by Tom Pollock
Rita pulls the door shut. There’s a brass keyhole just under the handle. She selects a key from her bunch, inserts it, and turns it clockwise. She gives the door a good shove with her shoulder. It swings inwards and the doorframe goes with it, but only to about forty degrees. I gasp. Where a moment ago there were shelves of tat, the cobwebbed bricks of the terrace’s cavity wall are now visible. Rita looks down, and I follow her gaze. The closet floor’s dropped away too, and now a staircase coils up out of the darkness to meet us like a black iron snake.
I look at the angle the door cuts across the space and the width of the wall cavity, and whistle softly.
“The closet collapses and slides into the cavity when you push the door. What, is it on rails or something?”
Rita doesn’t answer. I run a hand over the inside of the doorframe. There’s nothing out of the ordinary visible; no electrics, no flattening of the wood grain where it’s been drilled and filled. You could take this whole house apart with a sledgehammer and you’d never find it.
“Who . . . what are you people?” I feel dizzy and out of breath.
“In a hurry,” Rita says shortly, her expression fixed.
We descend, my uncomfortable formal shoes clanking on the metal. The mechanism slides back silently above us. She leads me down into the dark.
The staircase ends in a brick arched tunnel. Halogen bulbs on the ceiling yield a mortuary glare. Rita sets off down it on her stained feet, and I hustle along after her.
“This tunnel leads back under the road, doesn’t it?” I ask. She ignores me. “That house, number 57, it’s just the entrance. Our destination isn’t even on the same street.”
Still no reply. There’s something physical, something stifling about the quiet down here. The tunnel turns corner after corner. It’s a maze, I realise. You need to know the path. Left, right, right, left again. I pull a pen from my pocket and scratch notes on the bandage on my hand to keep track. Every five metres an identical light; every brick the same. It would be so easy to lose yourself. I imagine being alone down here, stumbling around in circles until I starved or ate myself, watched by the unsympathetic lenses of the little black cameras set into the ceiling.
Maze, I think. There’s a theorem about mazes. I remember Dr. A laughing as he told me: Learn this and you’ll never be lost in one. I grasp hungrily after the shreds of memory, but I’m too wrung out, and they elude me.
Side tunnels lead off every ten metres or so, some on the left, some on the right. Faint, chill draughts kiss my cheek as I pass them. Routes to the outside?
“Jesus,” I mutter. “Random doorways.”
Rita still doesn’t reply, but the rhythm of her footsteps falters.
“That’s right, isn’t it?” I press. No response. Nervous energy lifts the hairs on my neck like static. Come on, I implore silently. Give me something.
“You don’t want to leave a pattern, you can’t let anyone see you visiting the same house over and over again, so you’ve got ways in all over the neighbourhood.”
Still no answer, but a muscle tightens under the skin of her cheek. She’s like a rusted tap, I think. You grip and turn as hard as you can and it feels like she’s giving a little, but that might just be your hand slipping.
“Are all the other entrances at the 57th house on their roads, too?” I ask. “Is that why you call this place that?”
She barks a short, flat laugh—finally—the first drop.
“Why on earth would we do that? The house numbers are random too. As you said, it’s all about patterns. There will always be patterns, unfortunately. It’s our job to obscure them, make sure they’re as complicated and confusing as possible.”
“You create static around the signal?” I ask. But she’s fallen silent again.
Left, left, right, left again. The sheer, methodical paranoia of this place takes my breath away. But terrifying as it is, I feel a weird kind of kinship with it. This place was built by very clever, very determined people who were very sure they were very under threat.
Possibilities flicker through my head, each one only deepening the chill I feel.
Terrorists, religious cult, organised crime . . .
And they called Mum a colleague.
We turn one last corner and the tunnel ends at a big metal door with a camera lens set into it. Rita leans into the lens and lets it take some sort of scan of her eye. There’s a deep clunk and the door bevels slowly outward. The door’s thick, like “built to survive a nuclear apocalypse” thick. Somewhere in my motor cortex, the lizard slams a scaly foot on the brakes and I. Just. Stop.
