The Coincidence Engine Page 25

  What was Jones looking at? What was the last thing his eye saw of the world? Had he been looking at her when he died? She couldn’t remember.

  Bree looked up and across the waiting area. A young black guy, lanky arms shining with sweat, was muttering and yipping. A girl in a hooded top sat with her hands folded in her lap, her lips moving silently. There was blood down one side of her face. A bulky man in a pale blue T-shirt, wedged into one of these chairs, had his right arm wound round and round with toilet roll. He was dozing, coughing out sporadic, apnoeic snores.

  There was a noise. Through the door to the outside there came a man dressed in a white jumpsuit and a dark wig with extravagant sideburns holding a wad of bloodied tissue paper to his nose. He still had his sunglasses on.

  Bree saw Alex look up, and something that might in another circumstance have been amusement passed across his face.

  ‘It’s not, honey. It’s not. Not the end of the world,’ said Bree, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. ‘Life goes on. You just feel sad for a bit. Maybe a long time. I had a husband. Marriage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’

  ‘Are you still with him?’

  ‘Had.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He left. I wasn’t easy to be married to.’

  ‘Did you love him?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bree, a flat matter of fact.

  ‘Still?’

  ‘No. Jolly Rancher?’

  Alex frowned.

  ‘It’s a candy,’ Bree said. She pulled half of a stick of Jolly Ranchers from her pocket, the paper wrapper in a spiral tatter where she had been attacking them. Alex took one, unwrapped it, put it in his mouth. It clinked against his teeth like sticky glass, then started tasting of sour artificial apple. ‘My friend liked these.’

  ‘I’m sorry about your friend,’ Alex said. Talking was making him feel – not better, exactly. But it was like not looking down. In the back of his mind there was still this sinkhole, this gap, widening, between what he had thought his future was going to be, and what it was now.

  With every passing moment, the gap got wider. It was irredeemable. Bridges crumbling and falling into the sea. Alex replayed Carey saying the one thing, the thing that was impossible: ‘Can we just forget this?’ It was done.

  ‘How does it get better?’ Alex said.

  ‘What?’ Bree had three Jolly Ranchers in her mouth and was unwrapping a fourth. The Ranchers didn’t seem to be imparting the jollity their name promised. It occurred to Alex that there was something about her – a look around her eyes? – that made him think he knew her. As if she were someone he saw often and paid little attention to, and then met in another context: like bumping into your old dinner lady in the supermarket a couple of years after you’ve left school.

  ‘Better,’ repeated Alex. ‘How long does it take?’

  ‘Long time,’ said Bree. ‘Wait. Waiting does it. Apparently.’

  ‘Look,’ Alex said. He dug a hand into his pocket, and half stood up, and out of his pocket he pulled a square box. ‘I even got a ring.’ He popped the box open.

  Bree reached out. Her fingers were chubby, her nails bitten down. She took the ring and turned it round in her hands.

  ‘Pretty,’ she said. ‘The number eight. Swirly. Ah… I’m sorry, kid.’ She drew it a little closer to her eyes. ‘What’s that written in it there?’ She indicated some scratchy markings.

  ‘Hallmark, I think.’

  ‘No. Hallmark looks different. Longer. That’s just…’ Bree angled the ring in the harsh light of the waiting room. ‘ “AB” it says.’

  Alex took the ring off her and looked at it more closely. It did – right up by where the band swooped into its figure-eight design. The letters had been worn almost to indecipherability by the warm friction of the finger that had once lived in the ring. Bree remembered something Red Queen had said.

  ‘What do those letters mean?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said truthfully. ‘I hadn’t noticed them. I bought the ring second-hand.’

  ‘Used?’

  ‘I bought it from an antique shop.’

  Banacharski’s mother was called Ana. The letters they had intercepted had gone on and on about her. She had died.

  ‘You’re lying,’ said Bree.

  The look Alex gave her – weariness mixed with fear – was enough to convince her that he was not. And if this was it – why show her? ‘Let me see it again,’ said Bree. She held it up to the light once more. On the leading edge, the metal seemed for an instant to have a diffracted blue light – a blur, as if it had slipped sideways in space.

