The Furies

THREE LITTLE MAIDS: DOWNING STREET, 0730

"What do our forensic psychologists say?" The prime minister looks across the table at a thin, serious blond woman. He is a small, thin man, smaller than she had imagined from his television images. He is sitting directly across from her, tie loose and jacket draped over the back of his chair.

The Home Office psychologist returns the look over the top of her half-moon spectacles. "There's very little to go on, Prime Minister. For example, for all we know the writer could be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, but you might not pick that up in a short communication."

"If we could have it in simple language."

"The letter is bizarre, and we did look into whether this reveals some sort of thought disorder like derailment or incoherence, which could suggest delusional beliefs of some sort. I mean, how does a runny nose come from a flying saucer, or the Plague of Thebes follow from two impossible things before breakfast? Are we dealing with tangentiality here? But there are no other indicators such as semantic paraphasia, perseveration …"

"Is he a nutter, Dr. Melrose?" the prime minister interrupts.

The psychologist winces. "We think the bizarreness is calculated. If there's psychosis in the letter, we don't see it. The writer is tightly controlled and focused."

"A hoaxer?"

"Impossible to say. But we think whoever wrote this has some serious intent."

"Thank you, Doctor." The prime minister pauses. Then: "If you would leave us now." The forensic psychologist blinks nervously, taps papers on the polished oak table, and strides out.

"We can't even contemplate evacuating London because of a crank letter." The home secretary is using a tone of voice that doesn't allow argument.

The PM waves the letter in frustration. "But suppose this is a genuine threat and we do nothing about it? The public would hang us from the lampposts."

"All you have is a piece of paper."

The intelligence chief clears his throat. He is a bulky man with thick, hairy hands and a coarse-featured face that makes him look like a wrestler. "Revealing an insider's knowledge of a deadly weapon and making a threat — specific in time and space — against us."

The home secretary sighs. "Even if we evacuated London, they'd just wait until the city was back to normal and then fire off their wretched device. We can't abandon London — and if we did they'd just turn their attention to Birmingham or someplace."

The chief of intelligence says, "I've set up a small task force, some of our best people from Five, Six, and GCHQ. There's no place for turf wars in this situation." C likes the phrase task force, and uses it often. It has a gung-ho, action-man sound to it; much better than committee, even if it means the same. He'd even toyed with war party at some stage in the past, but decided that would be too colorful for the gray suits of Whitehall. "They need to tell us what this crazy letter means, if anything, and tell us quickly."

The home secretary sniffs skeptically. "It's a piece of insane nonsense, obviously."

C ignores him. "And as you know we're trying to get hold of this Lewis Sharp on the off chance that the swastika implies some connection with the Nazis."

"My God, Gordon, how can a man of your caliber take such an idea seriously?" The home secretary shakes his head. "It's not as if you people have nothing else to do. What is it, thirty known groups actively planning atrocities against us?"

"It does seem a long shot," the intelligence chief says mildly. "And we are stretched to breaking point. Tell me, Home Secretary. Do you want to gamble the population of London on your opinion?"

The prime minister cuts into the sudden antagonism. "I go with Gordon, we can't put a chip like that on a roulette table. What are we doing about the Americans?"

"We're liaising with their FBI through a young woman by the name of Ambra Volpe. She'll be on the next Los Angeles flight. And I'm due in Legoland five minutes ago. I'm briefing a few senior civil servants, police and army officers, et cetera."

"I'll join you," says the home secretary.

C nods. "The shuttle's downstairs. We'll take it over." By over he means under, referring to the secret tunnel under the Thames joining Whitehall and the MI6 building.

The prime minister says, "Gordon, if there's anything in this, we only have until Friday. I don't want you to feel constrained by legal niceties. Just make sure that whatever you do is deniable."

C nods again. "I understand completely, Prime Minister." Anything messy can be handled by the SAS, he tells himself.

The home secretary says, "I'll issue Certificates of Immunity in the Public Interest if anything gets out."

