Resistance is Futile

by Jenny T. Colgan

  ‘I can’t comment on that,’ said Anyali. ‘Where were we?’

  Nigel shifted the gleaming car into sixth gear, overtook a salesman’s Galaxy in the fast lane and took a sip of black coffee from his brushed-steel cup.

  ‘Contained,’ he growled. ‘More or less. But this Ben Hirati thing… I can’t. I can’t get a handle on it. It’s too coincidental to have happened on the day. It just points to one of the six, or someone at the facility who wanted to stop what he was doing.’

  ‘Or just didn’t like him. Or it really was natural causes. How on earth did you get the wife to identify him?’

  ‘Didn’t,’ said Nigel briefly. ‘Brought out his watch and rings. Told her someone at the office had already done it and it wouldn’t be necessary. Then I offered to let her see the body and, thankfully, she said no.’

  ‘And she believed that? She just swallowed it.’

  ‘Look, I know you’re a weird, emotionless robot, but she was pretty cut up about everything and barely took a thing in. So let’s say yes.’

  ‘But why would your spods kill him?’

  ‘Dunno,’ said Nigel. ‘Maybe they knew they were getting close to the truth and didn’t want it to come out.’

  ‘But then why not kill the girl? She’s the one who figured it out.’

  Nigel shook his head. He couldn’t understand that either. He’d had his own men on all of them for seventy-two hours and – nothing.

  ‘My money’s on the weird, wimpy guy,’ he said, rubbing his head.

  ‘I thought they were all weird.’

  ‘Oh, they’re a frog box. But the skinny one has a way of looking at you… like you’re not there at all.’

  There was a rustle of papers.

  ‘Do you mean Luke Beith?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘I thought he had problems with his eyesight.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Nigel.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be rather tricky for someone with vision problems to sneak past all your detection systems… plus isn’t he rather…?’

  She coughed quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘… um, noticeable? Wouldn’t someone remember seeing him?’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  She coughed again.

  ‘I mean, he’s…’

  For the first time he could remember, Nigel detected a note of softness in her voice.

  ‘What?’ he growled, his lips twitching for the first time that day.

  ‘Well, he’s rather… I mean, I don’t of course, but he could be considered… rather…’

  Nigel left her hanging on the end of the line.

  ‘… handsome?’

  He smiled to himself.

  ‘Really?’ he said.

  ‘It’s just a professional observation,’ said Anyali tightly. ‘I just thought that might make him more likely to be noticed. Like your girl with the bright ginger hair.’

  ‘They’d notice her,’ said Nigel. ‘There are barely any girls there. I doubt they’d notice some scruffy chap.’

  ‘No,’ said Anyali hurriedly. ‘Of course they wouldn’t.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Wouldn’t it make more sense,’ said Anyali, ‘just to keep them all in custody? I don’t like the idea of them all running free. It’s an uncontrollable variable.’

  ‘Well,’ said Nigel. ‘We’ve considered this. Firstly, they’re they only ones who can translate the data. Or rather, they have been so far. I am in no mood to open the data setup to anyone else right now, even if I was allowed to, which I’m not.’

  ‘No,’ said Anyali. ‘Quite.’

  ‘So it makes sense to have them together. Their phones have been removed and their passports are being monitored, except for young Beith, who doesn’t appear to have one. Or a phone in fact.’

  This made Nigel cross. There were so many things about that man that didn’t add up.

  ‘They can get on with their work. Or having long, fucking boring meetings about cleaning products, which seems to be about all they’re doing at the moment.’

  ‘Fine, good, I realise we need them,’ said Anyali. ‘I just wondered if it wouldn’t make more sense to have them all together in custody.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Nigel. ‘Unfortunately it’s against the law.’

  ‘I don’t think the PM and COBRA are going to have much problem with suspending habeas corpus under this particular set of circumstances,’ said Anyali stiffly. ‘We’ll be lucky if we can avoid a state of emergency. We’ve already informed the top brass to stand by for a potential large-scale military exercise.’

  ‘Have you now?’ said Nigel, watching a truck pulling into a service station and wondering how his mind could hold both the concept of a military state of alert in the UK and wanting a muffin at the same time.

  ‘So the least you could do is pull them in. And make them work at the same time. Tell them it’s for their own protection.’

  ‘Okay, two things,’ said Nigel, conscious time was rushing on. ‘They’re better like this. They don’t feel too much under suspicion, they can move about – they know they’re being watched, but they can do it within limits. They’re still pretty relaxed. They’re working for us. If they decide they’re being persecuted, or unjustly imprisoned – and I’ll tell you now that fat American is fairly well-briefed on his human rights – they could shut up shop in two seconds, seal their mouths and then we’d have a whole new set of problems on our hands, do you understand? Involving starting all over again from the beginning, getting a clutch of Bletchers in, and if you think mathematicians are difficult to work with, wait till you meet these guys.

