Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“I wanted to satisfy myself that he was the asset we were searching for,” Lance Makioka told Brother. “Mr. Marcel DuChamp, definitively ID’d by me, previously unmasked by us as Quix 97. That was what it was about. We didn’t give a damn about the flight simulator. That just got me in the door. Once we had a positive make on Marcel, we were all systems go. We acquired him later that night.”

“Asset,” Brother repeated. “Acquired.”

“Correct,” said Lance Makioka.

“Is my son alive? Did you hurt him?”

“He is in excellent health.”

“And you. What is your real name? Steve Sayonara? Ricky Fujiyama? Rock Mishima? Who are you, anyway?”

“I’ve heard,” Lance Makioka said, “that your mother, accusing you of being secretive, would sometimes ask you that question.”

“You’ve heard a lot,” Brother said. “No point in asking how, or where, or from whom.”

“As a gesture designed to encourage trust,” Lance Makioka said, “I am meeting you tonight under my real name. I can show you ID if you so wish. Sir.”

“I’m sure you have many IDs.”

Lance Makioka did not reply.

“What did you do with him after you ‘acquired’ him?” Brother demanded. “The ‘asset’? My son? You were on foreign soil. What did the Indian authorities have to say about an American kidnap carried out on their turf?”

“We didn’t see any need to trouble the Indian authorities, sir,” said Lance Makioka. “Mr. Marcel DuChamp is a U.S. citizen, so we see him as one of ours. We have him in a secure holding facility.”

“In India?”

“In the United States.”

“Oh my God,” Brother said, “it’s the plot of my seventh book.”

“Reverse Rendition,” Lance Makioka said, actually clapping his hands in delight. “I hoped you’d recognize the similarity. We’re all big fans.”

In his seventh novel Brother had imagined a scenario in which the American secret state needed to extract an asset from a safe haven in a neutral country and bring him onto American soil for questioning.

“If my information is correct, it was your most popular book,” Lance Makioka said. “I took a look at the sales figures. They were pretty impressive. For you.”

“This story you came to tell me,” Brother said. “How much of it is a fairy tale?”

“It’s a good story,” Lance Makioka said. “You wrote it.”

“But you do have my son. And now you want something from me.”

“This is where I mention Blind Joe one more time,” Lance Makioka said. “We want you to talk to Marcel DuChamp and invite him to change sides. That’s what we want, just like with Joe. We’re offering him a ‘poacher turns gamekeeper’ scenario. A term dating back to the fourteenth century, I believe. If he accepts, he will have financial comfort, health insurance, a government pension, all of it.”

“Why would he listen to me? We haven’t so much as spoken in years.”

“Using you as the messenger adds the element of surprise. He won’t be expecting it, so it will put him off balance. After that it’s up to you. It’s my guess he’s carrying an amount of anger, aimed at society, sure, the corrupt system, the fat cats, the power structure, no doubt. But mainly anger at you and maybe at his mom a little bit also, and he’s going to need to let that out. You being there, taking him by surprise like I say, that’s going to help him let off that steam. You can take it. You’re his dad. You want him back in your life, so you’re going to let him say what he has to say. Once the steam is out of him, he’s going to be able to hear the message you’re going to deliver for us. And the message to him is, he plays ball, he does the right thing for his country, and he’ll be well taken care of. Alternatively, he’ll face cyber-terrorism charges and we’ll make sure he goes to Guantánamo Bay for the rest of his fucking life. ” Again that sudden climactic roar and the right fist thumping into the left palm. The agent wore a fine suit and had a cultivated manner, but under all that, the naked guy under all that expensive clothing, was the scariest individual Brother had ever met.

The world Brother had made up had become real. There was a black Cadillac Escalade waiting outside his building. Lance Makioka held open a door—rear door, near side—and ushered Brother into his seat. The blindfold requirement was delicately alluded to and Brother, having little choice in the matter, acquiesced. If he had been a real spy, he thought, he would have been able, even blindfolded, to follow the movements of the vehicle and know, at the very least, in which direction they were headed, east along the 495 for example, or north past the stadium, and on upstate. But he had no idea. Blindfolded, he experienced a certain dizziness brought on by the merging of the real and the fictional, the paranoiac and the actual outlook. Even the son he was going to meet felt fictional in a way. The Man of La Mancha mask! Like a dime-store Darth Vader who had escaped from Brother’s story and gone over to the dark side. His doubly pseudonymous life, Quix 97, Marcel DuChamp. His son had become an imaginary being—two imaginary beings!—by the force of his own will. So also Brother had brought Sancho into the world, and then Sancho had willed himself into being real, live. These doubled births echoed one another, deafeningly. If he said to his son when they met, I have longed for you so much that I dreamed of an old fool giving magical birth to the son he never had, how would Son react? Was there any love left in him that might lead him to react lovingly? Was there a chance of a reconciliation? Estrangements, reconciliations…again, the dizzying union of the real and the imagined. A third party, reading these accounts, might even, at a certain point, conclude that both were fictional, that Brother and Sister and Son were imaginative figments just as Quichotte and Salma and Sancho were. That the Author’s life was a fake, just like his book.

They drove for two hours, or what felt to Brother like two hours, and all the way the Japanese-American gentleman spoke in soft conversational tones, briefing him. A team of genius-level cyber-warriors had been assembled and was being expanded, to fight the growing force of cyber-attacks emanating from Russia and North Korea and their proxies from the early identity-theft days of CarderPlanet to the full-fledged assault of Guccifer 2.0. The present leader of the group, which went by the code name of Anthill, was a Bulgarian hacking genius who had turned himself in to the FBI two decades ago and had helped them set up the counterforce. He called himself Hristo Dimitarov, but that was a nom de guerre constructed from the names of two celebrated Bulgarian soccer players, Stoichkov and Berbatov. Anthill had been built slowly but surely, and almost all its members were hackers who changed sides. “They understand,” the Japanese-American gentleman said, “that this is the third world war, and the future of the free world, of untwisted social media and unfixed elections, of facts and law and democracy and freedom as we understand the word, depends on winning it. Tell your son this. I suspect him of being a patriot. Currently wrongheaded, but a patriot below the mask. I note that he chose to disguise himself as the fictional character from whom we derive the adjective quixotic. He’s an idealist. Right now he’s charging in the wrong direction, let’s say at a windmill, but he can be turned. There are real giants out there for him to fight.”

Cyberwar was the attack on truth by lies. It was the pollution of the real by the unreal, of fact by fiction. It was the erosion and devaluation of the empirical intellect and its replacement by confirmations of previously held prejudices. How was that any different from what he himself was doing, Brother asked himself, how was it different from the fictions he was making and which were now ensnaring him? Except that he was not trying to bring down Western civilization, excuse me. That was a small difference. And he was tying nobody up in knots except himself.