The Cause Page 7

  I didn’t move.

  “I should also disclose that two men have died.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Training.”

  “But how?”

  “How is not important. I warned everyone people would die here. More will follow.”

  I heard him reach down and leave something. Then the sounds of his steps drifted away. I fumbled around the dirty concrete floor until my fingers bumped into the pages of a book. On top of it, I felt a glossy photograph—my Earth photo—and a large box of matches. I took out a match and lit it, shining its crown of light above the photo. The Earth was still, unwavering, static. Calm and tranquil, the color of an eye deep in space, wrapped in the blink of a tiny instant of time. A tear came to my eye. I moved the match toward the ceiling until my arm was straight. Then I stood, moving the light farther from the Earth on the floor until my hand hit the ceiling, the Earth accepting the darkness, yet I could still see the faint glimmer of atmosphere, the cerulean blue marble as still as a whisper, refusing to rotate. Then the match went out, and I bent down and picked up the photo and moved it close to my heart.

  After a minute, I moved the flame of another match over the book. The book was The Call of the Wild, and I spent the next hours devouring it until the last match was gone. Then I used the first pages to provide light for the next until the book was finished.

  The next set of hours turned into loneliness. Some of them I slept, but when I awoke, the fictional dog Buck barked in my head—out on the tundra, the lead pack dog plowing through mounds of fresh snow. Hazy and still partially in a dream, I plunged through an ocean of snow, through its thickness and permeability. Dappled spots of white frost blew across my face, the snow bite of a fierce Artic wind before me weaned and the darkness returned pure and heartless through the sub-arctic winds of the North Pole. I came out of it to find the animal in me, the Buck I struggled to understand.

  My mind drifted from one thing to the next, floating from the dog Buck and his lesson with the club, to the fight with Seee and my own lesson, to two weeks ago at the hangar, saying goodbye to the America that was burning in the flames of riots and chaos.

  Then I heard Seee’s voice. “So you’ve decided to stay?”

  “Yes.”

  “You haven’t been outside yet. Perhaps you’ll want to reconsider.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Wait and see. I’ll be honorable and give you one last chance once you reemerge.”

  “Honor is for losers. Evolution—extinction—remember?”

  He laughed, and the sound of it bounced through the corridor. “You’re right. Should I bury you now then?”

  I said nothing, and the walls grew silent once more. Each of us held his breath. It felt like the moment before our first clash, everything standing still, an instant stolen from time.

  “Tell me how you became known as The Conductor,” I said, breaking the silence awkwardly.

  “Do the men really gossip like this? Like schoolgirls?”

  “There were rumors, but you never know what the truth is.”

  “In this case, I do,” he said. “Tell me what you heard, and I’ll tell you how accurate it is.”

  “I heard that for ten years you stalked a target. I don’t know where exactly it was, but it wasn’t a simple mark.”

  He finished opening my cell door which squealed on the rollers. I heard him step into the room, the shuffling sweep of bare feet. He sat down, his back scraping against the cinder-block wall with the lidless toilet. The darkness was immovable, yet I felt I could see the expression on his face, the muscles in his cheeks relaxing. A light I imagined shining over his face showed a curling smile.

  “If I was authorized to snipe the target, it would have been a simple job. But they wanted more discretion. They wanted deniability. As well, the CIA used the assignment as a punishment. They wanted to sweep me away after the ordeal with Hassani, but that is another story for another time.”

  “They told me you dressed yourself up as a bum, rags for clothes, dirt under the fingernails.”

  “No. The story is veering off course already.”

  “So how was it then?”

  “I wore a threadbare brown second-hand tweed double-breasted suit. In fact, I had others—flea-market clothes, but not rags.” From there, he described his wardrobe, how nothing in it was ostentatious, yet not completely cheap. He bought his items from a Saturday market held out in the open space in the Plainpalais area of Geneva and paid cash. He kept an unshaven look (stubbly but not bearded) and used special eye drops to make it seem as if he had cataracts. He dyed his hair gray and smoked cigarillos down to the nub. He made himself look like a man in his fifties and carried himself with a slight limp. Then he hit the streets as The Conductor, waving his hands in the air frantically, directing invisible symphonies and string quartets.

  “For the first two months, I didn’t go near the target’s location. I stuck to the city center streets, getting the people used to me. I would always keep my distance, never invoking any fear with my bizarre behavior. At first they stared and pointed. They said to themselves, Who is that crazy man? But they knew what I was doing. They saw my arms swinging, hands gyrating, gesticulating like the great maestros motioning for crescendo. Music was playing in my head and I was leading the violins, violas, cellos, and horns. They hypothesized about what affliction I had. If they guessed obsessive-compulsive disorder, then they guessed it right. This is who I wanted them to believe I was—a habitual man disturbed by the thought he was a conductor, harmless, minding his own business, yet showy. The same times every day, they would see me pass. They looked at me sorrowfully at first. Others would even say hello, but I pretended not to hear. They were other sounds drowned out by the thunder of the orchestra. I dove into my own world, and they seemed to understand, and above all, not question it. A few months passed. They would see me tick by and come to think of me as timely as the city clock mounted high on a bell tower. It grew such that they expected me to walk by their cafes and Laundromats and small stores and arcade shops. They would say, ‘There goes The Conductor. I wonder what he’s playing in his head today.’”

