They were also, most of them, laden with the sort of high-end Trojan viruses that would install a nice back door, for MIC, in their hosts’ computer systems.
They knew, for instance, that the Atlanta package had travelled by air to New York within a few hours of its disappearance from the courier company. But the signal from its tag had abruptly cut out on arrival. It had either been discovered or encased in concrete, or discovered and then encased in concrete.
In New York, the tag had not been discovered, nor had it had been encased in concrete. But it was deep underground, with the DEI’s cryptographers. And it was nearly a day before those cryptographers fully cracked it. And a bit over a day when they realised what had happened.
‘Like something gift-wrapped in a cartoon,’ Porlock said without a trace of mirth when he made his report. ‘Black on face. Hair sticking up.’
‘Swine,’ said Red Queen.
The quarantined network they’d been using to open the drive had quietly suffered the computer-virus equivalent of Ebola and would take more time and energy to cure than it had taken to break the encryption in the first place. Among the effects of the virus was that every computer in the network was quietly trying to get in contact with a remote ISP – almost certainly one of MIC’s secure nodes – four times per second. They were doing so in vain, since the network wasn’t wired to the outside world. But it made Red Queen think of the magic harp in the fairy story, screaming and screaming from under Jack’s coat that it had been stolen.
The data on the drive had been mud. One programmer speculated irritably that the extensive personnel file for a company named ‘Herring Enterprises’ – they checked: it had no personnel; it was a Cayman Islands shell – was a private joke.
The DEI’s programmer was right. It was a private joke. But it was not a private joke that Ellis was much laughing at. Ellis, too, had missed a trick. When he was first told about the missing package, he had given it little thought. Let his subordinates work it.
He was more preoccupied with trying to find this probability machine, and the routine loss of a BME – as, on checking, he saw it was – was neither here nor there. It was only when it occurred to him that it was Atlanta and that it was about the same time this kid had given those idiotic thugs of his the slip there, that he went back and wondered about a connection.
Could the boy have stolen the package? Could the machine have caused the package to be stolen?
Ellis looked at the loss of the package. It had gone through the airport, routinely, with no problems. The representative of the courier company had picked up the briefcase with the hard drive. But the closure of the Atlanta offices after the incident with the frogs – another thing that had installed the flickering jelly bean of an incipient migraine in the corner of Ellis’s field of vision – had meant that he’d returned with the package to his own company’s offices with a view to putting it in the safe. Where he’d been mugged and relieved of the suitcase. Two muggers – he didn’t get much of a look at them. The loss had been reported to the police, but Ellis didn’t hold out much hope of recovering it. Not with someone flying it instantly to New York, which was not what normal muggers did.
Ellis couldn’t see a way that the boy, even if he had had an accomplice, could have known about this package arriving at the same time as him; nor where it would be going; nor why he would be interested in it in any case.
Ellis found out which courier company MIC had used, and telephoned their UK office. He was rude to a series of dispatchers until a senior manager looked it up on the computer.
‘His name was Alex Smart,’ said the manager. ‘Yup. First time we’ve used him, according to our records. The usual thing – student or something, no criminal record, answered one of our ads online. He got a short-notice flight to Atlanta. We got your parcel sent. Why? Is there a -’
Ellis hung up. Well. That explained how the kid got to Atlanta. MIC bought him a ticket.
If Ellis had been more puckish, he would have said ‘Swine’, but Ellis instead swore unimaginatively, hammered the phone cradle with two fingers and then started to dial again.
‘What I have been trying to do,’ says Banacharski later in the week. His sentences, still, are not always coming out entire. ‘To build a machine. To undo – these knots.’
They have spent a long day together. As usual, Isla has been circumspect. She has tried to make herself useful – has cleaned, even, where the opportunity to do so without looking rude has presented itself. She has retreated when it seems right – particularly when he has insisted that it is time for him to meditate. It hasn’t been a problem for her. She has taken herself off on a walk.
She has started to get used to his moods. She doesn’t think that she’s going to learn from him what she’d hoped – still less, get him to come back to civilisation. This was the thing that, though she didn’t admit it fully, she’d fantasised about: she, as Perseus, with the gorgon’s head to show off. When she was little her dad taught her how to fish. She liked the idea, always, of the skill of bringing something in that was stronger than the line by which it was caught. She has an ego, Isla.
So she doesn’t think she’s going to bring him in. But she has started to feel for him. She reproaches herself. She always felt for him – even when she’d only read about him she felt she understood him. But now, she feels like she has a responsibility. She sees his mind, like a boat straining at its moorings in a heavy tide, and she feels sorry for him. She wants to soothe it.
‘In the war. My father died. My mother lived. My little sister died. I lived. Chance. How do we live with that? How, Isla Holderness? How do we live with it? It is impossible. Nobody can. Nobody can do that.’ He seems half to be talking to himself.
Then he changes tack again. ‘There are walls in the air.’ His hand, in a chopping motion, comes down between her face and his. ‘Everything is so close to us. These walls: a membrane’s distance. We think – our physics, already, almost shows it if you know how to look. Every moment spawns infinities – new universes. A sparrow falls, a sparrow doesn’t fall – you know that?’
‘The Bible,’ Isla says.
‘Yes. The Bible. Every sparrow, a new universe. Every feather, a new universe. Every wingbeat. What happens -’
‘This is the parallel universes idea you’re talking about?’
Banacharski waves, impatiently. ‘Not parallel. No such thing as parallel. That’s what the devil, as I told you, made impossible -’
‘You’re talking metaphorically?’
‘Yes! Metaphorically. Yes, I am. Exactly that.’ He looks, riddlingly, pleased with her – but not as if she has said something he agrees with, she thinks, so much as that he knows she didn’t understand. ‘What he does to the measurements, the devil, that’s it. Everything curves. Not parallel. Like soap bubbles, these infinities. Everything touching everything else. You could just step through. If you could only see the walls. If you could hear what all those versions of you are saying, just on the other side. Think of what happens. How do you think of it? You go forward, yes?’
‘Ah. Yes?’
‘Look.’ He wiggles his hand like a fish. ‘Your choice, this or that. Your chance, this or that. You jump out of the trench and the precise angle of the bullet from a machine gun two hundred metres away -’ he dashes the tips of his fingers on his temple ‘finished. You are hiding in a house, and your baby daughter then – just then, as the guard comes by – she hiccups or she starts to cry – finished.’