All Fall Down

by James Brabazon

  All the bombs, I thought. People dream of all the bombs.

  “It’s everything,” she said, “and I did it for everyone. It’s beautiful and invulnerable. No cryptosystem could withstand it. And the Russians paid the price.”

  “No,” I said. “Doc paid the price. Amos, too. And Moshe. Shot through the heart because of that hundred-dollar bill. I didn’t pull the trigger. Not me. Not this time. All this—all this blood—for what? An equation? It’s madness. And it’s over. We’ve all paid. Them, you, me. Now let’s get out of here while we can.”

  “You still don’t understand, do you? It’s too late, Max.” She laid her hand on my chest. “The money they sent to me, they used it for hardware, too. That’s why I stopped. That’s why I left. Amos found out what they were doing, what it was really for.”

  “And what, exactly,” I asked her, “was that?”

  “A computer. The Russians are building a computer, a working, powerful, true quantum computer. The Americans, the British, the Israelis, the Chinese, even the Indians—everyone has been trying. It was always just an impossible idea, a dream that no one really thought would ever come true, not like this, not for decades. But the Russians are doing it, Max. Soon it won’t be a dream anymore. They lied to me and they used me. Used my vision. My faith.”

  I looked at the mad marks on the wall with fresh eyes and saw, finally, what she had seen all along. She followed my eyes as I read the signs and symbols.

  “You asked what it means, Max. It means absolute power. It isn’t a dream anymore. It’s a nightmare.”

  33

  Zero zero thirty hours.

  Outside, the church of St. Michael, patron saint of soldiers, loomed over me in the night. The snow had stopped falling and the clouds had opened enough to see stars here and there. But there was no moon and the road beyond the village dissolved into darkness. Under different circumstances it would have been beautiful. But then and there it looked, felt lethal.

  We had around seven hours until first light. It was a twenty-two-hour, twelve-hundred-kilometer drive first north and then west across frozen-hard tank country to Estonia and the nearest friendly border that bypassed Moscow. I had no decent cold kit, no intel and no meds. I did have half a dozen bruised ribs, a badly sprained knee and two bullet wounds. But thanks to Aleksandr Denisovich I also had the keys to a car—or soon would. And Baaz? He had the keys to the kingdom, if only he knew it. He’d never get the credit for bringing back the algorithm—but I’d make sure that he was compensated handsomely. The “Bhavneet Singh School of Quantum Computing” had a satisfying ring to it.

  I put the battery into Talia’s cell phone and switched it on. The screen was cracked, smashed from the dive onto the truck in Moscow. But the processor was undamaged and it came to life. One bar of service cut in and out. I moved farther from the house, opened Signal and typed:

  Mobile to Värska by road. RV 2300HRS. Likely have Red Forces in pursuit. Please have welcoming committee ready. Tea and Medals. Out.

  I pressed send and waited for the double ticks to appear by the message. Talia had given me her contact details. But I didn’t need them. The phone number of the only person I could count on had been seared into my memory for twenty years. Frank Knight might have been unresponsive, but Sergeant Major Jack Nazzar never was. Somewhere on the other side of Europe a very grumpy Scotsman was about to live up to his nickname.

  Whoever had released my photograph had known exactly what they were doing. After I’d been exposed in the press, asking for Nazzar’s help again had become impossible. It would have compromised him unacceptably in the eyes of the Crown he’d sworn to serve. As far as Whitehall was concerned, Jack wasn’t off the books: he was on the cover. Besides, there was little, if anything, he could have done that would not, ultimately, have made things worse—for me, and for Rachel.