The prime minister stays alone in the first-floor study after the others have left. He reads the strange letter carefully again, checking points one by one against the MI6 chief's notes.

Three little maids from school are we …

MI6 BUILDING VAUXHALL CROSS, 0830

Somewhere around Geneva, the snow transforms itself into gusty rain. A Learjet is waiting and takes them smoothly across France and the Channel; they arrive at RAF Northolt an hour later in a bleak but dry dawn. A black Jaguar is waiting on the runway, purring quietly. A man and woman, both late twenties, are standing next to it. Jocelyn does the introductions.

"This is Craig Downey from GCHQ. He does cryptography."

A round-faced, cheerful man takes Sharp's hand. "And I have a classics background. The weirdness in that letter."

The woman: slim, olive-skinned, dark eyes, shoulder-length black hair. Sharp knows she can't possibly be Five or Six. The brown leather trousers, Prada boots, white blouse, and suede bolero don't fit the "drab anonymity" dress code of the intelligence services.

She introduces herself. "I'm Ambra Volpe, from Six." Her voice has a slight Italian inflection. "I'm off to LA now but I thought I'd say hello first."

"Jocelyn owns you, too?"

"Yes, she's my slave master." She gives her boss a cheeky smile but Jocelyn stays forbiddingly dour. "Is there anything in that swastika or is it just a decoy by some local militia? What do I tell FBI and Homeland?"

A quick, focused mind. No social chitchat — friendly but straight to the point. Sharp likes that. He says, "Tell them I don't know. It could go either way."

There are documents and Sharp, next to Downey in the rear of the Jaguar, starts to fill them in as Ambra Volpe takes it quickly around the back of the Lear, past a big AWAC and along a wet, narrow airfield road. She pays no attention to speed limits on the trip into town, and they arrive at Vauxhall Cross just after half past eight in the morning. She takes the car to the rear of the MI6 building and into the underground car park, gives Sharp a farewell wave, and steps into another car, a company one to judge by the dismal paintwork.

Despite himself, Sharp can't suppress a flutter of excitement as they enter the secret building. It is his second visit, and memories flood back. Through the big swing doors into the spacious, space-age reception area. Sharp hands over his mobile phone and watches the security man put it in a pigeonhole in exchange for a tag. A woman next to him is getting rid of a laptop and a mobile phone. He hands over a passport and the completed documentation and to his surprise the guard immediately gives him a pass, complete with his photograph. "All right, sir, in you go." Then Sharp remembers — they'd photographed him last time, when his hair was army-short and he'd had a shave. The woman is being escorted to a photo booth.

And at last he has swiped himself through the revolving sealed capsule and he is in, into the otherworld. Jocelyn, waiting on the other side, glances at her watch and leads them swiftly to a lift.

"How much do you remember about this place?"

"Not much. It was pretty rushed last time, too."

"It's Category A security," she explains. "I have to escort you everywhere, including the loo. It has target status HIS, HTA, and HPT, where H is ‘hostile' or ‘high' and A is ‘attack' and you can guess the rest. Half of it's underground. The windows look green because the glass is nearly ten centimeters thick. We have triple glazing and wire mesh everywhere, and computer suites and technical areas that you won't see and whose floor areas are secret."

Downey says, "But if you want to be really naughty, and should you happen to be passing the planning office of Lambeth Council …" He grins wickedly. Jocelyn frowns her disapproval.

Emerging a few floors up, Jocelyn taps her watch. Sharp and Downey break into a trot while Jocelyn waves them on. Sharp is disappointed to find that the interior of this most secret of buildings seems quite ordinary, comprising a warren of corridors marked by doors with mysterious acronyms. Here and there they pass open-plan offices, which he finds hard to reconcile with MI6's legendary ethos of secrecy. Downey seems to know the way and scurries quickly on, glancing at his watch, while Sharp chases after him, feeling like Alice following the White Rabbit.

"What do we know about this Lewis Sharp fellow?" The minister speaks over his shoulder. He is looking down at the neat garden hidden from the public, the row of steps, the line of trees, the river beyond. After three days of heavy rain, the Thames is dark brown and flowing swiftly.