  It wasn’t long, he told me, before they would raise questions if he didn’t keep his routine. Where is The Conductor today? He’s missed his rounds.

  They would surmise illness. The next day, he would be there once again and the faint tickling worry would disappear. He compared himself to a stray cat coming around to a house to be fed. If the animal failed to show up, there would be anxiety in the household imagining the worst.

  “Why such an elaborate ruse?” I asked.

  He said the target’s mansion was impenetrable. There were high, electric barb-wired fences surrounding the estate. The perimeter was covered by infrared detectors and video cameras and guarded by a hundred men. Parts of the garden were mined. The target’s bedroom was inside the interior of the mansion, away from any window or balcony. Inside, twenty other guards took shifts twenty-four hours a day. They monitored the chefs. Food was dipsticked. Acid levels tested by doctors they had employed for years, and then fed to tasters. Packages, luggage, and any other object coming into the premises were X-rayed and then put under a Geiger counter.

  Seee said, “It was impossible to get to him from the inside. His office was equally difficult. If it had to be done quietly, there was only one way to do it—in transition—from one place to another.”

  “So how did you get close?” I had forgotten about the barrier of darkness between us. His story had entwined me. Finally, there seemed to be a string of understanding between us.

  “I’ll explain that in a minute,” Seee said. “I walked the streets around his office each mundane day only passing in the morning at precisely the same time. I threw my hands in the air, orchestrating ad-nauseam the intro to Mahler’s First Symphony. I used delicate feather strokes with supple fingers, raising eyebrows gently and puckering my lips as I walked by. Or I would bounce my hands li
ke field rabbits, humming Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker if I wanted to appear friendly and ambient. Or Penderecki’s Passacaglia Symphony No. 3 when morning nerves would unravel, when I would grit my teeth and resist shoving a Welrod pistol into my trousers before I left. I weaved myself into The Conductor bit by bit, stitching into every bodyguard’s fabric of conscious that I wasn’t a threat. I never went too much over the top. I never carried a conductor’s baton, as that in itself could be conceived as premeditated. I studied my character, read books on conducting and music theory, taught myself how to play piano. I forged the right papers and went to institutions, watched, and even counseled, OCD patients under the guise of being a doctor.

  “Eventually, the target’s guards got used to me walking by the office building on Rue du Rhone. They had already checked me out, I’m sure. But my information was nothing but my cover. The bodyguards would see me around town performing Stravinsky, Haydn, Wagner while off work doing their shopping or sitting on a terrace having dinner. I was everywhere, yet nowhere. Invisible. Part of the landscape of Geneva as much as the UN or the Parc des Bastions, or the Jet d’Eau. After a year, chance had it that my timing got better. One day, my rotation around Rue du Rhone corresponded to an intersection with the target. His car pulled up to his office building, and he stepped out of the car and was immediately swarmed by five of his bodyguards. That day, I gave a heavy berth and passed a meter away. One of the guards raised his hand to me and asked me to halt, which I ignored, as if I were an imbecile in my own unbroken Schubert world. I grumbled and mumbled something incoherent, humming simultaneously in an off-cadent slur. But this was an important day, because I had managed to break through their minds. I was not pushed or hit. I was not harassed. Had I not given berth, they would have surely thrown me out of the way, but this day I was within striking distance.

  “As time went on, I eroded their will to watch me closely. I camouflaged myself into the surroundings even though I was in plain sight. I was becoming part of the background. I could have been a parking meter or a streetlight. They saw me no differently.”

  “Who was the target?”

  “A Russian oligarch. I’ll refrain from giving him a name—let’s just call him Mr. X.”

  “Why knock him off?”

  “He was very influential, with a significant share of world oil output. He was beginning to buy up banks and get involved in various financial schemes at the time.”

  “Why was he living in Geneva?”

  “Like any smart oligarch at the time, he minimized his time in Russia. There were political risks, and who could tell when the Kremlin would seize back assets once again as they did when the Soviet Union broke up.”

  I was caught in the web of his story. I wanted to ask more questions, but thought better of it. I didn’t want to risk him becoming reticent so I simply listened.

  “As I got more adept at timing, my intersections with Mr. X became more frequent. I was able to get within eyesight several times a week and make a pass-by within a kill radius about once every two weeks. At that time, I didn’t even carry the injection. I knew it was too soon. After some months, the guards stopped waving me off, as they had the habit of knowing I wasn’t stopping. Their eyes stuck with me, but more importantly, they didn’t want to be rude and shove me out of the road. What would they have looked like then? Would they have left a bad impression on the boss bullying an old man who was mentally unstable? It wasn’t in their psychology to push me out of their way, but they were still cautious when I got too close.

