The Lure

46 Iced Logic

So far as Petrie could remember — or was it a false memory? — it had started at age four. He faintly recalled spending hours making patterns out of Smarties, sometimes constructing little regiments of rows and columns and eating the stragglers. Eating your prime numbers was a good way to learn about them. At school, he found that he was usually able to solve problems better than his maths teachers, and the same had often been true at university.

He knew, and didn’t care, that it was an addictive drug. Sometimes his problem-solving was achieved through sheer logic, more often it came in an intuitive leap after hours or weeks of concentrated thinking. As he entered adulthood he found that the things which excited young men of his age left him cold. What did he care about who was dating whom or wearing what designer clothes? Why did the latest sports label on trainers matter? Why should he follow the progress of some team except perhaps as an exercise in random walk theory? Girls were interesting in a visceral way, but none of them could compete with Erdos’s brilliant proof of the prime number theorem or Ramanujan’s wonderful formulae for pi. Strangely, he seemed to attract the opposite sex. He had no idea why but guessed that they saw him as a challenge.

Of course, now there was that damned Norwegian female.

To Petrie, whose working days and nights were spent on the edge of the possible, problem-solving at the limit of his ability, the logic of his position was simple, indeed trivial, to handle.

Dozing on his bed, he heard low voices and footsteps, and then the click of a car door. And then the muffled sound of a big engine, and tyres crunching over gravel.

The little man on the wall, dressed in Wellingtons and sou-wester, was holding an umbrella and taking a tentative step out of a door. Next to him a clock showed twenty minutes to two. There was a trace of woodsmoke in the air.

Still floppy from the accumulation of a week’s stress and the morning’s interrogation, Petrie rolled off the bed and put his head in his hands. He went over it again.

1. We’re fugitives without money, false documentation or the means to obtain it.

2. We’re in a strange land, without friends or contacts.

3. Two governments, British and Russian, are determined to obliterate us.

4. That being so, is there anywhere reachable on Earth where we’d be safe?

5. America, possibly. The Americans will go for it, or they won’t. Lacking information on this, there’s an even chance.

6. If the Americans go for it, and the signal goes out, and the celestial coordinates of the signallers become public knowledge, Freya and I will be safe.

7. If the Americans don’t go for it, we’re finished.

8. An even chance of survival is better than a negligible one.

All this had gone through his head while talking to Freya in Roland’s Café but he had kept his thoughts to himself, ruthlessly stuck with the decision that Freya and he should split, to double the chance of the signal getting out.

The logic might have been icy, but the prospect of being dead in a few hours was flooding his mind and threatening to paralyse him. He tried to relax his muscles, but with no success. His throat felt constricted. He knew, without looking in a mirror, that his face was white. At the same time he had the weird feeling of being disembodied, as if he was a separate person looking down on his anguish.

He wondered about Freya. What was her plan? How could she survive on air? Where was she heading? Would she be safe in Norway, or would she be arrested at some border control and then disappear?

Back to the Americans. If they went for it, they would somehow have to get him out of the country. Somehow they would have to get him through a hostile passport control at some airport, on to a transatlantic Jumbo.

They must have done stuff like that hundreds of times.

Or they might buy into the same logic which had made the heads of two countries, one of them his own, decide to kill the knowledge, and its carriers.

He wondered if it had occurred to Callaghan and Alice that, since they were privy to the dangerous story, they might themselves now be targets. He had a surge of guilt at having exposed them to risk; at the same time he knew that anyone exposed to the knowledge would be at risk.

The mobile was under his pillow, apparently unmoved, and it had a message.

Freya, still alive. He heard her soft sing-song voice, smelled her perfume, watched the flow of her long skirt …

Cut that out. Concentrate on surviving.

Petrie walked on to the verandah. Clouds were straddling the peaks but the sun was riding above them. A car was descending the hairpin road, visible now and then through gaps in the conifer forest below. It was three miles away and Petrie couldn’t be sure if it was Callaghan’s. He breathed in a big lungful of fresh air before turning back into the room.

He stepped down the wooden stairs, meeting warm air coming up from the big living room. The fire was glowing red, and was too hot to stand close to. Petrie threw on some logs.

The kitchen looked new. Dishes piled neatly in the sink told Petrie that Alice and Joe had had breakfast. More exploration revealed a large cupboard which served as a study; it was cramped — ‘bijou’ in estate agent speak. The chalet was empty.

Petrie then explored outside. The house was built on a mountainside, in an acre of ground which had been sculpted from the rock. The property was enclosed by high fencing. He wondered about its purpose; he thought it was maybe to keep out chamonix or bears, but it seemed unnecessarily high.

Back in his room, he pulled out Wildlife of the High Tatras. The disk was still there, still between the marmot and the owl. In the bijou study, he fired up Callaghan’s computer, and found that it was connected to the outside world. He typed in the address of Freya’s Icelandic friend.

Callaghan’s e-mail system, so far as Petrie could see, had no inbuilt encryption, nor did he have time to download a system. His message had avoided the key words which would draw the attention of Echelon, but he thought GCHQ had probably extended the repertoire of trigger words. His finger hovered over the return button which would fire the message over a telephone line, into some paraboloid somewhere and then up into an aether buzzing with curious satellites. He thought the message would probably go down into one of the big ears listening on the Yorkshire moors, and from there to GCHQ and MI6. He wondered if its route could be traced back to this isolated chalet in the back of beyond.

He thought maybe yes, maybe no. If yes, the cost of warning Freya could be a visit from British or Russian specialists, and this remote, isolated safe house would become his execution chamber, and Freya might still be caught anyway.

The balance of the logic was clear: don’t send the message.

He pressed the button.

Damn woman.