The Coincidence Engine Read online

  ‘Aarrp! Raaup!’ Alex looked at his feet. There was no sign of a bus.

  The tramp made slow progress up the road. The barking sounds he emitted sounded more and more like dry heaves with each moment that passed. And from what Alex could see out of the corner of his eye, what he was expecting to arrive on his shoulder wasn’t welcome. His eyes were rolling like those of a terrified horse.

  When he got level with Alex, whose existence he had not appeared to notice, he suddenly whipped his head the other way, so his face was pointing straight into Alex’s, and shouted: ‘BOO!’

  Alex’s stomach flipped and he jumped back in fright. He stumbled over the rucksack at his feet and landed with a painful thump on his coccyx. He scrambled to get his feet under him.

  Leaning against his shopping trolley, the tramp was wheezing with laughter.

  ‘Faggin’ aaaRRGH! Gotcha. Faggin’ liberal!’

  Alex’s face flushed with blood but, fearing violence, he snatched up his rucksack and took a step back. The tramp scissored into another burst of mirth, then apparently took fright again, and his head jerked back round to look over his shoulder.

  ‘Arrrp!’ he exclaimed, then looked piercingly at Alex.

  ‘Spare sssigarette?’ he said, sending a hot gale of rotting pilchards in Alex’s direction. There was a furze of white stubble on the bulb of his chin and his cheeks were sunken. His lips moved and ticced, flashing teeth the colour of toffee. His right hand probed under the webbing round his chest and scratched absently at his left nipple.

  ‘Hnuh? Eh?’

  Alex shook his head.

  ‘Asshole,’ said the tramp genially, and stood, left arm on the trolley, laughter passed, sizing Alex up. Alex coughed officiously and looked distractedly past the tramp down the road. There was still no sign of the bus.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. The tramp shrugged, and barked again. Alex looked at his feet. It occurred to him to whistle a thin tune, but his mouth felt dry. And then, as they stood there with Alex looking at his feet, the tramp grabbed Alex by a twist of shirt and walked in until the hot physicality of him, sour stink of skin, dried sweat, rancid mouth smell, enveloped the younger man.

  Alex’s eyes flicked up. And the everyday madness in the man’s face had been replaced by something different. He looked as if he was having a seizure. The muscles on his neck were standing up, and a coil of vein went across one.

  ‘Nobody’s here,’ he hissed. You could hear the wet breath whistling against his wrecked teeth. ‘Trust nobody. Nobody can help you. Bring them together. Bring them back. Forgive.’

  The tramp was breathing very hard now, and he had Alex clenched to his chest. But whatever he was doing wasn’t directed at Alex, apparently. His eyes were milky, absent, staring into Alex’s face as if seeing someone else there, or as if seeing someone through him. He opened and closed his jaw wordlessly. A creamy crust of foam moved where his lips met.

  Alex grabbed him by the shoulders – his skin was like dry rubber to the touch – and pushed him off. The tramp’s hand released the hank of T-shirt, leaving a smudge of dark grime.

  ‘Isla… Kara… Ana…’

  ‘Are you – are you all right?’ Alex tried. The man’s voice had changed and his face looked – grief-stricken.

  ‘Nameless,’ the tramp said then. ‘Nameless ones. All the nobodies…’

  Then something passed – whatever neurological event had upset him, whatever mental weather had passed across his brain, blew itself out. The man swayed, blinked as if confused, and then his focus found Alex again. He stepped back as if a little embarrassed, and put a tetchy, proprietorial hand on the bar of his supermarket cart.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Alex saw the bus arriving. It swung into the stop where they were standing and the door opposite the driver opened with a slap and hiss. Alex shouldered his pack and hopped quickly on, fumbling a rolled-up dollar bill into the feeder and wriggling down to the end of the bus, sitting on a hard plastic seat.

  A couple of seconds later, he heard the tramp’s voice. He had climbed onto the bus, and was now arguing with the bus driver. Alex saw him fishing in his horrible trousers and waving something at the driver.

  ‘My money stink? My money stink? Zat it? Faggin’ liberal.’

  The bus driver said something Alex didn’t catch.

  ‘…take a piss right here, lady. Just ask.’