  ‘When? Where did it come from?’

  ‘Just a shop. A shop in Cambridge. A couple of weeks ago. I happened to stop there – I saw it and I thought it might be nice to… you know. To ask her to marry me.’

  Bree rubbed her eyes. It felt like there was grit in them.

  ‘I think,’ Alex continued, ‘I – I don’t know. I don’t know what made me think she would say yes. I know she’s got… she’s much more experienced than me, is what. And she’s got what she calls “issues around commitment”. She’s said that before. She didn’t have a normal family, like I did – she was fostered when she was a teenager and never sees her birth parents. Never talks about them.’

  There was a very long silence between them. Alex drew the space blanket tighter around his shoulders, and Bree tugged at where the fabric of her blouse had wedged into her armpit.

  ‘How did you find me?’ Alex asked.

  ‘Dumb luck,’ said Bree. ‘We’d lost you. But the man who was chasing you – we had a fix on his cellphone. You can triangulate them. Good as a tracking device. He followed you and we followed him.’

  ‘How did he find me?’ said Alex. Bree shrugged. A known unknown.

  ‘I don’t know what they had on you. My boss thought they were getting information from inside our organisation. There’s a lot riding on this.’

  ‘But why did you think I had this thing of yours in the first place?’

  ‘We were watching the Banacharski Ring…’

  ‘The Banacharski Ring? It’s a web ring. An academic group. We share papers about maths.’

  ‘Ostensibly. Our cryptographers say different.’

  ‘Not ostensibly. Really. Isla -’

  ‘Isla Holderness?’

  ‘Yes, exactly. Isla set it up after she corresponded with him. It’s just a website with a discussion forum attached. My supervisor took it over when she left. He was friendly with Isla when they were at Cambridge together, before her accident.’

  ‘Uh-huh? OK. So tell me about your supervisor.’

  ‘Mike? Not much to tell. He’s a research fellow at my college. We meet for supervisions. I show him my work. Sometimes we have a drink. That’s it…’

  ‘Mike Hollis?’

  Alex looked perplexed. ‘You know him?’

  ‘No,’ said Bree. ‘Colleagues of mine were interested in him.’

  Alex shook his head. He still had no idea what was going on. He wondered where Carey was now, and then pushed the thought out of his mind.

  ‘Hollis sent an email,’ said Bree. ‘He mentioned you. He said he was leaving the ring in your hands. Shortly afterwards, you left for America. And here you are with the ring. Are we not expected to find that suspicious?’

  ‘This is a ring I bought for my girlfriend,’ Alex said, past exasperation, ‘it has nothing to do with Mike, or Nicolas Banacharski, or anybody else. I bought it. Me, at random, in a shop. Mike was leaving me in charge of the Banacharski Ring’s website while he went on sabbatical.’

  Bree thought: what a mess. None of this made any sense. Another wave of exhaustion hit her. And now, when she thought she’d been bringing a loose end in, she might have been doing the opposite. She decided all she could do was breach it.

  ‘Your girlfriend?’ Bree said.

  ‘Carey, yes.’ He added bitterly: ‘Ex-girlfriend.’

  ‘She the l
ast number you dialled on your cell?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ said Alex.

  ‘Number ending -’ Bree pulled his cellphone out of her pocket and consulted the screen – ‘137 0359?’

  ‘Give me that!’ Alex said, snatching it back from her. She let it go.

  ‘She’s on her way here,’ said Bree. ‘I called her. Said you were in trouble and to come. She sounded a little drunk. It was hard to make out whether she was taking it in. But I said you were going to be here. Said you needed help.’

  ‘What? Why?’ Alex, panicking, even through his tiredness. It felt like a humiliation – even after everything, seeing Carey was…

  ‘Because you’re in trouble, and you need help.’

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘Dead people. Me. You’re in lots of trouble.’ Bree gave it a moment, looked at her well-bitten fingernails. ‘But you’re right. It wasn’t for you, not strictly, that I called her. I thought she was your connection here. I thought you were going to pass the machine over to her.’

