12Long-Term Care
June 6th
Wednesday
EMERGING FROM THE LIFT in the basement the next morning, Hermann saw Preston leaving the radio lab. He was halfway down the hall before he noticed Hermann. Preston had a weird, bulky gait. He seemed to heave towards Hermann in the dim hall. As they passed, Hermann nodded to him, but Preston only stared, dead-eyed. Any idea of sending a message upstairs with him to his master—I was wrong. Rennie isn’t dead—left Hermann’s mind.
It was raining that morning. Hard and cold and steady like it would never stop. Hermann, living out of a newly bought suitcase, had no raincoat, only an umbrella. In the half-lit lab, he shook it out and set it in the stand, then went into Weeks’s office to give him the update on Orpheus.
No positive results so far, he reported. They were nearly finished running through all of Victor’s suspects. This update was surely what Preston had come for. Hermann could practically see Weeks’s hand itching to pick up the phone receiver.
“If I may,” said Hermann. “If we return no match, can we attempt to decipher the messages?”
“Decipher them?”
“Yes. Sir.”
“Well,” said Weeks, looking like the question was somehow impertinent. “Well, I thought we had tried that.”
“No. We never tried. The cursory check didn’t identify the cipher. But it was low-priority. Now that it’s high-priority, I could try to decrypt it myself.”
“We can’t send Orpheus up to the coding bay,” Weeks said. “The messages are too sensitive.”
“No sir. Of course not. I can do it.” Please, Hermann thought. Let me at it.
“I’m sorry, Hermann, upstairs was very clear about this. They only want traffic analysis. Not decryption. It’s not worth the hours.”
“But sir—”
“No, no, I won’t have you wasting your time on this. It’s probably some nasty little number personally devised by this fellow’s handler. It will take far too long. No, no puzzling.”
Hermann frowned and abruptly stood. “If that’s all.”
Weeks looked surprised. “No, not quite. It’s not. Don’t you want an update on Dr. Geiszler?”
Hermann’s pulse jumped. “What’s happened?”
“Well, nothing. but I thought you would ask.”
Hermann hoped he hadn’t paled, but he feared he had. He should have asked. Damn it all. They knew. They knew everything.
“That’s what old Preston was down telling me. No news. But I’ll keep you updated, all right, Hermann?”
“I didn’t think it was my—business,” Hermann managed.
“Nonsense,” said Weeks, opening his drawer. “Of course I’ll tell you what they tell me. It’s our lab, after all.” He fished out his bag of tobacco. “Victor expects your report tomorrow. You’d better hurry.”
His heart rate still slowing back to normal, Hermann returned to his desk. Why wouldn’t they let him decipher the messages, for God’s sake? Just traffic analysis. What bloody stupid orders. He glared around the empty lab, wishing he had stayed at Cambridge and devoted his life to number theory. Well, there was still time. Yes. He would find Birch, and together they would run back to academia, where they belonged.
The lab was quiet this early in the morning. Most of the lights were still off. Hermann sat in the dim silence. He needed coffee. He’d slept very poorly, and little. He kept waking from dreams about fire, shivering in the hotel bed. Newton, curled next to him, radiated warmth, but Hermann only pulled the blanket more tightly around himself, loath to touch, or even to get up and turn off the A/C.
"So now we know who set it all in motion," Newt had said, late last night, when the rain was starting.
Hermann had nodded vacantly.
“And now we know who stole the transducer, back in ‘63,” Newt added. “When he woke up from his coma, he ran right back to the Abteilung to sell it.”
“Unless they captured him.”
“Rennie was working for them, Hermann. He was a double agent, just like Bowen.”
Just like I could have been, Hermann had thought.
“As soon as he woke up, he called his buddy Bowen and got a sweet deal for his stolen gadget,” Newt had said.
“The language in the message is ambiguous,” Hermann had said.
“Why are you still looking for excuses for him?” Newt had said with unusual directness.
