Borderless Deceit

By Adrian de Hoog

A virus destroys the communication network of the Canadian diplomatic service. Carson Pryce, a reclusive, moody intelligence analyst, and Rachel Dunn, a brilliant diplomat with a glowing humanitarian track record, are implicated in the event.

For years, Carson has been secretly obsessed with Rachel, and abuses his privileged access to intelligence information to keep track of her and the people around her. He knows things about Rachel which she doesn’t even know herself. The investigation into the virus deepens and Carson initiates a cover-up to prevent damage to Rachel’s reputation. The plot in Borderless Deceit skips easily from Ottawa to Vienna, from Berlin to Alexandria and from Transylvania to Kenya. The action takes place in a world where privacy has disappeared, where hackers circle each other in cyberspace, and where a mouse click can orchestrate deceit in faraway places. Is there space in this for a rekindling of humanity’s enduring values?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Breakwater Books Ltd
• Release date: Jul 22, 2007
• ISBN: 9781550812763

Adrian de Hoog

Adrian de Hoog was educated in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Oxford, and spent 30 years working as a Canadian diplomat in countries as varied as Kenya and Germany. Adrian de Hoog lives in Ottawa. His first novel, The Berlin Assignment, published in 2006, was a tale of political intrigue with German re-unification providing the backdrop. The scope of his second novel, Borderless Deceit, is more international still. The intrigue spills effortlessly across borders; individual privacy is in short supply.

Book preview

1 CHAPTER ONE

The bug arrived in stealth, without warning. And it was virulent, so bad that some – the closet mystics amongst us – supposed it sprang from the occult. A visitation? they murmured, keenly tracking an inexplicable disorder. More sober thinkers took a dimmer view. They were unsure of what had stolen in, but the devastation was plain enough. Infestation was their spin. Yet, they too were ignorant of the grim extent of what was really happening. Only Irving Heywood had it right. He was in an emergency session of the High Council. Look, he said, leaning far back in his chair and stroking a ballooning paunch – in bad situations Heywood often acted nonchalant – there is no remedy. Although he seemed unruffled, he felt otherwise. Hugging upper arms to his chest to hide stains of perspiration growing on his shirt, he shrugged, adding, We’re just about wiped out. No embassy’s been spared. I tell you, it’s like a plague.

The tag stuck. It entered Service history. That black day of digital destruction seared all our memories.

Cyberspace velocity and a voracious appetite for ruination – these were the overt symptoms. But the bug also possessed an inner wizardry, because it was precisely targeted, like a smart bomb. Years of assurances from the techies had wrapped us in a comfortable cocoon. We had come to believe that the Service communication network was invincible, closed to outsiders, protected by a wall of silicon as unscalable, as impenetrable – so its designers claimed and they were never short of hubris – as that cast-in-concrete aberration that once snaked its way through Berlin. But in an hour, maybe less, the years of network building went for nought. Vital spirits gushed from the Service as water through a burst dam. Ten thousand linked computers scattered over all the diplomatic outposts were sabotaged with one stroke. Emptied of all contents, they went dead. Our shocked techies stood by, helpless and slack-jawed. Outside in the rest of the world all the other networks went about their business in robust good health. Why us? Why no one else?

The bug’s origin was eventually pinned down, of course. An ancient, deserted monastery in Transylvania. A satellite dish sat on the roof. Beneath it there may have been a bookless library, or a chapel which long ago ceased to house God. Painted on the roof around the dish in a circle, in crude strokes from a broad brush dipped in a sickly yellow paint, were words in the Romanian language: Cursed are they who deny, for they shall be denied. It sounded like a translation of the writings of an ancient Judaic cult.

The words were studied, of course. One analyst eventually observed they were taken from something unknown, something unusual, possibly a yet-to-be-discovered satanic version of the Sermon on the Mount.

Anyway, the plague during that single wrenching hour transformed me. I didn’t know it then, but now, months later, recognize its impact was transcending. It brought me role-reversal. Always the hunter, I was suddenly the hunted. The plague turned me into quarry, though quarry that escaped. Not an escape of the ordinary kind, not just the usual ducking of suspicion. Nor do I mean that I stayed minutes ahead of accusing knocks on my front door, though that would happen too. No, not that. What the plague’s ravage really triggered off was the opposite of the destruction of digital reality. A link, some form of reverse cause, seemed to exist between it and that other world, I mean the one I inhabit now, the one beyond vulgarity. The bug from Transylvania allowed me to escape from a miserable view of life. It reversed a despicable attitude towards my fellow man. The plague begot the elevation of my soul.

