeper, though, and you’ll see that they really just have a handful. Not that different from English, when you think about it: ‘snow,’ ‘sleet,’ ‘slush,’ ‘hail,’ and so on.”

This I didn’t know. I’d put up with plenty of dinner party snobs in my time, idly jibber-jabbering about how the Inuits have such different realities from us, don’t you know, and how their lives must be so much more real, y’know, being centered around snow and all that. And so I guess it was these idle gossips who were the carriers of the Eskimo meme from one middle-class dinner party to another.

I wondered how many words the Inuits would allegedly have for snow by the time the meme finally ran its course. A hundred? Two hundred? More?

“Sadly, real life tends to be a little less exciting than all that,” Lucia continued. “And contrary to popular belief, there seems to be very little correlation between language and people’s perception of reality. No matter where you’re born or where you grow up, reality is just that little bit too resilient to be buffeted about by language. The thought always comes before the language used to express the thought.”

“And yet I’m thinking in English right now.”

“Well, it might seem like that, because your reality is one that incorporates the English language into itself. But actually your thought process consists of a number of different factors, and language is just one of the tools at its disposal. Language is a subset of thought, if you will, not the other way around. Trying to argue that people think with language just because we have a keenly developed linguistic sensibility is a bit like saying that beavers have evolved to think with their teeth.”

“That’s an … interesting analogy.” I wasn’t being sarcastic. I had to acknowledge that there was a certain attractiveness to the idea that reality was determined by words and that it was the meanings that people attached to words that acted as a filter to construct their own versions of reality. But at the same time, something had always struck a false chord with me about this theory. I remembered back in high school our English teacher proudly relating the story of Eskimos having many different words for snow (twenty, was it, in that telling?) and feeling profoundly uncomfortable about this. After all, words were real, they were bundles of reality that existed in the outside world, independent from me. I remembered wondering how they could possibly influence my thought in that way when they weren’t really part of me.

“What sort of units do you imagine a mathematician or a theoretical physicist thinks in? When they first conceptualize their ideas?” Lucia asked me.

I answered that I supposed they would use more numbers and numerical formulae.

Lucia shook her head. “You would have thought so—but Einstein’s actually on record saying that it was always a visual image that came to his mind in the first instance. Other so-called geniuses have said similar things. That it’s actually a sort of diagram that comes to mind first, and it’s only by manipulating that diagram in their minds that they’re able to come up with formulae as the output.”

“That’s hard to believe. To understand, I mean. How do you visualize an imaginary number, or infinity for that matter?” I asked.

“Hard to believe for you or me. That’s because our realities are different from those genius scientists. So, you see, it’s probably more accurate to speak of different realities as being determined by thought processes, not language as such.”

“May I ask you a question?” I decided to press the point. “What are words to you? If they’re not objects that determine our realities, then what are they there for?”

“Tools for communication, of course. Or … organs, maybe, I guess?”

It was at this moment that I realized that Lucia’s language had shifted in register—slightly, subtly, but definitely. At the start of our conversation, she had been talking to me as a prospective student and customer—and that was supposed to have set the boundaries of the conversation.

But here she was now, enjoying her conversation with me.

“Organs?” I said. “You mean, as in body parts? Kidneys and bowels and arms and eyes?”

“Exactly.”

“But isn’t language a human abstraction?”

“So are you saying that abstractions can never be real? Do you believe that there’s no way the human soul could be contained in a pitiful little organ such as the brain, maybe?” Then Lucia appeared to stop herself. “Oh, forgive me if I’ve overstepped the mark. You are, perhaps, a religious man?”

I thought of Alex.

Hell is here.

Alex pointing at his own forehead.

“No, I’m an atheist,” I said.

Alex had been a religious man. He had believed in God.

And that same Alex had said that hell was inside our minds. Hidden among the folds and creases of our brains.

“That’s a relief. I know this sort of conversation can be offensive to some people.”

I laughed. “Lucky escape for you, I guess. Besides,” I pointed out, “if I were the Bible-thumping type, you would have already offended me earlier with your talk of souls and whatnot.”

