When I met Coover, and we were crossing Third to go to this very bar, I remember thinking I could short-circuit my rising sense of panic by just taking off at a run and making for the nearest subway stop.
It’s what I do now, but I no longer have the expectation that it’s going to cause my fear index to drop by even a single point. All movement there, I can tell, will be in the other direction.
Because Phil Coover . . .
Who is he? What is he?
A train rushes into the station now that matches the speed and roar of my thoughts.
Is he a consultant, as he said when we met? Is he a private-security contractor? Is he an executive at Gideon? Is he US military? Is he NSA? Is he CIA? What’s his interest in me, and how far back does it go? Did he have Trager’s car hacked? And the prep cook at Barcadero, the one I replaced, Yannis . . . holy fucking shit, was that Coover too?
Somehow?
And what about Sharista?
I get on the train, shaking, maybe muttering to myself, only a step or two removed from being that guy – the central-casting crazy person, the one who makes you wish you’d gotten on the next car.
Hey, you!
Hey, buddy!
Hey, gorgeous!
I stand, leaning back against the door, and try to remain calm. Then I look up suddenly, and around, scoping out the other passengers. Am I being followed? Watched? That’s what Coover said, at the beginning. But did he mean watched all the time, or is it more like what Trager said when I mentioned surveillance to him? Not twenty-four-seven, Jesus, don’t flatter yourself . . .
I don’t know what to think.
Except that I’ve presumably just put Kate into a very dangerous position. It was obvious from his reaction that Lessing was freaked out by what I told him, and he reported it back to Coover almost immediately. So what’s Coover’s reaction going to be? And how long before they realise I’ve cut loose? If they don’t already know?
I look around again.
I have no idea where I am or where I’m going. I just ended up on this train . . . which is . . . an uptown 6. It’ll soon be pulling into 59th Street. What good is that to me?
None.
When it stops, I get off. At street level, I wander for a block or two and then head into Central Park. Not wanting to go too far, I walk down by the pond and find an empty bench to sit on. Huddled now in this oasis of calm (though watched over by the steel and granite monoliths behind me and to my left), I close my eyes for a while and think.
Maybe cutting loose is the wrong move. Maybe I shouldn’t be panicking at all. Maybe I should just go back to the office and act like nothing happened.
Or back to the apartment.
Because where else would I go? How else would I function? At this point, who else would I be?
In any case, Kate and Pete Kettner aren’t a real threat. They don’t have any incriminating evidence. There’s nothing they can actually do.
I open my eyes.
The reason I told Lessing about them was to explain my behaviour, to demonstrate how cautious I was being. This is a rationalisation, I know, and just as I’m about to tie a nice little bow on it, my cellphone rings. I take it out and check the screen. It’s a private number. I think about not answering it, but I don’t want to set off any alarm bells.
‘Hello?’
‘Teddy. It’s Karl.’
I focus on the dark pool of water in front of me, people gliding by, insubstantial, like shadows.
‘Hi, Karl.’
‘I’ve been thinking, Teddy, and, you know what? Your instincts were right. Easy to see how it could happen, with the laptop. And she was bound to get curious, which is probably all this is . . . but better to be safe too, better to be inside the tent and all of that. For now, at least. So . . . yeah, we’re going to put some money into Pivot. In fact, we’re going to try and buy it, like you suggested.’
We?
A little dart of pain shoots up the back of my neck.
‘What does Doug have to say about all of this?’
‘I wouldn’t worry about what Doug thinks.’
‘No?’
‘No.’ He pauses. ‘Look, Doug is having some issues right now, health issues. He’s not really in a position to weigh in on stuff like this.’
I remain silent as I try to process what I’ve just heard.
‘Teddy? You there?’
‘Yeah.’ I crouch forward. ‘I’m here. So . . .’
‘So, yeah, that Pivot thing will be taken care of. Better that you keep a little distance from the whole thing anyway, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And by the way, listen, I should tell you . . . you’re doing a great job, and, uh . . . keep it up.’ It sounds like he’s reading this from a card or off a screen or something.
I say a mumbled thanks, and then he hangs up.
