The Sandpit

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Updark said: ‘We picked this up in the café where he liked to take breakfast. The waiter overheard Marvar talking to himself before he leaped up and rushed off. He sounded pretty excited about something – so excited that he forgot to ask for the bill. This was last Friday morning. One week and three days ago.’

  He unfolded the white paper napkin with tremendous care, as if it might detonate. Scribbled on it in black ink, among the coffee stains and dried egg yolk, was the beginning of what looked like a mathematical formula.

  ‘Mean anything to you?’ asked Hissop.

  ‘It may be nothing,’ Updark broke in, ‘but we can’t afford the risk of it being something.’

  Dyer stared at the scribble. All at once, the sandpit reeled back. In among the small, imperfectly obliterated mounds, the same figure 7 and letter M.

  They were watching him closely.

  ‘It looks like fried egg.’

  Updark stood up and rammed his fist into his palm. His cheekbones were livid, as if they had been slapped and weren’t suffering from the mysterious allergy that he had contracted immediately on his return to England, as he explained to Dyer in the car, and for which he was having to undergo patch-testing. Three days, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. A plastic sheet on his wrist, with aluminium chambers containing allergens for ‘suspect agents’. Updark was relieved to speak about it, sharing the details as they came up the stairs, once Dyer’s person had been thoroughly searched – Updark’s interrogation by two top dermatologists in Milton Keynes, their prognosis. Had he been bitten? Had he used another shampoo, soap, shaving cream? What had he done differently, where had he been? They were speculating, really. There was no diagnosis for it – Granuloma faciale was the best they could do. ‘They don’t know, that’s the point. Sometimes it just disappears.’ They weren’t ruling out stress, he had told Dyer optimistically.

  Not much optimism in his face now.

  ‘You’re pulling my pisser, Basil.’

  Reverted to a nickname, Dyer could have been back in Upper One.

  Updark reached up and smoothed his hair. He liked people who had been at the Phoenix to remind him of himself when he was at the Phoenix, with the world laid out before him. Dyer did not. ‘I don’t think you appreciate how high the stakes are. The numbers, damn you. Look at them.’

  Dyer pushed away the napkin. ‘If you recall, I was never good at numbers.’

  ‘He didn’t give anything to you?’ Updark persisted. He was still standing. With his blotched red face. Yanking a disobedient creature by the leash.

  ‘Why would he? As I told you, I hardly know him.’

  But Dyer’s mind was racing. His account of their conversation, which he had devoted much of Sunday to writing out – was it downstairs in his shoulder bag? On the kitchen table? He had a memory of moving the pages to one side on Sunday evening as he helped Leandro plot the disposition of the British and French fleets at Trafalgar.

  Updark was rapping his notebook against his leg.

  Just then, Lorna interrupted to say that Updark was wanted upstairs.

  ‘I’ll be back pronto,’ he promised in a detached voice. His glance flickered again to the paper napkin on the tray. Then he closed his notebook and slipped it into his jacket pocket and left.

  Hissop said: ‘I think we need another coffee. Lorna!’ and to Dyer: ‘She’s my secretary.’

  ‘I’m not really his secretary.’

  ‘Well, whatever you are, please get us some more coffee.’

  To Dyer, taking his white mug from him: ‘Black still OK for you?’

  He nodded, and suddenly recognised what was familiar in her voice – as unmistakeable as the sound of the curlew – and in the gingery taste of her flapjacks. ‘Where up north are you from?’

  ‘Near Sedburgh.’ She looked at Dyer. ‘With that accent thy’s not a southern soft either.’

  ‘Too right I’m not.’ His mother’s family were from Clitheroe. They hardly ever crossed the Shap Divide to go up to Penrith, he told her. His grandmother viewed everyone not from their region as an ‘off-comer’, could barely bring herself to speak to them.

  Her turn to smile. ‘You don’t seem very keen, either, to share what you know. Maybe once you have the full picture, you’ll see why it’s so important that you help us as much as you can.’

  Left alone with Dyer, Hissop said to him: ‘Iran. Ever been there?’

  No, said Dyer, but there was a time when his newspaper had wanted to send him, and he was tempted. In the 1950s, an English poet he admired had served in Tehran as the Times’s special correspondent, until his expulsion.

