The late February flurry could not do much damage. The falling flakes gave over to freezing drizzle in capitulation to the distant but oncoming spring, and the snow withdrew from the ground like a shadow at noon. When the next day dawned, driving conditions were not what any prudent Englishman would have called ‘navigable.’ But Newton Geiszler, Ph.D., was neither prudent nor—he was proud to say—was he an Englishman. On the morning of February 23rd, he rode his motorcycle to the office.
Division headquarters was decried by most of its employees as insecure. For the most secret office in the capital, its location was the city’s worst-kept secret. Ten years since the crisis, they said, and had we learned nothing? Vice Chief Victor had said that once, as an experiment, he got into a cab and asked for their headquarters. The cabbie took him straight there, asking only if he wanted to go in front or round the back.
This tradition was perfectly satisfactory to Newt. He parked his noisy American combustion engine in the underground garage per usual and walked the remaining blocks on foot. He climbed the concrete steps of the Century Building, greeted the front desk receptionist (to cheery reply), the morning watchman (to no reply), and pushed the button for a lift going down. His pressed colleagues had already pressed for the lift up. They gave him their usual curt greetings, and when their lift arrived first, they stepped in. The doors closed on Dr. Geiszler, hands in pockets, waiting for his ride down to the basement.
Everyone knew that the radio coding lab in the Century sub-basement was run by eccentrics. In the oblique language of the Division, they were known as “specialists,” but their nickname in mixed company was the “Looney Tuners.” Geiszler and his acerbic colleague Gottlieb, under operations manager Hal Weeks, ran radio technology and cryptography research. They developed new technology and techniques for signals interception and analysis. Newton Geiszler was an engineer, taking apart Soviet surveillance tech and building it better for the Division. Hermann Gottlieb was a cryptanalyst, analyzing enemy codes and writing ways of undoing them. These methods they passed upstairs, to ops and the coding bay respectively.
Upstairs, Weeks did his faltering best under the excessively watchful eye of Vice Chief Victor. (Victor was his only name—whether it was his Christian name or his surname was unknown.) It was he who had cleaned the Division out, top to bottom, after the crisis of 1963; but his paranoia had not stopped there. Over the next ten years it had grown. He prowled the halls and filing cabinets and databanks, sniffing out double agents where there were none. And he did it all with the tacit blessing of the unseen Chief, who had no name at all.
Geiszler and Gottlieb survived on their reputation as insufferable but effective. They were tolerated for their abilities and laughed at for their bickering. Colleagues speculated on whether they actually hated each other, but by and large, they thought not. Gottlieb and Geiszler looked out for each other the way people at the bottom do. And if any of their colleagues had discovered that they had keys to each other’s apartments on their respective keyrings, perhaps that would not have been a surprise.
Newt entered the door code and was admitted, with a beep, to the lab. All the desks were empty except for Dr. Gottlieb’s. His most punctual colleague was already hard at work.
He spared him an over-the-glasses glance. “You’ve survived another commute, I see.”
“I told you I would,” said Newt, setting down his bag and unbuttoning his jacket. “It’s a lucky day.”
“Is it?” said Hermann.
“Check your calendar, Doctorate in Mathematics,” Newt said. “The date is all primes.”
“My degree is in mathematics, not number trivia,” Hermann said, looking back at his dispatches.
“Of course. My apologies. Primes. So trivial. So rational. So concrete. Can’t have that.” Newt hung up his jacket. “I’ll come back when the date aligns with something nice and imaginary. Some abstract, abstruse equation that has no bearing on the real world.”
“You do that,” Hermann replied. “In any case, it’s 1973. There will be prime dates all year.”
“Exactly.” Newt picked up his bag and headed towards his office door. “So it’s going to be a very lucky year.”
“Superstitious,” Hermann called after him without looking up. “And irrational. Just like every year with you.”
But it was Dr. Geiszler’s optimistic superstition that bore out, because lying on his desk was a very special file. He opened it, and right away saw two things: one, that it contained a blueprint for a top secret new transmitter, and two, a that it was not for his eyes. This file was labeled fifth-floor only.
Newt ran out into the hall to see the receding back of the useless kid who’d delivered it. He called him back and handed him the file: “I don’t know whose desk this is supposed to be landing on, but it’s not mine. Don’t worry. I won’t tell them. Morning, Wesley,” he added to their labmate, who was just arriving. Wesley appeared not to hear. Newt returned to his office.
His employers knew that he was exceptional, perhaps even a genius in his field. They were lucky to have him in the Division at all, they said. By all rights, he should have been at the D.O.D. in his motherland. But what they did not know—what he had succeeded in concealing for nearly two decades—was that Dr. Geiszler had an eidetic memory.
One look at the blueprint was all he needed.
“I should like to write you the kind of words that burn the paper they are written on—but words like that have a way of being not only unforgettable but unforgivable. You will burn the paper in any case; and I would rather there should be nothing in it that you cannot forget if you want to.”
— Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night
1971
Two years earlier
The nurse had noted that morning that it would be particularly warm; she could tell from the way the clouds hung low and gray at dawn. Now sunlight rained down outside, and dark afternoon heat drenched the corridors in the hospital. Her mother used to call it die Affenhitze, the ‘ape heat.’ The nurse hadn’t heard that expression much since her childhood, but on such days, it resurfaced in her mind.
Krankenhaus Sankt Magnus stood on the furthest outskirts of East Berlin. It was a low series of brick buildings, secluded among the trees. She had worked there for the last fifteen years. Like any hospital in East Berlin, it was a public hospital, but somehow it seemed to have more money than most.
She wheeled her cart to the end of the main building, towards the long-term ward. She had finished her rounds, but then her supervisor, wiping the perspiration from his forehead, had asked, “Can you see to the long-term ward as well?” She’d obliged, hiding her reluctance. The long-term ward made her sad, and uneasy.
The ward was at the westernmost corner of the building, near the riverbank. The exterior walls were lined with windows, but all the blinds were drawn, and so were the gauzy inner curtains. It gave the clean white ward that special darkness found only in shaded spaces shielded from harsh sunlight.
Before her lay a dozen pale, motionless bodies. She slowly pushed her cart along the aisle between their two rows. The long-term coma patients were so few that they felt like a community—like they played cards together on weekends, smoking and talking of the old days. But they were drained as white as the rooms around them, and they slept as if they were already dead.
She stopped at the end of the row beside the windows. The last man in the ward had deep lines under his eyes and between his thick red brows. His leathery skin looked like it had survived deep sunburns in far more tropical places than this. He was not as pale as the others—in fact, his face was a bit ruddy. It seemed he was the only one who felt the heat. Sweat beaded around his peaked hairline.
The nurse remembered his arrival, almost nine years before. They knew nothing of him. He had arrived anonymously. They had removed the bullet in his chest and treated his burns, but he had not awoken. His external wounds had long since healed; there remained something internal that would not resolve.
Yet he sweated. The nurse tsked softly and went to the window. She pulled up the blinds and sunlight poured in.
She turned back to the sweating man. His eyes were open.
She gasped and jumped back, grabbing the headboard behind her.
He opened his mouth, forming a word: “Gott... Gott...”
Trembling, she laid her hand on his shoulder.
“Water,” he croaked at last.
Why had he switched to English? The nurse recovered herself enough to nod.
She moved towards the sink, but a hand caught her wrist. His grip was impossibly firm for a man in his condition.
“Wait.”
“Sir,” she said, speaking German, for though she understood some English, she could not speak it. “Please let go. You need water. I need to call the doctor.”
“No, no doctor,” he said, switching back to German. His accent was flawless. “I need the embassy.”
“You need a doctor.”
“I need the embassy.”
“Which embassy?” she said. “You are a diplomat, sir?”
He coughed. His lined, ruddy face was sweating more than ever, but his voice was bone dry. She had never seen anyone who looked less like a diplomat.
“What year is it?”
She shivered.
“Sir... You must let me call the doctor.”
He squeezed her wrist. With his brown eyes open he looked years younger already. They begged her ear, made her complicit. “Call no one. Please. Tell me. What year is this?”
“1971.”
The man relaxed slowly, eyes sliding away. The lines of his face loosened from consternation into something more obscure.
“Let me get you water,” she said softly.
He let go of her arm.
The nurse hurried to the ward phone and called the dispatch desk. But the internal line was busy. Agitated, she told him that she would return and to please lie still. He nodded wordlessly. His eyes were on the phone.
It took her five minutes to get to the dispatch desk. The nurse on duty did not know where to find the right doctor, and they spent ten minutes looking for him. But he was busy, and could not come until he had finished his consultation, and by the time he finally did, almost half an hour had passed. The nurse was agitated—the man’s wild eyes and strong grip had left an impression of danger. Whether he was in it, or was it, she did not know. But she did not like to leave him alone.
When she finally herded the doctor, her supervisor, and another nurse back to the ward, the man was gone. His bed was empty. The phone was off the hook. The window was open.
It was impossible that he had walked, after eight years spent dead. Impossible, the doctor said. His muscles would be completely atrophied. He must have had help. So who then, the supervisor asked, who took him? Who did he call?
They said it was impossible—yet the nurse’s instincts said otherwise. None of them had felt that grip.
The window was still open, the same window whose blinds she had raised to let in the light. No breeze disturbed the translucent curtain.
31 May, 1973
Thursday
It was Hermann Gottlieb’s belief that as long as he continued to behave as normal, any out-of-the-ordinary situation would resolve itself. If something was amiss in the system, it was because somebody else had done something untoward. The usual suspects were foreign agents, retail clerks, small committees high up in national government, and his partner. But none were any match for Hermann’s routine, and the doggedness with which he could stick to it.
So on this Thursday he left the Century Building at 5 PM, as if it were a normal weekday evening. There were several reasons why it was not.
“Vice Chief Victor believes there is a mole among us.”
The words echoed in his mind as he descended the Lambeth North staircase with the crowd. Those words had been spoken in Weeks’s office a few hours before, and they would have impressed Hermann more if he hadn’t heard them every few months since the crisis of 1963.
The train arrived crowded and Hermann boarded it with everyone else. All the seats were occupied by the time he got on, and only one person looked up. The stranger’s eyes flicked up to Dr. Gottlieb’s cane, up to his bent middle, and then to his face. He bestowed upon Hermann an openly hostile look before reopening his newspaper. Hermann’s face twitched angrily, and since he was distracted when the train started to move, he stumbled sideways. He bumped into an older woman in an overcoat, who steadied him and asked if he was all right.
“Quite,” he snapped, taking hold of a pole.
The woman turning away in a huff would have been astonished to learn that the man spreading waves of irritation throughout the subway car was a valuable asset to British intelligence. Hermann Gottlieb was a tallish, thinnish man with a cane and a vague continental anonymity. He was professorially dressed and professorially hunched. His face was strangely geometric, like it had been sculpted by an art student who only had access to sharp-angled tools. If you asked his family, he worked for the Treasury. His neighbors were aware that he worked for ‘the government.’ A stranger would have taken him for an accountant, a teacher, or a mathematician. The former was true, if you asked his labmate; the latter was true if you asked his bosses. Hermann was one of the foremost minds in British cryptanalysis, and had been for almost twenty years.
“We—” Weeks had stumbled on the pronoun, eyes darting sideways to where Victor’s menacing assistant stood in the corner, out of his eyeline—“We, uh, believe Orpheus is a serious threat. We’re upgrading him to top priority.”
Weeks had called Gottlieb into his office that afternoon to nervously relay this message, courtesy of Victor’s assistant Preston Blair, a pint-sized bulldog in a well-fitted suit. It seemed the further Vice Chief Victor retreated into his files, the more Hermann saw of Preston, and the further Victor’s reach grew in the service. In fact, he didn’t think he had seen Victor once since the new year. He was becoming as reclusive as the Chief.
“Top priority, sir?” Hermann shot Preston a suspicious glance. “We’ve been picking up these Orpheus transmissions for nearly two years.”
The train jerked, and Herman winced as his back bent with the effort of staying on his feet. He straightened up, sighing through his nose. He did not look down at the people sitting placidly in their seats, and they did not look up at him. Though born in Germany, he had long assimilated into the codes of English discourtesy. He put his free hand on his hip and tried to keep it still. It was beginning to ache insistently.
The Orpheus transmissions had started appearing at irregular and intense intervals in radio traffic two years ago. Among hundreds of routine Razvedka signals sent from fixed positions, Orpheus broadcast at irregular times from irregular locations. They were distinguished by their unusual encryption, which did not appear to be OTP or any other conventional Razvedka cipher.
Hermann and the coding bay had never spent much time on the Orpheus transmissions because they were infrequent and had always been graded low-priority—until now.
Victor believed Orpheus was a mole within the British secret services, and that the transmissions were coded messages between himself and his Soviet handler. Coming from anyone else, Hermann would not necessarily have dismissed the possibility out of hand, but it was not so plausible coming from the man who cried mole.
Someone stood up for her stop, and, as if she hadn’t noticed Hermann before, gestured to her empty seat. Hermann shook his head, excessively deferent, and said, “My stop’s next.” His hip ached in protest. She passed by him, and he, gripping his cane, let someone else sit down instead.
“Orpheus is top priority, Gottlieb,” Preston had said. “The ‘why’ is unimportant to you. Only the how. I’ll need your files.”
“My files?”
“The Orpheus records,” Preston snapped. “I’m taking them upstairs.”
“Victor can come get them himself if he wants them,” Hermann was tempted to say, but did not. Victor had avoided Hermann for the last ten years—today would be no different.
“When will I get them back?” Hermann asked instead.
The intercom announced his stop, Wheaten Street, coming up next. Hermann heard it without much relief. Normally, he left his work at work. At home, he was a regular person, with regular hobbies, regular hopes, regular secrets. But as the train slowed and stopped, work clung to his thoughts: the unreadable transmissions, the unknown mole, even the absent Victor’s ever-present cold shoulder.
And normally, he did not spend the evening alone. But tonight, he would. His habitual dinner guest had left town.
Hermann emerged into the sun and turned up Wheaten Street. He looked up at Newton’s building as he passed it, eyes climbing to his third-floor window. The light glared off it, shielding it from his eyes, and for a second in the evening sun he felt dislocated from time, terribly out of place. Something was wrong, he thought, something was horribly wrong. The light moved as he did, and he saw that the curtains were drawn, like always.
And anyways, nobody was home.
Hermann turned a corner, walked another block, and turned onto his street, Airedale Street.
On the stairs inside of his building, he heard music. For a moment he thought a neighbor was listening to Liszt at a disrespectful volume, for those were the unmistakable bars of El Contrabandista. But as he reached the top step, the notes stumbled.
Something like a smile disturbed the blunt lines of his face. Hermann took out his keys quietly.
The heavy opening motif plunged down again before stopping abruptly. The piano player restarted a few measures back.
Hermann unlocked and opened the door softly, and the playing continued at full volume. It was dark in the front hall—the first blue shadows of night were falling in from the kitchen doorway at one end, and the front balcony door at the other. Warm light came from the living room doorway, because someone had turned on a lamp.
Hermann slipped off his shoes and stepped into his slippers. He closed the front door with care, but as soon as the bolt clicked home, the song abruptly changed.
“Liszt giving you difficulty?” said Hermann, emerging into the light and leaning against the living room door frame.
“Liszt?” Newton, sitting at Herman’s upright piano, made a scoffing sound. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Strange,” said Hermann, beginning to unbutton his shirt cuffs. “I thought for certain I heard someone practicing El Contrabandista as I came in.”
“Now why on Earth would I do a thing like that?” said Newt. He made as if squinting at the sheet music, while continuing to sound out ‘In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida’ with his fingers. “First of all, the Contrabandista is outrageously difficult. Even Liszt couldn’t play it. Second, it’s nowhere near as badass as Iron Butterfly. And third, I don’t ‘practice.’ I’m just good.”
“Is that so?” said Hermann, switching to his other cuff.
“Yes. And if I did have to practice,” Newt said, finally looking up at Hermann, “I certainly wouldn’t allow anyone to witness it. I have to maintain my pristine reputation for effortless genius.”
The prodigal engineer was a short but leggy man, dressed for work in one of his unprofessional patterned shirts, sans tie. He had thick-framed and thick-lensed glasses. His large forehead was accentuated by a high sweep of hair, one he maintained carefully even as it passed out of style. He peered at Hermann with heavy-lidded green eyes.
“I would not call your reputation in this flat ‘pristine,’” Hermann said.
“But you would call it genius?”
“I would say,” said Hermann, approaching the piano, “that anybody who can play El Contrabandista will be eligible for consideration for such a title.”
“Hmm. Doesn’t sound worth the hassle,” said Newt. “What’s your policy on Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2?”
He played the opening bars.
“I like El Contrabandista,” said Hermann, leaning on the piano. “It sounds like an argument.”
“Can’t possibly imagine why that would be appealing to you,” Newt said. But he was unable to keep from smiling as Hermann leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.
“I thought you’d already left for the conference,” Hermann said, crossing the living room and going into his bedroom.
“Decided to go tomorrow morning,” Newt called to him as Hermann opened his closet. “But I went to the station this afternoon and sent my things ahead.”
“Sent them ahead so you could...?”
“Yes, so I could ride up on the Bonneville. You think I’m going out to the countryside in June and not going riding? Come off it.”
Newt played a few more measures of Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.
“Man, it’s been years since I was up at the Estate,” Newt said. “I didn’t even have the Bonneville back then.”
Hermann hated Newton’s motorcycle. He chose on this occasion not to comment.
“How was work?” Newt called. “Everyone miss me already?”
“Wesley does,” Hermann answered. Wesley was their older labmate, a strange, friendless engineer with a couple of consuming obsessions. “Weeks sent him to my desk, to divide the labor on Orpheus, and all he wanted to talk about was—”
“Fermat?”
“Fermat.” Hermann sighed, frustrated.
“Never gets old, does it?”
“I wish someone would solve that blasted theorem so I would never have to hear about it again,” Hermann said, reemerging from his room in a sweater. “If he would just choose something useful to devote himself to, like Poincaré, or even something just interesting like the Riemann—”
“Hey, don’t you get him started on Riemann,” Newt said, breaking off his playing to point at Hermann as he passed. “I’m going to get that bastard myself.”
“If you really still think a machine is going to solve the Riemann hypothesis, you’re a romantic,” Hermann said, going into the kitchen.
“Guilty,” said Newt.
“In any case,” Hermann said, as Newton resumed with something more melancholy, “Wesley finally stopped talking long enough to ask where you were. I told him you’d be gone until Tuesday.”
“Did he say he’d miss me?”
“He said, ‘It’s always so quiet when Newt is gone,’” Hermann replied, imitating Wesley’s deeper voice. “And I agreed.”
Newt made a face. He resumed Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.
“So Weeks has you back on Orpheus? What, is it slow upstairs?”
“Actually—Victor,” called Hermann, violating his minimal-work-talk-at-home rule due to stress. “Preston the watchdog came down and told us it was top priority, all of a sudden. Victor wants full traffic analysis, cross-referenced with travel records of active personnel.”
“Which personnel?”
“Ops and officers. He gave us an enormous list.”
A stumble on the keys, and a correction.
“Preston took all my Orpheus files upstairs. I’m sure Victor’s in his office poring over them right now.”
“He didn’t come down himself?”
“He never does.”
Newt paused, and then started playing the opening of the Contrabandista again.
“Why Orpheus now?”
“Preston wouldn’t say,” Hermann replied. He took out a pot and began filling it with water. “He thinks it’s a mole.”
“Ah. Typical.”
Hermann made a noise of assent and shut the water off.
Newt’s hands slowed down, playing lightly.
“He could be right, though,” he offered. “I mean, this is exactly how the Americans finally caught Bowen.”
“Found him out,” Hermann corrected.
Newt rolled his eyes. “Well they nearly caught him.”
With a click-click-click the stovetop turned on.
“And imagine if they—or we—had,” said Hermann, not archly enough to disguise a genuine bitterness. “Maybe Victor would be tolerable.”
“Maybe he would tolerate you,” Newt said.
“Doubtful,” said Hermann, putting a lid on the pot.
The musical notes tumbled over each other. Then abruptly, they stopped.
“But how did they lose him?”
“Bowen?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you mean?”
The piano lid shut. Newt appeared in the kitchen doorway, massaging his left wrist. Hermann was sitting at the table peeling potatoes.
“Do you really think they knew? At the Estate?”
“Newton, what do you—”
But Newt was distracted by the appearance of Laplace. “There he is!”
Hermann turned and watched his cat lumber into the kitchen.
“Leave him alone,” Hermann said pointlessly. Newton was already pursuing the cat into the pantry. Laplace was extremely fat and unpersonable, and staunchly resistant to Newton’s advances. From the pantry came a predictable hiss and predictable cry.
“Hermann,” said Newton plaintively, reemerging into the kitchen.
“He hates everyone.”
“But I’m not everyone. I saved him. I gave him to you.”
Newton had found the bedraggled cat on his balcony a few years before. He was unable to keep it, because he kept birds, and the cat had a hunger in its eyes.
“Who is this ‘everyone,’ anyway?” said Newt. “When has Laplace ever met another human being? Who have you been bringing round to harass the cat? I just don’t understand why the Estate people let Bowen stay after the warrant was issued,” he said, swerving between topics without pausing for breath.
The Division’s infamous former Vice Chief, deep cover Soviet spy Robert Bowen, cast a long shadow—a shadow ten years long. Hermann had known him a little, through Victor. Bowen had been just as charming as his reputation, just as finely and eccentrically dressed, with his one drooping eyelid and his attentive smile. No one with their head on straight would have accused him of being anything as outrageous as a Razvedka agent.
But he was. And when, after more than twenty years undercover, the Americans discovered his treachery, Bowen fled. He hid out at the Estate, the Division’s training ground in East Anglia.
Division Headquarters issued a warrant for his arrest, and a red-alert to all employees. But, inexplicably, he did not flee the country right away. He stayed at the Estate for two days. Even more inexplicably, the Division employees who worked there—teachers, trainers, and support staff—let him stay there. They hosted him, did not tell London he was there, and then, when he announced that he was leaving, they did nothing to detain him. Somebody drove him to the train station, and he traveled the last hundred miles to Great Yarmouth Port, where a Scandinavian merchant in the U.S.S.R.’s employ picked him up, and smuggled the mole away via the Baltic to freedom.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” Hermann said, looking back down at the potatoes. “You used to work at the Estate. You knew those people.”
“Used to,” said Newt. “And almost everyone was fired.”
“Ask Caitlin.”
“She was fired too,” Newt said, as if Hermann didn’t know that.
“You’ll see her next week, won’t you?”
“At our gig? Yeah.”
Newt wandered to the stove and opened the pot.
“I see her every week, Hermann. That doesn’t mean she wants to talk about it.”
Newt shut the lid.
“I just don’t get it,” he said. “After all these years, I still don’t.”
“As I understand it, the Americans found transmissions corresponding to a mole in the British service. They matched the locations, times, and dates to his travel patterns, then brought the evidence to Whiteha—”
“No, I understand that,” Newt said, sitting down across from Hermann. “It’s the Estate thing I don’t get.”
Hermann handed him a paring knife.
“I don’t understand why he even went there at all,” said Newt, picking up a potato and beginning to peel. “So the Americans tell us on Friday. Someone tips him off. He skips town. Goes to the Estate. But he stops there. Then on Saturday, the scandal breaks. And he stays there.”
“Yes.”
“Until Sunday.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what I don’t get. Why did he stop? Why didn’t he leave? It’s not that far from the port. He could have left the country on Friday, before his photo was sent out to every border crossing in Western Europe. Why did he wait?”
“I’ve no idea,” said Hermann frankly.
“It’s not how I would have done it,” Newt commented, putting a potato in the bowl.
Hermann said nothing.
“Maybe he had misgivings about defecting,” Newt said. “I mean, it’s one thing to serve the Raz at a comfortable distance for twenty years. It’s another thing to actually live under Soviet rule.”
“Perhaps,” said Hermann.
Something in his voice made Newt glance up at him.
“What I really don’t understand is the Estate staff,” Newt said, looking back at his potato. “Why didn’t they rat him out?”
“He might have interfered with the alarm call somehow,” suggested Hermann. Newton frowned. Engineering and circuitry genius he may have been, but the human intricacies of operational spycraft never came easily to him.
Hermann put a peeled potato in the bowl of water and started on the last one.
“The thing is,” Newt said finally, “I don’t even think any of the Estate staff were actually turned. They weren’t his agents. I knew them back then,” he said. “And I saw the reports, afterwards. During restructuring. None of them were on the lists. They weren’t traitors.”
“It would only take one,” Hermann pointed out. “One traitor to take the alarm call, to cover for him.”
Newt just frowned and shook his head.
“I don’t know,” Newt said. “I think... I think he just talked them into it.”
This vexed Newt for some reason. It vexed Hermann too. It vexed Victor, who had been a great friend of Bowen’s. Victor, Robert Bowen, and Charles Rennie—they were the famous trio, Victor and the ‘Twins.’ Nobody had been taken in by Bowen’s charm more than Victor had, and no one had been more blindsided. Except perhaps for Rennie; but he was dead.
Hermann put the last potato into the bowl of water. “It’s certainly strange,” he said, standing up.
“I’ll never understand it,” Newt said, as Hermann went to the stove.
“Well, I don’t think it’s likely to come up this weekend.”
“Bowen always comes up,” said Newt, putting his feet on Hermann’s vacated chair. “If we don’t bring it up, the Americans do. Honestly, they were so pissed about Bowen, you’d think it was them he double-crossed. Like, it’s been a decade. Get over it.”
“I think that’s the hope,” said Hermann. “At least from the way Weeks talked about it.”
“Oy. Weeks. What a nebbish.” Newt was slicing the potato peelings into smaller and smaller pieces. “He’d lie down in a puddle and let the Americans walk right over him if they told him they didn’t want to get mud on their shoes.”
“Frankly I think he would let any authority figure do so,” Hermann said, giving the potatoes one last stir and shutting the lid.
Newt laughed.
“Strong words, coming from you.”
Hermann dried his hands primly on a dishtowel. “Exactly.”
“Maybe the mole will strike again this weekend,” said Newt. “Send some frantic messages from the conference. Maybe Orpheus is Bowen, Mark Two. Bowen, son of Bowen.”
“I certainly hope not,” said Hermann.
“Can you imagine Victor’s face?”
“I doubt that he would survive another Bowen,” said Hermann honestly.
But that was impossible anyhow—Victor had no one left to betray him. He had made sure of that.
They ate dinner and retired to the living room, where Hermann tried to catch up on his reading and Newton made unappreciative comments about the Debussy record Hermann had put on specifically to irritate him. Newton was rereading The Fellowship of the Ring, as he did annually, with his feet tucked under Hermann’s thigh.
“This is my record player, Newton, if you take issue with my record selection, you can go home. To your record player.”
“I’ll beat you at chess next weekend,” said Newt, turning a page. “Enjoy your two-week reign while you can.”
“Your belief that beating me at chess gives you legal claim over the music selection—”
“Not legal claim, but it does give me veto power—”
“—is almost as pathetic as your belief you are better at chess than I am—”
“All flukes,” Newt said, turning another page rebelliously.
“Right. Whatever helps you sleep at night. Speaking of which...”
Hermann glanced meaningfully at the wall clock.
“Yeah. I’ll go soon,” Newt said, making no movement to do so. His eyes wandered across the curtained windows behind Hermann’s head.
“Are you thinking about the conference?”
Newt shrugged. “Are you thinking about Orpheus?”
“It’s nonsense,” Hermann murmured, trying to see if he believed himself.
Newt stared at the curtains.
“The conference will be fine,” Hermann said.
“Yeah,” said Newt. “I’m just curious about this new CIA gadget. That’s all.”
Hermann frowned a little at Newt. Usually, the man’s curiosity translated into excitement, but instead, he seemed preoccupied.
“Weeks hasn’t told you anything?”
“Not really,” said Newt. “He might not know anything. It’s a high-level thing. It might even be a Victor thing. I heard there’s going to be a whole treaty... the works.”
Something, some chord in his voice, suddenly woke in Hermann the idea that Newton was lying. He was hiding something. The idea came from nowhere, like a brick flung through a window—but now the window was smashed, and there was the brick. This was their life, after all; for all its comfortable routine, ordinary tiffs, and other shared intimacies, the world they lived in together was a world of secrets. There were some secrets Hermann could not share.
Hermann had a long-held superstition that there was something inside him which needed protection. Something that needed protection from external intercession, or perhaps something from which the world needed protection. This superstition was what had drawn him into the world of secret intelligence in the first place—not the intelligence, but the secrets, the guarding of all those secrets.
If his heart was an ocean, like anyone’s, Newton had charted it. There was one last anchor Hermann guarded. He guarded it not for what it held, but for the security of its untouched existence.
Did Newt know that he was holding back? Hermann averted his eyes from Newton’s own pockets of secrecy—his dark labyrinthine flat, the experiments he did there. Hermann did not ask. Not out of consideration, but self-preservation.
So all he said was: “Are they even going to let you look at this ‘gadget’?”
“Do not disguise your envy as disparagement,” said Newt. “It’s very unattractive.”
Hermann rolled his eyes.
“Officially, according to my schedule, no. I’m just running workshops. The usual how-to shtick. For locals and my fellow Americans.”
When Hermann closed the journal a half an hour later, Newton was dozing with his head on Hermann’s lap. When he said softly, “Go home, don’t fall asleep here,” Newton murmured, “Uh-huh.” Some time later, when Hermann was settled in bed on his good side, one pillow between his knees and one behind his back, the bed creaked and Newt crawled in beside him. In the morning, he was gone.
For what was now widely considered a highly productive professional partnership, Newt and Hermann’s acquaintance had begun in a rather quaint manner.
Hermann was born to a Jewish family in 1930 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria. They fled Germany when he and his sister were small, and settled outside London. His father Lars Gottlieb was a doctor, and an unforgiving sort of man. Conforming readily to the spirit of their new nation, he sent his children away to school and rarely saw them. Hermann eventually found his way to mathematics, and then to Cambridge.
It was an old recruiter, a don named Thurston, who spotted Hermann at Cambridge. Thurston was an ageless professor of Old English literature and Germanic philology; Gottlieb, reserved, intelligent, and multinational, caught his eye. He introduced Hermann to Victor, a war hero ten years Hermann’s senior and a rising star in the Division. Victor took a liking to him. He made the right introductions, handled the vetting and interviewing, and saw to it that, upon completion of his mathematics degree, Hermann Gottlieb entered training at GCHQ in Cheltenham. So began his illustrious cryptographic career, under Victor’s convivial eye.
Newt’s recruitment a few years earlier had been, characteristically, less passive. He was born to a large German-Jewish family in New York City, on the Lower East Side, in 1932. An emotional and intellectual terror from a young age, like many child prodigies, his case was taken up by an affectionate science teacher. His parents were happy to hand him off, at the age of 12, into the care of MIT.
Seven years later, he was selected for a yearlong research fellowship at Oxford University. A prodigy of American birth and German breeding, pursuing his doctorate in electrical engineering at the age of 19, he attracted attention on paper. His antics attracted even more attention on campus. He burst in uninvited at parties to give speeches on archaeological history or the Riemann hypothesis, or withdrew abruptly from formal gatherings to tinker in his room, where, if rumors were to be believed, he was inventing a new kind of telescope, a cordless telephone system, a personal-use missile detection radar.
Such rumors, though surely false, attracted the network’s attention. Oxford’s venerable intelligence tradition was rich with both targets and recruits; unfortunately, as a result, barely trained new recruits were the ones to surveille the targets. Newt noticed his watchers. He figured out who they were. Then he marched up to one and demanded, with a hierarchical misunderstanding he would never outgrow, to be taken to their leader. He wanted a job.
Within two years, Newt was the star child of the Division’s Hardware department. Absurdly young, he was a hot poker in the seat of hardware’s pension-age engineers, slow old men with secret medals from the wars. Newt’s mission was to drag the department out of the past and into the future, with no pause at the present, and though the veteran engineers fought him every inch, they were invigorated by this electrifying nuisance. With Newt in the hot seat, hardware churned out advances in surveillance technology, newer, faster, smaller.
Every couple of months, Newt went up to the Estate to train officers and ops on the new gear. It was at one of these workshops, a mild February weekend in 1962, that he was doing a puzzle under the table during a lull. It was the weekly number puzzle in the Sunday Times, which he had pinched from the boarding house breakfast room that morning. He complained to his neighbor, a brightly dressed officer with a crooked jaw, that the Times number puzzle had dropped sharply in quality since the new year.
“I used to spend all afternoon on these,” Newt said. “Now they take me 5 minutes.”
“That bad, is it?” said the officer.
“Awful,” Newt said with American frankness. “Either the puzzle department is under new management, or the old manager had a stroke.”
“Actually, he quit,” said the officer, who ran the German desk in London Headquarters and whose name was Victor. “I know him.”
“You do?” Newt said. “Why’d he quit?”
Victor leaned in confidingly. “His work’s gotten too busy.”
Catching his meaning with surprise, Newt exclaimed, “He works here?”
“As a matter of fact, I hired him myself,” Victor said with an easy smile.
Newt, not one for internal regulation, asked for the puzzlemaster’s workname and posting. He wanted to write him a letter thanking him for a consistent challenge. Victor, genial son of the old boys’ network, heir to mantles passed down simply by virtue of knowing the right people, was happy to share the information.
Hermann received the letter a week later, addressed to his workname and signed with a stranger’s initials. Thus began a confidential correspondence under cover of pseudonyms.
✦
Saturday
June 2nd, 1973
The Estate
The Estate was west of Norwich, a half an hour’s drive from the Broads. It was by all appearances a country manor, with a sizeable collection of outbuildings and acres of fields and forests. An officer named Marsden had left it in trust to the Division sometime between wars. His much younger wife, imperious Frenchwoman Mme Marsden, became the caretaker. For the next 30-odd years, it had served as the Division’s training center, where new operatives learned and old officers refreshed their skills. Since the Bowen affair in 1963, its security clearance had been severely downgraded. These days, it was primarily a temporary residence—a safe house, a place to debrief, and occasionally, a venue for diplomatic functions.
The conference with the Americans was Friday through Sunday. If all went well, it would be followed by a high-level treaty meeting the next weekend. It was top-tier only. The terms and stakes of the meeting were top secret, and so, widely known around the grounds.
Newt spent the first two days of the conference collecting intelligence. By Saturday, he knew several things. He knew the CIA gadget was extremely valuable. He knew the Brits were trading something of equal importance for it. And he knew where both gadgets were being kept: inside the conspicuously guarded stables.
Luckily for Newt, he was quartered in the boarding house, which was spitting distance from the stables. From this position, he had occasion to learn something else: Case Officer Raleigh Becket was in attendance.
He was not on the roster for any of Newt’s CO workshops. So what was he doing here? And why was he going in and out of the stables?
Becket was the head of the Austria station, if Newt’s memory was correct, which it always was. He was young, handsome, ex-Marines. Hermann had worked with him on his first and last away mission. Becket never seemed like a spy to Newt, except in the most vulgar, Fleming sense. He was too conspicuous, too shiny.
Becket also had the distinction of being the only named officer in the top secret file Newt had received in February. Over the last few months, Newt had given that file quite a bit of thought.
On Saturday, Newt finished his workshops and considered his options for the afternoon recess. Entering the dining room, he was accosted by the hovering Mme Marsden. She was a small, energetic elderly woman; age had not dimmed the vividness of her wardrobe. She still wore the same pearls Newt remembered.
“Newton, dear, how are you?” she asked. “I have been so busy, I have hardly talked to you—we have not been so busy here in years! Your room is comfortable? Newton, you bad young man, you never visit me anymore. It gets so lonely out here, you know, without the trainings. You should ride up your motorcycle more. Bring that girlfriend, how is she?”
“Cait’s not my girlfriend,” Newt patiently reminded her. “Mme Marsden, don’t you know that I’m married?”
She gasped. “Married?”
“Yes! Married to my work!”
“Bah!” She slapped his arm with her ring-studded hand. “One of these days you must settle, Newton. You are getting old. You will not have this hair forever. You must use it to attract a wife before you lose it.”
Newt laughed.
Mme Marsden squeezed his arm. “This is why I miss your visits, Newton. You smile and laugh, not like these Englishmen—they never do. We French only laugh, we do not smile. Still, one misses it.”
Newt smiled fondly. “Mme Marsden, you’re such a flirt. Caitlin is doing well, though, thank you for asking. We play music together. We have a show in London on Wednesday. You should come see us play.”
“London! London is not good for my lungs,” Mme Marsden said. “Or my headaches. Or my heart. Does Caitlin still work in the Black Chamber?”
Newt raised his eyebrows. Is she losing her memory?
“No, Mme M. She worked there before she worked here. But she was fired. She was here during the...”
“Ah, of course, of course.” Her face closed off abruptly, like blinds had fallen. “Terrible business,” she murmured, eyes roaming away from him.
“Yeah,” was all Newt came up with. She was a proud woman, after all, and the Bowen affair had taken place on her watch. Even to say his name to her felt like a vile insult.
“He was always good to me, you know,” she finally said, lifting her eyes to Newt’s. “Those boys, they always were. The twins and the tagalong. There were so many summers they spent here, training their recruits. I miss them all, the trainees. I miss seeing them grow. Most of all, do you know who I miss, Newton? That Charles. His ‘twin.’ And you know, I miss Victor too. It is like they are all gone.”
“Victor’s still here,” Newt said.
“He is not,” Mme Marsden said. “Victor is gone.”
Newt looked away.
“Newton, mon cher, your room. It is comfortable? I am sorry to put you up in the attic with all the spiders, but the beds are more soft there.”
“It’s great,” Newt said, putting his hand on her arm. “Very cozy. I don’t think my neighbor much cares for me though.”
“Your neighbor? Mr. Rosewater? He was rude to you?”
Mme Marsden turned, squinting across the crowded dining room. She spotted him.
“Ah. There he is. By the French doors.”
“Is he American?” asked Newt.
“He’s the American, mon cher. He is the liaison,” she said. “This is why I give him the nice rooms. But was he rude to you, Newton?”
“Oh—it was nothing,” Newt said, craning his neck to look at the liaison. He was thin and smooth, with the youthful vitality of American military bureaucrats. When he replied to someone’s greeting, Newt could see his gold fillings flash across the room. “...Pounding on my door this morning asking if I had used up all the hot water. Calling me a nancy-boy. That’s all.”
“Hot water!” she said, scoffing. “He probably used it all up himself. These Americans. So decadent.”
“No wonder they hate the reds so much,” Newt said. “Do you know what his title is?”
“He is the R&D Director for the CIA,” Mme Marsden replied promptly.
“The whole CIA?” Newt was impressed.
“Yes,” Mme Marsden said. She shook her head. “I should have given him a room in the basement with his colleagues.”
✦
What Victor had told Newt in 1962 was entirely true. Hermann had been forced to resign his enjoyable side job as puzzle editor because he was being fast-tracked for promotion in his top secret posting in a top secret lab at Menwith Hill, North Yorkshire. There, GCHQ shared a surveillance base with the Americans, and their cryptography partnership was being championed by none other than Washington liaison Robert Bowen.
When he received Newt’s first letter, Hermann was close to drowning in this institutional riptide. He was paddling out in the waves without a map or star or white whale to keep him company, and so he did something peculiar and unadvisable with the letter: he answered it.
Within a month they were writing twice a week. They were careful to avoid work topics, particularly Hermann. His little North Yorkshire flat was government-owned, so their letters could be read at any time. His correspondent never asked about the particulars of his work, nor detailed his own, and Hermann appreciated his tacit respect of this boundary. From this unspoken understanding he extrapolated swaths more. Hermann roamed the slopes and swamps of his lonely psyche, plucking material for his letters; he mistook his sparse clippings for meaningful confessions, and he mistook his own footprints for his correspondent’s.
Back in London, Newt was invigorated by his challenging and clever correspondent. Finally, he thought, he had found a peer in his field; not some arthritic engineer and not some hungry young ladder-climber. The puzzlemaster seemed equal to every topic Newt threw at him, except for modern music—he appreciated Newt’s speculations on paleontology, his inflammatory opinions on classical composers, his bizarre application of subjective idealism to the Space Race. The puzzlemaster returned with some fascinating ideas on the philosophical implications of transfinite math and the first compelling case for opera that Newt had ever heard. They also shared a passion for the Riemann hypothesis, and Newt divulged the truth of his personal project at Oxford: he had been trying to build a calculating machine to find Riemann Zeros.
Sitting on his small wrought iron balcony above the courtyard in North Yorkshire, Hermann spent whole evenings drafting his replies. Newt devoured each on his crowded commute, drafted his reply in his head all day at work, and typed it out in a single draft when he got home. For Newt, their correspondence was the natural extension of the Sunday puzzle. Hermann did not view it with the same pragmatism.
✦
Hermann was one of the specialists on the Division team being prepared for the new American cryptographic partnership. It was all part of Bowen’s project to bring the American and British networks into closer alliance. London smiled on Robert Bowen like a proud father, and as he drew up the charters in Washington, glasses were clinking in Moscow. But abruptly, in January of 1963, the Americans backed out of the partnership. A discreet emissary flew in from Washington and met with the deputy head of the Foreign Office in a soundproof room in Whitehall; when they emerged, the charter was scrapped and Bowen recalled to London.
His program terminated, Dr. Gottlieb was recalled from North Yorkshire. After ten months, Newt’s correspondent fell abruptly silent; his letters went unanswered for one week, then two, then returned, roughed up and stamped: “No Forwarding Address.”
✦
Saturday
June 2nd, 1973
The Estate
Newt returned to the attic for the late afternoon recess. Was his neighbor really the American liaison? That would be a stroke of luck. He walked by Mr. Rosewater’s door on his way to his room, and paused.
It was ajar, which meant he was inside. Or was he? Newt stood still, but heard nothing within. He couldn’t see anything interesting through the crack. If he just poked his head in…
Footsteps sounded on the stairs and Newt hastily resumed forward motion. He went into his room and shut the door.
He collapsed on his twin bed under the eaves and read Fellowship for a while. Then he slid off the edge of the mattress into the narrow space between the bed and the wall. Lying on the scratchy carpet, he investigated the crossbeam under the headboard. A handful of initials were carved into the wood, some of them forty years old. He gazed at C.R., wondering if it was Charles Rennie, Hermann’s old CO.
Newt settled on his side and watched a spider at work between the beams. Lying there in the stuffy attic air, he spun thoughts of Becket and the blueprints, the treaty, the stable, Mr. Rosewater’s gold teeth. He drifted into a doze.
Newt woke to the sound of footsteps in the creaky hallway. “Check the other rooms, will you?” said an American voice, and he heard someone open the door next to his. Mr. Rosewater was home.
It was still light, but Newt, dazed, could not see the clock from behind the bed. His mouth was very dry. He was about to stand when his door opened. Under the bed, he saw shiny patent leather shoes, and then the door closed again. “Empty,” said Raleigh Becket’s voice.
Newt heard Becket’s feet walk next door, then Mr. Rosewater’s door closing and locking.
Awake now, he climbed as quietly as possible onto his bed. The foot of his bed was against Rosewater’s wall. He knelt at the end and pressed his ear to the wall. Too muffled.
As carefully as he could, he climbed off the bed and crept across the room to the dresser. Fortunately, it was a small room; unfortunately, it was a creaky attic. Teeth gritted, he unbuckled his surveillance demo kit and rooted around until he found what he was looking for: his mechanic’s stethoscope.
Newt crept back to the bed and put the stethoscope into his ears. In a pinch, the analog tricks still worked best. He put the other end to the wall and listened.
“...the transmitter blueprints.”
“Of course. But I gotta say, I’m much less interested in the blueprints than in the Greenwich file.”
“Yes, sir?”
“He was your guy, wasn’t he, Becket?”
“Birch?”
“Who? No—Greenwich.”
“Oh. Oh, yes, sir. I was his contact.”
“Will I get a look at that file? Maybe even the unredacted version?”
“Yes, sir,” said another voice. “The courier is bringing it up along with the blueprints tonight.”
“Good. I want to see it before the recess. And I’ll make sure you gentlemen get a look at the transducer before tomorrow night.”
There was a pause, or something was happening that Newt couldn’t make out.
“Right. Great. I’ll see you fellas tomorrow evening.”
“Sir.”
Fellas? Who was the other speaker?
There was a sound of someone standing up, and then footsteps to Rosewater’s door. It unlocked and Becket walked by his bedroom door and down the stairs.
Newt took the stethoscope out of his ears. He slid off the bed and into the gap again. He wedged himself in between the bed and the wall, legs folded, chin on knees, thinking.
The conversation all but confirmed his suspicions: this CIA-Division tech exchange involved the transmitter he had glimpsed in February. Becket’s presence was the first definite clue, but the mention of Greenwich made it certain.
The transducer...
Newt needed to take some precautions first. He checked on the spider (web complete, spider MIA), then unfolded himself and climbed out over his bed. He grabbed his jacket and wallet and barreled out the door—and nearly ran right into someone.
“Excuse me,” snapped Preston. He was coming out of Mr. Rosewater’s room.
“Oh!—Preston?”
“Dr. Geiszler,” said Vice Chief Victor’s assistant. “Do you have some business up here?”
“Sleeping?” said Newt. “This is my room.”
Preston threw a glance at the room behind him, and Newt became aware of a quiet conversation going on inside. He followed Preston’s glance through the half-open door.
Victor was in there.
Newt paled slightly. Had he been in there, the whole time, without saying a word?
He looked back at Preston, who was giving him a warning look.
“This is Mr. Rosewater’s room, isn’t it?” said Newt.
“Chatting with the guests, are we?”
“Not as such,” said Newt, putting his hands in his pockets. “We had some words about the hot water this morning.”
There was the sound of a chair from inside the room, and Preston flashed Newt another warning look.
“I suggest you keep from bothering the American liaison, Geiszler. We don’t need to remind you how important this conference is.”
“Right,” said Newt. For a second, he’d felt curious to see the Vice Chief outside his office for once—but self-preservation won out. “I’ll be going then.” He started walking backwards.
“Where?”
Footsteps sounded from behind the door.
“Into town,” said Newt. “To call H—ome. Call home. And do some errands. Do you need anything? Stamps? Smokes?”
“Thank you, no,” said Preston coldly.
“Right then,” said Newt, and turned tail down the stairs just as he heard the door open.
He hastened off the Estate and into town. It was a short ride on the Bonneville, and the cool spring air calmed his nerves.
✦
In January 1963, Hermann returned to London. Victor seized the chance to have his protégé transferred into his section. Bowen, too, was back in London for the first time in a few years. Following the unknown unpleasantness with the Americans, the Division cleared Bowen and petulantly promoted him—thanks in no small part to Victor’s lobbying—to Vice Chief.
In London, Dr. Gottlieb’s focus shifted from the advancement of Division encoding methods to the unraveling of the Razvedka’s. Victor had an exciting new project to put him on.
A year before, a Soviet cipher clerk had defected, codenamed Raspberry. In his lengthy debrief in a Canadian hotel room, Source Raspberry revealed that there had been a manufacturing error with the Russians’ onetime cipher pads. They had accidentally manufactured duplicates of a set. 10,000 formerly unique encryption keys were now circulating in duplicate. On their own, messages from a onetime pad were unbreakable. But two messages from the same encryption key could, if matched, be deciphered.
Source Raspberry said most of them were in use in Eastern Europe. Victor was chief of the German desk, so Bowen handed him the reins of the so-called “twotime pads.” The project: construct a system to detect reused encryption keys. What they needed was not just a quick-calculating computer, but a computer with memory. At the time, no such machine existed in Britain.
Victor christened the operation Project Blueberry and assigned it to the Hardware lab. He was still in need of a mathematician when Hermann transferred back to London. Victor was quick to add his protégé to his pet project. At their semi-weekly status meeting, Victor introduced Dr. Gottlieb to Project Blueberry’s lead engineer, Dr. Newton Geiszler.
It had been two months since their correspondence was interrupted. Newt was confident that the puzzlemaster would write him back eventually. Given their work, Newt reasoned, he had probably been deployed to somewhere unreachable. For Newt, the mystery was on the back burner. And Hermann had no idea where in their vast organization to look for his anonymous correspondent.
That day, they shook hands as strangers.
They took an instant dislike to each other.
A week of intense friction followed. Then, in their third status meeting, Hermann spat out what Newt recognized, with a terrible sinking heart, as a turn of phrase from one of his letters. Hermann snapped at him, in front of everyone, to “cease his American palavering,” and Newt saw in his mind’s eye the longhand script criticizing a colleague at Menwith Hill base using the exact same terms. This man too was a cryptographer recently returned from a top secret posting in North Yorkshire. This was him, Newt realized. This was his correspondent—and he hated Newt.
✦
Hermann reacted poorly to the news.
It is a hard climb up out of the gulf between reality and fiction; Hermann refused to make it. He stayed at the bottom, subsuming his disproportionately crushing disappointment. Newt received, but could not parse, the distress signals he was broadcasting. Why was he so upset? Hermann himself did not know why. The real Newton had barged in and obliterated his own vague, idealized shadow. Before Hermann’s eyes that imaginary person vanished into the realm of forgotten fiction.
Newt had no idea how to deal with Hermann’s silent but intense reaction. With equal but noisier intensity, he focused everything on their work.
In circuit diagrams and failed prototypes, reams of data, algorithm after algorithm, they circled each other. Failure was followed by minor success, which was followed by major setback and days of arguing. Over two months, Newt designed a skull for the brain Hermann was writing. In March, Newt and his team began to build it. By the end of March, the Blueberry was complete. Its memory storage unit took up an entire room. Hermann installed his painstakingly constructed code, and it went online.
The Blueberry was designed to detect an OTP match, not to decipher it. Copious amounts of data—thousands upon thousands of undeciphered enemy messages—had to be fed in before a duplicate could be discovered. When one was found, the computer’s output would be the transmission IDs of the two messages which matched. These two enciphered messages were to be located in the records, and then taken upstairs to the busy coding bay, where a clerk would decipher both by hand.
For weeks, under the anxious eyes of its creators, the Blueberry swallowed and digested every OTP-encoded message since WWII. After a week, it had processed and stored every message up to 1950. By the end of week two it had reached 1959, and Hermann’s anxiety had nearly reached the breaking point. But it was here that they got their first match. An OTP from 1942, reused in 1959. The operation was a success. Their machine worked.
Up until then, Newt had harbored hope of reconciliation. This hope was fused to the success of the project: if he could build the Blueberry for Hermann, that would make it up to him.
What “it” was, Newt didn’t quite know.
Nor did Hermann. But he didn’t stay to find out.
Newt returned to the lab from their final debrief meeting to find Hermann emptying his temporary desk. The sight hit him in the gut. With no idea what to say, he aimed at something unimportant—something from the meeting—and began throwing darts at it wildly. Hermann in turn called him unprofessional, like always, and Newt told him he was impossible to work with, like always, even though it wasn’t true. It wasn’t true at all—the opposite was true. Working with him had been better than anyone, better than he had imagined from his mythical correspondent, and he could not say so, he could not say it. And Hermann, by all evidence, did not feel the same.
Three weeks later, Hermann was in East Berlin. Vice Chief Bowen was sending Charles Rennie on a surveillance mission, and Rennie needed a technician with coding expertise who spoke German. Hermann had volunteered. An unidentified object had crashed in the countryside, east of Berlin.
✦
Saturday
June 2nd, 1973
London
In Hermann’s flat on Saturday night, the phone rang. He let it ring once. There was no second ring. He waited, and after a 30-second pause it rang again. He picked up and listened: three clicks, a two-second pause, then four taps. The line went dead.
“Typical,” he muttered irritably, almost before hanging up.
Outside the air was cool and foggy, with a humid tang of rain. He was still buttoning his coat as he hurried out his front door and limped around the corner. The phone in the booth was already ringing.
“Four minutes is not enough time for me to walk to this one, you nitwit,” he said angrily into the mouthpiece, shutting the glass door behind him. “I barely made it.”