As I walk out of the park, I’m tempted to let myself think that I’ve dodged a bullet here, that I could easily rewind a bit and pick up from where I left off . . . but where would that be, exactly? At the office, before I went to lunch at Jean-Georges? Before I hired Leonard Perl? Before that conversation with Nina?
I cross at the light and walk south on Fifth.
What does it matter, though? There is no rewind option, so if I’m going to pick it up, it has to be from here. It’s just that . . . everything has changed, and this is no longer just about me. If Phil Coover is the one buying or putting funds into Pivot, he will have a window into Kate’s life and will be in a position to exert a degree of control over her. It’s bad enough that that’s what I was proposing to do, but this is a lot worse.
I keep walking, and a few minutes later I’m at the Tyler Building. But on my way in I have this overwhelming sense of dread. For the first time, I feel like an actual fraud. I certainly don’t feel like someone who’s doing ‘a great job’, or even someone who knows what their job is. I’m also unsure of what to expect when I step out of the elevator and into reception. Everything seems normal, though, and as I approach my office, Nicole appears, tablet in hand, as usual. I shake my head.
‘But—’
‘Later,’ I say without looking at her.
I go inside, close the door behind me and head over to my desk. I need to find out who Phil Coover is, and I spend the next couple of hours searching for information about him, a reference, an image, anything. There are plenty of people called Phil Coover, but none of them quite fits the bill. I trawl through all things Gideon, I go to DoD and CIA websites. I look up work by investigative journalists who operate on the fringes and have written previously about PMCs and the intel community.
I come up with nothing.
Then I remember what Nina said when she was talking about Teddy’s car being hacked and where she’d come across information on the crash forensics.
I get on the phone and call Jerry Ellis again. Now, clearly this shithead can’t be trusted, because if he didn’t tell Karl Lessing about my dealings with Leonard Perl, then I don’t know who did. But I reckon he can still be useful. Without going into specifics, I say I have an IT issue and ask him to send me over someone who knows their way around computers.
An hour later, an intense young guy called Billie Zheng shows up, looking eager but also slightly apprehensive. I tell him to sit, and I chat with him for a few minutes. Then I square up to it. ‘Okay, Billie,’ I say, ‘I need to get onto the deep web . . . or, uh, the dark web, or the deep net, whatever the fuck it’s called.’ I pause. ‘Can you get me down there?’
Billie Zheng looks simultaneously relieved and puzzled – relieved, I’m guessing, because this won’t be a challenge as far as he’s concerned, and puzzled, I’m pretty sure, for the same reason – because if it’s no challenge for him, how can it possibly be something that tech visionary Teddy Trager needs help with?
He hesitates, as if there might be a punchline coming that he should wait for.
I lean forward. ‘Well?’
‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘sure, of course.’
So we get into it. He explains stuff to me about encryption and randomised peer-to-peer relay channels. I ask him questions and take notes. My obvious lack of basic knowledge here continues to puzzle him, but I don’t care. I’m focused on what he’s telling me. Within an hour we have downloaded TOR, the deep-web browser, and he’s giving me tips about how to maintain anonymity: turn off cookies and JavaScript, for example, and put some duct tape on the webcam. He then shows me the basics of how to navigate my way around and how to locate specific sites. He mentions Hidden Wiki, a reliable deep-web link directory for newbies and a couple of real-time chat rooms where experienced denizens of this shadow realm can steer me in the right direction.
When I have what I need, I send Billie on his way. If he ends up getting quizzed by Lessing or anyone else, there isn’t much he can tell them about my intentions, because I didn’t tell him. And I’m not even sure I know what they are myself. In fact, it takes me a few days to really get my bearings here, to swim around all the drugs, guns, porn and human organs for sale and find what I’m looking for, which is the kind of site that Nina mentioned, a place where investigative journalism and public-interest accountability can operate without fear of restriction or censorship.
There’s no doubt that some of the material I manage to see is insane, hardcore conspiracy stuff, but not all of it. There are plenty of sites on the surface web that track corporate corruption and malfeasance, but nothing like a thing down here called Soul Trader Inc. This is where I find the details of every single whistle-blower allegation that has ever been levelled at Gideon Logistics – and not just the nine cases that Kate did her best to tell me about, the ones that went to trial, but all of them . . . including what may be a reference to the incident I witnessed at Sharista.
