by Sam Leith
‘We were shut down for reasons nobody within the organisation understands after the Kennedy assassination, but then, come the run-up to the second Gulf War, certain senior members of the administration became very interested indeed in the sort of paranoid X-Files material that was traditionally associated with the Directorate. Donald Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defense, reinstated our work. Our off-books budget suddenly reappeared. It got big.
‘Below where we’re sitting this compound goes twelve storeys down. There are tea-leaf readers, distance seers, chaos magicians and tarot tellers. Dicemen. Catatonics. Psychokinetics, psychic healers, lunatics. Haruspices. Illuminati. Idiot savants. Hypnotists. Bearded ladies. Oracles. All drinking the same coffee, and all paid for by the American taxpayer.’
Red Queen didn’t seem entirely sold on the tea-leaf readers, it occurred to Hands, but it didn’t seem his place to point it out.
Instead, he said: ‘So, ah, what is your interest in our mad genius?’
‘Banacharski?’ Red Queen said. ‘We don’t think Banacharski was mad. We think Banacharski was trying to build a weapon.’
Chapter 5
Alex didn’t know what made him stop in Atlanta.
He’d been rebooked onto an onward flight to San Francisco, after the hurricane, but he had never gone to the airport. He had sat on the bed in his motel looking at the clock, his suitcase packed on the bed beside him.
The time when he had planned to leave for the airport had passed. Then the time when he’d need to leave to have a hope of making the flight. Then the time that the gate would have closed. Had he looked out of his window he’d have been able to watch his flight lift into the air. He thought about the empty seat on the plane, carrying a ghost of him to San Francisco, another reality peeling off this one and heading its own way.
He imagined the ghost travelling into town, walking down Market Street, the khaki-coloured buildings and tramways and clean sunlight. It would be weary, T-shirted, happy. He imagined walking up over towards Chestnut, and surprising Carey at Muffin Tops while she was pouring coffee for a customer. Then – blank. Nothing. He wasn’t imagining Muffin Tops. He was imagining Central Perk from Friends. And he wasn’t imagining Carey. He was imagining Jennifer Aniston. And his images of the city were a mash-up of Carey’s postcards and Google Street View.
He couldn’t imagine Muffin Tops. He couldn’t imagine Carey. That future was illegible. Instead he was in Atlanta, in a motel room with its brown curtains drawn against the daylight, while his more purposeful ghost flew across America to surprise his girlfriend.
He couldn’t stay, and he couldn’t go. He didn’t feel sad, or scared, or anything at all. He’d flown here on an impulse, and now the impulse had left him and no other impulses had arrived to take its place. He examined the feeling, or lack of it. He felt like if he stabbed a knife into his leg it would make a dull thunk, and then stick out as if he’d driven it into a wooden table leg.
He took out the small cherrywood box and thumbed it open in his lap. The ring was inside, a half-moon of silver metal standing proud of its little velvet cushion. Where there might have been a solitaire diamond, there was instead a double loop in the metal: the lemniscate.
He shut the box with a snap, opened it again, shut it again. What a small thing it had been to decide to change his life. He tried to remember whether he had decided to ask Carey to marry him before he’d seen the ring in the antique shop, or whether the idea had come fully formed into his head when he’d seen its object expression in the world. He couldn’t.
He remembered wanting the ring, and knowing he wanted the ring, and knowing what it was for. The ring had cost about half what he had in the bank. The infinity symbol. He’d thought it was cool. Now he thought it was tacky.
He didn’t know if it would fit. He didn’t know if Carey would say yes. He didn’t know what he’d say if she did. He didn’t feel hungry. Eventually, as the afternoon slid into the evening, he turned on the television.
‘Isla Holderness,’ Red Queen continued. Hands was more or less at his ease, now. And he was curious to know how this story would unfold. A weapon? That sounded wrong. Banacharski was a fierce pacifist.
