by Ian Hocking
The policeman scrambled downstairs. ‘A six-four is an assault, Sam. Takes priority. You stay here, eh.’
The policeman’s footfalls became quiet, then clear and brisk as he ran out into the street. David kept the weapon trained on the door and his eyes on the shadow of Sam, the landlord. The door was still unlocked. Sam muttered something and stepped away. Finally, he toddled down the stairs.
David held his position until his calves prickled with cramp. Only then did he exhale and stand. He rubbed his legs. He took another breath and pocketed the gun, shaking his head at his outstanding luck.
He walked to the window and parted the curtain. The policeman was running down the road and David felt a momentary guilt. He had been ready to electrify that man.
David took his helmet, confirmed the presence of his rucksack, and moved to the door. He pressed his ear against it. There was no sound. It opened on an empty corridor. He made his way downstairs, low and sideways. He heard the far-off sound of a jukebox, some laughter, and breaking glass. At the bottom of the stairs, he risked a glance into the bar. The landlord was not there.
David took three huge steps across the entrance and slid through the door. The street was deserted. He swung the helmet over his head and jogged towards his bike. It was a mistake to act like an escapee, but he had too much spare energy. He slipped into the alley and noted, with relief, that the bike had not been moved. The old woman’s window was closed and dark.
He climbed aboard the bike and made ready for the long ride, pausing often to listen for running footsteps or a shout of alarm. Finally, he zipped his jacket and kicked up the stand. The alley was too narrow to turn in, so he waddled the bike backwards to the pavement.
‘Ego, can you interface with the bike’s computer?’
‘No. It has not responded to my attempts at communication.’
‘Fine. Listen, the bike computer uses a vocal input. I don’t want to get the two of you confused. From now on, I’ll refer to you by name if I’m talking to you.’
‘Understood.’
David cleared his throat. Still no police. He held the brake, turned the key and pressed the ignition. The bike rumbled to life. Its windscreen rose and the suspension settled. The display gave him the time, his fuel load and a route map. He had enough petrol for one hundred kilometres on the straight. The excitement of escape began to lighten him.
‘Ego, what do you think will happen when the police learn I’ve disappeared?’
‘The local traffic division will move to a high state of alert. Records indicate that the local constabulary has one helicopter. If it locates you, the probability of reaching Heathrow is almost zero. You must find a motorway to leave the area before roadblocks are set, then transfer to minor roads to avoid detection.’
‘Bike computer, show me the fastest route to the nearest motorway.’
A map appeared. He could be on the A1 in less than twenty minutes. He would pass through settlements called Walshford, Fairburn and Darrington. Names he would never remember. He could make Leicester without stopping for fuel.
He rolled to the junction and looked left. The two police officers were standing only metres away. They had their backs to him. Between them, being berated vigorously by one, was Janine. Her eyes briefly touched upon David’s. Her expression did not change. David nodded.
He turned in the road and coasted away, retracing his route along Main Street.
‘Bike, change colour.’
The motorbike rode through one pool of streetlight with a silver finish. By the next, it was midnight blue.
‘Ego, read me War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.’
‘“Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Bonapartes. But I warn you…”’
~
Mrs McMurray, Saskia’s landlady, gave her a key with a plastic St Andrew’s Cross as the fob. Saskia took it and closed the bedroom door in her inquisitive face. She had fantasised about collapsing on the bed and sleeping dreamlessly, but her mind had not spent its momentum. It turned over still, rolling facts around, testing them, tasting them. The words on the wall. Shakespeare. The Fates. The death of Bruce Shimoda. The first bomb in 2003. The second bomb. Proctor. Back to the words on the wall.
By the pricking of my thumbs.
Minutes later, she lay stretched on the bed. Her nose was cold. By the pillow, her glasses were folded and dark. Near her feet was the dusty envelope, unopened. It read: ‘Do not open this envelope’.
She walked to the sash window. She might have been looking from the window of an apartment on a quiet, cold night, back in Berlin.
