‘When? Where did it come from?’
‘Just a shop. A shop in Cambridge. A couple of weeks ago. I happened to stop there – I saw it and I thought it might be nice to… you know. To ask her to marry me.’
Bree rubbed her eyes. It felt like there was grit in them.
‘I think,’ Alex continued, ‘I – I don’t know. I don’t know what made me think she would say yes. I know she’s got… she’s much more experienced than me, is what. And she’s got what she calls “issues around commitment”. She’s said that before. She didn’t have a normal family, like I did – she was fostered when she was a teenager and never sees her birth parents. Never talks about them.’
There was a very long silence between them. Alex drew the space blanket tighter around his shoulders, and Bree tugged at where the fabric of her blouse had wedged into her armpit.
‘How did you find me?’ Alex asked.
‘Dumb luck,’ said Bree. ‘We’d lost you. But the man who was chasing you – we had a fix on his cellphone. You can triangulate them. Good as a tracking device. He followed you and we followed him.’
‘How did he find me?’ said Alex. Bree shrugged. A known unknown.
‘I don’t know what they had on you. My boss thought they were getting information from inside our organisation. There’s a lot riding on this.’
‘But why did you think I had this thing of yours in the first place?’
‘We were watching the Banacharski Ring…’
‘The Banacharski Ring? It’s a web ring. An academic group. We share papers about maths.’
‘Ostensibly. Our cryptographers say different.’
‘Not ostensibly. Really. Isla -’
‘Isla Holderness?’
‘Yes, exactly. Isla set it up after she corresponded with him. It’s just a website with a discussion forum attached. My supervisor took it over when she left. He was friendly with Isla when they were at Cambridge together, before her accident.’
‘Uh-huh? OK. So tell me about your supervisor.’
‘Mike? Not much to tell. He’s a research fellow at my college. We meet for supervisions. I show him my work. Sometimes we have a drink. That’s it…’
‘Mike Hollis?’
Alex looked perplexed. ‘You know him?’
‘No,’ said Bree. ‘Colleagues of mine were interested in him.’
Alex shook his head. He still had no idea what was going on. He wondered where Carey was now, and then pushed the thought out of his mind.
‘Hollis sent an email,’ said Bree. ‘He mentioned you. He said he was leaving the ring in your hands. Shortly afterwards, you left for America. And here you are with the ring. Are we not expected to find that suspicious?’
‘This is a ring I bought for my girlfriend,’ Alex said, past exasperation, ‘it has nothing to do with Mike, or Nicolas Banacharski, or anybody else. I bought it. Me, at random, in a shop. Mike was leaving me in charge of the Banacharski Ring’s website while he went on sabbatical.’
Bree thought: what a mess. None of this made any sense. Another wave of exhaustion hit her. And now, when she thought she’d been bringing a loose end in, she might have been doing the opposite. She decided all she could do was breach it.
‘Your girlfriend?’ Bree said.
‘Carey, yes.’ He added bitterly: ‘Ex-girlfriend.’
‘She the last number you dialled on your cell?’
‘I don’t remember,’ said Alex.
‘Number ending -’ Bree pulled his cellphone out of her pocket and consulted the screen – ‘137 0359?’
‘Give me that!’ Alex said, snatching it back from her. She let it go.
‘She’s on her way here,’ said Bree. ‘I called her. Said you were in trouble and to come. She sounded a little drunk. It was hard to make out whether she was taking it in. But I said you were going to be here. Said you needed help.’
‘What? Why?’ Alex, panicking, even through his tiredness. It felt like a humiliation – even after everything, seeing Carey was…
‘Because you’re in trouble, and you need help.’
‘Trouble?’
‘Dead people. Me. You’re in lots of trouble.’ Bree gave it a moment, looked at her well-bitten fingernails. ‘But you’re right. It wasn’t for you, not strictly, that I called her. I thought she was your connection here. I thought you were going to pass the machine over to her.’
Alex started to say something, but she interrupted. ‘Yeah, yeah. I know. There’s no machine. You’re here to see your girlfriend. You don’t know what I’m talking about…’
‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. He was standing now. Fidgeting with his hands. His cheeks looked like they had been gouged from limestone. He wasn’t acting like someone who had been caught by a government agency trying to smuggle a weapon through a strange country. He was acting like somebody who was unbearably miserable at the prospect of confronting his ex-girlfriend.
Bree made a decision. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘Go. You don’t need to be here.’
‘But I thought…’
‘Yeah,’ said Bree. She shrugged, but didn’t smile. ‘So did I. This whole thing started as a mess and now it’s a worse one. Go. I know where you are. Go get some sleep.’ Bree did not add that, having been through Alex’s wallet and tagged his mobile phone, she knew how to find him if she needed to. ‘Enjoy Vegas,’ she added.
She watched as he walked towards the wide doors. The security guard watched him walk through, then looked back to Bree, then scratched his gut and rearranged his shoulders. That probably figured. Still no police. Perhaps miracles did happen.
Bree leaned back in the seat, comfortable as she could get, and let her eyes close.
Chapter 23
‘Something odd.’ It was Porlock, standing at Red Queen’s desk. Red Queen didn’t remember him having had the courtesy to knock on the door. ‘Look.’
He put a sheet of paper on the chewed red leather of the desk. It was a stock chart, showing a company’s share price falling off a cliff.
‘MIC. Last fifteen minutes. We’ve been watching them – ever since this started. But this you could get on the evening news. The chief investor just dumped all their stock on the market. All of it. It’s bad. A cascade effect. The stock’s toxic.’
‘Is the government invested?’ asked Red Queen innocently.
Porlock looked sarcastic.
‘Every government that buys or sells arms is invested. The consequences could be-’
‘For who? The consequences for who?’
‘Everyone,’ said Porlock, whose usual expression of imperturbability had given way to one that looked almost ironical. Porlock, it occurred to Red Queen, would look ironical aboard the Titanic. ‘This will go through the world economy like a hurricane. Contracts cancelled, jobs lost.’
‘This investor…’ said Red Queen.
‘Nobody knows about him,’ said Porlock. He swung his hand back and forth in front of his chest like a paddle. ‘Nobody knew he even existed until recently. There were so many institutional investors in the company that who bothered to check which was what? Until this started happening, and a lot of forensic accounting was done very fast and in breach of all ethics and international agreements. The simultaneous stock dumps. It looked like a concerted attack. Each of them traced back several layers. A name associated with a network of accounts in Switzerland. Sleeping partner. Seemingly bottomless pockets. If there was a share loose, he bought it.’
‘Nazi gold?’ asked Red Queen.
‘Nothing that simple, I don’t think. Nor that small-time. The Nazis didn’t have that much gold. MIC was in trouble by ’99, sure – not much more than a think tank attached to a logo. There’d been bad press about its wartime history and, like everyone, a lot of investment in new tech that turned out to be imaginary. But it was still an arms company: still big. Still not the kind of thing you take control of with pocket change.