  Calling on him now wouldn’t just do me a favor—it would help him out as well. He couldn’t refuse my request for evacuation—and London wouldn’t want him to. However things stood between me and Frank, no matter what apoplexies General King had been sent into, and irrespective of what Nazzar personally made of my run and subsequent about-face—it was a fair bet that the only thing uniting us all was an urgent desire to see me, and the intelligence I’d collected, back in Britain as quickly as possible. Nazzar and I had both crossed a line when we’d spoken via Dr. Rose from the hospital in Ashford. His bringing me in would set the record straight—for him, at least. By keeping me close, he’d tell them, he’d kept me on side, inside. What happened then was neither his prerogative nor his problem. But there was no question at all that he’d be the one they sent to get me.

  I didn’t know what would be waiting for me and Rachel on the road ahead. Mystery gunmen were uncannily good at tracking me down. But Avilov was dead, and Arkhangel village apparently hadn’t figured in his equation. I was banking on the GRU having no more idea where I was than Frank did. They would have better luck looking for a needle in a haystack than a Lada in northwest Russia.

  I didn’t know what was waiting for us back in London, either. But we had tabs on the banknote, and that was all the security we needed. It had kept Baaz, Rachel and me alive this long, and our funerals would be Frank’s failure if he didn’t gain possession of the bill first. Killing us—or allowing us to be killed—would lose him everything. In that respect, if no other, Commander Frank Knight and Dr. Leonid Avilov had a great deal in common.

  I went back into the priest’s house. Rachel had sat down again, huddled on the floor, fixated trancelike on the candles. I raised the phone and took a photograph of the calculations scrawled across the wall. Then I removed the battery and put the phone back in my pocket. Moshe would have approved; it doesn’t hurt to have insurance. I walked over to her and touched her gently on the shoulder.

  “It’s time to go.” She shook her head and kept her back turned to me. “Rachel, please. We need to leave now.”

  I circled around and stood in front of her.

  “I can’t,” she said, looking up at me.

  “We can make it, Rachel. We can get over the border. My people will meet us. They’ll help us. It’s a long drive, but we can do it. We can give them the algorithm. You can continue your work.” Her eyes widened. “It will be a memorial to Doc, to Amos. Finish what you started. You can do it. We can do it. But first we have to leave.”

  She scuttled away from me, terrified.

  “No.”

  “Rachel, please. Trust me. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  “You can’t give it to them, Max. You can’t. It has to be destroyed. You can’t give it to anyone.”

  “It’s OK, I promise. I won’t.”

  She backed farther away, fingernails clawing at the wooden floorboards.

  “I don’t believe you. You did kill my father. That’s why you’re here. You’ve got the algorithm, and once you understand it you’ll get rid of me. You and Avilov. You’re the same. You’re all the same.”

  I bridled at the thought of it. But she was right. Frank Knight and Leonid Avilov had something else in common, too: an individual—any individual—would always be expendable in the face of their ambition, whether that be serving the interests of national security or their own personal advancement.

  “Avilov is dead,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter. The Russians have the computer.”

  “Let them build it. Without you it will only be a dream. No ghost for their machine, hey?” I fished the fake Arkhangel bill from my pocket. I unfolded it and then opened the stove door. The embers inside flared with the rush of air. I held the note up so she could see it, see my near-perfect interpretation of her sloppy Cyrillic script on the reverse. “Forget London. We’ll go east, deep into the forest. Not even your angel will be able to find us. We’ll survive. Thrive. You and me.” And then I held the note over the grate and let the flames take it. “T
here,” I lied. “It’s over.” I walked back to the candles, to the wall she’d used as a blackboard. “And this is the algorithm, too?”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “Part of it. The final part.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The banknote wasn’t complete,” she said, turning to look at the calculations writ large behind her. “It took coming here finally to see it, to finish it.”

  “So this is the conclusion?”

  She nodded again.

  “It gives Azrael the eyes to see.”

  “The hundred-dollar bill and this”—I pointed at the wall—“are—were—the only copies?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  I paced back to the stove and picked up her sleeping bag.

  “And Amos, could he have told anyone?”

  “No. He didn’t know how close I was to solving it.”

  “And Doc—what did Doc know?”

  “He knew I’d made a breakthrough, but . . . Max, what are you doing?”

