Double or Die

by Charlie Higson

  The two candles, which they had placed in the middle of the dance floor, threw their giant shadows on to the walls and ceiling.

  ‘You dance divinely, your highness,’ said Kelly in a mock posh voice she had picked up from the cinema. ‘Especially for someone with a wooden leg.’

  ‘Damn the war,’ said James with a stiff upper lip, and Kelly smiled.

  ‘You have a very pretty smile,’ said James, in the same clipped tones. ‘Especially for someone with wooden teeth.’

  ‘Oi, less of your lip,’ said Kelly. ‘I’ll give you wooden teeth.’

  ‘Promises, promises,’ said James.

  The music stopped and there was the sound of clapping from the doorway. James and Kelly jumped, but it was only Fairburn.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep after all,’ he explained. ‘Too excited. I looked for you, you’d gone. Then I heard music.’

  ‘I told you,’ said James to Kelly..

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry,’ said Fairburn. ‘I was close by. I don’t think it could be heard from far.’

  ‘All the same…’ said James, ‘no more music.’

  ‘You have me at a disadvantage,’ said Fairburn, sitting down on the edge of the stage. ‘You seem to know all about me, but I know nothing about you.’

  ‘I’m a friend of Pritpal Nandra’s,’ said James. ‘He’s my messmate.’

  ‘James Bond,’ said Fairburn and his face broke into a lopsided smile. ‘He was always talking about you.’

  ‘It’s because of him I’m here,’ said James. ‘He solved most of your clues.’

  James and Kelly joined Fairburn on the stage. The dancing had warmed them up and their faces were glowing. James was almost starting to feel normal again.

  ‘Good old Pritpal,’ said Fairburn. ‘He always was the cleverest in the Crossword Society. How is he? You must tell me everything.’

  So, sitting there in the deserted ballroom, with the flickering candlelight playing over them, James began to tell Fairburn his story. While two hundred yards away across the water another story was being acted out on board another ship.

  26

  Babushka

  Colonel Sedova, known by all as Babushka, the Grandmother, was standing in the hold of the Amoras looking up at the Nemesis machine. For several minutes she had been standing like this, with her back to the others, and she had said not a word.

  Sir John Charnage looked at her broad back, looked at the grey jacket stretched tight across it. Below the jacket, her skirt and the thick stockings on her sturdy peasant legs were also grey. With her grey hair she might have been a statue carved out of rock.

  It was hot down here. Charnage was sweating. He could feel a drop of moisture crawling down the small of his back. The only other people in the hold were the Smith brothers. Ludwig was picking his rotten brown teeth with a nail and Wolfgang was clutching his bandaged hand. He looked sick. His face was yellow and he shivered uncontrollably, occasionally letting out a small whimper. The man should really have been in hospital, but the ship’s doctor, a fat Russian who smelt of cloves and cheap wine, had patched him up, crudely stitching his hand and closing the wounds where his fingers had been severed.

  When they got to Russia, Wolfgang had been promised the best care in the country, but for now, he was needed here.

  Babushka took a deep breath. Charnage saw her back expanding and the seams of her jacket stretching even more. Then at last she turned. Her flat, unremarkable peasant face showed no emotion.

  ‘Without Fairburn,’ she said, ‘this machine is useless. It is a pile of junk.’

  ‘We can get it to work, Colonel,’ said Charnage, wiping sweat from his moustache. ‘You have scientists, after all, mathematicians –’

  ‘It could take years,’ said Babushka dismissively. ‘And it is not even finished.’

  ‘I’m telling you,’ said Charnage, ‘if we don’t sail tonight we can’t sail until the next tide. Fairburn could even now be talking to the police. We need to get going.’

  ‘I do not believe that Fairburn has left the docks,’ said Babushka bluntly.

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘I am sure. I have men at every exit. He is hiding here and we will find him.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad one of us is certain, at least,’ said Charnage. He was hot and tired and he needed a drink.

  ‘I do not make mistakes,’ said Babushka.

  Charnage looked at the woman. He didn’t like her, he never had. She had no sense of humour. She reminded him of a Polish nanny he’d had when he was a boy.

