‘Oh, dear . . .’
‘Hmm . . .’
She spirals inwards in endless recursion.
Except that the infinite series of her transformations turns out be convergent, and so she wakes before the end of time, staring at the grey gloom and muttering to herself, ‘Too many jam doughnuts,’ a second before sleep comes back, this time minus dreams.
When Gavriela woke up, her notebook, closed, was atop the candlewick bedspread, and her fountain-pen, actually borrowed from Rupert, was neatly beside it, cap screwed in place and not an ink blot anywhere. She had no memory of taking either object to bed.
Senility strikes at last.
Pushing down the covers, she forced herself up to a sitting position, sideways on the bed, wanting to pee but needing to check something first. It was decades since anything like this had happened, but perhaps the notebook contained sentences from her unconscious mind, written while she slept, as on that wartime night in Oxford.
Out in the hallway, the phone began to ring.
The notebook opened naturally at the midpoint, to a pair of facing pages that yesterday had been blank. The left-hand page now bore a blotchy ink sketch:
And the opposite page contained only a handwritten note, a first draft of a message intended to be written by her, not sent to her, although the intent was not obvious.
You will see three. You will be wrong.
G
P.S. Pass it on! κ∞ = 9.42 ; λ∞ = 2.703 × 1023; µ∞ = .02289
Rupert tapped on the door – it could not be anyone else – so she closed the notebook and pulled her dressing gown around her, hoping this would not take time because she really did have to pee.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said when she opened the door, ‘but I needed to tell you . . .’
He was wearing his dressing gown with the burgundy lapels, and the new slippers she had bought him to replace the tattered monstrosities he wore when she moved in – less than four months ago, yet already the distant past.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
The lines on his face were deeper than ever.
‘Your niece Ursula,’ he said, ‘must’ve been further enceinte than I realised. Apparently you’ve had a great niece for the past two months. I had no idea Ursula had given birth.’
‘Oh, no.’ Gavriela made a guess, hoping she was wrong. ‘The baby’s ill or even . . .’
She did not want to say it.
‘Missing,’ said Rupert. ‘The baby is missing.’
‘How could that happen?’
What kind of mother was Ursula if she could not even—?
‘—from the house,’ Rupert was saying. ‘At least three men were involved, in addition to the female decoy. Even I might have opened the door to her, because by all accounts she sounded convincing.’
Some tale of woe, whose details Gavriela could not process because in her mind she was wondering how bloody stupid she could possibly have been, ignoring a clear warning that an enemy was near, almost certainly Dmitri Ivanovitch Shtemenko, who seemed to have some inhibition against killing her – given the opportunities he had passed up – but clearly possessed the capacity to be monstrous.
‘One of the men was thin and not young according to other witnesses. Sounds like Shtemenko, though Ursula did not see him, so our people can’t be sure.’
Would he have killed the baby out of spite?
It was horrible, but Dmitri might be evil enough to do such a thing.
‘The woman,’ Rupert added, ‘was identified by Ursula from a photograph as one Daniela Weissmann, a young Stasi officer under Shtemenko’s command. One rumour says she’s his lover also, but that’s not known for sure.’
‘He’s taken the baby,’ said Gavriela. ‘Taken her home with him.’
‘Not even a KGB colonel would mount a team operation purely to snatch a two month old relative,’ said Rupert. ‘He must have been here for something else.’
Of course he was, but there was no likelihood of SIS or Five finding out, and if they did, surely there was no reason to divulge the information to a retired spymaster or the equally retired cryptanalyst who shared a house platonically with him.
But Rupert had influence still, it seemed.
‘You know the Chester Terrace out-station?’ he asked.
‘Vaguely heard of it,’ said Gavriela. ‘I’ve never been there.’
‘Nice place. Georgian mansion, overlooking Regent’s Park, ideal for eavesdropping on the Soviet embassy. Stank to high heaven last time I was there, but that was because they were re lacquering the parquet flooring on the top floor, and half the rest was dug up.’
Gavriela glanced at her notebook.
‘They’ve invited us over,’ Rupert went on. ‘To talk to Ursula’s watch team and find out what went wrong.’
‘I had a sense of the darkness yesterday,’ she said. ‘Not exactly the kind of information I can share with them.’
‘No, I suppose not. Maybe we need protection.’
Gavriela thought about it.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘But it can’t do any harm.’
Rupert would act on his own suggestion, faking a story that suggested the KGB might know his private address and have reason to perpetrate personal vengeance, so that he obtained a permanent watch team to safeguard him and incidentally Gavriela. Whether that was unnecessary, or whether it was the presence of the watch team that prevented the enemy from making a run at Rupert, they would never find out.
Not for as long as Rupert lived, at any rate.
FORTY-TWO
MU-SPACE, 2607 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)
Roger was promoted to captain, with a hint of fast-track advancement to come, on the basis of his intelligence report concerning the dark matter star (to use the newly revived archaic term) that sat at the heart of the realspace galaxy. Roger’s ultra-hellflight had become an unofficial legend; and unlike his father, he had not needed to die in order to achieve success. It felt undeserved.
But it was the entire squadron’s analysis of the renegades’ base, not just Roger’s report, that was of immediate interest to the battle planners. Linguistically, the base was again labelled Target Shadow, which gave more than a hint of how they saw it. The combined telemetric data of thirty-eight ships produced a reasonable model not just of defensive resources and their disposition, but also the residential deep-space modules and the massive devices under construction, whose purpose and mode of operation remained conjecture.
This was war, officially so, which meant that personal secrets could not be kept private if germane – hence Roger providing a sealed addendum to his report, the heart of it related as a personal reminiscence of his father’s memories: ‘After using my tu-ring to defeat the locking mechanism, I opened Greybeard’s case to reveal a fist-sized device, purpose unknown. All this while, Greybeard remained in delta-coma, but he wasn’t going to stay that way, because his closed eyes were flicking from side to side.
‘But when I tried to pick up the device, small though it was, I failed. It was so massive I could not shift it. Yet when Greybeard awoke, he was able to lift the thing easily.’
There were more details, but that was the salient portion, as he pointed out in the covering metadata, in which he also explained the addendum’s provenance: ‘These are my father’s memories, that is Carl Blackstone, from a covert operation conducted nearly twenty standard years before I was born – memories inherited from his ship by mine, but inaccessible to my father due to targeted amnesia applied during debriefing.’