Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 39 Lampedusa, Sunday 8 July [Now]

The chat with Katie Petrov was interesting, mostly for what it revealed about Dr. Petrov's views on emotional autism.

"Good morning," said Petra Mayer, shutting a door behind her. She listened to it lock from the other side and smiled. The Colonel was keeping to his orders. "I'm Professor Mayer," she added. The small woman said it like Prisoner Zero should know that already. "And you're..."

Petra Mayer glanced at Katie's folder, mere pantomime. "It seems you're more of a problem than we first thought."

The folder was simple and buff-hued, suggesting common sense, frugality and prudence. All virtues that Katie, Petra Mayer's second most famous pupil, liked to project as hallmarks of her work.

"Gene sent me."

Even this casual reference to America's President didn't rate a flicker of interest from the naked figure who sat with his back against a wall staring flatly at an utterly blue sky. And it was a very casual, we-go-back-a-long-way kind of mention.

The room was on the ground floor of Hotel Vallone but it was in the main building and had metal bars rather than steel mesh set over the windows. An en suite shower-room had been stripped of everything sharp and the door between the two rooms removed along with all the furniture except the bed. A notepad lay untouched beside the bed and the walls were still as pristine as when they were repainted. Prisoner Zero hadn't even opened the wax crayons he'd been given.

"You mind if I smoke?" Petra Mayer waited a few seconds and then shrugged. "I'll take that as a no." Pulling a brass Zippo from her pocket, the Professor put it on the bed beside her and dug into her pockets for a packet of Lucky Strike.

"Want one?"

Another silence.

This didn't worry Petra Mayer, who'd once ingested so much lysergic acid diethylamide that it was seventy-six hours before the Wernicke area of her brain could organize enough words to tell a very pretty German boy about the rainbow on the tip of her tongue. They were at the Burning Man in Nevada. Needless to say, no one else noticed a thing.

"Okay." Putting flame to her cigarette, the small woman smiled. "Let me tell you what's going on. As I said, my name is Professor Petra Mayer and for the purposes of irritating the Pentagon I've been made a general in the US Army. I am here at the direct request of the President of the United States of America. All my expenses are being paid for by the Oval Office."

It was called the Russian Pitch and Harvard Business School used to teach it way back when. Around the time the old Soviet Union hit meltdown and arriving in the right place at the right time meant having whole industries drop into your lap. It relied on being flat-out honest and up front about the who, what and why.

Dragging on her Lucky Strike, Petra Mayer ran through the points and realized she'd left out the what's-in-it-for-me/what's-in-it-for-you.

Something of a deal breaker, usually.

"The President is minded..."

She hated that phrase, with its recursive echoes of qualification and non-commitment, its sheer mean-mindedness. Needless to say it hadn't been Gene who suggested its use. That little gem was down to the White House counsel.

"No, fuck it." Petra Mayer tapped ash onto a paper plate. "Gene doesn't want to kill you, okay? He thinks it's a crap idea. So I'm here to sort out some kind of deal. That's what's in it for you. As for what's in it for me..."

There were probably pin-lens cameras in here and microphones, infrared and other stuff so secret military intelligence at the Pentagon had forgotten to let the President know it existed. Professor Mayer wasn't too worried about that. She had a box of tricks of her own and Gene Newman knew it existed because he'd been present when Paula Zarte briefed the President's old tutor on its use.

It fucked up bugs, that was how the recently appointed Director of Central Intelligence put it, ignoring the glance of disapproval from the President's private secretary.

"There's been a suggestion," said Petra. "We swop you for a condemned prisoner and then publicly execute the prisoner. You get a new identity and we get the equations."

The suggestion had come from the First Lady and, much as it pained Professor Mayer to admit it, the idea had its attractions in a disgustingly realpolitik kind of way. Not least, that it kept the equations out of the hands of dangerous lunatics, while bluffing the world that they'd been lost forever.

Of course, Professor Mayer knew it didn't really keep the equations out of the hands of dangerous lunatics at all. It merely put them into the hands of our dangerous lunatics as opposed to their dangerous lunatics...

