The Truth

by Peter James

  Her mother, Gayle, answered it and stood there for several seconds, jaw open. Susan stared back at her, lamely. Her mother was wearing jeans, a sweatshirt and slippers, and she’d put on a little more weight since Susan had last seen her, over a year ago. Otherwise she seemed little changed. Perhaps the lines in her face were etched even deeper, as if someone had just gone over them with a charcoal pencil, and her hair, shovelled up and clipped untidily, now had more grey than blonde in it. Her mother has been slim and strikingly beautiful, but since Casey’s tragedy she’d put on weight, which had stayed, and she’d let herself go, right down to her red-varnished nails, which used to be neat and were now badly chipped.

  A smell of cooking came out of the door. Her mother was always making casseroles, Susan could never remember a time when the house hadn’t smelt of something good cooking, and this now stirred so many memories.

  A whole raft of questions was flooding into those wide blue eyes of her mother’s. Your pregnant daughter did not suddenly pitch up on your doorstep with a suitcase, thousands of miles from home, if everything was fine. No way.

  ‘Hon, what’s –?’

  Susan swallowed, managed a smile, then before she could say anything, she started to cry. The next moment she was in her mother’s arms and she was a kid again, just a kid who’d fallen over and hurt her knee, and her mom was hugging her, holding her hard in spite of that big bump between them, and everything was going to be better in a minute, it was all going to be better.

  Everything was going to be fine.

  Susan had a shower and a short rest. Then they sat in the family room, Susan on the antique settle, her parents in battered armchairs either side of her. She could remember the day her mother had bought the settle, years back, in a garage sale in Santa Monica. Her father, Dick, with his thin, craggy face, furry eyebrows, alert eyes, wistful Henry Fonda smile, and faded denim overalls that reeked of turpentine, stared at the bottle of beer he was holding in his rough, paint-stained hand, and listened.

  Susan, who had thought she’d become so much stronger than her parents, was feeling even more like the child she’d left behind, oh-so-many years back. She felt as though she was being interrogated over a misdemeanour. ‘John’s in league with them,’ she said, registering the horror in their faces – except that she wasn’t sure whether it was horror or just plain disbelief.

  Her mother said, ‘Tell us more about what you found in the attic.’

  ‘The loft,’ Susan corrected. She described the symbols that she could remember, and then the finger. The finger disturbed them.

  ‘This deal that John did with the bank, what kind of say did you have in it?’ her father asked.

  ‘It was my choice.’ Susan shrugged. ‘I went along with it because –’ She hesitated.

  ‘Because you trusted John?’ her mother prompted. ‘Sure you did.’

  ‘I always liked John,’ her father said, ‘but he’s a hustler. I always felt he put ambition above everything else.’

  Susan winced as the pain suddenly became acute. It might have been the baby moving.

  ‘I think we should get you to a doctor tonight,’ her mother said, anxiously.

  Susan shook her head. ‘I’m just very tired. It’ll be better tomorrow, after I’ve had some sleep.’

  ‘I’m getting you seen by a doctor tomorrow. We’ll go down to the medical center, get you in to see Dr Goodman, you’ll like him, he’s just the nicest doctor you could ever meet.’

  Susan sipped her apple juice. The air in the room felt sluggish, and she wondered whether she was dreaming all this. It just seemed so bizarre to be here, sitting alone with her parents like this. The silver clock on the mantelpiece had come out of an old Packard car and ran off a battery tucked away behind it. The clock said seven twenty-five, and she did a calculation. It was three twenty-five a.m. in England.

  She suddenly felt guilty that she hadn’t left a note for John and wondered if she should call him to let him know she was all right, and that she was going to stay over here until the baby was born and until it had the protection of the courts.

  But then he would know where she was, and he’d tell Mr Sarotzini or Van Rhoe.

  And they would come and get her.

  Kündz, sitting in his flat in Earl’s Court, listened to Susan saying, ‘I can’t let my baby go. I can’t let it go and be killed.’