“You’re right. I guess I’m the sort of person that has to rely on having lucky escapes.” Lucia laughed. “Anyway, what I was saying was that language is one of the fruits of evolution, of humanity’s natural tendency to adapt to the environment. Humans had to acquire the ability to somehow compare themselves with other things; that way they could run crude mental simulations to try and forecast the outcome of a particular action or interaction. Human thought processes—or maybe you could call it raw emotion—came up with a way of differentiating our selves from the other: the ego, they call it in psychology. After all, without having an idea of the self, you have no way of comparing yourself with the outside world, no way of making any sort of comparisons or judgment calls. But with a sense of self, man was able to avoid all sorts of danger through his ‘forecasts.’ You could say that language developed as a way of trading these ‘forecasts’ with other similar beings. This allowed us to build up a mental database of information without necessarily having to experience it firsthand, and this in turn further reduced our exposure to danger and allowed us to adapt even more perfectly to a wide variety of environments.”

“So you’re saying that language is basically just a product of evolutionary adaptation?”

“Yes. Just like our other organs.”

So the very fact that I was here now, talking to Lucia, was nothing more than an incidental byproduct of evolutionary adaptation of the brain? Was language really no more than an organ, like an elephant’s trunk or a giraffe’s neck?

Language was indeed a precise and delicate instrument, I supposed. It occurred to me that even though we now had technology such as giant artificial flesh Meatplanes and the like, we still didn’t have a way of fully replicating the complex filtration systems of human kidneys and livers on a miniature scale. Those organs were, in their own way, just as precise and delicate, as exquisite, as language. For medical science, the perfect artificial organ was still some way over the horizon. When even our internal organs still contained countless mysteries hidden to us, what right did we have to think of language as being this unique, divine gift?

I needed to know who I was. I needed to use words to communicate with other people. Surely then, language was just another inevitable evolutionary process. Language was part of my flesh. An organ called the self. An organ called language.

“If that’s the case, isn’t it a particularly human conceit, this idea that living things will necessarily develop language once they’ve evolved past a certain point?”

“You’re thinking that another species might have other ‘organs’ develop instead, you mean?” Lucia said. “So in a super-advanced civilization of crows, they’d all have incredibly sharp beaks rather than language?”

Language, and my own sense of self—both mere adaptive mechanisms. That much I got and was prepared to accept. Having said that, if language really was nothing more than an adaptive organ—well, there were examples, weren’t there, of species that became extinct through over-adaptation?

Wasn’t the saber-toothed tiger eventually driven to extinction by the weight of its own canines?

5

“Well, whaddaya know—I guess that English major came in handy after all.”

These were Williams’s first words to me to welcome me back when I returned from Lucia Sukrova’s apartment via a prearranged back route in an apartment on the opposite side of the building.

“Just the way the conversation flowed,” I said as I pulled myself out of my suit.

Williams’s eyes stayed glued to his monitor. “If you say so, dude. Sounded to me like you were quite happy to let the conversation flow that way, though, huh?”

“Not getting much at home these days, Williams?”

“Hey, buddy, I’ve still got it when I want it, you know? Ten minutes with that little lady and she’d be putty in my hands.”

“Uh-huh. What would you do, sit there and grunt at her until she submitted?”

“Nah, I’d spin some line about Eskimos and snow. Or maybe talk about Kafka.”

“I thought it was all Kafka to you?” I said.

“You don’t get it, do you? You’re allowed to leave some gaps in a conversation with a woman—hell, you’re supposed to. Gives her a chance to stick her pretty little oar in.”

“Gaps in the conversation are one thing, but in your case you’d be leaving hulking great craters. Anyway, women can’t stand self-assured pricks like you, in case you haven’t noticed.”

If I sounded like I was crossing the line from banter into something more irritable, it was because I was sometimes genuinely tired of Williams’s incessant braggadocio. Besides, he had it all wrong. You don’t try and engage a Czech language teacher by talking at them about Kafka, any more than you become buddies with a fishmonger by lecturing him about fish. If there’s one thing worse than shop talk, it’s shop talk with an amateur who thinks he knows it all. I shuddered at the memory of those godawful presentations on special ops we used to have to sit through given by slack-jawed CIA goons.

“Nice. Anyhow—any sniff of John Paul along the way?” Williams asked.

I thought back to the room. I’d kept an eye out for all the usual indicators—a ring, photographs, magazines, general cleanliness, and decor—but I had detected no obvious signs that a man had been there recently.

