The Ministry for the Future

27

Now Mary had a new problem: twenty-four-hour police protection.

Of course there were worse problems to have, but it was surprising how upsetting it was to Mary, until she considered it: she had lost her life. Or at least her habits, her privacy. Sad to consider that these were much of what her life had come to.

After the police were done with their questions and investigations that night, she went to bed and tried to get some sleep, and failed. Police officers were still in her kitchen, and downstairs outside the front door. That was likely to remain true for the foreseeable future. She damned her kidnapper with a million damns; she was hating him more and more, the more she thought about it.

Even though what he had said nagged at her. Even though the memory of his face troubled her. His wild-eyed conviction that he was right. Usually she disliked and distrusted people like that, but he had been different, she had to admit. A terrible conviction had been forced into him. His brush with death had made him mad. Although in the end he had only shouted at her. Kidnapped her to argue with her—then also, her bathroom door swinging shut on her—in some ways he had fought hard to hold it together, to do nothing more than persuade her. Words like fists to the face. Paper bullets of the brain. It was enough to make her heart hammer all over again. Her face burned with the memory.

So she went into the office that morning in a very foul mood. They had promised her they would keep her apprised of their progress in the case, but she doubted she would learn anything important or timely. The young man had seemed confident of his ability to hide. That in itself was strange. No one should have that confidence, especially not in Switzerland. She wondered if he had some hideaway in Zurich, or near it, so that he could get to it quickly and go to ground, wouldn’t have to go on the run.

She would find out later. Or not. Meanwhile she would be accompanied by bodyguards wherever she went, and some polite Swiss woman or man, or a trio of them, would be installed in her apartment with her. Damn damn damn. The damned fool—she could have killed him.

At her office people crowded around her and commiserated and such. She ordered them to get back to work, and contacted Badim. He was on a train back from Geneva and texted his condolences; he had just heard, he would come to her office when he got in. He hoped she could meet him for lunch. That was good, actually; get out of the office and talk frankly where no one could overhear. Require her new bodyguards to keep a distance.

So just after noon Badim entered her office, and he went to her and briefly held her hands, looked at her closely, gestured at a hug he didn’t enact. They left the office and walked to the tram stop, bought sandwiches and a chocolate bar and coffees, and walked back toward the office until they came to the little park that overlooked the rounded green copper roofs of the ETH, and the city across the river to the west. They sat on one of the park benches. Her bodyguards were a couple benches down, the obvious bodyguards anyway.

Mary had had to think about what to say to Badim, and in this matter, as in everything else this morning, her exhaustion caused a flurry of contradictory thoughts to ricochet around in her. Something in her was resisting the idea of telling Badim the full story of her night. Not that she could avoid it entirely.

“I had quite a night last night,” she said.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m all right. I guess I was being surveiled? And they saw me go into my apartment with the guy, and they came to check up on me. An hour later, I must say. Must have been camera stuff, and when they saw it they came over. He slipped away while they were inquiring.”

“So I heard. I’m glad you’re okay. Are you okay?”

“No!”

“I’m sorry.”

They ate in silence for a while. The city was its usual forest of cranes over gray stone. No sight of the Limmat from this vantage; to the south, just a narrow arc of the lake, with the long hill that ran south from the Uetliberg backing it.

“I’ve been thinking about our situation,” she said when she had taken the edge off her hunger. “Our dilemma.”

“Which is?”

“That we’re charged with representing the people and animals of the future, in effect to save the biosphere on their behalf, and we’re not managing to do it. We’re failing to do it, because the tools at our disposal are too weak. You said something like that the time we walked to the lake. The world is careening along toward disaster, and we can’t get it to change course fast enough to avoid a smash.”

Badim chewed on his sandwich for a while. “I know,” he said.

“So what are we going to do about it?”

“I don’t know.”

She regarded him. A small dark man, very smart, very calm. He had seen a lot. He had worked for the Indian government and for the government of Nepal, which had begun as a Maoist revolutionary organization. He had worked for Interpol. She said, trying it on, “I think maybe we need a black wing.”

That surprised him. He looked at her for a while, blinking, and then said, “What do you mean?”

“I think we need to set up a secret division of the ministry, working in secret to forward the cause.”

He considered it. “To do what exactly?”

“I don’t know.” She chewed for a while, thinking it over. Her kidnapper’s vivid glare. The fear she had felt.

“I don’t like violence,” she said after a while. “I mean, really. I’m Irish. I’ve seen the damage done. I know you have too. Secret wars, civil wars, the damage never goes away from those. So, I don’t mean killing people. Or even hurting them physically. We’re not the CIA here. But still, there are other things in the black, I’m thinking. Actions that are maybe illegal, or in some senses ill-advised. Undiplomatic. That would nevertheless forward the cause. We could consider them in secret, on a case-by-case basis, and see if any of them were worth pursuing. Things that we could defend doing if we got caught.”