  Then he heard her mother say: ‘If this man Sarotzini shows up here …’

  Susan’s father, Dick Corrigan, said, ‘We have to be practical, Gayle. Susan’s tired and she’s pretty emotional right now. She’s had a bad shock and she’s had a long flight. These flights knock the hell out of you even when you’re strong – remember how we felt when we got back from Europe that time?’

  Her father continued, ‘I don’t think we ought to make any decisions right now. I think Susan needs a bite to eat, a good night’s rest and then we’ll talk about this in the morning.’

  ‘I’m telling you one thing, Dick,’ her mother said. ‘There’s no way she’s handing over that baby, not to anyone.’

  ‘Gayle, I don’t think we ought to rush to any conclusions right now. We’re here for you, Susan, and we’re gonna take care of you, but I think we’re gonna find there’s some other explanation for all this,’ her father said.

  ‘There’s been a lot in the news about surrogate babies just recently,’ her mother said. ‘There was a documentary on Channel Nine last week. Maybe we should find a help group for Susan, get some advice?’

  Dick Corrigan raised his voice. ‘But if John doesn’t want this baby, how’s Susan gonna make him change his mind? Tell me that.’

  ‘He will,’ Susan said, with quiet determination. ‘When my baby’s born, he’ll change his mind, won’t he?’

  Kündz smiled. This was all working out so well. Oh, Susan, I’m so proud of you.

  Shortly after half past seven in the morning, John arrived in his office, drained and fraught with worry.

  He hadn’t slept. The one time he had started to nod off, around half past three, Pila had rung him, totally hysterical, from a pay phone at St Thomas’s Hospital, to tell him that Archie was in intensive care.

  He’d driven straight there and promptly had a row with the ward sister, who wasn’t going to let him or Pila see Archie because they weren’t relatives. When he got to Archie’s bedside, it was a distressing sight. His friend stared blankly ahead, neither responding nor reacting to anything John said, occasionally making an odd flicking motion with his thumb.

  A bolshie junior houseman pumped John for information, then lectured him. He told John that Archie was grossly overweight for his height and age, a heavy smoker, doing a crazily stressed-out job. He had played a hard game of squash, immediately followed by alcohol, and had then gone back to work in the office. That made him a pretty good candidate for a whole raft of problems, and a stroke was one of the possibilities high on the list. They wouldn’t know more until they got the test results back in the morning.

  John sat at his desk, his whole life apparently in tatters. He was beside himself with anxiety about Susan, and deeply upset about Archie – hell, he and his friend were the same age, and he’d always considered Archie indestructible. OK, so he wasn’t overweight and he didn’t really smoke any more, but he was just as stressed as Archie. If something could happen to Archie, it could equally easily happen to him.

  He closed his eyes. Where are you, Susan, darling, hon? Oh, Jesus, where the hell are you?

  He tried hard to put himself in her position. She was pregnant, she was terrified that Sarotzini and Van Rhoe were planning to sacrifice the baby, she was freaked out by the occult shit up in the attic, she was gutted by Fergus Donleavy’s death, and now she didn’t even trust him.

  Everything, in her mind, was a conspiracy against her or, more particularly, against her baby.

  Somehow, he had to talk sense to her.

  Although he wasn’t sure what sense was any more. His tired brain was thinking about
all that weird shit up in the attic. About Archie’s colleague with the pentagram tattoo and the Vörn Bank as a client. He was thinking about how Zak Danziger had conveniently died soon after the Vörn Bank had become involved. About Harvey Addison dying after they’d gone for a second opinion. Fergus Donleavy dying after warning Susan. Now Archie, down with a stroke or whatever.

  But how the hell could all that tie together? It couldn’t. It was easy to get spooked and jump to conclusions; being calm and rational was much harder. It could be just a chain of coincidences, and Susan, with her hang-up about coincidences, could have got herself into a state over nothing. But however much he told himself that, he couldn’t convince himself. Not totally. Worry burrowed away at his confidence, undermining it further all the time.

  Susan, where are you?

