by John Meaney
‘Tangleknot, then.’ Clara still looked serious.
Roger nodded. ‘Starting tomorrow.’
‘Didn’t we try that earlier, darling?’ asked Jed.
‘Oh, for—’
Then they looked at each other and laughed, clinked goblets, and drank a toast. Things were beginning to happen: a career under Roger’s control, instead of a maelstrom of events sweeping him up without reason or predictability.
Maybe I can live a normal life.
Except, of course, that was not what he had signed up for; nothing like it.
TWO
EARTH, 1954 AD
It was a year since her last visit to Rupert’s office, and this time Gavriela was in a rage, in tears as she stood there, fighting not to slam the Times onto the polished desk.
‘He deserved so much.’
Rupert’s pale face tightened. ‘I know.’
‘Were you ashamed to be seen protecting a pervert, was that it, Rupert? Couldn’t you have moved to protect him?’
‘I’ll forgive you that because you were his friend. Because we are friends.’
Rupert was the consummate chessmaster, moving spies across the board with whatever degree of ruthlessness was required to win. But he loved men in the same illegal way that Turing had – and in particular loved Brian, father of Gavriela’s child – which meant the corridors of Whitehall would grow chilly indeed if they were ever indiscreet. Homosexuality meant openness to blackmail, a lever to crack open a man and produce a traitor; and these days the stakes could rise as far as global war and humanity’s extinction: you could never tell where a chain of events – or a chain reaction – might end.
‘I’m not just talking about stopping the Director of Public Prosecution in the first place,’ she said. ‘After the trial, your bloody watchers should have been looking after him. Or are you telling me it was suicide, as the papers say?’
Perhaps someone here in MI6 had ordered the killing. Cyanide in an apple, so typically Russian, so perfectly characteristic of the KGB’s modus operandi, was precisely the kind of thing some Whitehall mandarin might have indirectly suggested, a hint of: ‘Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?’
She stopped her thoughts and sat down on the visitor’s chair.
‘AMT was in a strained state of mind.’ Rupert tapped the rosewood desktop, noticed a fingerprint, breathed on the mark, and used a monogrammed handkerchief to wipe the surface clean. ‘We did have watchers on him, and they followed him to Blackpool Pier, where he had his fortune told by one Gipsy Rose Lee. When he came out he was white-faced and shaking.’
This was ridiculous.
‘He wasn’t superstitious.’
‘I’m quoting the report,’ said Rupert. ‘Plus, he had raised the subject of killing himself.’
‘With whom?’ Normally she would have said who with? to annoy him; under stress, she reverted to Teutonic exactness.
‘Someone close to Turing. But the point is, when my officers questioned the fortune-teller, she remembered nothing of him. Nothing at all.’
Purely in memory, she heard an echo of nine notes: da, da-dum, da-da-da-dum, da-da.
‘Tell me there have been no sightings of Dmitri Shtemenko.’
He was her first suspect, when it came to altering minds.
Rupert said: ‘Someone who might have been Shtemenko was seen at the Institute of Physics. Looking for a Dr Gavriela Wolf.’
‘No.’
She was registered as a member of the institute, but as Gabrielle Woods, the name that everyone knew her by: the identity created by Rupert during wartime, with a fully backstopped biography. Only someone who had known her earlier than 1941 would refer to the Wolf identity – someone like Dmitri Shtemenko, who saved her and himself from Nazi thugs, back in 1927 when the world was young.
‘So, Shtemenko... It’s interesting you ask about him, Gavi. Some kind of premonition?’
‘I’m Gabrielle, thanks all the same, and no premonition. Do you have any actual intelligence on the man?’
Six years ago, during de-Nazification procedures in Berlin, Dmitri had surfaced using the pre-war German cover identity provided by his Bolshevik masters, and he had slipped away from American and British military police who tried to arrest him. At the time, Rupert had concluded that Dmitri Shtemenko slid across to the East via Checkpoint Bravo, presumably reverting to his real name, to be shot in a courtyard or kissed on both cheeks as the GRU’s prodigal son returning. GRU or KGB, they had never determined which.