Something wicked this way comes.
The Fates: Clotho, she spins the thread of life. Lachesis, she measures a length. Atropos, she cuts it.
Spin, measure, snip.
The window was jet, smoky with hints to the scene beyond. The impressions merged and snapped into focus. A human face.
Whom do you hunt?
Saskia stepped back, aghast. Her calves met the edge of the bed. She did not see the face as a reflection, but as a visitation. She drew her revolver.
‘Only me.’
Saskia screamed as she turned. Mrs McMurray, the elderly proprietor who had asked her not to smoke, there’s a dear, dropped her tray of tea and thin British biscuits.
‘Why, my dear girl,’ Mrs McMurray said. Her mouth worked on autopilot while her eyes roamed. ‘I’m very sorry. I should’ve knocked, should I not.’
‘Frau McMurray—’ Saskia began. Why was the woman apologising? ‘The tea,’ she said, confused.
‘Aye. Will you look at that. I should clean it up.’
The landlady remained exactly where she was.
Saskia faked a laugh. She let the revolver tip over her finger. ‘Do not worry about the gun. It is not loaded. I was…oiling it. This is my nightly practice.’
Do I look familiar, Frau McMurray? Read any Russian newspapers? Do I give you a sense of –
Saskia stowed the gun in its holster. ‘Listen. You clean the spill and I shall make us a fresh pot of tea.’
Mrs McMurray brightened. She was staring at the gun. ‘That’s a fine idea.’
Saskia crept down the thickly-carpeted stairs, past printed masterpieces and a cross-stitched owl. Her heart slowed with each step. The television became louder. She remembered the ghostly reflection and decided that Jago’s last word of the night had been correct. She needed to sleep.
Of course, if the landlady walked into a room without knocking, she got what she deserved. What Mrs McMurray really needed was…
A bullet?
She froze on the stairs.
Is that what she needs, Frau Kommissarin? Spin, measure, and…snip!
Saskia cleared her throat and continued walking. That voice was surely just her conscience. But she remembered the words of Klutikov: ‘The imposition of the donor pattern must be constant. If not, the original pattern—that is, the personality and identity extant in your brain—will resurge.’
Was it the mind of her true body—and its murderous mind—straining at its bonds? She could not be sure. But if she even suspected that she could lose her new mind to the old one, then that gun would find itself pointed at her temple. She did not want to meet the Angel of Death.
A little off the top? asked the voice. Snip.
Chapter Seventeen
Early the next morning, Saskia sat with Jago in the back of a police car as they drove towards the Special Incident Unit. She wore a borrowed police greatcoat, complete with sergeant stripes. Their driver was listening to a local radio station. She did not recognise any of the songs. She shivered and turned up the collar of the greatcoat. It smelled musty. Onto to her thoughts stepped Jago, reading from a handheld computer. There had been a sighting the night before, he said. Proctor had checked into a hotel in Northallerton, two hundred and thirty kilometres from Edinburgh and one hundred and sixty kilometres from the equipment shed. Jago had been eager to visit Northallerton, but not Saskia. Her inst
inct told her it would be a waste of time.
Jago shrugged. Local police and some officers from the Edinburgh team were on the case. They were competent enough.
Saskia closed her eyes on Edinburgh and let Jago’s beautiful vowels and intermittent trill carry her through the report. The equipment shed, she learned, had provided little evidence. A farmer had discovered the parachute and, inside the shed, the exploded remains of a laptop computer: a Korean model available from hundreds of outlets nationwide. It had been destroyed by a plastic bonded explosive with a generic, untraceable blasting cap. A wider search revealed tracks made by four motorbikes. The farmer had no clue. They were not his. He owned two trail bikes and they were kept in a garage at the main farm. They were untouched.
Saskia yawned.
‘What about Northallerton?’
