by Sam Leith
But the small flat Mike Hollis lived in on the other side of Cambridge from his aunt was a sublet, and the address and phone number appeared in the book under his landlord’s name. So when discreet enquiries were made of Google by the accident-prone employees of MIC Industrial Futures, those enquiries yielded an M. Hollis in Glisson Road. And when those enquiries were cross-checked by the same accident-prone employees with the payroll system of Emmanuel College, Cambridge – a comically easy hack, they had thought – they confirmed ‘M. Hollis’ at that address, and in receipt of the sort of miserly monthly cheque that corresponded to their understanding of what research fellows in mathematics could be expected to earn. They were right about only one thing – research fellows in mathematics do earn about the same as a long-standing college administrator would expect to draw as a pension. But they are paid by the faculty of mathematics, and not by the college.
So, twenty-four hours after ruining Mary Hollis’s home and her peace of mind for no good reason, the two men were standing in a room that smelled of dry-cleaning and swivel chairs and paper plates of stale biscuits covered in cling film.
Davidoff stood with insolent blankness, big hands nested behind his back, chin up. His hair was sandy and his cheeks permanently windburned so he always looked as if he had just shaved with a blunt blade. Sherman was smaller – wire-haired, sallow, all muscle and nerve. He was like a longdog constructed from twisted rubber bands. They were making their report.
Their report was that they had nothing to report. In search of their employer’s fugitive piece of hardware, they had burgled a blameless old woman. On the evidence of her house she, also, knew no more about the device than you’d expect an elderly secretary to know. Then that old man had turned up. They’d no idea if he’d been a husband, a lodger, or what – he’d looked more like a tramp than anything else – but he had appeared as if from nowhere, and Sherman feared – though he did not tell Ellis this – that the guy had got a look at his face.
What had he been doing there? Everything had been quiet. No burglar alarm, no nothing. They’d watched the old woman leave earlier in the day, and lock the front door behind her.
It had given Sherman the fright of his life. The man had just appeared at the top of the stairs and started walking calmly down towards them. Sherman and Davidoff had bolted as soon as they’d seen him.
They had ‘struck out – nil for one’, as Davidoff, wearing his affected Americanism with an irritatingly complacent air, had put it on the way in. Davidoff seemed almost to relish failure; or perhaps he simply liked watching Ellis cross. What was being handed down to MIC’s head of security was, it was reasonable to speculate, about three times as nasty as what he was capable of passing on to those below him.
‘Gentlemen,’ said Ellis, which was his customary overture to a bollocking. He thought it made him sound superior. ‘Gentlemen, I don’t need to remind you that a very great deal of this company’s time and money is invested in the recovery of this device. And I don’t need to remind you, either, that if it falls into the wrong hands – that is, any hands other than our own – my position is going to look very weak indeed.
‘And that means that your position, gentlemen, is going to look even weaker still. This is incredibly fucking important, this thing,’ he said, letting his profanity hang in the air for a bit.
There were people who knew how to swear, Sherman reflected, and people who thought they knew how to swear, and Ellis, with that stupid little vein throbbing self-importantly in his forehead, fell into the latter camp.
Ellis prided himself on his swearing, you could see. It was important for his self-esteem, as an ocean-going civilian sub-craphat, to be able to swear in front of ex-servicemen. Sherman worked really hard to see if he could bring himself to be even the faintest bit intimidated by Ellis. He could not. Davidoff, Sherman could respect. Davidoff was a squarehead, but he was quite a dangerous squarehead. Ellis was… His thoughts drifted off.
‘This is the future of this company. We own this thing. We paid for it. And our proprietors are not going to sit back and give it away for free to any teenage geeks, Islamist loons, Marxist wackjobs, or any fucking fucking blue-hatted save-the-world fucking ponce-fucker.’
Ponce-fucker, eh?