  ‘We all make mistakes,’ he said and laughed quietly.

  ‘Some make more mistakes than others,’ said Babushka and she took the chair from by the worktable and sat down, folding her hands neatly in her lap.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ said Charnage. ‘If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t be here. None of this would be here.’

  ‘Twice you had the boy, and twice you let him go.’

  ‘I’ll admit that the first time was my mistake,’ said Charnage. ‘I didn’t know how resourceful the lad was.’

  ‘And the second time?’

  Charnage nodded at Ludwig and Wolfgang.

  ‘You can blame these two clowns,’ he said.

  ‘A good officer never blames his men,’ said Babushka.

  ‘A good officer wouldn’t necessarily be landed with these two idiots,’ said Charnage.

  Ludwig muttered something and Wolfgang swore under his breath. Charnage turned to them.

  ‘Well?’ he said. ‘You think I’m being unfair? Come off it. All you had to do was drop a half-conscious boy into the Thames, and look what happened.’ He waggled his fingers mockingly at Wolfgang.

  ‘You are responsible,’ said Babushka, calmly. ‘That boy should have been dealt with properly. Your plan was not serious.’

  ‘Oh, my plan was not serious, eh? I wonder what you would have done with him?’

  ‘I would have strangled him with my bare hands,’ said Babushka, and Charnage did not doubt her.

  ‘He already knew too much,’ Babushka went on. ‘You should not have taken any more risks.’

  ‘Well, you might have said something at the time.’

  ‘You were in charge, John.’

  ‘I got Fairburn here, didn’t I, for God’s sake?’ Charnage shouted angrily. ‘I got him to build this bloody thing for you. I did what you wanted. I did my job, I completed my side of the deal.’

  ‘If your work is complete, then you are of no further use to us.’

  ‘Now that’s not the deal we made, and you know it,’ said Charnage, jabbing a finger at the seated woman. ‘I’m getting out of this godforsaken country and starting again in Russia, and don’t think you’re going to get away without paying me. I’ll kick up such a stink.’

  Babushka started to chuckle, softy and quietly, like a kindly grandmother chuckling over a baby. ‘How little you seem to know of the world, John.’

  ‘Oh spare me,’ said Charnage and he slid his cigarette case out of his jacket pocket. He took out a cigarette, knocked the end of it to tamp down the tobacco, then lit it with a safety match. He threw the spent match on to the floor.

  ‘If you’re going to punish anyone, punish these two,’ he said. ‘They had several chances to do away with the boy and they botched it each time.’

  ‘I wonder who they serve,’ said Babushka. ‘I wonder who they are loyal to.’

  ‘We’re loyal to whoever pays us,’ said Ludwig. ‘Our only boss is hard cash.’

  ‘I wonder how you can show your loyalty,’ said Babushka.

  ‘They can show their loyalty by doing what I tell them,’ said Charnage, blowing out a great cloud of smoke.

  ‘Do you really think they are loyal to you?’ said Babushka, raising her eyebrows quizzically.

  ‘Listen, I’ve had enough of this,’ said Charnage. ‘It’s getting boring. I’ve told you what I think we should do. Set sail now and get away from here. We’ll figure out how Ne
mesis works somehow, but if we stay here any longer we’re risking everything. We can always come back for Fairburn.’

  Babushka turned her eyes on Wolfgang and Ludwig. Those eyes that had seen so much. That had watched countless men die. There was a message in her eyes. A message that Ludwig clearly understood.

  Charnage didn’t notice, he was busy wiping his face. He felt dizzy and his head ached. He hadn’t slept at all last night and it was now nearly one in the morning.

  ‘You were only ever a servant, John,’ said Babushka. ‘Perhaps you dreamt that you were something more, but you were simply a tool. What use would you be to us in Russia? A drunk. A gambler. A capitalist. You were a servant. And a wise servant serves the strongest master. Isn’t that right, Ludwig?’

  ‘Oh, to hell with the lot of you,’ said Charnage. ‘I’m going to bed.’ He dropped his cigarette on to the floor and stamped it out.