It turned out that the electronic sensors had had better luck than my own limited human sensory organs. A man had been in the room recently. We knew this thanks to the tiny sensor patch that I placed inside my nostril beforehand to record the airborne particles in the room. Or rather, the patch sent the data to a device stuck to my torso, the nostril-patch being merely the sensor that transmitted the data to the processor under my shirt, via the natural salts on my skin.

The smoking gun: Penhaligon Eau de Cologne.

“I guess even John Paul likes to make an effort for his lady.” Williams sneered.

The CIA had reported that no men had entered Lucia’s apartment since John Paul had left a few days ago. Only a few women, mainly bored housewives who had recently moved to Prague with their businessman husbands.

So the cologne must have been the lingering scent of John Paul. My own nose might not have picked it up, but it was picked up by something in my nose.

“Damn. No semen,” continued Williams. He was referring, of course, to the results of the analysis that were now displayed on the screen in front of him. “I guess he didn’t miss his girlfriend all that much, then.”

I sat down, tasted the bowl of Czech sauerkraut soup in front of me—not bad—and started reading Lucia Sukrova’s file. Poring over the details of her life like some sort of stalker. Sure, I could justify it by telling myself it was just work, but was what I was doing any less sordid than Williams’s search for cum stains? I couldn’t really concentrate and closed the file.

I decided to access USA, partly to forget that I was in this den of professional peeping toms.

The network acknowledged my account, and the USA home page opened up.

Recently updated Intellipedia pages and the latest news items popped up in the topics area. The “hot topic” illustrated RSS feed was about the pictures of the massacres in India captured on keyhole satellite, complete with furious commentary from other members of the intelligence community who were logged in. The developments in post-nuclear-war India were a source of heated discussion for members of intelligence agencies across the world, and the discussion boards were buzzing.

A subpage in a window also showed a number of topics particular to my level of security clearance, along with dictionaries and wikis. USA’s official name was something like the National Defense Information Sharing Network, but for some reason everyone referred to it as the United Spooks Association, or USA for short.

Could you ever imagine a situation in which a company could easily store its information on a network for all its departments to access as necessary, saving time and money, and yet its various departments bypassed the network completely and kept on using their own local systems for the pettiest of reasons, such as not trusting the developers of the network, or due to simple precedent and inertia? To keep their entire infrastructure offline, despite the obvious cost and inefficiency? Well, this was exactly what had happened on a national scale—with the old United States information systems.

Departments insisted on sending executives to rendezvous with other departments in person despite the costs involved. Offices insisted on sending and receiving faxes, laboriously reentering data by hand every time. Administrations persisted in using outdated systems when far more efficient ones existed, and they did not even know where and how to look for them. Everyone looking out for their own little patch, battening down the hatches, reinventing the wheel that had been invented—and would continue to be invented—countless times by countless other organizations, all ostensibly on the same side. Such was the daily reality of the information agencies in the US.

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.”

“Well, you certainly do know how to spin a line, Mr. Bishop!”

Except it wasn’t a line, not completely. Part of me was absolutely serious. But rather than say this, I decided to carry on playing the part.

“And what about you, Ms. Sukrova? There must be someone in your life who can read you a good bedtime story?”

“No,” Lucia replied, shaking her head. “Not anymore.”

“Not anymore?”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Bishop, you’re in danger of straying into some rather personal territory. Do I have to remind you that you have a wife and a child?”

I opened my arms. “Forgive me. But it’s precisely because I’m happily married that I sometimes overstep the mark. After all, it’s not as if I’m going to try and seduce anyone.”

“Well, forgive me, Mr. Bishop, but being married is no guarantee these days.”

“Maybe not, these days. But I’m an old-fashioned guy with old-fashioned morals. I assure you, your virtue is quite safe with me.”

“I’ll just have to take your word on that,” Lucia said. Then, hesitantly, “It was a while ago, now. A fellow linguistics researcher.”

“At MIT?”

“Yes. Although when I say fellow researcher, he really was on another level. He was involved in a language project for the National Military Establishment.”

“I didn’t realize that the National Military Establishment funded linguistics research.”

“Well, he told me that an agency called DARPA provided the research grant. I never knew the exact details.”

This was news to me. There was nothing in John Paul’s profile that said anything about his working on a project for national defense—it had just said he was involved in a federally funded language project. It had never occurred to us that his linguistics research could have been directly involved in what came next; Williams and I had both been content to gloss over his early life as being more or less irrelevant.

