Davidoff was lying on the bed nearest the window when Sherman came back in. He had his white earplugs in and was rapping his knuckles in the same annoying way on the wooden bed frame. That was what he had been doing to cause Sherman to go outside in the first place, Sherman remembered.
On the table was the wreckage of a service-station sandwich.
Still standing up, Sherman plugged his own iPod into his ears and pressed play.
There was a high squalling guitar noise and then what sounded like a teenage girl’s voice even higher through a gale of feedback. Sherman winced: a teenage girl with serious emphysema, apparently.
‘Waaansathoudahsawyou…’ the girl’s voice wailed, ‘… innacrowdiyazybaaaah…’ A drumbeat started to thump insistently in the background, and another wave of guitarry fuzz came over the top. Sherman pulled out the headphones.
‘This is pointless,’ he said, just loudly enough to break Davidoff’s reverie. The younger man picked his big head up a little and looked at him. He stepped over and pulled out one of Davidoff’s earbuds, at which he frowned. Music leaked from the dangling earbud: ‘… bompTSSSSS, bompbompTSSSSS, bompTSSSSS, bompbompTSSSSS.’
‘What?’ said Davidoff.
‘Are you receiving your directions from the cosmos all right there, mate?’
‘No,’ said Davidoff. ‘I’m listening to REO Speedwagon.’
Sherman dropped Davidoff’s earbud so it dangled by the bed, inhaled, and shuffled impatiently. It bugged him to be doing so little. It also bugged him that Davidoff pronounced REO ‘reeyo’, but that was just part of a wider discontent.
They had arrived late the previous night into an airport still clogged with backlogged passengers, and after picking up a car and driving around had finally hit on this unlovely motel. They had spent the day getting the lie of the land.
Davidoff had either bought the daft idea that this next-generation weapons system could be tracked down with the use of a last-but-one-generation MP3 player; or he had embraced the possibilities Ellis’s plan offered for bunking off. He had spent most of the day with the earbuds in, nodding away to himself, now and again saying something moronic like: ‘I’ve just had “Love in an Elevator”, “The Only Way is Up” and “Stairway to Heaven”. Do you think we’re closing in on it?’
‘Fuck. Do. I. Know, mate,’ Sherman would respond with unfailing regularity.
His own iPod was clearly broken. Since they’d arrived in the motel it would play nothing but that Neil Young racket over and over again.
The money on this job was good – if Ellis was going to pay them to listen to music, on his own head be it – but the doing nothing was not. Sherman would have been happier back in the desert, slotting ragheads from a long way away. He wondered about slotting Davidoff from less far away.
He took another can of Mountain Dew from the small fridge, cracked it open, and went outside to drink it and wonder what to do next.
‘So we got this.’
Red Queen showed Hands another photograph. It was the satellite image of the aeroplane.
‘It’s an airplane,’ said Hands.
‘Yes,’ said Red Queen. ‘This is a satellite image taken from space. When the weather is doing what the weather was doing over most of the Southern states last week, satellites can’t see much of anything. There’s cloud, rain, electrical interference. This is the only image we’ve got.’
The image, though distinctively the shape of a plane, was blurry and pixellated. It was more than half obscured by a wisp of grey-white that Hands assumed must be cloud.
He adjusted his glasses with his right hand and looked at it again.
‘I still see a plane. I only just see a plane. As you say, it’s not a very accurate picture. So what’s special about it? What does it have to do with me?’
‘What’s special about it is -’ Red Queen hesitated. ‘There are two things special about it. First, this plane is sitting on the ground, nowhere near anything that looks like an airport. It’s in the middle of a field. So how did it get there? And second is that this plane doesn’t exist. Didn’t exist.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s a 737. There aren’t that many of them made. They register every one. We have access to those registers. All accounted for. This one not. This plane appeared from nowhere.’
A look passed across the professor’s face that conveyed, with a pink wrinkling of the forehead from eyebrows to scalp, that he was still wondering, from time to time, whether he was the victim of a practical joke.
‘Ri-i-ght.’
He decided to show willing.
‘So how do you think the plane appeared from nowhere?’
‘This image was taken not far from a large scrap-metal disposal facility in Alabama, in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Jody. We think the hurricane assembled the plane.’
‘That’s completely absurd,’ said Hands. ‘Hurricanes don’t build planes anywhere outside undergraduate philosophy lectures.’
