Time of the Octopus: Based on the True Story of Whistleblower Edward Snowden

09:57 P.M._

The Lawyer stretched to the remote control to switch off the TV. There was some night show. But suddenly, the door leading to the corridor swung open and in the doorway, completely filling it, was a real mountain of a man in a black suit with a tie.

He had huge red hands, so broad-chested and tall he reminded me of a two-door bar refrigerator, yet his shaven head grew directly from his mighty shoulders and seemed disproportionately small. The overall picture was completed by the headset attached to his left ear and the radio set sandwiched in his left hand.

“Gentlemen,” the man-mountain said with an unexpectedly high-pitched voice. “I ask you to remain where you are. We have an emergency situation.”

Kold jumped up, overturning a chair, and moved back to a corner. The man-mountain stepped into the room and stood beside the door. After him several members of spetsnaz in masks and grey ‘city’ camouflage slipped in like fleeting shadows, armed with small submachine guns with extra thick barrels. Two raced into the bedroom, while the others – five or six of them – took up positions around the table, directing their weapons at the door.

“Look, what is going on?” the Lawyer asked, trying to speak quietly and calmly.

“Maybe an unauthorized penetration,’” Mountain replied without looking at him, squeaking in ultrasound. “Keep calm, gentlemen, I am asking you. Mr. Kold, sit down; it will be more convenient for you at the table…”

The radio set came to life, made several rustling sounds, croaked a muffled phrase and then went calm again.

“Roger, waiting,” Mountain growled quietly.

Grim minutes past. The spetsnaz men stood still and silent. Kold pulled out two jade baoding balls from his pocket, each the size of an egg, and began to roll them on his palm, phlegmatically looking at a wall.

“Perhaps, it is better for us to move to another room?” the Lawyer asked.

“This is the most suitable room for ensuring your safety,” Mountain answered.

The Lawyer knew he was asking in vain for in the bunker for sure there were countless additional tunnels, technical corridors, ventilation systems and other passages connected with each other, and the security people know best. But to just sit there and be silent when beyond the door, perhaps, there was someone who came here for Kold’s life, was very hard, if not intolerable.

It was obvious to the Lawyer that the ‘unauthorized penetration’ was connected with Kold. If nothing had threatened the life of this man, he wouldn’t have been hidden straightaway from journalists, diplomats and others. Of course, he had made things safe, having securely hidden the compromising evidence and making sure of its publication in case something happened to him, but at the same time no one has repealed the old maxim, as old as the world, attributed by the writer Anatoly Rybakov to Stalin in the novel Children of the Arbat: ‘No person; no problem.’

Kold’s death would also instantly lower the amount of scandal hanging over the activity of the U.S. National Security Agency, and significantly reduce the belief of people in the accuracy of exposed materials published in the mass media.

It’s one thing when it’s done at the instigation and with comments of a real employee of the intelligence agencies, someone who actually worked with the surveillance programs, and absolutely another when behind revelations there are only questionable journalists of dubious reputation, who are also no doubt homosexuals.

No sound reached them from behind the locked door. The spetsnaz men stayed as still Madame Tussauds waxworks. Man-mountain snuffled. And the baoding balls tapped in Kold’s hand. Minutes passed.

The Lawyer had not touched alcohol several months but suddenly thought that nothing could be better now than a glass of good red wine – for ‘nervous anaesthesia’, as one of his high-ranking clients, the famous specialist and expert on body relaxation, used to say.

Red wine was much better for this, than, for example, cognac or whisky, because it kept clarity of thinking and in moderate doses didn’t impair coordination. The Lawyer realized that coordination might really be needed at any moment, if there was any chance of getting out of this mess alive.

The most reliable way to destroy an objectionable person is with an explosion, and the more powerful it is, the better. Both the mafia and terrorist organizations around the world have made it their choice in recent years, having graduated from training snipers to training high quality demolition engineers and suicide bombers. The fact that the technologies and techniques for programming a normal person to suicide and transforming him into a walking weapon came to terrorists from their curators in the intelligence agencies of various states was no secret.

“If a drugged fanatic with about ten kilos of explosive on his paunch gets into the bunker, there’ll be hell,” the Lawyer thought. “But there are different explosives. Some plastic explosive will rip everything to shreds here, though regular TNT can do a lot of damage in a closed room…”

The Lawyer knew firsthand about TNT and closed rooms from the time he had served in the Strategic Missile Troops of the Soviet army, where they’d had classes in case of attempts to capture command bunkers by enemy saboteurs.

