Pattern Recognition (40 page)

“Take credit, Sergei,” says Marchwinska-Wyrwal, lightly but, Cayce thinks, meaningfully. “You yourself invented much of that.”

“—involved an inherent risk of exposure,” Sergei finishes. “The work would not be viewed unless it were somehow able to attract the attention of an audience, and it was Stella Volkova’s heartfelt wish that that audience be global in scope. To that end, we devised the method you are familiar with, and we ourselves ‘found’ the first few segments.”

“You did?” Cayce and Parkaboy exchange glances.

“Yes. We sometimes, also, were able to point people in the right direction. But the result, almost from the beginning, far exceeded anything any of us had anticipated.”

“You watched a subculture being born,” says Bigend. “Evolving exponentially.”

“We hadn’t anticipated the numbers,” Sergei agrees, “but neither had we anticipated the level of obsession engendered in the audience, or the depth of the desire to solve the mystery.”

“When did you come into this, Sergei?” Parkaboy asks.

“In mid-2000, shortly after the Volkovas’ return to Moscow”

“Where from?”

“Berkeley. A private scholarship.” He smiles.

“Andrei Volkov has been particularly farseeing, in his recognition of the importance of computing,” Marchwinska-Wyrwal says.

“And what did you do, exactly, Sergei?” asks Cayce.

“Sergei was instrumental in the creation of this production facility,” says Marchwinska-Wyrwal, “as well as arranging the watermarking operation with Sigil. We are particularly interested in learning how you were able to obtain the address you used to contact Stella. Did that come through Sigil?”

“I can’t tell you,” Cayce says.

“Would that be because it came through some connection of your father’s? Or perhaps from your father himself?”

“My father is dead.”

“Wiktor,” says Bigend, who Cayce suddenly realizes has just been silent for far longer than she’s ever known him to be, “Cayce has had a very long, very trying day. Perhaps this isn’t a good time.”

Cayce lets her fork drop, ringing on the white china. “Why did you say that, about my father?” she asks, looking at Marchwinska-Wyrwal.

Who starts to reply, but is cut off by Bigend. “To dispense with being so charmingly old world about it, Wiktor and Sergei represent the two malcoordinated tips of the pincers of Volkov’s security operation. Wiktor in particular seems to have forgotten that he’s here to apologize to you for the clumsiness of its grasp.”

“I don’t understand,” Cayce says, picking up her fork. “But you’re right: I’m very tired.”

“I think I can explain,” says Sergei, “if Wiktor will allow me.”

“Please do,” says the Pole, his tone now lethally amiable.

“There have always been two security operations around Stella and Nora. One is a branch, or subsidiary, of the group that protects Volkov himself. The flavor is ex-KGB, but in the sense that Putin is ex-KGB: lawyers first, then spies. The other, largely the creation of colleagues of mine, is less conventional, largely web-based. Wiktor has been brought in very recently to attempt to sort out a serious lack of understanding, of communication, between the two. Your arrival on the scene, via your discovery of the stellanor address, is glaring proof of our difficulties.”

“But what does any of it have to do with my father?”

“You first came to their attention,” Bigend says, “when you suggested in a post that the maker might be a Russian mafia type. It was merely for example, but you struck a nerve.”

“Not with us, directly,” Sergei says, “but with a pair of American graduate students we’d hired, to search for, read, and collect commentary on the footage. Your site had quickly emerged as the liveliest, the most interesting forum. And potentially the most dangerous.”

“You paid people to lurk on F:F:F?”

“Yes. Almost from the start. We made it a rule that they weren’t allowed to post, but we later discovered that one had created a persona and had been posting quite frequently.”

“Who?” asks Parkaboy. “No,” he decides, “I’d rather not know.”

“Cayce,” Sergei says, “when you attracted our attention, a report was passed on to the more traditional arm, and that is where your father comes in. You were tracked, via your post’s ISP, your name and address determined, and logged. Somewhere, then, it rang a very old bell. They went into the paper files, in Moscow, and found your father’s dossier, and verified that you were his daughter. To further complicate things, being traditionalists,” and here he stops, and grins, “probably, I should say, simply being Russian—they became more deeply, more baroquely suspicious: that the name of this brilliant man, an old opponent, supposedly long retired, should be again before them.… But they cannot locate him. He is gone. Vanished. On nine-eleven. But is he dead? No? Where is the proof? They took certain steps.” Sergei pauses. “Your apartment was entered and devices were installed to allow your phone and e-mail to be monitored.”

