The Showrunners (The Falsifiers Book 3)

By Antoine Bello

In this third and final installment of the Falsifiers trilogy, Sliv has a hand in Barack Obama's election and helps Lena Thorsen create a Maya city with the whole world watching.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Antoine Bello
• Release date: Aug 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463344286

Antoine Bello

Antoine Bello est un auteur de langue française, né à Boston en 1970. Il vit à New York. En 1996, il publie un recueil de nouvelles, Les funambules, aux Editions Gallimard. Couronnés du prix littéraire de la Vocation Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, ces cinq textes mettent en scène des personnages surhumains lancés à la poursuite d'une perfection inaccessible. Le premier roman d'Antoine Bello, Eloge de la pièce manquante (1998) remporte un grand succès et est traduit dans une dizaine de langues. L'histoire se déroule dans l'univers fictif du puzzle de vitesse. Le roman se présente sous la forme de cinquante pièces - articles de journaux, rapports, interviews - sans cohérence apparente. Suivent deux romans formant un dyptique, Les falsificateurs (2007) et Les éclaireurs (2009), qui content l'ascension d'un jeune Islandais, Sliv Dartunghuver, au sein d'une organisation secrète internationale qui falsifie la réalité et réécrit l'histoire. Les Eclaireurs ont reçu le Prix France Culture - Telerama. En 2010, Enquête sur la disparition d'Emilie Brunet joue avec les codes du roman policier en rendant hommage à Agatha Christie et Edgar Poe. En 2012, il publie sur amazon deux nouvelles, L'Actualité et Légendes, initialement conçues pour figurer dans Les falsificateurs. Antoine Bello travaille actuellement à son prochain roman, l'histoire d'un jeune footballeur prodigieusement doué qui décline les offres des plus grands clubs pour jouer dans le championnat universitaire et décrocher le titre que son père était sur le point de gagner avant sa mort. Dans une vie précédente, Antoine a créé, développé puis revendu la société Ubiqus, qui propose des services de comptes rendus aux organisateurs de réunions. (Photo : Christopher Michel)

Book preview

PART ONE

Hollywood

1

The telephone rang at around five o’clock, waking me. I reached out my arm, cursing the meddlers who had so little regard for my sleep. Never sure of which continent I was on, my friends had gotten into the unfortunate habit of calling at any hour of the day or night. In their defense, they didn’t know that the rules of the CFR forbade me from turning off my cell phone.

Hello, I said, wondering in which language I was going to insult the unwelcome caller.

After a short silence, a metallic voice recited:

Your presence is required at an extraordinary meeting, to be held at 06.00 today. No excuses will be tolerated. End of message. To hear this recording again, press the star key.

I kept the receiver against my ear, waiting in vain for further information, until a click put an abrupt end to the call. Yakoub had once mentioned the existence of a procedure for summoning the members of the Excom in an emergency, but in five years he had never resorted to it.

What could have happened? I wondered, stepping into the shower. I went over the current operations in my mind, trying to figure out which one might have gone off the rails. None was particularly delicate. Even if the United Nations realized that the damage caused by Cyclone Nargis had been greatly exaggerated, they would suspect Myanmar of wanting to arouse international sympathy. Likewise, the Chinese Politburo had not reacted when we had hacked into the Xinhua press agency to announce that, because of the earthquake that had struck their province, the inhabitants of Sichuan would, exceptionally, be allowed to have a second child. But eight years in Special Operations had taught me that problems never arise where you expect them.

I went down to the parking garage. At this hour, the drive would take me less than ten minutes. I tuned the radio to the BBC World Service. The night’s news was being read in the kind of casually distinguished voice that would maintain the illusion of British greatness for a long time to come. Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defense Minister, was demanding the resignation of the head of the government for corruption; the constituent assembly in Nepal was meeting for the first time today; Dutch scientists had managed to sequence a woman’s DNA. Everything seemed relatively calm. There were no coups, no forgers had been arrested, no extinct species had been found alive and well in the Amazon rainforest. I began to suspect this might all be an exercise—or a practical joke of Youssef’s.