Hermann had said nothing, staring vacantly out the dark glass. “No. I’m not. You’re probably right.”
“Hey, at least he’s alive,” Newt had said. “He didn’t die for you after all.”
Hermann had nodded again, not listening.
He sat, listening to the pipes running quietly and equipment humming. Wesley had been right: the lab was quiet without Newton’s presence. No noisy machinery from behind his door, no pirate radio. Hermann stared at his office door on the other side of the lab, feeling a dull sadness.
As he stared, he noticed the light was on. A shadow passed behind the door.
Somebody was inside.
Hermann stood slowly, taking his cane, and crossed the lab as quietly as he could. He paused outside the door and listened. They were moving things around. Papers. Drawers.
Like they were looking for something.
Hermann wrenched the door open. A cry came from within.
“Oh!”
“Is—Wesley?”
“Oh, Hermann, how you startled me. I was just, I,” Wesley blustered, stepping back from Newton’s desk, like it was a bomb whose fuse he’d just lit. “I—”
“Dr. Wesley!” said Hermann sharply. “What in God’s name are you doing in here?”
“I was just—looking for something.” Wesley backed up into a shelf and upset a stack of files, sending them cascading to the floor.
“Best of luck,” Hermann snapped, trying hard to keep his voice down. The mess was catastrophic in Dr. Geiszler’s tiny office, everywhere except the workbench. That was cleared, all tools neatly arranged or put away in boxes. Everywhere else—the desk, the shelves, the chairs—was an unmanageable ocean of files. “What exactly were you looking for?”
“A file.”
Hermann’s control on his volume failed as he barked, “What file?”
“Please!” Wesley put his hands up in front of him— “Please, you don’t need to shout.”
“Tell me,” Hermann hissed, “why I shouldn’t call Weeks in here, right now, Dr. Wesley. This is a major breach of protocol.”
“It’s a confidential situation,” said Wesley, glancing furtively at the door behind Hermann.
“In this building, most things are!”
Wesley gestured. “Please! Hermann, I can explain, if you just listen.”
Hermann unclenched his free hand grudgingly and pointed at the side door, which led out into the hall. “Out,” he said.
In the hall, Hermann shut the door behind them and rounded on Wesley.
“Would you please explain,” Hermann began in a furious undertone, but Wesley unexpectedly grabbed him by the shoulder.
“Hermann—” His voice was distraught. “I’m terribly worried about Newt, I think he’s in real trouble—”
To Hermann’s horror, he heard his labmate choke back a sob.
“I didn’t think anything of it, at the time, but now he’s missing, and I’ve been—been so—”
Hermann, leaning instinctively away, patted Wesley awkwardly on the hand. “Wesley, please, it’s all right. I’m sure Newton is all right.”
“No, no,” said Wesley miserably, covering his eyes, “And it’s my fault, I didn’t stop it...”
“What are you talking about?”
“Leak check,” Wesley said. He dropped his hands and looked up at Hermann. “They asked for my help, checking Newt.”
A leak check was a test done when there was a suspected security breach. A set of copies were made of the same tempting file, with minor differences in each—differences like punctuation or extra spaces. Each file was distributed as normal among the suspects. Then, if one version was leaked, it could be traced to the person who had leaked it.
“A leak check? Who did? When?”
“A few months ago,” said Wesley. “February. One of the fifth-floor boys came down and asked me to—asked for my help. He just asked the normal procedure, how files are distributed down here, you know.” Wesley sniffed loudly. “I told him we just use our couriers. I mean, anyone could have told him that.”
Alarm bells were going off in Hermann’s head.
“What did he want?”
“He, he wanted to see what... what Dr. Geiszler would do,” Wesley said. “He wanted me to keep an eye on him. When he sent the file through.”
“What file? Did you see it?”
“Yes—as a matter of fact. He gave me a look at it first. It was classified stuff,” Wesley added, standing up a little straighter. “New tech. From the Germans, I think. He told me it was very important.”
