“Radioactive?” Bevan shouted. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Remember all those films they used to make about what the world would be like after a global nuclear war?” he called. “It’s like that there.”
5
D
URING HIS FIVE
minutes or so in the Campus, Challis had managed to shoot thirty still photographs and about three minutes of video, and they all made chilling viewing.
They showed an apocalyptic landscape of bare, blasted trees and snow, except it wasn’t snow, according to Challis. It was ash. Like volcanic ash. Soft and greyish white and still drifting down from a sky that looked like a special effect for a terrible science fiction horror film.
“Nuclear winter,” said one of Bevan’s pet physicists, brought in and hurriedly briefed. “This is what happens when you detonate a number of nuclear devices in a universe two hundred miles across. Like starting a fire in a snow-globe. When can I go in?”
He was quietly returned to academe, with what Shaw described as the industrial-strength version of the Official Secrets Act in his briefcase.
“Well,
this
is a turn-up,” said Bevan. “They’re a nuclear power.”
With the release of the first transcripts of Rupert’s debrief, the Perigee Committee had begun to swell discreetly. Where once it had just been Jim and Bevan and Shaw, now there were various scientists and researchers and other, less identifiable, participants. The Committee had adopted a strategy called ‘encapsulation,’ in which different aspects of the Tombola product were only released to those who were specialised in it. Today’s capsule included a man in RAF uniform, his chest covered in medal ribbons, and another man, to whom he deferred. Jim had no idea who any of these people were, and it made him uneasy, like seeing a quaint cottage industry move into a shiny new factory. It made him think of asset strippers and other, less worthy things.
Beside him, Bevan sat gloomily poking at her tablet. He glanced over and saw that she was Googling radiation poisoning again. The consensus of opinion was that Captain Challis was going to survive his brief visit to the Campus, at least in the short term. He was going to have to be checked for cancer for the rest of his life.
“How are we going to proceed now?” Shaw asked the committee.
“The on-site team are working to establish what the radiation levels are on the other side of the tributary,” Jim said.
“How long is that going to take?”
“As long as it takes,” he told her. “They’re making things up as they go along.” Lew Hines’s latest bright idea was to fix radiation measuring gear on a petrol-driven replica of
HMS Hood
– a child’s toy bought at a local shop – and sail it up the tributary trailing a long piece of string to tow it back with. He thought it was ridiculous enough to work, if the boat could overcome the current.
“So we can’t mount any more incursions until we know how safe it is,” Shaw said.
Everyone looked down the table to where the scientists were sitting. The scientists looked at each other and shrugged.
“Not enough data,” said one of them, a man named Merson. “The images suggest a massive event, but without more information we can’t make an accurate assessment. We’re running simulations on the effects of nudets in such a confined area, but the math is tricky. We’re having to use estimates.” Merson liked using words like ‘nudet’ – short for ‘nuclear detonation.’ Jim didn’t like Merson.
“We’ve done a sweep of the area and there’s no increase in the local background radiation,” said another of the scientists, a woman Jim didn’t recognise. “Not even at the mouth of the tributary. Until the field team’s results come in, we won’t be able to make a judgement.”
“Well
you’re
no fucking use, then,” Bevan muttered under her breath, just loud enough for Jim to hear.
“Have we considered sending personnel in wearing NBC suits?” asked the RAF man.
“Not safe,” said Merson. “Not till we have the radiation levels. Ideally, we’d wait for the fallout to settle as well. The detonations and resulting fires may have depleted oxygen levels over there. The atmosphere may be unbreathable.”
One of the theories the committee had come up with was that the Trent tributary was not the only route in and out of the Campus. An early plan had been to infiltrate the pocket universe and look for other routes, which might possibly lead them into the Community. The prospect of trying to do that now, in that awful landscape, wearing nuclear/biological/chemical protection suits and breathing gear, was madness. Bevan had vetoed it the moment she and Jim had returned from Nottingham.
Shaw scratched her head. “Delahunty told our source about another route, one that led to Ernshire.”
