The Director

29

The antiquarian bookseller on Pierrepont Street in Bath had served many eccentric customers, but few with the relentless obscurantist curiosity of James Morris. He had slipped into Bath from nearby Bristol to satisfy a few personal needs, of which book browsing was only one. He had earlier paid a visit to a woman who had been referred to him, in the strictest confidence, by the incandescent Beatrix. Now, in the afterglow, he was indulging another passion at a celebrated local bookseller. The establishment occupied a fine old listed stone building near the Avon River, a mile below the crescents that surmounted the city. The bookseller’s office had carved arches over the windows and a handsome gabled roof. Inside were the incunabula of the book world: ancient tomes in glass cases; tools used for printing and binding; and what looked like acres of old books.

Morris approached the wizened bookseller at the desk. The man was wearing an apron, and had metal garters on his sleeves to keep his cuffs from encumbering his hand movements. He might have been working in identical costume when this establishment was founded in the nineteenth century. Morris, in contrast, was wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket and cargo pants, which hung from his waist as if from a wire coat hanger.

“I’m looking for an old book about finance,” said Morris. “It’s called The Bank for International Settlements at Work. It was published in 1933, when the bank was three years old. Does that ring any bells?”

“We have no bells here, sir. We are a bookseller. Let me consult the catalogue.” He pulled out several metal drawers and examined index cards with meticulous notations.

“Lucky you,” he said dubiously. “We appear to have a copy. The book is by Eleanor Lansing Dulles. It was published by Macmillan, in 1932, actually. Let me bring it out.”

The bookseller disappeared into the stacks and returned with a dusty volume, running to more than six hundred pages. He handed it gently to Morris.

Morris opened the book to the title page and scanned the three pages of the preface. He closed the book and looked at the bookseller with genuine astonishment.

“Teraflop! Eleanor Lansing Dulles was the sister of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles. Can you believe that? She thanks her brother John Foster in the preface. It’s true! It is a conspiracy.”

“I beg your pardon?” The bookseller wasn’t used to emotion in his workplace.

“Never mind. I have another request. Do you have a 1903 French monograph called Essai sur l’Histoire Financière de la Turquie?”

Morris had been assembling a small library on Ottoman financial history; this was another of his private obsessions. He liked to see the hand of the British, encouraging the bubble and then puncturing when it suited their interests. It was part of Morris’s new obsesssion with the idea of a hidden British hand that had directed every turn of the wheel from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first.

The shop owner advised him curtly that the shop didn’t carry foreign books. He glowered at the intruding customer.

Morris retreated toward the shelves carrying his bulky BIS history. He found a collection of books about intelligence. He surveyed the meticulous Cold War histories that Christopher Andrew had compiled from the Russian defectors Gordievsky and Mitrokhin. The Cold War bored him. Morris was about to walk away when he saw a fat book in a plain red cover called MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service. It was nearly nine hundred pages, as big and heavy as a stack of bricks.

Morris returned to the register with the bulky history of British intelligence on top of his BIS tome. The bookseller appraised him. This was a peculiar reader.

Morris paid cash for his books and was on the way out the door when he stopped and turned back toward the cash desk. His face was alive suddenly, with a mixture of shame and excitement.

“Do you possibly have a book called Justine?” asked Morris. “It’s translated from the French.”

The bookseller paused. There was a twinkle of recognition in his eye.

“By the marquis?” he asked.

Morris nodded. The heat was rising under his skin, reddening his cheeks.

“Ah! Alas, it’s out of print; very rare. We do get occasional inquiries from collectors. It’s a bit of a cult item, that one. If you’d like to give me your card, perhaps I could have one of them contact you.”

The bookseller waited conspiratorially. Morris’s pleasure at the prospect of purchasing the book turned instantly to panic at the fear of discovery. He turned suddenly and made for the door, clutching his two volumes. Out the door, he turned right and walked up the street toward the river and the tourist destinations along its banks.

Morris was safe. He found a wooden bench set back from the Avon looking upriver toward the parabolic banks of the stone weir that stretched nearly across its width. Beyond was a covered bridge, perfectly formed in imitation of the Rialto Bridge in Venice. Morris was lost in time. He unwrapped his new acquisitions and held them in his hands. He spent his life with the digital representations of words but took particular pleasure in the physical object that is a printed book.

He opened the Dulles book on the BIS and leafed through the pages. It was written in the confident certitudes of rising American empire. The old world was faltering. America was its rescuer and protector. It needed multilateral institutions like the BIS to mask its hand and lend an idealistic sheen to its activities.

Morris came upon a passage near the end of the book that conveyed this illusion of higher, unselfish purpose that was so characteristic of the Dulles brothers in their global machinations and now, he saw, of their sister, too:

Who was Sister Eleanor kidding? The BIS wasn’t a philanthropic organization. It was the lynchpin of global capitalism.

A few pages later, still on his bench above the Avon, Morris came upon a passage that gave him the shivers. The words might have been written directly to him, from more than eight decades ago. He read them as an injunction, a seal on his mission:

Here was Morris, the liquidator. The future, so long delayed, was about to arrive.

