Niedermeyer clearly did not like the idea. Leith felt his cold eyes flicking over him. Leith smiled.
'But first we'll start with some introductions.'
Niedermeyer nodded. 'The gentleman on the end is General Cauthen, he represents the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The next gentleman along is Gordon Williams, our presidential advisor. The gentleman to my left is Stafford Holm and next to him is Edward Lauthe. They are Deputy Director, Support and Deputy Director, Plans respectively.'
Leith studied the backs of his nails. 'That's unfortunate.'
'What is?' Williams asked sharply. He was heavily built and almost bald. His voice was high, almost childish.
'You're all dangerously senior. System X has access to all our information sources. If it thought we were on to it I suspect we would be eliminated instantly. We've got away with it so far because the suspicions have filtered up from people at relatively junior levels like myself and Forbes.'
Niedermeyer cut in. 'This room is perfectly secure, I assure you. But more importantly, getting back to the warheads, how did you know? And do the Arab nations or China or anyone else know?'
'I wouldn't worry too much about the Chinese. My guess is they've got exactly the same problem.'
Cauthen sat forward. 'I'm glad you said that. I'd thought perhaps I was being optimistic in my interpretation of some of our intelligence reports from China. It's a difficult business tightening security while at the same time struggling to maintain the appearance of normality. It produces odd tensions that manifest themselves in unexpected ways. Why are you so sure the Chinese or anyone else for that matter are in the same position?'
Leith shook his head. 'No. I want some assurances before I start answering questions. I head the team that works on this. That's my minimum condition. I report to you, Niedermeyer. I never meet any of you others again, at least until this is resolved. The reports that you make to the people who manage you,' he looked at the presidential advisor, 'must also be purely verbal. Nothing we say must ever be encoded on a database or electronically recorded in any way because System X has access to it all. They mustn't be alerted.'
He looked at Niedermeyer.' You will temporarily promote Dr. Stan Nevis to run Forbes' department. Stallard will go back to work as though nothing has happened. Both men will report directly to me. The same applies to Durrell; he's my man from now on. Forbes' department is too central to divert its resources to investigating System X. It'd be too obvious. You'll put me in charge of my original section. They're what we'll use to continue the investigations.'
'Even in an overt sense, that jumps you up two levels of promotion, covertly it’s more like eight, if you were to become senior to Stallard. That kind of career leap is unheard of.'
'And it still will be. None of this goes on paper. My pay and conditions change only to accommodate my overt promotion to Nevis' position. Only you, Stallard, Nevis, Durrell and Forbes, if she returns before this thing starts to get nasty, are going to know what the chain of command really is.'
'Why do you say nasty?' Williams narrowed his eyes.
Leith ran his fingers across the keys of the terminal but didn't press any. 'System X has devoted a vast amount of resources to its project, which I think amounts to a kind of social engineering on a global scale. The trouble is...' he sighed,' the trouble is that it hasn't worked. They're going to have to try something else.'
When Leith didn't continue Niedermeyer shook his head. 'You've got to explain why you think that!'
'My conditions! Do you accept them or not?'
Niedermeyer looked unhappily at the other two Deputy Directors. They stared back blankly. Niedermeyer pursed his lips then turned back at Leith.
'I guess we have to,' he said evenly.
CHAPTER 12
Chilton, Washington
'The fourth dimension?' Stallard swirled his brandy. 'And they bought it?'
'What else could they do?'
Stallard looked across at Durrell. 'Don't let this man sell you anything, Tom old son. He's a devil when it comes to marketing.'
Durrell looked angry. He had done since his release from prison, when he'd been informed that a man he'd had tortured was now his boss. He'd kept very quiet.
The report of his capture had made interesting reading. His partial crushing by the Volvo's steering column had proven fortuitous for everyone concerned. He'd been unable to get at the Ingram submachine pistol he kept in a holster under his left armpit. Nevertheless, he had managed to account for the top two joints of a security guard's finger. The man had been trying to remove the poison pellet before Durrell could get to it.
