All Fall Down

by James Brabazon

  I pushed the papers to one side and made space among the mess to set out the remainder of my kit:

  Grach MP-443 pistol and fifteen rounds of ammo.

  Pepper spray.

  Pozidriv screwdriver.

  Lukov’s wallet, driver’s license, credit cards and French identity card.

  Greek passport in the name of Maximilianos Ioannides.

  Waterproof watch.

  Two thousand euros in fifty-euro notes and a couple of hundred in smaller notes—courtesy of Lukov.

  An unopened packet of French smokes—also from Lukov.

  From the ticket pocket in my jeans I produced the tightly folded, damp hundred-dollar bill. A little battered and worn along the creases, but it was still in one piece. The scrawled Russian letters on the reverse that spelled out Arkhangel hadn’t faded, either. I spread it out to dry on one of the pages of equations.

  “Miraculous,” I said out loud.

  “There are no such things as miracles.”

  I turned around to see Baaz backing in through the swing door to the kitchen, which wafted a rich smell of fried onions and spices into the living room as it fanned shut. In one hand he carried a bowl of steaming beans, and in the other a plate piled with a stack of parathas, hot out of the pan.

  “Although my auntie’s tarka beans are pretty close to divine.”

  He went to set the food on the table, saw my things spread out and motioned for me to move the laptops to one side. I did, and he put the food down, returning to the kitchen to fetch two mugs of hot tea and two squares of kitchen towel. We sat down on wooden stools that were tucked beneath the table and ate ferociously with our fingers.

  It was the first time I’d seen him clearly. He looked more substantial than he had in the gloom of the tunnels—more like five-eleven, and a hundred and fifty pounds. It was the sniper’s curse to assess everyone as a potential target, mentally adjust every breeze for windage, scope every distance for elevation. His hair was bound up in a simple, neat black turban. Washed clean, his beard was still wispy, but at least looked a little more dignified. I hadn’t shaved. And my bullet wounds burned continuously.

  “That,” I said, mopping the last of the spicy bean sauce from the bowl with the last of the parathas, “was grand. Thank you.”

  “They’re literally the only things I can cook. My mum’s sister taught me how to make them the day before I left the UK. She was worried I would starve. She was completely correct.”

  I took a slug of the tea. It was sweet enough to put my teeth on edge.

  “I thought you were from Chandigarh?” I asked him.

  He nodded. “I came to London first, to see my auntie and finish school. Then I came to France. To Saclay. The university,” he clarified, gesturing toward the piles of notes and the bank of screens. “I’m doing an MA. Computer stuff. But the campus is miles away.”

  He looked around the living room as if to say, So here I am. I looked around, too. The apartment was large for Paris, never mind student digs.

  “Rich parents?”

  He looked taken aback and slightly sheepish. “Oh, no. Not at all. I . . . the course is OK, but, ah . . .”

  “But what? It’s OK, Baaz; I’m not going to call your auntie.”

  “OK.” He drew a breath as deep as I had done before my first confession. “I trade crypto. Digital coins. It’s going quite well.”

  “So I see.”

  There was a plain three-seater sofa in the room—which I’d slept on—with matching armchairs. The décor was simple, neutral: the walls were peppered with bland abstract art, the bookshelves lined with most likely unread classics. It felt more like a hotel room than a home—and would’ve had a rent to match. There were few, if any, personal belongings to be seen; hardware and notepads consumed his entire attention.

  The living room, bathroom, kitchen and Baaz’s bedroom were all connected to an L-shaped hallway, at the long end of which a bolted, double-locked door led to a landing that fell away down a steep, twisting staircase to the main, intercom-operated street door one floor below. Rue du Texel was a narrow road in Montparnasse with no visible CCTV cameras, and was southwest of the graveyard, between an imposing police station and the church of Notre-Dame-du-Travail—though as things stood, I doubted either of them would respond positively to a call to save our souls.

  Downstairs there was a red-fronted café selling crêpes and sandwiches; opposite, half a city block had been leveled for development, affording a clear view from the living room of a swath of dead ground. I’d rather have been higher—there were three floors above us—but otherwise it was as good a place to be holed up as any. Baaz wiped his fingers on the kitchen towel.

  “And you,” he said, looking at me intently, as if making his mind up about something, “you’re the guy in the news, aren’t you? The one Interpol is after.”

  “I didn’t know they’d issued a Red Notice. But yes, I am.”

  I sipped my tea. If he tried to run for it, he’d be on the floor before he crossed the room; if he went for the Grach, his arm would be broken before his fingers closed on the grip. I blinked and smiled.

  “You shot up that bar yesterday, too, didn’t you?”

  “No. I was the one being shot up. The bar got in the way.”

  “Well, the whole joint is messed up. There are pictures online.”

  “How many dead?”

  “Eight. Plus two more in intensive care.”

  “My photo in the papers, and the attack in the bar. Who’s connecting them? The press or the police?”

  “Neither,” he said. “But I’m right, aren’t I, Max McLean?”

  I nodded and put down my mug.

  “And the bike chase across town? I expect you looked that up, too. Has anyone released CCTV footage of that?”