Next to him, the head of MI6 sips at an oversweet coffee. "Army brat. Father and grandfather before him were career soldiers. His father made full colonel. Young Sharp made major — NBC officer — at thirty, remarkably young. Worked with Five briefly on the dirty bomb scare a couple of years ago."

The hesitation is so slight that the home secretary wonders if he imagined it. "But?"

C retrieves a manila folder from the big oval table and returns to the triple-glazed window. It has a label with a string of numbers and, crayoned on it in red, SHARP, LEWIS C. The photograph shows a well-built man in his thirties, with short, sandy hair and a round, alert face. The eyes are intensely blue, and there is a hint of humor, if not mischief, around his mouth. C reads from a sheet headed with the Semper Occultis logo. "Threw it all in shortly thereafter, and disappeared. Dropped out, basically."

"Any reason?"

"None given here."

"There's more?" The minister is still picking up vibrations.

"He's made a study of the Nazi secret weapons program. Even wrote a book about it. He impressed my people during the dirty bomb incident. If there's anything in this Nazi connection, he might just have the esoteric knowledge we need."

"When you say dropped out …"

"If I may interject, Minister?" The man sidling up to them is holding a cup of tea and a saucer. He is tall, sixtyish, dark-skinned as if he has spent some years abroad, and has a hair-style like a monk's tonsure.

C says, "Home Secretary, may I introduce Professor Alec Duncan?"

The home secretary says, "Forgive me, but where do you come into this?"

"Alec Duncan is a Cambridge historian."

"I have a background in the history of biowarfare. I worked with Sharp briefly on the Nazi secret weapons program."

"Ah." The home secretary puts an at last we're getting somewhere tone into his voice.

"I can give you a little background on him. To say he worked with me is a bit of an exaggeration. He came to King's College for a few months, trying to research the secret weapons program of the Third Reich under my tutelage. I'm afraid he didn't get very far."

"My people tell me he's a first-class NBC officer."

Duncan's lips twitch into something like a smile. "Was, Minister. He now earns his living as a part-time cook, somewhere in the French Alps."

"A cook, somewhere in the French Alps," the home secretary repeats tonelessly.

"His historical research was a bit outlandish. He had a tendency to give too much weight to unreliable stories from old men from the period. He started out on a PhD all fired up and enthusiastic, but frankly he wasn't up to it. I wouldn't take anything he says about Nazi secret weapons too seriously. And …" The professor hesitates.

"Well?"

"To put it bluntly, he's a crank."

The minister turns to the chief of intelligence. "And you're putting this cook, this washed-up ex-army-officer, this crank, this failed PhD on the team."

"Interesting to hear that," C says to Duncan. "My information is that he knows as much about the Hitler secret weapons program as anyone, including you."

The lips twitch again. "I'm afraid you've been misinformed."

The home secretary asks, "What's your view on the Nazi link?"

The professor gives a wise smile. "The Nazi flying saucer business is a playground for lunatics. There's no documentation. As I said, all we have are unreliable claims by a few old men. And the idea of machines like that spraying anthrax around is just off the wall."

The minister assimilates this, and then turns to the chief of intelligence. "I'd feel more comfortable with the fate of London in a pair of safe hands."

"My sentiments exactly. But in my line of business people who don't go beyond the facts rarely get as far as them. After all, what do we lose by letting this Sharp loose on the problem? If there happens to be anything in it …"

"He'll mislead the team," Duncan says. "Or he will if you listen to him."

There is an awkward silence. A couple of Special Branch heavies, just within hearing range, are making a good job of pretending not to listen. The minister says, "Well, where the hell is he?"

At that moment Sharp and Downey stride puffing into the room.

ISLAMIC TERROR SYNDICATE

"First, I welcome the home secretary to our deliberations. What I want to do here is determine whether we can get any insights into this Fossil Creek incident from the British end."

