The Lure (25 page)

*   *   *

At first, Petrie thought they had come for him. He was being shaken roughly by the shoulder. Then he smelled the green slime on Shtyrkov’s breath and saw his massive bulk in dark outline. ‘Tom! Tom!’

He felt Freya’s leg taut over his own. She was stretching. A bedside lamp clicked on and then she was hiding under the sheet, only the crown of her head visible on the pillow.

Petrie sat up. The Russian’s face wore an intense expression and he had a finger to his mouth. ‘Get dressed. Come and see this. Be very quiet. No shoes.’

Suppressing his embarrassment, Petrie stretched out for underpants and in a moment was dressed in plain T-shirt, jeans and socks.

‘Freya. Put the light out.’

A slim arm appeared from under the sheet and groped towards the bedside lamp, and then they were back into darkness. Petrie followed the Russian to the door, sensing rather than seeing his frame.

Along the narrow carpeted corridor and down the broad staircase. A faint light was coming from below. Shtyrkov’s wheezy breath was loud in the silence and there was an occasional
crack!
from his arthritic knee.

Into the atrium. The light was here; it was blue, and it was coming from under the door to the administrator’s office. They crept past the armchairs and settees, and stopped at the oak door. Shtyrkov tapped Petrie on the shoulder. He whispered in his ear. ‘The keyhole!’

On his knees, Petrie had a good view of half the room. He looked, and was appalled.

Hanning was talking quietly. The light was coming from the monitor he sat at. The screen was edge-on to Petrie and he could neither make out the face on it nor hear the words. From Hanning’s body language the conversation seemed to be coming to an end. Suddenly the civil servant leaned towards the monitor. He switched it off.

In a near panic, Petrie jumped up and collided with Shtyrkov. They set off quietly and as fast as the near-blackness would allow, Shtyrkov gasping for air. They reached the marble stairs but it was too late, the door was opening. Petrie pulled at Shtyrkov and they were down, crouching, behind a chair a few feet past the steps.

The door to the library closed, very quietly. Hanning was padding straight towards them. He was making almost no sound. At the foot of the stairs they heard him stop.

Dead silence.

Hanning no more than six feet away.

Shtyrkov holding his breath.

A distinct
crack!
Shtyrkov’s arthritic knee.

Somewhere in the distance a dog barked.

Shtyrkov still holding his breath.

Petrie wondering if they had been seen: two figures, one of them bulky, trying to hide behind an armchair.

Silence, except for the dog going wolf and the hammer-hammer in Petrie’s chest. And Shtyrkov still holding on, his eyes beginning to pop.

Green slime!
Shtyrkov was reeking of alcohol. It had to be a giveaway. Hanning could surely smell their presence.

Then footsteps were padding quietly up the stairs and Petrie was mentally saying,
Hold on, Vashislav, don’t blow it now, don’t breathe, just seconds more.

The footsteps were gone and Petrie was shaking all over and Shtyrkov was taking in air in deep, shuddering gulps. He was trying to do it quietly but without much success.

They made their way slowly up the stairs, following Hanning’s direction, with the Russian bent double and gripping the balustrade. After every few steps he would pause and wheeze. Back to the corridor. Petrie counted the doors on the right.
One, two, three, four, five.
He turned the handle and the door was unlocked. Good for Freya: she’d had the presence of mind to keep the room dark. So far as Hanning knew, the condemned scientists were sound asleep.

Shtyrkov found a switch and they blinked in the sudden light. Freya had pulled on her skirt and sweater but Petrie thought there was no bra underneath it. She was sitting on the broad window ledge, hair tousled and her face showing strain and tiredness. Eau de cologne lingered in the air.

Petrie sat on the edge of the unmade bed, and they waited, wordless, while Shtyrkov leaned against the door, slowly regaining his breath. Finally: ‘Hanning is a traitor.’

‘He was on the conference circuit just now,’ Petrie told Freya.

‘What does that prove?’

‘That he was communicating without our knowledge.’

‘So? Maybe he was trying to bargain for our lives.’

‘No.’ Shtyrkov’s voice was quiet but emphatic. ‘I heard him earlier. He was talking to Sangster. He was informing his lordship that we are deeply suspicious, that we would like to flee the castle but can see no way out and that we are nevertheless continuing to work on the signal.’

Freya said weakly, ‘That makes him a traitor? It’s no more than the truth.’