  “Then one day, Mr. X didn’t come to work. Nor the next day. Or the day after that. Every day, I woke up and walked my usual route, as devout as a Muslim to morning prayers. The Company was slow getting back to me, but it turned out he went back to Russia. No one knew for how long. So I kept walking, keeping my routine. One morning during this hiatus, the doorman to Mr. X’s office building glanced at me as I passed, and he said, “Maestro, what are you playing for us today?” He was a well-fed, red-faced Pole by the name of George Bernard, short and fat with rolling jowls. He continued this sort of behavior. It was just something to amuse himself. I would pay him no heed, my myopic gaze staring directly at the ground three paces in front of me while making absurd faces at the gallery of invisible clarinets, sometimes waving them to enter during The Magic Flute. George Bernard never got the benefit of the doubt as I did. Mr. X’s guards would simply push him out of the way, where I was afforded a little bit of real estate.”

  “How long did you keep it up for?”

  “Mr. X left for nearly two years. When he did, I was four years into the job.”

  “So you continued the routine?”

  “Yes. Although I was acting, I can tell you I was absorbed under the spell of my character. When I went wandering into the streets with my beige beret and cigarillo stuck between my lips—my wrinkled suit and scruffy trousers—I felt that every passing day I gravitated slowly into the hapless Mr. X with an uncontrollable compulsion. That man is still part of me today.”

  “How many hours a day were you on the street?”

  “Two hours twenty-three minutes was the time it took me to do a route. I did one in the morning and one in the evening. The evening route I skipped Mr. X’s office building entirely.”

  “What did you do with the other hours of the day?”

  “I studied. I did research. As I said, my station chief essentially left me there to rot until it was done. Many in the agency thought it was pointless. Then the Russian came back, and the deed suddenly became more urgent.”

  “Why?”

  “It was purely personal. I woke up one day with the notion I might be able to change things. I felt a great need to return to the U.S. after my discoveries.”

  “What discoveries?”

  “The rampant corruption going on. Evidence I discovered in Mr. X’s office led me to inspect UBS’s offices. I found insurmountable evidence of Libor manipulation, Federal Reserve documents giving policy away before it was released publicly. But that is another story.”

  I did not press him. It was apparent he wished to finish the present story so I said, “So how did it end?”

  “The Russian had been back for several months. Still, the opportunity did not present itself, although now I carried the injection. The injection was a poison, a strychnine-leopard’s bane blend inside a miniature hypodermic needle that would take its time killing him. Then one autumn day when the sun was slight and the weather blustery, the opportunity presented itself. As the car door opened and he was in the midst of stepping out and being surrounded by his security, the Polish doorman, Mr. Bernard, cried out and fell over, crumpling to the ground. All eyes shifted to him, and this was all I needed—a moment of diversion, a moment of confusion. I turned my shoulder sideways slipping through a guard, feigned tripping over another, and fell into the path of the Russian. I came down partially on him, grabbing at his ankles in a mock fall. Twisting his ankle simultaneously, I shoved the tiny needle through his sock deep into the skin beneath his lower calf. It was done within a tenth of a second. The move I had practiced thousands of times. His guards were on me in a flash, yanking me from the Russian and throwing me away from him. I responded by feigning rage and commenced to wave my hands in the air brutally conducting as I moved forward. It was out of this expectation, this natural sense of how I should have reacted, my predictability as the character whose identity I forged, that they let me simply move on. If they would have been thorough and would have searched me, they would have not found anything. But if between the time I was released and the time I veered off my normal course over the gutter and toward the other side of the street—if they would have pried open my mouth—they would have found the tiny needle that would kill the Russian. But they did not, because they did not think of the unthinkable. It would have been an insult to their egos to think otherwise.”

  “So Bernard?” I asked. “He didn’t just fall, did he?”

  Within the darkness, I pictured Seee wi
th a slight surreptitious smile as I finished the question. A lurid shape on the invisible face that was more than just a storied voice with soft enunciation and a quasi-illustrious tone. “No,” Seee said. “Bernard went down because of a series of tiny razor blades stuck in his shoes. When triggered, they ejected upright into his feet. But that is another story.”

  “And so security didn’t check him?”

  “Perhaps they did. I don’t know. What I do know was that there was a search, but for The Conductor, it was his last performance.”

  “So when you went back to the U.S. what did you do?”

  “I searched for those who might believe.”

  “Believe in what?”

  “In what the notion of real patriotism means.”

  “And how exactly would you define that?” I asked.

  “A country is not just a name or ideas written in a constitution from the antiquated past. It is the sum of the beliefs of its constituents. The wave of change happens through them. Government power can only be expressed as well as they can control the degree of that change.”

  I paused thinking about this.

  “You do not agree?” he asked.

  “I do,” I said finally. “But you are here, aren’t you?”

  “I am,” he said. “Here training patriots. Here training people who are willing to die for their country. I consider it a serious occupation, and this you do not want to doubt. For me, it’s the best one can hope for in these uncertain times.”

  “And there’s nothing more to it?”

  He stood, and I heard him step toward the cell door, snorting. “Politics,” he said. “Elephants and Donkeys and the talking-head demagogues of the press. What could go wrong?” Then he took on a more serious air to his tone. “There’s a lot more to it obviously. We’re just scratching the skin in this place. So why don’t you step outside and start itching?”

  Chapter 7

  “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”

  -Confucius