Alex went with Bree and Jones’s body to the emergency room.
Retrieving the main section of Sherman – as the two paramedics discovered when they tried to lift the snooker table – was going to be a separate project. They called for backup while the lights of the ambulance revolved noiselessly on the main street, red spilling through the gap in the fencing and over the bare pocked earth.
While Jones had been dying Alex had passed out. The last thing he heard was a clattering sound somewhere nearby – the landfall, like giant pick-up-sticks, of a baker’s dozen snooker cues and rests of different lengths. His system was lousy with whiskey and adrenalin. Alex’s mind had had enough.
‘Alive,’ Bree had said to the paramedics, still with Jones, waving at where Alex was lying. ‘That one’s alive. Bring him.’
And they had – hauling the boy’s unresisting frame into the back of the ambulance between two of them, letting him lie on the floor at Bree’s feet, beside the gurney on which Jones, having given up smoking for good, made his journey to the hospital.
While they were loading the bodies, Bree called Red Queen. She just said: ‘We’ve found him. The other side was there. Jones is gone.’
‘Jones is gone?’ Red Queen said. ‘Where gone?’
‘Gone. Dead. We’re in an ambulance on the way to the medical centre.’
‘Wait there,’ said Red Queen. Bree was exhausted. She wondered whether Red Queen would be thinking that Jones dead solved a problem. She didn’t know Red Queen well enough to make the call, and didn’t have the energy for anger. Alex came round in the ambulance, tried to sit up, lay back down again. Bree took charge of him.
When they got to the emergency room they took Jones away and made Bree sign a form. Jones had no identification on him. She realised she didn’t know his first name, so she wrote on the form just ‘Jones’ and circled ‘Mr’. You could also be ‘Mrs’, ‘Miss’ and ‘Ms’. If you were dead in this hospital, it seemed, they were still interested in whether or not you might be single.
She said that she was his next of kin, and didn’t have the presence of mind to give any but her real name. Under ‘relationship to the deceased’, she wrote: ‘Friend’. Her hands were still shaking.
Afterwards Bree was asked to wait. She was hustled through the emergency room, and into a public waiting area. The walls were sea green and grainy in the strip light. Alex was already there, and Bree went and sat beside him on a metal seat with fixed armrests. The seats were bolted to the walls. It had the feel of a budget airport departure lounge, except that the room’s hard acoustics rang with the wails of the suffering and the mad.
Doctors appeared through double doors, looked anxious, and vanished again. A drunk with some sort of wound in his leg lay across two seats on the facing wall. His dark grey jogging bottoms were streaked down one leg with a wet black stain, and there were smears of blood and dirt on his hands and face. He was muttering something that sounded like ‘ong, ong, ong’ and every few minutes he would shriek out ‘They’re here! They’re here! They’re here!’ and bang his open hand on the metal chair, some ring or bangle he wore making a piercing clangour as he struck.
An old man with matted hair and several days of stubble sat, in the far corner, topless and dirty, with a twist of webbing slung around his bare chest. His head jerked, sporadically, towards his shoulder but his gaze was fixed on Bree. She broke eye contact and looked at Alex.
Alex sat, still wrapped in the foil blanket they had given him in the ambulance, hunched and looking away. His face was a waxen yellow, his deep-set eyes dark with sleeplessness and shock. He focused on nothing.
‘The thing, then,’ said Bree, quietly. ‘Tell me about it. Where did you hide it?’
Alex took a long time before answering.
‘Who are you?’ he said, still not looking at her.
‘A friend?’
‘Really.’ His voice was dead flat. ‘I don’t know what’s happening. You tell me?’
‘No,’ said Bree. ‘Not really.’ Alex paused, and zoned out again. Bree’s question went ignored. Then, as if remembering something from a dream, he said: ‘You were at the supermarket, weren’t you?’
‘The supermarket?’ Bree tried to think. She picked at a hangnail. Adrenalin, washing back out of her system, had numbed her. Everything felt unreal.
‘The supermarket. Where the man chased me. The dead man.’
‘Yes,’ said Bree. She didn’t know what to say after that. The dead man. The other dead man. The other other dead man.
‘Why did he chase me?’
‘He thinks you have the machine.’
‘I told him,’ said Alex. ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about.’
‘No?’ Bree looked at him appraisingly. If he was lying he was a good liar. She continued. ‘Something has gone missing. Something that we think – the agency I work for, that is – and the man who had the gun on you thought – the people he worked for, anyway… you have. We’ve been trying to find you. You and your connection in the city.’
‘I’ve got nothing,’ Alex insisted. ‘I came here to see my girlfriend.’
