The Unknown Terrorist Read Online Free PDF

had danced or would get the chance while he continued talking.
    Richard Cody then argued for the necessity of torture, properly managed. Proper management, sensible policies, agreed procedures—it was possible, after all, to civilise something as barbaric as warfare with the Geneva Convention, and now we needed a Geneva Convention on how we might conduct torture in a civilised fashion.
    Sometimes Richard Cody shocked even himself with his opinions and the violence with which he forced them on others. What was even more shocking to him was how other people tended to agree meekly with him, not, he feared, because they thought he was right, but only because he was stronger, louder, more aggressive. People, he felt, merely went where they sensed power.
    Still, at first, winning would bring him a feeling of pleasure in victory so acute his face would flush and his nostrils flare. But soon after, Richard Cody would realise he didn’t really believe anything he had just so passionately said. Worse, he had only argued because he felt it important thathis view, and his view alone, prevail. And then everything he said seemed to him so full of hatred and ignorance, intended only to hurt and to impress, and he despised the way no one would rise to his challenge and call him the fool, the bully, the buffoon that, in his heart, he feared he was.
    And because no one ever did, and because he was at once enraged and relieved that they didn’t, because they invariably shut up, because no one had the courage to speak the truth or, like the graphic designer, they simply left, Richard Cody would keep on talking and it was hard to know when, if ever, he might stop.
    “This is a good world,” Richard Cody heard himself saying. “We have prosperity, beautiful homes”—here he held out a hand indicating Katie Moretti’s house, recently featured on a magazine home-decorating show on the Six Network—“some more beautiful than others”—here there was laughter—“but there is irrational evil lurking out there.”
    These were grand words, and Richard Cody felt himself grand speaking them. And then he changed his tone, spoke more quietly, took them into his confidence and told them dark tales of terrible plots foiled, of the mass poisonings and bombings and gassings planned and, through vigilance, averted, offering vivid descriptions of how Australians might otherwise have died en masse in the very heart of Sydney.
    Richard Cody could feel the fear take hold. He sensed the pull of a story, the power of its telling, as the table went quiet, their imaginings now hot-wired to his images of conspiracy, fanaticism, horror. He could feel himself cheering up. He was on to something, were it not for the fact there was no newstory other than three unexploded homemade bombs at Homebush Olympic stadium.
    When the taxi arrived, Richard Cody apologised for leaving early, but lied that he had a shoot at dawn the following morning. That, he said, not looking at Jerry Mendes, was “the truth business”.
    “A little journalist is a dangerous thing,” said Jerry Mendes after he was gone. “Invaluable, really.” And once more he laughed until his laughter turned to wheezing, and once more he had to reach for his inhaler.
    As the taxi swung out and down the street, Richard Cody leant back into the clammy grey vinyl, took a small bottle out of his coat pocket and sprinkled some fluid onto his hands. It was all a racket, thought Richard Cody as he wiped his hands clean of the germs and bacteria he had picked up at lunch—Six, the media, journalism. He would show them who was the master of such things, he would find the ways and means to restore his standing. He would get a story up that no one would forget. As he reminded himself of his resilience, he wrung his hands, finally clean of Jerry Mendes’s slimy touch and the overly moisturised farewell handshake of Katie Moretti, the hand of a mortician, cold and somehow congealed.
    His mind returned to the