"Islamic Terror Syndicate," the home secretary declares. "It has to be al-Qaeda."

"No," says the chief of intelligence. He nods at the Middle East desk officer, a woman in her midtwenties with black, wavy hair, wearing jeans and a drab gray sweater.

She nods back. "We can't connect ITS with the Arizona device."

"Come on. JTAC tells me that two hundred Britons have received training …"

"Perhaps if you will allow Judith to report," C suggests mildly.

The home secretary gives a brusque nod, and the girl from the Middle East desk starts to read: … Shirwan alHilali sighted in Kuwait International Airport three weeks ago … our Saudi intelligence contacts report an unusual movement of funds into … the Voice of Jihad have issued a statement … the Omanis have detained …

One by one the team work their way through the overseas reports. Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Americas, and the Far East all say much the same thing — in the shifting, murky web of international terror organizations, there is nothing to connect a crashed UFO in Arizona. At least, nothing visible.

"Very well." The home secretary sounds unconvinced. "That leaves the enemy within."

The MI5 man reports. He throws up a PowerPoint diagram looking literally like a huge, murky web. It is spattered with red dots. He talks in a rapid monotone about phone and Internet traffic analysis, social network traces, field operations groups, graph theory, and Granovetter algorithms, to an accompaniment of hand-waving, blinking red dots, and flashing yellow threads like a fairground advertisement. The upshot, he tells the increasingly glazed eyes facing him, is that Five can find no sign of any "special operation" in the pipeline that might connect with the Arizona device.

The home secretary says, "What about this so-called Nazi connection? The swastika engraved on the side of this thing. I understand there's some disagreement among our experts."

The professor licks his lips and adopts a knowing smile. "There's only one expert here. I'm sure Lewis would agree with me, wouldn't you, Lewis? And I think I can rule out any idea about a Nazi weapon. It's just too far-fetched."

"Spell that out, please," the home secretary says.

Duncan gives a quick glance at Sharp, sitting across the table from him. "The notion that the Nazis developed some sort of aerial device for spraying anthrax around is just preposterous. The only witnesses either lack credibility or only have secondhand stories to tell. If there was such a weapon, why wasn't it used during the war? Why does it suddenly turn up sixty years later? Hitler had a horror of poison gas. Even a superficial study will show that the Nazis never got into bioweapons."

"Sharp?"

"A superficial study would give that impression. But I've gone into this rather less superficially than Professor Duncan — you would agree, Alec? Dig deeper and you find that the Nazis did in fact have a chemical and biological weapons program. And it makes no sense to develop the chemicals without developing some means of delivery. In practice that means dispersal from the air. Okay, we don't know what they did in that line, but a lot went on in wartime Bavaria that we don't know about even today."

Duncan gives Sharp a scimitar smile. "I'm sorry to be blunt again, but Nazi flying saucers spraying anthrax are for people who read comic books, not for serious historians."

Sharp catches a couple of the Special Branch men grinning slyly at each other. What am I doing here? I'm finished with this stuff, making a new life for myself. Was I brought to London to listen to this idiot spouting rubbish? This rip-off artist, this giant egoist whose only interest is in showing people how important he is? But even as these questions go through his head, he knows the answers. I know what I'm doing here. I can't bury myself in libraries researching my next book while this threat is hanging over London and Duncan is left to screw them up.

Duncan is still holding court. Sharp drags himself back to the present.

"… nothing in navy CinC records or U-boat loading lists … main item is this. How could such a weapon have been transported across the Atlantic? By ship? By aircraft? The Luftwaffe didn't have the range, and no such journeys by the German navy could have gone undiscovered; nor are there any records of such. And the device is far too large to have gone into a submarine; U-boat hatches were scarcely wide enough to allow their torpedoes in. Transport of such a device from Germany to the States would have been impossible in wartime conditions."

The home secretary looks across at Sharp.

"I agree."

The home secretary's eyebrows go up. "You concede Professor Duncan's point?"

"I do."

"But …?"