“Oy, you’re old,” replied Newton’s tinny voice. “Who even says ‘nitwit’ anymore? Old on two counts.”
“Need I remind you—”
“Focus, Hermann, I don’t have very much change. I need a favor.”
Hermann sighed in a put-upon manner that said, Go ahead.
“I need you to hide something for me.”
“Oh, excellent. Of course, Newton, please help me jeopardize my career. And yours as well. My pleasure. Do go on.”
“Yeesh, relax,” said Newton. “It’s a personal thing, not a work thing.”
“As if there is any real division between the two,” Hermann snapped.
If only you knew, Newt thought. “Bad day huh?” he said instead. “Did one of our colleagues do something untoward? Like ask about your weekend plans?”
“Please get on with it.”
“It’s in my apartment,” Newton said, sounding like he was looking around. “In the spot. Green box.”
“What spot?” Hermann said impatiently.
“You know where I mean!”
“I do not make a habit of visiting your nightmare of a flat, as you well know.”
“Hermann, I’m not saying over the phone, okay? Fortress of solitude. You’ll figure out where it is. Green box. Don’t touch anything else. Especially not in the workshop. And don’t forget about the lights.”
“I won’t,” Hermann said, remembering the time he did forget about them.
“And once you’ve got it, can you—”
“Yes, yes, I’ll take care of it.”
“And one more thing?”
“Yes?” said Hermann shortly.
“...Would you check on my birds?” said Newt.
“Jake has them?”
“Yes. Just make sure he has enough food and everything.”
“Yes—fine,” said Hermann. “Are you going to tell me what all this is about?”
“Not over the phone,” Newton said again.
“Then will you—”
“Not via post either. Just wait til I get back. I’ll explain.”
“On Monday night?” said Hermann, aiming for a put-upon delivery but delivering something more like gloom.
“Aw,” said Newt, with an air of realization. “You’re cranky ‘cause you miss me.”
“Is that all, Newton?”
“Yes, th—”
Hermann hung up.
Hermann stood in the booth a moment longer, nervously running his thumbnail up and down the ribbed metal phone cord.
The street outside was empty. Hermann took a detour to return to their block via Wheaten Street. Personal, he had said, a personal thing. Hermann did not believe him.
It had been ten years since he was trained as an operative, and almost as long since he had put those skills to use. The tricks, the vigilance came back to him now like it had been no time at all.
He saw no watchers outside Newton’s building, but walked past it without stopping and went home.
Then, instead of going upstairs to his flat, he descended into the basement. He exited the building’s back door and hurried around the periphery of the courtyard. He made a quick check in the alley, found it empty, and crossed. He hurried around the other courtyard to the back door of Newton’s building, and with his copied key and a last look around, he let himself in.
Hermann climbed to the third floor. He did not like going to Newton’s flat, his “Fortress of solitude.” The disorder of his laboratory-office in the Century basement was one thing (and what a thing it was). But the chaos of his flat had an... undefinable menace. Newton calls me paranoid, thought Hermann (trying one lock, failing, cursing the man under his breath, trying the second, wishing for a world where his partner did not have three separate locks with three separate keys on his one front door), yet it was Newton who had turned his flat into a bugged and bear-trapped labyrinth.
Hermann turned the doorknob and slid his thumb over the bolt so it would not pop back out (if it did, an alarm would sound), stepped inside, and carefully closed the door. He picked up the little wooden slivers that had fallen from the lock bolts and pocketed them—another security signal, to replace before he left. If the slivers were missing, the owner would know the locks had been opened and re-closed in his absence.
Newton’s combination of espionage tradecraft and near-farcical mad scientist tactics unnerved Hermann. It unnerved him, too, he thought, removing his shoes and stepping, socked, over the tripwire just past the welcome mat, that he had so much security for no discernible reason. If, God forbid, some inquiry did ever give the Division reason to search his home, their suspicions would immediately rise to red alert, simply from the outrageous apparatus of the place—all of it to hide, as far as Hermann knew, absolutely nothing.
Hermann flipped the switch outside the living-room-turned-bedroom to stop the sensor-activated floodlights from blaring. In typical Geiszlerian style, the rooms had been shuffled and repurposed. Newt’s unmade bed and half-open dresser lived in the front room. The wide street-facing windows were half-blocked by an overflowing personal bookshelf full of records and pulp science fiction. Music leaked from a radio in another room. Hermann turned on his flashlight.
It was very annoying of Newton not to tell him where to find this mysterious green box, though in a way Hermann desired the challenge. The box was probably in a sentimental or somehow personally significant place, because unlike Hermann, Newton had never properly trained as an operative. So, stepping over dirty discarded clothes, he looked inside of Newton’s upright piano, the bench, his empty guitar case. He felt behind all the books. He removed What’s Going On from the turntable and checked for secret compartments in the record player. He opened the back of the television set and found a short-range signal delay jammer—of Newton’s own design, but stolen from work. The delay was set to two hours, he noted. Newton had probably installed it so as to watch television shows after their broadcast hour.
Next Hermann shone his light on the door of the original bedroom, now Newton’s workshop. Locked. The music was coming from inside—Newton’s preferred pirate radio station, he guessed from the sound of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ by The Who.
The workshop was the core of the bizarre little apartment. Hermann had never been inside it. When he looked at its lock, an apprehension of untraced origin tugged him away. Had Newton given him the key? Was it on his overcrowded keyring?
Hermann chose not to find out.
Instead he entered the kitchen, wondering how different the growth rate of communications technology in the British intelligence service would have been if it received the full brunt of Newton’s interest. Fortunately for communists everywhere, his laser strength interest remained laser-pointed at his personal tinkering.
The kitchen was primarily a greenhouse and a storage space. Hermann’s flashlight passed over a large telescope and a dissected motorcycle engine. Over the counter and sink hung a truly impressive wall of foliage. His light revealed a hose hooked up to the faucet. Probably hooked up to a timer. One mystery—Who waters Newton’s plants while he’s gone?—closed. Another mystery—How, if at all, does he drink water?—opened.
And does he eat? Then I’ll get on my knees and pray... sang Roger Daltrey from the other side of the wall... We don’t get fooled again... Otherwise, all was silence. No furnace or pipes hummed. Nor did the refrigerator.
The refrigerator.
Hermann threw open its door. No light turned on. Unplugged and empty. He stifled a snort at this—Freeloader, he thought, not without fondness—and opened the drawers. Empty.
He felt around the floor of the refrigerator. There—a clasp.
From below a dummy panel in the base of Newton’s unused refrigerator, he drew a small slim box. It was green. Triumphant, he replaced the panel, shut the fridge door, and examined the box by flashlight.
The green box weighed a couple ounces and rattled enticingly. It had a combination lock, four digits, which Hermann opened easily. He overturned it into his hand.
A small aluminum object fell out. Hermann could not immediately identify it. It was gunmetal gray, curved like an ear or a waning moon. He settled it in the center of his palm. It fit like it was meant to be there. He thought he could recognize Newton’s handiwork, but it was... neater than his usual designs. It was entirely closed up in its metal shell—the only visible part was a button on the inner curve and two collapsed antennas. If it was a radio, it was probably a transmitter, AM, with a minuscule range.
If it wasn’t a radio, well, then he had no idea what it was.
Hermann put it back in the box, snapped it shut, and left the apartment, resetting all the alarms and signals as he went.
June 3, 1973
Sunday
The Estate
Just at sunset on Sunday night, Newt left the boarding house by the back door.
He strode through the wet grass, which was growing quickly, still unmowed. The boarding house faces the stables, but he took the long way round behind the big house. It was a damp spring night, and the air was fertile and cool. Night was coming on quickly and stealthily. There was no moon.
He circled around the big house from the back and gazed up at the lighted windows. In the uncurtained window of the upper parlor, he could see Mme Marsden puttering. He walked on, keeping his distance from house. Flowerbeds of just-blooming peonies glowed with dew.
At the end of the garden plot, he stopped by a hibiscus bush. Through the last first-floor window, he saw a dark back and broad shoulders. Becket turned around, holding papers in one hand and a glass in the other. He was talking to two people—Victor and Rosewater, if the schedule Newt had purloined was correct. He checked his watch. It was 8:37 PM. He’d just set it by the radio clock in the boarding house dining room. If they kept to their schedule, they would be schmoozing until 9:15. He had plenty of time.
Newt circled around the front of the house. The wide front terrace, dotted with deck chairs, was deserted—the night was too cold. At last he reached the gravel driveway. He hurried back in the direction he had come, towards the boarding house and stables.
The stables lay low and long like a bluff in the hill. Newt paused on the edge of the driveway, turning to look back at the big house one more time. It was a blue-white mountain in the mist, rapidly turning gray in the vanishing sun. He saw points of light, but no people.
One light hung over the big front doors. In the fog, its white light made a solid cone over the entrance. It was best to walk in boldly, with no visible qualms. People usually overlooked a confident snoop. So he took off his glasses, put them in his pocket, straightened his coat and, with a last glance around, walked confidently towards the light. Crickets and frogs sang from the tall grass along the path. He ignored their warning song.
The inside of the stable was a cavern of poorly lit brown and gray blobs. The air was heavy with dust and hay, as if animals had actually lived in it some time during the last 50 years, which they had not. As Newt walked forward, some blobs resolved into a metal folding table. Behind it sat two vacant-eyed young corporals in U.S. Army fatigues, with a small radio murmuring on the table between them.
The fatigues seemed, to Newt, a bit extreme. They looked equally unimpressed with him.
“At ease, gentlemen,” Newt said, approaching jauntily.
“Who are you?” said the one on the right.
“Me? I’m the plumber,” he said.
They stared blankly.
“Oy, tough crowd,” Newt said, and clapped his hands together in a businesslike manner. “I need to take a look at the transducer, fellas. Make sure everything’s ready for tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Can we see some authorization, sir?” said the one on the left, putting an intonation of doubt upon the ‘sir.’
“Authorization?” said Newt, playing it amused. “I built the damn thing myself.”
They stared blankly.
Should have just snuck in a back window, Newt thought.
“We haven’t seen you before, sir.”
“What? Me? Of course you haven’t,” said Newt, throwing his back into some blustering. “I just got here. By charter plane! And you ask me for authorization? Like you don’t know who I am? Why don’t you call up Mr. Rosewater and ask him? Ask him about my authorization, and see how he—”
“Sir,” said the one on the right, cutting him off, “We can’t let you in without ID. It’s that simple.”
“Oh,” said Newt, settling down. “ID? That’s what you want?”
They stared.
“Of course. My mistake. I’ve got that.”
Newton produced his wallet and pulled out a card.
He put his CIA building pass onto the table and slid it to them. “Here you go.”
It was his picture, and his number, and it was genuine. It was just that the “TEMPORARY” in large red letters had been covered with circular color-code stickers, the sort that security guards love and that army corporals are unlikely to know. And the name the name under his picture said “Neilson Garrett.”
“Thank you Mr. Garrett,” said the one on the right, sliding it back. “Was that so hard?”
“You’ll need to sign in,” said the one on the left, indicating a log.
“So sorry. Of course.” Newt took his pass back and signed the log with his right hand and his fake name. Squinting to read, he noted Raleigh Becket’s name above. In at 8:20, and out at 8:31.
“It’s 8:47,” the guard on the right said, checking a clock Newt could not see.
Newt filled it in accordingly. He resisted the urge to salute facetiously and instead apologized again before heading down the dark hallway. He’d been issued the temporary ID card on a business trip to Langley two years before, and made some alterations to it afterwards. The trip had been disastrous. At least one useful thing had come of it.
With the door closed behind him, Newt pulled out his glasses and put them back on. The stable corridor that stretched before him was long and unlit. Behind the white bars of every stall was a pocket of pitch black. The only light came from the window at the end of the corridor. As he passed stall after empty stall, the uneven boards beneath his feet became temporary plywood, then concrete. Then he was pushing opening the door at the end of the corridor. It creaked like a rusty spring, making him jump.
Then Newt stepped inside and saw it.
✦
In the summer of 1963, both of them were exiled from London. Newt was put on full-time training and workshop duty in East Anglia. Some mania was possessing the service, and they were dispatching ops almost faster than they could train them. The frenzy came from the top, the untraced spasms of Vice Chief Robert Bowen’s anxiety as the Americans closed their net around him. Nobody would understand until much later.
At the Estate, Newt was being reckless. His technical workshops were disorganized and his trainee lectures were barely comprehensible. He drank late into the night on the roof with Caitlin Lightcap, and on later after she went to bed. But his poor job performance did not get him sent home to London, because Victor had asked for him to be kept out of Headquarters for a while.
Hermann, meanwhile, was on foreign assignment for the first time in his career. By day, he was a university adjunct in East Berlin. By night he conducted the analytical side of a dangerous surveillance operation on Wagner Airbase.
Cover was easy, for a German-born academic. By day, Hermann taught one class while Raleigh Becket, a young but capable op, led the surveillance mission on Wagner Airbase. By night, Hermann was the technical help.
All was overseen by case officer Charles Rennie, crooked old hand and war hero. Robert Bowen had discovered Rennie in occupied Paris, already a con artist of impressive repute, glad-handing German soldiers. He was a natural recruit, and he’d never lost his taste for the grift. He and Bowen looked oddly alike, and they used this passing resemblance to their operational advantage—people called them the Twins. After the war, Victor made three, and together, they went to Istanbul.
Ten years on, his comrades Victor and Bowen climbed floors in headquarters, but Rennie still preferred to stay in the field. Hermann was fairly certain this was because he was turning untaxed profits behind the Iron Curtain, but he had a streak of turn-of-the-century adventurer about him too. So, at home, Victor and Bowen watched his back and made sure he always got the best postings.
Shut up in his miserable little flat, Hermann worked by lamplight into the early hours of the morning. Whatever he had fled in London had followed him here. He shuttled from depressed campus to depressed flat locked in a state of perpetual fight-or-flight. Fearfully, he would recall the distrustful looks of his university colleagues, of strangers on the street. Bitterly, he would recall losing his composure some late night in the lab and scathingly saying, “Newton, you are not at all what I expected,” and Newton’s reply—defiant but hurt—“Then lower your expectations.” He could hardly eat. The strain of fear and the strain of guilt were twin hands on his throat. He crawled into bed late every night, and lay awake exhausted and wired; he woke up late each morning in the oppressive sunlight, which grew hotter with each passing week.
Newt did not know the nature of his former correspondent’s mission. Even years later, he still did not know it. Hermann had never explained it to him.
At the same time Hermann was deciphering signals by lamplight, Newt was drinking with Lightcap on the roof of the big house on the Estate. Sometimes he would hang backwards over the edge of the parapet, Cait holding his ankles, and watch the dark green fields reel backwards into the sky.
The incident for which he had been exiled had occurred in early May. Newt had barged into Section Chief Victor’s office. He demanded to know why Dr. Gottlieb, of all people, was being dispatched to East Berlin. Victor did not understand his concern—to him, this mission was a step up for his protégé. With rising hysteria, Newt begged Victor not to send him. It was too late, Victor said. And anyway, Gottlieb had asked to go. Pleading turned to shouting, then cursing. Then Newt found himself transferred. When Caitlin asked, under the thin July moonlight, what was really wrong, he broke down crying saying that it was nothing, not important at all.
✦
Sunday
June 3rd, 1973
The room appeared to once have been a machine room of some kind. It was populated by mountainous shapes shrouded in canvas, ranging around the dim room like ghosts. There was only one light, which was suspended over a dining table by a string. The table was old and unvarnished, surrounded by six bentwood Windsor chairs. On it sat a glass carafe and six glasses, all clean and empty. The tall carafe gleamed like a beacon in the dull room, and drew attention to the fact that these glasses and this rustic furniture had, unlike the rest of the room, no dust upon them.
Newt, walking slowly over the uneven floor, absorbed little of this. He approached the table, pulled like a moth to a flame by the two glass document cases, one at each end of the table.
He reached the table, the light sloughed off the angled glass, and he saw the blueprint inside the case. He almost touched the glass in excitement, but stopped himself. It was the transmitter blueprint, as familiar to him now as all the blueprints of his own design.
Newt spent a moment reveling in vindication. He’d known it. He was right. This was what they were offering to the Americans.
And what were the Americans offering in return?
With a last loving glance, he rounded the table and examined the other case. The Transducer, read a helpful label. The case contained more specs, which looked much more complicated at first glance, but his attention was arrested by the other thing in the case: a rubber ear, containing a tiny black insert.
Newt pulled his sleeves down over his fingers and carefully lifted the glass, using his sleeves as gloves so as to leave no fingerprints. He picked up the ear and lifted the tiny black thing out.
The Transducer. He squinted at it. It was shiny and cylindrical, like a tiny beetle, no larger than his pinky fingernail. It had little legs at one end and a small wire at the other—an antenna?—making it look like a microscopic satellite. He glanced at the diagram, but was too impatient to read it. It had been inside the rubber ear antenna-end first, so he put it into his left ear antenna-end first.
He did it without thinking. At no point did he stop and wonder whether this was safe or smart. He didn’t know what it was; he just knew that it was for ears, and that he had ears.
It fit. It was so minuscule that it was hard to manipulate, so he poked at it until it felt settled. He wiggled his ear a little, then waited.
Nothing happened.
Was it on? Oh, shit, he had forgotten to turn it on. He tipped his head like a swimmer and tugged his ear by the lobe.
It didn’t move.
Frowning, Newt leaned further. He poked his pinky finger into his ear and jiggled it. The transducer did not budge. He scratched it with his pinky fingernail, and caught a shallow ridge. Then he yelped in pain.
Four needle points of pain burst in his ear canal, right inside his tragus. He jerked his finger away, breathing through his teeth. He looked at his finger—there was a tiny drop of blood on it.
He exhaled, but his breath was coming fast. The pain was mostly gone, but the thing was definitely stuck. The little legs, he thought. They must spring outwards. Fucking Americans and their fucking torture fetish, he thought.
It occurred to him then and for the first time that perhaps this was not surveillance tech at all. It was American made. It was not impossible that it was a torture device.
But why would the Brits want it? he thought, panicking. It couldn’t be. What could his transmitter have to do with a tiny torture device?
He looked quickly down at his watch. 9:01.
Oh, you’re going to be in so much trouble, he thought in a voice not unlike his partner’s, shoving the rubber ear into his pocket and looking around the room for something long, thin and metal. Wire. wire. Fuck. How hard could it be to find a bit of wire in a barn?
Are you going to rupture your ear canal by ripping this thing out? he thought to himself as he made for a canvas shape and yanked its cover up. It was a tool bench, thank the lord. He started opening drawers.
I’ve got two ears for a reason, he thought frantically, panting, opening another drawer full of mouse nests and slamming it shut. It was then that he heard footsteps.
Newt gasped and dove under the tool bench, pulling the canvas cover down behind him. The footsteps reached the door and pushed it open with a creak.
There was a pause. Then footsteps walked, slowly, across the wooden floor. They were coming from the left—Newt, disoriented by his muffled ear, realized they had not come in through the main door, by which he’d entered. Whoever this was, they had come in the back door.
The visitor approached the table, then stopped again. Newt was holding his breath. You’re dead. You’re fired. You’re dead and fired. Hermann will kill you. You’re dead.
Then the visitor resumes walking, businesslike, to the table. He heard a chair move, then an inhale across teeth. Whoever it was whispered something. Newt couldn’t hear what.
Then there was a wordless, vicious noise of frustration, followed by a horrible smash of glass breaking. Newt clapped a hand over his own mouth.
A sliver of glass skidded under the edge of the canvas, and glinted up at Newt.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
Something indistinct happened, but he didn’t really track it because his hearing was not at its best, and he was trying not to hyperventilate. Then the footsteps walked swiftly across the room, back the way they’d come, and shut the door.
After a time, Newt could only hear crickets and frogs, muffled and in mono. He slowly opened his eyes.
He crawled out from under the canvas, dizzy in the light. He checked his watch—9:12. He stumbled across the room in the direction the visitor had left from. If there was a back exit, he was taking it.
✦
1963
In August 1963, after nearly four months abroad, Hermann returned to London for a short bureaucratic visit. He pleaded family business to the university, took a Friday off, and boarded a plane to Sweden with his East German passport; in the Stockholm airport he sealed it in an envelope and posted it express to his P.O. box in London, then went into a bathroom and unstitched his English passport from the lining of his suitcase, pinned the lining back in place, presented the passport to the ticket agent, and flew to London.
He was on-edge in London. The whole weekend was an August downpour. He turned every corner at headquarters with apprehension, expecting to meet Newton at each turn. But he did not see him. He felt relieved, then, when unresolved, reckless.
He looked up his address and went to his flat.
But Newt did not answer his door, because he was not there. So Hermann went down his slick stone steps in the pouring rain, and into the phone booth in front of Newt’s building. Hermann dialed the Division directory, and was put through to the Training Estate.
✦
Rain hammered on the roof. Droplets drove down the panes, bright pin lights against the black night. They talked on the phone for nearly an hour. Hermann ran out of change, and they said goodbye. He hung up and stood in silence for a few moments in the booth, listening to the rain and the cars going by. It struck him that he did not know what to do with this reconciliation. He considered going home to his flat and writing a letter, but then thought he had better wait a day or two.
Hermann returned to East Berlin on Monday. He received a letter from Newt, and canceled an appointment he had made before his trip to London. He wrote Newt a reply. Summer turned to fall and they rekindled their epistolary relationship. Their letters were less fervent, and less constructed, because they were now, more or less, on the same page. And Hermann was vindicated in his long-held but long-unacknowledged conviction that Newton, by his letters, was impossible not to fall in love with.
✦
Fall drifted into winter, and then suddenly in December, the Bowen crisis struck. Newton was back in London, being excess personnel on the semi-seasonal Estate campus. But Hermann was out in the cold in East Berlin. Every network Bowen knew of was rolled up within a week of his escape—and Bowen knew Rennie’s networks intimately.
Newt had no idea, still, how Hermann had gotten out. He didn’t know what had happened in East Berlin. He knew it was bad. Charles Rennie had been killed in the chaos; Becket had gone underground for several months. But Hermann had, somehow, made it out safely.
On the Sunday morning after Bowen’s escape, Hermann had called Newt long-distance continental collect and asked him, in a blank voice, to pick him up at Reading Station at 7:30 PM. Newt, who had been in a state since the news broke, said “Yes,” hung up, and briefly sobbed with relief. Eight hours later he was at the station.
Newt took Hermann’s bag under feeble protestation (his only bag was his briefcase) and led him outside to the street. He furiously crumpled the ticket on the windshield of his illegally parked car and pitched it into the gutter, then drove them both home, to Newt’s flat.
He lived in Kenton then, though not on Wheaten Street. Hermann said nothing about any destination, because they both knew it wasn’t safe. Nowhere was. But Newt’s was safer than his and anyway, in a matter of days maybe none of it would matter. The crisis was absolute. For all they knew, they’d be unemployed by tomorrow; maybe arrested; maybe killed by Razvedka agents who had learned their names from Bowen’s very lips.
On the steps outside his door Newt fumbled with the keys while Hermann stood painfully still, ostensibly keeping watch but looking, Newt knew, at nothing outside his mind. Glancing down at his keys, Newt saw Hermann’s white-knuckled hand clutching the handle of his briefcase. It was subtly shaking. Newt looked up quickly at Hermann, who met his gaze with a look of open fear. Newt just shook his head. “It’s okay,” he said, “Almost there.” He opened the door and held it open for Hermann to step inside.
When he turned around from bolting his many locks, Hermann was still just standing there in the narrow hall, coat on, shoes on, briefcase in one hand, cane in the other. Newt stepped in closer because the walls were pushing them in, caught his gaze and drew it up. “What is it?” he said, and Hermann said, “I thought we had more time.” He looked down and said again, “I thought I had more time,” the words trailing away to nothing as Newt put his hand on Hermann’s, telling him to put the briefcase down. Up this close, he could see that Hermann had lost weight in Germany.
Hermann did not move. Newt remembered it now as odd, that moment of self-doubt—rare for the Hermann he knew today, the Hermann who had since grown into someone much more sincere.
This Hermann had lived alone in his head for a long, long time.
And in that moment they both knew that if he had his way, he would go on stalling forever.
So it was Newt who stepped in close, into the silent space that surrounded Hermann, unbuttoned his coat, slid it off his shoulders, and hung it up on the hook beside his own. And then he put his hands on Hermann’s arms, steadying him or himself or both, and kissed him. After a year and a half of waiting it felt like something newer and stranger than he’d ever imagined. Hermann kissed slow, like he was just trying to catch his breath.
He stayed until the all-call on Thursday night. They returned to a deserted headquarters to find Victor at the collapsing center, lighting a match to cleanse it with fire.
✦
The inquest was conducted by Military Intelligence, their sister service and rival; there was nobody else to do it. The upper management of the Division was almost completely annihilated, save for Victor and the Chief. Three-quarters of the employees were corrupted, and purged. Either they were turned, or blown and useless. Many were arrested. The Estate inquest was the most merciless. Every employee present that weekend was interrogated and then fired—including Caitlin Lightcap—not for full-on treason, but for unforgivable incompetence. Mme Marsden alone remained. Meanwhile in Germany, Becket had gone underground, like many quick-thinking ops posted abroad. He resurfaced a few months later, was shaken down, and found clean.
The Chief held on because of his Whitehall connections, but he was deeply damaged by the scandal. Most of the Eastern European networks were completely razed. The American espionage partnership was on the brink of death.
The Division’s internal structure had been completely exposed, and had to be redesigned and rebuilt from scratch. Victor was chosen for that job, and promoted to the office of the man who had betrayed and destroyed him. Hermann, too, had failed him in some way; once his affable mentor, Victor would now no longer look at him. Hardware and crypto research were merged into one signals lab. Newt and Hermann, because of their success with the Blueberry, were appointed lead researchers: the specialists.
The next nine years passed. Lightcap got a miserable programming job at IBM’s London facility. Newt decided he did not like computers and shifted his focus to radio. Hermann stayed the same externally and changed dramatically inside. The Chief’s rebuilding strategy turned out to rest mostly on riding the Americans’ coattails. Victor appeared not to sleep. Newt invented the radio delay jammer and received a commendation for it. He and Hermann moved into flats on either side of the same block in Kenton. On one memorable occasion in 1971, Newt went on a consulting trip to Langley and then skipped the return flight to London. After two days of radio silence he phoned Hermann, drunk, from Coney Island, New York, apologized profusely, and promised to be home soon. He returned to Britain a week later with a brand-new motorcycle and was formally reprimanded by upper management.
Lightcap and Newt had coffee every weekend, and soon started a rock band. Hermann bought an upright piano for his flat so that Newton would come over to play it. Newt became secretly increasingly paranoid and began constructing his fortress of solitude. Hermann allowed himself to be convinced to watch Star Trek.
✦
June 4th, 1973
Monday
London
Hermann woke in the dead of night to the sound of someone pounding on his front door. It was pitch black in the apartment. He got up blearily and felt around for his cane in the dark, but he could not find it. The pounding continued. The buzzer sounded. Then again. Bent at the waist, drawn by the urgency of the sound, Hermann felt his way to his bedroom door and, leaning against the walls and doorways, made his way through the darkness to his front door.
The hall was dim with diffuse streetlamp light. He was awake now. He knew the layout of his flat, he knew the number of paces between each of the eight doors and which way each one opened. When he reached the front door, which was still being beaten, he dragged the umbrella stand in front of the space where it would open. Then he said, “Just a moment,” loudly, and unbolted his door. He drew back the chain, turned the handle, and lurched backwards away from the door, bracing himself for attack.
But no blow came. No assailant surged in and stumbled over the umbrella stand. The door drifted open, and revealed Newton, barely supporting himself on the wall, looking as nauseous and lost as a sailor about to be shipwrecked.
“Newton!” whispered Hermann in shock.
“Evening,” he managed, and then collapsed into Hermann’s unprepared arms.
Hermann set a hot cup of strong tea down on the table in front of Newt. Newt, half dozing with his head against the kitchen wall, came back to with a start.
“Newton,” said Hermann, for the fifteenth time in as many minutes. “Please let me take you to a hospital.”
“M’fine,” said Newt, blinking.
Hermann didn’t like that.
“Then please do not become unconscious at this table before explaining why.”
“I won’t,” said Newt, without any confidence. He set his sights on the teacup and reached for it.
Hermann watched him lift the cup, frowning. Newt raised it very slowly to his mouth, took a sip, winced, and set it carefully back down. He only spilled a little bit.
“Are you experiencing impaired fine motor functionality?” Hermann said with enough forced casualness to launch a national security inquiry.
“No. My motors are fine. It’s my balance that’s being weird.”
“If you—”
“Stop it with the hospital thing, would you?” said Newt, nudging Hermann’s knee with his.
Hermann muttered something in German and produced a tea towel seemingly from thin air. He wiped up the small amount of tea Newt had spilled. Newt tipped his head sideways against the cool white wall and closed his eyes, feeling both comforted and oppressed by his partner’s attentions.
“Turn on the radio,” Newt said, gesturing with eyes closed.
Socks slid over linoleum, and then the BBC’s early hours classical show began to play. Hermann turned it up to a volume that would interfere with electronic eavesdropping.
“It started in February,” said Newt when Hermann had sat back down.
“In February? Newton, have you been ill—”
“No—I’m not sick! I’m telling you what happened, and it started in February, all right? Just listen. So in February. I got this file.”
“File?”
“Yes. Manila, with paper inside. You’re familiar?”
Newt cracked an eye open to get the full brunt of Hermann’s glare.
“It was misdirected,” he said, re-closing his eye. “It was lying on my desk when I came in, but it was not meant for me. Fifth-floor only. That was immediately clear from the labeling. Among other things, this file had a blueprint inside it. It was labeled ‘Transmitter’ and the credited author was ‘Greenwich.’ It looked like a bug. A radio transmitter. I gave it back to the delivery kid and told him to take it where it was supposed to go. But...”
“But you had already memorized it,” said Hermann. He reflected, not for the first time, what an asset Newton would be if recruited as a mole by the other side. He would not even need a microfilm camera to copy sensitive documents.
Newt explained that he had memorized both the blueprint and the first page of the file. The CO listed was Raleigh Becket. There had been a file reference number for Greenwich, and no other explanatory material.
The blueprint had been clearly labeled in every respect except for one: function.
“So, I gave the file back. But the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me,” Newt said. Here, a note of reproach crept into his voice. “I mean, I’m the head of Research and Tech Development—for engineering,” he added, before Hermann could interrupt to correct him. “I’m head of Radio RTD. I am Radio RTD. So what the hell is this transmitter? Why wasn’t I involved in the project? Who the hell is Greenwich? Is he gunning for my job, or what?
“And the device itself—it was bizarre. Not only had I been uninvolved, but I couldn’t... tell what this was. I couldn’t figure out how it worked or even what it was supposed to do.”
“That bothered you.”
“Immensely, my dear Watson,” said Newt. “So I started to rebuild it.”
“The diagram?”
“The transmitter.”
Hermann understood suddenly.
“That’s what you had hidden in your refrigerator,” he said. “Secret, stolen Division technology. Newton...”
“Hermann—please—before you say something about the unfathomable scale of my stupidity, just let me finish. See, I don’t think it is Division technology.”
“Please explain,” said Hermann, picking up his drink and downing half of it, wishing he had poured himself something stiffer instead of tea.
Newt had spent the next few months rebuilding the device in the privacy of his home lab. But even completed, it had answered no questions. When he’d turned it on, nothing happened. He’d had no idea what it transmitted, if it transmitted anything at all.
At a dead end with the device, he’d decided it was time to collect some internal intelligence. By this point, he explained, the conference was approaching. “Rumors about the big tech-trade-treaty with the CIA got me thinking: what if my transmitter is involved? So I made sure to get an invitation, and, then I, you know. Poked around.”
“How illegal of you.”
“Nobody gossips like spies gossip,” Newt said appreciatively.
By this point, it seemed Hermann’s anxiety had either eased or been forcibly contained.
Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor drew busily to a close. There was a pause, and then the radio said, “You are tuned to BBC 1. The time at the tone will be 2 AM.”
They fell silent. The tone played. Hermann reflexively checked his wall clock. It was a couple seconds off.
Piano Concerto No. 27 in B Flat began.
“Ah, Mozart,” said Newt. “The Paul McCartney of the 18th Century.”
“I have no idea what you mean by that.”
“I respect him and all,” said Newt, rubbing his temples. “But when you really come down to it, it’s just soulless pop.”
Newt could almost hear Hermann’s eyes roll. He resumed his story.
He told Hermann about seeing Becket, and eavesdropping on the meeting next door with the American liaison. Hermann was not impressed.
“But I did learn a few things,” Newt said. “Important things. Rosewater said, ‘Wasn’t he your guy?’ And Becket said yes, he was Greenwich’s ‘contact.’”
“Ah,” said Herman, finally understanding. “So Greenwich is...”
“The code name for a Soviet source.”
“And the transmitter is not Division technology.”
“No. It’s stolen Raz technology.”
“Passed to Raleigh Becket by someone who worked on the project.”
Newt nodded. He attempted another sip of tea. Hermann had so far vetoed his requests to move to the couch, on the grounds that Newt would nod off.
“Becket also mentioned Birch.”
“Bernard Birch?”
“I assume,” said Newt, grimly.
Birch had been a cipher clerk. He had defected the year before; his disappearance and subsequent return had been a minor public scandal.
“Then they talked about the CIA tech,” Newt went on. “‘The Transducer.’”
“That’s what they called it?”
“Yeah.”
“That makes it sound...”
“Yeah,” said Newt. “Transducer and transmitter. It makes it sound like the two are related.”
Hermann frowned. “How? How is that possible, if this is the first exchange between the two agencies?”
“Convergent evolution?”
Hermann tapped his fingers on the table. “Not impossible, I suppose, if it was us and the Americans. But the transmitter is Russian, and the transducer is American. Where is the convergence between the two of them?”
“There are plenty of projects they’re racing each other on,” Newt said, sitting forward and hugging one of his knees. “Picture this: In Langley, the DOD is working on some xyz—let’s say it’s nukes. A nuke thing. They know the Soviets are working on the same thing over in Moscow. They want to know how far along the Soviets are, but their agents are coming up with nothing. Knock, knock—it’s the Brits on the transatlantic cable.” He put on an exaggerated accent: “‘Ello Yanks, we’ve got a very valuable Soviet source sitting in our parlour, and he’s saying he knows all about the xyz nuclear project. But we want something in exchange...’ Then they negotiate with us, and in exchange, the CIA agrees to show the Division the x of their yz.”
“It’s not impossible,” Hermann said again.
“But.”
“But...”
“But,” said Newt slowly, “It sounds like they’re two complementary components. Like they’re supposed to go together.” He dropped his knee. “I know. It’s weird, right?”
Hermann nodded slowly.
It looked like something was still bothering him, so Newt asked again, but Hermann said it was nothing. Newt went on.
Saturday evening, he had called Hermann. Hermann had hidden (“—Presumably?” “Yes, it’s in my safe deposit box at the bank,” said Hermann) the telltale transmitter. Then Newt had purloined a meeting schedule and found a time when all three—Rosewater, Becket, and Victor—would be occupied. They had a meeting from 8:30 to 9:15 PM. He’d left the boarding house, checked that the three were safely occupied, and gone in to the stables to look at the transducer.
Hermann did not like this part of the story.
“You did what with it?”
Newt winced.
“And that’s...”
“And that’s why you’re—”
“Hermann!” hissed Newt. “Keep it down!”
“So,” Hermann said several minutes later, when he had recovered his composure. “It’s still in your head?”
Hermann was no longer hovering, the way he had when Newt had stumbled in. Instead he had removed himself as far from Newt as possible while still remaining in the kitchen. He was leaning against the furthest counter, arms folded, surveying him as if he were an unexploded mine. Newt anxiously wrapped his hands around his tea cup. It was hardly warm.
“Yes,” Newt said.
“And hence your—incapacitation?”
“Yes.”
“And your balance problems?”
“Yes.”
“And your—” Hermann sighed and looked at the ceiling in hopeless appeal to unseen deities. “Flight in the night from both the Division and the Central Intelligence Agency?”
Newt took a diplomatic sip of his tea.
After it had got stuck, he resumed, somebody else had come in. “I can only assume to steal it,” Newt said.
“What a disappointment it must have been for them to find that you had beat them to it.”
“I didn’t mean to steal it, Hermann,” Newt said, coloring. “Really. I just meant to look. I had to know.”
“You didn’t have to, you wanted to,” Hermann snapped. “You don’t think. You just act. It’s irresponsible. You are capable of rational thought, I know you are. You simply—”
“Hermann, would you just listen for one more minute? I know, I know, I’m a trial and a disaster and a bore, and isn’t it generous of you to look after me, woe is you, but I’m almost done with my story, all right?”
Hermann glared at him in a way that said, Go ahead.
“So someone else came in. Through the back.”
“What time?” Hermann asked.
“I checked my watch at 9:02,” said Newt. “He came in maybe, I don’t know, two minutes after that.”
Hermann nodded.
“I hid. He went up to the table. He said something quiet, I didn’t catch it. Then he smashed the glass case and left.”
“Out the back?”
“Yeah. Same way he came.”
“And you?”
“I waited a few minutes, then I followed.”
“Out the back way? No one saw you?”
“I don’t think so,” Newt said, “But I was, uh, a little disoriented.”
Hermann was rubbing his closed eyes. He looked exhausted.
“Then I caught a train home.”
“How?”
“I walked,” he said. “It’s only five miles,” he added when Hermann looked over. The anger had been shocked right off of his face, and replaced with something unbearably raw—pity, or just despair? Like a cloud had moved over the sun, Newt could suddenly see what Hermann was thinking with the total clarity of shadow—he could see himself in his partner’s mind’s eye, stumbling askew through the tall wet grass, skirting the light that fell from buildings, abandoning his beloved motorcycle and walking miles in the dark, disoriented and alone. The clarity with which he could read Hermann startled him, and then it was gone again.
“So, where do we stand?”
They were in the living room, Hermann hunching slightly sideways in an armchair, Newt tucked against the arm of the couch with his feet up and his eyes closed. Whenever they were open, the floor reeled unexpectedly.
The pronoun did not escape Newt’s notice.
“‘We?”
“You may be fired,” Hermann said, ignoring the question like it was beneath him. “But—much as I believe you have behaved badly—”
Newt rolled his eyes and suffered the vertiginous consequences.
“—and much as I hesitate to suggest this,” said Hermann, and then hesitated.
“What?”
“Well, it just seems like rather a lot of coincidences.”
Newt frowned.
“You receive a file ‘by accident.’ You are then conveniently invited to the relevant conference, where you are conveniently roomed next door to an important conversation between the relevant parties.”
“Mme Marsden said she made the room arrangements.”
“What I’m saying is that the possibility should be considered.”
“What possibility?”
“The possibility that you are being set up in some way, Newton,” Hermann said. “If, for example, the person who snuck in to steal that device wanted to frame you for the theft, they would not have a difficult time of it.”
“But I did steal it.”
Hermann sighed sharply. “Yes, Newton, thank you, I had forgotten. Don’t you see that, if this was a plot, it was aptly executed?”
“Except for one thing. They didn’t get it. I have it.”
“Well, yes,” said Hermann. “And that’s our second problem.”
“I would think it’s our advantage,” Newt said. “I mean, who knows what cool stuff it can—”
“Our second problem,” Hermann said, talking over him, “is figuring out how to remove it without doing permanent damage to your head, before it does permanent damage to your head.”
“I feel fine,” Newt said. He immediately stood up to demonstrate.
Hermann caught him before he tipped onto the carpet.
“Let me look at it,” Hermann said, sitting him back down on the couch.
The examination by pen light proved useless, and only agitated them both.
“If you will not go to a hospital—”
“Absolutely not.”
“—then I will find out what I can about this device.”
Newt looked at him quickly.
“If, however, your vertigo worsens,” Hermann said, taking out a handkerchief and wiping away the spot of blood from the small wound on Newt’s ear, “Or does not improve inside of a week, I will carry you to a doctor myself.”
“Deal,” said Newt immediately. Did he not expect any better offer, Hermann wondered, or was this absolute faith in Hermann’s ability to solve the problem?
“Good—” began Hermann, but Newton was already speaking:
“Or,” he said, “We could always run away. Disappear into the Pyrenees. They’d never find us, you know. They’d stop looking. We could cross the Atlantic and start a biker gang. Go riding through the prairies, purple mountains, from sea to shining sea.”
Hearing nothing, Newt opened his eyes again to find Hermann looking even angrier than before.
“Okay, okay, no road trip,” said Newt.
“That isn’t funny.”
Newt could see that Hermann was past the brink of exhaustion and losing his ability to regulate emotionally. Newt diplomatically effaced any reaction.
There was a pre-hysterical pause.
“What we need to do now,” Hermann finally said, carefully, “is find out where this device came from, what it does, and if the components are related. And if so, how.”
Two components. Two components, and Raleigh Becket. That is not enough to be a connection, Hermann told himself. Not enough.
But it could be.
“Tomorrow, I will go into the office. You will stay here.”
“Will you bring back the transmitter when you come home?”
“If I have the time,” said Hermann, with no intention of having the time. “At work, I will discover what I can. I will go to the registry and take out the Greenwich file.”
“Won’t that look suspicious?”
“I’ll handle it.”
“What if it’s classified?”
“I’ll handle it.”
Newt cautiously raised his eyebrows.
“I will not handle it in an illegal manner,” Hermann said. “I will not break any rules or perform any subterfuge to find this information.”
“Except for harboring a fugitive,” Newt did not say.
That was a given.
Hermann seemed more upset than Newt could understand, but he chose to blame it on the lateness of the hour. He let Hermann lead him to bed, and collapsed instantly. But despite the time, Hermann lay awake, imagining Abteilung searchlights stealing through the drawn curtains of his home. When he fell asleep, he dreamed of the Wall.
“His experiences and hers became harder and harder to tell apart; everything gathered behind them into a common memory―though singly each of them might, must, exist, decide, act; all things done alone came to be no more than a simulacra of behavior: they waited to live again till they were together...”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day
June 4th
Monday
When Hermann woke, he knew it had rained before he knew anything else. He became conscious of the fact first, and its cue second—it was the sound of wheels slicing through water on the street below.
The light from outside was bright gray, the implacable London shade that obfuscates the time. It could have been morning, early evening, high noon. But it was 7:00 AM. He’d hardly managed four hours of sleep. The bed next to him was empty, but there was a small spot of blood on the pillow, extinguishing his last hope that it had all been a dream.
For another moment he lay there. He felt completely unequal to the task of rising. There was too much before him, and too much behind. He could never surmount it all. From the other room, he heard morning kitchen sounds—the click-clack of the coffee machine, the springs of the toaster, the murmur of the wireless. Newton was humming to himself (Take a Walk on the Wild Side).
Hermann got up.
After forbidding Newton from leaving the apartment or destroying it from within, he left for work alone. The train was crowded. In front of Century, the wind chased scraps of newspaper down the stone steps. It felt nothing like June—it felt like September. A church bell chimed the half hour, then eight chimes. A second bell joined in on the fourth note and chimed its own time, delayed.
Hermann’s plan was simple; so simple it was not even a plan, really. He would execute a normal work day (easy), dodge any questions about Newton (unlikely), then slip into the registry (under a pretense) and ferret out the file whose number Newton had recited for Hermann three times (until Hermann could repeat it back). The Greenwich file.
At 8:40 AM he entered the lab apprehensively, peering around the corner for his labmate—but Wesley’s desk was empty. No sooner had Hermann hung up his jacket than he heard a voice from next door:
“All right, Dr. Gottlieb?”
A head was poking out of the office attached to their lab. It was his boss.
“Gottlieb—is that you? Yes—I thought so. All right? Nice weekend? Restful? Awful weather, isn’t it?”
“Rather,” said Hermann perfunctorily. “It hardly seems like June.”
“Hardly,” agreed Hal Weeks. “Though I did hear this morning that it’s supposed to let up tomorrow. Should be gorgeous. Would you come in here, please? Is that the Times? May I—?”
Hermann approached his boss’s office apprehensively. He held out his paper for him.
“Thank you,” said Weeks, taking it, refolding it. “Didn’t have time to read mine this morning. Got an early call. Do come in.”
Hermann walked in through the door that Weeks, still fussing with the paper, held for him, and found himself the victim of an ambush. A slender neck twisted and dark eyes locked on to him from behind rimless spectacles.
“Good morning, Dr. Gottlieb,” said Victor.
Hermann’s first impulse—to snatch his paper back from Weeks and swat him with it—was lost in Victor’s headlights. It must have been the first time Victor had looked him in the eye in years, because Hermann felt like he had fallen into a subway tunnel and a light was rushing towards him.
Hal Weeks was an unassuming man, tall and tippy. He had a tuft of sandy-red hair, retreating on his scalp from all sides, and he dressed well. He liked Hermann, which was odd, because Hermann did not like him. And he had never disliked him more than he did this morning.
Weeks sat behind his desk, so tall he seemed to be hovering behind it. He worried the corner of the closed file on this desk. Hermann sat on the other side, next to Victor but at an awkward angle. Victor was smoking. Hermann declined his offer of a cigarette. He felt like he and Victor were waiting to start an extremely tense tennis double.
“Well,” the Vice Chief said, in a friendly tone, slightly hoarse. “Thank you for coming in.”
Victor had a curious way of appearing to belong in every room, as if he had furnished the place himself and invited you in as his guest. He had dark hair, and large, heavy-lidded eyes. His jaw was crooked, which gave him an approachable asymmetry and a permanent, slight grimace. Legend had it that he’d gotten his jaw broken in a fight during his residency in Istanbul after the war, when the trio established itself as a force: Bowen and Victor running the Turkish networks, point-man Rennie twisting arms for them. The jaw surgery had been haphazard; it had never realigned properly.
Victor’s father had been the youngest son of a duke, an heir to wealth but no title. When Hermann had met him nearly twenty years before, at the beginning of his career, Victor had had a full, open face and small, thick-framed glasses. All that had drained away now—he had hollowed cheeks and frameless specs. The change was extraordinary; it was like accelerated decay. He had long since abandoned the eccentric, flamboyant style of dress that Bowen had made fashionable in the service. He dressed in dark, old-fashioned suits. With his high white collar, he looked like an undertaker.
“Of course, sir,” said Hermann stiffly.
“Awfully good of you,” offered Weeks.
“I do work here,” said Hermann.
With the graceful aristocratic condescension of times gone by, Victor ignored their exchange. “I’ve come to check on our friend Orpheus, Dr. Gottlieb,” he said, leaning forward to pocket his cigarette case. “What progress have you made?”
That was obviously not the reason for his visit, when he could have just sent Preston Blair. Hermann nervously hesitated trying to think of a polite way to say “none whatever.”
Weeks rushed into the vacuum of his unfortunate pause: “I don’t suppose Hermann had much time to run the numbers on Friday. And he didn’t come in this weekend. Did you?”
“No. I didn’t.”
“No progress, then?” said Victor, still perfectly friendly.
“None, sir,” said Hermann. “Sorry.”
“Of course, Dr. Gottlieb,” said Victor, crossing his legs.
On top of the alien friendliness, the honorific irritated Hermann. His irritation was sharpened by the memories, unexpectedly vivid now, from a decade before—all the times in Victor’s office or in his club when he had proudly introduced Hermann to important people, all on the frank, first-name basis he had with everyone. Hermann didn’t like being on a first-name basis with most people. But he liked when Victor called him Hermann instead of “doctor.” He remembered the first time they met, when Victor crossed his legs and leaned forward to finally make the offer, and his trouser cuffs had slid up to reveal irreverent orange socks. How Hermann had adored Victor. He’d admired his wisdom, his easy way with people, and even that silly umbrella he’d always carried, back then.
“But it’ll be top priority this week,” Weeks was saying, talking anxiously into the silence. Hermann studied the buttonhole on Victor’s suit lapel. “Not to worry, sir. We’ll have something for you before you know it.”
“I know you will,” said Victor. “The gears never stop down here. I do admire that about your department,” he said, and it was unclear whom he was addressing. “But the same is true of our enemies, as you well know. And in fact, while you were both enjoying your weekends, Signals intercepted a new Orpheus transmission.”
“Oh,” said Hermann dumbly.
“And could you guess from where, Dr. Gottlieb?”
Hermann did not need to feign the expected wonderment and confusion: “No, sir, where?”
Victor tapped his cigarette on the rim of Weeks’s ashtray and said, “A little ways west of Norwich, East Anglia.” His voice flicked upwards like a hound flipping a rabbit on its back.
That was the risk in harnessing your actual confusion to mask what you knew and did not: it could expose your actual throat. Hermann had forgotten that.
“Near the Estate, sir?”
“Oh, my, well,” said Weeks, starting some sentence and then dropping it.
“Exactly. As you know, Dr. Gottlieb, we are in the middle of an important ten-day conference with the Americans. You probably know it is being hosted at the old training estate. I know these things get around.”
Victor tipped his chin back slightly, taking a pull from his cigarette, and looked over the framed pictures on Weeks’s wall—naval prints from the golden age of sail. Hermann wrestled with his instinct to sit perfectly still and make himself as small as possible.
“The Americans are overtaking us,” Victor said mildly. “When I got started, before the war, they were our little protégés. But the scales tipped, when it was all over. Or perhaps sometime shortly after. They’ve simply got more money, and more manpower. We’ve lost face over the years. Everyone knows it.”
Hermann was frowning, hiding his mounting fear. Was Victor about to talk about Bowen?
But he was not: “I don’t believe the Chief has any hope of recovering our prestige. Nor does Whitehall, most likely. They’re perfectly happy with his solution, which, it seems, is to simply ride the Americans’ slipstream wherever they’ll let us fly.”
His cigarette was dwindling. The only crack in the veneer of civility was the way he pronounced the word—Americans. There was a violent disdain in the second syllable. Without that, Hermann might have trusted this apparent display of frankness.
“It’s an ugly war, this,” Victor went on, still addressing the prints. He massaged his jaw slowly. “Still—there’s a lot the Americans don’t understand, I think.” His eyes, darkly pensive, flicked to Hermann’s. “They fight from hatred. They hate the reds. They fear them. They haven’t got loyalty to a cause. You see? They don’t do it for queen and country. They do it for themselves.”
Hermann frowned, evincing skepticism.
“But,” said Victor, exhaling some smoke, “Misery, strange bedfellows, and all that. There were suggestions of interference at the conference beforehand, which I rather recklessly ignored—” (There were the first outright lies Hermann had detected, for he knew Victor had dreamed up all those suspicions himself, and that the chances of his doing nothing were close to zero)— “and now it seems we are going to pay the price.”
“Interference, sir?” said Hermann, taking the first step out onto the tightrope.
“When was the last time you saw Dr. Geiszler, Dr. Gottlieb?” said Hal Weeks, surprising him from the right.
Hermann turned.
“Dr. Geiszler?”
“Yes.”
Hermann paused the length of a breath for thought. “Thursday morning, in the office, I believe. Probably the same time you last saw him. Sir.” Hermann forced himself to turn back to Victor, so as not to be seen averting his eye. “He told me he was going to the conference.”
“He was,” said Victor. “He’s missing.”
Hermann raised his eyebrows.
“Missing, sir?”
“Yes. He disappeared from the Estate last night.”
Hermann’s lungs contracted quick and tight. He was not a good liar, not outright. But he had learned something from his training, in which Victor had played no small part. The trick was not to lie; it was to believe in your role as completely as you believed in whatever pair of shoes you were wearing that day.
“What happened?”
“He simply vanished, it seems,” said Victor, with a cheerfully upturned inflection that betrayed extreme English anger. He looked at Weeks for the first time in the whole meeting. “He was last seen at dinner, last night. All of his things were left in his room, and his... motorbike is also still in the garage. I’m letting you in on these details, Dr. Gottlieb, because it’s very important that we find him. If he contacts you. Has he?”
“No, sir,” said Hermann.
