by Bill Napier
Svetlana says, ‘You’re too dangerous to have around. You could finish us and everything we’ve achieved.’
‘But you’ve achieved nothing. You will find that you no longer have access to the signal. I changed the password. And the original disk is now on its way to GCHQ, where it will be examined by others subject to the Official Secrets Act. They will have no information about the place or time of the signal, and so no way to work out where the signal came from. But they will know what the disk contains. It may put the Great back into Great Britain.’
Gibson grows pale, looks as if he might hyperventilate. ‘You’ve denied us access to the message?’
Hanning nods. ‘So far as you are concerned, it’s gone.’
‘I’ll check.’ Svetlana disappears quickly from the room. They hear her running downstairs. She returns after two long, silent minutes. ‘I can’t get into the computer.’
‘What? Have you tried Tom’s?’ Gibson is almost croaking with tension.
‘Yes.’
A despairing groan comes from Gibson. He hunches forward, puts the gun on the table. Hanning sits very still; only his eyes move, flickering between Gibson and the pistol.
Svetlana flops into her chair. ‘Jeremy, does your government’s treachery extend to double-crossing my country too?’
Hanning shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. But think of the advantages to any country which has sole access to the secrets of the signallers.’
‘And the hard drive in the cave?’ she asks.
‘The intention was, and is, that it will be taken from you as soon as you have it. So you see, even if by some miracle you escaped from here, you would have no hard evidence to back up your story. It would just be a fantasy thing.’ Hanning’s body language is now defiant. ‘There’s absolutely no purpose in getting rid of me. You’re already defeated.’
Svetlana breaks the brittle silence. ‘Charlie.’
‘What?’ Gibson’s head is on the table, and his arms are cradling it as if to keep out the world.
‘I didn’t trust you when we came here. I thought you might disappear with the disk and try to grab all the kudos for yourself.’
‘So?’ His voice is indifferent.
‘So I made a copy of the disk. It’s in my room.’
Gibson is like a man rising from the dead. He sits upright, visibly swelling. He looks at Hanning as if the man is Satan incarnate, then laughs harshly. His hand goes to the pistol. He takes a deep breath and says, ‘Do it, Vash.’
In the fraction of a second it takes Hanning to understand Gibson’s remark, Shtyrkov is bringing the fire axe hard down, as if he is chopping wood.
* * *
Petrie had first fainted, then vomited on and off during the following hour while Svetlana and Shtyrkov had wrapped Hanning’s body in a grey blanket. Gibson and Freya had then seen to the scrubbing down of the kitchen table, chairs and floor, while Shtyrkov had taken Petrie by the arm, led him gently to a settee in the atrium, and described some of the things his grandparents’ generation had had to do in the Patriotic War. Petrie had listened to the horrors with his face buried in his hands.
Freya had then appeared with tea and biscuits, looking as if she had just been baking scones. The cosy normality of this had sent Petrie slightly mad. After a fit of hysterical laughter, he had calmed down sufficiently to drink the tea, giggling and spluttering into it now and then. He got to his feet and staggered apprehensively through to the refectory, while Shtyrkov headed up the stairs to change his blood-spattered clothes and have a shower.
It was impossible to connect the clean, polished refectory with a grisly murder. Petrie looked round in bewilderment. ‘Where is he?’
‘Don’t use the kitchen freezer,’ Gibson advised. He looked at Petrie closely. ‘I don’t think you’re up to this. Maybe Svetlana should go in your place.’
‘I’ll be fine. You need a tough, aggressive male to see it through.’
‘In that case Svetlana should definitely go.’
Svetlana shook her head. ‘There’s nothing I’d love more. But we’ve made the decision. Tom’s the expert on the decipherment.’
‘He’ll be fine,’ Freya said.
‘I’ll be fine. Thanks, Svetlana.’
Gibson adopted a businesslike manner although he was visibly shaking. ‘Okay, we have about ninety minutes. Let’s go over the maps again while Vashislav prepares the copy disks.’
* * *
Freya and Tom stood just inside the door they had entered five days earlier.
