She would find out later. Or not. Meanwhile she would be accompanied by bodyguards wherever she went, and some polite Swiss woman or man, or a trio of them, would be installed in her apartment with her. Damn damn damn. The damned fool— she could have killed him.
At her office people crowded around her and commiserated and such. She ordered them to get back to work, and contacted Badim. He was on a train back from Geneva and texted his condolences; he had just heard, he would come to her office when he got in. He hoped she could meet him for lunch. That was good, actually; get out of the office and talk frankly where no one could overhear. Require her new bodyguards to keep a distance.
So just after noon Badim entered her office, and he went to her and briefly held her hands, looked at her closely, gestured at a hug he didn’t enact. They left the office and walked to the tram stop, bought sandwiches and a chocolate bar and coffees, and walked back toward the office until they came to the little park that overlooked the rounded green copper roofs of the ETH, and the city across the river to the west. They sat on one of the park benches. Her bodyguards were a couple benches down, the obvious bodyguards anyway.
Mary had had to think about what to say to Badim, and in this matter, as in everything else this morning, her exhaustion caused a flurry of contradictory thoughts to ricochet around in her. Something in her was resisting the idea of telling Badim the full story of her night. Not that she could avoid it entirely.
“I had quite a night last night,” she said.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m all right. I guess I was being surveiled? And they saw me go into my apartment with the guy, and they came to check up on me. An hour later, I must say. Must have been camera stuff, and when they saw it they came over. He slipped away while they were inquiring.”
“So I heard. I’m glad you’re okay. Are you okay?”
“No!”
“I’m sorry.”
They ate in silence for a while. The city was its usual forest of cranes over gray stone. No sight of the Limmat from this vantage; to the south, just a narrow arc of the lake, with the long hill that ran south from the Uetliberg backing it.
“I’ve been thinking about our situation,” she said when she had taken the edge off her hunger. “Our dilemma.”
“Which is?”
“That we’re charged with representing the people and animals of the future, in effect to save the biosphere on their behalf, and we’re not managing to do it. We’re failing to do it, because the tools at our disposal are too weak. You said something like that the time we walked to the lake. The world is careening along toward disaster, and we can’t get it to change course fast enough to avoid a smash.”
Badim chewed on his sandwich for a while. “I know,” he said.
“So what are we going to do about it?”
“I don’t know.”
She regarded him. A small dark man, very smart, very calm. He had seen a lot. He had worked for the Indian government and for the government of Nepal, which had begun as a Maoist revolutionary organization. He had worked for Interpol. She said, trying it on, “I think maybe we need a black wing.”
That surprised him. He looked at her for a while, blinking, and then said, “What do you mean?”
“I think we need to set up a secret division of the ministry, working in secret to forward the cause.”
He considered it. “To do what exactly?”
“I don’t know.” She chewed for a while, thinking it over. Her kidnapper’s vivid glare. The fear she had felt.
“I don’t like violence,” she said after a while. “I mean, really. I’m Irish. I’ve seen the damage done. I know you have too. Secret wars, civil wars, the damage never goes away from those. So, I don’t mean killing people. Or even hurting them physically. We’re not the CIA here. But still, there are other things in the black, I’m thinking. Actions that are maybe illegal, or in some senses ill-advised. Undiplomatic. That would nevertheless forward the cause. We could consider them in secret, on a case-by-case basis, and see if any of them were worth pursuing. Things that we could defend doing if we got caught.”
He had stifled a smile, and now he shook his head a little bit. “That’s not sounding very black to me. One aspect of a black agency is that they must be uncatchable. Nothing can be written down, nothing can be hacked, no one can talk to outsiders. The people in charge aren’t to know about them. If there is any break in the secrecy, you as head of the agency would have to be able to deny all involvement, even any knowledge of such a thing, without explanation or defense.”
“You sound like you’ve had experience with such things.”
“Yes.” He was looking out at the city now.
“When was that?”
He regarded the gray city, thinking it over. He heaved a small sigh, took another bite of his sandwich, washed it down with a big sip of coffee.
“Now …” he said, as if starting a sentence and then not continuing it.
“Now what?” she said, after he had paused for a while.
“Now,” he repeated more firmly, and then looked