The CFR occupied a glass and steel tower in the business district of Toronto that had taken years to build and cost several hundred million dollars. A second surprise awaited me in the elevator. The light under the button that closed the doors was glowing a menacing red. I had only ever known it to be green, even in 2004 during the darkest hours of the Congressional hearings on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

My theory that it might be an exercise faded once and for all when I discovered my secretary Jessica in front of my desk. They wouldn’t have gone so far as to summon the personal assistants, I thought, hanging up my coat. Jessica handed me a mug of coffee.

I figured you might need it.

Thanks. What’s going on?

I was hoping you’d know. Yakoub asked me to inform him of your arrival. He’s upstairs with the others.

Increasingly anxious, I went up to the conference room where we met on average three times a week. Seeing me, Yakoub Khoyoulfaz, who was on the telephone, dismissed whoever he was speaking to and came to greet me.

Thanks for coming, he said, taking me by the shoulder. We’ve been waiting for you so that we can start.

I looked around. Not everyone was there. Aren’t Ching and Martin joining us?

Ching got on the first plane for London, and Martin is on vacation in the Caribbean with his family, he’ll join us by video conference.

London? I replied, searching in my memories. Is it about Lady Di?

No. Hold on, you’ll find out soon enough.

He gestured to me to excuse him and took another call. I used this opportunity to say hello to my colleagues. Zoe Karvelis, the Greek who ran Human Resources, looked like death warmed over. Usually so elegant, she had barely had time to do her hair and was wearing a sweater with holes at the elbows that must have belonged to her husband. Sophie Onobanjo, the Nigerian who had replaced Claas Verplanck, on the other hand, showed no sign of fatigue. It was said she only needed two or three hours’ sleep a night. Chances are she was already up when the phone had rung.

Suddenly, a face appeared on the screen: the American, Martin Suarez. He was showered and freshly shaved. As a former Marine, he had probably also made his bed and cleaned his gun.

Good morning, Martin, Yakoub said as we took our usual places around the horseshoe-shaped table. We were just about to start.

Suarez merely nodded slightly. He never wasted his breath.

This morning, at about three o’clock GMT, Yakoub began, Nigel Jones, a class II agent from the London Center left his attaché case in the taxi that had just dropped him in Knightsbridge. The case contained several innocuous documents, and one which was less so: a list of the fifty scenarios to be submitted to the next dossier evaluation committee.

Excuse me? Onobanjo said, choking. How could a class II agent…?

There is no doubt Jones infringed a bunch of security regulations, Yakoub cut in. Only class III agents have access to the committee’s preparatory documents, and even they can’t take them out of the office unless they’ve previously encrypted them…

You mean the list can be read directly? Onobanjo gasped.

I’m afraid so. Let’s be clear about this: mistakes have been made and heads will roll. But the priority is to get that case back before someone manages to unlock it.

Onobanjo’s anxiety was obvious to us all. As head of the General Inspectorate, the branch of the CFR that established internal procedures and made sure they were applied, she would doubtless have some explaining to do.

How long would it take a thief to open it? I asked.

Hard to say. The combination lock is designed to jam for an hour after three unsuccessful attempts. The frame can withstand a weight of several tons and even a jig saw couldn’t cut into the carbon fiber covering. But let’s not be under any illusions: the more indestructible the case seems, the more tempted a thief will be to crack it open.

Does it have a tracking device? I asked.

Alas, no, or we wouldn’t have got you out of bed.

The next generation will have them, Onobanjo promised. We’ll be able to follow the movements of all our agents.

If there is any left, Yakoub said bitterly.

Each of those present was already preparing his or her arguments for the forthcoming investigation. Yakoub would blame the Inspectorate for not having put a simple and effective tracking system in place, while Onobanjo would invoke the budget cuts that the Excom had imposed on her department.

When did Jones inform us of the loss of the case? Suarez asked from his hotel room in the Caribbean.