  There was a tiny schink sound and then Charnage grunted.

  Ludwig had punched him in the back.

  Charnage tried to turn round and say something but his muscles wouldn’t obey him. He couldn’t move. The trickle of sweat down his back had become a flood. Warm liquid soaked into his shirt.

  He dropped to his knees, suddenly too weak to stand.

  ‘What have you done?’ he said flatly and, as Ludwig stepped into his field of vision, Charnage saw that he held one of his Apache guns in his hand, the brass knuckleduster curling around his long, white fingers.

  But he hadn’t hit him with the knuckleduster.

  The blade was extended and slick with blood.

  Ludwig plucked Charnage’s handkerchief from his top pocket, wiped the blade clean and stuffed the handkerchief back.

  ‘What have you done…?’

  ‘Put him out of the way,’ said Babushka. ‘Then throw him over the side somewhere in the North Sea.’

  Charnage looked at Babushka. He looked into her merciless black eyes. They were growing larger, filling first her face and then the entire hold of the ship, they were two bottomless black pools and he was falling into them.

  ‘I told John that I wouldn’t cooperate unless he allowed me to at least let people know that I was all right,’ said Fairburn. ‘He saw the sense in that. He didn’t want anyone to come looking for me, after all. So he let me set one final crossword puzzle, which I sent to The Times with a brief letter telling them it would be my last. And he let me write a harmless letter to the Head Master and one to Pritpal. I knew John never did crosswords or puzzles of any kind so he wouldn’t spot the hidden clues. However, the other day, while I was working on Nemesis, his men searched my cabin and found an early draft of the letter with some notes on it that I had foolishly failed to destroy, and he realised he had made a mistake.’

  ‘Your clues were too subtle,’ said James. ‘We didn’t realise until it was too late just how serious it was.’

  ‘I never meant for you boys to try and find me by yourselves,’ said Fairburn, shaking his head. ‘I thought Pritpal would simply discuss it all with the Head Master who would alert the police.’

  The three of them were still sitting on the stage in the ballroom on the Empress of the East. Kelly was very sleepy and her head kept nodding forward, but James was burning with excess energy and he felt slightly delirious.

  ‘If the police had been involved,’ he said, ‘Charnage would still be stalling them and you’d be halfway to Russia.’

  ‘You could be right,’ said Fairburn sadly. ‘John always was a troubled character, but I still find it hard to believe that he could do this to me. This whole affair is ghastly, quite ghastly.’

  ‘How did it all begin?’ said James.

  ‘At Cambridge, I suppose,’ said Fairburn. ‘After the war. I was there with poor Ivar and John. John was a few years older than us; he had delayed going to university to go off and fight, but we were good friends. We had rooms next to each other in Trinity. Ivar and I were both studying mathematics, and John was reading chemistry. The only thing we fell out over was politics. Ivar and John were both interested in communism. For a young man with a brain, it seemed to be the future. Equality for all! Banish poverty! Take power away from the hands of the men with the money, overthrow all the stuffy old rules and give the poor a chance. All fine ideals. But I knew it wasn’t like that. I was living in England, but my mother and father were still there, in Russia. I heard about what was really going on. My father managed to smuggle letters out in secret to me. Then one day the letters stopped coming and I have never heard from him or my mother again.’ Fairburn paused and rubbed his eyes.

  ‘The revolution started with bloodshed,’ he said. ‘Lenin had the tsar and all his family shot. And it didn’t end there. Terrible things were happening. People who supported Lenin’s rivals were disappearing. People who questioned him were disappearing. The ideal of communism died, and Lenin became just another tyrant.’

  ‘Could Peterson and Charnage not see that?’ said James.