  Hissop had not heard of Basil Bunting. He brushed the crumbs off his shirt. ‘Time I was there, it wasn’t very funny either. I tell our chaps: Don’t lose your temper. Count to ten on lots of occasions. If you say: “Listen I’m not going to pay you, you arrogant bastard, because you’re lazy and corrupt,” you’re not going to get over the border in a hurry, but this is what our American friends tend to do and wonder why they’re not home in time for dinner.’

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘Long story, don’t worry about it. But you’ve worked in South America. You know the smell of the lonely roads at night.’

  Presently, Updark returned. He retrieved from his jacket the small spiral-bound notebook in which earlier he had entered Dyer’s answers, and glanced at it. ‘Where were we? Oh, yes, you were saying Marvar didn’t give you anything.’

  ‘That’s not quite true,’ said Dyer. ‘He did leave his overcoat behind. I’ve been wondering how to return it. If he’s gone missing, that explains why I haven’t heard from him.’

  The unstiffening was minuscule, but Dyer detected a relaxation in Updark’s response, as if he was quite pleased that Dyer had mentioned the overcoat. ‘You have no inkling where he might be?’

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘These physicists love to go hiking,’ said Hissop, somewhat joylessly. ‘They say it’s good for clearing their minds,’ and he read out the names of four scientists and their favourite mountain ranges. ‘Did Marvar mention any hiking?’

  ‘What, in February? Without his coat?’ Dyer laughed. He wasn’t going to tell them about Ullswater, and he could be reasonably certain that Marvar hadn’t told anyone else. ‘You’ve seen him,’ appealing to Updark. ‘He’s an alien to all forms of physical exercise, I’d have thought.’

  ‘If he is on the run, then he’d better clean his rear mirror,’ said Hissop in the same bleak tone. ‘There are a lot of people who won’t rest till he’s told them what he knows – or else he’s chopped up in bags in their freezer, to borrow a phrase. And I mean a lot.’

  ‘Before we get into that,’ said Updark, ‘I still haven’t formed a clear picture of the man. Roly?’

  ‘“Rude, sarcastic, touchy, withdrawn, monosyllabic,”’ Hissop read from a page clipped to his board. ‘But also: “Smart, loyal, witty, patriotic, creative, deft.”’

  Updark turned to Dyer. ‘How did he impress you?’

  ‘I barely knew him, as I keep saying. But if you want me to add to your list, I’d say honest, sensitive, confused, frightened, and, as I told you, physically out of shape.’

  ‘Not a rabble-rouser then?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so, no.’

  Updark sighed. ‘Show him, Roly.’

  Hissop unclipped a photograph and handed it to Dyer.

  The colours had faded, but Marvar could be seen clearly. Much younger, leaner, his features sharpened by a moustache, like a leftist student. He was marching in a crowd down a foreign street under a blue sky. He held up a placard and his mouth was open as if he were shouting something.

  Dyer smiled.

  Updark studied him. ‘Did he tell you he was an activist? No, I don’t suppose he did.’

  ‘If he was an activist,’ said Dyer, who all at once could picture Marvar fired up – by Heisenberg, by Houtermans, by the regime’s treatment of his mother – ‘then I’m sure it was for democracy.�
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  ‘Did he tell you that he studied engineering before he switched to physics?’

  ‘He did not.’

  ‘Well, let’s put aside for the moment that most jihadis have engineering backgrounds. Let’s also agree that he was demonstrating for democracy, and that he is every one of those things you say he is, and he was not sent as a spy by the regime to continue research that would benefit them. Let’s further assume that since leaving Iran he has become a really good mechanical engineer as well as a plasma physicist, and that he has by some extraordinary and unanticipated miracle done what we think. But here I come to something that puzzles me. No one else rates him so highly. Not here, not in Tehran, not anywhere. The man who wants to crack fusion has to take a pretty big size in hats. From whichever angle you view it, Rustum Marvar’s head doesn’t fit.’

  Hissop nodded. ‘Frankly, he was below our radar.’

  ‘Not only our radar.’ Updark glanced at Dyer. ‘I’m only telling you what my people tell me. Your friend Rustum is not exactly high up in the pecking order of brilliant Iranian scientists. The chief nuclear negotiator has never heard of him. Same in Oxford.’

  Hissop said: ‘He has no affiliation with any college. He doesn’t have students. He’s basically just a junior researcher, part of a group of eight PHD students with a professor in charge.’