Like all the pestilential horrors that swept through Transylvania centuries ago and, God knows, may linger still, this black animus spread invisibly. And as with human bodies in medieval times, our network once penetrated had no defence. The bug consumed the essence of what we were – our vitality, our plans, our memory – and as it fed off this rich booty it expanded at a terrifying rate. It hitched a ride on a frantic instruction delivered over the network to cut all power. But this only spurred the calamity to spread still faster. Next an SOS reverberated over intercoms and through the international phone lines. In Europe, our diplomats out on the cocktail circuits had their feasting interrupted by chauffeurs whose car phones started buzzing. And in Asia our ambassadors, awakened in the middle of the night, groped irritably in the darkness to stop the ringing. Too late. The network’s servers and connected hard drives were already gone. In no time the limbs of the Service had been severed from the body. Embassies, from Jakarta to Pretoria and Brasilia to Moscow, were splintered off. And here, in headquarters, we lay, you might say, cut-up, beheaded, eviscerated.

My own computer, I remember, made one of those digitally clean buzzing sounds of something small working away with passion. Then it was lifeless. Puzzled, I stared at the black screen until I heard sounds in the hallway and opened my door. Arthur Beausejour, the few remaining strands of his much-nurtured hair hanging unstuck from his forehead, looked ragged the way he came forward. I didn’t see Arthur often. He spent the weeks in his cell glued to his monitor the way I was to mine. He studied the drug cartels; I tracked the international weapons trade. We talked only when we saw that a commodity of his was being traded somewhere in the world for shipments of mine. At those times I took care to use my size to hover over him. I don’t know why I tried to intimidate him that way…nor why he took it.

Carson, he cried in horror, it’s gone. His eyes stood wide open and his hands covered his cheeks. I assumed he was referring to the memory of his computer.

I too was tallying what I might have lost, yet had an urge to rattle Beausejour still further. Maybe not even the back-up system survived, I said coldly. Beausejour gave me an insane look and hurried towards the sliding security doors and the normal world beyond. Now others in our line of work emerged from their cells. Lise Landry and Phil Doherty, Ghislain Khan too, plus some of the younger ones. Even Francis Merrick, our leader, who spent most days as if in soporific residence on a foreign planet, came shuffling out in his absent-minded way. They huddled, were perplexed, and seemed unsure of what would happen next. Some muttered; others laughed nervously. All of us, we – the watchers – the chroniclers of information teased from the world’s dark shadows using unseen techniques – with our tools suddenly melted away, felt true pointlessness that moment.

Once more the sliding doors opened and shut. Beausejour was back, his face ashen, his voice resigned. It’s not just us, he said. It’s everywhere. There’s nothing left… As this sunk in, the consternation grew and a din revved up, and above it rose Beausejour’s tinny voice. …and the High Council is going into emergency session.

The scene – the despondency, the hand-wringing – it irked me and so I turned away. Back in my cell I began to think.

Weeks later, after I had provided the details of my discovery of the plague’s origin to our friends to the south, they completed their report, which then duly appeared before the High Council. It revealed that the plague’s origin was the Romanian satellite dish. The killer program sent from there, the American report noted in a mixture of techno-babble and bureaucratese, had been ingeniously conceived:

…It can be deduced that fixed into the meta-instructional layers of the target communications network were pathways which, through previous reconnoitring, the intruding alien presence came to understand how to exploit. It actively engaged them to access the network’s central repositories of information, as well as designated repository extensions. The intruding presence had a search and destroy nature and supported itself with auto-initiated feedback loops so as to guarantee 100% destruction. From what has been ascertained, the process was characterised by a hyper-complexity, the result of a high skill level assiduously applied during the design phase of the full operation.

The turkeys that did it were smart for sure! barked Heywood after the report came out. Any layman would come to that conclusion. Who needs the Yanks to tell us that? Finding the perpetrator, he swore to all who listened, would be his next most urgent mission. I will not rest, he added for good measure.