They had finally clubbed him with the butts of their weapons until this, or the asphyxia brought on by hanging upside down by a safety strap, had rendered him unconscious.
Leith had forgotten about his own pellet until one of the arresting officers had spat copiously into his ear. He'd taken it as a gesture of contempt, until the man had started poking industriously at it.
A big purple bruise discoloured the point man's skin just forward of his right temple. His top lip had been split by one of the blows, and the medics said he'd probably cracked a couple of ribs. Despite this he showed not a hint of pain or discomfort.
The blazing fire cast huge inconstant shadows across the high moulded ceiling of the lounge. The faded embroidery of the chairs seemed to gain a new life under the light from the flames. Old but still comfortable, the armchairs were arranged in an arc about the burning logs. Stallard would occasionally select an iron from a Torquemada's assortment in a rack by the fireplace. With it he would perform arcane operations on the log, which never seemed to burn quite so well after. It looked like fun though.
Leith had moved in with Stallard at the man's insistence. His own house in Prester was too far out and too vulnerable, as Durrell's men had shown.
Stallard rolled back the sleeve of his silk dressing gown and poked at a log with a three-pronged iron. He was wearing a white shirt open at the collar and plain black trousers under the gown.
The log disappeared in a cloud of sparks. 'Naturally I'm familiar with the concept of the fourth dimension. I'm a big fan of the Twilight Zone, you know,' Stallard said, 'but perhaps you'd care to refresh my memory.'
Leith couldn't help laughing. He stretched out luxuriously and ran a hand across his chest, the fabric of his new white sweater still cotton wool soft. He'd treated himself. He felt he'd earned it.
'People shy away from the idea of a fourth dimension, but they forget that in reality we live in a world of scores of dimensions.'
'Scores,' said Stallard, his eyes sparkling, 'I see.'
Leith laughed again. 'It's true. Dimensions are just ways of measuring where you are. Right/left, up/down and front/back. But what about hot/clod, light/heavy, happy/sad. What about the colour of something, or even how much it's worth?
'All these things are variables that can be represented graphically, just like the position of something on a map. Just to describe this...' he touched a lamp beside him, 'I need to give not only its position, but all the other things I've mentioned, requiring a graph with six or seven axes, six or seven dimensions. And that's just the ones I could think of off the top of my head. There's others like reflectivity...'
'No, no, no,' Stallard chuckled, 'I know I'm just a dumb old Comptroller of Hemisphere Intelligence but I don't think these things are quite the same. Light/heavy and all the rest aren't spatial dimensions. That's what we're talking about here!'
'Ok, so you're hung up on this spatial business. I'd just like to suggest that in an absolute sense the others are equally valid, equally meaningful.' He took a sip of brandy and felt a rivulet of rich fire course across his tongue.
'I guess the Flatland analogy is the best one to use. I can't show you where the fourth spatial dimension is. I certainly can't point to it. But perhaps I can give you a hint of what it means by talking about what a third dimension would look like from the viewpoint of a two dimensional creature.'
/> He ran a palm over the drinks table that lay between his and Stallard's chair. 'Imagine the surface of this table as forming a two dimensional world called Flatland. This tissue is a two dimensional creature who lives there. The creature, we'll call him Reagan, is without depth or height. He only has length and breadth. If Reagan comes across a closed building in Flatland...have you got any pens or pencils?' Stallard, ever obliging, hurried to a bureau at the far wall and brought back with him a handful of fresh pencils. Leith laid four together end to end to form a square. 'He can neither enter it nor look inside. Happy so far?'
'Never more so,' replied Stallard. Durrell nodded and sat forward, the right side of his mustard-coloured cardigan bunching up around the Ingram. Does he ever disarm? Leith wondered.
'But we're three dimensional creatures. We can look inside the building without any trouble because we have access to the higher dimension of 'up'. We can also cause any mayhem to poor old Reagan that we like, and he can't even see us coming.' Leith crumpled up the tissue.