  “I don’t think so. There’s some phone footage on the Internet. Mostly rubbish. I didn’t know that was definitely you, though.” He smiled, too. “You can’t see it clearly enough. Your face, I mean.”

  I felt dangerously close to being played. But the truth was that unlike Dr. Rose in Ashford, Baaz didn’t need convincing of anything. He’d lived it. And he appeared, unaccountably, to be enjoying it—whatever it was.

  “Baaz,” I said. “I need to ask you something.” He slurped his tea and shrugged. “Last night I told you to run. But you didn’t. You were waiting for me when I came out. And this”—I looked around the room again, and gestured to the empty breakfast platter, choosing my words carefully—“this, hospitality. Don’t get me wrong. I’m very grateful, but . . .”

  “But I’m in deep shit, aren’t I?”

  “Yes, you are. And I’m not sure I can help you the way you’ve helped me. There’s nothing, I mean, I can’t—”

  “You saved my life.” Baaz cut me off. “That’s why I didn’t run. And this,” he said, lifting up his cup of tea, “is the least I can do. And besides, my auntie would kill me if she thought I wasn’t showing my friends proper hospitality. She takes that very seriously.” I nodded. Baaz knitted his eyebrows, as if concentrating on solving a puzzle. “I know those men did what they did to me because of you. But I was breaking the law by being down there in the first place. So maybe that was my just deserts.”

  I had to laugh at that.

  “I don’t think even the Russians have the death penalty for trespassing. What were you doing down there, anyway?”

  “Mapping,” he replied. “To be honest with you, it’s a bit of an obsession.” He looked away from me, at the table, and began drumming the fingers of his left hand as he’d done in the tunnels. “You see, I can recall the routes very well.” He tapped his temple with his index finger. “Bloody crowded, remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “But there are no maps. Not proper ones. The last decent one was made in 2011; but there are so many
floods and collapses that it was out of date as soon as it was printed.”

  “So?”

  “So that’s my challenge. For my dissertation. To come up with an algorithm that works with a map of the catacombs across all the levels—just like a map on a phone finds you the safest, most efficient route between multiple points, and doesn’t simply tell you if the one you’ve found is correct. It’s basically a three-dimensional, subterranean traveling-salesman problem. Only I’m plotting between tunnel junctions, not cities.”

  “And that’s hard, is it? To solve, I mean.”

  He looked at me as if I were an idiot.

  “OK. Imagine you are a traveling salesman and you want to visit a certain number of cities before returning to the place you started. But you only have a limited amount of fuel for your car, so you need to find the shortest route.”

  “OK.”

  “If, say, there were seventy cities.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, then the number of routes you would have to consider is more than the total number of atoms in the universe.”

  “You’re not wrong.” I smiled. “That is hard.”

  “But not,” he said, “if you’re using a quantum computer. That’s what I’m writing my algorithm for.”

  “A what?”

  “A quantum computer—one that uses qubits and not, you know, just bits.” I shook my head. “Am I speaking Punjabi?” He looked at me earnestly.

  “No, we’re still in English. I think.”

  “OK, it’s just sometimes I forget. It drives my teachers crazy, huna?”

  “Quite.”

  “OK, well a, classical, er, normal computer uses binary digits. It doesn’t matter how big the computer is or how powerful; everything comes down to ones and zeros. You can have a very fast machine, but it can only do one task after another—sequentially. Never mind the traveling-salesman problem—a ten-character password would take even a supercomputer three years to crack. But a quantum computer is completely different. It uses qubits. They’re, like, subatomic. They can be either ones, or zeros, or a simultaneous superposition of the two.”

  I held my hands up. “In English, please.”

  “Ah, sorry. I mean they can be both one and zero at the same time.” He scratched his beard. “Mystical, really.”

  “That’s one word for it.”

  “So,” he continued, “two qubits can be in any quantum superposition of four states; three qubits, eight states. But a normal computer can only ever be in one of those states at any one time.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “It means you can do every step in a big calculation simultaneously.”

  “Like your traveling-salesman . . . thing?”

  “Yes, although there are already algorithms exactly for—”

  “OK,” I cut him off. “I get it. With enough qubits you could solve really hard problems really fast.” He nodded. “Like adding up on a calculator rather than your fingers.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “It’s the difference between illuminating a room with a candle and a stadium with a floodlight.”

  I didn’t understand anything about the physics or the math of what he was saying. But the implications were obvious. “So, cracking the ten-digit password?”

  “With a quantum computer? Instantaneous.” He grinned.

  “And they exist, these computers?”

  He snorted and gulped down the last of his tea.

  “No way! That’s just sci-fi. Last month IBM revealed a working fifty-qubit quantum computer. But get this: it can only maintain its quantum state for ninety microseconds. There are loads of issues to resolve. Decoherence, scalability, noise . . .”

  I held my hand up to stop him.

  “The main issue to resolve right now, Baaz, is that I have literally no idea what any of those things mean, OK?”

  “OK.”

  “So let’s keep it simple. If anyone could resolve those issues and build a working machine . . .”

  “If anyone could demonstrate quantum supremacy, and build a proper machine—with, say, ten thousand qubits?”