  She watched me as I picked up a candle and held it under the sleeping bag. The nylon sacking caught almost immediately. I swung the growing ball of fire under the dresser. The old varnish cracked and blistered. Small blue flames licked up its sides and took hold of the legs. Within seconds the wood was alight, the room filling with smoke. I stepped back and covered my face as a rush of flame leaped up. Whatever had been stored inside the cabinet had accelerated the burn into a roaring blaze. Soon the floorboards would catch, then the wall and ceiling. The roof would go up and the house would come down—by which time we would be on our way.

  I took her by the wrist, but she twisted free.

  “No,” she shouted above the hiss of the fire, stepping backward toward the flames. “You’re not listening. You haven’t understood anything. It isn’t the note that needs to be destroyed.”

  I went after her, arms outstretched, lungs already straining from the smoke and heat.

  “Please, Rachel.” She was choking now, struggling to draw breath as the oxygen burned out of the room. She hesitated and then let me embrace her. I held her close to my chest as the blaze began to spread across the floor. “It’s OK,” I said.

  She flattened her hands against my back and I readied myself to take her weight. My shoulder, ribs throbbed. She buried her face into my chest. With one hand she gripped my waist, with the other the back of my neck.

  “Just relax.”

  A brilliant mind; an infuriating, captivating lover; a revolutionary—whatever she once had been was consumed then and there by madness. Perhaps completing the algorithm had sent her over the edge; perhaps it had taken the descent into insanity finally to see the answer she’d devoted a lifetime to looking for. She had spent years fighting her demons, without ever imagining that she would create one, become one. She had gazed into the abyss, and the abyss had gazed into her.

  I could feel the fire singeing my hair, clothes, burning the skin on the backs of my hands. But as I braced myself to lift her, she pulled away from me again, even closer to the fire. Her hand was still at my neck, so that our heads touched, but her body, legs were clear of mine.

  “Rachel . . .” I moved forward again and felt her fist clenched between us. I looked down and saw the scout’s knife, drawn from behind my back, blade up, old steel reflecting red in the fire glow.

  “I’m sorry, Max,” she said, pressing her mouth to my ear.

  Then she drew her head back, eyes fixed on mine, and thrust. I brought my hand around, down, but I was too slow. The cutting edge ran across my fingers, slicing to the bone. The point went in hard. She gasped with the effort of it and then smiled, pushing herself onto me, forcing the steel in and up. I felt the blade lodge home, felt the blood pumping onto her stomach and mine. I closed my fist around the grip and we clung to each other. I saw my mother and Doc, laughing, happy; I saw Rachel on the bedroom floor, the life pouring out of her; I saw her in the forest, the wind in her hair, laughing, free. And then all I could see were her eyes, flashing green in the firelight. She raised her hands, red with gore, and laid them on my cheeks.

  “God forgive me,” she whispered in Irish. “It is finished.”

  I let her go and she stepped back, pulling herself free of the knife. Then she looked up, and her legs gave way, and she fell into the flames—and it was.

  34

  Zero one hundred.

  The glow of the fire threw a halo around the village. I ran to Aleksandr Denisovich’s house and didn’t look back.

  I headed east and then north, and within a few minutes the red glow in the rearview mirror vanished and there was no sign that anything had happened at all. The Lada ground on through the darkness to Vologda. Hunched over the wheel, the heating cranked to the maximum, I strained my eyes into the bright beams thrown by the four-by-four’s headlights. The sides of the road were piled with snow. Fresh ice formed on the asphalt as new flurries froze between the tire treads. My hands were stained red with my blood and hers.

  I wanted to turn around. I wanted to rub my face with ashes and scream at the sky. I wanted to do, say something—anything that would change what was. The road pulled me onward. I repeated the words we’d said. I imagined a life in which I had not run, in which she was not dead. But what’s gone is gone. And you can never go back. Trying to has cost many a man his head, his soul. Mine nearly included. The consequences of survival would be something I lived with forever.

