The Lure

by Bill Napier

  The President, half-smiling, looked at Hazel expectantly. She controlled her temper and kept her voice even. ‘Mr President, I have no answer to this Antichrist rubbish. If you believe it, there’s nothing I can say.’

  The CIA Director said, ‘You know better than to question a man’s religious faith, Hazel.’

  ‘No, sir, I don’t know better. We have a golden route to the future in our hands, the conquest of disease, unbelievable longevity, great wisdom. It’s in our hands and from where I sit we’re being denied it by one man’s medieval superstition.’

  Sullivan opened his mouth angrily.

  Bull said, ‘It’s okay, Al, calm down. I’m not looking for Yes men.’

  Sullivan strode over to a side table and poured coffees. The flames from the fire were now leaping up the chimney. He came back with a tray and distributed cups. ‘If the disks end up in the wrong hands it would be a catastrophe. It could reduce our nuclear arsenals to the level of pikes and swords. They must either be destroyed or delivered into our hands.’

  The President turned to his Science Adviser. ‘Say we had to remove Petrie, Hazel. What’s your view on that?’

  Hazel replied tensely, ‘Not my field. I’m just a hack doing my job.’

  ‘If I thought that, you wouldn’t be here. But I’m never quite sure what’s going on behind those beautiful dark eyes of yours.’

  ‘I just do my job, sir.’

  ‘Uhuh. Tell me something. Would you kill a man for your country?’

  ‘If I had to. Like any soldier.’

  ‘Say some terrorist in Teheran needed to be stopped before he set out to spray New York with botulinus toxin? Me, I’d knife him in some dark alley and sleep like a baby after it. But you?’

  ‘Pass me the knife.’

  ‘But now suppose the man is innocent. That he just happens to know too much.’

  ‘I’ll pass on that.’

  ‘See what I mean, Hazel? That’s what I call an ambiguous answer.’ This time the laughter was subdued, and had a nervous edge to it.

  Bull finally dipped his nose in the brandy glass, took a deep sniff and swallowed half the liquid. ‘Politicians have this in common with soldiers: they don’t like ambiguities. It makes them nervous. We give a directive, we like to be sure it’ll be obeyed.’ He gave his Science Adviser a quizzical look. ‘Having you around can be, let’s say, uncomfortable.’

  He looked across at Sullivan, who was eyeing the President speculatively. ‘We’ve got this mathematician guy in a safe house?’

  ‘The word “safe” is an exaggeration, sir. We haven’t had much call for safe houses in Central Europe these last ten years.’

  ‘What are you saying? That the Europeans could find him?’

  ‘And soon. The Russians have sent in a team of specialists and the border is effectively sealed. They must know that this Petrie and his girlfriend might approach us.’

  The President had been about to finish the brandy. He stopped, the glass poised at his lips. ‘Yeah. The girlfriend. What do we know about her?’

  ‘A young lady by the name of Freya Størmer, part of the team. She’s a Norwegian astronomer, co-opted like Petrie. Our information is that they’ve become close.’

  ‘And where is this Freya Størmer?’

  ‘Vanished. But she must be at the end of her tether by now. She can’t stay free without money.’

  ‘Hell, Al, if they get to her…’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ve a team flying out there now. She was last seen in southern Slovakia, a few miles from the Austrian border.’

  The President stood up. Light from the room was catching snowflakes just outside the window. Ford had used a snowmobile to get around the site and he wondered idly if he ought to get one in for himself.

  He turned back from the window. ‘Who do you have out there, Al?’

  ‘A man by the name of Joe Callaghan. His file says he’s third-generation Irish. Not what you’d call a high flier, but he has a reputation for reliability.’

  ‘Christ, Al, we’re talking about the vital interests of America, and an unsafe house, and specialist Russian teams looking for these people and the clock ticking away. And what do you give me? A footsoldier. Some third-rater out in the boondocks waiting for his pension.’

  ‘As I said, sir, I have a team flying out at this moment.’