“He sounds like quite a guy.”

“Yes, I met him at MIT and was going out with him for a while. But then one day he went away. Just disappeared completely. After that, I returned home to the Czech Republic and started this line of work here.”

“Couldn’t you find any work over there?”

“Oh, there was some, but it wasn’t easy. I’m a researcher at heart, so I probably should have remained with the university. I just couldn’t quite bring myself to stay …” Lucia shrugged.

I nodded sympathetically. “And did he like books too?”

“Well … he read a lot of Ballard. Have you heard of Empire of the Sun? It was made into a movie last century.”

“The Spielberg film, right? Sure, I love old movies.”

“Well, the movie was based on a book by an author called J. G. Ballard. The book’s even better—full of dry humor, but at the same time so wonderfully evocative of the end of the era.”

“Doesn’t sound much like the film.”

“Well, the adaptation was faithful enough to the story. But the original was much bleaker, more harsh. Ballard’s work often has themes of decay and of things coming to an end. He was a science fiction author, mainly.”

“Sorry … I’m not so up on my sci-fi.”

“That’s fine. John was always reading Ballard, though. Novels set in nuclear wastelands or on a desolate space station.”

“This John … he sounds like he sure did like a good apocalypse,” I said, trying to visualize the sort of scene that attracted John Paul. The eschatological stories favored by the man who now traveled from land to land leaving piles of corpses in his wake.

I wondered if John Paul dreamed of a world in ruins. Spaceship Mother Earth, a giant, unmanned satellite that silently orbited the sun. A world where aliens would land one day and find only the traces of civilization long destroyed, the empty husks of building after building whose inhabitants had long since disappeared.

As I imagined the scene, I realized that I was feeling a strange tranquility wash over me.

After all, how different was John Paul’s dream from my dream of the land of the dead?

6

I noticed them as soon as I left Lucia’s apartment.

There were at least two of them. Tailing me? Or staking out the building?

Given that we’d been keeping a lookout on the front of the apartment ourselves, I figured that it must have been me they were tailing.

I suppressed a grin and stepped out into the street.

I could tell that adrenaline was starting to pump through my veins, so I adjusted my internal tension to counterbalance its effects.

One step. Two steps. I could feel the ground beneath my feet clearly, so clearly. My senses were heightened so much that the mere act of walking almost tickled my feet.

I couldn’t very well just cross the road to our apartment where Williams was currently holed up. That would have been just too funny. So I wondered which way I should go now. After all, I had only used this exit to double back so that Lucia wouldn’t be able to detect our movements while we were watching her …

I wondered if my tails knew about our stakeout of Lucia’s place. Possibly. They probably knew it existed at least, even if not exactly where it was. I didn’t know if they were John Paul’s men or not, but we’d already factored in the possibility that we would come up against some sort of organized resistance, hence our precautionary measures such as entering the country at different times and avoiding all real-time wireless transmission of data from Lucia’s apartment as proof against interception.

I scratched the back of my head. My signal to Williams that I was being followed. I decided to take a stroll through the streets of Prague and discover the identity of my tails.

I arrived at a busy street, and my field of vision went into overdrive. My AR contact lenses were flooded with virtual banners.

Prague was a tourist hotspot, so its Alternative Reality databank was pretty well developed. Shop after shop, street after street, all had labels, links, a cornucopia of secrets to be revealed. On the film of my contacts, the noble city of a hundred spires was plastered with virtual neon writing and lighting, turning the elegant historic vista into a cross between a neon-soaked Hong Kong night and Ridley Scott’s Los Angeles. The type of store, hours of operation, the number of Michelin Stars a restaurant had—all kinds of landmarks were liberally annotated with virtual neon, creating an alternative reality for the benefit of travelers.

But what I needed was a plan.

I looked around for a Touchboard terminal. Prague’s roads were AR-optimized, so there were plenty of terminals scattered about the place. Groups of tourists were huddled in front of giant plastic boards, and each board was illustrated with a picture of a smaller keyboard. I went to stand in front of one of them, staring at the keyboard for three seconds until my contact lenses paired with the Touchboard. I started “typing” on the picture of the keyboard, which functioned every bit as well as a normal keyboard as long as you didn’t need the luxury of spring-loaded keys.

