20/20

by Carl Goodman

  ‘Yes, Laska did that. I tell you, it was brilliant. A quad-focal lens that thin and that perfect. Who could have imagined it?’

  She chose her next words carefully. ‘But Laska is no longer at ProOptica?’

  Marik made light of it. He didn’t seem to be perturbed by the fact at all. ‘No, but he was totally wiped out. Laska needed a rest. Time out, you know? He’ll be back though,’ Marik told her. ‘He’s a genius. He won’t be able to stay away.’

  * * *

  Jelen met Eva when she finished her tour. She had her coat draped over her arm. It had been too warm to put it on when she left the clean area. ‘Your documents,’ Jelen said as he presented her with the USB stick. ‘I trust everything is in order.’

  ‘I have every confidence they will be, Strýc Jelen,’ Eva said. ‘I will review them this evening and discuss them with my colleagues in London in the morning. I expect there will be some questions; there always are. I’ll return tomorrow afternoon hopefully to finalise everything.’

  For a moment Jelen looked disappointed, but then he tried to conceal the fact. Beyond the glass door the sun had set but in the glow of sodium lights Eva could see snowflakes the size of coins drifting towards the ground. She pulled her coat on and buttoned it up, turned her collar and put her hands into her pockets. Jelen shrugged.

  ‘These things are necessary,’ he conceded finally. ‘Of course they are inconvenient, there is always concern that something might have been overlooked, but when all is said and done,’ he shrugged again and gave Eva a sharp look. ‘Perhaps it will not be necessary for you to return tomorrow afternoon. Perhaps everything will be in order.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ She tried to smile but the word stuck in her throat. The piece of paper she now found in her right pocket had not been there when she left her coat outside the clean area. The urge to take it out and examine it was almost overwhelming, but instinctively she knew Jelen shouldn’t see it, whatever it was.

  ‘Let’s talk in the morning,’ Jelen said. Eva nodded and pushed on the front door.

  She waited until she was back in her hotel room to see what had been placed in her pocket. When she took it out she found an envelope, plain and unaddressed. It was sealed. Eva tore it open and found a folded piece of A4 paper. On it was written: Národná, 10 p.m.

  What the hell was Národná? She turned to her phone and started searching. From a translation website she learned that the word meant ‘national’ in Slovak. She found web pages for the national bank, national council and even for the national lottery but nothing that gave her any clue as to what the message meant. Then again, Eva thought as she swiped through screens, it had to be so obvious that whoever had put it in her pocket must have thought she would immediately understand. Well, she grumbled silently to herself, she didn’t.

  It took her another ten minutes of growing increasingly irritated to discover that Národná was also the name of a short road just another few minutes’ walk away. It led to the Hron River, she saw when she checked the map. Univerzita Mateja Bela stood at the opposite end of it.

  So what was she supposed to do? Stand on a street corner and hope to get lucky? Her phone told her it was 7.15. At least she had time to get something to eat. Out of curiosity she decided to check the USB stick with the documents on it that Jelen had given her. While the files were transferring onto her laptop she went downstairs to order a sandwich from the empty hotel bar.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  By nine forty-five the snow was falling hard. It had settled, and she had to tread with care as she walked down the steps at the front of the hotel. The map on her phone gave her directions. She turned left out of the hotel and traipsed along the street with her collar turned up, and the fabric of her coat pulled over her mouth to give her some protection from the freezing night air. She didn’t have a hat. Snowflakes settled briefly on her short hair and then melted, droplets of water trickled occasionally down her neck. Her footsteps crunched in crisp, fresh snow but apart from that the blanket of white muted every sound.

  It was only when she turned to cross a street that she realised she was being followed. At least, she thought as she stared at two men fifty metres behind her, that was what her instincts told her. They stopped when she stopped, moved when she moved, but kept their distance. She checked her phone. She still had time. On the map she dragged the narrow blue line at random and forced it to work out a different route to Národná. She could still arrive by ten o’clock. She saw that when the directions changed.

