After spending a few hours digging into the databases, I eventually gave up and started the program for cleaning the registry, sat in the armchair and dozed off to the barely audible humming of the cooling systems for the server.
The octopus came to me in my dream. It was huge, faceless and almighty. Its invisible tentacles were spreading across the world, entering every house, every room. They were no thicker than a thread, but inside those threads powerful streams of data were pulsating, feeding this horrible creature.
The octopus never moved, but from time to time new tentacles emerged from the disgusting bag, replacing its head and body, and crawled out along the surface of the planet in search of prey. In utter silence, it slithered into another house in which there was a computer connected to the Internet, another person who had just bought a mobile phone or a tablet. It would attach itself to the gadget and soon start pulsating, draining out gigabytes of data. From that moment, the person didn’t belong to himself anymore, but had become part of a huge information organism, a food source which can be completely sucked out to leave only an empty skin.
I woke with a stiff neck and a feeling of brokenness through my whole body, I went through a few unpleasant minutes of psychological self-flagellation, After all I had just committed an official misconduct and maybe even a crime by exceeding my official duties and sticking my nose somewhere I should not have. Apart from that, the helicopter case clearly showed me that the NSA treats such concepts as ‘honour’ and ‘duty’ quite freely, which was a direct contradiction to the Baseball player’s belief.
But then the bright sun outside the window, the singing of African birds, the rustling of the trees and the aroma of freshly baked bread, which came up through the slightly opened window from the café on the ground floor, reconciled me with reality.
‘Josh, people don’t come to the baseball field with their own rules’ I told myself. In the grand scheme of things, the supply of our helicopters to SAR in itself is quite a positive fact. The Russians were left holding the bag – there’s nothing so special about it, it’s business!
And then, direct assault is not always the best way to take over a fortress. If you remember Iraq, a donkey loaded with gold breaks the gates much more effectively, more cheaply and more safely.
‘Do what you must – and come what may,’ I said out loud.
And the wheel of my service went on rolling.”
01:21 A.M._
“Tell me, Mr. Kold,” the Lawyer stirred his coffee and took a sip. “It is believed that the action of Private Banning, who passed a huge amount of secret information for publication to Cassandzhi, had a big influence on you. Is that true?
Kold thought. The Lawyer noticed that he didn’t have an unequivocal answer to this question. Silence went on for quite a long time. Finally Kold began to talk:
“You know, I’ll say it’s both: yes and no. The thing is, in the United States itself, there’s no clear position towards Banning’s actions. You see, from the point of view of the law, he is a criminal, a traitor, and because of his actions and the information which he helped make public, people have died. And society doesn’t see a hero in him. As for my point of view, I pay tribute to him, of course, as a man who managed to force himself to cross the fatal line. I’ll say more about Banning, but it’s not a simple subject, so I need to think about it first. I just don’t want to talk about it now. I’ll tell you now about the ‘honey trap’ in Zurich – which had much more influence over my decision than Banning’s actions.”
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“The Baseball player told me about a trip to Europe. I was sitting in the cafeteria on the sixth floor, drinking coffee and looking out the window, thinking about all sorts of things – like fishing, for example. My father and I had been planning for a while on going to the coast and staying in a camping lodge to fish, grill what we caught, drink wine and just chat. To be honest, last time we had something like this was when I was still at school.
Of course, I doubted that my father, despite his promises, would indeed be able to leave all his stuff and take a week-long holiday. And I too had issues with spare time – at that time we were testing yet another version of our latest cryptographic program and I often had to stay at work as late as two o’clock in the morning.
Anyway, I was drinking my coffee and looking at clouds floating by in the faded late summer sky. It was lunch time, the cafeteria was booming with a melee of voices, people were walking around my table, the waiters were scurrying past with trays, and it all smelt of fried bread, sausages, vanilla, coffee and boiled milk.
The Baseball player appeared suddenly, just like he always did – just materialised from thin air. He was all positive in his impeccable suit and his sportyhaircut and classic American smile.
He began the conversation without any preparatory etiquette about how I’m doing or my health. He just came flat out with it:
‘Tell me, Joshua, have you ever been to Europe?’
I shook my head. No, I’d never been to the Old World. I’d been to Asia a few times. As a schoolboy, I went on an exchange trip to Sendai in Japan, and then we went with the whole family to Thailand on holiday. I’ve also been to South America – to Brazil and Peru. And you know about Africa. Though Australia was also beyond the world I happened to see, but, to be frank, I didn’t want to go there. What is Australia? Deserts, kangaroos, eucalyptus and koalas. And to sit for nine hours in the plane for that – no, thanks.
Old Lady Europe is completely different! You don’t need to be a genius to understand that our whole modern civilization was born there and any person who carries a passport in a pocket of his trousers wants to return to the basics, to perform a kind of pilgrimage and go to London or Paris.
All the same, I must admit that we Americans do treat Europe with some scepticism. In essence we are a part of it but we Americans broke free from the geographic and social-historical shackles that poor Europeans are forced to still live by – you can put it this way – in crowded living conditions, constantly wary of the rock of Russia hanging over their heads.
Still, of course, I was fascinated to visit Europe, and the Baseball player guessed at once that he could pull me in on a hook, like a marlin. But he needed a hundred per cent result; people like him never rely on chance, so he asked me another question:
‘And what do you, my boy, think about gnomes?’
I can’t stand it when people call me ‘my boy’ and other words like this, but this time I ignored it because the word ‘gnomes’ awoke many more emotions. I even asked Mr. Jenkins, whether I had heard him correctly. He said, yes, and smiled.
What did I know about gnomes? First of all, the books by Professor JRR Tolkien and the films made from them by Peter Jackson, of course. I had watched a couple – they are quite tolerable gum for the brain, pure escapism. They probably have hoardes of fans who run around in homemade tin armour, fake beards and duralumin swords.
But gnomes themselves, or rather the word, was invented, I think, by Paracelsus, who got it from the Latin gnomus, which means ‘knowledge’. The alchemist thought that each natural element in this world has its own spirits-protectors, and he called them gnomes.
In reality of course, gnomes are bearded dwarfs, the owners of countless treasures. Different nations call them differently: ‘dvergi’, ‘ cvergi ‘, ‘dwarves’, ‘nibelungs’, ‘krasnolyudki’, ‘svartalvy’, ‘kobolds’, ‘leprechauns’ and many other names.
By their character, gnomes are mean and miserable, but they are also workaholics, and in their free time they like nothing better than to drink beer, eat, sing, and rampage with their fellow gnomes.