15The Black Chamber
LONG AFTER EVERYONE HAD GONE HOME that night, Hermann still sat in the Blueberry room, waiting for results. The machine he and Newton had built together grumbled and hummed, whirred and clicked like an industrial loom. In the chilly little underground room, Hermann ordered his mental to-do list.
If the Blueberry found a match, he would use that to decipher the Orpheus messages. If the Blueberry found no match, he would decipher them by brute force. That could take days. And if the deciphered messages didn’t reveal the mole’s identity, then he would try something else.
As soon as the Blueberry was finished, he would leave and return to Newton. And he would ask him why the records matched. If it had one mistake—the weekend of the Bowen affair—might it have others?
Behind him, the Blueberry made a series of beeps and buzzes. It was getting close.
And if it wasn’t a mistake? And if the messages didn’t exonerate Newton? What would Hermann do then?
He thought of the land border with Ireland.
The computer beeped one long note, and then the dot matrix began to whir. Hermann stood slowly, unhooked his cane from the chair, and limped over as it printed.
There was a match in their records: a statistical bulge in the Orpheus messages correlated to a code dating back 20 years earlier. It was archived in the Black Chamber. It was not a cipher—it was a book code. If Hermann could get his hands on that file, he’d know what book, and what edition. Then he could decode the Orpheus messages.
Hermann read and reread the file ID, committing it to his color-coded memory. When he was sure he had it, he shut the Blueberry computer down. He took the output paper back to the lab and shredded it.
At his desk, he collected his things. He pulled on Newton’s jacket, pocketed his keys, and locked up his files. He walked slowly across the lab, hip aching insistently from the twist it had suffered the night before. At the door, he paused, holding his breath, hand on his lower back. He had no painkillers left—the bottle was at home, where he hadn’t been for days. Hermann exhaled. He had to go. But as he reached for the door, he heard Newton’s phone ringing inside his office.
He got to it just in time—“Hello?”
“Hello, who’s there?” said a child’s voice.
“Jacob?”
“Mr. Gottlieb!” said Jake. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re all right.”
“Why are you calling Dr. Geiszler? Is something wrong?”
“I was feeding your cat, sir,” said Jake, “And your phone rang. I’m sorry but I picked it up, because I thought it might be Mr. Geiszler, but they was looking for your next of Kim sir.”
“Kin,” said Hermann. “It means family. Who was it?”
“Oh,” said Jake. “I told them I didn’t know your next of—kin. I tried calling Mr. Geiszler but then I remembered he’s away—so I thought I had better try the office just in case but I only had his office phone number, and not yours—I’m just glad you’re not hurt—”
“Jacob,” said Hermann, loudly and clearly. “Jake. It’s all right. I’m all right. Who was it that called? Who was looking for me?”
“The hospital, sir,” he said in his little voice. “They said they got your name and telephone number from the tag in your jacket. They said you was collapsed in the train station.”
Later, Hermann could not recall the journey from the office to the hospital. The train ride felt interminable, all the mundane movement around him unbearable. The train was taking him just eight stops, but it seemed to be taking him from his old life to a new hell. And as he sat laden with dread, it seemed to him that none of his actions or choices really meant anything, and that life was entirely made up of these moments of waiting.
But later, he forgot this. He forgot the furious search through the halls, the confrontations with hospital staff, and the tone with which he demanded to see the person they believed was him.
He didn’t quite manage to forget the feeling of finally seeing Newt—through an interior window—limp and pale and shrunken, an oxygen tube under his nose. Hermann was accustomed to thinking of Newton as someone small and dense, the hard center of a molten planet, the weight in the keel that kept a boat upright. But the man lying in the white hospital bed was as insubstantial as the sheets, making almost no impression on the surface.
They wouldn’t let Hermann into the room. Someone was examining him, or doing another test. He was unconscious, and that was all they knew at present. They didn’t know why. They were sending for Mr. Gottlieb’s records but had yet to receive them. (And when they did? And noticed the obvious discrepancies?) Nobody mentioned of a foreign object in his ear canal.
A sympathetic doctor told Hermann that he had collapsed inside of King’s Cross Station, under a clock. His pockets had been full—glasses case, sewing kit, lighter, other useless items—but no wallet, hardly any money. The doctor showed Hermann the plastic bag with his things: his ring, his watch, whose face had smashed on impact at 4:35, and at the bottom of the bag, the little green box with the combination lock.
Where had he been taking that box?
If Hermann had managed to decode the Orpheus message, back in the lab, would he know the answer?
“Do you know what’s inside?” the doctor asked. “I wouldn’t open it—of course—even if I could. Just curious.”