  He started a second, more purposeful rummaging in the horrible trousers before the driver shot out an arm and snatched the note from his hand. The door slammed shut behind him.

  ‘Heh,’ he said, and ambled stinkily down the aisle of the bus. Ignoring several vacant pairs of seats, he hoisted himself into the one next door to Alex, sat down and looked straight ahead. He seemed to have stopped barking.

  ‘Spare cigarette?’ he asked, then answered his own question with a long sigh. ‘Nahhh.’

  Alex wanted to move, but he was sort of wedged in, and he didn’t like to seem impolite.

  ‘Ah, sir, your… things…’ Alex pointed at the window.

  The tramp shrugged.

  ‘Ah, none of that stuff means… it’s just stuff, you know?’ He looked as if with the slightest curiosity out of the window at his shopping cart, orphaned on the sidewalk as the bus lurched away.

  The tramp fished a single bent cigarette out of his trousers and put it in his mouth. He didn’t light it.

  ‘Don’ need bags of stuff when I got… my freedom. I can do anything, go anywhere…’ He delivered this in a tone of flat unenthusiasm. ‘Yessir. Whee. Free will. The open road.’

  He paused, apparently reflecting on all that the glorious exercise of his freedom had brought him.

  ‘Where you from, kid?’ he asked.

  Alex became conscious of a certain stiffening in the neck of the Korean girl a few seats in front. A raisin-skinned old woman down at the driver end of the bus adjusted her bag on her lap and looked pointedly out of the window. Everyone was pretending not to be listening. Alex felt acutely self-conscious.

  ‘Ah. Cambridge.’

  ‘Mass?’

  ‘What? Oh. No. England. Britain, England.’

  The tramp’s head bobbed thoughtfully.

  ‘You -’ Alex coughed – ‘know it?’

  ‘Yarp. Posted there. Inna war.’

  Another long pause, as the tramp seemed to zone out. Whenever he stopped talking his marine funk seemed to cycle chromatically through a range of species: now tuna, now kipper, now lobster-on-the-turn.

  ‘Fred,’ the tramp said.

  Alex felt himself colour.

  ‘Alex.’ He twisted awkwardly in his seat and shook Fred’s hand. Always him, he thought. Always him. How much longer was it going to be before he asked for a -

  ‘Dollar? Y’lemme a dollar, pal?’ His voice now a confidential growl.

  ‘I -’

  ‘Gotta get inna shelter. I get inna shelter I can – look…’

  Fred, surprisingly limber, ducked his head down, grabbed his own foot and levered it up on his knee. His shoe was like a Cornish pasty, split at the seams. The filling looked unappetising. He pulled it off, revealing a foot that had seen a lot of life. Its crowning glory was the nail on the big toe: a full inch long, with dry blood crusted at the base, it was the shape and colour of a tooth rather than a toenail.

  ‘Horrible,’ he said.

  ‘Um,’ said Alex.

  ‘They got clippers inna shelter. Lend me thirty bucks.’

  ‘Thirty?’

  ‘All I ask.’

  ‘I’m really terribly -’

  ‘Forty. Pal. I’m mentally ill.’

  The unlit cigarette bobbed and wagged as if it were glued to his lower lip. The back of the Korean girl’s head looked fascinated by the exchange.

  ‘I get fits. Pal. Alex. I can’t work. There’s a bullet in my brain. Right here, look.’ He grabbed Alex’s hand and guided it to a place at the top of his forehead near his hairline where there was a scar. He pushed Alex’s fingers against it
and there was a disconcerting boneless give under the skin.

  ‘Wenn in. Docs could never get it out. I pick up radio signals. Get visions. I know what’s going on. You better gimme forty dollars.’

  ‘I don’t – I’m really sorry. I haven’t got that much money. I’d like to help, but -’

  ‘Pal.’

  ‘I’ve – will this…?’ Alex pulled a note from his pocket. Shit. It was a twenty. Fred snatched it.

