by John Meaney
Harij found the purple spiker bush where the dreamlode mind had told him to look. He sucked on creamy nectar, and broke off leaves to carry with him. Then he worked out which direction to walk in, which way to begin his journey home.
To the punishment he needed the town to give him.
TWENTY-SEVEN
LABYRINTH, 2603 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)
Silvermead swirled in Max’s throat, luxurious and sweet, while the feel of clean clothes against bathed skin was an equal pleasure, along with the lack of pain in his healing body. His chair enveloped him like a soft throne, and the chamber was configured to cosy dimensions, lacking only a fireplace to turn it into a Victorian sitting-room.
Smartfluids threaded the hypodermic layers, giving him the appearance of scarlet veins; while seams and capillaries of the stuff enwrapped his organs, webbed the connective tissues of permysium, enomysium and epimysium, and threaded his muscle fibres: healing, building, repairing. He was under no illusion about the lack of pain: his rehab was just beginning.
‘I regret we’ve never worked together.’ Pavel Karelin’s chair had morphed into a formal, minimalist design. ‘Your reputation is the highest.’
‘Still,’ said Max, ‘I know who you are.’
Clayton and Clara stood by the wall, clearly the junior members here.
‘Likewise,’ Max went on, ‘I know who Ms James reports to.’
‘Then you’ll know the risk I’m running,’ said Clara.
‘I’m grateful for the rescue, if that’s what this is.’
No one asked: what else could it be? The truth was, their operational lives existed in a medium of interpretation, of facts-as-tools, illusions within illusions; and this could so easily be an interrogation taken to a new phase, rendering the subsequent torture devastating.
‘Give us something to justify our trouble,’ said Pavel. ‘That’s all I’m asking for.’
‘I told your two officers how Admiral Kaltberg behaved that day. She came to my office under compulsion, with a graser pistol that part of her brain tried to turn on me.’
To see a Pilot burn out half her own cerebral cortex was a landmark in a life of disturbing events beyond the norm.
‘But you said the pistol was set to explode anyway,’ said Pavel. ‘So why bother?’
‘Insurance, in case I had a bolt-hole. Which of course I did. I regret I couldn’t drag her through with me.’
Whether these people believed him or not, Admiral Adrienne Kaltberg had been the finest Pilot he had ever served with.
‘Accepting this as truth, provisionally,’ said Pavel, ‘who might have implanted such a compulsion in her mind?’
It was time to let them have some point of information, or clam up entirely and wait for the next stage.
‘Admiral Kaltberg was due to retire shortly.’ Max could not tell if this was news to Pavel, but the other two blinked. ‘I believe she had been to see Dr Sapherson.’
‘Motherfucker,’ said Clayton.
Everyone looked at him.
‘Sorry,’ he added. ‘Is my bias showing?’
Pavel said, ‘Sapherson will have been acting under orders. That should be clear.’
Clara crossed her arms.
‘So why don’t we ask her nicely about that?’
‘Yeah,’ said Clayton. ‘Very fucking nicely.’
‘Enough,’ said Pavel. ‘So, Commodore. Assume we find that an amnesia-induction session turned into something different. That’s a single datum. What else can you give us?’
Max shook his head.
‘All right,’ Pavel went on. ‘How about this? Clayton went through one of Dr Sapherson’s sessions because of something he learned talking to Carl Blackstone. Later, both he and Clara were part of the group who debriefed young Roger Blackstone, your dead officer’s son.’
‘My what?’
But this referred to events that took place while Max was in his bolt-hole, a hidden layer of reality. He had finally come out in the midst of unexpected crowds on Borges Boulevard, showing all the trappings of a state occasion, but with no time to absorb details before officers descended, whirling him through a fastpath rotation into imprisonment.
‘Let me explain,’ said Pavel. ‘And afterwards, you might reciprocate by explaining what you know about this darkness that only a father and son could see. A darkness related to a prisoner locked up for what appears to be years.’