  ‘A team? What sort of team?’

  ‘Specialists,’ the CIA Director said vaguely.

  ‘Specialists.’ Bull nodded thoughtfully.

  46

  Iced Logic

  So far as Petrie could remember – or was it a false memory? – it had started at age four. He faintly recalled spending hours making patterns out of Smarties, sometimes constructing little regiments of rows and columns and eating the stragglers. Eating your prime numbers was a good way to learn about them. At school, he found that he was usually able to solve problems better than his maths teachers, and the same had often been true at university.

  He knew, and didn’t care, that it was an addictive drug. Sometimes his problem-solving was achieved through sheer logic, more often it came in an intuitive leap after hours or weeks of concentrated thinking. As he entered adulthood he found that the things which excited young men of his age left him cold. What did he care about who was dating whom or wearing what designer clothes? Why did the latest sports label on trainers matter? Why should he follow the progress of some team except perhaps as an exercise in random walk theory? Girls were interesting in a visceral way, but none of them could compete with Erdos’s brilliant proof of the prime number theorem or Ramanujan’s wonderful formulae for pi. Strangely, he seemed to attract the opposite sex. He had no idea why but guessed that they saw him as a challenge.

  Of course, now there was that damned Norwegian female.

  To Petrie, whose working days and nights were spent on the edge of the possible, problem-solving at the limit of his ability, the logic of his position was simple, indeed trivial, to handle.

  Dozing on his bed, he heard low voices and footsteps, and then the click of a car door. And then the muffled sound of a big engine, and tyres crunching over gravel.

  The little man on the wall, dressed in Wellingtons and sou-wester, was holding an umbrella and taking a tentative step out of a door. Next to him a clock showed twenty minutes to two. There was a trace of woodsmoke in the air.

  Still floppy from the accumulation of a week’s stress and the morning’s interrogation, Petrie rolled off the bed and put his head in his hands. He went over it again.

  1. We’re fugitives without money, false documentation or the means to obtain it.

  2. We’re in a strange land, without friends or contacts.

  3. Two governments, British and Russian, are determined to obliterate us.

  4. That being so, is there anywhere reachable on Earth where we’d be safe?

  5. America, possibly. The Americans will go for it, or they won’t. Lacking information on this, there’s an even chance.

  6. If the Americans go for it, and the signal goes out, and the celestial coordinates of the signallers become public knowledge, Freya and I will be safe.

  7. If the Americans don’t go for it, we’re finished.

  8. An even chance of survival is better than a negligible one.

  All this had gone through his head while talking to Freya in Roland’s Café but he had kept his thoughts to himself, ruthlessly stuck with the decision that Freya and he should split, to double the chance of the signal getting out.

  The logic might have been icy, but the prospect of being dead in a few hours was flooding his mind and threatening to paralyse him. He tried to relax his muscles, but with no success. His throat felt constricted. He knew, without looking in a mirror, that his face was white. At the same time he had the weird feeling of being disembodied, as if he was a separate person looking down on his anguish.

  He wondered about Freya. What was her plan? How could she survive on air? Where was she heading? Would she be safe in Nor
way, or would she be arrested at some border control and then disappear?

  Back to the Americans. If they went for it, they would somehow have to get him out of the country. Somehow they would have to get him through a hostile passport control at some airport, on to a transatlantic Jumbo.

  They must have done stuff like that hundreds of times.

  Or they might buy into the same logic which had made the heads of two countries, one of them his own, decide to kill the knowledge, and its carriers.

  He wondered if it had occurred to Callaghan and Alice that, since they were privy to the dangerous story, they might themselves now be targets. He had a surge of guilt at having exposed them to risk; at the same time he knew that anyone exposed to the knowledge would be at risk.

  The mobile was under his pillow, apparently unmoved, and it had a message.

