A Spy in Time

by Imraan Coovadia

  “Thank you but no. Is everyone around here a Thirteen or is your designation a coincidence?”

  “Members of the foreign service, we find, have a lively sense of superstition, not like the rational beings in counterintelligence. Thus we can use the assignment exclusively for our recruits.”

  I thought, just for a moment, that Lucan might be smiling. But when I looked again he wasn’t. He was folding the tripod and packing it away. I could hear the rain drumming on the building, as if the sky were falling on us.

  “Ready?”

  “For what?”

  “There’s a memorial for your friend, who worked closely with us in Section. I thought you had a right to attend.”

  The garden of unknown heroes was situated behind the mansion. It was contained inside a masonry wall. The top of the wall was lined with rosebushes. Cypresses in tapering pots stood among the holograms, more men and women in suits, almost solid on their projected plinths.

  The holograms, set in rows of ten, were life-sized. They seemed to be turning in my direction, whichever angle I looked from. Yet their faces were dissolving into the rain so that, like the portraits of Directors in Century, you couldn’t quite recognize any particular individual.

  In the middle of the enclosed space was a pool filled with black water, receiving the rain.

  While we waited under an umbrella, I studied my reflection in the disturbed surface of the pool, nervous for any sign of deterioration. I couldn’t tell for sure if anything had changed. When I cast my mind back to a year or two ago, it seemed that my reflection had been more full-bodied and vigorous. It was said that reflection sickness could affect any thinking creature, even a consultant, as it began to lose its exact place and time. I might have been so paranoid about being in a trap because excessive suspicion was an early symptom of the disorder.

  The members of Internal Section came in through a different gate. They wore dark raincoats and sunglasses and didn’t check out their reflections in the mirror. When they went past they nodded to Lucan. I wondered if they knew who I was or if they were at all curious.

  Nobody was talking. The lamps came on, rain hissing past them, clouds running close over our heads. In the distance I heard the sporadic rumble of automatic trucks, carrying ore north to the continent. The sounds of the trucks too were lost in the crackle of approaching lightning.

  I had the feeling of having stepped from one dream into another, and another still more distant, so that by now I was so far away I could never make it back to my origin. I shivered and was lost in my cone of rain among these men and women in their black coats.

  Lucan noticed. “You good?”

  “Just dizzy.”

  He lent me his free arm and held the umbrella high above our heads.

  “You may have spells like that for some time, Eleven. I wouldn’t worry unnecessarily. Nothing to do with your reflection. After all, you went to the end of time—you travelled to Jupiter. You met Europeans in person, including Keswyn Muller, without being enslaved by them. Then you came back in one piece. From my perspective, you are as healthy as a hog. In the mirror, you are the picture of health, as they used to say.”

  I looked into the rain and felt miserable. I wasn’t turning out to be the hero I had hoped.

  “I’m not brave. I still can’t stop staring at my own reflection.”

  “I see that. Sometimes case officers who’ve been through extreme stress become obsessed with their own reflections. In some cases, they stop being able to see their reflections, although they’re clearly visible to others. It’s a kind of hysteria, mind blindness. In our line of work, you have to be careful of the tricks that you play on yourself.”

  “You sound like a psychologist, Lucan.”

  “In this line of work, you need a good understanding of human nature. You need to know what makes a person turn, and turn again.”

  The rain let up in time for the ceremony. A procession of old men in three-piece suits entered the garden from the direction of the mansion. They carried torches, smoking black ink into the wet atmosphere, and were accompanied by a harpist, in a very short white jacket, black nail polish conspicuous on her fingers. She uncovered her instrument, set up by the reflecting pool, and played in long strokes, no kind of music I had ever heard. This strange sound was an accompaniment. The men read out the doctrines of S Natanson.

  We joined the rest of the audience in repeating the familiar clauses—from the impermissibility of the causal loop, to the zeal we owed to the quick and the dead; the bond we shared as sons and daughters of the continent; and, above all, our commitment to the purity of the past and future of humanity. Despite everything, I felt pride to hear the essential propositions spoken out loud. Whatever anybody else in this place was up to, I worked for an organization which safeguarded the past and the present, cared for individual human life even to the extent of the poor man and the albino.

  When the recitation was complete, the torches burnt higher, casting greater and greater shadows, until the fire joined above our heads. The blaze was completely without heat. It soon disappeared into a haze of scarlet smoke. The holograph of Shanumi Six appeared in the smoke, six-plus feet tall, the tattoos which ran up her arms disappearing into her shirt.

  I didn’t think I needed to stay with Lucan. I walked through the procession, wondering if I could find someone who would shed some light on my uneasiness. Instead, they were admiring the statue from every side—and rightly so. You could feel Shanumi’s presence through time and her black woman’s pride, her big presence which attracted attention. You could pick out the strong cords in her neck. Only her face was indistinct, as if seen in the bottom of a kaleidoscope. When you looked away, you couldn’t bring its memory back to mind. You even started to lose hold of your recollections of the living woman. Section revered the ancestors—as our ancestors had done—but they worshipped them with a hidden face. They wanted to keep their secrets through the ages, as I would soon discover, protecting themselves from the hidden enemy.

