Extraterritoriality

Victor Bartram was the name of the U.S. government agent waiting to arrest me the moment I stepped outside the Swedish Embassy.

At least, I thought so. The ambassadors passed onto me that bit of information, and while they speak perfect English, their Swedish accents are so thick at times it’s hard to know for sure if I heard them correctly. And though I see the man every day, I am hardly in any position to ask him for his name. Our interactions are wordless. I stand there behind the top story window of the embassy, he sits there behind the front seat window of his black car, and we engage in prolonged staring contests.

We’ve never properly met. We’ve never even exchanged words. But I am certain he hates me. Mr. Bartam has every reason to despise me. It’s directly because of my actions that, for the past seven months, he’s been forced to sit in his parked car outside the Swedish Embassy for twelve hours a day. At midnight, another guy comes and takes over, but I don’t know him as well, as I’m usually asleep by then.

It was around four, another rainy spring afternoon in D.C., and we were about ten minutes into our game of gawking. As we played, I nibbled on some pretzels. That’s all the Swedish Embassy’s break room cabinets ever had, little bags of pretzels. I guess I should have realized I would be giving up fine dining when I decided to make the embassy my home (or, for that matter, when I sent that email and suddenly popped up on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, flanked by drug traffickers and murderers), but still, I came to hate pretzels about as much as Mr. Bartram probably hated me. I rejoiced on the bimonthly occasion that Freja brought lutefisk into the office in her slow cooker.

I took a good look at my opponent. I couldn’t see much of Mr. Bartram’s figure, even with my bird’s eye view, but I could tell that he was big. Big and dense. If you went to shoot him, you’d worry the bullets might ricochet back at you. He could probably crush me under the weight of just his big toe alone. Hackers are the boogiemen of the Information Era, scary in every way to the typical American except in physical constitution. And indeed my arms and legs were as skinny as pool noodles and could deal only marginally more damage than two foam pipes might if forced into a fight.

My phone buzzed and, instinctively, I looked down at it. I actually cursed aloud. As the days wound on and my toleration wound out, this imagined game between us increasingly became more and more real to me. I went to the cabinet to grab another pretzel pouch for round two.

The break room of the Swedish Embassy is a dull place. The only spot of color is the massive blue-and-golden Swedish flag hanging on the wall next to the pretzel-bearing cabinet. Other than the flag, there exists no other decoration. And other than the cabinet, there exists but one other piece of furnishing. That was a small cot the Swedes left out for me. Though it was small, uncomfortable, and definitely in need of a wash, it was better than sleeping on the hard and cold linoleum floors.

We were about three minutes into the new game when there came a knock.

“Can I come in?”

“Yeah.” I said, not breaking my gaze.

The door opened and Freja entered. She was apparently delegated the task of looking after me, so twice or thrice a day, she came to the break room. She wasn’t my friend, but she was the closest thing I had to one for those seven months.

“Staring contest?” Freja said.

I nodded. Freja came over and stood next to me and looked down at Mr. Bartram.

“Still the same guy?” Freja said.

“Yup.” I said. “You said his name was Victor Bartram, right?”

“Yeah, Victor Bartram. He’s actually a pretty nice guy.”

“You’ve met him?”

“Oh yeah. Sometimes we feel bad and bring him food.”

“You Swedes are too nice.”

“Perhaps you Americans are too mean.”

“Perhaps. I mean, if a whistleblower comes out and says the Swedish government has been torturing prisoners of war in hidden military bases, that’s surprising. But...well, needless to say, the American public didn’t bat an eye at my exposé.”

My phone buzzed again, and I lost the competition again. I cursed again then went to reply.

“Who’s that?” Freja said.

“Why should I tell you?” I said.

“Because we’re the only thing standing in the way of you going to federal prison for life. So who is it? Mr. Karlsson says I have to keep tabs on who you’re talking to..”

“It’s my kid.” I said.

“Oh, really?” Freja said, “Her name’s May, right?”

“Right. How did you know?”

“You tell me so much I could ghostwrite your autobiography.”

“Fair enough.”

“How’s she holding up?”

“Not well. She keeps using her mom’s phone to ask me where I am.”