"But Professor Duncan has overlooked one thing." Sharp pauses, aware of astute eyes assessing him. Duncan is smiling and shaking his head. "Local hillbillies might be able to produce a few teaspoons of anthrax. The Arizona device carried a ton of the stuff. Whoever built it had the backing of large-scale industrial muscle."

The home secretary turns grimly to C, who is watching the exchange dispassionately, his big hands clasped behind his neck. "A fucking ton of anthrax. I'm having lunch with the PM in forty minutes. What do I tell him? That the Arizona device was a one-off? That the letter is a hoax? That we allow people to flood London for their Saturday shopping?"

The head of MI6 spreads his hands in an Italian-like gesture. "What can I say, Minister? I don't know."

"For Christ's sake, Gordon, we know something. Someone sent that letter. Someone who knew about the anthrax-spreading machine."

PAUL'S WALK: SAFE HOUSE

"No way will we crack this by Saturday." Jocelyn is at the wheel of an old Saab.

"You'd better be wrong about that." Sharp is still mentally in transition between the Mont Blanc massif and central London, still mentally fighting Duncan.

"Lewis, are you serious? You really think this is a genuine Nazi weapon rather than homespun militia?"

Sharp, in the backseat, says, "Forget a local terrorist group, it's beyond them. There's a degree of sophistication about that device."

Downey, in the passenger seat next to Jocelyn, turns around to Sharp. "Don't underestimate the banjo players. They may be homespun but you can be sure there's a lot of sophistication in among the moonshine. And you can get recipes for anthrax on the Web. All you need is a dead cat."

"A helluva lot of dead cats."

"Everybody's nervous these days," Downey says, apropos of nothing. The Gherkin is on their left, peering over rooftops from time to time. They pass the College of Arms, all dark red bricks and tall, gilt-topped wrought-iron fencing.

A traffic light turns red, and Jocelyn stops with a curse. "Alec Duncan's briefing the PM, he'll join us shortly. We were all mightily entertained seeing the pair of you at each other's throats. What is it between the professor and you?"

"It doesn't matter."

"He says you're incompetent, a crank."

"Jocelyn, you're being naughty."

"Well?" Jocelyn's fingers are strumming impatiently on the steering wheel.

"The man's a parasite. For my first war book I put some work into aspects of the Nazi nuclear weapons program, such as it was. I found a wartime sketch of a primitive atomic weapon in a German library archive. It was unsigned but I managed to chase up the source. It was exciting stuff — it put a whole new perspective on the German atom bomb project — and I discussed it with Duncan. God, I was naive. The next thing I knew there was a paper on the subject with his name on it. He's spent the last two years putting himself forward as the big cheese on the topic. He's Batman, I'm Robin. That's his message."

"Didn't you complain?"

"Who to? His pals on the Senate? He's the big professor and I'm nobody."

"He says you dropped out of a PhD program."

"I opted out, when I saw what he was like."

"And that's when you cleared off, took up a life of glorious irresponsibility. And here you are, dragged back into the thick of it, poor thing. First the army says you'll never get past major …"

"I got fed up with the pack mentality …"

"… then you get ripped off at the outset of an academic career."

"Are you any good as a cook?" Downey asks. Jocelyn winces, but Sharp laughs.

The light turns green, and Jocelyn takes off smartly. "What gives with these Third Reich secret weapon stories? Was it all propaganda and false rumors?"

"No, there was a huge secret weapons program. A lot of it was crazy stuff that only existed in Himmler's head, but there were also real weapons. There was a plan for a thousand-ton tank called the Mouse, with guns bigger than a battleship's. They had ideas for vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft, and transatlantic bombers, and fourteen-g jets. They were going to build a people's fighter in the thousands — a manned doodlebug — with a suicide pilot. They put sixteen-year-old boys into plywood jets that broke up in flight."

"But you're saying not all the wonder weapons were rubbish." Now she is doing a loop and turning back on the opposite carriageway. "Not all fantasies in Himmler's head."

