SHELBY WAS WORKING AFRICA. I WAS WORKING GIGABYTES.
I had persuaded one of the tech guys to help me unscramble and download the contents of the SD card from Dullar’s digital camera onto my computer. As I had figured—and secretly hoped—the card was not nearly as sensitive as film might have been. The problem was more one of encryption—spy stuff, really, the kind of thing in movie scenes where the frazzled tech-wizard spins multiple codes through his laptop as the clock ticks down and guys with guns come running down a neon-lit corridor outside until—bingo!—the screen says: DOWNLOAD COMPLETE. This one came without the gunslingers.
At first Dullar’s SD card proclaimed itself to be unreadable, but the tech guy stroked a few keys to overcome its reticence, then ran a bit of pirated software that slipped by the crude protective barriers.
Jean-Louis Devreux had always been friendly enough to me, but I knew he had a hard, cynical streak. He claimed to have driven a Paris taxicab for a decade before becoming an all-purpose I.T. wizard. Somehow his knowledge of the cobbled backstreets and tangled alleys of Montmartre had morphed easily into an instinctive understanding of convoluted programs and the instructions that made them navigable. His cab-driving days and nights had also given him a scorn for people who feigned noblesse but showed him disrespect, usually in the form of parsimony with their tips and demands to know why he was taking them on such roundabout routes to reach their destinations.
Prefixing my requests with many monsieurs and frequent use of s’il vous plaît, I was always careful to avoid inclusion on his voluminous list of bosses who, at some time and in some way or another, unknown to them, had behaved in a manner that Jean-Louis considered demeaning. Early in his post-cab-driving career, a secretarial mistype had engraved the name on his laminated ID as Jena Louis and he refused to have it altered, preferring to maintain the moniker as a symbol of a managerial slight that would one day be avenged.
In his desire to gather ammunition for this final showdown with authority, Jean-Louis also had a natural curiosity verging on nosiness. Politely but firmly, I had to shoo him out of my office—s’il vous plaît, monsieur; merci beaucoup, monsieur—before I began the download of Dullar’s SD card. But I noticed that Jean-Louis had slipped a USB storage device into my PC before he began working. When he left, the USB left with him. I guess I should have stopped him. But at that stage he was the last person I wanted to confront or alienate. How was I to know, at that particular moment, on that particular day, that Jean-Louis was preparing to blast open a box beyond even Pandora’s dreams?
I surveyed the results of the download. It contained 197 images with time stamps dating back a year or so. I locked my office door and drew the blinds on the windows before I opened the directory.
It was just as well that I did.
The screen lit up with rows and rows of postage stamp–size JPEG images that could be enlarged to full screen with a click of the mouse.
One after another, they depicted Dullar in the company of another person, sometimes more than one. Some of his companions looked to be dazed or asleep or otherwise unconscious. Some were clad. Many were not. Most were strangers to me, but I recognized some of them with that particular frisson that emanates from the familiar seen in an utterly new and improbable context.
One, in particular, closely resembled the spouse of one of Graphic’s most senior executives. Another resembled one of the Graphic’s senior executives herself. And she was not alone.
With a start, I noticed that, in the photos where Dullar posed half clad with some equally insouciant partner, you could see a curiosity of his anatomy that seemed to confirm Elvire Récamier’s anecdote about his and Shelby’s fiery pursuit of Faria Duclos in Vietnam. At first it looked as though he had been born with only one nipple. Then, if you looked more closely, you could see that half his chest was a patchwork of skin grafts, a landscape of restorative surgery. What was most striking was the contrast between Dullar’s angelic looks and this ugliness, usually hidden, now suddenly exposed.
Only one of Dullar’s compositions had no obvious claim to inclusion in this gallery of fun and frolics. It showed a hotel room door—you could clearly see the number 207—but I figured that was just one of those false starts, like photos you take of your shoe when you are finding your way around a new camera.
Among the most recent was one I could barely bring myself to contemplate (although I did, of course) and I wondered how it could be erased. I recognized the backdrop as Faria Duclos’ apartment. She was in her wheelchair. Dullar was crouched beside her, smiling affably, an arm draped over the steel framework. She was looking pensive—no big smile—and leaning away from her guest. There was no suggestion, though, that Dullar had been holding the camera to take the picture himself, like those happy snaps that people much younger than I post on social sites to show themselves partying with their faces pressed together in grimaces and tongue-pulling, party-hat merriment. Either it had been taken on a timer or by a third party—my suspicions fell on Ivar Bild, the inscrutable night nurse, acting in Nordic innocence, thinking it was just a happy snap and not a digital stiletto that Dullar would one day slide between Shelby’s psychic shoulder blades. But Faria understood Dullar’s motives. And when I saw the image, so did I. Once again, I caught sight of that distant gaze in Dullar’s eyes, as if only his body was living in the present and the rest of him was someplace else where unspeakable things happened to other people.