‘Final check-list,’ Gibson said.
Petrie unzipped his inside pocket. ‘Two disks. One with a sample, the other with the full works. Encrypted.’ He tapped a side pocket. ‘Purse with cash and all your credit cards. Pin numbers memorised.’
‘Freya?’
‘Two disks. One the full signal, the other a message from Vash to his friend in Murmansk, to prove authenticity.’
‘How will he know the message is really from you?’ Gibson asked.
‘It has things on it which only he and I know about.’
‘And Vashislav’s mobile,’ Freya added, feeling a side pocket.
‘With which you can send and retrieve e-mail on the move,’ Vashislav reminded her. ‘I’m sorry that there is only the one between you.’
‘Remember your passwords?’ Gibson asked. ‘One for decrypting the disks, the other for deleting them if you’re loading up under duress.’
Shtyrkov said, ‘I’ve used Blowfish encryption and put a compiled C program into the DVD. Insert the duress password and the program will flash “decrypting” on the screen while it’s busy writing zeros all over the disk.’
Gibson smacked his forehead. ‘I nearly forgot! The screwdriver!’
Freya fiddled with the waistband of her jeans. ‘It’s here, Charlie.’
‘Remember, Tom: fifteen. Not fourteen, not sixteen. Fifteen seconds precisely.’
‘We never did get that game of chess, Vash.’
Gibson said, ‘That’s it, then.’
There was a long, long silence. Shtyrkov eventually broke it. ‘I’d have slaughtered you.’
‘Never. I do a good endgame.’ Damn! Endgame was the wrong word.
But Shtyrkov smiled and said, ‘A good endgame won’t save you, Tom. It needs to be devastating.’
Freya’s eyes were moist.
‘Do this for us.’ Gibson’s voice was strained.
‘Either we’ll get you your immortality, Charlie, or we’ll die trying.’
Svetlana said, ‘It’s probably as well I never married, never had children. Maybe if you have a child some day, Freya…’
‘If it’s a girl she’ll be called Svetlana.’
Gibson said, ‘I think you’d better go.’
There was an exchange of handshakes. Petrie held Svetlana briefly, and then Gibson was opening the door and she was pushing him towards it, and they were out, Freya first. Cold air met them. As the door was closing Petrie looked back and glimpsed Shtyrkov, smiling at him. Then Freya was taking his hand and they walked along the path towards the archway.
Beyond the archway, an army truck was waiting, steam coming from its throbbing exhaust. The canvas flaps were back and there were about a dozen soldiers inside. Most were grinning in the direction of Freya. A bulky Sergeant directed them into a Land Rover. Freya sat next to a dark-skinned, swarthy driver in battledress. The driver nodded curtly. The vehicle grumbled into life and set off down the hill, the lorry following about thirty yards behind.
Past the little church, they turned left. The look-out tower, still snow-capped, was visible over the trees. Then the driver picked up speed on the narrow road and the castle was out of sight and they were heading north, towards an uncertain future.
32
The Madonna
In 1921, in the Demänovskà Valley in the northern part of the Czechoslovakian Low Tatras, a spelunker called A. Král penetrated a cave. The cave, or rather system of caves, turned out to be in four l
evels connected by steep passages, and to be over eight kilometres long. Bones showed that, long ago, the cave had been penetrated by some bear, which had no doubt wandered in the dark until it died of starvation. Over the years the cave was made accessible through a system of walkways, stairs and galleries, and the public could now visit the sinter waterfalls, the stalagmites and stalactites, the caverns, pools and streams of this Tolkien-like underworld.
In 1951, thirty years after it had first been penetrated, a connection was discovered to another cave system. Thirty-two years on again, in 1983, a speleo-diving team discovered yet another connection, and three years after that the system, now named ‘the Demänovskà Cave of Liberty’, was found to be connected also to ‘the Demänovskà Cave of Peace’. The limestone mountains, it seemed, were honeycombed with tunnels.