Hermann shook his head, taking the bag. But the doctor didn’t let go. He wasn’t giving Newton’s possessions to Hermann, only showing them to him. Of course. Hermann looked back through the glass at his unconscious partner.
“What’s your name again? You’re a friend?”
Hermann half-nodded. “Yes,” he lied without thinking. “Lightcap.”
“What’s in the box then? Diamond ring?”
“Maybe,” he managed, letting go of the bag.
He hovered in the hallway, but none of the staff would let him into the room. Visiting hours were past, and anyway, he wasn’t family.
Hermann stalked out the front door of the hospital, tearing his visitor’s badge off. He threw it onto the cement, attracting a look from the smokers by the curb. The twilight surprised him—he’d lost track of the time. White street lamps were attracting bugs but casting little light. The trees and the city were nothing more than dark silhouettes.
There was a phone booth at the end of the hospital driveway, on the corner of the street. He walked towards it at a quick clip. What should he do? Call Lightcap. But she might still be under surveillance. And moreover, he didn’t want to call her.
Someone was in the booth, so he waited under a small hawthorn tree while she talked. A night bird up in the branches was singing a three-note evening tune. The woman came out of the booth, wiping her eyes, and left without looking at him.
Inside the little lighted box, leaning his shoulder against the glass, Hermann searched his pockets for coins. But he didn’t have enough—no small change. He patted all his pockets, all of Newton’s, searched down to the bottom of his briefcase. “No, dammit—” It was no use. He didn’t have enough.
He struck the side of the telephone box with his hand, hard. Then he stopped himself. He clenched both fists, and brought them to his face. He breathed through his nose for a long moment.
Back inside the hospital, he bought a coffee in the half-deserted cafeteria. He used the change at the public phone.
She answered on the second ring.
“Hello,” said Lightcap.
“Hello.”
There was a tense pause. Hermann listened, imagining the order of her thoughts: recognizing his voice, wondering why he would be calling her, noticing he wasn’t saying anything else, extrapolating that something was wrong.
“Give me the number,” she finally said.
He gave her the number of the public phone he was calling from. She rang off without another word.
He waited a few minutes, and then the phone rang.
“What’s wrong?” she said from a phone booth.
“I need to speak with you.”
“Why?”
“I’m certain you can guess.”
There was a brief silence.
“Where are you?”
“A hospital,” he said, and gave her the name.
“Are you sick?”
“No. Not me.”
There was a longer silence.
Hermann looked around himself and leaned closer to the receiver.
“There’s been a mix-up and he’s... here under my name. For now.”
There was still silence. He had no idea what was going on at the other end of the line.
“You’re being watched,” he said in the same undertone. “You need to come without leading them here.”
“To do what?” Lightcap finally said.
“I need your help with something. Please,” he added.
“Why me?” she said after a pause.
Her hesitance was a surprise, and not a pleasant one. Hermann was unable to conceal his impatience: “I have to ask you some questions. It's important.”
“No need to get short.”
“Will you come or not?” he snapped.
There was silence again.
“I don’t have time for this,” Hermann said. He hung up.
Lightcap found him in the cafeteria a few hours later.
“Were you followed?” was his first question.
“No,” she said, sitting down and folding her long legs under the chair.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she said, “I’m not an idiot.” Her tone was devastatingly Newt-like.
She was pulling out a cigarette and lighter. He stared at her as she opened it.
“This is a hospital,” he said.
She looked up at him, holding the lighter.
“Sorry, does he have pneumonia?” she said sarcastically. But she took the cigarette out and put it back into her breast pocket. “I forgot you are, genuinely, always this unpleasant.”
Hermann waved her words away. “Newton is in trouble,” he said in an undertone. “The device in his ear has rendered him unconscious, and I don’t know why, or how to fix it. And it’s only a matter of time before they find him here.”
“‘Them’ being who? The Div, or the CIA?”
“Either of them. Or other parties."
"Other parties, as in...?"
Hermann raised his eyebrows, and she got the drift. She grimaced.
"Headquarters is actively looking for him. They believe he’s working for the other side.”
“Hm,” Caitlin said.
But he stopped there. She frowned.
“Why do they believe that?” she asked.
“Because there is... compelling evidence to that effect.”
“Compelling evidence? That Newt is—”
“Please, keep your voice—”
“Good God—” She dropped to an affected whisper— “that our mutual friend is working for the Razvedka?”
Hermann found himself unable to verbally affirm.
Lightcap frowned, sitting back, but looking less incredulous than Hermann would have liked.