“Do you miss her?”

“Yeah, of course. I’m her dad. In the alternate timeline where I didn’t send that email, didn’t get all the information published, it was because of her, because of what I knew it would mean for her and her life.”

“Well, despite everything, she can at least say she’s the daughter of a true American hero. Or, at least, a true American hero in the eyes of the Swedish government.”

“Yeah. That’s true. I mean, I hope that’s true. I hope she can say that one day.”

There was a silence here, a silence tinged with awkwardness. I don’t know why or when I decided to spill my guts to her. All I knew about Freja was that she was a twenty-something girl from Stockholm who liked to ski and who made good lutefisk. And yet I regaled her with the overly long tragicomical ballad of my existence every other Thursday.

When you think of hackers, you think of solitary men, shut up in a dark room, the only source of light their blinking computer screens, the only sound the rapid clicking of the keyboard. You might think we hackers are just an introverted bunch, that we like to be left alone at our desktops, cracking government databases free of distraction. But that was deeply not my experience. I got lonely so damn easily. And regardless, I think anybody trapped in one building for seven months is bound to tell their life story to any person they have even semi-regular social contact with.

“Thank you.” I said.

“Why are you thanking me?” Freja said.

“I don’t know. Just thanks for listening to me ramble on all the time, I guess.”

“You’re really starved for human interaction, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. Can you tell?”

“Of course I can tell. If I were you, I’d hate everyone who works at this embassy, this place where you’ve suddenly found yourself imprisoned.”

“Better imprisoned here than in an actual prison.”

“I guess. But still, I didn’t think you’d want for friends among the staff here.”

“A lonely man makes do with the people at his disposal. Besides, I rather like you people, despite how much I hate this damn building. I guess you could call it Stockholm Syndrome, in more ways than one.”

Freja laughed.

“Well, I’m glad you don’t hate our guts.”

“Not at all.” I said.

“Good. Well, alright, I gotta get back to work. Oh, by the way, new orders from Mr. Karlsson. No going downstairs until further notice.”

“Why can’t I go downstairs?”

“I can’t tell you that. Just don’t go downstairs, OK?”

“Alright, alright.”

By the time Freja grabbed a bag of pretzels for herself and left, I made up my mind. I was going downstairs tonight.

All the embassy staff went home by nine-thirty that night. It was just me and Mr. Bartram, and even Mr. Bartram had to leave soon.

Descending the stairs, I found myself at the embassy’s entryway. You always hear people talk about the pearly gates of Heaven, but the egress that haunted my imagination were those front doors, the glass smudged with the fingerprints of Swedes, looking out into one of the few, commonly unoccupied streets of the District of Columbia.

It didn’t take me long to realize why they wanted to keep me upstairs. Off to the side of the room was an inconspicuous-looking door that was always, throughout my entire seven-month stay, conspicuously locked. I once asked Freja what was inside and she told me that even she didn’t know, and she’d been interning at the embassy for seven months now.

There exists in humans an innate desire to crack open locked doors. Part of this is our natural curiosity and inclination toward adventure, but I think a bigger part is the fear. What is behind that door? What am I missing? What don’t they want me to see? Throughout my stay, I often scrutinized this door and turned over those very questions in my mind.

On that night, I finally got some answers, for when I came downstairs I saw the mysterious door opened a crack, bleeding a sliver of light into the dark parlor. And when I opened that door, I found, a staircase.

The staircase began immediately. When you walked into the room, you walked onto the top step. What proceeded was a straight descent into the basement level of the embassy previously unknown to me. The corridor was narrow and the ceiling was low. I didn’t have to worry, however, about falling, because the room was remarkably well lit. Someone installed singular light bulbs across the ceiling, with their long drawstrings greeting you at about every tenth step you made. They cast a yellowy haze onto the concrete walls and floor, entirely devoid of decoration save for the occasional cobweb or dust bunny.

Stepping off the twelfth and final step, I saw that even though the staircase had stopped, whatever corridor I found myself in was just getting started. Before me stretched a huge underground hallway, a huge straightaway that reached so far ahead I couldn’t begin to see the end of it.