The Lawyer cast a sidelong look at Kold. He had closed his eyes and was twirling and twirling the baoding balls, representing Buddhist renunciation of the world, but his skin was very pale and his thin nostrils trembled, indicating that he was literally shaking with tension.

A muffled thud several minutes later from the corridor made the Lawyer flinch. One of Kold’s jade balls fell on the table, rolled and banged against a glass.

“Easy, everything’s under control,” Mountain made a soothing gesture with his free hand as if he was parting waves, and then reached into his jacket and pulled out a square black pistol.

Kold gulped noisily. The spetsnaz clanked their safety catches. Along the corridor hurried footsteps pounded, and it seemed to the Lawyer that he heard a stifled cry. At that moment Mountain, who was listening to something on his headset smiled a child’s disarming smile and said with obvious relief:

“That’s it, all-clear!”

The Lawyer barely noticed as he and the shadow soldiers with their automatic machines left the room – he was suddenly visited by a thought about this pale guy with the jade balls in his hand that now sat opposite him at the table on the minus seventh floor in the secret Cold War bunker: around this one guy, thousands, if not tens of thousands of people, were participating in the most highly complex intelligence, diplomatic, geopolitical games, the results of which no one could undertake to predict.

But the fact that no one will undertake it doesn’t mean that in such a game it’s all left to chance. No, no there are no accidents, it’s all too weighty, and even experienced players are burnt. There’s too much effort and money spent on training, and it is even possible that someone gave their lives so that the game took place.

“And I’m not sitting here accidentally. It is very possible that my appearance in this bunker was predetermined long before Kold even boarded the Hong Kong Airlines plane and set foot in Russia,” the Lawyer mused.

Kold got up quickly, went to the bedroom and a few seconds later returned with a big-bellied bottle of Irish whiskey. He thumped it on the table with a look as if he was going to drink until he was unconscious.

“But you don’t drink?” the Lawyer was surprised.

The surprise was sincere. In the data-file on Kold he had read before the first meeting, it was specifically stated that Joshua practically never drinks alcohol.

“In this case it is medicine,” Kold said in low tones and unscrewed the green lid from the bottle.

“Couch syrup?” said the Lawyer, whose conversational English left much to be desired (although he perfectly understood Kold and quite clearly stated his thoughts), deciding to flaunt the slang phrase which had recently got to him in some article. But right there in these circumstances it was hardly relevant and he apologized: “Forgive me if this joke isn’t entirely successful.”

“I appreciate your diligence in studying English,” Kold parried icily. “But it is better to refrain from using doubtful idioms until you master English perfectly. Sometimes they can be taken wrong.”

He poured himself and the Lawyer two fingers, lifted a glass and then instead of a toast gave a quote from Lao Tzu:

“‘He who overcomes others is strong, he who overcomes himself is mighty’.”

“‘Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it’,” the Lawyer responded with a quote from the same source and gulped down his whiskey in one go.

The fiery stream slipped down his gullet and blew up in his stomach like a thermal bomb. The Lawyer looked at Kold. His companion drank standing, in small sips which made his sharp Adam’s apple twitch, threatening to tear the skin from his thin neck.

After dealing with the whiskey, he looked at the Lawyer with eyes watering, and noisy breaths and asked:

“What do you think? Will they come back?”

“I think they won’t.”

“So strange,” Kold sat down, rubbing a cheek with his palm. “Why would they want to kill me… It is meaningless!

“I think not all think so.”

“Yes, you are, it seems, right. If your government denies me asylum, I will be forced to surrender to the U.S. authorities. I’ve already guaranteed… No, this is not an option. It seems I am in a desperate situation…”

“Don’t rush things,” the Lawyer said softly. “Don’t back yourself into a corner. A way out will always be found. I am asked sometimes why I undertake fruitless cases. But I always answer that there are no fruitless cases. Anyway, all my experience confirms this truth.”

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“So, having passed all school assignments externally, one fine day I went to study at AACC in Maryland. AACC is ‘Anne Arundel Community College’, in Arnold, near Baltimore. However, in Maryland everything is ‘near Baltimore’.

Why there? Firstly, AACC wasn’t a pretentious place, secondly, they had a computer science course and… why hide the truth – I just wouldn’t have gotten into a more prestigious college, my grades weren’t up to it.

The first feeling that visited me in college – loneliness. Maybe, if our school psychologist had learned about it, he would put me down as a deviant teenager, registered, and would prescribe some rehabilitation therapy and antidepressants. But firstly, I wasn’t going to tell anybody anything, and secondly, the school remained in the past, and I was inexpressibly glad about that.