“When was that?” Parkaboy asks.

“Within a week of the post that attracted the attention.”

“Someone’s been in my apartment within the past two weeks,” Cayce says.

“They were checking,” Marchwinska-Wyrwal says, “to see whether the devices had been compromised. It is routine.”

“Your psychologists records were copied,” Sergei continues. “She had absolutely no knowledge of this. Burglary, not bribery. But all of that was the traditionalist response, not ours. Ours was to employ Dorotea Benedetti to keep track of you, both through the site and through her ongoing business contacts with firms you worked for in New York.”

“Why her?” Parkaboy again. They all look at him. He shrugs.

“The traditionalists had had dealings with her previous employer,” Sergei says. “They felt they understood her. We felt she understood us.”

“She bridged the two cultures.” Bigend smiles, sips wine.

“Exactly. And when it became apparent, recently, that you were coming to London to work for Blue Ant, another bell rang. Mr. Bigend had come to our attention as well, through Blue Ant’s very creative investigation of the web culture around the footage. It registered quickly on the Sigil software we use to observe the movement of the footage. The interest of Blue Ant, and of Hubertus Bigend, for reasons that must be obvious, we found cause for concern.”

“Thank you,” says Bigend.

“The idea of both of you together, we did not like at all. The traditionalists liked it even less. We allowed them to take over our handling of Benedetti, and she was ordered to disrupt your relationship with Blue Ant. She used her own people to compromise the phone and e-mail in your London flat.”

“The man from Cyprus?” Cayce asks.

“A traditionalist, yes. Her handler.”

Cayce looks from Sergei to Marchwinska-Wyrwal to Bigend, then to Parkaboy, feeling much of the recent weirdness of her life shift beneath her, rearranging itself according to a new paradigm of history. Not a comfortable sensation, like Soho crawling on its own accord up Primrose
Hill, because it has discovered that it belongs there, and has no other choice. But, as Win had taught her, the actual conspiracy is not so often about us; we are most often the merest of cogs in larger plans.

The waiters are clearing the main course now, and bringing smaller glasses, and pouring some sort of dessert wine.

It occurs to her then that the meal has been entirely free of toasts, and that she’s always heard that a multitude of them are to be expected at a Russian meal. But perhaps, she thinks, this isn’t a Russian meal. Perhaps it’s a meal in that country without borders that Bigend strives to hail from, a meal in a world where there are no mirrors to find yourself on the other side of, all experience having been reduced, by the spectral hand of marketing, to price-point variations on the same thing. But as she’s thinking this, Marchwinska-Wyrwal taps his glass with the edge of a spoon.

“I wish to offer a toast to Miss Pollard’s father, the late Wingrove Pollard. It is an easy thing, for those of us who remember how it was, to lapse for a moment into old ways of thought, old rivalries. I did that myself, earlier, and now I must apologize for it. Had there not been men like her father, on the side of democracy and the free market, where would we be today? Not here, certainly. Nor would this establishment serve the purpose it does today, assisting the progress of art while bettering the lives and futures of those less fortunate.” He pauses, looking around the table, and Cayce wonders exactly what it is he’s doing, and why? Is it a way of covering his ass with Volkov, after having upset her? Can he actually mean this, any of it?

“Men like Wingrove Pollard, my friends, through their long and determined defense of freedom, enabled men like Andrei Volkov to come at last to the fore, in free competition with other free men. Without men like Wingrove Pollard, Andrei Volkov might languish today in some prison of the Soviet state. To Wingrove Pollard.”

And they all, including Cayce, repeat these last three words, raise their glasses, and drink, beneath the shadowed ICBMs and Sputniks of the faded mural high above.

AS
they’re leaving, Parkaboy and Bigend to accompany Cayce to the guest house, originally for visiting academicians, where the three of them are to stay the night, Marchwinska-Wyrwal excuses himself to the others and takes her aside. From somewhere he has produced a large rectangular object, about three inches thick, enclosed in what appears to be a fitted envelope of fine beige wool.

