Revelation

6 The Museum

Findhorn held onto one certainty in his uncertain world. In no circumstances was he about to take up his room at the Edinburgh Sheraton. Not with the icy Ms Drindle and her knuckle-grazing companion on the prowl.

He gave himself an hour in the Spiral Galaxy before risking the streets, feeling his lungs silhouetted by tobacco smoke. He plodded up Leith Walk, the backpack heavy on his shoulders, keeping a sharp eye out on the dark streets. Once a car stopped about twenty yards ahead of him, began to reverse. It was probably someone looking for directions. Findhorn ran off up a side road and then into the mouth of a close and stood, heart beating, for about ten minutes, before risking the streets again.

At the top of the Walk, near Calton Hill, he waved down a taxi. He took it to Newington, and trawled half a dozen anonymous B & Bs before he found one with a room and a welcome. The doorbell was answered by the lady of the house, whose long, green Campbell tartan skirt matched the hall carpet. His room was small, clean and had a deep-piled, green Campbell tartan carpet. He dropped his luggage and flopped onto the soft bed, exhausted; the encounter with Norsk's unnerving representatives had left him drained.

He looked at his watch. It was 11 p.m. There was a payphone in the hallway, and a directory. A television was flickering in the lounge as he passed; some football match. He glimpsed a few semi-comatose guests sprawled over armchairs. He dialled through to the Sheraton and asked for a Mister Hansen, just arrived.

It was clear from the slurring in Hansen's voice that his liver was. having to cope with something like a litre of Glenfiddich.

'Hansen? Findhorn here. I need your help.'

'Well, well, if it'sh no' the elusive pimpernel. They seek him here, they seek him there, they seek yon Findhorn everywhere.'

'They? They've been looking for me?'

'Desperately. A comely wench, too, ye have hidden depths, laddie. I'd go for two falls, two submissions and a knockout wi' that one any day.' The captain giggled.

'She'd probably strangle you with her thighs. Will you sober up, man?'

There was a long silence. Findhorn visualised the captain swaying on the edge of his bed. Then: 'Whaur are ye?'

'A few miles away. Look, would you phone Norsk in Stavanger? I can't do it from here. Leave a message on their machine if there's nobody there. Tell them I have the papers they're looking for. And tell them I'll hand them over only if given good reason.'

The silence was longer. Findhorn could almost sense the struggle at the other end. When the captain spoke, he was clearly trying to get a grip on reality. 'Good reason?' 'Yes.'

'What the hell is that supposed to mean?' 'Listen, Hansen. Ten men died in that operation. Shiva were a hundred miles off base. They were carrying out a major tunnelling operation which had nothing to do with Arctic meteorology. There were people on that berg desperate to get their hands on that briefcase and for all I know they have a right to it. For all I know I am the rightful owner. I won't hand it over to the Company or anyone else until I know what this is about.' 'You won't hand over — my God, Findhorn.' 'I'm not an employee. There was no written contract, I accepted no payment. Nothing requires me to hand over material found in an iceberg to them or anyone else.'

'They'll cut off your goolies, laddie. Norsk's a giant.' Hansen struggled for an adequate description. 'A Sumo wrestler with three balls and forty foot high.'

'Phone their Stavanger office. I'll call you tomorrow.' Back in his room, Findhorn slipped off his clothes and slid under the cold sheets. He looked at the material he had emptied from the briefcase: a bundle of letters, bound together with red tape, and about twenty small desk diaries, dark blue, each marked with a year. He opened one at random and flicked through it. It was in good condition. The binding was loose, as if someone had tried to pull it away from the pages; otherwise there were few signs that it had been under the crushing pressure of glacial ice. Water had ruined some of the other diaries, reducing the ink to an illegible smear or removing it altogether.

They were American. On the front leaf of each was written a name in English: Lev Baruch Petrosian. There were no other details. The name sounded vaguely familiar. The diary had been written up in a strange script. It looked Cyrillic but Findhorn knew the Russian alphabet and this wasn't it; neither was it Arabic. He thought it might be some Caucasian or Asian script like Persian. Scattered throughout the pages, and looking incongruous against the ancient script, were equations. There were even, here and there, phrases in English, written in a small, clear hand.

The equations caught his attention. They weren't the familiar ones of meteorology, and he didn't understand them, but he recognized the field in which they were used, and the knowledge gave him a twinge of apprehension.

