Saskia Brandt: Deja Vu Part 12

David cleared his throat. Still no police. He held the brake, turned the key and pressed the ignition. The bike rumbled to life. Its windscreen rose and the suspension settled. The display gave him the time, his fuel load and a route map. He had enough petrol for one hundred kilometres on the straight. The excitement of escape began to lighten him.

'Ego, what do you think will happen when the police find out I've disappeared?'

'The local traffic division will move to a high state of alert. Records indicate that the local constabulary has one helicopter. If it locates you, the probability of reaching Heathrow is almost zero. You must find a motorway to leave the area before roadblocks are set, then transfer to minor roads to avoid detection.'

'Bike computer, show me the fastest route to the nearest motorway.'

A map appeared. He could be on the A1 in less than twenty minutes. He would pa.s.s through settlements called Walshford, Fairburn and Darrington. Names he would never remember. He could make Leicester without stopping for fuel.

He rolled to the junction and looked left. The two police officers were standing only metres away. They had their backs to him. Between them, being berated vigorously by one, was Janine. Her eyes briefly touched upon David's. Her expression did not change. David nodded.

He turned in the road and coasted away, retracing his route along Main Street.

'Bike, change colour.'

The motorbike rode through one pool of streetlight with a silver finish. By the next, it was midnight blue.

'Ego, read me War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.'

'"Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Bonapartes. But I warn you..."'

Mrs McMurray, Saskia's landlady, gave her a key with a plastic St Andrew's Cross as the fob. Saskia took it and closed the bedroom door in her inquisitive face. She had fantasised about collapsing on the bed and sleeping dreamlessly, but her mind had not spent its momentum. It turned over still, rolling facts around, testing them, tasting them. The words on the wall. Shakespeare. The Fates. The death of Bruce Shimoda. The first bomb in 2003. The second bomb. Proctor. Back to the words on the wall.

By the p.r.i.c.king of my thumbs.

She stretched on the bed. By the pillow, her gla.s.ses were folded and dark. Near her feet was the dusty envelope, unopened. It read: 'Do not open this envelope'.

She walked to the window. She might have been looking from the window of an apartment on a quiet, cold night, back in Berlin.

Something wicked this way comes.

The Fates: Clotho, she spins the thread of life. Lachesis, she measures a length. Atropos, she cuts it.

Spin, measure, snip.

The window was jet, smoky with hints to the scene beyond. The impressions merged and snapped into focus. A human face.

Whom do you hunt?

Saskia stepped back, aghast. Her calves met the edge of the bed. She did not see the face as a reflection, but as a visitation. She drew her revolver.

'Only me.'

Saskia screamed as she turned. Mrs McMurray, the elderly proprietor who had asked her not to smoke, there's a dear, dropped her tray of tea and thin British biscuits.

'Why, my dear girl,' Mrs McMurray gasped. Her mouth worked on autopilot while her eyes roamed. 'I'm very sorry. I should've knocked, should I not.'

'Frau McMurray a' Saskia began. Why was the woman apologising? 'The tea,' she said, confused.

'Aye. Will you look at that. I should clean it up.'

The landlady remained exactly where she was.

Saskia faked a laugh. She let the revolver tip over her finger. 'Do not worry about the gun. It is not loaded. I was...oiling it. This is my nightly practice.'

Do I look familiar, Frau McMurray? Read any Russian newspapers? Do I give you a sense of a Saskia stowed the gun in its holster. 'Listen. You clean the spill and I shall make us a fresh pot of tea.'

Mrs McMurray brightened. She was staring at the gun. 'That's a fine idea.'

Saskia crept down the thickly-carpeted stairs, past printed masterpieces and a cross-st.i.tched owl. Her heart slowed with each step. The television became louder. She remembered the ghostly reflection and decided that Jago's last word of the night had been correct. She needed to sleep.

Of course, if the landlady walked into a room without knocking, she got what she deserved. What Mrs McMurray really needed was...

A bullet?

She froze on the stairs.

Is that what she needs, Frau Kommissarin? Spin, measure, and...snip!

Saskia cleared her throat and continued walking. That voice was surely just her conscience. But she remembered the words of Klutikov: 'The imposition of the donor pattern must be constant. If not, the original pattern - that is, the personality and ident.i.ty extant in your brain - will resurge.'

Was it the mind of her true body straining at its bonds? She could not be sure. But if she even suspected that she could lose her new mind to the old one, then that gun would find itself pointed at her temple.

A little off the top? asked the voice. Snip.

Chapter Seventeen.

Saskia's driver listened to a local radio station as they travelled to the Special Incident Unit. She did not recognise any of its songs. Her poverty of memory. Onto to her thoughts stepped Jago, reading from a handheld computer. There had been a sighting the night before. Proctor had checked into a hotel in Northallerton, two hundred and thirty kilometres from Edinburgh and one hundred and sixty kilometres from the equipment shed. Jago had been eager to visit Northallerton, but not Saskia. Her instinct told her it would be a waste of time.

Jago shrugged. Local police and some officers from the Edinburgh team were on the case. They were competent.

Saskia closed her eyes on Edinburgh and let Jago's beautiful vowels and intermittent trill carry her through the report. The equipment shed, she learned, had provided little evidence. A farmer had discovered the parachute and, inside the shed, the exploded remains of a laptop computer: a Korean model available from hundreds of outlets nationwide. It had been destroyed by a plastic bonded explosive with a generic, untraceable blasting cap. A wider search revealed tracks made by four motorbikes. The farmer had no clue. They were not his. He owned two trail bikes and they were kept in a garage at the main farm. They were untouched.