“What’s the evidence?” she asked.
He explained the story of Orpheus, and of Newt’s travel records. Every date and location was a match. Such a thing was circumstantial, and could be faked, he said, but he knew, off the top of his head, that many of those dates and locations were correct.
“I remember when he went away in the last few years. I’d have to confirm at home, but anecdotally, they’re a match.”
“No mistakes?”
“Well—there is one mistake,” said Hermann, addressing her shoulder. “At least. As far as I know. In December 1963... the weekend of the Bowen crisis.” He glanced up at her face. It was as stony as ever. “The record said he was at the Estate that weekend. He's always told me that he wasn’t.”
Lightcap frowned, confused. “Orpheus was at the Estate in 1963?”
“No. Orpheus only began transmitting two years ago. I just happened to notice the inconsistency in his record while I was looking. It is—it is an inconsistency, isn’t it?”
An awful idea—that Newt had been working with Bowen as a double agent, and that he had been the one to cover for him—briefly occurred to Hermann.
But Caitlin said, “No. He wasn’t there.”
“So his record was altered. In at least one instance,” said Hermann.
Caitlin made no reply to this. Her hand twitched in a habitual smoking motion, but she stopped it. “What other evidence is there?” she said.
He told her, at length: Newt’s behavior was suspicious. He had vanished from Langley, shortly after Orpheus sent a transmission. In February, he had duplicated intercepted top-secret blueprints. And in June, he had stolen sensitive CIA equipment from the Estate. They were searching for him because they believed he was the thief—and he was.
“He only did it because he was curious. That's what he told me.”
She made a face that said, could be. By this time, they were outside, at a cafe table on the cafeteria’s flagstone courtyard. The night air was still hot. Hermann sat in a chair, his hands clasped around another styrofoam cup of coffee. Lightcap stood, smoking, blowing the smoke over his head.
“And he lied to me about where he was when he disappeared in America. I've known that for two years."
“He lied?”
“He never told me the truth. The whole truth.”
“So he only lied by omission.”
“I knew he was hiding something,” said Hermann testily. “Whenever I asked. Where he’d gone, what he’d done. Why he hadn’t called. Why he came back with that stupid bloody motorcycle.”
Caitlin made no comment. "Is that it?"
Hermann glared down at his styrofoam coffee cup, his shoulders tight and his back rigid.
Finally he said: “Today... today, he tried to run.”
She looked down at him.
“He left the hotel. And went to King’s Cross Station. That's where they found him. Unconscious. With... with both parts of the device.”
“You think he was trying to get out of the country?”
He hadn't believed it, or, really, acknowledged the option of even entertaining the possibility of believing it, until today. And now...
"I... I honestly can't think of any other explanation," he said in a low voice.
Hermann looked up at her.
“Even if he wanted to get away, how could he?” she said. “You said he didn’t have a passport, or any money. How would he even buy a ticket?”
“He had the device,” said Hermann. “Both components. If he had contacts, then they could have gotten him out of the country in exchange for the device.”
Lightcap was frowning at him.
“You’ve certainly thought this through,” she finally said.
“You don’t find it plausible?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“I mean, why—why would he?”
Lightcap took a drag on her cigarette. Hermann saw she had no idea how much hinged on his inability to answer this question. The only one he couldn't answer. If there really was no good answer, then maybe, maybe—
She exhaled smoke. “Why would anyone?” she said. “To fulfill the basic urge to perturb. To make your mark.”
To make your mark. They occupied the secret world. They had no place in the history books. Newton had never made his mark the way he should have, as a pioneer, as a genius. Until now.
Hermann thought of Bowen. His face was on Soviet postage stamps.
“Why?” he said again.
Looking down at his cup of coffee, Hermann realized it was trembling. His hands were shaking. His arm muscles tensed, simultaneously trying to crush the cup and to stop himself from crushing it.
All at once he stood and threw it to the ground. Coffee exploded on the flagstone, splashing onto his shoes, but he was already storming away, off towards the brick wall that bordered the courtyard. The rage consumed him—he wanted to shout, strike, make something shatter—anything, make any impact, to make any mark on the world that someone would see, someone would hear. He was so angry he couldn't breathe. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right, he wasn’t supposed to do this, not to Hermann—to anyone else, to England, to America, to science—but not to him.
But he had. And for that blind moment, Hermann felt he would never forgive him, not ever.
Caitlin, sitting on the table with her boots on the chair, watched him curse into the darkness. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, the rebukes delivered to someone who wasn’t there. The question Why, she knew, really meant, How could you? She looked down at the coffee, watching the dark stain thread between the stones beneath her feet.