  Eva crossed the road and turned at a junction. The road was poorly lit, she moved between shadows and kept looking back to see if the men were in fact still behind her. Had she imagined it? Was it just paranoia at being a stranger in a strange land combined with her recent experiences? Her feet slipped on smooth concrete hidden beneath a layer of snow more than once. Refuse bins stood stacked by the side of a garage. When she reached the next junction her phone told her to turn left again. The two men entered the road at its far end.

  They moved more quickly now. They must have realised she had seen them. Whatever it was they began to trot, even though the snow hampered them. Eva tried to walk faster too, but the pavements had not been salted and twice she almost tripped and fell. Flakes drifted down and hid the city from view. The silence in the streets became oppressive.

  Another right turn, then a left. The phone adjusted itself and decided she would now arrive at three minutes past ten. Surely Laska would wait that long, if indeed it was Laska she was going to meet? Another thought struck her then. She had no proof that somebody was leading her to Laska, but the two men had followed her as soon as she left the hotel.

  A sudden gnawing in her gut. Suppose it was a set-up? What if Jelen had put the note in her pocket himself? Národná, the national road with a university at one end and a river at the other. What better way to dispose of an unwanted visitor than to club them around the back of the head and toss their body into the churning water of the Hron?

  They were getting closer. She tried to run but she slipped, fell, caught herself before she struck the ground and managed to scramble back up. The map no longer seemed relevant. Eva took another couple of random turns and found a small public space, a handful of snow-covered trees and a few benches set in an area only a few tens of metres square. She was actually on Národná, she realised when she glanced again at her phone. At the end of the road, barely a dozen metres away, she could see the river.

  The streets were silent and empty apart from her and the two men. It had to be a trap. She could try to hide but then she realised: her footsteps in the snow would give her away. She crossed the tiny park and looked for another way back to the hotel. The two men appeared just across the road.

  She had to run, to try to run anyway. Eva turned towards the centre of the city and started to move, but a hand came from nowhere and grabbed her from behind. It covered her mouth. An arm wrapped itself around her shoulders and dragged her back into the shadows. She reached up to tear the hand from her face. It didn’t seem that strong, but a voice whispered in her ear. ‘Quiet, please,’ it said, imploring. On the other side of the tiny park two men peered into darkness.

  They would see her footprints. She felt certain they would. Then one turned to the other and muttered something. The second man shrugged and walked away.

  After a few more seconds the hand that covered her mouth was lowered. ‘Excuse me,’ a voice whispered. ‘I did not know if they meant you any harm, but I was certain they did not mean you any good.’

  She turned in the shadows. Another man, quite slender, face still hidden. ‘You are Detective Inspector Harris,’ he told her as if she were unaware of the fact. ‘I am Grau Laska.’

  * * *

  Laska bought them coffee. He set two mugs down on a table at the back of a late-night cafe next to the Hron River, away from a window that looked out at snow falling on the empty streets of Banská Bystrica. In the distance she saw the reflection of streetlights flickering on water.
There was no sign of the men who had followed her.

  ‘Do you understand what is going on here?’ Laska asked her. Even though he was only in his early thirties his hair was flecked with grey. His face was thin, almost skeletal, although he seemed healthy enough. Tired though, Eva thought as she gazed at the dark patches under his eyes. He clearly hadn’t shaved in days. The stubble on his chin cast more shadows over his jaw and throat. Laska had the air of someone who needed to unburden. That suited her perfectly.

  ‘I know it’s about money,’ she said as she sipped her black coffee. Bitter and brackish, it bit her tongue. Laska nodded vigorously.

  ‘Yes,’ he breathed the word almost as though he were relieved to speak it. ‘The question is, how do you get to that money and what are you prepared to do? Antonin Jelen would do a lot.’

  ‘Jelen struck me as an odd man to be running a lens company,’ Eva said.