He had stifled a smile, and now he shook his head a little bit. “That’s not sounding very black to me. One aspect of a black agency is that they must be uncatchable. Nothing can be written down, nothing can be hacked, no one can talk to outsiders. The people in charge aren’t to know about them. If there is any break in the secrecy, you as head of the agency would have to be able to deny all involvement, even any knowledge of such a thing, without explanation or defense.”

“You sound like you’ve had experience with such things.”

“Yes.” He was looking out at the city now.

“When was that?”

He regarded the gray city, thinking it over. He heaved a small sigh, took another bite of his sandwich, washed it down with a big sip of coffee.

“Now…” he said, as if starting a sentence and then not continuing it.

“Now what?” she said, after he had paused for a while.

“Now,” he repeated more firmly, and then looked at her. “Always, in other words.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t talk about it.”

She found she was standing over him. Her paper coffee cup was quivering in her hand, half-squished. He was wincing as he regarded her. He glanced at her coffee as if she might sling it in his face.

“Tell me what you mean,” she demanded in a grating voice. “Now.”

He sighed again. “Imagine that there might already be a black wing of the Ministry for the Future. That even I myself might have started it after you hired me as your chief of staff.”

“You started it?”

“No, I’m not saying that, please. I’m like everyone else. I have some friends in the office. Whatever they do as friends, it would not be quite right to tell you about, precisely so that if something got out and you were asked questions, you could honestly say that you didn’t know about it.”

“Plausible deniability?”

“Well, no. That I think refers to having a good lie in hand. This would be more like proper functioning of an agency, keeping things as they should be. If ever questions were asked, which hopefully would not happen, but if they did, you would say you didn’t know about it. If there were improprieties, others would take the fall, and on you could go with the ministry undamaged.”

“As if it would happen that way!”

“Well, it has before. Pretty often in fact. It’s a common form of organization. Most unorthodox operations take place without their political heads knowing they exist. Certainly never the details, even if they’re aware in a general sense that such things exist. As I thought you might be.”

The previous night’s events all of a sudden crashed into her and shook her to the core, and she shouted, “I won’t be lied to!”

The bodyguards across the little park looked over at them.

“I know,” Badim said, looking pinched and unhappy. “I’m sorry. I haven’t felt good about it. I’ll tender my resignation this afternoon, if you like. Happy to fall on my sword right here and now. But I will remind you that you were just talking about the possible need for such a thing.”

“The fuck I was,” she said. She waited for her heart to slow down, thinking that over. Too many thoughts were jamming her head at once, creating something like a roar. “I didn’t really mean it. And even if I did, I’ll be damned if I’ll have secrets being kept from me in my own fucking agency!”

“I know,” he said, looking down. He took a deep breath, steeling himself. “Tell me, did this not happen to you when you were a minister in Ireland’s government?”

“What do you mean?” she cried.

“I mean, you were head of foreign affairs, wasn’t it? Did you think you knew everything your agency was doing?”

“Yes, I did.”

He shook his head. “Surely not. Of course I don’t know for sure. But Ireland was in a civil war for a long time, and that always has aspects that are out of the country. Right? So, your security forces almost certainly kept things from you, and they probably understood you to be knowing about that, and wanting to keep it that way.” He shrugged. “It’s certainly been true in Nepal and India, and at Interpol too for that matter.” Interpol was the agency Mary had hired him out of.

She sat down beside him, hard. Her coffee cup was smashed; carefully she sipped the remainder of the coffee out of one of the folded spots in the rim, put the cup on the ground.

“So I’m naïve, is it? An innocent stateswoman in the world of Realpolitik? Which is no doubt the reason they gave me this job?”

“I’m not saying that. I think they assumed you knew what you were doing.”

“So what has this black wing of yours done so far? And who does it consist of?”

“Well, but this is just what you should not be asking. No no, please”—he held up a hand as if to ward off the blow she was about to give him—“people might resign if they knew that their actions were known to higher-ups. Anyway you might not even know these people, I’m not sure how acquainted you are with our whole staff.”

He watched her calm down. She picked up her crushed coffee cup and sipped from it again. “I’m head of whatever happens operationally,” he went in a low voice, as if sharing a secret to conciliate her. “That’s what a chief of staff does. People who help me when doing the needful gets tricky, they would naturally come from various divisions. Cyber security of course, it’s in the nature of their work to be preemptive sometimes. Nat cat guys are often helpful, they’re used to getting dirty—I mean just physically dirty, you know, working with machines and such. They’re at the coal face. They see the damage being done, and they get impatient to do something about it.”

