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

07:42 P.M._

The elevator stopped, the next officer on duty opened a door and stood aside to let the Lawyer pass.

In front of him there was a corridor with all the same oak panels, and a thick carpet pathway to muffle the sound of footsteps. The doors were marked only by stark alphanumeric codes, and the dim light glowed from opaque plafonds in the ceiling.

There was one more guard post to negotiate, at which the Lawyer had to open the contents of his briefcase to a Federal Protective Service officer. Then at last, turning round a corner in the corridor, after passing through highly secure isolation compartments designed to protect against the penetration of toxic agents, the Lawyer stopped at a door marked very simply ‘Lounge.’

For reasons only they knew, the journalists above, with the special powers of concentration and highly developed cynicism of the all-understanding and all-knowing professional, were sure that the whole world danced to their tune.

But from down here, at a depth of thirty metres, they seemed like the bunch of kids the cunning and artful piper from Hamelin led astray. The piper, as is well-known from the story, very dexterously coped with rats, but also drew children away with no less success.

Then chasing unnecessary thoughts and allusions away, the Lawyer knocked on the door and pushed.

The Lounge was a large room with a sofa, several chairs, a small billiard table up against a wall and an oval table of walnut under a massive triple-armed chandelier with opaque plafonds. A wall clock in a wooden case ticked, emphasizing the silence in the bunker.

Joshua Kold was sitting at the table looking like a diligent pupil with straight back, and hands on the table. He was clean-shaven, except for a small hipster beard, and he was dressed in a grey shirt, jumper, and jeans – all reminiscent of a student concentrating before an important exam. The illusion was supported by the pile of books to the right of Kold. The Lawyer skimmed their spines – reference books on law in English, the Bible, George Orwell’s ‘1984’, and also Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ and other books gifted by Lawyer on his previous visit.

On the table, there was a metal tray with couple of glasses and several small bottles of water. There was a flat screen TV on the wall behind Kold. In the corner, there was the already familiar floor lamp with the hammer and sickle hidden, and nearby there was a door connecting to another room, most likely, a bedroom.

The lounge didn’t smell at all like the rest of the bunker with its thin, almost imperceptible odour of Cold War – a smell of dampness, rusty metal and burnt electrical wiring. Here it smelt quite civilized – coffee, good perfume and fried bread.

“Good afternoon!” the Lawyer said softly.

Kold raised his shining black eyes towards him. Seen through the glasses, they reminded him of olives.

“Good afternoon, hello,” the young man got up and shook hands with Lawyer. He had a palm as dry and firm as if turned from a tree. “Sit down, please.”

“Thank you.” The Lawyer put his briefcase on a floor, pulled up a chair and sat down opposite Kold. “How are you? How do you feel? Where there any requests, wishes?

There was a pause. Kold opened the folder and pulled out a sheet of paper on which there was some writing.

“I’m fine,” he said calmly, scanning the writing. “Only one request. Let Ms. Morisson meet me no more than once a day, and only in the briefing room, not here.”

Rebecca Morisson was the plenipotentiary representative of Mikiliks, the scandalous international revealers of secrets, and maybe the girlfriend of its founder Augusto Cassandzhi. Cassandzhi had already been hiding for a long time in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. In Kold, Cassandzhi at once saw a kindred spirit and disciple. How Kold saw ‘the great unmasker’, as Cassandzhi was called, is unknown, but he obviously didn’t favour Ms. Morisson.

The Lawyer remembered that in a lobby of the Presidential Administration there was talk that all the story of Mikiliks and the attempts to catch Cassandzhi were well and skilfully thought-through provocation.

“But there remains the question of what Kold’s business actually is,” he thought, examining his subject. “In our information century any release of compromising data is a Pandora’s box and who gets what out of it nobody knows.”

“I’ll let them know your request,” the Lawyer nodded. “Anything else? How are you fed?”

“Thanks, the food is ok.”

“How are the conditions?”

“Perhaps, it might be more comfortable up above.” Kold said raising his eyes to the ceiling. “But hardly safer.”

“Aren’t you afraid to become the new Nasseri?” the Lawyer asked.

“Who is that?” Kold inquired disinterestedly.

“Well, it’s a well-known story. Mekhran Karimi Nasseri, Iranian political refugee. In 1970 he was exiled from the country for his participation in antigovernment activities and protests. He wandered for several years between different countries, and finally obtained citizenship of Belgium and, respectively, a passport. In 86, Mekhran travelled from Belgium to London where his relatives lived, but at Heathrow airport it transpired he had no documents – either he lost the passport or it was stolen. The British returned Mekhran to the airport of departure, the Charles de Gaulle in France. There it became clear that he couldn’t return to Belgium for the same reason – there were no documents. But then there were also no legal reasons to deport him from France. It was noted that he had entered the country absolutely legally because at that time Mekhran had documents. So he got stuck in the transit area of Charles de Gaulle. Do you know for how long?

“No, I don’t know.”

“For eighteen years!”

“Why couldn’t the Belgians just give him a duplicate passport?” Kold made a gesture of bewilderment.

The Lawyer shook his head.