‘Late last night, a constable reported the flight of a man who matched Proctor’s description. He had checked into The Poor Players under the name Harrison. He was moments from being arrested when the constable was called away on an assault-in-progress, which turned out to be a false alarm. When the constable returned twenty minutes later, after a cup of tea—’
‘Meine Güte. The English and their narcotic tea.’
‘—he found that Proctor had vanished.’
‘Go on.’
Jago angled his computer screen against the sunlight. ‘House-to-house enquiries uncovered Mrs Taome Gallagher. Tay to her friends. Bit of a wind-bag by the sounds of it. She spoke to a man matching Proctor’s description around the time he checked in. According to the credit card people, that was 6:02 p.m. Said he was riding a chrome motorbike and wanted to park in her alleyway. We have an APB on him.’
‘APB?’
‘All Points Bulletin. His description is released nationally.’
Saskia stared at the shops sliding by. ‘Surely that compromises the secret nature of the investigation?’
‘Perhaps. But the governor phoned me this morning and said he was fed up working with one hand tied behind his back. I’m inclined to agree.’
‘Does Proctor’s bike match the tracks found next to the glider?’
‘Yes, but my guess would be that he was met by a group of his own people. They gave him supplies and rode away, splitting up.’
‘No. I think that would be a waste of effort. Why not put all the supplies in the shed?’
Jago scratched a tooth. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Where else was the card used?’
‘Two filling stations between Belford and Northallerton.’
‘Do they have cameras?’
‘No, we checked. He chose wee one-pump jobs. He’s using minor roads. One or two lads saw him, but they can’t give a good description. They say his bike was chrome too. Maybe a trail bike.’
‘So. A trail bike. Probably the same bike he used to ride away from the equipment shed.’
‘Yes.’
‘Back to last night. You said there was a falsified accusation of assault?’
‘It came over the radio just as the officer was about to interview Proctor.’
‘That is convenient. In Germany we say somebody has “cried wolf”.’
‘Here too.’
‘Who was the caller?’
‘It turned out to be a kid. Truscott—the reporting officer—said she looked to be on the wrong side of sixteen.’
Saskia felt a memory move, delicate as a baby’s kick.
~
The driver stopped midway along a featureless road on an industrial estate. Saskia and Jago left the vehicle and entered a grey complex of office buildings. She could see security cameras tracking them. On instinct, she lowered her face into the raised collar of her greatcoat. The wind sang in the corners. Jago ushered her into the lee of a five-storey building. There were Lothian and Borders Police signs, but the impression was blank, corporate. The occasional flowers looked unhappy.
Saskia relaxed her shoulders as they entered the lobby. There was a security barrier but its horizontal bars were open and its lights green. Jago nodded to the guard and, just like that, they were through.
‘The good news is, they found us a room,’ said Jago, entering the lift.
‘And?’
‘You’ll want to keep your coat on. They’re renovating some of the floor and half the windows are missing. It’s a tad “parky”.’ He used air quotes. ‘That means -’
‘Parky. Right.’
They shared a smile as the doors closed.
~
‘Agent Brandt,’ said Paul Besson, removing his mittens, ‘what do you know about cryptanalysis?’
Saskia considered this nervous, boyish forty-year-old. She was reminded of Lev Klutikov. The last two minutes had comprised rapid introductions and work allocations for the team of four, all galvanised by the chill in the room.
She was about tell Besson she had no idea what cryptanalysis meant. Then, the answer came to her. She said, ‘The study of methods for undoing the encryption that has been applied to a signal, in order to discover its true meaning.’
‘Very good.’ His tone was flat and he had difficulty meeting her eyes. She could smell the anxiety on his breath. ‘Yes, very good. So far, we know this. That, sometime in the last forty-eight hours, our suspect initiated a communication using his personal computer as the interface, and telecommunications equipment in his taxi as the transmitter. That the communication was an encapsulated transmission of video and audio. That it passed through the exchanges at ScotIX and MAE-West. That it lasted less than two minutes. That there were two parties involved.’
‘And that we very much want to know its content.’