Irving Heywood ran Service Operations with an absolutist’s touch which had earned him the corridor nickname Czar. He considered few to be his equal, and certainly not the Americans. As soon as their report appeared he began belittling it. He hated its style and he denied its implied technological leadership. Mostly though, he couldn’t stand that they had issued it without him having asked for it. But he did study the picture on the front cover, the satellite snapshot of the yellow graffiti on the monastery roof. Cursed are the deniers…Was this a cruel little swipe at Heywood’s attitude? If it was, he didn’t get it, but then, irony was never Heywood’s strong suit.

I was convinced that our friends to the south, though outwardly helpful, were privately chuckling. And why not? Heywood and his hordes of techies had bragged too loud and long about their marvel, the great network. The best in the world, no one can beat it. Now, with the plague having pulled the rug out from underneath, the Czar had fallen hard, ending up in a graceless pose, on the floor so to speak, on his fat imperial behind.

About the time the American report came out, during the latter stages of the Service’s operational capability being restored, I picked up a curious signal on my computer. Initially it seemed no more than a minor perturbation, like a puff of cool air on a summer day. Though it puzzled me, I didn’t immediately recognize it signalled bad weather. Only later, when it had turned into a storm – just before I had to run away – did I see that it too was part of the plague’s full impact.

As I say, the network was still being rebuilt, although my personal ultra-classified link to the colossal American databases had been mended first thing. I recall it was late, well after posted hours. I was on personal time, still in my cell, feeding an obsession. Years before, more than a decade, I’d fallen into abusing the privileges which came with my status. I had started monitoring Rachel’s travels.

Back then the Americans had added new features to their information warehouses. One was airline passenger manifests. Through my special line I accessed it and as a test, a kind of schoolboy prank, merely out of curiosity, I entered Rachel’s name. She was there, of course. I tested her name in another source for related information, and another still. Already then at the dawn of the information age much raw data was available, and when it came to Rachel’s comings and goings – and doings – I could dig out quite a bit. It fuelled my imagination and quickly an addiction set in. Soon I was tracking her all the time, unable to restrain myself.

This evening too, going back to the period missed while the network was down, I saw that a few weeks before she’d been travelling again, always the same trip now, a flight from Vienna to Cairo with a connection to Alexandria. I searched elsewhere for confirmation that her weekend accommodation had once more been the spacious suite in the elegant El-Salamlek Palace, the one with a view of the small harbour below and beyond it the open Mediterranean. I also saw that the account had been settled as usual by Morsi Abou-Ghazi. He, I knew, passed himself off as an altruist, as a passionate, caring and cultured man. I was also convinced that Rachel was unaware of who he really was and what he truly did.

As I was consigning these details to storage, I noticed a hesitancy in the encryption. It was nothing really, not even a hiccup, and it came just prior to confirmation that encryption had been completed. Had I been looking up I would have missed it. Partially intrigued, partially suspicious, not yet thinking that my watching was being watched, I banged a key to activate a monitoring function. A checklist began forming. All routine. Then an unusual item was shown…Zadokite Port…after which the checklist stopped. In the next instant the entry vanished, as if it had never been. Had someone pulled a plug? My mistrust grew. I pressed another function key for a more detailed search. Some moments later the result was in: Zadokite Port unknown.

As I say, it puzzled me; then it began to worry me. Had some entity retreated from my cyberspace chamber through an opening which, once shut, would be forever indiscernible? Was someone seeking information from me, but denying me knowledge of them? It made me think of the graffiti scrawl on the monastery roof. Which made me think of Heywood. Next time we do the denying, our bombastic Czar had pledged, his indignant voice trembling as much as his excess flesh. We’ll get them turkeys, I swear. We’ll tattoo DENIED on their foreheads. We’ll do it with acidic ink.

This corrosive pledge, or something similar, was first voiced during the High Council’s emergency session. At least, that’s what the Service rank and file – the scribblers, thinkers, analysts and information diggers, in short, all the crushed souls heaving away in bureaucracy’s trenches –believed. Service legends often begin with irresistible snippets of hearsay, and on this occasion the rank and file sensed a great one was in the making.

