The Lure (11 page)

Petrie squeezed Svetlana’s shoulder. ‘Make it tumble.’

Svetlana typed a few symbols and the Man in the Moon, mouth agape, tilted and disappeared, reappearing from time to time in random orientations.

‘Look closely,’ Petrie said.

Svetlana said, ‘It’s not a sphere.’

‘No. It’s an icosahedron.’

‘A what?’ Gibson was looking blank.

‘It’s made up of twenty triangular plates joined together. Look at it. See how it keeps coming back to the same shape. That’s because it looks exactly the same from sixty different orientations. It’s one of the Platonic solids.’

‘Plato?’ Gibson repeated in exasperation. ‘Tom, are we on different planes of reality or what?’

‘Charlie, an icosahedron is one of the most beautifully symmetric solid forms. Plato wanted to understand the world in terms of mathematics and harmony. He believed that tetrahedron, cube, octahedron and icosahedron made up earth, air, fire and water. It’s all there in his
Timaeus.’

‘So what are you saying? That the signallers have read
Timaeus?
That they’ve shaped their planet like a Platonic bloody solid?’

Petrie shook his head. ‘That’s not a planet, Charlie. It’s a virus.’

13

Moscow Chatline

Phone ringing.

Its rasp penetrated layers of sleep and merged with a bizarre dream in which she was floating above a TV quiz show. An uncomprehending eyelid dragged itself open; green numbers on a bedside clock read 2.10 a.m.

Phone ringing, at ten past two in the morning.

Dasha! There’s been an accident!

She dragged herself fully awake. A sense of dread washing over her, she threw back the blankets and stumbled through to the tiny living room.

Phone still ringing.

The window was partially open and a black electric cable snaked through the gap down to the battery of a silver Niva five flights below: it was the only way to ensure that her car would start in the minus thirty degrees of a Moscow winter. But the night air from this Moscow winter was drifting in through the gap and she gasped as she opened the living-room door and hurried towards the telephone. The sound of traffic, still rumbling at this hour, came up from the street below.

Still ringing.

Don’t stop!

She banged a shin painfully on the edge of a low table.
Keep ringing. I’m almost there!

She found it, dropped the receiver, picked it up, trembling.

Professional voice, deep male: ‘Tatyana Maranovich?’ A doctor or a surgeon. Dasha was in some hospital bed. No. This was a policeman. Her daughter was lying on a mortuary slab somewhere.

Tanya’s voice and hands shook uncontrollably. ‘Yes?’

‘My name is Vashislav Shtyrkov. I want to speak to Professor Velikhov. The duty clerk at the Academy referred me to you. May I have his home phone number?’

Relief and anger struggled in her head, and relief won: Dasha was all right, probably tucked up with Alexei somewhere. Suddenly the bitter cold, which she had ignored, became an issue. ‘Vashislav Shtyrkov, it’s two o’clock in the morning.’

‘I know.’

‘I can’t give the Professor’s name out to a stranger. I could lose my job.’

‘Let me give you an assurance on that: you will lose it if you don’t.’

‘Can you tell me what this is about?’

‘No.’

‘At least tell me who you are.’

‘A colleague, from the old days.’

Something stirred in Tanya’s mind. ‘Are you the one who called the Professor about that castle in Slovakia?’

‘I am the one. Now will you give me his number?’

‘No, I’m not allowed to do that. But if you give me yours I’ll relay it to him.’

‘That will suffice. But you must give it to him now.’

‘At this hour? The Professor will not thank me for that.’ She was now shivering inside her thick flannel nightgown.

‘On the contrary, Tanya Maranovich, if you call him now he will bring you lilies from the Nile and sunshine from Mexico.’

*   *   *

Georgi Velikhov, as befitted the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, had a villa in the Gorki-9 district of Moscow. The villa came with a maid and a cook, six bedrooms and government-issue furniture. His neighbours were diplomats, high government officials and, not two kilometres away, was the
fazenda
of Mikhail Isayevich Ogorodnikov, President of Russia.

And the central heating stayed on all night. Apart from anything else, the house was full of children: over the New Year, Velikhov was playing Father Frost to his wife Masha, his three daughters and their husbands, and nine grandchildren.