In the early twenty-first century, a young German caver by the name of Armin Tyson explored a long, deeply descending passage. After many kilometres this opened out to a cavern of curved and banded curtains, flowstones like melted wax, ten-metre stalagmites rising out of rimstone pools and – most amazing of all – a cavern with an underground lake almost a kilometre across and, it would later turn out, two hundred metres deep.
Vashislav Shtyrkov, of Moscow State University, heard of this lake by chance from a speleo-fanatic student. Himself physically incapable of squeezing through the discovery passage, now known as ‘the Wormhole’, he sent the student to Slovakia with Geiger counters. The student reported back that the radon, uranium and carbon-14 levels in this deep hole were satisfyingly low. The lake was wonderfully inaccessible to the public, and the opportunity was too good to miss.
There was just one problem: the Russians had no money.
The British, however, had. Charlie Gibson was soon enticed from the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory’s Yorkshire mine experiment by the prospect of leading a new dark matter team. He fronted the paperwork necessary for the British funding.
At a cocktail party in Warsaw, Shtyrkov also approached Svetlana Popov, a Russian woman at Cracow University with a rising reputation as a careful experimentalist. On the basis of a conversation over lemonade and canapés, she agreed to join Shtyrkov’s little team: dark matter was a powerful lure, the quest for it hard to resist.
The newly discovered lake was part of the Tatras National Park but Shtyrkov, as he liked to say, had friends in high places. Nevertheless strict conditions were imposed for the use of the lake as a laboratory. Diversion of an underground stream, nicknamed ‘the Styx’, was permitted. A narrow shaft could be sunk. Everything – scaffolding, chairs, cables, electromagnets, computers – had to be brought up and down this shaft. Desks were assembled underground. Doors were welded on site out of steel panels. Svetlana knew every piece of wire in the cavern.
From then on, it was a question of maintaining and improving the apparatus, and waiting. Waiting for a dark matter particle to zip through the lake, trailing light, on its endless cosmic journey.
Tyson’s Wormhole was the way out.
Tyson and his team had used ropes, bobbins, gunlocks, Gibbs ascenders.
Between them, Freya and Petrie had a screwdriver.
* * *
The driver maintained a sullen silence and chain-smoked along a twisting, narrow road. Petrie, having retched his stomach contents out a few hours previously, began to long for an early death. That the wish might be close to fulfilment was something he couldn’t quite take in.
Visions of Hanning kept recurring: an axe splitting the man’s skull like a log; blood and grey matter squirting up; face becoming a non-face, something hideous and nonhuman; the cadaver sliding, trembling violently, under the table. It added to his sense of unreality, of detachment from the real world. Freya smiled thinly at him from time to time but he was too miserable for conversation.
Svetlana’s sketch had been too dangerous to carry and he tried to go over it in his head.
‘First the Styx, then the Madonna. First opening left, along the phreatic tube. A high vertical chimney to the grotto with the white flowstone; first left again and a long narrow crawl to a boulder chamber. Over this to a broad sloping highway, like a motorway with a rocky roof, marching steadily and steeply up for a kilometre. Then the dreaded sump, a long underwater tunnel which Tyson’s team had traversed with aqualungs and which you probably won’t survive. Use the guide rope left in place by Tyson’s team. Finally, if by a miracle you aren’t lost or drowned to this point, you arrive at Piccadilly Station. Take the fourth entrance round from the big orange stalactite; you will find walkways and lights and human society. Slip in with a tourist group and leave the mountain. What follows then is up to God and you.’
After an hour a sizeable town, or at least rows of Identikit high-rise flats, appeared ahead of them. They joined a motorway, its surface wet but clear of snow. The jeep speeded up, turned north. The Malé Karpaty receded to the horizon. The driver maintained his silence and kept up his chain-smoking. Now and then he would hum something tuneless, strumming nicotine-stained fingers on the steering wheel. Petrie wondered about heaving the wretch out of the jeep, taking off with the lorry in pursuit, finding a helicopter in the wilds, flying to an airport and jumping on a plane to Rio de Janeiro. He laughed and Freya gave him a look.
