Revelation

27 DNA

Past the passport control, Findhorn looked warily at the humanity in transit around him. He steered Romella towards a quite corner. She looked at him in surprise but said nothing.

Findhorn licked dry lips. He said, 'Ten men on the berg. Then Hansen. And now Petrosian's brother. Twelve dead and I'm on Matsumo's hit list. Maybe even the CIA's, if they kill people. I don't see any way out of this. What's my survival time, Romella?'

'Fred, don't crack up now.'

'Somebody has Petrosian's secret, and we haven't a clue about it. Where does that leave us?'

Romella stayed silent, and Findhorn continued, his stomach knotted. 'And where do you come into this, Romella? Have you made an alliance with someone?'

'It's not the way it looks,' Romella said. She added, 'Fred, you have to trust me.'

'Why?'

He found the coolness in her voice disturbing: 'You have no other choice.'

Two armed policemen were strolling at the far end of the terminal. Findhorn found reassurance in the sight. 'There may be people here who want to do me harm.' She put her arm in his. 'We can lose them.'

Three taxis and an hour later, they found themselves a small table in the Black Swan near Egham, overlooking the Thames. Findhorn came back with coffees. 'We've lost the game, right?' It was his first remark since the airport.

Her face was grim. 'How can I put this gently? If we have, you're dead.'

Findhorn stared.

She poured the coffee. 'How can Matsumo be sure you haven't worked out the Petrosian secret from the diaries, enough to put a patent together? He almost has to erase you some time in the next day or two. What choice does he have, Fred? Believe me, you're being intensively hunted.' She scanned his face closely. 'By the way, have you worked out the secret?'

Over Romella's shoulder, he saw an elderly couple clambering out of a motor launch at a lock. They were doing things with a tow rope but didn't seem very sure of themselves. A small black mongrel on the cabin roof was watching them with interest.

'And where do you stand?'

She was spreading butter on a scone. 'I'm a translator.'

'I want to trust you.'

Romella stayed silent, then said, 'You're keeping something back.'

'It's true.'

She took a bite at the scone. 'Fred, why did you cut a piece of hair from Anastas?'

'Petrosian wasn't on that plane.'

Romella froze, coffee cup halfway to her lips.

'There were two bodies in that wreckage. The pilot's body was at the controls, and the other body wasn't that of Petrosian.'

'Don't worry, Fred, I'll look after you. I'm beginning to like you.'

'The body in question was blue-eyed. Petrosian was trans-Caucasian, an Armenian with Turkish and Persian ancestry. His eyes would have been brown.'

'And you've been keeping this to yourself from day one?'

'I also kept back a corner of a diary cover. It has dried blood on it. And here, as you say —' he tapped his top pocket '— I have a clip of hair from Anastas Petrosian's body. I'm going to try for a DNA comparison.'

'Fred, how did you see inside that iceberg? There were lights, right?'

'Yes, arc lights. And there was a torch. His face was a foot away from mine.' The memory of the hideous face came back to Findhorn.

Behind her round spectacles, Romella's brown eyes were a picture of scepticism. 'Doesn't ice look blue in a strong light? Maybe it was playing tricks on you.'

'Some day I'll write a book about what ice looks like and what it does. Meantime the eye was blue and that wasn't Petrosian. I don't know what happened on that Canadian lake. But somehow Petrosian's diaries climbed on board and he didn't.'

'Maybe they threw him out over the north pole.'

'My bet is he just vanished into the woods. Maybe he made a deal with the Russians. Atomic secrets — maybe his secret — in exchange for a new identity. They were fooling the FBI into thinking he'd vanished behind the Red Curtain. The old Petrosian dead, the new one starting a fresh life.'

She acquired a thoughtful look. 'Let's go along with your fantasy for a moment. Do you propose we search for one man who's been missing for fifty years, somewhere on the planet? Someone who'd been given a fresh identity and is therefore totally untraceable? Who's probably now dead? And if he's alive and we find him, what then? Do you think he'll just reveal all, assuming he's not totally gaga by now?'