The snap of Duclos and Dullar was not the last one on the SD card, but I had no time or inclination to open the final few. I guessed, though, that I would find them sickeningly familiar, given that they were taken in the minutes before I surprised Dullar at his nefarious business only days earlier. So much had happened since that moment that it seemed like ancient history.
If I had been writing headlines about the whole selection of photographs, I would have come up with expressions like “Blackmail Bonanza” or “Serial Seducer” or, knowing the creative uses to which he put his camera during his trysts, “Lens Hood Lothario.”
But I was not writing headlines. I was too stunned to do anything beyond save the whole file to a USB stick of my own and purge it from the computer lest anyone else on the system stumble across it.
This was dynamite, Semtex. HEU, Little Boy and Fat Man rolled into one. Mutually assured destruction writ small.
And like all explosives, it required careful handling to prevent it from blowing up in your face.
I slipped the USB stick into a padded, unmarked Jiffy bag with a hasty note to the addressee then dropped it into the mail room out-tray outside my office door. There was just time for a smoke-break and I drew deeply on my cigarette, the way condemned criminals are supposed to just before they head for the gallows. Then I made my way back to the newsroom, wondering how long it would be before the trap-door opened beneath all of us if those pictures ever saw the light of day. Shelby was crafting one of his fanciful pieces in Homepatch—the kind no one was supposed to be able to see or steal.
By Joe Shelby
CAIRO—Defying Egypt’s emergency laws, tens of thousands of protesters poured onto the streets of Cairo, flooding the central Tahrir Square and confronting police who used tear gas and water cannons against them.
“Mubarak out,” many of them chanted, expressing the profound discontent that has arisen across a whole generation of young people in the Arab world with their autocratic and unbending rulers.
“We have had enough,” one protester, Ahmed Mahmoud Moussa, 23, declared as he and others sent messages using Facebook and Twitter to urge friends and like-minded Egyptians to join them in their effort to end almost three decades of Mr. Mubarak’s increasingly ironfisted rule.
“Enough is enough is enough,” he said.
It was not clear who—if anybody—had led the protesters onto the streets. Their appearance followed the creation of a Facebook page that drew more than 70,000 posts from Mr. Mubarak’s adversaries.
Police sought to deploy in a thin line with batons drawn to protect the Egyptian Museum, which houses the nation’s vast trove of priceless antiquities dating to the time of the pharaohs.
As clashes with the police spread to other locations, news reports said Mr. Mubarak had unleashed groups of thuggish supporters from the secret police and his ruling party, urging them to crush the demonstration.
The unrest, which protesters called a revolution or uprising, followed similar clashes in Tunisia that led to the precipitate flight of the strongman ruler, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.
In Cairo, the protest seemed to have been ignited after Friday noon prayers, a sacred moment in the Islamic week. Demonstrators marched from mosques across the city, converging on the Nile-side locations that stand as emblems of Mr. Mubarak’s control.
At the headquarters of the ruling party, there were initial reports of fires in the lower floors of the building. And functionaries were seen in television footage gathering up bundles of files before the protesters could get their hands on them.
At one point, pro-government demonstrators took to the roofs of apartment houses overlooking Tahrir Square, lofting chunks of masonry and even satellite dishes onto the president’s foes 10 stories below …
endit
“Christ, Shelby. Where did that come from? What the hell have you been smoking?”
“Only in Homepatch, old boy,” he said. “Just in case. Got a call from an old stringer. Old buddy, actually. Did I ever tell you about that old trick called the Wireroom Switcheroo …”
Now he was going through his mock-up article again, showing unsuspected skills in the new task we had been given: the insertion of hyperlinks into the text so that readers could click on marked words or phrases on the website to be sent automatically to background material.
If the piece was ever published—and heaven forbid that it should go beyond the confines of Homepatch without some kind of serious confirmation—a reader would be offered profiles and clippings on everything from the course of the Nile to the origins of the pyramids and the story of Mubarak’s rise to power as a lynchpin of American foreign policy in the Middle East following the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981.
“Close it. Store it. Forget it. Better still, spike it, kill it, erase it till it’s real. And do it now before the meeting starts.”
“Remember the Cayman Islands Mafia story?” Shelby said. “Or the Somali smugglers? Well, let’s just call this the Wireroom Switch-eroo. Version Two.”