‘We backtracked,’ said Rupert, ‘to find out he was probably a V man for the last years of the war’ – he meant a Soviet mole inside Wehrmacht intelligence – ‘but what he did before that, no one knows.’
‘There’s no way to justify a manhunt,’ said Gavriela.
It was the fear that spoke: a creature of the darkness was on her trail, and if anything happened to her, then what about Carl? Twelve years old, a grammar school boy who had excelled in his Eleven Plus, and whose questions about his father received no satisfactory answers.
‘I think there is justification.’ Rupert gave her the chess grandmaster stare. ‘Clearly the real reason has to stay out of the reports – unspoken among friends, as it were – but if our man is back in the field, he’ll be a senior intelligence officer by now.’
‘Therefore a good catch for Five or Special Branch.’
That was a provocation, because there was no way that Rupert would delegate this outside the family, and never mind that domestic counter-intelligence was explicitly beyond the remit of SIS, alias MI6.
‘Europe is just entering a phase of peace,’ said Rupert. ‘That frees up personnel, cold war or no.’
Fully eight years after V-E Day, that might seem an odd statement to the fabled everyman on the Clapham omnibus; but from her desk in GCHQ, Gavriela kept track of the same events that Rupert did. The past four years had seen – finally! – a decline of the violent anarchy that had ruled most of Europe following the official end of the war.
Whatever the propagandists at home and in America wrote in the newspapers, much of the continent had remained lawless for years, morality dissolved in the need simply to eat. Women and children sold themselves; the concept of personal property did not apply; gang-rape was a pervasive horror; and entire populations died in genocide years after Hitler, in the Führerbunker beneath the bombed-out Chancellery, took the coward’s way out.
‘It will go better if you help,’ Rupert went on. ‘But I’m willing to use a decoy, if you’re not up to it.’
She felt a downward sweep of blood from her face. She had begun by railing about Alan’s death; now it was turned around, with Rupert Forrester once again about to shift her where he wanted. Pawn to whatever, check and mate; and never mind the sacrifices on the way.
‘Decoy,’ she said, knowing she would, after arguing, give in.
Everything else was detail.
Old Joe (or Big Joe, depending on who you asked) projected high above the court and its lawns – the ensemble shaped like a rectangle fastened to a semicircle, resembling an elongated, round bottomed mediaeval shield – to form the centre of the Birmingham campus. All around was ornate redbrick architecture, including the Poynting Institute, home to the physics department. As for Old Joe, the technical term was campanile, in the Italian renaissance tradition: the world’s tallest free-standing clock tower.
A more obvious place to resurrect Dr Gavriela Wolf would have been Manchester, home to the civilian world’s first electronic computer, thanks to Alan – damn you, Dmitri, if it was you who killed him – but the problem was that AMT’s col leagues knew her already, as Gabrielle Woods. Still, among physics departments, Birmingham was near the top of anybody’s list.
Carl’s headmaster had been reluctant to release him before the end of term, but changed his mind overnight after a phone call instigated by Rupert (its details unknown to Gavriela, but clearly effective), allowing Carl to trip off to Oxford on the train (though it seemed on
ly yesterday he called them choo-choos) where he would stay with Auntie Rosie and Uncle Jack. Or perhaps it was Anna, his own age and pretty, he looked forward to seeing.
From the long enclosed lounge of the Bridge – it spanned the road-like pathway separating Maths from Physics – she scanned the campus while listening to the students behind her: off-colour jokes regarding Poynting’s Balls, referring to the apparatus Poynting had used to determine G (known as Big G), the universal gravitational constant.
A voice muttered: ‘Blighters.’
She turned to see a red-bearded man watching the undergraduates depart. Blue-grey smoke rose from his pipe.
‘Dr Anders,’ said Gavriela. ‘It’s just end-of-term spirits, and I don’t think they realised I was here.’