A while back they actually introduced technology that allowed you to type just by looking at a key—the machine scanned your eye movements—but these visual keyboards died a quick death once it became clear that they were never going to work at any real speed; it turned out that good old-fashioned touch typing was faster than anything the human eye could do.

I activated a filter that blocked out all tourist information and logged into USA.

I flicked through the data on Prague’s transportation and infrastructure. Nothing helpful. Damn, I should have done my research beforehand. On the off-chance that someone had something useful, I started a thread requesting a map of Prague with footfall data. I set it up so that I’d be messaged the instant the topic had a reply and sent the link over to Williams for good measure.

Having done all I could do at that moment, I severed my connection with the Touchboard and set off to find a lonely alleyway somewhere—a dark corner where I could turn the tables on my pursuers without fear of being disturbed.

I jumped onto a passing streetcar, reflexively stealing a glance behind me as I did. Two men and a woman had also jumped on with me at the last minute. They sat apart from each other. One of the men in particular—a rough-looking youth—was keeping his distance. Were they too far away from me to tail me effectively, or was it a double bluff? Too soon to tell. The streetcar made a few stops, and just as we were approaching central Prague I jumped off. The two men and the woman stayed on the trolley.

Just in case something was about to happen to me that meant I would never see the light of day again, I picked at a pheromone capsule embedded in one of my fingernails and let a couple of drops fall to the ground. If I vanished, Williams or someone else would be able to follow my scent using tracer dogs. Worst-case scenario, these pheromones would be my epitaph, marking my last stand.

I started winding my way through the old stone buildings of the city of a hundred spires. This was an old city, even by European standards—it had remained mostly untouched in the great wars of the twentieth century. Neither the Nazis nor the Russians had penetrated the core of the old town. This city was a survivor. And I was determined to use it to help me to survive.

The ancient, winding alleyways and the looming shadow of Kafka conspired together to transform this town into my own personal labyrinth. Not like the Latin American labyrinths of which Borges wrote, but something distinctly European—a pale, chilling entity against the backdrop of the harsh midnight-blue sky.

They were still following me.

I walked among Prague’s spires and churches, past Saint Vitus Cathedral, over her cold stone slabs. After a couple of careful feints and misdirections I managed to get a clearer picture of the people following me. The two men and the woman from the streetcar were here. There was also a youth in standard-issue, minimalist, trendy Pentagon-style gear, and a woman wearing a vintage jersey.

All of them were young. None of them could have been my age.

Some sort of youth cult that worshipped John Paul, maybe? My mind spun through the possibilities as I walked around, staking out my pursuers. I could easily have taken any one of them out, but the others were sure to converge on me as I made my move. Was discretion the better part of valor right now? I could always shake them off here, but they’d be back on my tail the next time I showed my face at Lucia’s, no doubt.

Was I going to have to take an hour-long detour to get home every time I went for my Czech conversation class?

Fuck that.

My thoughts were interrupted by a new transmission to my AR contact lenses. Someone had replied to my thread on USA. I headed for the nearest Contact Board and logged in to find that someone had uploaded a detailed, color-coded map with all traffic data for Prague during the last four months. Bingo. They’d only gone and found me an open-source map straight from the Czech Ministry of Transport, complete with mean footfall figures, recorded from an aerial blimp that observed the action from sixty thousand feet.

I scanned the map and spotted a nearby side alley that was virtually never used.

Now that John Paul had disappeared, my tails were our biggest lead. A gift, really. I started cricking my shoulders and stretching my arms—a public warm-up for the violent exercise that I was about to engage in. It was the scruffy youth from the streetcar who was following me at that moment, and he stopped for a second, bewildered by my sudden burst of energy. I guess it just didn’t occur to him that he had just gone from predator to prey.

And so it came to pass that I was able to launch a total surprise attack on this unlucky youth.

I slipped into the deserted alleyway. He scurried after me, oblivious to the fact that I was waiting and ready to deliver a sucker punch straight to the solar plexus. He went down with a pitiful gurgle. Exactly as I planned. I was almost disappointed at how easy this was.

“Surprise,” I whispered in his ear and then delivered another powerful blow. For now, my aim was to beat all resistance out of him, no more.

