The Man Between: The gripping new spy thriller you need to read in 2018. Charles Cumming

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       STATEMENT BY LARA BARTOK (‘LASZLO’)

       CASE OFFICERS: J.W.S./S.T.H – CHAPEL STREET

       REF: RESURRECTION/SIMAKOV/CARRADINE

       FILE: RE2768X

       PART 2 of 5

      ‘Euclidis was our first target. That was the first and most brilliant idea of Ivan’s, to capture this snake, this poison in the bloodstream of public life, and to show the world that decent people were prepared to stand up to hate, to put an end to divisive words, to expose Euclidis for the narcissist that he was. For all his expensive clothes and his clever talk, we showed the world that he was just a self-interested clown. He blogged to make money. He spread lies to get rich. To get laid. He was not interested in changing the system, in making the world a better place. He and his friends – the alt-right, the white supremacists, the anti-Semites, the Holocaust deniers – they had no alternative ideology. They had no ideas. They just wanted to draw attention to themselves. They wanted to make decent citizens feel uncomfortable and frightened. That was their reason for living. They were bullies, high on hate.

      How did Euclidis draw so many admirers? By making stupid people feel better about their stupidity. By allowing bigots to think they were justified in making anti-Semitic statements, saying that it was OK to hate women, to be aggrieved about people of colour, about immigrants. The sad truth is that there were enough trolls buying his books, reading his articles, attending his talks to make him a rich man. They gave him the fame he craved. Euclidis was a junkie for attention. And if they didn’t give it to him in public, they gave it to him on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook. We had to take him down.

      So Ivan, with my help, and with the assistance of Zack Curtis and , seized him at Berkeley. Grabbed him as he stepped out of his hotel. It was so easy. We were in America so we were able to obtain guns. The hotel had no security, we possessed the element of surprise. We put a hood on him, we put him in cuffs, we threw his phone out of the window. He did not like that, he did not like being separated from his precious phone! We switched vehicles and drove into the mountains. Euclidis of course was a physical coward. He cried like a four-year-old boy. It was pitiful.

      We filmed him in secret, as the world now knows. We were able to show on camera that Otis Euclidis was a charlatan, a fraud. He confessed that he had done it all to make money. He had never meant anything he had said or written to be taken seriously. His followers were ‘clowns’ and ‘losers’. When he had said in interviews that black lives ‘did not matter’, he had been ‘joking’. When he had written that feminism was ‘the worst invention since gunpowder’, he had only been ‘fooling around’. He showed himself to be a fraud who believed in nothing but fame. When we screened the film, when we put it out on the Internet for the world to see, and we saw the reaction, well, it was a beautiful moment.

      Almost immediately there were copycat attacks. Dozens of politicians and right-wing figures around the world came under threat. My favourite was done by the refugee in Amsterdam. The kitchen porter. A Muslim from Iraq who had been washing dishes in a restaurant so that he could feed his wife and baby daughter. He was no older than twenty-five or twenty-six. Samir. I’ve forgotten his surname. [JWS: Samir Rabou] He learned that Piet Boutmy, the leader of the Dutch far-right party – again, I don’t remember the name of this party [JWS: Partij voor de Vrijheid] – was eating in the restaurant. A waiter, a Syrian, I believe, came into the kitchen and told him Boutmy was there. Samir knew about the kidnapping of Euclidis, he told the police who later interviewed him that he had followed Resurrection from its very first statements and that he greatly admired Ivan Simakov. He took off his washing gloves, kept his apron, walked out of the kitchen and went directly into the restaurant. The security guard protecting Boutmy thought he was a waiter. The table was covered in many dishes, including – perfectly! – a soup prepared with beetroots which was still very hot. Also bottles of water, glasses of red wine, cutlery, a vase of flowers. Shouting ‘Resurrection!’ Samir lifted the whole table on top of this racist animal, soaking him to the bone, also the colleague from the same party who was dining with him. I heard that he faced no charges and soon found another job at a rival restaurant. It was beautiful.

      Everything that Ivan and myself had hoped for came to pass. Ivan was worried that the Resurrection movement would burn out. It didn’t. He wrote that he wanted Resurrection to have ‘a seismic effect on public attitudes to the liars and enablers of the Right’. This is exactly what happened. The summer homes of criminal bankers were burned to the ground. Cars belonging to producers at Fox News were vandalised and damaged. Those who had attended white supremacist rallies were identified by their peers and targeted for retribution. They paid the price for their hate with the loss of their careers, their friends. All it took was one or two examples for everyone to follow suit.

      But, of course, Resurrection changed. What started as a non-violent movement, symbolic acts targeted against deserving victims, quickly became violent. I was naive to believe that this would not happen, but what distressed me was Ivan’s willingness to change his position, not only towards non-violence, but also concerning his own role as a figurehead. He wanted the limelight. He craved adulation. I had not identified these characteristics in him when we first met. His vanity, his stubbornness, his readiness to lose sight of what Resurrection was about and instead to place himself at the heart of what became a hijacked, paramilitary organisation. It became impossible to live with him. I could no longer do useful work. I lost my respect for Ivan Simakov and I left him. That is when they began to hunt me down.

       9

      Carradine reached his room and switched on the television.

      Every major news network was carrying the story. The police believed the murder had been carried out by the same members of Resurrection who had kidnapped Redmond five days earlier. Tributes were being paid by friends and colleagues, inevitable expressions of outrage articulated by politicians, fellow journalists and friends.

      Carradine muted the television. He sat on the bed and felt a hollowness inside him close to a feeling of personal responsibility in the death of an innocent woman. Had he done more to help, had he found the courage to cross the street and to confront Redmond’s kidnappers, she might still be alive. He thought of the girl who had been standing beside him, chatting away to her friend. So I says to him, I’m like, no way is that happening, yeah? I’m like he needs to get his shit together because I’m like just not going through with that bullshit again. Where was she now? How would she react to news of this kind? Would she share Carradine’s remorse or experience nothing but a momentary, fleeting anxiety that Resurrection had again resorted to murder? Would she even be aware that Redmond had been killed?

      He went to the window and looked down at the vast city. Low whitewashed buildings stretched in a broad semi-circle to the Atlantic coast. At the sea’s edge the vast Hassan II Mosque dominated the skyline; to the north-west, the cranes and wharves of the port were blocks of shadow partly obscured by a high-rise hotel. Carradine had detested Redmond. He had abhorred her character and public style. She had weaved deliberate ignorance into casual prejudice with the sole purpose of inciting outrage, hysteria and fear. She had craved the spotlight of notoriety. In the wake of an Islamist suicide bombing on the streets of London, she had called for ‘internment’ for male Muslims under the age of forty. Handed a column in a tabloid newspaper with which to disseminate her toxic views, she had advocated the use of naval warships to prevent refugees – many of them fleeing the horrors of Syria and Yemen – from crossing the Mediterranean. СКАЧАТЬ