Through a Nepalese lawyer, the family of a Sajit Pradhan has apparently been trying to establish the whereabouts of their son, a so-called TCN, who went to work for the company in Afghanistan months ago and now appears to be missing. This is one of several similar cases, some of them going back years, but in all of them the families have met with resistance and obstruction leading to prohibitive legal costs and, in many instances, financial ruin.
Extremely uncomfortable with this, I move on to another site and read about Gideon’s legal battle with the Pentagon. The level of detail here is staggering and would be unimaginable on any normal news outlet. But what’s really shocking is the revelation that Gideon Logistics, one of the world’s largest private military and defence contractors, was started in the mid-1990s with seed money from a CIA-fronted VC firm called Silo, which was itself a forerunner of the agency’s official VC arm, In-Q-Tel. Apparently, the connections and links between these companies are labyrinthine and ongoing, which makes the multi-billion-dollar fraudulent-billing case something of a joke.
But there’s a trail here, and I follow it all the way to what emerges slowly – to me at least – as some kind of logical conclusion. Because it transpires that what I discovered about Gideon Logistics is also pretty much true of Paradime Capital. The exact details are way too knotty to unravel, let alone retain – I can just about understand this stuff as I’m reading it – but the basic point is the same. The seed money for these companies, the funding, the patronage – it all came from the CIA.
If this were a Venn diagram, it occurs to me, I’d be at the intersection, and so would Phil Coover.
It takes another couple of days before that name elicits a response. I throw it out there on a corporate-watch forum, and someone with the user ID fg63br7iyzg chimes back with: ‘Oh shit, is that Project Mandrake Phil Coover? Haven’t heard HIS name in years.’
I ask a follow-up question, and wait. There’s no reply.
The next day, I try to go onto the forum again, but it appears to have been taken down.
*
I’ve seen all I want to see anyway. I may not fully comprehend everything that’s happened to me, or why it’s happened, but I have enough of a sense of it to understand one essential thing: this is no longer a dream, no longer a weird, extended, solipsistic trance. Whatever spell I was under has broken, whatever edifice of delusion I was occupying has crumbled. As Nina suggested, I am, in fact, and have been all along, a puppet. And is there anything more pathetic than that? A puppet who believes he is a free agent?
A marionette with a soul?
Outwardly, over the next few days, I carry on as normal. But really, I’m just floating along in another trance, a different kind of trance – this one fuelled by guilt and dread, by images of the past and visions of the future, by the now-spectral face of Sajit Pradhan and the yet-to-be-seen face of Nina Schlossmeier’s child. And as for the great job I’m supposedly doing, by the end of another week it really couldn’t be said – unless staring out the window counts – that I am doing any job at all now.
So how long can this last? How long before I feel a gentle tug on my pull strings? Not long at all, as it turns out. The next morning, I’m in the back of the limo, we’re on the way to the office, Ricardo driving, when I feel it. Instead of going his normal way, Ricardo heads for the Lincoln Tunnel. As soon as I notice the change of route, I reach over to the intercom to say something, but . . . I don’t know what it is, I hesitate. I hold my finger over the button and let it hover there for maybe fifteen seconds. Then, just at the entrance to the tunnel, I sigh loudly, flop back in my seat and proceed to gaze vacantly out at the oncoming rush of flickering lights and vitreous white tiles . . .
After a while, I look at the back of Ricardo’s head through the thick glass of the divider. I’m not going to give him a hard time. What would be the point? He hasn’t lost his mind. He hasn’t gone rogue. He’s just doing his job.
By the time we get onto the New Jersey Turnpike I have a fairly clear idea of where we might be headed: the Gideon training facility where I did my orientation sessions before shipping out to Afghanistan. It’s in Pennsylvania, not too far from a place called Doylestown.
It takes us a little over two hours to get there, and I spend most of this time lost in thought, in loops of anger and regret, but also moving, slowly, I suppose, to a state of resignation and acceptance. Whatever reason they have for bringing me out here, it isn’t to do further training or orientation, that’s for sure.