  ‘What does his professor say?’ asked Dyer.

  Hissop coughed. ‘Marvar wasn’t terribly well connected to the head of the group.’

  ‘Professor Bruce Whitton,’ Updark expanded acidly, stretching out his leg, ‘is a great believer in the doctrine of economy of effort. He is more interested in another branch of plasma research, and is far too busy raising money for that, plus going to All Souls for dinner. He professes incomprehension at the idea of Marvar’s so-called breakthrough. Roly?’ He picked up his mug, waiting for Hissop to locate the note.

  Hissop read out: ‘“Plodding, erratic, paddling his own canoe up a dead-end tributary of plasma focus.” Whitton finds it beyond inconceivable that this man should have stumbled on the answer to nuclear fusion. “What did he use as fuel? He didn’t have access to tritium.” Also, Whitton is in a rush to remind us that a lot of the claims in the past have turned out to be bogus. They appear viable at first, but scratch – and the evidence doesn’t exist. There was that German scientist in Argentina in the 1950s. All that palaver about cold fusion in the 1980s. Then the false dawns with ZETA and TFTR and JET. One after another, each of these so-called discoveries has been dissed.’

  ‘Then why not listen to Whitton?’ said Dyer, marvelling at how easy it had been to lead them into full disclosure.

  ‘As a matter of fact, Whitton’s not our main source on this,’ said Hissop, flushing.

  ‘The thing that’s changed,’ said Updark, as if Dyer’s question had been answered, ‘is that a single entrepreneur sitting in a room now has the tools and the lack of bureaucratic encumbrance to outdevelop and outsmart governments. You don’t need big labs. All you need is a very small team on a very small budget.’

  ‘What about others in the group?’ persisted Dyer. ‘Wouldn’t they have an idea?’

  ‘Roly, you’ve spoken to them,’ said Updark. ‘They had little or no contact with him, am I correct?’

  ‘He seems not to have collaborated with anyone else on the team,’ Hissop confirmed. ‘Whitton ran a pretty open lab. Not much security. Marvar was free to come and go.’

  ‘What we are saying,’ said Updark, ‘is that he’s not a high-value asset. He doesn’t count, he doesn’t move the needle, he’s small fry. But then again – and it doesn’t really sound logical – if anyone is going to break through the fusion barrier, it’s likely to be someone who has been ignored. Discoverers are dull. Look at Fritz Zwicky.’

  ‘Who’s Fritz Zwicky?’ asked Dyer.

  ‘Responsible for arguably the most spectacular discovery of the twentieth century. Dunkle Materie, or in plain English, dark matter. But for forty years no one took him seriously – just like our guy. No, the part that is hard for me to believe is that Marvar did this in a university lab over what sounds like a weekend.’

  ‘There are surprises. Surprises happen.’ Hissop was leafing through his notes. ‘There was widespread underestimation in the West after the Second World War of Russia’s capability to make bombs. Then in the 1960s the Russians achieved great advances in fusion with the tokamak. We’ve probably committed the same miscalculation with North Korea. But up until this moment,’ referring to his digital watch, ‘ten-thirty-seven a.m., Monday, twenty-eighth of February, two thousand and blah blah, no one has found a simple way to achieve fusion – and definitely not without massive government backing.’

  ‘So if it isn’t bullshit,’ said Updark, ‘the next question we have to ask is this. If he has indeed found a way, then has he done so on his own, or is another government now involved? And if our errant asteroid hasn’t done it on his own, has he done a bunk? And if he hasn’t done a bunk, has he been taken, and if so by who?’

  He folded his arms and sat back. ‘Roly, could you ask Lorna if we might trouble her for a moment?’

  Chapter Nineteen

  WHILE HISSOP WENT OFF TO fetch Lorna, Updark unfolded his arms and helped himself to one of her flapjacks. His attitude was less peevish, more reconciliatory, as if he was thinking that Dyer might be softening up a bit, but had first needed to be told things in order to play the game.

  ‘Fusion research has been declassified since 1958. Inter-cooperation is the name of the game. Want to know the cynical reason? Because no one has the knowledge, it’s so bloody difficult. But the moment it looks like someone is going to make a dollar out of it, then cooperation will be flat on its face. Right now, there’s a race on in Livermore, in Cadarache, in Moscow, in Beijing – in various places around Oxford, too.’ He spoke in the confident voice of this city, the baritone that commanded ships and government ministries and embassies.

