'They'll cut off your goolies, laddie. Norsk's a giant.' Hansen struggled for an adequate description. 'A Sumo wrestler with three balls and forty foot high.'
'Phone their Stavanger office. I'll call you tomorrow.' Back in his room, Findhorn slipped off his clothes and slid under the cold sheets. He looked at the material he had emptied from the briefcase: a bundle of letters, bound together with red tape, and about twenty small desk diaries, dark blue, each marked with a year. He opened one at random and flicked through it. It was in good condition. The binding was loose, as if someone had tried to pull it away from the pages; otherwise there were few signs that it had been under the crushing pressure of glacial ice. Water had ruined some of the other diaries, reducing the ink to an illegible smear or removing it altogether.
They were American. On the front leaf of each was written a name in English: Lev Baruch Petrosian. There were no other details. The name sounded vaguely familiar. The diary had been written up in a strange script. It looked Cyrillic but Findhorn knew the Russian alphabet and this wasn't it; neither was it Arabic. He thought it might be some Caucasian or Asian script like Persian. Scattered throughout the pages, and looking incongruous against the ancient script, were equations. There were even, here and there, phrases in English, written in a small, clear hand.
The equations caught his attention. They weren't the familiar ones of meteorology, and he didn't understand them, but he recognized the field in which they were used, and the knowledge gave him a twinge of apprehension.
He fell asleep with the bedside lamp shining in his face.
The following morning the haar had been replaced by a clear blue sky. He had bacon and eggs along with a black, coffee-like liquid, and then risked the streets, unsure whether he was in mortal danger or just paranoid.
The city centre was two miles to the north and he headed towards it, feeling increasingly nervous as he approached over the South Bridge. The Waverley railway station was below the bridge and he thought they might be looking for him there; or at the bus terminus; or the airport; or at Hertz or Avis or Budget. Or they might be cruising the streets; or they might be doing all of these things; or, he thought, I may be turning into a certifiable case of raging paranoia.
Along busy pavements to George Street. He found a business centre and started to photocopy the pages of the diaries. They were a page to a day for twenty years, two pages to a photocopy. It was tedious work. It took him an hour and a paper refill to get to 1940. For a break, he logged on to a computer and checked his e-mail. He'd been at sea for two weeks and he was faced with a long list of messages, mostly low-grade or now time-expired. The most recent, however, made him swallow nervously. It had been sent at three o'clock that morning.
Dear Dr Findhorn,
It would be in our mutual interests to discuss the papers which you have in your possession. I do not represent Norsk Advanced Technologies. May I suggest we meet at Fat Sam's at say 1 p.m. today? Their calzone is excellent.
He looked at his watch and did a quick calculation.
Edinburgh's George Street is stuffed with banks and there was a Bank of Scotland next to the business centre. He entered it and asked to open a safety deposit account. Outside of movies about robberies he had never seen the inside of a safety deposit. He put the diaries and the bundle of letters safely into a little steel box. Then he turned the corner to the post office in Frederick Street, where he put a label on his backpack, leaving it to be posted on to his Aberdeen office.
He emerged from the post office carrying no more than a bundle of photocopied papers: at last he was travelling light. He bought a cheap briefcase from a store with 'Sale of the Century' on a notice in its window and put the diary photocopies into it.
Now Findhorn made his way across Princes Street Gardens and up the Mound to the Edinburgh Central Library. There, in a quiet room occupied by scholars, students and a tramp getting a spot of heat, he looked through Encyclopaedia Brittanica. He quickly identified the script: the diaries had been written in Armenian. Then he looked up Petrosian, and it came back to him.
Lev Baruch Petrosian. A 1950s atom spy. He had vanished just before the FBI got to him. It was a long-gone scandal, the people involved now presumably old men, or dead. Findhorn thought of the blue eye, imbedded in the gruesome face, staring at him through the ice. Upstairs in the library, he flicked through The Times of the period. Petrosian had made it to the obituary columns and the librarian made him a photocopy.
Another short, nervous foray into the streets. He passed by a public phone booth, preferring to use one in a quiet corner of the Chambers Street museum. A grizzly bear contemplated him with small, hostile eyes. It had reared up on its hind legs, it had clawed limbs of immense power and it was displaying sharp teeth, but it was stuffed.
'Archie? Have I disturbed you?' Archie was one of those academics who led a semi-nocturnal existence, often as not turning up at his department around noon and leaving again at some strange hour of the following morning.
'Fred? How are you? Not at all, been up for hours. Anne tells me you were heading for the north pole. Are you phoning from there?'
'I'm in Edinburgh. I hitched a lift on an icebreaker and came back early. Listen, I need advice. It involves your field of study but I can't talk about it over the phone. Can I meet you, say in a couple of hours?'
'My goodness, Freddie me lad, are you spying for the KGB or something? Okay, I've no classes this morning. I can be in George Square at eleven o'clock.'
'No. I'd like you to meet me in Edinburgh.'
There was a puzzled hesitation, then: 'Aye, okay. Meet me at Waverley station at twelve.'
'No, again, Archie. I don't want to be seen at the station. I'm in the Royal Museum in Chambers Street.'
'This has got to be woman trouble.'
'I wish.'
'Right. The museum it is. I should be there in a couple of hours.'
That was the thing about Archie. He knew when not to ask questions.
Findhorn decided to do this methodically. He'd start with transport, work his way through the armour to the natural history, and then go up to the medieval dress and the Chinese stuff on the first floor, and then points beyond.
He was about thirty, tall with long untidy hair and an untidy black beard. He was wearing an unbuttoned trenchcoat, exposing a large beer belly. The archetypal wild Glaswegian, Findhorn thought, watching nervously from the top floor gallery overhead; and a man who didn't give a damn.
Archie was looking around expectantly. Findhorn gave it a minute, but he saw no signs that his friend had been followed. Feeling like a fool, he called out and waved, and ran down the stairs past the Buddha on the first floor.
They collected coffee and doughnuts at the museum cafe. Findhorn led the way to a corner table and sat facing both entrances. Archie's eyes were gleaming with curiosity. 'So what gives, Fred? I've been fired up all the way here.'
'I can't tell you what this is about, Archie. Not yet.'
'Och, be reasonable! I hav'nae come a' this way for a coffee. If it's no a wumman, you're in trouble with the polis. Neither of them sounds like Fred Findhorn.'
'What can you tell me about Lev Petrosian?'
Archie raised his eyebrows in astonishment. 'The atom spy?'