We drive through the gates of the facility, which is in a fairly remote, wooded area, and park directly in front of a plain, single-storey building. That’s when I start to feel a little sick. I get out of the car and look around, avoiding eye contact with Ricardo. The contrast of the sleek black limousine with the dusty, sunbaked, almost ramshackle surroundings is quite stark. As I remember it, there are several similar buildings to the rear of the one we’re parked in front of.
There doesn’t seem to be anyone around.
I look over at Ricardo, who’s leaning against the side of the car. I’m about to say something to him when a figure emerges from the building, a guy in his twenties wearing fatigue pants and a black T-shirt.
He approaches me and says, ‘Sir, come this way, please.’ He then turns around and goes back inside. I follow him into a small, sparsely furnished office. ‘In there, sir,’ he says and points to a door in the corner.
I nod in acknowledgement, wondering if there’s any way I can delay this. There isn’t. I take in a deep breath, hold it for a few seconds and release it slowly. I head for the door. What’s behind here? I quickly visualise a large empty room, blacked-out windows, a single light bulb, and then . . . after the bullet has entered the back of my head, and I’m falling forward, a spray of blood hitting the bare floorboards just inches in front of me . . .
The room is large, and pretty much empty, except for a pool table in the middle of it and several rows of stacked plastic folding chairs over to the right. The floorboards are bare and worn. To the left there are two windows, both of them grimy, probably from a combination of dust and rain. These are the only sources of light here, making the atmosphere dim and oppressive, and for this reason it takes me a couple of moments to realise that there is a man standing at the far side of the room. The fact that he has his back to me isn’t helping.
I take a few steps towards him. ‘Hello?’
He’s wearing a suit, a well-cut one, and is about my height and build, and—
He turns around.
I remain calm.
Controlled breathing helps, short ones – in, out, in, out. Because it’s Teddy Trager. Standing there in front of me now. Ten feet away, and smiling.
It’s Teddy fucking Trager . . .
Except that . . .
I take another step forward.
Except that it isn’t. He looks like Teddy Trager, but there’s something off . . . the cheekbones, the eyes, I don’t know what it is . . . something. He also has a visible scar below his left ear. As I get closer, he takes a step forward too and holds out his hand. ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
And he doesn’t sound a fucking thing like Teddy Trager.
I ignore his outstretched hand and study his face for a moment instead, the lines, the proportions.
That scar is really distracting.
Is this guy meant to be a replacement for me? They can’t be serious.
I’m about to say something to him when I hear a sound behind me – the door opening and then footsteps. On these floorboards, the footsteps are loud and firm. I swallow hard and find myself wondering, as I turn around, where the nearest subway stop might be.
‘Danny,’ Phil Coover says, striding towards me. ‘Danny, Danny, Danny.’
In green khaki pants and a black turtleneck sweater, he looks a little older than I remember. He radiates a similar vitality and presence, but his face seems heavier, more lined, his eyes less intensely vivid.
We shake hands. His grip is just as firm as before, and, as before, when we’re done he places a hand on my shoulder. ‘So, how’s my favourite cockroach?’
No change in style, either.
It might be a little soon to say fuck you, but nor do I want to waste any time being polite. I flick my head back to indicate the guy standing behind me. ‘You’re kidding with this, right?’
Coover removes his hand from my shoulder. ‘Say what?’
‘Oh, come on, look at him.’
Keeping his eyes on me the whole time, Coover seems to consider this. Then he says, ‘Leon here is a work in progress. The scar is unfortunate. We need more time for things to settle in.’
‘And for a little voice work, maybe?’
‘Yes. Obviously. We can’t all be perfect like you, Danny.’
My stomach flips, and I feel weak. ‘So why show him off like this?’
‘Why do you think?’
‘Well, let’s see . . . you want to make a point? You replaced Teddy Trager, you can just as easily replace me? Is that it?’
‘Not just as easily, but . . . yes.’
‘So then . . .’ I look down at the floorboards, frustration mounting, a part of me wishing there really had been a bullet waiting on the other side of the door. I look back at Coover. ‘I don’t get any of this. None of it makes sense. What are you running here, some kind of programme? Or project, I don’t know . . . Project Mandrake?’