Meaning it was hard for Max, held and interrogated in secret, to claim the moral high ground. He had done the same to others.
Because I had to.
The traditional excuse for evil.
‘Tell me about Carl,’ he said.
TWENTY-EIGHT
MOLSIN, 2603 AD
Amid the burning clouds of Molsin, Deltaville was giving birth. The emerging sky-city was called D-2, but only for now. When she had gained inhabitants and developed a culture of her own, a process that might take three standard years or thirty, she would receive a new name by consensus, gaining true identity.
Now, she popped free.
‘D-2 is born!’
Cheers resounded through Deltaville. An anxious team of urban-birth scientists would be aboard D-2 – the public holocasts were not privy to that process – but the focus of holoviews and partying people was the crescendo of celebration overtaking the mother city. In every hall and gallery, every corridor and colonnade, arcade and promenade, abstract holos burst in chaotic colours, while people jumped on the spot, waving their arms, and the quickglass beneath their feet and all around them hummed like a thousand choirs and orchestras, in a heart-rending composition created in the moment. Deltaville was singing of joy and proud fulfilment.
While Roger could not wait for it to end.
TWENTY-NINE
LABYRINTH, 2603 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)
Max stared at the trio – Pavel, Clayton and Clara – still not knowing who they were: rescuers and allies, or creatures of the darkness ready to torture him once more.
Time to trust someone.
He put down his empty goblet and, sustained by the silvermead, considered all he had been told and all he had deduced.
‘If there were a single person behind this,’ he said to Pavel, ‘then who would it be?’
‘Whatever’s going on, it’s too complex to be an individual’s doing.’
‘Agreed,’ said Max. ‘But hypothetically … If there’s a network with a single person ultimately in charge, who are we talking about here?’
Pavel looked at Clara and Clayton.
‘You brought them into this,’ added Max. ‘They need to know as much as I do.’
‘I don’t think anyone knows as much you do,’ said Pavel, attacking the ambiguity.
‘Wordplay aside,’ said Max, ‘if you were to turn Mr Clayton here on Dr Sapherson, and then she spills what she knows about clandestine orders, so you follow the trail back, all the way … where does it end?’
For all the warm decor, the room seemed hard-edged and cold.
Clara said: ‘We’re talking about Admiral Schenck, aren’t we?’
Clayton looked surprised – Max interpreted this as ignorance of Admiralty Council affairs – while Pavel was giving nothing away.
‘That’s one interpretation,’ he said.
Max looked at him.
Time to change your perspective.
Because it was now an issue of trust; and it was Clayton and Clara who were questioning Pavel’s unstated thinking, while implicitly accepting Max. That was what happened when you played mind games with someone who had lived in the secret world for so long. Then Pavel smiled.
‘I heard you were brilliant, Commodore. Even so, I think people underestimate you.’
‘And the name you were thinking of is—?’
Pavel nodded to Clara.
‘Admiral Boris Schenck, then,’ he said. ‘Clara is right.’
‘Good,’ said Max. ‘I agree.’
All four of them stared at each other. They had j
ust declared the most powerful person on the Admiralty Council to be an enemy of Labyrinth.
‘We can’t move against someone like Schenck,’ said Clayton. ‘For one thing, it’s treason.’
‘You know the counter-argument to that,’ said Max. ‘It’s an old one.’
‘Not if we win?’ Clara smiled.
‘Exactly.’
THIRTY
EARTH, 1941 AD
They met in the cellar, Erik and Ilse and the group they had joined, seven strong including them. Tonight, for the first time, Gérard had brought in the new recruit they had been discussing for weeks: André Wahlberg, originally Belgian, an employee of a pancake house here in Utrecht since two months before the Wehrmacht tanks rolled in.
‘Hello, Erik,’ said Wahlberg, holding out his hand. ‘Good to meet everyone, finally.’
Erik forced his expression to remain businesslike even as he shook hands, despite the flickers of darkness that moved impossibly around Wahlberg’s head like some satanic halo.
