doubtless just me… As to the moon, I’ve no idea.”
They didn’t say anything for a moment as Middleton looked at her, his benign, bland face creased with concern.
“You’re practicing here for the rest of the day?” he asked.
“Practice, practice, practice. After a while… ”
“Stay indoors. I’ll arrange a cab to the Wigmore Hall and a hotel for you this evening. Pack your things. Leave your bag here when you go to the concert. We’ll pick it up for you later.”
“But… ”
They didn’t wait for anything except a few short pleasantries. Felicia Kaminski watched them go, wishing they could have stayed a little longer. She knew no one in London. She felt a little lonely and bored.
“Practice,” she hissed. “If I practice one more time I’ll go mad.”
As the door closed, she picked up a piece of paper and scribbled down the words she remembered from Harold Middleton’s note.
Some forensics people would be running through every last one to try to forge a link. Maybe-she was worried, slightly, by the look on Middleton’s face when she threw in her idea about the bracelet-they would be looking to see what the term “heavy water” meant in relation to India, Pakistan and the Kashmir question. Quite a lot, possibly, not that she wanted to think much about that. The dark shadow Chernobyl had cast over Eastern Europe had never quite lifted from her.
She looked at the grandfather clock by the fireplace. Two hours remained before she had to leave, a little less if she packed as Middleton had wanted. She had time. There was something else she could use too, something she felt sure Middleton and Tesla would never have countenanced.
Felicia Kaminski went to her laptop computer and pulled up the web page for Bicchu, the new search engine she’d stumbled upon only a month ago. It was all the rage in the social networks. The answers were sharp and relevant, almost as if someone were reading the question then thinking about its context and perspective before responding. It felt smart and human, not part of some dumb machine. Best of all, Bicchu promised to pay you for being online, for typing in queries and following through on the results. Just a few cents but it was something. For all the glamour of an appearance at the Wigmore Hall, she still felt like a music student when she looked at her bank balance. It would be years before she could even hope to command a reliable income.
Felicia glanced down and typed in the words on her scribbled note.
Then she added a phrase of her own:
And another:
It took longer than normal for the answers to appear. A good 10 seconds. Must have been Middleton’s broadband connection, she thought.
He sat in the restaurant near Piccadilly Circus, glued to the iPhone they’d given him, working the private application that linked through the mobile network, securely, privately, to the field HQ. He’d no idea where that was. In Kashmir. In Paris. Two doors away in the heart of London. It was irrelevant. The days of fixed bases, of dangerous safe houses and physical networks capable of penetration… all these things were in the past. It was thirteen months since he’d last met another comrade in person. As far as he knew anyway. Orders came via secure encrypted email delivered to a series of ever-changing addresses. Plans and projects arrived as password protected zipped pdfs, read, absorbed, and then deleted forever. This was the way of the world. Everything was virtual. Nothing was real. Except, he reminded himself, blood and money.
A YouTube video had just begun-the trailer for some new Bollywood movie-when the phone throbbed and flashed up an alert. It took a second or two for the signal to deal with the amount of data that followed. Then, as the little handset caught up, he watched as a series of web search requests were mirrored to his little screen. The results narrowed constantly. The scope and scale of the queries made him realize why they’d got in touch. A small window in the upper right hand corner showed the IP address of the source. It was in central London, somewhere near the British Museum. He tapped a few buttons. There was a pause then he found himself in the My Documents folder of the remote computer. A long list of correspondence was stored there. It was all encrypted. He hunted around the remote hard drive until he found the folder where the word processor stored its templates, unseen, often forgotten by those who used them. Sure enough when he got there he found a single file marked “personal letter.” It was open, unsecured by encryption, just text.
He clicked the icon and the document drew itself on the screen of the phone. Dragging his finger across the letters he managed to copy the address into a note. Then he clicked a button in the private app marked “key-log all remote.” Every letter and number typed on the distant machine would now be echoed directly into a file somewhere in the Bicchu system then passed on discreetly, encrypted from beginning to end, to his phone where the private app would decode the text automatically.
After that he copied the house number and street in the heading and pasted them into Google Maps. He knew the general area. It was no more than ten minutes away on foot. Pocketing the iPhone he walked back into the kitchen. It was full of the familiar smells, cumin and turmeric, a tandoori oven and scorched spiced chicken.
The sous chef watched him come in, as if half expecting what was about to happen. The little man from Bangladesh was staring mutinously at an office lunch booking for sixteen. It had been pinned to the order board just thirty minutes before.
“You can cope,” he said, taking off his apron and his stained tocque. Then he walked out of the back, stopping only to collect his little Walther pistol on the way.
Bicchu was feeling talkative. Soon the answers began to come so quickly her head started to spin. She thought of the fearful years after Chernobyl, the pain, the uncertainty. And the school friends she lost, two, who died slowly, almost in front of everyone, day by day.
This was the world of the past, or so she’d thought. A world of hard, cruel science, in the thrall of men who didn’t care about the consequences of their actions. Watching the hints and clues and links begin to assemble as minutes turned to an hour, she felt herself both repelled and attracted by what she was uncovering. This was important, she knew. And forbidden, terrible knowledge.
After one significant breakthrough, she tore herself away from the computer, made herself a cup of green tea, felt briefly guilty about neglecting her instrument and chose, instead, to listen to one of her favorite renditions of the piece she would play later. A fellow Pole, Henryk Szeryng, playing his famed Guarneri del Gesu “Le Duc” for Deutsche Grammophon in 1968: fourteen and a half minutes of bliss.
Then she went back and looked at what she’d found. A lot. Too much. It made her mind turn in on itself, craving the peace and simple faith of the music.
She called Middleton’s cell phone. There was no answer. There wasn’t even the chance to leave a message.
“That’s not your real number is it, Harold?” she said to herself, half listening to Szeryng tackle the music with a studied assurance she hoped one day she might possess.
He wondered what would happen in the restaurant with him gone. The Bangladeshi was competent but slow. It was still a business, still a place that needed to look after its customers.
Later, he thought. The top end of Lamb’s Conduit Street, after the pubs and shops, was deserted. Everyone had gone to work. This was good. The only vehicle around was a large black van with opaque windows on a meter at the park end of the street. Children leapt and danced in the little playground on the other side of the road. He glanced at the van and shook his head. London mothers. They wouldn’t let their precious little princes walk half a mile any more.
She typed what she’d discovered into an email for Middleton and made sure to mark it for encryption, adding the digital signature he’d convinced her to use always on the net. No one could read what she’d written once it traveled beyond her computer and Middleton could be assured the message really came from her, not some imposter who knew how to spoof an email address.
“Fact one,” she wrote, and she shivered as she was unable to force the true import of her words from her
