The Ears of a Cat

by Roderick Hart

‘Anything else, Frau Lang?’

  ‘I should also report that Cooper has recruited a woman to look after her cat while she visits her mother in England.’

  Lang noticed that Pearson was entering all this into his laptop and wondered why. He typed as he asked his follow-up questions.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Trudi Kirsch.’

  ‘Will Kirsch be visiting this animal on a daily basis?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Which means she has access to the Cooper apartment.’

  ‘Yes. And as a matter of fact…’

  But Klein had heard enough of cats and their sitters.

  ‘Well, thank you for that, Frau Lang, we are always anxious to collate as much information as possible on domestic pets. Moving on?’

  Klein described the meeting between Catherine Cooper and Gudrun Grönefeld, which had, as it were, fallen ripe into his lap.

  ‘As you may imagine, I could hardly credit my eyes. You will see from your notes that Grönefeld works in biological research. As far as I can tell, she is concerned about her place of work, Breakout Labs, but when she took those concerns to our Austrian colleagues, they felt her fears were misplaced.’

  ‘Do we know what they were?’

  ‘Biosecurity, I believe. But Breakout are accredited in this regard and have passed all their inspections so far, the most recent being in April this year. Those who know about such things believe that Grönefeld’s concerns are groundless.’

  Pearson looked up from his laptop, clearly interested. ‘But Herr Klein, why would she take them to Catherine Cooper? Were they acquainted; was she already a friend?’

  ‘An excellent question, Mr Pearson, but I’m confident I observed their first meeting. Which takes us to the subject we have yet to address: the shy and retiring Frau Cooper herself. If there is a network here, and I am not yet confident there is, she will be at the centre of it.’

  Klein explained the references he’d heard to Future World. The website was not extensive, but it dealt with dangers facing the planet from human activities. There were separate pages for climate change, pollution, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and population growth.

  ‘I have tried to link up via their contact page, so far without success.’

  ‘And Cooper herself?’ Vogt was curious.

  ‘Yes, that proves to be interesting,’ Klein said. ‘Mr Pearson?’

  ‘Okay, here’s the thing; Cooper is a researcher into population geography. In the past, she took part in various public fora on this and related subjects, but all activity stopped two years ago. It didn’t peter out; it was abrupt. She had a small enough profile then, now she barely exists.’

  ‘Perhaps her employer took exception.’ Werner had known cases of this happening. ‘Where does she work?’

  ‘The Free University, Institute of Geographical Sciences.’

  Werner knew his academies. ‘Ah yes, the Geo Campus.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have closed her down; there has to be some other reason.’

  ‘And what might that be?’ Klein enquired.

  ‘That’s obvious, I would have thought,’ or so it seemed to Ursula Lang, ‘whatever she’s doing she doesn’t want us to know.’

  In his standard put-down manner, Klein was dismissive.

  ‘You can’t think she has us in mind, surely? She doesn’t even know we exist!’

  ‘Not us specifically, Herr Klein, not as named individuals, but people like us, people doing our job.’

  Pearson noted Klein’s literal cast of mind, a definite limitation, and at the same time detected a faint whiff of cologne coming from his direction. A man who referred to the French as “frogs” and the German as “krauts”, though not, of course, when they were there to hear it, Pearson wasn’t given to political correctness. When it came to homosexuals, there were several terms at his disposal, and that was the way it appeared to him. Klein was clearly a kraut with dubious sexual tendencies. There was some hope for Lang, though, a lived-in woman who’d led a lived-in life. He didn’t desire her but thought she might prove useful.

  ‘I can’t help but notice,’ Pearson remarked, ‘that their messages are remarkably bland, insipid, anodyne; almost as if they’re writing in code. Though,’ he added, ‘I don’t believe for a moment that they are.’

  ‘So what do you believe, Mr Pearson?’

  Pearson sat back in his chair; he normally kept his hunches to himself.

  ‘If I didn’t know any better, I would think the traffic we’re seeing now is what they intend us to see because they have an alternative channel we know nothing about and they want to keep it that way.’

  Klein was astonished. ‘That’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it?’

  ‘As I say, just a hunch, nothing more.’

  Lang looked at him with greater interest. ‘But based on years of experience, Mr Pearson.’

  He did his best to produce an enigmatic smile. ‘Indeed, Frau Lang.’

  Klein resumed control of the meeting before things got out of hand.

  ‘To sum up, what we seem to have here is a generalised interest in the environment. And if that’s the common factor, I cannot see how our translator friend fits in.’

  Horváth was currently translating for the hell of it a book called The Death of Grass, but Klein didn’t know that, and Lang didn’t tell him. Neither did Pearson, who’d checked out her blog. Posts From the Word’s Edge was only of interest to those concerned with the art of translation, but he’d seen Horváth’s videos and liked them a lot.

  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? She’s their travelling honey trap, their femme fatale.’

  He’d no idea who she might be trapping or why, but he wouldn’t say no if she set her sights on him.

  To prevent any further cheap contribution of this sort, Klein drew the meeting to a close.