Jim nodded. “The branch off the main railway line out of Paddington. We think it’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Decommissioned. Possibly under Beeching. We’re looking for it.”
Shaw looked at the committee. “We appear to be at a bit of an
impasse
, then, don’t we.”
“Delahunty told him there had been contact between us and them,” Jim said.
“If there was contact with us, it ended when the Whitton-Whytes died out,” Shaw pronounced crisply. Jim felt Bevan, beside him, stir and gaze balefully at the woman.
“The presumed assassination attempt suggests they’re aware that the source escaped,” said someone down the table. “Could that be the reason for the bombs?”
“That just went onto my Top Five Stupidest Things I Ever Heard list,” Bevan said, and there was a little commotion at the other end of the table until Shaw raised a hand.
“Please,” she said. “Could we refrain from ad hominem remarks?” She turned to Jim and asked, “How is the investigation going, by the way?”
Jim glanced at Bevan, who was fuming silently. He said, “Still no sign of the attacker. The source believes it may have been an attack by an émigré group, but to be honest with you I can’t see how anyone would know he was here. Or indeed how anyone could know Delahunty was there.”
“She used her phone,” someone else said.
Everyone looked at the speaker, a casually-dressed young woman who had so far not said a single word.
“It says in the briefing document that Delahunty used her phone several times, to convince the source and others that the Science Faculty had access to mobile phone technology,” she went on. “The final time, they used her phone to target a missile. The phone would have identified her.”
Jim closed his eyes and sighed.
Smoking gun
, he thought.
“So we’re theorising that the Science Faculty ID’d her phone, passed the information to someone in the Community, and they passed it on to an intelligence cell here, which used the information to identify Delahunty and turn her flat over?” said Shaw.
Bevan chuckled, very quietly.
Shaw looked around the table. She said, “Tenuous. Very tenuous. They could have been watching Delahunty’s flat because they already knew her brother was in the Campus.”
“They’d have realised she’d gone missing then,” Jim said. “Why not break in and search the place at the first opportunity, rather than waiting until now?”
“Is there really any evidence that it was done recently?” asked Shaw. “Really?”
Jim had a sense of angels dancing on the heads of pins, the Committee overthinking itself.
“We’re not really making any headway here, are we,” said Shaw, as if reading his mind. “Perhaps we should adjourn and reconvene tomorrow, when we all have fresher minds?”
“Has anyone told the source yet?” asked the woman.
I
T WAS ALMOST
eleven when he finally got home. The car dropped him outside his garden gate and drove off, but he didn’t go in immediately. All the lights were off, which meant his wife and stepson had already gone to bed. If she was feeling particularly forgiving, his wife would have left something for him to eat in the oven. But those occasions were becoming rarer and rarer. Most of the time, he ate at the subsidised canteen at Northumberland Avenue, or had a late lunch with Bevan in a restaurant somewhere, and if he still felt peckish he made himself a sandwich when he got home.
He stood by the gate and smoked a cigarette, trying to get up the nerve to go in.
Here I am, a member of His Majesty’s Security Service, afraid of a row
. But it was more than that. It wasn’t just one row; it was a succession, an unending line of rows. About the late hours he was working, how he didn’t talk to her, how he didn’t spend any time with his stepson, how every time she tried to organise a family outing he was ‘busy’. She knew he worked for the Service – he’d decided very early on in their relationship that he was going to tell her – but until Rupert came into his life he had been working more or less regular hours. Now there was no telling where he would be from one day to the next, or whether he would get home at all. It went without saying that his wife was not, and never would be, Perigee-cleared.
He finished his cigarette and flipped the end out into the street, where it landed in a little burst of sparks. One of the neighbours, out walking his dog, spotted this minor act of rebellion and sucked his teeth noisily as he went by.
Shaking his head, Jim walked up the path to the front door and offered his key to the lock. The key would not go into the lock. Thinking he’d inadvertently tried to use one of his other keys, Jim searched around his key ring until he found the right one, and tried again. Once more, the key refused to go into the lock.