‘Fortunately, we have a lead. Our friend in the States has learned of a young man connected to the Banacharski Ring who has just unexpectedly upped and flown across the Atlantic. No warning. Just went. And there’s no good reason we can see why he might have decided suddenly to go on holiday by himself.’
Ellis knitted his fingers together, and cracked his knuckles.
‘His name is Alex Smart. Postgraduate student, close associate of this Hollis. While we were looking at the supervisor, this lad skipped out and there’s very good reason to believe that he has the device. He was booked on a flight for San Francisco, but he wasn’t flying direct. For no reason we can readily understand, unless he was trying to discourage pursuit, he flew via Atlanta. Two different airlines. Tickets booked at different times – the first through an agent. Only the second was on his own credit card. But the onward flight was grounded by the hurricane. He never got back on a plane, according to our intel.’
Intel? thought Sherman. He noticed that Ellis had a monogram on his shirt. He enjoyed hating him for a bit.
‘We’ve lost track of him,’ Ellis continued. ‘But so have they. So enough messing about. Do not shoot anyone if you can help it, do not get shot yourself, and if and when you find it helpful to do something illegal, do not get caught doing it. I need scarcely remind you that we have no status either in the UK or in the States. You are private citizens. Whatever favours our proprietors are able to call in when from time to time we find ourselves in a legal grey area, you can be sure they will not call in for you. If you get in trouble, MIC will disavow you so fast your heads will spin.’
‘Disavow’ could mean lots of things. Which was, Sherman thought, probably why the two of them were being better paid than they would be if they’d been working for private hire even in Iraq.
Ellis looked at them both, one after the other, and then enunciated, slowly: ‘Go to America, find him, and get our toy.’
‘America’s quite big,’ said Davidoff. ‘How do you suggest we go about that?’
Sherman was surprised when Ellis replied: ‘There is one idea. Look – this device affects the way probability works, as we understand it. Like a magnet in iron filings. We think the effect is more powerful when it’s closer by. But it’s eccentric. For some reason one of the things it seemed to affect strongly, if the literature is to be believed, are these.’
Ellis, who had remained sitting throughout this conversation, reached into the drawer of his desk. He pulled out something attached to a tangle of white wires and put the tangle on the desk.
‘There’s one each,’ he added.
‘The literature,’ said Sherman.
Davidoff’s big hand went down first. He fished up a small square of plastic that brought some of the white wires with it. He looked at it.
‘This is an iPod,’ he said.
‘An iPod Shuffle, yes,’ said Ellis. ‘It’s preloaded.’
Sherman picked the other one up and looked at it.
‘What are we supposed to do with these?’
‘Listen to them,’ said Ellis. ‘Listen for patterns. Songs that seem to keep repeating; runs of the same artist; albums that come out in order.’ He looked a little sheepish. ‘Even things like… songs that begin with the same word, or something.’
‘This is what we’re supposed to use to hunt down this super-weapon, or whatever it is. An iPod. Are you having a laugh?’
‘I hate rock music,’ said Sherman.
Three hours later he and Davidoff were on a plane.
Chapter 4
‘Does the name “Banacharski” mean anything to you?’ Red Queen asked.
The man looked confused and disoriented, as he was entitled to. Four hours previously he had been teachin
g a class of students in MIT. Three hours and forty-five minutes previously, he had been on his way off campus when a couple of men in suits had started steering him by the elbows as if – he had thought with indignation – he were not a small, bald professor of mathematics but a small, bald bicycle.
Two hours previously he had been, for the first time, in a helicopter. An actual black helicopter, tilting over Boston and heading out into the country. During that short, fast journey, Professor Hands had become quite convinced that his voluntary work leafleting for a human rights organisation had made him a target for extraordinary rendition. His whole short body had been flushed, moment by moment, with the chemicals of terror and the lip-trembling self-righteousness of a liberal academic facing a non-fatal kicking from the forces of reaction.
America, he knew, was a totalitarian enemy of free speech – but it didn’t actually kill middle-class white men. He expected to endure pain, speak eloquently, and become a cause célàbre. He imagined Chomsky talking about him on CNN; Glenn Beck denouncing him by name on Fox.