‘Who knows,’ said Red Queen levelly. ‘Perhaps the hurricane was showing off. But that’s the only working explanation we have. And we got this.’
Red Queen showed Hands the Intercept. Hands frowned at it. Noting the spots of pink on his cheeks, Red Queen expected him to dismiss the Intercept one sentence in. He got to the end, though – and again, there was something indecipherable in his expression as he read.
‘I don’t know anything about engineering, or about satellites, or about – whatever this is supposed to be. But I’m afraid this is complete garbage,’ he said. ‘The whole thing. Impossible.’
‘Improbable,’ said Red Queen.
‘Garbage. Impossible.’
‘Improbable enough to be effectively impossible.’
‘No, just impossible.’
‘We think that what Banacharski was making was a machine that would make impossible things probable.’
Hands looked uneasy at this point. Red Queen watched him very closely.
‘That sounds highly -’
‘Yes. Improbable. Extremely improbable, in fact.’
‘So where is this plane, then? Surely your… men in black helicopters -’ Hands pronounced the last phrase with notable distaste – ‘will already be halfway to Area 51 with it.’
Red Queen looked pained.
‘Our men in black helicopters, if you want to be crude about it, didn’t get anywhere near it. Professor Hands: do you remember what happened twelve hours after Hurricane Jody?’
Hands looked blank.
‘Hurricane Kim.’ The second storm had been even faster and more violent than the first, curving in from the north. ‘By the time another human being was in a position to stand where the satellite image shows that plane, there was nothing but fragments of twisted scrap metal spread out over the surrounding area as far as the eye could see.’
‘So who wrote this?’
‘You tell me.’
Hands emitted a long sigh, and decided it was time to come clean.
‘Me,’ he said. He took a sip of the coffee from the paper cup. It was stone cold.
Red Queen’s eyebrows climbed half an inch. ‘Really?’
Alex woke up feeling better. He showered, trying not to let the discoloured nylon shower curtain touch his body. The curtain sucked onto the whole of his flank in a big wet kiss, held there by static electricity. But the towel was clean enough, and Alex stood on the scrunched, wet mat in front of the sink afterwards and in the yellow light shaved for the first time since he had left London.
He dressed in jeans and a clean white T-shirt, then put on his blue denim jacket, then opened the curtain onto the scrubland out behind the motel. The sun was dazzling white and the sky pale. He thought better of the jacket and took it off, rolling it up under two straps of his rucksack.
You are always nearer by not keeping still. That was a line from a poem Carey had quoted to him. It had made him think of centrifugal force – the way the earth falls constantly away from us.
He wondered, fleetingly, about calling Carey. But he didn’t know yet what he was going to say to her – and he didn’t want to spoil what was supposed to be a surprise. He realised, though, that he’d now been gone long enough that he’d be missed. It was – what?
His watch said 9:50.
He wondered if Saul would be at home. He grabbed his phone from the bedside table, thumbed two buttons to unlock it and prepared to dial. Before he was able to touch a button, though, the screen said ‘Unknown’ as if there were a call in progress.
He held it to his ear. There was silence at the other end, but an open silence, a breathing silence, like the sea in a shell.
Alex listened, then he said: ‘Hello.’
As he did so, another voice said ‘Hello’ simultaneously. It was a girl’s voice.
He said ‘Hello’ again, quicker this time, and her voice, once more at the same moment, like an echo so instantaneous as not to be an echo at all, said ‘Hello’. Then he paused and heard the breathing sound.
He had had his own voice in his ear when the girl had been speaking, but he was pretty sure now that the girl’s voice belonged to Carey.
He felt a chill. He must have speed-dialled her by accident. He pressed the red button and spiked the call.
He dialled his brother, listening to tiny, insect click-clacks and then the long distant ring of a transatlantic connection. Saul answered on the third ring.
‘All right, bumface?’
‘All right, Saul.’
‘I would like you to know,’ said Saul, in a voice of some seriousness, ‘that I have now owned every last level in Peggle.’
‘Saul, I have literally no idea what you’re talking about. Is this one of your computer games?’
‘Not just any computer game, my friend. I’m talking Ultra Extreme Fever, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”, Magic Hats… Compared to this, Plants Versus Zombies sucks balls.’