That’s the second piece of bad luck, Yakoub sighed. It took that moron an hour to notice his blunder and another thirty minutes to realize that he wouldn’t be able to rectify it by himself. He called the taxi company and gave them the car number that appeared on his slip. The driver claims he didn’t find the case. He had four passengers after Jones: three men and a woman.

Does he remember where he took them?

More or less.

Well, that’s a start, Suarez said, with somewhat forced optimism.

So we have five suspects, Karvelis said. The four clients plus the driver.

Let’s begin with the driver, Onobanjo suggested. At least we know his name.

Yakoub raised his hand to cut short our conjectures. As you can imagine, our teams in London are already following all these leads. The question that immediately poses itself is whether or not we inform the Metropolitan Police of the theft.

Surely not! Onobanjo exclaimed. We don’t want the police to establish a link between the case and an employee of the CFR.

It may already be too late, I remarked. Do we know if Jones gave his name to the taxi company?

No, Yakoub replied. He had the presence of mind to call from a phone box and use a pseudonym.

So what’s the point of alerting the police? They’ll do nothing to find that case unless we tell them the contents.

Let’s conduct our own investigation, Suarez said. We’re better equipped than Scotland Yard.

Zoe? Yakoub asked.

I share the general opinion.

Good, then we’re in agreement. Ching and I outlined several lines of enquiry before she left. As I speak, our IT people are hacking into the London surveillance system. With more than three hundred thousand cameras, it’s the biggest network in the world: with a bit of luck, we should be able to reconstruct the taxi’s itinerary and identify the four passengers. We’re also going to break into the company’s servers in case one of the passengers might have ordered his cab by phone or the car is equipped with a bug that might have recorded its itinerary.

I nodded my head mechanically. Yakoub hadn’t wasted any time.

We’ve placed the driver under surveillance: where he goes, what bank transactions he makes, we’ll know everything. If, as I suspect, he’s innocent, we’ll approach him and ask him to help us establish identikits of the passengers. Any other suggestions?

Yes, Suarez said. Let’s try to open one of those damned cases ourselves. That’ll give us an indication of how much time we have.

Good idea. Anything else?

Let’s put an ad in the newspapers promising a large reward for the case, I suggested.

Excellent. We’ll do it tomorrow.

"Why not this evening? The Evening Standard probably doesn’t go to press for another hour or two."

You’re right.

Once Yakoub had called his assistant on the intercom to relay his instructions, Zoe Karvelis asked the question that was worrying all of us. What happens if we don’t get the case back?

Anxious to keep panic to a minimum, Yakoub had evidently prepared his answer. Let me remind you, first of all, that the CFR never uses headed paper and that, except on very rare occasions, no document is ever signed. The list Jones was carrying is unfortunately quite explicit. For each dossier, it gives the unit it comes from, the title of the falsification, and a brief summary. For example: Unit: Prague Bureau. Title: Lauda and Ferrari cheated in 1976. Description: September 1976, Ferrari puts pressure on Niki Lauda to take part in Monza, just six weeks after the accident that almost cost him his life in the German Grand Prix. Lauda, who is still a contender to win the world championship, does not feel ready to compete. It is therefore Carlos Reutemann, Ferrari’s third driver, who starts off the race, discreetly replacing Lauda on the grid. He finishes in fourth place, gaining three precious points in the battle for the title."

Gifted with a photographic memory, Yakoub always expressed himself without notes.

Even though the words ‘trick’ or ‘falsification’ are not used, any lover of Formula One will see through it immediately, I said.

And anybody who finds the case is bound to be familiar with one or two of the fifty subjects, Zoe added.

I know, Yakoub replied. At the risk of appearing over-solemn, I think I can say that this is one of the gravest crises we’ve ever had to deal with. I don’t dare imagine what would happen if that case fell into the wrong hands: journalists, blackmailers, the police, the secret services... The CFR probably wouldn’t survive. So I’ve declared a red alert: as of this morning, there will be exercises in all our units to make sure that all premises can be abandoned and all compromising documents destroyed in less than ninety minutes. We’re also going to reinforce our IT security, diversify our bank deposits, and review the procedures for exfiltration of staff.