My mind began to swarm with images of elite diplomats and government officers, clad in huge, heavy black trench coats, opaque glasses, and large-brimmed hats. Here they might exchange metal briefcases, pass on files stamped TOP SECRET in blood red, pass on whispered secrets and rumors about the dark and bulging underbelly of governance they themselves represented. What alighted my imagination more were those scenes in movies, scenes where such dark-clad figures fled down concrete tunnels after the declaration of a nuclear war or an assassination attempt. I let myself imagine this was a Swedish variant of one such tunnel. 

A giddiness filled me and my feet tingled with the delight that, if I moved deftly and silently down this hallway, I might again be free. I might get to stand outside for the first time in seven months. Even if that meant popping back into the embassy before sunrise to avoid arrest, there was still a chance I might yet be able to feel for a few hours the night air on my skin, see the moon and D.C. below it not behind glass, but right there, there that I might reach out and touch them. Needless to say, I began to run and, though not a religious man, I began to pray. Just one night outside, just one night is all I need. Please, God, please.

After a certain amount of time, I made it to another staircase. And at the top was another door which I pushed open immediately. I swore I could feel the moonlight on my face. A cool breeze stirred within me not a chill, but a warmth. So it was that I, a man who considered himself a citizen of the Internet before he did a citizen of the United States, wept at what he found behind that door, a small and simple park. The dark green of the grass was enough to force me to my knees and make me beg for mercy from Mother Nature.

I strolled along the small concrete path that ran through the simple park. It was empty. Well, empty of other humans at least. It was not empty, however, of magnificent trees that the wind gave voice, of squirrels who squirreled around even at this late hour, of birds who chirped even as their bedtime neared. 

It was all so serene and viscerally real to me that I felt a great deal of regret when the sound of footsteps appeared behind me and I suddenly began to sprint frantically past it all.

I didn’t turn to see who it was, but something in my mind told me it was Mr. Victor Bartram. Maybe he too needed a spot of nature after being holed up in his car for so long and just happened to see me while feeding the ducks by the pond.

Call me crazy, but I swore I could hear the anger in his heavy footsteps. Each time his shoes hit the pavement, it sounded to me like the step of some awakened titan. But then, what did I expect? For seven months, I made his livelihood a long and frustrating joke. Yes, of course, he’d want nothing more than to hunt me down and arrest me. He’d probably kill me if his superiors would let him and take great pleasure in doing it.

We snaked around the park’s winding paths. My legs burned from lack of exercise and my forehead prickled with huge beads of sweat. It was by virtue of my head start alone that I was able to outrun Bartram. But that lead all came crashing down as I came crashing down, tripping on an acorn beneath the heel of my shoe.

I fell backward and hit my head on the pavement. There was a ringing in my ears and blurriness to my vision when I suddenly saw Freja standing above me.

“Freja?”

“You’re under arrest.”

“Freja, what are you doing here?”

“I’m here to arrest you.”

“Arrest me?”

Freja grabbed my hand and stood me up before putting handcuffs around my wrists.

“I don’t understand.” I said.

“You will.”

“Where’s Mr. Bartram?”

“Victor? He’s bringing the car around. He’ll be here soon.”

“You work for them?”

Freja didn’t reply, just held my shoulders and led me to the park’s entrance.

“This was all a trap?” I said.

“Yes.” Freja said, and she actually laughed a little. “You’ll be flattered to know this night was several months in the making. All to catch you.”

“No, no. I know this, everything that happened tonight was a trap, but was it all just…?”

“But was it all just...what?”

I barely recognized Freja now. The darkness of the night covered up half her face and distorted the other half. This wasn’t the woman I spent so much time with in that break room over the past seven months, was it?

“Nothing.” I said, feeling stupid I ever fell for it in the first place.

Another bout of silence appeared as we exited the park and stood at the street corner beyond.

“Listen, I-” Freja said before I interrupted.

“Don’t talk to me.”

And she didn't, at first. However, Freja did eventually break her silence. She screamed when I threw myself in front of a taxi cab, which proceeded to crush my rib cage and kill me, leaving tire tracks on my exposed, slimy, pinkish heart.