He knew Holderness’s story well. It had done the rounds in the mathematical world. She was the woman who had found Banacharski. She’d started as a disciple and they’d exchanged some letters. She wanted to see if she could talk him out, talk him back in. She’d schlepped through tiny villages in the Pyrenees armed with an old photograph of the mathematician. She’d found him, living in a shack in the hills, living like a monk.
Banacharski, to her surprise, had been friendly. The shack was a mess, by all accounts. Banacharski slept on a pallet on the floor, and – in one version Hands heard – lived on grass. Hands wasn’t actually sure that was possible.
Somehow, though, he took to Holderness. He had even been flattered to hear that, since his disappearance, one or two of his conjectures had been proved, but he said he’d stopped doing mathematics. Then he’d started ranting about the devil and the physics of free will. He believed that an agency – he called it the devil, though Holderness hadn’t been sure whether or not he meant it as a metaphor – was interfering in measurements, making precise knowledge impossible, minutely bending space time.
After she returned to England, they began to correspond. It went well at first. He indicated, so the story went, that he intended to make her the custodian of his legacy – that he’d pass her his findings. Then one day a letter arrived, apparently, demanding the answer to a question: ‘What is a metre?’
Holderness had no idea how to answer it. A sheaf of further letters arrived before she had even finished composing her reply. The first was incoherently angry, filled with scrawled capitals and obscenities. It accused her of being in league with the Enemy. It arrived on the same day as another that appeared to threaten suicide. The third arrived a day after the other two. It was addressed to ‘The Supposed Isla Holderness’. Every mention of her name in this letter was surrounded by bitterly sarcastic inverted commas. ‘Since you are not who you say you are, you know that I cannot be who you say I am,’ it opened. It was signed ‘Fred Nieman’. Holderness had set off to find him. She had found the shack burned to the ground and Banacharski, again, gone.
‘He thought Isla Holderness was a spy,’ said Red Queen.
‘Why would he have thought that?’ said Hands.
‘He was intensely paranoid,’ said Red Queen. ‘Also, he was quite right. She was a spy. She worked for us. We’d been monitoring all her correspondence with him. His letters dropped hints of what he was working on – I think he thought that was what was keeping her interested; after all these years of isolation, the human contact was welcome, and he was flattered by her interest. But you have to remember this was a deeply, deeply paranoid man. The hints were purposely fragmentary. We had to stay at arm’s length, and she was deep cover.
‘We thought we had the breakthrough, but “What is a metre?” completely threw us. It threw her too. But she waited to respond.
‘That was when it became clear something was very wrong. Banacharski vanished. Then we thought Holderness had gone rogue. We knew enough about what this man was like to know that the longer she left her response, the more likely it was that he’d flip his wig. We’d sent the clearest possible instructions on receipt of the “What is a metre?” letter that she should go immediately, in person, to see him and find a way of talking him round. But instead she spent a week trying to work out the answer to his riddle.
‘She was responding to none of our signals to come in. She didn’t use the dead-letter drops, and the messages she was sending stopped making any sense: newspaper buying, for instance. There was a complex series of codes surrounding what paper she bought, at what time of day, and how much change she used.
‘All of a sudden she seemed to be buying newspapers completely at random. It took us a while to cotton on to what had actually happened.’
‘What had happ
ened?’
‘It turned out that – actually – Banacharski was wrong. Isla Holderness was just what she professed to be: an academic mathematician who was interested in his work.’
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘He was right but he was wrong. Isla Holderness was a spy. But that was a different Isla Holderness. We made a huge mistake. This woman with Banacharski wasn’t our Isla Holderness, and she wasn’t spying on him. It was another woman with the same name. And she’d been buying newspapers completely at random all along.’
Red Queen looked a little bitter about this.
It was hard enough keeping track of all the DEI’s agents, and the organisation’s institutional reluctance to commit anything to paper for fear of being counter-surveilled made it more or less impossible.
Many DEI field agents didn’t even know they were working for the DEI – and a good few of them actually thought they were spying on it for one of the several fictitious cover agencies that it ran. Red Queen occasionally pretended to be unsure whether the DEI was a real organisation or, itself, a red herring.