Bree thought about it for a moment. The calls they’d picked up once they’d got hold of his phone records: the calls to a cell on a San Francisco network; then the phone showing up in Las Vegas. The contact: how could it be otherwise?
‘Your girlfriend?’ Bree wondered whether she was going to regret the initiative she had taken while Alex had been unconscious in the ambulance. If Jones had died – if Jones had died for this, she had wanted to make sure it had been for something. She wasn’t going to let it away.
‘Ex-girlfriend, probably. We had – something went wrong that can’t be put right.’
Bree exhaled. She knew all about things that went wrong that couldn’t be put right. She felt a hundred years old.
‘This is bigger than that,’ she said.
‘Oh yes?’ said Alex. Not sounding convinced.
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ said Bree. ‘People are trying to kill you. That man was trying to kill you. It has to have been the machine that saved you. The coincidence engine.’
‘What?’
‘It affects probability. It might be a weapon. Everybody thinks you have it.’
‘I haven’t got anything. I’ve never heard of it.’
‘Well, if you haven’t got it, who has?’
‘If I’ve never heard of it it’s not very likely I’m going to know that, is it?’
Bree fell silent again. She looked down at her hands. Her right palm was slightly tacky with Jones’s blood.
‘You need to stay here with us,’ she said. ‘My boss needs to speak to you.’
‘Oh no. No, no,’ Alex croaked. ‘I’ve got rights. I’m not saying anything. I don’t know who you are.’
‘I work for the government.’
‘A government that puts people in black planes and tortures them? I don’t think so.’
‘Suit yourself,’ said Bree. ‘But the other guys will come back. You know that, don’t you? You were lucky this time. Lucky. If you can’t decide who to trust, you’re going to end up dead, my friend. People are already dying because of this thing. My colleague there.’
‘A snooker table fell out of the sky,’ said Alex. ‘How is that something to do with me?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Bree. ‘I’ve barely heard of snooker. But it fell on a man who was trying to kill you. And it killed a man who was trying to protect you. He’s right in there somewhere -’ she pointed down through the double doors into the lit corridor beyond -’being zipped into a bag. That was my colleague. We were coming to try to help you.’
‘Were you?’
‘We didn’t want you dead. The other guy did. We were on your side. I am on your side.’
‘Nobody’s on my side,’ said Alex. ‘Not even my girlfriend.’
Girlfriend? Jeezus. Talk about self-absorbed. She let the pause ride, and picked a bit at her thumbnail.
‘Want to tell me what happened?’ she said afterwards. Bree didn’t care about the kid’s romantic problems – she had just seen two men die violently at very close quarters, and she wasn’t wanting to think very much about the likelihood that whatever killed them would kill her too. People who got close to this thing were dying.
‘No,’ said Alex. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
Once again, Bree’s mind did what it always did when traumatised: it sought refuge in the practical. Bree was thinking. She knew the police would have been called – the immediate assumption being that what had happened to Jones was a gunshot wound – and they were likely to have enough trouble with them as it was, explaining what these four people, some with guns, had been doing there in the first place.
The guard at the entrance to the emergency room was already casting the sort of glances their way that suggested he’d been briefed to prevent them walking out if they wanted to. Or was that paranoia? Red Queen would be able to calm this down. Perhaps.
‘It’s my girlfriend, see, Carey. She works here. She was a student where I go to university, in Cambridge. I’m studying for a PhD. You know about Cambridge?’
Bree let him ramble. She thought about the way Jones’s eye had looked when he was lying there in that vacant lot. Not the damaged eye – the other one. Stone grey in the iris. And that sudden sharp opening of the pupil as he came to grief.
‘Anyway, she went home. She’s American, from the West Coast. I came out to visit her and I had this idea that I… It sounds so stupid now, I know. But I thought she was it. She was… it’s hard for me to talk about this to a stranger, but…’
Came to grief. Why was it people said that?
‘I asked her to marry me. She didn’t want to, I don’t think. She sort of hesitated. No. Got to admit it. She turned me down flat. Just like that. I had a ring and everything. I came all the way here to see her.’
As if grief was there already, waiting for you. You don’t go away to it. You arrive. The boy burbled on.
‘Pretty funny. I was pretty upset at the time, but now – you know, you chalk it up to experience. It was about four hours ago, actually. I mean, I’m still pretty upset about it if truth be told. I wasn’t completely – you know, I did what you do. Went out and just left her. You can’t – you can’t recover from that, you know. But you live and learn, move on. Into every life a little rain must fall. It’s not the end of the world. It just feels -’ his voice quavered – ‘like the end of the world…’
What was Jones looking at? What was the last thing his eye saw of the world? Had he been looking at her when he died? She couldn’t remember.