“Who did?” demanded Hermann in a low voice. “What was his name?”
“His name was Becket,” Wesley said. “Raleigh Becket. Case officer.”
Hermann opened his mouth, furious, about to shout, but then heard footsteps behind him. He turned and saw one of the IBM techs walking towards them. The tech nodded to both of them. They nodded back.
“Morning,” said Wesley weakly.
The tech walked past. He turned the corner.
“Wes—”
“So I watched him, then,” Wesley said, oblivious. “The morning of. Right in this hallway. Saw the courier deliver it. Heard him come into his office, saw the light come on. Then he came out right away and called the courier back. The kid hadn’t even made it to the lift. Gave him back the file, said it was misdirected.”
Hermann nodded once, not trusting himself to speak.
“So that was that, then. No time for stealing or copying. Newt was secure. No leak.”
“And that’s what you told Becket?”
“Yes,” said Wesley. “But I—” He opened and closed his mouth, looking distraught again. “Well, I thought it was all right. But then this weekend, at the conference, there’s the, well, the theft, and next thing you know, he’s missing. So I got scared that I had been wrong. That I’d made some mistake.” He covered his eyes again, voice trembling. “But it’s impossible, of course—I mean, it’s just—”
“Wesley,” Hermann interrupted viciously, “None of this makes any sense at all. A leak check is not done on just one person. And it is not done on specialists. And it is certainly not done using actual classified material!” He was practically shaking with rage. “Why didn’t you ask any questions?”
Wesley was shaking his head.
“Why on Earth would they check Newton without his supervisor’s knowledge?” Hermann continued, voice rising. “And where is Becket in the chain of command? He’s a bloody resident, he’s not fifth floor—did you even think to ask what they suspected him of or what he—”
“Hermann!” cried Wesley, covering his eyes with both hands. “Please, please stop shouting at me!”
Hermann stopped.
The echo died on the acoustic tile.
“This is our lab,” said Wesley, muffled. “You’re supposed to be on my side.”
Hermann, stymied, said nothing.
“I shouldn’t have helped them,” said Wesley. “But I didn’t know.”
“Right. You're right. Sorry.” Hermann’s guilt was rising like an inconvenient cough. He could well imagine it—someone well-dressed from upstairs, coming down here not for Weeks or even Hermann, but to talk to Wesley. Whom no one ever talked to. Flattering him by showing him a fancy classified gadget. He never would have said no.
“Did they say why?”
“Why what?”
“Why Newton was under suspicion?”
“No,” said Wesley. “Didn’t think it was my place to ask.”
“How do you know about the theft this weekend?” Hermann asked.
“At the conference?” said Wesley. He shrugged, like it was obvious. “Heard about it, same as you.”
Hermann nodded, to imply that he too had heard from rumor.
“I’m sorry for shouting,” he said, after a pause.
“That’s all right, Hermann.” Wesley glanced at him, then back at the floor. “We really don’t get many visitors down here. Especially not me. It’s hard to know what to say.”
“That’s true,” Hermann said. Wesley was a born specialist; he had no idea how things worked upstairs. Hermann should have known that. Becket had.
“But in any case, it’s completely impossible,” Wesley was saying. He searched Hermann’s face for reassurance. “I mean, I’ve no idea what they’re thinking, upstairs, really.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s impossible. That Newt could be an informant. He never would.”
He was still looking at Hermann for reassurance.
“Right?”
“No,” said Hermann. “No. Of course he wouldn’t.”
When they spoke on the phone, Chara understood what Hermann wanted before he had to say it. It was like Chara had been waiting by the phone for this call for the last twelve months.
“I can take you, Dr. Hermann,” he said. “I can take you to see him.”
“Where?”
“Don’t be worrying,” he said, and it sounded like he was looking around. “He is in clinic. Long-term care. No security.”
He didn’t give any more detail, and told Hermann to meet him at Paddington Station at 3:30 that afternoon.
