Chapter 6 The Secret in the Soundstage #2
“There is an active tag sewn into the vest lining. I did not bring the vest.” Mina turned the strap over.
“Simone, they are wearing site credentials. Not covers. Not sterile kit. They stripped their watches and they left their phones locked and they came up a fire stair with breaching tools like professionals, and every one of them was carrying an access card lanyard with the card taken off it.”
“Because the card goes back at the end of the shift.”
“Because the card goes back at the end of the shift.”
On the wall Simone put her coffee down and did not pick it up again.
“Say the rest of it,” she said.
“They are not contractors. Contractors are hired and paid and they disappear. These men are employed. Somewhere in this city there is a muster point and a duty roster and a supervisor who signs cards in and out.” Mina spread her good hand.
“Which means the thing we have been calling a conspiracy has a staff canteen.”
“And a door.”
“And a door,” Mina agreed, “that their tags open.”
Hal looked between the two women.
“Sorry,” he said. “Is that good news?”
“Harold,” said Simone, “that is the best news I have had in fourteen months. Every intelligence problem in the world is easier if the other side has an HR department.” She was already typing.
“Give me until tomorrow night on the tag. If it is what I think it is, it is a proximity credential with a facility code baked into it, and a facility code is an address.”
The third thing took four minutes and Simone delivered it without any emphasis at all, which Hal understood later was mercy.
“Now the part you are not going to like,” she said. “Harold, you have been asking me procedural questions for an hour and they have all been good and I have been putting off the answer. Ask the one you actually want to ask.”
Hal spread his hands.
“Why has nobody arrested anybody?”
“Because we have no standing here.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning what it says.” Simone set the coffee down.
“The Global Integrity Taskforce is a treaty body. Our authority is not moral and it is not because we are clever. It is a protocol, and the protocol’s signatory list is defined by reference to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
In a signatory state I can open a file, compel disclosure through the domestic courts, put evidence into a chain of custody that a judge will accept four years from now, and be protected while I do it. ”
“And here?”
“The Philippines deposited notice of withdrawal from the Rome Statute in March of 2018. It took effect in March of 2019.” Simone looked into the camera.
“So here, I am a French woman in a shipping container. Mina is a private citizen with an extremely good camera. Everything she has collected this week, all of it, the change orders and the phone image and the forty-two million dollars, would be thrown out of almost any court that matters because of how she got it, and there is no court in this country that has to take it from us at all.”
The soundstage was very quiet.
“There is a carve-out,” Hal said. “There is always a carve-out. What about crimes from before they left?”
Simone actually smiled at that, without warmth.
“You are quick. Yes. The Court kept jurisdiction over things that happened on Philippine territory while they were still a party, which is November 2011 to the sixteenth of March 2019.” She let that sit. “Every crime in this file was committed this year.”
“So the door is shut.”
“The door was shut in 2019 and everybody in this conversation has known it since Tuesday.”
Hal looked at the floor of a 1971 soundstage for a while.
He had been running an assumption. He had been running it since about nine o’clock that morning, underneath everything else, and he had not examined it because you do not examine the floor.
The assumption was that this was a delay.
That there was, somewhere above all this, an authority, and that the job was to survive long enough to hand the whole mess to it, and that the men in the kitchen were an obstacle between here and the grown-ups.
There were no grown-ups.
There was a woman in a container with instant coffee, and a woman beside him with twenty stitches in her arm and a fourteen-day restriction she had already decided to ignore, and a man in a bell tower that went nowhere.
“Nobody is coming,” Hal said.
“No.”
“There is no cavalry.”
“Harold.” Simone’s voice was almost kind. “We are the cavalry. That is the joke. It is not a very good one.”
Hal did not sleep, and at some point around nine he stopped pretending to, and went and found a light.
Mina found him at seven.
He had pulled the 1978 war film’s street set apart. Not destroyed it. Pulled it apart the way you break down a load, and stacked what he had taken in three piles on the concrete, and he was standing in front of a section of church facade with a piece of chalk in his hand.
On the facade, in chalk, he had drawn the soundstage.
Not to look at. He had drawn it the way a warehouse is drawn, which is to say as a plan with numbers on it, and he had marked the four personnel exits and the two vehicle doors and the scene dock, and beside each one he had written a number in minutes.
“What is this,” Mina said.
“You are not going to like it.”
“Try me.”
“Okay.” Hal tapped the drawing with the chalk.
“This building has six ways out and two of them are lies. That door there is chained on the outside, I went and looked, and it has been chained since before you people started using this place, and if you go out that one in a hurry you are going to hit it at speed in the dark and break your face.”
“There is a chained fire exit in Studio 4 as well,” Mina said. “I have reported it twice.”
“Baby, there is a chained fire exit in every building on earth, that is not the interesting part.” He moved the chalk.
“This is the interesting part. Your vehicle door is a roller and it is on the three-phase. If somebody takes the substation the way they took your building this morning, that door does not open, and the manual chain release is up there, nine feet, on the wall, behind a stack of plaster columns from a fake church.”
Mina looked up at it.
“So I moved the columns,” Hal said. “They are in that pile. Took forty minutes. Also there was a wasp thing.”
“A wasp thing.”
“We do not need to discuss the wasp thing.”
Mina walked along the chalk drawing and read it.
He had written water levels on it. He had gone out into the rain at some point, without telling her, and found the valley’s historic flood marks on the outside of the building, and brought the numbers back in and put them on the plan, with the slab elevation, and a note that said FLOOR IS +5.
1, WE ARE FINE, and under that, in smaller letters, ACCESS ROAD IS +1. 4, WE ARE NOT.
“The road goes before the building,” she said.
“The road goes about nine hours before the building.” Hal set the chalk down on a ledge.
“Which is not the same problem as the building flooding, and it is the one nobody thinks about, because everybody looks at where they are standing and not at how they leave. If this valley comes up tomorrow the way it is going to come up tomorrow, this place stops being a safehouse and starts being an island, and an island is only a good idea if you have a boat.”
Mina stood in the middle of a 1971 soundstage looking at a chalk drawing on a fake church.
“We have to be out by noon,” she said.
“You have to be out by ten,” said Hal. “I have built in two hours because something always goes wrong and because you are a person who is going to want to do one more thing.”
She turned around and looked at him.
“What,” he said.
“Nothing.”
“That is not a nothing face. I have seen the nothing face. This is a different face.”
“Hal.” Mina put her good hand flat on the drawing. “This morning you asked me what was on the table.”
“I remember.”