“No, to put it simply. Under Belgian law, the paperwork requires the presence of the person the passport is issued to, but then it is impossible to enter Belgium without documents.”

“Catch 22?”

“Exactly. Though after nine years of life at the airport, having already become not just a local celebrity, but a fixture of the transit area of Charles de Gaulle, Mekhran suddenly received from the Belgian Foreign Ministry an offer by which the country was ready to accept him without any documents. And you know, he…”

“Refused!” Kold smiled with his short, fleeting smile. “I studied psychology. It’s so simple: popularity and public attention are like a drug. Once tasted, ninety percent of people can’t refuse and try to recapture it again and again.”

“True, true,” the Lawyer nodded again. “So Mekhran left the transit area and went over to the airport hotel only after he fell seriously ill. The most ridiculous thing is that he moved neither to Belgium, nor Great Britain, but lives in Paris now and feels good.

“Emigrants are always like that: where it is good, there is home,” Kold murmured.

“By the way, Steven Spielberg did a quite famous movie based on Mekhran’s story “‘The Terminal’ starring Tom Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Didn’t you see it?”

Kold tugged his shoulder, then nodded.

“Now I remember. Yes, I saw it.”

The Lawyer was irritated. He’d just spent several minutes telling this man something he already knew. But, maybe Kold is just too affected and couldn’t concentrate?

Mekhran Nasseri was neither the first, nor the only prisoner of transit areas in airports. In this same Sheremetyevo transit area, Zara Kamalfar also spent ten months – after fleeing Iran too, by strange coincidence,.

The husband of this unfortunate woman who belonged to a Muslim sect of dervishes was executed in 2006, and she fled with her two children through Moscow to Germany, hoping to receive shelter there and get political asylum in Canada.

The German officials, however, remained deaf to the tragedy of this family and sent Zara Kamalfar and her children back to Russia. After being forced to stay in the transit area, the refugees had almost no means of support. In a video appeal to the world, Zara said: “Life here is hard, very hard… We fill a bucket of water in the toilet in the middle of the night away from the eyes of the authority to take a bath. I have no place to wash my clothes, all doors are closed to us… A policewoman pushed me, I hit the wall and blood began to flow from my mouth. I don’t cry because I have to be strong. Children shouldn’t see my tears. I laugh to give them hope, so they can fight, so they withstand.”

After a while the children began fall ill from lack of sunlight, scant nutrition and a shortage of vitamins. The daughter developed a skin disease and the son had scurvy. All the same this story ended well since after ten months the Canadian authorities allowed the Kamalfar family to fly to Vancouver and gave Zara and her family residence permits.

But if Iranians were political refugees, then Englishman Gary Peter Austin simply missed his flight at a Philippines airport since his e-ticket had been inexplicably cancelled. The situation was complicated by the fact that he had run out of money and so was stuck ten thousand kilometers from Foggy Albion.

He spent New Year in the airport of Manila, and altogether spent twenty three days there, after turning into a local tourist attraction. In the end the unfortunate Austin’s ordeal ended when either a passenger flying to the Netherlands took pity on him and brought him a ticket – or he was helped by the British Embassy.

And the story of German Heinz Müller seems almost a good joke. Müller arrived in Rio de Janeiro to meet the woman of his dreams. They had become acquainted on the internet and agreed to meet, but to the great disappointment of this German Romeo, his Brazilian Juliet didn’t want him.

As a result, Heinz ended up in the middle of a foreign country without any money for his return ticket. He lived at Virakopus-Campinas airport near Sao Paulo for several days until he was taken to a local clinic for psychiatric assessment.

There are also some volunteers among the captives of transit areas. Japanese man Hiroshi Nohara stayed for 117 days at Mexico City airport without any apparent reason. His tickets and documents were in good order, and Japanese diplomats were constantly keeping an eye on him, ready to provide him with a new passport at once if necessary.

The story among journalists was that this little Japanese man was simply craving celebrity. And there was no doubt Nohara was happy to be interviewed, pose for tourists, crying out: ‘Terminal-2!’, with clear allusions to the Spielberg movie. And yet he always refused to explain what he was doing in the transit area.

The final twist in this stationary Odyssey was even more mysterious. One fine day in December 2008 a young Japanese woman called Oyuki literally took Nohara by the hand, forced him to buy a ticket and they departed together for Japan. And nobody heard any more about them.

And if for some transit areas were a shelter, then the famous Chinese dissident Fan Chzhen Hu used them for political struggle. For 92 days, Fan Chzhen Hu lived at Tokyo’s Narita airport in protest against the Chinese authorities’ refusal to let him come home after treatment in a Japanese clinic.

In the USSR, the People’s Republic of China, and other countries with oppressive regimes, dispatching undesirable elements abroad and depriving them of their nationality was by no means rare, but only Fan Chzhen Hu ventured to fight for the right to return. Most surprisingly, he managed to draw international attention to the issue and China relented, their prodigal son back. The dissident was put under house arrest immediately in Shanghai, but this hardly frightened Fan Chzhen Hu who had already spent three years in Chinese prisons for illegal entrepreneurship.