  I flexed my fingers, gripping the steering wheel through makeshift dressings I’d torn from my shirt. Only when I tasted the salt on my lips did I realize I was crying. I blinked hard and kept on keeping on. It was all I could think to do.

  But it was slow going.

  The farther north I drove, the harder the snow fell. I estimated the drive at sixteen hours in decent conditions, and added four hours to account for the winter weather and another two on top to be safe. If I stayed in-country any longer than twenty-four hours, getting out would become almost impossible. No matter how ineffectual the Russian police were, a day was the most I’d have before they caught up with me. Steal more cars, and I risked tripping a wire where it counted. If the FSB got involved and joined the dots with the GRU, I’d be lucky to make it halfway to the Estonian border.

  Even if Aleksandr Denisovich had already reported his car stolen, I doubted the police would make visiting him a priority. And it was unlikely that he or anyone else would bother to call the emergency services about the fire: the dilapidated priest’s house had been consumed entirely, and there was no one to call an ambulance for—even if one was available to send. No, the real variable was old Polina Yurievna. I couldn’t count on it, but I’d have bet my last hundred rubles that she’d send the authorities on a wild-goose chase. I was near enough kin. And Russians take blood very seriously indeed.

  I kept my speed steady and my driving unremarkable. I didn’t want to give the police any excuse to pull me over. It wasn’t only a case of being identified; even a successfully negotiated routine stop would slow me down. Although there were hours of driving ahead, I knew that, in the end, every minute would count.

  Timing my escape was a fine balance, though: if I’d given Jack Nazzar much less than twenty-four hours, he wouldn’t have time to get an extraction team on location. Sometimes he’d use local Special Forces for exfiltration. But for this job I knew he’d insist on running the whole show with his own men from the Revolutionary Warfare Wing. Deploying the SAS in Estonia was a political minefield, but I doubted the pro-NATO government in Tallinn would object—always reveling in any opportunity to give Moscow the finger.

  But the entire plan—if sending one message and then driving halfway across Europe to find out if it had been acted on could be called a plan—might be tipped into failure by even the slightest margin of error. A flat tire, worsening weather . . . It would take very little to defeat me.

  * * *

 
—

  ZERO FIVE HUNDRED.

  I arrived in Vologda two hours before first light, and refueled. Then I fished Talia’s cracked-screen cell phone out of my jacket pocket and weighed whether to create a backup of the photograph I’d taken of Rachel’s final calculations. I could send it to myself by Signal, but it was too much of a risk. I had to assume that the handset would be loaded with spyware, and, just as Baaz had cautioned in Paris, even if the messaging application was fireproof, it would be straightforward for Talia to capture the photo before the data was encrypted and sent. Besides, as soon as I switched the phone on, Talia would see exactly where I was again.

  In Israel she’d been good to her word. But as soon as she knew that Rachel was gone, there was no reason for her to keep me alive. On the contrary. I was a witness, the only witness, to the Shabak’s absolute failure to protect someone who’d turned out to be one of Israel’s most valuable human assets. It was an unsettling thought, but whatever happened in the hours that followed would owe as much to the quality of Talia’s relationship with Ezra as it did to the quality of mine with Frank.

  As far as the Shabak was concerned, though, the clock was on my side: even if Talia wanted to, she simply didn’t have enough time to take direct action. And given everything, it seemed unlikely she’d enlist the help of the Russians. Although that was a gamble, too; if she was monitoring the phone, then she knew I was heading for Värska from Arkhangel. But if anyone was following me, they couldn’t be sure where I’d approach the border—and cordoning off half of Russia simply wasn’t practical.

  I wrapped the phone tightly in a plastic bag I’d found in the glove box of the stolen Lada and buried it deep inside my jacket with my Russian passport and the photograph of my mother. I restarted the engine and pushed the gear stick into first. But as my foot hovered over the gas pedal, I heard my own voice come back to me.