I spent one day in bed and then the interior minister met me. Times were different. Montenegro was dictator. Now the Home Office secretary is called the minister of the interior. We began a pleasant friendship. Anyone who is no one in another country can be someone here. And before coming here I was no one in the north ... Just another agent ... After having been many people in other places and at other times ... I was more than someone here. Not just a consultant ... Someone who held a lot of power.
That's why I was sad. When. After. A. Year. I received the order to return ... To the United States. I didn't want to go back to being no one ... I liked the country and wanted to stay. I had found my north in the south. So I convinced the military they needed to create an organization that specialized in intercepting and decoding messages from the opposition. And Chile. The Black Chamber.
Montenegro was obsessed with Chile. He wanted to be the one who would return the sea to his country. I laughed. But I told him yes. Certainly. Of course. Whatever you say. And from the shadows he put me in charge of the Black Chamber. I quit the CIA. This country is very good to foreigners. A German led their army in the Chaco War.
Medieval towers.
Faces. Pass in front of me. They sit down. They wait. They wait for me ... Their gestures are codes. Their clothing is a code. Everything is a code ... Everything is secret writing. Everything is written by an absent God ... Or a hemiplegic ... Or a stupid demiurge ... An incontinent demiurge...
We don't know how the message began. We know. That. He. Is. Having. A. Hard. Time. Finishing it ... And continues to write sentences. Pages. Notebooks. Books. Libraries. Universes.
Someone comes in and wants to touch me. They don't...
I'm here and I'm not here. Better if I'm not.
Or are they the same?
I
N HIS OFFICE
on the top floor of the Black Chamber, RamÃrez-Graham reviews the files that Baez has just brought him. He is drinking his third coffee of the morning. Not as hot as he wanted it, but they can't get anything right in this fucking country. The last few weeks he has had stomach problems. The doctor told him that it might be gastritis or the start of an ulcer and that he should avoid alcohol, spicy food, and coffee for two months. He paid attention to the doctor for ten exasperating daysâthe exact length of time a doctor's orders should be followed. Then he remembered his father, who had had emphysema and continued to smoke, saying that everyone had to die of something and that there was no use in denying yourself the pleasures of life. He died a year later. What a senseless death, RamÃrez-Graham had thought; if only his dad had taken better care of himself, he might have lived for five more years. But now that he is about to turn thirty-five, he is starting to understand his dad a little better. In the last two years the top of his nightstand has filled with medications and his life with prohibitions.
Various mathematical formulas float on the computer monitor. In an aquarium with blue-green water, four angelfish swim in circles, magnetized by their own boredom. A Nokia cell phone rests on the desk.
Behind him, in a glass case protected by an antitheft system, is a rusted Enigma machine. The first time he saw it, the cover reminded RamÃrez-Graham of those typewriters that date back a few generations. But in truth the device was a typewriter that was tired of its humble purpose of transferring men's words onto paper and was willing to carry out a much more advanced role by means of its rotors and cables. No one knows where Albert got it; there are only a few left in the world, in museums and in the hands of private collectorsâthey understandably go for an exorbitant sum. With Enigma, the Nazis had managed to mechanize the sending of secret messages and, thanks in part to their impenetrable system of communication, had achieved a great advantage in the war for a few years. Luckily, a group of Polish cryptanalysts was undaunted by the complexity of Enigma; luckily, there was Alan Turing.
Albert brought the machine to the office on his first day of work at the Black Chamber. He took it home each night for the first few weeks, until the case was built. Behind his back, Albert's employees called him Enigma and spread rumors about his unknown past. In their eyes, the device was irrefutable proof that he was a Nazi refugee. The government was lying when it said he was a CIA consultant. After all, his Spanish, with its
r
that became a guttural gand a
w
that sounded like a
v,
was German-accented, not American. Albert never bothered to contradict the rumors.
RamÃrez-Graham is intrigued by his predecessor. He feels that all of his actions are measured against the bar that was set by the creator of the Black Chamber. He wonders how much truth there is to what he hears about the man, but he has resisted the temptation to go and see Albert on his deathbed. Perhaps the image of his decrepit body would destroy the invincible aura that people have built around him. But no. RamÃrez-Graham would rather study history first. He will go down to the Archive of Archives and review the documents that set out how the Black Chamber was built and what it was that Albert actually did.