‘We could do with some drinks to celebrate.’ Erik made his way over to Ilse. ‘Could you go up to the kitchen and get that schnapps I hid?’
‘I … yes. If you want me to.’
Damn it, she was going to give the game away. But then Ilse’s face blanked out, and he kissed her.
Run now, my darling.
She nodded, and made her way up the steps. Once out of sight, she would have to move fast.
Gérard said, ‘We’ve made up a new batch of leaflets. We need to think about whether to place them around the Old Town again, or go further afield.’
Wahlberg was smiling in a way that Erik did not like.
You’re a creature of the darkness. Are you a Nazi too?
The one other man he had met like this, Dmitri Shtemenko, had been a Bolshevik agent who had saved Gavriela’s life – his sister, who might be alive or dead and he would never know.
‘Leaflets.’ Wahlberg’s expression was half-smile, half-sneer. ‘I thought this group did more than leave seditious bits of paper lying around.’
‘It’s a bullet in the head regardless,’ said Gérard.
Wahlberg was holding Erik’s stare.
‘Kill him,’ said Erik, addressing Gérard.
‘What?’
But a crash from upstairs meant the opportunity had passed. Boots clattered, louder as they neared the cellar stairs.
Knowing exactly which way to come.
They had breakfast in a Lyons Tea House in Kilburn where noise bounced off the ceiling in the steamy atmosphere, filled with the cheerful clatter of cutlery and the chatting of the clientele; and if it were not for the tape criss-crossing the windows and the number of people in uniform, you might have thought it was peacetime.
Rupert sat with his legs crossed. Brian had pushed his chair a little way back from the table. Gavriela tried to read the unspoken context of their conversation before her arrival, and failed. From the questions they had asked in debriefing, Brian had not known about the message that she had decrypted, but Rupert possibly had. Did that mean it had been planted for her to act on?
Alone with Brian, there had been no discussion of her actions, beyond his comforting her in the aftermath of shock. And the lovemaking, rough and urgent and a surprise to them both.
‘Last night’s shenanigans,’ said Rupert now, ‘weren’t what anyone expects, not here.’
Their language had to remain oblique, because of eavesdroppers; but they were far enough from Baker Street that no SOE personnel were likely to be here, and Gavriela thought that was deliberate.
‘Am I in trouble?’ What she wanted to ask was, were they were going to arrest her? ‘Because of what happened?’
Brian’s face tightened. She hoped it meant he would fight her cause.
‘Considering what you prevented,’ said Rupert, ‘you’re a heroine, and that’s exactly how you’ll be described in our reports.’
She did not feel like a heroine. Nor did she imagine his report mentioned hypnosis of a kind that no psychologist would recognize. But so long as the four guards were not blamed, she did not see how twisting the truth could matter, not in a file that few people would ever read.
‘Too bad we got nothing from the blighter.’ Rupert shrugged his elegant shoulders. ‘But nostra culpa, not yours, don’t you see?’
‘Gabby did a good job.’ Brian’s pale face began to colour. ‘More than anyone could expect.’
‘Indeed.’ Now the raised eyebrow. ‘I believe that’s what I just said.’
Rupert’s manner was beginning to annoy Gavriela, but she quelled the feeling. If this was provocation, it was likely to be deliberate. Bletchley Park had its share of chess grandmasters, but Rupert played all of life as if it were a game.
‘And this is not the first such person’ – Rupert’s searchlight gaze swung to her – ‘you’ve come across, is that right?’
‘There was a man called Dmitri in Berlin, as I told Brian. Plus a Nazi rabble-rouser, once.’
She did not want to say anything about the man’s identity, partly because she needed Rupert to believe her sane, partly because she did not want to give the appearance of an excuse to a murderous psychotic whose power derived from a conscious understanding of mass psychology and practised oratory as much as inductive hallucination. Or so she believed.
‘So they’re not all Nazis, then.’ Rupert pronounced it in the Churchillian manner: nah-zees. ‘Are you saying they’ve an agenda of their own? Or are they separate individuals who just happen to manifest similar odd attributes?’