‘Lewis, please. And you’re right, they didn’t see you, but I’m not sure that’s the point.’ Then he cracked a smile. ‘Mind you, I finished delivering my end-of-year elec-and-mag lecture with the aphorism that every couple has a moment in a field.’ And, with a tweed-shouldered shrug: ‘I take it you understood the Poynting reference?’
‘I knew about E-cross-H already’ – Gavriela meant the Poynting vector that declared the energy propagation of an electromagnetic field – ‘but the gravity apparatus, I only learned about yesterday, reading up on the place.’
‘It’s not the most significant work we’ve done here.’ Anders looked from right to left, checking they were alone, then held his pipe to his chest and stoppered it with his palm, as if closing someone’s ear to prevent them hearing. ‘Radio cavity work and the magnetron, and I was here throughout the war.’
‘Oh,’ said Gavriela.
‘I’ve said nothing to my colleagues, but you’ve appeared overnight, while the department listings and so on make it look as if you’ve been here for ever.’ He put the pipe in his mouth and sucked hard three times, causing it to release a smoke-cloud. ‘Brings back memories.’
Of war work and the need for secrecy. Understood.
The Soviets had detonated an H-bomb last year, but it was the American test four months ago that had fired up reporters everywhere. With its 14-megaton blast catching the crew of a vessel called the Lucky Dragon, nasty indeed, and how about that ship’s name for irony? The Cold War, and the likelihood of its growing hot, was on everybody’s mind.
Perhaps that was why Anders jumped now, seeing the stranger standing fifteen feet away, near the end of the Bridge.
‘It’s OK,’ said Gavriela. ‘He’s friendly.’
‘We keep an Alsatian, my wife and I,’ said Anders. ‘He slobbers over us, but if you’re a stranger, he’ll bite your hand off.’
Gavriela laughed.
‘You’re right. He’s exactly that kind of friendly.’
Him and the other watchdogs.
‘I hope he keeps you safe,’ said Anders.
‘Yes. So do I.’
‘I’ll leave you to it.’
Anders strode away, leaving her in the middle of the Bridge on her own, visible to anyone outside who cared to look up, which was of course the point.
A Judas goat.
Just like you on Molsin, Roger.
One of those strange thoughts that sometimes flitted into her mind then evaporated, sublimating like dry ice to invisible gas. Yet somehow she felt better, despite her conviction that the darkness was somewhere beyond the edge of her ability to see it, like the tiger lurking before he bursts from cover to a sudden end.
His own, the goat’s, or both.
THREE
LABYRINTH, 2603 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)
Bullies arise everywhere, even in a city-world of infinite wonders: witness this small boy shivering with his back against a wall, confronted by bigger lads. Roger, coming on the group from behind, allowed his inductive energies to grow inside him, eyeballs growing sore with the need to release until the resonance caused the boys to flinch, sensing him at last, picking up the potential for destruction. Then he damped the energies back down as the boys – call them a gang – walked away, all apart from two, including the biggest, less attentive than the others, about to push his fist into the victim’s face.
But his pal grabbed his sleeve, receiving a startled look; then they were summoning a shaky fastpath rotation. ‘He’s a peacekeeper, must be, you moronic—’ The words disappeared as the rotation shut down.
Only the trembling boy, their victim, was left. Roger knelt down beside him.
‘You’ll be OK.’
But the expression in those wide obsidian eyes said that the problem went far beyond the incident Roger had interrupted. This was the boy’s everyday world, not an isolated event.
‘I remember when I was your age,’ Roger continued, still kneeling. ‘Adults seemed to have forgotten what the world was like when they were young. I could never understand that.’
The boy’s eyes widened further.
Dad, I didn’t think I’d use your gifts for this.
Espionageware in Roger’s tu-ring slipped through the defences of the simpler tu-ring that the boy was wearing. The ware accessed everything, including where the boy lived, and his educational record. That history, lased directly onto Roger’s retinas (and after he had waded through the bullshit wording), told of a youngster with quirky imagination, his intellectual potential unfulfilled due to lack of courage and self-discipline.