‘Oh, young Freya, I love you for your innocence.’ Shtyrkov managed a grin, but his face showed pain and there was a purple rim round his lips. ‘If I were thirty years younger … But no, Hanning’s tone was that of an informant. He is reporting back to Sangster and that has only one interpretation. The man is what you call a mole.’

Petrie said, ‘Damn.
158 Rock Walk.’

Shtyrkov looked bewildered, and Petrie continued: ‘Somebody sent me a warning. It reached me in London on my way here.’

‘I remember. It worried Charlie.’

‘It was lightly encoded, I cracked it in minutes but it wouldn’t have made sense to a casual reader. Vashislav, it can only have come from someone in the UK government who had access to your ET suspicions.’

‘More than that, my friend, someone who anticipated the possible reaction of your government. Someone close to your Prime Minister.’

‘That settles it,’ said Petrie. ‘Hanning’s a traitor in our midst.’

Freya asked, ‘Does it matter now?’

‘It matters very much, my dear, if we think of a way to escape. He tells your fine English lord, the lord tells your Prime Minister, he tells the President of Slovakia and then…’ Shtyrkov made a throat-cutting gesture.

‘But even if you’re right, what harm can he do? We have no way out. You said it yourself.’

‘I gave a good performance, did I not? “There is no prospect of escape.” I spoke with such bravura, such conviction!’

Petrie’s heart lurched. ‘What are you saying, Vashislav?’

‘Englishman, your life may depend on keeping your voice down.’ Shtyrkov flopped down next to Petrie on the bed. The mattress sagged under his weight. He took some breaths before continuing: ‘There is a way out, just possibly. Very likely to be terminal, and only for the desperate.’

‘Vashislav, stop playing games.’

‘Games, my friend? With the signallers waiting for our answer?’

Freya said, ‘Vashislav, for God’s sake, we’re condemned prisoners. A desperate plan will do nicely.’

‘Yes, young Freya. But listen, here is the word on my escape route. One. It is very dangerous. Two. It cannot work if Hanning knows we suspect him. And Three, the worst bit.’

They waited while Shtyrkov once again caught his breath. Then, ‘The route can only be taken by two of us. We will have to decide who goes and who stays.’

‘Well?’ Freya asked.

‘In the morning, young lady. This must be discussed by all of us together.’

30

Hanning

Sunday morning brought a blue sky with a light trace of high cirrus. The air was cold. Shtyrkov, Gibson and Petrie climbed the stairs to the high tower, slowly out of deference to the Russian. They looked out over the panorama. Hanning was already on the terrace below. He had his back to them and was handling two piles of papers, weighed down by books to keep them from fluttering away. It was impossible to believe that they were in their last hours, perhaps their last hour. Impossible to believe they couldn’t just walk away from the castle, across the sunlit fields.

‘What’s he doing?’ Petrie asked.

‘Still trying to match our downloads with pictures of known viruses,’ Gibson said. ‘That should keep him occupied for hours.’

‘Not outdoors,’ Shtyrkov suggested. ‘It’s freezing.’

‘He’s a public school type,’ Petrie said. ‘Brought up on cold showers and running around naked at sunrise.’

Shtyrkov looked at Petrie with some wonder. ‘Sometimes I think the English are a strange people.’

‘Where can we talk?’ Gibson asked.

‘Here,’ Shtyrkov proposed. ‘We can keep an eye on our English gentleman while we do so.’

‘I’ll bring the ladies up,’ Petrie said, making briskly for the door.

Petrie found the women in the kitchen. The air of normality was weird, even surreal. Freya was pouring herself cereal, and Svetlana was bringing a pot of water to the boil. His invitation to join the others in the tower was delivered quietly, as if Hanning was listening at the door.

‘I wondered where you’d all got to,’ Freya said.

‘Why the tower?’ Svetlana asked. ‘And what about Jeremy?’

‘We’re keeping him out of it and we don’t want him to know we’re having a meeting.’

Svetlana looked puzzled. Petrie added, ‘We don’t trust him. I’ll explain as we go.’

To reach the tower from the kitchen, they had to pass French windows leading to the terrace, in full view of Hanning. Petrie took Freya’s arm and they strolled past as if in conversation. Hanning looked up and nodded. They waited at the steps. A minute later Svetlana walked purposefully past, head bowed and looking neither left nor right. ‘He didn’t notice me,’ she said quietly on the stairs. ‘What’s this about?’