The word exfiltration had been judged preferable to withdrawal. The idea, however, was the same: in case of emergency, we were supposed to vanish into thin air, thanks to the Timorese passports we had all been issued with in 2004. I had put mine at the bottom of a drawer. I couldn’t have sworn it was up-to-date.

Last but not least, Yakoub went on, I’m sure you’ll approve my decision to temporarily suspend all the dossiers mentioned on the list.

That goes without saying, Onobanjo exclaimed loudly, hoping her zeal would make us forget what a mess her teams had made of things.

While we all nodded in turn, I thought sadly of the agents who had sweated blood over those dossiers. They had chosen their subjects after incredible torments, filled hundreds of pages with notes, drawn up well-intentioned but often ridiculous first drafts, absorbed the more or less friendly comments of their case officers, and at last looked on blissfully as the printer spewed out those few sheets of paper on which their future and—some were convinced—the future of the world depended. I remembered as if it was yesterday the night I had submitted my scenario on the Bushmen to Gunnar Eriksson for him to transmit to London. What would I have thought at the time if some idiot had left it in the back of a taxi?

How many first dossiers are there on the list? I asked.

Four, Yakoub replied.

I felt a knot in my throat. I’ll call them today. They may need it.

2

Two days later, the case had still not been recovered. Although our IT people had found a video recording of the taxi when Jones had gotten out of it, they had been unable to follow the vehicle for more than a minute or two. The driver had plunged into one of those mazes of Dickensian alleys that still escape—but for how much longer?—the surveillance cameras. The cab had resurfaced an hour later in Westminster, to then vanish again almost immediately. Of the passenger, engrossed in reading the Financial Times, all that could be made out was the left hand. It bore a chain bracelet but no wedding ring. It was a start.

Our ads had appeared in the Times, the Guardian, and a few less respectable titles, but didn’t elicit any response. As for the taxi driver, we had quickly ruled him out. He led a steady existence and had been saving for ages to buy his license. He had frequently handed in handbags, cell phones, and even wallets.

For a small fee, he had agreed to help with identikits of his passengers. Rarely were the resources of the CFR so badly spent. The driver boasted of being good at recognizing faces. Rather than answer our questions, he pointed out resemblances to all kinds of diverse personalities. According to him, the woman he had taken from St. Pancras to Victoria Station had Britney Spears’s mouth, Keira Knightley’s nose, Victoria Beckham’s hair, and Margaret Thatcher’s chin. When we presented him with the result—a fairly monstrous one, it has to be said—he blamed our expert for getting it all wrong.

Our prime suspect was the second passenger, a tattooed man of about thirty who had been dropped in Soho, on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. He had twisted his body as he extracted himself from the cab, as if trying to conceal a cumbersome object, although our driver remembered him being empty-handed when he got in. Several thousand people used that intersection every day. It was covered by a dozen cameras, and we analyzed the recordings in vain. The Tattooed Man seemed to have vanished into thin air.

In the corridors of the CFR, the suspense was tangible. The exfiltration exercise ordered by Yakoub had gotten everyone worked up. The assistants spent hours in the kitchen, comparing their versions of events and speculating on the chances of the Mounties raiding the place. It was that moment that a mysterious virus chose to decimate the workforce. The agents struck down left to take a rest deep in the countryside or, in the case of the most adventurous among them, in countries having no extradition agreement with Canada. The units were not spared this anxiety. Having even less information at their disposal than their colleagues in Toronto, the employees of the Paris, Bangkok, and Lima bureaus constructed the most alarmist scenarios, which we strove to demolish in the course of interminable video conferences.

