The Lure

15 The Observer

The angel had Freya’s face and long blonde hair, and its wings spanned the sky. It was scattering counters at amazing speed in geometric patterns over the numbers on the roulette table. There was something behind the pentagons and butterflies and intersecting doughnuts, some unifying concept trying to get out, but as Petrie’s dream faded, the idea slipped frustratingly back into his unconscious mind. A bedside clock told him he had been asleep for four hours.

The corridor was deathly quiet. There were no cleaners, and his colleagues, he supposed, were still asleep. He had the entire Hapsburg castle to himself.

He took the stairs two at a time down to the first floor. Icy air was wafting along the corridor and he saw that the door to the terrace had blown open. He walked along to close it and was surprised to see footsteps on the thin powdery snow which had settled overnight on the terrace. Someone had crossed to the battlement wall, walked alongside it and turned back to the door. He followed the trail, looking over the parapet. There was nobody to be seen and no vehicles other than the blue Dormobile belonging to Gibson and his colleagues, snow-dusted and tucked in a corner. Tyre tracks in the snow were probably from the cleaners’ van.

Something flickered at the corner of his eye and he looked sharply up at the high tower, but there was nobody. He shivered in the bleak January sunlight, damned his imagination and turned back into the warmth of the castle.

Fresh bread, milk, vegetables and assorted groceries were piled up on the kitchen table. He filled a kettle and put a couple of slices of bread into an electric toaster.

Fed and watered, and faintly resentful of the time it had taken up, he walked along the empty corridor towards the theological library, anxious to coax back the conjecture which had come and gone in his angel dream. He was surprised to see the door to the computer room slightly ajar.

And even more surprised to see a stranger, his back to the door, tapping at Svetlana’s computer. Her notes were on the desk; the man had clearly been going through them.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

The man turned. He was in his thirties, with brown hair greying at the edges, and a tanned skin which told of years spent someplace hot. Brown, slightly watery eyes assessed Petrie through wire-framed spectacles. When he stood up Petrie saw that the man was lean and muscular, the sort who ran four miles before breakfast. His voice was English public school and surprisingly deep: ‘Going through the signal. Mind-blowing, isn’t it? But it can’t be for real.’

Petrie, taken aback, asked lamely, ‘Who are you?’

‘Hanning, Jeremy Hanning. And you must be Dr Petrie.’ The man gave a carefully judged smile. ‘I’m an observer for the Cabinet Office. I have to see what you’re all up to and report to Lord Sangster by tomorrow evening. It’s that simple.’

Warily, Petrie asked, ‘How much of a briefing have you had?’

‘The story is that you’ve been contacted by little green men.’ He nodded towards the terminal and gave an isn’t-it-silly smile.

‘And you don’t believe it. Does Lord Sangster?’

Hanning ignored the question. ‘There are five of you here, am I right? Two British, two Russians and a Norwegian.’

‘Yes. The original team was one Brit and two Russians. Freya Størmer and I were co-opted.’

‘How do you get on with the Russians?’

‘Fine.’

‘No, ah … differences?’ The man was studying Petrie closely. One eye, Petrie noticed, seemed slightly larger than the other, but he thought that might be due to a cold.

‘None — why should there be? Look, how do I know you’re not a journalist or something?’

More laughter, a touch too brittle. ‘We’ll phone Lord Sangster up, shall we? Let’s use the video circuit.’

‘First let’s get the team awake. Forgive me, but I think we have to make a communal judgement about you.’

There was a long teak desk at the centre of the administrator’s office. A black computer sat at the head of this desk, and a large video monitor sat atop the computer, and a wide-angle camera sat atop the monitor. Sangster’s face appeared on the screen, nearly filling it, against a background of books.

‘Simon Sangster here.’

Gibson sat at the opposite end of the table, facing the screen directly. ‘Lord Sangster, this is Charles Gibson, principal investigator on the Dark Matter Project. Good morning, sir.’

Sangster returned the greeting with a nod.

‘I have a Jeremy Hanning here. He tells me that you’ve sent him out to oversee the proceedings.’

‘Oversee is too strong a word, Dr Gibson.’ Sangster’s face was expressionless; he was making no attempt to be friendly or encouraging.

‘First, would you confirm that this is in fact Jeremy Hanning.’ Gibson played with controls on a keyboard and the camera swivelled round to Hanning.

‘Well, of course it’s Jeremy. Who else would it be?’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Back to Gibson.

‘Jeremy will assess the situation and report to me at nine o’clock tomorrow evening by the British clock. The main thing is to confirm that this is not some dreadful error and that you really have received an extraterrestrial signal. Have you identified the source?’

‘We’ll be working on that today.’

‘And I understand you say the message contains information of a biological nature.’

‘Yes.’

Petrie had a momentary, startling vision of Sangster as a calculating lizard. He put it down to a slight exophthalmic goitre coupled with deep eyelids. His lordship was saying, ‘What sort of information?’

Gibson hesitated. ‘We’ll be working on that too.’

‘I look forward to hearing from you tomorrow evening. Meantime, of course, security is everything.’