‘Plants Versus Zombies? Was that the one with the -’
‘…Plants and the… zombies? Yes. And the sucked balls. I knew that hoity-toity Oxbridge education wasn’t lost on you. Now I’m insis-’
‘Never mind that. Saul: I’m in America…’
There was a pause. The forward progress of Saul’s onslaught had been impeded, momentarily, by this new piece of information. The phone was on the end of the breakfast bar in Saul’s flat, and he imagined Saul’s whole-body gesture of surprise and interest catching Tim’s peripheral vision. Tim’s Evening Standard would go down and he would make a silent question mark with his face.
‘Alex. He’s in America!’ Saul would be mouthing to his boyfriend, his eyes wide. The image was so clear to him Alex felt homesickness lurch in his stomach.
Saul started to sing ‘I wanna be in Ameh-ri-cah’ but Alex cut him off with ‘Saul -’, and his voice changed, became more serious. ‘Skidoop, what are you doing in America? Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine, Saul. I just had a thing where – I wanted to get away. It’s not a big deal…’
A thought occurred to Saul.
‘Are you with the girl?’
Alex said nothing for a moment and Saul ran, in triumph, with the silence. ‘My God! Tim! This is so exciting. This is more exciting than anything that’s ever happened. Alex has eloped with the American girl! He’s going to go live on a farm in Iowa and make sweet love to livestock and breed adorable little one-eyed children in dungarees…’
‘I haven’t eloped,’ Alex said. ‘Saul, I’m not with Carey. Look, I haven’t got long – I’m calling on my mobile phone. I didn’t tell anyone I was going, and I’m fine, but I don’t want people to worry about me or call the police or anything.’
‘Where are you? Where in America?’
Alex looked out of the window.
‘Atlanta,’ he said.
‘Atlanta?’
He ignored the question. ‘Can you call Mum and tell her – I don’t know what you tell her, actually. Don’t tell her I’m here, though. Please. Tell her I’m staying with you if you have to. Make something up.’
‘What happened, little brother? Are you alone?’
‘Nobody’s here. I’m fine,’ Alex said. ‘I’m going to go and see Carey, but I’m not sure what’s going to happen.’
Saul seemed to digest this.
‘You’re not going to go all Thelma and Louise on us, are you?’
‘No,’ Alex said. ‘I’m not going to go all Thelma and Louise. I promise.’
‘Well, you have a fabulous holiday, then. And seriously: take care.’
‘Thanks. See you soon, Saul.’
‘Laters, bumface,’ said Saul. And he rang off.
Alex put the phone in his hip bag. He had a plan in mind. On the road, he’d be able to think. He opened the door of the room and stepped onto the balcony. The man who had been there last night was nowhere. He walked down the stairs and across the car park to check out.
The clerk said the nearest Hertz office was back out by the airport. Alex crossed the highway and waited for the bus. The bus shelters here didn’t have benches, like in the UK. This one didn’t even have a shelter. Alex dropped his rucksack between his feet and leaned back on a concrete post. A tramp with a piled shopping cart was approaching from the direction Alex was watching for the bus. He was the only other person Alex could see, and wore a grey felt hat of shapeless design, filthy brown trousers hanging low on his waist, and some sort of twist of webbing slung round his bare chest. He was barking like a seal. ‘Raup! Arrp!’ he said. ‘Aaarrp!’
Alex could hear it from some way away. With each exclamation, the shopping trolley, with its cargo of stuffed 7-Eleven bags, would take a jolting bunny-hop forward and its owner would whip his head round to the left. It looked like a nervous tic, or like he was anxious that something unwelcome was on the point of arriving unannounced on his left shoulder. Alex couldn’t think of why exactly anything would want to go near the man’s left shoulder.
‘Aarrp! Raaup!’ Alex looked at his feet. There was no sign of a bus.
The tramp made slow progress up the road. The barking sounds he emitted sounded more and more like dry heaves with each moment that passed. And from what Alex could see out of the corner of his eye, what he was expecting to arrive on his shoulder wasn’t welcome. His eyes were rolling like those of a terrified horse.
When he got level with Alex, whose existence he had not appeared to notice, he suddenly whipped his head the other way, so his face was pointing straight into Alex’s, and shouted: ‘BOO!’
Alex’s stomach flipped and he jumped back in fright. He stumbled over the rucksack at his feet and landed with a painful thump on his coccyx. He scrambled to get his feet under him.
Leaning against his shopping trolley, the tramp was wheezing with laughter.
‘Faggin’ aaaRRGH! Gotcha. Faggin’ liberal!’