  In accordance with this policy, there was no speech in honor of Shanumi Six. Her name wasn’t mentioned. Her achievements weren’t itemized. Nor was there anybody in attendance from the Agency proper, as far as I could tell. At the time, I didn’t understand why my Six had been adopted in death by Internal Section, how they had come to own her memory.

  I stood in the ranks of the unknown men and women, in the remnants of rain and smoke, and wondered how it was possible that I had never seen any of them in the halls of the Agency. They hadn’t been in the cafeterias or the seminar rooms, neither hanging in the workshops around new machinery nor glimpsed on the escalators which joined the parts of our campus, never participants in any of the debates on the foreign policy which should orient our actions in the past. They were as good as complete strangers.

  It crossed my mind again that I was being held under even falser pretenses than I’d thought before. That Internal Section itself was the secret enemy, the object of our fears which nobody could prove existed, for the sight of which we travelled the labyrinth of time. That I must escape this garden of holograms and make my way back to the Agency. That my father’s warning had been quite correct. I even began to think that reality had not been the same since I had returned from Jupiter.

  And in the very same instant, I told myself that it was a mere trick of the imagination to distrust these men and women. That I should clear my head.

  The ceremony ended with a celebration. We followed the other guests into the mansion which had been readied for the occasion by unseen hands. A long table in the hall had been loaded with the food of the centuries: Jollof rice and Bassi-salté, banana fritters and cassava, cucumber in mirin in memory of Shanumi. The chandelier in the ceiling shone brightly. Ella Fitzgerald was playing on the sound system, her cool lines floating through the room. Shanumi’s favorite record.

  A line formed in front of the co
ffee machine. A man stood behind it, pulling the levers: Nicholson Thirteen, a cryptanalyst at Section. From time to time he added new beans to a grinder on top. While the machine was working, he took more orders, and patiently and precisely created a pattern in each cup. Other members of the Lucan group were scattered around the room. Belvedere Thirteen, who wore two tiny earrings in one ear. Yewande Thirteen, in her gold-buckled belt and blouse. Thurston Thirteen. Akiko Thirteen again, whom I was almost pleased to see, wearing a chopstick in her hair.

  I got the connection between them. Lucan’s team members looked different but each, in a certain sense, was alike, tight-lipped and pleasantly dog-faced, not unlike their leader. The men wore blue suits and brown shoes. The women wore blue skirts and blouses, security holograms pinned to their top pockets.

  Despite Lucan’s introductions, his Thirteens didn’t want to make conversation with me. They didn’t speak more than necessary, content to gaze into the bottoms of their cups, a fortune-teller’s perspective. Occasionally they looked around, keeping tabs on the others. They were spies. They acted like it. They weren’t case officers who went on location. They were born to be cagey. It made me nervous because I was in their power and there was more than one thing I didn’t know.

  I turned to Akiko, who was counting under her breath.

  “So you knew Shanumi Six personally? Is it safe to assume?”

  She looked uncomfortable, continued counting for a minute.

  “I wasn’t personally acquainted with her, no. I know the contents of the case folder, as far as it implicate my interests.”

  “Do you think anybody in this room knew her? On a personal level? As an individual soul?”

  Akiko put her cup down before she answered. She had a glow on her dark purple face which most would find conventionally attractive.

  “Officially, we only know what’s in the case folder, which is provided on a need-to-know basis by the consultants. So nobody’s going to admit it to your face. The real question you should be asking is quite different: Why is Section able to function at a time when the larger Agency is paralyzed?”

  I said, “I don’t like riddles. Why is it?”

  “Because, for centuries, Section has kept its files on paper, not inside a machine. Muller couldn’t wipe them out. Do you know anything about real writing?”

  “I had to learn to use paper and pen when I chose my specialization.”

  I thought at first that Akiko and her brethren were not like members of the foreign service as I knew them. Akiko, Lucan, and the others, I thought, were more in the mold of a judicial personality, an algorithm which listened to your case and scrutinized each and every word until it found the hole and knocked it down. I would soon change my mind about Akiko.

  She said, “We’ve learnt that you cannot control information once it’s in electronic form. You can trust a key; you can trust a lock because it has a defined physical location. It can be made in such a way that it is difficult to duplicate. Numbers, no matter how difficult they are to guess, can be copied perfectly. We use physical objects. See for yourself when we go back to headquarters. It’s like Fort Know.”

  To get to the operations center, which was the transplanted heart of Internal Section, the string of limousines pulled out of Constitution Hill, clattering one after the other onto the macadam, and headed out to the ring road. Lucan sat beside me on a long black couch, absorbed in his screen. Akiko was in another car. The skyline disappeared as the windows of the vehicle darkened, along with the panels of the navigation system, so that there was only the engine, and the sound of automatic trucks rolling past at five hundred miles per hour, to remind us we were traveling on the continent’s busiest ore shipment route.

  It took some minutes to reach our destination. We exited the controlled section of highway and threaded our way behind the loading docks of a series of microfactories, following in the line of black vehicles. The road led to a boom which opened into a covered parking lot, the ceiling hundreds of feet over our heads as if we were in an old-time cathedral.