  ‘Jelen,’ Laska told her, ‘is a businessman.’ He made a gesture in the air when he said the word, drawing imaginary inverted commas around it. ‘It’s what he does. There are people like Jelen in every country. They start a small company and grow it by any means possible, and then they sell it on and buy into another. Jelen began in construction. It’s said he won contracts by undercutting competitors and mixing sand with cement to keep his costs low. He jumped from one company to another, used them like stepping-stones and let them sink behind him. But you shouldn’t underestimate him. Jelen grew up in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the decades of turmoil that followed. Those were hard years, so my parents tell me. Only hard men succeeded. I have no doubt there is violence in his past, but he has always kept one step ahead. ProOptica had been a family business. Jelen bought the family out when one of their main customers suddenly said they were going elsewhere. Once Jelen had acquired the company the customer just as suddenly decided to stay of course. Jelen paid a knockdown price because of a fabricated crisis that he had orchestrated. Not long after he took over, ProOptica was thriving again.’

  ‘But Bright Eyes?’

  Laska nodded. ‘It was not his idea, as you might imagine. ProOptica was already doing business with the Chatham Centre, supplying ordinary multi-focal intraocular lenses. They were not the largest contract the company had, but the margins were far better than the run-of-the-mill contact lens manufacturing business. Jelen met Sir Robin Chatham. It was like a courtesy visit, you know? I guess Chatham would have talked about how lens implants were the future and how the search for a better lens was like the quest for the Holy Grail. Well, Jelen the businessman saw the opportunity. He jumped at that.’

  Eva stared into her coffee as she tried to form the next question. ‘But Jelen couldn’t have understood what that entailed?’

  Laska scowled. ‘Jelen is not a stupid man. He’s a gambler to be sure, he takes risks that most people would not, he is almost certainly a criminal but do not think of him as just a thug. Jelen understands business and he understands the market, better than I ever could. He asked me: what’s stopping you designing the perfect lens? I told him it was the constraints of the material, of the plastics we used in manufacture. He said: don’t worry about that; just imagine we have the best plastic imaginable and go from there. He said it was like a thought experiment, a road map. The kind of thing the companies that make silicon chips do. Imagine how manufacturing techniques will be five years down the line and then design for that.’ Laska sighed. ‘It’s part of his skill. He set me the task of designing the kinoform for Bright Eyes. How could I resist the challenge?’

  Eva frowned. ‘I think I’ve heard that term somewhere before?’

  ‘Kinoform? Just think of it as the profile of the lens. It’s almost like a dogtooth pattern, but each tooth bends light in a slightly different way. It’s complicated,’ he glanced at her, ‘I mean really complicated. The math is substantial. It’s easier to calculate a moon-landing trajectory for a rocket than it is the kinoform of a diffractive lens like Bright Eyes.’

  ‘This is what you do though?’

  ‘This is what I do,’ Laska agreed. ‘My family has worked with optics for four generations. It’s in the blood.’ His expression became wistful for a moment. ‘I grew up in a house of lenses and prisms,’ he told Eva. ‘My earliest memory is of a rainbow shining on the wall above my cot. A spectrum is the most beautiful thing I could ever imagine. So when Jelen asked me to look at the problem, I jumped at the chance.’

  She still didn’t quite understand. ‘What problem?’

  He swirled his coffee. ‘I would call it the refractive limit. Think of it as the maximum amount that light can be bent by any given piece of glass. Jelen simply wanted to extend the combined refractive limit of a diffractive lens so that it would provide the best-quality image imaginable, to create vision clearer and sharper than most people could ever hope to achieve naturally.’

  It sounded like an extraordinary feat to her. She could at least begin to imagine the skill and knowledge needed to create such a thing. ‘You actually managed to do this?’

  Laska winced, though. ‘That depends on what you mean. It’s true I designed a kinoform that could achieve such quality. It had a serious limitation, though.’ He pushed his mug around and stared at the table. ‘You can bend light with a lens. You can split it with a prism. You can do those two things separately and then bring it all back together again to focus on a single point. Light is miraculous. It’s both a wave and a particle, and the fastest thing in the universe. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, absolutely nothing. And yet we capture it in glass, we bend it to our will with lenses. Yes, I could achieve the effect Jelen desired with a hypothetical plastic. The problem was that in order to minimise loss of light, to increase the refractive limit, the lens had to be so thin it was unusable.’