Fragments of the picture emerged in the corridors, the washrooms, the cafeteria, even at the bus stops before the Service complex. Much was made of the fact that shortly after the emergency session Heywood began making the rounds, showing up everywhere, like a latter day lay preacher. No one recollected him being this visible before. Such perambulating always creates grounds for serious suspicions.

Proud and self-important, palming his gut as he went, the Czar called on unit after unit. His purpose was to ask anyone knowing something about the bug’s invasion to come forward. The oratory was fluid, warm, earnest. As Head of Service Operations, Heywood said, he wanted a total reconstruction. The debris of the disaster, he informed solemnly, would be gathered together. Components of exploded jetliners get dredged up from the ocean floor for reassembly, so why not our defunct network? He added he had carte blanche to get to the bottom of the mess. Support for a massive reconstruction operation was already sitting in the wings and normality would return soon. He usually pressed his palms together in the manner of a Swami when he finished, bowed and then whispered, Thank you. God Bless.

Despite Heywood’s dignified body language, his claim that he had carte blanche convinced nobody at all. It merely whetted an appetite to find the truths which his behaviour hid. The rank and file knew full well that the High Council never issued carte blanche to anyone. Senior committees – the world’s cabinets and diets, the soviets or synods – are all places for balancing cravings for power. Why would our High Council be any different? Everyone knew it was incapable of trusting any one of its members to act decently on behalf of the others. Carte blanche was really, quite truly, quite preposterously impossible. Heywood’s use of the term only served to spur the trench dwellers questing for the truth to dig still harder.

Heywood’s name came to dominate the early morning conversations on the buses bringing the workers in from the outlying hamlets. It was at the centre of remarks during those mid-morning moments of relaxed talk in the washrooms – when the women smooth their blouses before the mirrors and, one wall over, the men stand chatting at the urinals. All were out to assemble the real story of the High Council’s emergency session. And sure enough the snippets began adding up. The picture wasn’t at all as Heywood claimed. He had no carte blanche. The opposite was true. He’d been put on a short leash. Some went so far as to snigger that his head was in a noose and it would soon start tightening.

2 CHAPTER TWO

The High Council’s emergency session had been both farce and drama. The plague still raged when the senior officers of the Service filed into the meeting chamber. They looked peeved, like lords and ladies disrupted, impatient to get the bother over with. Behind them the sound-proofed doors clicked shut.

The Head had not yet entered through his private entrance, which allowed for a few free minutes. The High Council’s favourite pre-meeting game was quickly in full swing: the tossing back and forth of darts dipped in verbal poison. Back and forth the barbs flew. Back and forth. Rhythmically. The poison’s source that day, naturally, was the vexing reality of ten thousand computers suddenly gone dead – and of a darkness descending. Good throws set off a light tittering, the best got loud guffaws.

Hey Irv, good show. How did your guys do it? I mean, this bringing down the curtain. Hunt, the Service baron who delivered the country’s conquests in the world of trade, smirked.

Irving Heywood was just sitting down, arranging his great weight on soft calf leather. We entertain, Ron, he said amicably, and we aim to please. We know there’s not much levity in the world of commerce. Some laughter, the loudest from a self-congratulating Heywood.

Claire Desmarais, an icy woman with thin embittered lips, sat across from Heywood and stared at him over her lenses like a lizard contemplating a thick, fat insect. I have a meeting with the American ambassador in forty minutes, she said coldly. Shall I tell him we have a learning challenge, that we don’t know how to handle computers? She had a habit as she spoke of sharply snapping her head from side to side, also like a lizard.

Why don’t you keep him in the dark, Hunt advised merrily. We are!

"Is that true, Monsieur Heywood? Claire Desmarais sniped right back. Are we in the dark? Will we soon be freezing too?" She did the political work in the Service, so she knew about democracy’s light growing faint all over the world and of international relationships getting the chills.

Heywood leaned back in his chair and stroked his paunch. Ask the good ambassador…in my name, Claire, if you like… He paused to sneeze. …to explain to you the details of the last launch of their new missile-interceptor missile. Another pause. It failed. Scattered chirps of pure delight.