Alex’s face flushed with blood but, fearing violence, he snatched up his rucksack and took a step back. The tramp scissored into another burst of mirth, then apparently took fright again, and his head jerked back round to look over his shoulder.
‘Arrrp!’ he exclaimed, then looked piercingly at Alex.
‘Spare sssigarette?’ he said, sending a hot gale of rotting pilchards in Alex’s direction. There was a furze of white stubble on the bulb of his chin and his cheeks were sunken. His lips moved and ticced, flashing teeth the colour of toffee. His right hand probed under the webbing round his chest and scratched absently at his left nipple.
‘Hnuh? Eh?’
Alex shook his head.
‘Asshole,’ said the tramp genially, and stood, left arm on the trolley, laughter passed, sizing Alex up. Alex coughed officiously and looked distractedly past the tramp down the road. There was still no sign of the bus.
‘Sorry,’ he said. The tramp shrugged, and barked again. Alex looked at his feet. It occurred to him to whistle a thin tune, but his mouth felt dry. And then, as they stood there with Alex looking at his feet, the tramp grabbed Alex by a twist of shirt and walked in until the hot physicality of him, sour stink of skin, dried sweat, rancid mouth smell, enveloped the younger man.
Alex’s eyes flicked up. And the everyday madness in the man’s face had been replaced by something different. He looked as if he was having a seizure. The muscles on his neck were standing up, and a coil of vein went across one.
‘Nobody’s here,’ he hissed. You could hear the wet breath whistling against his wrecked teeth. ‘Trust nobody. Nobody can help you. Bring them together. Bring them back. Forgive.’
The tramp was breathing very hard now, and he had Alex clenched to his chest. But whatever he was doing wasn’t directed at Alex, apparently. His eyes were milky, absent, staring into Alex’s face as if seeing someone else there, or as if seeing someone through him. He opened and closed his jaw wordlessly. A creamy crust of foam moved where his lips met.
Alex grabbed him by the shoulders – his skin was like dry rubber to the touch – and pushed him off. The tramp’s hand released the hank of T-shirt, leaving a smudge of dark grime.
‘Isla… Kara… Ana…’
‘Are you – are you all right?’ Alex tried. The man’s voice had changed and his face looked – grief-stricken.
‘Nameless,’ the tramp said then. ‘Nameless ones. All the nobodies…’
Then something passed – whatever neurological event had upset him, whatever mental weather had passed across his brain, blew itself out. The man swayed, blinked as if confused, and then his focus found Alex again. He stepped back as if a little embarrassed, and put a tetchy, proprietorial hand on the bar of his supermarket cart.
Out of the corner of his eye, Alex saw the bus arriving. It swung into the stop where they were standing and the door opposite the driver opened with a slap and hiss. Alex shouldered his pack and hopped quickly on, fumbling a rolled-up dollar bill into the feeder and wriggling down to the end of the bus, sitting on a hard plastic seat.
A couple of seconds later, he heard the tramp’s voice. He had climbed onto the bus, and was now arguing with the bus driver. Alex saw him fishing in his horrible trousers and waving something at the driver.
‘My money stink? My money stink? Zat it? Faggin’ liberal.’
The bus driver said something Alex didn’t catch.
‘…take a piss right here, lady. Just ask.’
He started a second, more purposeful rummaging in the horrible trousers before the driver shot out an arm and snatched the note from his hand. The door slammed shut behind him.
‘Heh,’ he said, and ambled stinkily down the aisle of the bus. Ignoring several vacant pairs of seats, he hoisted himself into the one next door to Alex, sat down and looked straight ahead. He seemed to have stopped barking.
‘Spare cigarette?’ he asked, then answered his own question with a long sigh. ‘Nahhh.’
Alex wanted to move, but he was sort of wedged in, and he didn’t like to seem impolite.
‘Ah, sir, your… things…’ Alex pointed at the window.
The tramp shrugged.
‘Ah, none of that stuff means… it’s just stuff, you know?’ He looked as if with the slightest curiosity out of the window at his shopping cart, orphaned on the sidewalk as the bus lurched away.
The tramp fished a single bent cigarette out of his trousers and put it in his mouth. He didn’t light it.
‘Don’ need bags of stuff when I got… my freedom. I can do anything, go anywhere…’ He delivered this in a tone of flat unenthusiasm. ‘Yessir. Whee. Free will. The open road.’
