Face/Mask (13 page)

Especially after that stunt Joe pulled with the trip up north. Despite promising himself that he would try to make Terry happy Janus hadn’t been able to keep his irritability under wraps. The only sex had been a frustrating, mercifully brief attempt before supper on Wednesday, when Janus hadn’t been able to get Sahar’s face out of his mind. It had ruined the mood for the rest of their time together, and things between them were still cool since they’d come home.

Joe, with all his best intentions, had really overstepped himself that time: interfering in Janus’s family life, as well as his private pleasures. Nobody had asked him to prove his gratitude to Janus, nor to be so generous with his limited means. Now there, on Janus’s P-screen, was a 10-digit com number, flashing red, inviting him to drop a dime on his wife’s uncle.

Drop a dime?

He liked that expression, something he’d heard on an old gangster film his father made him watch in his youth. It sounded ominous and treacherous; fitting for the action that it described. And the fact that nobody would ever know who was behind that treacherous act made the idea so inviting.

Before taking any time to reconsider Janus reached out and touched the numerals on his screen. The cursor turned into a flashing clock-face. Janus looked up to see if anybody was at his office door, but there was nobody there. He took a deep breath and waited.

As the cursor continued to flash, taking forever to connect to the site, Janus was surprised at how shallow and uneven his breathing was. From somewhere underneath his desk he could hear spinning disks and a far-off whine, telling him that his relic of a machine was working hard. He had pressed the screen quickly to avoid having time to think about his actions, to avoid changing his mind. Now his damn P-screen was taking an eternity to open up the administration site, leaving him too much time to ponder the gravity of what he’d done.

Janus had never hurt a fly before. But he wanted to do something, take some sort of action that confirmed, in his mind at least, that he was still the most important man in his household.  But Joe hadn’t hurt anybody either. And the cursor was still flashing, giving him the time he needed to reconsider his actions; a last chance to change his mind. Janus hadn’t wanted to change his mind; he’d wanted to take decisive action and he had. He’d pressed the screen to inform on a “friend and neighbour.” He’d also done his civic duty, with no interest in the financial reward.

Janus reached out and touched the red numerals with his index finger a second time, interrupting the ongoing attempt to make the connection, and allowing himself to breathe easier. He had proven, to himself at least, that he could do it. He had a way to regain some control over his life if he wanted to. There was no need to go further, to truly hurt anyone. Not now.

He pressed the link back to his report window, and waited for the screen to change views. In the two minutes it took for the link to be made he allowed himself a small feeling of pride.

A new window opened and he saw that a half-dozen traffic drone alerts were flashing on his screen. Things were back to normal.

August 29, 2039:

It was the first day of school. Richard sat in the third row of his social studies class, wondering if his new teacher was really as open-minded as he seemed, or if he was just putting on an act to impress his grade 12 students. The tall man stood silently against the blackboard, watching as the students filed in, with his name written in block letters behind him: Jordan Robinson.

Once everybody was seated Mr. Robinson sprang to life, welcoming them all while promising “a challenging and eye-opening semester.” He handed a pile of new study discs to the first student in each row, and asked each one to pass them to the students behind them. As the discs were being handed from student to student, the teacher began a running commentary, openly criticizing the most recent revisions to the texts, while displaying more energy than any of Richard’s other teachers.

“Of course there are lots of changes once again this year,” he said, walking excitedly from one side of the classroom to the other. “In fact, if you find any old textbooks in the library, say pre-2018, you might be surprised at how differently the world around us was viewed then. For example, on these new discs there’s no mention of how the race to keep up with the Indo-Chinese Economic Union’s industrial boom led to the cancellation of all environmental regulations in the West, which in turn contributed to the destructive pollution that affects all our cities.”

He stopped, looked at the surprised faces of some of his students, and gave them a cheerful smile, before continuing with a slightly calmer tone.

“Then again, I’m not sure if the library is even allowed to keep textbooks from that far back, you know, with the directives on education. So, these discs contain the official texts, which we are required to teach, and you’re required to learn. That doesn’t mean you have to accept everything as gospel without asking questions. I encourage everyone to always ask questions; whether it’s of your teachers, or your parents, or, well…teachers and parents are enough for now.”

Julie Prégent, a pretty girl who Richard considered the smartest student in his year, as well as an uptight pain in the ass, waved her hand furiously until she got the teacher’s attention.

“Yes,” Mr. Robinson said with a small hesitation. “Miss…”

“Julie Prégent,” she stated in a way that meant he’d better not forget her name again. “Are you telling us that these discs are full of lies? I find that quite surprising.”