“I know you two are friends,” Victor said, somewhat carelessly, eyes elsewhere. “Despite it all. You can imagine how this will look to the Americans, if it gets out. He’s misbehaved in front of them before. They weren’t happy then either.”
This allusion to Newton’s East Coast crisis two years earlier was unexpected, and agitated Hermann.
“I’m sure it’s... much the same, this time,” he managed.
“You know about that, then?” Victor said mildly.
Hermann and Weeks exchanged an unusually frank look. “Yes, sir, it was... difficult,” he said. He cursed the man mentally—for his inexplicable week-long disappearance and his undignified return with his undignified motorcycle.
The incident would have been easier to explain if Hermann actually understood it.
“My colleague is quite... He has a rather unusual mind,” said Hermann. “This is not news to anyone. His sense of proportion is perfectly balanced in rational matters. In emotional matters, it is... not.”
Hermann glared at the corner of Weeks’s desk for a moment. He was collecting himself. He was careful not to offer a concrete explanation. When he met Victor’s eyes, he did so wearing a rendition of the frustration he genuinely felt.
Victor nodded slightly.
“He seems difficult to work with,” Victor said, and Hermann knew he’d had him.
Hal Weeks exhaled a laugh of agreement. “You could say that, sir,” Weeks said.
Hermann only nodded. Victor’s face loosened into something brighter, an allusion to a sympathetic smile. Hermann began to relax.
“It’s just that Dr. Geiszler is not the only thing missing from the Estate, you see,” said Victor, suddenly sitting forward and snubbing his cigarette out on Weeks’s ashtray in a single movement. “Several documents and an extremely valuable piece of equipment have also gone missing, Dr. Gottlieb.”
An irrational rage shot through Hermann—Dr. Gottlieb, Dr. Gottlieb—and for a moment he hated Victor for tacking that honorific on like the butt of the gun he’d pistol-whipped him with. He wished with stupid longing to be home lying on his carpet, listening to Newton play the piano, and with an almost equal longing to be back in time, fifteen years younger, sitting across from Victor at his club. He wished for those days—the days when Victor had lit his way up the stairs at the Division, and confided in him about his family life, his difficult divorce. Hermann even knew his surname, knew it still. Hermann remembered it all, and he remembered the end—the terrible December day in the soundproof conference room off the Chief’s office, and the look on Victor’s face when Hermann had told him that Charles Rennie was dead.
“Oh dear,” he managed. “What’s missing?”
“Documents,” said Victor. He leaned back with his arms folded, as if daring Hermann to interpret him as relaxed. “Some equipment the CIA brought in to show to us, and the documents we are presenting in exchange. It’s all gone.”
“What sort of equipment, sir?” Hermann said.
“I’m afraid I can’t say.”
“Do the Americans know?”
“Not yet,” said Victor. “But they will by the end of the week. That’s when the higher-ups arrive. Once they arrive to negotiate terms of the exchange, I’m afraid it will be impossible to hide the truth—that the goods on exchange have all vanished.”
Hermann’s mind was racing. So the blueprints were missing too. The second man did take them.
“And you suspect Dr. Geiszler has made off with these… with all this?” he said.
“As soon as we realized the equipment was missing, we alerted our people and made inquiries. The Americans had a sign-in sheet in the building where they were keeping the equipment. The last name on it was someone called ‘Neilson Garrett.’ We made an emergency search of the campus last night. Turned up nothing. The only person unaccounted for was Dr. Geiszler.”
Hermann watched Victor light another cigarette. He deposited the match in the ashtray.
“Oh, pardon me, two people were unaccounted for.”
Hermann prayed silently that the second was Becket.
“Mr. Garrett was also nowhere to be found.” Victor exhaled some smoke. “His name was also missing from our conference rosters.”
Hermann nodded slowly. “I see.”
“I’m telling you all this so you can help.” Victor looked him in the eye. “If you have any information, this is the time to share it.”
Hermann shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“Or if you hear anything,” said Victor. “From Geiszler, or from other sources. You haven’t heard from Geiszler?”
“No, sir,” said Hermann, again.
“If you do,” said Victor, “tell him to come directly to us. Maybe he saw something and ran. Maybe he’s having troubles of his own, completely unrelated to the treaty. I want any undue suspicion cleared up as soon as possible. We’ve got to focus our attention on the right person.”
Victor stood up suddenly. Weeks jumped to his feet, and Hermann rose more slowly, reaching for his cane.
“Needless to say—no mention of this outside this office. Geiszler’s on vacation again, if anyone asks. And Orpheus is top priority. The sheet, please, Weeks?”
“Sir, of course,” said Weeks, as Victor snubbed out his second barely-smoked cigarette in Weeks’s tray and held out his hand. He handed Victor the file on his desk, and Hermann watched it pass, cursing himself for not looking it over when he had the chance. It was unlabeled, and very thin.
“Thank you,” Victor said. “Dr. Gottlieb.”
“Sir.”
Victor left.
“Gottlieb, a moment?” said Weeks, before Hermann could follow.
He sat back down with silent relief. There was an agreed-upon pause until they heard the sound of the lab’s outer door closing.
“Sir, how exactly are we concealing the theft from the Americans?”
Hermann did not feel he had to play his hand as closely with Weeks, because he did not consider him very astute. In fact, he considered him quite foolish.
Leaning back, Weeks replied, “I don’t know for certain. If they had been the ones to find it missing, then we’d have been in trouble.”
“Who was it?” Hermann asked.
“Victor. That’s why he actually came down here in person.” Weeks leaned back even further, a seemingly impossible angle without tipping. “I think that’s why Vic’s been able to keep it under wraps. He personally searched the place, requisitioned the Americans’ sign-in sheet, and took the first train back this morning. He was in my office when I came in. Rather a shock, actually. Wanted me to take a look at the sign-in sheet and see if I recognized the handwriting.”
“Which handwriting?”
“This Garrett fellow,” said Weeks with a combination of mystification and resignation. He took out his anachronistic pipe and sat abruptly forward. He tapped it on the edge of his desk.
Hermann was full of dread. “And did you?”
“Afraid not,” said Weeks, opening a drawer and searching inside. “I even showed him some of Geiszler’s handwritten reports, for a comparison. It didn’t match. Not that it means much.”
“That was the file you had, then?” Hermann dared to ask.
Weeks nodded, taking his bag of tobacco out. He told Hermann Victor’s timetable as he packed his pipe.
Victor, Becket, and the American liaison had been in a meeting until 9:15 PM. After the meeting, Victor had gone to the barn where the “equipment” was being stored.
Victor had signed in with the American guards. The last name on the sheet was Neilson Garrett. Never having heard of this person, Victor asked the guards who he was. They described a short, dark-haired CIA agent. (No glasses.) Garrett had said he’d just arrived, and wanted to check up on his equipment.
Garrett had signed in at 8:45, out never, Weeks reported from his look at the sheet that morning. Above Garrett on the sheet was Raleigh Becket: in at 8:20, out at 8:31. Below him was Victor, in at 9:20 and out at 9:26. Victor went into the room, he said, and found it empty.
In his head, Hermann was tabulating the story against the one Newt had told him last night. It all matched up, but he felt no relief.
“That was all he said about Dr. Geiszler?” Hermann asked. “There was nothing else to implicate him, aside from his absence?”
Weeks was trying and failing to light his pipe. He shook his head.
“Nothing else, nothing else. Vic said he last saw him at dinner, ‘round 7:30. After that, nothing.”
He cast the burnt-out match onto the table and lit another.
“Gottlieb, I have no doubt this is just—bad timing,” he said, pipe between his teeth. “Geiszler will be all right. He’ll come back.”
“I’m sure, sir,” said Hermann stiffly. He watched Weeks fail with the second match as well.
“Have you really not heard from him?” Weeks said, looking up. He shook the extinguished match. “You can tell me the truth, Dr. Gottlieb. I won’t tell Vic. I want Geiszler to turn himself in, too.”
Hermann, a little lightheaded from the adrenaline comedown, felt a sharp disgust at this heavy-handed invitation into Weeks’s confidence. He wasn’t certain how much Weeks really knew about their relationship, but in that moment he resolved he would tell him nothing. Nothing, ever.
Weeks dropped his eyes back to his matches, apparently unwilling to pursue the point. “Until Geiszler comes back,” he said, “just focus on Orpheus. Cross-reference away. Don’t worry about this conference, don’t worry about Geiszler. He’ll show up—I’m certain of it.”
The third match was the charm. He clamped the pipe between his teeth, puffing triumphantly, and swept the matches into his palm. He reached far across his desk to deposit them in his glass ashtray, which Victor had left on the distant edge. Unaccountably, Hermann remembered the first time he had met Robert Bowen, sometime in the 50s. He too had smoked a pipe. He had also carried an umbrella, just like Victor. With a deflating sense of pity, young Hermann had recognized the reason Victor carried that silly umbrella. He even dressed like him.
With a final nod and thanks, Hermann left Weeks’s office.
When Hermann opened the door, he started—someone was outside. But it was just Wesley. He was trudging by with his three-bag mug of tea, heading towards his desk.
“Dr. Wesley,” said Hermann. “You startled me.”
“Hermann,” Gus Wesley said, smiling hello with uneven teeth. “Newt in yet?”
“Not yet,” said Hermann. “I don’t believe he’s coming in today.”
Wesley nodded, eyes darting to Weeks’s shut door. “Shame,” he said, in his uncomfortably loud voice. “Some June this is, eh?”
“Indeed.”
“I like it cold, myself,” Wesley said. “Everybody hates the long winter, but I like it.”
Hermann had no response to offer, and no interest in prolonging the interaction. There was a pause while Wesley looked at him.
“I hear it’s meant to break,” Wesley finally said.
“So everyone keeps telling me,” said Hermann.
While Hermann was working in the lab under a storm cloud of institutional anxiety, Newt was at home on Airedale Street, struggling against an enemy of similar magnitude: boredom.
Really, he was a self-motivated person, he reflected as he sat on the kitchen floor among the pieces of Hermann’s disassembled toaster and clock radio—and thank goodness for that. Even in the face of quarantine-lockdown in a house with no television, no interesting books, and no records with words in English, and even in the face of intermittent vertigo of unknown etiology from a device of unknown purpose in his ear canal of unknown destiny—even here, now, he was resourceful.
Hermann was upset with him. Newt didn’t blame him, though he didn’t regret what he’d done. He thought he’d been a bit reckless by showing his face to the guards instead of sneaking in, but otherwise, he felt all his actions from February to today to be justified.
Newt hummed ‘When I’m Gone,’ an old folk song Caitlin liked, quietly to himself as he liberated the AM antenna from the radio’s circuit board. What Hermann didn’t understand was his motive. Perhaps Newt himself didn’t either, but he had the mental privilege of never (or, rarely) questioning his own motives. If he wanted to do something, the desire originated in his brain, and he knew of no worthier qualification. The effects of these desires or actions on others was a secondary consideration.
Yet despite these customary rationalizations, he was beginning to suffer from a creeping doubt still too nascent to classify.
So far today, instead of repenting, he had: cleaned up breakfast, searched futilely for Laplace the cat, fixed Hermann’s clock according to his watch, attempted to use the vacuum cleaner, deemed it inefficient and taken it apart to improve it, gotten bored, turned on the BBC newscast and discovered that the clock had actually been right, rewound both his watch and the clock, and practiced piano until he got a headache. He had also done some tests on the transducer’s ongoing effects on his ear.
But he was bored. Newt was under strict house arrest orders, but he wanted someone to talk to. He thought about going downstairs to check on his budgies, which were in the care of Hermann’s 12-year-old neighbor, Jake. Jake was a good kid. He was the youngest of a Black Pentecostal family that lived on the first floor. Jake took good care of the birds whenever Newt was gone, and kept an eye on his apartment from across the courtyard too. But it was Monday—Jake was probably at school.
He wandered out onto the balcony, where it was raining halfheartedly, and gazed longingly at his own distant apartment across the courtyard. “Won’t see the golden of the sun when I’m gone,” he sang quietly, holding the slick railing for support, “And the evenings and the mornings will be one when I’m gone...” It wasn’t loneliness, exactly, or restlessness; it was the feeling that the world was going on outside without him.
From experience, he knew the argument with Hermann wasn’t over. This budding sense of guilt was going to make him defensive, and then things would get contentious. Unfortunate, Newt reflected, that he was not after all just a brain in a box. He could argue solipsism with Hermann as many times as he liked, deflect his Wittgenstein-isms with Descartes, but alas, evidence continued to accumulate that he was not alone in the universe, and that there were others outside his consciousness whom his choices did affect.
Newt went back inside, wiping off his glasses. He wanted to call Lightcap, but stopped short of the phone. He was wary of the line, and she was at work anyway.
Lightcap worked as a programmer now, but her area of expertise was everything. Any system—information, electronics, music theory—she would map and master with the energy of a child chess prodigy. Her trouble lay where her mind ended and others’ began. Lightcap was blonde, pretty, and very tall, with a deep, disconcerting voice. That voice, her unbecoming haircut, and her intimidating height were the speedbumps that threw eager men off. And in her chosen field, at the Division, there had been many such men. She had never been well-accepted there, but she had not accepted this non-acceptance. Instead, she’d stalked from department to department, solving complex problems and creating enemies of the men she disturbed.
Newt was one of the only exceptions. He’d met her back when she worked at the Black Chamber, early in Newt’s Hardware career. It had been an auspicious first meeting.
“Knock knock,” Newt had said, opening the door without knocking. He heard a wordless shriek and a metal thunk dangerously close to his head.
He looked down, then up.
“Did you just throw a stapler at me?”
There was a woman sitting behind a desk at the far end of the room.
“Oh. You’re not who I thought you were,” she said.
“Um.”
She stared at him with a surprisingly unrepentant blankness. She had thrown it quite a distance and quite level, for such a heavy object. If he had, in that moment, chosen to compliment her arm, they would never have become friends. But instead, he said, “Hi. I’m new. I wasn’t told there would be ballistics.”
“No one warned you about the Chamber Guard?”
“No, no, not a word. They just said, ‘Bungle down and grab me those files, young feller.’ Nothing about needing a helmet.”
“I thought you were Prick Warren,” she said.
“Isn’t his name Patrick?”
“Is that not what I said?”
“Oh yes. It is. I just wanted to be sure that I heard right. I’m new. As I mentioned.”
“I heard you,” said the woman, folding her hands together, “when you mentioned it.”
“A fellow American?” he said, in reference to her accent.
“Just an accomplished mimic.”
She was actually, as he later learned, the bidialectal child of a vicious British Army officer, raised on various American bases.
“Impressive,” said Newt, taking a step into the office. “Well, pleased to meet you. No hard feelings about the flying stapler, by the way. I should have knocked. Or ducked.”
“You didn’t really need to,” the woman said with an unkind inflection.
Newt shrugged.
“May I?” he said.
She could see that mocking his height had stymied him by how it severed any rejoinder. Feeling a stab of remorse, she jerked her head. “Come in.”
She stood as he approached. He registered no visible reaction to her height and shook her hand, saying, “Newt Geiszler, Hardware,” and she said “Caitlin Lightcap. Research.”
“What are you doing down here, if you’re Research?”
“They move me around a lot,” she said.
“Jack of all trades?”
“‘Difficult to work with,’ actually.”
“I see, I see,” said Newt, grinning.
“Is that funny?”
“It’s all too familiar,” Newt said, too busy laughing at himself to notice her aggression.
He explained what records he needed from the Black Chamber, and the Chamber Guard graciously helped him find them. The Black Chamber was the classified archive, for old files out of circulation. It dated back to the earliest days of British government surveillance, when the crown paid to have foreign envelopes steamed open. And it lived up to its name: the room she led him into was a pitch-black basement. A switch turned on dim, ancient lightbulbs.
“Golly gee,” he said. “Are these Edison originals?”
Newt sneezed from the dust.
“You tell me, Buddy Holly,” she said. “I thought you were the engineer.”
“I’m the engineer, not the electrician,” he said. “But I could probably requisition some more up-to-date bulbs for you. ‘Lightbulbs for Lightcap,’ I’d call it. It would be a covert operation. Because by ‘requisition,’ I did mean ‘steal.’”
“Not the most covert name for your op,” she pointed out.
“Hey, I’m the electrician, not the spymaster.”
“You’re kind of adorable, Geiszler.”
“Please, don’t patronize me.”
They were friends from that day on. They’d worked together at the Estate for a while, until her firing in ‘63. For the past ten years, she had worked at IBM’s London facility as a programmer. She hated it.
Since her firing, Newt had made efforts, probably against protocol, to keep connected. Sometimes he felt he was her only lifeline, but that made him fret, because he was not much of a support to anyone. Sometimes he wondered why she stayed here in England, but he knew she hated her family, and would rent a room in Hell if they were in heaven. Sometimes he romanticized their heady, semi-alcoholic days together at the Estate, but these days, by the end of a night of drinking with her, he was relieved to go home to Hermann’s quiet flat.
Still, he loved her, and wished he could talk to her. He looked away from the phone. They had a gig on Wednesday. If all went well, he’d see her then, and tell her everything. He turned, swaying a little, went back to the kitchen, and resumed trying to install remote controls into Hermann’s toaster.
Century Central File Registry was open daily until 6 PM. Most of Century’s daytime employees went home at 5, so when Hermann entered the registry at 4:50 PM, most visitors were leaving or already gone. Century Central was the internal file library: all general access files were available here. Smaller, more specialized file libraries existed for particular sections, with ‘reading rooms’ for those with special clearances. Hermann’s only special clearance was for the crypto library. He had checked the crypto registry index during lunch, while their clerk Aalvar took a nap at his desk, but as he’d expected, they had no file named Greenwich.
The registry took up the entire third floor of Century. White concrete pillars braced a tile floor and a tile ceiling. The reading area had dignified wooden library tables like a university, complete with green-hooded lamps, but the actual stacks were all dull metal shelves and file cabinets. The distant walls were lined with tall glass block windows, distorting the light passing in and out. As always after a day in the sealed basement lab, Hermann was disoriented by the natural light.
He approached the desk, behind which loomed the vast card catalog. The clerk on duty was Sykes. He had been a cipher clerk in the field, once, but like many cipher clerks, the stress had gotten to him. He was happier here, viciously cross-checking and guarding his files. Hermann had hoped Sykes would not be on duty, for he was by far the most uptight clerk.
“Afternoon, Sykes.”
Sykes looked up. “A bit late to sign in, isn’t it, Gottlieb?”
“Registry hours have changed, have they?” said Hermann. “I must have missed the memo.”
This retort amused Sykes for some reason. “I don’t know that they circulate to the basement,” he said, lifting the chained clipboard from his desk and handing it to Hermann. He didn’t offer a pen. “Request tickets are there. Be quick about it, would you? I want to get home for the match.”
“Shouldn’t be long,” said Hermann, signing in, but when he handed Sykes five request tickets for five different files, the clerk was not impressed.
He turned to the card catalog behind his desk and opened five tiny drawers. He copied the file numbers onto the tickets and tore off carbon copies while giving Hermann the shpiel: “Take them out yourself but don’t put them back. Stay in this area to read them, keep everything on the table at all times; no ink, notes in ballpoint only, absolutely no writing on the files. Mack will be gone, so just bring your files up to me, with tickets, when you’re finished. No skulking around the aisles. And I’ll need your bag.” He gave Hermann his file tickets and took his bag.
The last few stragglers were getting up from the reading tables. A young assistant clerk with a hunted look, who could only be Mack, was collecting abandoned files and tickets in a cart. He hurried over to demand where Hermann thought he was going, but when Hermann showed him his tickets, Mack docilely showed him where to go.
The stacks were deserted. Hermann was acutely aware of the sound of his cane on the tile. He collected the first four files, which were a range of colors and sizes and came from different sections. Most were projects he had personally worked on, either completed or scrapped, of no importance. Finally, he made his way to the section that contained the Greenwich file.
He closed his eyes and collected himself. The section ID, shelf code, and file number flashed by, recited by Newton and stored by Hermann in his color-coded memory. He opened his eyes and found the shelf. He could hear the squeaky wheel of Mack’s cart, a few rows over. He took a deep breath, then knelt down before the shelf. There was Greenwich: a blue file, thin. He took the blue file in his arms (Atlas, a 1968 radio surveillance op on the Turkish embassy, scrapped), opened it, and removed its contents. He slid Greenwich off the shelf, removed its contents, and swapped them. He put the Greenwich file back, Atlas contents inside. Then he stood up and made his way back to a desk. He sat as far from Sykes as he could, and began to read.
In March, 1972, Passport Officer at the British Embassy in Vienna Raleigh Becket (unofficially, the Head of the Austrian Station for the Division) received an offer from a defector. The man was a Razvedka scientist. He was working on a very important, very secret project in East Germany, and that was all he would say. His codename was Greenwich.
So said Becket’s first report, submitted to London last March. London’s first reply, a day later, requested more information. This offer was irregular in many ways. Foremost: why was it coming to Becket, in Vienna, and not to Fischer, the East Berlin Head of Station?
We need more information, Becket told Greenwich. Meanwhile, he contacted Fischer in East Berlin. Fischer told him they had rejected Greenwich already, not believing him to be genuine. They thought he was only looking for money.
When Greenwich answered Becket, he told a different story. He said that the project in (location redacted) had placed him in danger. Once it was completed, he feared he would be recalled to Moscow and silenced—imprisoned, or worse. But, worse, the project itself was hounding his conscience. He believed the device they’d built was dangerous, and wished he had never helped to build it.
Becket wrote this up in his second report to London. He was already starting to buy into it, Hermann could tell. He couldn’t see why. But then, he didn’t have the interpersonal instincts of a case officer.
Here Becket accepted Greenwich’s first offering: his real name. He sent this to London in his second report. (The name was redacted in the file.) They looked it up, and found him in Century. Greenwich was educated at (redacted), graduated with a degree in (redacted) in the year (redacted). He had worked on the (redacted) RTD project during WWII for the Red Army.
His personnel file reference number was included, but it had been crossed out, and a new number had been stamped in red beside it. Hermann recognized the formatting: the original file would have been accessible to him, but the new file was not. Sometime between last year and today, Greenwich’s clearance had been raised.
Now Becket gambled where the East German resident had not. He sent his third report to London: he wanted to negotiate terms with Greenwich. With clearance, he would issue a visa under a fake name. He requested permission, and a passport.
What convinced him?
London replied a few days later. They did not approve the immediate request for resettlement. They would authorize an info-first trade. If Greenwich shared his information, and they could verify it, then they would issue a visa.
While Becket was arguing with London, Greenwich sent him another plea. The testing stages of the project were almost complete. He was personally holding back on the final stages, he said, but he could only drag his feet for so long.
He reached out, he said, not for his own self-preservation, but for the damage he feared this device could cause. Please, he begged Becket personally. Please make me a deal.
Becket, reporting this in his fourth missive, expressed doubts about Greenwich’s sincerity. The cipher clerk, encrypting this report, made an addendum to assert his belief.
Hermann frowned at this. Becket’s coding clerk had inserted his opinion into a report? That was bizarre, and very much against protocol.
Indeed, the reply dispatch from London agreed. They issued a warning, and a threat of formal reprimand, to cipher clerk “B.B.”
“Riveting stuff?”
Hermann jumped and shut the file. Sykes was right behind him. Apparently he was not reading over Hermann’s shoulder, because he just chuckled and said, “30 minutes ‘til closing time. Last call.”
“Thank you,” Hermann replied curtly.
Sykes left, and he resumed reading.
A week later, Greenwich sent Becket an ultimatum. His last day of work on the base had been set. He was being sent home to Moscow.
He said he would destroy all his files and prototypes on his final day in the airbase. He knew that this was a suicide mission. But the project had to be destroyed. It would die with him, he said, unless Becket sent someone. He would tell all he knew. He had no price.
Hermann found that his heart was beating somewhere in his stomach. No price? He glanced at the clock behind Sykes’s desk. It was 5:36.
One sentence of Greenwich’s message was blacked out. Perhaps this contained the convincing detail; or perhaps the desperation compelled him. Whatever the reason, this message sold Becket. He did not send anybody. He went to Greenwich himself.
Hermann could picture it: Becket taking his jacket off the back of his desk chair and walking right out of the Vienna embassy, into a cab, and onto an airplane. He submitted no travel request to London, and no warning to the East Berlin residents. As the former East Berlin resident himself, he knew the territory.
In the city, he got in touch with Greenwich somehow. There were no details on how. The next pages in the file were a transcription of their conversation, from a tape made on Becket’s pocket recorder in a safehouse flat over the long night of May 15th, 1972.
The transcript was many pages long, highly redacted. The curious reader was referred again to Greenwich’s classified personnel file. Hermann glanced at the clock again. He had not given himself enough time. He started scanning the transcript quickly.
Greenwich was a Russian military intelligence scientist. He worked in radio surveillance RTD—the elder Newton Geiszler of the Razvedka. He summarized his career, giving the highlights. In 1971, he had been sent to the G.D.R. for a special project.
The thump of his glass on the coffee table was noted. Stolichnaya, Hermann wondered? Or had Becket scrounged up some German liquor?
Becket began to ask ordered questions about the project, but Greenwich was unwilling to give up the monologue. He interrupted Becket, finally, and said he wished to clarify his reasons for doing this. They spoke in German, which was their only language in common, but not the native tongue of either: They say this project is for the good of our country, and for the good of mankind. I believe the opposite is true. I believe this technology brings about the demise of our way of life.
Of course, Becket said. It’s a matter of principle, Greenwich insisted. Becket recognized this, from a career dealing in Soviet defectors: the self-made moral structure built as a bulwark against the violent unpredictability of the system they lived in. But Hermann recognized something else too, as Greenwich pressed on with his story: the proud, desperate, final transmission of a scientist. Whatever it was he had invented or perfected, he did fear it—but a part of him was proud of it. And he did not want his work to go unremembered.
The project started, Greenwich said, in 1971.
The Razvedka picked up a new source in East Berlin—a British agent. He knew the location of a piece of technology that had been stolen from Wagner Airbase.
Wagner Airbase.
Hermann stared, his eye caught in the crease of the file. The thumping in his stomach was getting louder. He needed to check the clock. The clock. If he looked, would Sykes notice that all his color had just drained?
His hands were shaking. He set the file on the table and exhaled. He looked up at the clock. 12 minutes. He put his hands on his knees, straightened his back against the chair. There was not time to panic. He needed to finish. Sykes was wheeling his full cart into the stacks.
So it was Wagner. In a way, it was a relief to have confirmation. He realized now that he’d already known, because he had already been so frightened.
This connection explained, too, Becket’s reaction to Greenwich’s offer. It explained why he had gone to Berlin himself to hear the story. Closing his eyes, Hermann recalled the last time he’d seen Becket—December 1963, on the canal bridge that had been their fallback rendezvous. The frown in his blue eyes when Hermann had told him no, it was gone.
After ten years sunk on the ocean floor, the memories of that mission were rising to the surface. Now Hermann was going to have to look at them.
He returned to the Greenwich file. The Abetilung had picked the agent up in the summer of 1971. (The file referenced a transmission; Hermann saw with a mix of relief and trepidation that it was a 2TP transmission, dated 19 August, 1971, processed by the Blueberry on 25 August. That meant he had automatic access. In fact, two years before, he had processed it himself.) The British agent had important technical information on the (redacted). Hermann knew the redacted word without a doubt: the transmitter.
Becket asked, did Greenwich know who this British source was? He said he did not. Becket pushed, but it seemed Greenwich knew nothing.
Now, Greenwich’s real testimony began: the ins and outs of the technology. But the pages were almost entirely blacked out. Hermann checked the clock again. Seven minutes. He had no time.
He flipped quickly, past entire pages of Greenwich’s uninterrupted speech. The whole story was spilling out of him—his life’s work, all of it censored.
There were not many pages left. The transcript ended with Becket asking whether Greenwich had destroyed his work yet, like he’d planned. He said, Tomorrow.
Becket promised to get Greenwich out of East Germany. He said the information he’d shared was was more than enough to buy him a visa. But Greenwich seemed to know the demand implicit to his defection: reconstruct the device, for our side. And so Greenwich refused. To Hermann’s utter shock, he said he would not come. He would not rebuild it for England, or for anyone.
Hermann didn’t believe it. Was this principled refusal—or just hopelessness? Greenwich was due to leave for Moscow in two days. Maybe he believed Becket could not carry off the extraction, maybe he had accepted his fate. Or maybe he believed he still had a chance in Moscow. Or maybe he had a martyr complex.
The transcript ended there, with Becket’s reassurances that he would contact Greenwich the next morning with an escape route. But Hermann, trembling furiously, flipped to the next page—he couldn’t refuse, he couldn’t possibly refuse, there was no principle strong enough—but that was it. The next page was a report from Becket to London, a week later. He had not heard from Greenwich again. He was returning to Vienna alone.
The last item was a memo from Vienna, dated June 1972. It reported the disappearance of embassy employee Bernard Birch, cipher clerk.
The final page of the file was an index of cross-referenced files. There was a file on the technical specs Greenwich had recreated—the file Newton had seen all those months ago. There was the personnel file on Greenwich again. There was the Bernard Birch case file. There was Raleigh Becket’s personnel file, and Fisher’s, the East Berlin Head of Station. And there was the case file on the Wagner Airbase surveillance operation of 1963. Hermann nodded silently to no one. That file, too, was classed outside of the central registry, but he had no need to see it. He knew what was inside, because he’d been there.
Hermann closed the blue file slowly. Sitting still, he listened for where Sykes was, among the stacks. His cart squeaked a few aisles down.
He gathered his things quickly and entered the stacks. In front of the shelf where Greenwich belonged, he loudly dropped everything, sending his cane clattering and his files scattering. He cursed a bit.
“All right, Gottlieb? I’m in the 1-B90s. Just bring the files to me.”
Hermann cursed under his breath. “Be right there.”
He gathered up the files. He had a moment of terror when he couldn’t locate Atlas in Greenwich’s place, then he found it. He pulled it, switched Atlas back out, and replaced Greenwich. Then he loudly stood and hurried a few rows over to Sykes.
“Can I have my bag back, please? I’d like to catch the 6:10,” he said, rudely dumping his files on top of Sykes’s others. Sykes, looking very put-upon, brought him back to the desk and made a production of retrieving Hermann’s bag. Hermann took it, blood roaring in his ears, and escaped to the lift.
He was standing on the wide stone Century steps. So it was Wagner. So it was the stolen technology, stolen from Wagner, stolen back, and stolen again. He didn’t know what it was, but he did know where it came from. There was no longer any doubt.
The sun had come out, the sky was blue, and the wind was cold and higher than ever. It was going to be a beautiful spring night. He had to tell Newton—finally, he had to tell him everything about the Wagner mission. And it was all so impossible, absolutely absurd; and Newton would believe it. He would be upset that Hermann had hidden it from him for all this time, but he would believe it.
He had started walking with the intention of collecting himself and then calling home, but as time and city blocks passed, Hermann became more agitated. He turned corners without intent and crossed streets without looking. A church bell chimed and he realized he had been walking for an hour, and that he didn’t know where he was.
A strange sort of trance had overtaken him; he felt like he was playing the role of someone else. Hermann took another turn and found himself in a stone arcade around the periphery of a market. On the other side of the arches, farmers were closing up their stands for the evening. He turned on impulse into the market, and walked until he found a flower stand.
He bought two bouquets: one large bouquet of lilies and one small handful of irises, which he tucked into his pocket. He paid in coins, and as he accepted his change, he felt a disorienting sense of anachronism—he wasn’t where—when—he belonged. Then he hurried back down the arcade and turned out an alley, onto a crowded shopping street. Only then did he realize, belatedly: he was in Berlin mode—op mode. He was in enemy territory again. Training, unbidden, had taken over.
He ducked into a chemist’s and stalled a few minutes, seeing if anyone else came in. Then he left again, and let the crowd carry him until he could orient himself. He was on the Strand. He walked with the bouquet in front of his chest, taking a tourist’s pace. He paused at a crowded bus stop, then when the bus arrived, stepped into the department store next to it instead. There, he bought a rolled-up poster and asked for a bag. In the vestibule, he set the large bouquet of flowers down on a window ledge. He took off his shoulder bag, removed his coat, folded it, put it in the shopping bag, then walked out the double doors with his shopping bag, his shoulder bag, and without his bouquet.
It was well past 7:00 when the phone finally rang. Newt, sitting in Hermann’s kitchen, bolted to his feet, grabbed the table to steady himself, then hurried into the living room. The phone had stopped ringing. He waited, counting in his head and swaying slightly on his feet. When it rang again, he jumped.
He picked up, and said nothing.
From the other end, there was a hubbub—a busy street. Not a word. Then church bells started ringing the quarter hour. Newt tried furiously to guess where he was calling from—right inside a cathedral, from the sound of it—then he heard the shriek of bus brakes and a garbled something-something-hill, Old Bailey.
Hermann tapped the mouthpiece, then inhaled, like he’d thought better of it. The bells finished tolling. St. Paul’s Cathedral, Newt’s brain announced, triangulation completed.
“Sorry for calling so late, darling,” said Hermann finally, in a tone of excruciating normalness. “Jim at work gave me tickets to the symphony tonight. I wonder if you’d like to go. They’re playing Mahler’s 9th at Henry Wood Hall. I know he isn’t your favorite,” said Hermann quickly, in an intonation completely alien to Newt, “But I think it would be good to get out.”
Newt could hear in his tone that he was not to reply. So he did not.
“I’ll wait at will call,” said Hermann. “At 8:00.”
He rang off.
Newt held the phone to his ear for another moment before hanging it up. He looked over at Laplace, who was curled self-protectively on Hermann’s armchair. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. He left the house in silence.
They should have arranged more word codes and rendezvous points. Then they wouldn’t have had to rely on the truth, and Newt wouldn’t have had to listen to Mahler.
Hermann liked Mahler, of course. They met in the lobby just as intermission ended, and trickled in with the thin crowd for the third movement. They sat in the back of the sparsely populated concert hall, in the dark cave below the balcony. Hermann spoke in a low voice, not taking his eyes off the pit. He had a handful of irises wrapped in paper; Newt had no idea why.
“In April of 1963, an aircraft crashed outside of East Berlin,” he said. “The Abteilung picked it up. The Razvedka wanted it, but the Germans got there first—there’s infighting on that side of the Wall too. They picked it up and brought it to Wagner Airbase for study.
“Our mission—my mission—was to monitor communications surrounding the base, and to spy on their research. I was made to understand that this was a very secret, very important mission. The Division wanted to know what it was that they were studying, and I believe they wanted to find a way to steal it.”
“Right,” said Newt, who knew this. “And it was an American plane?”
“No,” said Hermann. “No.”
Newt, who had lived the last ten years under that impression, frowned at Hermann. “It wasn’t?”
“No, it was not American,” Hermann said, eyes still fixed on the orchestra. He switched the inexplicable irises from his right hand to his left. “It wasn’t a plane at all. It was a craft of unknown origin.”
Newt stared at him. Hermann went on:
“I left London at the end of April. When the Blueberry wrapped up. You remember.”
Newt remembered.
“They sent me up to the Estate for two weeks, for abridged field training. Contact protocols, technical report writing, self-defense, memorization, memorization, memorization. And radio,” he added. “With Caitlin.”
Newt nodded.
“After two weeks, my papers were ready. I was dispatched to East Berlin.”
He watched the orchestra for a moment, not appearing to hear it.
“Rennie was the CO, he ran the operation. Becket was the point-man, and I was the technical help.” Becket collected surveillance on the base, Hermann explained. He had a couple of soldiers on the inside, who provided him with drafts of internal memos, microfilm photos of technical reports, and, crucially, gossip. He was working on recruiting one of the scientists. Every week, he collected this technical data and folded it into a book, which he left in a dead drop for Hermann. At first, it was a defunct postbox, but later, Rennie rented a bus station locker and made two copies of the key.
Besides coordinating hand-offs, dead drops, and debriefs, Rennie monitored radio chatter. His clerks transcribed it daily and treated the paper, then rolled it into a newspaper which was delivered to Hermann’s mailbox. Each night, Hermann read the radio transcripts and parsed any technical data that appeared.
“But I couldn’t,” Hermann said frankly.
“Parse it?”
“No. It made no sense,” said Hermann, and paused a moment. The third movement’s fugue was in a lull.
He saw the chipped Formica-topped table that had served as his desk, and he saw Becket’s papers laid out on it. He’d had to drag the table into his bedroom from the kitchen—the flat had three tiny rooms, and only the bedroom was windowless. He smelled the tang of the chemical with which he treated the papers: acidic but off, like a rotted lemon. The report’s letters and numbers would swim to the surface under his lamp. Power outages had been frequent; sometimes brief, but sometimes lasting all night. Then, he’d worked by flashlight.
Summer had dragged by in that darkened bedroom, without windows to let in the tepid wind. Hermann hunched over the reports, shirt sticking to his back, struggling to understand, failing, every moment expecting pounding on the front door.
“The Germans had extracted some unknown form of technology from this crashed object,” Hermann said. “But their findings were incoherent. If they knew what the device did, they weren’t saying so. My suspicion was that they didn’t know, yet.”
“Yet?” said Newt.
Whatever it was, the Americans wanted it. So did the Russians. Wagner Airbase was fielding numerous information requests from the Razvedka, and declining many visitations. Rennie said that Bowen was shielding the Division’s mission from prying American requests as well. They probably had their own surveillance operation.
“The mission culminated in an operation to extract the device from the base. I wasn’t involved—I was to examine it, once Becket got it out. But he was only able to get one component.”
“So there were two parts?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to the other part?”
The fugue was crescendoing. Newt felt like a rabbit pursued down a dark hillside. The drummer was going wild on the timpanis.
Abruptly, it ended. Silence fell on the hall—the tense, inter-movement silence where every audience member prays that no one else will clap. Hermann’s hands were still folding and unfolding around the stems of the flowers, white ghosts in the dark gulf between the rows.
“Newton, why do you think everyone wanted this technology so badly?” he said in an undertone.
“I don’t know,” said Newt, as the music resumed, acutely melancholy.
“The Division, the Abteilung, the Razvedka, the CIA?”
“I would know if you’d just tell me what it was.”
“I don’t know what it was,” Hermann said, not reacting to his incendiary tone. “I never knew. I still don’t.”
“Then why,” said Newt impatiently. “Why did everyone want it so bad, since you obviously want me to ask.”
“Because,” said Hermann, “it didn’t come from the Americans. It didn’t come from the British, it didn’t come from the Soviets. It didn’t come from China or Japan or Australia or South America. It didn’t come from Earth at all. It crashed here from outer space.”
✦
“The Russians are coming,” Rennie said. “The General’s been trying to keep ‘em out, but it isn’t any use. The man’s pushing water uphill with a rake.”
He turned the page of his newspaper rather ostentatiously and, from behind it, gave Hermann a ‘so it goes’ sort of look. He had a ruggedly lined face and a rakish mustache. People said he looked like Vice Chief Bowen, though Hermann didn’t see it. (The mustache interfered, perhaps.) He had always looked, to Hermann, too real for this secret world—too much a character. He looked like the charming con man he had never really ceased to be. He didn’t look like someone who could write a technical report or speak six languages. Seated next to him on the bench, Hermann tried to picture him getting a drink with his friend Victor. It was a bizarre image.
They sat in a remote corner of an East Berlin park. Hermann hated park rendezvous. He felt exposed and unnatural. And what was more, it was cold.
Briefings with Rennie were always terribly casual. “What do you think of the General, Professor?” Rennie asked. He called Hermann ‘Professor,’ which Hermann understood to be some joke between himself and Victor. “You read his chatter too, after all. I rather like him. Jolly optimistic fellow. I believe he thinks he’s got a handle on the situation, he really thinks he does.” He turned another page. “But the poor man has no idea, really. Works well enough for us, but when the Raz gets here, well.”
Hermann nodded. “Right, sir,” he said uncertainly, and Rennie gave a small laugh; he had given up telling Gottlieb not to call him ‘sir.’
It was late November. For months, the German general in charge of Wagner Airbase had been keeping the Russians at bay. The Raz had been having one of their purging seasons, but now they were sending a delegation at last. They would requisition the device, most likely, and take it back to Moscow, and the General, bless him, would be powerless to stop it.
“It’s our last chance to get our hands on this device before it gets whisked away. But really, I don’t know about this plan of young Becket’s,” said Rennie, scanning the football column. “I met his inside man, the one Becket’s paying to do the deed. The private. He seems awfully green. Trust a child to pick an even smaller child to do the dirty work.”
Herman nodded, fiddling with the handle of his cane. He was watching a distant man in an overcoat, walking his small dog over the rise.
Rennie saw his face and followed his gaze without moving his head. He flicked his eyes back to his paper, apparently seeing no threat.
“Has he told you about it?”
“His plan? Not in any detail,” Hermann said.
“Well, I’ve got my doubts. Told him as much.” He turned another page. “But he won’t get anywhere if I’m breathing down his neck. If it works, it works. And if it fails, it fails. And we’re all fired!” He folded the newspaper suddenly into his lap. “Or worse.”
“Quite,” said Hermann nervously. Rennie leaned back on the bench, slinging his elbow over the back. He stretched his long legs and gazed across the empty field of dead grass.
Hermann’s breath rose in front of him. He watched the man and the dog disappear into a copse of bare trees.
“So, Professor,” said Rennie. “Let’s talk about where you fit into this plan.”
Hermann’s stomach reeled with dread and excitement. “Yes sir.”
“Once Becket gets it out, he’s going to leave it for you—not in the locker, but in dead drop C, that one’s more secluded. That spot should give you enough privacy. Take it out, take a look, make some notes, then put it back. I’ll come collect it that night.”
Hermann considered this with a frown.
“But sir...” he began faintly.
“What’s that?”
Rennie was deaf in one ear from a wartime injury.
“But sir,” he said more clearly, sitting forward. “I’m meant to examine this device... on the spot? That seems quite risky. And it would have to be quite a cursory examination. I mean, I’d hardly learn enough to write a report of any substance.”
“Substance? No, that’s not the idea,” said Rennie, crossing his legs. “That’s for the London boys. No, no. I know. Think of it this way: I don’t expect this to come off. Becket’s too smart for his own good. There isn’t any way he’ll get that thing out. But if he does,” he said, and tapped Hermann’s arm with his knuckles, “You are the insurance. I need a second pair of eyes on this thing. This operation has been six months in the making. We get it tomorrow, we could lose it the next day. I need your notes on this before it gets couriered off to London.”
“Oh,” said Hermann, trying and failing to hide his disappointment.
“Ah,” said Rennie. “You did want a closer look, didn’t you?”
Hermann glanced at him.
More than almost anything else, he wanted to examine that device.
“Well...”
Rennie grinned. That conspiratorial smile was the closest he ever got to mentioning what they never acknowledged. What he was impossibly, reassuringly blasé about.
Alien technology.
“I know,” said Rennie. “But if this works, maybe they’ll send us home, and you can get a real look.”
Hermann doubted it, but nodded. “All right.”
Rennie stood up suddenly, dropped the newspaper onto the bench, then stretched, facing Hermann. “Christ, it’s cold,” he said. “You seen that fellow before?”
A young man in nondescript clothing was making his way along the path, approaching from behind Rennie.
“Just look, tell me if you know his face,” Rennie said, still stretching his arms above his head, facing towards Hermann. Hermann looked. The man was studiously avoiding his eyes. Hermann looked back at Rennie and shook his head.
Rennie dropped his arms.
“Boy’s been following me, I think,” Rennie said in a low voice, but not low enough, Hermann thought—he was nearly on them—then Rennie turned quickly round and the man collided with his shoulder.
“Ah!”
“Pardon me,” said Rennie in easy German. “So sorry, sir.”
The man shook his head and hurried on. Rennie walked quickly away, and Hermann watched him go, certain he had taken the man’s wallet.
✦
It was a warmer evening, 600 miles and ten years away. The June dusk was bright, and they were walking down the blue-shadowed street slowly. They moved north, towards the river. They made a noticeably asymmetrical couple—Newt listing to the side, Hermann leaning heavily on his cane. He had done a lot of walking today, and there was still more ahead. Every few minutes, Newt would put his hand on Hermann’s elbow and look fixedly forward. When the horizon realigned, he would let go again.
“The Razvedka was coming, and Becket wanted to get the device out before they arrived,” Hermann explained in the low monotone voice he had adopted.
“You mean devices?”
“Becket’s inside man only managed to get half. One component of the two.”
“He—wow,” said Newt, taking Hermann’s arm again. “He pulled it off? It worked?”
Hermann nodded. “Yes. By half.”
“Impressive,” he said, letting go of Hermann’s arm. Hermann felt surprisingly bereft when he did. They were in public, and it wouldn’t be proper, but he wished Newton would keep hold.
“We can sit down,” Hermann said, again.
“No, let’s keep walking. It’s easier to walk and talk.”
They crossed a busy street. They had almost reached the Thames. Newton was a surprisingly attentive audience. He had taken the revelation of extraterrestrial technology with impressive equanimity—so far.
“He left it for me in dead drop C, as planned.”
“When was this?”
Hermann inhaled. “December 5th,” he said. “Thursday.”
“Oh...” said Newton, touching Hermann’s arm again, but not for balance. “Oh, no.”
“He got it out,” Hermann said grimly, “And the Bowen scandal broke 48 hours later.”
“Christ,” said Newt.
Hermann nodded.
They crossed the last street that ran parallel to the Thames, and turned to continue walking along it. Newt ran a hand along the railing; the river ran silently on the other side.
“Becket extracted it on the 5th, and left it in dead drop C that night. I came the next morning, Friday the 6th. But it was gone. The drop was empty.”
The device had gone missing. He’d emergency called Becket for a crash meeting. They had met on a canal bridge that evening. Becket had no idea who could have taken it. He swore he had left it there. Hermann didn’t know whether to believe him.
He signaled Rennie, requesting another crash meeting. Had Becket stolen it? Someone else? Had he lied about securing it in the first place?
It was the morning of December 7th. (Newt winced.) Hermann left his flat and took his usual route to the university, which took him past Rennie’s office, so he could check the window for any signal.
Today, the potted plant was in the window. That was a code red.
Hermann had gotten no other signal or warning. Feeling panicked, he hurried onward. Were they in danger? Were they blown? What was the emergency? At a newsstand on a corner, he found out:
High-Ranking British Intelligence Official Missing, Wanted for Treason.
Below, a photo of Robert Bowen. An ID photo, suit and tie, one drooping eyelid, no smile.
“I panicked,” Hermann said.
They were sitting on a bench in a small park next to the river. It was late.
“I would have too, I’m sure,” Newt said fairly.
“No, I... I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t trained for this. I needed help, I needed... orders. So I broke protocol. I went back to the field office.”
“Rennie’s office was disguised as a law firm. I smelled smoke as soon as I walked in. All the drawers and file cabinets were open, and gutted. The file clerk—the last one left, apparently—was burning papers in the grate. He looked at me, didn’t stop, just told me to ‘Lock that fucking door’ behind me.
“Rennie was upstairs in his office. He jumped when I came in, then saw who I was, and asked what the hell I was doing there.
“His office was in total chaos too. He was packing a bag full of files.
“I asked him why his clerk was burning everything. He said, ‘If Robert’s corrupted, then our whole operation is too. He’ll have told them all about it. We’re blown, and so are most of our European outfits, I should think. You’ve got to get out, Professor.’”
They were sitting on a bench facing away from the river. Hermann was folding and unfolding his symphony ticket between his fingers, the same creases over and over. His eyes were fixed on the lamp post across the street.
“I was paralyzed. And I didn’t believe it—didn’t want to believe it,” he corrected himself. “I said, maybe the papers were wrong. Maybe it was a false flag, or, or a—a mistake—and Rennie just laughed. He believed it. I hardly even knew Bowen, and I couldn’t accept that he was a traitor. But Bowen was his friend, and he accepted it, and acted right away.”
Hermann started tearing the ticket carefully in half along the crease lines. Newt stayed silent, chewing his lip in sympathetic anxiety. He was struck by the level of detail with which Hermann recalled this scene, and braced himself for worse.
“I asked—if he had heard from London, directly. A dispatch. I said, ‘Can I see it?’ He said no. I said I didn’t believe him. I wanted proof, concrete proof. Maybe this wasn’t true at all! I was on the verge of—I don’t know, genuine hysterics—then he stopped packing, and asked if I smelled smoke.
“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Your clerk is down there burning your bloody files.’
“He went to the window, and looked down at the street.
“Then he asked whether I had been followed.”
Hermann balled up the bits of paper in his fist and threw them onto the sidewalk, then leaned forward and covered his eyes with his hands.
“I had not taken the proper precautions when coming to the field office. I shouldn’t have come at all. I led them right to Rennie’s front door.
“Someone started pounding on the door, downstairs. Yelling. They said they were the police.
“Rennie pointed at me and told me to get out, now, down the fire escape.
“I could really smell smoke now. I think that the clerk’s fire had gotten out of control—I could hear him downstairs, shouting at the police. Then the door burst open and we heard two gunshots.
“Rennie rounded on me and yelled ‘Go!’ I went. Out the back door to the fire escape. The adrenaline was starting to do its job. And I didn’t want Rennie’s protection. I had led the police right to him—and I didn’t even trust him to begin with. None of it was right.”
Hermann opened his eyes and sat up. He tipped his head back.
“I got out onto the fire escape, then I hesitated. There was a window. I... waited. I shouldn’t have. I should have just run. The police came into Rennie’s office, guns in hand. Rennie was yelling at them. It was the Stasi, not the Abteilung. They were looking for a man with a cane. They were looking for me. Rennie, he kept saying this word over and over, but I couldn’t make it out—a code word?—Whatever it was, it was to no avail. The Stasi agent shot him in the chest. He went down. Then I ran.
“Hobbled, rather. I heard one of them yell to search the building for der Mann mit dem Stock, but I was already halfway down the fire escape. I came out in the back alley. I ran out to some street, and I got onto a tram. I rode to the railway station without stopping at my flat—I thought they would be searching it already.”
As the tram had sped away, he had turned around and looked out the rear window. A column of smoke was rising from the field office. A firetruck whooshed by, then an ambulance.
“How did you get out?”
“Out?”
Newt nodded. “Of East Germany?”
“Oh—oh,” said Hermann, looking away again. “I got lucky, really. I only had my German passport with me, so I couldn’t go by air. I took the train north, to Rostock. I took the water route to Copenhagen, and went to that airport. That was Sunday. When I called you.”
“Stop, stop,” said Newt, holding up his hands. “The ‘water route’? What the hell is that?”
“A boat, Newton,” said Hermann, his tone rising to match Newt’s. “They travel across water to transport humans and cargo.”
“But how did you—”
“Rennie had told me about the route previously. It was a backdoor solution, a shipping company we sometimes did business with—or he did—not strictly our outfit, more of a contractor—it was risky, but—”
“I’ll say!” Newt interrupted.
“—but I had no other choice—”
“If he was compromised, and you were compromised, how could you use his route, Hermann, that is so incredibly dangerous—”
“This? This is what you find outrageous?” Hermann hissed.
“That was crazy! That was craziness!”
“Will you please settle down?”
“What did you do, ride in the cargo hold with the crates of bootleg liquor?”
“I made it to Denmark and flew back to London,” Hermann finished, talking over him. “You picked me up. That was it.”
“That was it?”
“Yes.”
It clearly was not. Newt cursed himself mentally. He had slipped up—after a long night of delicately letting Hermann lead him where he needed to go, Newt had let his anxiety out of the box. Now this too-blunt question had severed their dialogue into a dead end. Hermann was tired, he thought to himself. He needed help him relax.
“Hermann, it’s late. Let’s go home.”
“Home?” Hermann was looking at the lamp post again. “We can’t go home.”
“To your place?”
“No. No, it’s not safe. It might not be safe. We can’t be sure.” He looked back at Newt. “We need to go to a hotel.”
“But—” said Newt. “We could stay with someone...” Hermann was shaking his head.
