6. In the light of the above, and the difficulty of using VENONA, wiretap and similar material in open court, we have decided not to seek extradition or prosecution. The British MI6 have been informed. His illegal entry to the UK will be ignored as he may be a useful trap should the Soviets wish to use him on any future occasion. The Home Secretary concurs.
______________
COORDINATING OFFICER
At last they were through the town and heading west. Findhorn looked out at the flat agricultural land. Ahead of them, a small aircraft was dropping slowly towards some airfield hidden by trees. 'So Lev and Lisa have been in hiding for fifty years, and there was no need.'
'We can't tell them that.' Romella was slowing for a tight corner.
'Agreed. We leave them to hide in peace. I wonder about the blanked-out stuff.'
'Don't push your luck, Fred. I was lucky to get even that.'
A few miles ahead of them, streams of lorries were marking out the line of the Al. Romella was looking thoughtful. 'You've reached your decision on the Petrosian secret.'
'It needs a stake driven through its heart.'
'What? Why?'
'It's too dangerous. It could work like a dream or it could evaporate the planet.'
'What are the odds?'
'A hundred to one it would be okay. Maybe even a thousand to one.'
'One chance in a hundred of oblivion versus a near certainty of ending up richer than Bill Gates. I might take a chance on it, Fred.'
'I might give it a try too. At an individual level it could be a gamble worth taking. But not if you're risking the whole of humanity. There are people out there who don't give a toss for anyone but themselves.'
'And Albrecht is probably one of them,' she said. Ahead, a tractor was trailing a machine with long, swaying metal prongs. She slowed, edged cautiously past. 'Duty obliges us to hand this over to the authorities.'
'We have a higher duty, Ms Grigoryan. To the greater good.'
'That was pure Rosenblum. You have an anti-authoritarian streak, Fred. But who the hell are we to make a decision like that? We have to send it upstairs.'
'There's nothing I'd love more. Unfortunately my conscience is right here in the car with me, not upstairs. Someone out there would take that one per cent chance.'
She shook her head in disagreement.
They were now on a long, straight stretch of road. 'I guess the Romans were here,' Findhorn said, to break the tense silence.
The junction with the Al was about a mile ahead. Romella was frowning. 'The deal is that we find Petrosian's secret.'
'So let's stick to that.'
'But, Fred, we don't even know where the document is.'
'It's probably in Albrecht's hands by now. My guess is he's poring over it in some hideaway, about to summon his engineers. We have to reach him before they do because the moment they've gone over it, it's out. He'll start on a patent application. I reckon we have less than forty-eight hours.'
'But you now know the principle of the thing. Can't you beat him to a patent — assuming in your infinite wisdom you decide the risk is worth taking?'
'No chance. The mathematical details would take weeks to work through before you even started on the engineering aspects.'
'Have you thought this through, Fred? Say we find Albrecht. What do we do about him? By now he knows the secret.'
Findhorn, anticipating Romella's next words, had the sensation of a trapdoor opening in his stomach. She was slowing down as they approached the junction.
'Are you up to murder, Fred? Would you kill for the greater good?'
Findhorn was biting his thumbnail. 'Matsumo asked me the same question.'
'Fred, a man in his business acquires enemies. He probably hides from Mossad, the Palestinians, the Iraqis, the Iranians, the Mafia and the Salvation Army. He's an elusive man. How can we possibly discover where he is?' 'The Celestial Truth might know. The information might be in their Swiss headquarters.'
The Rover had stopped at the junction. The Al was a solid mass of traffic, streaming north and south like anti-parallel lava flows. It took a second for the implication of Findhorn's remark to sink in; when it did, Romella turned to him open-mouthed. 'Are you serious? Break into the Temple?'
'It'll have to be tomorrow. We're out of time.' 'You're raving, foaming-at-the-mouth insane.' 'Decision time, Romella. South to Whitehall, or north to Dougie's?'
There was a momentary gap in the flow of southbound traffic. In the north lane, lorries were effectively blocking the carriageway and leaving a stretch of empty road in front of them. 'Oh, bloody hell,' Romella said, swinging the Rover smartly across the road and into the northbound carriageway.
Findhorn said, 'I put it down to my charm.'
32
Piz Radont
Findhorn came out of the Glasgow sleet into the warmth and chatter of a crowded pizza parlour. Waiters were whirling around the tables, the plates balanced on their arms defying gravity. A young Sicilian in a tuxedo led Findhorn to a table, lit a candle. Findhorn, indifferent to what he would eat, ordered spaghetti and clams.
His free hours in Glasgow had left him emotionally battered. Miss Young, the white-haired departmental secretary, had looked at Findhorn with open-mouthed dismay when he had called in. He knew it when she scuttled off to collect Julian Walsh, the prim-mouthed, fussy little head of physics, and he knew it when Walsh came in the door looking like a funeral undertaker.
Archie had been on vacation, and had stood too close to the edge of the Isthmus of Corinth. It's a steep man-made gorge, in Greece, you know.
I've heard of it. Did anyone see him fall?
No. You're surely not implying that he jumped? The prim lips had twitched anxiously: the eyes had worried about departmental scandal, pressure of work, sharp questions at next month's faculty meeting.
Oh no, nothing like that. He'd been pushed. He was a path to the Temple of Celestial Truth, and much too dangerous to be left alive.
Findhorn had kept the last bits to himself, and Walsh's lips had relaxed, he had grown expansive. He will be missed. His second-year lectures on solid-state physics were a model of clarity.
Findhorn followed the spaghetti by a phoney zabaglione, made with cheap sherry rather than marsala al'novo, but the house saved money and the punters didn't know the difference. He emerged into an Argyle Street drizzle.
The next twenty-four hours, he knew, were going to be the most difficult and dangerous in his life.
He wandered off reluctantly to find a taxi, his whole body suffused with a sense of dread, the spaghetti and clams lying heavy in his stomach.
'I'm dying. I can feel myself slipping away.'
'Shut up, Stefi. Let Joe do his job.'
'I tell you I'm freezing to death.'
'At least be quiet about it.' Findhorn turns to the man crouching behind the boulder. 'What do you see?'
'Gie's a minute.' The man shifts his position slightly, and taps the brass eyepiece of the telescope. 'A big dog. It looks like an Irish setter. No, it's a Doberman.'
Findhorn says, 'That's bad news.'
'You might put it that way. Here, have a peek.'
The man stands up, rubbing his thighs and flapping his arms. Findhorn crouches down, fiddles with the focus. Under the high magnification the image in the Questar is rippling slightly as cold air drifting up from the valley far below mingles with the colder air at three thousand metres.
A fence nine feet or so high encloses about four acres of rocky, sloping ground in the shape of a square. In the centre of the square is a large rectangular building, glowing red in the light of the setting sun. A kilometre beyond it, and separated from the building by an immense grim chasm, a restaurant sits atop an adjoining peak like an illuminated flying saucer. In the telescope Findhorn can just make out that restaurant and building are joined by a cable and that a trio of small cable cars are slotted into a concrete station underneath the restaurant. The cable disappears round the back of the rectangular building and Findhorn cannot see where it ends.