  You wouldn’t believe what I’ve been through. Lift to Bulgaria took me to Varna, on the Black Sea. Now in Albena, a seaside resort to the north. Less than 300 km from Russian border. Will try to reach Odessa overnight and tomorrow fly from there to St Petersburg if Unur can get money to me. After that it gets hard but I have an idea. Reply through Unur if you are reading this.

  Freya.

  Freya, still alive. He heard her soft sing-song voice, smelled her perfume, watched the flow of her long skirt …

  Cut that out. Concentrate on surviving.

  Petrie walked on to the verandah. Clouds were straddling the peaks but the sun was riding above them. A car was descending the hairpin road, visible now and then through gaps in the conifer forest below. It was three miles away and Petrie couldn’t be sure if it was Callaghan’s. He breathed in a big lungful of fresh air before turning back into the room.

  He stepped down the wooden stairs, meeting warm air coming up from the big living room. The fire was glowing red, and was too hot to stand close to. Petrie threw on some logs.

  The kitchen looked new. Dishes piled neatly in the sink told Petrie that Alice and Joe had had breakfast. More exploration revealed a large cupboard which served as a study; it was cramped – ‘bijou’ in estate agent speak. The chalet was empty.

  Petrie then explored outside. The house was built on a mountainside, in an acre of ground which had been sculpted from the rock. The property was enclosed by high fencing. He wondered about its purpose; he thought it was maybe to keep out chamonix or bears, but it seemed unnecessarily high.

  Back in his room, he pulled out Wildlife of the High Tatras. The disk was still there, still between the marmot and the owl. In the bijou study, he fired up Callaghan’s computer, and found that it was connected to the outside world. He typed in the address of Freya’s Icelandic friend.

  Urgent for Freya.

  Overjoyed that you’re still at large but don’t send me any more details of your movements. Unless you’re pgp-encrypted your messages can be, and probably are, being read.

  Tom.

  Callaghan’s e-mail system, so far as Petrie could see, had no inbuilt encryption, nor did he have time to download a system. His message had avoided the key words which would draw the attention of Echelon, but he thought GCHQ had probably extended the repertoire of trigger words. His finger hovered over the return button which would fire the message over a telephone line, into some paraboloid somewhere and then up into an aether buzzing with curious satellites. He thought the message would probably go down into one of the big ears listening on the Yorkshire moors, and from there to GCHQ and MI6. He wondered if its route could be traced back to this isolated chalet in the back of beyond.

  He thought maybe yes, maybe no. If yes, the cost of warning Freya could be a visit from British or Russian specialists, and this remote, isolated safe house would become his execution chamber, and Freya might still be caught anyway.

  The balance of the logic was clear: don’t send the message.

  He pressed the button.

  Damn woman.

  47

  The Judgement

  Half-past three in the morning. A stillness in the glacial air blanketing Camp David, its paths now under two feet of snow. Here and there, little oases of light in the dark, illuminating the falling snow. One oasis around Chestnut, where the duty officer sat at a quiet switchboard; another surrounding Elm, little more than a hut, which a Secret Service man was using to escape the Siberian cold. And lights were burning in the lounge of Aspen, where the President, Hazel, the CIA Chief and Harris were spread around armchairs.

  ‘Executive Order 12333 of 1981. Part two, section eleven. “No person employed in or acting on behalf of the US Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”’ Hazel waved the document she had taken from the library in Hickory, then dropped it on the floor. She was on her fourth coffee of the night; hours of cigar smoke were drying up her throat.

  Bull said, ‘Hazel, that’s a presidential ban, not a law. I can overrule it.’

  ‘But article two, para four of the UN Charter confers peacetime immunity of all people from acts of violence by the citizens, agents or military forces of another nation.’ She paused. ‘We can’t seriously conspire to assassinate innocent people.’

  The DCI was starting on his fourth cigar. ‘What do you mean by assassinate?’

  ‘Come on, Al, you’re not going to give me some legal fudge?’