What made the danger seem all the greater was that we had no idea of the form it would take. Jessica bombarded me with questions. What would happen if the case fell into the hands of a criminal organization? Would the Excom agree to pay a ransom in order to protect its agents? Would a journalist get into contact with the CFR before revealing its existence to the public? These were valid questions, which I claimed I wasn’t authorized to answer, but which I asked myself at least as often as she did.

What we dreaded above all was a move by the FBI, the example of Guantánamo having proved how little the Americans cared about habeas corpus when their security was threatened. Yakoub, terrified at the prospect of the CFR’s assets being frozen, had asked the Financial Directorate to report the slightest suspicious activity in our bank accounts. He had had a camp bed installed in his office and spent his nights on the telephone reassuring the heads of the bureaus.

On the third day, Ching Shao returned from London in a foul mood, cursing about how incredibly casual the English were being. Like Onobanjo, she must have felt she was in the firing line. The London Center, whose job it was to approve new dossiers, answers directly to the Plan, of which she had been director since Djibo had resigned. In spite of the risks that such an admission entailed, Ching confessed to us that she had lost all hope of finding the case. Jones had waited too long to raise the alarm, and the driver wouldn’t have recognized the Queen of England if she had honored his taxi with her august patronage. The scalps of Nigel Jones, his direct superior, and the head of the London Center, which she had brought back with her in her luggage, would, alas, make no difference.

Ching had followed Martin Suarez’s advice. She had recruited the best team of safecrackers in the British Empire and had given them the challenge of opening an attaché case of the same model as the one carried by Jones without causing its contents any damage. Seven hours later, she terminated the CFR’s contract with the manufacturer, who had claimed his products were impregnable.

After this particularly discouraging report, Yakoub resumed speaking. If, as Ching forecast, we never found the case, we had to be prepared for the worst. He entrusted Suarez and Zoe Karvelis with drawing up an array of measures, up to and including the complete disbanding of the CFR.

I deliberately held myself back during this period. This regrettable episode merely confirmed the fears I had harbored for several years. Djibo’s CFR, and maybe even Khoyoulfaz’s, had had its day. Too many threats hung over it.

Physical falsification, which had been responsible for our greatest achievements, was quite simply no longer possible. I had become convinced of that in 1999, when I had been entrusted with keeping the CFR out of the rumors surrounding the fake Vinland map. This mappa mundi, supposedly dating from the fifteenth century, was in fact the work of one of our agents, who, by putting the North American continent on it, had been hoping to substantiate the theory that the Vikings had discovered America before Christopher Columbus. Even though I had managed by sleight of hand to get the map attributed to another forger, I had reckoned that the days of physical falsification were numbered. The production of convincing fakes, capable of withstanding thorough scientific examination, is going to become more and more difficult, if not downright impossible. Dossiers like the Vinland map no longer have a place in our organization. They put it in danger for the sake of victories that will be increasingly ephemeral, I had written. Subsequently, the Excom had quite simply prohibited physical falsification or, to be more precise, it had prohibited making it the central pillar of a dossier. You could still fabricate a gravestone to support a legend, but you could no longer circulate the new Turin shroud.

While I might have demonstrated a certain prescience in the first section of my memo, I had gone badly wrong in the second part. The Internet, I wrote then, would greatly increase opportunities for the CFR’s agents, while reducing the risks of being unmasked. But quite the opposite had happened. The Internet had rendered impossible falsifications that even ten years earlier were being cited as examples at the Academy. Adding an extra title to the list of works by a Danish dramatist on Wikipedia was easy enough; significantly modifying the biography of a political leader or a singing star, on the other hand, was a struggle, because their admirers had their eyes constantly open.

That wasn’t the worst of it. Between 1994, the year when the Internet became available to a wider public, and 2003, the date when the Excom put a stop to the most dangerous practices, some agents had made excessive use of falsification on the web, unaware of the risks they were running. Their misadventures had ranged from the harmless (my successor in Reykjavík had made thousands of modifications on Wikipedia from his own home, in nine different languages) to the very serious (the head of the Lima Bureau had left his IP address on the KGB servers). For the past year or two, Special Operations had been spending most of their time rectifying the blunders made by these sorcerer’s apprentices.