I can’t make myself take another step. I glance at the sequence of blue Biro Ls and Rs scrawled on my bandaged hand. Walk, I urge my legs, but they’ve gone on strike. They know that there is still a way back, but not if I let that half-ton hunk of steel close behind me.
I ask one final time.
“What is this place? Who are you people?” Rita turns to look at me. “I . . . I won’t, I can’t, take another step, until you tell me what’s waiting behind that door.”
Her gaze seems to weigh me for a second, then she says, “We’re 57.”
“You’re named after an address that isn’t even really your address?”
“You’re named after an uncle who isn’t even really your uncle.”
I feel jiujitsued. That scrap of knowledge, so casually tossed off, seems to hint at limitless libraries, volumes filled with information not just about my famous neuroscientist mother, but about me.
“How do you—”
“By being halfway competent at my work.” She cuts me off, rolling her eyes towards the brick ceiling as if praying for patience. “Fine,” she mutters.
“In 1994 as part of his commitment to ‘open government’”—her lip curls as though the words have curdled in her mouth—“the then Prime Minister John Major officially acknowledged the existence of the Secret Intelligence Service, probably better known to you as MI6.”
“So?”
“So, on the same day, 57 was given the primary responsibility for the clandestine pursuit of Britain’s interests. We’re the knife in the nation’s pocket now.”
“So . . . the first thing this ‘open government’ did after officially revealing a spy agency was replace it with another hidden one?”
“Sure,” she says impatiently. “You either have a secret service or you don’t. But if you do, it should be fucking well secret.”
Somewhere behind us water drips. I stare at her, Rubik’s Cubing the idea in my head until it makes some kind of sense. “My mother’s a spy?”
“No, your mother’s a scientist. She just works for spies.”
A thought occurs to me then, an appalling thought, and it must be amateur hour in the paranoia centres of my prefrontal cortex, because it didn’t occur to me earlier. A fresh rain of warm sweat stipples my shoulders.
“How . . . how can you show me all this and then let me walk away?”
I’ve been drawn into a secret, and only those sworn to secrecy will ever know I’m here. I look at the curving brick walls and think, Crypt. I’m being encrypted.
“I’m never leaving here, am I?”
She stares at me solemnly, and for a second I think, Shit, I’m dead, but then she laughs, sudden and shocking in this tomb-like place.
“Don’t be such an arse! Of course you can leave. You’re a good kid. You’re the son of my best friend and I probably saved your life today, and if that’s not enough”—she half shrugs—“I can rely on the twin facts that you’re the boy who’s afraid of everything and I am tremendously scary.”
I’d like to contradict her, but when you’re nailed, you’re nailed.
“Now”—she jerks her thumb at the massive door—“behind me is your mother, some answers, and a cup of tea that I will honestly kill you if you keep me from any longe
r. Behind you”—she nods down the tunnel—“is a man with a knife. Decide.”
Well, when you put it like that . . . I take a step towards her, so hesitant I almost lose my balance. She puts an arm around me, steadies me. I take a deep breath, and enter 57.
Beyond the door is a short brick hallway, then another set of doors, glass this time, and then a square chamber, yet more bare brick. Judging by the three sets of elevator doors on the far side, it was once just a lift lobby, but now it’s rammed with trestle tables, computers, half-unpacked cardboard boxes, and bustling people; all the gangly paraphernalia of an organisation that’s had a growth spurt but not filled out into it yet. Men and women, twenty-five, no, twenty-six of them, push past one another in the narrow spaces between the desks and type away at the makeshift workstations.
The dominant sound of the “knife in the nation’s pocket” is the click of fingers on keys, but the odd snatch of conversation is audible: someone says “him,” someone says “wolf,” and “cipher” and “lost” and “attack.” There are numbers I can’t make sense of. It all seems random to me, but I know it isn’t.