They felt a shared homesick disappointment, the loss of a promised rest.
“Did you feed the cat?” Hermann asked.
Newt nodded.
Hermann hailed a cab.
While Hermann showered, Newt went to the shop in the lobby of their seedy hotel. It was relatively clean, but far enough from the beaten path to allow two men with no luggage to rent one room. Hermann said they would find a better place the next day. In the lobby shop, Newt bought a pack of cigarettes, took one out, asked the clerk for a light, went outside to smoke it, then cursed, threw the whole pack out, and went back into the shop. He bought toothbrushes instead, and a sewing kit.
When he returned to their room, Hermann was sitting on the bed in his undershirt, his unbuttoned shirt over it. He was calmly dismantling the room’s telephone.
“Dude,” said Newt. He threw his purchases onto the bed and went to wash his mouth out.
When he emerged, Hermann was sitting on the edge of the bed, hands folded, telephone in pieces on the bedside table. The room was small, with lurid green wallpaper above wainscoting that was painted to look like hardwood. There was one dim lamp. Most of their light was borrowed from the streetlamps outside.
“You have more questions,” Hermann said, looking up at him.
“About a million,” he said, approaching, “but most of them, you don’t have answers to.”
Newt sank onto the floor and leaned back against the side of the bed. He began unlacing his shoes, and glanced at the clock on the table.
“It’s only 11.”
“Mm,” said Hermann vaguely.
Newt tilted his head and rested it against Hermann’s knee. Hermann sighed and ran a hand through Newt’s disorderly hair.
“You ought to shower, too.”
Newt snorted. “No need to be rude,” he said.
Hermann exhaled what passed for a laugh. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
Newt patted his knee. “Why were you so suspicious of Rennie?”
Hermann sighed. “There were... a few reasons. Everyone knew about his ties to the, I suppose, ‘criminal elements.’ Someone has to deal with them; but I suspected his ties were mutually beneficial in a manner inconsistent with the Division charter.”
Newt laughed at this exceptionally circumspect casting of aspersions.
“Of more concern to me, still, was this: why was he packing up files he should have been burning? What was the code word he was trying to use with the Stasi? And who stole the device from the dead drop? The only people who had access were Becket and Rennie. It had to have been one of them.”
“Or you,” Newt added.
“Or me,” said Hermann ruefully.
“So, what then: did you think Rennie was just selling secrets—just a little corrupt? Or did you think he was a double agent, like Bowen?”
Hermann’s silence lasted longer than Newt thought it should have.
“There was something else. It was in... late July, I believe. I arrived to a meeting with Rennie in the park. But instead of Charles Rennie, a stranger sat down next to me.”
Newt tipped his head back on the mattress and looked up at Hermann.
“I’d never seen him before. He was—nondescript. German. Sport coat. Gave me an oblique sort of speech. But he was offering me something. He was vague, but he made it... understood.”
“Offering what?”
Hermann looked at Newt’s upside-down green eyes.
“He seemed to think I’d be interested in the arenas of research and... freedom of domestic arrangements that a life further on the other side of the Iron Curtain might afford me.”
Newt’s frown spread into wide-eyed shock. He sat up, putting his arm on the bed and facing Hermann.
“He was trying to recruit you? As a—as a—”
“Yes.”
“And he knew who you were?”
“Yes.”
“And he knew you were—”
“Yes.”
“But how? Rennie?”
“I think so.”
Newt turned away in affront. “Holy shit,” he said. “But you turned him down.”
Hermann was silent.
Newt turned back around. “Hermann?” he said shrilly.
Hermann closed his eyes, then opened them again. “I agreed to consider it, and to meet him again.”
He didn’t look away from Newton’s wide, shocked eyes, but his expression was pained.
“Hermann...”
“Please—don’t. I said I would consider it. We were meant to meet two weeks later. The next weekend, I went home to London, for debriefing. August.”
“Oh,” said Newt quietly.
Hermann frowned slightly, less with disapproval and more like he was trying not to cry.
“When that agent approached me... I was alone. The mission was getting nowhere; I saw no future for myself in the Division, and I had no future at home. You and I had... cut ties. As far as I could see, no one would care if I... disappeared.” He exhaled. “I didn’t want to defect, but it was... a new possibility.”
Newt’s hand was resting on the bedspread. Hermann put his hand over it.
“When I returned to East Berlin from London, after our reconciliation, I felt... better, but I was still confused. I still didn’t know if I would go to that meeting. Then, the morning of, I got a letter from you. The first one in eight months.”
His voice shook, but didn’t break. He squeezed Newt’s hand. Newt felt like his stomach was being strangled. He turned his hand upward so that Hermann could thread his fingers through.
“So I stayed home,” Hermann said simply.
Newt nodded slowly, and rested his chin on the bed.
“And that’s why you think Rennie was working for the other side? You think he tipped them off that you were... volatile?”
Hermann had let go of his hand and was wiping his eyes with dignity. “I take issue with your choice of adjective, but yes.”
“Did you ever tell anyone about this?”
“Only one person.”
Hermann swallowed. Newt folded his arms on the edge of the bed and rested his chin on them.
“When I got home to London,” said Hermann, “it was several days before I was able to speak with anyone... But eventually, I got ahold of Victor.
“He wanted to know where Rennie was. ‘Charles.’ He’d had no word from him. Did I know where he was? And how was I able to get out, if Charles was not? He was... quite frantic. I had never seen him in that state—or any state, for that matter.
“I was so relieved to finally have someone to tell that I told him everything. I told him about the recruiter, the device, Becket, the police, and... and Rennie’s death.”
Hermann trailed off, remembering the terrible look that had come into Victor’s eyes then, and never left them.
“I told him everything,” he said again, “except for agreeing to a second meeting with the recruiter. But I did tell him my suspicions about Rennie. He didn’t like that at all—he didn’t like hearing that I doubted his... that I doubted Rennie. It was insensitive, I suppose, after Bowen had just stabbed him in the back, to suggest that he should check for two knives.”
Hermann glanced nervously at the door.
“He was very angry. And I don’t think he ever forgave me.”
“For what? For Rennie’s death, or for casting aspersions?”
Hermann shrugged. “Both. Either. For surviving at all. It was my fault he died like that. And I got out alive, through dumb luck. He and Rennie were... they were very close. ”
Newt made a face.
Seeing no reason to delay beginning repairs on this decade-old psychological damage, he said, “It wasn’t actually your fault, you know.”
Hermann frowned. “What?”
“You obviously feel guilty about Rennie’s death. You shouldn’t. You were out of your depth. And anyway, Rennie would have probably bit it during the purge, regardless of what you did.”
Hermann squinted at him, his feelings so far removed from Newton’s blunt diagnosis that he could muster no actual offense. Guilty? That didn’t even begin to cover it. But how could he explain the inescapable knowledge that he had led the executioners to a man’s door, or the price of an un-re-payable debt to someone he had not even trusted—and still did not? And the interest on that debt, extracted from him for ten years with Victor’s every cold look, brimming with the blame he knew he deserved?
The knowledge that he had almost been one of them? A traitor, a defector, a promise-breaker?
“So that was the end of the Wagner operation,” said Hermann. “I was debriefed. Becket showed up later, told Victor some story, and the case was closed. I suspect the Americans swooped into the space we left. And I think they had more success, because they must have stolen the second component.”
“The transducer?” said Newt.
Hermann nodded.
“And now, some descendant of the original is in your ear.”
“So where’s the transmitter?”
“In my safe deposit box.”
“Ha, ha. I mean the original.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know whether it was Becket or Rennie who originally stole it, but it resurfaced in Germany two years ago.”
“Resurfaced?”
Hermann rubbed his eyes as Newt climbed onto the bed.
“Yes. I read the Greenwich file today...” But suddenly he felt so tired.
“Yeah? So that’s what Greenwich was working on?”
Hermann nodded, eyes closed.
“Okay, so, if I’ve got this timeline straight,” said Newton, sitting up with the air of someone starting a speech. “In 1963...”
Hermann sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
“...A UFO crashes in Germany,” said Newton, driving on despite what Hermann considered obvious cease-and-desist signals. “Fine. Totally. I accept it.”
“Do you?” said Hermann with unexpected force, dropping his hand and looking up at Newt. “You’ve certainly taken it with an unusual level of credulity.”
“What—should I not believe you? Did you want me to be more shocked? Ooh, aah, aliens! I saw a UFO as a kid, you know. I’ve told you that. In Cambridge. My roommate was all, ‘It’s just a plane, Geiszler,’ but hello—”
“Newton—stop, please, just stop,” said Hermann. “I’m exhausted. I’ve got to sleep.”
“Oh,” said Newt. “Sorry.”
He fell silent with abrupt shame. Hermann left to brush his teeth. Newt watched him go. After ten years, did he still not know how to handle his partner’s worst emotions? Or, worse—had this confession revealed some unknown, insensitive facet of Hermann’s character? Someone who lashed out in shame?
If Newt Geiszler had possessed accessing skills to match his memory banks, he would have recognized the person who had lashed out as the cornered, frightened mathematician he had met eleven years before, the one who had accepted his Blueberry designs and rejected him. After all, that was the Hermann who had gone to East Berlin, and so he was bound to appear now to give his testimony. Newt had forgotten the way Hermann had once made him feel—excessive and overwrought and ashamed—because he’d forgiven him for it so long ago.
“We can talk more in the morning,” Hermann said when he returned. “I’ll set the alarm early.”
“Are you going to the office tomorrow?” Newt asked, looking up at him as he took off his shirt.
“Yes,” said Hermann. “Could you put the clothing out to be laundered?”
Newt nodded, accepting the clothes surrendered to him. Hermann climbed into bed and was asleep in minutes. Newt, still sitting at the end of the bed, stared for a few minutes at Hermann’s sleeping face. His foot pressed lightly into Newt’s leg. He wished he could hear what Hermann was thinking, what he was really thinking. Not because he suspected that Hermann harbored other secrets—Newt’s mind didn’t work that way. He just didn’t understand Hermann’s distress, and was in the habit of blaming all their fractious moments on Hermann’s emotional reticence.
After a few minutes, Newt stood up carefully, gathered the pieces of the telephone, and switched off the light. He brought the pieces into the bathroom, threaded the cord under the door, and shut it. He laid everything out on the bathmat. As he put the phone back together, he examined each piece. He wasn’t really expecting to find a bug or wire. And he didn’t.
When it was reassembled, he considered it for a moment. Then with the tension of a question, he got to his feet and shut off the bathroom light. He let the darkness settle around him and sharpen his other senses. A faint orange strip glowed under the door. He heard the furnace below, the pipes above. Distantly, the traffic. And below it all, the quiet ring that had persisted all day in his left ear.
He had tried several ways of amplifying that tone, while alone in Hermann’s flat. He had put a glass over his ear to create a resonating chamber; he had pressed his ear against the radio and turned the dial. But he had found no difference, no amplification. Not until he’d answered Hermann’s phone call.
Newt lifted the receiver to his left ear and listened to the empty dial tone in the dark. Nothing. He pressed 1. The dial tone stopped. The ringing in his ear was still faint. He tried 2, 3, 4, all the way to 8. He stopped, and pressed 8 again. The 8 tone made a resonance. The ringing in his ear seemed to widen, like it was a tuning fork and the 8 tone was the right note at last. Newt pressed it again and again, tapping out the rhythm of Good Vibrations and humming it under his breath, listening to the standing wave ring through his skull like a church bell tolling.
On the grounds of the boys’ school where Hermann had spent most of his childhood, there was a wide, deep lake. By day, the blue lake was where they learned to swim, to row, and later to sail; but past dusk, the water was black. Unsupervised swimming was strictly forbidden. A boy had drowned there some years ago. He’d dived too deep, his ankles had gotten tangled in the pond weed, and he hadn’t resurfaced.
The circumstances of this drowning were muddled zealously by generations of schoolboys. He was said to have been pushed in, lured in, eaten by a giant snake, or to have drowned himself on purpose. And in the dormitory mythos, it merged with the other object of interest at the lake, which was the dark underwater shape in the northeast corner.
On rare occasions when the boys did manage to sneak down, they secreted a boat out of the boathouse. The opposite shore was dense, dark forest. They never ventured there. Instead, they paddled to the northeast corner of the lake. The water there was clear enough to see, at the bottom, a big dark shape. This, school staff had told them, was simply a large rock. Many boys believed it was a wrecked ship, a sunken bridge, or a crashed warplane; one of them said it was an alien craft.
But none of the fantastical explanations for the drowning were more terrifying to Hermann than the real one. And the mystery of the rock—or ship—paled next to the danger of drowning, dragged down by mundane, indifferent weeds.
Myths or not, the lake became a permanent fixture in the landscape of his mind. Secrets were large black shapes on the lake floor. Visions of escape were set on that distant wooded shore. Even as an adult, he had nightmares in which he snuck out to swim, against the rules, only to find his legs entangled and the air vanishing from his lungs. Tonight, he dreamed he was rowing on the lake’s flat black surface. The prow of the boat pushed the mist aside. When he reached the northeast corner, he stopped paddling and peered over the edge. His pale face stared back at him. As the dark shipwreck took shape below, something in it quivered and moved. Suddenly he realized that the face in the water was not his. It was Charles Rennie’s. Strong white hands leapt out and dragged Hermann into the dark waters below.
June 5th
Tuesday
The morning started poorly when Hermann discovered that Newton had forgotten about the laundry. There was no room service—it was not that kind of hotel—and Hermann refused to risk going out to eat. So he left Newt and returned with sandwiches in a bag and paper cups of coffee from the lobby. While they ate, he told Newton all that he had learned from the Greenwich file, trying his uncaffeinated best not to snap at him.
“I want to find out what happened to Birch,” Hermann said. “What actually happened.”
“You don’t buy the party line? Kidnapping?”
“No,” said Hermann. “I never did.”
He began collecting his things for work. Newt, still eating, watched him do so with unacknowledged envy. He suddenly dreaded the long day alone in that tiny room.
“You should talk to Stella. Stella McLuhan,” Newt said. Hermann, tying his tie in front of the mirror, nodded curtly.
“Yes.”
“You already thought of that?”
Hermann hadn’t, though it was the obvious thing—everyone knew she and Birch were friends. She’d been treated rather badly in the fallout. In fact, she had been one of Hermann’s teachers at GCHQ. She now ran one of the coding bays upstairs. But he hadn’t had a conversation with her in years, and he dreaded asking a living person any question about this case that they could repeat.
He simply nodded into the glass, trying to keep his unwarranted annoyance in silent check. Newt felt it nonetheless. He came to the mirror to fix Hermann’s collar and straighten his tie, because he only knew how to run at a problem; but even when he kissed his partner on the cheek, Hermann studiously avoided his eyes and told him to stay in the room, not speak with anyone, and wait until his call after work. When Hermann left, Newt collapsed back onto the bed with a sigh.
Hermann commuted alone. It was a relief, the solitude, but he still felt anxious and unresolved. He had expected to feel differently after his Wagner confession—relieved, or absolved, or at least unburdened—but all he felt was touchy and tense. It wasn’t Newton’s fault, but he couldn’t help it.
Today he would follow the Greenwich file to Bernard Birch. Birch was a disgraced former cipher clerk. He had been an energetic, friendly man, somewhat eccentric, once of military intelligence. A few years ago, he had been posted to Vienna. There, working in the secluded Division offices inside the British embassy, he’d enciphered and deciphered messages to and from Becket and his staff. Then one Monday morning last July, he had not come into the office.
Rumors had flown through the support staff networks, a whisper web more robust than even the best op could hope to grow. Hermann remembered hearing of Birch’s disappearance—the radio lab had been among the first in Century to learn the news. Support staff witnessed all of the action from the sidelines. Stories of defections, kidnappings, and nervous breakdowns passed with fearful exaggeration among them. Cipher clerks, with their high levels of access and high-stakes daily tasks, were known flight risks.
No one had believed Birch was that type. But the investigation had found otherwise. They’d discovered a receipt for a train ticket to East Berlin. In his flat, they found a microfilm camera: British-made, but not issued to him. When his phone records were requisitioned from the Viennese phone company, they found a regular Friday night phone call from a long-distance number.
His betrayal sent a tremor of shock through Newt and Hermann’s strata; even as the upper floors pursued their investigation, their peers whispered anxiously. Birch became a traitor to most in the service, and a tragedy to those who had known him.
Whitehall exercised control over the story—in what minor press he received, he was called a ‘deserter.’ There had been no expectation of ever seeing him again.
Then in late September, 1972, he had reappeared.
He was discovered in Prague. He was insensible. Rumor had it that he was damaged beyond even speech. He’d been returned to London, where an inquiry had been launched, which the press had caught wind of, and soon Whitehall was in another minor intelligence scandal.
The headlines ran amok. Repatriated Traitor: Disgraced British Intelligence Officer Returned at Taxpayer Expense. The Spy Who Sold Secrets and Kept His NHS Card. Send Him Back to the Russians! Whitehall’s intelligence committee and the Division’s spokesperson took what had been leaked and shaped it into a palatable story: Birch had been lured, they said, kidnapped, and then tortured. They said that his return was part of a prisoner trade.
Hermann had always had his doubts. He’d never understood how Birch, of all people, could become a traitor. What had lured him from his post? What had they offered him to come over?
And what in God’s name had happened to him over there?
And now Hermann knew that his desertion had coincided approximately with Greenwich’s. Coincidence? Perhaps. But instinct told Hermann it was a meaningful thread. It was not the Greenwich connection alone that raised his suspicions; it was the subsequent cover-up, and that scent of Division secrecy and mismanagement which had troubled him all along.
Stella might know something about Birch; but she was only a friend. She hadn’t worked with him in Vienna—there was no reason she would know the truth. No reason to involve her in his inquiries. No reason to trust her, really.
He held onto a pole as the train lurched forwards. Somebody holding onto the same pole had the word STAMPS scrawled across the back of his hand, and below, in smaller letters, juice, bread. He thought of Newton. He would have to go shopping before he went home. To the hotel, that was. Not home. And they would have to move hotels. There was so much to do, and he felt alone doing it.
Hermann spent the morning in the computer bay, entering the cumulative Orpheus data. The IBM had been purchased in the last few years. It had a massive memory, but it was a bit beyond the Division, as an institution. They didn’t really know how to integrate its massive database into their venerable intelligence processes. As a result, it was understaffed, and Hermann and Wesley had to do a lot of the hands-on programming.
Unlike the Blueberry, which was merely a processor (and now a bit outdated), the IBM was a database computer. It stored personnel records, including travel records. Referring to Victor’s list of “suspects,” they looked up a personnel code in the paper directory. They entered that number into the IBM, calling up the file. Then they directed the computer to interface with Orpheus’s transmission record. If they found a travel record matching the locations and dates of the Orpheus transmissions, they found the spy.
As a former employee of GCHQ, the computing and surveillance headquarters of the British secret services, Hermann had little patience for doing this the old-fashioned way—least of all to hunt for a culprit who probably didn’t exist.
“I left GCHQ twelve years ago,” Hermann was saying to Wesley, “And I swear the machines they had then were more efficient than this one.”
“It’s a shame,” Wesley said, paging through the directory looking for a Smith. “A lot of computing progress was lost after the war, you know. All destroyed. Top secret. Really a shame.” This was one of Wesley’s frequent complaints. “I used to know Tommy Flowers, you know.”
“I don’t think you’re meant to tell me that, Dr. Wesley,” Hermann said flatly. “Do you have the ID number?”
“Oh—yes,” said Wesley, and read it off. Hermann entered it into the computer. “We only went to school together,” he added, as the IBM hummed. Hermann ignored him and limped down the bay to where the dot matrix was whining. He watched the output emerge. He could see there was no match.
“Negative,” he said, tearing it off. “Wesley—let’s do a batch in a row and check them all at once. It’ll be more efficient.”
“Certainly, certainly, Hermann,” Wesley said, standing up from his chair. “I’ve just got to step out. I’ll only be a moment.”
Frustrated, Hermann sighed out his nose as Wesley shuffled out. Then he realized that, since he was alone, he could look up Birch’s personnel file.
He hurried to the directory, looked up Birch’s personnel number, and entered it into the IBM. The machine printed his record at the other end of the room. Hermann hurried back over and tore off the output.
To his disappointment, it was less than two pages long. A bulleted summary of his government career. His treason—his first known contact with the other side—was dated several months before his desertion. His return was referenced in the final paragraph, vaguely. It said only that he was sighted in Prague, and not by whom.
Birch’s employment had officially terminated October 25th, 1972. There was no information about where he was now.
Who found him? Where had they hidden him away?
Who had sanitized his record?
Hermann heard footsteps and hurriedly fed Birch’s record into the paper shredder. When Wesley came back in, he said quickly, “No match.”
He returned to their tedious task, frustrated. The full case file for Birch’s disappearance could be in Century Central, but he didn’t remember the number, so he couldn’t steal it—he’d have to ask outright, and he didn’t want to leave a trail. And it might not even be there.
He was brooding on the problem, paying even less attention to his labmate’s Fermat chatter than usual, when a different name brought him out of his reverie.
“What’s that?”
“Newt? He’s still out, is he?”
Wesley had paused with the paper directory open.
“Yes—I suppose,” said Hermann.
“Weeks said he’s sick,” Wesley said. “You haven’t heard from him, then?”
“No,” said Hermann, but Wesley, he realized, would not believe that. “But I’ll call him tonight and find out how he is.” Wesley thought of them as friends, and would notice an absence of contact if he noticed anything at all.
“He’s at home, then?” Wesley said, turning a page and avoiding Hermann’s eye. “I thought he was at the conference.”
“Don’t know,” said Hermann. “I thought so too.”
Wesley’s eyes roved down the columns of names. “Only with all this, and with Orpheus being at the conference...”
“Orpheus?” Hermann said sharply.
Wesley looked at him, frowning. “The signals?”
“Oh. Oh, of course,” said Hermann. The new Orpheus transmission from the weekend, the one sent from close to the Estate: in all the confusion, he had entirely forgotten about it. “Of course. Excuse me. But I think Victor is exaggerating this whole business... If you want my opinion, Orpheus doesn’t exist.”
If he had been less distracted, he might have noticed Wesley’s silence, his uncomfortable nod. Or he might not have. Hermann was not in the habit of taking Dr. Wesley seriously.
At lunch, Hermann went to the crypto registry to look up the August ‘71 2TP transmission, the one mentioned in the Greenwich file. That message had set off the whole thing. Their registry clerk, Aalvar, was leaning back in his chair with a newspaper over his face. He greeted Hermann by name without lifting the paper, and told him to find whatever he needed quietly. Hermann searched the 2TP directory and checked the Blueberry archive. And he left with a queasy combination of frustration and vindication, for the transmission was missing from the files, and its interception had been scrubbed from the record.
After an afternoon of hand-wringing, Hermann decided he would go upstairs to the coding bay and ask to check their records. He didn’t have clearance, but he had tentative hopes of leveraging his title.
But these hopes were dashed when he saw Berkeley at the counter, chatting with the young female clerk behind it.
“Ah, Gottlieb!” he said, smiling uninvitingly.
Berkeley was a case officer, ex-Army, with all the worst self-importance and machismo that came with both titles. He was a contemporary of Raleigh Becket’s. He’d recently been promoted to the North African desk, so he could have no reason to be in this office other than to harass the clerk.
Hermann disliked him immensely.
“You’re busy,” Hermann said, hovering in the doorway. “I’ll come back later.”
“No, no,” said both Berkeley and the clerk at the same time, in two different tones. Hermann hesitated, then came in.
“How is it, down in the basement? Hermann here works in the lab,” he added pedantically to the clerk. “He doesn’t get out much. Where’s your little friend?” he said, back to Hermann. “I haven’t seen that pansy around for a while.”
“Sick,” Hermann said shortly.
“What are you looking for, sir?” the clerk said.
“I—need to look at some files,” Hermann said lamely.
“Which ones?” barked Berkeley. “Excuse him,” he said to the clerk. “They don’t see many women down there.”
Hermann stifled an undiplomatic urge to step on the man’s foot.
“I’d like to look them up myself. Is that possible?” Hermann said.
“Sorry, sir,” she said. “The filing system is too complex. There are too many files, updating all the time. I’ve got to fetch the records for you.”
Hermann nodded, heart sinking.
“Would you like me to step out?” Berkeley said, in a voice that invited a ‘No, that’s quite all right.’
“Yes, if you don’t mind,” Hermann said abruptly. “This is a sensitive inquiry.”
Berkeley made a face. “Oh, well, if it’s a sensitive inquiry, then I suppose I’d better leave you two alone… Gottlieb. Miss.”
Hermann stood still, frozen with furious humiliation, until he heard the door close.
The clerk exhaled and looked at Hermann. If she was looking for commiseration, she was disappointed. He intended to act like nothing had happened. Without looking at her, he said, “I need the twotime transmission from August, 1971, please.”
“Certainly sir,” she said mechanically. Hermann watched in agony as she wrote it down on a slip of paper, and then disappeared into the stacks.
He waited for several minutes. Just as Hermann heard her hurried step, he saw a woman pass by the window into the hall. It was Stella McLuhan.
He turned quickly back to the counter. The clerk was back. Her hands were empty.
“Sorry sir, it appears we didn’t get a 2TP transmission that month,” she said.
“There’s nothing?” Hermann said in surprise.
“You’re certain it was August?”
“Quite—” Hermann stopped himself. “No, perhaps I’m mistaken,” he amended. “I’ll have to double-check. I’ll come back tomorrow. Thank you.”
“Of course,” she said.
Hermann exited into the coding bay. This was the department with the most manpower in Century; it took up several floors. But manpower was the wrong word, for the majority of the decoding clerks were women. Each bay covered a different region of the world.
As he waited for the lift, he looked across the hall to the other set of glass doors: Decoding. Eurasia. That meant Russia. It should have read “deciphering.” That was one of Hermann’s pet peeves.
Today the files had disappointed him. It felt like someone was sneaking ahead of him, clearing signs from the path—unsnapping twigs and sweeping dirt over footprints. Would the clerk destroy that slip of paper? He hated knowing that he was leaving traceable tracks.
Through the glass into the Russia bay, he could see a few women still at work. If he wasn’t mistaken, this was Stella’s section.
Hermann closed his eyes and sighed. File-spelunking was getting him nowhere. He had to ask somebody—he had no other choice.
“Miss McLuhan?”
Stella looked up from her desk in her small office at the front of the Russia bay.
“Hermann!” she said, in her surprisingly high voice. She stood and crossed the room to clasp his hand with both of hers. “What a wonderful surprise. Oh dear, it’s been so long—so long. How long has it been?”
“I don’t know,” Hermann said, trying to smile. Stella McLuhan was a small woman on the later side of middle age, with quick brown eyes and beautiful dark hair. She wore it up, in an old-fashioned style, which made her look older and more matronly than she actually was. Back in the ‘40s, just after the war, she’d answered an oblique job posting for girls who were “good with numbers” and who “enjoyed puzzles.” She was a natural. A few years later, when Hermann was training at GCHQ, she’d been one of his instructors—the only female instructor, at the time.
“I was hoping we could talk,” Hermann said, unsure how to put the question. “Are you busy?”
“Talk? Is something wrong?”
“Not urgent,” Hermann lied. “Can I walk you out?”
She took his meaning. “Certainly,” she said. “I was just, I was just leaving. Let me get my things.”
“Oh—it’s Bernard you wanted to talk about? My, you should have said so.”
They were in the corner booth of a café, far from Century. She sat up a little straighter, and patted the side of her hair with the air of a press secretary. She fixed her bright eyes on him—brighter, now, in self-defense. Birch’s disgrace had harmed her by association.
“What were his particular interests?” Hermann asked as two coffees were set down in front of them. “He studied physics before he joined the service, is that right?”
“Yes, oh yes,” said Stella. “Particle physics. He missed it. He was always keeping up with the research, reading all the new developments, telling me all about them. All the public ones, anyway. He was a little... superstitious about the work the government was doing in that field.”
“What government? Our government?”
Stella nodded. “Ours, theirs, the States. All that. I think it was the work he would have really liked to do, physics, but maybe it would have been too much for his nerves. They got worse the older he got. His nerves did. He wasn’t always like that, you know. Not when we met.”
“At GCHQ?”
“That’s right,” she replied. “Class of ‘47. Most of the others in training were men, of course, so they either paid me far too much attention or none at all. Bernard was an odd duck, you know, so he talked to me. At me, is more like it. I don’t think he really noticed that I was a girl at first—he only noticed that I wasn’t telling him to piss off.” She smiled. “After we completed the course, I stayed on to teach, and he got assigned to military intel. I think he was in the radar area, though he couldn’t tell me, of course. But we always stayed in touch. Letters, dinner, you know, whenever he was in town. He proposed to me once, you know, after too much wine, but I told him not to be silly.”
Hermann smiled. He had forgotten how much he liked Miss McLuhan.
“Bernard was in MI for, oh, seven years. Nearly. He got transferred back to us in ‘62. I was working at Century by then, you know, managing the girls in the coding bay.” A lock of hair swung free, and she re-pinned it as she continued. “It transpired that the event that had made him finally impossible to work with was the Cuban Missile Crisis. He had become obsessed with the idea of these secret Soviet missile bases. Wouldn’t concentrate on anything else. His bosses finally had enough. They transferred him.”
Hermann frowned and nodded. “It’s strange how an idea can take hold like that,” he said.
Stella nodded, looking at the window behind Hermann’s head. “Yes, yes. Very strange. Bernard was always that type. He was looking for that—that one great discovery. He wasn’t meant for this business, I think, Dr. Gottlieb. He should have stayed in physics. Research. At a university. Not working for the government. But he couldn’t resist it.”
Over the next few years, working together in London, she had watched his paranoia grow in secret. He had talked less of scientific papers, and more particularly of Soviet nuclear studies. He had done everything he could to get his hands on their research intercepts, even the ones that didn’t come through their coding bay.
“Then he was dispatched to Austria. I didn’t think it was a good idea, you know, sending him into the field,” she said. “He wasn’t exactly a spring chicken. But he was excited. I think he wanted to get closer.”
“Closer?” said Hermann.
“To the Wall. The Iron Curtain. He thought there were secret bases in Austria.” Stella’s voice became oddly sharp. “I mean. I don’t know what idea he had in his head—to find one in the forest and sneak in? One little man with no field training? I have no idea what he was thinking. I really don’t.”
Hermann looked away, abashed by her flare of anger.
“Well, he got what he wanted,” she said. “Because the next time he visited home, he told me he had met someone.”
“Someone?”
“Someone from the other side,” she said. “An informant. I didn’t believe him. But he was so certain—so certain.”
“I don’t understand,” Hermann said. “Birch was the informant.”
“It was a trade.” She rubbed her eyes. “He had a contact with information about the GDR’s nuclear missile project. They were sharing it with him, in exchange for information of his own. Of course that’s not how he explained it to me, and I thought the whole thing was a con. Which—well, it was. Just not the way I thought.”
“So you believe he was tricked?” said Hermann.
“Tricked? Yes, of course,” she said, dropping her hand from her face. “Of course he was tricked. He was desperate for information—they manipulated him. They fed falsehoods to him, while pumping him for information.”
Hermann said nothing, only nodded.
“Then, last year, in the spring, he visited home once more. He told me that his boss—I forget his name, do you need it?”
Hermann shook his head.
“Well, Bernard said the Vienna station was in touch with a nuclear scientist. A defector. He was very anxious that this man come over to our side. He said he was working on a very dangerous project.”
There was a sliver of ice digging into Hermann’s heart. Greenwich. If only Birch had known the truth. Not nuclear missiles—something far less destructive, and far more sinister.
“Bernard told me he was going to use his contact to get to that defector—but that was insanity, of course, all just—”
Hermann looked up quickly. Without warning, her voice had fragmented. Her mouth was trembling. “And that—that was the last time I saw Bernard.”
She shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut.
“He was gone for all those months... I thought for certain he was dead... and then...”
Hermann’s heart was in his gut. “What about when he came back? You didn’t see him?”
She kept shaking her head. “No, no. They never let me see him.”
Hermann pulled his handkerchief out and wrapped it anxiously around his palm under the table. “But...”
“They wouldn’t even tell me where—where he was—where they were keeping him—” Stella rested her elbow on the table and shaded her eyes. “They say he’s—out of his mind, doesn’t know where he is, but—but—”
Sobs shook her shoulders. Hermann handed her the handkerchief. She took it with her free hand but only clenched it in her fist.
“—But I kept thinking—if they would just let me see him, that I could help... And now...”
She pressed the handkerchief to her eyes, and breathed in a great shuddering breath.
“Oh, Hermann, I’m so sorry,” she said, eyes still covered.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry that it... happened.”
She patted his arm, still wiping her face.
“I shouldn’t get so worked up. It was just such a mess, you know.”
“I know.”
Stella sniffed.
“I just don’t understand why,” Hermann said. “Why did he turn?”
“For information,” she said in a light, brittle voice. “I’m sure he didn’t see it as a betrayal—only a transaction. It wouldn’t have been a contradiction to him. He wasn’t a traitor, Hermann. He wasn’t a spy. He was a scientist. He just wanted to know.”
She drew her hand back.
“But they manipulated him. They used him. And then when he ran away to East Germany, they... tortured him.”
Hermann reclaimed his handkerchief while she, frowning, drank some coffee. Her defense of Birch, her faith in him despite it all, was heartbreaking.
“Who found him in Prague?” he said. “The report said he was wandering on somebody’s property. One of our people recognized him in a local newspaper. Do you know who it was?”
“It was Chara,” she said. “The head of the Marathon network.”
“Chara?”
She nodded. There was a short silence.
“Miss—Stella,” Hermann began with difficulty. “If anybody asks whether we’ve spoken…”
She shook her head. “Of course. But Hermann. If you find out where he is, where they’re keeping him, you’ll tell me?”
Hermann nodded. “Yes.”
Stella excused herself. When she reappeared, face pale and eyes scrubbed, Hermann had already paid the bill. He walked her to her bus, trying to formulate his last question.
“In the... decoding bay, who is it that deciphers the 2TP matches, generally?”
“Oh, that’s by region,” she said. “Most of them come in through Eastern Europe, I think.”
“Is there one particular clerk who takes care of them?”
“They’re rare these days, aren’t they?” Stella said. “Oh, there’s my bus. No, no one in particular. At least, not in my section. They may run it differently in E.E.”
“Right,” said Hermann, heart sinking. He watched her bus go, then trudged to a phone booth.
He had no idea where to look for the ‘71 2TP transmission. Every route was a dead end. The day felt like a failure.
He called several downtown hotels in the phone booth directory and asked their availability. Finally, he found one—large, corporate—with two adjacent single rooms available. He booked them.
Through the glass, he watched the front doors of a ballet school open across the street. Kids in their teens and early twenties spilled onto the sidewalk, over-bundled in the spring air, bags slung over their shoulders. Two girls linked arms; one boy spun a twirl, making his classmates laugh. Hermann thought about the world of spies through which his colleagues traveled. The web of dark alleys, seedy bars, the clubs, brothels, libraries, offices, airports, where spies exchanged their covert goods on the market of information. The journalists collecting disinformation, the soldiers stealing blueprints, the diplomats sleeping with other diplomats’ wives. That was the world of Rennie and Bowen and Victor’s golden years, the world Becket and Berkeley had inherited. It was not his world. The support staff—himself, Newton, Stella, Wesley; Mme Marsden; Caitlin, long ago; Birch, until a few months ago; Rennie’s long-dead cipher clerk, whose name Hermann had already forgotten—they stood by like the telephone wires on which those important people sent their vital messages; they were the poles, they were the catenaries. The spies came and went, but they were fixed: inflexible, under-repaired, overlooked.
Newt was tired. Tired of flipping between BBC 1 and BBC 2. Tired of this ugly carpet. Tired of this headache. Tired of the vague dizziness, the distant ringing. It was louder today. Most of all, he was tired of having nothing to do.
He heard footsteps in the hall and looked up. They stopped right outside his door. Cursing, Newt scrambled up, made unsteadily for the closet, and dove inside. He wedged himself into the dark back corner, head spinning. He listened hard, panting, hand cupped around his good ear. Then the footsteps shuffled onward. He heard a squeaky wheel.
It was the housekeeper.
He slumped back against the scratchy spare blankets. False alarm. Of course. Housekeeper. Obviously.
He closed his eyes. The ringing vibrated in his left ear canal.
How did you get here? he asked himself.
You acted stupid, and now you’re acting stupider, answered the voice in his head.
Yeah, he thought. Sounds about right.
Why had he done it? At the time, it had simply seemed the thing to do—the natural next step in the transmitter investigation. He wasn’t sure he regretted it, still, but a new dread was growing as he confronted a consequence not previously considered.
Treason was one thing. But he was starting to consider that this incident might have been bona fide professional suicide.
If Hermann couldn’t prove he was being framed—which was tough, when he was 100% guilty—he was, at the least, probably going to lose his job.
And why? What for? Why throw a stick of dynamite into the works of a 20-year engineering career? He thought of the Langley incident.
Newt took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes. Solitary confinement was going to drive him crazy.
He crawled out of the closet and got back on his feet. He rubbed his rug-burned hands together, then made his way to the phone. He dialed Caitlin Lightcap’s work number.
The phone stopped mid-ring and a voice said “Lightcap.”
“Yello.”
“Hey kid,” she said, voice warming. “How’ve you been?”
Newt flopped back on the bedspread and looked up at the ceiling. “Oh, me? Never mind about me. How are you, chum?”
“Just peachy, pal,” she said.
“Tell me about your day.”
“Same old,” she said, and he heard the sound of a hole puncher. “We still on for tonight?”
“Tonight?” He groaned. “Oh, shit. It’s Tuesday.”
“You forget what day of the week it is?”
Newt was rubbing his eyes, frustrated. “No—yes—God dammit.”
They had band practice tonight. He’d forgotten completely. And he couldn’t go, because he was in hotel prison. Newt hated letting the girls down—especially Caitlin. The band was one of the few bright spots in her life.
He heard her sigh angrily on the other end. “Well, yes. The rumors are true. It is Tuesday. And we have practice.”
Newt said nothing.
“Right?”
“Right...”
“Look, man, if you’re canceling on me, just say so.”
“No, no—” Newt winced, feeling the full weight of his obligation to her. “Yeah, I’m really, really sorry, but I won’t be able to make it...”
There was a long silence on the line. Newt’s dread grew with every second.
“Man—I’m sorry,” he said, overwhelmed with the feeling that he let everyone down, everyone in his life, without fail. “Really, it’s just that some stuff has come up, and I can’t really get out right now... I’m sorry, I’ll make it up to you, I just—”
There was a sound as she stopped sucking her teeth.
“Lightcap?”
“Yeah?”
Her voice was still tense.
“Can you do me a favor?”
“A favor?”
“Can I borrow a guitar?”
“A guitar? What’s wrong with yours?”
“For practice.”
“Did your goddamn house burn down? Is that what’s going on?”
“Ha—no. No, I kind of wish, but no, I just need to...”
Some chord in his disappointed laugh tipped her off. Her voice turned on a dime.
“Need to what? I’ll bring it over. The guitar. No problem. Just tell me where.”
He gave the name of the hotel. “Room 237. Just leave it at the reception desk.”
“All right. I will. Should I cancel the gig tomorrow?”
“Maybe,” Newt said sadly. “Well, maybe not. I don’t know. Do you mind singing?”
“If you don’t show up? I can manage. Up to you, really.”
Newt chewed his lip.
“I’ll call you.”
“All right.”
“I want to come. I’ll try to come. We should... talk.”
“Ominous.”
Newt said nothing.
“I’ll drop the guitar off after work,” she said. “Don’t scratch on it.”
“I won’t.”
“And don’t do anything weird with it.”
“Weird? Me?”
“I’ll tell Laurie and Vivian. We’ll see you tomorrow. Or maybe not.”
“Thanks. You’re the best.”
“I know. Take it easy, kid.”
“Bye.”
Caitlin rang off, and Newt listened to the dial tone for another moment before hanging up too.
“Newton, where in God’s name did you get that?”
Newt stopped strumming the guitar. The door to their room closed behind Hermann with an ominous click.
“Good afternoon to you too,” Newt said, not turning as Hermann came in. “Or is it evening? I’ve lost track of the time.”
“I told you not to leave this room,” Hermann said to Newt’s back, as Newt sighed and closed his eyes. He heard no sound of Hermann taking his jacket off or putting his bag down. That meant he wanted a fight. “I know you don’t take threats to your safety seriously, but I do, and if you don’t—”
“Hermann! I didn’t leave the damn room, all right?” Newt said, setting the guitar down with a hollow twang. “I had it delivered. Will you settle down?”
“Delivered by whom?”
“Caitlin! She brought it over, left it at the desk, and then someone brought it up to the room. I’ve been in here. All day. Nobody has laid eyes on my precious face. How exactly do you plan on covertly changing hotels? Will we be schlepping through secret tunnels, Dr. Gottlieb?”
Hermann closed his eyes and sighed through his nose, dropping his briefcase onto the carpet. “Yes. We’re going. I’ve booked the rooms. Collect your things. I’ll call a cab.”
He went into the bathroom and shut the door. Newt heard the tap turn on.
“It’s boring as shit being in hiding, you know that, Hermann?” Newt said to the closed door. “And you know, I was actually looking forward to finally talking to someone, after being by myself all day. And instead what I get is scolded. I had absolutely nothing to do until Cait dr—”
The door reopened.
“The walls here are extremely thin,” said Hermann with condescending evenness. “I could hear you playing from the lift. I suggest you quiet down.”
Newt sighed frustratedly and stood up. He put the guitar into its hard-backed case and shut it with excessive force. He dropped his arms to his sides.
“There. Packed.”
Hermann spared him a glance, infuriatingly blank, and went to the phone to call down to the concierge for a taxi. Newt stalked into the bathroom and retrieved their toothbrushes.
A short, silent cab ride brought them to their new temporary home, a tall, bland hotel with a prefabricated lobby full of hideously colored mid-century seating. The rooms themselves were less offensive, carpeted and upholstered in various shades of gunmetal gray. They had a connected pair of rooms, better appointed than the single room they’d left: each had a full-size bed, a sofa, a television, a radio, an A/C unit, a desk with an anglepoise lamp, and wide windows overlooking the busy street. It was a clear, cool day; the sun had sunk behind buildings already, leaving an empty blue sky.
Newt could tell that Hermann’s investigations today had gone poorly, but Hermann refused to explain anything until Newt had searched the new room for listening devices. While he did so, Hermann unpacked the sparse luggage he had bought—a few changes of clothes, razors, soap.
“All clear?” Hermann asked when Newt returned from the adjoining room.
“Yeah,” Newt said. He frowned at the clothes Hermann had bought for him, still packed into the bag on his bed. Did Hermann want him take his things into the other bedroom?
“What? You disapprove of my choices?”
“No,” said Newt, unsure if a fight was coming, and ambivalent about starting one. “I mean, probably. But—you had time to pick all this up, but not to go to the bank and get my transmitter?”
Hermann stubbornly avoided Newt’s eyes. “This was more important,” he said.
Newt sighed.
“Do you want me to take my stuff into the other room and sleep there?” he finally asked.
“What?”
Newt frowned at Hermann.
“No—I only booked two rooms for—appearances. Of course not.”
Mollified, Newt nodded. Hermann felt a stab of guilt for giving Newt such a cold shoulder. Hermann sat down at the desk, leaning his cane against it, and looked at the couch. Newt sat down on top of the desk.
“I think Victor is right,” Hermann said. “I think there’s a mole in the Division.”
Hermann told him what he’d learned—or, for the most part, not learned—in the office that day.
“So you think someone scrubbed Birch’s file, and the 2TP from the British defector,” Newt said. “The same person.”
“Yes,” said Hermann.
“A mole.”
“Yes.”
“It could be institutional,” Newt pointed out. “Birch was a scandal. All that was patched up. The missing file could just be another patch.”
Hermann shook his head. “He knew about Greenwich. Stella said—”
“Yeah, yeah. I guess.”
“And what about the 2TP? What reason would the fifth floor have to hide that?”
“The Greenwich connection?” Newt suggested.
Hermann shook his head. “There’s something else in that message.”
Newt was still frowning, unconvinced.
“How are you feeling?” Hermann asked into the silence. “How’s your ear?”
“Ear? It’s all right,” Newt lied. The ringing was worse, but it was nothing to worry about. He didn’t want to set all Hermann’s crazy alarm bells off.
“Are you still dizzy?”
“Off and on.”
“Is it worse?”
“About the same,” Newt said with persistent optimism.
Hermann frowned and looked away out the window, at the high-rise across the street. Its many windows were reflecting the setting sun. Newt leaned back, hugging one of his knees.
“I want to know who that British source is,” Hermann said, half to himself. “I want to know who sold them the transmitter. I wanted that 2TP message. I wanted to decipher it.”
Newt glanced at him.
“What about asking me?”
Hermann looked at Newt. “Asking you what?”
“For the transmission.”
Hermann stared at him.
Newt raised his eyebrows.
“Do you remember it?” Hermann said in shock.
“Yes,” said Newt, like Hermann was the densest person he’d ever met. “Obviously!”
“And when exactly were you planning on telling me—?”
“Oh my god, Hermann, just give me the notepad.” He stood up and tugged Hermann’s arm. Hermann surrendered the desk chair. “Of course I remember it. Hello? Human Xerox? How can you forget this so often, Hermann, my god. You don’t even care about my stupendous brain. You only love me for my body.”
Hermann watched in amazement as Newt closed his eyes and began to scribble letters in groups of five onto the notepad, his hand moving feverishly.
“The groups don’t actually...”
“Shut up.”
“...matter,” Hermann finished. “And did you see the original matched transmission as well?”
“Yes, yes,” said Newt, tearing a page off and continuing on the next. “It was from September 1950.”
Hermann watched him fill a third, and then a fourth page.
“Done,” said Newt. “And the match...” He began transcribing the matching message.
“Newton,” said Hermann. “Are you in the habit of memorizing all the OTP transmissions that the Blueberry processes?”
“Everyone’s got a hobby,” Newt said, still writing. “No—I mean, yes. Only the matches. I usually take a look.”
“Why on Earth do you do that?”
“Are you seriously complaining about it right now?”
Hermann opened his mouth to retort. Again, it occurred to him how much sensitive information was stored inside of Newton’s head. Nobody at the Division had any idea how much. Not even Hermann.
A few minutes later, Newt tore the last page off triumphantly. He put both packets together and handed them up to Hermann. “Done,” he said. “Can you do anything with these? Or do you need to take them to your buddy Stella?”
Hermann looked offended. “I may be a bit rusty, but I can still handle a matched set of Vigenère ciphers, I should think.”
“They’re OTP, Hermann. There’s no key.”
“Yes, there is. It’s just long. But when you have two messages, it isn’t difficult. It just takes a bit of time.”
“Fine, then, if you’re so smart.” Newt stood up to offer the chair, then grabbed the edge of the desk. “Oy—too fast.”
Hermann steadied his arm. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Newt said, opening his eyes. “I’m fine. Sit. Decode.”
Hermann sat. “Decipher,” he corrected, putting on his glasses.
Newt rolled his eyes and sat back on the couch. Hermann leaned intently over the messages. “And the first message—do you remember where it came from?”
“Hamburg. Embassy message, I think.”
“Lucky,” Hermann muttered. So both messages were in German. He squinted, then took off his glasses and cleaned them with his tie. It had been a while since he’d done an OTP by hand. He put his glasses back on and started writing out a Vigenère Square.
In the long, underhanded history of cryptography, an uncrackable cipher is the holy grail. Many have tried to invent a cipher that can only be read by the sender and the recipient. The onetime pad system is, in a vacuum, that cipher. It cannot be deciphered.
The OTP is descended from the Vigenère Cipher, a fairly secure form of enciphering. The cipher is created using a Vigenère Square, a grid of 26 alphabets resembling a multiplication table. The first alphabet starts with A (A=a, B=b, C=c... Z=z), the second with B, (B=a, C=b, D=c... A=z) and so on, until Z (Z=a, A=b, B=c...Y=z). The completed table is a list of all possible Caesar cipher keys.
Each letter of the message is encoded according to a ‘key,’ a prearranged word. Each letter of this key corresponds to a line in the Vigenère Square. So, in an enciphered message, the first letter of the message corresponds to the first letter of the keyword: if the keyword is, say, “NEWTON,” the sender encodes the first letter according the “N” alphabet, the second in the “E” alphabet, and so on. They repeat the keyword as many times as necessary.
Because each character is encoded from a different alphabet, the cipher is extremely difficult to decrypt. But not impossible. The repetition of the keyword is what makes it vulnerable. A clever cryptanalyst can discover the length of the keyword, and then analyze the frequency of letters in the message to unravel its meaning.
The onetime pad solves that weakness: instead of a repeating key, the key is the same length as the message. And the key itself is a completely random set of letters. This random set of letters is distributed on a pad of paper to only two people. They can then exchange completely secure messages, only to one another, only using each key once. Each letter is encoded on a random line of the Vigenère Square, and the interceptor is never the wiser. It is really, truly unbreakable.
Unless the same key is used more than once.
Perfect cryptographical methods may exist, but perfect organizations do not. The Razvedka’s accidental duplicate set of keypads made a subset of their messages vulnerable to attack. It was this weakness that Newt and Hermann’s Blueberry computer exploited. But Hermann didn’t need a computer to decipher two messages that matched. All he needed was a Vigenère Square.
Hermann was familiarizing himself with the two messages, planning his strategy. Now, they were just a patternless set of letters. But soon, he would pry them apart.
He started with a crib. A crib is a word the analyst assumes to be present in the ciphertext—usually a common word, like “the,” or a name, or a day of the week.
Hermann knew that this message was in German, and he knew when it was sent, so it probably contained the German word for August (August). The first letter of the ciphertext was “N.” Assuming that this represented “A,” that meant that it corresponded to the “N” alphabet. He repeated this with the next three letters, acting as though they spelled out “AUG.” Then he turned his attention to the first message. The two messages shared a random key; assuming that his crib was correct, then he knew the first three alphabets in that key: N, P, E. So he tried the first three letters of the ciphertext according to his key. They revealed “BSO.” Probably not correct. He started over. Assume that “August” starts at the second letter...
Newt lay on the couch, staring at nothing, listening to the scratching of Hermann’s pen. After a few moments he heard another crossing-out, and heard Hermann sigh to himself. He turned to look up. He was staring at the messages with a blank focus Newt recognized. He saw a less intense rendition of it every Sunday over the crossword. It was the total focus of the puzzlemaster. The hotel would have to catch fire or collapse before Hermann took notice.
So Newt got up and took the guitar into the other room to practice. As he was closing the door between their rooms, Hermann said:
“You can leave it open.”
Newt paused.
“The door?”
“Yes. If you’re going to play.”
Newt smiled. “Sure.”
An hour or so later, Newt was hungry. He didn’t hear anything from the other room, so he set the guitar down, took the notepad from his desk, and checked on Hermann.
His partner was standing in front of the window, stretching. The desk was entirely covered in papers, filled to the margins with numbers and letters.
“Hey,” said Newt, approaching with his notepad. “Thought you might need a spare.”
“Thank you. I will soon.” Hermann set it on the desk. “I’m just taking a break.”
“It looks like it’s going well,” Newt said. “Did you find a crib?”
Hermann nodded. “Yes. I have the first few words.”
“Impressive.”
Hermann shrugged modestly, leaning back against the edge of the desk. He began to loosen his tie. “It’s nothing too complex, once you get going.”
Newt smiled wryly. “Right. Nothing too complex.”
Hermann returned his version of a smile, eyes flicking down. “I’ll have it done by morning,” he said.
“But you’re taking a break?” Newt said, moving a little closer. “Right?”
“That’s right.”
“May I?”
Hermann dropped his hands to let Newt take over tie-untying duties. “You’re too kind.”