And to make matters even worse, there were some fearsome hackers on the web, on the lookout for credit card numbers, industrial secrets, or any other information that could be sold to the Russian Mafia or the Chinese government. The CFR was spending ever-increasing sums of money on security, which did not prevent it from being the object of regular attacks.

But the main danger of the Internet, in my opinion, was quite different in nature. A rumor started by a young boy on his cell phone had almost as much chance of going around the world as a dossier that had required months of work. Conspiracy theories flourished on forums, achieving success in inverse proportion to their plausibility. The pages of websites were filled with them, and the visitor could choose those that supported his ethnic, political, or religious prejudices: the FBI was behind the September 11 attacks, a small number of business leaders ruled the destiny of the world, the US government had contributed to the spread of AIDS within the black community, and so on. Nonsense like this had always been around, but the Internet had both given it legitimacy and made it easier to proliferate. The concept of truth had never seemed so relative. The web provided arguments for the champions of every cause, Zionists and anti-Semites, supporters of evolution as well as those of creationism. Everything was true, which meant that nothing was true; everything was false and therefore nothing was false. For the CFR, whose business rested on that fundamental distinction, the rise of the Internet was a catastrophe.

As the youngest member of the Excom, I felt that it was up to me to lay the foundations for a new model. Khoyoulfaz, Karvelis, and Ching belonged to the old generation. Suarez lacked imagination. As for Onobanjo, the very function of the General Inspectorate, which she ran, was to oppose change.

Conscious of the difficulty of reforming a system of which I was a product, I constantly wavered between the temptation to immerse myself in the minutiae of the CFR and that of keeping my distance, a schizophrenic position which often put me at odds with my colleagues. During the twelve years it had taken me to reach the top of the pyramid, I had naïvely imagined that the role of the members of the Excom consisted in constantly updating the CFR’s mission, conversing learnedly on the power and limits of falsification as a vector of human progress. Nothing could have been further from the truth. More than anything else, we were super-managers, the directors of an organization of several tens of thousands of people. I spent my time in budget meetings, revising memos prepared by others, or wondering if the Taipei Bureau should report to Beijing or Toronto. I didn’t attack anybody. Overall, the heads of units did their job properly; they took the vast majority of decisions and only asked for our arbitration once or twice a year on the most delicate subjects, those that involved symbolism or risked creating a precedent. Alas, with twenty centers, a hundred and fifty bureaus and almost a thousand branches, their exception became our rule. In a way, my job was like that of the judges of the US Supreme Court who have to choose from among the constant stream of requests that reach them those that deserve their attention.

Added to that was the problem of my age. I sometimes had the impression that Khoyoulfaz and Shao, who were almost fifteen years older than me, didn’t take me seriously. They systematically passed on to me projects nobody else wanted, a kind of hazing that I considered less and less justified.

I had never needed so much to think, and had never had so little time to do so. I was snowed under with work but never tired. And like the judges on the Supreme Court, I laid down the law from morning to night, without ever pausing to reflect on the meaning of the word justice.

3

The next day, the red light was still on in the elevator. I sensed it would stay that way for quite a while.

When he had given me the keys of what had been his office, Djibo had added a magnificent gift, a sixteenth-century map showing the imaginary island of Frisland. Lacking either the time or the inclination, I had changed very little to the room’s minimalist look. A few trinkets brought back from my travels and the glass sculpture I had been awarded for my first dossier were the only things to slightly brighten the shelves.

Two reports were waiting for me on my desk. The first was from our Djakarta Center and concerned the economic situation in East Timor. Seven years earlier, I had participated in the final stage of one of the largest initiatives in the history of the CFR. In return for substantial advantages to our organization, Lena Thorsen and I had supported the country in its bid for independence. Convincing the United Nations experts that the Timorese economy was as reliable as it needed to be had been no easy matter. I had had to invent statistics, doctor export statements, inflate the projections of royalties derived from oil, and even hire extras to give the illusion that a marble quarry was working at full stretch. The head of the UN delegation had left convinced that East Timor was the next Asian dragon. Ever since, I had done all I could to prove him right.