He fell asleep with the bedside lamp shining in his face.

The following morning the haar had been replaced by a clear blue sky. He had bacon and eggs along with a black, coffee-like liquid, and then risked the streets, unsure whether he was in mortal danger or just paranoid.

The city centre was two miles to the north and he headed towards it, feeling increasingly nervous as he approached over the South Bridge. The Waverley railway station was below the bridge and he thought they might be looking for him there; or at the bus terminus; or the airport; or at Hertz or Avis or Budget. Or they might be cruising the streets; or they might be doing all of these things; or, he thought, I may be turning into a certifiable case of raging paranoia.

Along busy pavements to George Street. He found a business centre and started to photocopy the pages of the diaries. They were a page to a day for twenty years, two pages to a photocopy. It was tedious work. It took him an hour and a paper refill to get to 1940. For a break, he logged on to a computer and checked his e-mail. He'd been at sea for two weeks and he was faced with a long list of messages, mostly low-grade or now time-expired. The most recent, however, made him swallow nervously. It had been sent at three o'clock that morning.

He looked at his watch and did a quick calculation.

Edinburgh's George Street is stuffed with banks and there was a Bank of Scotland next to the business centre. He entered it and asked to open a safety deposit account. Outside of movies about robberies he had never seen the inside of a safety deposit. He put the diaries and the bundle of letters safely into a little steel box. Then he turned the corner to the post office in Frederick Street, where he put a label on his backpack, leaving it to be posted on to his Aberdeen office.

He emerged from the post office carrying no more than a bundle of photocopied papers: at last he was travelling light. He bought a cheap briefcase from a store with 'Sale of the Century' on a notice in its window and put the diary photocopies into it.

Now Findhorn made his way across Princes Street Gardens and up the Mound to the Edinburgh Central Library. There, in a quiet room occupied by scholars, students and a tramp getting a spot of heat, he looked through Encyclopaedia Brittanica. He quickly identified the script: the diaries had been written in Armenian. Then he looked up Petrosian, and it came back to him.

Lev Baruch Petrosian. A 1950s atom spy. He had vanished just before the FBI got to him. It was a long-gone scandal, the people involved now presumably old men, or dead. Findhorn thought of the blue eye, imbedded in the gruesome face, staring at him through the ice. Upstairs in the library, he flicked through The Times of the period. Petrosian had made it to the obituary columns and the librarian made him a photocopy.

Another short, nervous foray into the streets. He passed by a public phone booth, preferring to use one in a quiet corner of the Chambers Street museum. A grizzly bear contemplated him with small, hostile eyes. It had reared up on its hind legs, it had clawed limbs of immense power and it was displaying sharp teeth, but it was stuffed.

'Archie? Have I disturbed you?' Archie was one of those academics who led a semi-nocturnal existence, often as not turning up at his department around noon and leaving again at some strange hour of the following morning.

'Fred? How are you? Not at all, been up for hours. Anne tells me you were heading for the north pole. Are you phoning from there?'

'I'm in Edinburgh. I hitched a lift on an icebreaker and came back early. Listen, I need advice. It involves your field of study but I can't talk about it over the phone. Can I meet you, say in a couple of hours?'

'My goodness, Freddie me lad, are you spying for the KGB or something? Okay, I've no classes this morning. I can be in George Square at eleven o'clock.'

'No. I'd like you to meet me in Edinburgh.'

There was a puzzled hesitation, then: 'Aye, okay. Meet me at Waverley station at twelve.'

'No, again, Archie. I don't want to be seen at the station. I'm in the Royal Museum in Chambers Street.'

'This has got to be woman trouble.'

'I wish.'

'Right. The museum it is. I should be there in a couple of hours.'

That was the thing about Archie. He knew when not to ask questions.

Findhorn decided to do this methodically. He'd start with transport, work his way through the armour to the natural history, and then go up to the medieval dress and the Chinese stuff on the first floor, and then points beyond.

He was about thirty, tall with long untidy hair and an untidy black beard. He was wearing an unbuttoned trenchcoat, exposing a large beer belly. The archetypal wild Glaswegian, Findhorn thought, watching nervously from the top floor gallery overhead; and a man who didn't give a damn.

Archie was looking around expectantly. Findhorn gave it a minute, but he saw no signs that his friend had been followed. Feeling like a fool, he called out and waved, and ran down the stairs past the Buddha on the first floor.