  ‘But Bright Eyes works,’ Eva said. ‘Irina Stepanov told her friends it was the best thing she had ever done, that her vision was incredible.’

  ‘It would have been,’ Laska agreed, ‘for a while. I can’t take credit for that part though; that was Jelen’s contribution. If it had worked it would have solved all the problems, but you know what they say. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.’

  She waited for him to continue. ‘Jelen wanted to make a prototype,’ he said. ‘It seemed crazy but I went along with it. Making the plastic clear enough turned out not to be the problem, but making the plastic durable was impossible. It had to be too thin, even Jelen understood the lenses were too brittle to be implanted into human eyes on their own. So he took from his construction background the idea of encasing them in resin to give them strength.’ Laska paused. ‘The difficulty was that the resin affected the optical quality of the lens. He had just reintroduced the refractive limit into the equation.’ He looked tired then, Eva thought; more than just fatigue. Grau Laska seemed completely world-weary.

  ‘I suppose that’s where the likes of Antonin Jelen differ from the rest of us,’ he said eventually. ‘Jelen would not give up. He found another company that specialised in such things. He had them go through literally thousands of formulations of materials until they finally found one that cancelled itself out. It did not effect the lens.’ For a moment he looked almost guilty. ‘I cannot describe the sense of excitement. It seemed like we had actually found the Holy Grail for a while. Even I believed it; so did Sir Robin Chatham. Miraculous, he called it. If it had worked, it would have been.’

  ‘But?’ Eva said.

  ‘But,’ Laska agreed. ‘The resin itself turned out to be unstable, susceptible to ultraviolet light. It was like Jelen was mixing his cement with sand again. Over time, over a period of years that is, the resin will decay. It will break down, and basically crumble. When it does the lenses will become as brittle as a dried leaf again. They will break. They will shatter inside your eyes and there will be no way of removing the fragments. Jelen kept that detail to himself of course,’ Laska snarled, bitter fury tingeing his voice. ‘It took me some while to realise
.’

  ‘My God,’ Eva said. ‘Is that what happened to Robert Isherwood?’

  ‘In part.’ He thought for a moment. ‘You came here pretending to be from the MHRA, the British regulator for these things. Do you know how this all works?’

  She had done most of her research on the plane. ‘I know they use the European Medical Device directive as a criteria, and comply with the CE standards.’

  ‘Yeah, there’s a bunch of rules. MDD 93/42/EEC, ISO 15223-1, ISO 11135, ISO 10993-6, a load more. I memorised the numbers. The point is they are all checked by what they call a Notified Body. That’s not a government department, it’s a private company and that private company is permitted to use subcontractors for certain tasks. Guess which subcontractor was used to verify the resin coating for Bright Eyes?’

  She gasped. ‘Surely not ProOptica?’

  ‘Not in that name, but a company set up by Jelen for that purpose. The lenses are supposed to last for the rest of your life. The truth is you’d be lucky if you got eight to ten years use out of them before the resin decayed.’

  Eva thought for a moment. ‘Isherwood had only had the lenses a few months?’

  ‘Yes,’ Laska agreed, ‘and that’s exactly what somebody is trying to cover up. Isherwood, Stepanov and the others had lenses that belonged to a faulty batch. The resin didn’t take years to break down. It only took months. Isherwood sent Jelen into a complete panic. If somebody with half a brain investigated Isherwood’s lenses they would realise that the results on the resin had been faked, and that all Bright Eyes lenses contain a fatal flaw.’

  She thought back to the Chatham Centre. Robin Chatham said they had implanted almost a thousand of pairs of lenses. Was that a thousand of pairs of time bombs? ‘But what happened to Isherwood?’