Lionel Chara, the son of a Frenchwoman and a Czech freedom fighter, had served his first jail sentence at the age of twelve. After a turbulent adolescence, he’d cooled off and found gainful employment on the train lines. It was there that he’d been recruited to one of the Prague networks. In the late 50s, he’d helped with a complex diplomatic document-lifting operation spearheaded by the ubiquitous Charles Rennie. They’d brought Chara to the U.K. for a more robust education and then sent him back to Prague, with encouragements to rekindle his criminal connections. Soon enough he was running his own network of native informants, dubbed the Marathon Network.
Chara had been the valuable, affable runner of a valuable, high-yield network in a dangerous region. The Division had invested time and money in his education, and it had been paying off in dividends. So it had been bizarre, last year, when the Division had unceremoniously sacked him.
Hermann found him, unmistakably hulking, at the lost and found baggage desk in Paddington Station. He said nothing and queued behind him in his shadow. When Chara left, there was a ticket lying on the counter. Hermann covered it with his hand and slipped it into his sleeve.
It was a round-trip ticket to Reading, leaving in ten minutes from Platform Three. 2nd CAR was written in tiny print on the back.
It was early yet for commuters, and the second car was mostly empty. The train was well out of the station before the door of the car opened and Chara entered, all 6’6” of him. He edged between the two columns of seats to Hermann. He was out of scale with his surroundings—with interiors of any kind. His black overcoat kept catching on the seats as he passed.
“What you are doing here, Dr. Hermann?” Chara said, sitting down beside him. “How is Dr. Isaac Newton?”
“He’s well,” Hermann said. Newt had always liked Chara.
“My favorite teacher, at the old Estate,” Chara said. “Not so serious as you Englishmen.”
“Not serious enough, some might say.”
“Ah—no,” Chara said, correcting himself. “My favorite teacher was his friend Miss Lightcap. It’s so long since I see her. She got fired, just like me.” He grinned down at Hermann. “Maybe now she has time to get drink with me.”
Hermann tried, in vain, to smile back. “Lionel,” he said, and gave up the attempt, “What are you doing here? Why are you still in London?”
“They took my passport,” said Chara, looking away out the window, where raindrops were skating backwards on the pane. “After all, they printed it.”
“But—”
“So you are wanting to see Birch. I will take you, Hermann, but I tell now: there is nothing to see. His mind is finished. That part is true. The rest of it, maybe no. But that is true.”
“The rest of what?” said Hermann.
“‘Lured, Kidnapped, Tortured,’” Chara pronounced, quoting the headline that had shortly preceded his sacking. “Lured, I don’t know. Kidnapped, I think so. But he was not only tortured.”
“What happened?”
Chara leaned in.
“I think he was a test subject,” he said.
“Never made public, did they, how I found him? I almost missed him, you know. The police found him, he is wandering on farm. Very small town. The farmer’s wife calls them from one of the telephone in town. She has to walk ten miles from her house to use phone. When police arrive, they are expecting a drunk. He is in the hayloft. When they see him, they decide no, not drunk—an imbecile. Or someone escaped from asylum.
“So they lock him up, and his picture is printed in paper. That is when I see it. I always read the papers back to front. It’s my job, right?”
Chara’s heavy eyebrows descended. Outside, the city flew past in fog-choked monochrome.
“I recognized him from the wanted pictures. From Austria office. Deserter. Defector. The police, they have no idea he is foreigner—because he is not speaking, I think. I only have a little time before they figure it out and turn him over to government. So I take the first train out.
“I bail him out with some half-cooked story about how he is my retarded brother. They don’t believe me but I have enough cash, make it plausible. And as we are leaving, one of the cop is asking me: ‘Hey, where did your brother learn English?’
“We leave in hurry. But the cops have seen me. Us. Together. I do not like that. They can give our description to anyone who is asking. And I know that there will be people asking.
