Ark

by Charles McCarry

  Daeng said, “Henry would like you to join him. He said you should pack a bag for two or three days.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “What kind of weather?”

  “Very warm.”

  Two hours later, I was flying near the speed of sound at forty thousand feet, out of Bear’s reach.

  2

  THE AIRPLANE LANDED AS THE sun came up on Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands. Mountains wreathed in cloud, green forest, pounding surf, shimmering bays. But where were the canoes filled with dusky maidens and muscular lads in crowns of frangipani that should be paddling out to meet us?

  “There is Henry’s house,” Daeng said over the loudspeakers.

  I could see its glass parts winking down below. Tinted pink by the sunrise, it clung to the edge of a cliff.

  “Paul Gauguin and Jacques Brel are buried in the Marquesas,” Daeng said. “According to Google, the Marquesas are considered the most beautiful of all the Pacific islands.”

  Ah, so I wasn’t the first to notice.

  Henry’s house was what you would expect—filled with light and dazzling art. I was given a bedroom overlooking the ocean. From its balcony I could see surf splashing twenty feet above the lip of the towering cliff. The surf, Henry told me later, was caused by the South Equatorial Current, which had been smashing into these islands for more than a million years. It had excavated deep caves in the volcanic stone of the cliffs.

  There was no sign of Henry. Nothing stirred. I took a nap and went downstairs around noon. Henry, Amerigo, Ng Fred, the English engineer, and an Englishwoman of a certain age whom I had not met were drinking sparkling wine on a terrace. All except the impeccable Ng Fred, who wore a blazer and cravat, were dressed in resort clothes. They had been snorkeling, and could talk of little else. All were pinkened by their morning in the sun. Amerigo was extravagantly glad to see me. Ng Fred smiled in his friendly way. The Englishwoman—big-boned and meager of flesh, sharp Norman nose, sharper eyes, unstraightened working-class teeth, wispy gray chignon in the process of escape from its rubber band—looked me over as if she thought she recognized me from a Wanted poster. Had she been a man she would have been ugly-handsome. She wore perfume that smelled something like witch hazel. Henry introduced her as Clementine Machen.

  He said, “Clem is our chief of security. She was in MI5.”

  Changing the subject as I suppose MI5 people are trained to do, Clementine asked me if I had heard that the Pacific Ocean had been invaded by floating islands of plastic trash—those abominable water bottles mostly—which, if lashed together, would create a single island of debris the size of the United States of America and thirty meters deep.

  I said, “No. Somehow I missed that.”

  We ate lunch. Clementine sat next to me. She commanded many anecdotes, and every story she told me reminded her of something that was even more interesting. She talked, she looked like a character out of Oscar Wilde. Her diction was flawless, her delivery fluent, her accent homogenized. Her gruff voice chopped up sentences into words and words into syllables. Her commas, semicolons, and periods were as detectable as the words were audible. On my left sat Amerigo, who filled me in, in whispers, on Clementine’s past. Before retiring from MI5 and joining up with Henry, she had had a long career in which she protected her country’s secrets and exposed those of her country’s enemies. She had outwitted some of the most slippery spies of our times. Her feats and her honors, if lashed together, would probably have been the size of the Shetland Islands. She was a Dame Commander of the British Empire, addressed in Britain as Dame Clementine, though she was just plain Clementine when abroad.

  Clementine did not speak of herself or pepper me with personal questions as the Brits are wont to do. She spoke instead of the thing we had in common, i.e., the work. She thought—as did Henry, as would any reasonable person—that there was reason for concern about the security of the operation. It amazed her that we had gotten away with our activities as long as we had. This would not last much longer, in her opinion. We had too much to hide—more than any other conspiracy in history, surely—and every single bit of it was explosive. How, for example, could we possibly keep it a secret that we were going to take off in a spacecraft with tens of thousands of frozen human embryos in the hold, even in the unlikely event that it didn’t become known that we had genetically altered those embryos?

  If I had come here to escape my anxieties, I had come to the wrong place.

  I said, “You seem to know a lot of things. How is it we’ve never met?”

  “I’m the hush-hush department,” she said. “Unseen.”

  “But all-seeing.”

  “Not quite. But that’s the goal.”

  “How does one go about being all-seeing?”

  Clementine neither smiled nor answered. She was the one who had been following me around in Manhattan. Not Clementine in person, of course—her gumshoes. She knew all about Bear, all about Adam, all about everything.

  I said, “Are your files going to be encoded in the sphere?”

  “What sphere might that be?” she asked.

  After lunch we all went upstairs for a nap. Apparently Henry had no urgent work for us to do today. This was a U-shaped house with a courtyard in the middle, two stories high and just one room deep, so that every upstairs room had a view of the sea from the front windows and, from the rear, a view of Tekao, a cloud-ringed peak on the other side of the island. Clementine appeared on the veranda. Her room was next door to mine.

  “Lovely mountain,” I said.

  “Quite,” Clementine said. “I understand you like pictures.”

  She waited to see if I would confirm this report. I nodded.

  “There’s rather an interesting watercolor of Tekao in my room,” Clementine said. “Come over and have a look, if you like.”