  Alex started to say something, but she interrupted. ‘Yeah, yeah. I know. There’s no machine. You’re here to see your girlfriend. You don’t know what I’m talking about…’

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. He was standing now. Fidgeting with his hands. His cheeks looked like they had been gouged from limestone. He wasn’t acting like someone who had been caught by a government agency trying to smuggle a weapon through a strange country. He was acting like somebody who was unbearably miserable at the prospect of confronting his ex-girlfriend.

  Bree made a decision. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘Go. You don’t need to be here.’

  ‘But I thought…’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Bree. She shrugged, but didn’t smile. ‘So did I. This whole thing started as a mess and now it’s a worse one. Go. I know where you are. Go get some sleep.’ Bree did not add that, having been through Alex’s wallet and tagged his mobile phone, she knew how to find him if she needed to. ‘Enjoy Vegas,’ she added.

  She watched as he walked towards the wide doors. The security guard watched him walk through, then looked back to Bree, then scratched his gut and rearranged his shoulders. That probably figured. Still no police. Perhaps miracles did happen.

  Bree leaned back in the seat, comfortable as she could get, and let her eyes close.

  Chapter 23

  ‘Something odd.’ It was Porlock, standing at Red Queen’s desk. Red Queen didn’t remember him having had the courtesy to knock on the door. ‘Look.’

  He put a sheet of paper on the chewed red leather of the desk. It was a stock chart, showing a company’s share price falling off a cliff.

  ‘MIC. Last fifteen minutes. We’ve been watching them – ever since this started. But this you could get on the evening news. The chief investor just dumped all their stock on the market. All of it. It’s bad. A cascade effect. The stock’s toxic.’

  ‘Is the government invested?’ asked Red Queen innocently.

  Porlock looked sarcastic.

  ‘Every government that buys or sells arms is invested. The consequences could be-’

  ‘For who? The consequences for who?’

  ‘Everyone,’ said Porlock, whose usual expression of imperturbability had given way to one that looked almost ironical. Porlock, it occurred to Red Queen, would look ironical aboard the Titanic. ‘This will go through the world economy like a hurricane. Contracts cancelled, jobs lost.’

  ‘This investor…’ said Red Queen.

  ‘Nobody knows about him,’ said Porlock. He swung his hand back and forth in front of his chest like a paddle. ‘Nobody knew he even existed until recently. There were so many institutional investors in the company that who bothered to check which was what? Until this started happening, and a lot of forensic accounting was done very fast and in breach of all ethics and international agreements. The simultaneous stock dumps. It looked like a concerted attack. Each of them traced back several layers. A name associated with a network of accounts in Switzerland. Sleeping partner. Seemingly bottomless pockets. If there was a share loose, he bought it.’

  ‘Nazi gold?’ asked Red Queen.

  ‘Nothing that simple, I don’t think. Nor that small-time. The Nazis didn’t have that much gold. MIC was in trouble by ’99, sure – not much more than a think tank attached to a logo. There’d been bad press about its wartime history and, like everyone, a lot of investment in new tech that turned out to be imaginary. But it was still an arms company: still big. Still not the kind of thing you take control of with pocket change.

  ‘The last decade saw it turn into what it is now. Everyone assumed that whoever was buying it knew something others didn’t, so they bought too. Everyone assumed it was just a successful company, which it was.’

  ‘Who is this investor?’ Red Queen asked. ‘We have no file on him? Seriously?’

  ‘No. Not one. But his name comes up in connection with Banacharski. He’s called Fred Nieman.’

  Red Queen thought. ‘The man who was due to visit Banacharski before he disappeared. Mentioned in the letters.’

  ‘And,’ said Porlock, ‘the name Banacharski himself used to sign his final letter.’

  Red Queen raised one eyebrow. In the windowless room there was a sense of something coming to an end. ‘You think Banacharski’s alive?’

  ‘Nobody ever found a body,’ said Porlock. ‘And MIC paid him a lot of money over the years. What do you suppose he did with it? Under any number of guises, through third, fourth, fifth, to the Xth-term parties, Nieman’s fronts had been buying shares in MIC steadily since the beginning of 1999. He didn’t work for MIC. He owned it. Had a controlling interest within a couple of years, if you added it all up. Did nothing with it. No record of any involvement in board meetings, not through any of these fronts, and, you know, agencies like ours – governments, senior pols – it’s the sort of thing we’d expect to know. All that happened was the money came in, and made more money, and now it’s gone.’