“The pleasure’s all mine, Dr. Gottlieb,” said Newt. He unknotted the tie, then unbuttoned Hermann’s top shirt button, pulled the tie free, and tossed it aside with a flourish that made Hermann laugh. Then he slid his hands under Hermann’s jacket, around his waist, and kissed him.
Newt pushed Hermann back so he sat on the desk. Hermann made some noises of objection as several papers slid off, but Newt kept him quiet. He pushed Hermann’s jacket off and threw it aside onto the couch.
Hermann leaned back for a second of air. Newt secured his position between Hermann’s knees and started playing with the straps of his suspenders.
“You know it’s 1973, right? Not 1913?” he said as Hermann took his glasses off, chain and all, and set them on the desk.
“Braces are more secure,” Hermann said primly.
“You’d wear suspenders and a belt if you could,” Newt said, and nosed under Hermann’s chin, pushing the suspenders back off his shoulders. Hermann exhaled.
“Darling—please, watch the papers.”
“What’s sexier than a little national security risk?” Newt said, while Hermann ran his hands through Newt’s hair.
“Many—things,” managed Hermann, distracted.
“Mm,” Newt said into his ear, and nipped it.
“Newton...” Hermann said a few minutes and a few buttons later. “I’m not—excuse me—I am not having sex with you on this desk.”
“What?” Newt pulled back. “You’re no fun.”
“You’re an idiot,” said Hermann, too breathless to sound believably annoyed. He gave him a light push on the sternum. “I have work to do.”
Newt scoffed, and kissed him again before letting go. Buttoning up a shirt was much less fun than unbuttoning it, so he let Hermann do it himself. “I’m starving. Maybe human computers don’t need to eat, but engineers do. I’m going downstairs.”
“To the restaurant?” Hermann said, looking up anxiously from his shirt buttons.
“Yes,” said Newt. He took over buttoning. “It’s fine. It’s late. It’ll be empty. And you should eat too.”
Hermann had been successfully put at ease; he acquiesced. They ate in the hotel restaurant. A few solo businessmen were scattered among the tables, eating or drinking alone, and there was one family—two parents with their college-age child, who looked uncomfortable on the verge of adulthood. Newt made charming chatter with the lone waiter. They stuck out like a sore thumb, Hermann knew: they looked incongruous together, uncategorizable as a pair. They would have been safer at odds, or separated. But their familiarity was, by now, impossible to hide.
Hermann watched Newt telling the waiter that, yes, in fact, astronauts could one day grow crops on the moon, and would. Somehow the prefabricated restaurant, with its white tablecloths and chintzy carpet, the mass-production with the gaudy veneer of sophistication, felt too unreal for anything to befall them.
“So, okay. All right,” Newt said, sitting back. He took off his glasses, rubbed his face, ran a hand through his already disorderly hair, and put his palms together. Eyes closed, he said. “So. 1963, UFO crashes.”
Newt opened his eyes, reached across the table, and dragged Hermann’s abandoned plate over. He picked up his untouched bread roll.
“UFO. Crashes in Germany.” He dropped the roll onto the plate. “Abteilung takes it to Wagner. It contains some form of valuable technology. They extract it, do science all over it. Make it a workable input-output. Becket breaks in, steals one part.”
He tore the bun in half and held one half up.
“The transmitter,” Hermann said.
“The transmitter. You go to check it out. It’s gone. Someone has stolen it, hidden it somewhere.” He tucked the ‘transmitter’ half under the rim of the plate. “Transmitter is now MIA.
“Bowen disaster breaks. Some unknown time afterwards, we presume, the USA gets ahold of the output half, the transducer.”
He removed the remaining bread piece from the plate.
“Years go by. The Americans are R&D-ing the transducer. The transmitter is still MIA. Separated, and never the twain shall meet.
“Then in 1971, Abetilung hears from someone in Germany. Brit. This guy’s got the transmitter. Same guy who originally stashed it? Someone who bought it? We don’t know. He—or she—sends an encoded message, reusing the onetime code pad—”
“Cipher.”
“Cipher, whatever, yes, the cipher pad. We intercept their message, process it in the Blueberry in August of 1971.”
Hermann nodded. “Yes.”
Newt retrieved the first piece of bread and put it back onto the plate. “So. He sells the transmitter to the Soviets. Or they steal it from him and imprison him—who knows. Then the Raz call in Tovarish Greenwich. They renew their studies with vigor.
“Then Dr. Greenwich gets cold feet, calls up Becket. Shares his research with the Brits. Becket recognizes the tech from the Wagner mission, and hurries over to get Greenwich’s testimony... and his blueprints... and then Greenwich disappears.”
Newt squished the bread up and held it in his right hand.
“Meanwhile,” he said, placing the other half of bread back onto the plate, “the USA brings their completed transducer over to the UK, preparing to bring the two halves together for the first time in ten years. But then some shmuck steals it and gets it stuck in his ear.”
He picked that piece up too, and held it in his left hand.
Both hands out, he looked up at Hermann expectantly. Hermann nodded.
“All correct.”
“So what is it, Hermann? What is it? What does it do?”
“I don’t know.”
Newt opened the ‘transmitter’ half in his fist slowly, and, holding them both out, raised his eyebrows insinuatingly at Hermann.
Hermann caught his meaning.
“We will not find out via trial and error inside your skull.”
“Come on. We have both components. We’re the first people to have both components in ten years.”
Hermann was shaking his head. “Absolutely not. We have no idea what it will do to you.”
“What’s the worst it could do? Kill me? Well do you know what not knowing is doing to me? It’s killing me. I’m dying, Hermann.”
“I’m sure,” said Hermann briskly, sliding his plate back towards himself. “But you’re wrong on one count. We don’t have both components. The transmitter is at the bank.”
“Then get it.”
“And I’m certain the transducer is affecting your hearing,” said Hermann, taking both halves of bread from Newt’s outstretched hands, “because I just said no. Twice.”
Newt dropped his hands into his lap with an annoyed sound as Hermann put them back on his plate and sat back.
“Why won’t you let me test the two components? That transmitter is mine. Technically.”
“I don’t approve of self-experimentation,” said Hermann.
“Well sorry about your principles, Hermann,” said Newt, “but this is the best lead we’ve got, and you know it.”
Hermann looked at him. Why did he feel so reluctant to return Newton’s transmitter to him?
Instead of answering, Hermann picked up half of the torn bread, and ate it.
“You used to flatter me so much,” Newt said, leaning back in his chair. “Back in Menwith Hill. I miss those days.”
“I’m sure you do,” Hermann said.
“You don’t?”
“Not in the slightest.”
“Remember when you sent me that enciphered message?” Newt said in a reminiscent voice. “Without any explanation? That was a risky move.”
“Why? Because the government was reading my mail? Or because you might not be up to breaking it?”
“No. It was just a bit of a move, that’s all,” Newt said, grinning.
“You had written that you enjoyed my puzzles. It was simply...”
“Yes, I know what I wrote!”
Hermann’s cheeks were pink. “Yes, well. When you did decipher it, it was quite tame.”
“I had to go upstairs and get a lesson from the coding bay.”
“I appreciated your commitment to the question.”
“Newt Geiszler: committed to the question ‘til they commit me to the institution.”
Hermann took a sip of his drink, his eyes smiling.
“Still, I prefer just doing the crossword together,” said Newt.
Hermann set his glass down. “So do I. It is a great relief to no longer have to scan the Entertainment section of the newspaper to keep up with questions about the music of the Beatles.”
“Glad to help purge that knowledge from your mind. It can live in mine forever. By the way, how many of them are there?”
“How many what?”
“Beatles.”
Hermann thought about it. “Between 3 and 6.”
Conversation wandered to linguistics. Twenty minutes later their waiter interrupted a heated discussion about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis to tell them the restaurant was closing.
“Your bandmate Laurie is a bad influence,” Hermann said as they got into the lift. Laurie, the drummer, was a linguistics professor by day. Once, she had given Newt an informal lesson on syntax trees; Newt’s subsequent attempt to share that knowledge with Hermann had led to such a broigus that any mention of syntax trees was still banned in Hermann’s apartment.
Newt took Hermann’s arm, closing his eyes as the elevator moved upwards. “Why don’t you show me color terminology that...”
“Yes? That what?”
“Speaking of Laurie,” Newt said, abruptly conversational. “Gig tomorrow.” His eyes were still closed.
The elevator dinged. “That’s a shame,” Hermann said.
“Right. Yeah,” said Newt. “Probably too dangerous.”
“Definitely too dangerous,” said Hermann, leading him out of the lift and back to their rooms. Newt’s heart sank
Hermann found a classical station on the wireless and then resumed working. The messages would only reveal themselves through their connections: He had to guess each word of one correctly before he could decipher the next word from the other. It was like doing a crossword puzzle without any hints.
The A/C unit was climatizing aggressively, so Newt dragged the blanket off the bed and curled up on the couch. He was soon asleep. Hermann worked steadily, facing his dim reflection in the wide black glass, vague against the dim city lights. Bach played, Newton snored lightly, and he kept working.
It was well past 2 AM by the time he finished, and Newt was fast asleep. The radio was still playing quietly. But at the slight sound of Hermann setting his pen down, Newt’s snoring cut off.
“You got it?” he said blearily.
He twisted so he could look up. Hermann was rereading what he had deciphered.
“What is this, Gregorian monk music?” Newt mumbled. He stood, unsteady with sleep, and went to look over Hermann’s shoulder. The words were in German and did not resolve immediately to his eye, but he was duly impressed. He kissed Hermann on the temple. “You’re brilliant.”
“Newton.”
Something had emptied out of Hermann’s voice.
“What?”
“The British source. In 1971, the Abteilung picked him up after he woke from a coma. He says he has the transmitter, but he asks to talk to Robert Bowen first. And they want special radio equipment for him—mono input headphones. Because he’s deaf in one ear.”
Hermann looked up at Newt.
“It’s Charles Rennie. He’s alive.”
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.
Wednesday was going badly.
Hermann had left Newt at 8 AM. After eating breakfast (which he requested, through a closed door, that room service leave in the hall), Newt watched the TV with the sound off and the news playing on the radio. But the ringing. The ringing was louder today.
He turned the radio up, but as soon as his attention drifted from the words he was hearing, it wormed back into his awareness. The ringing, the ringing. Like a mosquito he couldn’t slap.
He turned the volume up on the TV and lay on the carpet, between the bed and the window, with the radio next to his head. Rain hammered the glass. He strummed Caitlin’s guitar for a while, mindlessly running chord progressions, while in his head, his thoughts paced the perimeter inside an electric fence. If he tried to get out—if he stopped playing—he would get shocked.
He closed his eyes and slowly convinced himself of this. Keep playing, or the alien ray zaps your brain.
Obediently he played another chord.
That was a game he had played since childhood. When Newt closed his eyes, only his mind was real. Nothing else outside his head existed. He could logic himself anywhere he liked.
When I open my eyes, there won’t be anything. It will all have been a dream.
He strummed, feeling the vibration in his chest.
This is all my imagination. I’m going to open my eyes, and there will be nothing—no London, no Earth, no universe... Just a big empty plane, a huge silent airplane hangar, an unformed space cloud.
He let the chord echo into silence.
None of it’s real. Just me.
A relative lull in the TV coincided with the end of a transition on the radio, and in the silent slit, it slid in.
The ringing.
He squeezed his eyes shut tighter, trying to withdraw into his mind. It’s not real. Nothing can touch me in here, he thought.
But what if this could?
Newt sat bolt upright and opened his eyes.
This thing was fucking with his brain.
It’s feedback, he thought. The ringing. It had to be. Some other signal. Close by. He yanked the radio plug out of its socket, then crawled over to the TV and pulled its plug too. He stumbled into the adjoining room and unplugged those too, then dizzily turned all the light switches off.
It was still ringing.
He got frantic. He pulled the bottom off the desk lamp and pulled out the wires, then took out the lightbulb and smashed it. He pulled the back off the TV and searched its guts. He did the same to the other TV and both radios. Nothing. He tore apart the bathrooms, opening the U-pipe under the sink and unscrewing the head of the shower. He used a coin to unscrew every outlet and vent.
Nothing.
Newt was about to step right off the deep end when at the door came a knock.
Lunch.
He ate his sandwich in the empty bathtub with the lights off. The semi-repaired radio played Lou Reed next to his head, reverberating soothingly off the walls and the tub. The calories soothed him too. All was dark except one thread of light from beneath the door.
Why did you put that thing into your head? he asked himself, properly, for the first time.
This was a problem he sometimes had. The problem that had reared its head on his trip to Langley, nearly two years before. Sometimes things were too good. Sometimes, in the absence of a real problem, he rationalized a net of potentialities and justifications and inventions and then before he knew it, he was trapped inside. And then the only way out was with scissors.
Things were stable now, or had been. He had a stable relationship; Hermann was patient, and Newt had his privacy. He had a stable workplace, focused but out-of-the-way. Conditions could hardly be better.
But Newt was not stable. He did not deserve these things. He deserved—needed—wanted—an instability to match the shape of his psyche. Its spikes and drops, its static frantic ground-covering, its chaos pattern tracking, its unpredictable meteorology. He didn’t belong here. He was not in the world he deserved; it was not good enough for him, it could not keep up with him, but at the same time, he didn’t deserve it as it existed: growing, calm, normal, real. He belonged elsewhere.
But there was no such place.
He would not go down this slope again. If this was where solitary confinement was sending him—he would not go.
He was going to clean up, he decided, and get out of here.
Newt was up, he was out, listing to the left as he smacked on the light and threw open the bathroom door. Light poured in. He turned on the tap and ran it until it was frigid, then plunged his face into it. His glasses went clattering.
When he couldn’t feel his face anymore he came up, ran his hand back through his wet hair. He blinked, tasting salt and iron. He put his glasses back on and found that the foggy reflection in front of him was having a nosebleed.
Newt found her in the alley out back, smoking. Lightcap was hugging herself in a long overcoat, rolling a can back and forth between the heel and toe of her high-heeled boot. The generous eaves of the bar were protecting her from the ongoing downpour. Newt, already drenched, ducked through the curtain of water and splashed his way towards her.
Caitlin was singing:
There’s no place in this world where I’ll belong when I’m gone
And I won’t know the right from the wrong when I’m gone
And you won’t find me singin’ on this song when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here...
She glanced up. “Hey, Buddy Holly.” She did a double take. “You all right, Newt?”
“I must look really schlubby if you’re giving me the first-name treatment,” Newt said, putting his hand on a dumpster as he felt the first verging of a dizzy spell. His weather-inappropriate wool coat was already soaked through.
“You do,” Lightcap said. “You look like...” He had his eyes closed, waiting for the ground to stop pitching below him. “Seriously, are you all right?”
He straightened up. “It’s just vertigo.” He blinked. “I’m fine.”
“If you say so,” she said, bending down to bump cheeks hello. “Cigarette?”
Newt was pushing himself up to sit on the wooden crates next to her. “Thanks.”
While he wiped off his glasses, she lit one in her mouth and passed it to him. He only really smoked with Cait. He took one pull and then held it between his fingers, immediately forgetting about it.
“Are Laurie and Vivian here yet?”
Cait shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Thanks for the delivery yesterday,” he said. “You really saved my ass.”
“That hotel was seedy as hell, dude,” Caitlin said. “Are you still staying there?”
“No, we moved last night. New place. Downtown. More secure.”
“‘We’? So Dr. Stodg-lieb is slumming with you too?”
Newt snorted at the nickname. “No. I mean, yes, he is. But we moved. To a nicer place.”
Lightcap dropped her cigarette butt and stepped on it. “Why?” she said, lighting another. “What the hell is going on with you two? Are you eloping? Or am I witnessing the early stages of the next big Div scandal?”
“Please. They knew what they were getting when they hired me.”
Caitlin snorted out smoke from her new cigarette. “I knew you had it in you. Burn it all down on your way out. Come and join me. I’ll get you a job.”
“At IBM? No thanks,” said Newt. “No, I think Hermann’s pretty committed to keeping me gainfully employed.”
Lightcap rolled her eyes. “What for?”
Newt shrugged. “Habit?”
“Loyalty?” she said with a derisive edge.
“Convenience.”
“The ample pay, perhaps?”
“The friendships.”
“Ha, ha. Tell me what’s going on.”
Newt remembered the cigarette burning down in his hand, and took another pull. “Yeah. Well, nothing. I just semi-accidentally stole some extremely sensitive CIA equipment from the Estate. And now it’s stuck inside my ear, and everyone is looking for it, and also me.”
“Newt, holy shit,” she said.
He told her the story of his escapades—the transmitter blueprint, the reconstruction, and the semi-accidental theft, followed by the semi-failed real theft. He told her too, as briefly and obliquely as possible, Hermann’s side of it.
“Jesus,” she said when he’d finished. “What a mess.”
“Yeah.”
Newt sat back on the heel of his hand, and breathed in the cold, humid air, the smell of rain and the city and the smoke of Caitlin’s foul American cigarettes. “It’s good to be out,” he said. “I was starting to think the real world no longer existed. Or maybe never had. And that I was just a figment of Hermann’s imagination.”
Caitlin shrugged. “Locking you up is stupid. It’s not like they have any proof.”
“Um, once they apprehend me, they’re gonna find proof right quick. They take one quick look in here with the otoscope and I’ll find myself getting extradited.”
“I meant Hermann,” said Caitlin, exhaling smoke. “He shouldn’t lock you up. They don’t have any evidence against you.”
Newt shrugged. “He just wants to protect me. How much do you know about neurology?”
“Neurology? Some. Why?”
“Any idea what long-term effects a single nonstop frequency might have on the brain or skull or inner ear?”
“No. Besides insanity.”
“As in clinically?”
“No,” she said, exhaling smoke. “But I’m no expert. Are you hearing something?”
“Yes. Actually, no, not out here, with the rain. But when I’m alone and it’s quiet, yes. It’s getting louder every day.”
“Ooh. Maybe it’s a tracking device. And they’re coming closer.”
“Cait, seriously.”
“Seriously, I have no idea. Have you tried taking it out?”
“Yes,” said Newt.
“But have you really tried?”
“Yes.”
Looking skeptical, she pulled her cigarette out of her mouth and threw it down. It made a faint but satisfying hiss when it hit the water.
“So Rennie, huh,” she said.
“Seems like,” said Newt.
“He always was a two-timer.”
“Even in the good old days?”
“Back when he was running with Bowen and Vicky?” she said. “Definitely. Birds of a feather commit treason together.”
Newt snorted. “I guess. Vick being the exception.”
“Someone’s got to get excluded, or it isn’t a club.”
“I s’pose,” Newt said. He frowned. “Wasn’t their heyday before your time?”
“I was recruited younger than you, Shortstack,” she said.
“What? No you weren’t,” said Newt, sitting forward competitively. “I was 21.”
“I was 20.”
“Recruited in uni doesn’t count, you didn’t actually start until you graduated.”
“Anyway, asshole,” she said, “I’m just telling you. Rennie and Victor were awfully close.”
“I didn’t know you knew them so well.”
Cait looked at him, then away at the rain. “Not them,” she said.
Newt frowned. “What do you mean?”
She looked back at him, and paused like she was about to say something. Then she caught sight of someone over Newt’s shoulder.
“Look alive,” she said, turning away quickly. “Your boyfriend’s pissed.”
Newt turned quickly, and saw Hermann splashing furiously down the alley towards them under an umbrella.
“Shit,” he said, throwing his cigarette butt into the puddle with Caitlin’s.
“Newt—if Rennie’s involved in this—if he’s alive, and you two numbskulls figured it out, I find it hard to believe Victor doesn’t know it too,” Cait said in a quick, low voice. “And if he doesn’t, he should know. If I were you, I’d look into it.”
Newt just frowned, hopping down from the crate.
“Afternoon, Doc,” Caitlin said loudly as Hermann reached them. “Come to see the show?”
“I most certainly have not,” Hermann said. “Newton—what are you doing out here?”
“Not smoking,” Newt said immediately.
Hermann, opening his mouth angrily, was derailed by the unexpected reply. “I meant—out here. As in outside.”
“It’s a beautiful day, Dr. Gottlieb,” Caitlin said over the sound of the rain. “Can’t a girl smoke outside with some company?”
“Miss Li—Caitlin,” Hermann said. “If you don’t mind. Newton and I must be going.”
“We’re onstage in an hour,” Lightcap said. “So hurry back.”
Hermann raised his umbrella and met her hard look.
There arose in the air the same tension that always rose when Hermann and Caitlin met face-to-face. He was disconcerted by her, by the dangerous edge she articulated in his partner. Caitlin disliked him for all the conventional reasons—rigid, unfunny, interested in boring things, never came to Newt’s gigs, seemed (to her) to exercise an excessive control on Newt’s free will. In truth, this discomfort with his influence was that of someone uncomfortable with the surrender that a relationship demands. In her view, she and Newt were still in the same foxhole, fighting together, and would die before surrender. But the truth, which neither of them really realized, was that Newt had surrendered long ago, and only hunkered down to visit her.
“We’ve got to go,” Hermann said. “Another engagement.”
“Mazeltov,” she said.
“He’s right,” Newt said, touching her arm. “I gotta go.” Smoking had made him light-headed and now he felt nauseous. He was in no condition to stand, never mind to perform.
“If that’s what you think is best,” she said, with an emphasis on you.
“Tell Viv and Laurie I’m sorry.”
Newt was braced for excoriation from Hermann, who was pale and gaunt and visibly shaking. But all Hermann did was lift his umbrella over Newt and put it into his hand—“Take it,” he said, and Newt did—so that he could wrap his arm around Newt and help him down the street. Newt realized that he needed the help.
The tube was still crowded enough to pass unnoticed. Newt could hardly stay standing. Every time the train moved or stopped, the world swirled around him like he was going down a drain. He closed his eyes, nauseous, and tried to hold on. His legs were trembling.
His eyes were still closed when, after a busy stop, hands guided him into an open seat. He gratefully sank down, holding Hermann’s arm to do so. At least in the crowded car, the screaming wheels in the echoing tunnel drowned out the noise in his head.
Hermann looked down at Newton, who was swaying in his seat with the motion of the train. Unaware or beyond caring about the people all around them, Newt leaned forward and rested his head on Hermann’s stomach. Hermann counted to five, then ran a hand through Newton’s wet hair. Then he gently pushed him back in his seat. Newt nodded vaguely, settling back.
By the time they returned to the hotel, Newt was refreshed by his underground nap and enlivened by the news of the transmitter. Hermann vetoed his request to stop at the bar for a brandy to “warm up” (“Absolutely not,”) but Newt insisted he only needed to eat something, and then he’d be ready to test it out.
“I cleaned,” Newt explained, back in their rooms.
“Is that what you did today?”
“Well, first, I made a mess,” said Newt as Hermann sat him down on the bed. “But I cleaned before I left for the gig so that you wouldn’t think I’d been kidnapped.”
“I still thought you had been kidnapped, idiot,” Hermann said, not voicing the other possibility that had occurred to him when he found the rooms empty. “Take off your wet clothes. I’ll call for the food.”
“And put on what?”
“I bought new clothes,” Hermann said testily.
Newt was wiping condensation off his glasses. “Those? No way.”
Hermann picked up the phone. “Catch a cold, then.”
“I will,” Newt said, putting his glasses back on.
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine.”
“Newton, you almost fainted on the tube. The transducer is affecting you. Tell me your symptoms.”
Newt sighed. “I’m fine. Dizziness. The associated nausea. Headache. Caused by... persistent ringing in my ear.”
“Ringing?” Hermann repeated, like he’d never heard of any such thing.
“Yes. Like when you’re lying in bed trying to fall asleep but you hear a little ‘eeeeeeee,’ you know? Like that. But much louder. And all the time.”
Hermann frowned.
After they had eaten, and after Hermann had told Newton what he’d learned from Chara and Birch, he at last surrendered the little green box. Newt sat on the floor cross-legged and unlocked it. Hermann, sitting at the desk, angled the lamp so he could see better. Newton’s hands moved intently, unhesitant, the same way he played piano—like what he held was part of him and equally manipulable. He flipped open the lid and tipped the transmitter into his palm. It glinted in the lamplight. Then he squeezed the seams of the metal, and the device gracefully sprang open. The transmitter lay open in his palm like a butterfly. He lifted it up to examine his handiwork.
He nudged Hermann’s knee.
“Hm?”
“Glasses,” Newt said, not taking his eyes off his transmitter. “Let me borrow your readers.”
Hermann handed them over and Newt put them on in front of his own glasses to squint at the wiring and minuscule circuit board. Just watching him do it gave Hermann a headache.
“How do you work, little friend...” Newt muttered. He took a deep breath. “Well. After a week of waiting, months of wondering, and years of—” He glanced up at Hermann— “concealing the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence—”
Hermann rolled his eyes.
“—at last, at long, long last, let’s find out what you do.”
With a dramatic flick of the wrist, Newt used his fingernails to pinch the minuscule power switch.
Nothing happened.
Newt frowned, then took Hermann’s glasses off and shut the transmitter with a click.
“Nothing?” said Hermann.
Newt held it up to his ear.
“Bupkis.” He held it up to his other ear. “What the hell?”
“Is the transducer turned on?”
“It’s on. Trust me,” said Newt.
He opened the transmitter again. He squinted at its guts. Everything was in order, just like he remembered it.
“What if they aren’t actually supposed to work with each other?” he muttered.
“Maybe they can’t,” said Hermann. “You made one. The other was made by the CIA. Maybe they aren’t synced. Or tuned.” Hermann frowned. “Is it tuned?”
“What?” Newt said, not listening.
“It’s a radio, isn’t it? Did you put a dial into it?”
“Hermann, what?” he said, looking up.
“Are they tuned,” Hermann articulated, “to the same frequency?”
Newt’s eyes widened. “Frequency. Frequency. Hermann!” He grabbed Hermann’s face and kissed him on the mouth. “The frequency!”
Hermann, blinking, watched Newt jump up and scramble over the bed to fetch the—telephone?
“The day after I got it, I could hear the ringing the whole day, it was just out of range, and I kept trying to find some way to amplify it—I tried everything, I tried the radio, the TV, a glass over my ear, I even stuck a paperclip into it to see if I could make an antenna—didn’t work—but then, but then you called, and I could hear it—a frequency, there was a resonant frequency—so that means it’s somewhere within the phone’s bandwidth! Between 300 and 3,500 Hz!”
Hermann stared.
“So, one of those three-thousand two-hundred frequencies?”
“No!” said Newt, holding the receiver to his ear. He had dragged the phone cradle back across the bed and was sitting on the edge, his legs bouncing. “It’s 8!”
He was punching the 8 button over and over.
“8? How—”
“Here! Listen to it! No, dammit, what am I talking about, you won’t hear anything. It’s 8. The resonance. With the 8 tone.”
Newt was still jabbing the 8 button.
“All right, I believe you. I believe you!” Hermann put his hand on the cradle to hang it up.
“What’s the 8 tone’s frequency?” asked Newt.
“How on Earth should I know? Shouldn’t you?”
Newt was squeezing his eyes shut. “No, I don’t... the tone... There’s two. Each number on a telephone has two frequencies. When you press the button, the two frequencies are transmitted down the line. Then the network interprets the paired frequencies and registers which digits you pressed.” His hand was dancing, like he was turning the pages of a book. “So 8... 8...” He shook his head and opened his eyes. “I don’t know it.”
“But your memory—”
“I haven’t read every technical manual ever published,” Newt said impatiently. “We have to get one. Maybe it’s in the phone book. Maybe they know downstairs. I should call Lightcap, maybe she can—”
“May I?” said Hermann, and took the phone out of Newt’s hands before he could answer. He put the receiver to his ear and started dialing.
“Who are you calling?”
“Information,” said Hermann, adjusting the phone on his shoulder. “Good evening. I have what might seem like a strange question. No. Yes, I’m aware. It’s about telephones. Thank you. Could you please tell me what frequencies the 8 tone transmits? Yes.” There was a pause. Hermann raised his eyebrows at Newton like he was proving some kind of point. “1,336 Hz... and 852? Thank you. Yes, you as well.” He rang off.
“Resourceful,” Newt said, taking the phone back and setting back on the bed.
“Thank you,” said Hermann. “So which one is it?”
“Not so fast,” said Newt, reopening his precious transmitter. “We’re finally getting to the interesting part.”
“Yes?”
“The transmitter has two tuners. And two antennas. And I never knew why.”
“Two?” said Hermann, watching as Newt tuned one with his fingernails, using Hermann’s readers as a magnifying glass. Hermann angled the lamp higher. “Can you see those numbers? They’re minuscule.”
“Just barely,” Newt said, squinting. “8...52. And...”
“1,336.”
“13...3...6...” Newt moved to the other tiny dial. “I always wondered why there were two. The antennas are absolutely tiny too. This thing probably has a range of about five feet.”
“So don’t go far.”
“Mm.”
Newt squinted.
“Done.” He frowned. “It’s tuned.”
Hermann stared at him expectantly.
“Nothing?” he said after a moment.
Newt made a frustrated noise.
“Are you sure it’s tuned correctly?”
“No.” Newt squinted. “I can hardly see these stupid little dials. Hold this?”
Hermann took the transmitter and held it out. Newt leaned in to examine it.
“Is it at 1,336?” said Hermann.
“Yeah, should be...”
Newt felt odd.
“Well, do you hear anything?”
“No, not...”
A question was pressing into Newt’s thoughts but he didn’t know what it was. Like an idea he’d had, but just forgotten—it would come back if he could look at the object his eyes had lit on just a moment before—what was the object? He could see objects, but he couldn’t move his eyes.
He was seeing something else.
“It’s working,” he tried to say, but the sound was distant and doubled, vibrating through his skull but also coming from behind glass. It felt like he was sinking in a pool, letting all the air out of his lungs in a stream of bubbles, sinking down, lower, from the bright warm surface to the cool dark deep.
There was music playing.
Newt was distantly aware of his own hands closing around the bedspread, gripping the fabric, and his eyes closing. He sank deeper: he saw slats of light on a summer evening, he saw the marble corridor of a museum, he saw the signals lab; he saw the directory and the IBM and Wesley from behind; an accented voice said, I think he was a test subject. Ravel was playing over an intercom system, a muffled 5-measure loop in red and black; they were standing in a white hospital room, looking at a balding man in a white bed. His face was turned away.
He saw the interior of a phone booth, I think he was a test subject. They made me listen... He was dialing a phone number—the hotel phone number. Each number was a different color. When he lifted the receiver, the voice that spoke was emerald green.
I think he was a test subject.
Something was pulsing. Was it in his head, or outside? His eyes were closed, but he saw someone sitting in front of him, someone who looked ill and felt green, emerald green, someone gripping the bedspread and tilting dangerously to the left...
“Newton—”
The word vibrated through his head like he had said it himself.
A chair moved abruptly and there was a scuffling sound and a thump, and then everything was dark and silent again—or as silent as it ever was, inside of Newt’s head.
The ringing had stopped.
Also, he was on the floor.
“Are you all right? What happened? Did you hear something? Can you sit up—?”
“Dude,” croaked Newt, eyes still shut. He was becoming reacquainted with the carpet. “I think you have synesthesia.”
“Are you—what?”
Newt started coughing violently.
When he came to, Hermann was holding his chin in his hands, pressing something against his face.
“What’s this?” Newt mumbled. He realized belatedly that he had briefly blacked out.
“Your nose is bleeding,” said Hermann, pressing the handkerchief into his nose. “Tip your head forward.”
Newt sat up, too quickly. Blood dripped down his pharynx, making him cough again. He leaned forward, hacking. The floor pitched below him.
“Are you going to be sick?”
Newt, eyes still closed, managed, “Uh. Maybe.”
Hermann helped him to his feet with difficulty. They only made it a few steps before Newt’s legs gave out, and he heard a hiss of pain from Hermann.
“Oh—Hermann, are you okay? Put me down, I’m okay—”
“Are you—?”
“No, just—”
Newt helped Hermann pivot them clumsily. They collapsed onto the bed.
Newt lay on his back, breathing in through his nose and out his mouth, feeling the nausea ebb. Beside him, he could hear Hermann’s tense breathing. He felt a pulsing in the bedspread that might have been his heartbeat, or Hermann’s.
“Did I twist your hip?” Newt said after a moment.
“I’m fine,” said Hermann, in a way that meant yes.
“I’m sorry.”
There was another breathless pause.
“Synesthesia,” Newt said again.
“What are you talking about?” said Hermann hoarsely.
“It’s a perception thing,” Newt said, not opening his eyes. He was still weirdly breathless. “Colors... associated with other sensory input. Like numbers, or letters... Even smells, or sounds. It’s a... a sense thing.”
He cautiously opened his eyes and checked the handkerchief. Not much blood.
“Associating numbers with colors? Everybody does that,” Hermann said to the ceiling. “It’s mnemonic.”
“Not everybody,” Newt murmured.
“What happened, Newton?” said Hermann.
“It worked,” Newt said. “It’s a mind-reading device.”
Hermann had dropped the device when Newt had fainted. Once Newt explained its function, he refused point-blank to pick it up again.
“Come on!” said Newt a few minutes later. “I feel fine. Let’s try again.”
“Absolutely not,” said Hermann. “It’s much too dangerous! Look at yourself!”
“I feel fine!”
“You don’t, Newton, and in any case I do not want you listening to my thoughts!”
They made me listen, Birch had said. They made me listen.
“It wasn’t really sonic,” Newt said. “It was actually mostly seeing. Like seeing your memories. I got snippets of your day, too. Lots of colors, like I said. You’re a much more visual thinker than I would have guessed, by the way.”
Hermann was shaking his head incredulously.
“When you do math—when you look at numbers, or codes—ciphers—are the letters and numbers each different colors? Is that how you’re so good at it?”
Hermann closed his eyes, still shaking his head. “Stop—what did you see?”
“Oh, is this why you won’t do it again? Because you’re worried I’m going to see something embarrassing in there?”
“No,” said Hermann, coloring. It wasn’t that. “Because of Birch.”
“What about him?”
“He was a test subject.”
“What? For this?”
“Yes, and Newton, he’s completely gone. And I’m certain he’s not the only person whose brain was damaged by trials of this device.”
“But we—”
“We need to take it out,” Hermann said firmly. “We know what it does. That’s enough. That’s all we need.”
“Take it out? Now? No way!”
“Newton, it’s too dangerous! We need to return it to the Americans. If we cooperate, they might be lenient.” Hermann was starting to get truly agitated.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Give it back?” said Newt.
“Yes!”
“This device? Hermann, have you thought about what this could mean?”
“Yes, it could—”
“No, no, I mean in the hands of the government! This is completely unethical!”
That stopped Hermann up short.
“Did you even stop to think about how a government would use something like this? Picture it—no more interrogations. No more reasonable doubt. No more secrets. Of any kind.” He shook his head. “This is way too dangerous. Not for me. For everyone.”
Hermann paused, his mouth open to object.
“No wonder they all want it so bad,” Newt muttered, looking away. “Imagine what this would mean for surveillance. I mean—you worked for GCHQ. You hardly even have to imagine it.”
Hermann frowned at his accusatory tone.
“Excuse me, but were you about to claim that thing and dub yourself the savior of liberty? You make bugs, Newton, for the British secret services.”
“Yes, bugs to use on other spies,” Newt snapped. “That’s not the same as eavesdropping on people’s thoughts.”
“All right, but you’re hardly the antiauthoritarian rebel—”
“Oh, shut up, you loyalist. Yeah, take the gadget right back to our boss. Take it upstairs to Victor. Wield it to serve your queen and fucking country. Kiss my ass.”
Hermann sighed noisily, trying to cover his rising panic. “Stop being unreasonable. If it’s dangerous and unethical, we ought to take it out and destroy it. Let me take it out.”
“No way,” said Newt again, leaning away from Hermann. “You can’t. We already tried.”
“Then let’s go to a doctor.”
“No!”
Hermann sat back and raised his hands in truce. Newt eyed him warily.
Why won’t he let me take it out? Hermann thought desperately. Desperately trying to find an explanation besides the obvious. Why?
Then Newt’s eyes slipped away from Hermann and fixed on the window. “I know what happened,” he said. “In the stables.”
“What do you mean?” said Hermann.
Newt looked up at him. “It was a setup. The Division wanted to steal this tech from the CIA. So they used me as a decoy. They wanted to steal it and then pin it on me.”
“Newton, that makes no sense.”
“No, think about it. The fifth floor put all the clues in front of me... made it look like I had means and motive... Their plan only backfired because I got there first.”
Hermann frowned and looked away. It didn’t make sense—the Division didn’t operate that way. It was clumsy, as an institution, but not mercenary. It would never choose to jeopardize the transatlantic alliance over something like this.
“And Becket,” Newt was saying. “Becket is the fixer.”
“Newton, that’s ridiculous...”
Hermann looked back up at him.
Newt was watching him closely.
“Can I try it again?” said Newt.
“What?” said Hermann.
“I’ll let you take it out if you let me try it. One more time.”
What would he see if he did?
Would he be able to hear it? The thought that Hermann kept having, beneath it all, even as he refused to listen to or acknowledge it?
Hermann shook his head.
“No,” he said. “No.”
That night, they both dreamed of the lake.
“Do you know what love is? I’ll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.”
—John le Carré, The Looking Glass War
August, 1971
Berlin, G.D.R.
It had been a month since his eyes had opened. Some parts of him had woken quickly—his mind, his eyes were still sharp—but some parts took longer. Standing up straight was still hard work, and walking quickly put him out of breath. Sometimes his voice got lost in his throat, like a bad dream; chewing was hard, his jaw didn’t work right. He knew he ought to eat, to regain his strength, but it felt as though he’d forgotten how. He sweat too much, and got cold, and shivered in the sunlight. Sometimes, his attention wandered, and when it came back, he felt he could have forgotten his own name.
He was planning to contact his old office very soon. It would be all new staff, of course, and probably no one would know who he was. When he invoked Robert Bowen, he hoped, they would grade his message high-priority; but he wasn’t counting on that. He understood life was rather cutthroat in the Raz, and he wondered whether that had actually suited Robert, after a life playing his jovially quiet con.
But he was patient. He knew how to tug at the threads. A reactivated agent with a secret to sell, who knew Bowen personally, that would pique someone’s interest, sooner or later.
And if Bowen’s name didn’t pique their interest, he had something else that would. He just had to retrieve it.
So he was getting his ducks in a row. He had money and a passport, recovered from where he’d cached them a decade before. He had a hotel room, close to a library, where he read up on the news. He felt like he was still in peaceful, secret stasis. He absorbed the events of the last few years with the bemused interest of a time traveler. The gears of the world had spun on without his hand for a little while—but not for much longer.
He slept long, hot nights, and could feel his strength coming back. One morning, he woke up ravenously hungry. After he ate, he took the bus to the outskirts of the city.
The only people on the pre-noon bus leaving town were tiny old women and one sweaty farmer. Outside the streaked windows, the streets and buildings turned abruptly to farmland. He disembarked at the top of a dusty hill. The sun was bright and hot; the heat wave that had woken him had not yet broken. He walked slowly down the slope, leaning on his walking stick. He passed that pub where he’d met his handler a few times, heading towards the church spire.
It was an old stone church, long disused. Pigeons and doves cooed and fluttered in the eaves of the rotting roof as he walked below. Behind it there was a cemetery, barely more than a handful of eroded gravestones. He stopped at the corner and shaded his eyes with his hand. He checked his watch. It wasn’t time yet. He wished he had a better visual memory, but at least he had forethought.
So he crossed the cemetery, stepped over the stone wall, and strolled across a cow pasture. There was a barn at the top of the slope. He saw no one about. It didn’t take long for him to find a shovel. He took it. Victor would have laughed at this, he thought. Well, I’ll bring it back, he thought, replying to the man who couldn’t hear him.
Since he’d woken up, his thoughts had turned often to Victor.
It was just noon when he got back to the church. The shadow of the spire fell straight back from the center of the building, perpendicular across the churchyard. Stepping over the stones in his path, his walking stick in one hand, his shovel in the other, he followed the shadow of the spire.
When he had buried this cache box, it had been winter. The ground had been hard, and he’d been in a hurry, and in the weak, oblique December sunlight, the spire shadow had reached farther. Standing in the middle of the cemetery now, eight years later, supporting himself with a walking stick and a stolen shovel, he squinted at the stone wall. The cross landed in the middle of the lush grass.
He had no idea what stone marked his spot.
“Couldn’t have slept another five months, could you?” he muttered to himself.
A warm breeze rustled across the grass and through his hair. His hairline had receded while he’d slept. But it had also grown longer, and been trimmed. They’d shaved him, too. No more mustache. A stranger shaving him while he slept—strange to think of. He lifted his arm to smooth his hair back down, and as he did so, his shadow did too.
Of course. Just like a sundial. Rennie stepped into the shadow of the cross, and the top of his shadow extended the line, past the last gravestone. He raised his stolen shovel over his head, and the tip of the shovel reached a stone at the base of the wall. There.
He could only dig a few strokes at a time before he needed to rest. Sweat beaded on the back of his neck, and evaporated quickly in the sun. Just when he was starting to get tired, and thinking he would have to take another break, his shovel hit something—something harder than wood but softer than rock. Rennie dropped to his knees and dug with his fingertips. He pried the box out of the dirt, dusted it off, set it in the grass, and opened it.
Wrapped in crumpled yellowing newspaper from 1963 was a tiny little crescent-shaped metal object. With the grin of a card shark, he held it up to the light. It still glinted—no rust. Eight years, Rennie thought. Eight years of searching, and no one had found the place where he’d hidden it. Sweat beading on his forehead and neck made him shiver; he wiped it away.
He clicked the clasp. The device sprang open in his palm. All the bits and wires were still inside, and looking none the worse for wear. He knew nothing of how they functioned, and it made little difference to him. The men who wanted it, they would know. And they would pay handsomely. He felt a moment of gleaming satisfaction thinking that, if he really had died, this secret would have been buried with him. You’d need a lot longer than eight years to outwit Charles Rennie. And you’d need a lot longer to put him out of the game. It was a delicate game, this underhanded international warfare, and there was nothing Rennie had ever loved better than lighting a stick of dynamite and throwing it onto the board.
June 7th, 1973
Thursday
Newt and Hermann fought again in the morning.
Hermann wanted to tell Victor what he had found: The evidence of Orpheus’s work within Century, the erased files and transmissions. Real evidence of a mole, just like Victor had predicted. Newt said no, because then Hermann would have to explain why he had been looking, and give up Newt’s location. But Hermann insisted that coming clean now was the safest route.
“They’re framing me, Hermann,” said Newt, watching Hermann get dressed for work while he sat on the bed in unfamiliar clothes. “The Americans stole the transducer out from under the Brits ten years ago, and they want it back.”
“The transatlantic intelligence alliance is much more valuable than one single piece of technology,” Hermann said, buttoning his shirt. “Even alien technology. Our government would never jeopardize it over something like this.”
“Maybe not,” said Newt. “Maybe the whole fifth floor wouldn’t do this. But what about one man with a personal stake in this technology?”
“What do you mean?” said Hermann, knotting his tie. It was new, bought yesterday, because he didn’t want anyone wondering why he was wearing the same tie twice in a row.
“Someone who, for example, was on the original mission. Someone who could have stolen the tech in 1963. Someone like Becket. He knew about Greenwich,” Newt said insistently. “He was Birch’s boss. He knows everything he would need to know in order to orchestrate this, and he was at the conference with me. It has to be him.”
And he ordered a leak check done on you, Hermann neglected to add. Because Newton would ask, Why? and Hermann couldn’t think of more than one good answer.
He finished tying his tie and turned back to face Newt. “I don’t see why he would do it. Becket is a successful spy, on his way to promotion inside the Division. There’s no reason he would risk everything on something as messy and risky as this operation. Your theory makes no sense, Newton.”
“Ugh!” Newt made a frustrated noise and dropped his fist onto the bedspread. “Listen! If it’s not Becket, it’s someone else who has it out for me! Hermann, I don’t understand why you’re not—” Abruptly, he changed tracks. Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to. “You just—you can’t tell Victor. If you tell him what you know, they’re going to come for me!”
“But if you didn’t do anything with malicious intent—” Hermann began, folding his arms.
“They’re not going to see it that way! Someone upstairs is trying to hang me, Hermann! Don’t give them the rope to do it!”
Hermann hesitated, unable to communicate his panic—he wanted this to stop, he wanted the hiding to be over, he wanted Newton to let him end it. And he wanted Newton to want it to end. He wanted Newton to want to come back in from the cold. Hermann was hopelessly ensnared in this, like an animal caught in a net, and there was a knot at the center of it all that he would not untie or cut through.
“If I speak to Victor, if I tell him what we know, I think he would help—”
“Help? Help? He’s champing at the bit to throw a mole in prison, and he already thinks it’s me! Have you met Victor? Have you forgotten the last ten years? He hates your guts! Okay? If you bring him all this evidence, he’s going to throw you in jail for treason before I have time to get to a border crossing!”
Hermann waved his hand furiously, turning away from Newt again. “You don’t understand how any of this works!” In the mirror, Hermann saw his partner cover his face and slump backwards on the bed.
Hermann made brief eye contact with his own reflection. A border crossing. Where would he slip out? Ireland, maybe? A ship going west? A ship going east?
Newt had taken off his glasses and was rubbing his eyes furiously. “Becket could even be working for Victor,” Newt muttered. “Maybe they’re in it together...”
“Don’t be stupid,” Hermann snapped into the mirror. “It wasn’t either of them, because they were both in that meeting.”
“What?”
“During the conference, when you were snooping around the device. Their entry and exit times were recorded by the American Army guards, and the liaison was in that meeting too.” Hermann turned around, folded his arms, and then unfolded them, so as not to appear confrontational. “Please, Newton. Let me bring the evidence to Victor.”
Newt made a wordless noise of frustration and dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, muttering something Hermann couldn’t quite hear.
“What was that?” he said sharply.
“I said,” said Newt furiously, opening his eyes, “‘Fucking typical.’ You, getting upset because a situation is out of your control, and running to the nearest authority figure without even thinking about whether that authority figure can actually handle the situation!”
Hermann straightened up, stiffening as if bracing against a physical attack—Where normally Newton’s words would have made him livid, instead, his anger skittered away, chased off by his fear. He didn’t even feel safe fighting with Newton openly, for fear that in his anger, he would betray what he was thinking—something which would destroy everything, if it was true, and which could never be taken back if it wasn‘t.
So he set his jaw and said nothing.
Sitting on the bed, Newt clenched his fists over the covers. He had to rein it in. He had to stop trying to make Hermann mad. Hermann wasn‘t fighting back, and if Newt didn‘t stop his blind slashing could hit an artery. Newt took a deep breath, and looked at Hermann imploringly, instead of angrily:
“Please, Hermann. Promise you won’t tell Victor. Promise me.”
Hermann shook his head mutely.
“Hermann!”
“What do you want from me, Newton?” he demanded furiously. “What would you have me do?”
“I want you to prove that I’m innocent! Prove that I’m being framed!”
As Hermann left, he paused with his jacket on his arm and his hand on the door.
“Newton,” he said. “Don’t leave.”
Newt, sitting on the bed behind him, said nothing.
“Please.”
“I’m not your cat, Hermann,” Newt said coldly. “And I’m not your prisoner. You can’t lock me up in your safe deposit box and tell me to sit on my hands.”
Hermann gave him one last look, and then left. The door closed. A moment later, he heard the bolt lock. Standing there in the dark hallway, he seriously considered trying to jam the lock so that it could not be opened from inside. But how would he even do that?
And why did he want to do that? Was he really afraid that Newton would run?
No, he thought. No. He wouldn’t.
He found that his heart was thumping in his chest.
Hermann walked slowly to the elevator. His hip and his back ached from getting twisted last night. He thought of the night before. Of Newton’s dangerous testing, the way he had wanted to try it a second time. Hermann had declined out of fear—not just the fear of what would happen if Newton tried again, but also the fear of that desire.
In the elevator, Hermann leaned on the railing. He noticed that his jacket fit oddly. He put his hand in the pocket, and felt an assortment of strange objects that were not his. He had taken Newton’s by mistake.
He couldn’t go back. The jacket would keep him warm in any case.
But when he stepped out of the hotel, into the busy street, heavy sunlight and humid air bore down on him. The rain yesterday had washed the last of spring away.
Summer had come.
Weeks told him Vice Chief Victor was expecting his report on Orpheus after lunch. Hermann got to work with Wesley, robotically running the last batch of records through the IBM. In his mind he was busy organizing his story, how he would explain it all to Victor.
We didn’t find Orpheus, but we know he’s here at Century, somewhere. Someone is covering their trail and rearranging the evidence... He was at the conference... Dr. Geiszler heard him sneak in... He’s after the device, but he doesn’t have it yet...
Hermann was still organizing the story as he rode the elevator upstairs at 12:55. He’d been too nervous to eat lunch. He held all of the files in his arms, all of them duds. Not one match in the records.
The lift, empty but for him, reached the fifth floor. The grate closed behind him, leaving him in the ever-underwhelming heart of Division upper management. It was just a hallway, a white floor and a row of office doors with frosted glass. All were closed. It was dim and silent.
And there’s something else you should know, sir...
No one had caught it two years earlier when the message came through. But Hermann had. If he was the one to bring that message to Victor, maybe, after all these years, Victor would forgive him.
Sir, you should know... Charles Rennie is alive.
Hermann walked down the corridor towards the office that had once belonged to Vice Chief Robert Bowen. His blood was pumping like he was standing on top of a skyscraper. He turned the corner. Preston the bulldog was waiting for him outside Victor’s door.
Neither of them greeted the other. “They’re ready for you,” Preston said. He rapped on the glass.
“‘They’?” said Hermann.
Preston, mouth twitching, took the armful of files from Hermann as a voice behind the door said, “Come in.”
Vice Chief Victor was standing at the window, looking out at the streets below. Sunlight blanketed the city, but the Vice Chief’s office faced north, so Century’s shadow fell beneath him. His hands were in his pockets. For one second, his casual stance filled Hermann with relief—he was going to tell him everything, the nightmare was about to end—
And then the two men sitting opposite his desk turned to look at Hermann, and he saw the others standing against the wall, smoking with their elbows on a cabinet. He was surrounded.
“Dr. Gottlieb,” said Victor, taking the cigarette out of his mouth. “Thank you for coming upstairs to give your report on our man.”
Hermann had no time to panic.
“Please,” Victor was saying, gesturing to the remaining empty chair.
“Thank you.”
Hermann sat.
The man next to him, a wispy older gentleman with a white tuft of hair, offered him a cigarette.
“He doesn’t smoke,” said Victor.
“Thank you,” Hermann said again.
“Hermann, this is Mr. Hardwicke, and this is—”
“Oscar,” said the other man, who was young, with chapped lips.
“Good to meet you both,” Hermann said, shaking Hardwicke’s hand and nodding to Oscar, who nodded back.
Hermann looked uneasily at the other men standing against the wall, but they offered no introductions. One was tall and bald and of indeterminate age. The other was medium-height, late middle age, unremarkable. Everyone had him at a disadvantage, except, somehow, Victor. Victor followed his uneasy glance at the silent men, and looked at Hermann for a second before continuing.
“I was hoping for your Orpheus report, Dr. Gottlieb, but I can see your hands are empty,” he said.
“Yes, sir, we just finished processing the files you gave us. I wish I had better news.”
“Or perhaps this is good news,” said Victor. “Perhaps this was a false alarm.”
It wasn’t! Hermann wanted to scream. But who the hell were these people? What were they doing here? What about their “confidential internal investigation"?
“Perhaps,” Hermann managed. Suddenly he had an idea: “Signals analysis proved unsuccessful, but I would be willing to spend some time deciphering the messages—if they’re still graded high priority, that is.”
Victor shook his head. “There isn’t enough time.”