Is that where you got your inspiration? questioned Harry Berezowski, a much younger man charged with assorted Service duties, such as protocol and the well-being of Canadians jailed in sinkholes all over the world. Is that where you got the idea for designing a system that self-destructs?

Ron Hunt hooted.

Good one, Harry, Heywood acknowledged.

Even Abbie MacAuley, a severe lawyer who had risen with unstoppable momentum to head that part of the Service sometimes referred to as Hammurabi’s Inner Sanctum, was laughing now. With verve she cried, We reap what we sow! But no one picked this up.

More darts flew.

Personal liability insurance’s all in order, Irv?

How will you restore our trust to use your technology, Monsieur Heywood?

Since work has stopped, why not declare a party?

Heywood snatched them from the air and looped them back.

My personal worth is beyond the reaches of insurance, Ronnie.

Technology, Claire, is like your friend the American ambassador;

never trust him, but squeeze out what you can as long as he is there.

Abbie, give me the legal loophole and I’ll declare a week of feasting.

The game ceased. Étienne des Étoiles arrived from the side with two assistants trailing. As with a piece of theatre, des Étoiles seemed to come from nowhere, and so thick was the mist surrounding his high office, so deep the mystery of his leadership, that when he was not on stage he appeared not to exist. Few were invited to spend time with him. Outside the High Council scarcely anyone had ever laid eyes on him. The occasional rare sighting reported a naked scalp, an oversized nose, and hooded eyes – in short, a vulture of a man. In the popular imagination he brooded at his desk and pecked away there at the tender parts of people and of policies.

Where’s D’Aoust? he asked in lightly accented patrician English. A stiff, quarter turn of his head indicated he expected an answer from behind.

In Africa, sir, replied one of the assistants, chairing the conference on strengthening democracies.

Huang?

St. Petersburg. Doing the new treaty on arctic pollution.

Just us then, he announced to the five around the table. He took his time to examine each one. Heywood was the last. My machine is dead, des Étoiles said in a voice tinged with regret, and my secretary no longer has my schedule. Why is that?

Heywood came forward and filled his chest. Somewhere near his centre he felt sick, but outwardly he challenged. We know the following…so far, he said, planting hands on the High Council table and staring directly into the lazy, brooding half-closed eyes of the High Council Head.

A two-minute briefing on the meltdown from Claude, chief of technical operations, was all Heywood had, and much of it was gibberish. Closed-system vulnerability, integrated software suites, geometric arrays of servers, spokes and hubs and mega-baud lines linking macro and micro missions: technical hocus-pocus, meaningless words, all of it passing through Heywood’s mind as water does through gravel. When he finished, Claude searched for a sign he’d been understood, but all he saw was the Czar rising, fixing his gaze on the door, and initiating the long slow trek to the High Council chamber. Half into the hallway Heywood hesitated. What’s really going on, Claude? he asked quietly. What’s causing it? The network engineer shrugged. Heywood pressed one last time. And what happens now? Claude looked blank. He had no idea.

But Heywood did. Blackness descending on ten thousand computers had a cause which, once known, would demand sacrifice. And in the eventual rite he could end up being the one supine on the altar waiting for the knife. From experience he also knew – with the disaster still breaking – that he might find some toehold with which to turn events to his advantage. That required authoritative answers to tough questions and, with Claude struck dumb, the Czar was only too aware that he would live or die by his wits alone. By the time Irving Heywood walked into the High Council chamber his opening lines were honed.

At approximately seventeen-twenty Greenwich Mean Time, a bit past the noon hour here, the watch in Network Overview noticed a couple of overload lights flashing on the board. Only one technician was on duty…the lunch break…and he wasn’t responsible for network overload, so he waited. I ought to say, network overload is not necessarily regarded as dangerous. It shows everyone around the world is busy. That’s good. It’s what we want. The main impact is that when you click a ‘send’ button the response is a bit slower. So it’s no big deal.

This, more or less, was fact.

A soft rhythmic sound had started up. Des Étoiles’s fingers were drumming the table. He half turned to one of the assistants, but checked himself and sent a combative glance at the electric clock on the far wall. Heywood pressed his palms down harder, glowered at the drumming fingers and picked up speed. More facts, some passably true: network overload spreading, the first signs that network overload was cover for network annihilation, the fact – absolutely remarkable from a technical perspective – that merely being on-line was enough to be invaded, no need to open an attachment for the malignancy to spread – a first, we think.