  ‘So, colleagues, either these people are motivated by a desire to protect the environment, in which case we give them no further time, or they are of an extreme green tendency and we continue to monitor their activities.’

  It didn’t occur to him that they might be both.

  14

  Klaus Wendling went home for Christmas to be with his family and take a present to his son, an anxious boy he didn’t much like but felt a weak duty towards. For the last three years, he’d asked Grönefeld to come home with him, this time hinting at marriage as an inducement. But he’d have to do better than that. In the absence of windsurfers like him, the area was peaceful in December and she liked it that way. As for the prospect of marriage, Wendling had his uses but they didn’t extend so far.

  As she cycled to Seewinkel, one of her favourite locations, she felt the wind in her face, a wind generated entirely by her own speed along the road. She enjoyed cycling, especially in a flat landscape like this. In due course, she passed the draw well and yurt much photographed by visitors, and the sign which always made her smile – ATTENTION, FAMILIES OF GREY GEESE CROSSING THE ROAD.

  One such family was pictured, the goslings, heads down, following their mother line astern. Waterfowl loved the lake and its reed beds. So did bird watchers, though she didn’t qualify, being a person who simply liked to find herself amid nature, a calming influence, a source of repose. The area was home to wandering women wanting to think things out and wild birds alike.

  Some of the birds were permanent, others, annual visitors. Grey herons, mute swans, bean geese, all of those were in residence now. And so were Syrian woodpeckers, though they avoided the reed beds altogether, preferring the presence of trees. She thought of these colourful birds as refugees from artillery shells, barrel bombs and air strikes; as refugees from people. But she knew that despite their name, they were probably as Austrian as the next bird, lacking only the passports to prove it. And what was a border to a bird but a notion
al line on the ground with even less existence in the air above it?

  The more she thought about it, the more she admired them. Many migrated thousands of miles each year. They could be found everywhere on the planet, even on the ice of Antarctica, and geese had been spotted on radar flying at 29,000 feet. How could they do that and live? How could they do that at all? But because they could travel unimpeded, they could also spread disease. She was thinking of avian flu, which she and her research team were working on even now. This was fine by her if their effort was directed to vaccines, but the head of research was going further than that.

  She spread her waterproof cape on the ground by the edge of the lake and sat down with her flask and a couple of apricot rings. The time had come to consider her position. Grönefeld knew her days at Breakout were numbered. Rumour had it that staff were being relocated from England before the UK left the Union. Some would be heading for Parndorf, and Pienaar would have his chance. And why was the UK leaving? she wondered; they’d opted out of everything as it was. What was the point? Since no one could tell her, she stopped thinking about it. Life was too short and might become even shorter if their esteemed head of research had anything to do with it.

  Dr Heidegger knew that already dangerous viruses could mutate into something more deadly. It had happened in the past and would happen again. His approach was to beat them at their own game, creating by genetic engineering even more lethal variants in the lab then coming up with the vaccines to counter them. Grönefeld disapproved of this approach. A lab-created virus might not arise in nature at all, in which case their effort was wasted. More serious by far was the prospect of such a virus escaping. Dr Heidegger might claim, as Pienaar did, that total containment was in place, but events could prove him wrong. And what then? A deadly virus would be on the loose before a vaccine was available. The result could be catastrophic.

  Her team was working with H7N9, an avian virus already capable of spreading to humans. Though such occurrences were rare, the mortality rate reached sixty percent when they occurred. We all know, Dr Heidegger had assured them at the beginning of the project, that at the moment we have to work hard to be infected. But, he added, emphasising the point with a wave of his glasses, this could change at any time. I would suggest that it will change, and when that happens we will be prepared. He didn’t add, though he could have, that the profits from the sale of the vaccine would do Breakout no harm at all.

  Grönefeld didn’t know it, but even as she sat on her yellow cycle cape gazing out over the freshwater lake and the reed beds on the western shore, Catherine Cooper was sitting on a boulder surrounded by the evidence of vanished species. She, too, was looking out over a body of water, observing seagulls soaring on the wind and bobbing on the water with folded wings. Both were thinking sad thoughts. What would a man who didn’t believe in coincidence have made of this? It was then that Grönefeld knew that something had to be done; she had to do it, and she would contact Catherine Cooper again.

  15

  Dieter Klein sat in his apartment listening to a quartet playing Bach. He was leafing through his remarkably thin background notes on the enigmatic Adalbert Pearson. In some ways, though, the less he knew about him the better. In the security business, deniability mattered, more so than most to a straight-up individual like him.

  After a brief moment’s silence the final fugue began. The composer hadn’t finished it and no one knew why. Contrapunctus XIV. Klein had considered completing it himself. The fact that he lacked the ability didn’t deter him. So when he retired, when he had more time on his hands than he did now, here was a project which would keep him fully occupied. And with any luck, the contrapuntal activity of the brain would neutralise the errant tendencies of the body.

  Ludicrous though the idea of completion appeared to him at first, in a rare moment of spontaneity, he visited a music shop near Kreuzberg in pursuit of sheet music, only to find that the salesperson, a young man with enough metal in his nose and ear lobes to attract a lightning strike, was sufficiently intrigued to lead him out of his comfort zone.