Hands looked mystified. ‘So where was your Isla Holderness while the other Isla Holderness was with Banacharski?’
‘Thousands of miles away in a cave network in northern Pakistan,’ said Red Queen, gloomily. ‘She had spent the previous three years infiltrating with unprecedented success – not that we knew about how she was getting on at the time, since we’d forgotten she was there – bin Laden’s inner circle.’
‘What?’ said Hands. ‘Osama bin Laden? The terrorist?’
‘No,’ said Red Queen, brightening up a bit. ‘As it turned out, not.’
The car was a box of smoke. It pulled into the parking lot of the International House of Pancakes where Bree had made the rendezvous and stopped in the rank of parking spaces across from where she was waiting in the shade of a tree.
Through the windshield, Bree could see nothing. It was like a white-out in there. The driver’s-side door opened, and the car exhaled – a roll of what looked like dry ice furling out under the door and dissipating above the hard top. A hand, holding a cigarette, gripped the edge of the roof. A foot – a giant foot, like a beached canoe – appeared under the edge of the door, and a very tall man scissored out and stood upright, looking around, as the smoke cleared.
Bree reckoned he was about six foot three. He had a thin face, and short pale grey hair. She walked up with a hand in her pocket, and she could see his attention register her.
He put the cigarette in his hand into his mouth and pulled on it very heavily.
‘Hello,’ he said, without taking his sunglasses off. ‘I’m Jones.’
‘Bree.’
They didn’t shake hands, though an awkward moment passed when they could have. They stood opposite each other in the hot parking lot, and even from this distance Bree could smell the smoke on him. There was a parchmenty greyness, close up, to his skin. It was like wasp paper under his eyes.
He indicated the car with a gesture of his arm. ‘This is my… wheels.’
He looked oddly pleased with himself.
Bree had been told a little about Jones. She still didn’t understand it, not exactly, but she was comfortable with that. Red Queen had said only that Jones’s ‘condition’ was going to be an advantage in the hunt – and that Bree shouldn’t be disconcerted if he seemed a little eccentric. Bree had, in her time, spent days staring earnestly into crystal balls alongside people who, in Brooklyn accents, assured her that they were 500-year-old Mittel-European Gypsies. She had a wide tolerance for the eccentric.
She guessed she’d find out about Jones as they went along; provided she didn’t asphyxiate first.
‘Jolly Rancher?’ she said.
She held out her hand, and the thought came to her momentarily that she might have been pulling a dog biscuit from her pocket. Jones looked at it, and paused as if confused.
‘Yes – please,’ he said.
He took one of the little candies from her hand. Bree noticed with satisfaction that it was the peach flavour, which was the only one she hated. Jones unwrapped it fastidiously. He removed the cigarette from his mouth, popped the Jolly Rancher in, and replaced the cigarette.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
Bree took one of the green-apple flavour, and after a moment or two they climbed into Jones’s rental car and they slammed the doors and Bree wound down her window and Jones pumped the air conditioning to full and lit another cigarette and then they drove out of the IHOP parking lot and into the world.
Alex’s mental fug lasted most of that evening. He had watched pinky faces on CNN until he had got bored, then he’d turned over to the orange faces on Fox News, then – briefly – the BBC, where he didn’t know whether it was the familiar rust-coloured graphics or the familiar green-yellow face of the correspondent standing by the railings in Downing Street that made him feel homesick.
Then he flipped again, to a show called I Want a Million Dollars NOW!. Some girls in bright swimsuits were screaming at each other.
He had noticed that the wall of his room, by the door to the bathroom, had a bottle opener fixed to it with screws. So you could lever the crown top off a bottle of beer, presumably, before you took it into the toilet to settle in for a shit.