  I recognized the environs of Gold Reef City. I knew the funfair from childhood. My father had taken my sister and me there, and had bought peppermint crisps for the three of us, stopping to converse with the automatic waiter. The bumper cars had levitated on a spiral track, the loop-de-loop stopping at twelve o’clock so that we hung upside down on the straps for half a minute. The solar plant next door had appeared in our field of vision, ten thousand ebony panels shimmering in the sunshine as if the entire installation were nothing more than a hologram. It was the same solar plant underneath which an underground complex had been dug to protect government officials in the event of a second supernova. Section had taken it over in the wake of the Muller incident.

  I took a last look at sunshine through the entrance and was led past the guard’s cubicle into a vast hall. The space contained several thousand yards of tubing which connected giant magnets breathing frost into the atmosphere. Superconducting lanes ran along the walls and fused into the ground, their ceramic lengths hooped in steel. There were locks, as Akiko had predicted, on every door leading out of the hall. Chains and crowns of barbed wire had been placed around the various entrances. So she wasn’t lying about everything. But I still felt like a hostage.

  The men in front of us opened one door and another and another, locking them behind us as we went forward. We entered a labyrinth of corridors and escalators, sank sixty floors down into the cold heart of the building and found more landings and more empty metal staircases. All I heard were footfalls and the crackle of solar electricity rising and falling, the ghostly voice of the power plant on the surface.

  At the bottom lay our destination. The first door was protected with a keypad. The people ahead of us entered a code, and we went in line into a room where we were scanned individually. Our silhouettes, down to the bones and cartilage, appeared on a long panel in the ceiling. A green light came on. We moved into a second room with a much lower roof, the line snaking single file between two barriers.

  On both sides, machines came forward on their tracked wheels, blue tips on their rifles shining into our eyes, and conducted their own tests. They rolled back, after the briefest hesitation, admitting us into a long hall scattered with tables and chairs.

  Most of the agents were too hard at work to notice our presence. There were blackboards covering most of the wall space, spidery equations chalked across them. A slide projector cast a ghostly rectangle across the room. I found out later that Section was a place for people with a preference for old-fashioned ways of getting things done. They used pens and pencils, didn’t like to be recorded, didn’t like to interact with consultants. Many of them even did numbers in their heads and worked out their own probability diagrams.

  Lucan tapped me on the back. “We had our eyes on this location for a while, but we only made the move after the attack. It’s very safe, we believe, especially from prying eyes in the future, because of the solar flux. Shall I show you around?”

  He walked me through the hall, which turned out to be a spoke on a far larger wheel extending a mile under the energy plant. There was a cafeteria and an auditorium, laboratories and pendulum forges, a machine shop, an observation dome, and also, needless to say, an archway. Cameras couldn’t peer through a solar plant. In theory, anybody trying to spy from a different time should see nothing but a blur of radiation.

  In practice, though, nobody knew what was possible anymore. Lucan admitted as much. He took me into his office, a windowless cube. With no further ado, he put his feet up on his desk, as if it would help him to concentrate, and pushed a key over the desk.

  “That’s to your resting suite. It’ll take you there in a minute.”

  I took the key and put it my pocket. The office was sparely furnished. There were filing cabinets in the corner, two desk calendars opened to different months, and a number of mechanical clocks lined up ne
xt to one another and connected in some way, like chess clocks.

  “I remember when I first held a key and tried to open a physical lock.”

  Lucan looked across at me while he turned the pages of his calendars, drawing a line through certain of the events.

  “Akiko tells me you want to understand why we’ve returned to locks and keys? What do you know about prime numbers, Agent Eleven?”

  “Prime numbers? They can be divided only by one, and by themselves, without leaving a fraction behind. Two, three, five, seven, eleven, and so on. But one is defined as not a prime.”

  “They don’t teach you anything else before they send you into the field?”

  I said, “If I had any talent for algebra and geometry, I would have joined the Interplanetary Service as my father had wanted.”

  Despite what I had just said, Lucan typed a number on his screen and showed me a long list of calculations which I didn’t understand.

  “Most of what we do, in terms of intelligence and counterintelligence, is keeping information safe, right? Which means codes. Codes depend on primes and super-primes. When you put the primes in a list, super-primes are the ones whose rank in the list is itself a prime number. I have one super-prime. You have another. When we multiply them, we get a number that not even a brasshead can figure out how to divide within the lifetime of the universe. In theory…”

  “Keswyn Muller, I’m guessing, managed to divide a large number into super-primes?”

  “He started with the prime assigned to Shanumi Six, an eight-hundred-digit number. It would have given him a great start, although only a start. You would still need a few billion years to resolve the factors.”

  “Shanumi would never have given it up. Besides, she was only in Muller’s custody for an hour or so. Not enough time for neural coercion to work.”

  “I’m studying the issue without presuppositions. If it’s not any one individual we can point to, then our reading of the situation gets worse. Somebody with a formula to make prime numbers can read any secret. Counterfeit any currency. Enter the mind of any automatic device. Consultants, archways, carts.”