Isla learns simply to ignore this sort of thing, not to startle, to go with the sudden shifts in his conversation. His speech is like the patchwork prose of his letters. She had assumed they were written discontinuously, at different times of day and in different moods, as the storms of his madness blew themselves out, as signals swept from nerve to nerve in his brain and clarity came and went. It seems, though, that the shifts are almost instant. It is as if he is participating in half a dozen conversations, and simply tunes in and out of them – sometimes responding to her, sometimes to some cue elsewhere.
‘Now in here -’ He points to her head. ‘Now out here -’ He waves at the air. ‘A pretty fantasy. You can measure nearly. Very, very nearly. But you can’t measure precisely. True knowledge is impossible. I measure this once, then twice. Which is right? Then a third time. This is – what is the word? An analogy.’
Isla asks, is he talking about subatomic particles?
‘Not that – yes, that is part of it, but I mean something bigger than that. I mean that everything we are is a mistake in the measurement. Everything. This mistake – this is the devil’s gift to us. The devil broke the clockwork. Now…’ He looks at her, suddenly exultant, and raises his hands, palms outwards by the side of his face. ‘… CUCKOO! CUCKOO!’
Late another night, they are talking about time. It is something that Banacharski seems agitated by, a subject he returns to.
‘Imagine, see. Time is not a thing, not a thing that flows from one thing to another thing to another. It is a direction – a dimension. Does north flow? Does sideways flow? No. You can’t measure time because what do you measure it with?’
At another point he draws a circle on one of the sheets of paper and shows her. ‘Here and gone do not mean anything,’ he says. ‘Look. Make this axis time. This axis space. Here -’ he marks a sort of triangle inside the circle, shades it roughly in – ‘is the map of Alexander the Great in the world. And here. He is not “gone”: look. He is here: on the map between such a place and such a place and so-and-so BC and so-and-so BC.’
He draws another blob on another part of the circle. ‘And here is the map of Nicolas Banacharski in the world. In this world. And here -’ he draws another blob, this one overlapping the last – ‘is the map of Miss Isla Holderness in the world.’
That night he becomes a little tearful. ‘You have to understand, Isla,’ he says. ‘When I was a child I was a displaced person. Whenever you have a war, you have displaced persons, shifting from place to place. They are victims of chance. For me, there was the chance of where I was born and when I was born, and the chance that I was born at all. Everything was chance. What my mother saw. Where my father died. It was chance. One lived, one died. Chance that I was born, and not somebody else. I am trying to repair that. Do you understand? Think, like a play on words, perhaps – another chance.’
She touches his arm, and she sees wetness on his lips. ‘I am an old man, Isla Holderness. I am an old man.’
Later, he mumbles something she doesn’t think about until much, much later.
‘Nobody wants me,’ he says. ‘Nobody is coming for me. I promised nobody anything…’ he says at one point. He seems distressed. Isla takes a risk, and puts an arm awkwardly around his shoulder, and a charge seems to go through him. The yellowy whites of his eyes roll sharply towards her. He seems not just self-pitying, but scared.
Chapter 13
Alex sat up in the bed under the thin motel sheet. He reached over to the little MDF unit screwed to the wall by the side of the bed and found his mobile phone in the half-light. It was the small hours of the morning, though he didn’t bother to check the display on the big digital alarm clock. The answer to the crossword game.
‘The set of all sets,’ Alex typed into his mobile phone, and pressed ‘send’.
‘In your face, Mr Rob,’ he said aloud, even though he was alone. He felt immensely comforted. Rob would be on his way to work, he thought. He pictured Rob, on the Noddy Train, as he without fail called the Docklands Light Railway, heading in to the job he boasted about but hated at PricewaterhouseCoopers or DeloitteDeLaZouch or whatever the company was called.
Rob had made such a noise, when they’d been together as students, about not becoming what he called a ‘spamhat’, his blanket term for anyone richer and older than himself whom he suspected of having taken a lucrative job because they had been – deservedly – bullied at school. Rob had been – deservedly – bullied at school.
Alex imagined – no, knew for a certainty – that his text would ping, or zoing, or chirp onto Rob’s BlackBerry or iPhone or whatever he now had as he swayed along on the train, and that Rob would be excited by it, and affect to have had his day ruined.
Alex, even though it was late, waited five minutes before sending his next text. It was as well to affect not having been saving it up – but at the same time taking a few minutes to imply a plausible albeit startling facility of mind.
‘Inexperienced butler? Sounds like an old film. (3, 5, 3, 2, 5).’
He was woken fifteen minutes later by his phone – on silent – burring against the hard surface of the bedside unit. He reached for it, bleary now, and thumbed the unlock sequence. The little square screen was fish-green. New message.
‘Cnut,’ said Rob’s message.
Alex smiled and sighed, replaced the phone on the bedside table and settled back into a happy sleep.
Red Queen’s encryption team worked on the hard drive they’d recovered from MIC – the drive the boy had couriered across the Atlantic for them and dropped off in Atlanta. The drive was exceptionally hard to crack, but – the cryptologists reported – not impossible. Progress was being made by brute-force computing. Red Queen regarded that as somewhat suspicious. So did Porlock. Still, they persevered. Resources were diverted. Compartment by compartment, data started to come off the disk.
It bugged Red Queen, though, that the casino metrics suggested the device itself was still on the move. The data coming off the hard drive didn’t make much sense, as yet – it certainly didn’t resemble, as Red Queen had initially dared to hope, backup blueprints for the machine. So what did it have to do with anything?
Ellis, MIC’s head of security, had been working on the hard drive too, or rather working on its absence. MIC couriered several items of varying sensitivity between its offices in London, Washington and Atlanta every day; to say nothing of the material it moved between narco states in South America and AK-infested government buildings in Lagos, Freetown, Mogadishu and Khartoum. If any of those packages went missing, Ellis was informed.
Commercial competitors – as senior management insisted on calling the private interests, most of them governments rather than companies, and most of them clients rather than competitors, that tended to be interested in ripping MIC off – needed to be discouraged from obtaining sensitive data.
Ellis’s anti-theft policy was twofold. The first side of it was straightforward. They used a dozen or more different courier companies in each country, randomising each job and booking them independently and at late notice. All electronic data that they couriered was encrypted and tagged; and all disappearances were investigated.
The second part of the anti-theft policy was slightly more complicated. In the first place, MIC couriered something in the order of five or six times as many packages as it needed to. Only very select personnel knew which contained the important data and which were heavily encrypted dummies. These were what Ellis liked to call ‘Barium Meal Experiments’: they’d tie up a lot of time and expertise, and once broken would yield complex, useless or deliberately misleading information. Their chief purpose was to cause their interceptors to give themselves away by acting on a red herring – a piece of bogus market-sensitive information that might cause a greedy dictator to tilt at a stock, or a hint that the opposition had bought a surface-to-air missile package for which MIC sold the only effective countermeasure. Sometimes it was more important and more profitable to know who was ripping you off than to prevent them doing so.