  She wasn’t at any of their friends’, so where might she have gone? Where would he have gone in her shoes? What was the natural instinct of anyone in trouble? To head for the comfort of home, of parents?

  California?

  She couldn’t have gone to LA, surely. And, anyway, you weren’t permitted to fly if you were heavily pregnant.

  Jesus, Van Rhoe would do his tank if Susan had left the country – he didn’t even want her to leave London, not even for a few hours. He checked his watch. Seven forty-five. That made it eleven forty-five p.m. in Los Angeles; late, but that couldn’t be helped. He looked up Susan’s parents’ phone number in his address file, and dialled it.

  His father-in-law answered, sounding as if he had just woken up. His tone was more formal and cooler than normal. Probably because it was late, John reasoned.

  ‘Dick, look, I’m sorry to bother you, and I don’t know how to explain this very well – but I think Susan might have had some kind of breakdown. I arrived home last night and there was no sign of her. She seems to have packed a bag and left. I wondered if by chance you or Gayle had heard from her, or whether she’d come over to you?’

  There was a brief silence, then Dick Corrigan said, ‘No, I – Gayle and I – we didn’t hear from her for a couple of weeks – er, Sunday last she called. Sounded fine, a little tired but fine.’

  John asked him to call if they heard from her. He promised he would, asking John to do likewise, then hung up.

  John sank his head into his hands. Just in case Susan had sent him an e-mail he switched on his computer, and logged on. The usual twenty or so awaited him. Then, scanning through them, he saw that one was from Archie Warren, sent at nine forty-seven p.m. last night, with an attachment. He double-clicked on the message and read it:

  john, all the stuff on vörn bank here seems to be encrypted. loads of files. if you can decode this file, let me know and i’ll copy the rest over to you. read then eat this. arch.

  John stared at it, thinking. Archie hadn’t mentioned this at squash – and, from the time it had been sent, he must have gone back to the office afterwards. Archie had found the files on the Vörn Bank, and then he had had a stroke?

  Could there be a connection? Was he crazy to try to make one?

  Or crazy to dismiss it?

  He double-clicked on the attachment, to open it, and seconds later his screen was filled with a jumble of letters, numbers and symbols, meaningless to him. He called Gareth and asked his partner to come into his office.

  A few minutes later, looking more hung-over than usual and dressed in clothes that appeared to have been retrieved from a laundry basket, Gareth was staring at his screen. ‘PGP,’ he announced.

  ‘Pretty Good Privacy?’ John said. It was one of the Internet’s standard encryption systems.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Can you decode it?’

  Gareth looked at him as if he were addressing a child of three. ‘Sure, no problem. Give me a Cray supercomputer and four years off and I’d be in with a sporting chance.’

  ‘Shit. You serious?’

  Gareth turned back to the screen. ‘What’s the provenance of this?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Does it come from someone who knows what they’re doing?’

  ‘Yes, I would think so.’

  Gareth lit a cigarette. ‘So it’s probably an NP-complete problem.’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘Nondeterministic polynomial.’

  ‘Want to give it to me in English?’

  ‘Sure. You’re fucked.’

  ‘Great, that’s really helpful, Gareth.’

  ‘To read this, you need to have the encryption phrase – the sender would have it, and the recipient. When you encrypt something in this system, you provide a key, 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit, or even higher, depending on how sophisticated you are. It works on a doubling principle, like the grain of rice on the chessboard.’

  ‘What grain of rice?’

  ‘You stick one grain of rice on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth, sixteen on the fifth and so on. By the time you reach the sixty-fourth square you have three times the entire world annual production of rice, or something like that. That’s the same principle on which this works.’

  John stared at him with a feeling of helplessness. ‘So? There’s no way we can read this?’

  Gareth looked round for an ashtray, then flicked ash into the waste-paper basket. ‘How urgent is it?’

  ‘Seriously urgent.’

