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the motherfuckers’. At the same time as the Fence was being built, the armies of Europe and China began disarming the rest of the world. There followed the Great Wars of Liberation, lasting just under five years, at the end of which all military equipment in the southern hemisphere was either destroyed or rendered non-viable, and the Fence was completed. The Fence divided the world for all time, roughly speaking, into areas of progress and regress - or, at least, stagnation, although conditions in the two parts could not, of course, be described as one hundred per cent progressive or regressive. But the general gist was correct, and without the Fence the radical elements of the Second World would long ago have dragged us down into their own abyss of primitive religion, the glorification of violence, and contempt for anything different – if only because at some point we would have been ready to confront them, trying perhaps to negotiate with them, to compromise, to give up our own freedom in the vague hope of peace. But you don’t discuss with fanatics, and there are some negotiating tables where you have lost as soon as you sit down at them. Let them tear each other to pieces, and so indeed they did.
    It was a shame that Ashcroft was to know no more of the fruits of his ideas than the American failure in Iraq. The grand old man of crime prevention had died in his home state of Missouri long before the erection of the Fence, and even longer before the first offices named after him were opened.
    But perhaps his strict religious faith means that the good Lord sometimes lets him take a look at the world below. If so, Ashcroft could feel justifiably proud to see the Western world protected from dangers abroad and kept in order at home on the basis of his ideas. I won’t go so far as some and claim that in the twenty-first century we, the heirs of Voltaire, Mozart, Picasso, owed not just our intellectual survival but our survival tout court , as the French say, solely to John Ashcroft, but the notion cannot be dismissed out of hand. I for one could only welcome the efforts of our Mental Health Department, MHD for short, to establish Ashcroft in the public mind as one of the spiritual fathers of the modern world. It’s true that the population at large still regarded Ashcroft agents as mere informers, better avoided if you had identified them as what they were. But all that was to change. The papers outlining the strategy for that change were already in the Eurosecurity pigeon-holes. The plan was to bring general mobilization to bear to transform our society into a single great Ashcroft organism, in which everyone would have so much social and moral responsibility for himself and his fellow women and men that, with such a dense network of actively public-spirited feeling, crime would simply no longer be possible. With that end in view, MHD was supplying the music and fashion media with cool, witty quotations from Ashcroft, anecdotes about him, and working hard to get T-shirts with his picture on them into the clothes stores where mostly young people shopped. Perhaps the time wasn’t ripe for that yet, but some day Ashcroft would take his place on the clothes rails beside Che Guevara and Elvis; I didn’t doubt that for a moment.
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    Two days after Leon’s arrest, I met Chen in our room at Ashcroft Central Office, as I did every Friday. I was feeling terrible. Something in me must have snapped when Leon was taken away before my very eyes. Even though I knew better, I felt like a traitor. For the first time in over fifteen years as an Ashcroft man, I seriously doubted the point of it all, and kept asking myself why I hadn’t turned a blind eye to Leon’s smoking. There’d have been no problem about that; smoking, after all, was one of those crimes that didn’t really endanger anyone or anything. But I was set on showing our Sicilian colleagues that the Ashcroft outfit had a really