  ‘Humph,’ said Fred. Then: ‘Wait up.’ He produced something from his horrible trousers. It was a very, very crumpled one-dollar bill and a stub of pencil. ‘I got your change. Hah.’ He unfurled the bill and held it in front of Alex’s face. He twitched his finger and thumb, seigneurially. Alex found it very irritating.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said a moment later, snatching the bill from the air. Nineteen dollars down. And sitting next to a tramp on the bus. Alex put the bill in his pocket. It felt like their business was transacted, and they sat on in a tense silence, Alex looking out of the window and breathing, shallowly, through his mouth.

  They pulled up to a stop, finally, within sight of the wire-fenced expanse of the airport car farm.

  ‘Bye,’ said Alex.

  The tramp said something, but it was a little slurred. It sounded like ‘I’ll see you around’.

  Alex wriggled past him and walked with relief down towards the front end of the bus to alight. Fred stayed where he was, and as the door shut behind him Alex heard from the inside of the bus what sounded like the bark of a seal.

  What Hands told Red Queen about the Intercept was not what Red Queen had been expecting to hear. Not by a long chalk. What Red Queen took for signs of guilt or complicity had been, as it turned out, something entirely other. It had been embarrassment.

  His first action when asked what he knew had been to protest, in a squawk whose sheer volume spoke of outraged innocence: ‘Nothing! Nothing at all!’

  Red Queen had known, from early on, that there had been something odd about the professor’s response to the Intercept, something shifty. When put on the spot, he had gone crimson.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said, ‘by trying to humiliate me this way. But if I hadn’t been transported here in a style quite beyond the means of even my wealthiest students, I’d long since have thought this a sophomore prank.

  ‘Where did you get this from?’ he asked, in the too-shrill voice of a man who was now all bluster.

  ‘Professor Hands,’ said Red Queen, ‘where we got it from is far less important than your having written an eyewitness account of the event that is at the centre of our investigation, and then lied about it. There is a man in the hospital in Mobile with severe injuries as a result of this event – an event that we have no choice but to treat as an act of war. You have professed not to know anything about this event, or its architect, but you are one of a handful of people on earth who works, at a high level, in Banacharski’s field. At the moment you are looking very much indeed like a prime suspect. You are on the point of becoming -’ Red Queen finished with a hard stare – ‘a known unknown. And that entitles me to hand you over to some people who will be a lot less nice to you.’

  Hands had the face of a man in whom panic and bewilderment were wrestling like drunken teenagers at a pyjama party.

  ‘But I don’t know anything about this – event, as you call it. This document: I should have told you what it was but I was, I don’t know, embarrassed. It’s -’

  ‘It’s an exact description of the formation of an airplane out of a junkyard!’

  ‘It’s fiction!’

  ‘Professor Hands, I put it to you that it is not. Look.’ Red Queen’s hand stabbed, again, at the blurry satellite photograph. ‘That is an airplane. Right there. In Alabama backcountry. An airplane.’

  ‘No, I mean this has nothing to do with anything. The passage you read, yes, I wrote it. But years ago.’ The professor took his glasses off and started to clean them. The pink on his skin had intensified to the point where it was coming out in creamy spots of white at the cheeks and the angles of his forehead. ‘I wrote that a decade ago or more. It’s fiction. I was trying to write a science-fiction novel – I, I don’t know. Call it a jeu d’esprit. It’s silly. Pure nonsense. It was about someone who builds a sort of magic probability machine. That was the first page.’

  ‘A novel. Like a what – like you’d buy in a bookstore?’ said Red Queen, who knew perfectly well what a novel was, and didn’t want to bother to pretend not to know what a jeu d’esprit was.

  ‘Yes,’ Hands, now a little piqued. ‘With pages and writing. Just like you’ve probably seen on TV.’ He regrouped, replaced his glasses. ‘Mine never got as far as the bookstore stage. I considered self-publishing, but after I’d had rejection letters from a number of agents I decided that, probably, I was a mathematician not an artist.’

  The panic was leaving him. What he said next was tinged with something almost wistful.

  ‘I loved – as a child – loved reading science fiction. I was of that generation of children for who Einstein was a hero – and the lunar landings. I ended up in pure math – and that’s a whole other story – but it was science fiction that got me on the path. I had the idea I could do it myself.’ He pursed his lips a little. ‘Evidently, I couldn’t.’ After leaving it for a little while, he said: ‘So, where did you get this from?’

