The Lure

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.

‘Did he buy it?’ Gibson asked in a low, urgent voice.

‘He was suspicious,’ Freya suggested.

‘I thought so too,’ said Svetlana.

‘Who cares?’ Vashislav said. ‘So long as it gets Tom and Freya to the cave. Remember the count, Freya and Tom.’

‘Fifteen.’

‘It’s critical. Not fourteen, not sixteen. Apply the brakes fifteen seconds into the fall. If that works, if it stops you at the entrance to the Styx, then you have a chance.’

‘Split up as soon as you get away,’ said Gibson. ‘Take different routes. That way you’ll double the chance of success.’

Svetlana’s face was ashen. Petrie stretched over to her and held her hand, without saying a word. She looked at him, managed a smile. ‘You’ll make it, Tom? You’ll do it for us?’

He returned the squeeze of her warm, small hand. ‘If it’s humanly possible.’

Something about Hanning.

Petrie climbed the stairs to his room, locked the door and pulled out a sheet of paper from his rucksack.

That much he had pulled down from the Net within an hour of Hanning’s arrival at the castle. No woman in the man’s life, no interests or hobbies, no recorded scandals or peccadillos; just a bog-standard Civil Service career route.

But now, without warning, something jumped into his head. He had no rationale for it, but it was suddenly, obviously, blindingly true. That man isn’t Hanning. He’s our assassin.