That struck a nerve, and her sleepless night came back all in a rush, not that it had ever left. Her stomach was a knot that the sandwich didn’t quite fit into.

“I met someone like that last night,” she said. She reached out and grasped the back of Badim’s hand. “That’s the kind of person kidnapped me last night! He was sick of doing nothing, of nothing happening.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. He turned his hand up so that it held hers. “Tell me what happened?”

She took her hand back and told him briefly, leaving parts out.

“We probably should have been guarding you more closely,” he said when she was done.

“It was close enough, as it turned out. Besides, I think you offered it once, but I said no. I hate that kind of thing.”

“Even so. It might be just for a while. They’ll probably pick this guy up soon.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“It’s hard to stay off the grid for long.”

“But not impossible.”

“No,” he admitted. “Not impossible.”

She shifted back into the bench, shuddered. Really things were fucked. She needed to sleep. But here they were.

“Look,” she said, thinking it over. “You grew up in Nepal, right? And I grew up in Ireland. In both places there was a lot of political violence. Which really means murder, right? Murder and all that follows murder. Fear, grief, anger, revenge, all that. The damage never goes away, I can tell you that, and you probably already know it. And then the better murderers in these murder contests tend to take over in the end. It’s not at all clear it has ever done any good in the world at all.”

Badim wagged his head side to side, not agreeing with her.

“What?” she cried. “You know it’s true! The damage has been tremendous!”

He sighed. “And yet,” he said. “What was the damage before? And did doing some of these things lessen the damage overall? This is what is never clear.”

“So what has this black wing of yours done!” she exclaimed, suddenly frightened.

“I really can’t say.” He saw her face, temporized. “Possibly some coal plants have experienced problems. They’ve had to go offline, and the investment crowd has seen that and understood that they won’t ever be good investments again. In a sense you could say that worked.”

“How do you mean worked?”

“The plants stayed shut, and solar’s gotten another investment boost. And new coal plant construction worldwide is down eighty percent since these things started happening.”

“That could be because of the Indians shifting to solar.”

“Yes.”

“Has anyone been hurt or killed?”

“Not on purpose.”

“Has anyone been terrorized?”

“You mean scared away from burning carbon?”

“Yes.”

“I think it might be good if that had happened, don’t you?”

“But how?”

“Well, you know. What really scares people is financial.”

“What really scares people is being fucking kidnapped!”

“Granted. Threat of violence. Although access to their money, if people get cut off from that, they are definitely scared.”

“Fuck. So you’re playing the god game.”

“Excuse me?”

“Playing god. Putting people through experiences they think are real, then seeing what they do.”

“Maybe. But it wouldn’t be just to see what they do. It would be to make them change.”

“So you terrorize them!”

“Well, but terrorism means killing innocent people to scare other innocent people into doing what you want. That’s what it means today, right? It isn’t just boo in the dark.”

“No, I suppose not. But you scare people. You use intimidation.”

“If we had, it might be a good thing. It might be doing the needful. As you were pointing out yourself, I think.”

She nodded. She remembered the young man from the night before. He had scared her, no doubt about it. On purpose. To get her attention. In fact he had had to calm her down a little, maybe, just to get started, so that she would better take in what he had wanted so desperately to convey to her. He had wanted her to pay close attention to what he was saying, so that she wouldn’t forget it. A mammal never forgets a bad scare; and they were mammals. And indeed she would not be forgetting.

“I just had that done to me,” she said. “That man wanted to scare me.”

“It sounds like it.”

“It worked,” she said, looking at him.

He looked back, letting her think that over.

She considered it. She felt like her stomach was going to implode.

“All right,” she said. “Look. I want to know what’s going on. I’ll lie if it comes to that, or take the hit if need be. But I want to know.”

“Do you really?”

“I do. You have to promise me you’ll tell me. Do you promise?”

For a long time he didn’t speak. He looked out at the city, then at the ground. Finally: “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you what you need to know.”

“Everything!”

“No.”

“Yes!”

“No.” He looked her in the eye. “I can’t tell you everything. Because look: there might be some people who deserve to be killed.”

She stared at him. The sandwich inside her was getting trash-compacted, it felt like; it would be better if she could just throw it up.

Finally she said, “Maybe I can help you to focus this program better than it is now. I know some things now that I didn’t yesterday.”

“I’m truly sorry about that.”

“Don’t be. They’re things I should have known all along.”

“Maybe.”

She thought it over. “Fuck!”

“I know.”

“But… Well, we have to do something. Something more than we’ve been doing.”

“I think maybe so.”

“Because right now we’re losing.”

“It’s a fight. That’s for sure.”