There was silence around the table as the implications of the invasion’s ease sank in.

There had to be an entry point, Heywood added, sounding competent. We’re not yet sure where that was, but we’ll find out.

An unfriendly visit would you say? Hunt intervened sarcastically. Something inconsistent with the laws of physics. A visitation?

Heywood did not play. He stayed focussed on the lines his inward self was writing and his conscious self could read out loud.

…once inside, the virus travels to the first server in its path, impounding the files, holding them hostage, incapacitating them to emit alarm signals, preventing the deployment of automatic anti-viral systems…

Like capturing the body’s immune system, said Abbie MacAuley brightly.

You got it, growled Heywood.

…the work stations attached to the server are seized next. With this beachhead, the invader sends an instruction to replicate itself in the next server, thus duplicating the operation. Steadily it moves towards the peripherals, to the e-mail accounts, and to the main files. The process repeats itself, again and again, taking hold of, but not yet obliterating, not yet, the whole network and its contents…

The Czar explained that all this looked so much like network overload that it threw everyone off.

Well, the symptoms of a light flu will mask malaria, asserted Abbie MacAuley, which is then often fatal.

Precisely, boomed Heywood.

…once the first branch of the network is fully secured, an instruction – now replicated inside the next branch – loops back to the first and issues the order for localized self-destruction…

My God, Harry Berezowski said softly, beginning to understand the virus’s chilling efficacy. Not a visitation, more like an infestation.

A deadly one too, Heywood said harshly. He fell back in his chair which rocked and squeaked a bit. Fingers intertwined over his round gut and in this pose of self-assurance he continued. The virus moved fast. The central servers were gone in twenty minutes. The ones at the embassies were next and got fried just as bad. Dead now. Gone to hell. No time for counter measures either. Pestilential it was, I tell you. A plague. I’ll find out who did it. I swear. They won’t get far. In the ensuing pause, he began twiddling his thumbs.

Étienne des Étoiles broke the spell. That may not be quite good enough. The intonation was colourless. A global operation erased? Not a finger lifted?

Heywood readied himself. Many great battles have been lost in minutes. He came forward, once more planting his hands on the table. Would the attack come straight from des Étoiles? Or from a proxy? Or from them all?

Claire Desmarais was first. She could not contain herself. Indeed, she said, not a finger lifted, and raised hers to make a point. I want to say that I haven’t heard here what I came for. Yes, I’ve heard a description of a problem. But, no, I haven’t had an explanation."

This unleashed hell itself, des Étoiles doing nothing to contain it. Snide digs from Ron Hunt; more biological concern from Abbie Macauley; reprimands, not entirely unfounded, from Claire Desmarais. Demands for damage assessment, claims about flimsy system design, laments about the catastrophic losses of sacred information, howls of pain over setbacks to global democratisation in accordance with the national vision; and above all…fear…fear that the Service would be ridiculed.

This tearing of cloth and showering of ashes went on and on until Claire’s fleshless lips ended the discussion by bringing it full circle: An explanation, she said. If it is beyond our capacity to find one, we should seek outside help. Her admonishing index finger had once again ascended and she was wagging it, as if to signal that the end of God’s creation was near.

Throughout the meeting, so the reconstruction went, Heywood fought the battle of his life. Sometimes he retreated nimbly. Then he’d stand his ground as if he held a pike. Occasionally he attacked. Once, loudly indignant, he metaphorically climbed up his banner, shouted out defiance, and said he’d stand by and for his troops. Afterwards he confided – not to Claude, but to Claude’s fresh assistant Jaime – how he survived. His jowls shook reliving it. Experience counts, he explained. You fall back on it. I tell you, Jaime, they were surrounding me. I know the macabre ritual, sabres out, first some prodding before the wild swinging begins. They want you to dance to your death. But I refused. I pitied them, you know. I sat and watched and shook my head.