“No, Julie. I’m not saying they’re full of lies. It’s just a question of how the people who wrote the history books see the world. For example, you know the old adage that history is written by the conquerors?”

“But nobody
conquered
us, sir. What exactly do you mean?”

Richard shot her a dirty look, but her steady gaze had not left the face of Mr. Robinson, who looked surprisingly serene under her aggressive questions.

“What I mean, Julie, is that different people can see the same factual situation two different ways. One is not necessarily a lie, and the other isn’t necessarily the truth. But if you are only taught one way to look at those facts then the person doing the teaching, me in this example, is doing you a disservice.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, let me try to be clearer. Take today’s, um, weather forecast. Let’s call it cloudy with a chance of acid rain.”

Several students laughed out loud, but Julie Prégent sat stone-faced, waiting to be convinced.

“If you go to chapter three of the disc you might get the impression that a poisonous environment was the unfortunate, but unavoidable, outcome of perfectly natural climactic changes over the past century. But air-masks weren’t even needed in any of the world’s major urban centers until after most of you were born. And there is very little that was natural or unavoidable about what’s been allowed to happen to our planet.”

“I can’t believe you’re even allowed to speak like that to us,” Julie Prégent interrupted, her face wearing an expression of exaggerated dismay. “Don’t you risk getting in trouble?”

“Shut up, Julie,” Richard snapped at her, unable to contain his irritation any longer. “Nobody asked for your stupid opinion!”

“Please, please, young man,” Mr. Robinson stepped forward and raised his hands in supplication. “We are all allowed to express our opinions in this class. Things haven’t gotten to the point where we can’t still do that, thank God. So, let’s all be civil to each other, no matter how much we disagree.”

Richard blushed at his teacher’s reproach, and looked down at the disc he was holding in his hand. He had been surprised by his own outburst. He’d always avoided speaking in class unless he was given no choice. He wasn’t someone who considered asking questions to be an integral part of getting an education. In fact, he felt that those students who did ask the occasional question were interfering with the spoon-feeding of facts and dates that was expected in every class. Now here was a teacher who encouraged questioning what he was being taught in the official discs, and who didn’t blanch at the merest hint of problems with school authorities or, potentially, the administration itself.    

Mr. Robinson went to the blackboard and wrote down the pages that they would be covering that week, while Richard worried that he’d embarrassed himself in his teacher’s eyes. He wasn’t sure why, but he wanted Mr. Robinson to have a high opinion of him.

Part II:

Law Enforcement

Chapter six

Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, RSC 1982, ch. 11, Section 7:
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.
(repealed, April 2, 2020)

January 31, 2039:

The snow that had come down in January of that year was mostly beige, and lay in dirty, foul-smelling puddles in the streets. Even as Yves Prescott fumed over his removal from Security Prosecutions, his thoughts turned to the passing of the ski hills and outdoor skating rinks of his youth. In his new position, with the prestigious-sounding but ultimately powerless, title of Deputy Minister of Public Works, he had all the time in the world to reminisce.

Prescott’s family had deep roots in the Outaouais Valley, not far from the Quebec-Ontario border. His father, Pierre-Karl, was ruthless in business, allowing him to amass a small fortune despite his lack of higher education. This talent was passed on to his sons, lending money to their less fortunate neighbours and foreclosing on properties until legend had it the family owned a piece of every farm all the way to Gatineau.

But the farms that were the source of the family’s fortune were struggling: the toxic soil no longer growing wheat for bread, or hay for the thinning herds of cattle. Pierre-Karl recognized that the family’s way of life was not sustainable. At the same time he saw that Yves possessed eloquence in argument as well as a razor-sharp logic. He decided the family would give over one of its children to university studies, where perhaps a different future could be built. In 2018 he allowed Yves to go to the
Université de Montréal
to study law, making him the first Prescott to accede to post-secondary education.

Yves Prescott had barely settled in Montreal when the bomb went off in Quebec City. As refugees poured into the city, Prescott looked on at the horrors caused by Muslim extremists bent on destroying his way of life, and took it as a personal affront.

So he studied diligently as the legal landscape changed daily in those post-attack days. The arrival of American military advisers, the continent-wide application of the Enhanced Homeland Security Act, the eventual repeal of the Charter of Rights: all of these combined to make his studies more arduous and more exciting than he could have imagined.

