The Cause Read online

  Chapter 2

  “There are four types of men:

  1. One who knows and knows that he knows. His horse of wisdom will reach the skies.

  2. One who knows, but doesn’t know that he knows. He is fast asleep, so you should wake him up!

  3. One who doesn’t know, but knows that he doesn’t know. His limping mule will eventually get him home.

  4. One who doesn’t know and doesn’t know that he doesn’t know. He will be eternally lost in his hopeless oblivion!”

  -Ibn Yami, 13th -century Persian-Tajik poet

  The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics states that for each possible outcome of a particular action, the world replicates itself into a copy such that each potential action is played out in a separate universe. The key to this is that these universes don’t interact.

  The computer is a similar system where the many-worlds theorem has great appeal. Such Black Hat hackers see the computer as simply a virtual world, split from this one, yet alike, able to learn and evolve, one with a myriad of potential outcomes, but different in that it can seek out and stretch the real world. If every outcome is known, or at least can be hypothe- sized, then one can inflict much damage onto the real world from the virtual one. Just because there is a screen in front of you, does that mean it should be believed? A particular example of duality in the real and virtual worlds took place on September 23rd of 2018 when an Anonymous hacker named Cerberus broke into CNN’s Twitter account and claimed a dirty bomb had exploded in the Capitol only a few blocks away from the White House. After this bogus news hit the Internet, another hacked media site reported the same story and within the short span of a second, high-frequency trading programs reacted by yanking their bids. Liquidity went dry. The result was a flash-crash in all of the major equity market indices. The Dow Jones Industrial Average crashed 663 points in less than a second. Other markets followed. System triggers tripped. The market shut down.

  One over-leveraged CEO running a high-frequency trading company whose algorithms had gone awry jumped off a bridge the same day—all because of a keypunch sent from a 5x5 StorQuest storage unit costing $70 a month that had access to the Wi-Fi of an OfficeMax across the street where the command was sent.

  There it was—one machine fooling a host of others—opening Schrodinger’s box and forcing an outcome—puncturing the superstate of the real system by that of the virtual. Quantum suicide in motion. What was the proof? The body of CEO Johann Jennings floating down the Hudson, a red stain on the chilly waters. The virtual world is a blaze that’s difficult to backburn, even if you wish you could. Like the photon, it’s moving in two directions at the same time, stuck in a coherent superposition, and when you observe it, it suddenly changes, morphs and adapts, such that the original state is lost by the observation itself.

  So on the morning of September 23rd 2022, four years later and two days after graduating from The Farm, the notion of the multi-world would flick back on again and I would remember the work of Cerberus the Hellhound. The “what if I did, what if I didn’t” sort of metaphorical fork in the road. It was another important day in my history, not a news-breaking headliner like the 2018 flash-crash.

  It was a day that started by schlepping along after forty-eight hours of nephrotoxic celebration. I had a hangover after waking, and the only cure had been hair-of-the-dog, luke-warm beers and a vodka-weighted Bloody Mary. Now, standing at a bus stop heavy-headed and aspirin-filled after a dizzying Williamsburg pow-wow in colonial town, I thought about the previous night at Franklin’s Tavern—double-fisted with friends Samuel Adams and Jim Beam at a staff-only after party. Drinking with Bunker-the-Blinded, waitresses Darlene and Kay (William & Mary girls) were dressed in uniforms of cheap Rococo strapless dresses. They wrestled with keeping their mobcaps away from Bunker while guzzling rummers. After hours more of drinking, sometime pecking the edge of dawn, Bunker decided to name his M40 rifle euphemistically “Titty Licker” instead of Daniel Boone’s “Tick Licker”—this while he undid the spiral laces of Darlene’s stay and wet her nipples with the foam of a lager. And then panniers, undercoats, shifts, stockings, garters flew into the air, tossed along with brain and body. The two days had been a breakaway from habit and discipline, and there was a bit of shame in the whole charade, although my frown still seemed to be worn upside-down.

