‘I have my music.’
Grenzenlos smiled benignly. ‘Of course.’
Their discussion lasted thirty minutes. In the course of it, the psychologist took an interest in Klein’s life and mental processes, but it did not occur to him to wonder, at any point, what her life might be like.
Grenzenlos was obviously a nom de guerre; no one can exist without borders, and he resolved to follow that up, but he would never know that she was happier at work than she was at home, a place she returned to with great reluctance since her husband would be there and their relationship was toxic in the extreme. He couldn’t explain, or if he could, refused to do so, the sudden rages which overcame him with increasing frequency, rages directed at her. It hadn’t always been like this, of course, but if Klein had known, he would surely have wondered how it came about that a woman accredited with insight into the workings of the mind or, as he thought of it, the psyche, could have let things come to such a pass.
29
Pearson’s business was aptly named, Klandestein suggestive of the dubious methods he employed. In more reflective moments, he knew he should have resisted the temptation to be clever, since being pleased with himself would surely lead to his downfall, though hopefully not before current events played out.
When he’d left her apartment after his earlier visit, Lang checked for any little gift he might have left behind, paying particular attention to the potted plants which he claimed to find so attractive. A thorough search took ten minutes, so when he contacted her again, she saved a further ten by meeting him in the Café Air. That he could bug if he liked.
‘Good morning, Frau Lang,’ he said when he arrived, ‘sorry to keep you waiting. Traffic.’ His gaze wandered to her hands. ‘No knitting with you today, I see.’
‘Your powers of observation do you credit.’
Pearson looked round the café at the other customers.
‘What do you think they do all day, these young people, with their phones and laptops?’
Lang smiled a little too sweetly. ‘I’m sure you have the wherewithal to find out.’ She rose from the table. ‘What would you like?’
But he insisted on buying his chai latte himself. She looked at it disapprovingly; more of a dessert than a drink and in no way refreshing.
‘I know, I’ve read the articles, the equivalent of twenty spoonfuls of sugar. But something’s going to get us, right? It might as well be something we like.’
He glanced towards the tables outside. A Leonberger as big as a pony was waiting patiently near the door.
‘I wonder who he belongs to. Love big dogs, don’t you? But,’ he said, in a businesslike tone, ‘we’re here for a reason.’
‘You wish to discuss the meeting.’
He wanted her opinion free of formal constraints.
‘Then this is strictly off the record, Mr Pearson.’
‘Of course.’ He stood up, took off his jacket and held out his arms. ‘Not wired, Frau Lang, frisk me all you want.’
How easily he gets his thrills, she thought, declined his offer, and reviewed the meeting as she had seen it. Pearson sat back in his chair for a moment, toying with his drink, apparently lost in thought.
‘Right,’ Lang said, ‘your turn.’
To her surprise he actually told her.
‘My best guess is that Gudrun Grönefeld removed samples of avian flu virus from Parndorf and passed them to Catherine Cooper, probably in Prague. I know they met there and it wasn’t by way of a cultural exchange. Cooper then took them back with her to Berlin, where she sent them on for collection in Los Angeles by a Mr Herschel J Wood.’
‘I have never heard of this man.’
Since he didn’t exist, this was not surprising.
‘Wood is an alias of Gina Saito, Cooper’s contact in California.’
‘I see.’
‘My opinion? We should work on this together.’
Though that might well be a sensible way forward, Lang suspected he was talking to her with the intention of bypassing Dieter Klein. He looked out of the window to the street outside.
‘Nice park, that.’
‘It used to be a cemetery.’
‘Really? Not a portent of things to come, I trust.’
‘Anyway, you mentioned working together. I take it you’ve come with a suggested division of labour.’
‘Frankly, Frau Lang, there’s a problem with my take on all this.’
More than one, Lang thought, but she started with the most obvious.
‘So how do you suppose Grönefeld removed the virus from Breakout without being detected?’
‘Haven’t a clue.’
‘And assuming it was her, how do you suppose she did it without infecting herself in the process?’
‘That bothers me too. You say you weren’t around when Breitenbach and Heidegger peeled off to the labs, so if they reviewed all that, we have no idea what they said.’
‘According to Pienaar, they’ve passed all their inspections; which is true, I’ve checked.’
‘Even so.’
Not the most helpful response; he was holding her off while he thought.
‘You could perhaps follow that up, Frau Lang, get hold of the latest inspection report, check out any colleague who might have helped her. I don’t see how she could have done it alone.’
Since Parndorf was in Austria, this wasn’t as easy as he made it sound. But there were ways.
‘And you?’
‘There’s much to follow up at the US end. Saito is clearly female.’
‘So is half the population.’
‘True, but it raises an obvious question: how could a Japanese woman turn up at a mail counter claiming to be a man called Herschel J Wood? I mean, come on, check this!’
He produced a review of the latest must-have device to hit the online retail outlets: the Sensor C autonomous vacuum cleaner. Under the title SUCKITUP AND C, the article was accompanied by a photograph of the author.
Lang scanned the text. Just lie back and let Sensor C do the work. All you have to do? Shut your dog in the broom cupboard for a while and keep your feet off the floor.