It was a delicate balance, hurting someone enough that they have absolutely no fight left in them without actually knocking them out cold. Easy to misjudge. This time, though, I seemed to get it right—helped by a few more well-placed punches and kicks to the face.

“Now then,” I said. “You’re going to tell me who you are.”

“I’ll never speak,” said the youth, through swollen lips. I dug the tip of my foot sharply into the prostrate youth’s kidney.

“Now then,” I said again. “You’re going to tell me who you are.”

“I’m nobody,” the youth said.

I brought my weight down on his kidney again. Oops, my foot must have missed, and I must have pressed down on his stomach instead. Warm vomit erupted from his mouth.

“Who are you? Tell me,” I said for the third time. Except this time I spoke in Czech, using the vocabulary and grammar from the lesson I just had with Lucia. An interrogative sentence or a normal one, the rules are the same in Czech: the phrase you want to emphasize comes first.

“I’m nobody. Please. Please believe me, sir. I really am nobody.”

Hmm. It seemed that my Czech lessons weren’t destined to bear fruit so quickly. Well, enough talking. Time to find out what I needed directly from his body. I pried open his swollen eyelids and photographed his bloodshot retinas, and then pressed his fingertips onto my portable reader to get his prints. If we’d been in a better location I could have really tightened the thumbscrews and had him singing in no time, but we were still in the middle of the city, after all, so I decided to call it a day.

Probably hard to believe after what I’ve just described, but I’m no sadist. I was just fulfilling my professional duties. My job is violence. My job is deciding whether people live or die. Die, mostly.

My job is this pain, these whimpers, this vomit.

The guy’s buddies were probably starting to miss him. I figured they’d come looking for him shortly. I slipped away and left the scene behind me.

After a couple of minutes of browsing through the data I had obtained from the kid, I was overcome by the desire to apologize to him for what I’d done. If I ever came across him again, I’d man up and ask his forgiveness, straight to his face.

The youth’s fingerprints and retina scans apparently belonged to different people.

“Man, that was some nasty shit you pulled on that kid, though.” Williams laughed as he chomped down on a jalapeño pepper that he had just picked off the Domino’s Pizza that was apparently available in the Czech Republic too.

I’m nobody. According to the database, the youth’s words were literally true. It was hard to imagine that either of the so-called identities that his biometric data matched with were actually his.

“Yeah, well, I guess I am just a nasty shit,” I said, digging into the pizza Williams had secured for us. Lucia Sukrova was having her dinner now too. We glanced occasionally at the monitor that showed the comings and goings of her apartment as we discussed this bizarre ID case.

Had the youth suffered a finger-losing accident and had a new set transplanted? Unlikely—we might have been living in a world where nanomachines and synthetic flesh were the order of the day, but medical science hadn’t yet nailed the thorny issue of immunologic organ rejection. It would have been one thing to regrow fingers from a person’s own tissue, but transplanting from another person? Technically possible, maybe, but a huge operation. It would, at the very least, have left some sort of paper trail. Yet we could find no record of any such operation.

Could it have been a simple case of a mistake in the database? Conceivable way back when human error could have caused an entry to be inputted incorrectly. But now the databases containing personal information were managed by giant insurance companies and their subcontracted InfoSec firms. There was basically no margin for error. They had redundancy systems in place to double and triple check every single process. After all, these days it was impossible to do anything or travel anywhere without relying on personal data systems, which meant they had to be failsafe: as accurate as, say, aviation equipment or medical life-support systems.

In other words, neither scenario was particularly likely.

I’m nobody.

The young man had said these words repeatedly through his tears. He hadn’t exactly been crying because he was being forced to talk, of course—it was my well-placed shot to his kidneys that brought forth those tears. But that didn’t necessarily make the words that he managed to force out over his sobs any less true.

How, though? Shadowy figures able to manipulate the contents of the database at will? After all, “Mr. Bishop,” my assumed identity for this mission, was obviously a fiction. But this was only possible because I was a government agent and because the army had farmed out its own ID systems to an independent contractor rather than one of the standard civilian insurance companies. Even then, there were still lots of hoops for us to jump through, as with any country with a properly developed ID management system; every time the CIA or Special Forces needed a fake identity for one of their agents, they needed to secure explicit permission in advance. The chairman of the Senate Committee on Information Security and at least one other member of the committee needed to sign off on every request.

In other words, it was highly likely that the youth was some sort of government agent.