  A line of Sunday drivers turtled by. I was somewhere near Market Square, the 10 bus nowhere in sight. I stood inside a bus shelter with a huge poster plastered to the inside wall that said, Government For You—Putting People To Work One Job At A Time. I drooped over the glass casing containing a bus schedule and squinted to find 9:35, the time for the next departure. I turned around and looked back at the road. There was a saltshaker tipped over in the middle of the street, the wind so light, sandy grains trailed along the asphalt to where it had come to rest. Up in the sky, a couple of old-model Predator drones flew overhead, tiny white contrails trailing behind. They were in the air nights and days now. The newer models were segmented into different classes of use: sound capture, video surveillance, kill machines, covert spy apparatuses that looked like living things. Now, there were quiet, battery-powered gliders that flew low to the ground called EEDs (eyes and ear drones). They were silent chameleons, verging on imperceptible. They had skins that morphed from cerulean blue to pale white, flying blurs with camouflaged bodies adapting to the color of the sky. Built for video and audio surveillance, a slew of them had been taken down by organized crime gangs who could afford guided missiles. These were the people who took offense at having their activity monitored. Other people seemed not to care. The latest designs they built smaller, sleeker, but the rumors said these were being shot down too by new, short-lived neutralizer rockets, the hottest-selling item on the black market. Evolution and adaptation were in play across cities in America. To the naked eye most were impossible to see, but if you looked through a telescope at the high-flyer UAVs, it seemed like the sky was a swarm of insects over the big cities.

  At the bus stop, my thoughts idled, slowly drifting over the last three months in the CIA at The Farm—paramilitary training, jump school, tradecraft, explosives, tactical driving, engineering, telecom. Flashes of memory blurred with the posted bus times, and I found myself again focusing hard at the bus schedule blank-brained and wobbly. Then I heard Tomray Bunker over my shoulder. “We’re C, fucking I, fucking A, man.” I turned around to his wide-lipped grin. Dumb-faced and giddy, he was out in the morning chill bare-chested and sockless, dressed in black Nikes and a pair of knee-holed jeans. On top of his head was Darlene’s mobcap fluttering in the wind.

  “Yeah,” I said. “CIA who’s DOA.” Each of us was a NOC (non-official cover), a field operative—deep undercover where your existence would be denied should you ever be caught. Somehow it hadn’t dawned on me yet, the significance of it all.

  “Not me. I feel great,” Bunker said.

  “The bipolar feel best when they’re down.”

  “C fucking I, fucking AAAA,” he droned on, sticking out his wine-stained tongue. I glanced around but the streets were bare. The whole world had gone to sleep. He sensed my agitation and stuck out his tongue at me, shaking his head.

  “All I seem to remember was you fucking Dar fucking Kaaaay.”

  “Very funny, motherfucker,” he said laughing, tying the straps of the mobcap into a bow under his chin. “But you was there too, if memory serves. Kay, Isse, and Dar. A dark-meat white-bread sandwich—a ‘K’—‘I’—‘D’. A palindrome for DIK, which seems to describe you quite well.”

  I laughed—had to—it was Bunker’s way, always one-upping you. A fiery-mouthed kid, smart as a whip with a comeback. IQ of 161. A Rice summa cum laude son-of-a-bitch.

  “So, you give any thought to the camp?” he asked, referring to The Abattoir, this time with a bit more discretion to the volume of his voice.

  I dodged his question. “Spring training is long over. No need to go back to camp.” I pointed to the saltshaker in th
e middle of the road.

  The previous night he had told Darlene and Kay we were ball players from the Tidewater Tides. I was the slugger, Dirk Harmon who was batting .321 with 40 homers and 151 RBIs, sure to soon go to the show. He was Dan Rollins, a pitcher with a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball. So adamant about it, he piled a heap of salt and pepper shakers in his shirt, and with a bottle of tequila in his other hand, stumbled outside to give us a demonstration.

  Now I gazed back at the tumbled saltshaker dusting up the middle of the street and wondered when the bus would get here.

  “You’re avoiding the question,” he said, referring back to The Abattoir with a more serious tone. “You know what I mean.”

  “I certainly haven’t thought about it today.”