  ‘Hazel, the line between legality and illegality can be very thin. But these days we stay rigidly on the right side of it. That’s why precise definitions are fundamental. The NSC, the Department of Justice and the army’s International Law Division have all carried out legal analyses of domestic and international laws on assassination.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The reports are all classified, but the essence is this: terrorist infrastructure is a legitimate target even if the infrastructure happens to be human.’

  ‘And if the infrastructure consists of nothing but an individual?’

  The Director’s voice hardened. ‘If he poses a threat to the security of our country there will be nowhere to hide. I think we demonstrated that in Afghanistan.’

  ‘I see. So the legal niceties you mentioned, they go by the board.’

  ‘No, they’re more important than ever; they define us. They’re the difference between the civilised world and the barbarians we’re fighting.’

  ‘Okay,’ Hazel said. ‘But these aren’t terrorists. They’re innocent citizens. Young people.’ It’s going wrong, she told herself. This isn’t turning out the way I wanted.

  Logie Harris said, ‘You surprise me, Ms Baxendale. Why should you care? Since you believe we’re all just animals then, to you, there are no absolute rules. Killing for expediency should be easy as falling off a log.’

  Hazel flushed.

  Sullivan said, ‘An enemy soldier is an innocent man, doing what he must. And he can be sixteen. It’s down to definitions again. Are they bringing us destruction, does that amount to an undeclared war, and is bumping them off like fighting a pre-emptive war?’

  Bull said, ‘Logie, you got an ethical handle on this situation?’

  The evangelist nodded. ‘Practically all authorities agree that the Bible sanctions the taking of life in particular circumstances. Whether at an individual level, or at the level of nations, killing is justified in self-defence.’

  ‘Self-defence?’ Hazel said incredulously. ‘You—’

  Bull interrupted, ‘But as Hazel says, these are innocent people.’

  Harris’s face was adopting the old dogmatic expression, the turned-down mouth, the fixed expression. ‘They are not. They’re emissaries of Satan and are only too willing to bring his message and insinuate it into our society. Consider the words of Paul in Ephesians six, verse eleven. “Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” There are no half measures, Seth; nothing less than the whole armour. That’s about as plain as you can get. In war you kill your enemy. And this is a war declared on us by the Prince of Darkness.’

  Hazel was swingin
g her long earrings again. ‘Logie, do you and I share the same planet?’

  The President turned to the DCI. ‘Al, say I wanted you to arrange for these people to stop breathing. Without fuss. Given all the internal and external scrutiny you guys are subject to, would that be a problem? There’s my own Intelligence Oversight Board, and your internal one – the Inspector General’s office – and then there’s the congressional Intelligence Committee. And they insist on prior notification of all covert actions.’

  ‘An assassination need cost no more than a few air fares, a few hotel bills and some bullets. Sure we can do it, hide it away in the rounding errors. But if it worries you, Mr President, there are other routes open to you. For example you could go through the Pentagon. They have authority to carry out “special operations” which bypass congressional scrutiny altogether.’

  ‘Hell, that would bring in the Vice president, SecDef, the joint chiefs, the National Security Adviser and the whole damn NSC.’

  ‘But as you know, sir, the rules for writing reports of an NSC meeting are strict. If you gave an assassination order there’d be nothing on paper. Eisenhower and Nixon both played the game.’

  Hazel couldn’t resist it: ‘And of course there was the Castro farce, eight assassination attempts by the CIA, all failures.’

  ‘That was the Stone Age.’

  ‘And now? You’re squeaky clean?’

  ‘We’re more efficient.’ Sullivan’s face was beginning to go pink. It might have been the heat from the flames leaping in the stone fireplace. ‘Hazel, do we really need ethics to flush nasty things down the tube?’

  ‘What about Callaghan and his assistant?’ Hazel asked. ‘Two Americans; and your own people. They know about this extraterrestrial signal.’

  Sullivan looked uncomfortable. He glanced over at President Bull, who was leaning back in his chair. ‘It’s down to what the President wants.’

  ‘What do you want, Mr President?’ Hazel asked.

  They held their breaths.

  The President told them.

  48

  Execution