“Sir, the Blueberry has all the matching protocols and precedent codes up to ‘65. If you don’t want the Orpheus messages disseminated to the coding bay, or even GCHQ, I understand. But I could try, myself—it would only take me a few days—”
“No, no. Not now. We haven’t the time. We meet with the Americans on Saturday. And we’re reasonably certain that the ‘Orpheus’ mole is the same person responsible for the—” He glanced at the spectators— “thefts this past weekend.”
Hermann tried to betray no feelings about this suggestion. “Because of the signal sent out?” he said.
“That’s right.” Victor snubbed out his cigarette. “We’re focusing our efforts on catching the thief. We need this cleared up by Saturday. Preferably sooner.”
“Two birds, as they say,” Hardwicke offered.
“Of course,” said Hermann nervously. “Then am I... off this case?” Why are you telling me this? he thought, throwing another glance at the silent spectators.
“Hardwicke and Oscar here are from Surveillance,” Victor said, standing up straighter and putting his hands into his pockets. Hermann wished he would sit down.
“Oh.”
“I’m in charge of the Gophers,” Hardwicke clarified with an apologetic smile. The ‘Gophers’ in the Surveillance section were responsible for placing and monitoring listening devices. “Many thanks to your lab for making our jobs easier and easier over the years. Hard to believe we’ve never met—I’d have thanked you sooner.”
“I’m afraid I can’t take credit for most of that,” Hermann said, and then immediately regretted the allusion to his partner.
“The radio delay jammer, in particular,” Hardwicke added. “Inspired.”
“The what?” said Oscar.
“The short-range signal delay jammer,” said Hardwicke, turning to his subordinate. “Delays the radio signals within a certain radius, makes them arrive a few minutes late. Oscar’s a bit green,” Hardwicke added to Hermann. “Marvelous little thing. Just a couple minutes can really make a difference.”
Victor cleared his throat, silencing Hardwicke. “We have another set of names for you to run,” he said to Hermann. “A shorter list.”
“Sir?”
“Suspects,” said Victor, with another glance at their spectators. “You haven’t heard from Dr. Geiszler yet, I take it?”
Hermann swallowed, his mouth having gone dry, and shook his head.
“I’m afraid he’s on this list,” said Victor. “As well as everyone else who was at the conference. Anyone who was at the conference last weekend is now a suspect.”
“Ah.”
“But,” said Victor.
Hardwicke’s voice took Hermann by surprise. “But I’m afraid Oscar here has some additional testimony for us.”
Hermann turned. The boy’s ears were bright red.
“I’m in street surveillance,” Oscar said, eyes fixed on Victor’s ashtray. “Sometimes I’m assigned to watch... ex-employees.” Oscar glanced at Victor. “This is confidential policy, sir,” he added, to Hermann, as if resentful that he had to own up to it. “Well as it happened, I was out and about yesterday, off duty, and I saw an ex-employee I recognized. She was speaking with a… missing employee.” Oscar twisted his hands together. “Caitlin Lightcap, Research, terminated 1963. Newton Geiszler was meeting with her in a back alley.”
Hermann’s blood ran cold. And we saw you there too. You’ve been lying to us. These men are here to arrest you.
“And what did you do, Oscar?” said Hardwicke encouragingly.
“R—reported, sir,” managed Oscar. “Ran to the phone booth. Even though I was off duty. Geiszler, he’s graded high-priority. By the time I got back, she was alone again. Then she went into a bar and played a show with her rock band.”
“I—” Hermann was in total confusion—he had lost any concept of strategy—“The two of them are friends. They have been for many years. They play in that band together regularly.”
He turned to Victor.
“If he’s still in the country, that’s a good sign, isn’t it?”
“Unless he’s working with Lightcap,” said Victor, and he actually looked pained.
“But she isn’t under suspicion too, is—?”
“Not your concern.”
Hermann turned. The nondescript man had spoken.
He didn’t elaborate.
Hermann turned back to Victor.
Victor stared at him in a way that said, Don’t.
“It is of paramount importance that we catch him—the thief—before the Americans arrive,” said Victor. “We haven’t much time left.”
He put his hand down on the stack of files on his desk. The name on top was Becket, Raleigh.
“Is Becket a suspect—sir?”
Victor nodded.
“Everyone who was at the conference,” he repeated. “We need you to run them all. Hermann,” he said, and Hermann’s stomach turned over. “I’m sorry. I’ve taken a preliminary glance, and I can tell you... There’s an Orpheus message from Washington D.C., fall of 1971. Of the people on this list, Dr. Geiszler is the only one who was on that trip. I was on it with him. As far as our records are concerned, I don’t know that anyone else could have sent that message.”
Victor was looking at him, his expression terribly sad.
This wasn’t a trap, Hermann realized. It was a enlistment.
“I’m sorry,” Victor said. “I didn’t want to see things turn out this way.”
This wasn’t a trap for Hermann—if they wanted him, they could have arrested him on any charge they invented. But they wanted him on their side. They wanted to use him to get to Newt.
They would do that if they were certain. Certain that he was the mole.
“The best thing you can do for Dr. Geiszler now is to tell us all you know.”
“But I don’t know anything,” Hermann said, willing himself to look at no one but Victor. “I’m sorry.”
Wesley was already in the computer bay when Hermann entered. “Weeks said we had more names to run,” he said. “I wanted to help.”
Wesley looked at Hermann’s face more closely than he ever had before. Hermann wondered what he saw there. He found he didn’t want to turn away or tell Wesley to leave. The switch in his feelings towards the man had been complete.
“Thank you,” he said, voice hoarse.
Becket’s file was first, and a disappointment. Most of the Orpheus messages were from London, and Becket had been in Vienna on many of those dates. But there was one hopeful sign—he had been on the Langley trip with Newton. Why hadn’t Victor mentioned that? Had he forgotten? Or overlooked it? Hermann marked Becket down as indeterminate.
After a string of mismatches, they reached ‘Geiszler, Newton.’
Wesley looked at Hermann.
“No point delaying, is there?” said Wesley bravely.
Hermann shook his head.
“I can do it,” Wesley offered.
“It’s all right,” Hermann said. “I’ll do it.” He entered Newton’s personnel ID number.
The IBM hummed smoothly. The dot matrix began to print.
Wesley hurried down the computer bay, and Hermann stayed standing stock-still.
It wasn’t a match, of course. They were all wrong. It wasn’t Newton.
“But it’s a match!”
Wesley looked back at Hermann in horror.
“But it can’t be!” said Wesley.
Hermann unfroze. He limped over, and took the papers from Wesley’s hands.
“There must be a mistake,” Wesley said as Hermann scanned the records. Travel records. Each matching entry was highlighted in gray.
June, 1973: Newton was at the Estate the weekend of the Orpheus message from East Anglia.
May, 1973: Newton was in London, Orpheus was in London.
April, 1973: Newton was in London, Orpheus was in London.
April, 1973: Newton was at a workshop in Yorkshire. So was Orpheus.
London, February, 1973. Oxford, December, 1972. London, October, 1972. Glasgow, August, 1972. London, June, 1972. London, May, 1972. Oxford, February, 1972. January, 1972. December, 1971.
October, 1971: He was in Langley the same weekend that Orpheus signaled from Virginia.
September, 1971: He was at home, in London, when the first Orpheus message was sent out.
Every Orpheus entry was a match.
“No...” Hermann muttered. It was impossible.
“It must be a mistake,” Wesley said again.
“Look,” said Hermann, finding something. The relief was thrilling. “Look at this.” The IBM had printed Newt’s full travel records for all time. “These records say Newton was at the Estate the weekend of the Bowen affair. In East Anglia. But he wasn’t. He was in London.” Or so he told me. “His record is inaccurate.”
“Or it’s been altered,” Wesley said.
Hermann nodded quickly. Mostly to himself.
“Wesley, I’ve got to make a phone call.”
In a phone booth five blocks from the office, Hermann called the hotel. He was sweating in Newton’s ill-fitting jacket. It was hotter than a greenhouse in the little glass box.
The hotel put him through to his room.
The phone rang and rang. There was no reply.
Frantically, Hermann hung up and redialed. He dialed the extension of their second room.
No answer.
He slammed the phone down and cursed. “Dammit. God dammit!”
He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes.
Where was he? Had he fled?
But it was impossible. Even if—even if. Even if, Newton was in no state to travel.
No, Hermann realized with sudden hope. Newton was far too unwell to go anywhere. And he didn’t even have his wallet. Hermann had it. He couldn’t go anywhere even if he wanted to.
Hermann was out of coins. On a last ditch hope, he made a collect call to Newton’s flat. There was no reply there either.
He returned to Century drenched in sweat. He took the Orpheus file from the IBM bay and went back to the lab. He took his keys from his desk, walked out the back of the lab, through two locked doors, and into a dark, dusty room. He turned on the light. It had been a while since he’d visited the Blueberry.
They had originally built the computer to detect OTP matches. Later on, they had added other code-and-cipher-matching protocols. Orpheus’s cipher was not an OTP. There was a small chance the cipher, whatever it was, had been used before in a previous Razvedka transmission. If the Blueberry had that transmission in its databanks, it would tell Hermann. It wouldn’t decipher it for him, but it would be a place to start.
To hell with Victor and Weeks telling him no. His design of clearing Newton’s name was fading rapidly to a fantasy. Hermann needed to know—not for his superiors, or for Newton, or his career—for himself. He needed to know for certain.
If he could identify the encryption, he would be able to determine beyond a doubt whether Newton was really Orpheus.
He shut the door behind him and began to enter the data.
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.
June 8th
Friday
Hermann caught a few fitful hours of sleep before dawn, sitting in a chair in a waiting room. When he woke, he was as stiff as a corpse. His hip and back were locked up, numb and unpliable. It took several minutes of stretching and standing before he could walk, and when he did, every step ached like the spaces in his joints had been filled with white-hot cement. He went to look in on Newton. A nurse told him there was no change.
The sun was rising when he left the hospital for the underground. It would be another hot day. The train was full. He asked a stranger for a seat, gesturing meaningfully with his cane, and sank down, closing his eyes. He was still wearing Newton’s jacket. He shoved his hands into the pockets and felt the assortment of objects within. There was the Mahler ticket stub, a stick of gum, a toothpick, other tiny ends of garbage stuffed in thoughtlessly; a small gray rock, an Allen wrench, a lighter, a golf pencil, a battery, an assortment of European and American coins. He still had Newton’s wallet, too, and his house keys. Hermann examined his overburdened keyring. Its single adornment was a medallion from M.I.T., engraved with its motto: Mens et Manus. Mind and hand.
Hermann pressed the medallion into his palm and leaned back in his seat, closing his eyes. He really had no right to be angry with Newton for passing secrets, he reflected. Not when he himself had come so close to doing the same. Rennie, Bowen, he was hardly different. It could just as easily have been him.
There was a funereal silence over the Century lobby. It was populated with Division employees, but they were strangely still. A man in a suit waited at the receptionist’s desk, immobile; the watchman stared at the parquet floor. Head down, like an intruder among mourners, Hermann limped to the lift.
In the empty lab, he unlocked his desk drawers, hoping against hope he had stashed painkillers somewhere inside. The Orpheus file was on top, the encoded transmissions stored within. He would need to copy these somehow, and express mail them to Caitlin.
He looked underneath, for the printout of Newton’s travel records. If he was going to cover Newt’s trail, his first order of business was to destroy the hard copy of his travel records, and then alter them in the IBM database. But the printout wasn’t in his drawer. Frowning, he searched the rest of his dek. He found no printout, but he did find a bottle with two pills left. Thanking the incompetent deity watching over all this, he shook them into his palm and went to the lab’s tiny kitchen.
He passed Weeks’s door, and saw that his light was on. In the kitchen, he filled a mug with coffee and downed his pills. Then, gritting his teeth, he went to knock on Weeks’s door.
“Come in,” his manager called.
Hermann opened the door, but didn’t enter.
“Sir, has Wesley been in?”
Hal Weeks looked up, taking his pipe out from between his teeth.
“Morning, Hermann,” he said, smoke coming out of his nose. “No, not this morning.”
“Will he be in soon?”
“I don’t think so. I told him to take the weekend early.”
“Why?” said Hermann, apprehension growing.
Weeks set his hands on the table, one fist still holding the pipe. His expression was unusually hard.
“He was being difficult yesterday, in fact,” said Weeks. “Late in the afternoon, I was looking for the results of the last Orpheus cross-checks. I couldn’t find you, so I asked Gus.”
Hermann’s heart was thumping. “I did have them.”
“Yes. Well, Wesley wouldn’t tell me where they were. He kept saying he didn’t know. I could tell he was lying. He’s quite a bad liar.”
Hermann nodded cautiously.
“Do you need the file?”
Weeks, in a rare display of coolness, put the pipe back in his mouth and leaned back, looking at Hermann from his chair. “I found it inside your desk. Where Wesley said it wouldn’t be. He was sweating quite a bit by this point. I took a look at it. The results are pretty unequivocal, aren’t they?”
Hermann closed his eyes.
“Yes, sir. They are.”
“Don’t you think you should have alerted me?”
“I was going to, sir, I was just—cross-checking, first.”
“Well, I sent the results upstairs.”
Hermann looked up sharply.
“When? Yesterday?”
“Yes.” Weeks shook his head. “I’m afraid they‘ll be seeking a warrant for Dr. Geiszler’s arrest.”
Hermann flushed, furious with Weeks and absurdly proud of Wesley, for his brave, futile effort.
“Another step up the ladder for you, I suppose?” Hermann spat. “Anything to get up out of this basement.”
“What alternative do you propose, Hermann? That we harbor a bloody traitor?” said Weeks, plainly angry too. “The envoy from Washington arrives tomorrow. Victor’s got to get the device back, or there’ll be hell to pay!”
“I have no idea where Dr. Geiszler is,” Hermann said, with the cold conviction of his rage. “But if I did, you can be sure I wouldn’t tell you.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” barked Weeks. “Maybe you should take the weekend early as well.”
“I have work to do,” said Hermann. He turned on his heel and stormed out, slamming the office door.
“There will be questions for you to answer!” Weeks shouted after him. “You can’t protect a traitor!”
Hermann rounded the corner and entered the empty lab, leaving splashes of hot coffee in his wake. I can’t? Weeks had no idea—none of these people had any idea—what Hermann was capable of.
At his desk, he set down his mug but didn’t sit. He picked up his phone and pressed “7” for the Century directory.
“Directory,” said a female voice.
“Archives, please,” he said.
“Just a moment.”
There was a pause, then a gruff male voice said:
“Who’s this?”
“Radio lab,” said Hermann. “I’d like to come in and read a file this morning. Can I make an appointment?”
“Slots are full this morning. I have one after lunch.”
Plenty of time to copy the Orpheus file and express it to Lightcap.
“That’s fine. Thank you.”
“You have the reference number?”
“Yes. It’s just that it’s rather urgent. Are you open during lunch?”
“’Course not. Nothing’s urgent in the Black Chamber. Take it upstairs to Central if it’s that important.”
“They haven’t got it.”
“Then we’ll see you at 1:30.”
The line went dead.
“The Black Chamber’s strongest line of defense is disorder,” Caitlin Lightcap had said to him at a back corner table in the stuffy hospital cafeteria, while he took obscure notes on the back of a receipt. “They’ve been adding files for more than a hundred years, and there’s no governing organizational system. There’s never been an overhaul. No one has ever made a central directory. It’s impossible to find anything if you don’t already know where to look.
“I was one attendant in a long chain. No one stays there long—another line of defense. I only know where to find materials from the last 50-odd years. So will the current attendant, more or less. His name is Shepherd. He’s a bit of a hard-ass, but outsmarting him won’t be impossible.
“I know the schedule, and the general layout. I can’t tell you exactly where to find the file, but I can tell you which sections to case, and how.”
“Why keep all these files, if we can’t even access them?”
“Information is power,” said Caitlin. “What’s an institution without a memory?”
“But an inaccessible memory?”
She shrugged. “They have all the cards. If you need it, you can’t find it unless they want you to. If they need it, they can find it. It might take them some time, but time is always on their side. The house always wins.”
The attendant will go out for lunch. Get there when the assistant is closing up.
“Excuse me,” said Hermann. The assistant jumped and looked up at him, keys in hand, eyes wide. Hermann stepped into the anteroom of the Black Chamber and brought his full disgruntled professor persona to bear. “I’m looking for Mr. Shepherd. Is he in? We had an appointment a half an hour ago.”
“Shepherd?” said the boy. “I’m afraid he was transferred some time ago—the archives attendant is Irvine.”
“Irvine?” Hermann barked. “Since when?”
The boy straightened up in his seat. “Nearly six months, sir!”
This was a bad start. “I made this appointment months ago. I work in Cheltenham. I don’t get down to London much. Which means I don’t have time to waste. When will Mr. Irvine be back?”
“After lunch, sir. 1:30. But I believe he has an appointment—”
Hermann was shaking his head. “I have a meeting in half an hour. I need to take a look at this file, now.”
“Sir, I’m not authorized, and even if I was, sir, I wouldn’t know where—”
“I know full well where to find it, thank you!” said Hermann sharply. “I don’t need your help. And I don’t believe I need your permission either. I don’t have any more time to waste!”
Get him to let you inside. I can think of two different sections this file might be in. You’ll need to case them both.
The assistant opened the door and illuminated the ancient, flickering lights of the Black Chamber. There were thousands, millions of files, some in filing cabinets, some in bookshelves, some in tatty stacks of cardboard boxes. The light weakly illuminated the first few rows, but beyond that, the shelves stretched into cavernous darkness. They might have gone on for miles, down into the earth.
“Section F-14-F,” said Hermann.
The assistant, torch in hand, led him along the rows. “Here we are,” he said. “Do you have the number?”
The IDs in this section are formatted like this, Lightcap had said, writing out a sample on his receipt. Give him something that fits that formula.
“Yes,” said Hermann. He recited his invented file number to the assistant.
They turned down the aisle, and the assistant turned on his flashlight as they entered the darkness. He stopped in front of a set of maroon filing cabinets, then flipped through an astounding collection of minuscule keys on several chains before finding the right one, and unlocking the cabinet. He slid the drawer open for Hermann. Hermann bent over by the dim torchlight and examined the labels one by one, looking for the one that matched the the Blueberry’s output number.
1957. Prague. 1957. Berne. 1957. Morocco. 1956. Prague. 1955. Istanbul. 1952. New York City.
None matched. It wasn’t here.
This isn’t working, he thought, fighting down panic.
“It’s not here,” he said sharply. “Does this set continue below?”
“Are you sure?” said the boy. “This is all in that set...”
“Then this is the wrong section,” said Hermann. “It must be G-16-F.”
The assistant closed the file cabinet obediently, locked it, and led him down the aisle. The darkness was thick like a cobweb. The lights behind them grew distant. Only the torch lit their way.
The assistant opened the cabinet and held the torch so that Hermann could search it. The file was there. Hermann saw it pass by under his fingers. His hand trembled but he didn’t stop. He stopped at the file behind it, pulled it out, and examined it.
“This one, sir? That’s not the right number,” the boy said, passing the flashlight over a report on a low-grade informant in Rome, circa 1944.
“This is the one,” Hermann said with confidence, and the boy looked at him with what Hermann felt, with a shiver, was his first inkling of mistrust.
“This one?” he said again.
“I knew this man,” said Hermann, inventing randomly. He pointed at the picture. “I told Shepherd I suspected as much. I just wanted to—check.”
The boy frowned. “Er, yes.”
Hermann opened his mouth to justify himself further, then closed it. He had no story prepared—why hadn’t he thought of that? Why hadn’t Caitlin? This was never going to work.
He snapped the drawer shut.
“Not really what I was looking for. That’s a disappointment.”
“Right, sir.”
See which key he uses.
The boy took out his keys to lock the cabinet. Hermann watched the keyring. It was #44. Silver. High collar, two small bitting cuts, one deep curve.
Hermann followed him back out of the archive.
Then circle back.
The Black Chamber took up an entire floor of the Century basement. There was no traffic outside the elevator, and Hermann had no trouble staking out the archives entrance for the next hour and a half. He saw Irvine return, and waited until the breathless assistant left for his lunch hour. Caitlin had been wrong about the attendant’s identity, but her schedule was still right. It was 1:35 by then, so Hermann arrived late for his appointment with Irvine.
Now that Hermann had cased the archive, he knew exactly which cabinet in Section G-16-F contained the file he needed. But he couldn’t request that specifically, of course, so he requested a different one—a decoy, made up, from an adjacent section, G-15-F. If, in some future inquiry, anyone consulted Irvine’s records, they would see that Hermann had requested a totally unrelated file from an unconnected section.
And if this plan worked, then in that future inquiry, the file they actually needed would be gone.
Hermann requested the decoy file from Section G-15-F, as Lightcap had instructed. Irvine, an unshaven man who had, by the smell of his breath, spent his lunch hour drinking, led him in. The problem now was getting the key from Irvine, and getting him to leave. Lightcap’s plan had been somewhat involved, and hinged on Shepherd’s obsession with model ship building, but as Hermann followed Irvine’s light into the darkness, he had another idea.
Irvine came to an abrupt stop at the file cabinet and slammed the electric torch down on top with a startling clang. He laboriously removed his keys from his belt, then started to sort through them.
Hermann helpfully picked up the torch and held it over his shoulder for him. “Thanks,” grunted Irvine, searching until he found the right key.
The torch flickered and dimmed. He glanced up. Hermann shook it, frowning. The light brightened, and Irvine resumed his search. He found the right key and inserted it into the lock. Just then, the light went out.
“Damn.”
There was a rattle in the darkness as Hermann shook the flashlight again. Irvine took it back from him and slapped it twice with his open palm.
“I can’t believe this,” he sighed angrily. “I changed these batteries not three days ago. Unbelievable. You don’t have a spare, do you?”
“No.”
“Unbelievable,” he muttered again. “Want to come back with me, or wait here?”
“I’ll wait,” said Hermann. Leave the keys, leave the keys, leave the keys...
Grumbling, Irvine shuffled away towards the lighted end of the cavern carrying his sabotaged torch. Hermann saw the light of the door opening, then closing.
He was alone in the archive.
He pulled out Newton’s lighter and flicked it on. By the light of the small flame, he located key #44 on the ring, and detached it. Leaving the keyring where Irvine had left it, inside the lock of the G-15-F cabinet, he took #44 to Section G-16-F, and found his cabinet. He leaned his cane against it and unlocked the drawer.
Holding the flame dangerously low, Hermann located the record that the Blueberry had matched with Orpheus, the one previous instance when this book code had been used. He pulled it out. It was from 1953, used in a long-defunct network in Berne, under Robert Bowen’s leadership. So that was why they had the key on record—Orpheus’s code was one of their own.
Hermann slid his thumb across the page to the book’s title and edition, and his heart sank. The Fellowship of the Ring. 1953 edition, English.
He looked back. All was dark. No one was there. He slid the piece of paper out of the file and replaced the folder. He folded the paper up, unbuttoned the top of his shirt, and stuffed it in under his undershirt. He buttoned Newton’s jacket over it, locked the cabinet, and returned to G-15-F to wait placidly for Irvine’s return. He eventually came back with a functional torch, and they looked at an insignificant file together, and then Hermann left, paper in his shirt and key #44 in his pocket.
“Oh. I get it,” Caitlin had said, hours into their conference the night before, after Hermann had finished his story. “You wanted to help Birch out because he’s like Newt.”
Hermann had shaken his head. “No,” he had said. “Newton isn’t like anyone.”
With his successful extraction and escape from the Black Chamber, Hermann’s transformation into an enemy operative was complete. He was now operating in opposition territory. The mundane work he’d been assigned a lifetime ago was his cover, and he performed it without registering any of it. All he was thinking of was when to use the shredder without arousing suspicion, and how to access the IBM without anyone seeing him. He needed to destroy the Fellowship file from the Black Chamber, and he needed to edit the electronic copy of Newton’s travel records. He had no hope that any of this might clear him, only that it would confuse and delay the search while Hermann got him over the border and out of England.
Hours passed, and he waited for an inquiry to come down upon him, but nobody came. He received no news about the arrest warrant. He remembered this feeling from East Berlin: The perpetual state of fight-or-flight; the distrust he imagined in every look from his colleagues; and the bitterness of his last conversation with Newton, who now existed in a suspended state in Hermann’s mind. It was a state not unlike the one he had existed in in Hermann’s head back in the summer ’63, a petrified gargoyle of anger and shame, not endowed by Hermann with any ability to process emotionally, just the ability to be hurt by Hermann. Yes, Newton was the one—the one who had turned. But it seemed that everything was Hermann’s fault at the root: If he had never volunteered for the Wagner mission—if he had gone east when Rennie’s friend recruited him—if he had been more honest with Newton and earned his complete trust—if he had been more attentive, less judgmental, a better partner, a better man.
Finally, Weeks left, and Hermann was alone in the lab. He completed his sabotage, and then packed his bag to leave. He hesitated at his desk for a moment. The little scraps of home he had always kept at his desk—a souvenir pin from Glasgow, a postcard from a friend, his reference books, his blue coffee mug—he had to leave them behind. After the things he’d done, he had no idea whether he’d ever return.
It was strange to take the regular evening train and return home to his flat in Kenton, after being gone for what felt like months. The painkillers were wearing off. It was a slow walk up the stairs at Wheaten Street Station.
On his street, Hermann scanned for changes—signs of surveillance, or worse—but everything looked different than he remembered, and none of it made sense.
He climbed the stairs of his apartment building even more slowly. He paused on the second landing, his hip and back aching. In his pocket, he touched Newton’s MIT medallion; then he continued upward.
As he rose on the last flight, he saw his door, and saw that it was ajar.
He stopped. He listened. He heard movement, too distant to gauge.
Hermann slipped out of his shoes. Then he stepped as quietly as he could up to the landing.
He listened at the open door. Noises were coming from the kitchen. He pushed the door open and entered silently.
He was halfway across the living room carpet when he heard a metal bowl bwong onto the linoleum, and a voice say “Rats!”
“Jacob?”
His twelve-year-old neighbor looked up at the doorway. “Oh! Mr. Gottlieb, you’re all right!”
“Yes,” said Hermann, utterly relieved.
Jake collected the upset cat bowl from the floor. “I was just feeding him. He’s been in a bad mood. He’s hiding from me, and hissing when I find him. I think he’s in the pantry now.”
Jake was small for his age, with a round face and bright eyes. Hermann watched him pour food into the cat’s bowl, over-filling it. It had, after all, only been a few days. There was still a real world, full of people and cats. As Jake set the bowl on the linoleum, Hermann felt a pressure on his calf.
He looked down. Laplace was rubbing his rhomboid face on the cuff of his pants. He looked up at meowed at Hermann.
Hermann exhaled. “Hello, you. Ich bin zuhause.”
“Oh, there he is. He’s all right,” said Jake.
Hermann wanted to crouch down and pet the cat, but he couldn’t. He was in too much pain.
“I’m glad you’re feeling better, then?”
“Yes, I’m all right. How are the birds?” asked Hermann.
“The budgies? They’re fine. My mum doesn’t like the noise, but I don’t mind it, so they’re in me and my brother’s room. Is Newt coming back soon, d’you know?”
Hermann shook his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t know.”
“I thought he might be back,” said Jake. “I saw the lights come on in his flat last night. The bright lights. But he hasn’t called.”
“When?” said Hermann, perhaps too sharply. “When did you see the lights?”
“Oh. I dunno,” said Jake, taken aback. “Must have been yesterday, late afternoon. Evening, I s’pose. It was dark out.”
Perhaps Newton had come home before he left. To fetch something?
“So you’re all right, then?” Jake asked again. He was filling the cat’s bowl with water, and directed his question at the sink.
“Yes, I’m fine. It was a mistake, with the hospital,” said Hermann.
“Well, good,” said Jake. The water kept running, though the bowl was full. “But are you sure? Sure you’re not hurt? You can tell me, Mr. Gottlieb. Really. You can. It’s a shame, you living alone, my mum says, with your leg and your cane and no one to take care of you. And if something was wrong, and nobody knew, and then... And then something bad happened to you? And nobody knew? Except Laplace? Who would take care of him? Only I...” He glanced at Hermann, then back to the water.
“I’m all right,” said Hermann, with more attention. The child seemed truly concerned. “It was a mix-up with the records. Really, Jacob. They had the wrong person. I’m sorry they alarmed you.”
“Only my friend, his neighbor down the street, she died, she was old, she just had cats, and nobody found the body for days,” said Jake all at once, “And he said the cats—ate her eyes, and her face.” He looked stricken. “Mum said he was lying. But I found her obituary in the paper, it said she had no family. So I think it might be true. Who else would find her?”
“I’m not sick,” Hermann reiterated, trying to be gentle. “Laplace won’t eat me unless he has to. But if he has to—better that than starve, don’t you think?”
“It’s just so sad,” said Jake, frowning hard at the running water, like he was keeping tears at bay.
“It is,” said Hermann. “It’s terribly sad.”
“If you died, I’d take care of Laplace,” Jake said, looking up at Hermann as he approached and picked up the kettle. “Dad’s allergic, but he can live in my room.”
“Dad can?” said Hermann. Jake moved the water bowl aside so that Hermann could fill the kettle. He turned off the tap, and put the kettle on the stove.
“Laplace,” said Jake, finally setting the water bowl on the floor. “I think Dad’s lying about it anyhow. He just doesn’t want a cat.”
Hermann made them tea, and Jake told him all about school and football and the church play. Before he left, Hermann thanked him again, and told him he would pay him for the bird-sitting as well as the cat. “I’ll put the envelope through your slot later tonight, all right?”
“All right—and you’re sure everything’s all right, Mr. Gottlieb?”
“Everything is all right.”
Hermann shut the door behind him.
The flat was bright and silent in the everlasting summer twilight. Hermann closed all the curtains and took two more painkillers. While waiting for them to take effect, he walked through his flat, looking for signs of a search. He didn’t find any, but the people they worked for were quite deft. He didn’t find any bugs either, but Newton’s innovative designs were quite minuscule. At the door to the back balcony, he drew the curtain for a moment and looked across the courtyard to Newton’s apartment.
He’d gone back once more, before he fled.
What had he gone back for?
When he felt ready, Hermann left his flat, leaving the lights on and the radio playing. On the second floor, he slipped the envelope into Jake’s family’s mail slot. Then he exited via the back courtyard.
It was still hot, the kind of relentless heat that would to give way to rain. The sun was heavy in the western sky, making shadows long and harsh. In the back staircase of Newton’s apartment building, it was already dusk. The light turned the white walls blue, the wooden stairs black. Hermann climbed quite slowly. The slower his steps, the less they hurt. He had no expectations about what he’d find in the apartment—signs of Newton’s trail? More incriminating evidence? He was drawn by a new, passive sort of curiosity, slim but sturdy. The future held things unknown, but they couldn’t get any worse. It was a little like hope.
Or maybe it was a little like forgiveness. He reached the first landing, considering his partner’s betrayal of their organization. Indeed, he’d come close to doing the same. It could have been him just as easily. He thought back to Newton’s reaction to the story of the Wagner Mission, sitting in the hotel room—“It wasn’t your fault. You obviously feel guilty. You shouldn’t.” Did Newton feel guilty for what he’d done?
Well, in any case, he was wrong about Hermann’s feelings. Hermann didn’t feel guilty about Wagner. The lost prize, the police, the “death” of Charles Rennie, the fire, the flight across borders. The memories weighed on him in a place he couldn’t easily access, an anchor too deep to dive to safely. And he didn’t like to talk about them.
But it wasn’t guilt.
It wasn’t his fault. Obviously. He knew that.
Hermann paused on the second landing to rest.
His almost-defection, that was what he was ashamed of. It could have been me. Bowen on the front page of every paper—that could have been Hermann. Countless lives ruined and ended. Rennie, shot through the chest. It could have been me.
And now, it was Newton.
He didn’t know how to confront that.
On the third floor landing, he unlocked the three locks with his three keys, and slid his thumb over the bolt as he opened it. He thought about little Jake, feeding his cat so it wouldn’t eat his bachelor neighbor. Inside, he shut the door carefully, and locked it again. He removed his shoes while his eyes scanned the hardwood floor, searching for something. For what? The slivers. The little slivers of wood, left on the bolt to signal whether someone had been in... There. He hadn’t heard them fall. With difficulty, he bent and collected them.
Newton’s front hall was long and dark. Every door was open, and all the lights were off, creating pockets of blackness. The only light came from the living-room-turned-bedroom. As Hermann limped slowly towards it, the boards beneath his socked feet turned to carpet. Then he reached the doorway and stepped in—and the lights blared on.
He jumped back, grabbing the door frame and shielding his eyes. The floodlights—how could he have forgotten? He fumbled for the switch on the wall, and found it. The floodlights dimmed down, and he dropped his arm, but his heart rate took longer to lower. Adrenaline was pumping through his veins.
As the light receded, his eyes readjusted to the familiar room. It washed back into semidarkness: the overstuffed shelves, the unmade bed, the jumbled boxes. Everything was the same, but as his eyes readjusted, it became sharper, as if he was looking at something under shallow water and the surface had stilled.
He was wrong. Newton was right. It was guilt. Hermann did blame himself. Not for Rennie’s death, or for surviving the purge—he blamed himself for Bowen’s defection. Because of what Hermann always thought, whenever he thought of Bowen: it could have been me.
He was blaming himself for Bowen’s actions. That was why the revelation that Rennie had lived did nothing to alleviate his guilt. That was why he never spoke of it to anyone. Hermann had spent ten years thinking that it ’could have been him’ who turned—who betrayed trust given to him, who sold out to a government just as evil as his own, turned his back on friends and allies just to serve himself. Hermann had told himself that because Bowen, even Rennie could do it, so could he. If they deserved punishment and censure, so did he. And if the collapse of Wagner and all the other operations and networks was their fault, it was just as much his.
But their choices weren’t his. That made no sense. It was ridiculous.
Because he hadn’t made the same one. Hermann was hardly a hero, and maybe he acted callous or unkind in moments when he felt insecure or agitated. That was not the same as being a cold-blooded traitor, a collateral killer. He wasn’t that kind of person, because he hadn’t done it. Q.E.D.
Hermann was breathless with the realization, and a little dizzy. His heart rate was still high from the lights, and his hip hurt from the stairs. He needed to sit down. He crossed the room slowly, like a sleepwalker, and sank down on top of Newton’s unmade bed.
The bedroom looked the same as he remembered it, although he doubted his ability to detect a disturbance among this chaos. Hermann rubbed the bridge of his nose. Then he remembered that he was alone here, safe from outside observation. So he lay back on Newt’s bedspread and exhaled, long and slow, closing his eyes and relaxing his body for the first time in—God only knew how long.
Sunset light was sneaking in over the tops of Newton’s blackout curtains, painting his white ceiling with a wavy line of pink. The blankets smelled like him.
As soon as Hermann understood how he’d blamed himself for everything, he understood why, too: To put himself in the at-fault position was a way to take responsibility for the disaster. It was a way to exercise a modicum of control over a devastating, unmanageable situation in which he had been, in almost every way, completely powerless.
But it was true—Newton was right. It wasn’t his fault.
Finally, he sat up. The door to Newton’s workshop was painted green. Hermann had never been inside. Propelled by the energy of the door just unlocked in his own head, he stood and went over to it.
If Newton had come here yesterday, this workshop had surely been his destination. But how to get inside?
He pulled Newton’s keys from his pocket, holding them by the medallion, and searched for one that matched the brand of this lock. His thoughts were still racing, and when he found the right key, and turned the lock, he found that it had been unlocked all along.
The door opened.
The workshop was a cluttered nightmare. Whatever he’d been expecting, it should have been this. Hermann walked down the canyon between the overflowing bookshelves, observing the books and papers, boxes of parts, schematics on the walls, all of it lit by homemade light fixtures. In all, it was not really different from the bedroom or from Newt’s office in Century.
At the workbench, Hermann turned on an overhead lamp. It illuminated a desk full of tools and bits, a sheet of notes, a long-dried orange peel, and a little corkboard. He recognized the schematic tacked there—a hand-drawn recreation of the transmitter. As he leaned in for a closer look, marveling at his partner’s carelessness, his hand rested on a hardcover book on the desk. He looked down. It was Fellowship.
Hermann picked the book up, slowly. He looked at it. He had the sensation that he’d skipped a line or two while reading, and continued, knowing he had to go back—just go back, just re-read, just make sure. His personal realization had so disoriented him, and he was still adrenalized from the lights. But the book he held in his hands, that he’d found in Newton’s lab... did not belong to Newton.
No... No. It wasn’t his. Hermann checked inside. It was the 1953 edition, all right. It would decipher the Orpheus messages. But it was not Newt’s beloved, dog-eared paperback copy.
Hermann scanned backwards, over the lines he’d missed. The book wasn’t Newton’s. The workshop door had been unlocked. The slivers had been out of the door. Yesterday, the bright lights had come on, Jake said, after dark—but Newt wouldn’t have tripped his own lights. And he hadn’t been here last night. He’d been with Hermann, at the hospital.
Hermann stared out the one visible window in the workshop, half-obscured by a tall shelf. The clouds outside were turning red. He had been wrong about so many things.
Back at the hospital, they had moved Newton from emergency care to an inpatient room. Hermann took a doctor aside. “There’s something stuck in his ear canal. I can’t tell you how I know this,” he said. “Take it out.”
Thursday, June 7th
One day earlier
Of the questions on Hermann’s mind, one was foremost: Where had Newt been going? What was his destination from King’s Cross Station, with the device in his pocket and no money to his name?
But in fact, on Thursday afternoon, Newt had just returned to London. A train had taken him north under the late morning sun, and another had returned him south by the late, humid afternoon.
Newt set out in the morning heat feeling, physically, much better. The transducer’s adverse effects had lessened since the dual test the night before. There was no more ringing, and his mind felt clearer than it had in days. Only the intermittent vertigo persisted. Propelled by claustrophobic restlessness and Hermann’s contagious anxiety, he was aiming for a simple goal of intelligence gathering. He had to do something. Did he need the device to do it? Both components? Probably not. But he brought them just in case. In all, he felt ready and able to ask the questions on his mind and to get some answers about the man on the margins of all this: the mysterious Raleigh Becket.
His destination was Dr. Gottlieb’s alma mater, Cambridge University. When he disembarked, Cambridge Station was bustling with end-of-term travel. Though it was hot under the sun in Hermann’s oversized jacket, Newt found himself shivering. He narrowly avoided death by trunk trolley and stopped at a bench to count the money left in his pocket. Getting to the train station with no wallet had been tricky, and the round-trip ticket had nearly cleaned him out. Newt wasn’t sure whether Hermann had taken his wallet on purpose. It wasn’t like him, so Newt was trying not to accept the theory. But Hermann was being really paranoid right now.
Newt didn’t have enough for any more cab fares. He thought wistfully of the Bonneville, still stranded at the Estate. Riding it at this point, though, probably would have been a challenge. The fact remained: he needed a lift.
Newt asked a dazed-looking undergraduate for change outside the phone booth. Then he called the university, got himself transferred to St. Catharine’s, and breezily lied to a secretary about having a personal appointment with the don. After another pause, a gravelly voice said:
“Thurston, who’s this?”
“Professor! It’s Newt Geiszler. I’m in town for the day. Might you be free sometime this afternoon?”
“As it happens, I am,” said the ancient voice. “Are you on campus already, Newton?”
“No,” said Newt. “Still at the station. Just arrived.”
“Ah. Yes. Good. I’ll send somebody ‘round.”
“You aren’t still riding your bicycle, Professor?”
“No, no, regrettably no,” said Thurston, with a heavy sigh like someone launching into a long story. “I’m afraid I really have become too old for it. My knees...”
“That’s a shame.”
“I’ll send one of my graduate students,” Thurston said, as if he didn’t hear Newt, which he may not have. “He’ll be there for you presently.” Thurston rang off abruptly.
After a long career in the secret services, Thurston had ‘retired’ to take a post at Cambridge. There, he specialized in Old English literature and Germanic philology, while he continued his work as a talent-spotter. It was he who had first recruited the nervous young Hermann. Newt had only met him once or twice, and found the old professor both compelling and alien, but he remembered Newt because he remembered everything.
“This must be the Thurston express,” Newt said a few minutes later as the unmistakable craft drew to a halt in front of the station. The undergraduate riding it, in shirtsleeves and wool pants, put a foot down. Thurston’s famous bicycle was military-issue from WWII, and it looked fit to haul a cannon. Its detailing was painted eggshell blue. A little wooden cart was frequently hitched behind it, painted the same color. The venerable professor’s slow trips around the campus were well known. In his heyday, Thurston had towed around books and sometimes students in the cart.
“I thought it was retired,” said Newt.
“The don said you requested it specifically,” said the undergraduate. He was not looking impressed by that.
“Not as such,” said Newt, failing to conceal his laughter.
“All the same, you’d better get in,” the student said, nodding to the cart. “He’s waiting for you.” Newt climbed in and rode, facing backwards, to Cambridge University.
The day was bright and full of birdsong, and the wind pleasantly cool in the hot sun. The green and brick campus slipped by at a non-nauseating speed. It was here that Hermann had diverged from his academic path, onto the unlikely path that led underground—‘underground’ both figuratively and literally, Newt reflected. He wondered, had Hermann ever taken a ride in the Thurstonmobile? He guessed no, but he spent an enjoyable moment picturing it. He thought of his own years at his various universities, and didn’t miss them a bit.
It occurred to Newt belatedly, as cars slowed down and passers-by turned to gawk, that this was perhaps the most conspicuous way to travel. An undergraduate whooped as he flew past.
Professor Thurston was huge, as vast as his indeterminate age. He ushered Newt into his sitting room, walled with bookshelves of leather-bound Germanic titles, and asked another undergraduate to bring them tea. Newt politely sipped, feeling at home in the unrepentant plush-and-leather extravagance of academia.
In the venerable Thurston’s time at the secret services, he had been a “computer,” a person who archived and processed immense amounts of personnel data in his head. The electronic computers they had now were only just catching up with what Professor Thurston could do with his eyes closed. His memory was as vast as the Black Chamber’s archives. He knew every agent, on each side, every name and every alias. Everybody in the Division had known him, once; you could be sure that he knew about you, too, even if you hadn’t met.
It couldn’t be said that Thurston knew anyone particularly. He knew each person like a curiosity. His memory was extraordinary, by far more extraordinary than Newt’s simple photographic memory—it was agile, it made connections, and it stretched back decades. While Newt’s archive was in ideas and concepts, Thurston’s was in people: their habits, their careers, their lives. But the thousands of lives in his head were still, to him, data points.
Thurston settled down with his tea, wheezing as he lowered himself into an unwilling armchair. There was first some preamble about Thurston’s troubles, his lazy students and the uncooperative committees. He asked after all the radio lab employees, including Hermann (whom he referred to as “your man”), and Newt reported their affairs and career trajectories faithfully. There was a moment of confusion when Thurston also asked after Augustus Westerby, and it took clarification before Newt realized that he’d meant Wesley—an unexpected blip for the professor. Could it be that he was losing his gift, after all these years?
“I don’t suppose you’ve just dropped by for tea and pleasantries, then, Newton?” Thurston finally said, setting his cup down and leaning back in his chair.
“You suppose correctly, Professor,” said Newt, leaning forward in his.
“What’s on your mind?”
Newt opened his mouth, and his well-ordered set of questions blew away like a deck of cards in a brisk wind. The question that came out was:
“What is Raleigh Becket’s problem?”
Thurston made a thoughtful exhale that sounded like a winded racehorse. “Becket,” he said.
“Raleigh Becket. He was probably still a runner when you last heard of him,” Newt said. “He’s risen in the ranks ever since Bowen leveled the playing field—as it were, by blowing it to pieces.”
Thurston didn’t respond. He looked unfocused, half-asleep. Newt wondered if he had traveled here in vain.
“Ex-Marine,” Newt said, trying to jog his memory.
“Mm,” said Thurston, eyes closing fully.
Watching the professor, Newt wondered where a person’s memories went when you could no longer access them. Did they vanish from existence? Or were they still stored in Thurston’s head someplace? Would they be, perhaps, accessible with the right tools? He had both components of the device...
“I think he served in the Middle East,” said Newt.
“It was the Suez Crisis,” Thurston corrected conversationally, eyes still closed. “Becket may have been the only Englishman who came out of that looking well.”
“What did he do?”
“Timely information to his commander and shrewd advice, too, I’m guessing. It got him a transfer into the Division. As—”
“And then he was posted to Berlin?”
“Some time later, yes,” said Thurston. He opened his eyes. “Are you going to interrupt?”
“No. Sorry, Professor.”
“Why did you come to see me for this, rather than consult the record?” Thurston asked, picking up his teacup again, which looked minuscule in his gigantic hand.
“I got a tip, of sorts. From Caitlin Lightcap.”
“Ah, Miss Lightcap. Such an interesting choice for recruitment, I always thought... Not really suited to the field, emotionally, you know. She’s still out in the cold, I assume?”
“Very much so,” said Newt, choosing unhappily to ignore the slight against his friend.
“An extra-curricular tip, then. What was it she told you?”
“Well, it actually started with… Wagner,” Newt said before he finished thinking about whether he should say it or not.
“The Wagner Mission? Of ‘63? Or ‘34?”
“’63,” said Newt reluctantly.
He hadn’t really thought about how much he’d have to confide in Thurston to get his information. Was Thurston still in touch with his old buddies? With the Chief? Newt wanted information from him, not the other way around. But whatever he said might make its way back to Century.
In his pocket, he touched the little box with the transmitter inside.
“I don’t know much about it,” Thurston said. “It was after my time.”
“It’s Hermann, you know,” Newt burst out. “He was on that mission. And he never told me about it. Traumatic experience, I guess. Well, he finally did. Tell me. About it. Recently. And after all that, he never even found out what happened to the device, right, the one Becket lifted—supposedly—from the East Germans. So I decided to ask around a bit, see if I could figure out who took it—to put Hermann’s mind at ease, you know. I mean, the guy goes on one away mission and then blames himself when it has a horrible outcome. How many of these operations turn out, anyway? Gotta be less than 20 percent! I mean, it’s ridiculous. So I was talking about it with Lightcap, and she said—well, her note actually was about Rennie, not Raleigh. And I guess, I guess they could have been in cahoots, but that just doesn’t, I don’t know, it just doesn’t fit with what I know of Becket, so I thought—”
“What was it she told you about Charles?”
“Just that he and Victor were close,” said Newt, pulling his babbling up short.
“Yes, certainly,” said Thurston, looking at him placidly. “They were involved for many years.”
“Involved?” said Newt, taken aback. “Charles Rennie and Vice Chief Victor?”
Thurston frowned at him. “Yes. Your man never told you?”
“No! What? Did he—do other people know about this?”
“Not my business whether or not others know. Just my business to know it all, in case they come to ask. I suppose you never knew them, but yes, young man, they were involved, lovers if you’re feeling sentimental.”
“But—” Newt’s mind was racing. How could he never have known? All these years? “But they’re so... different.”
Thurston made a nonverbal noise and picked up his teacup.
He didn’t believe it. He knew it was true, if Thurston said it was, but it wasn’t penetrating his reasoning faculties. “How long were they together?” Newt persisted.
“Forever. Until Charles died, as far as I know,” said Thurston.
“And Hermann knows this? Why didn’t he ever tell me?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said Thurston, setting his cup down carefully. “But I believe you came to me about Mr. Becket, not old workplace gossip.”
“I—er, yes,” said Newt, rubbing his jaw. The conversation kept getting away from him. “Is it possible—” He ventured his working theory: “Did Becket and Rennie know each other well? Is it possible they were in cahoots?”
Thurston considered. “It’s possible.”
“Would you say it’s likely that Rennie recruited Becket for one of his, you know, schemes? His weapons-dealing friends?”
“To steal the coveted Wagner device, for instance, and sell it to these weapons-dealing friends?”
Newt shrugged. “For instance.”
“It’s possible,” said Thurston. “It’s possible.”
“But not likely,” said Newt, hearing his tone.
Thurston was sipping his tea. He set the tiny cup down.
“In my opinion, the crack of corruption went much deeper than Charles’s weapons-dealing friends,” he said. “Not everyone sees it the way I do. Victor, for instance, does not agree with my theory. He still believes Charles was a casualty of Bowen’s betrayal. But these last ten years, I’ve given the problem much thought.” Thurston spoke of it as if it were a puzzle, a theorem whose solution eluded him.
He raised his finger and traced a triangle in the air. “Victor, Bowen, Rennie.”
“The holy trinity,” said Newt, with an irony that Thurston did not seem to notice.
“To really understand it, you must understand his conspiracy with Robert. I believe Charles was working with Robert, for the other side, for many, many years. Together, they deceived the whole service, and Victor most of all.”
“But to truly make you understand, I ought to go back to the beginning,” he said.
“Before we discovered Robert Bowen, the Soviets recruited him. It was, we believe, early in his university studies. They recruited him as a deep cover agent, a mole. He was meant to build an illustrious career in English intelligence, to gain power and access, and act on the Russians’ behalf every step of the way.
“At the same time, Victor, who was a year ahead of him in his studies, was already a member of our early recruitment group at Oxford. Victor’s father was the youngest son of the Duke of Dodge. I wonder, what did young Victor think of his cousin, the duke-to-be, as they grew up together? Alfred was the boy’s name, I recall. How Victor must have hated him. By the time we met, he was older, and it was all a joke to him. The title—! In this day and age, who would want such a thing? Victor was a soldier, a man of action! A man of action, like his friend Robert.
“They met in Robert’s second year, after he got himself recruited. In my estimation, Victor was absolutely crucial to his rise in the service. Someone like Robert, someone who is hungry for power, they need acolytes. That’s exactly what Victor was. Oh, when I met them, they were thick as thieves. Enchanted by Robert, Victor was. Everyone was, men and women. But Robert gave Victor the time of day, and that made him feel like the most important man in the network.
“Now, I am no great judge of character. Not my purview, not my function. But there was always something cruel about Robert the charmer. He was always a philanderer—everybody knew about his dalliances in the secretary pool and among the coding bay girls. His attention, his approval was a wonderful thing. But a barb from him stung, and made you the more desperate to recover in his eyes. Even I, unsentimental as I am, could feel it.
“Well, the war came and put an end to their studies. Robert and Victor were posted together in London for the first years of the war, and then separated. I believe Victor ended up in Spain. Robert was sent to Paris. He was superb. That was also where he discovered young Charles. Do you know how they met?” Thurston asked, remembering there was another person in the room and opening his eyes. It was plain that this was where his interest and his expertise lay: in the glory days.
Newt shook his head. “No.”
“I quite like this story. It’s a few months into the posting in Vichy France, and Robert’s restless. He hears about this underground café still operating, where the opposition and the criminal element drink and play cards. He thinks he’ll go play a few hands, meet some locals, maybe win a few francs. He steps through the door, and there’s a shout, and someone’s socked him in his jaw. He goes down, and two Frenchmen jump on him, shouting about a debt. He protests: ‘There must be some mistake! I’ve never been here before!’ They take a second look. They realize that he’s not who they thought he was. ‘But my, you look so much alike! Are you a twin?’
“So Robert searches for his doppelgänger. And he finds him, running a check-and-telegram con on a German troop, no less: Mr. Charles Rennie.”
Then Thurston said something else. Newt, coming back to himself, realized he had missed a sentence or two.
“...steal the plans for an offensive on the southern flank...”
“What? Sorry—could you repeat that?”
Thurston blinked, disoriented by the interruption.
“Repeat what?”
“Just, whatever you just said.”
The professor cleared his throat with consternation and said: “I was explaining the way they operated in Vichy France. Charles made a connection to a troop of Nazis, posing as a dealer who could bring them contraband; when they got used to him, Robert walked right into their barracks. They took him for Charles, let him through the door, and he cleaned them out. Plans and code books and all.”
Thurston raised his two index fingers, and crossed them demonstratively.
“One replaces the other.”
Newt nodded attentively, still feeling a little disoriented. He was very warm.
