Arkhangel : A Novel (2020)

by Brabazon, James

  She looked down and rested her chin on her knees. Her hands were dirty, nails blackened. Then I saw on the floor next to her a burned stub of kindling, sharpened to a point. I studied the wall again. She’d been using firewood to write with, her hands as an eraser.

  ‘Rachel,’ I said, feeling the weight of the syllables fill my mouth, ‘this time you have to tell me the story.’ I opened my left hand and gestured towards her calculations. ‘I don’t understand what any of this means.’

  ‘It means,’ she said, slowly and deliberately, ‘the eyes to read every word, the ears to hear every whisper.’ She smiled at me. ‘It means the triumph of light, Max, and the defeat of darkness. At least that’s what I thought it meant.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, looking for some way, any way back into the mind, the soul, of the person I’d cherished as a teenager.

  ‘Do you?’ She stood up abruptly in one strong, fluid movement and moved away from me. She wrenched the centre candle free of its wax fixings and brought the flame to bear on the charcoal scrawl. ‘Do you see? Do you understand?’ I looked up at her and pursed my lips.

  ‘What do you think death looks like, Max? A skeleton on a horse? The Grim Reaper? A fantasy to scare children with?’ She turned around to face me, holding her arms and the candle aloft. ‘Well?’ The sleeves of her tunic fell back, revealing the thick, angry scars that ran from her wrists to her elbows. I bowed my head. ‘Look at me, Max. Look at me!’ she shouted. ‘Look at them!’

  ‘I’ve seen them already,’ I said, still staring at the floor. ‘Remember?’

  ‘Remember? How did you think I could forget? I wanted to disappear, Max, to slip away quietly without bothering anyone. To vanish. I didn’t want to be any more. And then …’ her voice calmed again, ‘and then you brought me back.’

  I looked up at her.

  ‘Of course I did. Of course I saved you. What else could I have done? Doc loved you. I loved you. We were kids, Rachel, and you were out of your mind with …’

  ‘Saved me? Mamash, mamash lo, Max. No. Really no. You condemned me.’

  ‘Condemned you to what, exactly?’

  She was quiet for a moment, making the space for what she needed to say, making sure I would hear her words. I kept my eyes fixed on hers, glowing green in the half-light.

  ‘Náire shíoraí,’ she said at last, in Irish. Eternal shame. ‘You brought me back and then you ran. You vanished and left me to burn in the heat of my own humiliation. And do you know why, Max?’ I struggled to my feet. Blood ran down my arm. ‘Because you are a coward. Whoever put those words in my mouth in the paper knows you better than you know yourself. You were too scared to let me die. Too scared to keep me alive. Too craven even to spare the life of an old man who loved you. But I survived, Max. And I survived for a reason. Everyone always does.’

  ‘Stop!’ I blurted out with unexpected force. ‘Please.’

  I reached for her, but she recoiled, her face flickering in the chaos of shadows thrown up by the candles.

  ‘I asked you a question, Max Mac Ghill’ean. But I’ll give you the answer. Death is beautiful. They say the angel Azrael is covered with eyes, millions upon millions of eyes – beautiful, piercing eyes whose gaze no one can avoid. That no one has ever avoided. That is what is written.’ She jutted her jaw towards me, resolute, her own eyes catching the light again, filled with the certainty of belief. ‘And that is the truth. Do you know how it happens, Max? Do you know how Azrael takes your soul?’

  ‘No,’ I said, struggling to find anything to help me calm the storm I knew could drown us both.

  ‘You look into those eyes, those million, million eyes, and you fall in love. That’s how. There’s no escape. There’s nowhere to run. You can’t hide. He sees everything, all the time, from one end of the world to the other. And as you open your mouth to tell this angel, this wonder, that you love him, that your heart has broken, he lets fall a drop of gall between your lips, and then you cease to be, putrefied by your own passion. That is the Helper of Ha’Shem. That is the Destroyer. And I have seen him.’ She pivoted abruptly and threw the candle at the wall with all her might. Wax exploded across the giant calculation laid out before her. ‘And this is what he looks like.’

  Everyone has a breaking point. I had one. Rachel had reached hers. Moshe had been right: she had gone insane. She stood facing the wall, shaking. I peered into the corners of the room, glanced at the ceiling, and then over my shoulder towards the door. She kept her back to me and composed herself.

  ‘I know who you are, Max Mac Ghill’ean, or McLean, or whatever you call yourself now. I know who you are. And I know what you are.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘A murderer.’ She turned around. ‘My father told me everything. About how he helped you to join the army. About how you ran away. And do you know what? He was glad, Max. Glad I got away from you, glad I was free of you. He loved you. But, by God, how he despised what you became. That’s why he drank. Not because of your mother. Because of you.’

  ‘That’s not true, that’s …’

  ‘There is only one reason that you’re here, and that’s because you’ve got the banknote. It’s the only reason you could be here. The only person Arkhangel means anything to, apart from him, is you.’