"The V1 and V2 were real enough. Eisenhower had to divert an army to capture the launch sites. There were plans for a transatlantic rocket. But there was so much secrecy that even today we're not sure we've uncovered everything. If the Nazis had held out another six months, some of these weapons would have come online."

"By which time the Allies had the atom bomb. Quelle horreur."

"The Nazi flying saucers? What about them?" Downey asks.

"The stories are unsubstantiated rubbish. A whole mythos has grown up about anti-gravity machines, underground labs in Antarctica, crap like that." Mentally, Sharp is beginning to think of Downey as the Doughnut — the alliteration with the doughnut-shaped GCHQ building has clicked. "We know of at least two circular-wing aircraft, but they got nowhere. The AS-6 was twenty feet across, propeller-driven with a 240-horsepower engine. But it slewed from side to side on the runway and flew like a porpoise. They gave up on it."

Downey says, "What are you saying, Lewis? That Duncan was right all along? A flying saucer carrying anthrax spores is nonsense?"

"There were designs for at least fifteen others, but if there were prototypes the Nazis destroyed them at the end of the Third Reich, to keep them out of Allied hands. There are no records, nothing. Duncan's right on that. But there is one thing."

Jocelyn is turning left into a narrow lane. She trickles the car down a steeply descending ramp ending at a corrugated steel shutter. "You were saying. One thing." She pushes a card in a slot, and the shutter rumbles up noisily.

Sharp says, "Okay, the Nazi bioweapons program was the biggest secret of the war. But we do know something about it, thanks to the Russians. After the war they found documents hidden down a mine in Silesia. They also found twelve thousand tons of nerve gas and anthrax."

Downey gives a nervous giggle as Jocelyn takes them into the underground car park. "Lewis, for a scary moment there I thought you said twelve thousand tons."

The Doughnut looks around. "My God, this is grim."

"Hey, this is a cool pad," Sharp says, following him in.

The bleakness of the brick walls is broken up by a few art nouveau pictures and a 1970s Hammer movie poster, all Dracula and fangs and nubile wenches in distress. Everything looks new, executive pad, sterile.

Jocelyn says, "It's a safe house borrowed from Special Branch. You eat, sleep, and breathe here until you've cracked the problem. Hanslope Park fixed up communications early this morning. Right, we don't have a minute to waste. Let's get started."

"You spotted the sarin clue?" Downey asks.

"Sarin? Where?"

Downey runs his fingers down Jocelyn's photocopy.

"And these are the symptoms of sarin poisoning. Whoever wrote that knew what they were talking about."

Sharp settles into a white leather armchair. "That's another big hole in the hillbilly theory. I believe it's beyond the resources of a terrorist group to make even one bioweapon. Two different weapons, one anthrax and one sarin — now, that's impossible. Talking of which, Two impossible things before breakfast is a quote from Alice in Wonderland. The Red King always believed in two impossible things before breakfast. Right, Craig? Not many Arizona hillbillies know that."

"It was the White Queen and six impossible things. An Arizona hillbilly could get it wrong."

Sharp asks, "What gives with this Plague of Thebes?"

"This guy Oedipus bumps off his father and marries his mother, and then turns up in Thebes. The gods are cheesed off by these antics and they send a plague on the people of Thebes as a punishment. Around 400 BC Sophocles writes a play about it called Oedipus Rex and he bases it on a real plague of the time, okay? We know what that real plague was, because it was written up by Thucydides, who happened to live through it."

"Thucydides?" Jocelyn says.

"A Greek historian. And Sophocles modeled the Plague of Thebes of his story on the real Plague of Athens, and that plague was bubonic. The letter writer's toying with us. He's telling us there's another bomb and it's going to spread bubonic plague."

Sharp says, "That can't be right. Bubonic plague is spread by Yersinia pestis, which comes from fleas. Unless the Huns found a way to keep infected fleas alive for sixty years …"

Downey shakes his head in irritation. "I was about to say. The writer's a Bible basher — by their fruits ye shall know them et cetera. So look at the Bible. God punished the pharaoh with the ten plagues of Egypt, but only one of the ten plagues is an actual disease. It's the fifth plague, which the modern medics have identified from the symptoms. You take that line, the writer's telling us that his Good-Bye London machine is anthrax, just like the Fossil Creek one."