“Well, after the war, Victor joined them, and the happy trio was posted to Istanbul. It was there that Charles and Victor took up together. Istanbul was a hotbed in those early postwar days—I’m sure you know the story of Victor’s broken jaw—”
“I just don’t see it,” said Newt, unable not to interrupt. “The two of them? How did they get along? What did they even talk about? Victor’s so straight-laced, and Rennie is—was—a crook. Although, well, Victor was different then, I guess. That’s what Hermann says. Was he?”
“I really haven’t the slightest idea,” said Thurston, annoyed at the interruption.
That, Newt thought with some frustration, could sum up your knowledge on the whole issue. Thurston really was a computer—human behavior was all statistics to him.
He tried again to believe it. Rennie and Victor. He had an uncomfortable feeling that his inability to accept or empathize with the complex private lives of these men made him more like Thurston than a person.
“But if I may,” the professor was resuming, “Istanbul. They collected good intelligence, the three of them. They set up networks that were in use until 1963. They were there for five years. Then, Robert was promoted to Swiss Head of Station—quite young for it, too—and posted in Berne. Rennie went along with him. Headquarters offered Victor a job in London, and he took it. Married his secretary. Settled down.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. Most of these men do. During this period, I retired. I recruited your man, Gottlieb, with Victor’s help. In the late ‘50s, Bowen returned to London for promotion.”
That must have been when Caitlin met him, Newt thought. Thurston said something else, and again, Newt had the curious sensation of the memory getting lost along the way. He felt sure he had heard it, but it hadn’t been recorded for storage. Newt shifted uneasily in his seat, to see if he still had control of his faculties. He did. He had the uncomfortable sensation that his body and mind were performing tasks, unsupervised.
He touched his ear. No ringing. Maybe that silence was not a relief, but rather something to be wary of.
“...and Victor got a divorce.” Thurston was saying. “Around this time, the Americans lodged their complaint about Bowen. That was when the net began to close around him.”
“Yikes,” Newt murmured, a little distracted by his own unsteady thoughts.
Another moment passed and disappeared. Then:
“...they moved to arrest him quietly, but he’d already run off to the Estate. I know you know all of this, of course. But I’ll add in my own suspicion.”
Here, Thurston sat forward. The professor’s voice grew sharper, straighter, like an archer searching for its target. It drew Newt back to attention.
“When Robert went missing, Headquarters sent out an emergency alert to all homeland stations. That included the Training Estate. According to Headquarters’ records, a call was placed. But no staff remembers it. In the inquiry, afterwards, everyone swore there was no call. And they were all fired, of course. In the final report, it was decided that Robert himself intercepted it.
“But I believe that he had somebody on the inside, at the Estate. Somebody he trusted, who interfered with that message. Somebody who was never identified.”
Thurston sat back again, straightening up. His intensity ebbed away—he seemed to be coming out of his trance. Newt, too, was feeling more lucid. Maybe the heat of the afternoon had been putting him to sleep.
“Well, 36 hours later, he gets a lift to the station, gets on the local train to Great Yarmouth Port, gets picked up by a Norwegian merchant, and sails off into the sunrise, as it were. To the great unknown East.
“So that was it. Bowen was gone, Rennie was dead. And Victor swore revenge.”
Newt nodded. “Revenge,” he repeated. “Do you think Bowen’s still alive?”
“I do,” Thurston said, shifting and beginning to lift himself out of his chair. “Though we can’t really know what they’ve done with him in Moscow. Would they give him a job? He’s their hero, certainly. But would they trust him?”
After Newt went to the bathroom to splash some water on his face, he returned for the final questions. He had learned far more than he’d expected, about matters he had never thought to wonder about. The scale and scope of Bowen’s operation awed him, and his own muddled maybe-frame-up shrank to a mere inconvenience in comparison. Yet things were making more sense, somehow—even if he didn’t have the answers he had wanted, his researcher’s intuition told him that he was in the right arena, asking the right questions.
“Where did Becket come from? What does he want?”
“He was a bit after my time, but I can offer you the broad strokes of his career,” Thurston said. “American father, French mother, raised in England. He joined an elite force in the Royal Marines quite young, along with his older brother. His brother was tragically killed in a training accident. He was only 22.
“After the Suez Crisis, young Raleigh came home from Egypt, discharged from the Marines, and went to the Estate to be trained. The Division’s newest bright star. I don’t know who fast-tracked him. He was quite young—hardly 23, as I recall. From there, he was posted to Bonn, and then later West Berlin. That was a coveted position, at the time—dangerous posting, lots of excitement. In ‘63, Vice Chief Bowen sent him over the wall to East Berlin, to help Rennie. Then, the Bowen crisis broke, and his position was compromised.”
“He vanished, didn’t he?”
“Quite right. Along with every forward-thinking operative in the field.”
“He seems to have a talent for surviving a crisis.”
“Mr. Becket is an ambitious young man. He saw early that a career in the Marines would not give him the stature it once would have. Someone gave him an opportunity to jump ship, and he took it. He’s made a remarkable job of it already—he’s the Head of Station in Vienna before the age of 40. He has his eyes on the prize, as it were: Whitehall, or intelligence minister.”
And Newt was reminded of Thurston’s description of young double agent Robert Bowen: He was to build an illustrious career. Was that where Newt’s theory was wrong? Was Becket not another Rennie, but another Robert Bowen?
He bid goodbye to the professor and rode back to the station in the bicycle cart, conducted this time by a different student. Newt was thinking of Becket the ambitious young man: that was exactly the impression Newt had got from him on their trip to Langley together. That was, now that he thought of it head-on, the reason why he had never trusted Becket. It seemed so obvious now.
But how could he have broken into the stables at the same time he was in the meeting?
And why had he targeted Newt?
In the bicycle cart, Newt watched the bricks and bikes flash by and thought of Hermann here. Not as a student, but as a professor. That was where Hermann really belonged, Newt thought, breathing in the spring wind. He belonged in a dusty, sunlit library, not in a damp, unlit basement where the mold aggravated his asthma. His discoveries deserved to see the light of day.
On the train, the strange lethargy returned. Newt slouched low in the leather seat and for many stops, he remained unusually still. He reviewed all that Thurston had told him, focused intently on it, wanting to make sure he had remembered it all. But he found that his line of thought kept falling away from what he wanted to pursue, like he was a climber on a rope, descending into a canyon bit by bit. He wanted to stop, grip the rock face, climb back up a few inches and examine things, but the inexorable force of gravity kept on pulling him down.
He descended into his memory, trying to work something out. Becket, the conference meeting schedule, the stable sign-in sheet.
Becket had signed in at 8:20, out at 8:31, and then joined Victor and Rosewater for the meeting, until 9:15. Newt had arrived at 8:45. The intruder had come in at approximately 9:04 by Newt’s time. And Victor had arrived at 9:20.
So how had Becket fooled them? Had he perhaps left the meeting early, unreported? Had someone else done his dirty work? Was Victor covering for Becket?
He came back to himself again; it was a moment later. Getting lost in thought, that was nothing new. But this was different. The rope was dropping him down into the chasm, bit by bit, but he could never remember falling. He just kept finding himself deeper and deeper. It was his short-term memory, he realized, like back in Thurston’s office. It wasn’t integrating.
With another jolt, he came back to the present moment again. Newt realized all at once that he was in trouble. He looked at his hands, and felt the nauseating disconnect between the act and his desire to do it. He didn’t remember wanting to do that—was he in control of what he was doing?
He touched the tips of his fingers to his thumbs. The sensation, repeated, felt real; it felt like putting his thoughts outside of his head. He kept doing it.
He was stepping off the train and onto the platform. As his heel landed on the pavement with a jolt, he ran back over the last minute. He had stood up and walked out of the train car and down the little steps, right? He must have. But he had no memory of doing so.
Now he was walking along the platform. The crowd of commuting strangers carried him onward. The motion and the jolting of walking was grounding him a bit. Some other program was running, in the background, unsupervised. Something about the sign-in sheet, the meeting, the stables. There was something there...
But a weight was pulling him, jolt by jolt, down into the dark. What was down there? What if the rope snapped?
The jolts came every three steps. Now every two. He was stopped under a two-sided clock. A bell was tolling the hour.
The clock still said it was one minute til. How long had he been waiting for the minute to finish?
He was unstuck from time. But his long-term memory still worked.
He felt something slide onto his lip. He tasted iron. Blood.
It clicked into place.
“Oh,” whispered Newt. “I know how he did it.”
On the platform, the flow of commuters halted and circled. Somebody was shouting, calling for help, a medic, and somebody was on their knees taking the pulse of the unconscious man.
Where there had been a wall, there was instead a deep, dark chasm. He was falling into it. He had a rope, but it wasn’t anchored. Instead it was attached to a bell, and he was pulling it, making the bell toll, vibrating through his skull, making his jaws rattle. Some amount of time passed, and he was walking through a dark cavern full of file cabinets. One of them held something he needed. He’d forgotten which one. The batteries in his flashlight were running out. It flickered. He hit it. It flickered. It illuminated a bed. His bed. At home. The torch went out. His eyes opened. He was lying in a hospital room.
Newt blinked. He didn’t feel like he could move any more than that. He could hear a steady beeping, in the distance, but no ringing. Something made a noise next to him.
He rolled his eyes to the left. Hermann was asleep in the armchair next to his bed, arms hugging himself, one hand tucked under his chin. In his sleep, he frowned.
Newt refocused on the room around him. With his expanding awareness, a sense of urgency was returning to him. Everything was out of focus without his glasses, but there was a large number “8” on the wall opposite his bed. Was it the date?
Suddenly a sharp pain lanced into the center of his skull and he squeezed his eyes shut. The pain ebbed after a moment.
Eyes still closed, Newt counted forwards from the last date he remembered. What day had the conference started? The 3rd of June. But he couldn’t remember how many days and hotels had come after that. The gig, the gig had been on Wednesday. Which meant he had passed out on Thursday, right? Thursday was even more distant, like a film he half-remembered. But there was something about it, something important he had to remember...
“Hermann,” he croaked. Nothing happened. He rallied and tried lifting a hand, and found it easier than he’d expected. He reached sideways and swatted gently at Hermann’s arm. “Hermann. What day of the week is it?”
Hermann grimaced, then squeezed his eyes shut more tightly and turned away, mumbling, “It’s Friday.”
“Oh, thank God,” said Newt, exhaling.
He looked back at the ceiling, leaving his hand resting on Hermann’s arm.
“Can you pass me my glasses?” he croaked after another moment.
Hermann inhaled sharply through his nose, and sat up. “You’re awake!”
“Yes. I am. Hi. Sorry. Glasses?”
“How do you feel? Are you all right? You can hear me? What do you remember? You’re in a hospital...”
Newt took his glasses and put them on. “Yes, I can see that. I feel great. Except my muscles have been liquefied and my bones have been turned into bricks. And I feel like someone is inside my skull redecorating with a sledgehammer. How long was I out? Tell me it was a day, and not a week” A horrible thought occurred. “Or weeks.”
“No. No. Just a day. Twenty-four hours, just—about.”
Hermann’s fragmented voice made Newt look up. He could see Hermann more clearly now. His face was drawn, and the shadows under his eyes were deep purple. He was listening to Newt attentively, but his eyes looked defeated.
“A day… It feels much longer,” he said, quietly.
“Hey. Are you okay?” said Newt, sitting up and reaching for him. “What’s wrong, did something happen?”
Hermann looked over his shoulder at the door, the window to the hallway. Then he hunched forward, catching Newt’s outstretched hand and clasping it between both of his.
“I’m sorry,” he said, voice quiet.
“Hermann? What happened?”
“Shh, shh.” Hermann looked back at the window again. There was no one visible, but you could never know for sure.
“What’s wrong?”
“There’s been a paperwork mix-up,” Hermann whispered, “and they believe you are Dr. Hermann Gottlieb. I’d like to keep it that way. So please keep your voice down.”
Newt propped himself up on his hands and tried to rise. “Ew. Why?”
Hermann put a hand on his chest to stop him. “Because there’s a warrant out for Newton Geiszler’s arrest.”
“A warrant?”
“Yes.”
“...Because they think I’m Orpheus.”
“Yes.”
Newt looked at Hermann, who was staring at him too intensely. His heart shrank away.
“And so do you,” said Newt.
Hermann shook his head.
“I’m not,” said Newt.
“It’s all right,” said Hermann quietly.
“No, really—I know you think it’s me—I can tell—and I get it, I do—but listen. I’m innocent. You have to believe me, Hermann. You have to.”
His face was flushing.
Hermann put his hand on Newt’s forehead.
“I know,” said Hermann, quietly but clearly. “I know it isn’t you. Lie back.”
He was putting pressure on Newt’s head. Newt lay back.
“Don’t want you passing out again,” said Hermann, watching the blood leave his face.
“Or getting a nosebleed.”
“Nor that.”
Newt stared up at Hermann, whose cold hand was still resting on his face. Hermann looked down at him. Gently, he combed Newt’s unruly hair back from his forehead.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” Newt whispered.
In the tiny room, their voices seemed to echo on the tile. Around them the hospital was quiet, except when voices and footsteps rang out irregularly in the hall outside, always unexpectedly close. Hermann spoke hardly above a murmur: “It started on Thursday morning. After our test on Wednesday night. I went to the fifth floor to deliver my report on Orpheus—no match. There were all these people in Victor’s office... They told me they were prioritizing tracking the thief at the conference. They’d decided the thief and Orpheus were one and the same, and they wouldn’t let me decipher the messages. They said there wasn’t time before the envoys arrived on Saturday. So I was to run the names of all the conference attendees. Including you.
“But it was obvious they had already concluded that you were guilty. One of them had spotted you with Lightcap in the city. They wanted me to run your records. So I did.”
Newt looked at him. “And?”
“They matched.” Hermann gave a small nod. “Your travel pattern matched Orpheus’s perfectly. Every signal for the last two years.”
He’d been unable to reach Newt, he explained. So he went to the Blueberry to search for a key to Orpheus’s code. After a few hours of processing, it found the previous instance of the code: a book code, its record archived in the Black Chamber. “Then you were found,” said Hermann. “Unconscious, in King’s Cross Station.” Because he’d had no identification besides the jacket tag, he was admitted to the hospital under Hermann’s name.
“You were found in a train station, and you had both components of the device... You can imagine how it looked. Like you were trying to run.”
Newt looked up at Hermann, his mouth tight.
Hermann shook his head. “I wouldn’t—shouldn’t—have believed it. That you might be a mole, a, a traitor. I should never have considered it. But I was in a state. I was paranoid, I was... I was reliving the Wagner mission. Thinking about how I almost went over... And, well, with the way everything looked...” He shook his head again, looking down. “...and then there was the trip to Langley. Always those missing days.”
Newt closed his eyes and turned away.
“And then on top of everything, you were in hospital, unconscious... So I couldn’t ask you...” Hermann swallowed, steadying his voice. “So I broke into the Black Chamber and stole the matching code.”
“You did what?”
“Please, you have got to keep your voice down. I entered the archives, under a pretense—”
“Oh my god...”
“I found the file. The book was The Fellowship of the Ring, 1953, English edition.”
Newt fell silent again.
“I stole the contents of the file and destroyed them. Then I made copies of all of Orpheus’s messages. Then I went back to the IBM, and I altered your records so that some of the travel dates no longer matched, then I left. And I took the key to the Black Chamber’s filing cabinet, for good measure. I no longer had any hope of clearing your name—just delaying the hunt.
“Then I went to your apartment. The traps were disturbed—not all of them, but someone had been inside. There were signs. I went into your workshop and found the book.”
Here, Newt frowned. “But... I think my copy of Fellowship is still at the Estate.”
Hermann nodded. “That’s correct. It wasn’t your copy. I’d know the cover. But the copy in your flat was the correct edition for the book code.”
“So you—”
Hermann nodded. “I realized that it had been planted. I realized I was wrong. And paranoid. You were right. It was a frame-up.”
Newt nodded, frowning at Hermann for another moment. When Hermann said nothing, Newt looked away from him.
“I’m sorry,” said Hermann again. “I’m sorry I didn’t trust you, I’m so sorry. They made me doubt you, but I shouldn’t have let them. It was myself I didn’t trust.”
Newt jerked his head in a small nod, closing his eyes. Hermann put his hands on Newt’s arm and gripped him gently. “You would never live a lie like that. You’re not a defector. I thought because I could, that you could. But I couldn’t. I didn’t. Nor did you. You never would. If I hadn’t been so—so bloody—”
“Hermann, stop,” said Newt quietly. “Don’t cry.”
“Don’t call me that,” said Hermann, wiping his eyes.
“It’s okay. I get it. I’m a shady character.” Newt looked away, across the room, at nothing. He listened to Hermann sniff. “Do you want to know what happened to me at Langley?” Hearing no answer, he said: “I got a job offer.”
Hermann looked up. “From the CIA?”
Newt nodded against the pillow, looking at the opposite wall, the one with the big window. “They’re doing some crazy stuff over there. Two of the guys I was conferencing with, they were on the um, the quantum computing team. It’s years away from anything viable but... they knew the kind of work I—we—used to do.”
“They tried to poach you?”
“Yeah. If I was interested. And I was. I was interested.”
How many times had Hermann asked himself, why did this man, who’d spent his spare time at Oxford building a calculating machine to find Riemann Zeros, who owned four biographies of Charles Babbage—why did this man abandon computer science in favor of the outdated field of radio? He should have been a star engineer at IBM or the DOD, not, Hermann wasn’t ashamed to admit it, playing second fiddle to a mathematician with no technicians, funding, or future in the Cold War bargain basement that was England.
“It was kind of a horrible trip. The Div team was six people: me, Weeks, who was out-of-his-mind nervous, freaking Vice Chief Victor, who said about four words total, attack dog Preston, that putz Berkeley, and our mutual friend, Mr. Raleigh Becket.
“The Americans put us up in this fancy hotel, which was awful. Becket and Berkeley were all buddy-buddy... Berkeley was schmoozing, making all these nasty jokes just to get Becket to laugh. I just tried to stay out of his line of fire, ‘cause I knew that once Berkeley ran out of American girls to heckle or humiliate, I was next. And not only that—I could tell that Becket didn’t actually like him. He’s gross! But Becket liked the admiration. He ate that up.
“So finally, we got away from them, and they went to conference with the other COs or whatever. Weeks and I, we went to give our shpiel to the Langley crypto labs. Their facilities were massive. Loads of computers, new ones, with all these techs operating them—none of the pen-and-paper bullshit. The lead engineer, he was an MIT guy too, so he liked me. We went out for drinks, and he told me he wanted to introduce me to his team of specialists. Quantum computing. Like I said, it’s years away... but it sounded so... promising.
“So the next day, while Weeks was busy, the lead introduced me to the rest of his team. They showed me some of the stuff they were working on. It was fascinating. They said they knew all about me, that they loved my presentation, and that if I wanted to come back and talk... talk about moving back home... that I should.”
Newt rubbed his temples, closing his eyes.
“I stayed all day... way too late. Finally, I took a cab back to our fancy-shmancy hotel. I was so energized I could have run all the way back... I was imagining all kinds of things. A bright future. Discoveries. Computer revolution. Nobel prize. Personally ending the Cold War. I knew you’d hate the idea of moving to the States... But I didn’t think about that. I didn’t think—about you at all.” He shook his head, eyes still squeezed shut in discomfort.
He exhaled. Hermann was silent. There was a pause.
“Then…” Newt sighed disgustedly from the back of his throat. “So then. I get back to the hotel. Over-the-moon excited. I hop out of the cab, walk into the lobby... And fucking Berkeley and Becket are there, sitting at the bar after their upper-floor-conference-confabulation bullshit, having a Scotch or whatever the fuck. Berkeley waves to me and says—he says—” Newt spat it out—“‘Look who’s back from the bugger basement!’”
Hermann winced. Newt continued, his face red. “Becket just sort of laughed. It was half-hearted. But it was humiliating. Absolutely humiliating. I didn’t know what to say. For once. I just wanted to take Berkeley’s Scotch glass and smash it into his smug fucking face. Well, I couldn’t really reach it, so I—” He plunged on, turning even more red— “I kicked his fucking barstool. I should have kicked higher—fucking—knocked him off it. I wish. But he just kind of wobbled. And then he laughed again, like, ‘Can you believe this little faggot?’” Hermann flinched. “Before he could retaliate, I hightailed it out of there. I went right back to my cab and told him to take me back to HQ. I never wanted to go back to Century. I never wanted to go back to England. I was going to take that Langley job, right the hell now, and go work with people who actually wanted me—not in a basement office with three other nobodies, below a bunch of guys who acted like we were the dirt under their boots.”
Out in the hospital hallway, there was a sudden commotion. Urgent voices shouted out orders, moving closer, pushing a rattling gurney with a squeaky wheel. Then the convoy turned the corner, and the sound died again.
“But as I drove back to the labs, I didn’t feel... freed,” Newt went on. “I started to panic. What if they rescinded the offer? What if I interviewed, and they decided they didn’t want me? Worst of all—what if I got hired, moved, started work there, and then I couldn’t handle it? What if I choked? What if I didn’t fit with the American guys either? What if the reason I stayed in the fucking—bugger basement—was because this—” He tapped his own temple agitatedly— “was not up to this—?” He gestured with a spasm of the arm, encompassing the room and Hermann. “Everything would have to change. What if I couldn’t handle that? What if I can’t handle any of that? What if I’m not—strong enough, or sane enough? What if I’m all brains and no bite? Do you—?”
Hermann was frowning sadly at him, like he was trying to understand.
“I just—I freaked out.” Newt shook his head quickly. “I was so—scared—and so mad at myself for being scared...”
“So you...”
“I just ran,” said Newt, his face still flushed. “I leaned forward and told the driver to take me to the train instead. Went to New York. Wandered around for a few days. Went to my old neighborhood... Ended up staying with this kid I knew from grade school... Well, not a kid, he has a family now. Eventually, I realized I was running away from the problem and shooting myself in the foot at the same time. Called you. Probably freaked you out.”
Hermann nodded.
“Then I bought a motorcycle and came home.”
Newt scratched at the loosely knit bedspread.
“I wouldn’t have left you behind,” he said to Hermann. “But I… I felt bad. For considering it. So I didn’t want to tell you.”
Hermann nodded again. “I understand.”
Newt sighed. In the hallway outside, two sets of feet passed by, walking in step.
“For a while, I was ashamed of the whole thing. I thought I had been a coward. That I was just afraid to try my mettle, or whatever, with the big dogs. But then I realized, I like my life, actually.” He shrugged. “The only thing it was actually missing from it was a sick-ass motorcycle. Really, it was just a midlife crisis, when you get down to it.”
Hermann exhaled a slight laugh. “Right.”
“Embarrassing,” muttered Newt, looking away. “I should have just explained.”
“It’s all right,” said Hermann. He felt relieved, but also sad.
“You really broke into the archives, huh?” said Newt, glancing at him. “How’d you manage that?”
“Lightcap helped me.”
“Really?”
Hermann nodded. “She coached me. When to go in, what sections to ask for. File ID code formats. Recognizing the key...”
Newt smiled, thinking of them collaborating—then he blinked, as a memory reached him, and he remembered sitting across from Caitlin in the hospital cafeteria, in his dreams. He remembered the cavernous darkness of the Black Chamber, watching the silver keys flash by in a faltering flashlight beam...
He looked over at Hermann—ashamed, exhausted, noble, foolish Hermann.
“Was it a silver key?”
“What?” said Hermann, rubbing his eyes and stretching his back. Newt remembered the ache in his hip as if it were his own. In his dreams, the pain had been dull and deep.
“So, where does all this stand?” said Newt.
“It’s over,” said Hermann. “You were framed. It worked. And whatever bridges they hadn’t already burned, I’ve set on fire. I altered your record, I destroyed the evidence in the archive. We could take our chances, turning ourselves in...”
The pronoun did not escape Newt’s notice. “‘We’?”
Hermann ignored the question like it was beneath him. “I honestly think our best option now is to go into hiding.”
Newt put up a hand to stem the flow of Hermann’s pessimism. “Wait, wait. We still have the device. And the book! Did you try decoding any of the Orpheus messages?”
“Not yet. I haven’t had the time,” said Hermann.
“We can still figure out who’s doing all this. We can stop them from getting away with it.”
“They already have, Newton.”
“I know I can figure this out... In fact, I feel like I have already.” Newt broke off, squinting at the ceiling. “Thursday is pretty fuzzy. But I think I...”
“Oh, yes—Thursday. Where were you going on the train?”
“Going...? Oh. I was getting back, actually. I went to Cambridge to talk to Thurston.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah. And on the ride home, I started to get... I don’t know, it was like really bad vertigo. Physical and mental. From the transducer. I kept losing track of time. And I was trying to figure something out... Something about the conference... and I did figure it out.” Newt frowned. “But I forget.”
“Figure what out? What was it?”
“I don’t remember.” Newt made a frustrated noise. “It’s like it’s just out of reach. But I figured it out once. I know I could work it out again.”
“‘Once you know how, then you know who,’” said Hermann, quoting a detective novel he was fond of.
Newt chewed at a hangnail on his thumb.
“We know that Becket and Victor were in their meeting until 9:15 PM,” he said. “Becket was in the stables from 8:20 to 8:31. I got there at 8:45, and then the thief came in at 9:04. He smashed the glass, mumbled to himself, and then left, and then I left a few minutes later. 9:15, meeting ends, Victor comes in at 9:20 and sees the carnage. By then, I’m gone, and so is Orpheus.”
Hermann was listening closely. “What did Orpheus say?”
Newt shook his head. “I couldn’t hear it.”
“Is there any chance the guards had the wrong time? Did you get a look at their clock?”
“No, because I didn’t have my glasses on. But as far as I remember, I had the same time on my watch.” Newt hesitated. Something in his memory snagged. “Yeah... I checked my watch when I signed in. Theirs had the same time.”
“When did you last set it?”
“In the boarding house, before I left.”
“So your time definitely matched up with the Army’s time?”
“Yes!”
“All right, all right, I just want to check every possibility.”
“What possibility are you checking? Clock confabulation? Get your mind out of the Agatha Christie novel, please, this is the real world.” Even as he said it, the needle of Newt’s memory caught the groove it had been seeking. “—My watch,” he said. “No. My watch was off. I didn’t notice until the next day, in your apartment. I was 15 minutes slow.”
“Really?” said Hermann.
“Yeah. Yeah—” Newt opened his mouth—his mind was speeding ahead too fast for speech, and instead of speaking, he started hitting Hermann’s arm with his fist.
Hermann sat forward in his chair. “What? What is it?”
“The—yes. My watch! The time! It was ahead! How? Why? If the boarding house—and the stable—somebody must have messed—and nobody noticed—”
For once, Hermann didn’t tell him off for speaking nonsense. Hermann’s mind raced along with his, doing the same math: “My God. If that’s true, and the Army sign-in sheet is wrong, then all of the alibis from that meeting are worthless. They had 15 extra minutes, completely unaccounted for.”
Newt was still babbling, sitting up and hitting Hermann’s arm even faster. Hermann grabbed his wrist to stop him.
“How? How could Orpheus have changed the clocks without anyone noticing?”
“How do they set the clocks on the Estate?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know!”
“The clock that you set your watch by in the boarding house, what did it look like? Was it a 12-hour wall clock, or a radio clock?”
Newt was talking over him, not answering his question: “When I worked there, they just set the clocks by the wireless, just according to the time on the BBC—”
“But when you—”
“No! It was a radio clock! You’re right!”
His trapped hand suddenly seized a handful of Hermann’s shirt, as Hermann simultaneously reached the same conclusion:
“The jammer!” Newt practically shouted.
Hermann clamped Newt’s hand and forced it down onto the bedspread. “Shh!”
“My radio delay jammer!” hissed Newt. “That’s it! That’s what I was trying to remember. That’s how he did it! Hermann, you’re a genius.”
“I won’t dispute that,” he hissed, glancing back at the door. “But for God’s sake, keep it down.”
“Come on.” Newt pushed off the covers and sat up, pinching the bridge of his nose for a moment. “Orpheus installed a radio delay jammer. I bet it’s still there. They can’t have made the trade yet, ‘cause we still have the transducer. So we have to get up there before the confab tomorrow and find that jammer. We can find the proof, show the feds, and clear our names.”
“I don’t share your optimism about getting ‘cleared,’” said Hermann, “but if that’s what you want... I’ll go with you.”
Opening his eyes, Newt smiled at him. “Of course you will. Help me get up.”
He swung his legs down off the bed, then perched for a moment. Hermann stood stiffly, and helped him to his feet.
“Are you still dizzy?”
“Actually, no,” said Newt.
He touched his ear.
“...They took it out.”
He looked at Hermann. Hermann nodded.
“I told the doctors. It’s here.”
He produced a small plastic bag and handed it to Newt. Newt held it up, and squinted at it, the tiny little device that had caused him so much trouble. It had traveled from outer space to Germany, slipped between the fingers of the Soviets and the Division, once and then twice, and ended up, of all places, with them. There was a little smudge of blood on the inside of the bag.
“Your condition wasn’t improving. So I told them it was in there. I said it was shrapnel from an explosion.”
“And they believed you...?”
“Not once they’d taken it out,” said Hermann darkly. “What should we do with it?”
“I got it,” said Newt, and disengaged himself gently from Hermann’s grasp. He walked slowly but steadily to the toilet, pulling his IV pole along with him. Hermann frowned, watching him go. He heard a clink, then a flush. Newton reemerged.
“What did you do?”
“Flushed it down the toilet. Where are my clothes? We’ve gotta get going.”
Hermann only raised his eyebrows. “They’re here,” Hermann said. Newt shuffled over to the chair where they were neatly folded. “And I’ll take my jacket back, thank you.”
“Hey, you took mine first,” said Newt, trying to shrug out of his hospital shirt without dislodging the IV line. “Get the nurse, would you?”
When Hermann returned, Newt was dressed except for one sleeve. His arm hung awkwardly out of his half-buttoned flannel shirt.
“I hate this shirt you bought me, Hermann,” Newt said. “It’s too soft.”
“Stop calling me that,” said Hermann, glancing at the door. “The nurse is on her way.” He craned his neck to look out the window.
“What is it?” said Newt. He craned his neck. “Is someone there?”
“No.” Hermann stepped over to Newt and kissed him.
He pulled back in what felt like no time, but left his hand on Newt’s arm—which Newt was grateful for, because he was a little dizzy.
“I’m glad you’re alive,” Hermann said in a low voice.
“Me too,” said Newt, with a dopey smile. “Thanks for saving me.”
“I should have thanked you for that a long time ago,” Hermann said. Footsteps sounded in the hall, and Hermann let go.
June 8th
Friday
“The last train for Norwich leaves when?”
“At 9:12, sir, and it’s—”
“We’re not going to make it!”
“Shut up,” said Hermann. He turned back to the clerk. “Two, please, right now.”
“It’s 9:10!” Newt hissed.
“You’re the one who wanted to go tonight!” Hermann hissed back at Newton, who was hovering at his elbow at the Liverpool Street Station ticket counter, eyes on the huge clock above the half-empty lobby.
“But we can’t wait until tomorrow!”
“If you have an alternate suggestion, I would love to hear it!” Hermann snapped.
Rrrip. The clerk produced two tickets and slid them under the hatch. “That will be £8.56.”
“Thank you,” Hermann said, and began to count through the money in his hand.
Newt intervened by snatching the tickets, seizing a £10 note, and slamming it onto the counter. He said, “Keep the change!” then grabbed Hermann by the arm and started running.
“Newton, what part of—not drawing attention to ourselves—”
“It doesn’t matter if we’re being followed, we’re going straight to them,” Newt shot back, half pulling, half pushing him across the floor towards the doors. “If we even make it aboard, since it’s 9:11—”
“Whether or n—” Hermann broke off with a hiss of pain as Newt yanked him around a bench, where a family surrounded by luggage watched them with mold interest.
Newt winced and slowed down. “Dammit, sorry.”
“Just go,” snapped Hermann, pulling out of his grasp and straightening up with his cane. “Make sure it hasn’t left yet!”
Newt sprinted on ahead, around the corner, and out the swinging doors onto the platform. A wall of hot, humid air hit him. The platform was dark, thick with smoke and fog. He scanned the tracks for their northbound train. It was still standing, but there was only one figure left on the platform—the conductor.
Newt shouted and waved, and started running over. The conductor saw him, and made some signal with his arm.
“Chop chop,” said the conductor, jerking his head at the door.
“H—hang on,” panted Newt, reaching him, waving the tickets. “One second. One more passenger.” He stepped onto the stairs, but kept one foot on the platform. The conductor, a hulking, fair-haired young man, looked past him with a frown. He sighted Hermann with a look of visibly depreciating sympathy.
“Get on,” he said to Newt.
“Hermann!”
Hermann was limping as quickly as he could, and almost there.
The conductor made another signal, as Hermann arrived, out of breath and red in the face.
“Come on,” said Newt, grabbing for Hermann’s hand to help him up the stairs. Hermann swatted him away and Newt moved up. The railing in one hand and his cane in the other, Hermann pulled himself up the steps. The conductor blew his whistle just behind them, and slammed the door shut.
“Made it,” said Newt, panting in the vestibule. The exertion, though brief, had left him dizzy. The engine rumbled.
“Yeah,” said Hermann, breathing heavily.
“Are you all right?”
Hermann shook his head. “I need to sit down.”
The bell began to ding, and the train began to move. Newt pulled open the carriage door.
At the front of the carriage, there was a couple, speaking in heated undertones. They fell abruptly silent when the door opened, and looked away from each other. Newt led Hermann to the center of the car, where it was emptiest. He picked a row across the aisle from a lone businessman, who was working with his head bowed, intently focused on whatever he was writing. They were already half-sitting down before Hermann noticed that the businessman had an enormous German Shepherd sitting at his feet. Hermann watched it warily as he took his seat.
The man himself ignored them.
“Hermann, I’m starving,” Newt said as soon as they had settled and the train had left the station. “When was the last time you ate?”
“I have no idea,” said Hermann in an undertone.
“We should see if there’s anything to eat at the first stop.”
“Absolutely not. There’s no time to get off the train and back on again.”
“I’m so hungry—” Newt began, with the sound of someone launching into a monologue, but before he could, a voice behind them interrupted.
“Excuse me?”
They both turned. A bald man with glasses was standing anxiously above them. He wore a long, ill-fitting coat and clutched a hard-backed briefcase.
“Pardon me. I notice your luggage rack is empty,” the stranger said. “I was wondering if I might stow my briefcase?”
“Fine,” said Hermann, waving his hand and turning away.
Newt squinted suspiciously at him.
“Thank you ever so much,” the stranger said, reaching over them to stow the briefcase.
“Don’t mention it...” said Newt.
“And you’ll keep an eye on it?”
Newt frowned. “Sure,” he said.
The man thanked them again and hurried off, leaving their carriage and closing the door behind him. Hermann twisted around to watch him go.
“What the hell was that about?” Newt said.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Hermann, scanning the back of the car for anyone else suspicious. Near the back door, there was a wiry man wearing sunglasses and a long dark coat. He appeared to be asleep. Hermann turned back around, with a glance at the German shepherd. “What were you saying?”
Newt was rooting around in Hermann’s messenger bag for something. Outside, diffuse lights passed in the fog, like fingerprints smudged on the glass. Occasional waves of darkness passed when a building obscured their view. As they left the city, those interruptions became less frequent; the buildings shrank and spread apart, and the halo of light grew murky.
Hermann found himself watching the couple arguing at the front of the carriage. He hadn’t noticed at first, but the woman was much younger than the man. He was speaking to her in a pleading undertone while she looked ahead in furious silence.
“Here we go,” said Newt, finally pulling the Tolkien book out of the brown envelope and decoy book jacket in which Hermann had concealed it. “You got the messages?”
“Messages?” said Hermann.
“Orpheus,” Newt hissed. “Are we decoding his messages, or not?”
“Right,” said Hermann. He took his bag back, and extracted a thick file full of random accounting sheets and tax forms. He undid the bulldog clip and thumbed through until he found a small packet in the center. “Here.”
The complete record of the Orpheus transmissions fit onto five pages of small print. He had illicitly printed two hard copies that morning—one set for himself, and one set for Lightcap. He handed the packet to Newt.
“So,” said Newt, spreading the five papers out across their laps and onto the seat next to him, while Hermann looked around to see if they were in anybody’s eyeline. There was only the dog and his owner, who was still engrossed in his own writing. “You saw the file. How did the book code work?”
Newt tugged on Hermann’s tie. Hermann looked back at him in surprise, and saw that Newt was using his tie to polish his glasses.
“The code is word by word,” Hermann said. “Not a homophonic substitution cipher. Mercifully. Bowen used it with his field operatives in Berne for a short while.”
“Bowen... always Bowen. Wait.” Newt put his glasses back on. “If it’s his old code, do you think that’s who Orpheus is talking to? Bowen?”
Hermann stopped short. “Huh... It’s possible. But that would mean...” He gazed across the train carriage, absently renewing his inventory of the faces and outfits. “...That would mean Bowen was still a Razvedka operative, or a case officer of some kind—that he still has clearance. We have no proof of that. We aren’t even sure whether he speaks Russian.” Hermann looked back at Newt. “But it’s also possible Orpheus thinks he’s communicating with Bowen.”
Newt nodded, looking back down at the five pages of code.
“So. How did Bowen and his ops agree on what—pages? Chapters?”
“Chapter,” said Hermann. “And each message specified what chapter the next message would use.”
“Where?” said Newt. “Beginning or end of message?”
“I don’t know,” said Hermann. “And that’s easy to change.”
“So do we have to start with the first message?”
“Well, assuming they started with chapter one—”
“Can we assume that?”
“I don’t know, Newton, there are a lot of variables, and I don’t have time to try every possibility in the usual manner, since you’re rushing me.”
“I’m not rushing you! I’m just asking if the—”
“Tickets please,” said a sharp voice above them before Hermann could retort. They both looked up.
The conductor stood over them with his hand out.
“Two to the end of the line,” said Hermann, holding out his hand to Newt. Newt bypassed him and handed them to the conductor himself, along with a wooden smile.
The conductor took his time reading them, then punched both with his puncher, but did not hand them back. “Bags?”
“No,” said Hermann.
“This isn’t yours?”
He indicated the briefcase.
“Not ours,” said Hermann.
“Whose is it, then?”
“I don’t have any idea whose bag it is,” said Hermann impatiently.
“You’re traveling to Norwich without any luggage?” he said, as if that were unseemly.
“Is that a crime?” said Newt.
“Are you American?”
“Is that a crime?”
A bell began to ding, and the train slowed as they approached Chelmsford Station, mercifully distracting the conductor. He handed back their tickets haughtily, and left. New passengers began to board.
“What a nudnik,” Newt muttered, and Hermann nodded vigorously. Their situational annoyance redirected onto a mutual target, they derided the conductor until the train began to move again.
They rolled out of the station as the first bolt of lightning flashed. As the train laboriously accelerated, the thunder cracked and growled, close after the flash of lightning, and after a long, silent interval, it cracked again, unleashing a torrent of rain onto the train.
A grandmotherly-looking woman had sat down in front of them. Up in front of the carriage, the elder boyfriend, who had been quiet for some time, made another attempt at bridge-building with his young girlfriend. She finally snapped at him. Hermann looked away from them as they began to argue in earnest. They were loud he could almost hear the words.
“Realistically, we only have time to decode one message,” Hermann said finally. “Let’s decide where to focus our efforts.”
Newt was not listening. The grandmother in front of them, having settled in, had opened her bag and took out a small box of dates. Newt had taken notice, and, ignoring Hermann’s look of daggers, asked her for some. She shared them enthusiastically.
“The last message is the most up-to-date,” said Hermann, taking the papers out of Newt’s hands while he occupied himself with his dates. “It will have the most relevant information. We’ll focus on that one.”
“Sure,” said Newt, mouth full. “But how do you know which chapter?”
“We can eliminate the first,” said Hermann. “And probably the last. How many chapters are there?”
“22,” said Newt.
“Brute force. Low and high chapters are less likely, so I’ll try them last. And I’ll start in the middle of the message, in case there are nulls at the beginning. I need you—” He slid the book into Newt’s lap and opened it to Chapter 5, “A Conspiracy Unmasked”—“to find me words by number.”
“Okay.” Newt nodded, chewing and swallowing the last of the dates. “That was delicious. Do you want me to ask for some for you? She was very nice about it.”
Hermann waved his hand impatiently. “Focus. We only have an hour and a half.” He traced to the early middle of the message and chose a set of numbers that looked promising. Each set was five digits: 2 for the page number starting from the first page of the chapter, and 3 digits for the word on the page. His other hand held a pen over a notepad, balanced on his other leg. He wrote “Ch 5” on top of the page. “First set: 05-167.”
“‘The,’” said Newt after a second.
“10-045.”
He turned a few pages. “‘Where.’ Hmm. Not promising.”
“One more. 17-130.”
Pages flipped. “This chapter is only 12 pages long.”
Hermann looked up at Newt with interest. “Ah.”
Newt looked at him, coming to the same idea.
“Find the—”
“Yes,” said Hermann, already scanning the transmission. “The highest page number is...”
Newt flipped back to the table of contents “And if we just calculate the...”
“...it seems to be 21...” said Hermann.
“Ugh,” Newt said under his breath, “Arithmetic...”
“Swap,” said Hermann, thrusting the transmission into Newt’s hand. He took the book, and started calculating the number of pages in each chapter.
“Check if the illustration plates are numbered,” Newt added, beginning to scan the transmission with his finger. “21... Here’s a 22...”
It took them a few minutes to find the highest page number in the message (23) and thus eliminate a little more than half the chapters in the book. They spent the next hour trying each of the nine remaining possibilities, one by one. It was laborious work; by the time the train reached Ipswich Station, they had only conclusively eliminated two chapters.
The rain was still pouring steadily as the train tolled to a halt. The older woman got off the train, bidding them good night.
They were halfway to Norwich.
Newt twisted around to peer at the back of the carriage.
“Where’s the briefcase guy?”
“He’s in a different carriage.”
“Why?” said Newt.
“I have no idea,” said Hermann impatiently.
“Tickets,” said a voice, and they both jumped. The hulking conductor was standing above them.
“We already showed them to you!” said Newt defensively, hiding the book even though Tolkien was a perfectly innocuous thing to be reading.
The conductor said nothing, just held out his hand.
Newt handed them over.
“These are already punched,” said the conductor.
“Because you punched them,” said Hermann.
“You’re sure you don’t know whom this case belongs to?” the conductor said, pointing at the briefcase.
“Yes,” said Newt. “He just came and put it here. Then he left. We haven’t seen him!”
The conductor glared for a moment, then handed back the tickets.
“Stop being so defensive,” Hermann muttered to Newt when the conductor had left. “You’re drawing attention to us.”
“He’s fixating on us!” Newt whispered, watching him exit the back of the car. “He knows who we are, Hermann. He probably called us in at the last station. There will be cops waiting for us at the next stop!”
The German shepherd growled low. Hermann glared at it.
“How are you not more freaked out about this? It feels like everyone on this train is watching us,” Newt hissed, with a significant glance at their across-the-aisle neighbor, Mr. Shepherd.
“Why don’t you ask him whether he has any snacks,” Hermann hissed back.
“And what about that shady guy?” said Newt, turning to point at the back of the car. But the sleeping man in the sunglasses had vanished.
“Concentrate,” said Hermann as he turned back. “We have 8 more chapters to try.”
A half an hour later, the train was pulling out of Stowmarket. It was still pouring rain, and they still did not have the message.
“We’re only two stops away,” said Newt. “We’re running out of time.”
“We’ll get there.”
“What if this is the wrong system?” Newt said. “What if it’s not pages from chapter—what if it’s paragraphs? From a pre-agreed-upon point?”
“The file said chapters.”
“Well the file could be wrong—”
“The Blueberry wouldn’t have matched the codes if there wasn’t significant overlap,” Hermann said, speaking over him. “We’re on the right track. Keep trying.”
Hermann’s dogged calm kept Newt steady. Finally, just as they reached Diss Station, they found the proper chapter. They read Orpheus’s final message in full:
Meeting passing without incident all clear all parties in proper place meet at one as agreed east by water to complete trade.
“Well that’s inconclusive,” Newt said, when they had both read over the finished message. “He could be anyone. And he could be talking to Bowen... or to anyone.”
Hermann nodded slowly.
“‘East, by water’? Where’s that?”
“No idea.”
“A trade? What for, do you think?”
“Trading the transducer, surely.”
“But for what? What does Orpheus... want from Bowen?”
Hermann shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“When did Orpheus send this?” Newt asked.
“Last Saturday night.”
The train, tolling its bell, was pulling into Diss. It was 11:00. Hermann’s eyes wandered as Newt speculated in a stream of consciousness murmur.
Up front, the young woman seemed to have given up arguing. She was staring at the seat across from hers, eyes unfocused, reevaluating it all while the older man collected his things. He was fiddling with the strap of his briefcase, and searching his pocket for something. The train was slowing down. He stood, still holding her hand. She looked up at him, and he let it drop. As he left, Hermann saw the glint of the wedding ring, restored onto his finger. His heart sank for her.
“...From the conference, it really only could be Becket or Victor,” Newt was saying. “A trade. A trade. A trade for what?”
The married man left the train carriage. The door rolled shut behind him, and the young woman buried her face in her hands.
The train pulled out of Diss. One stop left: Norwich.
At Norwich station, Hermann phoned the Estate to tell Mme Marsden he had arrived. He had called to notify her of his arrival earlier in the evening, from London—all he’d said was that he was coming on urgent business, alone. She’d promised to send a car for him. Hermann also called Lightcap again, on Newt’s request. There was no reply.
They waited outside the station with a handful of other passengers. The rain had eased. Newt was antsy, and Hermann was on guard. One by one, the others disappeared until they were the last ones waiting, listening to the light rain on the tin roof. Finally, a black car with an indiscreet Union Jack sticker on the window rolled to a stop in front of them.
Hermann had an explanation prepared for the driver, if he recognized Newt from the internal alert. The driver got out—he was young, and carried himself like a soldier, and he was missing an eye. He took no apparent notice of Newt, only opened the back door for them and shut it when they were both inside.
“Everything settled for the conference tomorrow?” Hermann ventured as they pulled out onto the main road.
“All quiet, sir,” said the officer. “Americans are all settled in.”
“How’s the mistress?”
“She’s all right, sir,” he said. “A bit tired, with all the fuss. But she’s waiting for you.”
Newt opened his mouth to say something, but Hermann hit him with his knee to keep him quiet. Newt glared at him.
As they drove down the highway, the storm ceased, leaving smoky clouds, rolling fast. They drove up a steep grade, then down a long hill, flat planes of field stretching out to an unseen horizon. Eventually the car turned off the highway to a side road, then a bumpy dirt road. Two sentries stood just inside the stone gates, half out of sight. They let the car pass with a nod.
Pale blue by day, the mansion was granite gray in the fog-drenched air. All the upper windows were dark. On the white gravel driveway, sleek government cars were packed together, side by side. An air of expectation hung over the Estate with the mist.
Hermann walked up the white gravel driveway. Newt touched his arm without a word and hurried away towards the stables, to search for the jammer.
The porch was silent and empty. The light above the heavy painted front door was still lit. Before Hermann could knock, the door opened, and a young woman with deep circles under her eyes led him inside. Upstairs, the conference attendees slept, awaiting tomorrow, and the silence downstairs was that of a deserted theater lobby, empty in the moment before the curtain goes up. She led him quickly and quietly down the halls like she was an usher and he was late to the show.
Below the candle brackets and extinguished lightbulbs, past the front parlor and the lavish dining hall, all dark within, and finally to an eggshell blue swinging door without a handle. The light was on inside the kitchen, and Mme Marsden sat at the table, gray hair pinned up, a tartan shawl around her shoulders, her arthritic hands resting on the floral tablecloth.
She stood up from the table, slow and shaky but determined, to greet Hermann and kiss him on the cheek. In the late hour, she seemed older.
“I am very worried about Newton,” she said without preamble. “Sit,” she added, moving to the stove to turn the kettle on. The girl had already done so, so Mme Marsden shooed her away. With thumps and clinks she took down two teacups and saucers from the wooden cabinets, while Hermann weathered a sudden wave of exhaustion. He rested his hands on the tablecloth, his thoughts swirling in disarray. Behind him the kettle boiled. She poured the hot water with a whispering sound while he watched her bowed reflection in the dark window, collecting himself.
Outside, Newt stole across the dark grass towards the stables. The still-wet grass quickly soaked the hems of his pants, his shoes, and then his socks. The frogs and crickets were silent, awaiting the next torrent.
Facing the dark forest, he found the back door to the stables, which was padlocked and easily picked. It took him a few moments, but it seemed that none of the perimeter patrols passed this way.
Newt had given some consideration to where he would have hidden a radio jammer, and given his knowledge of the Estate’s layouts, he had a promising hypothesis about the cellar below the stables. He let himself inside and shut the door. He found the cellar door in the dark, and opened it—unlocked. He turned on the staircase light. It flicked on, then with a pop, out again. The fuse had blown. Newt took out his pocket flashlight and shone it into the dusty darkness, then picked his way carefully down, holding the railing for balance.
“When he was here last week, he was just fine, just himself,” said Mme Marsden, sitting back down. Hermann warmed his hands on the teacup but didn’t yet drink from it. “Then—” She snapped her fingers, rattling her bracelets, “he vanishes. I do not believe all this, what they are saying with the alert. That he missing. That he is wanted for questioning. I think he was kidnapped, Hermann. Truly, I do.”
Hermann chose to gloss over this sensational speculation and said instead, “Where did he sleep last week? Are his things still there? Perhaps I could look at them.”
“He slept in the boarding house,” she said, gesturing at the window. “Top floor. The same place he used to when he worked here with Caitlin. His bags are still there, everything. He wouldn’t leave all of these by choice.”
“And you were the person who made the sleeping arrangements?” said Hermann.
“My staff,” she said. “I have the final say, of course,” she added.
“Was it your choice to house Newton in that particular room?” Hermann asked.
“It was his old room. It isn’t easy access. If he was kidnapped, I do not think it was from there.”
“But did someone ask you to place him there?”
She shook her head, frowning. “No, Hermann, I made the arrangements. Nobody asked me about Newton.”
Mme Marsden sipped from her cup, and Hermann looked away, frustrated. Maybe the lateness of the hour was confusing her. She didn’t seem to understand his questions.
“Has it stopped raining?” she said, looking out the opaque window.
“Madame Marsden, this might be a strange question,” said Hermann, throwing tact to the wind, “but did you get orders about where Newton should sleep?”
But she did not seem to hear him. Her eyes roamed the landscape outside, the dim strip of gravel and the dark outbuildings beyond. Mist was rising in white tendrils from the grass.
“It was a night like this, when he came,” she said quietly, her voice far away. “But colder.”
“Who?”
“Robert.”
Newt coughed, covered in dust. He was on hands and knees in the cellar, feeling around behind the crates. It was so dark down here. Why had he made his radio jammer so small and sleek and hard to find? Why was he so awesome at his job?
He spat out some cobweb and got to his feet. A crossbeam swooped into his eyeline and he leaned back just in time to avoid smacking his head. He grabbed the crossbeam to steady himself. It wasn’t as close as it had looked. His vertigo had still not left him. He wondered whether the damage to his inner ear was permanent.
He moved to search the light fixtures.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Hermann said. The words, however useless, were the truth. “He lied. They called, and he lied. You trusted him.”
“They called?” said Mme Marsden, frowning, coming back from her reverie.
“The call from headquarters,” said Hermann. “The alarm call, saying Bowen was to be detained.”
“But there was no call,” she said. “That was the trouble.”
“But Ca...” Hermann trailed off, remembering what Caitlin had told him in the hospital courtyard the night before. Suddenly he remembered the blankness that had come over her face when she spoke of Bowen. He said it was all a mistake... that it would just blow over.
Caitlin had taken the call.
It was Caitlin who had covered for him.
