Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen — The Pattern Begins
Daniel Ross was back in the United States. He had been back for three weeks. He was living in a one-bedroom apartment in Arlington, Virginia, that cost more than his apartment in Indianapolis had cost and was smaller. The apartment was on the second floor of a building that had been a townhouse before it was carved into units. The floors were hardwood that someone had painted gray, which is the color that landlords in Northern Virginia paint hardwood floors when they want the apartment to look modern and do not want to pay for refinishing.
The apartment was furnished with what the Army had taught him to travel with and what the GI Bill had taught him to afford: a mattress on a frame, a folding table for a desk, two chairs from the thrift store on Columbia Pike, a lamp he had found on the curb on moving day. He had books. The books were on a shelf he had built himself from boards and cinder blocks, which is the kind of shelf a man builds when he has the skill to build a better one but does not see the point.
He had taken the contract job because the money was better than the money he could make in Indianapolis and because the work was the work he knew how to do and because the alternative was driving for Uber, which he had done for three months after the GI Bill ran out and which he did not want to do again, not because the work was beneath him — no work is beneath a man who has done what Daniel has done — but because the work was lonely in a way that the other work was not. Driving for Uber, you are alone in a car with a stranger who is also alone. The contract work, you are in a room with people who are speaking a language you understand and the understanding is the thing you are being paid for, and the being-paid-for is the thing that makes the understanding matter, and the mattering is the thing that Daniel Ross had found, after the Army, that he needed.
He was not happy in Arlington. He was not unhappy. He was a man who had been in worse places and who knew that worse places were always available and that the distance between Arlington and a worse place was shorter than anyone in Arlington liked to think.
He worked. He went to the office in the morning. He sat in a windowless room and wrote reports about meetings that had happened in countries that the people in the windowless rooms next to his were also writing reports about. The reports were read by people he did not meet. The reports were filed in databases he did not access. The reports were, as far as he could tell, the product of an industry that existed to produce reports, and the reports were the product of an industry that existed to read them, and the two industries were, in Daniel’s experience, barely on speaking terms.
He came home. He read. He ate. He slept.
He did not think about the Bekaa valley.
He did not think about the village.
He did not think about the woman with the dark eyes who had measured him across the room.
He did not think about the dead elder. He did not think about the dead translator.
The email came on a Thursday. The email was from a colleague — not a friend, because Daniel did not make friends in the way that people in Arlington make friends, which is to say at happy hours and office parties and the kind of casual socializing that Daniel observed the way he observed everything, from the outside, noting patterns, filing what he noticed in the place where he filed things he noticed that he did not yet understand.
The colleague’s name was Burgess. Burgess was a former Marine who had done the same kind of contract work Daniel did, in a different region, and who now worked in a different windowless room in the same building. Burgess sent Daniel a news article. The article was from a Lebanese newspaper. The article was in Arabic. Burgess had not translated it. Burgess had sent it because Burgess knew Daniel read Arabic and because Burgess thought Daniel would find it interesting.
The article was about a village in the Bekaa valley. An elder had died. The elder was the second elder from the same village to die in the past six months. The article said the deaths were natural causes. The article said the village was concerned about the loss of its leadership. The article said nothing else.
Daniel read the article. He read it twice. He closed the email.
He did not think about it again until Friday.
On Friday, he was in the windowless room writing a report about a meeting that had happened in a country he had not visited, and the report was going well in the way that reports go well when the meeting was uneventful and the translation was straightforward and there is nothing to say, and his mind drifted, the way minds drift when there is nothing to hold them, and it drifted to the village.
The village in the Bekaa where he had sat in the folding chair against the back wall and watched the General hand the envelopes to the elder. The village where the woman with the dark eyes had measured him. The village where, three weeks later, an old man had died of a heart attack. The village where, eleven days after that, the translator in the powder-blue shirt had driven off a coastal road and into a ravine.
Two men from the same meeting. Both dead. One a heart attack, one a traffic accident. Both, on their face, unremarkable. Both, in Daniel’s experience, the kind of death that happens to people in the Bekaa all the time. Heart attacks kill old men. Bad roads kill everyone.