‘These people can’t be serious.’
But Pearson had no interest in the words, from his point of view entirely beside the point.
‘The photograph, Frau Lang. The photograph!’
He was right. There was no way a young Japanese woman could pass herself off as Wood, a middle-aged, bespectacled gentleman with pale Caucasian tendencies.
‘You wonder how she collected the parcel.’
According to Pearson, this was obvious: someone had done it for her.
‘If I can track that someone down, presumably a man, making the link to Saito will be easy, a piece of cake.’
‘And you propose to do that how?’
‘We know when the package was signed for and the mail centre’s counter is covered by CCTV.’
As far as Lang knew, and she’d looked into it, Pearson was a one-man operation, and that man was not in LA, he was sitting with her here in Berlin.
‘I assume you have contacts in LA.’
‘Let’s just say,’ he said, drumming his fingers on the table and lowering his voice to an unrecordable level, ‘let’s just say that I have certain connections. In any case, I’m heading there tomorrow.’
Lang looked hard at Pearson as his gaze strayed again to the dog outside, now with its owner. Why was he so sure that the source of the avian flu outbreak at Los Angeles was traceable to Catherine Cooper? It was all so circumstantial. When she put this to him, he looked uncomfortable, as close as he could ever come to looking guilty.
‘Well, the thing of it is, Frau Lang, and this is strictly between you, me and the gatepost, Cooper was heard to make a specific reference to H7N9 before mailing anything.’
‘To Gudrun Grönefeld?’
By now, Pearson was looking positively shifty. ‘This goes no farther.’
‘We’ve established that.’
‘All right then. Since you ask, she made the remark to her cat.’
Despite herself, Lang was visited by a cartoon image of Catherine Cooper’s cat, the bell on his collar concealing a microphone planted there by Pearson, who’d got round him with a slab of line-caught haddock or cod.
‘She talked about avian flu to her cat!’
‘And not just any strain of the disease, Frau Lang.’ He produced a notebook from his jacket pocket, opened it at the relevant page and read. If a passing eider duck lands on the balcony looking a bit off-colour with this H7N9 thing, you’ll have to exercise some self-control for once. Whatever you do, don’t eat it! He snapped his notebook shut with a rhetorical gesture intended to suggest that his case was as closed as his notebook. ‘So what do you make of that!’
‘Amazing. Why would she do that? It makes no sense.’
Pearson assumed that Lang’s question did not concern what Catherine Cooper had said but who she had said it to.
‘Bear in mind that Cooper lives alone.’ He dug a dollop of chai latte out of the cup with his spoon and sucked it clean. ‘She talks to her cat a lot. Confides in him, you might say, runs her problems past him.’
Lang lived alone too, so what did he think she did of an evening, talk to her plants?
‘I see.’
What she saw was that Pearson had bugged Cooper’s flat and there was no way he’d been authorised to do it. She was about to challenge him on the point when, out of nowhere as it seemed, a Leonberger approached on silent pads and pushed his snout under her arm, its owner just behind him.
Pearson had clocked him on the street. ‘Well, well, look who the dog dragged in!’
‘You remember Werner Vogt, our most recent recruit?’ Werner looked embarrassed as she said it. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’
‘Officially, walking the dog.’
‘Unofficially?’
Pearson answered for him. ‘Klein has asked young Werner here to keep an eye on us, right, son?’
‘Right.’
‘And I’m willing to bet he didn’t say why.’
‘Reading between the lines, he seems to suspect you of setting him up, something to do with grass.’
Though she knew exactly what Werner was referring to, Lang couldn’t resist pulling his leg. ‘Klein doesn’t do cannabis.’
‘He doesn’t do humour either.’
Pearson didn’t rate humourless people: when you came right down to it, life was one big joke.
Lang was puzzled. ‘I’m surprised you’re telling us this. Klein would consider it a betrayal. You know what he’s like.’
Werner sank his fingers into Theo’s thick coat, for him a living comfort blanket.
‘Actually, I don’t. I can’t figure him out at all.’
Pearson smiled. ‘Join the club.’
‘And you should know,’ Werner said, ‘that making no secret of it was his idea.’
‘Ah,’ Pearson sighed, ‘the old technique. He doesn’t expect to discover anything; all he wants to do is to keep us on the straight and narrow.’
But Pearson’s suspicions that Werner was a Klein in the making were reinforced when he left Theo in their charge to order a coffee.
‘Did you hear that? Decaffeinated! For Christ’s sake, what’s with this guy? You either do drugs or you don’t.’
30
Back in his office, free from any suggestion of artwork on the wall or potted plants on the window ledge, Pearson had drummed up the thinking – though it would be more accurate to say that his software flagged up connections he might not have noticed for himself. Some years before, he had been hired by Charles Ventris who, at the time, was identifying genes, which was fine, but attempting to patent them, which was not. This had provoked indignation among fellow geneticists whose prime objective was the pursuit of knowledge rather than the accumulation of wealth in offshore accounts. It had also provoked outrage among the hard-liners of The Lord Alone.