  ‘And you? What does it mean to you? Why name your project after it? Why write it on the note? Why send it to him? Why come here at all? Why run? There’s nowhere to go from here. You’re trapped.’

  ‘I didn’t come here to escape, Max. I came here to do something I should have done a long time ago. I came here for the same reason you did.’ She took a step towards me. ‘To understand.’

  ‘But I don’t … I don’t understand.’

  Yet in my guts I began to feel the truth unfurling like the Devil’s banner.

  ‘You don’t think they sat up all night just talking about Russia, do you? Your mother and my father?’

  ‘Rachel, don’t.’

  ‘Don’t? Don’t what? They were lovers, Max. For years. And you know they were. While we were fucking in my bed, they were fucking in hers. Oh, don’t look so shocked. You’ve always known, whether you wanted to admit it or not. Your mother changed my father’s life, Max. She changed our lives. She showed him what it meant to love. And she taught me what it meant to serve.’

  ‘Serve whom? Men like Avilov?’

  ‘Not who, but what. She loved this place, these people. She thought they were special. She thought I was special. Ty moi volchonok, she called me. Remember? My little wolf. She was obsessed with the idea of Russia. The beauty of it. The promise of it. Her work, her vision, was brilliant. One of the best, brightest scientists of her generation. That’s what they said when she died, wasn’t it? That was what I clung to after she drowned, Max, after you ran away. I escaped to Israel to serve an idea. I clung to faith, and to science – just as she had done. My father assimilated. I never could. Your mother thought that one day Russia would be her saviour, all our saviours.’

  ‘And so you came here to do what? Understand my mother?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, Max. I came here to understand how she could have been so wrong. So completely and utterly wrong. My work, Max. It’s bigger than Russia. Bigger than anything you can imagine.’

  ‘But you knew that the money came from the Akvarium, didn’t you? You knew that the GRU was funding you, funding Arkhangel.’

  Now she looked down, hair falling in front of her face. ‘Of course.’

  ‘You worked for them, for Avilov.’

  ‘No. I worked for the beauty of it, the promise of perfection. I imagined a world without shadows, a world without secrets, a perfect future where everyone is equal because nothing can be hidden.’ She lifted her head. Tears flowed down her cheeks, matting wild strands of black and silver hair. ‘No one else would fund me. No one. They thought I was crazy – some whacko who’d tried to kill herself.’ She began to cry harder, her body swaying in the flame-light. ‘All anyone ever saw were the s
cars. No one could ever see past them. But Avilov did. He found me. He saw me. He saw what I could do, what I could create. I know what you think, but I’m not crazy, Max. I saw the Destroyer, the Helper of Ha’shem, and Leonid Avilov was the only person who believed me, believed in me. And then he betrayed me.’

  I moved closer to her. Only a couple of feet separated us now. ‘I believed in you, Rachel. And I still do.’

  ‘No. You betrayed me, too. You ran, and you kept running, and now you’ve come full circle. I thought I would be spared. I thought the angel would pass over me. But he hasn’t, has he? That’s why you’re here.’

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you, Rachel. That’s not why I’m here. I didn’t kill Doc. I didn’t kill Amos. Whatever that means,’ I pointed at the wall, ‘that’s what murdered them. Not me. Whoever gunned them down was looking for it, for you.’

  She collapsed to her knees, and then sank to the floor, hair spilling about her head in a ragged black halo at my feet.

  I reached down and took her by the bicep, and for the first time we touched. I pulled her to her feet and tried to think straight, through the pain and exhaustion.

  ‘Listen. Listen to me. What was on the note? What does it really mean? You have to tell me.’

  She wrested her arm loose and unstuck the hair from her face. She wiped her eyes with her fingers and sucked the tears from her lips.

  ‘It’s everything,’ she said. She was looking directly at me, eyes wet and wide. ‘All my work. It’s all written there, in the numbers and letters. It’s a key.’

  ‘What does it unlock?’

  ‘An algorithm. One simple algorithm.’ I thought of Baaz, our conversation in Paris. I hoped that he was safe, that the banknote was safe; that Talia had come through for him.

  ‘It’s for a quantum computer, isn’t it?’

  She nodded. ‘It’s the ghost in the machine.’

  ‘And you’ve given this to the Russians? This algorithm?’

  She shook her head. ‘Moshe hid it from them on the note. It would take a genius to crack it. Amos took it to the only person I could trust.’

  ‘But you did this for the Russians?’

  ‘No. It’s not like that. You wouldn’t understand. I did it because … because I had to. People dream of revolution, of the Second Coming, of Aharit Hayamim, of … whatever.’

  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 any more. 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 any more. 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-kilometre 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 on to the truck in Moscow. But the processor was undamaged and it came to life. One bar of service cut in and out. I moved further 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 favour – 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-turn – 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 Doctor 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’d send 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 north-west 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 – lost him everything. In that respect, if nothing else, Commander Frank Knight and Doctor 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 trance-like on the candles. I raised the phone and took a photograph of the calculati
ons 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 away further, 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. ‘There,’ 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?’