Coover holds my gaze for a moment, then looks over my shoulder. ‘Leon,’ he says, ‘thank you.’
Leon moves immediately. He walks around us and leaves the room.
When Coover hears the door closing behind him, he says, ‘Okay, so . . . no, Project Mandrake, that was’ – he clicks his fingers – ‘that was the late seventies, after the Church Committee hearings, in fact. So I doubt very much, quite frankly, if you know anything more about it than the name.’ He turns and walks over to the pool table. Resting against the edge of it, he folds his arms. ‘Things are different today. Well, the names are certainly different, but I suppose they all lead back in one way or another to the great fountainhead, MKUltra. That was Allen Dulles, in ’53. And even before that, I suppose, to get the ball rolling, there was Operation Paperclip.’ He seems quite wistful about all of this. ‘So you see, Danny, we’re part of a great tradition here.’
I shake my head. ‘I’m not part of any fucking tradition. I didn’t choose this—’
‘Well, none of us chooses it—’
‘Oh please.’ I feel another wave of exhaustion. ‘I need to sit down.’
He holds out a hand, indicating the stacked chairs. ‘Be my guest.’
I walk over and pick out two of the folding chairs. I set them up a few feet apart and take one of them. ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘This programme I’m apparently taking part in, what is it, Operation Doppelgänger? Project Lookalike? What?’
‘Something along those lines,’ Coover says, coming over and sitting down in the second chair. ‘Understandably, it’s classified, but yes, the idea is essentially that . . . to harness this opportunity nature provides, albeit rarely. Though not as rarely as you might think. Leon there, for example – okay, he needs work, I’ll admit it – but he comes from an area of Russia where for some reason we have found there’s a higher statistical probability of being able to find a lookalike, for our purposes, at any rate, than anywhere else in the entire world. And believe me, we’ve looked. This programme goes back twenty-five years.’
‘Holy shit.’
‘Yes, the thing is, you see, in most cases, there’s an initial wow factor, and then you look closer – like with Leon, I guess – and maybe it’s not such a close match. But there are enhancement options . . . surgical procedures, for example, prosthetic implants, genetic manipulation, and new areas are opening up all the time. It’s a regular Pandora’s box.’ He leans back in the chair. ‘But then, once in a while . . . man . . .’
‘What?’
‘We get a live one . . . a ninety-seven, ninety-eight per cent match. Almost too good to be true.’
‘And that’s me you’re talking about?’
‘Damn right. You’re the jewel in the crown of this programme, Danny.’
I shake my head, struggling here. ‘So . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘What about Bill Clinton?’
‘Ha. That’s another Russian guy, and he’s very good, but he doesn’t have anything like your numbers.’
‘Clooney?’
Coover shakes his head. ‘No, no, that was George. He and Teddy go back. It was Ray too. We put Bill in there to mix it up a bit.’
‘Look, what is this programme? I don’t understand.’
Coover clears his throat quietly, then sits up straight in the chair. ‘Okay, like any of these programmes, it’s a form of unconventional or asymmetric warfare. It’s an attempt to weaponise something that you wouldn’t usually think of in that context – so . . . psychiatry, LSD, sleep cycles, sex, the media, video games, consumer technology, or whatever – and it’s all done in the interests of protecting national security. In this case, it’s the strategic use of political decoys or body doubles. At least that’s how it started out, and you can see the appeal of it, being able to replace key figures, and then influence decision-making, reverse policies and, ultimately, shape events. But the limitation of it has always been this: how do you control the decoy? How do you control the double? Do you pay them? Or do you coerce them? Is it a suitcase full of money or a baseball bat? It’s all a little crude, I’ll admit, and more often than not it ends in tears. Or a goddamned book deal.’ He pauses. ‘Because the double, usually, is a nobody, a loser.’
‘A cockroach.’