He is exhausted, isn't sleeping well. Sometimes, a few hours after he finally nods off, he will wake up with the image of Kandinsky in mind, and then it is impossible to fall back asleep. Supersonic sleeps at the foot of the bed with his metallic hum. RamÃrez-Graham has gotten used to the noiseâalthough at first he had to stop himself from throwing the dog out the window or shutting him up by piercing his heart with a screwdriver.
The image he has of Kandinsky is his own, because there are no photos of him. Surely, though, Kandinsky is pale and malnourished from countless hours locked in his room in front of a computer monitor and is incapable of having an adult conversation with a woman.
Will this be the end of RamÃrez-Graham? The president is not at all pleased with the way he is handling the case and wants answers immediately. The vice president is trying to buy time and defends him, but he could withdraw his support at any momentâafter all, he is a politician.
RamÃrez-Graham scribbles numbers and algorithmic formulas on the edge of the papers he is reviewing, a thankless labyrinth of codes. He thought that some underlying structure might emerge, the forgotten fingerprint that would allow the criminal to be caught, but studying the various crime scenes is getting him nowhere. Those kids in the Resistance are professional when it comes to their work. Kandinsky has surrounded himself with capable people. The ironies of fate: a year ago RamÃrez-Graham arrived in RÃo Fugitivo with the arrogance of his past as a National Security Agency expert who was too good for the job as savior of Bolivia's Black Chamber, and now a Third World hacker has him in checkmate.
It's not the fault of the codes, but his own. He never should have accepted a bureaucratic job that would remove him from daily practice with the theory of numbers, with the algorithms of cryptology.
RamÃrez-Graham's dad, an immigrant from the rural highlands outside Cochabamba, had married a woman from Kansas who taught math at a public school. He had established himself in Arlington by managing a Latin American restaurant and hadn't even bothered to register his son's birth with the Bolivian consulate. Six weeks after RamÃrez-Graham was born, the Social Security card that made him part of the great American family had arrived in the mail. It had been so difficult for his dad to obtain residency that he was amazed when his son, simply for having been born on American soil, was considered a citizen of that country.
RamÃrez-Graham learned Spanish at home and spoke it very well, except for his somewhat deficient use of the subjunctive and his pronunciation of I and râundeniably English-speaking traits. Growing up, he had visited Bolivia several times; he loved the social life there, the multitude of relatives, and the never-ending fiestas. It was perfect for vacations, but he never would have thought of living there. Never. Not until he met the vice president at a reception at the Bolivian embassy in Washington, given in honor of the community's distinguished young Bolivians. RamÃrez-Graham had been invited because of his notable work as an expert on cryptographic security systems for the NSA. His work was supposedly secret and had remained so for the first few years, until a new boss, who wanted to improve relations with the media and make the NSA more transparent, made certain things public. Unsurprisingly, it was a resounding failureâthe NSA was so secret that the funding it received annually was hidden within the nation's general budget.
At the reception, the vice president had come straight out and asked RamÃrez-Graham if he would be interested in taking charge of the Black Chamber. He had to stifle his laughter. The Black Chamber was the name given to European intelligence agencies two or three centuries ago. The name spoke of a desire for modernity but perhaps indiscreetly revealed how backward the Bolivians were. However, he was surprised by the offer. Without knowing anything about the Black Chamber's annual budget or its equipment, but suspecting that they were infinitely inferior to the NSA's, he asked himself whether it was better to be a little fish in a big pond or a big fish in a little pond.
The vice president explained what the Black Chamber was.
"It was created for the challenges of national security during the seventies and has now become obsolete. President Montenegro, who gave the order for its creation, has come to realize that and has put me in charge of making it useful in this new century. In my opinion, one of the main challenges to national security is cybercrime. SÃ, incluso en Bolivia, mark my words. Because I say these things, people think I'm ultra-modern, when the truth is that in Bolivia one has to face problems that are premodern, modern, and even postmodern. Both the government and private industry increasingly depend on computers. Los aeropuertos, los bancos, el sistema telefonico, you name it. We don't really believe in these things and consequently not even one tenth of a percent is spent on computer security. It will be our downfall."
