The Lure

49 Endgame

The cabin steward shook him awake and Petrie was hit by his third surge of terror in twelve hours.

The first had been in Warsaw. At the check-in he withered under the steady gaze of hard-eyed officials. And again at Heathrow, the Special Branch officers seemed to have X-ray eyes which penetrated his mind. Petrie knew that a mistake at either of these key points, a tremor of nerves attracting attention, would have been fatal.

And now, on the screen showing the transatlantic progress of the jumbo, the aircraft was pointing south and practically touching Washington. He looked down, and glimpsed snow-covered ground through clear patches of cloud.

The endgame. A good one won’t save you. It needs to be devastating.

In the Dulles terminal Petrie defiantly pulled off the wig and sideburns and the heavy spectacles, eased the plastic padding out of his mouth and the stupid little moustache from under his nose, and tossed the lot into a litter bin. He put on his usual round-framed spectacles from a case. Amos and Obadiah escorted him to the sidewalk at the front of the airport, where a stretch limousine was waiting, with another large black car behind it. Amos opened the door for Petrie and said, ‘So long, Tom.’

In the back of the limousine, three people. Eau de cologne lingering in the air. He sank into leather opulence next to a strikingly beautiful young woman who gave him an open, almost naive smile. Her voice was melodious and tinged with a Scandinavian accent: ‘What took you so long?’

For the first time in his life Petrie was out of words. He squeezed her hand.

The driver merged smoothly into the flow of airport traffic. A middle-aged woman sat across from Petrie, on the luxurious backwards-facing long seat. She pressed a button on the arm rest and a glass partition slid up between the uniformed driver and the passengers. She extended a hand. ‘I’m Hazel Baxendale, the President’s Science Adviser. On behalf of President Bull I’d like to welcome you to the States. Don’t let Dr Størmer kid you. She arrived only a few hours ago.’

Her companion, elderly and white-haired, nodded at Petrie but didn’t extend his hand. ‘And I’m Al Sullivan. I run the CIA, for my sins. Glad we got you out okay.’

Heady company for a junior post-doc. Petrie said, ‘I feel as if I’m inside a Bond movie or something.’

Sullivan managed a near-smile. ‘We have a few guys like that on the payroll.’

The limo was now moving smartly along the freeway, the heavily tinted glass protecting them from the curious stares of other drivers. The CIA Director leaned forward. ‘The deal is this. You give us the password to the DVD. In return we go public with the ET signal. We put everything into the public domain, all the new knowledge and all the material still to be decrypted. But all of us agree to keep one thing back.’

Petrie waited.

‘The celestial coordinates of the signal, pending a decision from the United Nations. If they decide on a reply, we release that information too.’

Freya said, ‘It’s everything we’ve asked for, Tom.’

‘But the moment I give them the password,’ he warned her, ‘they can do anything they like.’ He looked across at Sullivan. ‘You have the DVD, then.’

‘Came in the pouch weeks ago. But we can’t bust it. Neither us nor the NSA.’

‘If I give you the password you could decrypt the message, use the knowledge for your own national advantage and keep the knowledge of the signallers to yourselves.’

‘But if they did that they’d have to silence us, Tom,’ Freya said.

‘Seen the car following us?’

She glanced nervously out of the rear window.

‘Don’t be silly.’ Hazel was smiling, but the smile had an edge.

Petrie said, ‘How do we even know you are who you say you are?’

Freya attempted a light tone. ‘It’s the castle. It had an effect on everyone in it. We all ended up paranoid.’

Nobody smiled. She turned to Petrie. ‘Tom, if they want the knowledge of the signallers suppressed they’ll bump us off with or without the password. We’re in their hands.’

The even chance. ‘It kills me to say this, Freya, but we have to focus on getting the signal out. That matters more than us.’

Sullivan closed his eyes. ‘Young man, there are people at the Farm who’d have the password out of you before the day’s end.’

Petrie remained silent. Yes, the duress one, the one that would wipe the disk clean. Beside him, Freya had frozen, and suddenly the air was thick with hostility.

Hazel tried to break the tension. ‘It must be the jet lag, Tom. May I call you Tom? You have to trust someone.’

It’s not going well. Not the devastating game that Vash demanded. Petrie tried to unclench his fists, think carefully. The car was stuffy and he felt sweat down his back.

Freya broke the long silence. ‘I trust you. You’re nice people.’

There was a mystified silence. ‘But before I knew you were such nice people, I made several copies of the disk when I was in Prague and sent them around to colleagues and friends, with instructions. If there was an accident, everything would go out, including the exact location of the signallers. To sub-arcsecond accuracy, if you understand that. Do you know how many backyard radio telescopes there are in the States alone? Hundreds! All convertible to answering devices.’

There was a brief silence as they assimilated Freya’s bombshell. Hazel broke it; she threw back her head and laughed. The driver glanced in the mirror.

‘There’s another condition,’ said Sullivan. ‘A little rewriting of history. No mention must ever be made of the attempts to muzzle you people and suppress this discovery. The British and the Russians insist.’

Hazel said, ‘And we’re happy to agree. What else are friends for?’

Petrie asked, ‘But what about our colleagues, Svetlana, Charlie and Vashislav? How will you explain their deaths?’

Hazel said, ‘They’re alive.’

Freya raised clenched fists, squealed with delight. ‘Fantastisk! Hvordan ei all verden…?’

‘All in due course, Dr Størmer,’ Hazel said.

Sullivan spoke quietly. ‘The password?’

Petrie looked out of the window. The facts were in and he had them analysed in a second. Freya, probably, was lying in her teeth. He glanced over at her. She nodded, almost imperceptibly; it was little more than a slight narrowing of her eyes. But Vashislav alive was like the Bismarck loose on the high seas; the genie practically out of the bottle; membership of the club all but guaranteed. This thing was beyond stopping.

He turned again to the window. ‘Origin of Species, chapter three, paragraph three, first sentence. “We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence.” Join the words up and write the sentence backwards.’

The DCI scowled. ‘This guy Darwin has a lot to answer for.’