Jaime didn’t know it then – how could she? – that Heywood had been confronting sabre-swinging ghosts long before the Transylvanian plague. It was later, when she and Heywood were meeting often – she to create and he to glorify their common cause, the one they esoterically called Zadokite Port – that he began to share his confidences with her. A troop of ghosts had been landing brutal blows on him for years. Irving’s wife Hannah, always a sunny woman, had become bedridden at home with cancer. She was recovering, or maybe not – it was too early to know. Their second son, after thirty-five years of roaming and seeking, had recently phoned from out west to say that he’d just married a cowboy and had found true happiness at last. The eldest son had a child with dyslexia, definitely not a Heywood gene. The third son had gone bankrupt four times as a book seller in western ski resorts. And the youngest one, wildly successful professionally, was living in deep poverty because he was in the middle of a third marriage, which too had hit the rocks. And then there were his little personal miseries: haemorrhoid attacks; an enlarged prostate making peeing a hassle; hip joints so stiff that some days he pined for a wheelchair. As for his mind, well, twice already he’d caught himself leaving the kitchen with the tap water still running. Life, Jaime, is one endless fight.

Irv, Jaime had said, The first hundred years are the toughest, so think of the good times ahead.

Heywood had sniffed. My attitude exactly, he had replied.

That evening, inspired by Jaime’s youth and boundless energy, having returned to the family home on Ivy Crescent, a red brick house with a wooden porch from which the paint was peeling, he went upstairs to the bedroom to kiss his wife. He projected cheerfulness and hope. In a weak voice Hannah asked the same question that in earlier days had radiantly bubbled out: How was it at the office, darling?

His reply: Wonderful, sweet. Inspiring. Thirty-five years…I’m still loving it.

Yes, Heywood had fought. And he would fight some more, so as to get to the good times ahead.

But good times ahead was scarcely the issue at the High Council session. Claire Desmarais’s absurd notion – to request outside assistance – had put the Czar’s dignity on the block. Outside assistance? Good God! Good times ahead are nothing if the voyage there brings with it a sullied reputation. When Claire made that suggestion, Heywood’s fight at the High Council session turned into one not so much for a better future as for an honourable past.

Deftly changing his bearing, discarding the veneer of authority, taking defiance off the table, placing clasped hands humbly under his chin, the Czar morphed into the role of supplicant. His comeback line to Claire was an invitation to the whole High Council to ascend to a higher level, to the one where charity begins.

We were caught unprepared, sure. And there was no antidote – a mistake from which to learn. But let’s be realistic. We’ll weather it. We’re resourceful. For a while we’ll communicate by telephone, as we always did. We can also start using the fax machines again. And let’s not forget, everything is backed up on tapes. Reports, records, letters, memoranda – it’s all still there. Even our schedules. We haven’t lost that much. We’ll rebuild the network, make it better. With a push it could be done in weeks. I’ll find who’s responsible too. I’ll get an explanation. I’ll make sure we’ll fathom this. I swear it. If you want, I’ll swear twice.

This was Heywood’s last shot, his ultimate lunge. Would he now stand or fall? Everyone waited for des Étoiles, but he showed no sign that he had made up his mind.

Harry Berezowski, the kid on the block, young enough to be able to spend a dozen years recovering were he ever to have a slip-up such as Heywood’s, stepped courageously into the void. What Irving says is wise, he said. The world hasn’t ended. Let’s get over it and on with it.

More silence, but of a different colour. Étienne des Étoiles continued reflecting. Heywood stopped his squeaky rocking. Hunt began a methodical cracking of his knuckles.

Suspense built.

Des Étoiles, took a deep breath and…came down on Berezowski’s side. We have faith in Mr. Heywood’s ability to get things done. Then he summed up. He wanted a full explanation for the meltdown: who was behind it, how the virus had entered, where defences were lacking. There were still more crisp orders to the Czar. You believe you can find the authors. Do what you have to. Keep me in the picture. Report daily.

Ron Hunt immediately winked at Claire. Report daily!

Des Étoiles was not finished. He also wanted an operational plan for mitigating the disaster’s impact. By breakfast tomorrow. And, ensure reasonable communications are restored worldwide within, shall we say, 48 hours. He next demanded detailed design plans for a new network – to be sanctioned only upon completion of a full peer review. Finally, he dictated an entire overhaul of network operating rules: If it’s true, said des Étoiles without emotion, that blinking lights can’t distinguish between system overload and a debilitating virus, then lights are useless. Sorry, Abbie, but there’s no excuse for doctors that can’t tell malaria from the flu.