  ‘We’re far, far better keeping them onside and cooperative and aware that this is for the good of the country, and possibly the world. Which it is. Plus, if we’re all nice and friendly and gentle and there is a rotten one in the middle, it’s going to be a much better way to flush them out, letting them gradually relax until we know exactly what the hell is up.’

  He thought about it. ‘Unless of course the message is, “We’re coming next Tuesday to blow up the planet, have a nice day, goodbye.”’

  Anyali sniffed dismissively.

  ‘Well, if we all thought like that, there wouldn’t be much use in us carrying on at all.’

  There was a short pause.

  ‘Right, well, I have to go and brief the PM. I need results, I need exactly what is in those messages and I need them soon.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Nigel. ‘But you have to let me handle them my way.’

  ‘All right,’ said Anyali. ‘For now. Try not to let them kill anyone else, will you?’

  Nigel let out an irritated sigh and went to hang up the phone.

  ‘Oh – you said there were two reasons we shouldn’t put your group in custody,’ said Anyali suddenly, just before his finger hit the off switch. ‘What was the other one?’

  ‘Because it’s wrong,’ growled Nigel, and hung up.

  The SCIF was at its quietest at just before seven, which was exactly how Nigel liked it. The men on the door snapped to attention – they had been bollocked to within an inch of their lives and interrogated back to front. Everyone now wore a paranoid, worried expression every day; Nigel was pleased to see people stiffen as he went past. Nothing wrong with a little alertness in the workplace.

  His own office was at the very top of the building, in a turret. It had once been used by Arthur Eddington, although this meant little to Nigel. There was also a stunning view across the ancient buildings and libraries which made up the town – this morning rising up out of a warm, early summer mist. There was only one way up – up a creaking staircase in fact – so if anyone was coming to see him he knew all about it. Apart from that, he had perfect privacy. His subordinates downstairs knew he was exasperated when the floorboards creaked over their heads as he marched up and down.

  He sat down, got his assistant Dahlia – who as usual scuttled in and out of his room like a rabbit – to get him more c
offee. She was Civil Service Fast Stream, off-the-chart clever, posh and completely wasted making him coffee, the only fact they could both agree on. She sidled in now. She was the only person whose tread was light enough on the two-hundred-year-old wooden staircase not to alert him. Every scientist in the building was quite disastrously in love with her.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Oh yah, also, the police are here.’

  Nigel looked up at her.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The police are here, yah? After, you know. The thing with the professor.’

  ‘The death you mean?’

  Nigel frowned. He assumed Thames House would have smoothed all this over by now. The last thing he needed was some clumsy plod marching round the place, asking questions about why so many of the rooms had such strong locking capabilities.

  ‘Did you tell them we weren’t very interested in plods?’

  Dahlia shrugged.

  ‘It’s not in my job description to be rude to Her Majesty’s police force,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not in your job description to use powdered milk in my coffee, but somehow you manage it,’ said Nigel, looking down at his cup with distaste, a slight scum floating on the surface.

  He sighed. Probably best with a bit of mid-level charm. Give them a bit of a kick out of the spying thing, sort out the mix-up, get them on their way.

  ‘Send them up,’ he said. He’d go to see the six afterwards.

  The two policemen entered the room five minutes later, their tread heavy on the steps. Nigel sighed. He didn’t have time for this, really didn’t. One sat in the corner with his hat on his knees; the other stepped forward.

  ‘Do you want coffee?’ asked Dahlia offhandedly. The policeman looked at her as if sizing up whether she meant it or not, which was wise – she didn’t.

  He was thickset, grey-haired, comfortable-looking.

  ‘DCI Malik,’ said the man, putting out a hand to shake.

  ‘Nigel Cardon,’ said Nigel. ‘Sorry, I don’t quite understand what you’re doing here.’

  Malik gave him a long policeman’s stare, but that didn’t matter to Nigel; he was king of the long stares. He could sit here all day: rank was with him.

  Nigel drank some more of Dahlia’s deliberately terrible coffee and glanced at his encrypted emails. He didn’t need to decrypt them to know exactly who they’d be from: Cabinet Office, Home Office, Thames House. Every single one of them asking, ‘Exactly what the fuck is going on in the skies above our heads?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Nigel. ‘Only, I’m very busy.’

  Malik cleared his throat.

  ‘Too busy to notice a dead body in your laboratory?’

  ‘No,’ said Nigel, ‘and we’re all beside ourselves with horror at what’s happened, for our facility and for his family. And as soon as they release the body, well, we can have a funeral.’

  ‘The family is complaining, saying the body isn’t local.’