  ‘Nowhere, more or less. It was highly corrupt when it came in. From general surveillance. We think it was originally a fax, but it was impossible to isolate where it was coming from or where it was going.’

  ‘Well,’ said Hands, ‘I can tell you for sure that it’s nothing to do with me that it’s come to you. My only remaining copy of the manuscript has been in a cardboard box in my garage in Cambridge for years, and is likely to remain there.’

  Red Queen put on a mulling-it-over face. It was possible Hands was lying, though it seemed unlikely, and trying to work out what truth he was lying to conceal was the high road to a migraine. If this was an eyewitness account, it would have had to have been from someone standing in the middle of a hurricane. And detail after detail didn’t make sense. How could they have heard the noise above the wind?

  Red Queen felt irritable; then, not.

  ‘So this thing was written ten years ago?’

  ‘At least. At least.’

  ‘Yet it describes exactly what happened in Alabama.’

  ‘No. It describes exactly what I invented ten years ago,’ said Hands prissily. ‘It’s only you who says this thing has happened with the airplane – and only this satellite picture as evidence.’

  ‘Let us say it describes what happened.’

  ‘It had an unreliable narrator.’

  ‘Zip it. It describes what happened. And less than a week after what happened happened, someone transmitted it and it came to us. Doesn’t it slightly stretch credibility to imagine that this is a coincidence?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Hands. ‘I think I see what you’re driving at.’

  Red Queen let him run. It seemed worth giving him a little satisfaction, a moment of control.

  ‘So you’re saying,’ said Hands, ‘that a document describing an imaginary coincidence engine, arriving just after something that might be a real coincidence engine takes effect, is proof that the real coincidence engine actually exists?’

  ‘We work with what we’ve got,’ said Red Queen.

  Chapter 7

  Jones and Bree had spent the morning doing what Bree thought of as old-fashioned detective work, not that she had ever been a detective. The Mobile line of enquiry having gone nowhere, Red Queen had now told her to find this kid from England who they knew ‘the other side’ was looking for. Bree didn’t ask who ‘the other side’ was; in the DEI it could mean anything.

  Red Queen had shuffled the DEI’s ring of skeleton keys and pulled passenger manifests for commercial flights out of Atlanta. He had been supposed to be on a flight. They had staked out the airport. He hadn’t showed up
. Red Queen had also slipped into the Customs and Immigration database and found the photograph they’d taken at border control in Atlanta when he’d got off his plane from England. It showed a lean, long-jawed young man. Early twenties, tired-looking, perhaps from the flight. Tousled blond hair, a slightly off-centre nose. This was an improvement on the photograph on his Facebook profile, which was a picture of a duck.

  There had also been a few frames grabbed from the CCTV in the luggage hall. In one of them he walked in – you could only see the back of his head because of the positioning of the camera – and crossed to the luggage carousel, where he stood unhelpfully behind a pillar. He had been carrying a briefcase – apparently his hand luggage from the plane – but what he fished off the carousel had been a backpack. It had seemed odd, to Bree – people who travel with backpacks don’t usually have briefcases as their hand luggage. The camera had lost him as he went through customs.

  There was one more of him getting into a taxi at the rank outside the airport. He still had the backpack on him, and a fanny pack round his waist. But no briefcase. Bree had pointed it out when the pictures came through.

  ‘I know,’ Red Queen had said. ‘We’re working on that end of it. You stay on Smart. Don’t approach him for the moment. Just find him, and stay on him, and as soon as you do, tell me. If he’s got this thing on him, he could be… unpredictable.’

  Alex Smart’s ‘unpredictability’ was the reason, according to Red Queen, that Bree had been teamed with Jones. The current thinking about this thing, if it existed at all, which Bree somewhat doubted, was that it was somehow affected by what people around it expected.

  ‘Do you know about the observer’s paradox?’ Red Queen asked.

  ‘Is that the one with the cat in a box?’ Bree said.

  ‘I’ve got people here who know all about it. Essentially, it says that you affect something by looking at it. Or you can’t look at something without affecting it.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘I’m not the expert. It’s something to do with physics.’

  ‘If you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you,’ Bree said.