Klutikov drew her hair through his gloved fingers. Her scalp shivered. ‘Hello, Angel.’
‘Hello.’
‘Our boss made a serious mistake with you.’ He lifted the hair to his nose and sighed. ‘After all, what qualifications do you have, apart from getting caught?’ He put an arm around her shoulders and suddenly his gun was at the soft meat below her sternum. She growled a breath and he pushed harder. His pupils were wide and black. ‘Now, tell me again where you put your gun, and don’t be,’ he blew across her throat, ‘clever.’
‘Under the passenger seat.’ She indicated with her chin. ‘Let me get it.’
‘No, I think I will.’
With his free hand, Klutikov opened the door. He put one knee on the driver’s seat and reached across. Saskia, heaving a breath, hooked his back leg with her own and tipped him inside. At the same time, she shut the door on his forearm. His hand splayed and his gun dropped to the desert. Saskia tucked his arm inside and slammed the door. The locks clicked. Before Klutikov could sit, the car accelerated out of the car park and was gone, its dust thinned by the breeze.
David stepped from behind a van. ‘Good work, Saskia.’
‘Is the car still under your control?’
David listened to Ego. ‘Yes. He’s broken a window, but the car is travelling too fast for him to bail out.’
‘How long do we have?’
‘The car will be out of Ego’s range in twenty minutes. Maybe Klutikov can overcome the car’s computer. I don’t know.’
Saskia nodded and crouched to take Klutikov’s gun. Despite the satisfaction of besting him, she was uneasy about the questions that his appearance raised. Why had he been improperly briefed? He should have been told to expect two people, not one. If Beckmann had wanted to recapture Proctor, why would he limit Klutikov’s effectiveness by restricting his information? Klutikov was eminently capable of retrieving Proctor. He was, perhaps, more capable than Saskia.
She pulled at her lip. No. Her reasoning was not correct. There was nothing to suggest that Beckmann had abandoned Proctor. Beckmann had simply tried to remove Saskia from the case.
She studied Met Four. The ghostly traffic of sand rushed about her.
Beckmann had changed his mind. If he did not want Proctor to be captured, that meant he wanted Proctor to reach his destination.
And his destination was his daughter.
‘Come on, David.’
Jennifer’s fingers trembled. She felt for the door handle and gripped it hard. She would make a run for Met Four.
No, she thought. Just drive away. Play it safe.
She touched a button on the dashboard. The engine started.
‘Car, take me home.’
But the rogue agent called Brandt was in front of the car, looking at her through the windscreen. The car switched to reverse, then stopped immediately. There was a man at the trunk. It was not Klutikov. This was a man she had last seen in New York.
‘Park here. Unlock the doors.’
His face was older now, an extrapolation of the man who had cried with her on the steps of Wayne’s College long years before. He was trying not to laugh. Jennifer stepped into his arms.
In the car, sealed from the airs, slow minutes passed. Jennifer’s attention shifted from her father to the rogue agent, and back again. The two sat on the rear seat. They were waiting for Jennifer to speak. Jennifer pointed at the woman. ‘Why would Klutikov lie about you?’
‘He told you what you needed to hear. His larger aim was to return me to Beckmann, our mutual employer, for execution.’
‘That doesn’t explain his blue Met Four Base clearance.’
The woman nodded. ‘It doesn’t.’
‘And you,’ Jennifer said to her father.
‘And me.’ The lines on his face, which had recorded all his smiles and frowns, were deeper and browner than ever.
‘What happened after I spoke to you, Dad?’
He sighed. ‘It’s a very long story, but I’m afraid that…Jenny, I killed a man. I’m on the run.’ He indicated Brandt with his head. ‘From her, actually.’
‘Dr Proctor,’ Saskia interrupted, ‘let me explain our position in brief. I was dispatched to apprehend your father. I did so, but he managed to exploit the situation and brought me here against my will. David had received a cryptic clue, from an anonymous benefactor, which directed us to this location. Does this mean anything to you?’
Jennifer looked through the windscreen at an expanse across which the devils spun. She turned back.
‘I’m a physicist. But there are many technologies being developed in our research centre. One of them, Dad, looks like a recreation of your old lab from the West Lothian centre. The project manager has a crush on me and I got the royal tour. He told me that they’re trying to reverse engineer some of what you and Bruce Shimoda did twenty years ago, before your technology went up in smoke. I…met a person inside the computer.’
Her father seemed to deflate. ‘Jenny, Bruce Shimoda is the man I killed.’
‘I know.’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Their footsteps echoed on the iron stairs. Jennifer led, followed by her father, then Saskia. The top of the column was edged by an artificial parapet of rock. They stopped at a chain-link fence with an inset door. Next to its handle was a slot. Jennifer swiped her card and they passed through. Met Four comprised two prefabricated buildings. An array of antennas and dishes sat on top of the first. Above the second, there were two flags: the Stars and Stripes and the pennant of the US meteorological office.
A man emerged from the first building. He was unarmed, but Jennifer knew that his colleague stood by in the second building with a sub machine-gun.
‘Morning, ma’am,’ he said. If he had said, ‘Morning, miss,’ this would have been a coded instruction to go home.
‘Morning.’
‘Guests?’
‘That’s right.’
They entered the first building. Inside, it was unremarkable. A ranger sat behind a desk, his hands at keyboard. Nearby, a secretary placed some papers in a filing cabinet. Jennifer had walked into the same room once a day for more than a year. The woman and the man had never changed their positions.
‘Good morning, Jim.’
‘Morning, Jennifer. Who are your friends?’
‘Professors Stiefel and Whitney from Caltech. They should be expected.’
Jim checked his computer. ‘They are. Have a great day.’
‘Thanks.’
Jennifer led them through a chipboard partition to a cloakroom. She placed her coat on a hanger and did a twirl for the microwave camera. Saskia and her father did the same. Jennifer showed them where to put their thumbs against the wood. Their nail beds glowed pink. Partial sections of her DNA were read and checked. Thanks to the work of Ego behind the scenes, they matched those held by Met Four Base. The floor sank. When their heads had passed below the floor, a panel closed the top of the shaft. A gap appeared at their feet as the lift slid into a room.
‘Where are we heading?’ asked her father.
Jennifer studied her father in the growing brightness. When she had argued for improved computing support at a committee meeting the day before, she had ridden her anger hard, as always, and she knew its source. She had not shouted at the chairman but at her father. At her father, who had dumped her in a school in New York and left for England. But now, in his presence, her fury had died to an ember. He had given her the best education. For him, that was the first priority. It was his one true aspiration. He had put that aspiration above their relationship. He was a principled man.
‘Through the looking glass, Alice.’
They spoke little for the rest of the way. They descended further into the rock and took their first steps into the research centre proper. Jennifer explained that the low-ceilinged, busy corridors comprised the Stack, which was the vertical structure that threaded the enormous, tunnelled spiral of Met Four Base. The Stack housed administrative offices, workshops, recreational facilities, a canteen, and a water processing system connected to Lake Mead. Five minutes later, they took a horizontal corridor leading away from the Stack. Jennifer gestured to the door at its end. Its sign read, ‘Project N25136 (Looking Glass)’.