After another hour the lorry behind them tooted and the driver pulled over to a small roadside restaurant. A young officer opened the jeep door and guided Petrie by the arm to a table. Freya was led to a separate table. A dozen soldiers spread themselves noisily around and Petrie ate what was put in front of him without knowing or caring what it was.
It was late afternoon, with the traffic getting dense, when the jeep began to run alongside sterner mountains. A white fluffy cloud in the distance turned out to belong to a chemical works. They passed by mysterious assemblies of fat pipes, and big cylinders painted blue or yellow, and tall chimney stacks, all enclosed within wire-topped concrete fencing and not a human being in sight. Petrie thought it could be run by aliens and nobody would ever know.
At last, just past a large lake, the driver left the motorway, took a side-road, turned off at a roundabout. Almost immediately they found themselves on a narrow road, covered with compacted snow, heading towards massive peaks. The ski-laden cars were here in force, streaming away from the mountains with snow chains on their wheels and snow on their roofs.
Petrie began to tense. He sensed that Freya, next to him, was the same.
To their astonishment, the driver finally spoke. ‘Nizke Tatry.’
Petrie said, ‘Drop dead.’
They drove into a car park deep with snow. There was a little row of wooden shops with postcard stands at their entrances, and windows filled with tourist junk. They stepped out and stretched. A path from the car park led over a wooden bridge and disappeared into a conifer forest hugging the mountainside. A chain barred the way over the bridge, and next to it there was a notice. Petrie guessed the path was closed because of avalanche risk.
The army truck was just turning into the car park and Petrie momentarily wondered about running into the trees. He caught Freya’s glance; she was clearly thinking the same. But then the truck had stopped and soldiers were jumping out and the moment had passed.
An officer was shouting orders. Then he pointed at Freya and Petrie and snapped something, waving his hand towards the path. They followed him along it. The soldier unhooked the chain and they passed over a stream of icy water and then they were climbing a steep, slippery path, soldiers strung out behind them on the trail. They had rifles, a fact which excluded any prospect of running away through the trees.
Stick with the Russian’s plan.
* * *
A steel door. The officer had a key. A push from behind, from some teenage soldier enjoying a sense of power. A dark atrium, the indefinable smell of old air, and steps going down to blackness. Lights flickered and came on, and there was the yellow cage, just as the others had described.
The steel door clanged shut. More orders, and the s
cientists were hustled down the stone steps. Two soldiers squeezed into the cage. With rifles and combat gear, it was almost impossibly tight. There was some chatter and then someone pressed the red button and they dropped from sight as if through a hangman’s trapdoor. The overhead drum whined smoothly and the braided metal cable vibrated tautly. Freya and Petrie stood close and shivered.
Presently the whine stopped, and then the cable began to move in reverse, more slowly. When the cage appeared two more soldiers were ordered into it and the shaft swallowed them up.
Fifteen seconds. That was Shtyrkov’s figure. Not fourteen, not sixteen. Fifteen precisely. Get it wrong by a second and you miss by ten metres.
The officer’s game plan was clear. At least four soldiers would be waiting for them down below. That left eight up above or, if he sent two more down, an even split between the top and bottom of the shaft. Freya and Petrie would each be under the guard of at least two, and possibly three, armed men. The cage reappeared and two more soldiers were sent down to Hades; the officer was going for a fifty-fifty split.
This was the crunch moment, or rather the first of several. The essence of Shtyrkov’s plan was that they go down the shaft together. The big worry was that Freya and Petrie would be split, each being sent down with a single soldier. In that case, the contingency plan was to insist on going back up together, on the slender grounds that two were needed to tend the delicate equipment. If that too failed, the outlook was bleak.
The officer snapped his fingers and waved them towards the cage. Petrie tried to look impassive, and Freya was putting on a good act. The cage closed. Freya pressed the red button and they plunged out of sight.
In an instant Freya produced the screwdriver from her waistband and Petrie started the count. ‘Fifteen – fourteen – thirteen – twelve…’ while she frantically unscrewed the black cowling protecting the circuit box. It came away easily and she was faced with a mass of wires. Rockface was hurtling past and the buffeting wind was blowing her long blonde hair in her eyes.