  “Another time, maybe,” I said. “I’m worn out.”

  Clementine raised her eyebrows. Clearly she thought I had misunderstood her invitation. She vanished.

  We met again at cocktail time. I drank water, which came in one of Henry’s ever-present plastic bottles, and ate some nuts while gazing out over the empty and apparently boundless sea. We seemed to be standing on the only firm ground in the entire world.

  I realized that Clementine was standing beside me—that scent of witch hazel again.

  “The Marquesas are the most remote islands in the world,” she said, “farther from any continental mass than any others.”

  I said I was not surprised to hear that.

  Clementine said, “You played lacrosse for your university, I’m told.”

  “Ages ago.”

  “What exactly is lacrosse? Is it like our field hockey?”

  “Not really,” I said. “It originated as an Iroquois game, very warlike. The ball is in the air all the time. It’s yellow and made of hard rubber. You pass it to one another and catch it with a stick called a crosse that has a small net pocket at one end. The players run a lot. It’s good exercise, very slimming.”

  Clementine looked interested. I doubted that she really was. I thought this conversation was a pretext. No doubt she had boned up on lacrosse before she approached me and already knew the answers.

  “I gather that lacrosse is quite violent,” Clementine said.

  “The men’s game is very rough. They beat the stuffing out of each other, like the Iroquois used to do. The rules for the women’s game were drawn up when ladies still existed. Theoretically, it’s a noncontact sport.”

  “You won some sort of prize or honor for your play, I understand.”

  “Yes. Nastiest girl.”

  Clementine guffawed. She laughed like a man who has had a drink or two—loudly and heartily and somewhat longer than necessary.

  We remained on Nuku Hiva for five days. Henry had decided that it was time for a tour of the horizon, so the entire enterprise was on the table.

  “Our purpose is to simplify,” Henry said. “So resist your education.”

  People fle
w in and made their reports, then flew out. Among these were the other two engineers, who projected their designs for the spacecraft onto a large screen that lowered itself from the ceiling of Henry’s office. The ship they envisaged was a string of spheres that looked something like an ant that went on and on, pods connected by threadlike passageways. The color choice, bad-guys matte black, was a disappointment to me. I had imagined a ship of many Playskool colors, based on my drawings. It took two full days to glimpse—merely glimpse—the many details of this mind-boggling design. Henry understood it in all of its details at first glance, naturally. He critiqued it as if he had designed it himself and made many suggestions for refinements. The engineers argued with none of the suggestions he made.

  During a break I asked the Russian engineer why they were so accommodating.

  He said, “The customer is always right, and he’s paying for everything. Also he’s a genius. So why would we object to improvement?”

  After the break, Henry announced that he had designed a propulsion system that would somehow draw its fuel from the charged particles in the solar wind. A prototype had already been built and was undergoing testing. So far, it worked just fine. The mother ship would carry several compact fusion reactors that would heat and light the ship or even drive it if the other engines failed. The spare reactors could also be used as a source of power if the crew decided to establish an outpost on Mars or one of the moons in the solar system.

  Afterward the amiable Ng Fred, who was becoming a friend of mine, asked me if I had any idea what Henry’s latest marvel would be worth on the great profit machine that was Earth.

  I shook my head. “Do you?”

  “About as much as Taiwan,” he said.

  What did it matter, I asked. Money had no future.

  “Sad but true,” Ng Fred said.

  “Why sad?”

  “Because of all things, money will be the hardest to say good-bye to.”

  “What about humanity?” I asked.

  Ng Fred rolled his eyes.

  Among those who flew in was the Prof. He did not seem to remember me. In any case, he showed no sign of recognition. His subject was the same as it had been at Amerigo’s house on the Hudson, but his conclusions were different. Was it ethical to save a chosen few and leave everybody else to die? Was it OK to alter DNA to produce an enhanced human type? He had pondered these questions since our last meeting. His answer was yes in both cases. If a civilization died, it died as a whole—evolutionary niche, ethics, and all. It was owed no obligation by its survivors apart from their duty to survive. He avoided my eyes while he said these things. This made for a nice moment.

  The Prof immediately paired off with Clementine. They sat together like the old friends they appeared to be, and in social moments hung out together, encircled by imaginary Keep Off signs. I hoped they would fall in love, or, better yet, were already in love. I hoped they would sneak away from the meeting and make out. Alas, nothing of the sort happened, because the Prof flew out that very day.

  People came and went daily. Henry owned a lot of airplanes. Finally there was no more business to conduct, and the guest list dwindled to Clementine and me. This wasn’t an ideal pairing. Clementine had never really recovered from my rebuff of her invitation to come look at her picture of Tekao. I was not able to forget that she was my personal watcher in the shadows. Henry was still present, but an airplane was due to return that night. He planned to leave the next morning.

  He asked if either of us would like to leave when he did. He was on his way to Paris, but the airplane could drop us off anywhere in the world. I opted to leave. Clementine decided to remain—possibly, I thought, to avoid being confined with me in the plane’s cabin for the better part of a night and day.