Heywood made a point of getting in the meeting’s final comment. Once more rocking back and forth, he said, Sounds reasonable to me. He couldn’t have made it sound more bland.

With a final short bow and a single knock on the table, his way of dismissing the session, Étienne des Étoiles got up and disappeared through the door in the wood-panelled wall. Harry Berezowski and Abbie MacAuley drifted away through the double doors. Heywood was still rocking back and forth when Claire Desmarais lifted her finger one last time. Her next appointment, she reminded him, was with the American ambassador. I’ll ask him what he knows, she threatened.

Ron Hunt lingered at the door. Ever seen that circus act, Irv, he twirped brightly, you know, the one with the dancing bear? Metal collar. Steel chain.

Of course I have, Ron, Heywood replied softly. I recall how it amused the children.

Alone in the High Council chamber, Heywood replayed in his mind the sound of Hunt cracking his knuckles. Strange how each clack had presaged a blow. He also reflected on Étienne des Étoiles summation. Do what you have to. It had the ring of a horoscope. And doesn’t a decent horoscope satisfy a thousand different desires for meaning? You could read that remark as posing no limits, sort of as carte blanche. The more the Czar contemplated this, the more he felt guided. A predestined line of thinking began to form; the line then widened into a plan; and the plan, once fashioned, began shining like a beacon.

How long did Heywood stay in his charmed state? Three minutes? Thirty? No matter. At the end he jumped up. Not for years had he had such sprightliness.

3 CHAPTER THREE

I need four, five people in here in a hurry, the Czar snapped to Claude.

Stiff hips were forgotten during the elevator descent from the executive floor. Half-walking, half-running, partially stumbling, feet almost skipping, trying to keep up with his surging-forward weight, Heywood had rushed through the foyer of the Service complex, beneath the canopy of flags of all the members of the United Nations suspended from the ceiling and past the diplomatic relics in glass cages watched over by the framed photographs of the Service Great. On and on he scampered, towards his realm, to the tower housing Service Operations. Alphonse, the entrance guard, who passed the days whistling popular classical melodies to himself, had a premonition that a mass of flesh was approaching and ended Ode to Joy halfway through a quarter note. The Czar normally neared with a slow, easy, swaying inertia, but this time the momentum of a freight train was bearing down and it nearly threw Alphonse right off. "Bonjour, monsieur!" he hailed, frantically yanking the door forward, allowing Heywood with his imperial countenance to sail through.

In the Czar’s office, Claude had remained immobile, in shock really, the whole time his leader was gone, and the sudden order to assemble his five best men wasn’t registering. What happened for chrissake? he asked, still dazed.

"Carte blanche, Heywood growled. Free hand. Personal instruction from Étienne."

This woke Claude up and he whistled through his teeth. Geez! How’d you do that? Thought for sure they’d make heads roll.

"They didn’t purr, Claude. Got a little rough. Wouldn’t be normal if it hadn’t. But in the end Étienne said: get to the bottom of the mess and get over it. Do what you have to. His words. That’s what we’re doing. Carte blanche. Starting now. There’s money too. A new network. Gotta get one off the drawing boards. Time’s short. I want a binder for Étienne first thing in the morning. Everything in it. Could be an all-nighter."

Heywood immersed himself into the place from which he governed, a custom-built chair shaped like a throne which, with a mere button push, would recline far down. This time he brought it back halfway and from that position lifted his feet into a small free space on his desk in between tall paper stacks.

The reference to evening work shattered Claude’s numbness. My curling night tonight, he protested.

A few rocks to heave here first, Claude, Heywood replied dismissively. Draw ‘em to the button, every one. I need your best guys. With his feet up high and leaning back, the Czar had interlaced his fingers over the hill that was his midriff.

Claude squirmed. It’s a mixed four, Irv. You want me to stand the ladies up? It’s for a spot in the play-offs. For chrissake!

The Czar was resolute. He formulated his requirements. Emergency response memo before breakfast; new design specs for a better version of the network in first draft to accompany said memo; a procurement plan for new hardware; a list of renowned experts to constitute a peer review – A what review,