Now they were asking him about Banacharski.
‘Of course it does,’ the man said. ‘He’s a very distinguished mathematician. Or was, I suppose – depending on who you want to believe. But this has to do with Banacharski? I can’t see why he’d be of any interest to the CIA.’
‘We’re not the CIA, Professor Hands,’ said Red Queen. ‘We do a different job than they do. Remember all those bits of paper you signed earlier?’
He nodded.
‘They don’t mean very much. They say that you’re breaking various national security laws if you disclose the existence of this organisation, let alone disclose the contents of our conversation, but the nature of what we do means that we could never actually drag you through open court if you break the agreements.
‘So we’re adult about this. However, I do want to impress on you two things. One of them is that if you tell people about us, these people will think you are mad. Your first point of contact with us was, was it not, with two burly men in dark suits wearing wraparound sunglasses?’
Hands nodded.
‘You were brought here in an unmarked black helicopter.’
Hands nodded again.
‘And here you are, three floors below street level in New York in a secret -’ Red Queen chuckled ‘- a secret underground hideout. Talking to somebody with a name out of Alice in Wonderland.’ Red Queen’s palms turned upwards. ‘It might be enough to earn you a sabbatical, but your accommodation would probably be chosen for you.’
Red Queen gave him a friendly smile. ‘We are a serious organisation. What we do is extremely important. And we really do want your help. Contrary to the fantasies of all very highly educated and very poorly educated people, the government is truly not engaged in a conspiracy against the people. We do everything we can, in secret and in the open, to prevent them messing things up.
‘So just listen to what we have to say, and to give us the benefit of what you know. Sit around here, talk, have a cup of coffee, come on board. And do us a favour: be an adult – and keep what we talk about to yourself. We need to be able to speak frankly with you.’
Hands followed the gesture and looked around the room. It was an odd room. Though it was windowless, on the wall behind Red Queen’s desk there was something in the shape of a window that was giving off light, like a lightbox. The floor was pleasantly enough carpeted, and beside him there was a cardboard cup that said ‘Starbucks’ on it. Hands picked it up.
‘Plus,’ Red Queen added, fixing him with a harder stare, ‘horrible things will happen to you if you speak about this. Really horrible.’
This was not true, in fact. Doing anything particularly horrible to a US citizen, particularly a member of a liberal institution of higher education, was almost always far more trouble than it was worth.
It was way, way outside the remit of the DEI – they didn’t even have agents licensed to use lethal force – and even the FBI didn’t do as much of that as people thought they did. If you want to keep a low profile, the two golden rules are: don’t start leaving a trail of bodies, and don’t, whatever you do, involve the FBI at any level. As for the CIA…
In any case, it was enough to focus the little professor’s attention. Even if he suspected all of this, he didn’t know it and he wouldn’t be likely to want to test the thing out. He had been warned, flattered and warned. He was short, and Red Queen was tall. He was sitting on a low sofa without a table in front of him, and Red Queen was sitting upright behind a desk. He was as ready as he’d ever be.
‘OK,’ Red Queen continued. ‘Banacharski. The organisation I work for has been very interested in Nicolas Banacharski for several years…’
Professor Hands, as Red Queen knew, was a number theorist with a very strong interest in Banacharski’s work. And Red Queen knew, too, most of the basic facts of Banacharski’s life.
‘Well, ehm, Banacharski was a prodigy. Born in Germany. Father was a Russian Jew, died in the camps. He won the Fields in the sixties – you know, the big mathematical medal?’
‘I know.’
‘Amazing work. Very, very high levels of abstraction. He more or less invented – well, completely reshaped – the field I work in. The Fermat solution wouldn’t have been possible without his work. But he’s barely been heard from since the early nineties. I don’t know where he is. Nobody does.’
‘Presumably he knows where he is,’ said Red Queen.