  Clementine left Henry and me alone. From the deck I saw her marching off toward the beach carrying what appeared to be a folding easel. Later, I watched again as she toiled back up the steep path that connected the beach to the house. In her voluminous British shorts and thick, folded-over knee socks and her walking boots and her ancient straw hat, there was something touching about her. Maybe it was guilt, but—I didn’t know why—I found myself wanting to protect her from her own oddness, to shield her retroactively from the brainless popular girls who must have made her life hell when she was a kid.

  At the moment of her return, I was sitting on the deck, writing on a laptop. This was difficult because the sun shone on the screen and I had to keep moving the computer so that I could read what I was typing. Clementine’s shadow fell on the screen.

  Without looking up, I said, “Thanks for the shadow. I can finally see the screen.”

  Clementine laughed—that mannish bark of hers. It made me smile and turn around.

  “You don’t startle easily, do you?” Clementine said.

  I said, “I’m not so sure about that, Clementine.”

  She was carrying a portfolio and held it open with one finger thrust between the covers. The corners of her mouth were lifted in the semblance of a smile.

  She said, “I’m not intruding, I hope.”

  Actually, she was, and she knew it. I was in the middle of a sentence and its second half was slipping away. But I said, “Not at all. Won’t you sit down?”

  “I’ve brought you something,” Clementine said.

  She laid the portfolio on the table and said, “Since you never came to see the watercolor in my room, I should be very pleased if you will accept this small gift.”

  She opened the portfolio and showed me the large sheet of paper it contained. I gasped. It was a watercolor of the mountain Tekao, painted by a master’s hand.

  Clementine said, “Take care, it’s not quite dry.”

  The technique was drybrush. This produces an almost photographic effect. Andrew Wyeth was very good at drybrush. So was the artist who made this painting. It took me minutes of close study before I saw the painting as a whole and absorbed its virtuosity. The signature at the bottom was that of O. Laster, a well-known living painter whose works sold for very healthy prices. He or she (the artist’s gender was not known) was a sort of Henry of the arts—unphotographed, uninterviewed, anonymity protected by friends.

  Clementine had been watching me closely.

  I drew breath to say that I couldn’t possibly accept such a gift. I could smell the paint. I lifted the painting to my nose. Clementine watched my investigation with a Holmesian eye.

  I said, “Clementine, this is wonderful.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You painted it, did you not?”

  “I did. This morning.”

  “Then you are O. Laster.”

  “You are free to make whatever surmise you wish. Will you accept the picture?”

  “With the truest of thanks, Clementine,” I said. “It’s extraordinary. I will treasure it.”

  Daeng appeared with a tea tray.

  Clementine said, “Tea. Good. I was at a loss for words.”

  Clementine and I had a pleasant talk over the tea and cakes. Nothing of consequence was said. No personal questions were asked. As we chatted, I invented her backstory—lonely childhood in a vicarage, solitary girlhood, chilblains in an unheated school, honors at Cambridge, unrequited love after unrequited love, finally a home at MI5, and now, rescue from loneliness and obscurity by Henry.

  I said, “Tell me, Clementine, why is MI5 called Box 500?”

  “My goodness, how do you happen to know that?”

  “One of my professors told me. He’d been in the OSS.”

  “During the 1939–45 war, Box 500 was the London post office box address of the British Security Service, alias MI5,” Clementine said. “Why on earth did your professor tell you such a thing?”

  “Who knows? Maybe he liked me.”

  “Of course he did. Have you ever heard of a man called Markus Wolf?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “During the Cold War he was the head of the East German intelligence service. He was a great spymas
ter who believed that important targets were vulnerable through the people they trusted, and that success usually came through indirection, almost never by frontal attack. If he wished to know what a politician or a high-ranking civil servant knew, felt, and thought, he did not muck about with corrupting the primary target. Nor did he burglarize his or her office and plant listening devices or cameras or any of that sort of nonsense.”

  A heavy pause. A keen look. Clementine cocked her great gray head and asked silent questions. She was making a point. Did she have my attention? Did I follow?

  “Wolf’s method was breathtakingly simple,” Clementine said. “He would send a handsome young man to seduce the great man’s secretary. This agent would be trained up into a sexual virtuoso in preparation for his mission. Once he was in place, it would be arranged for him to meet the secretary as if by coincidence. Typically, someone she trusted would introduce her to the agent. Romantic gestures would follow—flowers, letters, nights at the theater, intimate suppers, and finally, sex that would drive her right round the bend. Soon she would be doing things with this irresistible sexual mechanic she never imagined existed but was sure would send her straight to hell. And as soon as the session was over, she would long to do them again. Before long, she would be prepared to do anything for her seducer. It is a small step from anal sex or the whip and handcuffs to bringing a few top-secret documents to the next rendezvous. One kind of bondage is very much like another. The way to a great man’s secrets is through the orifices of his private secretary. That is what Markus Wolf believed, and he had many disciples.”

  Clementine delivered this colossal hint in the most ladylike tones imaginable. I had no trouble understanding exactly what she was talking about: Adam. The rush of incredulity that I felt must have shown on my face.

  Clementine, frowning, said, “You do understand what I am saying to you, do you not?”

  I said, “Clementine, I do indeed understand. Thank you so much for sharing.”