Morris picked up his books and began strolling again toward a small hotel on Walcot Street where he had left his bags. He meandered past a throng of people gathered around the Pump Room, which since Georgian times had housed the Roman baths that made the city famous.

The square was thick with students and tourists jostling past each other, but Morris was oblivious. An effetely dressed man in his forties brushed Morris’s wrist, hoping to get his attention. The flirtation was annoying. Morris turned and headed back the other way, toward the Avon and the refuge of his hotel.

Head down, clutching his books, living inside his head, Morris trod down Cheap Street toward the river again. People were gathering in the pubs and restaurants. He followed the curve of an old byway and took a last look at the Avon. A cool early November wind was rippling the water and flapping the banners that hung from some of the riverside buildings.

It was like the 1930s. What was required was a jolt, a catastrophic moment that caused people to see there was no foundation, and the empire would fall.

He had his detonation charges in place now: He had wired the bank at the center of the other banks. With its disorder, the insolvency of the entire system would be revealed. He would rearrange the bankers’ world according to rules of human justice, not inherited supremacy. For he could control the numbers; they were recorded in zeroes and ones, like everything else. They were not immutable facts but representations that could be altered.

Morris scuttled away from the river. There were too many people about; it was time to be sheltering himself. He walked up Walcot Street until he came to the beige brick façade of a small hotel. The desk clerk knew him as Mr. Bjork, traveling on a Finnish passport.

Morris went up to his room and ate ice cream, which was the only thing that seemed palatable. He opened the fat history of MI6, which he had been saving as a kind of treat for when he was in private, and began scanning the chapters.

MI6 had claimed to open its archives for this “official history,” but the amazing, audacious fact was that there was nothing there. The book went on, page after numbing page, citing agent code names and operational meetings — and the table talk of the various grandees who had been given the title “C” and run the service. But there were few real secrets or revelations… for the simple reason that a conspiratorial organization cannot produce a history. It commits nothing of importance to paper. It is like an epic poem, recited from generation to generation but never written down.

Would a British historian of MI6 ever write that they had created the CIA in their own image to protect the remnants of empire when Britain itself could no longer afford the upkeep? Of course not. Would they say that they had taken a democratic nation, born in a revolution against Britain and its aristocracy, and welded to it an intelligence service populated by the very Anglophile aristocrats that American democracy had meant to destroy? Dulles and McCloy, Helms and McCone — these names might have come out of Burke’s Peerage.

Morris found pages that hinted at the truth, however obliquely. He read the text of a December 1940 letter from Sir Stewart Menzies, “C” himself, introducing “Wild Bill” Donovan to Churchill:

It was obvious what they had done, if you understood the story. They couldn’t avoid leaving footprints. Yet the tracks were just dusty and covered enough that the ruse had held, then and now. Morris leafed a few pages further and found a message from Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, rejecting a proposal that Churchill personally embrace Donovan’s secret role and warning:

Ha! “Splendid free-lance,” indeed! But Morris had penetrated the code and seen this story for what it was. His friend Ramona had been clever to send him to a professional historian like Arthur Peabody, who could point the way. But an engineer like James Morris, unschooled in the “humanities,” could follow the wiring diagram. And then, with luck, he could rewire the grid.

Morris fell asleep for a few hours with his book open; he dreamed of his afternoon with Beatrix’s friend. He cried out in the dream, and he worried for a moment that people in the neighboring rooms would hear and make inquiries. But the hallway was quiet and empty. Morris lay awake for a time, and then took a pill. He would be gone from Bath the next morning, his journey almost done.

Morris took the 8:04 train to Paddington Street Station the next morning. He was late; he didn’t care: It was a form of power to make other people wait. The train compartment smelled of cigarettes even though smoking had been forbidden on the British railways for years. He found a window seat at the end of a car, beating an older woman to it. He gazed at his reflection in the glass, barely recognizing himself, and then peered through the panes at the fields beyond the tracks. Vaporous puffs of condensation hung over the grass and shrubs but they vanished in the heat of the rising sun and the approaching city.

Morris looked at the immense scroll of unanswered messages on his three phones; the world was nipping at his heels, no matter what disguise he wore or proprietary business he used as his cover. He had managed to elude them, but that couldn’t last much longer.

At Paddington Station, Morris descended from the train carriage and joined the rivulet of travelers who were heading to work. He rolled his suitcase behind him; on his back was a pack with his computer and other electronic gear. The rest of his kit he had destroyed. It was just 9:20, still time to pretend that you weren’t late. Commuters jostled Morris every few yards until he was safely out of the station and walking down Sussex Gardens toward Hyde Park. He maneuvered his angular body among shorter, chunkier pedestrians marching toward their offices. He had forgotten to eat breakfast that day, as most mornings.

He crossed Bayswater Road and entered the park gates near the ornate Italian Gardens. He checked his watch. It was nearly 9:40, and he was certainly late. What of it?