‘Agreed.’ Gibson hesitated again, licked his lips. Then: ‘But I intend to make a public announcement on Monday, whatever stage we’ve reached in our investigation.’

Later, and many times over, Gibson was to wonder why he had said that. Perhaps, he would wonder, he was unconsciously striking a blow in an ancient battle, defending a culture of openness against one of secrecy. Even as he spoke he sensed that something was wrong. Hanning cleared his throat. Shtyrkov, across the desk from Gibson, put his head in his hands.

Sangster was silent for a moment. His tone was icy. ‘That’s not your decision, Dr Gibson.’

Gibson swallowed. ‘Actually, it is. I’m the PI here.’

‘The facility is, however, financed by Her Majesty through PPARC, which falls within my department.’

‘You may finance it, Lord Sangster, but I run it.’

Damn it, Charlie, shut up. This is a disaster.

‘You may think so, but the fact that I finance it means that I also run it. HMG has ultimate responsibility for work carried out on its behalf. And there are assuredly dimensions to this discovery going beyond mere scientific interest.’

Gibson said nothing, but his face was showing open hostility.

‘Let’s not dig ourselves into trenches, Dr Gibson. We must talk through the implications of this discovery before we make it public. It’s in everyone’s interests to get this right. Jeremy, nine o’clock tomorrow.’

‘I won’t be done out of this.’ Gibson’s face was black with anger. ‘I’m not having this discovery announced by some bloody government minister.’

Svetlana, next to him, touched his shoulder in a gesture of sympathy.

‘That’s what’s behind this,’ Gibson continued angrily. ‘Sangster wants to pre-empt the announcement.’

‘For once I agree with you,’ Shtyrkov said.

Svetlana said, ‘So do I, Charlie. The announcement has to be made by the discoverer.’

‘Which is me. PI’s privilege.’

‘But I put twelve years into this machine,’ Svetlana said. ‘I get a slice of the cake.’

‘You do, Svetlana, of course you do.’ Charlie looked across at Shtyrkov. ‘We all do.’

Nobody mentioned that Hanning was excluded from the ‘we’; it was too obvious to need mentioning.

Petrie said, ‘You guys have been on this for years; I turned up two days ago. I don’t deserve an equal share.’

‘Tom, that’s not right,’ Shtyrkov said. ‘Your contribution deserves full recognition. Without it, where would we be? Your name goes on as part of the team. So does Freya’s.’

‘I’ve contributed nothing yet,’ said Freya.

‘But you will.’

‘I agree with Vashislav,’ said Svetlana. ‘We’re in this together.’

‘I feel a bit of a lemon here,’ Hanning said.

‘Nobody asked your opinion,’ Gibson said in a sudden outburst of fury.

‘Charlie,’ Svetlana chided him gently.

‘Mr Hanning, I’m sorry about this…’

‘Jeremy, please.’

‘Jeremy,’ Petrie continued. ‘But I wonder if you would leave us for a few minutes?’

‘I’m here as an observer on the authority of the Cabinet Office.’

Petrie waited.

‘But I suppose in the circumstances…’

The moment Hanning left, closing the conference door behind him with a click, Gibson spoke quietly and rapidly. ‘Monday morning we announce this jointly. We follow the IAA protocols. I send e-mails to the Secretary General of the United Nations, IAU Commission 51, et cetera.’

Shtyrkov said, ‘We should put it out on the internet. It will be round the globe in minutes. Whatever your position, Charlee, the British government cannot claim jurisdiction over me. I am a Russian. But not Monday,’ he cautioned. ‘They’ll be expecting that. Maybe pre-emption is their game. Spring a surprise. Do it sooner.’

‘Maybe their game is suppression,’ Svetlana suggested. ‘Maybe they don’t want this information to get out.’

The anger in Gibson’s face became tinged with bafflement. ‘Why not? Where’s the sense in that?’

She raised her hands. ‘Who knows?’

‘How could they suppress the secret?’ Petrie asked. ‘We all know about it.’

There was a sudden, tense silence.

Petrie said, ‘Let’s not get into fantasy here.’

… your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.

A warning, but of what and from whom?

Shtyrkov tapped the table emphatically. ‘Suppression, pre-emption, whatever. We must beat them to it. Make the announcement sooner, Charlee. Today.’

Gibson said, ‘When I go public with this I want to say the signal has come from Planet X or Star Y. Freya, how goes the identification?’

‘I may or may not have identified the source. It’s weird.’

‘How long will it take you to get one hundred per cent certainty?’

‘Never. But I’m weeding out the implausibles.’

‘With or without identification, this goes into the public domain on Monday.’

‘Today, Charlee. Don’t give them time for mischief.’

‘It’s a balance, Vash. Give Freya a chance to come up with something.’

‘I might — just — be able to decrypt more of the message,’ Petrie said. ‘I’ll work on it today.’

Shtyrkov said, ‘Svetlana, your job is distraction. Spend the day briefing this man from Her Majesty’s Government. Tell him everything. Tell him anything. But keep him out of our hair.’

Svetlana said, ‘Shall I wear fishnet tights?’