Bree looked up and across the waiting area. A young black guy, lanky arms shining with sweat, was muttering and yipping. A girl in a hooded top sat with her hands folded in her lap, her lips moving silently. There was blood down one side of her face. A bulky man in a pale blue T-shirt, wedged into one of these chairs, had his right arm wound round and round with toilet roll. He was dozing, coughing out sporadic, apnoeic snores.
There was a noise. Through the door to the outside there came a man dressed in a white jumpsuit and a dark wig with extravagant sideburns holding a wad of bloodied tissue paper to his nose. He still had his sunglasses on.
Bree saw Alex look up, and something that might in another circumstance have been amusement passed across his face.
‘It’s not, honey. It’s not. Not the end of the world,’ said Bree, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. ‘Life goes on. You just feel sad for a bit. Maybe a long time. I had a husband. Marriage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’
‘Are you still with him?’
‘Had.’
‘What happened?’
‘He left. I wasn’t easy to be married to.’
‘Did you love him?’
‘Yes,’ said Bree, a flat matter of fact.
‘Still?’
‘No. Jolly Rancher?’
Alex frowned.
‘It’s a candy,’ Bree said. She pulled half of a stick of Jolly Ranchers from her pocket, the paper wrapper in a spiral tatter where she had been attacking them. Alex took one, unwrapped it, put it in his mouth. It clinked against his teeth like sticky glass, then started tasting of sour artificial apple. ‘My friend liked these.’
‘I’m sorry about your friend,’ Alex said. Talking was making him feel – not better, exactly. But it was like not looking down. In the back of his mind there was still this sinkhole, this gap, widening, between what he had thought his future was going to be, and what it was now.
With every passing moment, the gap got wider. It was irredeemable. Bridges crumbling and falling into the sea. Alex replayed Carey saying the one thing, the thing that was impossible: ‘Can we just forget this?’ It was done.
‘How does it get better?’ Alex said.
‘What?’ Bree had three Jolly Ranchers in her mouth and was unwrapping a fourth. The Ranchers didn’t seem to be imparting the jollity their name promised. It occurred to Alex that there was something about her – a look around her eyes? – that made him think he knew her. As if she were someone he saw often and paid little attention to, and then met in another context: like bumping into your old dinner lady in the supermarket a couple of years after you’ve left school.
‘Better,’ repeated Alex. ‘How long does it take?’
‘Long time,’ said Bree. ‘Wait. Waiting does it. Apparently.’
‘Look,’ Alex said. He dug a hand into his pocket, and half stood up, and out of his pocket he pulled a square box. ‘I even got a ring.’ He popped the box open.
Bree reached out. Her fingers were chubby, her nails bitten down. She took the ring and turned it round in her hands.
‘Pretty,’ she said. ‘The number eight. Swirly. Ah… I’m sorry, kid.’ She drew it a little closer to her eyes. ‘What’s that written in it there?’ She indicated some scratchy markings.
‘Hallmark, I think.’
‘No. Hallmark looks different. Longer. That’s just…’ Bree angled the ring in the harsh light of the waiting room. ‘ “AB” it says.’
Alex took the ring off her and looked at it more closely. It did – right up by where the band swooped into its figure-eight design. The letters had been worn almost to indecipherability by the warm friction of the finger that had once lived in the ring. Bree remembered something Red Queen had said.
‘What do those letters mean?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ he said truthfully. ‘I hadn’t noticed them. I bought the ring second-hand.’
‘Used?’
‘I bought it from an antique shop.’
Banacharski’s mother was called Ana. The letters they had intercepted had gone on and on about her. She had died.
‘You’re lying,’ said Bree.
The look Alex gave her – weariness mixed with fear – was enough to convince her that he was not. And if this was it – why show her? ‘Let me see it again,’ said Bree. She held it up to the light once more. On the leading edge, the metal seemed for an instant to have a diffracted blue light – a blur, as if it had slipped sideways in space.
‘When? Where did it come from?’
‘Just a shop. A shop in Cambridge. A couple of weeks ago. I happened to stop there – I saw it and I thought it might be nice to… you know. To ask her to marry me.’
Bree rubbed her eyes. It felt like there was grit in them.
‘I think,’ Alex continued, ‘I – I don’t know. I don’t know what made me think she would say yes. I know she’s got… she’s much more experienced than me, is what. And she’s got what she calls “issues around commitment”. She’s said that before. She didn’t have a normal family, like I did – she was fostered when she was a teenager and never sees her birth parents. Never talks about them.’