Jocelyn says, "Thebes is a decoy? Is that what you're saying?"

"Don't you believe it," Downey says. "That letter's chock-ablock with clues — not a word is wasted. The writer's teasing us with Thebes. He's telling us something."

There is a brief silence. Then Jocelyn says, "Look, do I have to remind you people that if we don't beat this before Saturday we could end up with the whole of central London taken out? Can you even visualize it? Who gathers the bodies up? Where do we bury them? It mustn't come to that."

Jocelyn is still pale from the bumpy flight, Sharp thinks. He says, "There's another possibility. In 1950, when they made the decision to develop a hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer wasn't too happy."

"Oppenheimer?"

"You know — J. Robert Oppenheimer, who developed the atom bomb."

"You said atom bomb." The Doughnut sits upright. "That's not nice."

Sharp continues: "Oppenheimer was at a Washington party where they were celebrating President Truman's decision to go ahead with the hydrogen bomb. A reporter sees Oppenheimer standing alone, with a long face, and asks him the problem. Oppenheimer says, ‘This is the Plague of Thebes.' "

Downey shakes his head. "Don't say atom bomb, Lewis."

Sharp says, "People who think al-Qaeda can grab a handful of plutonium and turn it into an atom bomb have no idea of the complexity of the task."

Downey says, "I'm glad you said that, considering it's their sacred duty to try."

"A nuke acquired from some nuclear power, now, that's another matter."

There is a nervous silence. Then Downey, looking over the letter, says, "Something odd here. Three little maids from school are we. But there's no Meg or Alec or Tiffanee in The Mikado."

The front door opens and Duncan, fresh from briefing the PM, strides into the room. He gives Sharp a what-are-you-doing-here look and Sharp thinks, Christ come to cleanse the Temple. Jocelyn jumps straight into it. "Professor Duncan, we have very little time to crack this thing. I need your assessment of Sharp's thesis. Could the Nazis really have developed a bioweapon? Talk to me."

He sits on a couch, holding a DVD. "There's nothing new about biowarfare, Ms. Towers, it's been around for thousands of years. The Romans threw gone-off meat into wells to poison the enemy's drinking water. In the fourteenth century the Tatars catapulted the bodies of plague victims over the walls of a Black Sea city they were besieging. People escaped in sailing ships and carried the plague all over Europe. It knocked off nearly half the population. Three-quarters of Norwegians died. Look."

He moves over to a computer and inserts the DVD. The movie shows something like an incoming tide, moving across a map of Europe south to north, starting up from Sicily, spreading up Italy, fanning out across the Alps, and flowing all the way to Norway. "It crossed Europe in the space of a couple of years. So that particular biowarfare got out of hand."

Jocelyn agrees. "I'd have said."

"There have been four great ages of plague. Really pandemics or superplagues, sometimes made up of wave after wave of ordinary plague."

"Ordinary plagues," Sharp repeats in a dull voice. What makes a plague ordinary?

Duncan throws up a list on the screen:

And the fourth age started in the late 19th century, although it's been quiet up to now. A new strain evolved in China and took some ocean cruises around the world. This pandemic started bubonic, evolved into the pneumonic version. It's washed over Asia a few times. It's still lurking dormant — don't get bitten by a prairie dog.

Jocelyn shakes her head impatiently. "Professor, we need to know whether any of these could be delivered in a weapon. Explain bubonic, briefly if you please."

The Plague of Thebes, modeled on the Athens one. "It's spread through bacteria called Yersinia pestis, which enter the bloodstream through flea bites. A few vocal deniers say it was a virus like Ebola but they're wrong. The bacteria find their way to the lymph nodes, where they multiply at great speed. I have another movie."