So it was that, although it was three in the morning and the air outside was colder than a domestic freezer, the patriarch was warm and comfortable in a studded green leather chair in his study. A stove, which he had banked up with wood for an overnight slow burn, was burning brightly, and a green shaded lamp suspended from the ceiling was throwing a harsh light over a large leather-topped desk.

He was on the telephone for over an hour. Most of the time he listened, but now and then he would fire off a question in a staccato tone.

He didn’t hear Masha come into the study, didn’t notice his four-year-old granddaughter standing at the open door in a pink nightdress, finger in mouth and hand on the top of her head until Grandmother Masha picked her up and carried her back to bed.

At the end of the call he noticed the hot chocolate in front of him with surprise. It had gone cold but his mouth was dry with talking and excitement and he gulped it down.

Velikhov stood up, stretched briefly, and then paced up and down for some minutes. The Kremlin, of course, would have a duty officer.

Good morning, I want to speak to the President on an urgent matter.

Certainly. I’ll rouse the President’s Chief of Staff now.

Alexy? I believe we’ve been contacted by an alien intelligence.

Thank you, Academician Velikhov. I too find a few Stolichnayas quite heart-warming in this weather.

They have given us information of unbelievable economic, scientific, military and medical importance.

And I especially appreciate being wakened from my bed at three in the morning for a joke. A good New Year to you.

Velikhov smiled grimly and shook his head.
No, I don’t think so.

In any case, Ogorodnikov was unlikely to be in the Kremlin. More probably, he was five minutes’ drive from here, tucked up with his little fat Katya; or he might be staying in his other
dacha,
the modest one in the Odintsovo district. Or no – didn’t he go moosehunting in Sverdlovsk at this time of year?

Sensible to wait until waking hours.

Or a dereliction of duty?

*   *   *

Two miles away from Tatyana Maranovich’s small flat, in a bleak basement in the Nevsky Prospekt, a young man listened to her conversation with Academician Velikhov. The Professor had seemed a bit grumpy about being wakened up; perhaps the fact that it was three o’clock in the morning had something to do with it. The call was recorded automatically and there was little for the man to do but listen, which he did while idly filling in a jumbo crossword. Given the content of the call he was not surprised when, five minutes after it had ended, another one went out from the Academician’s
dacha.

The young CIA officer was alone, the Gorki-9 telephone traffic being light in the early hours. He had arrived only three weeks ago, full of enthusiasm about his Moscow posting, on the strength of his background in Van Eck monitoring. To his disappointment, he had been assigned to the ‘chatline’, the routine coverage of private calls to and from the
dachas,
private and government-owned, of the government officials.

Velikhov’s name and address came up quickly on the screen, but there was a few moments’ delay while the recipient’s location was traced through a satellite.

Ninety-nine per cent of it was drivel – gossip between wives, teenagers talking to each other, remote calls to children in distant places. There was an occasional diversion, the Canadian diplomat’s wife in particular: ‘Ruth’s on!’ would bring a gleeful rush to the terminal, as the calls between her and her opera house lover became ever more steamy and inventive.

No name. Some castle in Slovakia.

At this hour. Interesting.

The phonetic translator threw up the words in passable English but the CIA officer’s Russian was better than the machine’s.

He listened with growing perplexity. This wasn’t a conversation between two normal adults, it was between lunatics. He dropped the crossword and pressed the headphones lightly against his ear, frowning.

And then he smiled. Of course – he was on the receiving end of a joke, some ponderous Russian humour. They were saying,
‘Merry Christmas, Amerika, we know you’re listening in.’

But there was no humour in the voices.

His smile gradually faded. If they knew he was listening in, why tell him this through a joke? Why not use this knowledge to transmit misinformation? Why tell a tale that couldn’t be taken seriously, not for a second?

As the crazy exchange continued, it increasingly dawned on the young man that this was no joke and that if these were actors, they were damn good ones.

The call lasted over an hour. At the end of it, the CIA man took off his headphones with a sigh and scratched his head.

I’ve just intercepted this call about aliens.

Aliens?

The callers were serious.

Of course they were. How long have you been with us? Three weeks?