In spite of undeniable progress, however, the situation of Timor remained worrying. Barely a third of households had electricity, only half the population could read, and people were still dying in rural areas whenever there was a bad harvest. Coffee exports were on the rise, but far too slowly to have any effect on the general standard of living. Foreign companies gave the country the cold shoulder, frightened off by the absence of laws on intellectual property.

Grim from the start, the report became frankly depressing as I read on. Timor was beginning to exploit its enormous oil and gas reserves. This welcome development, around which we had constructed our scenario of economic liftoff, was undermined by the fact that only a small part of the income went into the State coffers. The rest evaporated in the hands of corrupt leaders whose power we had indirectly strengthened. A depraved judicial system opened the door to all kinds of abuse: a farmer could see himself dispossessed overnight of his land, legal decisions were sold to the highest bidder, and so on. To make matters worse, the government that had come to power in 2007 was already shaking on its foundations; President Ramos-Horta and Prime Minister Gusmão had both just narrowly escaped assassination attempts.

Unquestionably, the CFR had gained a lot from this dossier. We now had a network of some fifty embassies around the world, we had eyes and ears in the biggest international organizations, and all CFR agents had Timorese passports, to be used in case of emergency. Nevertheless, even though my role consisted first and foremost in defending the interests of my employer, I felt a responsibility toward the Timorese. The least that could be said is that at this stage I wasn’t sure I had set them on the right path.

The second report, devoted to the Bushmen, had been lying on my desk for a week. I hadn’t yet summoned up the courage to open it, knowing in advance that it would resemble all the previous ones. For twenty years, the number of Bushmen living in the Kalahari Desert had been shrinking, under the combined effect of repeated evictions, alcohol, and sexually transmitted diseases. The children, who no longer learned to hunt, were preparing for a life of dependency on State handouts, with the blessing of the Botswana government who had long had their eyes on these lands that were rich in diamonds and ore of all kinds.

I went straight to the conclusion of the report, which was the work of a respected German foundation. We are forced to admit that the strategies of various international organizations have produced none of the expected effects. The Bushmen today are at once less numerous, less well equipped, and more dependent on central government than at any other time in their history. The elders whom we met doubt that it will be possible to reverse this trend. The most pessimistic among them even speak of their children as being ‘the last generation of Bushmen in the Kalahari.’

I closed the report with a sigh. Here were two dossiers to which I had devoted several months of my life, which had won me honors and promotions, and which I now almost regretted having produced. No, the truth was that we were much less powerful than we liked to think.

Jessica put her head around the door to inform me that Yakoub wanted to see me. I crossed the corridor and entered his office. His back to the window, he was conversing with Lena Thorsen.

Like me, Lena was based in Toronto. After she had admitted—or, to be more precise, after she had boasted—that she had betrayed the CFR, the Excom had been obliged to give a ruling on her fate. Yakoub, Claas Verplanck, and Pierre Ménard had been in favor of imprisoning her for an indeterminate period, with no more respect for her civil rights than the Bush administration showed toward the detainees in Guantánamo. Zoe and Ching would have been content with her resignation. I alone had recommended clemency, in consideration of Lena’s exceptional abilities and the services she could still render.

My new colleagues—I had only been co-opted a few hours earlier— had not appreciated my appeal for mercy. True to her own temperament, Lena had not made my task any easier, saying she would prefer to die rather than apologize. I had met with the members of the Excom one by one to plead the cause of an agent who, not content with conspiring to bring me down, had just plunged the CFR into one of the most serious scandals in its history. It took an enormous amount of diplomacy for me to win a majority of members over to a middle way: Lena would remain in Toronto, retaining her rank as a class III agent; she would have no contact with the units and would be placed at the exclusive service of the Excom; she would also answer for her movements to Yakoub and would be free to produce dossiers within a strict budget, designed to limit her scope of action. In ratifying this arrangement, Yakoub had been very explicit that I had just spent the whole of my political capital with the Excom.