Jim took out his phone and switched it on, and by the screen’s illumination he saw that the lock was brand shiny-new.
“A
H,
J
IM,
J
IM,
” Bevan sighed.
Jim sprawled on the sofa, feeling a weird heady mixture of abandonment and relief. He drank some of Bevan’s Scotch. “She must have done it after I left for work this morning,” he said.
From the comfort of her armchair, Bevan shook her head.
He had spent ten minutes trying to phone his wife, and the only response he had been able to get was a text reading ‘Fuck off.’ Then he had spent another twenty minutes trying to work out where to go for the night, on the theory that a night’s sleep would do everyone the world of good and he could sort this out in the morning.
Bevan lived in Shepperton, in a chaotic old house full of books and amateur oil paintings and threadbare furniture. There was a cat, an alarming-looking Persian named Guillaume, which had hissed and snarled at him when he first entered the house and then wandered off somewhere, but no Mr Professor Bevan. Jim closed his eyes and put his head back against the cushions and willed the sofa to consume him whole.
“You can stay here tonight, Jim,” Bevan told him. “On the sofa. But tomorrow you have to try and sort this out. She’s not allowed to lock you out of your own home.”
“There’s a very strong smell of garlic in this house,” Jim said without opening his eyes. “Garlic and... is that rosemary?”
“Jim.”
“I know.” He opened his eyes. “I know, Adele. I’m sorry. I’ll find a B&B to move into tomorrow.”
Her expression softened. “Here,” she said, getting up from her chair. “Let me show you something.” She went over to one of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and took a slim cloth-bound volume from it. She handed it over. “Something wonderful,” she said.
Jim looked at the title of the book. It seemed to be a guidebook to English and Scottish holiday spots around 1943, a series of black and white plates with short descriptions under them. He flipped through the pages, closed the book, then opened it again and stared at one picture in particular.
Bevan beamed. “To our knowledge, it’s the only existing photograph anywhere of the Community.”
He looked at the cover again. “Where did you find it?”
“Someone gave it to me. About thirty years ago. They said they’d got it from someone who had been to the Community. Or came from there. We never quite got to the bottom of it. That’s how I got into all this in the first place.” She shrugged. “For all I know, it’s fake. There’s no way to check, without going there.”
“Does Shaw know you have this?”
Bevan shook her head and went back to her chair. “Not yet, and I imagine she’s going to be quite upset when they find out I do.” She sat down and said, “In a way, I’m quite glad your missus locked you out, Jim. It gives us a chance to talk. You see, I’ve had an idea.”
6
“N
O,
”
SAID
S
HAW.
“Absolutely not. I can’t possibly sanction this.”
“We’re at a dead end with the Campus,” Bevan said. “It could be months before we can even go in there. We need to try something else.”
“What about the assassination attempt?” Shaw asked. “There are
gigabytes
of footage of the attack floating around online.”
“We’ve more or less discounted the idea of an assassination attempt,” Jim said, ignoring Bevan’s stirrings of protest. “And none of the available footage actually shows Rupert’s face. Most of it isn’t of very good quality anyway, truth be told. We believe he won’t be recognised.”
This time it was just the three of them, the original Committee, sitting in a quiet side-room at Northumberland Avenue. Very very dimly through the thick glass and thicker net curtains of the windows, Jim thought he heard a boat on the river sounding its horn.
Shaw was shaking her head again. “No,” she said. “No. What about these people Delahunty claimed to have spoken with? The Community conspiracy nuts. The ones who gave her the maps.”
“Gone to ground,” Jim answered. “If they ever existed.”
“If she had maps, they came from the Community,” Bevan said. “Or they were drawn by someone who had been there. We shouldn’t stop looking for them. But they could be
anywhere
. They’ve been under the radar for
years
. I’d never heard of them, and I’m the closest thing you had to an expert on the Community until Rupert arrived. We don’t know where to start looking, and we
can’t wait
. If Delahunty was right and the Xian Flu originated in the Campus, we need to know what they’re playing at, and we need to know it now.”