Hermann turned his head slowly, carefully, back to Mme Marsden. She could see that he had been upset by something, and she was studying him closely.
“Mme Marsden, you knew him well, didn’t you?” he said.
“Who, Robert? Of course. Since he was a young man.”
“How well did he and Caitlin know each other?”
“Och,” she said, with the guttural noise of French disapproval. She swatted the air with a ringed and braceleted hand. “I told her. I warned her, I did. I told her, do not be a fool! But she does not listen, that girl. Never!”
“They were having an affair,” said Hermann, not in the tone of a question.
“For almost a year. He said he cared about her, loved her, she told me—I said Caitlin, you are behaving like a fool! He is a Don Juan, he is old enough to be your father. I’ve seen it so many times before, I said.”
Her voice had risen, and developed a tremor.
“But she refused to listen! And ever since then, ever since he defected all those years ago, she has not come back to see me. Never, not once.” Mme Marsden shook her head, lips pursed, and Hermann saw a decade of regret for that lost relationship.
Caitlin had protected Bowen—not for Russia, but for himself. Because she’d loved him. And though she had never been caught, she had paid for it every day since.
Hermann had shielded Newt in the same way. For that, he realized, he was going to pay.
Rain began to drum against the window.
The light fixtures were all clean, and Newt was starting to lose hope. Perhaps he was wrong, perhaps the jammer had been planted in the boarding house after all. He made his way back towards the narrow staircase, wondering if Hermann was having any luck with Mme Marsden.
His hand fumbled at the wall for the switch. He flipped it. It didn’t turn on. Oh right, he remembered. The fuse had blown.
He kept flipping the switch up and down. Then, on a hunch, he reached pulled his screwdriver back out. He unscrewed the switch and pulled it from the wall.
There, wired in behind the little metal panel, was a little blue bulb with a thick antenna. The radio delay jammer.
“Gotcha,” he whispered triumphantly.
It was burnt out. The jammer had used more power than the old wiring could handle. Newt leaned close and, holding his flashlight in his mouth, carefully unscrewed the jammer. He unwired it from the clasp, his hands shaking a little. This was it. He’d been right. He’d found the proof.
He was so engrossed in the task that he didn’t notice the footsteps behind him, coming down the stairs. By the time he did, the cloth was already over his mouth.
“Mme Marsden, are you certain that nobody told you which room you should put Newton in?”
“No.” She shook her head. “No one mentioned him to me.”
“With—” An idea occurred to Hermann. “Did anyone give you orders about where to place Rosewater? Did they tell you to put him in the attic too?”
She frowned, thinking. “Mr. Rosewater...”
“The liaison. The American liaison.” He leaned across the kitchen table, reaching for her hand. “Concentrate, please, Mme Marsden. Can you remember?”
She nodded slowly. “Yes... I got word about him. They wanted him in the attic. Special request.”
“Who did?” said Hermann. “Who told you that?”
She gave another little nod. “Victor did.”
Hermann’s mouth went dry. “Victor?”
At that moment they heard the car outside.
By the time Hermann reached the driveway, shouting after the car, rain driving into his face, the red taillights were already vanishing onto the dark road.
Hermann whirled around desperately to look back at the house, where the figure of Mme Marsden was still in the doorway, tugging at her shawl and shouting something. He wiped the rain out of his eyes and strained to hear her, but at that moment a dark shape darted out from behind the porch, coming straight at him.
Newt came to, slowly, in the passenger seat. The hum of the engine at first sounded like the transducer in his ear. The windshield wipers beat a fierce tattoo against the onslaught of rain, the kind of thunderless downpour that cannot last. There was a sickly sweet smell in his nose and mouth. He blinked slowly, dazed, and found that he could see, but one eye was out of focus. He blinked a few times—was it the transducer? Had it damaged his optical nerve?—and then realized the lens of his glasses had cracked.
It took another moment or two before he could move his head. He forced it to turn sideways.
“Where are you…?” he mumbled, the words slurring out.
He blinked a few more times, bringing the driver beside him into focus.
“Victor?”
The Vice Chief did not turn or acknowledge him.
“Where are we going?” he said again, more articulated this time. “What’s going on?”
Awareness was fluttering back to him with the swoop-swoop of the wipers. Newt’s hands wanted to move, but they couldn’t. He was handcuffed.
“You,” said Newt breathlessly. “You set me up. You’re Orpheus.”
A sneer gathered in the corner of Victor’s crooked lips, but still he said nothing.
“But—but that’s impossible.” Newt’s voice rose. “You hate moles. You hate the Russians. You would never work for them. You wouldn’t! What are you doing? Where are we going?”
The sneer transformed into a full-flown grimace.
“I’m not a mole, you bloody idiot,” Victor said finally, and his voice was icy calm. “I don’t work for them. I’m making a trade.”
“The trade? It’s tonight?” said Newt. A chill settled over him. “And you’re trading me?”
Victor did not reply. He flicked the windshield wipers, and they slowed to a calmer rate. Outside, the rolling storm was easing, revealing the dark, misty landscape. There was not a car or a house or a single light in sight anywhere in the velvety darkness.
Victor, Orpheus? It didn’t make any sense—he wouldn’t work with the Raz, he hated the Raz more than anyone. Destroying them was his life’s work.
...Unless they had something he wanted. Something he wanted more than he wanted revenge.
“What are you trading me for?” asked Newt in a hushed voice.
“A prisoner,” said Victor, a strange, forced casualness strangling his words. He took one hand from the wheel and reached inside his breast pocket. He extracted a cigarette, and lit it with the car lighter as he spoke: “Originally, I was to exchange the American prototype and the blueprints in return. But you’ve made scheduling a bit complicated. I don’t have time to extract it from your head before our appointment, so I’m just giving you to Robert. They can pry it out of you in Moscow.”
Newt’s heartbeat quickened, sending the dashboard and windshield spinning away in vertigo.
The transducer. Victor thought he still had it.
And that was probably the only thing keeping him alive.
“Robert won’t mind,” Victor was saying. “He‘ll like you.”
“Who’s the other prisoner?” Newt managed, voice slightly choked.
“Charles,” said Victor, exhaling smoke. “Rennie,” he added after a half-second pause.
Newt’s eyes widened. “You did know he was alive.”
Victor’s face creaked into a humorless grimace.
“And you...” Newt opened his mouth, trying to retrace Victor’s calculations. “He’s your...” Newt’s jaw slackened. “You think Bowen’s holding him prisoner,” he murmured. “You think he’s a prisoner. You don’t think he’s a traitor. Victor—” His heart fluttered with trapped-bird panic, his words tumbled out on top of each other—“He was—he’s never—he was working with Bowen the whole time. He’s playing you. The Russians are playing you. It’s a trick. This is a trick! He’s not going to be there! You can’t—you can’t seriously think—”
But his words fell on deaf ears. The simple truth was that Victor did not care.
Without thinking, Hermann took off running.
His run was lopsided and not fast. With every step his hip flexors seized tighter. His legs knew he had a better chance of hiding than outpacing, so he made for the garage nearest the house, less than 50 meters distance—nothing more than a floodlight and a gray shape in the torrent. The rain in his eyes nearly blinded him. The footsteps behind him grew louder apace, closer, spitting gravel. Rivulets of rainwater formed creekbeds in the gravel drive, and he heard his pursuer stumble into one, sending a splash and a curse.
Hermann’s free hand reached out and connected with the wooden doorframe. With a jerk he pulled himself up short, and then he yanked open the door and pulled himself inside.
He slammed the door shut behind him. It was dark. There was a toolbox on a heavy chair by the door—in a panic, he upended both in front of the door. His breath caught up with him and he gasped, staggering backwards, all his adrenaline and panic surging up his throat, and he thought he might be sick. His leg and hip were seizing. He couldn’t take another step.
A heavy, wet thump hit the door. But the chair kept it barricaded shut, and the intruder withdrew, making no second attempt. The shadow moved across the light around the door, and disappeared.
The rain roared on the wooden roof.
Hermann cast around the dark garage—barely any time to form a plan—he was taking inventory, object, object, object. Object = use. Breathing purposefully to keep his asthmatic lungs from wheezing, he inventoried, just as he’d been trained, all those years ago, on this very campus. Slowly, he twisted his leg, loosening his aching joints. When the garage double doors swung open less than twenty seconds later, he was already moving.
The noise and the floodlit curtain of rain rushed in. Hermann stepped from behind the car and swung the iron golf club, gripped in both hands, without mercy at his assailant’s shins. The man cried out and buckled, and Hermann dropped the club and came up with the flat edge of his hand straight into the man’s windpipe. His assailant choked and fell—only to his knees. His hand flew out and grabbed Hermann’s wrist with shocking strength, and Hermann registered that his attacker was lower to the ground than the towering Raleigh Becket should have been, and that his hair, slicked from the rain, was not blond, but dark. Then Hermann was jerked downward—he bent, locking his knees and straining to stay standing, but his leg was weak and the man had a vicious density. He pulled until Hermann buckled, slamming him onto the concrete and wrenching his shoulder. Victory slackened his assailant’s grip for a second and Hermann twisted his right hand, wrestling, a losing game but an engrossing one—while his left hand, unaccounted for, pawed the concrete floor—
Basic combat training taught them to aim for the eyes, the throat, and the groin. Division employees were not expected to get into scraps, and if they did, they were expected to be merciless, for in this business, if it came to a confrontation, it was life or death.
His attacker was making a horrible growling sound, as his free hand wrestled with Hermann’s convulsing shoulder and grappled for his throat. His tie was falling into Hermann’s eyes and all he could see of his face were snatches of bared teeth and skin creased in a grimace of hatred. Then with a gasp of satisfaction, a vindictive “Ha!” the attacker found his throat, and Hermann recognized his voice. It was the Vice Chief’s assistant, Preston Blair.
“No—” Hermann choked.
“Pathetic,” hissed Preston, pressing down on his throat.
Hermann’s lungs were pumping, and losing airflow had a quick, meaningful effect. He gasped and sputtered, his left hand spasming in its search, desperate, futile, as Preston leaned in, grimacing like Hermann was the man who had killed his mother and was going to pay at last—and then Hermann’s fingertips brushed against metal. He seized it—a heavy steel wrench, fallen from the toolbox—heaved it up, and slammed it into Preston’s face.
Someone cried out and there was a crack—it was probably his jaw, Hermann couldn’t tell, but the chokehold disappeared and blood was pouring onto Hermann’s face from Preston’s open mouth. Hermann flailed, his hands finding Preston’s face and shoving him away, and Preston fell on his side—stunned but groping for Hermann still. Hermann scrambled up and away into a painful sitting position. Black spots danced across his vision, and the floor pitched like a ship. He saw that his rusty pipe wrench had hit Preston full in the temple and jaw. Hermann’s back hit a tire, and he used the car to pull himself up. There was a lot of blood in his mouth and he still wasn’t breathing correctly. He looked at the bloody wrench and realized, with a bloom of pain reaching his brain, that after hitting Preston, he’d dropped it on his own face. His nose was broken.
Hermann’s back hit a tire, and he used the car to pull himself up. He tried to breathe deeply through his mouth, but the blood in his throat made him cough and choke.
Preston was on his hands and knees, leaving a trail of blood and saliva on the concrete. Hermann couldn’t see the injured side of his face. He was making a wheezing noise like a rusty spring.
“They’re... long gone,” he hacked out. “You’ll never catch them.”
“Where?” rasped Hermann, throat clotted. “Where is he taking Newton?” he said again, when Preston didn’t answer.
Preston was trying to get up off his knees. It wasn’t working. He made the rusty wheezing sound again. It was a laugh, Hermann realized.
“Why are you helping him?” Hermann asked.
“You’ll never make it,” said Preston from the floor. “You’re no threat at all.”
“Where are they going?” said Hermann, standing over him.
“The port,” croaked Preston.
“Why?” said Hermann.
Preston just laughed again. It was a horrible sound. He kept trying to get up, but something critical was damaged. He kept falling down.
Hermann turned away. He spat out blood, and found his cane. Then he staggered around the car to the last item from his inventory: Newton’s motorbike, parked by the doors, kickstand down, helmet hanging neatly from the handlebar.
“You’ll never—make it,” rasped Preston again from floor behind the car.
Hermann pretended not to hear him.
A light, steady rain fell as they entered the industrial port of Yarmouth. The entrance gate was raised, but the guard’s booth was empty. Low sheds rolled by, all deserted. Silent parked cars waited in the darkness between the sheds, raindrops glittering on their black windshields. It was empty, like it had been abandoned a decade ago.
Victor drove slowly. Newt couldn’t tell whether it was from certainty or controlled anxiety. At the end of an alley, the pavement turned to stone, and they turned abreast of the docks. The sea vista was blocked by boats, their portholes bobbing far overhead. There were parked cars here, too, and Newt imagined them all full of black-clad agents, tracking them with guns through invisible balistrariae. But there was no sign of life.
They stopped. Victor turned off the engine, locked the parking brake, then checked Newt’s handcuffs. He got out, opening an umbrella over his head. He left the keys on the dashboard, and Newt briefly considered lunging for them. When he unlocked the passenger door, Newt discovered that Victor was holding a second umbrella, which he helpfully opened and placed in Newt’s cuffed hands. Then he conducted Newt in front of him by the arm, leaving the driver’s door open and the headlights on.
They walked down the slick wooden quay, in the shadow of a shipping vessel’s massive, immobile hull. Newt, walking in front of his captor, not happy about being a human shield, strained to listen for some sound. But he heard nothing. No footsteps, no voices, no distant engines in hot pursuit. There was only the waves against the hulls of the empty ships, the hiss of the rain, and the ropes creaking in the wind.
They reached the stern of the cargo ship and stepped into a misty cone of light. Victor turned Newt right, onto a pier that jutted into the harbor. At that moment, Newt thought he heard something overhead—a creak or a door opening, far up in the cargo ship above them—but when he turned, he couldn’t see anything, and the rain flecked his glasses.
Victor jerked his arm, reorienting him on his path forward.
Moored beside the pier opposite the cargo ship there was a bright red fishing boat, medium size, bobbing gently on the waves. The light was coming from there, from a floodlight on its upper deck. In the rain and the light, Newt could make out three figures on the deck. Victor’s grip tightened on his arm.
The Vice Chief brought him to the foot of the gangway, which was a short slope up to the deck of the red fishing boat. The figures were standing in the lee of the searchlight, shadowed, and as Newt’s eyes adjusted, he made out the differences between them. Two were soldiers, in long, heavy coats, overdressed for the climate. One had a medal pinned to his collar. The other held a gun of implausible size. In between them stood a slimmer man, more smartly dressed. He had glasses and a receding hairline. His hands, gloved, were crossed at his waist.
“Where’s Robert?” said Victor, without preamble. His voice echoed strangely between the metal hulls.
“Good evening, Vice Chief,” said the man in civilian clothing, his Russian very slight. “You have brought a prisoner? I do not recall that part of our agreement.”
“We’ll get to that,” said Victor. “Let’s start with the blueprints.”
The Russian paused, then nodded once. “As you wish.”
He signaled slightly with his head, and one of the soldiers—the one without the massive gun—stepped smartly down the gangway.
“Don’t try running,” Victor murmured to Newt, unexpectedly close. Newt tensed as Victor released his grip. There was a shuffling behind him and then Victor produced a manila envelope. He handed it to the soldier.
The soldier took it and returned to his master.
“I’ll hold onto the device until I’ve seen the prisoner,” said Victor.
The Russian made no response, opening the envelope. He slid the papers out and examined them. The armed soldier produced a flashlight, and shone it over his shoulder so he could read.
“Where’s Bowen?” Victor said again. “My deal was with him. I want to see him.”
“We have your prisoner,” said the Russian, sliding the papers back into the envelope. He jerked his head at his guard, who flicked the torch off. “But your friend Boven is not here.”
Victor tensed next to Newt.
“I made my deal with him,” repeated Victor. For the first time that night, Newt detected a crack in the façade.
“No,” said the Russian. “Tovarish Boven does only a little consultation for us. He does not have the... clearance to handle an asset as valuable as yourself.” Newt could almost hear Victor’s teeth grinding for being called a Soviet asset. “We allowed you believe you were communicating with him, for the sake of a smoother conversation.”
“Speaking to Robert was part of my deal,” Victor maintained stubbornly.
Newt’s arms tensed around himself, his grip on his umbrella white-knuckled. They’re playing you, Victor, he thought, they’re taking you for a ride, and I’m the deer about to get hit along the way.
“You have not kept terms with our agreement either,” the Russian pointed out. “You have not brought the device in its complete state. Perhaps you would like to re-negotiate?”
Victor fell silent.
“We needed someone keeping an eye, paving your way, making life a little easier for you,” the Russian continued. “So Mr. Raleigh Becket, he kept us in the ‘loop.’ He told us that your theft-and-frame-up last week did not go quite as planned. But you are a skilled improviser. I trusted you would bring us what we asked for. And so?”
The Russian gestured at Newt, making eye contact with him for the first time.
“Dr. Geiszler, isn’t it?” he said. “It’s a pleasure.” He smiled a little, and Newt saw gold fillings flash.
Victor had re-clamped Newt’s arm, and Newt was trying to pull himself free again.
“The pleasure’s all yours,” said Newt, his bravado falling flat on delivery.
“An excellent choice for a patsy, from what I know of you. Who would trust an American, after all? Americans are... what is that charming expression you have in English? So wishy-washy.”
The Russian smiled, amused. Newt twisted his arm, trying to pull away.
“Let go of me,” he hissed at Victor.
“They’ll just shoot you if you run,” Victor replied in an undertone.
“So you have the device, then?” the Russian called down to Newt. “And you’re going to give it to us. Or are you coming with us instead?”
“I don’t have it,” Newt said. “I lost it.”
The Russian just chuckled.
“How unfortunate.”
“No, really,” said Newt, twisting his arm again. Victor held on like a vice. “I threw it away. I dropped in the toilet.”
“That is a shame,” said the Russian, amused by this lie. “Do you think you’d like to come with us nonetheless? From what I understand, your career with the British secret services is quite finished. And I’m sure we could find you some useful work in Moscow.”
Before Newt could respond, a sound came from inland. The whine of a motorcycle engine swung into hearing, like an approaching fighter jet.
Hermann tried to slow down as he wove between the sheds, but not much, because he had spent the last half hour in mortal fear of tipping over. He burst out from between the last stacks of crates and slammed on the brakes, because the sea was right there, and as he placed his foot down to catch himself, he saw the parked car, door open, dome light on. Gritting his teeth against the imbalance and the pain, he wrenched the handlebars to the left and gave it one last push of gas. He coasted to a stop just in front of the car and stopped the motorbike, at last.
He turned it off and pulled out the keys, whispering, “Never again,” as he staggered off. He pulled his cane from the side where it had laid under his knee, and righted himself on the cobblestone. His shoulder was on fire, and he couldn’t breathe from his broken nose. The pain of unbending his bad leg from the motorcycle, which he’d been dreading most of all, was worse than he’d been prepared for. He staggered for a moment as he unbuckled the helmet, and tried to step forward with his cane. Then he heard voices, coming from out on the dock.
He stumbled towards the dock. There was a light coming from the bow of the cargo ship. Up high on the deck, he saw someone, so he ducked closer to the hull, out of their sights.
The voices grew louder. He could hear Newton.
He burst into the light with no plan in mind. “Stop!” he shouted.
“Hermann!”
Victor wrenched Newt back behind himself.
Hermann stumbled down the dock.
“Look out!” Newt shouted, dropping his umbrella and shoving at his captor with his bound hands. “Stop, Hermann, stop!”
“Halt there,” said the Russian, not loud but still completely audible. “Now.”
Hermann stopped. The soldier on the deck was pointing his enormous gun at him. The other soldier had produced a pistol, and was pointing that at him as well.
“Stop now,” said the Russian, “and stay still. The adults are talking.”
He smiled his gold-clotted smile at Victor, who was holding the struggling Newt still. Hermann stood frozen, feet fixed, swaying in place.
“No more time to waste, Victor,” said the Russian. “Your people are coming, as you see. Hand him over.”
“Not until I see Charles,” said Victor.
“Is anyone going to ask this prisoner what he wants? Or has?” said Newt, in a shrill voice. “Because I’m not joking. I don’t have the transducer.”
Up the dock, Hermann inhaled. Charles. He was trading Newton for Rennie. Of course. Of course Victor knew Rennie was still alive.
And of course he didn’t care that he had been a traitor. He was still trying to save him. Of course.
The Russian nodded to one of the soldiers, and he disappeared through a door, into the cabin.
There was a long pause. The waves splashed gently. The rain hissed on the water.
Then they heard footsteps, and the cabin door opened. A black umbrella emerged.
The soldier pushed a man out onto the deck. To Hermann’s horrified vindication and Newt’s absolute astonishment, out stumbled the bowed, bound figure of Charles Rennie.
He was hard to make out in the shadow of the umbrella. He had aged more than ten years—far more. His jaunty mustache was gone, and his clothes were thin and loose. His high, lined forehead shone with sweat.
On Newt’s arm, Victor’s grip slackened. Newt himself was too shocked to move.
The soldier brought him to the top of the gangway, and jerked him to a stop. Rennie’s eyes found Victor on the dock.
The hand gripping Newt let go completely.
The Russian, watching the proceedings intently, signaled to the soldier. The soldier pushed Rennie forward again, and both men moved down the gangway under the dark umbrella.
“Victor,” rasped Charles, eyes wide as they approached. His voice rose. “Victor—I’m sorry, I—”
“Charles, don’t.”
They were halfway down the gangway. The soldier’s eyes were on Newt. He was coming to take him.
Newt’s legs trembled, and started to tense, to run—they couldn’t, they wouldn’t take him—a wave of vertigo hit him—
Rennie stepped into the light. With a whoosh and a clatter behind Newt, Victor dropped his umbrella to the ground.
“I thought you were d—”
A bang rang out. The echo ricocheted between the hulls. Someone yelled, someone else shouted, Newt was pushed aside and falling down. Rennie crumpled. Victor dove.
Up on the deck of the red fishing boat, the heads of the soldier and his master vanished, and there was yelling in Russian. Newt crouched on the dock, arm covering his face. He could hear Hermann yelling too. It sounded like “op—op—op—” The engine of the red ship came to life. Victor was screaming and shouting. Two gunshots tore from the fishing boat.
Newt lowered his arm just enough to look up, up, squinting, in the direction the shot had come from. The shooter was standing up on the deck of the cargo ship. She was staring down over the railing in horror, still holding the pistol.
Their eyes locked.
“Cait?” Newt said. “Caitlin!” he screamed over the roar of the engine and the shouting and the splashing. “Caitlin, no!”
Lightcap watched the chaos unfold on the dock below her, frozen. She watched Hermann stagger towards Newt, watched the water churn around the fishing boat, watched Victor, clutching the corpse of Charles Rennie.
She said, “I thought it was him.”
But Newt couldn’t hear her.
The Russian soldier on the dock had not retreated. Instead, crouching, he lunged for Newt. There was a second gunshot from above and the soldier cried out, falling back. Newt threw his arm up over his face and yelled “No!” The soldier dropped into the water with a splash.
The engine of the fishing boat was groaning, white water churning below it. Hermann finally reached Newt and dragged him backwards, up the pier, away from the commotion. Newt was yelling something unintelligible. The boat was trying to pull away, but the gangway was still lowered, and the ropes were still moored. Victor was prone on the ground over the body of Rennie. There was a dark hole in his head.
Hermann hauled Newt back to the quay, shielding his head, just as the boat, its engine straining, tore free of the gangway. With an explosion of wood and water and a horrible crack, the gangway shattered. Newt and Victor both cried out. The explosion echoed up and down the hulls and out across the water.
They had reached the stone shore. Newt was blubbering as they stumbled up the dark alley.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Hermann was saying, dragging Newt into the shadows, behind the cargo ship, away from the screaming Vice Chief. “You’ve got to drive, Newton, I can’t, my leg—”
“You can’t, you can’t, stop, you can’t—”
“Newton! What is it?”
“I saw her! I saw—Hermann, it was Lightcap—”
“No, that’s impossible—”
“Stop, I have to find her! Stop, listen to me!”
“—she couldn’t have known where—”
“Listen!” Newt almost screamed, and burst into tears. Hermann stopped short. Newt had his fist clenched in Hermann’s shirt as tightly as if he was trying to haul Hermann up from drowning. Newt squeezed his eyes shut. He tried to speak, to explain, to find some verbal footing so as to find some conceptual footing so as to drag them both out of the water of this unintelligible morass. But all that formed inside his head were images—Victor on his knees, Rennie with a hole in his face, the soldier falling back, Caitlin, Caitlin, Caitlin—
“What is it?” Hermann’s voice, trembling with exhaustion but pressing forward with gentle attentiveness. His voice sounded odd—like his consonants were weighed down somehow.
Newt strangled another sob and opened his eyes, breathing heavily. “I—she shot him. She shot him from up there! I don’t—I don’t understand! Why? Why? Was she just trying to save me? How did she get here? Where did she get a gun? Wh—why? It doesn’t—it doesn’t—” He was trembling violently.
“I can explain, Newton,” Hermann said pleadingly. “But we’ve got to run. We need to get out of here, now.”
“V—Victor left his car,” Newt said, pointing with a shaking arm. The black car floated, semi-fractured through his semi-fractured lens. He swallowed another sob, or possibly vomit.
“Come on.”
“We have to take her, Hermann—we have to get her out of here too.”
“All right. All right. Just—”
“We have to save her.”
As they staggered along the quay, towards the car and the motorbike, they could hear engines and sirens nearing the port. In Hermann’s mind, the only next step was to escape, but all Newt could think of was Lightcap: he had to find her, he had to make sure she was okay, he had to make her explain.
Then, in the cargo ship, a metal door slammed, and a figure flew down the metal gangway in the darkness.
“Cait—Cait!” Newt yelled. “Caitlin, stop!”
Lightcap stopped. She turned to look at them, some twenty meters away on the shadowy quay. Her clothes were dark and her hair was in disarray, and the pistol was still in her hand. Hermann stopped, gripping Newt for support.
Newt tried to catch his breath.
For once, no words came to him.
But she didn’t wait for him to speak. Without a word, Lightcap ran to the waiting car and started the engine.
“Wait! Stop! Cait!” Newt screamed, trying to run after her. Hermann held him back. “Stop, stop! Cait, stop!” He seemed to think that if she didn’t stop, if she didn’t answer him right then, she never would.
“Newton, we have to go—”
“Let go, let go!” He was sobbing again. “Let go of me! Let go!”
Hermann did not. The car engine revved, and she vanished alone into the night.
When the convoy of Division officers, internal security, Estate staff, CIA visitors, and U.S. Army arrived, they found a broken gangway, two dead bodies, and an insensible Vice Chief. Among the debris, two umbrellas floated upside-down in the water, filling with rain. When they questioned Victor about the bodies, he gave no coherent answers. Someone identified Rennie as a former agent, already presumed dead. Victor was taken into custody, and an inquiry was launched.
Though the inquiry was meant to be discreet, the story eventually leaked to the public. It was the CIA liaison Mr. Rosewater who, absolutely furious about the whole mess, reported it to the American press. From there, the story found its way back to Europe. The transatlantic intelligence partnership suffered another blow, as did national confidence in the British secret services. But the public never learned the true extent of the disaster.
They knew that it was a security breach. They knew that two low-level intelligence techs had been in clandestine contact with Russian agents via a British liaison, and shared confidential documents with them. They knew that the techs had stolen an American prototype for a highly classified piece of technology. They knew that the hand-off had been set for Great Yarmouth Port in June, and that violence had erupted there, somehow, killing the liaison and one Russian soldier; they knew that both techs were now missing, and presumed to have fled east.
The liaison, so the story went, was a British defector named Charles Rennie. At the hand-off, he had been shot. Details of Vice Chief Victor’s involvement were successfully kept out of the press, but he never saw the inside of his office again.
As for Rennie’s killer, the story said, the shooter was never identified or caught. And that, at least, was true.
On his motorbike, Newt pulled into an alley behind a warehouse. He and Hermann listened to the sirens reach their destination, and halt. The engines turned off and doors opened and slammed shut while voices barked orders. Tears were still rolling down Newt’s cheeks. He was trying hard to stifle the convulsions still racking his chest. Hermann was behind him, arms wrapped tightly around his ribcage.
When the distant engines had turned off, they rolled the Bonneville slowly and quietly out of the industrial port, and glided onto the main road. They rode in a low gear to the edge of town, and then sped up, back onto the highway, and out into the countryside. The night air had cleared and cooled. The rain was not coming back.
Newton insisted that Hermann take the helmet, since he had probably suffered a concussion when his nose got broken. Newt drove, and Hermann sat behind, holding onto him. Newton was warm, back in his jacket. Closing his eyes, Hermann rested his forehead on the back of Newt’s neck. His ears were still ringing with the commotion—the bullets, the engines, the haunting cries of Victor. His nose and head ached fiercely, and he had to breathe through his mouth. The ordeal was over. New anxieties queued up promptly to take the places of the old.
As they accelerated down a long, flat stretch of road, Hermann felt a vibration where his arms were clasped around Newt. For a moment he thought Newt was crying again, but then Hermann realized that he was singing. Hermann tightened his grip and strained to hear, to make sense of something over the roaring of the engine and the scream of the wind.
I won’t be running from the rain when I’m gone,
And I can’t even suffer from the pain when I’m gone,
Can’t say who’s to praise and who’s to blame when I’m gone...
Newt sang to keep himself grounded, and kept his eyes, still brimming with tears, fixed on the dark road ahead of them.
The late August storms took everyone by surprise. It had been an unusually blustery, moody summer on the lonely shores of the west coast. For months, the Pacific had been restless, with winds and waves so strong they could hear them as far inland as the quad. Many said it was the coolest summer in memory. But Professor of Electrical Engineering Dr. Montgomery, affectionately nicknamed Monty, never seemed to mind. Even in the unseasonable rain, he could still be seen trundling across campus on his Vespa, waving to students and members of the HAM radio club.
The small public college was perched on the California coast, just inland from the coastal highway, which was just inland from sharp cliffs. It was too far north for a warm winter, but far enough south to catch the AM rock radio from the Bay Area. The school had a robust liberal arts department, a well-known teaching program, and a sciences department small enough to fit in one cement building. Because of the science program’s small size, its funding was scarce, but subject to little oversight. The founding of the HAM radio club, the requisitioning of the required equipment, all of it went relatively unnoticed by the admin—or by the Science Department Chair, Professor Roger “Sleepy” Steele—until it was too late. Only Kate Irwin, the lone female student in the engineering program, saw the warning signs.
Sullenly quiet but whip-smart, Kate Irwin disliked citrus fruits and eye contact. At a young age, she had skipped several grades, and been accepted to Caltech at 15. She’d been the best student in the math department there, a distinction that earned her nothing but contempt from the mostly male cohort. Her mother had left when she was small. Her father was an inattentive man, proud of the fixed image of his daughter had crystallized when she was about 8, and in letters and long-distance calls did not recognize the warning signs of her isolation and despair until it was—almost—too late. At age 17, in narrow avoidance of something more permanent, Kate dropped out. Once she received medical clearance, she ended up here, at the low-ranked college three freeway exits from her father’s house.
Kate Irwin encountered Dr. Monty in her first transfer semester. Her advisor, on the advice of her psychiatrist, gave her a light courseload: one sophomore-level physics lecture, and one junior-level engineering course with labs. So it was that the spring semester EENG 311: Signals, Systems and Inference, in the tiny, all-male engineering department was joined by one silent, unstylish, permanently hunched-over 18-year-old girl.
Dr. Monty’s class was instantly Kate’s favorite, because of both his unconventionality and the way he treated her. He was energetic and non-judgmental, and ceaselessly enthusiastic about his field. He also blocked all her male classmates’ attempts to haze her, and gave her ample opportunity to out-calculate them until they started ignoring her or clamoring to be her lab partner. His endorsement secured her intellectual safety, and his protection secured her unspoken, unswerving loyalty until the day she died.
As the weather grew hotter and the spring semester wrapped up, Kate Irwin dreaded a summer recess with nothing to occupy her destructively overactive mind, and a fall without an excuse to visit Monty’s office hours. When he announced, in their penultimate Signals class, that he was starting a HAM radio club next fall, Kate didn’t pick up a flier. She was not the kind of person who joined extracurricular clubs.
As usual, she lingered in the lecture hall at the end of class, and this time, to her gratification, he called her name.
“Irwin!” Monty said. “You get one of these?” He waved his green fliers for the HAM radio club. Kate shook her head. “Here,” he said, holding one out to her.
Kate stumped down the stairs, conscious of the silent and now empty hall around them. She had visited Monty’s office hours several times, and was prepared to follow him to the ends of the Earth, but being alone with him still felt dangerous.
Hesitantly, she took the flier.
Monty considered her with rare stillness through his thick spectacles. “Not your thing?”
Kate shrugged. “I’ve never tried,” she said, her voice coming out more hoarse than she would have liked.
“Well? You got anything better to do?” He gave her a half-grin, attempting to tease.
But his question was ill-timed. The frank and truthful answer was no. Kate Irwin did not have anything better to do, and she was beginning to well and truly fear that she never would again. As a child, her purpose in life had been to study, learn, and excel; and at 17, she had failed. Her reintroduction into society and academia was doing little to change her belief that her life, if it was to be worth continuing, needed to change profoundly. In fact, Kate would have been interested in every single aspect of her current life being deleted and replaced with something radically different—everything, except for Monty’s Signals course. And that was coming to an end in less than a week. The future beyond stretched out, sun-bleached and featureless.
To Kate’s horror, she couldn’t seem to formulate a reply to his question, and instead she felt a pain in her throat. Monty must have sensed some small corner of this snag, because he turned around and clacked the stack of green fliers on his podium, noisily realigning it. “But that’s a stupid question. Of course you do. I just mean to say—if you can spare some time from solving the rest of Hilbert’s problems...” He glanced back at her and winked. “If you can, we could use your help. You would be an asset.”
His back was still turned, so Kate had time to hastily wipe her eyes. “I’ll consider it. Thanks, Professor.”
“No sweat, Irwin,” he said. “Really, I’m the one who should be thanking you.”
Kate left the lecture hall with a sense that there was—however vague, however short-term—some sort of future ahead of her. That summer she spent hours at the library reading deep into the archives of Radio-Electronics and Popular Electronics, and took out subscriptions to both magazines in her father’s name, so that in September, she was prepared to make herself indispensable to the nascent organization, and to Monty.
So it was that in her second year, Kate found herself spending Tuesday and Thursday afternoons in the engineering lab next to Monty’s office, squinting at circuit boards with Scott from the water polo team. She liked circuitry—she liked the difficult sets of rules, and the endless possibilities they generated. She liked that Monty called her “Irwin,” like she was a man or a soldier. She liked that she was the best at it, of everyone in the club, and she liked it when they praised her, and asked for her help, and when Monty referred to her as “the expert.” But her favorite part was the Thursday post-meeting, when the dozen-odd students piled into a handful of cars and drove to the burger joint near the cliffs. Later, when the members of the HAM radio club were interviewed, they would all attest that it was Kate Irwin who determined the trajectory of the club.
📡
In the tiny, tight-knit sciences program, Professor Monty was well-liked. He was forgetful about returning assignments, but he made up for this by being a forgiving grader, holding helpful tutorial sessions, and making appearances at almost every student demonstration. The science students tolerated his frequent tangents, and teased him for his flamboyant, dorkily outdated fashion choices. Overall, they found him engagingly eccentric. For instance, despite apparent ease on his motor scooter, whenever he walked, he seemed to list a little to the left. He was also hard of hearing in his left ear. And he talked so much that you could walk away from a long conversation without noticing that he had told you nothing of substance about himself.
Monty could be seen eating lunch and occasionally carpooling with Dr. Conrad, a stuffy professor from the math department. Dr. Conrad’s tests were difficult and harshly curved, but he reused the same ones each year, so his answer sheets went for a premium in the dorms. He walked with a cane, wore his glasses on a chain around his neck, and was never observed smiling or making a joke of any kind. He seemed to be an old friend of Monty’s, but the students didn’t waste time speculating on someone so boring. Not even Dr. Conrad’s British accent could make him intriguing.
Dr. Montgomery, by contrast, only grew more interesting as the members of HAM radio club spent more unstructured time with him. Throughout the fall, they inventoried his unusual private habits—like how he always kept the radio on at a low volume in his office, and how he never used landlines, only payphones. His larboard skew was more noticeable later in the day, and occasionally he appeared to suffer from dizzy spells; his treatment for this was to sit down on the nearest chair or table and vigorously smack himself on the left ear. Dr. Conrad, who sometimes helped convey the HAM radio club to the burger joint, was once observed actually seizing Monty’s wrist to stop him from hitting himself in the head.
Another incident of interest involved Radio-Electronics magazine. In late fall, having exhausted exploration of the extremities of the AM band, the HAM radio club was seeking ideas for what to do next. Jim, a tall, harmless geek, brought in an old issue of Radio-Electronics featuring the MITS Altair 8080 computer kit, and proposed this as their second semester project. Everyone was immediately taken with this idea, and they ran it next door, to Monty’s office. He was standing on top of his desk when they entered, doing something with one of his ceiling tiles. (This did not strike his students as odd.) Excitedly, they held the magazine up to him and started jabbering about the project. Oddly, he did not respond with his trademark enthusiasm, and flipped through the magazine slowly before closing it. They stopped clamoring, and Jim asked him what he thought. “The kit’s expensive. I’d have to talk to Dr. Steele.” (That in itself was unusual, since they all exclusively referred to the Science Department Chair as “Dr. Sleepy,” including Monty.) With the Intel chip, the whole kit was less than $800, which was decidedly within their budget. “Now get out of here and go do some work.” He shooed them out with the magazine. They inquired about the Altair later, and he gave vague answers until they stopped asking.
Even though they soon set their hearts on the infamous antenna, Monty’s hedging about the Altair struck them because he actually seemed to be pretty knowledgeable about computers. Computer science wasn’t part of his curriculum, or the Sciences Program at all, because the course catalog hadn’t been updated since roughly the time of the GI bill. But Monty seemed well-versed in the topic, and in his rambling explanations he would sometimes begin to compare the task at hand to a particular computer engineering protocol, before trailing off with an uncharacteristic “...Well, anyway. Nevermind.” As the year went on, some of the boys in the HAM radio club began to prod the question of Monty’s unclear computer science background. They didn’t get any real information, because he always blithely diverted the conversation, just the way he deftly deflected any talk of his personal history. But this void of information was, as any good intelligence officer knows, data in and of itself.
A mythos of conjecture began to grow around Monty’s ‘mysterious’ past. Kate Irwin first learned of these theories in the winter of her second year, in Scott’s friend Lucas’s car, en route to burgers. Water Polo Scott enumerated the evidence because he relished the rare opportunity to tell Kate Irwin something she didn’t already know.
“Most public sector people don’t know about computer stuff,” he explained, twisted around in the passenger seat with the white sun behind him. “The real computer research goes down in the defense industry. He’s probably ex-military, or even NASA.”
“Hm,” said Kate. He was right, and she disliked that someone else had noticed something about Monty that she had not.
“He’s probably deaf in one ear because of the accident,” Scott went on, tapping his left ear.
“What accident?” Kate asked.
“Well, I dunno,” said Scott. “Like, an accident. Like an experiment gone wrong or something.”
“And that’s why he can’t talk about his past,” Lucas, driving, added.
“Do you notice that? He never talks about it.” Scott said, turning back to Kate.
“I suppose,” said Kate, hedging less convincingly than she thought she was. Monty was always vague about himself, including where he’d studied. That, Kate had noticed, and unfortunately, she was extremely curious about it too. As a female dropout from a prestigious institution, Kate had a powerful but shame-ridden interest in where people got their degrees; as her intellectual idol, Monty and his CV held a particular glowing-hot-metal fascination that she did not touch. In her internal struggle to restrain her curiosity, she told herself that if his life could be happy regardless of where he was educated, then perhaps so could hers. “Maybe his alma mater or his old jobs aren’t secret-secret. Maybe he’s just embarrassed about them,” she offered.
“Maybe his credentials are fake,” Lucas said to Scott, raising his eyebrows. “Did we consider that theory?”
“They’re not fake,” Kate said hotly, at the same time as Scott said doubtfully, “No way.” He glanced at Kate and chose not to follow up on her tone; she was kind of psycho. “He’s not a fraud. He’s like, a genius,” he said. “I bet he was designing super top-secret satellite shit, and then the government wiped his memory.”
Lucas laughed, but Scott insisted he was serious, and then they got into a semi-real argument about the CIA’s brainwashing capabilities. It wasn’t the last time Kate heard this type of speculation about Monty, but she resisted participating after that—and it wasn’t like anyone had any real evidence anyway.
Kate simply didn’t accept the premise that Dr. Montgomery’s autobiographical diffidence must, necessarily, be concealing something. She was “Katie the maven,” the wunderkind of the HAM radio club and its de facto operations director; as such, she spent more time in Monty’s office than any other student; therefore, she knew him better than anyone else in the club, and therefore any other student on campus. (She did not presume authority over the other faculty, Monty’s peers—though Kate usually presumed herself smarter than most adults, in matters of emotional intimacy, she considered herself developmentally delayed, if not actually defective.) In their relationship, it didn’t matter that he didn’t really talk about himself, and that she didn’t really talk about herself. For Kate, working on a project together was synonymous with intimacy. A meeting of the minds at a single external point was more meaningful, more genuine than any banal discussion of the self could ever be—discussions which could only ever approximate her true feelings in imprecise and insufficient language. And she felt that in that regard, she and Monty were the same.
But as time passed, she did develop a theory of her own; not about Monty, but about Dr. Conrad. That winter, she obtained special permission to take Conrad’s 400-level abstract algebra course. Much as she adored Monty, Conrad’s static, impersonal teaching style was more familiar and comfortable. He had a foreigner’s discomfited air, like an alien on a small planet, that she identified with. And she could tell he was smart. Far too smart for their backwater school. He sometimes mentioned his education at Cambridge, and his old research in group theory and geometric topology. Once they discussed recent advances in proving the Poincaré conjecture, and Kate wondered why he wasn’t one of the people making those discoveries, why he was here instead. Perhaps projecting her own sadness, she felt a kinship with that missed opportunity. She wondered if something had happened that kept him in obscurity. But what, she had no idea—Kate Irwin didn’t yet know of anything that could be more important than your vocation.
📡
Later, after the exosphere antenna debacle, it would be said that it was the students’ idea. A discussion of cosmic microwave background radiation, most of them attested, led to a discussion of the Holmdel Horn Antenna, which led to the idea of recreating it at a smaller scale, perhaps using updated techniques. Nobody in the club could pinpoint where that idea came from: a few of them thought it was Ned who came up with it, and several of them agreed that it was Kate Irwin who was ultimately responsible for making it a success; none of them would attribute the idea to Monty.
Wherever the idea began, it was Professor Monty who made it the top priority for the HAM radio club’s second semester, and Kate who led the effort. Under her direction, they spent months perfecting it. A corrugated horn and a retro horn-reflector antenna design were both considered and discarded before Kate proposed a more modern shrouded parabolic antenna. Jim proposed using chicken wire for a reflector, making him the antenna genius for a while; Kate seethed privately and sought another innovation to reassert her authority. Her academic regimen was not the only one that suffered that term. Monty’s radio acolytes spent every scrap of spare time on the roof of the Sciences Building, testing, and modifying, and listening, and getting sunburnt as the spring turned into summer. In June, they declared it functional, lashed it to the roof of an old Dodge Travco, piled in, and drove across the desert to a UFO-watching festival in Nevada. Monty navigated, staunchly refusing to consult any maps, and Conrad drove, knuckles white on the steering wheel the entire trip.
Kate didn’t realize that this trip had occupied her every waking thought until it was finally here, and she was sitting in the RV’s back booth as Ned and Lucas played Rummy 500 while Jim and Scott earnestly discussed whether the Apollo 11 mission had been faked, and if so, whether Monty had been involved, and the desert rolled by outside the window. But it was here now. In fact, it was already 5% over. And she didn’t know what her expectations for this trip actually were. It seemed that her expectation was everything. This trip was going to mark the end of this wretched period of her young life and the beginning of her adult life, of her rise to America’s pioneering female engineer and the Ada Lovelace of the 20th century. How, precisely, her antenna was going to furnish this inciting event, she wasn’t sure yet. As she gazed at the desert, wondering how she was meant to seize this moment and become the fully realized person she was meant to be, Ned asked her if she wanted to be dealt into Rummy 500, so for the moment, she settled for playing cards.
In the blue, dusty desert night, among the hippies and the tin-hats and their telescopes, the HAM radio club set up their huge, homemade antenna. And as the moon rose, they listened to the static, searching for a solid signal among the noise from the stars.
Kate and Monty were the last to give up. It was past midnight and she was cold and tired beyond linear thinking, but too excited to sleep, and unwilling to end the night without results. She hadn’t really expected to hear anything unforeseen with the exosphere antenna, like military stealth plane tests or a deep space radio signal, but she was waiting for something that affirmed the importance of the project—a discovery would have been nice, but so too would have been excitement or an expression of pride from Dr. Monty. Or a meteor shower. Or someone offering her pot. But everyone else was asleep by the time Dr. Conrad said stiffly, “I think that’s enough for tonight.” While she and Monty unplugged and re-coiled everything, and stacked up the heavy crates of equipment, Conrad stood by with his arms folded, almost shivering; as always, he seemed unhappy to be in the place he found himself. She bade the two professors good night and climbed inside the Travco. While the boys camped in tents on the hard desert ground, Kate, the only girl, got the privilege of sleeping inside. She lay on the hard, flat bunk inside her borrowed sleeping bag, and stared up through the louver shutter at the stars, trying to settle down enough to sleep. She was lying there when she heard the conversation outside:
“...of this is smart or prudent.”
“...Because the kids might—?” Monty. His voice was hushed, but not quite whispering.
“No, not because of the kids! They don’t know any better!” Conrad. Actually whispering, and harder to hear, but his intonation was unmistakable.
“Then what?”
“You! You should know better! You are intentionally prodding at something that should be left alone!”
Monty made a familiar scoffing sound. “Science isn’t like that, dude. The question is there. I have to know.”
“Don’t ‘dude’ me,” Conrad hissed back. “You don’t have to. You want to!”
“I have to! You don’t get to ignore a question because it’s risky or some other bullshit like that.”
“Yes, you do!” Conrad was almost speaking aloud now.
“Do you? Because I don’t! And you know that about me!”
“...I do.”
“...And?”
A cautious pause. More carefully: “And it worries me... that you’re being... imprudent. This... life... is tenuous. And hard-won. We threw away every—”
Monty interrupted, barely trying to stay quiet anymore: “Oh, so I’m supposed to just do what you say forever, all because you—”
“Because I what? Because I what?” Conrad hissed, angry again.
“...That’s not fair, Hermann.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
Monty made a noise of disgust. His footsteps crunched away across the rocky ground, followed by Conrad’s tripled footsteps. “Imagine you do get a signal,” he went on, following Monty into the inaudible distance. “What will...”
Kate couldn’t make much sense of their argument. As she considered the possibilities, and wondered why Monty had called Conrad by a name she’d never heard before, she finally drifted off into a deep, dreamless sleep. In the morning, she couldn’t remember any details of the conversation, just the way they’d talked to each other.
Thus ended Kate’s first full, successful year of school since age 15—an A or A- in every class, a successful extracurricular project—and that summer, after she returned from the desert trip, her mood plunged catastrophically. Her success frightened her because it felt so tenuous, and she had no confidence she could recreate it in September. It was a fluke, and most of it—her temporarily improved self-esteem, her reason for dragging herself to campus even when she didn’t feel able—was due to Monty. The overheard conversation in the desert night had awakened a paranoia. What if he didn’t come back in the fall? What if he caught a terminal disease? What if he got hit by a bus and died? A worry stubbornly lodged in her throat, unwilling to be coughed up. Who could she explain it to? Her father, who spent all his time in his bedroom building model planes? Her aunt, who visited for a week to mend all their fraying linens? Kate saw him disappearing—not getting disappeared by some shadowy organization, like Scott and his moon landing paranoia—but getting swallowed up by the ocean or getting in a car and flying away down the coast; if his friend Conrad thought he didn’t belong here, at a quiet coastal college, then she couldn’t imagine where he did belong; she feared that Monty was like her, a perennial misfit with no place among people, unable to conform and never able to understand why. She had tried to make the antenna, but it had failed to change anything; she had wanted to make herself indispensable to him, so that he would never leave. But it was only the HAM radio club, after all.
📡
At last, the fall semester arrived, in a gust of rain and unseasonable flooding. The blue skies gave over to stormclouds foreshadowing the distant but oncoming winter, and the surf pounded the seacliffs like a tolling church bell. When the first day of classes arrived, Kate flew down the half-flooded freeway in her father’s Ford.
She parked in the student lot and splashed across the quad, soaking her tights and slipping in her ill-fitting kitten heels. The campus was drenched, with ankle-deep puddles covering the parking lots and storm drains gargling joyfully. She approached the Sciences Building from behind, scanning the faculty-staff parking lot. Then she spotted it. The white Vespa, parked in its customary spot.
When her classes finally ended at 6 PM, Kate sloshed back across the river delta that campus had become and climbed the concrete steps of the Sciences Building—past the white Vespa (still parked), past the departing students (who ignored her) and the professors with their bags (who greeted her), kicked off her stupid, slippery shoes, and ran up the stairwell to the top floor.
Outside, the storm had brought the evening on prematurely, and the early darkness gave the Engineering wing a tired, late-semester air—the light of after-hours studying in the exam period. All was quiet and dark—except the distant murmur of AM rock radio, and the light on at the end of the hallway. Though his door was open, the errant electrical engineer was not in his office. Shoes still in hand, Kate peered into the engineering lab next door, where she had built her glorious, useless antenna. Deserted—clean—awaiting her return. Then she heard wet, irregular footsteps—
“Katie!” It was Professor Monty, equally soaked and equally happy to see her. He beamed at her from behind fogged and rain-flecked glasses. “What are you doing here?”
Some time in the spring, he had dropped “Irwin” and started calling her “Katie” instead. She didn’t mind, but no one had called her that since grade school.
“I could ask you the same thing,” she said, hugging her heels to her chest.
“Well wouldn’t you like to know, huh?” he said, folding his arms. He was holding a bright yellow wire cutter and a roll of dental floss. After an appropriately dramatic pause, he jerked his head back in the direction he’d come from. “I have a surprise for you guys. But you can get a sneak peek, since you’re the boss. Wanna see?” Happily, Kate followed him to the end of the hall, abandoned her shoes and her bag at the base of the ladder, and climbed up onto the roof, where he showed her his summer project.
The Sciences Department knew that Kate Irwin was exceptional, perhaps even a genius in the making. They were lucky to have her there at all, they agreed, even if she was a girl, and somewhat unstable. Truthfully, she should have been at Caltech or Stanford, getting head-hunted by the DOD to revolutionize satellite technology. Monty knew it; Conrad knew it; even Dr. Sleepy knew it. But what they did not know—what Dr. Montgomery had successfully kept quiet for months now—was that her homemade exosphere antenna had already started a revolution on the roof of the Sciences Building.
Late that night, the flooding began in earnest. It was the first of its kind, in that part of California, but not the last. At the Irwin home, Kate watched late-night vintage horror on KTXL with her father. A few miles away, Dr. Conrad sat at home with their cat; he was trying to read a book, but kept looking anxiously at the telephone. On the roof of the Sciences Building in the rain, there stood no fewer than twenty new exosphere antennas, growing like a colony of mushrooms, each identical to Kate Irwin’s and tenderly calibrated by Dr. Montgomery—still unnoticed by the authorities, although not for much longer. Passers-by on that rainy September night might have noticed the white Vespa still parked outside, or the light still on in the top corner office. They might have wondered what Monty was working on, so late.
Only he knew what he was listening for.
📡