Upon graduation he spent three years cutting his teeth with Security Prosecutions in Toronto, going after dozens of young Muslims for a wide variety of acts that were now considered terrorism-related offences. The zeal with which he attacked his work impressed his superiors enough that they soon sent him to head the Montreal division of the Directorate. A few of those superiors were also relieved to get rid of the driven prosecutor who was all too willing to bend the rules in order to win his cases.

Under Prescott’s leadership, the Montreal division became much more aggressive in jailing anyone even suspected of aiding terrorists. He was quoted as saying that the police were not to be handcuffed in their investigations, handcuffs being reserved for the criminals. In over thirteen years with him as the head of this reinvigorated team of prosecutors Montreal easily outdistanced other Canadian cities in the number of arrests and convictions it recorded.

As chief prosecutor Prescott felt free to get his convictions any way he could, no longer confined by Toronto’s old-fashioned views of justice and fair play. The ends justified his not always strictly legal means, and there was nobody watching over his shoulder to point out to him when he strayed from the letter of the law.

He felt so far above the constraints of the few remaining rules of evidence that when he heard that an RCMP Inspector named Serge Bolduc was being investigated by Internal Affairs it never occurred to Prescott that this might somehow touch him
.
Bolduc had managed to cross some sort of line in his enthusiasm for securing convictions, a line that Prescott had often encouraged him to ignore. In a system which prided itself on convicting anyone who even looked like a terrorist neither man had worried worry about getting caught for doing their jobs too well.

The Internal Affairs investigators found eight cases where the evidence had clearly been planted by Bolduc. Not surprisingly all these cases had been successfully prosecuted under Yves Prescott’s watch. A chief prosecutor was a much bigger prize than an RCMP investigator, and they decided to propose an immunity deal to Bolduc if he implicated Prescott.

That plan was still-born when Bolduc was found hanging from a bed-sheet in his cell before they could take his statement. Whether his suicide was caused by shame or loyalty was never known, nor was it relevant to the undeterred Internal Affairs investigators. They forwarded their report to Charles Lesage, the Justice and Security Minister, with a request to be allowed to interrogate his top Montreal prosecutor.

The very whiff of scandal was enough for Lesage to act. He wasn’t interested in whether Prescott was aware of Bolduc’s actions, as long as the image of his Ministry was protected.

He intended to ask for Prescott’s resignation when he got to the office that morning, but his personal assistant reminded him that the lawyer’s father, Pierre-Karl, had been the largest contributor to his last three re-election campaigns. This was not something he could afford to ignore.

So, before calling for his chief prosecutor’s head, Lesage reached out to the senior Prescott on his personal com number. Nervously, he studied the businessman’s expression as he explained that it would be impossible to avoid an investigation as long as Yves continued in Security Prosecutions. Once Internal Affairs smelled blood all of Prescott’s money wouldn’t deter them.

The elder Prescott sat staring somewhere off-screen for several seconds. Finally, without looking back toward Lesage’s image on his own screen, he growled a single word, “wait,” and ended the connection.

Lesage sat at his desk for twenty minutes, trying to imagine what Prescott was up to, wondering if any of this was going to hurt his own re-election chances. With a pleasant bird whistle, Lesage’s screen lit up again and Pierre-Karl Prescott’s face appeared.

“Lesage, my son has just accepted an appointment as Deputy Minister of Public Works, effective immediately. You better let him know.”

The unexpected appointment got Yves Prescott out of his front-line position where he was a tempting target for Internal Affairs. In fact he would be totally outside their jurisdiction, which, according to federal protocols established in Toronto, was limited to active security personnel. As for the local RCMP, it had no interest in investigating a case that could reflect badly on its own procedures. For all intents and purposes, Prescott was off the hook.

It could be announced to the media as a well-deserved promotion, without anyone knowing that his name had come up in the Bolduc investigation. There would be no scandal, and that was all that mattered.

Lesage turned to his personal assistant, who sat quietly nearby in case he was needed.

“Get me Yves Prescott’s com number. I’ll call him myself.”

And so that day in late January found Prescott viewing the report on Bolduc’s death, and shaking his head at the unfairness of it all, when his office com emitted a low hum. Irked, he waved his hand past his ear, shrinking the on-screen Bolduc report with the same motion as he took the call. He hadn’t expected to find his Minister’s scowling expression glaring back at him.

“How do you do sir?”

“
Maitre Prescott
, can you be in my office in five minutes?”

Prescott viewed Lesage as an over the hill politician who had a found a sinecure mostly due to his father’s money. He sighed impatiently at being disturbed, something that Lesage couldn’t help but notice, and got up slowly from his desk. He was certain that whatever Lesage wanted would be a waste of his time, but nonetheless headed to the Minister’s office, eight floors up.