Which country could be acting on behalf of John Paul? Maybe that was the reason why the Pentagon was so keen on expediting John Paul’s elimination—because some other country was now getting involved?

“Yeah, that’s a possibility. He’s quite the little internationalist, isn’t he, this John Paul?” Williams nodded. So maybe we were being tailed not by John Paul, but by some foreign government agency that thought that we were somehow involved with him? That would fit: we had suddenly appeared out of nowhere and started spending a lot of time with Lucia Sukrova after all.

Damn. Secret agents from another country sure would put a monkey wrench in the works. The mood in the room darkened.

Anyhow, all of this was just guesswork and speculation. No point in fretting over the hypotheticals. What we had to do now was narrow down the possibilities. This was exactly what we had touched on in my conversation with Lucia: it was the act of narrowing down the possibilities, making logical predictions based on this information, and then surviving, that acted as the catalyst for the development of language and the ego. But spend too much time obsessing over the endless possible variations and you ended up missing your chance to actually do something.

And that’s why I decided to stop thinking too hard and focus on the facts that were in front of us.

Our character profile of John Paul was at best like a partially completed crossword puzzle, filling in the blanks one at a time but with the final few entries remaining tantalizingly out of reach. When he was our secondary target on our mission two years ago we had very few blanks filled in. Each mission since then had helped us to fill in some more of the blanks. Now we were almost there.

Conventional wisdom was that this was a terrible way to gather intelligence. As a basic military strategy, starting off with an insufficient force to achieve your objectives and then gradually increasing your resource allocation trickle by trickle as the war goes on was more or less the textbook way of how not to fight a war. As a tactic, it showed that you severely underestimated your opposition in the planning stages and wasted a significant amount of resources, time, and opportunity at the early stages of your campaign.

For Intelligence, information was power. It was our only real military resource. For regular forces, information was there to support the battle on the front lines, but to us in Intelligence information was our lifeblood, as powerful as live ammunition, as vital as a supply train. That was why we couldn’t understand, couldn’t stand, the indecisive, secretive attitude of the top brass over this mission. Trickling the information down piece by piece was just as stupid a strategy as slowly increasing your resource allocation bit by bit until you had enough of an edge to win. If only they’d just let us know all the facts up front, we wouldn’t be in this mess right now. On this point, at least, Williams and I were in agreement.

John Paul lost his wife and only child at Sarajevo.

John Paul’s wife and daughter, soon to turn six years old, were seeing the sights when they both vanished in a flash of fire as the city around them was turned into a giant crater. The beautiful city, its inhabitants, and a large number of visitors and tourists were all vaporized and scattered into the atmosphere along with copious quantities of radioactive debris. A mushroom cloud rose above Europe, marking the end of the post-Hiroshima era.

According to an ID trace, John Paul was in the apartment of a certain college student, one Lucia Sukrova, when the bomb detonated. Of course, I wouldn’t have known any of this or been allowed to learn of his private life unless it was strictly related to military and Intelligence business. I had no particular feelings about John Paul’s actual affair and made no judgment about his adultery. But I was trained to feel his pain, vividly. He betrayed them—the guilt, the pain, the self-recrimination and self-flagellation. All these feelings I could empathize with in abundance. It was my job.

A month after the explosion, John Paul had traveled to the camp near the perimeter of what was now called the Sarajevo Crater. Surrounded by NATO troops and an international task force there to guard the perimeter, John Paul waited in silence, patiently, for his turn to be loaned a protective suit to guard him from the nuclear radiation permeating the air of the ruins of Sarajevo. There were so many victims who had “disappeared” that it was impossible to tell with any degree of certainty who had gone missing and who was dead. At the time, genetic markers weren’t in widespread use as personal identification measures, so even when remains were discovered, it was rare that they could be identified as belonging to an individual. Most ended up in a mass grave.

Three weeks later, John Paul stood on the edge of the Sarajevo Crater, looking down into the abyss. There was no way to tell what this man who had lost his wife and daughter was thinking at that moment, but it was my job to try and imagine it.

And yet, I thought, what could a man possibly be thinking when confronted with the desolate landscape so typical of his favorite SF novels? When looking at the place that only a short while ago was a city but now had been scorched into a smooth, glassy wasteland surrounding a giant crater? What would the white-radiation-suit-clad figure think as he stood on the edge, looking down at the giant mortar bowl, imagining his family being crushed into paste?