He paused, apparently reflecting on all that the glorious exercise of his freedom had brought him.
‘Where you from, kid?’ he asked.
Alex became conscious of a certain stiffening in the neck of the Korean girl a few seats in front. A raisin-skinned old woman down at the driver end of the bus adjusted her bag on her lap and looked pointedly out of the window. Everyone was pretending not to be listening. Alex felt acutely self-conscious.
‘Ah. Cambridge.’
‘Mass?’
‘What? Oh. No. England. Britain, England.’
The tramp’s head bobbed thoughtfully.
‘You -’ Alex coughed – ‘know it?’
‘Yarp. Posted there. Inna war.’
Another long pause, as the tramp seemed to zone out. Whenever he stopped talking his marine funk seemed to cycle chromatically through a range of species: now tuna, now kipper, now lobster-on-the-turn.
‘Fred,’ the tramp said.
Alex felt himself colour.
‘Alex.’ He twisted awkwardly in his seat and shook Fred’s hand. Always him, he thought. Always him. How much longer was it going to be before he asked for a -
‘Dollar? Y’lemme a dollar, pal?’ His voice now a confidential growl.
‘I -’
‘Gotta get inna shelter. I get inna shelter I can – look…’
Fred, surprisingly limber, ducked his head down, grabbed his own foot and levered it up on his knee. His shoe was like a Cornish pasty, split at the seams. The filling looked unappetising. He pulled it off, revealing a foot that had seen a lot of life. Its crowning glory was the nail on the big toe: a full inch long, with dry blood crusted at the base, it was the shape and colour of a tooth rather than a toenail.
‘Horrible,’ he said.
‘Um,’ said Alex.
‘They got clippers inna shelter. Lend me thirty bucks.’
‘Thirty?’
‘All I ask.’
‘I’m really terribly -’
‘Forty. Pal. I’m mentally ill.’
The unlit cigarette bobbed and wagged as if it were glued to his lower lip. The back of the Korean girl’s head looked fascinated by the exchange.
‘I get fits. Pal. Alex. I can’t work. There’s a bullet in my brain. Right here, look.’ He grabbed Alex’s hand and guided it to a place at the top of his forehead near his hairline where there was a scar. He pushed Alex’s fingers against it and there was a disconcerting boneless give under the skin.
‘Wenn in. Docs could never get it out. I pick up radio signals. Get visions. I know what’s going on. You better gimme forty dollars.’
‘I don’t – I’m really sorry. I haven’t got that much money. I’d like to help, but -’
‘Pal.’
‘I’ve – will this…?’ Alex pulled a note from his pocket. Shit. It was a twenty. Fred snatched it.
‘Humph,’ said Fred. Then: ‘Wait up.’ He produced something from his horrible trousers. It was a very, very crumpled one-dollar bill and a stub of pencil. ‘I got your change. Hah.’ He unfurled the bill and held it in front of Alex’s face. He twitched his finger and thumb, seigneurially. Alex found it very irritating.
‘Thank you,’ he said a moment later, snatching the bill from the air. Nineteen dollars down. And sitting next to a tramp on the bus. Alex put the bill in his pocket. It felt like their business was transacted, and they sat on in a tense silence, Alex looking out of the window and breathing, shallowly, through his mouth.
They pulled up to a stop, finally, within sight of the wire-fenced expanse of the airport car farm.
‘Bye,’ said Alex.
The tramp said something, but it was a little slurred. It sounded like ‘I’ll see you around’.
Alex wriggled past him and walked with relief down towards the front end of the bus to alight. Fred stayed where he was, and as the door shut behind him Alex heard from the inside of the bus what sounded like the bark of a seal.
What Hands told Red Queen about the Intercept was not what Red Queen had been expecting to hear. Not by a long chalk. What Red Queen took for signs of guilt or complicity had been, as it turned out, something entirely other. It had been embarrassment.
His first action when asked what he knew had been to protest, in a squawk whose sheer volume spoke of outraged innocence: ‘Nothing! Nothing at all!’
Red Queen had known, from early on, that there had been something odd about the professor’s response to the Intercept, something shifty. When put on the spot, he had gone crimson.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said, ‘by trying to humiliate me this way. But if I hadn’t been transported here in a style quite beyond the means of even my wealthiest students, I’d long since have thought this a sophomore prank.