There was a very long silence between them. Alex drew the space blanket tighter around his shoulders, and Bree tugged at where the fabric of her blouse had wedged into her armpit.
‘How did you find me?’ Alex asked.
‘Dumb luck,’ said Bree. ‘We’d lost you. But the man who was chasing you – we had a fix on his cellphone. You can triangulate them. Good as a tracking device. He followed you and we followed him.’
‘How did he find me?’ said Alex. Bree shrugged. A known unknown.
‘I don’t know what they had on you. My boss thought they were getting information from inside our organisation. There’s a lot riding on this.’
‘But why did you think I had this thing of yours in the first place?’
‘We were watching the Banacharski Ring…’
‘The Banacharski Ring? It’s a web ring. An academic group. We share papers about maths.’
‘Ostensibly. Our cryptographers say different.’
‘Not ostensibly. Really. Isla -’
‘Isla Holderness?’
‘Yes, exactly. Isla set it up after she corresponded with him. It’s just a website with a discussion forum attached. My supervisor took it over when she left. He was friendly with Isla when they were at Cambridge together, before her accident.’
‘Uh-huh? OK. So tell me about your supervisor.’
‘Mike? Not much to tell. He’s a research fellow at my college. We meet for supervisions. I show him my work. Sometimes we have a drink. That’s it…’
‘Mike Hollis?’
Alex looked perplexed. ‘You know him?’
‘No,’ said Bree. ‘Colleagues of mine were interested in him.’
Alex shook his head. He still had no idea what was going on. He wondered where Carey was now, and then pushed the thought out of his mind.
‘Hollis sent an email,’ said Bree. ‘He mentioned you. He said he was leaving the ring in your hands. Shortly afterwards, you left for America. And here you are with the ring. Are we not expected to find that suspicious?’
‘This is a ring I bought for my girlfriend,’ Alex said, past exasperation, ‘it has nothing to do with Mike, or Nicolas Banacharski, or anybody else. I bought it. Me, at random, in a shop. Mike was leaving me in charge of the Banacharski Ring’s website while he went on sabbatical.’
Bree thought: what a mess. None of this made any sense. Another wave of exhaustion hit her. And now, when she thought she’d been bringing a loose end in, she might have been doing the opposite. She decided all she could do was breach it.
‘Your girlfriend?’ Bree said.
‘Carey, yes.’ He added bitterly: ‘Ex-girlfriend.’
‘She the last number you dialled on your cell?’
‘I don’t remember,’ said Alex.
‘Number ending -’ Bree pulled his cellphone out of her pocket and consulted the screen – ‘137 0359?’
‘Give me that!’ Alex said, snatching it back from her. She let it go.
‘She’s on her way here,’ said Bree. ‘I called her. Said you were in trouble and to come. She sounded a little drunk. It was hard to make out whether she was taking it in. But I said you were going to be here. Said you needed help.’
‘What? Why?’ Alex, panicking, even through his tiredness. It felt like a humiliation – even after everything, seeing Carey was…
‘Because you’re in trouble, and you need help.’
‘Trouble?’
‘Dead people. Me. You’re in lots of trouble.’ Bree gave it a moment, looked at her well-bitten fingernails. ‘But you’re right. It wasn’t for you, not strictly, that I called her. I thought she was your connection here. I thought you were going to pass the machine over to her.’
Alex started to say something, but she interrupted. ‘Yeah, yeah. I know. There’s no machine. You’re here to see your girlfriend. You don’t know what I’m talking about…’
‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. He was standing now. Fidgeting with his hands. His cheeks looked like they had been gouged from limestone. He wasn’t acting like someone who had been caught by a government agency trying to smuggle a weapon through a strange country. He was acting like somebody who was unbearably miserable at the prospect of confronting his ex-girlfriend.
Bree made a decision. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘Go. You don’t need to be here.’
‘But I thought…’
‘Yeah,’ said Bree. She shrugged, but didn’t smile. ‘So did I. This whole thing started as a mess and now it’s a worse one. Go. I know where you are. Go get some sleep.’ Bree did not add that, having been through Alex’s wallet and tagged his mobile phone, she knew how to find him if she needed to. ‘Enjoy Vegas,’ she added.
She watched as he walked towards the wide doors. The security guard watched him walk through, then looked back to Bree, then scratched his gut and rearranged his shoulders. That probably figured. Still no police. Perhaps miracles did happen.
Bree leaned back in the seat, comfortable as she could get, and let her eyes close.