As yet, no one knew who these people were, but they had a clear take on the issue. The Lord, who had created every gene on the planet, had made no attempt to patent any of them, so it ill behoved an unscrupulous money-grubbing piece of filth like Ventris to seek material gain from His work. They made their displeasure clear in statements to the media, often expressed in the biblical language of pestilence and plague, and clearer still in death threats directed at Ventris who, as one of several precautions, had hired Pearson to review his security and that of Ventris Labs in Madison, Wisconsin.
Though he paid well, Pearson hadn’t taken to Ventris at all. When he’d first met him five years before, he’d struck him as a man whose success had convinced him of his intelligence. Full of himself didn’t cover it. Regardless of how controversial his position, he was always absolutely right. But if he was so intelligent, why was he letting his body go to seed? He had to know that couldn’t be good.
And here they were again, in the Club Room of Ventris’ hotel. What was left of him had reached fifty-eight years of age. His hair, once brown, was silver shading to white, including his neatly trimmed beard and moustache. Concerned as always about his legacy, he was turning his attention to cryogenics with a view to insuring himself and others, though mainly himself, against present disease with the aid of future medical advances. Taking in the expanse of stomach under his shirt and evidence of slight hearing loss, Pearson thought he might have been better uploading his brain into the cloud via one of his many powerful computers. Ventris was not impressed.
‘Let’s get real here, Adalbert, where did you get that one: Star Trek?’
Disconcerted by the use of a given name which Ventris clearly found amusing, Pearson listened to Ventris’ argument, which boiled down to the view that any human personality, particularly his, consisted of two components: the conscious and the unconscious minds.
‘By the way,’ he explained, ‘I refuse to recognise the term “subconscious”. It suggests something of lesser quality which, in my experience, is far from the case. Indeed, I would argue,’ he continued in apostolic tones, ‘that any major scientific advance is the result of nothing less than a consecutive integration of the personality on the part of the scientist concerned.’
‘I see.’
‘I doubt that. Anyway, the creative part, the original insight, rises unbidden from the depths. Only then can the conscious mind get to work on it. And this process,’ he said, leaning forward in his chair for added emphasis, ‘should not be confused with the divine afflatus! It has a perfectly rational explanation.’
Pearson was tempted to lean forward in his chair too, not to emphasise anything but to rescue his back from the pressure of its hardwood rails and his elbows from its equally hard armrests. The fact that a chair had a quality look was fine with him, though comfort mattered more. But Ventris hadn’t finished.
‘So with respect to your suggestion, which I like to think was a joke, the problem is simple. The conscious mind operates like a computer, it thinks things out, so it may be possible at some stage to upload a conscious mind to a computer. But the unconscious mind, every bit as important, does not work like a computer and could not be so uploaded. It’s fantasy, nothing more, pie in the sky. Or as we might say in this case, pie in the cloud.’
Ventris had just published a paper on the creative process in The Philosophy of Scientific Advance, a quarterly inclined to accept it since he was a major sponsor. Diving into his monogrammed briefcase, he extracted an offprint and pressed it on Pearson lest he forget the intricacies of his argument after he left.
‘Misquote me at your peril,’ he said, with a menacing smile. ‘So, Mr Pearson, to what do we owe the pleasure?’
Because Ventri
s looked at his watch as he asked, Pearson came straight to the point.
‘You’re planning to meet with a Japanese national by the name of Saito tomorrow at twelve.’
Ventris looked interested. ‘Supposing I am, how could you possibly know? All communications with me and my office use end-to-end encryption, one of your recommendations when you assessed our security at Madison.’
‘Your PA, Alexis.’
‘Don’t tell me, she’s leaking like a sieve.’ But he didn’t believe that and tried again. ‘She’s a plant from the NSA.’ Then, as they often did, his thoughts turned to sex. ‘She’s entertaining one of your operatives between the sheets. No, wait, she’s entertaining you between the sheets!’ He looked Pearson up and down. ‘Okay, maybe not.’
Pearson had been about to explain that while Ventris’ communications were secure, his PA’s diary was not, but given his rudeness, decided to keep the information to himself. Hell mend the bastard, he thought.
‘There is a possibility, quite strong in my opinion, that Saito intends to approach you with an offer which may be tempting but is almost certainly dangerous. I believe she has in her possession…’
He stopped mid-sentence as Ventris held up his hand and checked the other occupants of the Club Room, several of whom were in conversation around a nearby table.
‘This information of yours, is it commercially sensitive?’
‘It may well be,’ Pearson admitted, ‘but that’s the least of it. We’re talking national security here.’
‘In that case, we should continue elsewhere.’
With silent flight, the elevator took them to their next destination and Ventris showed him into war room seven which, with its large table covered in dark plum-coloured cloth and laptops open for those attending, seemed just a bit intimidating. Perhaps that was the intention: after all, war is a serious business.
‘There are several of these here,’ Ventris explained, ‘legal war rooms, fully equipped and very secure. I’m meeting my team here in ten minutes.’ He ushered him in and shut the door. ‘So if you can make this quick.’
The Ears of a Cat Page 13