  The question was innocuous enough. ‘What is the nature of your interest?’

  He explained as best he could. ‘In short, I find this music challenging.’

  Despite the ponytail compensating for his bald patch, or perhaps because of it, the assistant appeared to be reading his mind rather better than he might hope to read Bach’s.

  ‘Not a few people have thought of completing it themselves.’

  Klein was disconcerted to hear this, though he had to know that a conventional person like him would never be the first to think of anything.

  ‘Who would presume to do such a thing?’

  The assistant reeled off several names, none of which Klein knew.

  ‘Have you considered,’ he continued, opening up for Klein a dangerous new world, a deep crevasse in a treacherous sheet of ice, ‘obtaining a file of this music for your laptop or PC? Then you could attempt a completion using notation software.’

  Klein hadn’t known such a thing was possible.

  ‘I’m not a professional musician; I need to hear what I’m doing.’

  The assistant smiled. ‘Allow me to demonstrate how easily that can be achieved.’

  He led him to a side room full of keyboards, guitars, several musicians in leather jackets with garish logos, and a young lady playing an electric cello finished in a tasteful shade of olive green. Klein had entered an alternative universe and his first instinct was to leave, but he sat down, as indicated, in front of a large screen with sixteen blank staves ready for the hand of the master. The assistant conceded the system was top end, but exactly the same procedure could be used with less expensive gear, provided the processor was fast enough and there was space to accommodate Apollo notation software.

  ‘You simply play notes into the score from your keyboard,’ he explained, pointing to an ebony-black digital piano neatly connected to the computer. Since it stood on legs of its own like the real thing, Klein assumed it didn’t come cheap.

  ‘I have an old Blüthner, I’m afraid.’

  An instrument to which he remained obstinately attached. Belonging to his grandfather, it passed to his mother, who played Brahms waltzes of an evening; an abiding and comfortable memory which lived with him still. The rosewood case and floral inlays transported him to happier times, as did the brass candlestick holders attached to panels at the front. Modern pianos had long since given up aspiring to character of this sort.

  ‘Ah, yes, well, they don’t make them like that anymore,’ the sales assistant said, without making it sound like a good thing. ‘However,’ he added, on the off-chance of increasing his sale, ‘a digital keyboard would meet your needs and needn’t cost the earth.’

  Andreas could put a package together for him, which he did. All the components would talk to each other. Seamlessly.

  ‘Any problems I would resolve on site.’

  And so Klein learned not only that he could hear the notes he entered, he could change at will the instruments which played them.

  ‘Provided the notes you enter for a given instrument fall within its range.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’d be happy to leave you for a while. Feel free to experiment.’

  At this point, Klein looked round and registered once more the other people in the room, all of whom would hear any mistake he made. And suddenly what little confidence he had deserted him, a problem understood at once by the assistant.

  ‘Use cans, if you like. They reduce distracting ambient noise and only you can hear what you’re doing.’

  Suddenly cut off from the world by large noise-cancelling headphones, Klein’s self-consciousness slowly ebbed away and he entered a line of notes, changing them from oboe to clarinet as the assistant had shown him. And changing them again, this time to the viola, an instrument he’d always liked. Suddenly he
could do anything. Write a string quartet, a symphony even, without caring who would perform it because, with technology like this, he could perform it himself. With due care on his part, the software would replicate any instruments he wanted: woodwind, strings, brass, the lot. Percussion even, not that he cared for that much.

  It seemed to Klein that a wonderful world was opening up before him and he found himself where he’d never expected to be – in an ecstasy of the possible, a world so immense he would have to retire to free up the time to explore it.

  When the assistant returned twenty minutes later, Klein had a question.

  ‘This software of yours has minimum system requirements?’

  ‘Which you may wish to exceed. Oh, and as for the Bach, a colleague reminds me that the composer included a coded message in the form of his own name.’

  Klein had forgotten that, yet mention of a code descended on the scene like a gift from the gods or a snowflake on Christmas Day, for codes were stock-in-trade to a man like him. However it turned out, this enterprise was meant to be. And a further question arose, could music notation be used for encryption? This was a prospect he had never considered nor, as far as he knew, had anyone else. He considered the variables; the staves, clefs, notes, accidentals, and the numerous ways to arrange them on the page. It had to be possible. But thoughts such as those were surely the sad effect which work in the security service had on a cultured man like him. Composing was much to be preferred.

  16

  Pearson waited outside Cooper’s flat till Trudi Kirsch’s van drew up and she entered the building. Giving her five minutes to let herself in and get to work, he climbed the stairs and rang the bell. When she opened the door, there he was, complete with ID badge round his neck, slung from a green lanyard. He was, after all, the employee of a green energy company. According to the wording on his two-toned green jacket, dealing with SIMPLY GREEN ÖKOSTROM was IMMER GUT, IMMER EINFACH. Since nothing in life is always good and simple, this was a bold claim. But Ökostrom was only one of three power suppliers whose name he took in vain when the need arose. If Klein had seen him in action, he’d have wondered how Pearson decided which of his several jackets to put on.