RamÃrez-Graham was seduced by the vice president's words. All of a sudden he saw himself assuming a post that was vital to the interests of a nation.
"Make me an offer I can't refuse," he found himself saying, without entirely having digested the consequences of his reply.
The vice president made him an offer that, while not spectacular, was tempting.
"But I'm not even Bolivian," RamÃrez-Graham said. "I suppose a government institution should be run by Bolivians."
"I can make you a Bolivian in the blink of an eye."
Ten days later, when his new passport, ID card, and birth certificate from Cochabamba arrived by courier at the door, he was stunned at the confidence with which things were done in his second homeland. That very same day the vice president phoned. RamÃrez-Graham simply could not say no.
He drinks his coffee and remembers his first few days in charge of the Black Chamberâhow he cursed his decision when he discovered a reality that was much more precarious than he had imagined. Unknowing, he had brought Mathematica on his laptop, thinking he would have time to program. Impossible. It was frustrating to want to sit down and work with his numbers and not be able to.
As for Rio Fugitivo ... What would Svetlana have said? He missed her. There was a photo of her on his deskâcurly black hair, prominent cheekbones intensely rouged, lips that seemed to depart from their natural position, preparing at once for a sullen frown or a passionate kiss. Not a day went by when he didn't e-mail her, not a week when he didn't phone her, but she never answered. They had been dating for ten months when one day she told him she was pregnant. His mouth hung open, his eyebrows arched, and he spoke the words he would later regret: he wasn't ready to have children. Svetlana stormed out of the apartment. The next day when he phoned her sister's house, he learned that she was in the hospital and had lost the baby. Her sister told him that it wasn't his fault; Svetlana had been distracted while driving after she left the apartment and had collided with a taxi. Still, RamÃrez-Graham couldn't help feeling guilty, a feeling that only grew when she wouldn't see him at the hospital or later at her sister's house. It was during that time that he received the vice president's offer. He thought perhaps it would be best to stay and try to win Svetlana back, but his pride prevented him from doing so. He accepted a two-year contract at the Black Chamber.
He watches the soporific movements of the angelfish in the aquarium. Back and forth, ebb and flow. At times he thinks that the reason he left the NSA was his impotence at the direction things were taking. The agency, one of the American government's central organizations during the cold war, was drowning in irrelevance, plagued by both budget cuts and new data-encoding systems that were practically invincible. The NSA continued to intercept messages from all over the world, at an average of two million per hour, but it was increasingly difficult to decode them. This shouldn't really have bothered RamÃrez-Graham, since after all, he was in charge of developing security systems and at that time cryptographers were far ahead of cryptanalysts. But it did worry himâa great deal. The NSA's loss of prestige resulted in his own loss of prestige. Perhaps accepting the vice president's offer had been a way to feel relevant again, in order to return to the NSA with renewed energy. He hadn't even been in Bolivia for a year and everything had worsened. In the days prior to the attack on the World Trade Center, the NSA had intercepted a variety of disturbing messages from Al Qaeda that had mentioned the proximity of an attack of unimaginable proportions. Those messages, however, had not been deciphered or translated in time. That was not uncommon; it was simply that the consequences had never been as dire as they were on September 11,2001.
What would Svetlana be doing right now? She was so slim; he liked to kiss her rib cage. He recalled her overwhelming collection of shoes, her compulsion for catalogue and online shopping, and then her surprise at the Victoria's Secret and J. Crew packages that UPS left at the entrance to the building. The way she took over the bed as she slept, leaving him so little room that he could move neither left nor right. He misses the apartment they shared on Twenty-seventh Street in Georgetown, less than ten minutes from Dupont Circle. He misses Svetlana's cats, which would curl up on his legs when he lay on the soft orange futon to watch television. What is he doing in this far-off country with its strange customs, so different from his place of birth? His dad had gone to great lengths to instill love and respect for his culture and Latin American roots. He had succeeded. RamÃrez-Graham followed the recurring mishaps in Bolivian history with genuine interest, but living in Bolivia was a different matter.