  ‘These things always come much quicker than you think. That’s why everyone lives in terror of the other side’s advantage. There’s not a scientist on earth who wouldn’t stamp on his grandmother’s neck to be first with the discovery.’

  His teeth clamped down, scattering flakes of oatmeal. He pondered as he slowly ate, a ruminative expression settling on his face.

  ‘Has Marvar beaten them to it? If so, does that mean Iran has the knowledge? Because this would change the whole game of marbles.

  ‘We know the Mullahs are desperate for any edge in the nuclear stake. The rhetoric coming out of Tehran suggests they might have got hold of something. That’s what the Americans feel.’

  ‘You mean Cubbage?’ It came out uncalculated and Dyer instantly regretted it.

  Updark stopped chewing. He lifted his chin. ‘Now why would you say that?’

  ‘I can put two and two together as well as anybody.’

  ‘Did Marvar talk to you about Ralph Cubbage?’

  ‘He had his suspicions about him.’

  ‘So he did talk about Cubbage,’ Updark insisted in a berating tone.

  ‘Only that he suspected Cubbage of working for the CIA.’

  ‘A moment ago, you said Marvar hadn’t told you about his work.’

  ‘I said he told me a little.’

  ‘Partial to a bit of flower-arranging with the truth when it’s inconvenient, are we, John?’

  ‘Look, what’s the point of asking questions if you’ve made up your mind?’

  ‘You’re still fobbing us off,’ said Updark, anger further colouring his face, ‘is what’s poking out at me like a dog’s balls.’

  ‘Well, you’d know more about dogs’ balls than I would,’ said Dyer in a defiant voice.

  Silence.

  ‘How are the flapjacks?’ came Lorna’s cheerful voice.

  Hissop stood behind her.

  She handed Dyer his mug, full to the brim with more warm black coffee.

  Dyer smiled at her. ‘Exceptional.’

  Updark groan
ed: ‘Marvar knew about Cubbage.’

  Hissop let out with irritation: ‘Cubbage is a real pain in the orchestra stalls.’

  Unbothered, Updark looked over at Dyer. He conceded sulkily: ‘We’re not happy with the Americans.’

  Dyer was conscious of Lorna bringing over a cube to sit on. ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Why. Is. That,’ Updark repeated very slowly. ‘Let’s ask Lorna,’ and to Dyer: ‘Lorna’s our Chief Analyst. She knows all about Americans. Please tell John what you know, Lorna.’

  Lorna impressed from the moment she opened her mouth. She was like his straight-talking aunt when Vivien showed her training and danced. Under that skirt, that smile, all sinew and steel.

  She looked directly into Dyer’s eyes. She didn’t need notes. She was in command of her material.

  ‘Where do I begin?’ in her North Country voice that summoned up for Dyer a small front drawing room in which his grandmother only ever used to serve tea on a silver tray with home-made Eccles cakes, exactly as she had taught both her daughters to bake.

  ‘Do I start in the 1950s, when the Americans refused to share their nuclear secrets? Which didn’t stop us going from zero to having the H-bomb within three years.

  ‘Or do I jump to 1975, when Henry Kissinger agreed to sell nuclear energy equipment to Iran for six billion dollars’ worth of business, with his besties Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld?

  ‘Or to the year of our Lord 2000, when those selfsame individuals stopped at nothing to deny Iran access to identical technology?

  ‘Or do I fast-forward to the decade between 2005 and 2015, and to America’s claims that it was the US who paid the economic price once sanctions were imposed on Iran, when in fact it was the EU who suffered most economically?

  ‘Or should I kick off in 2015 when, behind our backs, the Americans used the EU’s oil sanctions as their biggest card in the secret negotiations that they had with Iran, in fundamental violation of EU sovereignty?

  ‘That’s not such a bad moment to start, since it’s also the year Republican senators with outstretched arms welcomed Israeli lobbying against the deal – when Israel was not even a party to the agreement. And yet the Republicans didn’t allow us – America’s closest ally – to have any say in the debate. As of this moment, it’s the old guard in the Republican Party who pose a greater threat to world peace than the Revolutionary Guard in Tehran. After my experience with both sides – and I was at Livermore during the failure of three weapons tests – I am coming to the conclusion that it may be easier to negotiate with Iran than with Congress.’