How could you? How could you live a lie? How could you destroy everything we’ve built? How could you turn your back on it all? How could you turn your back on me? Why wouldn’t you listen to me—do you value nothing that I say? How could you humiliate me like this? How could you confide in me falsely, lead me astray, turn around, betray me?
After a time, Hermann came to a stop in the corner of the courtyard. He rested his elbows on the brick ledge and covered his face, ashamed at the ridiculous spectacle of his own anger.
He wiped his eyes, and turned to look up at the stacks of lighted windows, rising above him in a vertical tunnel. Behind one of them, Newton lay, unconscious.
What was there to do? They wanted Newt, and Hermann knew where he was. He would be in trouble once they found him, and every minute he continued concealing his location was worse.
He could call Century right now and tell them where he was.
He turned and walked back to Lightcap.
“If you find proof, what are you going to do?” she said.
“I want to decipher Orpheus’s messages,” said Hermann said doggedly. “Then I’ll know... Then I'll know what his plans are.”
Caitlin looked at him. “But are you going to turn him in?”
He couldn't answer.
“I’m not going to help you if you’re going to turn him in,” Caitlin said. She meant for it to be a warning, but it just came out as a blank statement of fact.
“I’m not going to,” said Hermann quietly.
She looked at him, then away. Something about his display of senseless rage had made him less hateful to her.
“I was there,” she said to the flagstone.
“What?” said Hermann. “Where?”
“At the Estate. In ‘63. With Bowen.”
“I know that,” said Hermann, faltering as the second half of her statement hit him. He had never heard anyone describe it that way; they’d been there when he was there. Not there with him.
“I took the call,” she said.
“What call?”
“The alarm call,” she said, not looking at him. Her voice sounded softer, younger. “The emergency call from Headquarters. The orders to detain him.”
“What did he say to that?”
Caitlin was silent for a moment.
“He said it was all a mistake,” she said after a pause. “And that it would just blow over. And then asked if he could wait it out here. We said of course.”
“He was really that convincing?” Hermann said.
"He made it make sense. If he was innocent, why would he run? Of course he'd wait for his name to be cleared. Of course we let him stay."
Hermann said nothing. Caitlin looked up at him. Her face was worried, unguarded—then her eyes sharpened and her features became discordant as she realized that her expression was giving her away and that it was too late to stop it. Her honesty was unpracticed. Sometimes, loneliness buries our real self; sometimes, it draws it out to hover uncertainly in the wings—unsure how to act in front of others, waiting for a cue.
Lightcap was a victim of the great betrayal, and if she went onstage, she wouldn't be able to see into the audience with the lights in her eyes.
Who was hiding, out there in the crowd?
Was it him?
“I’ll tell you how to do it,” she said finally. “But only if you give me copies of Orpheus's messages.”
“When I decode them?”
“No,” she said. “Originals. Tomorrow. Express them to my flat.”
“But they're still encoded.”
“I don’t care. I want to read them.”
“But I don’t know what book the code is based on.”
“Will you send them to me, or not?”
Hermann didn't want to disseminate the messages, because if Newton—well—Well, Lightcap would never give him up to the authorities. Not on purpose. But if she had copies, those copies could be discovered... She had been the weak link once. Even if this situation was completely different, she was a liability. And what could she want with them anyway?
But there was something he needed from her in exchange. “Fine—yes, all right. If that’s what you want.”
“It is," she said. She dropped her cigarette and crushed it with her boot. "Good. What's this payment for, then? What is it you want my help with?”
Hermann drew himself up straight. “I want you to tell me how to break into the Black Chamber.”
Newt was on a the esplanade of a wide, deserted street. Down the esplanade ran two rows of trees, white, leafless, dead. Around him rose half-crumbling stone buildings, decaying neoclassical porticoes. Some of them had been patched up, others had scaffolding and construction equipment, still others were simply abandoned—bombed out and never rebuilt.
He was heading towards a gray horizon. Tucked in his jacket, he had an envelope. He had to deliver it to someone on the other side. It was important. Life or death important. Yet he was sluggish, unable to run to his destination, down to the end of the esplanade where the horizon was a thick gray line. He was raising his foot to take another step, and his foot was so heavy, and his body was so slow—and his heart was racing so urgently—and his foot never completed the step.
The crumbling façades of East Berlin rose around him like a cemetery—empty dark guts he had never seen, a memory that was not his own, a wall he had never traversed. A wall built to keep him inside.
But he had to get across.
The envelope ticked.
He had to tell them something, and it was so important, but heaven help him, he could not remember what.