‘Where did you get this from?’ he asked, in the too-shrill voice of a man who was now all bluster.
‘Professor Hands,’ said Red Queen, ‘where we got it from is far less important than your having written an eyewitness account of the event that is at the centre of our investigation, and then lied about it. There is a man in the hospital in Mobile with severe injuries as a result of this event – an event that we have no choice but to treat as an act of war. You have professed not to know anything about this event, or its architect, but you are one of a handful of people on earth who works, at a high level, in Banacharski’s field. At the moment you are looking very much indeed like a prime suspect. You are on the point of becoming -’ Red Queen finished with a hard stare – ‘a known unknown. And that entitles me to hand you over to some people who will be a lot less nice to you.’
Hands had the face of a man in whom panic and bewilderment were wrestling like drunken teenagers at a pyjama party.
‘But I don’t know anything about this – event, as you call it. This document: I should have told you what it was but I was, I don’t know, embarrassed. It’s -’
‘It’s an exact description of the formation of an airplane out of a junkyard!’
‘It’s fiction!’
‘Professor Hands, I put it to you that it is not. Look.’ Red Queen’s hand stabbed, again, at the blurry satellite photograph. ‘That is an airplane. Right there. In Alabama backcountry. An airplane.’
‘No, I mean this has nothing to do with anything. The passage you read, yes, I wrote it. But years ago.’ The professor took his glasses off and started to clean them. The pink on his skin had intensified to the point where it was coming out in creamy spots of white at the cheeks and the angles of his forehead. ‘I wrote that a decade ago or more. It’s fiction. I was trying to write a science-fiction novel – I, I don’t know. Call it a jeu d’esprit. It’s silly. Pure nonsense. It was about someone who builds a sort of magic probability machine. That was the first page.’
‘A novel. Like a what – like you’d buy in a bookstore?’ said Red Queen, who knew perfectly well what a novel was, and didn’t want to bother to pretend not to know what a jeu d’esprit was.
‘Yes,’ Hands, now a little piqued. ‘With pages and writing. Just like you’ve probably seen on TV.’ He regrouped, replaced his glasses. ‘Mine never got as far as the bookstore stage. I considered self-publishing, but after I’d had rejection letters from a number of agents I decided that, probably, I was a mathematician not an artist.’
The panic was leaving him. What he said next was tinged with something almost wistful.
‘I loved – as a child – loved reading science fiction. I was of that generation of children for who Einstein was a hero – and the lunar landings. I ended up in pure math – and that’s a whole other story – but it was science fiction that got me on the path. I had the idea I could do it myself.’ He pursed his lips a little. ‘Evidently, I couldn’t.’ After leaving it for a little while, he said: ‘So, where did you get this from?’
‘Nowhere, more or less. It was highly corrupt when it came in. From general surveillance. We think it was originally a fax, but it was impossible to isolate where it was coming from or where it was going.’
‘Well,’ said Hands, ‘I can tell you for sure that it’s nothing to do with me that it’s come to you. My only remaining copy of the manuscript has been in a cardboard box in my garage in Cambridge for years, and is likely to remain there.’
Red Queen put on a mulling-it-over face. It was possible Hands was lying, though it seemed unlikely, and trying to work out what truth he was lying to conceal was the high road to a migraine. If this was an eyewitness account, it would have had to have been from someone standing in the middle of a hurricane. And detail after detail didn’t make sense. How could they have heard the noise above the wind?
Red Queen felt irritable; then, not.
‘So this thing was written ten years ago?’
‘At least. At least.’
‘Yet it describes exactly what happened in Alabama.’
‘No. It describes exactly what I invented ten years ago,’ said Hands prissily. ‘It’s only you who says this thing has happened with the airplane – and only this satellite picture as evidence.’
‘Let us say it describes what happened.’
‘It had an unreliable narrator.’
‘Zip it. It describes what happened. And less than a week after what happened happened, someone transmitted it and it came to us. Doesn’t it slightly stretch credibility to imagine that this is a coincidence?’
‘Ah,’ said Hands. ‘I think I see what you’re driving at.’
Red Queen let him run. It seemed worth giving him a little satisfaction, a moment of control.
‘So you’re saying,’ said Hands, ‘that a document describing an imaginary coincidence engine, arriving just after something that might be a real coincidence engine takes effect, is proof that the real coincidence engine actually exists?’
‘We work with what we’ve got,’ said Red Queen.