  The bus approached, lugged to a stop. The door folded inward with a swish and an old woman in a purple dress and milky-white pantyhose hobbled down the steps.

  “What are you taking a bus for?” Bunker asked. “You could walk it.”

  “I need a ride.”

  “I’m going to the show,” he said, meaning he was going to The Abattoir. There was a pause, and finally I nodded. He looked at me for a sign, eyes in bloom for a tell. I gave him nothing, because that was what I had to give.

  “You coming?”

  “I’ll jump later,” he said, moving off through the patch of grass toward the sidewalk.

  “Catch you later then.”

  He nodded with a pointed head-jerk and was off in a lope, mobcap blowing in the wind.

  Before the ceremony, head of training Basim Hassani—aka Dr. Bloom, aka The Paki, aka The Overzealous Immigrant, aka The Trainer—offered each recruit who was chosen to be a field operative a choice to go to The Abattoir for hardcore training off the grid. Rumors amongst the trainees were plenty—the real deal, live situations. Not only off the grid, but not condoned by the Office of the General Council. It was an important program for the CIA, who was losing the budgetary war to the NSA. Signal Intelligence (SigInt) was killing HumInt, and The Company was tired of embarrassments.

  The Abattoir remained off the books, off the records. It wore the same clothes as the NOC—the jacket of deniability. For those who wanted to go, a leave of absence was granted—off the payroll. A rumor circulated that an Abattoir graduate received the most dangerous jobs—the multiple passports, the hits, the black-ops with secret funding. These were the frontline men of the CIA, the HumInt guys who counted because they were the ones with the guts to hit the self-destruct button should they get caught. Most of the guys had already made up their minds before the offer was given. We had until that day to respond. In the end, sixty percent of the recruits would go. Pride and honor were at stake. The pussy word was used for those who abstained, and here I was in a hangover haze trying to make the biggest decision of my life.

  I had more to contemplate than most. Three days ago, a man up the ladder had asked me for an interview. Told me not to disclose the meeting to anyone. He was a station chief. Claimed his name was Pelletier. Didn’t give a first name, as if it didn’t matter. We met at a restaurant called The Shake and ordered steaks and chatted about the future. I was skeptical, but he had all the right credentials. Talked a smooth game, said he had heard I was going to The Abattoir.

  “Perhaps,” I said, “I haven’t come to any definite decision yet.”

  “There’s a person there we have an interest in.”

  “Like a ‘Dear Friend’ sort of interest?” I asked, referring to the letter a Clandestine would send.

  “Not so much.”

  “That’s what the ops guys are calling the guys working the diplomats, The Dear Friends. Did you know about that?”

  “I have no idea what anyone calls anyone,” Pelletier said.

  “I hear a lot of good agents have come out of this camp.”

  “I admit, the agents coming out are high quality. It’s why the tops secretly support this program. But that’s not why I asked you here.” Then Pelletier explained they received a message, something passed along from the NSA. Said they hadn’t decoded it yet, but the communication itself was suspicious. The NSA hadn’t broken it yet. They had a suspicion it was going to an unfriendly satellite. All of this is top secret he said, he shouldn’t even be telling me. Telling me what, I said. Exactly, he said. Then, he asked what assignments I was keen on in six months. He explained the mission and said I would be doing a great service to my country should I accept.

  “I won’t kill a man without a good reason.”

  “Who do you think you are?” he asked bitterly. “You’re green and untested. I’m giving you an opportunity here. I thought you wanted to play this game.”

  “I do, but that doesn’t mean I’ll take out one of our own without knowing why.”

  “He’s a traitor to this country.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked, a bit suspicious of the accusation.

  “We have it from a good source.”

  “What source?”

  “The source has to be protected. You’re going to have to trust me on that.”