She sighed.

"We'd need your agreement," Professor Mayer said. "And you needn't feel guilty about the man who takes your place. He's going to die anyway... Why would we do this?" she asked, watching smoke trickle towards the ceiling. A whole world of rigid rules covering temperature, convection and Brownian motion all busily pretending to be truly chaotic. No wonder she loved smoking so much. "Because we've got a situation. And mostly it's that we now know who you really are..."

Not a flicker from Prisoner Zero.

"...and according to your family you're already dead."

Professor Mayer glanced round the prisoner's new room with its neat bed, built-in shower and view of the Mediterranean. Dr. Petrov could be forgiven her verdict of emotional autism, naïve though it was, because the man seemed totally oblivious to anything going on around him.

"Not a dead-man-walking kind of dead," she added. "The real kind. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Although in your case it was very much junk to junkie, wasn't it?"

Flipping open her briefcase, which now contained the Marrakech file, two sets of fingerprints and her latest acquisition, Jake Razor's medical records and a long list of attendances from the early 1980s at a drug drop-in centre in Amsterdam, Professor Mayer found what she was after, a photograph of the squat on Vizelstraat, five burnt-out floors overlooking a canal and the stark carcass of a cindered tree. Children sat on the deck of a narrow boat, oblivious to three police cars parked nearby.

"Here," said Professor Mayer, holding out the photograph. "Recognize it?"

There was a "Politie BBE" stamp on the back of the photograph over a date, the initials of a crime-scene photographer and a coffee ring where a paper cup had been put down carelessly.

They told Professor Mayer little more than she already knew. In April 1989 a squat used by heroin addicts had burnt out in Vizelstraat, Amsterdam. The fire-twisted body of a victim had been found and the body had been so badly charred it proved impossible to put an age on it. Although it was doubtful if anyone tried very hard.

The Bijzondere Bijstands Eenheid became involved because the first police officer on the scene decided that the body had been shot through the head with a high-powered rifle. As most of the skull was missing this was a reasonable mistake to make, even if it was boiling brains and not a bullet that ripped apart the vagrant's head.

After this had been established, responsibility for the crime reverted to the Amsterdam police and it was their note which was attached to the photograph. The victim was thought to be one Marzaq al-Turq, sometimes known as Moz Ritter, and there was no evidence to suggest foul play.

"There was no reason to exclude it either," Petra Mayer said, but the Professor was talking to herself.

Police HQ in Amsterdam were currently trying to locate the evidence locker into which a bone sample from the body had been decanted, so they could carry out the forensics tests no one had bothered to do before.

"I followed your work, you know." She spoke as slowly and as clearly as she could. Many people thought Professor Mayer's lugubrious growl was affectation or the result of too many drugs. This was wrong.

The drug damage and the facial scar from her famous car crash might both be self-inflicted and closely related, but the voice came from God. Although the Professor was honest enough to admit that her sixty-a-day cigarette habit did not help matters.

"A BBS here," said Professor Mayer. "An early news group there. Little hints and rough workings. I kept a list of the names you used and I wasn't the only one, did you know that?"

How could he not? Prisoner Zero had waited for replies and confirmations. For other people's take on his solutions. It was a very quick and dirty form of peer review, a term he'd first stumbled over at Amsterdam University. Although it didn't always work, of course. He'd posted a line of code onto a Polish bulletin board, just that, nothing more. This was at the height of Solidarity. A time when messages were mostly coded and all BBS were watched no matter how primitive, and what passed for academic BBS in Poland at that time was very primitive indeed.

And his equation had just sat there, unanswered and perhaps unread. One of a dozen fragments he took from the notebook and posted in his attempt, fleeting and destined for failure, to find the numinous within numeracy.

"I'm offering you a new life," Petra Mayer said. "A new start." Grinding out her Lucky Strike, the elderly academic reached for the packet and realized it was empty. "No?" Professor Mayer's smile was sour. "I told Gene not to make me waste my time asking you." She paused, thought about it. "Not much point asking you anything really, is there?"