‘I’m going to tell you something difficult,’ Roger went on. ‘You can deal with these bastards’ – he used the term deliberately, calibrating his perceptions of the boy’s reactive body language – ‘but not straight away, by applying yourself in secret. I mean you practise every day, every single day, and meantime you observe what’s around you, to avoid them, the bigger guys, all right?’
A nod.
The boy’s tu-ring flared, acknowledging receipt of un-asked-for ware.
‘Exercise is part of it, stuff you can do in your room.’ Thanks to his Fulgidus education, Roger was able to tailor the data via subliminal commands while continuing to speak. ‘You will need to practise fighting techniques as well.’
Some of his words were pitched as covert commands. The ware, now loaded in the boy’s tu-ring, would alter his bedroom at home, extruding partial fighting mannequins from the flowmetal walls, altering the timeflow and acoustic properties so that no one would know what he was up to. There was also the matter of inspiration – and Roger grinned as he discovered copies of Fighting Shadows episodes stored in his tu-ring’s deep memory. He had thought his youthful self’s favourite holodrama lost for ever, along with his world.
There was a storyline called Ambush that would save Roger having to tell the boy how this should play out. After months of training – preferably a standard year, mean-geodesic – it would be time to forestall a group ambush by taking them out, one by one, until the threat was done.
It was the kind of harsh truth people with no experience preferred to ignore.
‘Which means you’ll also have time to study and have fun,’ Roger concluded, ‘because there’s more to life than combat, OK?’
A part of him thought what if there isn’t? but that was for an adult in wartime. And even so, there had to be something worth fighting for.
The boy blinked at him.
‘I’ll do it.’
‘You have my respect.’ With solemnity, Roger extended his fist, and they bumped knuckles. ‘Success.’
It was a benediction. He watched as the boy summoned a rotation – with more aplomb and accuracy than his attackers – and disappeared into it. Then a female voice came from behind Roger.
‘Good for you.’
He whirled, taking in the lithe form.
‘Rhianna? What are you doing here?’
‘I thought I’d take my boy to school, what with it being his first day and all.’
‘Your b—? Shit.’
She meant him, and Tangleknot.
‘Now, now. No cursing, son.’
Rhianna Chiang was barely old enough to be his biological mother, but a
fter their training on Molsin, you could say she had enabled the creation of Roger as he was now. He remembered their first sparring, when he had tapped out as she locked on an armbar – and Rhianna had ignored his signal of submission, continuing her leverage until the arm snapped through, because she was not teaching him a sport, or how to give up.
Because limits were there to be pushed through and destroyed.
‘You don’t want to be late,’ she added. ‘Not on your first day.’
‘No, ma’am.’ He smiled. ‘I certainly don’t.’
‘So we’ll go together.’
Rhianna raised her hands, summoning a fastpath to take them both.
To his new beginning. To Tangleknot.
Tangleknot disappointed, but only in a single regard: on his first day, Roger had hoped for advanced sabotage-and-silent-killing training. But after navigating through the twisted topological transformations that physical entry entailed, where the academy’s defences could have destroyed them at any stage, he and Rhianna separated outside an interview room. His first mission was to get through a start-of-course interview, and he knew without being told that he could be kicked out at any time.
The welcoming committee comprised two men and a woman; they gave their worknames as Havelock, Deutsch and Palmer.
‘Growing up on Fulgor,’ said Deutsch, leading the questioning, ‘how did that make you feel about the ordinary humans around you?’
‘I needed to hold on to my, um, self-image in secret.’ Roger wanted to explain his world to people who could have no conception of it. ‘They’re all impressive, especially the Luculenti and their . . .’ He noticed a twitching smile from Palmer. ‘All right, I had an unconscious bias, a part of me that thought I was superior, but my point is that I learnt metacognition via the Fulgidus education system.’
‘The people your father died attempting to save. By fetching a rescue fleet.’
‘Yes.’ Roger did not try to prevent his voice from thickening. ‘And if I achieve a fraction of what Dad did, I’ll be happy.’