Behind Romella, the motor launch, the couple and the dog were sinking below eye level. The dog was yapping excitedly, tail wagging. Under the table, her foot rubbed against his leg.

'Hello, is that the Hsu Clinic?'

'Yaais.' Middle-aged female, stockbroker-belt English. Findhorn visualised heavy-frame spectacles, hair tied up in a bun, a disapproving mouth.

'I want to check up on the relationship between two people.'

At first, Findhorn thought he had been switched over to a machine: 'Thank you for calling the Hsu Clinic your requests are treated in strict confidence results from our state of the art AB1377 automated DNA sequencer have been accepted as evidence of identity in over a thousand United Kingdom court cases you may post or call in personally with samples the procedure takes about three weeks we can confirm paternity with 99.99 per cent confidence in most cases or non-paternity with absolute certainty our terms are cash in advance.'

'I have biological samples from both.'

'Yaais. What is the nature of the relationship to be tested paternity is two hundred pounds everyone else three fifty except zygotic twins which we can do for a hundred pounds plus VAT.'

'Brothers.'

'Is this for an intended legal action?'

'No, it's purely personal, for a family tree enquiry. From one party I have a small sample of hair, from the other I have a square centimetre of dried blood from a fifty-year-old book.'

A brief silence, and then the machine switched back to human mode. 'Oh my good life! Are we in Agatha Christie territory, then?'

'Nothing so dull.'

Another pause, while Ms Stockbroker assessed this answer. Findhorn filled the silence by saying, 'I need the answer by tomorrow.'

'Most of our clients need it by yesterday. The waiting list is six weeks.'

'Tomorrow will do.'

The voice acquired a frosty edge. 'DNA sequencing is a skilled and time-consuming process and the results may have medico-legal consequences the sample preparation alone…'

'I'll call in later today with the samples and a thousand pounds cash.'

'I look forward to that, sir. You should have the results by this evening. You did say two thousand pounds?'

Romella found an Internet cafe in Staines. A handful of men and women, mostly young, were typing at terminals: a couple of female students on a project, a legal type peering at some turgid document, a schoolboy scanning a job list. She sat down next to a young man wearing earphones who, his face a caricature of intensity, was travelling through labyrinths, encountering strange and hostile creatures which he destroyed by tapping at the keyboard at amazing speed. She logged in to a search engine and typed 'holocaust + survivors'. Within minutes, as Romella clicked her way through infinitely darker labyrinths, she found herself sucked into a world more lunatic and unreal than that of her troll-fighting neighbour. She emerged, disturbed, into the sunlight an hour later, and took comfort in the normality of her surroundings, the shops, the bridge over the Thames, even the heavy afternoon traffic. She caught a red bus into central London and a tube to the Elephant and Castle. By the time she reached the address she had found on the Internet, it was dark, she was cold, and London was experiencing its first flurry of winter snow.

And by the time Findhorn emerged from the Leicester Square crowds, it was almost ten o'clock and Romella was frozen to the bone.

He dispensed with social preliminaries. 'Petrosian never got on that Russian plane. How did you get on?'

'Apart from being propositioned three times in the last hour? It was pathetic. The bulletin boards were the worst. You know, somebody in Romania asking his sister, last seen in Dachau, to get in touch, as if he hopes that some eighty-year-old granny will be surfing the Web…'

'Romella, calm down. It's all in the past.'

'I've always seen it that way. But for some people the pain's still here, right now.'

'Okay. Let's get you some place warm.' Findhorn took her by the arm and guided her towards the nearest cinema. 'Where are you staying tonight?'

'With you. Please.'

A surge of excitement went through Findhorn, quickly followed by a feeling of guilt brought on by the thought that to agree would be to exploit her unsettled state. 'We'll talk about that. And you can tell me what you found.'

'We'll talk about it? With men like you, Fred, how do we win our wars?'

They sat at the back of the cinema, and for two forgetful hours ate popcorn and drank orange juice, while warmth seeped into their bones and the Son of Godzilla rampaged through New York streets.