He shook his head. Three weeks in Moscow and either he had the coup of a lifetime, or he was the victim of a humiliating, career-damaging practical joke.

14

Kanchenjunga

‘You people are nuts.’ Little patches of damp have appeared under the armpits of Gibson’s shirt. ‘Am I supposed to go to the British government and tell them that aliens have beamed us a picture of a virus?’

Shtyrkov says, ‘It’s obviously a virus. They like to be icosahedrons.’

Petrie says, ‘We can test it. Your little coloured spheres, Svetlana.’

‘Yes. Each is a cluster of dots, hundreds of them.’

‘These dots should be proteins.’

‘Tom, I wouldn’t recognise a protein if it hit me on the nose.’

‘It’s a string of amino acids.’

‘That’s all right then.’ Svetlana is looking defiant.

‘Right. We need a biochemist.’

Gibson says, ‘No. There’s no time. And we have enough outsiders.’ He attempts a conciliatory smile at Freya and Petrie but it comes out as a leer. ‘Nothing personal.’

‘Svetlana and I will learn biochemistry tonight,’ Shtyrkov says.

Petrie says, ‘Will it take you all night?’

‘Even genius has limits. Tom, you try to decipher fresh bits of the signal.’

‘I’ll try to identify the source,’ Freya says.

‘It’s why you’re out here,’ Gibson reminds her. ‘I’ll get back to the press release.’

Shtyrkov warns Gibson: ‘You and I contact our governments simultaneously, Charlee. No jumping the gun.’

Apart from a scowl, Gibson makes no response.

Petrie says to nobody, ‘This is the biggest thing in history.’

Freya says, ‘I’d kill for a coffee.’

*   *   *

6 p.m.
Freya says, ‘We can rule out 47 Ursa Majoris. It’s way outside the error circle.’

A little later, Petrie takes to pacing up and down like a caged lion. There is a clear patch of floor near the centre of the room, and he criss-crosses this at random, looking over at the dancing patterns taunting him on his screen. From time to time he sits on the edge of his chair, still staring at the dots.

At random, he has cut into the signal about a minute down the line. Here the patterns are different. The biology was snowflakes in a blizzard, random swirls, sometimes a handful of dots, sometimes thousands. Random and yet not random. But here, further down the signal, things are in stark contrast. The salami technique, stacking slices of time to create a figure, doesn’t work. Here the patterns are harsh and geometric. There are pentagons and pyramids, abacuses in three dimensions and jagged cliffs in four. And yet sometimes, as he pushes the movie on, the harsh geometry dissolves and the blizzard reappears.

An alien mind, reaching out to me. What are you saying? What are you telling me? What do you
mean?

6.50 p.m.
After forty minutes of sitting and pacing, Petrie mutters something about the theological library and disappears. He returns without explanation an hour later. The restless pacing resumes.

8.30 p.m.
Shtyrkov and Svetlana say that the virus theory is looking good. The little spheres look like proteins made up of amino acids, but they don’t know enough to identify any of them or even to say if they are of a known type.

Close to midnight, they announce that the signal contains the codings for hundreds of viruses, maybe thousands. There is a brief discussion of what could possibly motivate the signallers to beam information of that sort. There are other structures of some molecular complexity, in their thousands, but they can make no sense of them. By this time Petrie, still doing the walk, is starting to mutter.

12.40 a.m.
Gibson leaves the room and returns with a tray of mugs and biscuits. Snow is fluttering down, the flakes catching the light as they pass the windows.

Petrie keeps disappearing and reappearing, muttering and sometimes walking up and down with his hands on his head, his face screwed up in concentration. Now and then he scribbles on paper and then, often as not, darts out of the room, sometimes with a groan of despair. Nobody pays him any attention.

2.05 a.m.
Freya’s program runs to its conclusion. She tidies up some numbers and consults star charts. The signal has come from one of two small regions of sky, in opposite directions. One of them contains a few ordinary stars. The other is deeply disturbing. She looks around furtively; everyone is busy at terminals, except for Petrie, who is still pacing, lost in his world of patterns. She thinks he looks mad, like Rasputin or somebody. She decides to keep her finding to herself until she has searched the Net for every scrap of information about the candidate sources.