'Now try extrapolating that up, with us as the 3-D equivalent of a Flatlander and System X as a four dimensional hyper-observer.'
Stallard waved his brandy glass. 'Hang on a minute! What about time? Isn't that supposed to be the fourth dimension, technically speaking?'
Durrell cut in before Leith could reply. 'No. Space and time are inseparably linked. What Leith's talking about is a real fourth spatial dimension. It's not a new idea, Einstein's General Theory regards mass as warping space in a fourth spatial dimension. Nowadays they actually need nine dimensions for theories on superstrings but the higher ones are compacted over distances smaller than a hydrogen nucleus.' He looked at Leith and must have caught his blank expression.
'I majored in physics at college. It's kind of a surprise to find it applicable in these circumstances.'
'Right,' said Leith,' I guess life's full of surprises.'
'What I don't understand...' Stallard reached over and pointed his finger vertically down at the tissue, '... is that if I fired a gun like this, the bullet would pass through Reagan and leave Flatland. The Flatlanders would never find it.'
'Yeah, but we did. I get your point. The answer is that the Flatland analogy breaks down because their universe is the surface on which they live. But we have access to an extra dimension so we aren't necessarily bounded by such surfaces. Using the Flatland analogy, our 3-D universe would seem to a 4-D observer like the two dimensional world with a permeable surface to us. We could lay the barrel of the gun in the plane of the table and fire into that dimension. That way the Flatlanders wouldn't suspect our presence.'
'I guess that's how System X could eavesdrop on us.' Durrell pinched the end of his nose. 'They just hot-wire a data bus, it wouldn't matter where it was or how secure the facility. As long as they made sure the current they took out was the same they put back in, they'd be undetectable.'
'Exactly, but that raises another point we've got to be aware of. We've concentrated up to now on the idea of electronic interception but someone from System X could be here right now, listening to us, seeing us, getting a good look at the insides of our coronary arteries if they liked, and we wouldn't know a damn thing about it!'
'Sorry.' Stallard was shaking his head. 'You'll have to run that last bit by me again.'
'Its like the 'closed' building in Flatland. It really is closed to a Flatlander, but completely open to us as 3-D observers. Again, by extending the analogy by a further dimension, our 3-space bodies may be 'closed' to us, but to someone in 4-space they're open for inspection.'
Stallard laughed. 'A Peeping Tom's paradise.'
'Also an assassin's paradise,' said Durrell more soberly.
Leith nodded. 'Right. They can do virtually what they like. They can kill anyone they want, no matter how well protected. And they have surveillance powers that would make Big Brother look like the Three Blind Mice. These people must be stopped and their power brought under control.
'In the meantime we've got to keep contacts to a minimum and be very careful what we say. We can only hope they're not already on to us. That's why we've got to use coded communications,' he touched the three sheets of paper which he'd prepared. They were destined for the fire when they'd finished.
'How can we be certain it's not the Chinese or someone else?' asked Stallard, absently trying to smooth out the crumpled tissue.
'Without our nuclear weapons we're defenceless. Conventional forces would be powerless against this sort of thing. If it were the Chinese I think we'd have heard by now.'
'So what next?' Durrell took a sip of brandy. It was still his first glass, though Leith and Stallard had got to their fourth. Stallard seemed to get a lot of pleasure in submerging people in his hospitality. Durrell had been adamant in his refusals of refills.
'Obviously we've got to track these people down. I don't believe anyone has suddenly stumbled on a way into the fourth dimension. It must have taken a lot of research expertise and resources. Even if we could step ana out of our world...'
'What was that?' Stallard sat forward.
'Sorry, that's the 4-D equivalent of 'up'. Ana and kata are like up and down, right and left, front and back,' Leith found he had forgotten what he was going to say. 'Anyway, even with access to 4-space, jobs like the Las Vegas massacre would still have needed quite a few personnel. One hundred and thirty-four men couldn't have been killed almost simultaneously any other way. Remember each shot had to be carefully set up if it was to match a previous murder. I think Durrell may not have been far out. Maybe it took about a hundred or so.'