Some time, maybe for three months, or perhaps half a year, I lived in an invisible space suit, like some surprising protective overalls that separated me from others.

Life bustled on around me, crowds of guys and girls communicated, kissed, smoked, drank, ate, copulated, quarreled, reconciled, danced at parties, watched movies, played computer games, attended classes, organized draws and played sports – and I observed all this through a hidden, but very strong cover that hid me from their eyes.

Nobody addressed me, or asked me about anything, invited me anywhere or demanded anything. I wasn’t…you know?

First it amused me, and then it began to anger me – what, am I worse than others? For me, as for any guy at that age, there was a desire for communication, I wanted credibility and popularity among my peers… I wanted pretty girls to notice me, damn it! But for half a year no girl at college ever stopped near me to have a quick word, let alone to ‘chat.’

Gradually, I began to develop a loser complex. I didn’t sleep at nights. I stopped eating normally and for days on end without a break, I vanished behind my computer.

At the time, I was fond of cryptoprograms linked to data encryption and breaking passwords. I had a cipher, the animated image of a green rabbit, a series of alternating pictures creating the illusion that the rabbit danced. Access to the ‘Dancing Rabbit’ program was password-protected.

I wrote a program that created passwords which were updated every ten, five, then three, two and one seconds, using a random number generator, and then another program which, using the same MFG (Medium frequency generator), generated passwords to try to crack my first program. I got really carried away. I could watch for hours on the screen the monitor columns of digits changing, changing, changing, with inhuman speed. They say there are people who can enter into a trance with a mirror pendulum and a candle. I entered into a trance with my ‘Kraken’ programs.

Once I took a disk with a couple of password generators to college and in a class on information security, I secretly logged in and ‘screwed’ my program into the final table in which the results of the lesson were noted and marks were given. So, if you tried to display the table on the screen, you got my green rabbit dancing and, with the most innocent look, asking you to guess three figures from zero to nine.

If you could only see how diligently they all tried this seemingly trifling task! All those blockheads tapping on the keypads of their personal computers! All those ‘Mr. Touchdowns’ and ‘Mrs. College-2001s’, and other lard-asses that didn’t even think that the combination from three digits gives one thousand combinations and they would spend several hours guessing it not the few remaining minutes till the end of the lesson.

I chuckled quietly, furtively looking at this until Mr. Thewlis, one of the teachers of information systems, came up to me.

‘I have been watching you for a long time, young man,’ he said quietly. ‘I see you are making progress down your chosen path. We have a small community here…more precisely, a club of fans of programming. Would you like to join?’

‘With pleasure, sir,’ I answered, ‘But my knowledge levels are quite low and I will hardly be able…’

‘You’ll be able, you will be able,’ Mr. Thewlis calmed me. ‘And now remove your spell, please, from our system – I need to finish the lesson.’

I already had a program for hacking the password generator on call, so I started it under comments from Mr. Thewlis and an ovation from my classmates who had at last noticed me. The green rabbit danced its final dance, the table opened and against the name Kold a capital letter A appeared.

It was the day of my triumph. Joshua Kold, ‘College Superstar!’ They shook my hand, patted me on the shoulder, called me by name – it seemed they knew my name!

But the most important thing was ahead. Neolani approached me in the corridor. Usually she was called Abigail, Abigail Svaysgud, but she said her parents gave her a second, Hawaiian name as well, Neolani, which means ‘heavenly girl’. She was one of the alternatives who hung out in the ‘Garage’ and she was cool, very cool.

Even externally Neolani made such an impression that guys on the street twisted their necks to see her – short leather jacket, leggings, a magnificent miniskirt, a brilliant belt with rivets, sneakers with bulbs in the sole… Add a hairstyle like Robert Smith’s, make-up like the replicants in Blade Runner, a pierced lower lip and a whiplash tongue that could snub anyone – and you get the portrait of this ‘heavenly girl’.

And so she approaches me with that special walk that makes you go dry in the mouth. She had rings in ears, bracelets on her hands with baubles, and she says:

‘You are cool, you should hang out with us! Savvy in computers?’

‘Like a shot,’ I say.

‘Well, come to the Garage this evening. Our computer’s giving out trouble. Will you come?’

I nodded – there was no force left for words.

‘Well, then bye!’