Alex didn’t have a bottle of beer. There was a little plasticky coffee-maker on the table by the television, though. He had plugged the two-pin plug in, filled the glass pot awkwardly from the shallow sink, filled the coffee-maker’s reservoir from the pot, replaced the empty pot on the hotplate. Beside it there was a plastic basket designed, apparently, to fool the passer-by into thinking it was made out of bright blue wicker. He had picked up the heat-sealed plastic envelope that said ‘Coffee’, and torn it open. It contained, apparently, a giant tea bag full of coffee, some of which had spilled out of the torn tea bag onto the table.
He had picked up the other plastic envelope, a paler brown, which contained the decaf. He had liberated the giant tea bag intact this time, smoothed it into the round space for it in the top of the coffee-maker, flipped the hinged holder so it sat back over the pot. Then he had replaced the two-pin plug, which had fallen out of its slot. Then he had flipped the switch on the base of the coffee-maker so it glowed orange, and waited for the machine to cough and splutter to a natural death.
Then he had unsheathed one of the two white styrofoam cups from its plastic wrapper, poured the scalding caramel-coloured coffee into it, waited for it to go cold, then drunk it.
Now he had run out of things to do.
Alex had never been to America before. Having set out with a sense – now, he saw, entirely bogus – of purpose and adventure, he felt suddenly small and pathetic and alone.
In his imagination, it had been a vector transformation. Going to America would, necessarily, make him equal to the setting. America, far away, looked big: he would become big as he travelled towards it. America, close up, was enormous. And he, travelling towards it, had become even smaller. He imagined himself labelled ‘Shown actual size’.
There was an entire country out there to be seen, and he couldn’t bring himself to leave his motel room even to eat. How hard could it be to walk round the corner and get a pizza, or go to a bar? He knew he was exacerbating things by inactivity. He felt low enough to do nothing but not so tired that he could go to sleep. Now the numbness was fading, the pleasurably dismaying shock of simply not doing what he intended and expected to, he found it hard to put the wasted cost of the flight out of his mind.
And while he sat here his mind was moving, never quite settling, on a survey of his situation. He was twenty-four years old. The most important thing in his life, for three years, had been a PhD that his gut told him he wouldn’t finish. Now it was a girl whom his gut had told him that he would marry, and in marrying whom, his gut told him, he would change his life. Now his gut had vanished. He was gutless. He looked down, miserably, at his gut, as if he imagined someone was watching whom he ought to impress wi
th his wryness if not his resolution.
Nobody was watching. He zoned back in. A bikini girl on the television shouted, at a buff-bodied and gormless male competitor: ‘Alix!’
He flicked the channel, and a British sports commentator said with lugubrious sonority: ‘… run…’
Flick.
‘…run?’
Cricket, this time. Flick.
‘…run away as far and as fast as you can…’
A cowboy film. Flick.
‘…circumstances are conspiring there…’
Politics. Flick.
‘Out!’
Tennis. Flick.
‘To get you…’
An advertisement for an ambulance-chasing personal injury lawyer whose swiftly scrolling small print was just beginning to make its way up from the bottom of the screen.
Click. Alex turned the television off. Something nagged at him – a feeling right at the back of his mind, almost below the level of consciousness – that someone somewhere was trying to tell him something. He shrugged it off.
He decided, finally, to make himself go for a walk. He swung his legs off the bed, and himself up onto his feet. He pulled back the chain from the door, shrugged his jacket on, and with not the slightest enthusiasm left the room, crossed the broad balcony and took the single flight of stairs down to the car park.
The light was orange and the night hot and tarmacky and strange-smelling. It was about nine o’clock, he reckoned. The motel consisted of an L-shaped block of rooms two storeys high, up to the foot of which parked cars nosed shell by shell. The motel was about a third full. Looking behind him as he crossed the tarmac, he could see a guy with his face in shadow, drinking a can of something on the balcony, two rooms down from his room.
At the registration office, strip light blared from the Perspex window where the teenage night clerk sat watching television. The door adjacent was half lit, with a sign hanging on it saying ‘Closed’ and the brightest light source the Mountain Dew decal on the vending machine.