‘And that.’
‘Milk and sugar, please,’ she said.
Saskia watched him pour four cups of coffee. They were standing next to the long conference table that dominated the room. Garland—a red-haired, thirtyish woman who had travelled up to Scotland with Besson—nodded and took one of the coffees and returned to her station at the head of the table, where she donned smoked glasses and re-entered her workspace. Meanwhile, Besson put milk and sugar into another cup—hesitating, his eyes on Saskia’s knees—and gave it to Saskia. She smiled and stepped away from the coffee machine.
‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘were both ends of the transmission encrypted at source, or were they directed through a third-party server somewhere?’
Besson raised his eyebrows. ‘It’s starting to sound like you should be the consultant, not me.’
‘Let’s say that I don’t remember what I’ve forgotten. Start with the basics.’
Besson sipped his coffee and unzipped his coat. He loosed a sigh of concentration. ‘Basics: encryption being the process of converting publicly readable information into something that can only be understood by the intended recipient. These days, we tend to use something called asymmetric encryption. It’s asymmetric because the key used to encrypt the information is not the same as the key use to decrypt it.‘ Besson made a sound like a purr. ‘It’s…’
‘Complicated?’ she said, sipping.
He grinned and put a hand on the crown of his head, scratching. ‘You remember the Enigma machine?’
‘No.’
‘The Germans used it to encode military transmissions during the Second World War. The cool thing about the Enigma cipher was that it changed itself with each letter of the message. The odds against breaking it were 150 million million million to one. But it was cracked.’
‘How?’
‘It was systematic. It was predictable. With modern computers we could break it easily. But if there is no system, we have a real problem.’ He looked pained. ‘I’ve had a brief look at the data this morning. I’d guess it falls into the unsystematic category. It’s a one-time pad. Unbreakable.’
‘I do not like the sound of that.’
‘Of all the methods of encryption, only one is mathematically impossible to crack, and that’s the one-time pad, or OTP. Even given infinite computing resources, the plaintext could ne
ver be recovered from the ciphertext. The OTP uses a key that has the same number of elements as the plaintext. Each plaintext element’s value—be it a letter or a pixel—is transformed by the corresponding random value in the key. As long as each element in the OTP is truly random, there’s no systematic element for a cryptanalyst to sniff out. It’s what we call perfect secrecy. You rarely find OTPs in the wild because they’re unwieldly, but we do use them to teach students the basics of cryptanalysis.’
‘So how does the receiver of the message know how to unravel it?’
‘The sender and the receiver must have identical versions of the key.’
‘And what form might the key take?’
‘It would be a series of random numbers approximately one terabyte in size, in this case—based on my guesses about the format and frame rate of the transmission.’
‘Paul, tell me honestly,’ said Saskia. Her voice was low. ‘Is it possible to discover the contents of Proctor’s communication?’
Jago’s arm reached between them and took one of the coffees. ‘You can forget you heard that name. I mean it.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Besson, looking amused. ‘Somebody point out the irony of spilling the beans to a cryptanalyst.’
Saskia frowned at Jago. ‘Scotty, I have made it clear that I do not agree with your superiors’ policy of restricting information.’
Besson nodded seriously. ‘I like your attitude, Agent Brandt.’
‘It’s Kommissarin,’ said Jago. He turned to Saskia. ‘All the same, we should keep this on a need-to-know basis.’
‘Did you manage to find a heater?’ asked Besson.
‘That depends. Will you manage to forget the name?’
After a pause, Besson said, ‘Kommissarin Brandt, you were asking about the possibility of cracking an OTP. Well, it has been done. The Signal Security Agency of the US Army managed to crack the OTP of the German Foreign Office in 1944. It turned out the Germans were using a machine whose numbers weren’t completely random. That gave the breakers a foothold. But Proctor’s code? We have no foothold.’
‘Well, looks like you can go back to Cheltenham,’ said Jago, triumphantly. ‘Sorry to have wasted your time.’