  “They’d break all known cryptography. Right?” Confusing as it was, I felt I was at least beginning to understand the basics.

  “Wrong. They’d break most known cryptography. Some algorithms would be resistant, though. But if you could solve the dihedral hidden subgroup problem, you could use quantum to break lattice-based cryptosystems.”

  “That’s not Punjabi, Baaz.” I looked at my passport on the table. “It’s not even Greek to me. Give it to me in simple terms.” I rolled my shoulders. “Please.”

  “Well,” he said, scratching his head, “with the right algorithm, you could say that quantum isn’t the bomb—it’s all the bombs. Imagine: you could empty every bank account everywhere in the world, crack all security, access anything online, anywhere, anytime. You’d have unrestricted access to everything—from the thermostat on the fridge to the thermonuclear arsenal.”

  “Just like that? With one machine?”

  “Yes. With one machine that doesn’t exist and an algorithm that hasn’t been developed. A computer is just hardware. It won’t work without software. Like buying a PC without installing an operating system. You know, like Windows. Useless.”

  “So that’s what you’re doing? Writing an algorithm for a computer that doesn’t exist?”

  He nodded again.

  “I get a grant, too. Absolute con job.”

  I smiled. But rather than smiling back, Baaz suddenly looked serious again.

  “Max,” he said, lowering his voice. “I have a question for you, too.” He paused. “Don’t take this the wrong way . . . but . . . er, it’s just that you’ve been accused of murder and there’s a gun on my table and a bunch of commandos are after us and, well . . .”

  “It’s OK. Fire away.”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  I finished my tea, too, and drew breath. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t tell him—or anyone—anything at all. Nothing true, anyway. But these were not normal circumstances.

  “I work for the British government,” I told him. “Or at least, I think I still do. I was sent to do a job. It went wrong. And now, apparently, the world and his wife are after me.”

  “And ‘the world’ is the Russians and ‘the wife’ is your boss?”

  For a twenty-something-year-old kid, he was remarkably perceptive. I pursed my lips and stared at him.

  “And?” he asked.

  “And that’s pretty much it.”

  “No,” said Baaz, excitement building in his voice, “I meant why are they after you?”

  “Good fucking question, Baaz. Good fucking question. I don’t know why.” The billion dollars, the bad deal with Lukov . . . those were things definitely not to share. “Actually,” I said, having an immediate half change of heart, “that’s not completely true.”

  I reached over and plucked the soggy hundred-dollar bill off the table and laid it out in front of him. Baaz gestured to me for permission. I nodded and he picked it up.

  “That is why,” I continued. “Part of why. The note. It’s special. It’s from a cache of notes the bad guys have, and it’s the only one we have. I have. A lot of people have died because of it. You and me both, too, nearly.”

  “So we’re the good guys, then?” Baaz was grinning. He was refreshingly straightforward.

  “Yes, Baaz,” I reassured him. “We’re the good guys. Scout’s honor. But it’s more than that. This note is valuable in some way that I don’t really understand.” He turned the bill over.

  “What does it say?” he asked.

  “Arkhangel. It means ‘Archangel’ in English. Like St. Michael, you know?”

  “I know as much about archangels,” he said, “as you do about Guru Gobin
d Singh.”

  “Fair play,” I admitted. “But Arkhangel is also the name of a village in Russia.”

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t. It’s not just any village. It’s the village where my mother was born.”

  He scrutinized the bill up close.

  “Oh my God,” he exclaimed, “I don’t believe it!”

  His shining eyes darted between Benjamin Franklin’s gaze and mine. It was as if a eureka moment had lit him up from the inside. My heart leaped. The thought half formed that maybe he’d seen, understood, something I’d missed, that he understood what the note meant.

  “What?” I asked. “What is it?”

  “This whole thing,” he said, fizzing with excitement, “is so totally James Bond.”

  My shoulders slumped. “All right then, Q. Tell me this: all this kit you have for trading . . .”

  “And studying,” he said quickly.

  “And studying. Can you use it to make calls, too? Encrypted calls.”

  “Of course.” I raised my eyebrows. “The actual call can’t be hacked. Not at all. Even if someone captured the data stream, it would be useless to them. Unless the person you want to call has malware on their system that records the audio of the call separately from the call itself, it’s completely safe.”

  “And how likely is that?”

  “It entirely depends,” he said, “on who you want to call.”

  It was a chance I was willing to take.

  “OK, then,” I said. “Set it up while I go to the bathroom.” I stood up and retrieved the banknote, feeling the tear in my thigh again. “When you need a lifeline, there’s only one thing to do.”

  “What’s that?” he asked, clearing away the breakfast things.

  “Phone a friend.”

  19

  Hal-lo?”

  “Ezra?” The line sounded dead. Not even a hiss. It was the fifth time I’d tried his number. I adjusted the headset. “Ezra, it’s Max.” There was a long pause. “Max McLean,” I added, uncertain how solid the connection was.

  The call from Paris to Sierra Leone had been relayed through three separate servers—all of which had been changed for each new attempt to get through. Then the line came alive with what sounded like the fumbling of a hands-free set being connected.