Peter Carey - Amnesia

“Holy Christ,” she said.

WOODY’S HUNDRED-DOLLAR FLASHLIGHT lay abandoned in the sunlight. Behind it was a lower part of his assassin’s iridescent beak, clean ripped away. Behind this, was a small hexagonal nut and I spat on my finger to make it stick. It was only then that I saw, in the black mouth of the tunnel, my source. She was luminous with cloudy-climate skin and tangled wheaten hair. She wore a grubby singlet. Her collarbone was pooled with darkness. Her bare arms were folded across her breasts.

No-one introduced her. She stepped out to the light, and I saw she was not quite as symmetrically pretty as I had expected, also shorter, thicker waisted, sturdier than she had seemed on CNN. She looked me directly in the eyes.

I nodded but all the niceties, the civilities, everything superfluous had been rubbed off her and she was left with that isolated, glass-cased quality, that sheen and distance that so often accompany power.

“Sweetie, did you have to use that thing just now?” Celine said.

“Who is this?” she demanded.

“If they were suspicious, now they’re certain.”

“Yes. Who is this?”

“This is Felix Moore.” I turned towards Celine only to understand she was a junior officer, dismissed, already walking back towards her house. There was no time to feel anything except: I had the interview. I would be worthy of it. My subject led the way and I was mentally recording: dancer’s walk, shoulders back. The pocket of her jeans was torn. I followed into the earthen gloom, to a back wall supported by rough-cut planks—incontestably solid, clay showing between the timber. It swung smoothly open and I was admitted to what was arguably, at least from the viewpoint in Langley, Virginia, the most dangerous place on this earth. I remember my entry like a car accident, awash with adrenalin, very slow and very fast. The covert world smelled like a pottery, but also a teenager’s bedroom. It was illuminated by computer screens, small video monitors beneath the ceiling which I would not really see until I was out in the air again: spooky black and white images, gum trees swaying, a car travelling along a dirt road, that same white feather of clay dust left by the police. I stumbled then tripped on an orange power cord. There was an indoor toilet, definitely, many small green lights, and a young man with the build of a bodyguard. His eyebrows were mad and heavy, his curling black hair explosive, and he stooped a little, as if he would not quite fit in the box he came in. He stood stiffly, his arms pressed against his sides like a schoolboy in short pants.

“This is Paypal,” she said.

I reached to shake his hand, an offer not accepted.

“Paypal. This is him. He’s famous.”

If this was a story about hackers I was laughably ill-equipped. I had never heard of Paypal. I had never heard of the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, or even the lowly practice of “carding,” the criminal process of using or verifying phished credit numbers.

When Paypal seated himself at a cluttered card table and fitted a jeweller’s loupe beneath his hairy eye, I did not think this particularly strange.

“Your mother had this place waiting for you?” I asked Gabrielle Baillieux.

She hooded her eyes. “Here is what you’ve got to know about my mother. OK? She’s got to own the story. Whatever danger I am in she has to be in worse herself.”

There were two plastic milk crates on the floor between us. She kicked one towards me. “You can’t upstage my mother, that’s the point.” As she sat, her jeans rode up and there was no evidence of the controversial anklet which had been a condition of bail.

She set a small black tape recorder on a milk crate. Of course. She was famous. She was accustomed to control.

“Don’t you take notes?” she asked.

“No.”

She switched on her recorder. I thought I would have to instruct her, later, about the dangers of this game whose rules she did not know. There was no tape recorder ever manufactured that could protect her from a journalist, but she clearly thought there was, and her broad expanse of forehead had a tense uneven surface like wet tidal sand.

“You just asked your mother who I was. But you clearly knew already.”

“Yes. You’re someone working for someone who wants to sell something.”

“That’s unfair.”

“It’s normal.”

“But not for you.”

“No, I’m a soldier.”

“You’re also a person with a life.”

“Duh.”

Of course I had interviewed far ruder people, but not one of them had been in such extreme danger. Earlier she had decided to trust me but now I was here she baulked. She loudly worried that a book would jeopardise her further.

“I wish you’d read my work. You’d know I’m not just some slimebag who will pretend he’s on your side then knife you. I won’t be cheap or reductive. I won’t ask you about politics and then leave out everything you want to say.”

The frown remained the same, but the eyes narrowed.

“Here’s what I think,” I said. “You want the world to actually understand you. You have put your life at risk, but for a rational reason. You are a sort of equation,” I said, not dishonestly, but not knowing exactly what I meant. I paused.

“No, go on.”

“Every life has a logic. Following the logic can be persuasive. Wouldn’t you prefer to be understood in your own terms?”

Her face, in considering me, was totally expressionless but I trusted that feeling in my gut.

“You’re trying to see if I’m wearing my anklet?”

Actually I had been touched by her little oblong feet, the chipped polish, all the toes of equal length.

“The Department of Justice is cost-cutting,” she said. “So they buy the anklets from K5C who source them in China.” She affected weariness, as if no single thing would be understood by anybody else. “They’re crap, of course. They break down all the time. Then K5C hires a mob of amateur hackers and recidivists to watch the monitors. The pay is shit and the kids are high and the monitors fuck up almost every day. When a monitor goes on the fritz they assume it’s just a false alarm. How you fix a false alarm is wait for it to fix itself. Do you want the technical details? Would you understand them? Do you know what a Faraday cage is?”

“Not yet.”

“Maybe this is not a good idea.”

“I’m here to help you.”

“It’s Paypal you should talk to. He transferred my anklet to a dog. They monitor the dog’s progress. They think the dog is me.”

I thought, Woody Townes did not come out here following a dog. “Someone stands to lose a lot of bail money,” I said.

“That big slob didn’t buy me, if that’s what you mean.”

“Do you know who he is?”

“He’s a pervert. I’ve known him all my life.”

In the corner of the dugout Paypal seemed to be soldering a circuit. He was so big and stiff it was hard to imagine him doing anything precise.

“Give me back the beak,” he said, not looking at me.

Gaby took the beak and passed it to him in a gesture somehow so familial I had no doubt that they were lovers. He lifted an inert magpie from the bench, then ejected something, a black metal battery or perhaps a motor, from the bird’s underside.

“You actually made this?” I asked him.

“We own it.” Gaby said. “They made it.”

By “own” I thought they had hacked it. Was “they” a corporation or our favourite nation state? I looked to Paypal but he turned his back on me. She also seemed to be in retreat.