Morris rolled his bag noisily past the Baroque fountains and onto an asphalt path that bounded the kidney-shaped pond that stretched nearly the length of the park: Boys were playing soccer on the grass, even on a school-day morning; in the distance, wealthy women on horseback were taking a morning ride in the park, as they had for centuries in this impermeably sealed island nation. Morris strolled toward a wooden bench that looked across a stand of shrubbery to the pond. He looked at his watch again, but only for show.

Waiting on the bench was a young man dressed in a swish Burberry raincoat. He was perhaps thirty and looked like a young merchant banker, newly hired by one of the old-line firms but restless, not sure he belonged. He removed a Benson & Hedges cigarette from a gold pack and stuck it to the flame of a lighter engraved with the seal of the Bank of England.

Morris sat down on the bench beside him. Even in his haggard, furtive form there remained something seductive and charismatic about Morris. He was like a romantic poet in his haunted, passionate affect. He was hungry for self-destruction. Beads of cold sweat formed below the hairline of his wig. He leaned his bag against the bench and removed his backpack.

“You’re late,” said the man. “That’s regarded as poor form in your trade, I believe.”

“I overslept,” said Morris. That was the truth. He had thought of catching the 7:21 train, so that he could make his appointment with ease. But he had been in a deep, drugged sleep, and when the alarm had sounded he had pushed the snooze button.

“I have what you asked for,” said the young man. He held his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. He removed a thin beige legal folder and laid it on the bench.

Morris looked at the skinny folder.

“There’s not much of it,” he said.

“It’s too hard. Everything is password-protected. They’ve had the cleverest people working on it for years. All I have is a few routing numbers and IP addresses. It’s too difficult to get all the way in.”

Morris stared at him, and then smiled.

“I don’t have to get in. That’s the point. You don’t have to get into the water to drain the pool.”

“Whatever, mate,” said the Englishman. He had the modern upper-class style of affecting a workingman’s diction.

Morris looked at the arid Englishman. He felt like a febrile animal, sweating from every pore, next to this dry relic of empire. Morris was subhuman in every respect except one: He was smart.

“Get lost,” said Morris. “Go back to your bank and its creamy parlors. The check is in the mail.”

“You’re a nasty one,” hissed the young Englishman. “But the pay is good, ain’t it?”

The young banker stood and buttoned his raincoat and adjusted his silk-lined paisley scarf. He left the beige folder on the bench and ambled off.

Morris held the brown envelope from the bank on his lap. He could look at it later. It was only rows and numbers, hieroglyphics, incomprehensible to most people. The structures on which people put their faith and credit were so many digits. Towing his baggage, he rolled off to a nearby hotel on Bayswater Road, where he ordered breakfast and began to read the modest but useful dossier from the Bank of England.

Morris was finishing the last of his eggs, scooping up the yolks with the crust of his bread, when he saw a most unwelcome visitor settle into the restaurant. He was wearing a different jacket than the peacoat he had worn several days ago in Bristol. Now it was a blue blazer with a tie, Mayfair-style.

But it was the same Russian man, the one who had called himself Roger. Morris wanted to escape back into the street. He called for the bill. It wouldn’t do to get arrested for skipping on a breakfast check. But the Russian was already seated beside him.

“Going somewhere?” asked Roger, looking at the suitcase and backpack.

“Maybe,” said Morris. He didn’t look up from his day-old copy of the Financial Times.

“Have you reconsidered?” asked Roger.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“This is your destiny,” said the Russian. “You cannot escape destiny. I told you before: There is a new world waiting to be born.” He softly hummed a chorus from Les Misérables.

Morris threw down his napkin. “This is ridiculous. I don’t want Russia’s help.”

“But you have our help anyway. We are always there, like Anonymous. We see you, even when you don’t see us.”

“I’m gone,” said Morris, standing up from his breakfast table. The Russian gently raised a hand.

“Ramona says hello. She misses you. But it’s too difficult now. She’s gone somewhere else, to Venezuela, to wait.”

“Fuck off.”

“They know about you back home, my friend. You are not safe anymore. You need protection. That is our specialty. What, do you want to end up in an airport transit lounge? No, you need help.”

“I’m out of here, I mean it. I don’t need anyone’s help. If you try to stop me this time, I will go to the police, I swear. You need me to keep functioning. I don’t need you for anything. It’s all done. You don’t matter. I don’t even matter.”

Morris walked out of the hotel restaurant. The Russian followed but Morris went straight to a policeman outside the restaurant along Bayswater Road, just as he had promised. The Russian vanished.

Morris asked the policeman for directions to London Heathrow via the underground. The encounter with the Russian had clarified something he had known already: It was time to go home, immediately.

Morris walked down the busy road to the Lancaster Gate underground station. Black taxis were queued nearby, but Morris waved them off. He changed trains twice, to make sure, but he doubted anyone was following him — and he didn’t really care. It was too late.

In Morris’s backpack, he carried the implements of another identity, which he had brought with him from Bristol for emergencies. There was a new tablet computer, with a new IP address, new credit cards, a new cell phone and, most usefully, a new passport and a disguise that matched the passport photograph. Morris started up the new computer and, using the newly minted credit-card identity, made a reservation for a flight late that afternoon.