The Frequency of the Dead – Chapter 21
All the Wrong Conclusions
The story was published forty-eight hours later. Adler’s outlet ran it in full, simultaneously with two partner publications in other countries, which made suppression legally and practically impossible. The headline was precise and uncharacteristic of sensationalism: Thirty Years of Illegal Surveillance: How a Government Signal Network Operated Without Authorization, Oversight, or End.
The reaction was various and predictable: official denial followed by official confirmation followed by the formation of an inquiry committee. Four names from the signal’s identifier list were placed under formal investigation. Arvid Thorn was charged with offenses related to unauthorized surveillance, obstruction of a death investigation, and unlawful detention (regarding Petra). The charges were serious. Whether they were sufficient was a separate question, one for courts that moved at a different pace than journalists.
Mira was briefly the subject of an internal investigation at the Northern Telecommunications Authority, for entering sealed premises and removing evidence without authorization. The investigation was closed within a week, partly because the evidence she had removed had been instrumental in exposing an illegal operation that her own ministry had failed to detect for thirty years, and partly because the person who initiated the investigation turned out to have had a professional relationship with Thorn, which created its own set of problems for the ministry and rather took the focus off Mira.
She was not given a commendation. She was not given a reprimand. She was given a two-week leave of absence and the implicit understanding that her department’s funding would not be cut this year.
She went home. Euler the cat, who had been cared for by a neighbor, regarded her with the mild disdain of a creature who has noted an absence without being willing to forgive it immediately. She fed him and sat on the floor of her kitchen with her back against the refrigerator and allowed herself, for the first time in two weeks, to feel the full weight of everything that had happened. It was considerable. She sat with it for a long time. Then she made tea and went to bed.
In the subsequent weeks, she corrected, where she could, what the media was getting wrong. Journalists had drawn several conclusions she considered imprecise: that the program had been targeting political opponents (it had targeted everyone indiscriminately), that Thorn had been the architect (he had been the maintainer; the architecture was Ost’s), and that the death of Casimir Lund was definitively murder (this remained, in the absence of the extended toxicology she had pushed for, unproven). She corrected these conclusions in interviews with Adler and in two formal submissions to the inquiry committee, with the patient insistence of someone who respected the difference between what was known and what was believed.