“This is something Andrei Volkov wishes you to have,” he says. “It is only a token.” He hands it to her. “I apologize again for pressing you, earlier. If we were to know how you obtained the address, we could mend a gap in the security of the Volkovas. We are very concerned now, with Sigil. But Sigil has become essential to the Volkovas’ project.”

“You suggested my father might still be alive. I don’t believe that.”

“Neither do I, I’m sorry to say. Our people in New York have studied the matter, very closely, and have been unable to prove his death, but I myself believe that he is gone. Are you certain that you will not help us, in the matter of Sigil?”

“I can’t tell you because I don’t know. But it wasn’t any weakness or betrayal at Sigil. Someone with intelligence connections did me a favor, but I don’t know its exact nature. Whatever it was, it took almost no time at all.”

His eyes narrow. “Echelon. Of course.” Then he smiles. “A friend of your father’s. I had guessed as much.”

She says nothing.

He reaches into his jacket and extracts a plain white envelope. “This also is for you,” he says. “This gift is mine. Traditionalists have their uses. Our people in New York are talented, extremely thorough, and have
many options at their disposal.” He places the envelope on the rectangular woolen parcel, which she’s still holding before her as though it were a tray.

“What is it?”

“All that is known of your father’s last morning, after he left his hotel. Good night, Miss Pollard.” And he turns away and walks back into the shadows of the oval room, where she sees Sergei has reseated himself at the candlelit table, and has removed his tie, and is lighting a cigarette.

42.
HIS MISSINGNESS

Aside from looking as though they all shop at The Gap and nowhere else, the inmates of Volkov’s rendering farm don’t seem to be required to wear a uniform. Cayce sees several, in the halls, as she s leaving with Bigend and Parkaboy, and several more as they make their way to the guest house.

The fence she’d climbed, Bigend says, has been only recently installed to prevent teenagers from the surrounding countryside from sneaking in to pilfer things.

There are usually sixty people here, he says, fulfilling their debt to Russian society by rendering, as they have been taught to do, the rough segments of footage that arrive from the Moscow studio. The physical plant, formerly a technical college, is intended to accommodate a hundred and fifty, which accounts, she supposes, for its dozy summer-session atmosphere.

“What sort of crimes did they commit?” she asks, scuffing along in her slippers, Parkaboy carrying Volkov’s gift.

“Nothing violent,” Bigend says. “That’s a requirement. Generally, they simply made a mistake.”

“What kind of mistake?”

“Miscalculated the extent of blat required, or who had it. Paid off the wrong official. Or made the wrong enemy. Sergei’s recruiters keep track of court calendars, sentencing.… It’s essential to get them before they’ve been exposed, literally, to the standard prison system. Then they undergo testing elsewhere, medical and psychological, before coming here. I suppose some don’t make it.”

Moths are whirling around the light atop a steel pole, beside the
concrete path, and the sense of being on the summer campus of some down-at-heels community college is eerie.

“What happens when they graduate?” she asks.

“I don’t believe any have, so far. The facility’s quite new, and their actual sentences are generally of three to five years’ duration. It’s all being made up as it goes along. As are many things in this country.”

The path climbs to a sparsely planted grove of young pines, screening a one-story orange brick building that resembles a very small motel. It presents them with four identical entrances and four windows. Ornate white lace curtains are drawn across the darkened windows, but there are lights on above three of the doors.

“You look bagged,” Parkaboy says, handing her the cloth-covered rectangle. “Get some sleep.”

“I know you’re exhausted,” Bigend says to her, “but we need to talk, if only briefly.”

“Don’t let him keep you up,” Parkaboy advises. He turns and enters one of the doors, without using a key. She sees the lights come on behind the lace curtains.

“They aren’t locked,” Bigend says, leading the way into the one to the left. An overhead fixture comes on as she shuffles in after him, bandaged feet smarting.

Cream walls, brown tile floor, hand-woven Armenian rug, ugly forties-looking furniture in dark veneer. She puts the woolen package down on a bureau with a mirror whose borders are decorated with frosted grooves carved into the glass.