Gavriela blinked. So did Brian.
He’s taking it seriously.
You would think Rupert had considered this over an extended period of time. Then again, he would have studied Nazi mysticism, to the extent that it drove the regime’s plans for conquest.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Separate, I think … But it’s a feeling, no more.’
‘Well, regardless.’ Rupert lowered his voice. ‘I’m driving to BP this morning. I’ll give you a lift.’
Brian said, ‘There’s no way I can get back, with this thing I’m seconded to.’ He looked at Gavriela. ‘I’ll see you next week, most likely.’
‘I’ll … see you then.’
Did she want to kiss him? In public, without Rupert’s presence, she thought the answer might have been yes. As it was, her movements felt shut down, her body tight.
As they left the tea-house, both men donned their hats and nodded to each other. Then Rupert took Gavriela’s arm, and they walked off in one direction, while Brian went the other way.
I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel.
Something that happened far too often in her life.
No one said anything the next day in Hut 27: nothing about signals regarding some darkness, nothing about Gavriela’s trip to London. Clive had returned, and was working on new intercepts with no mention of half-finished work from days before. During a break when Gavriela happened – by apparent chance – to find herself alone in the room, she hovered by Clive’s desk but did not open the drawer.
They had given her a second chance. She needed to take it.
That night she walked back into Bletchley village with Rosie, who chatted about the trivia of her day. Gavriela, in the back of her mind, was ruminating on maths the way physicists often do: wondering at the way the right mathematical tools so often existed in advance of science finding a reason for using them, meaning mathematicians had explored such lofty abstract thought-spaces with no original connection to reality. Here in BP she had witnessed feats of mathematical reasoning – counter-intuitive statistics, rigorous Boolean logic, the depths of group theory – that she would find hard to explain to an outsider, even if she were allowed. But Rosie kept her grounded in reality.
‘I had a letter from Jack yesterday! It was there when I got home last night.’
‘That’s great, Rosie. Is he all right?’
‘He’s fine, and getting a tan, he says.’ Rosie t
ook out a small, lace-edged handkerchief, waving it in the gloom. ‘Got my initials, see?’
There might have been a curlicued RD, but the night was too dark to be sure.
‘Jack bought the hankie on leave, and sent it—’
Rosie dabbed at one eye.
‘He says we’ll get married when he’s home.’
‘Oh, Rosie.’
They both stopped. Gavriela hugged her.
‘He’ll be OK,’ she said. ‘He’ll be OK.’
But they both knew, in the sudden randomness of wartime, that letters from servicemen took time to arrive, and sometimes the sender was already dead or maimed when their sweetheart read those cheery words.
Rosie stepped back, sniffing.
‘Now all we need,’ she said, ‘is to get you a nice young gentleman, and we’ll be sorted.’
‘Maybe,’ said Gavriela.
They walked on, while she remembered the overwhelming lust for coupling that overtook her in the Tube station and the night that followed, all of it dislocated from her normal world; and she wondered whether it was romance or something more primal, and whether that made a difference.
‘How about a nice cup of acorn tea?’ Rosie’s place was close, not quite on Gavriela’s way home, but near enough. ‘I’ve got a book you can borrow. I didn’t finish it myself, but you might like it.’
‘Love to.’
That night, Gavriela sat up in bed, reading her borrowed copy of The White Company, the slipcover worn grey and disintegrating at the edges. Whenever she paused, her thoughts would shift to Professor Challenger, then to the real Professor Möller whose leonine mane and clear gaze had been the personification of that fictitious scientist-hero; and she hoped that he remained safe in Zürich, though in the long term, in the face of the thousand-year Reich, neutrality had to be an ephemeral dream.
A photograph slipped out. Its edges were wave-like in the way special mementoes often were. Gavriela had occasionally wondered whether they were cut with sinusoidally edged scissors or something else, but never pursued it. The man in the picture wore dark naval uniform, aiming a long-jawed grin at the camera.