‘I wouldn’t bet on it. He’d be in his eighties now, and he – you know – went mad.’
Hands scratched the back of his neck. He still looked a little uneasy.
‘Banacharski had – well, they started as strong convictions. He was in Paris for ’68 and he started to become more and more political. There’d been a chair created for him at the Sorbonne. He’d worked there for a decade or so, perfectly normally. Then he threw it up in 1972 on the grounds that his chair was partly funded by the military. He was a pacifist.’
‘That’s what was said.’
‘It’s the only explanation. He was still working at this stage, but he was getting crankier. Started claiming there was going to come some sort of scientific apocalypse by the end of the century if the physicists weren’t kept in check. Then he upped and off.’
‘Off?’
‘Vanished.’ The mathematician was starting to forget his surroundings and enjoy his story. ‘He was living in communes, going Buddhist, vegan, some people said – stopped using beds for a bit. There were stories that he went round trying to sell buckets of his own faeces to farmers as fertiliser. He turned into a mad monk. He was notionally attached to the University of Toulouse, but -’ he blew air out between his lips and shrugged ‘- he was doing his own thing. Proofs, papers – he mostly just wrote thousands of pages of what he called “meditations”. There’d be fragments of proofs in them, amazing proofs – some of them are in libraries. But he was cracked. That’s how the story goes.
‘One morning in the early nineties his girlfriend returned home to find he’d had a kind of manuscript bonfire in her garden. He was never seen again.’
‘Literally never seen again?’
‘More or less. These letters go out, though – of the long and rambling sort. People in the community, you know – they try to piece together what he’s doing. He claims to have given up on math. He’s living by himself and working something like twelve hours a day on mad material – some huge manuscript about the physics of free will.’
‘That’s where we come in,’ said Red Queen. ‘We know about the letters. We were keeping an eye on them. Does the name Isla Holderness mean anything to you?’
‘Yes,’ said Hands, and there was a moment before something dropped into place behind his eyes. Red Queen looked expressionlessly at him. ‘Uh, yes. She’s a mathematician in my field. She’s one of the last people who saw Banacharski. She went to look for him in the Pyrenees.’
Red Queen exhaled. ‘You know the story.’
> ‘ “What is a metre?” ’
Red Queen nodded in recognition. ‘What is a metre?’ Banacharski’s weird riddle: the last communication with Holderness before he disappeared for the final time.
‘OK. We’re on the same page. We know a bit more than you about some of it. But I’ll lay it out. Our organisation is called the Directorate of the Extremely Improbable. It’s a silly name, but it’s always been called that, and the silliness acts as a sort of camouflage. We could just as easily have brought you here in a green helicopter, and had you picked up by men wearing clear eyeglasses and button-down shirts from Gap. As it is, we don’t sound like what we are. That is the idea.
‘Our job is to assess threats to national security that we don’t know exist, using methods that we don’t know work. This produces results that we generally can’t recognise as results, and when we can recognise them as results, we don’t know how to interpret them.’
Red Queen continued to look at him levelly.
‘It’s frustrating work. Here.’
Red Queen fished in a desk drawer, pulled something out, and lobbed it across the room to the little mathematician, who caught it. ‘This is a souvenir from the days when we used to have our own memorabilia.’
He turned it over. It was a bronze medallion. Engraved on it was the pyramid-and-eye logo from the dollar bill. Above it, a scrollwork banner carried the initials ‘DEI’. Curving below, a scroll carried the words ‘Ignota ignoti’.
‘Unknown unknowns,’ Red Queen said. ‘That’s what we do. We deal with things we don’t know we don’t know about. Once we know we don’t know about them we hand them over to the CIA, who -’ Red Queen sighed ‘- generally continue not to know about them.
‘Predecessors of the DEI have existed as long ago as the Salem witch trials. We had operatives in the Culper Ring during the Revolutionary War. This, at least, is how the story within the organisation goes – but there’s no real evidence for any of it.