And she left. And I stood as a statue, except my ears burned. Neolani had talked to me! I was invited to the Garage! Probably, it was one of the happiest moments in my life. A celebration moment, the moment of fulfilled expectations and the emergence of absolutely new ones. The line of my destiny at this moment made a sharp turn, an abrupt zigzag and I…

Damn, I became another person, get it? The Garage – it was a gate to the new world, the portal to the delirium pastures of Heaven. By hearsay, they not only smoked grass, but also snorted coke, and sniffed the Mexican brands, and beer flowed like a river. And of course, all the best girls in college went to the Garage not only to dance there were many secluded corners with soft sofas.

Of course, it was not a garage, but a former hangar for seaplanes on the bank of the Severn River. It belonged to the father of one of those guys that hung out there, Bach. Bach is not a name, but a nickname, in honour of the old composer who created the ‘Pa-ba-ba-ba!’ song; all ‘garagers’ had nicknames, some catchier than others.

To get to the Garage, you could go along a footpath on the coast. When it rained the path became muddy, and wet branches hung low over it, but I liked this way much better. If you go along the road, you inevitably pass houses rolling in thickets where there live some gloomy old women and loud mammies eternally complaining that along their precious lawns and mailboxes ‘all kinds gad about’. Well, some garagers once accidentally knocked over a couple of those boxes – so now you need to call the FBI?

Semi-darkness always reigned in the Garage. The door was locked – one of the Three Main Rules. The first: ‘The door is always locked!’, the second: ‘You disturb nobody, nobody disturbs you’, and the third: ‘The garbage from the Garage can’t be taken out’. Certainly, in the third rule it was not talking about empty beer bottles, crumpled cigarette packs, boxes from pizza or packaging from condoms, but information, and in translation into the language of our ancestors it meant: ‘What happens in the Garage stays in the Garage’.

There were always five people living there, generally guys. Their dens were in the east part of the Garage separated from the ‘Central Station’ and the ‘Waiting Room’ by racks and a black tarpaulin curtain on which it was written in silver paint ‘Iron curtain’.

In the Waiting Room there was a bar, a gallery and a dance floor. In the Central Station there were compartments for couples who wanted to smoke grass in private or get on with something else. ‘Nirvana’ was the iron box with a door where those who got enough marks or ‘passed on the three paths’ could ‘fly’. The ‘Senior Flight Control Room’ was the personal apartments of the head garager, who, to my astonishment, was not the phlegmatic fat man Bach, but a puny, short, short-haired guy with an unpleasant, even angry, face called Pincher. It as Pincher who owned the computer which was giving out trouble. On it, Pincher had made some music clips of the Cure and mounted porno-videos filmed in Nirvana in his spare time.

The computer, by the way, appeared so-so – weak and carelessly looked after – the case was wet with beer and the screen splashed with goo whose origin I don’t even want to think about. But the machine was a working one, so I just rebooted the operating system, much to the rough delight of the garagers.

‘Look at you, pro!’ Frisbee tapped me on the shoulder, a thin smiling blonde of six foot. ‘Perhaps you could also fix the amplifier?’

‘Wait a moment, Fris. We didn’t even ask the man whether he has time for this,’ Pincher interrupted. Unlike the majority of garagers he rarely used slang. ‘Josh, what do you say?’

I looked at Neolani, who suddenly smiled at me. I was at a loss and just nodded, agreeing that I have time.

‘Does that mean you want to join us?’ Pincher asked bringing his face so close to mine I wanted to push away him.

‘I wa-want…”’

‘Initiation!’ the girl with green hair laughed loudly. She was called Pipe. ‘There will be an initiation! Bach, bring some cream!’

And everyone around – about ten of them – whooped with delight. Someone turned on Quadrophenia and the entire Garage was flooded with the Who’s guitar riffs. Pete Townsend ripped strings, Roger Daltrey wailed over the unfortunate destiny of Jimmy, and the garagers dragged me from the office of the flight controller to Central Station, pulled up a table and set me on it, all the while yelling raucously.

The music ceased. The lights went out completely.

‘Joshua Kold, worthless college boy, are you ready to change your life, expand your consciousness and learn the beauty of the inner world of the Great Beaver here, in our monastery of Chaos and Gloom?’ Pincher said in a solemn and rather ominous voice.

‘Y-yes…’ I answered quietly, but in the Garage there was suddenly total silence and I could hear the waves of the Severn River rolling onto the coast behind the iron wall of the hangar.

‘Do you agree with the Three Main Rules imprinted on the Big Wall opposite to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you familiar with the Doctrine of Time?’

I shook my head ‘I just heard about it for the first time.’