Once there, the door opened by itself and Prescott entered the office, as well as a new career

The decision to send him to Public Works, where he would oversee municipal sewers, garbage collection and electric grids, both confused and humiliated him. Yet, as he had always done, he accepted the wisdom of his father’s decision.

March 7, 2039:

Prescott hadn’t been at Public Works very long when he came across a report about the head of Montreal’s Department of Municipal Infrastructure. It expressed concern that Allen Janus and Normand Leblanc had been seen several times at a dog-fighting establishment, although the report stated that Janus had put an end to that activity over a year earlier.

Prescott was shocked that dogfights still took place in the twenty-first century, especially in Montreal. He would have thought that this type of activity, if it still existed anywhere, would be limited to isolated backwaters in the southern United States.

Perhaps those cursed military advisers brought the unsavoury sport with them
.

Whatever the origin, and no matter how disgusting he found it to be, a quick check with the legal department informed him that it was tolerated by the military police as long as it was confined  to specific urban zones.

Prescott, on the other hand, cared little about what was tolerated when it came to anyone working under him. He was also unimpressed to learn that the Minister of Public Works hadn’t thought that a further investigation of either man’s habits was warranted.

The man only cares about killing time until he can retire and claim his guaranteed pension
.

Prescott, though, was not willing to turn a blind eye to the illicit comings and goings of two highly-placed members of his new Ministry. For that matter, just as he had at Security Prosecutions, he decided it would be sound policy to look into the personal habits of all his subordinates. Unfortunately, Prescott was Deputy to a Minister who had no interest in pursuing the matter, so he would have to reach out to his old connections to get anything done.

Prescott called on Robert Sévigny, the RCMP Division Head for the Laval camp and a man he’d dealt with regularly during his time as a prosecutor. Sévigny was short and stocky with no neck, his build reminiscent of a bulldog, although his temperament was conversely laid-back. They’d always had an excellent working relationship because Prescott had left Sévigny free to run his ring of informants as he saw fit, as long as these sources gave Prescott the convictions he so cherished.

What Prescott wanted him to do was far outside his jurisdiction over the internment camp, but Sévigny was happy to do a little moonlighting. Prescott gave him a list of the subordinates whose activities he wanted looked into. The first name on the list was Allen Janus.

Once Sévigny began to pry into Janus’s records to see if he was involved in any other illicit activities he learned that Janus had been signing a car out of the motor pool every Thursday night for several months. After a bit more digging he learned that Janus’s car was crossing into the Laval internment camp each week, always on those same Thursday nights.

A handful of camp guards were known to be taking bribes to allow people into Laval with few questions asked. As far as Sévigny knew none of these guards had ever allowed any of Laval’s residents off the island without their strictly controlled administration passes. However letting private citizens into the camp without proper authorization didn’t seem to bother them.

There was no legitimate reason for Janus to go to Laval; it wasn’t part of his official functions, which were limited to the Island of Montreal. Even if it were a personal matter Prescott found the idea that a senior municipal bureaucrat would have any dealings with the Muslims disturbing.

Sévigny advised against firing and arresting the corrupt guards too quickly. First, he wanted to find out exactly what those supposedly law-abiding citizens were up to in Laval.

“Anyway,” Sévigny said, “crossing guards are generally uneducated and underpaid, so whoever replaced any guards we arrest would be just as open to temptation.”

Prescott was determined to find out what was sending Janus into Laval each week. His former assistants at Security Prosecutions still feared his legendary wrath and his family connections. He reached out to one of them who quickly authorized the insertion of virtual probes into the P-screens of the men who were tracked entering Laval, including Janus. What Sévigny discovered from these probes surprised Prescott.

The one thing Janus had in common with many of these other men was a propensity to visit hard-core porn sites. The men in question were professionals and family men, leading Prescott to opine that many seemingly decent people were clearly deviants behind closed doors. Sévigny informed him that several of the sites were fronts for black market prostitutes, some of whom were operating out of Laval addresses.

“Comfort from an
Arab
prostitute?” Prescott made a face as if he’d just stepped in dog-shit, baring small teeth that sat in two perfect rows in his mouth. “Is that some sort of weird fetish?”

“Prostitution is pretty much found wherever people are struggling to make a living, whatever their religion. Maybe these men are looking for something, I don’t know, exotic; beyond officially-sanctioned comfort.”