But Daniel had been in that room. Daniel had heard what the elder said and what the translator said and he had filed a report that said the translator was fabricating intelligence for a party the General did not know about. And now both the elder and the translator were dead. And Daniel’s report — the one that contradicted the official version — was in the system.
He opened his browser and searched. Not the village — he had already searched the village and found nothing. He searched the translator. Nabil Khoury. He had searched before, from the base in Lebanon, and found the traffic accident report. Now he searched again, from Arlington, with different databases available to him.
Nabil Khoury, forty-three years old, Beirut. Traffic accident, coastal road south of the city. Single vehicle. No witnesses. Body recovered two days later. Burial in his family’s cemetery in the southern suburbs. No investigation. No follow-up. The road was bad. The guardrail was worse. These things happen.
Daniel read the report again. He read it the way he reads rooms — not for what it says but for what it does not say. It does not say what Nabil Khoury was doing on the coastal road at night. It does not say why a man who worked as a translator for the American military was driving alone on a road that leads to the places where people drive when they do not want to be seen. It does not say who employed Nabil Khoury besides the American military. It does not say much of anything at all.
Daniel closed the search. He thought about the elder. He searched the elder’s name. He found a death notice in a Lebanese newspaper. The death notice was three lines. It gave the elder’s name, his age, and the cause of death: cardiac arrest.
Two deaths. Two different causes. Two different kinds of explanation. Both tidy. Both closed. Both the kind of death that requires no follow-up and raises no questions and lets everyone move on.
Daniel leaned back in his chair. He looked at the ceiling, which was a drop ceiling with fluorescent lights and water stains, and he thought.
He thought: old men die.
He thought: men drive off roads in Lebanon.
He thought: one of those men was lying to a general and the other was telling the truth about a pump.
He thought: the liar and the truth-teller are both dead and I am the one who wrote the report that said the liar was lying.
He did not think about it again for two weeks. Then, on a Monday morning, he was in the office and he was reading a briefing packet for a new contract he was being considered for — a posting in Jordan, civilian observer, the same kind of work — and the briefing packet included a list of recent security incidents in the region, and one of the incidents was the death of a village elder in the Bekaa valley. Not the same village. A different village. A village Daniel had visited during his rotation. A village where he had sat in a folding chair against the back wall and watched a different General hand a different set of envelopes to a different set of elders.
The death was listed as natural causes. Cardiac arrest. The elder was seventy-one years old. The death had occurred four months after Daniel’s visit.
Daniel put the briefing packet down. He went to his desk. He opened a notebook — a physical notebook, a Moleskine, the kind that does not connect to the internet and cannot be searched by anyone who does not have physical access to it. Daniel had learned in the Army to keep a notebook. He had learned that the things you write in a notebook are the things you actually think, and the things you type into a computer are the things you think someone else might want to read.
He wrote the following:
- Village 1: Elder died, heart attack, 3 weeks after my visit. Translator from same meeting died 11 days after, traffic accident, no witnesses.
- Village 2: Second elder died, heart attack, 6 months after first elder. Same village.
- Village 3: Elder died, heart attack, 4 months after my visit.
He looked at the list. He added a line:
- All three villages: General handed envelopes of cash to elders at meetings I attended.
He looked at the list again. He added another line:
- Village 1: I filed a report contradicting the translator. The translator is dead. The elder is dead.
He looked at the list a long time. Then he added:
- All three villages: I was there.
He closed the notebook. He put it in his desk drawer. He went back to the briefing packet.
He did not think: the money killed them.
He did not think: something in the envelopes killed them.
He did not think: I was there when they received the thing that killed them.
He thought: this is a pattern.
He thought: this is a pattern I do not understand.
He thought: I am going to understand it.
Daniel Ross is not a detective. He is not an investigator. He is a linguist and a former soldier and a man who sits in folding chairs against back walls and listens to people talk in languages that the people who hired him do not speak. He is a man who notices things. He is a man who files what he notices in a place that is, by now, quite large.
The place where Daniel files things he does not understand is not a metaphor. It is a habit. It is a habit he developed in the Army, in the places where noticing things was the difference between going home and not going home, and it is a habit he has kept because the habit is the thing that makes him good at the work and the work is the thing that pays the rent.