‘Lani,’ Pincher turned his head towards my benefactor, ‘So you didn’t explain anything to him?’

‘Slipped,’ Neolani shrugged her shoulders. ‘Not enough time. You do it.’

‘So!” the voice of Pincher filled with epic force. ‘World governments by means of science lie to people about everything that surrounds them. The world is not such as it seems to all of us at all. And first of all this concerns time. They din into our ears that past, present and future exist. They do this so that all of us – all mankind – are slaves to time. We are forced to look back all the time at the past which allegedly contains the experiences endured in ancient times by previous generations. So we work, work hard all the time, and stoop for the sake of the future which will come after who knows how many years and allegedly will be light… It is a lie!’

‘A lie?’ I said, surprised.

‘Everything is a lie!’ Pincher confirmed. ‘To the last word.’

I looked at Neolani and she smiled with her contemptuous and haughty smile – the smile of the person who knows all.

‘Remember,’ Pincher summed up solemnly, ‘There is no Past. Absolutely. It has already passed, it was carried away back, absolutely back and therefore does not exist. I have said this phrase, and so it has already stopped existing, understand? That’s it, there is no past! Every second, each fraction of a second, the past disappears, melts like ice, evaporates into vapour, and is gone. So everything that was in it ceases to exist and has no value. All this experience, all these learned mistakes are nonsense and rubbish! Remember, Joshua, college-boy, others’ mistakes never taught anybody to do something. The free person learns from their own mistakes! Learns because there is no past. But there is no future either. It is absent for another reason – it hasn’t come yet.

Everybody today says you need to work hard and strive to bring the future we want but this is a double lie. The future can’t come, it can’t arrive because the moment it arrives, it becomes the unique condition of time which is the present. The present is that instant in which you live, in which you exist at present. Only the present is material and real. So live in the present! That is our motto! And now tell me, computer master with a chilly surname, do you want to spend the fleeting present working, sitting in stupid offices, for shares and transactions, for courts and reports?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Louder!”

‘No!”

‘Life is short!’ Pincher began to yell. ‘Learn yourself, learn the true world! Have fun! Create! Have a good time! Live in the present! Yeeha!!’

‘Live in the present! Yeeha!!’ the garagers shouted and began to leap in the air. Stroboscope lights flashed and dazzled. The music began again – this time the contemporary band Shadow Gallery, and Pincher ordered sharply:

‘Lani, on the table! Bach, cream!’

Neolani, still smiling, threw her jacket onto the floor, revealing a red crop top. She got up on to the table, crawled to the middle, sat down, and, coiling all her body, pulled off her crop top with a quick tug. There was nothing underneath! She lay down on her back.

My heart stopped, then was driven on in a beat, driven by the frantic pounding of the music.

‘Hey, hey!’ Pipe cried, twisting her shaggy green hair. ‘Why her, not me?”

‘Because I said so, baby!’ Pincher grinned. ‘Bach!”

The fat man approached Neolani and began to smother her erect breasts and their ringletted nipples with whipped cream from a barrel. When he had finished, the smiling ‘heavenly girl’ looked like a cake. Pincher pulled a bag of white powder from a pocket and strewed it over the cream.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘Vanilla sugar!’ Bach answered and laughed loudly.

‘Eat!’ Pincher ordered me.

‘What?’

‘Lick! Eat! Guzzle! Guzzle!

‘Guzzle! Guzzle!! Guzzle!!!’ the garagers chanted.

I bent down over the table and, avoiding looking at Neolani’s smiling face, licked the cream, trying not to touch her skin with my tongue. For some reason it seemed to me that the white powder, surely ground tablets like amphetamine, must taste bitter, but that cream really did taste like vanilla.

‘You need to eat with appetite!’ Neolani sang, suddenly seizing my hair and pressing my face firmly into herself. I choked, swallowing the sweet mass, and rested my hands against the table, trying to escape, but she held me tight. The rigid nipple of her breast with its corrosion-proof steel ring slipped into my mouth and…

And I calmed down. A strange languor spread through my body, and I wanted to laugh and eat this cream forever. I hugged Neolani, nestled on her and froze, feeling her body shuddering with laughter. It was… good. That good. Maybe for the first time in life it was so good. As if I had found a family. And maybe, I really had found it.

Do I need to say that that evening I became a man? But I don’t remember much about it itself, because Pincher had filled the cream with too much ‘magic powder.’ I was blown away very far and for a long time, and in the morning I felt so bad I swore never to use drugs again.