Shortly after he returned home, John Paul dropped out of MIT and shut himself away for six months. He ordered his groceries online. For half a year there was not a single record of him ever having used the subway, a bus, a tollbooth, a shopping mall, or a store. His web receipts showed that the only purchases he ever made online were for food. John Paul isolated himself from the world as much as was physically possible.

What depths of despair had John Paul been cultivating during these six months? Did he make attempts on his own life? Was every night a sleepless one? And then, emerging from his self-imposed silence, John Paul suddenly decided to take a job at a prestigious PR firm. A firm that regularly worked for governments and big business, coordinating “hearts and minds” propaganda campaigns. At the time John Paul joined the company his new employers were being retained by a certain developing country in an effort to persuade the international community that said country was an excellent prospect for direct foreign investment.

Whether he was hired for his White House and National Military Establishment connections from his MIT days or just for his phenomenal linguistic ability—he was apparently able to speak thirteen languages fluently—John Paul’s role was to take care of business for the firm’s nation-state clients.

His role was to attend the important functions in Washington, meet the right bureaucrats and Congresspeople so that he could plant seeds of sympathy in receptive minds. On the client side, John Paul had to select and prep the government ministers who would go down the most easily with the Western media, and then, when they were ready, fly them over to the US to place them on the right news programs. He set up a press center to receive foreign correspondents in style, building up a picture of his client country as a place where business could be done and foreign visitors were welcome.

After his first success, it was a simple case of rinse and repeat, and before long John Paul had become the go-to man in the field. He had become an official aide to various ministers for public information, press, media, culture, and propaganda for numerous developing countries.

And then the atrocities began.

The countries John Paul had worked for found themselves plunged into civil war in quick succession. The only variable was who started the troubles—in one country it seemed to be armed insurgents, in another the regular army, and in yet another the ordinary townsfolk—but one way or another they all seemed to lead to genocide on a massive scale. Even so, John Paul was seen as a success by some segments of society, for he always appeared to be at least partially successful, particularly in initially winning the hearts and minds and sympathy of the American people to the plight of his latest client. America would then be the country’s savior and guiding light, right up until the moment that the rug was pulled from under them when the people of their nice new client state inconsiderately decided to start killing each other. America had assumed the role of the shepherd toward a new democratic and civilized era for its adopted states, so Americans were understandably a little shocked when they found out that they seemed to be driving their little flocks into vicious civil wars.

It was as if the US had become an assassin of emergent developing countries. Initially though, no one would have dreamed of pinning the blame on John Paul. Why would they? How was anyone to suspect that this single, mild-mannered company man was capable of fooling all his bosses and colleagues and, unbeknownst to any of them, was coordinating a deliberate campaign to incite civil war and mass murder?

It was only when the evidence became too strong—when every single one of his clients ended up in some sort of horrific internal conflict—that people started looking at the possibility of a causal and not just a correlative relationship between John Paul and the atrocities emerging worldwide. Even then, John Paul was able to stick around at the company for a little while longer, as he paid no attention to his detractors. He was never worried about his company’s approval, after all. He didn’t need to play the game because he had no true interest in working there. He had only joined the company in the first place as a means of getting the genocidal ball rolling.

Eventually though, enough was enough, and John Paul was forced to leave the PR company. And then he seemed to disappear off the face of the earth. No trace of him in any country’s transport systems, no sign of him even buying food, anywhere, ever. Indeed, the last confirmed sighting was in a Prague shopping mall.

And here we were now, trying to track down the man who disappeared off the radar only a few days ago.

Since John Paul’s departure from the PR company he had only been visible through his works. His signatures on military orders. Whenever we heard John Paul was at the heart of another bloody civil war, we’d fly there to find he was already gone. Whenever we heard that he was orchestrating another massacre, we’d fly straight out there to find, yet again, that he had long since left. The greenhorn from the CIA must have seen his face at least one time, or else how else would he have kept tabs on him? And yet, according to his ID, John Paul had never been anywhere near the city …

It was then I realized that we were chasing a ghost. A specter born of the death and destruction of the Sarajevo Crater.

Waiting for Godot, huh? Maybe Williams’s analogy wasn’t such a stupid one after all.