  ‘No,’ said Nigel.

  ‘They’ve taken it away somewhere.’

  ‘We just need to make sure we work everything out properly and do the best for the family,’ Nigel said, as he’d already said before.

  ‘And you seriously think it’s natural causes?’

  ‘We’re not ruling anything out.’

  ‘So there are grounds for a murder investigation?’

  Nigel looked at Malik coolly.

  ‘Do you listen to a lot of gossip, DCI Malik?’

  ‘Why didn’t that body get to the local morgue? Death in the workplace? I believe that’s standard procedure.’

  Nigel leaned forward. ‘Forgive me, DCI, but as far as I understood, we thought the Cambridgeshire Constabulary also understood that this case has been deemed classified Top Secret and is now in the hands of… my colleagues and myself.’

  ‘Well, so they say,’ said Malik. ‘But I have to tell you that we’re the ones who have had to speak to his wife and his family, and I’ll tell you they’re beside themselves. And I haven’t seen much classified investigating going on. So I thought I’d come up and take a look, seeing as this is my town, as it were.’

  ‘Much obliged,’ said Nigel. ‘But don’t you have several acres worth of equal opportunities paperwork to be getting one with?’

  Malik shook his head.

  ‘Not when there’s a murder, sir.’

  ‘I realise that,’ said Nigel. ‘But I’m telling you we have it all under control.’

  ‘You have a suspect in custody?’

  ‘We have some people under observation,’ said Nigel, irritated despite himself. ‘And besides, this is a matter of national security…’

  ‘I’m sure clearance could be arranged,’ said the policeman, sitting back comfortably on his large haunches.

  ‘And I’m equally sure it couldn’t,’ said Nigel.

  ‘All right,’ said the policeman, standing up to leave. ‘Well, I thought I’d check. I’m sure my tiny uniform brain wouldn’t understand anything anyway. But I have to tell you: we’re the ones the family are coming round to see, hurling themselves on us. We’ve got his wife down the station every day, and all we can say is, “Sorry, luv, apparently it’s Top Secret”? It’s not good enough, sir.’

  The policeman looked straight at Nigel, who sized him up. He wondered if it would actually not be very useful to have a time-served copper onside. He knew absolutely how good the bullshit radar of your average copper was; how good they were at spotting lies – their average working life consisting of nothing but – and their ability to focus on one problem at a time, like a dog with a bone. If he could put a lid on this, it might help him get on with a lot of the other stuff without bringing too many more people into the loop.

  ‘Can you keep your mouth shut, DCI?’

  The man looked at him.

  ‘I have photographs of the dean you wouldn’t believe.’

  Nigel’s lips twitched. He wondered if he could wangle a bit of help without telling Malik what was really going on, and decided that he could. He seemed old school. Nigel liked old school. He liked by-the-book decent plod work – no mavericks. Nigel had never met a maverick who had been anything other than the most gigantic pain in the arse and who could hold up perfectly straightforward investigations for months on end purely by being a prick. As soon as Nigel saw a whiff of a leather jacket on a police officer, he automatically zoned out. But Malik seemed more his sort.

  ‘Go do your due diligence on these guys,’ he said, scribbling down the names of the six mathematicians. ‘And I’ll meet you at the Watson building at eleven. Introduce you to Professor Hirati’s original team.’

  Malik nodded and took down the details in his notebook.

  ‘Be nice to have this cleared up,’ said Malik. Nigel didn’t mention that the death of a physics professor came extraordinarily low on his list of priorities now. However, he would be extremely interested in Malik’s opinion of Luke Beith.

  Nigel strode down to the maths department just after nine. It was a couple of miles, but he could use his phone without being overheard on the way, and it was still a lovely day. He knew from the overnight feeds that none of them had gone home the night before: they had ordered pizza, which security had checked out (and then, Nigel noticed from the log, ordered some for themselves), and stayed up all night working on the papers. Nigel tried not to get increasingly nervous as he neared the Watson building. When it had been one piece of potential evidence from space, he could just about manage it psychologically.

  What the hell they had now he didn’t even want to think.

  But it was his job to get on with it. He made his face impassive, trying to prepare for any eventuality; anything they could possibly say to them.

  ‘This is amazing,’ Luke was saying. ‘It’s just completely unbelievable… I… I don’t have the words.’

  ‘Get your head out of there,’ said Arnold. ‘Seriously, you look like a greedy dog.’

  ‘How can you not have eaten pizza before
?’ said Ranjit, puzzled.

  ‘Because – alien?’ said Evelyn tartly. She was bored out of her mind. Having to sit up all night pretending to work while Luke translated had been incredibly tedious. She glanced at Connie, who actually had worked, but was still on the first page when Luke was through a bookful.