“In station, I call the resident at embassy in the Prague. Emergency line. Request for sanctuary, urgent. I cannot let Birch be in public even another hour,” said Chara. “He is complete mess.”
“A mess—how?” Hermann finally interrupted.
Chara looked down at him, then away over his head, back out the window. “He was in worse shape than any defector I ever saw, I’m telling you that. Birch, he said nothing. His eyes were… out of focus. He stared, but did not see. He moved without looking. Horrible moves. Like someone is jerking his puppet strings. And he said no words, but sometimes he made this whine—I think it was not intentional. It just came out of his mouth.
“I think he knew I was there to help him. He listened what I said, he followed my orders. He did not speak—he only told one thing. ‘They made me listen.’ Only words he said. ‘They made me listen.’”
The hoarse whisper in which he repeated it now, in the half-empty commuter car, made Hermann’s blood run cold.
“Listen to what?” Hermann said quietly.
But Chara resumed his story. “After that, he is silent again. We make it to safehouse flat. The Station Head take him. Goes smooth, for such unexpected delivery. I feel proud.”
“Where did they take him?” Hermann asked.
“Back to London,” said Chara. “Then one week later, they are calling me. I’m wanted back at HQ. I’ve never even been to HQ, right?”
Hermann nodded.
“At Century, they ask me all about. A million questions. Like they are preparing me to testify. I thought they were—I thought I am getting ready for something official. An inquiry. Not often you get your man back after he defects, right? But then the next thing I know—they sack me. I am leak, they say. Breaching official secrets act, they say. Lucky they don’t arrest me, they say. They took my passport. Well!” Chara raised both hands and dropped them to his side. “A leak! Me! To the press! Me! I have only been in country for few days. It was already leaked!”
“It wasn’t you?”
“No! Dr. Hermann, of course not!”
“Then who? Do you know?”
“I know who pointed finger at me,” said Chara. He straightened up in his seat, and then slouched forward, coming unexpectedly close to Hermann’s face. “That bastard from Austria Station. Birch’s boss. Becket.”
“Becket?”
Chara nodded, and straightened up again. “He had lot of little questions for me. I didn’t like him. His little questions. His expensive suit.”
He turned and spat onto the floor. Hermann raised his eyebrows in disgust.
“Hermann, ten to one he got me fired. If he is leak, that I don’t know.”
“You thought Birch was a test subject,” Hermann said. “A test subject for what?”
“I don’t know,” said Chara. “Something dangerous.”
“Did you tell the fifth floor your theory?”
“Yes. I tell them. But I think they are already knowing about it.”
The Reading care home was a low brick building out back of the hospital, shadowed by poorly tended hemlock trees. Up and down their slumping trunks were patches of dead gray limbs, with tiny twigs dense like cobwebs.
Hermann limped quickly down the slick stone walk behind Chara, his umbrella bouncing on his shoulder. Chara had no umbrella, only his ill-fitting overcoat. From the way he walked, Hermann could tell he had visited Birch before. He wondered again why Chara was still in England. Having no passport made travel difficult, but not impossible for someone of his education and resources.
The attendant asked for them to sign in on a clipboard. One after the other, they dutifully recorded fake names. The attendant led them down a silent hallway to the last room on the right. It was a clean white room with one window. The leaning trees outside gave the light a green cast. There was one bed, and in it lay Dr. Bernard Birch.
He lay half-reclined against several thin pillows, a white wool blanket half hanging off of him. Hermann almost didn’t recognize him for a second—he had far less hair, and no glasses. The rise of his lateral profile, knee, shoulder, chin, cut across the white wall like a mountain ridge. He was profoundly immobile. His expression was vacant.
He made no acknowledgement of their arrival. The attendant shut the door behind them, and Birch’s eyes moved over slightly. Hermann made a small step forward, into his field of vision, and then Chara took a much larger step, placing himself at the foot of Birch’s bed.
“Bernard, old fellow,” Chara said, “How is weather today? You see this rain? That is meaning spring is here. Many people, they are counting on the sun. But rain is what makes things grow in springtime. Especially in this country,” he added with a big smile.