  Gareth paced up and down the office and windmilled his arms. ‘Urn, right, OK, um, I have a friend, right?’ He moved towards John and lowered his voice, looking around, nervously. ‘We were at Sussex together – he’s now at GCHQ, you know, the top-security government listening place. They have a Cray there, and he’s told me this, strictly off the record, that they have the keys to most Internet encryption systems. He’s into real ale. I could try to have a drink with him at the weekend.’

  John shook his head. ‘This is really urgent, Gareth. Couldn’t you do anything quicker than that?’

  His partner looked at the screen again, and said, resignedly, ‘Oh, all right, do me a copy. I’ll give it a go, no guarantees.’

  And Kündz, in a club-class seat, was eating a breakfast of omelette, chipolata sausage and mushrooms, on an early-morning British Airways flight to Geneva.

  Chapter Fifty-four

  His room looked out on to the vineyards and olive groves on the southern slopes of the Ligurian hills. Down below, on the ribbon of road that mirrored the river’s tortuous path across the floor of the valley, lay the burnt-out remains of one of Mussolini’s last convoys.

  He was thirteen. The war had been over for two years. Local kids, garages and scrap dealers had long ago picked the carcasses of the trucks and half-tracks clean of anything that could be flogged as a souvenir, or carted away on the back of a van, and now just the hulks remained. They had started to rust.

  This was his life, this room with its low, slanted ceiling and narrow slit of a window, and its dull little paintings of flowers, and its views out over the valley, which was lush in winter and arid in summer, and up towards the firmament. This room and his books were his life. It was the rear of the attic, and there was a sheer drop of several hundred feet below; no one could see in. No one in the village, apart from the couple beneath him who owned the house, fed him, and slaked his thirst for knowledge with a constant supply of books, knew that he was here. Only a tiny handful of people in the whole world even knew that he existed.

  Which was why, when they came for him, he was not expecting it.

  He never saw those people who burst into his room that night. It happened in a rush of darkness. He was asleep and then he was awake, with a blindfold over his eyes and a foul-tasting gag forced into his mouth.

  Whispered voices around him, he did not know how many, he knew only that he was frightened, and that they were mostly women’s. They dragged him from the bed and on to the floor, then hoisted him on to the table that was also his desk. All the time they repeated, over and over and over, ‘ll Diavolo … ll Diavolo … ll Diavolo.’

  He heard t
he woman who looked after him, Signora Vellucci, screaming for them to leave him alone, warning them of terrible vengeance, but they ignored her.

  His nightshirt was ripped off him, and then he was being prodded, poked, examined like a calf at market. A woman’s voice said, in a pause between the chanting, ‘Ce l’ha il padre, deve averlo anche lui.’ It is on his father, it must be on him also.

  Another woman, who was pushing the hairs on his head apart, examining the scalp beneath, murmured that Emil Sarotzini’s son even had the devil’s hair.

  Then a finger probed his anus, pushed hard, coarsely up inside, making him cry with pain into his gag. The finger was retracted, just as harshly, a remark was made that he did not catch and there was a roar of laughter.

  Then silence.

  Fifty years later, he could still remember this silence.

  He could remember the hands that gripped his wrists, his ankles, his thighs, like a vice. One arm went round his neck, pulling his head so tightly down on to the table that he could hardly breathe.

  He could remember the fingers seizing his penis and pulling it sharply upwards. And he could remember the panic as he felt the fingers close around his scrotum and another woman’s voice saying: ‘We are not allowed to kill him, but we can make sure the Sarotzini line ends with this boy. He will be the last.’

  And then the pain, oh, yes, the pain between his legs from the blade of the knife. And all the loss that followed from it.

  And the words of the Tenth Truth, ‘A man who feels no thirst for vengeance feels no pain.’ These words he remembered every time he thought back to that night.

  No one from that village had ever given birth since 1947. Ajane d’Annunzzi was dying, it was known as the Village of the Damned. No one understood what it was about this place, whether it was something in the water from the chemical plant upwind or the high fungi diet the locals ate. Doctors and scientists, concerned about growing infertility around the world, had done many studies, and Ajane d’Annunzzi had achieved fame in medical papers, but no conclusions had been reached.