'I'm sorry about that,' Durrell shifted uncomfortably in his chair. 'That was a dumb thing for me to say.'
'Dumb but understandable. When the mind comes across something which it thinks is impossible, it usually manages to avoid thinking about it.' The grandfather clock chimed. Leith automatically checked his watch, then remembered he hadn't answered Durrell's question.
‘We start by finding out if anybody has been doing research into this kind of thing. That means primarily maths and physics research groups — scientists working with high-energy particles, or perhaps cosmologists or topologists. A breakthrough could conceivably have come in any branch of science, but I think those are our best bets.
'We can also keep an eye out for new incidents which System X may be engineering. Like I told the committee, I don't think their plans are working out. Take the Vegas thing again. It seemed like a blow against gangsters and drug pushers, but look what's happened since. Terrible acts of violence throughout the country, like all those poor people killed in Queens. Has it made any difference to the level of crime or the availability of drugs?'
He shook his head. 'It's the same abroad. System X cripples the military capability of North Korea. They blow up arms dumps, wipe out strike teams, and so on. Do the regimes become less oppressive as a result? On the contrary. There's a backlash and things get worse. It doesn't make sense.'
'It sounds like standard terrorist theory to me,' Durrell spoke with lazy confidence. 'Drive your enemy further and further to the extreme, until they alienate their own supporters.'
'Maybe, but whatever they're up to, we'll only find out if we examine carefully the incidents they engineer.' Leith suddenly felt very tired. It was one pm and he'd had little rest in nearly forty hours. 'I need sleep. Are there any more questions?'
'Millions,' Stallard smiled, 'but it's best we get some sleep. But there is one thing you haven't mentioned. Why are they so keen on this 'eye-for-an-eye' type of retribution? It's such an inefficient way of going about things. After all, as you've suggested, they could just as easily block an artery in their victims' hearts or brains. Why the guns and knives and strangulation and so forth?'
'Maybe they are religious fanatics. Cranks who've somehow found a way into 4-space. I don't know,' said Leith wearily.
'Maybe they just enjoy it,' said Durrell, straightening. 'Maybe they just like doing it the messy way,' he gave a faint little smile, 'per
haps they think it's fun.'
They all clustered round the library desk. Only Nevis and Leith remained standing. DeMarco looked like he'd bitten into a hot dog only to find it contained a rat. 'I don't fucking believe it,' he moaned and put his head into his hands.
'You'd better!' Nevis had never liked obscenity, which was just about all he ever got from these highly strung anal types. He rubbed his hands together as though they'd been dirtied by the bad language and looked across at Morgan and Slattery who were staring back open-mouthed.
Slattery recovered first. 'Just one frigging minute, Stan. DeMarco's the most senior, then me, then Ted. Maybe you'd like to explain how come Bob's the one who gets the promotion?'
Leith figured now was the time to assert himself. Twenty hours of sleep had done the trick and he felt like flexing his ass-kicking muscles. 'I'm not standing in for Stan,' he took his time looking from one to the other, confident Stan wouldn't interrupt. Stallard had left him in no doubt about the new status quo.
'I've been unofficially promoted. Above Stan. From now on Stan reports to me. Principal Collator Forbes, if she were well, would be reporting to me. Even the Comptroller of Western Hemisphere Intelligence is responsible to me. Stan's taking Forbes' job just to keep things ticking over while we do the real work.' Out the corner of his eye he could see Nevis nodding his head.
'This is kind of sudden,' Morgan was rolling his eyes and reeling his torso around. Leith had to smile. 'How about some background?'
Leith nodded. 'You'll get it, in all its nasty detail but right now I'll just summarise it. What it comes down to is that someone's fucking with the world. It isn't Al Qaeda, or North Korea, or even us.' He smiled grimly. 'Up to now these people — System X, we call them — have used assassination and sabotage to get their way, whatever that is. We're pretty sure they've slaughtered at least three thousand people in the past couple of months alone.'
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