  The problem was, I didn’t. He had the slippery tongue and mannerisms of Bloom, Hassani’s alter ego. In The Company, you never knew what to believe. Pelletier was a stocky man, a heavy-breather with a stomach that had eaten too many buttered sauces—a hungry girth that wasn’t afraid to take an extra dollop of sour cream with his baked potato. He had a head of brown curly hair no man his age should have had the luck to keep. Hassani had joked never to trust a man with curls. If a man’s hair wasn’t straight, how could he speak the truth? Hassani, Pelletier—these guys were a cult, and trying to read them was like hacking a password—you never knew how many attempts it was going to take to get it right.

  I thought about things for a minute. What would my dad, the Marine, have done? Would he have done this man’s bidding for the sake of country? I came to the conclusion he’d be proud to do it. I thought about his Purple Heart framed and mounted in the hallway of the old house. I thought of when I was a boy and him polishing and oiling his M16, shining the black metal until it gleamed like the waters of a dark lake under a shining sun, keeping it clean even though he never shot it anymore. “I’ll give it some thought,” I concluded.

  Pelletier told me he wouldn’t forget it. On leaving, he tapped me on the shoulder with a meaty palm and called me a patriot. Left me a number to call and said I was to state an identifier and repeat a witty phrase he had come up with which I had to memorize.

  Now, thinking about it all, I needed the bus ride for quiet contemplation. As a cluster of woods swept past the window in a deluge of green, my father’s whisper settled in my head, a voice rattling from years ago—Do right by your country and right by your family and life should be okay. The words were coming through garbled. Perhaps it was the booze talking. His face appeared in the window’s reflection. Shadows of speeding trees whizzed by in a swirl of green, blurring together with the image of his face and then suddenly everything evaporated into my own reflection. Then my mother floated into the window lighting a candle—Christmas, New Year’s, his third missed birthday, their anniversary. Days where an overwhelming absence filled an empty house. Days when a vaporous omnipotent presence swept through the hallways. Maybe the candle was for me—that possibility hadn’t escaped me—the flame burning with photospheric intensity to signify her disapproval. Anger and betrayal. Two words made of ash smoked up in a flame, because how could a mother loathe a son for such an accident?

  The bus came to a stop and several passengers stepped off. The bus driver’s eyes in the mirror were blue. He was probably six feet tall and a south paw. I noticed I was sitting in the closest seat to the exit. I watched what buttons the driver pushed and thought CIA boot camp had taught me something.

  I was the one forsaken by my mother, more so than my brother, the drug dealer. I was the son who mistakenly killed his own father responding to a 211—who failed to recognize him through a Scream mask and a gangster’s baggy pants and a chec
kered green-yellow flannel shirt, who wasn’t even supposed to be there, the neighborhood not part of his regular beat. I was the son who would hear the radio call and race to the scene only a couple of blocks away. Who didn’t even bother flipping the switch of the siren. Who crept in like a SEAL on ambush, and saw a figure through the window waving a pistol at a clerk. This boy who would grow up in a minute, crouching down behind the door of his cruiser in a kneeling Weaver stance armed with a Glock 19 pointing straight for the glass door, waiting for the cling of a bell. This son would watch a single man grab a paper bag and flee out of a dime store, would say halt but not really want it to happen, and would finally shoot when the figure turned around with weapon in hand.

  And then the masked man would struggle to get up from the blast, so unlike a hero, sternum caved in like a mule kick to the chest. There’s not any air left to breathe is there? The boy still there would kick the man’s gun aside, point his weapon at the perp’s head. Go on, pull the trigger on this lowlife. No witnesses, and who would fucking care?

  The cynic creeping out, the new man being born from the boy.

  The wound spurts blood in the air like a little blowhole. The perp coughs and blood flows out of the mouth behind the mask. The boy removes it so the perp doesn’t drown—there’s an ounce of humanity left in him still. But then, there he is. It’s like staring in the mirror down there. What the fuck, you scream. Holy fucking shit, Pop. What have you done? You throw your gun across the parking lot like it’s a curse. He coughs again. Blood drains out of his chest like a burst balloon. “It’s not your fault,” he says through a raspy cough, throwing blame far away into the parking space where you have tossed your gun. “I had to do something. No other way. Forgive me.” And there you are, applying pressure to the chest wound, figuring out how bad it really is. Why, Pop? Why?