Birch’s eyes moved up slightly, somewhere near the area where Chara stood, but otherwise he gave no sign of seeing the man.
“I brought a friend today,” Chara said, gesturing to Hermann. Hermann budged closer. “You remember Dr. Hermann? From signals? He is specialist just like you.”
Hermann looked quickly at Birch, then Chara, then the bedstead. He’d braced himself for the worst. The worst was not to be found here—drooling, tremors, deranged speech. But the emptiness of his affect was chilling.
“Hello, Dr. Birch,” Hermann said, voice coming out hoarse.
No matter how he tried, he could manage none of the bedside platitudes. For some, like Chara, that normal speech calmed the air. But Hermann could not act the part. He could not speak to the man as if they were making small talk in the elevator, or even as if he were in hospital making a routine recovery. As if, by speaking like everything was all right, it would be. For him, that type of lying was worse than saying nothing at all.
“Dr. Hermann wants to know how are you,” Chara said. “Since our daring escape. Do you remember?”
Birch remained immobile.
“Or your time in East Germany, Bernard,” Chara said, and Hermann looked at him sharply. “Do you remember?”
Hermann looked to Birch, afraid that the mention of his imprisonment or flight would trigger a reaction. But he was unmoved. His face was as empty as ever.
He understood nothing. Hermann could see, his heart sinking, that there was nothing here to learn but what Chara, Stella, and a dozen half-false articles had already told him. Birch had nothing to say.
Later, as they left, Hermann wondered: Was this the price Birch had expected to pay? When he had decided to turn, had he expected to lose this? He was not a double agent in the Robert Bowen tradition, an actor playing both sides for his own pleasure. He had been misguided, greedy for knowledge, unsure of his own principles. Not like Bowen or Rennie, the utterly principle-less. Perhaps he had expected to lose his life, in pursuit of—of whatever he had wanted to learn. But never his mind.
Back at Reading Station, Hermann bought a card, envelope, and a stamp. He wrote, “Thank you for the flowers,” sealed it into the envelope, addressed it to Stella, and wrote the care home’s address in the top right corner.
They were back in London before sundown. Despite massive and now articulated misgivings, Hermann went to the bank. He recovered the little green case from his safe deposit box.
He sat huddled at the end of the crowded train car. Why had Newt been under suspicion from the fifth floor? What had Becket wanted with him? What was Becket’s stake in all this? What was it all for? What did the device do?
Armed with Birch and Chara’s evidence, he would still do his best to talk Newton out of testing it on himself. He would try to convince him not to do it. But deep down he knew it would be in vain. And he feared what would happen when, after all this time, they finally brought the two components together.
On the tube, a woman in nursing scrubs was peeling and eating an orange. A man nearby was reading a biography of George Cantor, someone whom Newton considered a personal enemy. On the mornings when Newton rode the train to work, instead of his motorbike, he met Hermann at Wheaten Street Station and they commuted downtown together. Hermann was rather surly in the mornings, but Newt was just as talkative as ever. He would stand extremely close to Hermann in the crowded train—the only public place where this would draw no eyes—and prattle on about something or other. Sometimes he used Hermann as a support if he could not reach the bar. Hermann, now sitting alone amid strangers, tried to remember the subjects of discourse last week: the golden age of piracy, a Star Trek episode he disliked, what would happen if the Earth stopped turning?
That had been Thursday morning. Their last commute before he’d left for the conference. Had it been their final commute together? Hermann had never had any particular fondness for these mornings, but now the thought of them left him hollow. He had thought it would be this, forever. The same routine, the same home, the same Newton. Had he been wrong?
And when he opened the door to their hotel suite, calling hello as he took off his shoes, no reply came. All was clean and ordered. The beds were made, Rachmaninoff was playing on the radio. Walking in his socks through the two connected rooms, Hermann found them both empty.