Transmission: Ragnarok: Book Two (23 page)

‘I … yes. If you want me to.’

Damn it, she was going to give the game away. But then Ilse’s face blanked out, and he kissed her.

Run now, my darling
.

She nodded, and made her way up the steps. Once out of sight, she would have to move fast.

Gérard said, ‘We’ve made up a new batch of leaflets. We need to think about whether to place them around the Old Town again, or go further afield.’

Wahlberg was smiling in a way that Erik did not like.

You’re a creature of the darkness. Are you a Nazi too?

The one other man he had met like this, Dmitri Shtemenko, had been a Bolshevik agent who had saved Gavriela’s life – his sister, who might be alive or dead and he would never know.

‘Leaflets.’ Wahlberg’s expression was half-smile, half-sneer. ‘I thought this group did more than leave seditious bits of paper lying around.’

‘It’s a bullet in the head regardless,’ said Gérard.

Wahlberg was holding Erik’s stare.

‘Kill him,’ said Erik, addressing Gérard.

‘What?’

But a crash from upstairs meant the opportunity had passed. Boots clattered, louder as they neared the cellar stairs.

Knowing exactly which way to come.

They had breakfast in a Lyons Tea House in Kilburn where noise bounced off the ceiling in the steamy atmosphere, filled with the cheerful clatter of cutlery and the chatting of the clientele; and if it were not for the tape criss-crossing the windows and the number of people in uniform, you might have thought it was peacetime.

Rupert sat with his legs crossed. Brian had pushed his chair a little way back from the table. Gavriela tried to read the unspoken context of their conversation before her arrival, and failed. From the questions they had asked in debriefing, Brian had not known about the message that she had decrypted, but Rupert possibly had. Did that mean it had been planted for her to act on?

Alone with Brian, there had been no discussion of her actions, beyond his comforting her in the aftermath of shock. And the lovemaking, rough and urgent and a surprise to them both.

‘Last night’s shenanigans,’ said Rupert now, ‘weren’t what anyone expects, not here.’

Their language had to remain oblique, because of eavesdroppers; but they were far enough from Baker Street that no SOE personnel were likely to be here, and Gavriela thought that was deliberate.

‘Am I in trouble?’ What she wanted to ask was, were they were going to arrest her? ‘Because of what happened?’

Brian’s face tightened. She hoped it meant he would fight her cause.

‘Considering what you prevented,’ said Rupert, ‘you’re a heroine, and that’s exactly how you’ll be described in our reports.’

She did not feel like a heroine. Nor did she imagine his report mentioned hypnosis of a kind that no psychologist would recognize. But so long as the four guards were not blamed, she did not see how twisting the truth could matter, not in a file that few people would ever read.

‘Too bad we got nothing from the blighter.’ Rupert shrugged his elegant shoulders. ‘But
nostra culpa
, not yours, don’t you see?’

‘Gabby did a good job.’ Brian’s pale face began to colour. ‘More than anyone could expect.’

‘Indeed.’ Now the raised eyebrow. ‘I believe that’s what I just said.’

Rupert’s manner was beginning to annoy Gavriela, but she quelled the feeling. If this was provocation, it was likely to be deliberate. Bletchley Park had its share of chess grandmasters, but Rupert played all of life as if it were a game.

‘And this is not the first such person’ – Rupert’s searchlight gaze swung to her – ‘you’ve come across, is that right?’

‘There was a man called Dmitri in Berlin, as I told Brian. Plus a Nazi rabble-rouser, once.’

She did not want to say anything about the man’s identity, partly because she needed Rupert to believe her sane, partly because she did not want to give the appearance of an excuse to a murderous psychotic whose power derived from a conscious understanding of mass psychology and practised oratory as much as inductive hallucination. Or so she believed.

‘So they’re not all Nazis, then.’ Rupert pronounced it in the Churchillian manner:
nah-zees
. ‘Are you saying they’ve an agenda of their own? Or are they separate individuals who just happen to manifest similar odd attributes?’

Gavriela blinked. So did Brian.

He’s taking it seriously
.

You would think Rupert had considered this over an extended period of time. Then again, he would have studied Nazi mysticism, to the extent that it drove the regime’s plans for conquest.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Separate, I think … But it’s a feeling, no more.’

‘Well, regardless.’ Rupert lowered his voice. ‘I’m driving to BP this morning. I’ll give you a lift.’

Brian said, ‘There’s no way I can get back, with this thing I’m seconded to.’ He looked at Gavriela. ‘I’ll see you next week, most likely.’

‘I’ll … see you then.’

Did she want to kiss him? In public, without Rupert’s presence, she thought the answer might have been yes. As it was, her movements felt shut down, her body tight.

As they left the tea-house, both men donned their hats and nodded to each other. Then Rupert took Gavriela’s arm, and they walked off in one direction, while Brian went the other way.

I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel
.

Something that happened far too often in her life.

No one said anything the next day in Hut 27: nothing about signals regarding some darkness, nothing about Gavriela’s trip to London. Clive had returned, and was working on new intercepts with no mention of half-finished work from days before. During a break when Gavriela happened – by apparent chance – to find herself alone in the room, she hovered by Clive’s desk but did not open the drawer.

They had given her a second chance. She needed to take it.

That night she walked back into Bletchley village with Rosie, who chatted about the trivia of her day. Gavriela, in the back of her mind, was ruminating on maths the way physicists often do: wondering at the way the right mathematical tools so often existed in advance of science finding a reason for using them, meaning mathematicians had explored such lofty abstract thought-spaces with no original connection to reality. Here in BP she had witnessed feats of mathematical reasoning – counter-intuitive statistics, rigorous Boolean logic, the depths of group theory – that she would find hard to explain to an outsider, even if she were allowed. But Rosie kept her grounded in reality.