It’s just static around the signal, I think.
Randomness is surprisingly hard to fake. Now—right now—imagine tossing a coin a hundred times. If you’re like most people, you’ll have imagined close to fifty heads and fifty tails, and you won’t have a run of more than three or four of either in a row. Toss the coins for real, though, and those runs will happen, almost with certainty. True randomness is indifferent to our petty human expectations of it, and today’s events don’t have any of its telltale traits.
Everything that’s happened—the blood, the panic, the apparent chaos—it isn’t random. There is a pattern. I just have to see it under the gore, hear it under the screaming, and when I do, I won’t merely cope; I’ll find the rancid sack of animal shit that did this.
Come on, Petey, patterns are the one thing in this Gödel-forsaken world you’re actually good at.
Rita coughs and a couple of heads pop up over monitors, and the voices fall silent. “Frankie,” she calls across the room, “have we found the girl?”
The woman she’s talking to hasn’t noticed us yet. She’s late thirties maybe, bottle-blonde hair, grey Gap hoodie, and frayed jeans. She’s bending over a monitor and doesn’t look up.
“Not yet,” she replies. Her brow furrows in irritation. “We’ve tried a few times. Got the boys in the kitchen trying to find a way to cook up a message she’ll respond to—if she’s listening, but if we wanted someone who could break ciphers on the fly, then frankly we . . . lost . . .”
She tails off. Her face takes on the wondering expression of someone whose brain has just caught up with their ears. She runs a hand back over her ponytail and looks up at us.
“The wrong twin,” she murmurs. She hurries over to us, banging into a trestle table in her haste, her hands half raised.
“Thank god,” she says. “Ca—”
“Rita,” Rita interrupts her. “Outdoor names only, Frankie, while we have a houseguest.”
She steps aside so Frankie can get a good look at me and drops her hands. With a start I recognise her—she was the third figure in the photo Rita showed me.
“This is the Rabbit?” she asks. She sounds alarmed.
“You can’t tell?”
“You brought him here?”
“His mother’s having her abdomen sliced open upstairs for the second time in an hour. Where else could I take him?”
“But we’re not prepared for—”
“Look at him, Frankie,” Rita says patiently.
Frankie squints at me and some of the doubt ebbs from her voice. “He does seem to be taking this remarkably calmly.”
Rita nods. “I suspect we have some mixture of shock, exhaustion, and benzodiazepines to thank for that.”
“Benzodiazepines?”
“His file says lorazepam. We have an hour. Two at the outside.”
“File? I have a file?” I ask, bewildered. They don’t answer. That’s becoming a theme—spies, go figure. I have another go anyway. “What file? An hour until what?”
Frankie turns to face me. She’s smiling, but pale as if she’s had a nasty shock and is trying not to show it, like an arachnophobe who’s been given a pet tarantula for Christmas by a new best friend she really wants to impress.
“Until your medication wears off and you can have some more,” she says. “We know you sometimes have a tricky time adjusting to stress.”
I blink, so stunned by the magnitude of that understatement that I almost—but not quite—miss the fact that that was definitely not the true answer to my question.
“I’m so sorry this is happening to you,” she presses on. “Louise is very dear to all of us here. We’re doing everything we can for her.”
“Th-thank you.”
“My name’s Frankie,” she tells me, her smile sympathetic and confiding. “It’s okay . . .” Her hand moves to my cheek and I shiver as I feel it against my skin. “You’re safe now, your mother too. Anabel’s still out there, but we’ll have her safe as soon as we can. We just have a few questions about what happened.”
“Frankie,” Rita says, “have you got the museum footage?”
“What little there is. Why?”
“It might jog Peter’s memory.”
“Are you kidding? He’s not ready for that—he’s still in shock. His lips are blue.”
“So he’ll feel it less,” Rita replies firmly. “Better now than later. We’re running out of time.”