The movie shows little rod-shaped bugs multiplying at great speed. "The nodes swell into black lumps called buboes, which by all accounts are excruciatingly painful."

Jocelyn says, "We must have antidotes."

"One Friday night in Las Vegas a few years back, federal agents released a few gallons of simulated plague slurry on the streets, to see how it spread around town. I can tell you that if the stuff had been real, people would've gone down much faster than the emergency services could have reacted. Like a wildfire, totally out of control. Antidotes couldn't cope. But it's a lousy weapon. Your own side gets it."

"There are people out there who don't care," Sharp says.

"Transmission is by fleas?" Jocelyn asks.

"Yes."

Jocelyn is tapping the coffee table nervously with a pen. "So much for the Plague of Thebes and similar clues. Unless Lewis wants to tell us that the Nazis found some way to store infected fleas for sixty years."

"Sarin, then?" Sharp asks.

Duncan makes a big play of shaking his head. "Useless. It decays quickly. A few weeks or months after its creation, it has become almost harmless, at least as a nerve gas. Sixty-year-old sarin is thoroughly dead."

"And we can forget about your Oppenheimer speculation, Sharp." Jocelyn is tapping again. "Even I know that the Nazis got nowhere with an atom bomb. In summary, the reference to plague is nonsense, the reference to sarin is nonsense, Lewis's speculation about an atomic device is nonsense. It now seems to me the letter itself is a piece of clever nonsense. The sense I get from this meeting is that the letter was designed to confuse us, to make us dissipate our resources in pursuit of red herrings. The swastika engraving probably likewise. Whoever had the device has been giving us the runaround and we've been falling for it." She looks over at Sharp thoughtfully. "What do you say, Lewis? Time for you to go home?"

"I wish." Sharp crosses to the big window, frustrated and afraid. A glass-roofed clipper is taking off from the pier across the river, aiming for a gap in the Millennium Bridge. A slight movement attracts him to the pathway below. A well-built young man with a shaven head, leather jerkin, and earphones. Looking up, his back to the river. Their eyes meet for a brief second. The man turns away, strolls off. The incident makes Sharp feel uneasy, but he can't think why. And he can just hear the sounds of a party from an upriver flat, the occasional gust of laughter on the limit of hearing. The deep thump-thump of the bass sounds like backing for "Three Little Maids from School Are We." A party, on Saturday morning?

Don't be so bloody paranoid. At this rate you'll be getting messages from aliens through the wall sockets.

One of the terminals has a direct link to the FBI team. Letters, being pieced together from the shattered casing of the UFO. Sharp lists them on a sheet of paper, sits down and stares:

Jocelyn finds scissors in a kitchen drawer, separates out the letters, and Sharp starts to shuffle them in different combinations, getting nowhere. Downey glances over Sharp's shoulder. "By the way, IS might be SI upside down and OH might be HO. PHO isn't a common letter combination in German, which argues against your Nazi theory. It could well be a bit of Phoenix, like they've signed themselves THE PHOENIX MILITIA or something. That would more or less prove the hillbilly theory. RK is a slightly unusual combination, there won't be too many words with RK in English, like MARKSMEN or WORKERS. I'll see what I can do when I'm back."

Downey suddenly heads for the door.

"Where the hell are you off to?"

"Covent Garden, Jocelyn. I want to get a music score for The Mikado, and a video of Breakfast at Tiffany's, and I want to see how the movie connects with Meg Ryan and Alec Baldwin who didn't come until years later."

"Look, stop faffing about," Jocelyn snaps. "We've no time for nonsense."

Downey turns at the door. "Don't be so dorky, I'm not one of Lewis's squaddies. That letter has hidden meanings, and Meg, Alec, and Tiffanee are in there for a reason." He disappears.

Jocelyn and Duncan also head for the door. She turns to Sharp. "If you believe the letter, London gets it on Saturday. I want hard results over breakfast tomorrow. It would be nice to avoid a million dead."

Sharp waves her good-bye. The theatrical exit, he thinks, wasn't necessary. They have all the drama they can handle.