  ‘I tried to show them the truth,’ said Fairburn. ‘But Ivar was a pure mathematician, he was always more at home with numbers than human beings. He was in love with the idea of communism and like many he refused to see what was really happening out there. For John it was something else. He felt guilty about his family’s great wealth, and his father’s factory where the workers died. And when he went to war he lost all faith in his country. He could never understand how any government could send its young men off to die like that. He was badly injured at Gallipoli, you know, which is why he limps. Lying in hospital, fending off the flies, he changed, and when he recovered, he wanted to change the world. Even then, though, he was a gambler and a drinker. We could see that it was going to destroy his life. After Trinity I lost touch with John, though Ivar and I remained firm friends. And then one day Ivar told me about a numbers machine he was building. It was to help in gambling, in predicting numbers and generating numbers. I don’t understand gambling. I didn’t really understand what the machine was for, but as a mathematical device it was intriguing.’

  ‘I saw it,’ said James. ‘In Charnage’s office.’

  ‘Some Americans had been helping them design it,’ said Fairburn. ‘Gambling men from New York. In particular an accountant with an extraordinary mind for numbers. Abracadabra, or something.’

  ‘Abbadabba?’ said James.

  ‘That’s the man. Not my sort.’

  ‘He’s a gangster,’ said James.

  ‘The worlds of gambling and crime have always been closely linked,’ said Fairburn. ‘John has no head for business, but he has a genius for picking the wrong people to deal with. The criminals have been bleeding him dry. When the communists came knocking at his door with offers of great wealth and a glorious future in Russia, he let them in. They had heard about his numbers machine, and they wanted one of their own.’

  ‘Why?’ said James.

  ‘Not for gambling, that’s for sure,’ said Fairburn. ‘But for codes and code breaking. That’s what this has all been about, right from the very start. Intelligence is power, James. We Russians love secrecy. We love our spies, and the history of spying has been the history of trying to find out what the enemy is up to without them finding out what you are up to. Unless you have the latest secret codes you cannot win. No man has even been able to invent a code that couldn’t be broken, but a machine might just do it. A machine with a mind a million times cleverer than a man’s. The Russians were willing to pay John a vast sum of money to build such a machine. On a much larger scale than the original one, of course.’

  ‘But they needed you,’ said James.

  ‘Yes,’ said Fairburn. ‘Ivar tried, but failed. He couldn’t build what the Russians wanted by himself. He asked me if I would help.’

  ‘But you knew who Charnage was building it for, didn’t you?’ said James.

  ‘Not at first, and when I found out, I would have nothing to do with it. By then John was in too deep, though. He knew that if he tried to back out the Russians would murde
r him, that is their way. So he kidnapped me and forced me to complete the work that Ivar had started. And now it’s almost finished. The Numeric Evaluating Mathematical Engine and Serial Intelligence System. N.E.M.E.S.I.S.’

  ‘Can they operate it without you?’ asked James.

  ‘No. At least not yet.’ Fairburn pulled out the sheaf of papers that he had taken from his cabin on the Amoras. ‘Every day they would ask me to write down instructions, and every day I stalled, because I knew that if I ever did manage to write down how to work Nemesis, then they would have no more use for me and they would snuff me out.’

  ‘So the machine’s useless now?’ said James.

  ‘For a while,’ said Fairburn. ‘In a year, two years, they might figure it out, but it is very complex. You see, the scientists in Russia have all been killed. There are new ones being trained now, young men, but it will take time, and they are scared to think imaginatively, because imagination leads to questions, and the men in power do not like their people asking questions. Ask a question in Russia and the answer is always the same – prison or death.’ Fairburn stood up. ‘Come along, now. We must sleep. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.’

  They woke Kelly and navigated the short way back to the first-class cabins.

  Fairburn stared out at the Amoras, sitting at anchor in the middle of the dock.

  ‘John knew what he had done,’ said Fairburn. ‘He knew the terrible mistake he had made dealing with Russians. In a way I feel sorry for him, I can almost forgive him. When a man is in a corner he will do anything to stay alive. That is why he renamed that ship. It was his little joke. His confession to God. Amoras, the knight who tried to do a deal with the devil.’

  James said goodnight and took Kelly into her cabin.

  ‘It’s freezing in here,’ she said, wriggling under the blankets. ‘Stay with me, eh? We can keep each other warm.’

  ‘I don’t know…’

  ‘I feel like as long as I’m with you, nothing bad’s going to happen to me,’ said Kelly.