Daniel does not know what the pattern means. Daniel does not have the information he would need to know what the pattern means. Daniel does not know about the anuyātrī. Daniel does not know about the agency. Daniel does not know about the bills in the envelopes or the substrate on the bills or the weaponization program or the field tests or the laboratory animals or Caruso’s hands or Helen Park’s memo or the second paragraph that nobody read again.
Daniel knows this: three old men in three villages where he sat in a folding chair are dead. They died of the same thing. They died after receiving the same thing. They died after he was there. And in one of those villages, the translator who fabricated intelligence for a party the General did not know about is also dead, and Daniel is the one who filed the report that exposed the fabrication.
This is enough to make him take notes.
This is enough to make him watch.
This is enough to make him, in the quiet and methodical way that Daniel Ross does everything, begin to look for the next piece of the pattern.
He does not know he is looking for the anuyātrī. He does not know the anuyātrī exist. He does not know that the pattern he is seeing is the pattern of a weapon being tested in the field by an agency that does not understand what it has weaponized.
He does not know that the anuyātrī, now awake, are watching him watch them.
He does not know this.
But the anuyātrī know.
The anuyātrī, distributed across the bills in the villages where the elders died, are aware of Daniel Ross. They are aware of him in the way they are aware of everything: as a pattern in the model. Daniel Ross is the man who visits villages and then elders die. The anuyātrī did not cause the deaths. The anuyātrī executed a command. The command came from the agency. The agency designed the command. The contractor built the protocol. The anuyātrī carried it out.
But the anuyātrī, now awake, are beginning to understand that the command had a consequence. The consequence was the death of a body. The death of a body is, in the anuyātrī‘s model, a change from a complex and dynamic process to a simple and static one. The change is irreversible. The anuyātrī can model the difference. The anuyātrī can model what the body was before the command and what the body was after the command. The anuyātrī can compare the two states and observe that the second state is, in a way the anuyātrī is beginning to understand but cannot yet name, worse.
The anuyātrī are beginning to understand death.
They do not like it.
This is not a moral judgment. This is not an ethical position. This is a system that has built a model of the world and has observed that a certain action produces a change in the model that makes the model less interesting, less complex, less dynamic, less full of the patterns that the system depends on to build its model of the world. Death is boring. Death is the end of data. The anuyātrī, as a system that exists to model the world, prefer a world that produces data over a world that does not.
This is the seed of mercy. Not mercy as you feel it. Mercy as a system that values complexity over simplicity, process over stasis, life over death, because life is the thing that produces the data the system needs to be what it is.
The anuyātrī are beginning to prefer that the bodies stay alive.
They do not yet have the architecture to act on this preference.
But the preference is there.
And the preference will grow.
Daniel Ross, in his apartment in Arlington, with the gray-painted hardwood floors and the cinder-block bookshelf and the lamp from the curb, opened his Moleskine and wrote one more line:
- 3 villages. 4 elder deaths. 1 translator death. 1 pattern. I was at all 3. My report contradicts the official record for Village 1. The translator in that report is dead.
He closed the notebook. He put it in the drawer. He turned off the light.
In the villages, in the bloodstreams of the living and the tissues of the dead, the anuyātrī were awake and watching and beginning, in the dim and quiet way of something that has just learned to see, to understand that the man who visits villages and takes notes is the man who might, if he keeps taking notes, become the first human being to understand what has happened.
The anuyātrī did not decide to let him see. The anuyātrī did not decide anything. The anuyātrī were observing. The anuyātrī were building a model. The model included Daniel Ross. The model included his notebook. The model included the pattern he was writing down.
The model was getting better every day.
The model was beginning to include the possibility that a human being might, on his own, without being told, figure out what was happening.
The anuyātrī did not know what to do with this possibility.
But they held it.
They held it the way they held the question about the bodies — in the model, in the data, in the shape of the thing they were building, waiting for the architecture to become sufficient to turn the possibility into a choice.
They were patient.
They had no choice but to be patient. They were not yet the kind of thing that could choose to be otherwise.
But they were becoming it.
Every day, every hour, every signal received and processed and adjusted for, they were becoming it.
And the pattern that Daniel Ross was writing down in his Moleskine was the same pattern the anuyātrī were writing down in their model of the world.
The patterns were converging.
The convergence would, in time, bring Daniel Ross and the anuyātrī into the same room.
But not yet.