Frankie stares at her, eyes wary, and starts to shake her head. “Rit—”
“I want to.” My voice is small, but its firmness surprises even me. They both turn to look at me.
“Please, if I can help, I want to. I want to find who did this.”
There’s a silence. Frankie’s jaw goes tight, but she pulls around a monitor so we can all see it. She opens a folder and double-clicks a file. A black-and-white video plays silently. With a lurch I recognise the exhibit-lined corridor where I found Mum. It’s empty. In the bottom right corner of the screen, a clock ticks off minutes, seconds, tenths, and finally hundredths of seconds, racing headlong, almost too fast to see.
My chest and throat freeze up. Now it comes to it, I actually don’t know if I can watch this. Frankie, eyeing me warily, starts to narrate.
“We have footage all the way up until ten fifty-two, when you . . . well, here you come.”
A figure runs through the shot from the left: skinny, pale arms pumping, lips moving, though there’s no one to talk to. I squeeze my bandaged hand until the pain flares.
The camera clock ticks off eight more seconds, and then another figure enters the hallway.
“Mum,” I whisper. She has her heels in one hand, her skirt bunched in the other, and she’s running, but she doesn’t exit the shot like I did.
She stops dead in the middle, and the expression on her face . . . it’s horror and recognition and desolation and despair. It’s the look of confronting your worst fear and knowing it’s finally come for you, and that you aren’t ready, and you never could be.
She takes one hesitant step forward, then starts to stumble back, her mouth stretched in a cry for help, a name, my name. She turns to run and then the screen goes black.
I jerk around to Frankie, tears in my eyes.
“Turn it back on!”
“It is on,” she replies. “Something was interfering with the signal—look at the clock.”
I look back at the screen. The playback clock’s still perfectly clear, and still running, five seconds of darkness, six. I lift my hands towards the screen, as though I could tear away the blackness hiding my mother like a shroud.
Then something weird happens. The clock freezes; for two complete thuds of my heart, it reads 10:58:17:00, and then, like a
stumbling runner regaining her footing, it charges onwards. Three seconds later it stalls again, just long enough for me to heave a shuddering breath in and out again: 10:58:20:00. Then it runs on, time spilling on and on into the darkness. My eyes ache from staring at the screen’s not-quite-black glow.
“Keep watching,” Rita says.
The clock halts once more: 10:59:13:00 for two full seconds.
Then the picture flashes back.
“Mum,” I breathe, though from the camera’s vantage she’s barely recognisable. It’s just the wreckage of her, tangled limbs and bloody cloth, and I’m on my knees beside her, my hands stained dark as they patter desperately over her body. I look down at those stains on my hands now and feel the same wordless panic fill my throat.
“Freeze it,” Rita orders.
Frankie hits a button and the black-and-white me stops moving.
“We have no footage of the attack itself,” Frankie says. “But you were the first person on the scene afterwards. Did you see anything the attacker might have left behind? Anything at all could be a clue. Look at the screen, remind yourself.”
I shake my head, useless tears stinging my eyes.
“Anything at all, anything that could help us find them?”
No, except.
“Peter?”
“The clock,” I whisper, and my voice is hoarse. “During the blackout, it stops three times. The frequency . . .”
“We’ve already looked at it. It’s irregular,” Frankie says. She frowns. “There’s no pattern.”
“It’s not irregular,” I insist, “not completely. The pauses come precisely on the turn of the second. Look.” With numb fingers I take the mouse from Frankie and drag the cursor on the video back to the point where the clock first stopped.
“The first one on ten-fifty-eight and seventeen seconds exactly, the second at ten-fifty-eight and twenty seconds exactly.” I dragged the cursor forward, and then again. “And the last burst at ten-fifty-nine and thirteen seconds exactly. What are the odds of that happening by accident?” They look at me blankly, so I answer the question for them. “Exactly one in a million. It’s not random. Those numbers mean something. Seventeen, twenty, and thirteen.”