‘Vash will explain.’

Shtyrkov explained. They stood back from the edge of the tower, speaking in low, conspiratorial voices although there was no chance of being heard from the terrace below. Petrie glanced out from time to time, but Hanning was single-mindedly concentrating on his papers.

As the Russian talked, Gibson occasionally shook his head in disbelief, and once had to suppress a derisive laugh. Then he turned up the collar of his jacket and paced to and fro for a minute. Finally, he seemed to reach a decision. He stared from Shtyrkov to Petrie and back to the Russian again. ‘I guess it’s all we have.’

The Russian spoke the words they had all been thinking. ‘Now we have to decide who goes.’

Petrie added, ‘And what we’re going to do about Hanning.’

Shtyrkov’s face became ghoulish. ‘I have no problem with that.’

*   *   *

‘Something’s missing.’ Petrie was coiling pink mustard on to his plate from a tube, next to a broken-up boiled egg. He was unshaven and haggard. Svetlana sipped at her tea and looked at the mixture with distaste.

‘I agree with Thomas,’ Vashislav declared. ‘He has decoded a big hunk of energy desert, somewhere between the X and W bosons. It is wonderful. What people have called the Higgs particle turns out to be just one point in a spectrum of – I can’t even call them particles, they are entities…’

‘Maybe we just didn’t record it,’ Gibson suggested. He was adding milk with microscopic care to a coffee.

The Russian said, ‘No, we picked it up all right. It must still be on the second SCSI drive, in the cavern.’

Hanning looked up from a mug of tea; his voice was tinged with surprise. ‘What are you saying, Vashislav?’

‘Didn’t you know?’ Gibson said, taking a sip. ‘Yes, we have a second hard drive as a matter of course. One stays behind while we remove the other for analysis, in case particles come in, in the meantime. Clearly so much information came in that some of it was automatically shunted over to the number two drive.’

‘We need to get hold of it.’ Vashislav was being assertive.

‘With the time we have left – forgive me – surely you have more than you can handle here.’ Hanning was being casual.

Vashislav smiled tolerantly. ‘You don’t understand, Jeremy. There is a critical area beyond the energy of our particle accelerators and short of the unimaginable energies of the Creation. We know it only as a desert, but its span is immense, over thirteen powers of ten. There must be oases in this desert, new force fields we know nothing about, new forms of energy beyond anything we can visualise.’

Petrie was scooping up the pink gunge with bread. ‘If we had the hard drive here we could analyse it in a few hours. The decipherment pattern’s been cracked.’

‘Centuries of knowledge in a few hours.’ Vashislav turned to Gibson, appealing. ‘What do you say, Charlee?’

‘It’s the biggest gap,’ Petrie said. ‘We’ve enough genome stuff on site to keep the biochemists busy for a generation.’

Gibson pretended to count. ‘We’re three hours from the Tatras, another three back, say half an hour to penetrate the cavern and another half to dismantle the drive. Seven hours.’

‘I could be back late this evening and work overnight on it.’

‘This is our last full day,’ Gibson lied.

‘The bastards.’ Svetlana was looking down at the table.

Hanning was smooth. ‘Not that I go along with your paranoid fantasies, Tom, but it could be an opportunity for you to escape.’

Petrie shook his head. ‘A fact which will occur to my military escort. It’s not even worth thinking about.’

‘Still, if an opportunity should arise.’ The civil servant’s voice was still casual, but he was peering closely at the mathematician.

He suspects something.
Petrie shrugged dismissively. ‘Sure.’

Gibson turned to Hanning. ‘Jeremy, can you explain to his lordship that there is vital information still stored in the cave and that we need to retrieve it in short order. Might give particle physics a jump start of a few hundred years, with God knows what outcome.’

‘Take someone with you,’ Shtyrkov said to Petrie. ‘You’ll need an extra pair of hands to dismantle the drive.’

‘Can I come?’ Freya asked. ‘I want out of here, even for a few hours.’

‘Sure.’ Petrie thought,
Everyone’s being so bloody casual.
Svetlana was playing her part, sitting quietly, still staring at the table. At that moment Petrie was overwhelmed by her quiet courage, felt utterly inadequate against it.

‘You know how to do it?’ Hanning asked, turning at the refectory door. ‘Get this drive thing out?’

‘Of course,’ Petrie lied, with a grandiose wave of the arm.

Hanning looked around at the scientists, then left.