They collected coffee and doughnuts at the museum cafe. Findhorn led the way to a corner table and sat facing both entrances. Archie's eyes were gleaming with curiosity. 'So what gives, Fred? I've been fired up all the way here.'

'I can't tell you what this is about, Archie. Not yet.'

'Och, be reasonable! I hav'nae come a' this way for a coffee. If it's no a wumman, you're in trouble with the polis. Neither of them sounds like Fred Findhorn.'

'What can you tell me about Lev Petrosian?'

Archie raised his eyebrows in astonishment. 'The atom spy?'

'The same.'

Archie's face seemed uncertain whether to show astonishment, worry or delight. 'In the name o' the wee man, what are you getting into, laddie? Petrosian came over here as a Nazi refugee, like Klaus Fuchs. A lot of the top wartime brains did. Fuchs was the big spy in the A-bomb era, but not many people know there were others. Theodore Hall, for example, a Brit also at Los Alamos.'

'What did he actually do?'

A couple of dozen twelve-year-olds trooped boisterously into the cafe, carrying artist's notebooks and pencils, followed by two adults, both female. The ambient noise level went up sharply. Findhorn eyed the adults nervously.

'He was at Los Alamos twice. Don't know much about what he did. I know the first time round he was involved in a big scare. Teller got the idea that if they did manage to explode an atom bomb the fireball might be so hot it would set the world's hydrogen alight, turn the atmosphere and oceans into one big hydrogen bomb. That would have got rid of Hitler, along with the rest of humanity. Petrosian was involved in the calculations which ruled that possibility out.'

'You'd have to be very sure you got something like that right,' suggested Findhorn.

Archie was studying his doughnut closely, and knowing him, Findhorn thought he was probably analysing its topological properties. 'Aye. They kept coming back to it. Now the second time, when they were developing the H-bomb, I'm even less sure about what he did. There were rumours that the guy went off the heid.'

'In what way?'

'Let me think. Got it. It was the same again. Something about zapping the planet. But since hydrogen bombs were going off like firecrackers all through the fifties and sixties, we can safely say he was wrong.'

'Could he have found something new?'

Archie shook his head. 'Nuclear physics is understood, Freddie. There's no room for new stuff at the energy levels these guys were into.'

The adults were trying to get the pupils into a line and Findhorn thought that the teaching authority should have issued them with whips. He dredged up a distant memory, something he'd seen on a television news item. 'What about cold fusion?'

Archie's voice was dismissive. 'A fiasco. It never came to anything.'

Had the comment come from some establishment hack, Findhorn would have paid it only so much attention. But he knew Archie; okay he was one of life's iconoclasts, but he was sharp with it. The opinion commanded Findhorn's respect.

'Suppose you're wrong, Archie. Suppose Petrosian discovered something. And suppose the authorities of the day didn't want people getting curious about it. Putting it about that he went mad would be an effective cover story.'

Archie said, 'It's coming back to me now. Petrosian escaped from Canada just before the FBI closed in on him. The story is he was picked up and flew over the north pole to Russia. But there's no record that he ever arrived. The assumption was that he crashed somewhere over the polar route while making his escape.' He gave Findhorn a disconcertingly close stare. 'And all of a sudden, fifty years later, Findhorn of the Arctic leaps off an icebreaker, flips to cloak-and-dagger mode and starts asking me urgent questions about Petrosian.'

'A hypothetical, Archie. Suppose something of Petrosian's was found in the ice fifty years after it was lost. Let's say a document. And suppose that some people were very anxious to get their hands on it, would go to any lengths. The question is this: what could be in that document?'

Archie gave his friend another long, searching stare. Then he said, 'I'm damned if I can think of a thing.'

'Archie, I may need to tap into that giant brain of yours now and then. I can see the wheels turning now. But I can't tell you more just yet.'

'Any time, day or night.'

Findhorn stood up. 'I have to go, Archie. I'm meeting some people.'

Archie's face was serious. 'Fred, you could be getting into something heavy. If you've found something out there in the polar wastes, something that people want to get their hands on fifty years after it was lost, and if that something has to do with Lev Baruch Petrosian, let me give you one piece of serious advice.'

Findhorn waited.

'Keep it damn close to your chest. And trust nobody.'