‘I had a letter from Jack yesterday! It was there when I got home last night.’

‘That’s great, Rosie. Is he all right?’

‘He’s fine, and getting a tan, he says.’ Rosie took out a small, lace-edged handkerchief, waving it in the gloom. ‘Got my initials, see?’

There might have been a curlicued
RD
, but the night was too dark to be sure.

‘Jack bought the hankie on leave, and sent it—’

Rosie dabbed at one eye.

‘He says we’ll get married when he’s home.’

‘Oh, Rosie.’

They both stopped. Gavriela hugged her.

‘He’ll be OK,’ she said. ‘He’ll be OK.’

But they both knew, in the sudden randomness of wartime, that letters from servicemen took time to arrive, and sometimes the sender was already dead or maimed when their sweetheart read those cheery words.

Rosie stepped back, sniffing.

‘Now all we need,’ she said, ‘is to get
you
a nice young gentleman, and we’ll be sorted.’

‘Maybe,’ said Gavriela.

They walked on, while she remembered the overwhelming lust for coupling that overtook her in the Tube station and the night that followed, all of it dislocated from her normal world; and she wondered whether it was romance or something more primal, and whether that made a difference.

‘How about a nice cup of acorn tea?’ Rosie’s place was close, not quite on Gavriela’s way home, but near enough. ‘I’ve got a book you can borrow. I didn’t finish it myself, but you might like it.’

‘Love to.’

That night, Gavriela sat up in bed, reading her borrowed copy of
The White Company
, the slipcover worn grey and disintegrating at the edges. Whenever she paused, her thoughts would shift to Professor Challenger, then to the real Professor Möller whose leonine mane and clear gaze had been the personification of that fictitious scientist-hero; and she hoped that he remained safe in Zürich, though in the long term, in the face of the thousand-year Reich, neutrality had to be an ephemeral dream.

A photograph slipped out. Its edges were wave-like in the way special mementoes often were. Gavriela had occasionally wondered whether they were cut with sinusoidally edged scissors or something else, but never pursued it. The man in the picture wore dark naval uniform, aiming a long-jawed grin at the camera.

On the back, inscribed in careful copperplate, were these part-faded words:

She stared at it for a long time, then put book and photo aside, switched off the light, and lay back, wondering if it had always been like this: years of peaceful idyll that no one appreciated at the time, interwoven with periods of desperation when violence and contingency ruled life and death, and certainty was vanished from the world.

Gavriela woke in her pliable, crystalline body, stretched in a way her older organic self could not have imagined, and rolled off the bier, onto her feet. The familiar vacuum was a comfort. The wall-mounted weapons tempted her, but she walked past them into the main hall.

Roger and Kenna were manipulating a many-dimensioned maze of silver lines that floated above the conference table. Trick perspectives and something more granted it an exotic, impossible architecture. Here and there, points radiated five, six … up to nine straight lines that shimmered like this: each pair of lines appeared to form a right angle, no matter which pair she focused on, so that after a time, the mutual orthogonality appeared to spread, to be a natural feature of all the lines simultaneously.

A refracted spectrum slid across Kenna’s smile.

—
You can see why we need Roger
.

Gavriela put her hand on Roger’s shoulder.

—
I knew there had to be a reason
.

—Thanks, Gavi. I love you too
.

The complex image, had it been topological and not geometric – graph rather than shape – would have matched some long-gone memory, some resonance from Gavriela’s past. It resembled …

—
What’s the importance of computation, Kenna?

—
In what we do? Nothing and everything
.

—
It seems I knew … Was I at some kind of nexus? The people I met were key, weren’t they? Not just pioneers, but important in the course of human—

Kenna held up a glimmering hand.

—
You were in a closed profession where everyone knew everyone else. Don’t speculate beyond that
.

—But I was at the beginning of—

—
Yes, and that is why speculation is so dangerous. The wrong information surfacing to your conscious mind back then would be disastrous
.

Gavriela waved at the surrounding hall.

—
To all of this?

—
No, to you. The universe is more robust
.

Roger, with a series of control gestures, collapsed the silvery graph into a fist-sized ball, then to a bright point which he twisted out of existence.

—
So what now?

Kenna touched them both on the upper arm.

—
Why don’t you take a walk out on the surface, both of you?

A walk with Roger on the surface of the moon. There was nothing that Gavriela wanted more; but Roger gave a crystalline frown.

—
Are you trying to get rid of us, Kenna?

She could as easily have banished them back to unconsciousness, but Roger was right: Kenna had some purpose in mind.

—
Our newest member is about to arrive. You two can come back and meet him, but it would be best if I greet him alone on waking
.

Gavriela looked at Roger, at the minute interplay of light behind his transparent face.

—
Let’s take that walk
.

The pain of a thousand blades coming down, the intricate agony of slivers cut from him, reducing him, with no way to deaden the torture because sharing his full, untainted self was all, the reason for putting himself in death’s way. It ached, it hurt, it burned across millennia—

Sharp pulled himself awake.

—
Greetings, good Sharp
.

Oceans of agony ebbed, pulling back until he could function once more, though his memory of pain was permanent. Rolling his eyes, he saw his antlers had become like glass, sculpted transparency, while the rest of him … He held up his clear hands, bending all four thumbs, wondering why he was not afraid.