‘There you go. But what if,’ – he holds up a finger – ‘what if you could engineer it so that the decoy doesn’t really know what’s going on, so that the decoy thinks this is all happening to him, that he’s got the chance to become this other person all on his own . . . and then he does, and we just watch. What if you could engineer a sense of destiny for someone and then install it in them like a piece of software?’ He lets that hang in the air for a moment. ‘You know, at one time we had whole research departments working on it, in labs, in universities, looking at this deep-seated desire we all seem to have for personal transformation and what we’ll do to achieve it, the lengths we’ll go to . . . as well, of course, as our capacity for denial and self-deception. This stuff is all there in the literature. You can read it. Also, go talk to Karl – really, he’s fascinating on the subject.’ He clears his throat again, loudly this time. ‘Now, there’s a wild-card aspect to it as well. There’s unpredictability, there are variables – in this case, getting you in front of Teddy, for example, or trying to keep Doug Shaw in line, to convince him this was bigger than just protecting Paradime – but once the subject is embedded, sort of like a sleeper agent, then that’s a solid asset we have in place that we can activate further down the line, if and when we need to.’
I shift in the chair, partly because it’s uncomfortable, partly because I may be about to get sick. ‘And then?’
‘Well, at some point we have a version of this conversation. But, you see, the theory is that the decoy is now so entrenched in his new identity that there doesn’t need to be much persuading. The old life has been left behind, we’re all set, and, as for money or coercion, neither of those things is actually required. To be frank, though, Danny, I’m a little disappointed that we’re having the conversation so soon. Things seemed to be going pretty well, and then . . . I don’t know . . .’
He lets that trail off. But what does he mean? Is he referring to Kate?
‘What about Teddy?’ I say, in a blatant attempt at deflection. ‘I don’t get it. How is he such an asset? Where does national security come into it with him?’
Coover shrugs. ‘Maybe it doesn’t,’ he says, after a moment. ‘On the other hand, maybe it does. Maybe Teddy runs for public office, and crushes it. Then we have a glittering prize in our pocket. In any case, he’s on the board of all the major tech companies, and that’s certainly valuable. But you know, none of that really matters, because the point is, Danny, you’re an experiment, a trial we’re running. This is now a big programme, and we’re taking the long view. We’ve secured a lot of funding.’
I take in a deep breath. ‘There are others? In the programme?’
‘There will be,’ Coover says. ‘So this trial, in terms of future budget allocations . . . it’s very important.’ He pauses. ‘Look, since 9/11 the whole national-security apparatus has mushroomed, it’s out of control. There are now thousands of programmes and initiatives, and this is just one of them. But I’ll be honest with you, Danny, you revived it. Single-handedly. I’m serious. The programme was more or less dormant, had been for a while. I was involved in other things – I was with Gideon, consulting, liaising . . . and then you showed up on the radar.’
‘At Sharista.’
‘Yeah, after the incident that night, the riot. I’m looking through the reports, there’s video footage, there are photos, and, holy shit, if I don’t see this . . . this face.’
More questions arise here than I’ll ever be able to put to him, but as I go back in my mind to that night, and fast forward through the subsequent days and months, only one of them forms coherently in my head. ‘What about the cost?’
Coover shakes his head. ‘I don’t . . . what do you mean? Our budget is—’
‘The human cost, Phil. Sajit Pradhan? That prep cook at Barcadero? Trager himself? You hacked his car, you killed him. Then all the surveillance, the invasion of privacy, the denial of . . . I thought we had a constitution in this country.’
‘Danny, that’s a bit naive, isn’t it? Don’t you see that what we have in this country, what we’re facing, is an existential threat? Nothing less. Now that’s not anything the Founding Fathers ever could have imagined. So what I reckon is’ – he shrugs his shoulders here – ‘we’re no more than a terrorist incident or two away from pretty much having to let that thing go.’
‘Let what go? The Constitution?’
‘Yep,’ Coover says, nodding solemnly, ‘I’m afraid so. I mean, the argument has been used before that conditions in the country have changed . . . in relation to the Second Amendment, for example. But this is different. This is a whole new ball game.’
I stare at him. ‘What do you want from me, Phil?’
‘I want you to stay in place, Danny. I want you to go on being Teddy Trager, but to play by the rules, and we both know there’s only one of those.’ He gets up from his chair and stands, towering over me. ‘Okay. We’ve had the conversation. We’re beyond that now. As for incentive, well . . . you’re already rich, far richer than I’ll ever be, so I’m obviously not going to pay you, but please – and I mean this – don’t put me in a position where I have to coerce you.’