Fortunately for the two of us, Lena had fulfilled her side of the contract. She had sold her apartment in Los Angeles and found a place to live near the office. As I had feared, my colleagues had initially been in no hurry to give her work. I had outsourced a few dossiers to her, which, to be honest, had allowed me to concentrate on my new responsibilities. Lena had acquitted herself of these small tasks with her usual efficiency, not complaining about having to take orders from me but not thanking me either.

As the months went by, my colleagues had learned to recognize her merits. They had all called on her services at least once, mostly on subjects connected with IT, a field in which she was way ahead of all of us. In America she had become expert at hacking into servers considered impregnable and to disguise data without leaving any traces. Whenever one of these operations proved a little more difficult, she would write an ad hoc program in one of the dozens of languages she had mastered, spitting out hundreds of lines of code in less time than it took Jessica to bring me my coffee.

‘Ah, Sliv, good to see you,’ Yakoub said, rising to his full height.

I nodded slightly to Lena. Her nod to me must have been even slighter, for I didn’t notice it.

Do you need me? I asked Yakoub.

Actually, I need both of you.

We took our seats around his conference table. Yakoub’s worried air hinted at bad news.

This morning we received a Safe Haven dossier, he declared.

In November 2007, the Excom had sent out a circular to all units. Agents suspecting that one of their dossiers previous to 2003 didn’t have all the necessary security safeguards were asked to contact the Hong Kong Center. In order to get as wide a response as possible, the head of the CFR personally guaranteed the agents concerned that they ran no risk of sanctions.

Eighty-seven cases had come to us so far, of which at least two thirds had been the object of an in-depth revision. Every single time, Lena and her team of engineers had managed to contain the threat. The stream of dossiers had gradually dried up. We hadn’t received anything for a month.

Klaus Würth, German, forty-four years old, class II agent in Helsinki, Yakoub recited.

Has he only just woken up? Lena grunted.

He was based in Dortmund at the time, Yakoub went on, ignoring the interruption. The case goes back to 1995, when Herr Würth, convinced that humans were responsible for global warming, got it into his head to falsify the records of the National Climatic Data Center in America. His idea was quite a daring one. He had noticed that about a third of the NCTC’s temperatures were presented in the form of whole numbers, the conventional explanation being that, until the 1970s, many small or medium-sized weather stations did not record temperatures to the tenth of a degree. A few months later, a consultant working for Würth drew the attention of the IT people at the NCTC to a bug that had escaped them: a formatting error was preventing them from seeing the true data, which all or almost all had a figure after the dot!

And as if by chance, I said, the new data pointed to global warming…

Apparently so. 14ºC in 1880 was in fact 13.7ºC, while 16ºC in 1978 had become 16.2ºC, or even 16.4ºC. Climatic changes are so slow that the simple variation of two or three tenths of a degree in a century is enough to indicate a trend.

I let out an admiring whistle. The idea was magnificent. A pity that the execution had not been on the same level.

How did he falsify the fields? Lena asked—I despaired of ever seeing her express appreciation at the skill of a scenario writer. That kind of body isn’t in the habit of keeping its data in just one place.

That was the first thing that Hong Kong said. They’re sending us all they have by the diplomatic bag: the interim versions of the dossier, the risk analysis at the time, the NCTC’s IT protocols, and so on. As for Würth, he’s waiting for your call. Be gentle with him, apparently he isn’t getting much sleep at night.

If he respected the regulations, he has nothing to worry about, Lena replied, unaware that it was precisely the kind of phrase that might terrify the unfortunate Klaus.

Which center supervised his work at the time? I asked.

Dossiers follow an invariable route. After first being screened by the heads of the unit, they are transmitted to London, which rules on the quality of the scenario, then to one of the three centers specializing in the falsification of sources: Hong Kong, Córdoba,