It was only quarter past ten. As he sat in the restaurant his phone pinged. He looked at it. Two messages. One must have arrived earlier in the car, while he was driving.
The first one was from Rob. It said: ‘One for all and all for one? (3, 3, 2, 3, 4).’
For Alex and Rob, the crossword game was a sort of distant intimacy, mixed up with showing off, mixed up with competition. They’d been doing it since a drunken evening in their second year as undergraduates. Months could pass between them, but then one of them would think of one and the other would get it.
The first one after that evening had been a scrap torn from an A4 pad in a college pigeonhole: ‘Cows hidden from Nazis? (3, 6, 5, 2, 4, 5).’ Alex had scribbled ‘The Secret Dairy of Anne Frank’ on the note there and then in the porter’s lodge and popped it back into Rob’s pigeonhole.
Latterly they’d come through as text messages. Never a proper letter or an email. Never, since the first days of it, in person. The rule – though again, it had never seemed to be actually formulated or discussed – was that until you’d guessed the last one you couldn’t send one of your own.
Rob was better at it than Alex. Alex thought about this as he chewed his potato. Something something in something something? Something something of something something? Something something to something something? The something something something something?
That set him off thinking about the sentence Rob had once asked him to make sense of: ‘Dogs dogs dog dog dogs.’ When Rob had explained it – dogs that other dogs pester (dog) in turn pester other dogs – Alex had tried it on Carey. She’d failed to be as impressed as he’d hoped. She’d said, with a sad sigh: ‘Yeah. That’s about the way it goes.’
Rob had been interested in the way the sentence was jointed. Carey, having had it cracked open for her, had simply lit on the meaning – the least important part. Rob had been interested in whether it also worked for fish: fish fish fish fish fish. Carey had said that was stupid because fish didn’t fish – and if let’s suppose they did, the ones that had been fished would hardly be in a position to do any fishing themselves.
Alex had let it go, pleased simply to be with her on a summer lawn by the river.
The second text message, the one that had just arrived, was from Carey. ‘Where are you, boy? Weird things are happening. Have a good afternoon. Miss you. Talk tomorrow? Night.’
Alex wondered what he’d say. He’d phone her. If he did, would the dial tone, or caller-ID, tell her he was in America, though? A payphone? Would that be different? He didn’t want to freak her out. He didn’t want to spoil the surprise.
The box with the ring in it – he hadn’t felt comfortable leaving it in the room, with its flimsy door – dug into his hip as he leaned forward to flag the waitress for the bill.
‘Could I get the check?’ he said, enjoying the American words coming out of his English mouth, resisting doing an accent.
The something of something something.
When he got back to the motel he was tired and turned straight in, setting the alarm on his mobile phone for seven thirty. In the middle of the night he half woke up. The room was cool, and through the flimsy curtains he could see the moon over the parking lot. He could hear crying from the next-door room. Then he frowned, turned over, and sank back into sleep.
‘There have been disturbances in the mass media,’ Red Queen said. ‘Running up to this. That was one of the things that caused us to keep the file open on what seemed to many of us like a lost cause. It seemed perfectly possible the machine was just imaginary: something Banacharski had made up – though, remember, we have some partial material from his communication with Holderness. And, well, some of that material either demonstrated that this machine existed, or it demonstrated the opposite. He was very paranoid. It’s possible some of what he told Holderness was disinformation, especially towards the end. But…’ Red Queen trailed off. ‘Then the thing with the airplane. The thing with the frogs…’
‘Frogs?’ Porlock said,
‘You didn’t hear about that?’
Porlock looked slightly irritated.
‘Downtown Atlanta? It was on CNN. It led Fox. Frogs fell out the sky. Thousands of them. From very high up. Several citizens were killed.’
‘I’ve been working a lot of double shifts. That’s been known to happen, though. Don’t the frogs get sucked up by tornadoes? We’ve just had not one but two hurricanes…’
‘The killed citizens: 60 per cent of them were Atlanta-stationed employees of MIC Industrial Futures, Inc.; 40 per cent of them were Atlanta-stationed employees of subsidiaries or affiliates of MIC Industrial Futures, Inc.; 10 per cent of them was a postman.’
‘A postman?’
‘Yes. We think he was just unlucky. As opposed to the other citizens killed by falling frogs.’
‘What sort of frogs were they?’
Red Queen admired that sort of attention to detail.
‘Mostly the sort of frogs that are hard to identify when you drop them from a mile up. Almost all of them – that is, the epicentre of the frog event, or whatever you call it – fell on MIC’s Atlanta offices. They took out the glass roof of the atrium. It was over the cafeteria. A lot of people in hospital with very nasty cuts. The offices are still closed.’
‘Our Friends are sneaking in and planting more bugs, then…’
‘Yes. Lots more. MIC, as I don’t need reminding you, is the company that was paying Banacharski. From a good way back. They were funding his chair at the Sorbonne. When he resigned in protest at being funded by an arms company it looked like he was resigning in protest at being funded by an arms company, but everything we’ve since learned suggests that actually he was resigning in order to work directly for the arms company. The letters to Holderness talk about a man, Nieman, an operative for “the firm”, who’s clearly Banacharski’s liaison for his research. He lived for several years with no visible means of support. So MIC are all over this. We think it was their freelances who went after the guy they found in the plane.’
‘What about the guy in the plane?’
‘Still in hospital. Still a waste of time.’
‘You know MIC has links to government.’
‘What arms and baby-milk company doesn’t?’
‘Very serious links. We are, theoretically, on the same side.’
‘We are on the same side – but in this, no. This machine is a game-changer. If they get it they’ll be their own side. And the frog thing. It can’t be chance. As I was saying, though: the mass media.’
When Red Queen talked about the mass media, that didn’t mean newspapers and television. It meant the hundreds and thousands of the psychically sensitive, wandering mad. To most people, they were a disaggregated army of street-corner crazies, but for the DEI they were an underground railway, an early warning system, a giant biological radio tuned to sketchy transmissions from… well, that was the question. Red Queen preferred to remain sceptical, but running the mass media was Sosso’s department, down in the underhangar. Red Queen didn’t have to worry about it in detail. It was valued. Funding depended on it.
Sosso’s theory of it was only ever going to be a theory: whenever anything became empirically testable, it lost its Dubya status and was transferred out of DEI. Dubya was the Directorate nickname for any file coded UU, for ‘Unknown Unknowns’: double-U. But Sosso’s theory was this.
Old-style ‘mediums’ – Victorian charlatans in robes and false noses, wired up to jerry-rigged table-knocking devices – purported to have some control over their gifts. But media, to use the correct plural, were actually as passive as air and relatively common. The Chinese were rumoured to be ‘training’ them in very large numbers; harvesting Falun Gong and the Tibetan monasteries and ‘repurposing’ the prisoners in permanent detention. That gave even Red Queen the creeps.