  Red Queen struggled with the thought. Nieman had been buying stock since around the time of Banacharski’s last disappearance. But where would he have got this sort of money? The company had gone up in value by powers of ten since then – but that holding, still… it would have cost.

  ‘They can’t have paid him that much money. Not nearly that much money. There aren’t more than a handful of individuals on the face of the earth with that much money. And why reinvest it? And why take it out? Why would anybody build it up just to destroy it?’

  While he talked, Red Queen moused over the computer. There were jagged red lines on graphs, excitable reporters, flashes of men in dealing rooms with their ties held out sideways from their necks like nooses, shouting. It seemed a wonder planes weren’t falling out of the sky.

  ‘Never bright confident morning again,’ Red Queen said flatly. ‘Where’s the money gone?’

  Porlock shrugged. ‘MIC will be lucky to last until the exchange closes this afternoon,’ he said. ‘No government’s going to risk trying to bail it out.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘They’ve got game theorists on it. Your department, usually. But, no. Bottom line – nobody wants to jump first. They’d rather just watch the dominoes go down; hope the bomb drops everywhere.’

  Porlock moved his hand to his tie, straightened it.

  ‘Not good news for you, Porlock,’ said Red Queen. ‘Is it?’

  ‘Not good news for anyone,’ Porlock repeated.

  ‘Especially bad for you.’ Here, Red Queen sent out a questing thumb to scratch diffidently, almost coquettishly, at the scratched leather of the desktop. Looked down, then up again. ‘Not sure you’ll get paid, after all this, though I imagine you’ve thought of that yourself.’

  Porlock frowned. The lightbox on the wall of the room gave his face an unhealthy lustre, reflected as twin white rectangles on the balls of his eyes. He looked wary. Red Queen continued.

  ‘Your friend Ellis is going to be out of a job, isn’t he?’ Porlock’s compos
ure started to break. ‘And I don’t think there’s much chance of anyone getting a finder’s fee now, is there? Money’s a little tight over there…’

  ‘I still don’t follow you,’ said Porlock, although he did.

  ‘…and if I’m frank about it, I’m not sure how much use we’re going to have for you now there’s no MIC for you to pass information to. You’ve served your purpose, as far as the Directorate is concerned.’

  ‘You’re accusing – me – of passing information to MIC?’

  ‘Only the information I wanted passed,’ said Red Queen. ‘But, yes. Very much so.’ Red Queen picked up the telephone and spoke without dialling: ‘Porlock’s out. Call in Our Friends to pick him up for that talk. Yes. Thank you.’ Replaced the receiver.

  Porlock bridled. Red Queen looked at him directly, without emotion.

  ‘You’ll find your canteen card has been revoked.’

  Bree jerked awake. She heard her own mouth slap shut, and felt the pig-belch of an interrupted snore detonate in her throat. The green-white sub-aqua light of the waiting area hurt her eyes. She closed them again.

  For an instant, she was in and out of sleep. Her thoughts had been sinking down through layers. She was in and out of a sheaf of fragments. Jones’s eye, filling with blood, black in the moonlight. Watery recursions: standing at a table, drinking fast and anxiously, someone always about to come in. And then, again, the death-dream: the walls peeling away and the gathering roar of voices.

  ‘…Nobody knows where he is…?’ was a phrase that cut over, in a voice she seemed to know, from nearby. She opened her eyes, and her neck ached, and the ceiling was still there, attached to each wall by a right angle.

  ‘My boyfriend. He’s hurt. Someone called me from this hospital. Where the hell is he?’

  The voice came, high on the air through the noise of the room – a girl still not long out of her teens, high and hysterical and slightly slurred, somewhere on the other side of the room. Bree didn’t know why, but as soon as her dream slipped away, something cold entered her diaphragm and stayed there. Her head moved to find the source of the sound. She felt the room retreating from her.