Saskia yawned.

'What about Northallerton?'

'Late last night, a constable reported the flight of a man who matched Proctor's description. He had checked into The Poor Players under the name Harrison. He was moments from being arrested when the constable was called away on an a.s.sault-in-progress, which turned out to be a false alarm. When the constable returned twenty minutes later, after a cup of tea a'

'Meine Gute. The English and their narcotic tea.'

'a he found that Proctor had vanished.'

'Go on.'

Jago angled his computer screen against the sunlight. 'House-to-house enquiries uncovered Mrs Taome Gallagher. Tay to her friends. Bit of a wind-bag by the sounds of it. She spoke to a man matching Proctor's description around the time he checked in. According to the credit card people, that was 6:02 pm. Said he was riding a chrome motorbike and wanted to park in her alleyway. We have an APB on him.'

'APB?'

'All Points Bulletin. His description is released nationally.'

Saskia stared at the shops sliding by. 'Surely that compromises the secret nature of the investigation?'

'Perhaps. But the governor phoned me this morning and said he was fed up working with one hand tied behind his back. I'm inclined to agree.'

'Does Proctor's bike match the tracks found next to the glider?'

'Yes, but my guess would be that he was met by a group of his own people. They gave him supplies and rode away, splitting up.'

'No. I think that would be a waste of effort. Why not put all the supplies in the shed?'

Jago scratched a tooth. 'Perhaps.'

'Where else was the card used?'

'Two filling stations between Belford and Northallerton.'

'Do they have cameras?'

'No, we checked. He chose wee one-pump jobs. He's using minor roads. One or two lads saw him, but they can't give a good description. They say his bike was chrome. Maybe some kind of trail bike.'

'So. A trail bike. Probably the same bike he used to ride away from the equipment shed.'

'Yes.'

'Back to last night. You said there was a falsified accusation of a.s.sault?'

'It came over the radio just as the officer was about to interview Proctor.'

'That is convenient. In Germany we say somebody has "cried wolf".'

'Here too.'

'Who was the caller?'

'It turned out to be a kid. Truscott a the reporting officer a said she looked to be on the wrong side of sixteen.'

Saskia felt a memory move, delicate as a baby's kick.

'So so.'

'Agent Brandt,' said Paul Besson, removing his mittens, 'what do you know about crypta.n.a.lysis?'

Saskia considered the nervous eyes of this boyish forty-year-old. She was reminded of Lev Klutikov. 'It's all about the pattern?'

'Very good.' He put his hands in his armpits. 'So far, we know this. That our target initiated a communication using his personal computer as the interface, and telecommunications equipment in his taxi as the transmitter. That it was an encapsulated transmission of video and audio. That it pa.s.sed through the exchanges at ScotIX and MAE-West. That it lasted less than two minutes. That there were two parties involved.'

'And that we very much want to know its content.'

'And that.'

Saskia watched him pour four cups of coffee. Garland - the red-haired woman who had travelled up to Scotland with Besson - took one and returned to her station at the head of the conference table, where she donned smoked gla.s.ses and re-entered her work. Meanwhile, Besson put milk and sugar - hesitating, his eyes on Saskia's knees - into another cup, and gave it to her.

'Why did you make four?' she asked.

'These two are for me. I...well, that's usually what I have in the mornings.'

Saskia smiled, then saw that it had dazzled him. She frowned and stepped away from the coffee machine. 'Tell me, were both ends of the transmission encrypted at source, or were they directed through a third-party server somewhere?'

'So you do know something about crypta.n.a.lysis.'

'Let's say that I don't remember what I've forgotten. Start with the basics.'

Besson swigged his coffee and unzipped his coat. He loosed a sigh of concentration, and his breath steamed. 'Basics: encryption being the process of converting publicly readable information into something that can only be understood by the intended recipient. We'll call the ordinary information the 'plaintext' and the encrypted information the 'ciphertext'. The cipher itself is two processes: one part encrypts, one decrypts. But the cipher needs a special ingredient to work, something unique to the transaction. We'll call this the 'key'. So think of the cipher as a type of padlock. And think of the key as...'

'Hmm,' she sipped, 'a key?'

He grinned and put a hand on the crown of his head, scratching. 'You remember the Enigma machine?'

'No.'

'The Germans used it to encode military transmissions during the Second World War. The cool thing about the Enigma cipher was that it changed itself with each letter of the message. The odds against breaking it were 150 million million million to one. But it was cracked.'

'How?'

'It was systematic. It was predictable. With modern computers we could break it easily. But if there is no system, we have a real problem. I have a feeling that Proctor's code falls into the latter category. It's a one-time pad. Unbreakable.'

'More about that.'

'Of all the methods of encryption, only one is mathematically impossible to crack, and that's the one-time pad, or OTP. Even given infinite computing resources, the plaintext could never be recovered from the ciphertext. The OTP uses a key that has the same number of elements as the plaintext. Each plaintext element's value - be it a letter or a pixel - is transformed by the corresponding random value in the key. As long as each element in the OTP is truly random, there's no systematic element for a crypta.n.a.lyst to sniff out. It's what we call perfect secrecy. You rarely find OTPs in the wild because they're unwieldly, but we do use them to teach students the basics of crypta.n.a.lysis.'

'So how does the receiver of the message know how to unravel it?'

'The sender and the receiver must have identical versions of the key.'